skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the reason most people are ignoring Kurzweil is that he sounds like a crackpot. I happen to be a guy who owns an autographed copy of Kurzweil's latest book, but I acknowledge that the idea of the technological singularity sounds too good to be true. There have been thousands of cults proclaiming that the end is near; it would be a coincidence of historical proportions if this one happened to be right.

Kurzweil presents many convincing arguments, but the central tenet is that the doubling of processing power keeps up for another two decades. Due to the nature of nature, what we observe as exponential growth in the end invariably turns out to be logistic growth. If this is so, then at any time the doubling of processing power could slow, and this would mean that we would only, at the most, get one more doubling. Such an event would bring the dream of a near-term universe full of computers to a screeching halt.

I believe that we should be able to create machines that think, but it is important that we aren't blinded by ideology. A massive "singularity movement" that ends up disappointing people, will in the best case delay the advent of such technology due to funding issues. I think the history of AI has demonstrated this quite clearly.

If Kurzweil's estimates are correct, though, another 8-10 years of "exponential growth" in computer hardware will put full-scale simulation of a human brain into supercomputer territory. And frankly, I doubt that evolution has managed to find the most computationally efficient way to achieve intelligence. There's got to be a way to do this.
The learning algorithm could find others that have similar tasts and use their recommendations too, though maybe this just pushes the problem up a level.
76/100 running Safari 3.0.4 (5523.15) with ~mid-February nightly build on intel Mac.

50/100 running Firefox 2.0.0.9 on intel Mac.

39/100 running Safari 3.0.4 (5523.15) on PPC Mac.

39/100 running Safari on v1.1.3 iPhone.

39/100 running Safari on v1.1.4 iPod Touch.
From the article: 13. Cut out cable TV.

There's always something passable on cable TV. It could help your productivity if you don't have cable TV.
Huh, the community here is changing if people are getting downmodded for long posts.
This sounds like nothing more than promoting the status quo.

Why do you automatically assume that "no use" in this context would turn out to be a bad thing? The way I see this, if we happen to have greater intelligences working for our common good, we would be able to solve any problem better than a human could - including a possible problem of feeling useless. This would be the best-case scenario, and IMHO it would be much better than the world we have today. Possible solutions to the problem, from my limited human brain, could be bringing the human brains up to the level of the greater intelligence and hence finding new problems to solve, altering human drives so it isn't a problem any longer, abolishing AGI entirely or partially, etc. Any problem could in such a best-case scenario be solved better and faster than humans could.

I agree with you on the worst or worse-case scenario point. There are huge ethical risks and implications in creating very powerful and capable machines. This means that we need to go into this situation with our eyes open, and make sure that we discuss ethics, transparency and consequences from day one.

Enslaving humanity is a basic human drive, and I like to believe that we can do better than that if we try hard. In a pure cost-benefit analysis, it is obvious that it would be best to use such technology to help out everyone.
The best blogs you are not reading
A couple of days ago a reader of my blog (http://www.jgc.org/blog/) wrote a nice note saying that he was happy to have discovered it and it was one of the five blogs he reads all the time.

It made me wonder what blogs I'm not reading that I should be. We see lots of blogs come up here over and over again. What gems are there out there that we're missing?
They weren't long posts in the style of nostrademons, they were more stream of consciousness style.
Sounds like a perfect machine learning project for someone. Put in the blogs you read, how much you like them, and get some recommendations, both blogs and other people who have tastes similar to yours.

Indeed, Google Reader has a feature just like this...
What 'empirical evidence' are you referring to?

