skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I bought and read "The Emperor's New Mind" in the early 90s, mostly for "knowing your enemy." I have slowly but surely come to mostly agree with Penrose: I think there is something magical and "quantum mechanical" about brain consciousness (including animals).

I believe in eventual real AI, but I would guess that it will not be on current computer hardware.
Flisti - Create online polls without singing-up
Flisti is an easy tool, which allows you to create free polls without any singing-up and place them on your Twitter, Facebook, blog or anywhere online.
For God's sake, follow your dreams... before you start a family
Ah, yeah. The perils of taking definitions too seriously.
And how; a service that just catalogues tax IDs and handles sending out the right paperwork would make mint... this might be perfect for somebody like Indinero (a recent YC addition).
This will be an unmitigated disaster. Office Depot will get 50 million or so 1099's. How do you deal with that many accounting discrepancies? How do you match that many transactions to all those forms. What about under and over-reporting? This is a Democrat clusterfuck if there ever was one.
Startup Idea
I've just found a new job but got interviewed at two different places. However, I've just realized that I had a friend inside the company at both of those places.
They helped me to get inside (i.e. accelerating the process, talking of me in good term, etc.)

So:

1- For the one who actually work for a company: When you search searching your job, did you knew someone inside? Or what they you use?

2- If you own a company, how did your employees known about you?

I say that because when you're good, it's easy to find a job. However, it might not be easy to find your perfect job since you don't know about all the company.

And now, finally, for the startup idea:

A simple "friendsjob" where you log on with facebook, and you see job opportunities posted by your friend.

Does it already exist? Would someone be interested in creating that website? :)
Don't the existence of thing like the Gödel sentence show that there are things that are true but which humans can't prove, contradicting the claim that this is an important distinction between humans and computers?
Sorry I forgot the qualification: excepting one's own experience of one's own consciousness. That was silly.

What makes it weird and different from physical phenomena is the fact that it is not generally observable, even though it is posited to exist for all people.

Or do you disagree even with that? If you do: I don't just mean that it doesn't emit visible light. I mean it doesn't emit anything. Consciousness is just the fact that the universe exists from a perspective. It is not an object, "out there", "in the world", but something only experienced by each consciousness for itself. The mere fact that we could create a perfectly convincing AI and then still have doubts about whether there really is "anything in there" is a result of the fact that consciousness is unobservable. Does that explain well enough what I mean?
For 1. and 4. I use the "Find in Project -> as symbol" option. Not the best way of doing it, but decent. 2. is not available AFAIK. 3. is present, but only for inheritance and for header files inclusion, not for interfaces (called protocols in objective-c).
HA! 2^3!^4!^5!^6!^7!^8!^9!^10! ;-) (2! = 2) and (2^x) > (x ^2) where x > 3.

Then again 2^3^4^5^6^7^8^9^(10!!!!!!!!!) is larger. Also if it's it's simply a question of symbols 9!! is larger than 9^9 so 9 followed by n ! is probably your best bet without going into higher level math like BB(BB(...(9))...)
To answer a question in the article:

1) We forget our dreams and risks because if we have children or just people depending on us to put a roof over their heads and food on the table, we can't just drop everything.

2) Once you live in luxury, it is hard to drastically cut back a few months (like spend 1000 a month vs 3000) and then have enough money saved to just take a risk and hope for the best.

3) Even if YOU can achieve (2), your spouse might not be able to.

4) Loans, assist with this risk averseness, since you don't want to lose your house/invested money. Honestly this is why I am debt free. When a company I worked for went under, people were ripping their hair out, I was just smiling "cool, I got time to look for a better job".

5) In reality, you DO HAVE FREE TIME. I have 1 child (3yo), and a full time job, and a wife in college, AND I find time to r&r AND work on a startup, AND spend time with child/wife. If I have enough hours, no excuse for you. I have co-workers with even more responsibilities than I do AND they manage to find time for a side company.

In reality people who say "I don't have time" are just not willing to sacrifice anything for their dreams. Even if you fail you can at least live your life knowing you tried, if you succeed it feels even better, otherwise your whole life is spent envious of someone else's success.
Robot needs 50 tries to learn how to flip pancakes.
It's precisely because you can't predict everything that people will do with your library that you limit its extensibility to only those situations you've designed for. That way, when you come out with the next version, you have a much higher expectation that you won't be breaking users' code, and those users will be far less upset at you.

It's not about treating everyone like idiots. It's about responsibly designing for and managing change over time.

And thus you should almost always make fields private, make methods non-virtual, make classes final / sealed, etc., except in those situations where you've carefully considered the ramifications and designed for them.
I sent an email to HN asking for similar clarification on this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1532599 but have not received an answer.
Let's face it, there are many haters on HN. If you post your website for review, you can fully expect it's going to be attacked with malware or backdoor exploits, and your question will be down-voted.

