skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do you mean by 'heavy investigation'. The latest skyscrapers in dubai cost billions of dollars each. How much is spent on AI per year worldwide. I'd bet it's less than 100 million. I wouldn't call that serious effort.

How has the name of AI been tarnished. If people believe you can spend a fraction of the money spent on a building to create human level intelligence then it's their 'intelligence' that is tarnished.

If your goal is create human level ai, than more 'intelligent' systems is not progress, we've had 'intelligent' tools since the first loom weaving machines were created hundreds of years ago.
To me, "on topic" means an article that is a) not conventional/obvious, b) deep, in the sense that it provides greater analysis than most newspapers/magazines/blog posts, and c) makes me think of some process, idea, trend, method, or ideology in a new way (which ties back into a). All three of those could be further developed as points, but I think they nonetheless help describe what HN is about.

I think "Marry Him!" matches those criteria (since I submitted it): few if any sources covering mating markets and their incentives in as much depth; the stories match some of the data, as developed in books like Tim Harford's The Logic of Life; I hadn't realized the extent to which sexual politics change as one ages. Consequently, "Marry Him!" seems like it would be interesting to the HN crowd. So does the article on Haskell first impression, with its discussion of monads. To me, both belong.
Here's a recipe for living on one 'median' income:

* Pay your cars off.
* Get down to < $300 / month on food.
* Stop eating out except on special occasions.
* Turn the thermostat up / down in summer / winter.
* Cap mortgage or rent at $1000 / month.
* Live close to work
* Stop buying lots of crap you don't need.
* Build some savings

The key thing is, if you can manage on one income, a LOT of expenditure just melts away. Day care, gas for commuting to two jobs, much easier to eat at home, etc. etc.
This may explain why:

"The Story of Electronics (working title), due in early 2010, employs the Story of Stuff style to explore the high-tech revolution’s collateral damage—6 billion tons of e-waste and counting, poisoned workers and a public left holding the bill."

Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with the statements made by this author or the logic (or lack thereof) used to derive her conclusions that we're all in a giant conspiracy.
http://bigassmessage.com/741540b37
As the only reason we're paying attention to this non-mathematical essay is because Albert Einstein wrote it, noting that he was not actually an economist is entirely valid.
Customer-Initiated Ideas, Suggestions, and Comments
"But from what I've heard, to be successful I need to spend my time programming"

You've heard wrong then.
The problem I see here is that Einstein lacked any self awareness. He doesn't seem to grasp that his mind is an extraordinary one and hence an exception which has led him to conclusions like this...

=====
This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.
=====

Now anyone whose actually observed real people knows that competition tends to bring out the best in people (at least in effort not necessarily in personality). But to someone like Einstein who was self motivated to spend most of his life doing "thought experiments" he doesn't grasp that most people need a push in order to perform.

He also falls into the trap of not subjecting his preferred mechanism (Government) to the same scrutiny as he subjects that which he is opposed to. Take this statement for instance...

====
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.
====

It clearly didn't strike him that the U.S. Federal Government is controlled by an even smaller, more elite group (The Congress) and that they have more power than any private cabal really ever could. I mean, he says private industry "cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society" but Government can't be checked at all (effectively or otherwise). It is the ultimate power.

In the end Einstein had a theoretical mind and in the world of theory Socialism (and for that matter Communism) makes a lot more sense. That's why intellectuals have been trying to make both work for the last 100 years. But when measuring results Capitalism seems to come out on top.
"Dots connect in future". You are not the first one to not see any point in going to school now. You will see the point 10 years down after
- having met a co-founder of your very successful company.
- transforming a college project into a billion dollar enterprise.
- making great business deals with your college alumni.
- ... etc etc

School gives plenty of opportunities to be whoever-you-want-to-be. More than that, the bonds you create in college are priceless. They motivate you to do whatever big you are destined to do. Don't miss out on all that.
Maybe you mean axioms.

I don't see why you're defending an essay pimping socialism after the results of socialism over the course of the 20th century. Einstein had the excuse of much of what happened in the Soviet Union being effectively covered up; in the wake of our knowledge of what happened there, during the Cultural Revolution, etc., it's just not excusable in 2010.

It's like linking to Ludwig von Mises rambling about FTL travel.
"This was not the tree's first encounter with a truck."

If only the tree could talk...
In a random walk through wikipedia for 5 minutes, I stumbled on this other piece of six sigma tree news:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsurugaoka_Hachiman-gū

A thousand year old ginkgo was knocked down yesterday... I wonder how often 1000+ year old trees are felled?
Mexico’s Slim tops the list of world’s richest
"the U.S. Federal Government is controlled by a very small, very elite group (The Congress) and that they have more power than any private cabal really ever could"

I suppose you are not familiar with the Executive branch, or the Judicial branch. They are, at least in theory, supposed to share power with Congress. In fact, it could be argued that at the present time (and especially during Bush Jr's term) Congress is the weakest of the three branches.

