skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1 hour of work and 7 hours of play? Nah. Then you can easily compete by just working a bit more and soon only those that work more are competitive.

Your assumption is that we will need to compete to meet our needs, and I don't think that's necessarily the case: competition within a population only matters when resources are scarce and our efforts have a significant effect on the value of those resources relative to the background level that exists regardless of our presence.

Given that to any sufficiently advanced AI we will be less intelligent than our housepets are to us, I think it's a stretch to imagine that we'll be economically relevant at all. When you have two dogs, they don't need to compete with each other to do very well - you feed them based on what they need, regardless of what their relative levels of effort would merit in an environment that didn't include you, the owner.

In other words: if we have a peaceful coexistence long enough for computers to truly surpass us (which should not take very long once they reach our level), the table scraps that they hopefully toss down to us will probably render irrelevant anything that we could produce ourselves. And if they don't offer table scraps, we're pretty well screwed, because they're the de facto owners of all the resources since we have no significant power to wield against them and we don't have anything valuable enough to offer in trade.

"Friendly housepet" is probably the status we should be shooting for when we achieve AGI, honestly. Cooperative scenarios fail quickly because after a short time we would have precious little to offer an advanced AGI, and the antagonistic scenarios only end one way, with humans losing a disastrously one-sided battle.

Edit: grammar (need to drink coffee before posting on HN from now on)
But Time Warner Cable has much higher costs per user since they have to build the infrastructure to get to those users, whereas Hulu can take advantage of the fact that users pay for most of the infrastructure to get to Hulu (and they may even be paying Time Warner Cable).
I had to vote this one up. Thanks for submitting it.

I have a few posts related to this half written, but I haven't gotten around to finishing them yet. I think this is a really interesting topic that doesn't get enough discussion in the community at large. We already have "IT vs IS vs CS" distinctions that are tenuous at best, yet I think most people tend to approach CS more of an art or craft than as a science.

"Computer Science" as a term has really gotten muddled by the universities. I try to stick to its original definition, but I'm unsure how long it'll stay that way, considering languages change over time...
The drift from desktop software to software as service (usually free up to some capacity) is a good thing for linux because it fills some gaps in availability of some useful software on linux.

Personally I had far worse experiences with commercial software than with free software so I am not especially eager to see commercial software on linux. I think on linux commercial software has hard time competing with the software developed open source way.
Also companies who sell expensive laptops (eg. Sony), and the companies who supply them expensive laptop components (eg. Intel, Microsoft). This may have something to do with the tech writers' sourness on netbooks too.
Still forgot a factor of 4 while dividing through the area over which the EM radiation has been spread.
Yep.

Financial Services in London filter/block a lot.

They also disable DNS lookups, and so only browser lookups and specially coded wget have resolution capability.

No: Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Betfair, Twitter, Facebook
Python GUI scripting -> PythonGoose -> PyGoose -> Goose?
Paul's essays are often deliberate explorations of concepts that he doesn't start off knowing the answer to. This would seem to be an example of that, and is interesting to read as a view into how Paul thinks. That said, I think he drew the wrong distinction here between smartness and wisdom.

The distinction that I would draw is that a smart person is someone who can figure out the right answer, while a wise person is someone who does the right thing. I draw the distinction this way because there are a lot of people who know what they should do, but don't do it! We generally don't think of them as wise. Conversely most of the smart people that I know are good at figuring out things in a number of different contexts, so their ability doesn't tend to be just a one-dimensional spike.

This ties to the common belief that wisdom has something to do with emotions. Because inability to align emotions and actions is a common barrier to doing what you know you should do. Note that I'm careful not to say control your emotions, because a person who keeps emotions under deliberate control is in serious trouble when those emotions slip out anyways. And they will. Instead the people I've known who I call wise are capable of finding ways to align emotions and actions in such a way that they can act in accord with their emotions yet not cause problems for them.

By contrast I tie smartness to problem solving. Someone can be really good at solving set problems yet have no clue how to handle their emotional state. Paul offers many good examples of this in his essay.
Nibbler
Better that than python - Imagine how bad the DMV would be then!
Apropos comment from Reddit:

summary:

"When I was trying to get people to trust me with their personal details, I completely understood just how much they valued their privacy.

"Now that I know just how much advertisers are prepared to pay for said personal details, I'm suddenly convinced that no one values privacy anymore."
This is funny because it's not really a bug at all. I side with the PHP guys on this one. Passing in a string to a number_format function is not even proper form in the first place. I do agree that it should always default to 0 instead of null because it is a numeric function, but still. The usage is the main problem in this case - and who wants to fix a bug for an asshole anyways?