(If the eurohackers you think of now work for or sold out to US firms, that tends to support, rather than refute, the article's argument.)
Zoho Writer Extends Mobile Support, Adds Offline Capability for Windows Mobile Using Google Gears
They might be on generous welfare, but it's not free - it comes from other German people's taxes including poor Germans. Plus you tend to be poor on welfare even in Germany. Why is it okay to have 11.7% of the population be impoverished and idle? While the UK, Australia and the US have 5% or less unemployment?
I like it because it lets me vote even if I do not have an account.
+1 for making email optional.
Shifting Google Gears to mobile
"... Sounds like a perfect machine learning project for someone. Put in the blogs you read, how much you like them, and get some recommendations, both blogs and other people who have tastes similar to yours. ..."

something like ~ http://teddziuba.com/about-me.html & http://www.persai.com/
Silverlight On Mobile Devices
Microsoft Office Live Workspace goes live
rms -- that's truly ironic. The commenter broke unwritten rules so you helped him out with advice. Then you gave him a bunch of karma, in the process also breaking unwritten rules and getting busted.

And before pg says "it's in writing somewhere" -- the system shouldn't require people poking around the blog to figure out what will work or not.

The whole karma thing gives me a headache. It's supposed to be for good articles, except in the case where you use it to agree or disagree, unless you disagree and you don't have enough karma, unless you use it too much, in which case...

Ugh. It's like by insisting that it's a simple up and down arrow we've made the whole thing much more complicated than it needs to be. But hey! It looks simple on the page! I guess that's something.
25 Native iPhone Apps We Hope to See
Once again guys, thanks for the great posts, its really helped me -a LOT! I really appreciate the generosity of the effort and time people have taken to respond to my post.
67/100

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de-DE; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008030213 Firefox/3.0b4pre (Swiftfox)
And Google Reader's feature is quite handy. I end up subscribing to over half of what it suggests.
Hey, now as I think about it, games are the sort of thing that have taken UI expertise seriously, while ignoring all the UI experts (and their arbitrary heuristic rules!). And it's led to some very enjoyable applications!
Echo the last part. Dependability and responsiveness are absolutely top-importance! In fact, I feel that what's more important than responsiveness is a uniform response time. Nothing puts me off more than a file-copy among the same teo disks taking 10s one day and 2 min on the next (for the same filesize).

Of course that could be just me! :)
do you really believe that germany has a higher percentage of impoverished people than the us?i would think the lowest american salaries are lower than german welfare
Ask YC:  Do you know of any good books that teach programming by developing an application?
Something maybe targeted at intermediate developers, where they incrementally develop a software application, which each chapter focusing on a different pattern/technique.
Upvoted!
campaign monitor makes me happy
I'm a big fan of the 37signals software. Also Jott; Jott makes me feel productive, which makes me happy.
Artists Still Trying to Push CDs on Consumers
agree with AVR series, I myself is developing one data logger for my current company. I was using 8051 a few years back then.
Biggest case of plagiarism in the science literature
Elsevier is crap. I couldn't even get them to retract an article where the guy bluntly quotes over-unity energy devices...
Roll on PLOS and social networking literature!
Germany also has high unemployment because of the reunification, so it would be much harder to go down to 5%.

Anyway, of course 5% unemployment is better than 12%. On the other hand, Germans have less to fear from unemployment. Not only are they much harder to fire, but the unemployed are better off in Germany, and don't have to worry about losing health insurance. So Germans have more peace of mind than Americans. This comes with a hefty price tag, of course. So it's a trade-off.

My point was: Germany is doing just fine, in its own way, and there is even a start-up scene in Berlin.
This is that fight. It's the hope that not implementing opt-out version targeting is a precedent that IE8 will continue to follow.

The IE team recently has shown great dedication to bringing new versions of IE up to par with the standards set out by the W3C. I would not be surprised if they are close to on par with adoption alongside the other browsers, and with no opt-out version targeting we'll be able to more immediately see these changes take place.
A lot of the comments here are really eloquent in their brevity! Still, it'd be great if you could say which aspect of the software tool makes you most happy. I know, thoroughly subjective, not statistically projectable, but interesting nonetheless.
Of course, collaborative filtering applies to blogs too, but I wanted to hear people's opinions of different blogs. After all, I come here for the people not the algorithm.
That principle is what game designers call a "juicy" experience. It is, more precisely, when every action results in an large amount of feedback (animation, sound, particle explosion, etc.).
Rick Olson endorses Github
No idea what there is to learn about HTML, it's CSS that's the problem. I've never found a resource that explained CSS well.

