sterling312

Actually it's interesting that you mention this. Technically, you can also make it atoma-ku, (like ato like in later, and ma-ku as in mark). I wonder if the dip-tone was intentional to make it sound more like foreign word.

Too bad it's a queue and not a stack. I'll show myself out now.

meh, just use sum instead of counter

sorted([(i,sum([i==j for j in s.split()])) for i in list(set(s.split()))],key=lambda x:x[1],reverse=True)[:10]

I don't know what Japanese programmers use for social network, but try making a mixi group for hackers and see if you attract any people.

I've been wanting people to post their eigenvector/value on facial recognition training for a while. Imagine a crowdsource trained facial recognition database!

Yea, it sounds a bit mechanical. With that said, based on the priming he's given with the talk on waveform, I'm guess they are simply breaking the English speech into the waveform with corresponding frequency and simply mapping that over to the Chinese counterpart.

It would be even cooler if they created a distribution of possible sound frequency for each syllables in both English and Chinese, and determined where in the distribution his speech pattern lies, and transfer the "ranking" in the distribution. Hence you get a subjective transformation instead of a objective one. :)

and yep

yep

My buddy at Microsoft tells me that in terms of automation, they use the dogma that if you need to do it once or twice, you just do it by hand. If you need to do it more than that, you automate it.

Oh no, you did not contradict it at all. It is one of the vital point that was pointed out in the paper, and I wanted to make sure anybody else who don't having interest in reading the actual paper to have an opportunity to get this particular point across. I'm a researcher in a neuroscience lab, and this is one of the foundational paper into modern understanding of reward mechanism. Kudos to you for linking it here :)

The elaborate on the Schultz paper, dopaminergic reward feedback mechanism is for unexpected reward only. Repeated stimulation depreciates the neuronal signals.

A take home message from this is that an ideal diablo 2 drop has a expected drop time of T, and should never change. The reward, of course, can come from increased benefit of character strength, or from the rare item itself (Herald of Zakarum + Barnar Star ftw).

It seems to me like the T for Diablo 3 is much greater than that of Diablo 2, and because pretty much set items and unique items are non-existent, the satisfaction of getting the item from drops is also non-existent. Alas, the AH allows you to gain strength when you are stuck, but because the time it takes you to go to AH is not a function of T itself, since you can go whenever you want, it does not really contribute to the over all game reward mechanism.

Not to mention the horrible infrastructure they have built for the AH as Lewisham mentioned.

Feel free to comment, I want to hear what other people think on this issue.

I think there is nothing inherently wrong with unpaid internships. If the market price for your work is low enough to only compensate experience gained, that's perfectly fine. What's wrong with the system are more generalize than that, and there are two problems that causes it. I would break it down to A) industrial organizational problem and B) market downturn (and to an extent upturn) + inefficiency and lagging effects.

Part A is more about the over abundance of certain firms in the market supply-demand that makes it very difficult to pay interns. Since I've never worked as a unpaid-intern before (it might happen soon though :/), correct me if I'm wrong, but most of them are either in marketing, legal assistant positions, or journalism. Marketing firms that do not offer paid internships are usually small agencies that are barely able to survive on their own; same thing is true with journalism; the whole legal market has wage flooring that artificially reduces the supply of laws and therefore law firms. It seems to me that these industries needs to better allocate and either become more competitive via innovation, and people going into those industry might want to reconsider their path.

Part B is more on the fact that labor market is inherently inefficient, and in a recession, it exaggerates the underlining problem in part A. This is why we are starting to see more unpaid internship instead of flat wage cuts.

Regarding to the second quote, the statement just shows how the analyst doesn't get the situation at hand at all. Traditional firms uses IPO to gain cash and expand, true. That is because it is very hard to raise money in that scale using other methods. In the case of Facebook, with over $1B revenue, it can easily raise cash from other forms of investment (hey, who wouldn't want to own a piece of Facebook at this point?). Instead, what the IPO really does it introduce the pricing of Facebook to the market, which in turn hopefully reduces the volatility of the price. Who gets the most benefit out of this? The investors! Facebook is going to get cash one way or another; it is the investors who gets the most benefit out of its IPO. So Zuckerberg can do whatever he wants. The only ones he has to show respect to are the consumers that uses Facebook, frankly.

Just a thought that popped into my head. Assuming that the product issued in the end is going to be the same for everybody. And assume that the highest contributor that gets to put in the feedback generally improves the software. This creates a free loading problem for those who contributed less (myself included) for the same product. Even if it's a positive externality for the general backers, I wonder if there is a way for Kickstarter to properly compensate for such externality.

This is precisely the problem, and I'm glad you mentioned it. If the cost to produce a calendar-grad image is so cheap that an amateur can produce it, perhaps the force of creative destruction has rendered the traditional photographer to compete on the same ground, perhaps it is time for traditional photographer to reconsider the service they are providing.

This reminds me of the recent book review on the Economist.

http://www.economist.com/node/21545983

To quote one passage: "Mr Collini is moved by Newman’s insistence that a liberal education is not about what students learn or what skills they acquire but “the perspective they have on the place of their knowledge in a wider map of human understanding”."

That's certainly true. Many models of social enterprises exist and some of them are no more of a regular business that so happens to deal with "social" issues.

