skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Based on past experience (personal and otherwise), any technology or project touted by the Indian government (and most governments, at that) is vaporware until shipped.

The $30 number is doubtful because quite regularly, the government subsidizes projects to meet numerical targets like this. But the article says the $30 cost doesn't consider the cost of distribution. Even if the hardware really costs only $30 to make, distribution is going to at least double that. If this is to be sold by retail vendors, which is the only real way to sell this in a country like India, add another $30 to the cost.
In response to Netflix coming to Canada, Rogers lowers bandwidth caps
Praetorian to Offer One Time, Cost Effective Security Assessments
It looks like many commentators did not bother to read the full article.
Neither did I, but I remember not to use "infinity" and "number of atoms in universe".
Censorship of wordpress
Why Roger Penrose thinks computers can't
Market Timing Is A Skill Not Luck
It's deep, meaningful, and moving. That's all you really need.

Also, wow. I can't imagine dealing with this. The mother's words just suck you in and make you feel it too, even though it can never compare to what she's dealing with. Wow.
Mapping the cold snap in South America
Io has panache and a bunch of interesting ideas, but to me, the fact that I've never even been able to get it to compile on x86/BSD is telling. (And I've done a fair bit of porting.)

I eventually switched to Lua, and I haven't regretted it for a second - it's dynamic and expressive, but still a mature, portable, and clean language.
I'm pretty sure this type of business is considered a "payment aggregator" by merchant account providers and acquiring banks. It's usually difficult for a young startup to get an acquiring bank to underwrite such an account.

You can find some more information on payment aggregators here: http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/high-risk-mech...

You should also try out Amazon FPS: https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/helpTab/Amazon-Flexibl...
So the most significant posts about Io are only in the wayback machine? Really?
10→9→8→7→6→5→4→3→2

Somehow I think that Conway's chained arrow notation is cheating.
Oh man been waiting for this since WWDC. IB integration took way too long.

I do have a question for the compiler geeks, though: how was LLVM able to so quickly surpass GCC in both compiling source and binary performance, considering gcc had a two decade head start?
Lua. Seriously, check it out. Lua was born for scripting gaming engines.
So why is genius so rare, if each has almost all it takes?

Simple statistical distribution. Compared to monkeys we are all geniuses. Compared to a hypothetical super-intelligent alien race we are all as children. Individuals on average could easily be much more creative or much less; it's all relative. The fact that we recognize and elevate genius within our ranks is just an emergent psychology of being a sentient species.
Looks awesome, expensive though. Maybe there could be a pricing option based on volume? Maybe there is and I haven't seen it yet...
Truth: Steve Jobs came in for a demo before launch.

Sidenote: It sounds like apple has you paranoid.
Found this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmajlKJlT3U&feature=relat...
The credit card companies dropped the ball years ago by not letting their card holders accept payments from other card holders in a hassle-free manner. If they had done this PayPal would not exist, and the world of credit card holders would be able to transact business directly with each other, rather than going through a "middleman" -- and theoretically anyways, everyone's rates would be lower, too.
I beg your pardon? What did I miss?

(In case it happens to be you and not I who missed something: the said number is formally specified though uncomputable, just as much as saying BusyBeaver(100); it is not paradoxical like using English to talk about English; and it is also vastly larger than anything you can express compactly by talking about Busy Beavers and oracle machines, which was the top level of the original article.)
So say a 5-foot range. Find a group of employees out for lunch together and I walk past the table with a backpack on. Hardly suspicious, and I've probably got most of their building access cards.
I think that we'll just end up gluing neurons onto transistors for the near future. With the latest research they have rat brains flying flight sims.
The primary stumbling block is going to be the ethics committee or finding an animal that has a large brain that ethics committees aren't particularly fond of. Or networking the brains of rats together to form a much larger neural net that interfaces to ethernet. Think EC2 with a rat brain on each server. Or conversely a network interface for the human brain.

I do think it's possible to think with a UTM but I don't think that discovering that ability is going to be economical compared to fusing transistors to neurons.
Quick and easy multicore sort using Bash oneliners
He's been reading for years; he may very well have read them all. A book I read (much of) in college, Reading for Power and Flexibility, does point out that you don't always have to read a book cover to cover to get a lot of knowledge out of it. Some books I like a lot I start recommending long before I finish reading them, and I don't know whether or not Norvig might have the same approach to reading some books.
Umberto Eco values his library of many thousands for the books in it that he HASN'T read.
"Have Peter Norvig really read that many books? "

Why is this so surprising? I know many people who've read many thousands of books. I've read thousands of books cover to cover, I have about a thousand books in my library at home (about 300 ish technical books - I gave away another 300 or so) and I am still in my thirties (Fwiw I started reading by myself when I was 3. I buy a book every two weeks or so these days).