CSS still surprises me almost daily. I'll be probably fluent in Haskell before I ever get CSS. What would really help me is having the source code of a well-written, high-level CSS rules engine - written for educational purposes, not for performance.
Honestly Reddit makes me happy because of one simple fact: you write comments in plain text using Markdown.

If every site did this the world would be a better place.
One quick note: I'm using admuncher, and Jaanix somehow displays a lot of javascript from admuncher that it shouldn't. I don't know how many people are using this ad blocker, but it could be an issue for mass addoption of Jaanix if admuncher is popular!
In that case, lets ignore whatever problems you find in the article and discuss its basic message.

I lived in parts of Europe (though not Germany or France) for a while and found the contrast between there and the US to match the general theme of this article. These biases against the American attitude towards work seemed deeply ingrained into the culture.
More like 5 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65566
Dilbert on Software Architects
I have never had a problem managing money, but does anyone else think that everything stated in this article just plain old common sense?

I can't believe its managed to get almost 1300 diggs and a host of comments for stating the obvious. In saying that, perhaps these things are only obvious to someone who is already a good money manager - what does anyone else think?
Oil Tops Inflation-Adjusted Record Set in 1980
I wonder how they plan to do parameter estimation? Millions of nonlinear dynamic models running, each with at least 3 free parameters in the simplest of neuron models, with an almost infinite number of possible topologies of the networks. That is quite the search space and neuroscience can provide very little prior knowledge.
How To Learn Lisp
http://www.shatters.net/celestia is a favorite of mine.
I'm a little confused by your comment. Does the Europe you know embrace insane work ethic, high risk investments, low job security, and admire those who prefer to start their own companies, or not? Without those, the culture is creating a bad environment for startups.
XHTML validation is like English grammar.
My taste in music is cafe del mar tracks, ibizahouse, goa, classical, jazz and deephouse. I don't think that's a particularly normal taste in music - but last.fm seems to locate great music for me anyway, and rarely misses. Might all be done with tags though.
The keyword was might.You must admit ynews isn't for some of the people who get on here.
Here are 5 of my favorites nobody has mentioned here yet:

- The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth

- The Algorithm Design Manual, Skiena

- The Practice of Programming, Kernighan and Pike

- ACM Turing Award Lectures

- Applied Cryptography, Schneier
Robotic pet won't soil your carpet
Maybe it is time to expand the size of the editor base. "Articles" like this should be killed.
I heard the guy who patented those sliders (to narrow search results) made about 60 million dollars for about two days work. One of my friends went to interview at some company he was associated with.
Daylight Saving Wastes Energy
Great article that is politically unpopular. Nice use of textbooks as examples, unemployment rates, labor policies -- you could go on with this theme to any amount of detail required by the naysayers here. Sure it's a commentary, but that's what analysis pieces are supposed to be like. You can question whether the thesis was supported or not -- I found it adequately done for the genre.

But the most interesting part of the piece is the reaction from the commenters here. The things attacked in the article -- nice cushy jobs for life, the view of politics as the marxist battle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the view that political protest is required for job creation -- that's all part of the modern narrative in many colleges. So it's no surprise that such an attack would elicit so many apologists for the Germans and French.

I love the Germans and French, but you don't see very many startups at all coming out of there. I know I would never want to try a startup there nor would I want to take a well-developed company to one of these countries. For those of you who disagree, here's your chance! Go found a great startup in France and let us know how it went for you. BTW, good luck with the local workforce, governmental regulations, and pervasive politics.
I like it. I've kicked around this idea for a couple of years now.

Now automate the sliders for me.
Ed Boyden: How to Think
If someone built a laser powerful enough to illuminate tens of thousands of square miles, advertising would be the least of our worries.