I guess the point I was making is that the advantages that a non-profit has ultimately (feel free to correct me, or add new ideas that I neglected) are a) tax incentives, b) helping the world or altruism, and c) zero or very low price for the goods and services offered for most of the customers. Having never really worked in the non-profit sector, aside from working during my years in college, those are the only benefit that I can generalize for non-profits. Both a) and c) can be replicated in for-profit firms. And social enterprise, depending on the sector that it's in, can capture b) as well to an certain extent. Hence as long as the people running the company has the right attitude and has good goals, running a non-profit really isn't necessary.

What were the advantages you were thinking of? I would be very interested to hear your take on it.

To a certain extent, I agree with you. But to play the devil's advocate, I must say that having a open-whatever test is inherently dangerous in creating inequality in terms of information usage.

For example, if you were to have a open internet test in 2003, people who knew about wikipedia would have a significant advantage vs people who didn't. Or if the student is poor, he or she might not have access to fancy electronics or even laptops, which would make the open internet test difficult. Even if it was a open-book test, if the student were substantially poor to a point where he/she was sharing a book with a friend? And there is also an element of luck with it comes to open-notes tests. If the teacher only allow a single page of notes, what are the chances that the question might be on a subject that you omitted to put on your notes?

I've only listed tech-savvy, income, and luck as a potential way to make the test unfair, but I'm sure there are plenty more if you include any other element that is not the study material itself other than memory. I agree that in real life we don't have to memorize everything (matter of fact I'm all for critical thinking than memorization in schools), but there are certainly some benefit to the traditional test taking methods.

This is the famous tragedy of the commons problem where where the increase of members participating the in game (in an game theory sense), any individual is more likely to become a freeloader and hence less likely to put the optimal labor.

The fundamental problem comes from a form of information asymmetry where any individual is not able to assess the amount of labor placed by other members. If a project is run by 5 people and requires labor input of 5L, an optimal allocation of be L from each person. However, because each person does not know how much labor other people are placing into the project, they assume that others might put more than L, or the total labor from others are 5L-x where x<L. Hence the person in question only puts x amount of labor in the project. Alas, if everybody thinks in the same way, we only have 5x, which is far less than the required 5L. Unless all 5 people are together at all times, there are bound to be information asymmetry, and it is just much easier to manage with fewer people, in the case of 2-3.

Although non-profits has good tax breaks, it's much more difficult to get funding since it's "non-profit", hence no return for the investor capital. Why not try to create a social enterprise instead? You can still get a bit of tax breaks, AND you can earn profits for yourself and investors.

Copyrights is the same as creating a legal monopoly to a particular item/idea. Hence, from a pure economic perspective, it creates deadweightloss, or over all less for the economy. Hence assuming an efficient market, it is a VERY bad thing.

However, since we don't live in an efficient market, we have these things that prevents anybody from creating things called the barrier to entry. This could be startup capital, facilities, or whatever that is needed to manufacture and distribute the items. This prevents anybody from just making a movie, since you would need all the equipment and crew to shoot it. Copyright basically guarantees a limited monopoly for the creators to give them a reduction in risk involved in creating the item.

But the bottom line is, copyright is not a good thing, and it is only as good as the barrier to entry is. With the barrier to entry for making creative media so much lower than what it was before (anybody can record an album using Garageband), the reduction of risk, in the form of copyright, might not justify the overall loss created by the deadweightloss. Essentially it is a comparison of deadweightloss vs opportunity cost of not having the idea ever created. And in the current time, because the opportunity cost is so small, copyright laws should adjust itself, which it hasn't.

Although video game is not meant to be created as a passive entertainment, I think it is going that direction. With the combination of plot and amazing graphics, I don't see why a video game cannot be watched. Take for example Onlive, which allows you to stream game play of other total strangers. Or streamed Starcraft2 games. I know for a fact that a lot of my hard core gamer friends watch live stream from South Korea all the time.

From my personal experience, I used to actually play all the video games I thought was fun. However, ever since college ended, and when I have to use my time more wisely, playing a demanding video game counter intuitive as a stress relief. However, watching my roommate play video game is both entertaining and lacks the necessary attention I would need to attribute if I were playing the game. Of course, after watching my roommate play Skyrim twice might get a bit old. But then again, who watches the same TV show for over 30 hrs straight? I don't care how good mad men is, if I were to do two or three consecutive marathon of it, I would get tired of it too.

I guess I really should stress my sarcasm more lol

One might say that it's a super computer. What's the question again?

If the correlation between SOPA awareness and HN user is indeed 99.9%, we need to find a website that has close to 0%. cough MySpace cough Could this bring web attention back to the decaying social network? Stay tuned.

I think rather than saying that this is an abuse of power, MPAA with its massive lobbying power should really reconsider its position. Lobbying was particularly helpful way to reduce information inefficiencies to the government prior to the existence of the internet. The opinion of the smaller, individual voters would only be reflected on a voting day, hence every 2 or 4 years depending on if we are talking about a congressmen or a senator. However, with the progression of free flowing information, aka the internet, the opinion of the public became more readily available, to a point where it is in direct competition with an older form that is the lobbying system. Of course, I'm not saying that lobbyists are completely obsolete. But what I am saying is that the new form of information and opinion expression using the internet will take a bigger and bigger share of the way the constituents actually express themselves to the politicians. Hence, instead of complaining about it, they really just got to embrase it, and learn that what if they are indeed plotting to hurt the consumers, that even if they go around the consumers and directly to Washington, they will not be able to get away with it without consequences.