There is a herd mentality here as well (I suspect it's more the younger members than the older, established ones). If you say something that's out-of-the-box or too casual in tone, your comment will be punished.

That said, there are great people here, but there are snipers in these woods.
My counterpoint is -- yes, you may end up not having as much money to pay for your kids' stuff, but what really counts are the values you pass on to them. Being poor is hard. But teaching your kids the values of independent thought is best done by example. I learned young there's a price to pay for that. My parents paid it, but I never wanted anything different.
From my experience, there is no shortage of bees-- only honey bees, which are cultivated as agricultural pollinators and inbred so as to, apparently be less resistant to disease and parasites.

In my garden last year, no honey bees, but 3 other species of bees all over the lavender, Rosemary, and other flowers. This year, the honey bees are back, mostly on the borage, which they love.
Interesting how the failures make it look eerily human. And it seems to me while watching that the robot becomes frustrated when failing. I know it's me projecting that, seems interesting to apply that to human interaction though. How much is projection and how much is real empathy.
One thing that bothers me with the way submissions are killed in HN is that (i) it's not clear who killed them, how many kill votes it got (though this may be intentional); and what's more important (ii) the reason for the kill is not given, so that the submitted can understand why it happened.

The question closing mechanism in SO has both of these features. I had 1-2 questions closed there and immediately knew exactly why it happened, so I didn't repeat my mistakes.
Check out the awesome Gödel CAPTCHA (linked from the article): http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/captcha.html

Yay! No more spam.
Inside the heads of Android fanboys
Django docs rocks on the other side... Better than PHP and jdocs.
fair enough. thanks for the info.
I liked when the author said: "I knew I was about to start an argument with someone I don't know, so I smile and left."

To be honest, I would usually have argued.. would you?
http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/05/smallbusiness/1099_health_ca...

In any case, the final impact of the law won't be known
until the IRS issues its regulations on the new law,
which aren't expected to arrive until sometime next year.
The IRS has not yet commented on when it will release
regulations or schedule public hearings, and an agency
spokesman was unsure when it will do so.
Sorry, poor phrasing on my part - I meant "Of the Japanese people I know who are looking to go abroad, most hope to...".

I spent a year at a Japanese university with a focus on foreign languages and international communications before getting a job here - so the group of "Japanese people I know" is definitely skewed toward the side of those actively working towards finding work outside of Japan.
The idea of graphs is a very old and very interesting topic for mathematicians too. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsber...
The author of the article doesn't have a family.
> And lastly, this isn’t meant to be a prescriptive post,
> but we all know why micro-optimizing is usually a
> mistake: it wastes your time, it’s easy to screw up
> (see question 5), and it *typically* produces no
> measurable speedup.

I emphasized the typically because this is a key idea: you are fallible -- deal with it!

I visited a local hacker-space with a friend of mine to talk about a project of ours. A bunch of those guys are NASA and they know quite a bit about how to engineer for reliability. Since our project involved a lot of soldering, he suggested that we estimate our average solder join failure rate and use that as the number of expected failures to look for. That's what he does in his personal projects.

I exclaimed that was brilliant, then was a little embarrassed. Of course! Duh! I know I'm not perfect and I'm smart enough to have deduced that I have something like an average failure rate for solder joins. So why have I been proceeding for years and years as if I could just do everything perfectly if I just tried hard enough?

Every new function you write is a risk. Minimize your risks. Maximize the cost/benefit. Every routine you optimize is a risk. Minimize your risks. Maximize cost/benefit.

One's problems as a programmer are more likely the result of excess hubris and not insufficient smarts.

EDIT: Fear is as big a problem as hubris. Walk the middle path. You are your own optimization problem, and the optimal solution is almost never a no-brainer shove of a lever all the way in some direction.
from http://java.sun.com/javase/embedded/reference/release6/Embed...: "All Java SE for Embedded offerings are Java SE compliant."
Forbes profiles Alvin Roth on applying game theory to real-world problems
Wow, I actually thought it was already out. That's what I get for using the dev release for every day use.
He is right--- bankers at the level he speaks of certainly don't deserve the crap handed out by the tech community. That said I'd still apply the 'Shakespeare' solution to the rest of the corporate pyramid just after handling the lawyers.
Why is quantum physics magical? Or is that not what you wanted to say?