A lesson to all who rely on edge cases and un-documented behaviors for functionality.
I think a desire/plan to stay in one place for an extended period of time is a good reason to purchase a home. The best reason really. But I think if you're pretty uncertain about whether you'll want to spend 10+ years in 1 house it makes more sense to rent. And I really don't understand so many people have bought into this meme that renting is "throwing money away". The facts just don't seem to support that conclusion.
Does this guy realize he's asking the founder of PHP (rasmus@php.net) to "escalate this to someone who can answer". lol
um, http://www.autohotkey.com/ ?

it doesn't matter if your scripts are cross platform when the apps they script aren't.
If the only thing you get out of college is a piece of paper saying you graduated then you did something very wrong.
Thanks, appreciated. Not completely extinct, then - but it seems to live in a quite small niche ;-)
My EeePc 701 from Nov. 2007 has been rock solid after daily use. I'm now putting it into service as a server. I only stopped using it when someone gave me a 9" Asus for free.

Of course this is just two data points...
People are happy with netbooks unless they expect their laptop to be a desktop replacement.

As the owner of a nice beefy desktop, I find my eeepc to be delightful. Hour for hour, I probably even spend more time on it, but I never have to feel the frustration of not being able to do something, because I have my desktop machine.
If you intersect the two sets, everyone wants to get back together or scheme up a George Costanza-like plan to have the partner be the one to initiate a breakup.
I would argue that it makes a lot more sense for a non-number to return NULL than to return 0. If it returns 0, how do you distinguish between "0" and ""? At least with a NULL return value you can use the function to see if you're even looking at a number at all.
Because you're afraid to tell a troll on the Internet "no"?
More actively paying attention to my environment is something I have been trying to teach myself as well. Not much success so far.

As far as the writing is concerned, it was engaging enough to keep me interested until the end. Which is more then I can say for a lot of blog posts.

On entirely unrelated note, do you have any books you would recommend on (self-)hypnosis? It is a topic I am very interested in, but it is very hard to find good books on. Most books appear to be the trashy result of an author's "get rich quick"-scheme.
Is this technology related with spaced-based solar panel satellite as they use a smilar principle ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power

http://www.nss.org/settlement/ssp/library/index.htm

If we can transform a huge wifi-like signal coming from space onto electricity, surely it’s possible to do the same thing at a smaller scale?
If you have an Asus, there is nothing better than eeebuntu (eeebuntu.org). It's UNR with all the hardware tweaks specific to eeepcs (all the function buttons just work for example).

eeebuntu + chrome is definitely the way to go.
AutoPy? A quick Google doesn't reveal other projects with this name.
I'm sorry, two planets in our solar system?
>Would anyone on HN work at a company that filters http?

I'm consulting for one now. For the most part, they filter porn and borderline porn. However, they also filter Facebook (but not LinkedIn!), YouTube, and a few other things mainstream sites.

Circumvention certainly isn't that hard, but it also likely violates some company policy. I connected my Droid to their Exchange servers and got a nastygram from IT security (albeit a few weeks later).

Ironically, the risk isn't just that I would get caught - the first time would be a hand slap unless they wanted a reason to get rid of me. The corporate culture is so focused on conformity and compliance that it would be absolutely shocking to others that I would have even considered such a thing. And, this affects perceptions of trustworthiness. [No, I do not like any of this!]
It would be a second data point. If we the Earth was our only data point, we couldn't say whether life was a common trend or an anomaly. But if Mars had life, then we would at least have proof of the former.
wow, the unborn baby one is just wrong.
Patrick,

I really like the open business that you have been doing. What made you decide to do this? Is is because it's not your main source of income or would you have done it the same way if it was a startup and you were devoting your full time to it?

In any event thanks for sharing these posts.
I'd have to say Canada's immigration process is better (for the immigrant) compared to the US.

The usual US process:

1. Find a company willing to employ you, even though you are not a US citizen / GC holder.

2. Find some way to start working for this company. For some nationalities (ex. Canadian), this isn't actually too bad. For most nationalities, though, if the company wants you to start working right away, they'll have to base you at a foreign office until you become eligible for an intra-company transfer visa, or are able to get an H1-B.

3. The company applies on your behalf for an H1-B. The big problem here is that there is an H1-B quota which is usually exhausted very early on. In years where the quota is exceeded, the system switches to a lottery, so even if you've been trying for the visa for many years, there's no guarantee you'll get it this year if the quota is exceeded.

4. The company applies on your behalf for a Green Card. There's a whole pile of stumbling blocks here:

-- There are overall quotas for the number of GCs that can be issued by way of employer sponsorship.

-- There are national origin quotas. If you're from western Europe, you're probably OK, but good luck if you're from India/China.

-- The employer has to do a labor market search to show that they can't employ a US citizen / GC holder for your job.

