skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Go download David MacKay's Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms (free book). Go through the part on Bayes and the part on Neural Nets (and the info. theory part if you want to, which is fascinating but not as directly relevant), which is a total of roughly 20-30 chapters, some very short. Do as many exercises as you can do (i.e. try them all, fail and come back later if necessary), and try implementing those algorithms. That will get you boned up on this stuff generally.

From there:

Standard references are Hastie and Tibshirani which you already have, Pattern Recognition by Duda Hart and Stork, and PRML by Chris Bishop (though I found it boring - too many unmotivated equations). All of Statistics and especially All of Nonparametric Statistics by Wasserman are both excellent books which will fairly rapidly get you introduced to large swaths of statistical models. Papoulis (1993) is quite a good reference on statistics in general, and Joy & Cover is the usual reference of choice for information theory (which is very relevant to what you're interested in), but neither of those are much fun to actually read.

You seem less interested in classification/ML problems and more interested in straight-up stats and/or timeseries stuff. So some slightly deeper references:

- Given your interests you might absolutely love Kevin Murphy's PhD thesis on Dynamic Bayes Nets, which are excellent for describing phenomena in all three fields you mentioned.

- Check out Geoff Hinton's work, especially on deep belief nets (there's a Google tech talk and a lot of papers).

- Hinton and Ghahramani have a tutorial called "Parameter Estimation for Linear Dynamical Systems", which could be directly applicable to the models you're talking about

- If you're interested in these dynamic, causal models you'll want to learn about EM (which you should know already since you know HMMs), and its generalization Variational Bayes. MacKay has a terse chapter on variational inference; http://www.variational-bayes.org/vbpapers.html has more. One of those is an introductory paper by Ghahramani and some others, which is nice.

- Pretty much everything on http://videolectures.net will excite you.

Some of those references (esp. the VB stuff) can get slightly hairy in terms of the maths level required (depending on your background). Bayesian Data Analysis with R (by Jim Albert), or Crawley's R book (for a more frequentist approach), can get you started using R which can avoid you needing to implement all this stuff yourself, as much of it is already implemented. This might be your fastest route to writing code that does cool stuff - understand what the algo is, use somebody else's implementation, apply it to your own problem.
That article is full of baseless opinion masquerading as fact. 'Eurocrats are secretly pleased with the Euro strength'? Which 'Eurocrat'? What did they say?

The fact is nobody knows what is going to happen but people shouldn't blindly assume the USD is going to stay the global reserve currency.

No currency has ever lasted the test of time, and paper-based currencies are lucky if they make a couple of hundred years.

All this started nearly 40 years ago when Nixon dropped the gold standard. People predicted it back then, but they couldn't be sure of the timeline. The same stays true today ; it's going to happen (failure of USD as a global currency) but nobody knows when.
Ask HN: Review My Startup. Bookhu.com: The Gender Compatibility Engine for Books
http://www.bookhu.com

The problem I'm trying to solve:

I'm a casual reader of fiction. Once or twice a year I visit amazon and browse their bestsellers looking for inspiration. I don't keep up-to-date with fiction and find it quite time consuming to find something suitable. I thought it would be great to have a couple of filters based on the readership/intended market for a given book so I could at least make a quick shortlist.

Last week I decided to see if I could make a start on something that might suit starting with the gender of the readers. Yesterday I launched Bookhu.com which lets you search for any book (via the Amazon API) and see the gender split of the people who review the book together with the average rating by gender.

It's very early days (I only started on it last week) but any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks for yours and all the other advice given here.

I guess I should have clarified that I am not currently living in the US. I don't have debt and education is free in my country, but unfortunately I'm more into creating web stuff than studying, although I am (very very) slowly getting my masters. Buying a place for my own use doesn't really apply, because it is very likely I will move to another country soon.

I noticed there are some nice companies out there holding properties and paying dividends every quarter, for example ADC, GTY and PEI. Can't think of any reason why I would buy an apartment to rent out instead of just buying stock in these companies, considering they seem to be getting better bang for buck for their real estate than I could. Would be nice to find something like this not tied to USD though.
How do we know that human pollution has caused global warming entirely ?
I find it hard to believe that you wouldn't know how many registers code should use. However - it's not C code, it's assembly code, so it seems unfair to blame gcc - a C compiler.
"I am a developer, isn't there some sort of investment more suitable for me"

You've answered you're own question, you're a developer. Invest in what you love doing. Invest in the area of your skills and knowledge.

If you dont' know a lot about real estate, and don't have much desire to learn, then investments in real estate are likely to go south for you.

