skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quaero got US$306 million investment ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136759 ). SearchMe got US$31 million from Sequoia ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134291 ). Ex-Googlers start a search engine. Perhaps this is because Google stock options will be vesting in Aug 2008 and Google will rapidly become a shell of itself before Christmas:

By some estimates, more than 900 employees became instant millionaires when Google went public in August 2004, and that total has likely ballooned along with the stock price. ... By some estimates, nearly a third of the first 500 Googlers have departed, and many more of the estimated 2,200 pre-IPO employees are planning an exit as their stock vests. -- http://www.news.com/Life-after-Google%2C-with-millions/2100-...
This is going to sound stupid, but could you (or whoever) explain what leverage means? I'm plenty good at math but i'm a super newbie at the financial sector lingo.
A six-degrees of separation game. Tags in the same photo are a connection, and you have build paths from John Doe to Jane Fro, the longer the better - humans are worth more points than objects but both count.
So, which sentences in the article contain mistakes, specifically?
eBay already has the market cornered anyhow
Paul,
I like your DH scale. Something too little appreciated: the DH1 argument: Dr XXX is wrong because he's a tool of the YYY industry is an "ad hominem" argument but so is Dr XXX is right because he's a Distinguished Prof at ZZZ University.

People who can't understand an argument are reduced to "who ya gonna believe?" Then we begin to hear about sources of funding, motivation, nationality, religion etc.

I'm glad to see that you place all these arguments down near the name-calling level.

I enjoy your essays,
Bill Drissel
Grand Prairie, TX
I think that the argument given could definitely be considered ad hominem, but as I read it definitely stuck out that a better examples of ad hominem could have been given (that has much less to do with the subject matter at hand).

For instance: "Why should we give creedence to his position on the origin of the universe? He has been divorced twice and is cheating on his current wife... Surely we can't trust what he has to say."

Here the argument is attack by attacking the person. The attack on the person has no direct translation to the dispute at hand.
5:1 leverage means trading with 5x borrowed money and 1x real money. This drastically multiplies potential gains, losses, and overall risk.
UI needs work, as it seems a bit busy, but otherwise seems fine enough.
I'm not saying there simply does not exist such an algorithm; I don't have an opinion on that one way or the other. I'm questioning your claim that "it would be very hard to argue that the singularity won't arrive eventually" because "eventually there will be machines that are capable of passing the Turing test" (emphasis added). You don't know that. Nobody does. Some people like the idea, some people don't; it's wishful thinking on both sides.

My point was to offer one possible scenario under which computers might not pass the Turing test: namely, if there turns out to be some essential aspect of humans (capable of being observed through a low-bandwidth TTY, if you insist) that can't be captured algorithmically. Consciousness might be one such feature. (It's a reasonable one to suggest for two reasons: it's central to human existence and no one has a clue what it is.)

"We'll just simulate it, then" is, in my view, a dodge. If there isn't an algorithm for X, why should there necessarily be one that approximates X arbitrarily closely?

Partisans of the "singularity" are fond of insisting that it's all a matter of processing power, but that's only true if there's an algorithm for everything. That blithe assumption seems to me an article of faith. It reminds me of G.K. Chesterton's line, "Give us one free miracle and we'll explain everything."
It depends what you use it for. If it's for your public Flickr stream or something similar, privacy is irrelevant, right?
I believe it is still on for sometime in May 2008.

It would be cool if they did it on December 21, 2012 or another popular date of Armageddon, just to freak people out.
Why is consciousness special? What do you think about IBM's project to simulate a rat brain neuron by neuron?
Comments tend to do best by saying something clearly correct very early in the existence of a big thread. It's easy to get +5 on Slashdot in the same way.
Another good example of this recipe in action:

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/learning-python-programming-lan...
Prism offers very limited desktop integration. It wraps a browser in a separate process, so it doesn't crash with your browser. Hardly useful.

AIR and Silverlight both dig deeper into the desktop, while not as deep as a tradition client-side app, but deep enough to do interesting things.
How to Convert Website Visitors to Clients | Websites To Computers
stuff isn't worth as much now as it was then (relative to income, wealth, etc)
I'm not sure consciousness is special (or what "special" means). I brought it up as an example. But it doesn't really matter. "What if consciousness is not an algorithm" is just a special case of "What if not everything about humans is computable". That's the real point. Any grandiose claim about this seems to me laughably unsubstantiated. Yet there it is, giggling underneath the solemnity of the Singularians.

Edit: don't know about the rat project. Curious to know the results.
The demand is static for argument's sake.

The reason I believe it is valid to assume a static demand for demonstrative purposes is because I believe that the supply has shifted much more significantly than the demand has over the past 10 years or so, to the point that the change in demand is negligible.