Then there are all the private interests that influence these branches (most obviously Congress), such as the corporate lobbyists which funnel massive amounts of money in to influencing the decisions of government.

High ranking executives and members of the boards of corporations regularly get influential jobs in government, and when they retire from government they go back to serve as executives in and on boards of corporations.

It's a mistake to consider the US government as a separate entity from that of the corporations. It's all highly incestuous. They are two sides of the same hand.
As someone who has been through both sides of this debate, I've realized that school is what you make it. I went into school sure that I won't get much out of it. And that's what happened for the first two years. Then I took a 3 semester break. I returned thinking there is stuff I can learn at school. And I have learned a shit load which I have been able to apply directly to my new startup.

It is common for me to run into friends who claim a class is BS. It's hard for me to agree. At the same time, I understand where they are coming from. The class's professor might not be super interesting and he might be just running through slides--but if you went into the class(says its on Sales Management) hoping to learn about Sales Management, you can learn despite the average professor and class.

I encourage everyone who thinks school is crap to take some time off and test out your hypothesis. Some will find it to be true and won't return. That's the best case scenario! Vast majority will learn how much they suck at various things and return to school a little humbled and more receptive to the classroom.
That's truth you can feel in your gut!
How Does The Show Teletubbies Encourage Children To Learn?
I think I missed the point.
I think your advice for young women is good. That is what my wife did 20 years ago. Of course as a result she has to put up with me. While I claim this is a good outcome, it is hardly a perfect one...

However as a married atheist I have to point out that marriage is a legal and social construct and not strictly a religious one. I have no trouble pointing to past societies where it was very religious, and ones where it was not religious at all. In short marriage has meaning, and it has meaning for non-religious people as well.

In fact, the divorce rate among atheists is lower than the general public. So one could make a case that marriage matters more to atheists than to the general public!
By the same logic, no woman should ever come near you since she can't know if you like her for her or because you are driven by the genetic imperative to spread your semen around.
(is there IO Monad in Coq?)

To the best of my knowledge, no. If memory serves me, Coq actually isn't even Turing-complete, being a typed lambda calculus with no general fixpoint operator (specifically, a variant on the Calculus of Constructions). Any "program" that "type checks" in Coq is thus provably terminating.

Note that, in Haskell terms, the simplest general fixpoint operator is:

y :: (t -> t) -> t
y f = f (y f)

...which, interpreting "->" as logical implication, is a theorem stating that a proposition implying its own truth implies its own truth. Given that (t -> t) is clearly a tautology, this suffices to prove all possible propositions, also known as the "principle of explosion". [0]

On the other hand, see http://ynot.cs.harvard.edu/ for an attempt to add side-effects and general recursion to Coq in a controlled fashion, in order to turn it into more of a programming language.

[0] http://xkcd.com/704/
Economics in the 40-50s was about Markets vs. Planning. The big economic names at the time - Hayek, Keynes, were debating the merits and faults of markets and planning. Einstein threw in his 2 cents. That he was a physicist has no bearing on his argument.
Brizzly’s Been Busy — Buying Apps, Creating Guides, And Going On Picnics.
Since one of the main points behind "The Story of Stuff" is that the electronics industry is driven by consumerist propaganda, and that the real cost of electronics comes from the lives of third world citizens, I don't find it surprising that they don't support Kindle. The movie is a little bit overboard, perhaps, but it has a definite anti-gadget flavor.
:-O I wonder if they could get a cutting from it at least.
This top-down thing is getting tiresome. Typically this sort of statement is given by conservatives and libertarians. I'm not exactly sure how they manage to convince themselves that their dual love affair with military dominance & patriotic zeal impose less social control.

[Edit:] Well, actually, Stockholm Syndrome is one likely factor. It's amazing what sort of legs that research has, there really should be more comparative studies.
I'm pretty pissed somebody knocked that tree down, and it is on the other side of the world. I can't imagine how pissed the locals were.

Sure hope, for his sake, the guy sobered up soon enough and got out of there before they found out who did it...
Yeah, dynamic customization and extension is quite antiquated. Modern IDEs should only be customizable by writing 5000 different classes, recompiling, and restarting the IDE. Tools should only be built by dedicated tool-builders, not by your average programmer!

Nice troll though, I will give you that.
I don't know what university you went to, but this is about as far from the truth as statements come.