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/SamuelBernard1.shtml
To dismiss it, yes. To ignore it, no.

Few of us have the luxury of thoroughly examining every article. If it looks bad in the first sentence, that's as far as we're likely to get.
"In 2004 a bread roll cost 40 cents. For wheat that went into it the farmer received less than 2 cents. What do you think of that?"

I think that the bread makers should be fairly compensated for turning raw material, like grain, into edible prodcuts. If the farmers want more of the cut they should band together and form a co-op to negotiate contracts for better compensation.
Ask YC: What currency would you prefer to be paid in?
See title
hacker news, craigslist, and google maps, especially hacker news

During long and lonely coding sessions, they remind me that I am not alone.
When my children were small, I found the Berkeley Parents Network[1] to be a good source of information.

[1] http://parents.berkeley.edu
My title contains the word "engineer." That's what I'm good at. At least, I think. I'm good at solving problems, building tools, and doing the design and engineering for a system or feature.

However, there's no "engineering" to be done at the moment. Some days I wish they would just change my job title to "code monkey." It would really be a better fit with the actual work.
US unemployment figures do not capture all of the unemployed. A more comparable figure to the German number might be 8% if you count people who have given up on job searching and don't get counted in the official statistics.

To make a full comparison you might also want to look at the number of people working part time jobs that really want to be working full time. Our laws encourage employers to split some kinds of work among part time employees rather than hire full time employees. The economy still has just as many unemployed man hours, but they don't show up in the statistics because each individual is employed. (I don't know if German law encourages this.)

Germany is in a bad spot for unemployment, but suggesting it is more than twice the US with those statistics is not accurate.
App in a Box: Facebook Platform applications in 5 minutes
I regularly read http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/

Not sure how obscure that is among hackers, but there you go.
Pictures of my wife and kids make me very happy. I like my wifi photo frame, and I also like piclens. In conjunction with ourdoings.com, of course.
"The Architect"
I like "code monkey"

I've had all kinds of titles: PM, architect (project, enterprise, and system), senior developer, lead, tech lead, design team lead, DBA, trainer, mentor, coach.

I've had 'em all -- and I like "code monkey" the best.
There is other software than Emacs? Interesting...
Microsoft caves: ‘Super-standards’ mode to become IE 8 default
I prefer "Programmer Emeritus". I ask my clients to kiss my ring. (For some clients, I put my ring in my back pocket first.)
Wikipedia Founder's Fling With Columnist Ends in Nasty Public Breakup
haha. my precious.. cursor
OLPC, Classmate and Eee
It's La France, you illiterate chimp :-)
I don't really think it's possible for software to make people happier without making us more efficient. When a previously complicated task has been simplified or improved it generally makes people happier to use it than an alternative.

I tried but couldn't think of any software that I use which made me happier and was less efficient than something else.
Europe has the DSP valley. Sure, it's not half as sexy as "web 2.0"...
I'd like to see that too. Those would probably be far more useful examples to compare to the plethora of "he stuck it through and was awesome later". I think there are lots of people that get stuck in the equivalent of "I'm a waiter now, but just waiting for my big break" sort of thing for decades in acting/music/startup thing.

I find these type of stories to be useless, because it doesn't separate the difference between "those that stuck to it and made it" and those that "stuck to it and mired in limbo" While both luck and skills play into it, a lot of people lean too heavily on luck and not enough time developing their skills. I think it's important to be persistent, but persistent so you get better at what you do. Be undeniably good, so all it takes is a little luck, not a lot of luck.

Ironically, there's a demotivational poster that says "If all it takes is a pretty picture and a cute little saying to inspire you, then your job is what robots will be doing soon. Real soon."
but if you understand sipser, you've probably got a good enough base to fudge through a lot of whatever they throw your way.

