skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You obviously don't develop large/similar applications do you?

We have custom controls (text boxes, listviews, dynamic formviews) that inherit from Android controls, that are reused over 15+ applications. It was hell building them scratch because the main app was a Java library (not an android app so the XML resources are useless).

I don't think you even understand what I'm saying. For example: Can you explain to me why the CheckedTextView control is available in XML but the class itself is abstract?
"We are exploring a potential fee-based structure as well as ad-revenue models that will enable BOSS developers to monetize their offerings. When we roll out these changes, BOSS will no longer be a free service to developers."

Seems fair enough to me, depending on how the pricing looks. This will affect DuckDuckGo which I believe is built on top of BOSS.

"Several search-related web services will continue to be supported, but strictly through YQL. These include the Yahoo! Term Extraction Web Service, Related Suggestion, and Spelling Suggestion. Other non-BOSS search APIs such as Web Search, Image Search, News Search and Site Explorer APIs will shut down with no further support in YQL. "

No more web search API is unfortunate.

"On October 1, 2010, we will close the SearchMonkey developer tool, gallery, and app preferences."

I have to admit I never quite figured out what SearchMonkey was for.

"We will be evaluating all our Geo, Maps, and Local APIs--updating or shutting down some of them, and working with our strategic partner, Nokia, on others. We will work with our developer community to ensure a smooth transition in all instances and we will share more details about these decisions in September."

This sent a shiver down me. After avoiding Yahoo! GeoPlanet for a few years out of fear it might get shut down, I finally decided to go full-hog with it on several recent projects (since Twitter and Foursquare had bet on it, so I figured it was probably safe). I really hope they don't kill it off - it's an incredibly useful API.
At first blush, it sounds like this kind of hardware would be extremely useful in data compression, specifically entropy encoding. LZMA, for example, applies a probability prediction to each bit. Any type of data compression could probably make use of a "probability engine," which would be a huge boon for anything that deals with data. If every device could encode/decode data an order of magnitude faster, more aggressive compression could be added to everything: movies, music, HTML, voice communication.

"...has received more than $20 million in government funding from DARPA and other agencies..."

I'd also speculate that cryptographic implementations could benefit from this sort of technology, although I'm not very familiar with the inner workings of AES, etc. Maybe that explains their DARPA funding.

Further, it's my understanding that one of the primary limitations of GPGPU processing (and parallelism in general) are the large performance penalties involved when dealing with branching, severely limiting the use of flow control. Perhaps it would be possible to offload these instructions to a probability processor, alleviating some of the slowdown in regards to flow control.

Or maybe I've just read too much science fiction.
I define it in a different way, and in more practical terms. Being rich in America means not having day-to-day concerns about money. Sure, the rich need to worry about their riches. But not like most of us who are far to close to becoming poor (definition: not enough wherewithal to care for one's self and family).
#!/usr/bin/ruby

vapid_pronouncement = "#{dictionary.get_noun} is dead."
I used a couple of different script for all of this. The first intelligently crawled HN, trying to minimize the amount of total hits to the server while still grabbing every post. It also dumped most of its internal state to file every few seconds, allowing me to kill and restart it at my convenience and to easily grab only the new posts when I update the archive.

The second took each post on HN (all of which were saved to disk), found those that were ask posts, and then generated a document with the title of the post, the score and number of comments it received (allowing to me rule out looking at 90% of posts, as they had < 3 comments on average), and markdown ready for copy/pasting into the final document.
Java's chief weakness has been it's lack of first class functions. If closures don't make it in to Java 1.7 then it's game over, it'll be sealed as the COBOL of our times.
Well, you can write deterministic code in Java using threads, just use defined constructs that give you guarantees about how things will be executed and orders -- ExecutorService and BlockingQueue are your friends.
Vimeo Releases Embeddable HTML5 Video Player
The "Conclusions" section of this wiki page is rather uninformative... See http://www.safehaven.com/article/3880/the-past-performance-o... (from external links)

There's a table with all 22 confirmed signal clusters 1985-2005 and the following "crashes" along with their delays. Although the phrase "25% of these signals were followed by a market crash" is pretty impressive, when you look at the actual definitions of crash (>15% drop), and the delays (up to 4 months) it doesn't look as exciting anymore.
Manipulated data sets are like bikinis - they show you what they want to show, and hide the bits that you want to see.
what about looking for active abuse? Assuming I tell you on account signup, is running your traffic through an IDS to alert me when your system is compromised unacceptable? what if I only look at your traffic after I get an abuse report? what if I get an abuse report... can I use tcpdump?