This is just from first-hand observation. I don't have any evidence or reports to show this. It's only my hypothesis. If there are any reports showing a different supply/demand relationship please let me know.
I don,t see how when something was published decides whether it is relevant?
Wow! So needed, but probably only 1% of those who need this will read it. Helps me understand why there is so much negative response on the internet.
markaa
Lambda functions and closures in C++0x
Not really a dating site but there is a book-centric social network site: http://www.goodreads.com . If anyone wants to look at my list, it's at http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1009306
I'm not sure this would be worthy of Hacker News if it was new. Digg sure... But not Hacker News.
Not quite true. The banks which lent directly to hedge funds -- prime brokers -- were not depository institutions and, until last week, they couldn't borrow from the Fed. These were institutions like Bear Stearns or Morgan Stanley. Besides, even depository institutions are reluctant to borrow at the Fed's discount window. Pretty much all bank borrowing is either through short term loans at LIBOR or overnight loans via the Fed funds system. (Note that the Fed funds rate is the rate at which banks borrow from each other using the Fed's system, it is NOT the rate at which banks borrow from the Fed. That's the discount rate.)

Regardless, it still makes plenty of economic sense for a bank to lend to a hedge fund, whether or not the Fed is involved. This type of lending is typically short term and rolled over as loans expire. If a bank lends to another bank, it only receives LIBOR, but if it lends to a hedge fund, it can charge slightly higher, say LIBOR + 40bps. Given that the bank itself can borrow at LIBOR, this is a decent way to make money. It's really no different than short-term lending to any other kind of corporation.

I won't deny that credit has greatly expanded lately. I just don't think the expansion of credit to hedge funds has much to do with the Fed.
Close calls, very close calls...
About the downvoting, maybe it's because they feel you're making a predictable contradiction to a painfully obvious inane trolling? If somebody says something like "you are an idiot", just let them get downmodded alone.
This sort of stuff is not for hacker news.

Try digg.
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

If you want to be more of an Admin I recently wrote this:

to start do 4 os installs, centos, debian, gentoo, and freebsd in that order. install apache, mysql, bind and postfix on each. set up joomla, drupal, and word press on each. make sure all 4 systems will come up with all services working on reboot. get a free subdomain from someone like dtdns.com. set bind up to use it. make sure that you can view the web pages and send emails to the machine from an external machine, doesn't have to be at a remote location, and that it continues to work on reboot (without your intervention). drupal, word press, and joomla must be working at the same time. by the time you are done you will have an ok understanding of the the various nix's and nix itself, and the tasks common for a sys admin. if you need help you can probably ask for it on the distributions forum/mailing list or the softwares forum/mailing list.

it's a good start even if you want to be a programmer.
Your blog post doesn't add anything to http://www.freerice.com. So the guidelines say you should just submit freerice.com.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You are suggesting that there may be some aspect of humans which (a) can be observed by another un-augmented human over a low-bandwidth TTY and (b) can never -- at any point in the future -- be simulated by a computer, no matter how complicated the algorithm or how powerful the computer.

While I admit that this is possible, it strikes me as implausible for the following reason: the capabilities of computers are increasing as time goes by, while those of humans are not (the Flynn effect notwithstanding).

I could understand if you were to say that we won't have the technology to make computers that pass the Turing Test in the next x years, for a sufficiently large x. But you are suggesting that it is plausible that we will never do it, in the same sense that a physical object will never move faster than the speed of light. In the absence of a well-accepted theory supported by evidence (as we have for the limit of the speed of light), this strikes me as a very strong claim that is difficult to defend given the existence of technological evolution in the world.
Keep it real.

btw, your profile says to email you, but the email field in the profile is only visibile to admins. You have to list it again in your about me if you want it to be visible to the public.
Interesting. I guess I shouldn't have been so flippant.
#f
Lambda functions and closures added to C++
Come on. Grow up. Change is good.
That's an out of context quote. He explicitly says to only search for commercially licensed photos.
>> We just are what we are.

>

> You can only play to win if you have some control

> over your life. If you do, then you aren't just what

> you are now.

Yes, for all practical purposes I assume you have much control over your life, not because I'm totally convinced, but because there's no value, for practical matters, in entertaining the alternative.

I didn't mean that we can't change what we are. We definitely have power to make changes in the cultural (and chemical) part of ourselves, which is a big part of what we are. But where does the motivation to do so come from? It ultimately boils down to the same old pulsions.

Now here's a similar, but subtly more puzzling question: imagine some day science enables us to meaningfully overwrite our genetic conditionings so we can control all we feel and desire, from hypothalamus to cortex. Our psyche could become something totally alien to humanity.

Now, what would drive our desire to reflash our EPROM in this way?

