skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While Larry Ellison built an empire on over promising+, it doesn't sound like you have much chance on even getting close to delivering, if all of engineering is on the point of leaving.

There are two sides to the phrase "don't confuse selling with installing". Delivering custom solutions, that can be productised, to key reference customers, in a valuable niche, is good strategy (see "Crossing the Chasm"). Promising anything to get a sale to get some money, and worrying about how to deliver later, is usually a sign that people's jobs are on the line and they are taking desperate risks.

+Causing the SEC to rewrite rules on revenue recognition, and hence causing headaches for every sales rep in the IT industry ever since.
flyback http://code.google.com/p/flyback/ would do the job, if only somebody would attach inotify (even with the Python glue?)...
And for those of us for whom "D'oh, I deleted that!", or "Nooooo....I overwrote that file yesterday!" is more of a danger than "My house just burned down", I strongly recommend rdiff-backup:

http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/

It's short, sweet, incremental - and, because it uses diffs, not just hardlinks and new files, it doesn't use an extra 500MB each time you add 2k to the end of a 500MB dataset.
Viral Marketing for the Real World
I Want My HDTV | Tech Jaws
Guys, upmod him, we need to get this link to the top.

PS: Thanks a lot man.
It sounds a bit like a plans sold by get rich quick sites. Instead, spend time improving your site.
An atheist goes undercover to join the flock of mad pastor John Hagee
I admire McCarthy a lot, but I'm with you there in being a bit disappointed. As for humans being able to know truths that cannot be discovered computationally, there is some evidence [1] supporting the hypothesis that animal brains do what they do using analogue information processing. So it may be that there are "thruths" which can only be "known" using analogue processes, in which case, as digital reasoners, computers would always remain at a disadvantage when compared against humans in terms of "intelligence".

[1] Spivey, M., Grosjean, M. & Knoblich, G. (2005). Continuous attraction toward phonological competitors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(29), 10393-10398.
Competition Sucked Again : Live Messenger blocks YouTube
Not too long ago, users on the Neowin.net forums started complaining about not being able to send YouTube links to their contacts on Windows Live Messenger.you can see, any messages that contain in text or links to “www.youtube.com” fails to be delivered.
Check his submissions; overcomingbias.com is one of the links.
The Woman Who Can Remember Everything
If you're using Windows, go fuck yourself.

This is what happens when someone who knows what they're doing, rather than a journalist, writes an article ;-)
I've thought about using the index like that before, but the problem you run into is if you decide you need to go back to, or even just look at, some change several adds ago the data is gone. The index feels like I've just copied some text in an editor: the more time that passes before I use it the more likely I am to either have to check what is there or accidentally overwrite it by copying something else.

My general philosophy right now is that I should only push one commit for each complete feature or bug fix, which wasn't really reasonable in old VCS systems. That lends itself to making micro-commits for almost anything and then using rebase -i to clean up the mess into a single commit. I've recently been experimenting with tagging the pre-rebase commit so that if I want to look at the development history I still can. I use git-stash if I'm in the middle of something and need to change branches for a few minutes, but aside from speed there's no reason it couldn't be a commit as well.
Emacs as a powerful Python IDE
"Why should there be a general solution?"

Why indeed. However, finding one was very much on the agenda for GOFAI, and remains on the agenda for various AGI efforts, e.g. by people like Pei Wang, Ben Goertzel, and Eliezer Yudkowsky (who comments here, as I've observed).
Why Python is a great language for teaching introductory programming classes
Embracing Chaos Could Bring Order to Your Memory
Why do Macs need so much fixing?
Mac users who actually want to be able to read the text: press ctrl+alt+command+8.
> none of the online poker sites have really stepped up to the plate and either a) made bots legal (similar to the way that they're legal on Internet Chess Club) or b) put effective prevention measures in place.

That's a tough choice for a casino. Allow automation and you create a ghetto which discourages casual users. Disallow automation and you encourage an escalating "arms race".

Regardless, the techniques discussed could be detected using anti-virus techniques. I'm surprised that native clients don't perform integrity checks or is this the state of play in the "arms race"?

It would be fairly simple to disable integrity checks using methods to circumvent software DRM. Then it would be a matter of implementing distributed state to determine and ignore circumvented clients.
Inside Microsoft's war against Google
Mapping the Human Diseasome With a Network Graph
We didn't win too. We submitted port of http://www.bloove.com for Android. In allows you to manage your mobile phone via web. If you have Nokia or Sony Ericsson phone you can try it without Android :)
The first demo completely crashed Firefox on Windows 2008 for me.
I'm surprised so many commenters are describing this as "sanctimonious" or "bragging" when all it is, is a slightly amusing way to present an idea. Take it or leave it.

