skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As one of the more recent, visible efforts at general AI, OpenCog is automatically worth some attention (in fact, you've given it some..).

I agree that Open cog will fail but I think it's failure should be looked at.

"if we glue together enough parts that intuitively seem relevant to AGI, maybe AGI will pop out!" may sound dumb but sooner or later, an "intelligence" program needs to reach a boot-strapping stage so it is actually credible that there is some algorithm with the properties that if you add enough processing power to it, intelligence will indeed "pop" out.

Many believe the Mammalian neocortex essentially involves such a generic algorithm. But the problem is there are fairly good arguments that the kinds of algorithms we've tried so-far could include not this algorithm. They are not algorithms that can reach the "critical mass" level.

The first failure of AI was based on the now clearly-false belief that intelligent behavior was essentially logical deduction - these efforts main appeared in the 1970's. Shredlu was the most successful.

The second failure of AI seems to be the belief that intelligent behavior involves primarily something like statistical inference. Narrow "machine learning", OpenCog, and Jeff Hawkins stuff all seem to fall out of this later approach.

My sense is that the world humans live in is too chaotic for pure logic yet much more orderly than phenemena suited to pure statistical inference ("machine learning" can work but its failure is obvious in excessive time it take make "obvious" (to us) inferences). The most uniquely human intelligence involves neither making complex deductions nor filtering scattered and chaotic masses of data but rather putting "semi-structured" data together in a "common sense" fashion. Humans follow patterns immediately, not after seeing them over-and-over again. Humans are "terrible" at pure calculation but also "terrible" at pure inference problems like gambling games (and the way human fail at gambling is very instructive - we tend to see too many patterns in random data. )

The challenge is how to create a "third way" beyond these two failed approaches (keeping in mind that both approaches can have successes too).

I'll leave my grandiose announcement of this algorithm for a different post.
See for an example, Duncan Long's "Anti-grav Unlimited". Note Long is primarily a CQB and weapons writer so his scientific background is rather limited.
With all VPS services, you are expected to be a SysAdmin. If this is impossible, stop. Do not buy a VPS. find a shared hosting provider that can meet your needs, something like google appengine or hiroku or engineyard, depending on what language you need.
Yeah, it's not for corporate networks.

But, for example, corporate network (and security) could benefit from this, too. Virtual P2P meetings could be done this way without a third party central server or the need to install a special server software. The meeting initiator can send an email with an URI and everyone else just clicks on it running the relevant client software. Much better security-wise than most scenarios nowadays.

Cross-continent meetings are a major pain when it's over VPN or centralized.
This is very nice. Does anyone know of a similar emacs extension for mercurial?
Adventures in Obsolescence - The original Ipod
Thermodynamics would only matter over the multi-billion year span and is irrelevant for the matters discussed here.
This is how you quit Yahoo (with Geek Rap video)
If you pay by the year, especially if you don't use much bandwidth (and you won't, if you are just figuring things out) ec2 is quite competitive on price, if you don't mind the problem.

the problem with the basic 'small' instances is that if there are system problems, you lose your storage. Sure, you can get around this by paying extra for EBS, but it's another problem you need to deal with (and pay for) that is largely taken care of on most VPSs. (which isn't to say you will never have data loss on a VPS, but all the major providers mirror disk, so it should be fairly rare.)
just have a bunch of friends vote your stuff up....that's what most people do. Otherwise it's really a crap shoot on whether or not you'll make it to the front page, unless you are submitting something that other people would try to submit(i.e. techcrunch articles)
You’d probably need to use a bit more plastic to make it as structurally strong. The question then is whether the need for less shipping/storage space makes up for that.
Where did I say that the 2nd guy is completely anonymous online?
Good on you to have realized the inherent job scalability problem so early on in your life - you have just easily saved yourself several years of your life. The economical relationship between employer and employee is such that your employer takes upon himself all small and moderately-sized economical risks and in return collects most of the upside. There are exceptions such an outsized IPO (very rare) on one side and layoff (not so rare) on the other. In other words it's a risk swap not unlike car insurance or extended warranty. It's a great deal for someone who can't tolerate cashflow problems (e.g. who is in debt), but this sort of risk swap is unnecessary for someone who has a cash cushion to ride out the rough times. Many people voluntarily put themselves into such position e.g. by spending beyond their means - don't do that.

Your #1 goal is establish the cash cushion. Your #2 goal is to find a worthy idea. Once you have both you can burn cash to build business out of your idea. Here's how you do it:

1. Get a job and keep it. Reduce your burn rate and save money. You're ready when you have 18-24 months worth of burn rate stashed in the bank CDs (do not mess with the stock market - you are your high-upside investment).