As far as I know we have a pretty clear understanding of quantum physics.
Hrm, the built-in PDF viewing must not be on the Ubuntu PPA (Didn't see an option for it anywhere either)

Also, I'm not sure how the bookmark sync works. I set it up on one instance of Chrome, then on my other computer, it over-rides the first instance, removing some and merging others. I don't really know what it did, but it seemed kind of inconsistent. But of course, I was using a daily
Wishing for normal people to understand statistics isn't reasonable. I'd also like a pony. But the first point is important: journalists shouldn't be allowed to publish statistical musings without some oversight from a statistician, which any reputable paper would have on staff anyway to avoid basic mistakes. Journalists would never be allowed to speculate as freely as this in deciding questions of climate science or molecular biology, but once it's a question of statistics everyone is instantly an expert.
An interesting argument, but the lookup table argument falls flat.

The number of inputs is pretty much infinite, not finite like he says.

I emailed him this, I'll post here if he replies:

I think you are incorrect about the lookup table. Just
walking around a city will provide more input permutations
than any lookup table could possibly encode.

You assumed that responses are always deterministic, but
actually peoples behavior is influenced by what they have
seen recently. Or even what they have been asked recently!

Every lookup table will also have to include the result
of choosing any question from the lookup table - and in
what order.

The possible number of orderings of that grows far faster
than any finite lookup table could encode, because simply
asking a question in the lookup table changes the answer
to all further questions.
These rats clearly deserve $1000,000 bonuses. They are the indispensable financial innovators which drive our economy. These rats are too big to fail.
New budgeting guideline - spend no more than $599 at any individual supplier.
The story of AppendTo - the jQuery company
The disconnect between being able to read Chinese and write Chinese can be huge for a foreign learner. We're always reading Chinese when we walk the street, look at the menus, and watch local TV (most Chinese TV has Chinese subtitles). When typing Chinese using the pinyin input method, we use our Chinese reading skills, not writing skills, to select the correct character from the popup box. We virtually never practise writing skills, consequently I can read over 2000 characters, but only write 100 or 200.
Make something people don't want by they will pay for
I think we need to get some new glasses to find things that people don't want but things that they will pay for. Pay for your glasses now!
I took a theory of computation class with Prof. Aaronson and this brought back some fond memories. I like the fact that he's formal when he needs to be, but doesn't shy away from using simple "real-life" examples when he can. Think about how many professors would use a line like:

> can the human mind somehow peer into the Platonic heavens, in order to directly perceive (let's say) the consistency of ZF set theory? If the answer is no -- if we can only approach mathematical truth with the same unreliable, savannah-optimized tools that we use for doing the laundry, ordering Chinese takeout, etc. -- then it seems we ought to grant computers the same liberty of being fallible. But in that case, the claimed distinction between humans and machines would seem to evaporate.

Wonderfully written. I may not understand Godel's Theorems or ZF, but i did gain an understanding about some faults in Penrose's argument.
Ah I see. Now that makes sense.

So effectively the blogger took what is a relatively complex delay and over-simplified the issue with a 'look, Apple are being ridiculous again' approach to appeal to his readers.
He claims after selectively allowing the best performing rats to breed the second generation of rats performed better than the first generation. If it were survivorship bias the second generation should be no better than the first.
I'll try to give an overview of what's going on. In the late 1800s Peano came up with his set of axioms for the integers. This set is second order which means it isn't computable. Hilbert and others wanted a computable set of axioms so that one could, in theory, remove humans from the discovery of mathematical truth.

So the first order axioms were invented. Godel showed that the first order axioms are not strong enough to prove all true statements about the integers. There are infinitely distinct models of the first order integers. There is only one model of the second order integers.

In the proof of the Incompleteness Theorem Godel proves a statement about an integer which is not provable in the first order system.

Humans can work in the second order system but not computers. So, from my perspective there is something different about human thought patterns. I'm not an expert and would like to know what is wrong with my reasoning.
I was annoyed at how the article just blithely asserted that wavefunctions collapse, as if that wasn't a matter of ongoing debate. In fact, Penrose is remarkable among big name physicists for being sure that wavefrom collapse occurs.
http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm#believes
Excellent point! @irahul, I see that you view a library as the storage place for the books that one has read. It should come as a surprise that most researchers/scholars view their private libraries not in this way, they view it as a source of information of mostly unread books.

You should definitely read Eco's essay titled 'How to Justify a Private Library' in his collection How to Travel with a Salmon. In it, he discusses his answer to precisely the same question that you have put forth. Here's how he fantasizes answering the question "Oh, what a large number of books you have! Have you read them all?"

