skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Companies are always looking at ways to reduce costs. Some recognize that one employee performance varies greatly from the next employee. Asking these questions tends to indicate a different caliber of employee, one that is devoted to their field in obsessive ways. If that in the end defines a better employee I don't really know, but I tend to disagree. I personally (in the programming field) look for people who have the right ego (humble) and personality (outgoing). If you can do those two things, have a baseline of knowledge, and can LEARN then you'll make a great employee. (Maybe not a great entrepreneur?) (Also no the company I work for is not currently hiring)
Editor of Xconomy San Francisco here. For all you startup types, Daniel makes one point that I would absolutely agree with and underscore. Don't send us press releases. It's true, we get hundreds a day. They have a magical way of making a great company sound boring. Have them ready as background material, but don't lead with them.
The Ruby vs Python (vs any other language) question is easy for a newbie: what do the people near you (personally or professionally) use most? Then you will have access to advice, sample code, relevant documentation etc. If you strike off on your own it's no less fun, but it will take longer for you to get the point at which you can do something "useful".

You say you're studying science: perhaps NumPy or Sage (http://www.sagemath.org/) would be useful? (I don't know what the Ruby equivalents of these are or if they even have them).

The same is true for your OS - if the people around you are using OSX (for example) then you should too. Make an actual "decision" when you identify what it is that your current choice doesn't do that some other OS would do. For now the availability of help if you need it outweighs everything else.
Glimmer lets you add jQuery to your site without any coding
Here's some information about the Android installed base by country.

http://www.techinfospotlight.com/2010/05/phone-os-market-sti...

The big takeaway for me is that 75% of Android phones able to access AdMob are in the North America, versus about 50% of iOS installed-base in North America!

Quote: "Over half of Apple’s sales are now outside the US. AdMob’s figures indicate 49% of the iPhone OS devices reaching its advertisement network are in North The united states, while 28% are in Western Europe, 14% are in Asia & 10% are elsewhere around the globe.
For Android, a whopping 75% of the installed base visible to AdMob are in North The united states, with only 11% finding their way to Western Europe. A similar 12% are present in Asia, while less than 3% are in use elsewhere on the globe."
Define rich: you are rich when ...
I'm often confused about the meaning of the word rich. What does it mean to be rich? Does it depend on other values than money? When are you officially rich? Can you be rich but not wealthy, or can you be wealthy but not rich? Are they the same?
> Say, by helping improve the code of open source apps, etc?

Well, if you can't really code right now, that might not be possible. Maybe find something that needs doing and figure out how to do it, as a learning challenge, or help with documentation...

Laptop? I have a Dell. You can get them with Ubuntu:

http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/notebooks/laptop-inspiron-154...

You need memory and screen real-estate, IMO.

I prefer Ruby these days, but I've used Python too. They're both pretty good.
Oracle v. Google
If you wanted an exact simulation, the n-th digit is important. But if you just want some system where some other (possibly intelligent) behaviour emerges, the n-th digit is not important.
Sensory hijack: rewiring brains to see with sound
Just look at compressed source code, too.
People complain against google because:
- It has a "don't be evil" mantra, wich is deprecated right now
- A few years ago Google was promoting the net neutrality

Many people feel betrayed by the new Google behavior.
Just to clarify, I thought the manner in which phone towers were masked as trees was pathetic (or at least in the manner in which it was implemented), not the pylons proposal. I thought the design team hit a home run on the later. I have yet to see any phone tower made to look like a tree inspiring.
This looks very cool, however it doesn't seem to work in IE... :(
I do not quite understand what is your point, even with the "let me help you" comment below.

Are you suggesting that the article is wrong in stating that the Japanese believed that the Americans would treat them better if they surrendered to them rather than the Russians? If so, perhaps you can provide some authority.
John Cleese sells Compaqs [1980s]
am I the only one bothered by the second formula?
¬(¬MY_PEEPS ⇒ ¬SKILLZ) ∧ ¬(¬SKILLZ ⇒ ¬SOFTWARE)

at first sight it could be quite more simple as

¬(SKILLZ ⇒ MY_PEEPS ∨ SOFTWARE ⇒ SKILLZ)

(contrapposition, de morgan)
> We haven't solved the protein folding problem? So solve it.

You sir, are a genius. To make up for my previous lack of initiative, I will do so immediately. Please arrange for the world to be ready for my announcement of the solution at noon tomorrow.
The graph is interesting but gives a skewed view of the facts, since it's relative to each other. A more interesting graph would be one where absolute numbers are shown. I bet the "web"-part would still be on the rise, however not as fast as the "video"-part for example.
I know, but this post proposes 2 solutions to the problem. I haven't seen this before.

Also that thread talks about the correct use of down-voting while I address the issue of anonymity and the asymmetric costs to the writer vs. the down voter.
Actually I didn't find that very enlightening at all. Code or data - I'd say it's both, depending on your perspective. You need those instructions to build your proteins, after all. It's very lispy ;)

The point is, he seems to suggest that the genome is all you need, when clearly that's not true.
Not only that: it may be "only" 800 MB of code, but we have no access to the CPU it runs on.
Yes. I'm surprise how many people missed this point of the OP.

The golden ticket is in the "this is a perfect perfect storm; don't waste it" sense
("market demands" + "you can code" + "cheapest time to start" = golden ticket).

Not in the "quit your sorry job NOW and get RICH" sense.
... which is http://www.dotcomroulette.com/
Myers is attacking Kurzweil on the assumption that Kurzweil is actually proposing that the brain's structure should be reverse-engineesed from DNA, which would be intractably hard. Only Kurzweil isn't saying this anywhere. Instead, he seems to be using DNA as a measure for the amount of irreducible complexity that needs to go into a system that will end up with the complexity of a human brain.