Even if you restrict the scope to technical books(assuming they have to be read relatively slowly) reading and completely understanding the content of a few hundred technical books is well within the scope of a human lifetime. It isn't even that hard if you work steadily in a disciplined fashion.

"And to top it, majority of books he has listed are pretty heavy and dense books."

"Density" is a function of what kind of background you already have. Dr.Norvig has a degree in Applied Math (Erdos number 4 I believe) and a PhD in Computer Science. I am sure he can read a "dense" tract faster than most people could. Also, most of those books (I own some of them) are textbooks. They aren't really all that "dense" (compared to a PhD thesis in Pure Mathematics, say). Most advanced material in CS/AI is in conference papers and rarely, if ever, make their way into textbooks till years after publication. I bet Peter Norvig reads a thousand or so papers every year. Every CS researcher I know does.
The article doesn't really do a good job of explaining the real problem, which is understanding what consciousness is, as a requirement for a thinking 'being'.

Obviously Penrose's book 'The Emperor's New Mind' came out some time after this post by Minsky, but as one reviewer summarises:

"The Emperor's "new clothes," of course, were no clothes. The Emperor's "New Mind," we then suspect, is nothing of the sort as well. That computers as presently constructed cannot possibly duplicate the workings of the brain is argued by Penrose in these terms: that all digital computers now operate according to algorithms, rules which the computer follows step by step. However, there are plenty of things in mathematics that cannot be calculated algorithmically. We can discover them and know them to be true, but clearly we are using some devices of calculation ("insight") that are not algorithmic and that are so far not well understood -- certainly not well enough understood to have computers do them instead. This simple argument is devastating. " http://www.friesian.com/penrose.htm
It's also worth pointing out that if you read 3 books a year, you would have read 90 books in a 30 year time span. I would suspect that Norvig reads a good deal more than that and that this selection of books for his book shelf does not represent everything he has read or owns.
You thought credit-card skimming was bad when the skimmer had to be physically attached to the ATM? http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/01/would-you-have-spotted-th... Now imagine trying to find something that concealable anywhere in a 5 or 10-foot radius of the ATM itself. Hiding the card inside a metal wallet won't help you there.
The man IS the director of research at Google. And before that he was a very highly-respected faculty member at Cal.

Yes, he's probably read all these books, probably most of which after he received his PhD. He's probably taught classes where many of them were required reading. In his own writing, he's probably cited items in this library hundreds of times
I left a comment on your Jobs page. The input in the "about me" boxes isn't sanitized and it broke everything for me.
And then they could also have a place to make it easy to find applications, too. On top of that, they could expose it through software that (almost) everybody using OS X uses for their other media consumption.

They'll call it the "Program Market"
100% Agree. I'm about to finish my PhD in Computer Science, and one of the key reasons I'm not doing a startup is because I need a H1 visa to stay in the US.
I'd say it's both better design from the ground-up (coming from a better understanding of compilers) and financial support.
The article/study she is responding to was highly upvoted on HN a couple weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494011
So, how at what ratio of biology-to-technology does something seize being a thinking person, and start being a thinking computer?

Clearly, a few rat cells hooked up to big processors are a thinking machine. But someone with an electronic implant in their brain that prevents seizures is a thinking person. But at which point do we say, "you're a robot, beep boop"?
It has 20 years less baggage and 20 years of lessons learned of what not to do. And 20 years of CPU development, remember that when GCC was started there were no superscalar CPUs.

GCC isn't a particularly high bar to hit ICC and MSVC have been killing it for years.

It's largely the same reason that the ZFS codebase is drastically smaller than the UFS codebase. You don't think of the fastest / shortest way to do X the first time.

Not all the code works with LLVM, for example if you use LLVM to compile the linux kernel it won't boot.
That is ratsome.
Facebook ‘Suspects’ Zuckerberg Contract Was ‘Forged’
Probably because the GCC architecture itself no longer allowed for more optimization. Or to put it another way, it had been optimized as much as economically possible. Trying to optimize it further would get us to the realm of diminishing returns. At this point it is easier and more cost effective to simply re-design the whole architecture which will inherently improve the performance. LLVM was designed from scratch with performance being a top priority.
Git support was the #1 feature that I was waiting for.

Apple thank you for listening.
> because they don't clearly see the implications.

I think you hit the nail on the head.

A lot of policy makers who make rules and laws about how to fix poverty always assume they deal with rational, clearly thinking, autonomous agents. They assume there is some logical planning taking place in teenagers' heads before they get pregnant: "...Having sex will lead to pregnancy which will lead to having a baby, who, even though I can't support, the state will take care of it, my boyfriends will be forced to pay child support therefore it makes perfect sense to have a baby." Something like that.