2. While holding a job identify a group of people who have money, have problems, are willing to pay to solve the problems, you are able to solve the problems (it's in your domain), you can easily find and talk to. Bad choice examples: software engineers, teenage gamers. Good choice examples: middle-age middle-class women, small business owners. Business is not a legal entity and not even a product - business is a group of people whom you can reach and whose problems you can solve better than other people and who can pay you for it. Once you have that you've made it.

3. Talk to these people and verify the problem. Build a mockup of the solution and talk to them again. Try to sell the mockup on google adwords or any other channel you were going to use to reach out to your audience. This is a low-bandwidth activity that you can do while keeping your day job. Don't be afraid to drop one problem in favor of the another. In fact, strive for it - try to discover the most pressing problem your audience may have.

4. In a couple of years you should a solid idea about what to do, how to do it and how to sell it. You should also have enough cash to make the leap. You know the time is right when it doesn't feel like a "leap" anymore.

Also, read "Re-work" - it'll do you good.

Good luck.
What's the deal with all the sushi images in this guy's blog posts?
OK, normally I wouldn't nitpick on grammar, but I don't think it's nitpicking when it's central to what's being said, and in fact the opening sentence:

This is a guide on how to blog insightful. Not insightfully. Because insightful isn't a writing style, it's a type of idea.

Insightfully is an adverb, insightful an adjective. You can blog insightfully. You can write insightful blog posts. But how do you blog insightful? To me, that makes the opening sentence of the post a confused jumble of words, which made me skim over what might otherwise have been a good read. Can someone please enlighten me as to what he's trying to express?

And just to drive the point home, let's modify it slightly. See if the following makes sense:
This is a guide on how to wait patient. Not patiently. Because patient isn't a waiting style, it's a type of...

I went back and read the first few paragraphs properly. It seems that what he's trying to say is "how to increase the insight of your readers, instead of merely displaying your own insight". Maybe not a snappy opening line, but at least it can be understood. Please don't open your blog posts by re-defining common words. It detracts from your writing, which may otherwise be excellent.
I'm certainly not advocating complete uniformity in how everyone does everything, but I think we have to be careful about judging programming style based on artificial limitations. Static code navigation, on the level of your examples, is essentially a solved problem. If the developers you work with are using tools that can't do it, or aren't using the tools they have to best effect, then they have a basic problem that has little to do with coding style.
You didn't. Obviously a better reputation wins over a worse one... but many people seem to think that no online reputation /is/ a better online reputation, and I disagree with that.
Oh, sounds cool. I'm a MediaWiki developer, but I haven't been terribly active lately. I'm going to get back into it soon, and I want to focus on usability because I believe that usability (or lack thereof) is the number one blocker to the adoption of wikis to people not familiar with them.
Thanks for such an extensive advice.
A read-only database isn't a database in my book.

I agree that built-in replication can be difficult to administer even today, but you're being completely revisionist here. Replication wasn't introduced into MySQL until 2000. In 1997, you would by necessity have rolled your own replication system tailored to your needs (much simpler than solving the general-case problem). That's basically what you did anyway, but you solved it in the most trivial way possible: you 'replicated' by doing a complete database dump and re-distributing the entire DB. If you'd had a viable open-source relational database, you could have scaled the reads and got more developer productivity by distributing a SQL database (e.g. SQLLite) rather than a key-value database (BDB).

I appreciate your standing up and giving a concrete example of NoSQL usage - nobody else has been brave enough to do so. But it seems that the reasons for it were highly specific to the time: there were no viable open-source databases, Amazon was just introducing the idea of customer reviews (i.e. pre Web 2.0) so data was primarily read-only, memory was comparatively expensive and memcached didn't exist, and you had a comparatively small product catalog where complete re-generation was an option. I don't think you can carry forward the optimizations you made in that framework into today's world.
Infix languages eliminate most of these.

No, they don't.

They eliminate some of them, mostly ones associated with math. The rest of them they replace with different types of parenthesis.

Brackets, braces, tabbing and carriage returns, semicolons. They are all structure delimiters. In lisp you have one structure delimiter "()", in non-lisps you have many.

I don't see how it is terrible for complex arithmetic. Lisp order of operations is explicit. Code does not become more clear because you add a bunch of implicitly defined structure, (no matter how much you were drilled in math school, it is still another thing to remember). Besides, what makes math different from anything else? I end up parenthesizing infix math anyway, simply because it is hard to keep track of the order of operations.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion, and I didn't meant to imply that you aren't, I was just interested in your reasoning.