I mean, these are all possibilities. my concern is that if, for example, you make running an inward facing IDS illegal, selling (nearly) anonymous accounts on the cheap will be ah, more difficult. In theory, a good enough inward-facing IDS, if implemented by more ISPs, could largely mitigate the botnet problem we have now, where almost any site can be wiped off the internet by IRC kids. (now, my IDS system never got past 'experimental' and has been down for several years now. But when it was active, I think it was pretty neat; customers could see incoming attacks, and I could see outgoing attacks. Of course, like any ids, it had a huge false positive rate, so honestly, it wasn't all that useful, which is part of why it's currently down. I'm just interested in why people think that sort of technology is inherently a bad idea- a bad enough idea that there should be a law, even.)

Now, I think it's important that providers are very clear about what they do with a customer's packets... but I worry that codifying what a provider can do to a packet /with the consent of the customer/ into law will eliminate services I like.
Your assumptions are correct, being afraid is not what we look for. :) You can have confidence without ego, but that is normally because you know what you know and more importantly know what you don't (wisdom). Now combining the wisdom and willingness to always continue learning, that is what I attempted to sum up in one word of "humble".
You're right.

It's a software problem and a hardware problem. Our hardware is not up to the task, and even if it was we wouldn't know how to program it.

Evolutionary computation and non-von-Neumann architectures such as stochastic data flow architectures might be where to start. We would not write the code. We would build the right kind of architecture and then evolve the code within that architecture.
Sorry, but the chances of this are minuscule. However, there is a chance and it depends on their mental state, how much they've flown the simulator, what types of maneuvers they've practiced and how closely it matches to the actual aircraft. One thing that would vastly improve your odds is getting ahold of a flight instructor or another pilot via the radio.

One thing a pilot is never allowed to do, is give up (no matter what); and neither should you if caught in a survival scenario.

If this is a real concern for you, check out something like the AOPA Pinch Hitter's Course, which can teach someone to land an airplane during an emergency with only minimal flight training. See http://www.avweb.com/news/safety/183024-1.html

If your question is more along the lines of "does a simulator make an acceptable substitute for an aircraft?", the answer must be no. Simulators are really only useful as a supplement to actual flight experience and training.
There isn't a library in Cambridge which carries SICP?
Measuring "the web" based on amount of bandwidth used is kind of a ridiculous metric. Time spent engaging (or some such metric) with a particular internet service might be more relevant.

Video uses a seriously disproportionate amount of bandwidth per use.
"The idea should be sharp and pointy, an idea that lodges itself in people's brains where no other idea has already taken up residence."
(I tossed my login details but i'm the same guy who posted this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353050)

The best lie is a half truth.

"Max" the reason people read your articles is because you've said you make $40K a month from niche iphone apps.

Mark (lets drop the pretense) you sound like you have read Positioning by Ries, A. and Trout,J (http://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle-Your-Al-Ries/dp/044...).
Your positioning this "Max" character as the idealized serial entrepreneur. Globe trotting, living in 5 star hotel, identifying markets, working out those
niche products. I'm sure that idealized person is something many people here want to replicate.

That's only half the story though isn't it? The reality is your $40K a month is made from these apps (http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/feather-moor-ltd/id3053457...)
1 star apps with content ripped from sites like ehow.com. Lets not forget that feather+moor are your creation as well.

Would people read 37signals in the same light if they actually made their money by running casino affiliate sites?

Would people read joel on software in the same light if he actually made his money from porn sites?

Would people read Paul Graham articles in the same light if he actually made his money selling teeth whitening ads?

You are not hiding your identity because of privacy, your hiding it because the reality of your success doesn't fit with the image you've created for Max.

"Max" is not real because he is only half the story.
This is a bit absurd. When a company is floundering, everyone knows it, including investors. Shutting down is a very reasonable choice sometimes. The death is often just keeping the site running without updates, as in this case.

I don't advocate failure, but I don't think it makes sense to waste years on a product that doesn't have legs.

In this specific case, I wouldn't worry about reputations. Everyone who has worked with Ashwin knows he is awesome.

As for the general trend, this post by Jason Cohen is right on the money:
http://blog.asmartbear.com/rejecting-raising-vc-money.html
Could they be using memristor technology?
Yes, but when we are talking about "programming brain" we are assuming that changing few base pairs would change the behavior / structure.

Ova don't grow into random jumbles of cells, most of the time they grow into babies.