A 16 year old guy will think he can support all the babies in the world when having sex. The girl might think it will make the boyfriend love her more, they'll get married, find jobs, move out and have a happy your family and live happily every after. That is a very different thought process than what policy makers usually assume goes on.

Teenagers who are privileged end up making a lot of stupid decisions as well, but their parents, hover over them, guide them, fix their mistakes for them and wait for the kids to mature and start thinking rationally and maturely.

Many poor teenagers never have that. They don't get a second choice, a do over for small mistakes. Many are from a single parent family, or their parents are working 12 hour days to make ends meet, perhaps one or more parents are drunk or on drugs and there is just nobody to guide, to teach and to iron out the consequences of small and large mistakes. Consequently the teenagers grow up but mentally never mature. Then they become the next generation of parents. Then the cycle repeats.

Overall I think all the teenagers would end up procreating as soon as they can if they just grew up in the wild without any parental guidance. The ones that lead privileged lives have parents who teach, guide and iron out mistakes ("read : trip to the abortion clinic"), and this leads to a delay in procreation until some arbitrarily chosen "life event" usually : marriage + first job + new house.

I think taking this problem and turning it into some kind of evolutionary / genetic issue is pointless if not plain dangerous.
I can't wait for Single Window, the multi-window design was possibly the worst interface for an IDE I've seen. I was actually very surprised how bad the UX for XCode was compared to the rest of OS X.
Yeah, but where Postgres would nag you to dump and restore, YourSQL respects your time and just truncates your data.
I don't think computers can think, thinking is only a human perception and most of it is useless. Being creative to direct an orchestra that other humans may like is pointless to survival. Too think I think you need to have a purpose, If I were to give humans a naive purpose I would say to find the meaning of life through survival and attaining great knowledge. I believe a machine will be able to do this better eventually if not soon. All it needs is problem solving and to start with a set of resources that its allowed to use.
I have used SchedulesDirect. There are several applications that integrate with SchedulesDirect. The integration is free, but customers/users have to purchase a yearly subscription to obtain the data, $20 / year. It used to be completely free but recently went to a paid model, though they do claim to be a non-profit.
Having been at WWDC and played with it for a few weeks, I'm not sure I'd call LLVM a hands-down winner.

While there's a lot of win in terms of code readibility and the great interfaces it exposes if you're going to write an IDE that understands the code, I'm not convinced it's there yet in terms of binary performance.

My apps run around 5%-15% slower, on average, than the GCC -march= setting.
I posted something tangential to this topic, but none of you philistines upvoted it.

Bam! There it is. --> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1526734
I remember reading about how LLVM would be better able to interface with IDEs than gcc because it was library based rather than a giant monolithic system. It's interesting to see how this has been applied.
So... when is the public release?

btw, the wwdc videos have been public for a while. Take a look at them if you're itching for more infos: http://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2010/
Adam Curry argued convincingly that the hasty follow-up was b.s.
And maybe even disregard for social norms ;)
Something like this is an excellent candidate for Android OS. If they just design it with Android in mind they will have quality software and save a huge amount of money since Android is free.
Perhaps there is an elaborate rat society running around mazes and pressing switches somewhere in the bowels of Goldman Sachs?
Hmm,

I'm not an expert on African roads. I know that American School buses do quite well on the rough, mountainous terrain of Central and South America. They are tough, simple vehicles and ride fairly high off the ground.

Also, consumers in China, India or where-ever undoubtedly want cars. Despite this, I think it is unfortunate for automobile-centric development to progress. In the US, the private automobile has had terrible environmental track record, a terrible safety record and has enabled a geography of social isolation (suburbia and sprawl). As the most energy-intensive form of transportation, the private automobile seems, at the very least, to have pushed world energy production capacities to the brink. Reproducing this trend around the world seems undesirable.
"Sales or it didn't happen." was my knee-jerk reaction. Just how many similar computers have they "made"?
> Young girls wanted to have children.

It has been postulated that American welfare assistantship programs are somewhat to blame. I think it has been discussed here (sorry to repeat it, and for not quoting -- I forgot who mentioned it).

Basically the programs to help "single mothers" was created to help widowed mothers support their family. Eventually some women realized that having a baby is not that bad as they can take advantage of the "single mother" status. There is sort of a logical reasoning behind it.

Now, not that every girl goes through that logical reasoning and decides on having a baby. Rather with time this choice of having a baby become "encoded" in the culture as something else "it is cool" or "it bring attention" or "status". Girls see other girls get attention and acquire status when they have children to they want to emulate.

Basically in this particular case, the welfare system completely backfired and instead of just helping, it started expanding the population segment that would take advantage of a particular feature.
Angels Or Posers: Who’s Gonna Run This Town Tonight?
A bunch of the technical books, especially the textbook-ish and "handbook of X" ones, aren't books you "read" so much as "read the beginning of, then skim and refer to the rest". A common pattern is that there's general material in the first 10-50% of the book, which you probably want to read, then the latter parts of the book are series of specialized chapters and sub-sections on various techniques and variants of techniques. You wouldn't normally read every page of all of those in sequence, unless you were working really deeply in that exact area.