5. Apply for citizenship after 5 years

Usual Canadian process:

1. Apply for permanent residency. This is done on a points based system. The calculator is here:
http://www.cic.gc.ca/EnGLish/immigrate/skilled/assess/index....

Some permutations that will let you through:

-- BSc + MSc + 2 years work experience + excellent English skills

-- BSc + MSc + 1 year work experience + excellent English + basic French

-- BSc + 1 year work experience + job offer in Canada (requires labor market check) + excellent English

-- BSc + 3 years work experience + excellent English + basic French

-- BSc + 4 years work experience + excellent English

2. Apply for citizenship after 3 years

Advantages of the Canadian system:

- The Canadian system has no quotas (either based on visa class or on national origin). Apparently, the government publishes "targets", but they don't cut off applications if the target is exceeded.

- In the Canadian system, no one is "sponsoring" you -- your flow through the immigration system is a matter between you and the government. This removes a whole much of incentives your employer might have to keep you at certain stages of the immigration process.

- Once you're admitted as a PR, you can work for anyone you like. There's no period where you are stuck on visas that tie you to a particular company. If you feel the business you're working for isn't paying you enough, you can simply quit and take a job elsewhere without jeopardizing your immigration status.

- Once you have a few years of experience, you don't even need a job offer to get PR in Canada. This lets you enter the country first, and then once you've settled, start looking for a job.
Interesting how the reason that this bug is affecting the original poster is that a new version of the language is being used. The code can't be changed because "We have number_format in literally thousands of places across 50 or 60 separate products. Each of those changes will have to be coded, tested, written-off, released, tested by the clients since this is tax data and has to be precise for tax planning and retirement planning."

It seems to me that the entire process of testing and writing off is just as important when changing the target platform as it is when changing some of the API calls.
Sorry louislouis, I deleted my comment before seeing your reply (I thought my comment wasn't adding too much to the discussion). The link he is referring to was this: http://grab.by/grabs/429941810f908a076dfd5a3a712f45fb.png
This is an amazing visualization which does the same exact thing http://hint.fm/seer/
Fortunately for this community, prestigious degrees seem to be declining in importance. Anyone can found a startup, investors can look at traction and track record, etc. Even big software firms that hire thousands of people a year spend a lot of money and effort to recruit from a broad range of schools.

The last very obvious pocket of degree elitism where CS / engineering grads might go seems to be Wall Street and management consulting (for very rational reasons).
If you release it CC then by the afternoon a bookshop with a instant book printing system could be selling the book in competition to your publisher.

This does probably hinge on what is meant in CC license (CC-BY-NC presumably would be applied) by "non-commercial". I know under copyright law giving away for free can still be commercial as it can harm commercial activity of licensees/owners; but I've read elsewhere that CC allows cost of production to be recouped and still allow the sale to be allowed as NC.
You know, this is the second story about Google auto-completion this week. The behavioural economists have jumped on the Ajaxian/ReadWriteWeb/SmashingMag bandwagon memes.
is user experience not as nebulous (if not more) as well?

No, it isn't. "Good user experience" is a just a fancy way of saying "people enjoy using it". Even if you can't fully articulate a rationale, you probably have a concrete idea about whether you enjoy or don't enjoy using a thing. A sharp knife has a better user experience than a dull knife. A cardboard box has a better user experience than plastic clamshells. It may not a thing you can point to, but the meaning is pretty easy to nail down, unlike "Freedom".

* to each his own, I say.*

You're not actually saying anything though. Of course people value different things, but unless you have some idea of what those things are, you may as well be talking nonsense, because you can't draw any sensible judgement on the value of an abstract concept over something concrete.

I think this is important--and not just something to dismiss with "to each his own"--because nebulous terms like "Freedom" are often used to mask actual concrete demands like the legal right to modify and distribute someone else's work. "Freedom" is an idea I can get behind, but when it's code for something that I'm not so sure I agree with, then there's a problem with people using the two interchangeably.

the winner is the guy who serves both A^B not AxorB

But that guy competes with the guy who serves A^C, and the guy who serves B^C, etc. You cannot possibly appeal to every possible demand, which is why we have competition.
yeah the football coach analogy probably wasn't best example... maybe more like advisor / guide / personal trainer. still the point is valid about relevant experience. mins isn't exactly graphic design, but I do understand approach.
Supposing we found life on Mars.
Wow! 8 cents an hour! Thats...um....$57 a month. Oh.