If you can't learn anything interesting/useful/mindblowing in a university course, you are either not paying attention, or are taking the wrong course...
There's nothing wrong with voicing an opinion on the economy which you depend on, particularly if you've thought about it a lot. The world would probably be a better place if this were more common. (After all, wars are even fought over economic incompatibilities. Take the US and old Soviet Union; their economies even had crucial similarities, like top-down workplace decisionmaking.)

In probably any country it's very difficult to be an economics prof if you go outside narrow ideological bounds. Like if you wanted to pursue Participatory Economics or something, rather than forms of capitalism or marxism-leninism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics
Indeed. Remember that overlapping windows was a tech demo to show how powerful the graphics processing was. It was never intended to actually be a production feature.
This article blames the author for not having a Kindle version of her book.

That is a very simplistic view of what it takes for some authors to be able to sell Kindle editions (I used to work in that exact field) --

* their contract with the publisher may give all digital rights to the pub. This is the case surprisingly often. Depending on the publisher's priority or digital strategy, a kindle edition may take forever.

* Royalties may be different fir digital editions, eg the publisher may want to take a much bigger cut since they don't have to pay for printing, distribution, etc. If the author doesn't like that, it can seriously delay or halt digital publication.

* Agreements with other dist. channels may prevent a Kindle edition. File under either 'digital strategy' as above or 'publisher greed/stupidity.'
Am I the only one who though he meant this Go? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)
Yep. Not to mention their advocacy for prohibiting abortion and prohibiting people from doing drugs, and their advocacy for "law and order" and being "tough on crime" (yet another form of social control).

At least the non-socially-conservative libertarians are consistent in being against many of these things (the War on Drugs, military intervensionism, being anti-abortion). But there are plenty of other problems with libertarianism, such as their generally being ok with people getting screwed over by one another, as long as its the result of "market forces", or there's a contract saying it's ok for one to screw over the other.
I hear where you're coming from, economics definitely can feel clumsy at times, but that to me is even more reason to continue pushing it for breakthroughs. Economics is a relatively new field of study compared to the history of physics.
Another important reason to go to college is for personal growth. There are experiences that are to be found only in college.

You might take a music or philosophy class just to fulfill credit requirements but it turns out to greatly influence your world views or let you discover your hidden passion. You might meet a professor who turns out to be life long mentors.

You may join a study-abroad program to open yourself to a completely different culture and society. You may get to know others who will become your best friends in life. You may engage in intellectual conversations during lunch/dinner or late night with your pals.

To relieve you stress, you might do some stupid things with your friends during friday parties that you can laugh at 10 years later. The list goes on.

If you miss college, you are not just missing a degree, but much more. IMHO, the most important thing about college is not diploma or lectures but the college atmosphere, the people you meet, the connections you make with them and the invaluable experiences you will have during the 4 years.

Just think about it, if you love coding, you will code for your whole life.So there is really no rush.

And I highly recommend selective liberal arts colleges for better personal experiences.
Because there will not be enough equity left to give proper incentives to founders and early employees.
Mexican Carlos Slim Overtakes Bill Gates as World's Richest Man
I don't know, but since I moved from a house to an apartment building, my electricity bill is within that range.
Exactly. And yet the only reason this essay has been dug up is because the greatest physicist of the day wrote it.

Hayek, Keynes, et al discussed the economics - the models, the math.

Einstein here makes a political argument, complete with hand-waving about how economics can't be used to judge his position because it's so last-wave.

This is the political version of Linus Pauling and vitamin C .
Given that it's not registered by Randall, I'm going to suspect that some random guy registered that domain and pointed it at XKCD. Not that hard to do.
Ask HN: What kind of jobs exist for Computer Scientists in social justice?
Hello.

I am a soon-to-be college graduate. I've always been top of my (CS) class, but unlike all of my fellow classmates I won't be immediately jumping into an awesome job to get rich when I graduate. I know they won't actually be doing that either, but I don't even have the desire to do so.

Instead, I have a burning desire to work in a social-justice related field. I would like to help the world become a better place -- I know it sounds corny, but I do. I'm so frustrated with it right now I'm shaking. Nobody so far (professors, advisor, or parents) has been able to give me any substantive advice in this regard.

I'm college educated and I have a skill which is supposedly indicative of intelligence. I want to do some good with it. I would like to do a lot of good with it. Please give me advice.
Good find.

So much for 'prototypes' then, in that post he writes it is a sample. Bit of a difference there.

That also explains why he hasn't got a clue about the normal phases a piece of hardware goes through before you are in a position to ship product.

I still don't get where the discrepancy of "Anyway i am not pre-selling anything, the device is currently produced and i can ship you 500 hundreds of pieces to you in a week." to "I am just a couple of weeks away from being able to ship." comes from as well as the documentation stating clearly that the base unit definitely does not have phone capability (it's marketed as a media player) and yet 'Alberto' states clearly that it has, but on their specs page it says that GSM/EDGE/UMTS are through a dongle.

