khandelwal

I've used NLTK (http://www.nltk.org) to do something similar. And there's also http://scikit-learn.org/stable/. Both libraries are for Python.

As far as my experience with NLTK and machine learning in general goes: you'll need to spend a fair bit of time figuring out which features to extract.

Isn't there a website that ranks not the restaurant, but a particular dish at a restaurant?

I really like the Lenovo X201. Good build quality and extremely portable. You'll need to get a docking station if you want a DVD player, but other than that, it's a pretty nice machine.

No recommendations. Although buy a wireless one. I have an old, simple one from Cateye that works like a charm.

Gadgets: Buy a u-lock (harder to cut) rather than a chain, wire or some other configuration. Buy a cycle computer (shows you your speed, distance for your ride, etc) - the feedback is great. You'll know when you're pedaling slower than usual and also can keep track of how far you've been riding. Last of all, buy a pump for the tires. Keeping your tires properly inflated helps a lot.

Contrary to what has been suggested before, I would buy the lightest bike you can in your budget. A lighter bike will reduce the agony when you don't want to push yourself; and when you do want to push yourself, just go faster.

You can also get hired at a research group in a university without a PhD (as a full-time developer for example). The pay is not competitive with industry, but you get to work on interesting problems. I do this at Penn State.

"Please don't water down my PhD ... by teaching me management skills - I'm not in business school.""

Most faculty manage groups of 5 - 20 people (their lab), a budget (their startup and other research funds) and have to deal with all the problems of running a team of people with varied skills, interest and motivation. Some faculty go on to be department heads or directors of institutes. In all these cases, management skills would be useful. Sure, you're still doing research, but you'll spend a good chunk of your time managing the lab.

"These are the people we can trust with tenure, because they would do research even if we didn't pay them at all"

It's this attitude that keeps the postdoc (and in some cases the junior faculty) salaries so low. Just because you love what you do, you shouldn't have to raise a family on $40,000/year

If you don't like the mostly dry quinoa that's so popular in the US, try it in a soup. That's how the Peruvians make it, and it's a world of difference!

A great photo set of the bone yard: http://www.flickr.com/photos/telstar/sets/32971/

10000 Indian rupees = 225.5810 US dollars

At a number of places I've worked at, people did not want t-shirts. They preferred a free meal instead. Mentioning that a t-shirt lasts a lot longer than a meal had no sway.

Postgres seems like a good option. Thanks!

The best web stack is the one you're most familiar with and/or have the most fun working with.

If you don't like Java, you can use Python with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) and do the same thing. Please do provide the dataset for download.

I use the geocoder. It's terms seemed less restrictive than Google's.

Layout often also conveys information, and makes documents easier to read. Fonts are part of that layout information, but so is spacing.

I believe Orbitz is no longer owned by the airlines. It started off that way, though.

Is there a particular wireless chipset I should choose that works better with Ubuntu? Options seem to be: ThinkPad bgn Wireless and then various Intel Centrino variants.

If I install Ubuntu on it, does pretty much everything work? I don't care too much about suspend/resume, but I do need the wireless to work.

I'm hoping to avoid Dell. Their laptops (at least the ones I've been familiar with) seem to have poor build quality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Zanzibar

I don't get the point of traveling all at once (months at a time or more). It seems to me that most people that do so, visit dozens of countries back-to-back in a relatively short span of time.

I would think that everything ends up being rather similar.

I travel ten days at a time, with 6 months to a year in between international trips. Most trips only include one or two countries. Anything else would be a cognitive overload.

Reading about the wiki and the Group that has formed, it seems to me that things would go a lot smoother if Vinay Deolalikar simply spoke about what he's done. It would be a lot easier to convey the outline of what he's done and answer questions in that format.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but face to face communication will leave a lot fewer people guessing.

Note: I won't even pretend to understand that mathematical discussions, so it's likely that many already understand the gist. It doesn't sound like it though.

One of the great things about riding your bike into downtown (or into town) is that parking for bikes is easier to find and closer to your destination than that for cars. For years, the only way I'd go to the Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin was by bike.

To further this, get a job with one of these folks: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1557972

A lot of the jobs posted sound pretty interesting, with interesting problems to solve.

I think you've found an interesting problem to solve.

However, it seems like the opposite approach would work better. Users would signal that planning an activity, and their friends would be notified (somehow) and could click a simple 'yes' or 'no'.

I think something more like a real-time evite would make more sense (at least to me).

I'm 31 though - so perhaps out of the target market.

When I lived in Tanzania, Land Rover Defender (90s and 110s) were the most popular and seemed to be built for the road conditions.

It's an established platform.

I can't help but think that surely there's better problems to solve. I don't get what's wrong with either INR or Rs - neither of which require a new keyboard.

GDS = Global Distribution System. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_reservations_system