I second the recommendation to invest in yourself, that's the one investment anyone can make that will always give a good return.
Sounds like you're more into probability modelling and machine learning than statistics in the traditional hypothesis testing sense. Besides ESL, a book I'd recommend is Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. It starts from the beginning of probability theory applied to computer science problems, and covers every modern topic.

videolectures.net is filled with lectures on CS-flavored probability modelling and machine learning topics. The best bet is the multi-hour "tutorial" lecture series and minicourses; it may take a while to choose the right starting point.

For serious stats and probability without the CS flavoring (not useful for the quick-road-to-hacking-power agenda):

For classical deep stats theory, everyone I know begins with Cassela and Berger's Statistical Inference. Don't expect algorithms in this though.

On the probability side: Feller's An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications. Deep, readable, sometimes funny, full of "whoa" insights. Would be hard to actually grok every chapter in both volumes, but you read it for insight into the power of probability and then use it as a reference.

(grad student in stats, among other things)
As an NYU CompSci major, I'll say that if you were going to choose a school entirely based on the quality of its CS department, NYU is not the way to go.
First off, the department is small. Intro classes are offered every semester, though after even the first course, you end up with no flexibility in selection of times or instructors. Every Major-required course is offered every semester, so no worries there, but again, professor choice and classtime options are non-existant.

Moving on to the electives: The most popular electives are offered maybe every semester, as a single course, but it is much more common to see electives given only one slot every year. The less popular (either for teaching or for students themselves; I'm not sure) electives are offered as rarely as once every two years, and they include things such as Intro to Database Systems, Unix Tools, or other things that seem like they should be offered more frequently.

A plus is that you can take graduate level courses as electives, and there are quite a few interesting topics offered there. If you're looking to do web development, currently there is a Googler-taught course on Ruby on Rails, but little choice in the way of others such as Django or PHP. Actually, the CS department intentionally gimps some of the more interesting courses, reducing them to having zero value towards the completion of your major. (Web Development is an overview course that happens to be one of them.)

That said, NYC is an amazing place to be, and I don't think I'd want to be anywhere else, even given a better CS department. As well, you have the option of the Stern school of business, wherein you can take business classes, or potentially meet other NYU kids with ideas for startups, and business-side knowledge (though much more frequently you'll meet Sternies with ideas ripped off from other websites, and 0 ability to do anything productive for the site, who really just want to use you for grunt work programming their wonderful idea.)

Good luck with college applications, and may you end up with a wonderful department!
Just out of interest, how long does it generally take for
a question to get answered on #math? Does it vary quite
a lot, or is it fairly stable (assuming someone can actually answer it)?
This is good stuff. It will make writing assembly on Intel at least slightly less painful.

I am still amazed we don't have an x86 assembler that is anywhere near what DSP people use. I mean, we still have to track register usage manually and do manual instruction reordering to improve performance! The x86 world could learn a lot from the DSP world here (Texas Instruments tools are a good example).
Cambridge (where I did two degrees) has plenty of funding for non-UK and non-EU students.

It's less and harder to come by for undergrads, but postgrads of all nationalities have a very strong chance of being fully funded.

Don't get me wrong, it's still tough, but no tougher than what I understand the life of a postgrad in the US is :)
If you just want to reduce the caffeine, steep it for just a few seconds before pouring out the first pot. The caffeine dissolves out almost immediately (it's very soluble in hot water), but you'll still have most of the tea's flavor.

Herbal teas are also worth a try. I like rooibos and roasted barley. Korean grocery stores often have big bags of the latter ("barley tea"), and it's great iced. (Roasted barley is also used to add flavor to some darker beers.)
Amazon Pulls Cork on Wine Business
I'm laughing so hard right now.
Several good designers have responded in the last hour, one is already making a sketch, I think the job will get done, and hopefully in time.

Thanks to everyone that took an interest, HN is quite amazing.
Microsoft Offers Windows 7 Via USB for Netbooks
Prolog can blow your mind, too, perhaps even more so than Haskell.
Do startups usually equally split the company amongst founders?
Just wondering if companies like Apple and Microsoft and facebook equally split itself amongst all their founders. I just read somewhere that Jobs had to coerce Wozniak to join.

It makes sense to equally split to equally motivate though.
Introduction to Ring Theory
"If your first version is so impressive that trolls don't make fun of it, you waited too long to launch."
Real Life Prisoners Dilemma with $100k at Stake [vid]
The Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem
Consider some smaller colleges as well, where there's a chance your professors might learn your name. Olin, for example. Otherwise, had I the chance to go undergrad again, I might go for UCSB CCS.

Shameless promo:
If you have the option to apply to schools in the UK, I just started a PhD at Imperial, and I'm highly impressed by the undergrads here. They appear to learn Prolog, Haskell and Java in their first year. One built a Haskell EDSL that autocompiles to CUDA as his undergrad thesis - another guy got a summer UROP writing embedded C for a satellite. Last week in the comp. lab I almost stepped on an EeePC some kids had turned into a little autonomous robot. Some 3rd-years were in my lab the other day arguing with a PhD about safety when compiling STM to static locks.
Ask HN: help students with entrepreneurship class project - survey
We're taking part in an entrepreneurship course on the Danish Technical University and would appreciate some help from web application owners. Our product idea is about web application translations, and we need some kind of market feedback.

