Comments for Joel Grus

Comment on The Hardest Job There Is by PV Lundqvist

PV Lundqvist — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 13:37:10 +0000

The argument seems to turn on the definition of ‘hard’. Both rocket science and digging ditches are hard, but in different ways.

Babies are more like ditches: lots of lifting, gunky, and made easier by singing spirituals. Protractor is never required.

Comment on Hacking Hacker News by Roger Braun

Roger Braun — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:16:55 +0000

I sort of reimplemented this idea in a client-side JS bookmarklet. You might want to take a look.

Comment on Why Have You Not Signed Up For BIL Already? by Jezebel

Jezebel — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:16:03 +0000

I am ready for an Excellent Adventure!

Comment on Hacking Hacker News by Living in a Borg society » liftoff

Living in a Borg society » liftoff — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 17:02:40 +0000

[...] if you want to extract content in a specific way? You can easily program your own scraper, like Joel Grus described in ‘Hacking Hacker News‘ a few days [...]

Comment on Hacking Hacker News by HACKER LIAR

HACKER LIAR — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 16:10:12 +0000

http://www.facebook.com/AdminHackers

Comment on Hacking Hacker News by HACKER LIAR

HACKER LIAR — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 16:09:11 +0000

Hacking means finding out weaknesses in an established system and exploiting them. A computer hacker is a person who finds out weaknesses in the computer and exploits it. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, such as profit, protest, or challenge. The subculture that has evolved around hackers is often referred to as the computer underground but it is now an open community. While other uses of the word hacker exist that are not related to computer security, they are rarely used in mainstream context. They are subject to the long standing hacker definition controversy about the true meaning of the term hacker. In this controversy, the term hacker is reclaimed by computer programmers who argue that someone breaking into computers is better called a cracker, not making a difference between computer criminals (black hats) and computer security experts (white hats). Some white hat hackers claim that they also deserve the title hacker, and that only black hats should be called crackers.

Comment on Hacking Hacker News by HACKER LIAR

HACKER LIAR — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 16:07:53 +0000

Hack This Page is a like, safe and legal training ground for hackers to test and expand their hacking skills. More than just another hacker wargames site, we are a living, breathing community with many active projects in development, with a vast selection of hacking articles and a huge forum where users can discuss hacking, network security, and just about everything. Tune in to the hacker underground and get involved with the project.

Comment on Hacking Hacker News by Chuck

Chuck — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 15:13:58 +0000

Hi Joel.

I’m very interested in doing something alike (although different application and other area) this. And by this I mean implementing Naive Bayes for my own amusement. I’ve found your post very encouraging and interesting

Thanks for sharing the code (I’m a pythonista myself, but ruby is not my enemy )

Just wanted to add an observation to your featurizer.rb. I think you should modify your regex for YC classes slightly to include more cases. Lately I’ve seen a lot of people using YCS11, and since I don’t see many errornous matches for `YC[ SW0-9][0-9]` I thought that’d catch those few extras (also, limited to summer/winter. You could add F if fall ever becomes relevant). Anyway, use if you want

- Chuck

Comment on Hacking Hacker News by John Hunter

John Hunter — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 07:54:36 +0000

Very cool. It would be nice if you could include data on users that up-voted the story. My guess is you don’t have access to that data though. But if you did I would think that could be a very useful test. Even getting things like if these 2 or 3 people liked it super big bonus points… And even learning, either bozos that like stupid stuff or spammers so that if it learns big up-votes from those people is a negative (not a positive).

At the very beginning of using Reddit I thought they were doing that kind of stuff when displaying the home page. I thought my preferences were being stored so that it could judge what I would like (not just to bump that story up).

It would be cool if Reddit and/or HN could at least let us say add this person to my recommended list (and then highlight all stories those people up-vote).

Comment on Hacking Hacker News by Joel

Joel — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 23:05:35 +0000

I’m not sure what “takes off” means here. This particular filter is calibrated to my tastes. If people want to cater to my tastes, they are more than welcome to, but presumably other people would train their filters differently, and so a “caters to Joel” strategy would have limited reach.