I don't watch TV and the upside is: more time, more reading, more creativity. The downside is: when a friend asks "did you see ..?" and I have to explain why I didn't, then listen to his description of what it was I should have seen, then why it was incredibly funny, then pretend to get the joke when I have no idea WTF he's talking about. What I really mean is that not engaging in TV is culturally isolating sometimes, but I can live with that.
Does anyone have experience with Drobo (http://drobo.com/)?

I've been thinking of getting one, but the price tag has me hesitating.
We've spent 0 so far, and have had pretty good results. The blog is huge, and I started the company blog almost six months BEFORE launch. I'm also active in the general tech community and try and leave meaningful comments on the blogs that matter to what we're trying to do. And it has paid dividends. We're still in private alpha, but will be opening up our doors in 2 weeks.

Then its SEO, SEO and more SEO.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
from your memory??
Sounds like these guys have no experience in growing a social networking site/hiring programmers

1) A social networking site doesn't just grow on its own. Ask them how they intend to seed the userbase and what metrics they intend to monitor to optimize viral growth

2) You'll probably rewrite the thing anyway, so being fast and knowing what you are doing and why is more important.

3) What will these guys do when the product is being built. Ie how will they acquire users and what incentives do people have to invite more users.

Sound like these guys have no experience whatsoever.
I understand that it's a small component of the overall system you envisage; I just believe that it's a small component pointing in the wrong direction.

If you boil it down, my point is that while "do people like what I say?" is a suboptimal scoring criterion, "do most other people like the same things I say I like?" is likely to be significantly worse.
It's interesting, but to be honest, if you're smart enough to make a successful poker bot, you're probably smart enough to write a program to trade stocks or other liquid instruments like government bonds or commodity futures. The potential winnings are much higher, it's perfectly legal, and due to the depth of the markets such programs are capable of making much more money than poker bots. It's also doable, as funds like Renaissance Technologies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies) and D. E. Shaw have demonstrated.
There isn't a huge difference between $33 and $37 for a really motivated party to walk away. Microsoft had decided, for whatever reason, most likely the fact that Yahoo is such a reluctant target, leading to huge integration issues, to walk away. They just used price as a face-saving excuse.

Yahoo still bears responsibility (in the eyes of its shareholders at least) for making Microsoft walk away with their intransigent attitude. But at least Yahoo got what it wanted - we will see if a year later, they still want the same result. Something tells me if Yahoo stock drifts down to $10 in an economic downturn, knives are going to be out ...
Seed funding from NASA: 5K per month for lying down
Remembering everything is just quite as stupid as not remembering anything.

Our brain intelligently selects the things that are worth to remember.
They talked about her on NPR not too many months ago. She doesn't just recall events, but also the way she felt and even smells. Truely remarkable, but also debilitating.
Make the bot change locations and target creatures from time to time?... The point is that whatever heuristics are discovered to pinpoint bots won't be effective very long because of arms-race dynamics.
A Network Graph of Corporate America
Facebook to let users carry profiles with them
"Experience in a relevant field just means you can actually employ the knowledge gained from previous mistakes - particularily in the fast growing web 2.0 environment no project is like the other so there are many mistakes to be made."

That seems nonsensical, saying experience is important and no project is like the other in the same sentence.
My father has a similar condition. Given any day he can remember what he was doing on that day and what events happened in the news (global or local). His ability requires voluntary effort though, and I wouldn't say he can remember everything from each particular day (I doubt that this woman can remember _everything_ that happened in each day). My father clearly has an order of magnitude more memories per calendar day than the rest of us. Unfortunately I didn't seem to inherit any of his ability - I can't remember what day of the month it is today.

I don't know about the woman in the story, but it wouldn't take any stranger more than a few minutes to realize that my father is mentally ill (and I don't mean that his ability to record these events is a mental illness in itself).
We as a species have a long history of explaining the unknown with magic. So we should tread carefully around this kind of explanations, simply because we should be aware of such a strong bias towards them.

What the quantum intelligence does is take one unresolved problem (how do we think) and replace it with another (we think with quantum computing, but we don't know exactly how). Its only result is to take away the unknown and replace it with an incomplete explanation.

I also don't think Penrose would have come to this conclusion now. Cognitive psychology has taken enormous strides in the past years, and it's already pretty clear it's on the right track.
Take a look for example at "The Emotion Machine" by Marvin Minsky (who by the way is on par with McCarthy in AI but chose cognitive psychology as a main field: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky).
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Philip Greenspun!

"Computers are the tools of the devil. It is as simple as that. There is no monotheism strong enough that it cannot be shaken by Unix or any Microsoft product. The devil is real. He lives inside C programs.

...

"Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles:

Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right guru, you can make it work.

Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't.

PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't."