If you have a few minutes to spare, please fill out the survey located at http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dFMzLVFza3NFWDYtbXdxSEZUZDFSb2c6MA

Thanks.
The Ehrenfeucht Game and First Order Logic
Make sure you update us, I want to see what it is...
I would not overestimate importance of the dollar for the Chinese. Those dollar holdings are a simple by-product of past currency interventions, a way to park those dollars bought from exporters of electronic goods etc, not a conscious choice to invest some 'savings' in the US. Also, China's trade with US is less than its combined trade with countries of Pacific Region.

Also, I would not agree with your characterisation of China and its regime. Its current government has been doing wonders lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and cases of corruption unfortunately happen everywhere -- from Chicago to Shanghai. They do have a bit different social organization, but its current modification seems to work for them for the past thirty years.
Here's my analytics during my most popular submission reaching 30k views in 1 day.

http://www.codexon.com/temp/traffic.png

What may also interest you is that I earned around 50 cents in advertisements during this increase of traffic. I can't legally tell you the other statistics because of the AdSense TOS.

I had hoped that I could at least sustain the cost of the hosting through ads, but I don't know how I am making pennies on mountains of traffic while everyone else claims they are making $5+ a day.
read comment #24:

Martin, you should realize that this problem cannot be solved. Yes,
there will perhaps be a time when this particular test case compiles,
though I think that is unlikely. But anyway, then there will be other
cases that fail.

The reason is dead simple: register allocation is NP-complete, so it
is even theoretically not possible to write register allocators that
always find a coloring. That means any register allocator will always
fail on some very constrained asm input. And you cannot allow it to
run indefinitely until a coloring is found, because then you've turned
the graph coloring problem into the halting problem because you can't
prove that a coloring exists and that the register allocator algorithm
will terminate.

So really it doesn't matter at all whether or not your specific inline
asm compiles or not. When yours does, someone else's will fail.
send me an email I'll give you a preview
There are a bunch of passages surrounded by asterisks. Shouldn't that be italics?
I'd like to see pg write more about #12: Getting Users.
If Trac has a mass-add option like Fogbugz does, it sure wasn't obvious. Entering 50+ bug reports with Trac, like most other bug tracking software, is a pain.
register allocation is a notoriously hard problem. To make matters worse, registers on different architectures have vastly different properties.
The Most Important C++ Books...Ever
Young entrepreneurs get tips from Facebook, Twitter
Typo correction: "completely dietary" -> "completely outsourced dietary"
I'm friends with a david w. who went to cal with me. whenever I see your posts, I think it's him.
The classic study cited in Mythical Man Month (which I don't unfortunately have handy) said, if I'm remembering it correctly, that it was proportional to lines of code (thus 'wc -l' larger) and independent of the language used.

What I don't know is whether IDE-generated code gets you out of that problem or not.
I've enjoyed blogging about statistical programming (http://incanter-blog.org), it's been a great way to dig into subjects that interest me.
There are a couple reasons you wouldn't know that (for an entire inline asm function):

1. x86_64 vs. x86_32. It's possible that you'd want to use more registers than 32-bit has. In this case, it's usually optimal to use memory operands on x86_32 but registers on x86_64.

2. gcc _will not_ allow you to use ebx in inline asm with PIC code. Likewise with ebp with frame pointer. There's no technical reason gcc couldn't just save+restore those registers around the block, but it doesn't.

3. The case in the bugreport: you have various locations in memory you want to address, and you want gcc to figure out their addresses for you. Without analysis that eliminates identical registers, the naive implementation of using 1-2 new registers per operand will quickly fail.
You could try looking at existing generative music schemes. This one is classic[al]:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_Würfelspiel
I think it would be very cool if you could integrate it with goodreads.com etc. I want to know the gender split of my bookshelf ^-^
One of the big problems I have with PG's essays is that, though I like the content, I have a very hard time believing everything he says without evidence. When you are in an emotional low, it's very difficult to think, "I should just persist because PG says it usually works." So it was great to see his points actually backed up by other founders' experiences.

As a side note, does anyone have a transcript of Jason Fried's talk? His was another favorite of mine from yesterday.
#15, "You May Have to Play Games", resonated the most with me. I think even though we all know this its still a bitter pill to swallow because hackers generally don't have time/patience for smoke & mirrors. I think this is why customer development seems so wrong at first blush.

One nitpicky little thing:

"If you are persistent, even problems that seem out of your control (i.e. immigration) seem to work themselves out."