Exactly but can we change few base pairs and observe its effect? When we talk about reprogramming, we trying to figure out the cause and effect relationship, if a system is chaotic it is very difficult to figure out that relationship.

Three bodies don't mutate into 4 bodies or weather does not changes into an ice age in an instant, but at the same time we cannot reprogram weather by introducing small changes.
Thank you for actually taking the time to make the graph we all instantly thought of when we saw that ridiculous wired article.
Myers is wrong, because he overcomplicates. Kurzweil is also wrong, because he oversimplifies (I'm taking Myers's version of argument at face value; I actually suppose the argument was more sophisticated than that).

Firstly where Myers is wrong: the human brain ultimately comes forth from a bunch of information roughly equal to 1 million lines of code. If you could reproduce those 1 million lines and set them loose, allowing them to construct a human being (nothing else: what else could they construct?) and letting that human being live in our world, you would have 'created' intelligence. It's as simple as that and attacking that abstraction is completely the wrong approach to pointing out the problem with Kurzweil's argument.

So, then the two points where Kurzweil is wrong:

1) it's not just any million lines of code. It has to be exactly the million lines of code in our genome, give or take some bits. Considering the enormously complex interactions between these bits of code, this is worse than reverse engineering the largest codebase of spaghetti code you could possiblt imagine. The simple example that Myers gives is enough to show this.

2) The million lines of code cannot just be executed anywhere. It encodes for the construction of a human from raw material and the subsequent operation of that human. Give it different materials or a different living environment and something entirely different, in most variations nothing remotely capable of 'life', appears. And even if you could make it build something from electronic components: slight differences in the perceptive systems can create huge differences in the brain and the concepts in the brain. A machine with a finite pixelized array of visual light receptors would build a completely different conceptual model of the world. Reverse engineering the genome is not only extremely hard: it is very unlikely to produce the result you want.
You could be right about that specific example - disparate impact is a minefield.

But it isn't the non-job relatedness of MMA that's the problem, it's the fact that the criteria harms a politically favored group.
I think of those as more like programming styles. You can program C in a functional style (although the language is not your friend). You can write FORTRAN in any language.

I found personally that event-driven programming (signals, triggers, listeners) is different enough to be considered another style. Synchronization, causal sequences of events, and a clock, used for GUIs or workflows, requires a different sort of thinking than functional, procedural, or OO.
My programmer's understanding of the argument is this:

Even if you could reduce the brain to some sort of bytecode, an interpreter is still necessary to run that bytecode. For instance, a python program might be a few bytes, but the interpreter is still a few megabytes. Yet both are necessary to run the program. Who knows how large a brain bytecode interpreter is going to be, but probably very large.
Indeed, and bravo for recognizing this.

Not all meetings are meaningful, of course, but communicating with your coworkers and customers is an essential part of the practice of producing software.
Chances are good, especially when I was an adolescent. However, like many things it's way more complicated than that. I enjoy meeting new people. If you say, "Reg, let's go for a coffee, I want you to meet someone," I will probably leap at the chance. If you say, "Reg, there's an iPad programming Flash Mob going on downstairs," I might break out in hives. or go bouldering where I meet plenty of people and have rich experiences with them.

It's a very good and refreshing supposition, thanks!
> Whereas the training data for a neural net is extra information - but in utero, what is the training data that is not a predictable consequence of the genome?

For starters, the mother's chemistry which is a function of her DNA and environment. And the mother's physical environment, diet, health, etc. These are things that have no representation in the genome but can radically change brain structure in a developing mammal.

I'm not claiming the environment magnifies existing information, I'm claiming it's part of the total set and Kurzweil (and you) are vastly underestimating the amount of state that is associated with the exact details of a developing organism. This seems to be the thrust of Myers's point (at least in the beginning): you are simplifying and you are not allowed to do that.

Myers then follows that point by saying that even if we do manage to isolate all that information and understand it, we actually don't have certain critical problems like protein folding solved, or even reliably simulated yet.

Even if you hand-wave all this and assume it's possible, the notion that 10 years is the timeframe for this seems... excessively optimistic.
Next up: Ants are extinct! Their proportion of total mass compared to elephants is almost zero.
If you're used to web stuff, you can go pretty far by really learning HTML/CSS/Javascript in a deep way, then adding in an extension library like jQuery.

You can program cool, fun programs in the browser with Processing.js, a simple, cool graphics drawing language. Check out the exhibitions and learning stuff.

http://processingjs.org/
well, but it's Wired. So, it's normal.
Right. The point is that you don't have to search for the answer, it just gives it to you. That's a simple example of the possibilities of semantic search engines.
We actually have weeks with free submissions and we're strongly considering changes to the pricing structure.

