I love Clauset, Shalizi, and Newman for keeping up this fight. Even if you agree with them, you still have to include a linear regression in your paper to satisfy reviewers.

I was surprised to see this on HN, though. I guess everyone is trying to use power laws in one way or another.

Well, ever since Saddam tried to use power law to justify his invasion of Kuwait we've all been stepping on eggshells.

What?

I just saw Jeff Hawkins give a talk and it was quite interesting. I was a bit worried, however, that he is basing his theory of intelligence on the human neocortex, while claiming to go after general principles.

This is guaranteed not to be terribly general, considering the many bits of matter on this planet that exhibit intelligence without a neocortex. By many, I mean ones that hugely outnumber humans.

So very interesting stuff, but not the answer that I think he wants it to be.

In "On Intelligence" he postulates that he's not necessarily going for a "human-like" intelligence or even a "life-like" one.

Basically he just wants something that's very good at recognizing patterns over time, which I can imagine the neocortex would be great at.

Though, he also references the thalamus and hippocampus in the books a lot, as very important parts of the brain to his framework. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory-prediction_framework#Neu...]

For vim, I just open an unnamed buffer (:new). I think this is exactly the same as the scratch buffer in emacs.

The only differences being, when you close vim, the scratch buffer does not yield a save prompt, and also, if you open a scratch buffer, then close it, and then reopen it again with :Scratch during the same vim session, any leftover contents from before (but during that same vim session, of course) will be restored, which is neat/convenient. :)

edit: misread your comment, thought you were comparing :new and :Scratch (linked above), not emacs' scratch. Not sure about that one, but again, the 'reopen scratch -> find leftover contents' functionality is a neat thing.

:new | set buftype=nofile

I can't imagine using this for real. Perception is so much more parallel than that. If I see

  char *(*fp)(int)

I see that it matches the pattern

  returntype *(*function)(args)

It's the "* (* )()" that one sees all at once, and that signifies "this is a function pointer".

This actually reminds me of some research where kids are asked to trace the direction of interlocked gears. They start by looking at each one, but soon they move to more general strategies. Edit - this is the one, in case anyone is curious: Dixon, J. A., & Bangert, A. S. (2002). The prehistory of discovery: precursors of representational change in solving gear system problems. Developmental Psychology, 38(6), 918.

But before the kids could use general strategies, they had to work out the details.

You're right, the spiral rule is probably unwieldy in practice. But until a programmer can recognize the patterns, the rule can be used as a learning aid.

I think that decade is now. Brains work nothing like computers. Well, as much as they do like plumbing systems ;)

Eye tracker hardware is tricky and therefore usually expensive, but on the software side there are good tools. I've used VisionEgg[0] with an Eyelink II system and found it quite easy to deal with.

[0] http://www.visionegg.org/

Not that expensive. For a couple of hundred dollars you can build very nice 60-90fps IR eye tracking system. You'll need IR camera, IR tele lens (very important), couple of IR sources and open source tracking software. See http://www.gazegroup.org/develop/

There is also alternative approach. If you are just recording and don't need interactivity - all you need, is a regular camera with zoom and a small tripod. You can record on an SD card and synchronize the stream stream time in post-processing. Just flash the monitor screen couple of times at the start and the end of the recording, and play tracking alignment sequence.

Here's an attempt to do just that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJqKRL9D2qY

I somehow assumed this was done with a webcam eyetracking software .. my bad.

I remember seeing a shift in CS student populations, say around 1999, from people who already had a self-developed interest in computing to people who wanted to learn programming as a trade to make money. The first group had probably taught themselves programming and had already been tinkering with system internals and hardware. They were programming because they were drawn to it for whatever reasons.

I think the author of this piece is from the latter group. To that group, software as craft just doesn't fit into their world. Whereas I think the first group has an understanding that beauty on the inside of a program shows on the outside too, especially over time.

It's the same in a lot of technical fields. In my mechanical engineering courses there was a minority who truly loved everything to do with machines. The people who work on their car at weekends or build projects in their spare time. They were truly excited just to be able to do what they loved and get paid for it.

The majority though are people who have some affinity for maths and sciences and have made a career choice to study engineering. They put in the hours to do the coursework, but if it's not proscribed in the course they simply won't do it. They go home and don't think about engineering at all. Big companies are full of these people, chugging away at their job but not particularly interested in spending their spare time honing their skills or working on other stuff because it's actually pretty awesome.

If this is about weird/vulgar statements with FACEBOOK.COM in the name, they exist for just about every big domain. Whois queries return results for subdomain matches.

fMRI: Modern day phrenology

I found "Linear Algebra Done Right" to be a much more intuitive introduction to the subject. It doesn't get to determinants until the end.

http://linear.axler.net/

After going through that course I finally understood things like eigenvectors, null spaces, and projections. Now I see them everywhere (unless you think that's a curse)