(And recommendation thirded! I just reread a good bit of the book on a flight to Montana, and it still rocks.)
"I'd rather spend my money on my genome than a Bentley or an airplane"
Federal agencies boost scores in security
Time...?
The pupil was too much of a contrast from the irises, so it looks like she was looking at you too intently.
Startup Lesssons from Warren Buffet - Identify your moat
There is quite a hacking scene in Europe, but the people that have ambitions and want to create something big all move to the US. Tim Berners Lee, Bjarne Stoustrup, DHH, etc.
Cleaning 400 years of dust from books
I think you're failing to regognize the crying need this world has for plain old common sense.
I can't speak for m0nty but I'd agree that I don't recognise the Europe of the FP article.

I'm in Ireland, historically a very left leaning state until drastic measures were taken in the 1980s leading to our recent growth and prosperity. We've a culture of what's called 'begrudgery' - speaking ill of people who succeed - though in truth it doesn't seem to have held us back.

As to the things you describe I doubt they're of the same caliber. Someone starting a business here will often look to government grants and other funds for bootstrap cash. Does that create a bad environment though? In some ways yes, Govt may not be quick to hand over money and may not have the understanding a lot of venture capitalists do, but overall I don't think so: I know quite a few small business owners and technology startups, it certainly doesn't seem excessively detrimental. I've no experience of that scene in the US though.

In Ireland at least, I think we develop polar love/hate relationships with those that succeed, either lauding or slandering them. Micheal O'Leary of Ryanair is a good example.

I come from a family of business owners and starters and know many others. I've also worked on EU-wide research projects (telecoms related; and see little of the resentment the article implies is prevalent). As such my experience is obviously rather selective.
Since Europe is a continent of many countries, each with its own environment I can only speak for my own country (Denmark)

Of the items you mention we have an insane work ethic and that's about it.
That's in fact what I do. It's just a little tedious.
Ebb: C-Powered Web Server That Uses Rack - Faster than Mongrel *and* Thin
Fascinating stuff. I wish a northern state, like Montana, would try a similar experiment in half of its counties, and ditch daylight saving time for a year and see what happens. I suspect it would save money, too.

On a slightly more hackerish note: I worked on a power trading system, and it would break like hell twice a year, on DST switch days. Because electricity trades on an hourly basis (except in Texas, which uses 15-minute intervals), everyone who deals with aggregating power flow or power over the course of a day, ends up writing a loop like "for (hour = 0; hour < 24; hour++) { ... }", which is totally wrong. The spring forward day has 23 hours, and the fall back day has 25. That code therefore breaks twice a year and loses money because (a) it needs to be fixed, and (b) it did its accounting wrong. I hope studies examining the economic efficiency of DST take this sort of thing into account. Probably not.
Should be easy to figure out, but a quick google was unable to turn up an average welfare recipients' salary.

In the us, 5.85 * 40 * 52 = $12,168 annually. Figure 30% taxes, and you're at $8517 annually.

Who has better knowledge and/or google-fu to dig up what an average german welfare recipient makes per year?

(Also, most states have a higher minimum wage than 5.85: http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/america.htm . Also, the Euro/US exchange rate doesn't really express living costs. Perhaps we should measure salary in terms of milk or bread for a more fair comparison?)
iPhone SDK: What It Will Mean to Business Users
Gold $1 coins taxed at face value.
coming from a European school I have seen many questions like this, and unfortunately your reasoning is wrong.

The premise is that the farmer only gets a small percentage of the selling price, and hence is abused by a capitalist global economy.

I have discussions with intelligent people on a regular basis that still hold on strongly to the belief that the little man is being abused by the system.

We're a bunch of commies :-)
I just don't know how many people have ever typed more than a couple paragraphs on their phone. Zoho is amazing though.
There's a lot of truth to it nonetheless.
It's very much paced towards a beginner, but I know a lot of people who love the head first HTML book:
http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-HTML-CSS-XHTML/dp/059610197...

If you're more advanced or just looking for a brush up i second Dan Cederholm's book aimdave recommended.
Wandering About » Alchemy of Juices
Gmail. There are many great features that combined with ease of use, makes this a killer app for me.