Should be e.g., not i.e. I know its a quote and pg shouldn't fix it, but it drives me nuts when people get this wrong. i.e. is roughly equivalent to "in other words", and e.g. means "for example."
Thanks for posting this. It's the first time I've seen hard numbers explaining the monetary appeal of spamming.
NASDAQs new iPhone App is Slick - Includes StockTwits
18. You Get No Respect

There was one surprise founders mentioned that I'd forgotten about: that outside the startup world, startup founders get no respect.

In social settings, I found that I got a lot more respect when I said, "I worked on Microsoft Office" instead of "I work at a small startup you've never heard of called x."

Partly this is because the rest of the world just doesn't get startups, and partly it's yet another consequence of the fact that most good startup ideas seem bad:

If you pitch your idea to a random person, 95% of the time you'll find the person instinctively thinks the idea will be a flop and you're wasting your time (although they probably won't say this directly).

Unfortunately this extends even to dating:

It surprised me that being a startup founder does not get you more admiration from women.

I did know about that, but I'd forgotten.

-- I totally agree with that. My previous job was in a startup, and when I told them "i worked on real-time location based mobile communication", and tried to explain what it was, it will usually go over the head.

Now I tell I write the software of Kindle, and girls just dig it.
I also heard apple people that work on iphone/ipod get a lot of attention in parties.
My dating life has improved a lot.

I was thinking why is this, but it might have to do with "everyone has a dream". As children we dream to be rich/famous artist/rockstar/soccer players, etc., but actually few people achieve this status. And girls, the good looking ones, during their lifes will get bombarded with "guys with dreams", and will see them more often to just fail, than go anywhere. So the dream/vision is just that, but normally doesn't pay the bills.

Plus, the "dream of a startup", it is a very selfish one.

While saying I "work for big corp/famous product", it makes you competent in their eyes, and as you achieved something tangible, and not just dreaming.

Maybe I am overanalyizing it, but girls just like a provider, than somebody with a 'dream', but nothing to show for it yet, unless your startup made it, and you have something famous to show.
Well, it's nice to know that the last two or three years of my life are pretty usual in this game.
Here (perhaps for onlookers more than for your exact case) are more two favorite recommendations for free Web-based resources on what statistics is as a discipline, both of which recommend good textbooks for follow-up study:

"Advice to Mathematics Teachers on Evaluating Introductory Statistics Textbooks" by Robert W. Hayden

http://statland.org/MyPapers/MAAFIXED.PDF

"The Introductory Statistics Course: A Ptolemaic Curriculum?" by George W. Cobb

http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...

Both are excellent introductions to what statistics is as a discipline and how it is related to, but distinct from, mathematics.

A very good list of statistics textbooks appears here:

http://web.mac.com/mrmathman/MrMathMan/New_Teacher_Resources...
I know. The problem is that people have really no idea how relevant assembler really still is.

It's posts like these that can help getting the 70's stigma that assembler seems to be associated with removed.

Someone ought to do a major article about assembler in todays IT environment. Who does it, why they do it and why it is relevant.
You skipped over 26, 27, and 34...
You are correct, offices are indeed boring... but server rooms and farms are a beautiful sight to see. At least at Cisco, the server rooms span the entire length and width of a usual building... it looks like it never ends.
Yeah, that would be pretty interesting and could be the foundations of some sort of personalized reccommendation functionality.
Does catching a $0.0001 accounting error fall into the "surprising amount" or "not all" bucket? Because that's the example at hand.

I'm not surprised at all by what you can do with a type system. But type system fanboys (yes, I have to use the word) always have the same arguments. "You can do lots of stuff with types. Oh, except maybe for your actual example." It's not convincing, it's just noise that shows up whenever somebody is using the "wrong" language.
"One of the most important things that Sergey Brin’s gift signifies . . . is the possibilities inherent in being a refugee. The debate over immigration has frequently become so bitter that an important element has been lost: refugees are as varied in their skills sets and contributions as the rest of us.”

Okay, this will probably sound cheesy beyond belief, but: this is the American Dream, in purest form. In all the angry arguments about immigration we lose sight of the fact that the USA has always been a nation of immigrants; many of us are only a handful of generations removed from people who came to this land, often with little to their name, to build a new life.

All the practical issues aside, I've always felt that anyone who wants to come to this country to live and work is already an American in spirit--far more so than the angry xenophobes who were merely born here.

. . .
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

-- The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus, inscribed on a plaque in the Statue of Liberty
IIRC Apple and Microsoft did. I doubt Facebook did.
One of the reasons startups aren't for everyone is that most people strongly prefer a steady moderate income over a risky and sporadic one no matter how great (though they still buy lottery tickets).

This helps explain #18 as well as #4 :)
those horizontal scroll bars are infuriating.

when i tell people i work for my own company they're really impressed fwiw (in the uk) - I think tons of people can correlate with how terrible boring jobs are.