Edit: oh ya, and thanks for sharing Mark.

That said I had one friend who didn't come back and ended up in an institution for a period of months. He had a number of underlying issues that the drug brought to the fore. It was a horrible experience for all involved.

The next morning he was still acting strangely, not making sense etc. They kept an eye on him that day figuring he was just tired and worn out. But the next day he was worse so they got him into a psych hospital after some difficulty (he wouldn't go at first). He was put on anti-psychotics and stayed there for a couple of months.

He was released back into his parent's care, he is from the UK and this happened in Australia. So he went back to the UK and reportedly has found god and is doing fine. (apart from the religion thing ;)

- lost interest in psychedelics,

- hate to write about it,

- are not able to write about it,

- don't want anyone to know they were "mad" once

It's alright to disagree strongly with someone else but mutual respect is one of the attributes that keeps HN an open and interesting discussion forum.

also, realizing i didn't need a girlfriend to be happy was really big deal for me.

The belief you're holding is too strong since you've not been able to demonstrate any evidence for it.

if you don't see any value in learning that suffering isn't always bad, i think i understand your attitude a little better.

The reality is, you have no idea what a trip is like. You're building an image of what it might be like based on your own actual experiences, and it seems pretty lame, but that image is just that: an image; a picture; not the real thing.

And, much like life cannot be experienced just by looking at pictures, drugs cannot be experienced just by reading trip reports.

The problem with crack, heroin and motor oil is that two of them are relatively likely to get you addicted and then damage your body as you abuse them, and one is likely to kill you outright if consumed.

Psylocibin and LSD, on the other hand, are basically harmless (at a reasonable dose) from a physical standpoint, and non-addictive. So what's your rationale for not trying them?

You might argue you won't try them because most people won't try them - well, that may be a point, but a lot of people have tried hallucinogenics, especially in the 60s, and the vast (99.99+%) majority had a good time, is perfectly fine and was happy about the experience. So social proof isn't your reasoning for not trying them.

Which leaves the law. Perhaps you won't try them because they're illegal. Fine. Would you not try tomatoes if they were illegal? If you would try tomatoes even though they might be illegal, then what's the big deal about hallucinogenics?

Seriously, you claim to endorse learning, but you appear to have neglected to research this subject before posting.

Perhaps you would like to read some of these papers, and then come back with your assertions?

There is AFAIK no research that shows that crack, heroin or motor oil have similar positive effects.

Seriously, your comments sound childish and insecure.

Well, sexuality isn't the worst analogy one could make with drug use. Like sexual experience, psychedelic experience can be life alteringly profound and positive but is almost universally unprofound and vulgar when put into words. I enjoyed the parent's story both for it's entertainment and because I related to his experience.

I'm an avid reader, but experiences of these natures absolutely cannot be replicated with a book. I've never seen someone walk differently after reading a book the way someone walks different the day they've slept with a new lover. Likewise, it's impossible for prose to attempt to do what drugs and sexuality do - subtly suspend many of our basic assumptions simultaneously and thereby direct our attention to many fundamental blindspots in our thinking and experience.

Be careful - thinking that only well articulated sentences are the only valid form of intellectual stimulation is something of a logical fallacy common among brainy people.

  > You know what actually makes a difference in life?

These points do not stand on their own. Everything might affect your mind but that doesn't mean that every experience is the same. Consuming something may not make a difference to other people's lives, but it might give direct utility to yourself (for example eating food, drinking water, reading a book, watching a film.) This article was about an increase in openness. If you become more open as a result of doing something then indirectly your future actions might hold more utility to the people that you affect.

  > Taking action makes a difference, dropping acid does
  > nothing for anyone. End.

  > Taking action makes a difference, <blank> does
  > nothing for anyone. End.

You're ignoring the possibility that something that 'does nothing for anyone' can directly influence someone to take actions which do something for someone. E.g. if someone drops acid/watches a documentary/reads a book and it directly inspires them to open a soup kitchen for the homeless, how does that fit into your world view? Are the two things completely separate and without causation? Or is it only the influences related to drugs which hold this place in your mind (i.e. can never have a good outcome, so therefore if there is a good outcome it can't be because of the drugs)?

Would you consider meditation equally as pointless as dropping acid? How about worshiping a God, or Gods? Sitting alone in a park? Writing a journal? Looking through a yearbook or perhaps a photo album? Are these things all pointless in your mind as well?

Posting to a forum with your self-righteous, unapproachable attitude is the DEFINITION of masturbatory. You clearly cannot politely engage others on this topic, so why bother commenting here to simply tell the druggies how you feel about their petty dalliances? To make yourself feel better?

If you have been through it, it's up to you to judge whether it is good or bad, for overall society, or even at the individual level. But as it is, you simply don't know what you're talking about.

We have a word in our vocabulary: transcendental Some people would say we don't really need that word. No one that has taken a psychedelic experience would ever say that. It is truly out of this world. It is up to you to determine if it is beneficial for yourself.

Assuming you don't think it's beneficial for yourself, I'd like to hear your thoughts on why you think others should be denied this experience, if they harm no others. (assuming you are in favor of prohibition)

But you know what makes a difference to the experience of bring alive? Changing the way you interpret experiences.

(you're very negative for someone who claims Helping people is the only thing which makes a difference).

And since when are people only allowed deep epiphanies, but not shallow ones, even assuming you can judge that from outside?

if anyone reads what you have written and benefits from your insight, then you must have been wrong - because you wouldn't have written what you did if i hadn't posted this document detailing my experience with mushrooms.