I can think of a couple motivations similar to the ones that lead people to experiment with drugs: escapism and curiosity. Or, from a rationalist perspective, we might choose to get rid of inconvenient desires so we could more wholeheartedly pursue whatever ideals have emerged in our consciousness. For example, we might renounce sex and love without regret, and feel, say, the pleasure of acquisition of knowledge with the same intense visceral passion.

So it's plausible that even sane, already happy people see this transformation as desirable.

But this brings an interesting bootstrapping question. What we are doing is changing the "coordinate system" that we use to evaluate the desirability of stuff. According to what "desirability coordinate system" do we compare the old (genetic) one with the new (reflashed) one? Obviously, it has to be according to the old one, since that is what we have at the time the change is considered.

What does it even mean that one value basis favors substituting itself by a different one?? It recalls Nietzschean thoughts: that our minds, societies and cultures are battlefields for the struggle between competing values/ideas/memes, and that our very nature is aiming to become something else.

My initial point was that there was no absolute coordinate system that allowed different coordinate systems to be compared for desirability. I still believe this, but I no longer have such a nihilistic reaction to it.

Back to the point, I think for most people going against the grain of their instincts will be more a cause of suffering (even if it's more evenly distributed through their lifetime) and deathbed regrets than any particular pain endured in the pursuit of love. Therefore, I think pain avoidance is a weak reason to avoid romance.

Then again, I can believe there are people who are genuinely disinterested in romance/sex (Da Vinci and Warhol come to mind). Also, I can understand that some people choose to focus their energy on other things. What I don't believe is that such things are intrinsically more "important". It's just how you choose to redefine your game.
At this point I can only appeal back to what I already said: it depends on whether or not there's an algorithm for everything. If this is true, then sure: assuming enough processing power (and programming power), anything can be simulated. And if it's not true, well, it follows that there's a hard limit, à la your speed-of-light analogy, to what computers will ever be capable of. Doesn't it?

How is that a strong claim? I don't state that the "algorithms for everything" thesis is true or false, because I don't know. Nobody does. My point is that singularianism depends on a belief about this; a belief that is, based on what we currently know, rather miraculous, and therefore not very hard to dispute.

Thanks, by the way, for quoting me as saying "may be". I was starting to doubt my ability to get my point across!
Cool. Congrats! So, once again, you're missing Startup School. :/

I saw a few problems with auctomatic. Number one, I was never sure how this would work out considering eBay PowerSellers, your target market, would almost entirely be in their 40's, with auctomatic's team below drinking age. When I was 22, I enjoyed having customers 30-50 years old relying on me for my eBay software, but at 24, after Startup School, I realized that it was okay to be around, as well as to design, new software for people my age--and maybe you were beginning to feel that same way, as well. (Just like the Beatles could have probably tried to make more money by targeting older adults of their parents' age since an average teenager doesn't have nearly as much money as a 40 year old; yet, the Beatles became famous by creating music that was great for their own peers at the time.)

The other problem I found with eBay is that a startup based around another company's technology and users, at it's best, is tied down to another company, and eBay is not the most technically advanced, consistent, or stable parent to deal with (in my experience) even if they were one of the first web apps to come out with an API.

My third worry was that I believed that it would be better to do something for free to attract tons of buyers, and then convert them to sellers, than vice versa, because sellers will go to where the buyers are, from the tons of research I did, and not vice versa. That's why I concentrated on software for buyers this entire time.

The fourth is that such a startup targeting older adults would need to have older employees targeting forums where such sellers hang out, and I'm not sure any of that was being done other than visiting the eBay's annual conference. I believed you were focusing on creating killer technology and getting funding, but not the boring stuff like talking to older customers who couldn't care less about technology or social networking, nor did I believe you were asking them to tell their friends, etc, in places where older adults might be.

This move seems to make tons of sense. You're decoupling yourself from a being dependent on another company, you're focusing on the buyer aspect, and between the many different "properties" you may be developing, there are plenty of youthful opportunities like boxing.com and call.com to keep one excited and relative to others our age (just for the psychological benefits.) Oh, and you get paid as part of the process, and stay with the same great team, too.
Here's another one for your consideration:

- Even love-induced pain often helps you grow personally in some way.
Xmonad 0.7 released
<3 Regular expressions have always been one of my problems!
[I]t depends on whether or not there's an algorithm for everything.

We already know that there is not an algorithm for everything. Indeed, Turing himself showed that there is not an algorithm for solving the halting problem <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem>. But that has no bearing on whether or not there exists an algorithm that would someday allow a computer to pass the Turing Test.
"Sun, for instance, has created many important technologies in-house, including ...the Java language, popular with programmers."