-- http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/servers.html

---

Notes:

-- This was written before the Mac OS became Unix.

-- It is possible that, given that this paragraph is the prelude to a sales pitch for Unix as the best of a bad lot... Greenspun is overselling the extent to which Unix will work. ;)

The corollary to all of this is that the web's primary function is to contain websites by Unix newbies looking for gurus, by Unix gurus looking for newbies, and by Windows users looking for stiff drinks.
That was the reason for my original post. I think McCarthy can tell us a lot about production software too, probably a lot more then most. It's just nobody asks him, and instead we get the same answers we can find in his last 10 interviews.

I wouldn't mind AI questions too, if only they were a bit more original.
Google Custom Search Engine for Hacker News & Reddit Programming
I made sloppy link insert as a comment in haste, no real purpose or reason. I must have come into the discussion through user comment history from another article and thought the topic was on that other article. In essence I was replying just to the commenter and not the overall posted article.
It's not that it's hard, it's just that it violates the readability tenet of python. You can see online GVR himself scolding people for producing semi-functional code because it turns out to be a mess.
nice. very useful.
Surprised no one is mentioning these

http://www.cherry.de/english/products/keyboards_g81-3000.htm

Simple, timeless, cheap.
I created this for myself (it took maybe two minutes to make). It limits your search results to Hacker News and Reddit's Programming section. The results were skewed in favor of Reddit, so I added "Hacker News" as a hint keyword, which creates a more balanced search result distribution.

It is probably not as complete as the dedicated Hacker News search someone else created, but it does span two sites, which is helpful (to me anyway).
I'd just like to say that "I'm not dismissing him: I'm outsourcing my dismissal of him to guys like Dennett" is the best line I've read recently.

From now on I'm outsourcing all my dismissiveness to Daniel Dennett. I just don't have the time to be properly dismissive, and he's so much better at it than I am anyway.
What's the purpose of Genius? What does Bill Gates and Albert Einstein mean?
just because something is difficult to learn does not make it a goog weeder. Python/Perl/etc. were not thatdifficult to learn and back in late 90s were goog indicators as people who used them were focused on getting things done easily and efficiently as possible.

This, and the the fact that generally they were not taught at college/undergrad level, menat people who had learnt them were self-developers and/or early adopters etc. who had a "real" interest/passion and which then helped to differentiate them from the general masses.

Just because you know a functional language does not neccessarily make you any more/less smart. I know plenty of people who are brilliant at things like ML (they have maths backgrounds) but not so great at bigger picture thinking and putting it all together. the really smart ones are people who can do that.

Just imho how I see things.

Sorry if I was off topic in posts, maybe I was missing points as reposonding to many things at once.
I agree and pointed out this and other contradictions during our conversations.

But, I think the general idea is you can derive patterns and rules from experience that can be applied to other fields to help prevent repeating mistakes.
Unless you're building the next social news site or a bittorrent client, this is the wrong initial audience for your product. You want to find people that are actually in your target demographic, not the fickle digerati that try 10 new web services a day but never stick around at any of them.

You want your initial customer base to be your target demographic because their initial feedback will help shape future iterations of your product. If you just launch with the web 2.0 social news scene, their feedback will be less relevant and will take your product down a distracting path.
gc: excellent advice on the curls. other wrist strengtheners

http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/giftsunder50/6a4b/

(they need to check how many "Gifts Under $50" cost $59.99

and PowerWeb thing (you need one if you've hired Django or Rails devs!)
http://www.fitter1.com/Catalog/Category/35/HandWrist.aspx
This is why I dislike Matt Maroon. I never met anyone who was so successful in coming across as completely arrogant using only text.

Advertising has traditionally been very unfocused. Anything that focuses it will work better than unfocused advertisment. Facebook has the data to focus advertisments. So neccesarily, Facebook works better in delivering advertisments to users. QED.

If or not they are actually executing this optimally is not relevant, the fact is that they have the capability.

Microsoft and a bunch of very smart business people are willing to bet billions on this. I think I'll stick with their opinions, rather than that of Matt Maroon, a very mediocre smalltime poker player.
It depends on what you define as skill. Some skills can only be obtained through experience. However, experience alone is meaningless.

These guys do sound like they don't know what they are doing, and them looking for someone with skills in specific technologies only might be a bad idea.

Instead of those specific skills only, for a CTO, they should perhaps look for someone with broad knowledge (or willingness to learn) of their problem/solution domain (web application development for instance), as well as solid technical ability.
if you're smart enough to make a successful poker bot, you're probably smart enough to write a program to trade stocks or other liquid instruments like government bonds or commodity futures

I'm not so sure about that. I think the main reason is: there's a lot more "stupid money" at the poker table than there is in the market.