To me, 'readability' is a vacuous claim, being that they only thing that 'readability' really means is 'what I am used to'. (I write lisp code for a living, am used to lisp code (lisp was my first language), and I find it much easier to decipher than other languages).
If I owned Chatroulette and could sell it for $1M, I definitely would. Sure, there's a chance it could grow into a company worth a lot more, but there's also a good chance that once everyone stops talking about Chatroulette as this novel thing, his traffic will drop 90%, the penis rate will skyrocket because exhibitionists will be the only people still getting value out of it, and he'll have trouble selling it for even a small fraction of $1M.

$1M is a lot, even moreso in Russia. He could probably more-or-less live off of the interest, or he could use some of it to bootstrap a startup that's less likely to have its traffic vaporize in a month.
Capability Operating Systems
The “skin” is not just appearance. It changes how the editing boxes work. In particular, it adds a bunch of buttons for common tasks. It also moves interface elements to new locations (search box, etc.).

Go try editing http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Sandbox to see how it works.
Jobs, for the vast majority of people who only move horizontally and very little vertically in any org; will never scale.

This is why America is overrun with tons of get-rich-quick schemes. That's why MLM seminars are crowded after work at your local airport hotel. That's why the lottery lines are crowded on Friday afternoons.

And people in those jobs know it. That's why they keep trying for the MLM or trying to start a side-business. And thats why so many people get thrown into despair when they lose those jobs after calibrating their lives around it.

I'm pretty sure in 10 years from now, there will be more and more people working freelance, as businesses realize and it dawns on people that the days of the kinds of permanent jobs our Dads and Moms had are over.
Your comment just made me realize SQL is the new assembly.
I don’t care so much about WYSIWYG (I’d personally leave it off), but if it were possible to do some syntax highlighting in the editor boxes I think that would be tremendously useful.

Not sure where the best place to send feedback is, but one concern I have is that the text box used for entry breaks/removes Safari’s neat bottom-right-corner box resizer widget that usually shows up for textarea elements. Anyone here know what causes it to show up/disappear?
Violent Flash Mobs Becoming a Problem in Philly
LinkedIn decides they can effectively own anything you publish there
I was initially sceptical over the NOSQL approach, but I have since changed my mind. Let me be very clear SQL is not dead, and it's the right tool for many jobs.

However, if you want a cheap, replicated, multi-master, write heavy system - there is no simple way to this. Oracle is too expensive, I've used mysql-clsuter and pgpool-II etc, but in my experience they tend to introduce more failure points than they remove (at least in projects requiring a short development cycle).

NOSQL pushes a degree of the complexity of the data model back to the application (e.g. you end up building some of your own indexes), but the data model is often no more complex in the end (less normalised, and greater flexibility of columns).

The reward for this is massively simpler scaling. Something like Cassandra is so much easier to replicate to a multi-master multi-site system than PostgreSQL or MySQL.

If you're building any form of semi-mission critical site (where you don't want to rely on or be tied to a single hosting provider) and you need to be multi-site & replicated from an early point, then NOSQL philosophy has a lot going for it.

That said - I strongly hope that the MySQL/Postgres camp will fight back with a simple replication strategy that just works rather than is an bolt-on/afterthought.

I find it helps to think of NOSQL being about simplifying the datastore to make it easier to replicate. So far I think only Cassandra does a persistent multi-master solution properly, but others will catch up.
what % of those industries have used Macs in the past? There's a reason for that.

The Android tablets have advantages, that are only indirectly caused by open source. Having a lot more control over the software, hardware and not to be beholden to a single supplier is invaluable in industrial use.
it was fine for me, perhaps because the message is very obvious to me.
"Please don't open your blog posts by re-defining common words. It detracts from your writing, which may otherwise be excellent."

Quite true. I tried reading the post but was distracted by the hackneyed technique of asserting some new, unneeded, word usage.

As I read I keep thinking, no this is about how to write an insightful item; i.e. to write insightfully. Where's his real point, the one that justifies the awkward opening text?

One insight I got was, "Don't be too clever." Just say what you want to say.
Actually a sphere should be the most efficient shape. Scuttles off and starts designing a spherical coke bottle.
Unix Command-Line Kung Fu
If there is activity X and people who practice it usually achieve result Y, chances are that by engaging in that activity you will achieve the same result.

Therefore, if you keep doing what normal people do you will achieve the same result they did - which is to say an average life.
I don't know... Chatroulette is not my cup of tea, but the sub-chatroulette feature that the article mentions might make it more long-term useful. For example, wanna meet start-up people and no penises? http://startups.chatroulette.com - it's there, and there's no one there... yet.
I got it at first but was confused later, so yes I had to at least re-read it too.

I really like the post though and I agree that we need different thinking people that stand their ground. It's a shame so many give in to the 'mainstream' to save themselves from a few weird looks and some embarrassments.
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eh, even if it does become primarily sexual, sex has been selling on the 'net longer than anything else has. I think it's probably worth a bit more than USD $1M
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/12rdq/saddam_die...