Maybe his minimum order volume is 500 pieces and he hopes that he can scrape together the money to get the order delivered.

That could lead to 'interesting' situations if not enough people order.

have a read here:

http://www.ipadforums.net/ipad-general-discussions/291-tons-...

I guess selling fake brand watches wasn't enough of an income stream:

http://watch-replicas.net/

enso-now and admin-enso-now are sockpuppets for lostintech, who professes to have some idea of how to spot fake watches:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116174

No kidding...
huh?

They are called the "Fundamental Theorems of Welfare Economics" - look it up in any graduate econ text. Stop ranting.
Bruce Eckel - Programming in the Mid-Future
Tell HNers: Come to Flourish 2010 at UIC
Dear HNers,

Flourish is University of Illinois at Chicago's free annual conference
dedicated to celebrating and elevating open source software and open
culture in the Midwest. Through talks, workshops and coding sprints,
attendees experience and reconnect with the philosophies and
technologies that make the open source movement a key driver of
innovation. Flourish is also a great opportunity to meet up with old
friends and to make new ones. Join us at Flourish Conference 2010!

Here is some of what we have in store for you at our 4th annual
Flourish Conference

===Workshops===

- Bart Trojanowski on Introduction to Git

- Rob Landley on Developing for non-x86 targets using QEMU

- Ken Wasetis on Plone

- Carl Karsten on openRecording

===Code Sprint===

- Led by Massimo Di Pierro (web2py lead developer)

===Talks===

- Dennis Gilmore from the Fedora Project

- Dave Vondle of IDEO Labs

- Ryan Schultz on Studio Wikitecture

- Uki Dominque Lucas on Android 101

- And more

===WHEN===

Friday March 19th and Saturday March 20th, 2010.

===WHERE===

UIC Student Center East
750 South Halsted, Chicago, IL

See http://flourishconf.com/venue/ for more information.
" As a code editor, it lacks support for even basic semantic analysis"

Not strictly speaking true: http://cedet.sourceforge.net/semantic.shtml
Obama Supports DNA Sampling Upon Arrest
until I have to search for something really hard to find that only google can find the answer

What sort of things?
In Australia, you might leave the office the day you give notice, but you'll still get paid for the minimum notice period even if the company doesn't want you showing up to work.
The game industry does spend some money on AI development. Not sure if it's 100 million, but it's a serious amount as most game development teams have at least one or two AI developers. Although most people probably don't realize how much game AI has advanced in the last decade as most of the advances had been to cope with increasingly complex game worlds.
MetaLabs propose a design for Mozilla. Mozilla steals design. NOT COOL especially since you have the resources to afford something like this.
"This top-down thing is getting tiresome."

Then you figure out a way around the economic calculation problem. There's a Nobel in it for you.

Until then, I'm going to simply be amused at how it's unfair to note that Albert Einstein wasn't actually an economic expert, but it's perfectly reasonable to engage in knee-jerk US political stereotypes.
The way you describe your situation and outlook, I'm wondering whether you're pursuing a career, or a lifestyle. I fear it's a lifestyle. That is, what exactly do you mean by "interested in hacking and the start-up culture"? Hacking is about application of talent and curiosity; start-ups are about running a business (entrepreneurship, capitalism). Hacking, absent any purpose or discipline, is really just a hobby. Entrepreneurship, itself, isn't a "culture". It involves cleverness, creativity, pervasive optimism, and a lot of perseverance.

Your analysis is telling: "it seems that school is something one goes through to get a job and make money". And then you go on, "but to be successful...". I'd stop there - how do you define success? If it's being happy at work everyday, then I'd say you're seeking a 'job', a 'vocation'...you should seek to be a skilled tradesman.
I apologize if people thought I was hostile. I thought I was just making an argument by pointing out several examples of things text editors like Emacs don't normally do that IDE's do well. You've proven me wrong, at least for the case of C/C++. I would still argue that Emacs itself is not an IDE. It's just an editor with a turing-complete scripting engine. However, you could definitely convince me that Emacs+CEDET is an IDE, and I'm glad you pointed it out for me.

I would be interested in seeing similar environments for C#/Java as well as for dynamic languages like ruby/python/php, which IDEs have also been handling very well lately. I've also noticed in general that it's difficult to make an IDE for c/c++ that works better than editors. They compile slowly, The macro system severely complicates quick parsing, C++'s grammar in particular is very difficult to parse and analyze, the languages do not make run-time loading of code easy, and they don't provide much in the way of RTTI. In short, they are not very IDE-friendly languages. Java and C# are the perfect IDE languages, and dynamic languages suffer from not providing enough static information.
Graph of Canadian water consumption during gold metal hockey game