Yeah, I had no idea about the total amount of money raised, and had absolutely no faith in it having a notable effect. I'm pretty happy to be wrong.
Playing devils advocate, Google is the search engine. Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo together don't have the market share to pull this off. Baidu is the only other provider I can think of that could do something like this, but I don't think they have the same global reach that Google does. If you think someone can do something this important, it makes sense to me to name them. That said, from your other post, it sure sounds like the author has an axe to grind.
A Markov chain is a set of states. You can move from some of the states to other states, and there's a certain probability of the direction you will take. For example, you might go for a walk regularly. After you're done walking, you either go home (75% chance) or go out for ice cream (25% chance). There are three states here - walking, home and ice cream. If I wanted to model your behavior, I could say "Okay, now they're walking. What do they do next?", roll some dice, and then decide if you went out for ice cream or went home after your walk. With Markov chain text generators, the states are just individual words, and you transition from one word to another based on the probability that those two words appear together.
I always appreciate it when companies realize that they're good at something completely unrelated to their core product and spin it off into something. Like what happened with Amazon & their web services.
You can buy it and the first sequel on gog.com for $10. It's also available on Steam for a little more. The demo version is probably still floating around the internet, but since it was a DOS game originally, you'll probably have to work a bit to get it running. The Steam and GOG versions should just work out of the box. Here's a gameplay video to help you decide if you want to spend the money: The source code was released a few years ago, and a version's been created that handles higher resolution and transparency effects, so it looks a little nicer. Not sure if any of the sold versions come with it, but I remember it being easy enough to set up.
It's down right now, but there's a web interface for it here.
I only came to Shia Lebeouf after the 2005 reboot, so I'm not too familiar with the old Shias. Of the new ones, the 11th Shia was my favourite. Not as goofy as the 10th Shia, but still less serious and more fun than the 9th Shia. I'm still a little iffy about the 12th Shia, but maybe his writing will improve in the future.
I like alcohol specifically for the effects. I enjoy drinking, and I often have a bit of a hangover on weekend mornings (bad habit, I know). Even at my most inebriated, to the point where I was sick, I've never fully blacked out. I suppose I could have had fragmentary blackouts, although I've never noticed them. I wonder what makes us so different? Yes, I'm a man, but I'm 5'6" and weigh 120lbs dripping wet (I've also always thought I'm a bit of a lightweight). Does body fat percentage count for that much? Maybe there's some sort of genetic factor?
I made my own post about this before I saw this one. I'm just going to copy and paste the body here. What happens if you run an aritificial neural network in reverse? It makes art.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/this-mystery-photo-haunting-reddit-appears-to-be-image-recognition-gone-very-weird Or maybe you could say that it dreams. In-depth discussion of the Google team here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736598 High resolution images, suitable for desktop background here: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliattX4OUCj_8EP65_cTVnBmS1jnYgsGQAieQUc1VQWdgQ?key=aVBxWjhwSzg2RjJWLWRuVFBBZEN1d205bUdEMnhB
No. I never learned how. Now other people frighten and confuse me, and I need at least a beer to even attempt to interact with a group of new people. EDIT: I'm being mildly facetious. Meeting new people is usually uncomfortable for me though, and I really don't know how to make small talk.
You know, given what's happened with Sourceforge over the past couple of years, it's not so far-fetched to think Github could become untrustworthy. Fun fact: Sourceforge, Slashdot and ThinkGeek all had the same parent company. That company sold of Slashdot and Sourceforge a few years ago. It was just acquired by Hot Topic. Just think, in a slightly different world, Hot Topic could have owned Slashdot.
Why bother with tags at all? Just throw the entire posts in, see what comes out. Actually, that'd probably result in unusably large vectors and more data than Google could deal with. It'd be cool though...
As usual, alternately hilarious and terrifying. I wish there were more stuff like this. I was about half way through the video thinking "I should post this to Hubski", and then I remembered where I was watching.
Very cool idea, but I'm not a fan of the site itself. Maybe I'm missing something, but for each image I view, I have to scroll down to the list of images to select the next one. A sidebar with thumbnails would be a much nicer interface. I'm not criticizing you for sharing this Veen, because it's definitely cool, but is anyone else a little uncomfortable with some of the designs? A pink triangle for hedonism? That kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The upside-down cross representing atheism seemed a bit out of place as well. I guess if you want to communicate a complicated idea with a single symbol, stereotypes go a long way. The artist managed to get away without it for most of the other concepts though. And if anyone wants to learn more about the philosophical concepts covered in these designs, check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It gets pretty in-depth.
IS IT YOU???
I cook some ground beef, then toss in whatever I have on hand that has tomatoes in it, along with some corn. If I have chili powder I'll put that in as the beef cooks, if not, I'll use hot sauce. Results vary from bland to okay. I should probably add beans sometime.
I think I'm going to giggle a little bit every time I see that name. From what I know about GWAR, that's probably the intended effect.
I don't really know. I've always enjoyed learning about new things and trying to explain them to other people, but life sort of gets in the way of doing that full time. Between loving being a teaching assistant for introductory computer science courses and having profs (especially in math) that left me thinking "Hey, I could teach this better", I think it was university that made me realize that deep down, teaching others is a passion of mine. Of course, that's not at all what I'm doing now, and I'm not even on track to teaching as a career and don't know when I will be. It's okay though. That's just how life works. I work a job I often enjoy with people I like, and I'm slowly working towards building a website where I can just brain-dump all the cool stuff I know, so hopefully I'll get more fulfillment with that. I guess I don't really have any advice for you other than to keep learning. You don't know what you're passionate about, but you're probably passionate about something. The answer is out there somewhere, and you just have to find it. Don't expect it to hit you like a lightning bolt. I mean, it could, who am I to say? But it might be that you just have to pick something that's mildly interesting to you and work at it for a while. Passion comes with time. Learn to play an instrument or solve a Rubiks cube or juggle or memorize PI to 100 decimal places, or all of those things. Volunteer with some organization that's mildly interesting to you. Just keep doing things and you'll find it. Also, screw talent. I play a few instruments (most very poorly, some averagely, in my mind). People think I'm talented. They don't see the amount of time I've put into learning them, and they don't know that it feels like trying to make a hole in a wall by bashing your head against it. Sure, talent helps, it'll get you there faster, but not giving up is much more important. Sorry if this is kind of rambling. It's been a long day and I'm tired. tl;dr: Keep learning. Don't quit. Try new things. Stay humble.
Tycho - A Walk