I was using that construction. That is, it's an adjective with 'ideas' as the implied noun, because I want to emphasize that it's the structure of the ideas underlying the writing that determine whether or not that writing is insightful.

edit: See also 'think different'.
Who Will Buy the iPad? [STATS]
I don't have friends with HN accounts :(
I don’t think you missed a whole lot. The examples linked are interesting, but the argument is just an attempt to classify arguments about phenomena/abstractions. The classification doesn’t really shed much insight on how those phenomena or abstractions work, or explain where “less-insightful” essays/articles go wrong.

Basically it comes down to: “If you wrote something interesting its primary argument might have been of this form, or this form, or this form. End.”

From the “conclusion”:

> Once you understand the formula above, it should become trivially easy to create an indefinite number of insights.

Sorry, but there’s no shortcut for generating insight. It requires deeply understanding something and then clearly explaining it, both of which are hard work.

-------

Just so this comment isn’t a waste, here’s a link to a Hofstadter essay about how (he claims) cognition works, which should shed some insight into how arguments in general are structured:

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.h...
I am really not sure about the tip #1. Isn't that the main advantage for GC when comparing to reference counting because it can recognize circular referencing etc?
not sure about that...what's stopping trolls from going to startups.chatroulette and doing that there?
It doesn't.

You would need a LOT of plastic.

There is a reason almost all drink containers are square, except for pressurized ones which are universally round.

It's pretty much impossible for it to be actually square. It would need to bulge either in or out.

Take a look at the bottom of a pressurized bottle, and notice it's not square either.
IMO Web pages wider than 800px generally use the extra space for junk or whitespace.
they're dropping everything but DNS and HTTP from a proxy

That won't help them either anymore:

Weaponizing dnscat with shellcode and Metasploit
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1204931
To make women think cars are safer:

“…what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That’s why cup holders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cup holder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’m high, then I feel safe. It’s amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cup holders it has.”

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/the-psychology-of-cupholder...
In terms of eco-friendliness, the current bottles are better. Square bottles enclose a smaller volume of fluid per unit surface area than round bottles, so these waste more plastic. The supposed savings in shipping costs are negligible -- the marginal fuel cost of shipping bottled beverages depends much more on weight than volume.
Come hang out on #startups on Freenode!
Petition to stop software patents in Europe
It was essentially a key-value store of 256-bit audio fingerprints for an audio recognition system not unlike Shazaam but used for different purposes. The system was required to work on real time audio input so low response times were essentiall. And we're talking about many billions of keys here and a lot of queries per second. We've tried PostgreSql initially but response times were a real bottleneck. Then we have made a proof of concept with BerkeleyDb and it worked really well but we couldn't use it due to licensing issues so we have ended up coding our own key-value store
The machines with a rising catcher or conveyor tend to sell more drinks because people will buy one to see it go. (According a friend who is a vending machine operator)
> As long as we don't try to push the value system of most people to individuals that dissent I think we would be fine.

You clearly don't have much experience with actual people.

> But I am sure we can get some metric that represents most people and this can be used to measure the overall happiness.

No need for that. Just measure each person's happiness, no matter how they define it, and sum that over all people.

Yes, I am assuming that you can measure a person's happiness, but if you can't, how do you know what makes "most people" happy?

Let me suggest that what's likely to happen is that some folks will define happiness as what they like and/or think that other people should like....
That's the point. If the prediction is accurate, that's net beneficial: irresponsible people will get fewer loans, and responsible people will get more loans.

It sounds like you haven't quite decided whether this would be less accurate than FICO (maybe! But there's no reason to be outraged that some random person's prejudice is costing them money) or more accurate than FICO (in which case your argument seems to be "Yes, this kind of prejudice is accurate--or, at least, more accurate than the alternative. But that makes me feel bad, so misallocate capital and make more bad loans.")

The world economy just went through a couple very bad years caused by making wishful-thinking loans instead of unpleasant-truth loans. I hope that doesn't have to happen again.
Non-story; every Web 2.0 site puts this in their TOS to prevent copyright entrapment by users, then adjusts it when the mob complains.
Cassandra isn't just multi-master, it's symmetric and masterless (peer-to-peer). It also isn't the only system with that property: other Dynamo "implementations" (Dynomite, Riak, Voldemort) are the same way.

There are also multi-master systems that employ 3-PC like fault tolerant distributed commit protocols (e.g., Paxos with Leases, ZAB) and leader elections, allowing transactions to go through even if one of the coordinators fails.
To strengthen your argument, you need to provide a machine that will wash and refill a coke bottle. Otherwise you are simply sending some glass to the landfill (lazy customers) and some to recycling.