"In the past I adopted a tone of contemptuous sarcasm. ’I haven’t read any of them; otherwise, why would I keep them here?’ But this is a dangerous answer because it invites the obvious follow-up: ’And where do you put them after you’ve read them?’ The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: ’And more, dear sir, many more,’ which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have falled back upon the riposte: ’No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office,’ a reply that on the one hand suggests a sublime ergonomic strategy, and on the other hand leads the visitor to hasten the moment of his departure."
How is this different than training a neural net on historical data?
Check out:
http://www.taxgirl.com/new-rules-about-forms-1099-are-causin...

for a less dramatic look at things.
DreamIt Aims to Accelerate New Business Development
Accessible core libraries that are people are encouraged to use, stuff without a mess of dependencies to. You hardly ever seen introductions to PHP that encourage library use, it's mostly about rolling your own stuff.
I'm not claiming that humans can discover all true statements in mathematics. I'm saying the Incompleteness Theorem demonstrates that such a task is not computable and in the proof of the theorem a statement that can't be proven in a computable system is proved. So....can a computer ever reach the same level of reasoning? I'm skeptical.
Well that would be ok if it were slow or worked most of the time. It just doesn't work! Anyway, it's a decent product but not a big deal. The main issue is that technical journalism has stopped being journalism and has become a slave to the PR ecosystem. Journalism is a cornerstone of a free society and unfortunately, at least when it comes to reporting on technical products and services, it's controlled by PR programs. Flipboard is not a 2 man garage startup. It raised 10+M to write a page flipping UI. They did a great job of their PR launch though!
> why not go further, and conjecture that the brain can solve problems that are uncomputable even given an oracle for the halting problem

Can anyone give me an example of such problems?
Just purchase anything from a street vendor for around 100 yen equivalent. Japanese food is 'prestigious' and costs about 300 to 1000 yen for a meal. Traffic is a nightmare in inner Bangkok. Subway, canal boat or sky train only if you value your time. It can be difficult to find computer and camera stuff for newegg.com prices
The stock market has little to do with allocating capital. The bond market does, but the stock market is mostly about valuing short term and long term risk with associated rewards.
I don't get the problem. The app is great, they are having launch/growing pains. That much is true, to be sure, but would you write an article about how great twitter is and then be sure to write but I occasionally get the fail-whale!? I don't think so, it dates your article severely and isn't really relevant to the quality of the product.

Next week (or soon, anyway) things will smooth out. Review the app on it's functionality/style/etc not on the short-comings of it's server infrastructure. The latter is a detail that can be fixed pretty easily while the former is pretty permanent.
Yeah, I got an email about that yesterday morning and was just able to reproduce this. I might have to take the site down temporarily. Sorry about that.
This Month in Science
It seems to me that anyone taking such a job may be embracing permanent exile from Japan.

Even though the salary is probably quite good for the new country, it seems unlikely these folks could ever save enough money to go home and start a life there.
The good news is that purchases made with a credit or debit card will be exempt from this requirement. However this requirement is still likely to be a huge pain for me at least because I use PayPal for a lot of vendors for totral purchases over $600 in a year.

The IRS is accepting comments on this requirement at http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=225029,00.html
The Importance Of Being Trained
Yeah, I'm really really bad at writing by hand now. It physically makes my hand hurt if I have to write more than a few sentences, because I've gotten totally unused to it (the callouses I used to have on my ring finger, where the pen/pencil sit, have long since gone away as well). But I suppose it's a bit less of a problem because I do at least know how to write all 26 letters when I need to.

I did recently though want to write something in cursive (jokily flowery greeting in a card) and I couldn't remember how to write a bunch of stuff, especially capital letters. Had to go online to remind myself how you write a cursive capital Q.
Not "except." The jobs of the wealth destroyers don't count as wealth creation.
"Oriented" versus "orientated" is a which-side-of-the-pond issue. Most Brits are naturally inclined to use "orientated" where Americans would use "oriented" (which, to them, would mean something along the lines of "lustrous" or "pearlescent" but with an archaic flavour). Some are able to swallow the bile and use a word that feels just wrong when writing for an international audience, but not all.
IT and Data: If Not Me, Then Who? If Not Now, Then When?
Talking about starting a business or doing something equally 'crazy' is a popular conversational topic at lunch with my coworkers. It provides just about the same amount of escapism value as buying into a lotto pool. We do that too.

I noticed that when I actually started working on my business on the side, this topic of conversation started coming up less often. I think seeing someone actually work hard to change his reality sort of ruined the dream. "It's fun to talk about it, but you mean I actually have to do extra work??"
"People must choose, when a computer need not choose."
Perhaps I'm not understanding something, but that seems to be obviously false. A human always has the option of being unsure in the face of non-computable statements like "You can't know that this sentence is true" or such.
I just found an article talking about the same issue...

http://www.wptavern.com/forum/general-wordpress/1774-solutio...

It seems like mediatemple got hit pretty hard with this (which is what I'm using)

http://wiki.mediatemple.net/w/WordPress_Redirect_Exploit
The real solution to many of the problems lies in communication, effort and understanding. External tools, simple models and mathematicals tools are not enough.
Would you still read a technical publication that never got early press releases (so was always a day late to big announcements) or reviewer devices because they spat on all the PR flaks?