Something about that sentence is disturbing, but I can't quite pin it down. Certainly Java is widely used and there are people who like it, but describing a programing language as generically "popular with programmers" is weird.
I can understand this. I've just joined. I'm not sure that I'm benefiting in really reading this feed over digg or slashdot. I'll give it a few days before I determine that.
If he renamed it "Why Most Things Fail -- and 10 Easy Things You Can Do To Avoid It Happening to YOU," it would be on the front page of every social media site . . .

I need to read less about copywriting.
Haha

I'm a moron. Thanks!
"Change is good" is one of those things people say but don't actually mean. Not all change is good.
these people aren't merely assholes. They are terrorists (I do not throw this term around lightly). I generally abhor black hat's (grey hats and security researcher's breaking the law to prove a point aside) but this is beyond attacking a network, cracking a web site or even stealing someones Identity. This is as bad as taking an old womans walker and proceeding to beat her with it.
Replace that phrase with algorithm for everything that's intrinsic to being human.

Or, if you prefer, algorithm for everything necessary to simulate being human sufficiently well to consistently fool humans via low-bandwidth TTY. My point remains the same: it's a belief either way. And throwing processing power at it will only yield the predicted effect in one of those cases.

Edit: the existence of undecidability results (and the general failure of the formalist project) ought to make us more, not less skeptical of grandiose claims concerning computability.
I'm curious, what will you do in place of the time spent on ycnews?
Define personality. In my book, dogs have personalities.

Still, rather than about personality I was talking about basic pulsions, namely those directly related to survival and reproduction.

Contrary to rms, I easily concede that ideas are faster to fill survival needs. But where do those needs come from? Why do we care about surviving, as individuals and as a species? We wouldn't ever have put our minds to work on the problem of survival if the visceral will for survival wasn't already there.

I argued that our genetic conditionings related to sexual selection persist because our genes haven't had time to 'learn' their increasing irrelevance. The slowness of genetic adaptation is an argument in favor, not against, the prevalence of genetic heritage as a factor (certainly not the only one) in our drives and personalities.
I'm getting more disappointed with the front page as well. It's not necessarily the quality of the content, but the fact that too many posts stay on the front page for too long. Something about reading the same piece of "news" for 2 or more days really irritates me. If I was at least on the same computer it wouldn't be too bad, as visited links would get marked. But I read this site on my desktop, laptop, phone and work computer.

I've mentioned this earlier and requested the ability to dismiss items for view (archive), but pg didn't seem to think it was a good idea and/or worthwhile to implement. Every time time I see the same story on the front page 2 days in a row I get this sudden urge to add

127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com

to /etc/hosts. Sooner or later I'll go ahead and do it, and not return until HN gets archiving and keyboard shortcuts.
To answer rms, I'm a stanford alum. I think the course is interesting enough to give it a shot - thanks for the advice. I'll be sure to summarize anything interesting I find.
Ironically, this is a typical reddit post too. And why do you think that posts suggesting different strategies to combat noise are not worthy your attention? This is #1 problem for any news site, and this one of the best communities to discuss and test approaches to solve it.
or reddit. really
Many bay area law firms work for free for a while if they like your idea. They also hook you up w/ angels and VC's b/c they're not going to get paid if they don't. Ours have given many startup workshops where they bring in industry ninjas from various fields to speak. One of those people is now on our board of advisors. Lawyers can actually be a great way to get your foot in the door to the valley, and done right, should not be seen as a total cost sink.
[I]t depends on whether or not there's an algorithm for everything necessary to simulate being human sufficiently well to consistently fool humans via low-bandwidth TTY.

But clearly such an algorithm does exist, so this objection fails.

Its existence follows from these facts:

(1) only a fixed amount of data in the form of questions can flow through the low-bandwidth TTY,

(2) only a fixed amount of data in the form of responses can be sent back back, and

(3) there exists an algorithm for any function with a bounded input and output. (To see this, note that the algorithm could consist of a lookup table containing a correct output for each of the finite number of inputs it has to deal with.)

I concede that it is another matter entirely whether or not we will ever discover such an algorithm and implement it on a sufficiently powerful computer. But the fact that an algorithm for passing the Test must exist takes the discussion out of the realm of physical and/or philosophical possibility and into the realm of technology and engineering.
wouldn't be surprised if they were on a gov grant to help the semantic web.
But surely diversity is our strength?
10% of FaceBook Folks Are Xooglers
Can you list some of the stories you didn't like seeing on the frontpage? (You can probably still find them by clicking on More at the bottom.) I'd be curious to know if they're statistically distinguishable from older frontpage stories.
I have a somewhat related request -- it would be nice if weekend/weeknight submissions weren't instantly relegated to obscurity by their auto-rotation off of the front page.

Perhaps a random selection of stories for the front page, with probability of selection weighted by their score? That would diversify the news, and give off-hours posts a fighting chance for views....
Embed FriendFeed Widget in your Blog
google made ex-googlers - These people shit the same as the rest of us