The bot as mentioned doesn't seem to do anything particularly fancy -- it just looks at the cards on the table and figures out your odds of winning based on that. This is information which is easily extracted mathematically, but which most players don't have direct access to. Good players will have a pretty good idea of these probabilities, whereas lousy players won't. If you can find yourself on a table full of lousy players, you're at a huge advantage.

In the market, on the other hand, there's only one poker table, and all the best players in the world are already sitting at it. Any time statistical arbitrage opportunities arise in prices, you can bet that D.E. Shaw and Rennaisance Technologies have already noticed it and moved a few billion dollars that way. If you want to win, you don't just have to be smarter than six guys in their basements doing calculations in their heads, you have to be smarter than thousands of overpaid quants with supercomputers.
Ask YC: Tools for non-profit organizations
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0206.cabot.html

I was reading this article about donating cars to charity, and I was a bit surprised to learn that non-profits have to go through a for-profit organization to auction off the cars that they have.

In general, this led me to think about non-profit org problems (which are many). Every one that I know who's worked in non-profit before says that money is tight, and it's mostly based on volunteers who can be flaky and non-committal. The most glaring problem that I see are usually their basic IT needs, and getting the tools to coordinate and communicate. I can't help but feel there's an overlooked opportunity in an under-served market here. However, the only thing I can think of is consultancy, as most good tools they need have an open source version.

Anyone know what's currently done in this arena?
Emacs is my editor of choice, very powerful and portable. Its complexity can be frustrating sometimes, a bit of a time-sink.

Altough I'm currently using a Mac, I try to resist the temptation to use Textmate. It may be easier to use and extend, but it is not Free Software.

I wonder if in the next releases Emacs can be made more friendly to users who keep forgetting about how its internals work and the elisp syntax :-)
The essay struck me as being more condescending than helpful (and I despise TV).

If you were a regular TV watcher who had no intention of quitting, would that essay do anything other than encourage you to watch more out of spite?
False dichotomy. Ask yourself a slightly different question: can we hire someone with skill and experience? And the answer to that is not "I know someone with wild skillz who does all these kewl demos but he hasn't worked on a big project yet." Learning to program for a big project is a skill in itself, so I think you need to get an excellent programmer who is also good at building large apps and can prove it.
Well, I didn't actually mean it in that sense. When MySpace was getting its umpteenth million user, the site layout, fonts, styles, etc, was all amateurish and nowhere near "great". It didn't have any elegance at all anywhere.

Nowadays they've had some professionals hop in and touch up some of the core site elements. I still wouldn't call anything about it "great", even in terms of "good match for each user" because it feels more like they're just working with whatever they were given. None of the widgets/elements/profile tools they're given are 'great' on its own.

So basically MySpace shook the premise for me that quality is any sort of an essential element for success. They're probably an exception, but they're very much a huge exception.
I wonder if they'll let you develop your product while in bed.
Maybe it was an idea that just didn't have enough innovation to make the traction better. But one hell of a good effort I would say for a bootstrapped startup, toughing it out in market with fully funded sharks.

Can I ask what's next in your pipeline, how does this experience influence your future projects?
I see your now at http://labs.live.com/ so all in all the game was won IMO no? You got a great job as a result.
Facebook Raises Another $100 Million
Interesting. I wonder why this is downmodded. It seem remarkably apropos to the discussion.
Send your friends to http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-...

Also, Tip 11 might be of interest:
http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/05/07/13-tips-for-creatin...

Daniel

PS: However, to be honest, from the sound of it, your friends are pretty much doomed. I'd advise you not to invest your money in that startup, it's almost guaranteed to fail. See: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
Steve Mann, The Original Cyborg
Instead of those specific skills only, for a CTO, they should perhaps look for someone with broad knowledge (or willingness to learn) of their problem/solution domain (web application development for instance), as well as solid technical ability.

Indeed... at the moment it seems like a case of the blind leading the blind. The fact is, all their VC links and grand plans will come to nothing at all unless they have execution ability. And they have no execution ability until they have a technology director - the kind whose back you can build a company on. Those are rare enough. The technology of choice or even the level of experience should be of no consequence. They need a 1 or 2 in this taxonomy:
http://www.devtopics.com/programmer-productivity-the-tenfini...

Daniel
Three Reasons To Use Disqus
Maybe I could ask you a question here. I'm in a demographic which is probably less than 2% of the UK population. Not watching TV is not something I brag about because (generally speaking) people here seem to think it's a bit weird and different not to watch it, rather than a particular virtue.

But some of the comments in the article seem to suggest there's a section of American society which would see it as brag-worthy, and they clearly get on people's nerves.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694

So, when you suggest the article might encourage you "to watch more out of spite", I wonder if there's a cultural thing going on here, so maybe you could confirm or deny that (assuming you're in the US). Just curious is all...