You can also often skip loads of stuff if you're reading for applications-focused reasons rather than looking to directly extend the techniques in question as part of theoretical research. I read a lot of logic papers, because I build tools on top of logic-programming systems, and I find that out of an 8-page paper, there's usually only 1-2 pages of material relevant to me. There'll be 1-2 pages of introducing a new construct, motivating why the construct is useful, sketching how it would be implemented and how it relates to other ideas; and then 6-7 pages of proofs showing that their extensions have all the soundness and whatever properties you want them to have. When I'm reading, I read those 6-7 pages as a single sentence in my head---"and now we prove that it works"---making for a nice 75%+ compression ratio.
You're right, you've got me certainly beat by unimaginable orders of magnitude.

How does g↑(sub_g)g compare with BB(g)?
I don't speak Chinese or Japanese, but people that do told me that there are more than five ways to pronounce "yi", they all mean different things, but they're all transliterated to English in the same way.

That's because Chinese is tonal. There are 5 different tones in Standard Mandarin. When transliterating Chinese to the English alphabet, there is no way to write the tone, so you introduce ambiguity that wasn't officially present.
It's all or mostly technical stuff. I guess he doesn't read Calvin & Hobbes or anything non-work-related?
You can buy single quantities of ARM-based netbooks & tablets from China for under $90 a unit, including international shipping.(^)

So your estimates line up with that experience. I'd guess that if the Indian government really wanted to provide a lot of these to school students, they could bring the cost down a fair bit by either bulk-buying or bulk-producing, though.

I'd be interested to find out what the intended OS is, and what the plans for providing suitable useful educational software are, though.

(^) For starters, http://www.dealextreme.com/search.dx/search.WM8505
I find it funny that you bring this up. How many ways can 二 be pronounced in Japanese?
Tivo has released sources for the GPL covered portions of its software (http://www.tivo.com/linux/index.html ).

At least some router manufacturers have also released source code as required by the GPL. For example, see D-Link http://tsd.dlink.com.tw/GPL.asp and Cisco http://homesupport.cisco.com/en-us/gplcodecenter .
Wow, that was so long and rambling I couldn't read past the 2nd paragraph. I'll just assume you're right.
It's a pity that most of these are limited preview. I usually save only "full view" books because that makes my GLibrary more useful to others.
You wouldn't store full copies, you'd stripe it across multiple machines using some type of error correction coding, like Reed-Solomon, which has less than 2x overhead.
I've heard him called the no. 1 AI guy, in the world. He's basically Google's head researcher, and used to head search quality, he's been big in NASA, worked in industry, and written the no. 1 AI book for students.

I expect he's had to read a few books to get to where he is.

Also, he probably knew 80% of the content before he read it. Most of those books will have a chapter on vectors, a chapter on probability, a chapter on information (etc), and he's mastered that years ago ...
Off-topic: What does Thesis actually do? Most Wordpress "Themes" I've seen actually make your blog look a certain way. Thesis seems to be focused on giving you the tools to do... something to do with how your blog looks, but I can't figure out exactly what. And none of the blogs in the showcase look anything like each other.

Is this intended to replace freelance WP theme designers? Or is it intended to be something that they somehow use in their designs?

It doesn't help that all the video tutorials are behind a paywall... http://diythemes.com/thesis/generate-affiliate-links/

So maybe I am just not in the target market for whatever this thing is, but I cannot understand why I would want it.
The scientific case against astrology
The single window way to work in xcode worked very well in my opinion but I agree that the multi way that interface builder had and xcode had by default was the worst.
If you can make the time but don't have the temperament, go somewhere where they will beat it into you Chinese-style, because there really is no other way to memorize the thousands of characters necessary to be proficient in Chinese.

Please, some practical advice:

Learn your stokes and always follow stroke order. Each stroke has a rhythm, and each character has a composite rhythm. Rhythm is an excellent mnemonic device.

An hour a day, everyday, is enough to make good progress. Half an hour twice a day is better. Your nervous system forms pathways between sessions, not during, so you want to optimize for that, not the session itself.

Throw out the flash cards, and throw out the books of pseudo-etymology. Find a book of pen calligraphy, and focus on strokes, positioning, balance.

Here's one place to start:

http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Write-Chinese-Characters-Languag...

And once you're further along:

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Cursive-Script-Introduction-Pu...
second that =)
> It's much more efficient to have each character represent a sound

I disagree

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505584

If you learn Chinese by young, you'll have helluva advantage on pattern recognition and memory.