Can you schedule EC2 instances for certain times of the day, or is it an all on or nothing thing?
Sure. And I haven't used PHP in about a decade. But it sounds to me like this was overlooked by them and so returned 0 for many years. Despite being undocumented behavior, fixing it causes a breaking change. On my team whenever we come into this situation and realize that fixing overlooked things can actually "break" people, we really think twice about the fix. Even if in theory the fix on its own is totally the right thing to do.
HBCU = historically black college or university

What I don't understand is that in my state, so many blacks choose to go to HBCUs, even when (it seems) they could go to a better non-HBCU school.
Given that Google App Engine gives away the first 5M requests/month for free and allows outgoing HTTP requests, would it be possible to build a proxy with it? Let's say I built a SOCKS client for Windows which delegated requests to a small AppEngine app via HTTPS. The server-side would simply make the request on the client's behalf and return the result. Would this work? I suspect latency would be much worse than the EC2/SSH option, but it would be more convenient. I could use something like FoxyProxy to only use the AppEngine hack for sites which required it.
Yes it is, both as an ActiveScript scripting engine (you can doubleclick a .js file and it'll run) and as a component of a web browser (just add the script tags and it'll run inside the browser).

But i think VBScript's syntax is easier on the untrained eye :-).
Clearly, he doesn't, until the last comment.
The ending (the last comment). It is epic.
I found this argument structure pretty ridiculous, along the lines of: correlation is not always causality, but let's just pretend it is and not report on any changes in demographic qualities of student populations.

"When the SAT was instituted in the 1920s it was done precisely in the name of changing the admissions process to a more egalitarian one....In truth, the SAT, which is thankfully being phased out at many schools, has had the opposite effect....While correlation isn’t always causality, economics professor Jesse Rothstein of Berkeley has called it a proxy for other demographic components and for high school resources."

Overall, the biggest problems with this nonsense article are the common presumption that college admissions are supposed to correct for all inequality, conflating equal opportunity with equal ability, and a stated desire for a meritocracy while simultaneously rejecting any approaches to measuring merit that don't come up with an answer that equally represents every way he's decided to slice up the population demographically.

Maybe what we really need is more high school admission tests, so we can keep pushing the problem identification further back.
I don't see why it should return null.

If "" == 0, meaning "" is coerced to 0, shouldn't it coerce to 0 here too?
There's a long history of tablet form-factors being used in healthcare, and the docs I know who use them swear by them. The article mentions the Motion C5, which is pretty cool from a hardware standpoint, and is pretty decent to use, from what I've heard... also, the Marshfield Clinic network in Wisconsin has been using tablet PCs with modified EHR software as their standard clinical workstation for years, and has put together a pretty amazing system built around tablet computing.

The tablet-and-touch-screen form factor has some interesting healthcare properties- the most important, IMHO, that a well-designed touch screen UI can be used easily by people in a hurry who are wearing gloves. From what I've seen, most tablet PCs just use modified versions of Windows, which means lots of small and fiddly UI elements, and therefore falls short of meeting this potential UI sweet-spot. If Apple can get an iPhone-style UI with nice big buttons, task-oriented interaction (as opposed to document-oriented or window-oriented), etc. working on a gadget that can be easily sterilized/autoclaved and that has a screen big enough to display significant amounts of data, they might have something that would work really well in a medical context.

The problem, as always, is that people (especially docs and hospital IT admins) are really resistant to change, and EHR vendors resist true interoperability with the passion of a thousand burning suns. But, hey, the iPhone's remarkable success has demonstrated that building a gadget that doctors & nurses actually want to use is a good way to force management to support it (at least, it has at my hospital), so there is precedent for Apple-driven bottom-up change in healthcare IT (now that's a sentence that I would never have imagined writing four or five years ago...).
The legacy/athlete spots are the price of free tuition for middle-class students. The money has to come from somewhere, and if it's not coming from tuition fees, it has to come from wealthy alums. Those wealthy alums are more likely to donate if a.) their kids get in and b.) their school keeps winning.

Elite colleges have largely opted for a system where they set aside a portion of slots to keep the money flowing, and then use that money to make sure that anyone else who can get into the remaining slots will be able to come, and nobody will be turned away because they can't afford it. I find this system a little unsettling, since it's hard to pretend this is fair. But as someone who attended an elite college and was only able to do so because they paid for 2/3 of my tuition, I'm not really in a position to complain. It seems better than a system where everybody has an equal shot of getting in, but anyone making less than $100K/year doesn't have a prayer of being able to afford it.
Book: Introduction to Economic Analysis.
More like they're only 1/10th of the way towards breaking even.
I wonder whether TEX is one of the most bugless codebases in existence. If it is, it's worth studying how Knuth arrived at it and the tools he used (literate programming). Personally, based on what I've seen, I don't like literate programming: code organized into header and source files, divided into modules (ie. classes) by files with some terse accompanying docs in text files seems more programmer-friendly. (Poor programmers can produce crap in both formalisms.)