plessthanpt05

agreed. i have a philosophy and cognitive science degree, but have several yrs of programming, data mining & machine learning experience; haven't ever really had a hard time getting a related job.

Suggested books HN post from about a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3595599

one of the coolest things i've ever seen!

And this is why O'Reilly is leaps & bounds ahead of everyone else in technical & scientific publishing -- particularly regarding the respect it has gained from people in said fields!

was mostly thinking of courses that had lectures/vids up, but that also reminds me of this berkeley course i came across on HN a couple of weeks ago: http://alex.smola.org/teaching/berkeley2012/

Cool that so many things like this are popping up lately: Tom Mitchell at CMU putting up all of his lectures/material, the Stanford/coursera ML course, now this CalTech course... are there others?

Thanks for posting! (...though haven't been getting much work done now.)

Bahaha... opinions aside on the legality bit, that "ps" (true or not) is pretty damn funny.

I thought this was a joke; had to reread to be sure. just too bad there is little (to no) chance of actually going to mars. but hey, it's a foot in the door, eh? (riiiight)

exactly...my first thought was how this seems like a stones throw away from jurassic park.

this chiptunes station is pretty great: http://tunein.com/tuner/?StationId=127100&;

love somafm! ...a bunch of great stations for programming.

Pretty tied into Python/Numpy ecosystem & 3rd party libs; however, after reading that (somewhat over the top, albeit very persuasive) posting, I'm definitely going to dig a bit deeper. Really nice first impression, especially like the clean syntax and calling of c -- looks promising, thanks!

I use R almost daily, and sure, for tasks involving math (& statistical analysis in particular) R is fantastic; however, to say "for hackers" (at least in my mind) would involve a less domain specific language -- like a scripting language (python or some such similar language) that has statistical analysis capabilities. Perhaps a matter of semantics, but in a similar vein, I imagine a book of the same title that used Octave would not be considered "for hackers" by most due to the specific/constrained functionality.

Just seems like "hacker" is such a buzz word now that it gets tacked onto a lot of stuff just to generate interest.

I like (& use) R, but to say it is "for hackers" seems strange to me -- not really a "hacker" language. Seems like a bit of a marketing strategy(/gimmick) to toss that word into the title. Looks like a promising book, though i'd much prefer it be in a scripting language like Python.

indeed, this was my first reaction as well...seems like a bit of marketing gimmick to toss the word "hacker" into the title.

using R seems a bit strange to me -- i have nothing against R (use it regularly), but not exactly a "hacker" language. this seems like an ideal book for python, but R?

first thought exactly...just throw in a dash of skynet and, well, yup...

YES! i heard this (with great sound effects to boot) on npr's studio 360 a couple of months ago:

http://www.studio360.org/2011/nov/04/theyre-made-out-of-meat...

Easily one of the best websites i've ever come across -- been looking for something like this for a while! Would be nice to have html highlighting, but certainly not complaining as is...

Many thx!

"...They can build you a simple website for a thousand dollars but they can’t build the next Google and they won’t create the technologies of the future."

well, i always chuckle when people use this (admittedly worn out ex) for the their argument, but folks like Bill Gates, anyone, eh? ...well, guess it's not like he created "Google"? alright, sarcasm aside, I don't think there's any doubt about the importance of a college degree to get a broad perspective on understanding computational what-have-yous, esp compared to learning just a language or two, but the author overstates his point a bit -- of course exceptions are plenty where people can succeed w/o degrees, though i'd just imagine less likely.

indeed... don't plan on using g'wallet myself, but this why i thank my fu@#ing stars that t-mobile isn't being eaten by at&t (nothing against at&t here really, but t-mobile has a pretty decent track record for being "friendly" on these types of things).

other than unix (clearly) being one of the most important technological leaps forward in computing, which is just a given at this point, well, that pic is just awesome!

this is great; though as an android user, i much prefer the ui of taptu personally.

that's really cool, and it's nice for manual labor to be aided by some automated help, though dare to say, precursor to wall-e anyone?

where are lectures about classes/OO programming? just gave the link a quick glance and it seems good (i understand khan academy is for "gentle" introductions), but doesn't look like it goes into OO programming at all (which is kind of the point of python), no?

Not sure I would conclude that debain (or ubuntu to a lesser extent) is "Stagnant" from this data. The count seems to track quite positively w/ each of their release cycles -- every 6 months or ~2ys, respectively, and then settles back down thereafter; however, over all it looks like an upward growth trend (ok, w/ the exception of Ubuntu (fr), but that list has only ~1/10th that of the ubuntu(en)).