icandoitbetter

I actually use Amazon on Demand because Netflix does not support Linux.

This is such a beautiful example.

Speaking of screen scraping, can someone recommend good libraries for accessing information on GUI widgets with integrated OCR capabilities?

It's him. Google began in 1996, was initially developed in Java, and well, he's trying to write a web robot to visit pages.

No need for it to be grand. But it has to be substantial enough for anyone to want to read it.

I'm about his age, and I agree with his thesis. But this article is terrible. No substantial arguments for how formal education fails and why unschooling is a better alternative are presented. In Wadhwa's article, you can at least easily identify his arguments and decide whether you agree or disagree with them. His article is basically an enumeration of his opinions, as evidence by the abundance of "I" sentences.

Is anyone seriously considering porting this to C? I'm thinking of doing this myself, as I'm really interested in applying the algorithm, but I don't have a lot of experience in this kind of thing.

Thanks!

Can you explain the imperative code? I understand that it has to do with lists being monads and all, but I don't get why

    (return ([1..10]*2)) :: [Integer]

doesn't work. What's the magic behind

    x <- [1..10]

?

Generating sounds is rather straightforward with HTML5. On the other hand, manipulating sound bytes (which would enable both synthesizer-like web apps and audio streaming) really ain't that easy to do.

A software-generated paper has been accepted in a Computer Science conference as well [1]. If anything, this is a problem that characterizes academia in general, not isolated parts of it. I understand that humanities-hating is an entertaining activity, but it's important to be aware that naive generalizations of a whole field have no basis in reality.

[1] http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/08/12/23/2321242/Sof...

Are you serious?

Why not collect information from Wikipedia Simple English? You'll start with a huge database of information.

Does anyone else find the assumption that wage is somehow linearly proportional to 'value' completely ridiculous?

I'm so sorry that companies do not exist to promote your moral agenda.

Well, he did search Google with the Jeopardy questions and showed that very often the answer to the question was Google's first result. I think that's not only indicative of the difficulty of the problem at hand, but also shows that Watson is no different than established A. I. systems such as search engines. I had never seen Jeopardy before (not being from the States) and expected the game to be slightly more challenging; too many clues are included to the question asked and they make it too easy to determine the type of the expected answer ("this" appears almost in every single question). All three players seem to know the answer to any given question, and it's just a game of who presses the button first.

Sorry, I'm not going respect silly one-line remark because he's a celebrity in the field. This is exactly what he seems to be counting on, his 'authority': he can say whatever stubbornly contrarian thing he wants and be considered seriously because he's so established. If he didn't have time for an actual response, he should have not responded in the first place. He did, and he will be criticized for it.

Yeah, and the brain is nothing more than a bunch of atoms. Nobody is aware that you can make every single thing sound unimpressive by brutally reducing it to its components, and nobody has used that trick before! Way to go, Chomsky. Insightful as a twelve year old.

No. Learning is an algorithm that is applied on an algorithm. There is nothing spooky about it. I wish more people realized that before they started claiming that "machines and humans are different in that humans can learn from their mistakes while machines can't" -- of course they can.

So what? Why live your life with that perspective? There's absolutely nothing good coming out of having the belief that you are mediocre, notwithstanding whether you actually are or not.

Students: You are probably not Mark Zuckerberg, so pay $200,000 to put up with old-fashioned syllabi and badly-designed courses employing poor methods of evaluation and professors who do their best to make feel as mediocre as possible!

Is Numenta's approach really that informed by findings regarding actual brain function? It's been a while and I don't remember most of Hawkins' model, but I don't feel that one needs to consult any actual neuroscientific results to use the general concepts of hierarchical design or top-down processing, which seem to capture the basic idea of his work.

This whole neuro-A.I. fad began with artificial neural networks, which had nothing to do with brains, and still hasn't died.

Honestly, I think the answer is pretty straightforward in this case: WordPress was just a great piece of software, much ahead of its competitors.

I don't really agree. He was provocative for its own sake and there's nothing wrong with being provocative for its own sake.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make.

>but if your goal is to address a problem within a system, I'm not confident that the best method is to tear it down and start from scratch

What's a better method? Trying to work within the system in the hopes of improving it? You seriously think there's any hope of changing the ancient culture bubble of academia overnight?

He's not even attacking the system: he's offering motivated and talented people a very attractive alternative option.

Don't want to sound condescending, but I don't think that seeing this in layman's terms has any merit. All of mathematics, although often built out of some intuitive, natural notions, is about definition: describe an object and then see what follows from your description. The description is not, in general, something that's "out there" and can be deduced by common-sense.

(Infinity, in fact, can be defined as a number and can be defined as a non-number in different contexts. But infinity is only something when it's part of a strictly defined mathematical universe with specific axioms.)

You found the opportunity and owned it. I can't see how that deserves any criticism. How much did you make so far?

Excellent reply. SO far surpasses any other programming forum when it comes to getting answers for a specific problem, and that matters so much more than how easy it is for a user to get artificial karma.

I'd suggest you look into machine learning. It's probably going to be the single most important area of computing in the years to come. Start with the Stanford course online.

Also, if you haven't already, learn functional programming.

Let's just remember that taking sides = enabling free speech in this case.