Our main argument for the current fee has actually been to discourage a huge amount of submissions so that we could take time to evaluate the viability of each submission. However, as we've grown (we're just over a year old now), the fee certainly seems to have become more of a hinderance to good ideas and the community has actually become a lot better at actually judging and filtering out products based on their viability.
Still, RSS readers use plain old HTTP requests (Web Traffic). Transition of users from browser to reader apps shouldn't matter if we count traffic by type.
Most Customer Service Complaints on Twitter: AT&T Worst, Apple Sixth
I'm confused. There are lots of things where risk > reward, and most seem like pretty poor ways to get rich (e.g. jumping off a bridge).
Not if the world is actually more complicated than a newborn baby's brain. Can we simulate a baby's interaction with its mother without simulating the mother's brain?
I see you point but...

"Their proportion of total mass compared to elephants is almost zero."

...that...doesn't seem true.
I agree with everything you say, but this article says more about Ellison than Linux. He just sounds pompous, arrogant and irrelevant, I don't think he presents that big of a threat. Certainly not the way some other commenters have taken it, some people seem to think that it means he can extinguish whichever large OSS project he wants at whim.
I thought i was in the same boat as you until recently. Now the same job, which i thought was excellent, is boring and not interesting anymore. The people i used to love working with dont seem so nice now.
What do i do now?
IMO it took them a while to find their niche. At the start it seemed to be all about easily dividing expenses among friends. In the 3 years I've used the site I've used that feature exactly once and it didn't work because one of my friends never bothered to sign up.
Exactly. If I watched HD video on my iPhone, I would destroy my 2GB cap very quickly. But I can use the web and play QRANK and such constantly for a month and barely put a dent in it.
Note that there is more than one hand-drawn dragon book cover by Aho & Ullman. Principles of Compiler Design tends to precede "The Dragon Book" as commonly referred, although the material overlaps a lot. The newer editions are much less clear with regard to the trade-offs in parser design, e.g. I don't think the section on concrete and abstract syntax uses the phrase "scannerless" or "scanner" at all while I am pretty sure PoCD at least says "scanner" and explains why you might separate the scanner/lexer from the parser. The Java book is much less clear, even though it improves on the reasoning (IIRC, pg ~113 in the Java edition) for why you should keep the two separate (although I personally consider these reasons to be myths) -- it is the fact that they don't really build up to the idea that makes me wonder why they provide justifications in the first place. They don't really debate whether concrete syntax is that useful, etc.

I have to agree that the Java code is an academic object-oriented programming example. It's not "less clear" so much as "less practical". For comparison, see the ANTLR API reference and the interfaces provided there, which differ just enough to show practical consideration for the use cases one might want.
That's what they claim. And what Brad said is correct. According to the CEO (who is also CEO of LCC) their software is much more granular than other search engines. For example, when they scour NYT, Twitter, Blogs, etc. they are able to create about 100 semantic tags for every 1 that most of their competition does. This is how they're able to create so many Q&A pairs. They also incorporate real time keyword search along with the Q&A pairs that they have, which is something that (AFAIK) isn't done by any other company.
Twitter Tales: Our Users, Their Stories
The cost isn't nothing - learning emacs and org-mode, while rewarding, isn't trivial.
Actually the information needed for replicating brain is not just limited to the information encoded in DNA. Physics plays a great deal of role in all molecular biology and from physical interactions arise cell-cell interactions which then give rise to complicated organs that you have in the body. (And, of course, all these arose during billions of years of evolution which is encoded not only in DNA but environment also.)

So if you were to simulate the brain, modeling DNA will be A tiny part of it. Encoding the deepest of physics world (yes, quantum effects play many roles in DNA) AND then having enough computational power to model interactions of those particles in real time IS A REALLY BIG DEAL.
This might be especially valuable for startups who don't currently live in the valley.
Hold on, I'll make a graph to prove it to you.
"Instead what I'd like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers."

I'd like to clarify that doing a bunch of pointer arithmetic and manual memory management does not necessarily make someone a great programmer. In many cases, it distinguishes them as a "midgrade and needs to learn something about premature optimization" programmer.

Great programmers write solutions that make hard problems look easy, and mediocre programmers write solutions that make medium problems look very hard. Java makes it easy to do either of those -- anyone who's reviewed a decent quantity of Java code can attest to this (compare the code style in, say, Guava or Lucene with your typical J2EE app).
Incisive analysis. What do you have to say to this "Max" ?