You start sketching or typing and you realize you can see blood flowing through your hands, and then you realize you're actually an animal for whom it's hard to form coherent thoughts because everything is just so wobbly and undefined. Then you become amazed at how human language is actually a form of learned "symbols->sounds" synesthesia. And writing is "sound->visuals" synesthesia.

People have pissed their pants from fear on psychedelics, the fact that the author of the document was able to jot down his experience is a remarkable addition to the knowledge of humans.

Having said that, taking ML definitely made my theory stronger - but this was mostly due to the amount of proofs in the class, and not so much the programming :)

http://www.ai-class.com/overview says: "Programming is not required, however we believe it will be very helpful for some of the homework assignments. You may write code in any language you would like to (we recommend Python if you are new to programming) and your code will not be graded. For example, a question might ask for 6 answers to the same problem but with varied inputs or parameters. You are welcome to work each one out by hand, however writing a program might be both faster and give you a better understanding of how the algorithm works."

So there will be at least some programming, they got me confused - how is it possible to teach AI without programming? :) But we'll see.

I don't think you'd be able to understand multiple regression without some basic knowledge of linear algebra.

Statistics and linear algebra really should be required by all CS programs. It's funny that at many schools those courses are not, yet Calculus is. First, Calculus should have been handled in HS. Second, I've never had a use for Calculus professionally or for anything I've worked on in my free time.

- Machine Learning by Tom M Mitchell http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html

For general reading and introductions I also like:

- Pattern Classification by Richard Duda

- Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Christopher Bishop

For a bit more emphasis on statistics and math, I usually dive in to

- Classification,Parameter Estimation and State Estimation by van der Heijden

And last, but certainly not least:

- Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms by David MacKay, available here:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/

I've read O'Reilly's Collective Intelligence. It's a great introductory survey, but it was very light on theory.

I also own Collective Intelligence in Action. It had more explanation of theory than O'Reilly's offering, but most of the chapters devolved into how to use Java data mining framework X.

:(

Right now all versions have the same content, but I will continue to revise, so you can think of the version on Green Tea Press as the draft of the second edition.

I know it can be confusing, but I hope the benefits of the free license make up for it.

NodeJS is great for applications with a lot of clients, but not for CPU intensive apps. That's why I predict similar technologies built on Erlang, Scala, and Go will have more longevity than NodeJS.

Well, you do with node what you do with anything: if you have 4 CPU cores, run 4 copies of your app. Problem solved.

I had no trouble understanding the paragraph that you complain about and found the article to be very well written.

Where do you see excessive jargon or convolution?

Node's first commit:

    commit 9d7895c567e8f38abfff35da1b6d6d6a0a06f9aa
    Author: Ryan <ry@tinyclouds.org>
    Date:   Mon Feb 16 01:02:00 2009 +0100
    
        add dependencies

> What happened to this?

There's been some preliminary stuff on giving spawned node processes a more slick API, with the intent of then being able to optimize them in some way.

Whether or not it'll end up at the WebWorker API is yet to be seen, but that'd certainly fit with node's "don't reinvent BOM conventions where they fit" pattern.

function mergeSort(items){

    if (items.length == 1) {
        return items;
    }

    var middle = Math.floor(items.length / 2),
        left = items.slice(0, middle),
        right = items.slice(middle);

    return merge(mergeSort(left), mergeSort(right));

You don't need to run merge on the left and right partitions every call. You only need to do that if the left partition's last element is greater than the right partition's first element. Otherwise, you can just append the right partition to the left, since they are already in sorted order.

public List<Integer> mergeSort(List<Integer> list) { // Base case // If list has one (or less) element, return list as is int size = list.size(); if (size <= 1) { return list; }

		// Partition list in half
		int m = size / 2;
		List<Integer> left = new ArrayList<Integer>();
		List<Integer> right = new ArrayList<Integer>();
		for (int i = 0; i < m; i++) {
			left.add(list.get(i));
		}
		for (int i = m; i < size; i++) {
			right.add(list.get(i));
		}
		
		// Recursively merge sort each partition
		left = mergeSort(left);
		right = mergeSort(right);
		
		// If the last element of the left partition is greater than the first element of the right partition
		// The left and right partitions need to be rearranged
		if (left.get(left.size() - 1) > right.get(0)) {
			return merge(left, right);
		// Otherwise left and right partitions are in the correct order
		} else {
			left.addAll(right);
			return left;
		}
	}
	
	protected List<Integer> merge(List<Integer> left, List<Integer> right) {
		List<Integer> result = new ArrayList<Integer>();
		// While both containers are non-empty
		// Move lesser elements to the front of the result, and remove them from their containers
		while (!left.isEmpty() && !right.isEmpty()) {
			if (left.get(0) < right.get(0)) {
				result.add(left.remove(0));
			} else {
				result.add(right.remove(0));
			}
		}
		// The container that still has elements contains elements greater than those in the other container
		// It is assumed that the elements in the container are also already sorted
		// So the non-empty container's elements should be appended to the end of the list
		if (!left.isEmpty()) {
			result.addAll(left);
		} else {
			result.addAll(right);
		}
		return result;
	}

This condition is going to be true most of the time:

    left.get(left.size() - 1) > right.get(0)

For the case of nearly sorted lists, it could be an important optimization. But to say that the original mergesort is incorrect is not true.

Chances are it's not an Intel CPU you're using in your smart phone, tablet, or game console.