Basically, we have no idea where we will get the AI source code we can actually do something with, but we have some reason to believe that the most concise version of the source code won't contain more data than the human genome.

The rough intuition might be if we wanted to simulate brain in the caricatured reverse-engineer-the-DNA way, we'd need an impossible computer that could simulate years worth of exact quantum-level physics in a cubic meter of space, but the human DNA and basic cellular machinery for hosting it would be the only seriously difficult bits to stick in there, the rest would just be simple chemicals and the impossibly detailed physics simulation.

I guess the analogy then is that we make the AI source code (which we don't know how to write yet), which is supposed to end up at most around the length of a human DNA, but which can run sensibly in existing hardware. Then, deterministic processing entirely unlike the immensely difficult-to-compute protein folding from DNA will make this code instantiate a working AI somewhere at the level of a newborn human baby, in the same way as the genome initiates protein-folding based processes that makes a single cell grow into a human baby given little more than nutrients and shelter from the external physical environment.

So it doesn't seem like a really strong statement of overoptimism. It's basically just saying that the human brain doesn't seem to require a mystifyingly immense amount of initial information to form, but instead something that can be quantified and very roughly compared with already existing software projects. I'd still guess it might take a little more than the ten years to come up with any sensible code with hope of growing into an AI though.
Hindenburg Omen (Occurred Twice this Month)
This rant unfortunately fails to clearly demonstrate how Kurzweil errs. It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system?

Because so far, despite the best efforts of many geniuses and heroic computing resources, our simulations don't even reliably predict the real-world outcomes of far, far simpler systems. Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for demonstrating that sufficiently complex systems display emergent behaviors that can never be entirely predicted by studying their components in isolation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#The_End_of_Certa...

Kurzweil is hopelessly out of his depth in these arguments and is talking nonsense. Personally I'll be very surprised if we can construct anything approaching human intelligence in my lifetime.
The New World Powers in Innovation
> Well, my point was that other governments weren't designed that way and do fine. I think it's safe to say that people in e.g. Sweden trust their government more since (a) there are so many government services and (b) Sweden is supposed to be the most democratic place on earth.

Sounds like a lesser Minnesota.

Lots of things work with populations of Swedes.
Yep, there is a checkbox on the form that allows you to skip sending the email. Instead, on the confirmation page, you'll be given a unique URL and a password that you can send however you'd like.
The Mirah Language
What does being "hungry for fame and glory", "vain, sadistic and incompetent. Several high ranking officials and civilians reported his attitude towards his subordinates as nothing less than disgusting." or "in charge of Totsk nuclear testing" has anything to do with being a great guy because he beated the Nazis.

God knows what would happened if they had managed to occupy Russia!

Besides, war is all about fame and glory.
His last comment,

The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat

chimes with the large majority of bold scientific claims that appear in the press. For example, not that long ago the press jumped on Craig Venter's (http://bit.ly/uEC5) 'artificial cell' (http://bit.ly/c27AL5), hailing it as the beginning of man-made organisms and making bold predictions about the future of life itself, riling up environmental groups no end. (I'm not saying that wasn't a great acheivement. But all his team really did was take out one DNA tape and put back an identical, if newer version. Bread and yoghurt manufacturers have been doing a smaller version of that for a long time. Not exactly playing God.)

It would be nice if there was a scientific-bullshit detector that made sure the press didn't go crazy over wild claims. Proposal for a startup, anyone? :)
On the walk home.

Find it hard to listen to a podcast (that's at all interesting) while I try to concentrate on anything else.
Chrome Web Store Launch in October
There is Nobel-prize winning theory that shows that you won't ever truly solve this problem by studying the underlying atomic physics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#Dissipative_stru...
The definitions used by wealth advisors:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_net_worth_individual
As for the first answer: we all have to learn to deal with roundoff error. That's not by principle an obstacle.

The other answer contains an implicit assumption that's not obviously correct: you suggest that complexity only arises when you enumerate every possible dimension of phase space. But physical simulations have been very successful at reproducing complex behaviour from simple rules, without taking into account every particle's state vector.

Finally, did you really try to equate my statement to the statement that Windows could be written in three days? ...
It's done this for wordpress et al since the first public release of the source code: http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/81576aed622d560fdb3c96a26bb5...

Around last July's release it started showing subdomains anytime they aren't 'www'. Compare http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/arc3/news.arc#L1550 with http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/arc3.1/news.arc#L1556
Game Of Life with @lunivore
SubSonic MVC Scaffold Addin
> Such complexity is too much for a single person - a group of technocrats is a better way to run such a huge and complicated machine.

Oh really?

How many technocrats do you know who you'd entrust with your life decisions? What are the odds that they'd be the ones in that position as opposed by the resume-packing tards who infest student govts everywhere?

Eisenhower's "military industrial complex" speech was actually a warning about technocracy. (The MIC stuff gets more play because it fits the narrative and has cute phrasing.)
While working out
Maybe get checked for sleep apnea? If you have it, you repeatedly stop breathing during the night. It isn't long enough to kill you, but it's long enough to lift you out of deep sleep into shallower sleep, or keep you from entering the deep sleep states.
I'm not a genius, and you probably aren't either, but somebody probably is.

As far as I know there is no fundamental reason to assume that this problem won't be solved. It's not the halting problem.
Do you actually develop sites with this kind of thinking? I'm shocked that you'd rather use a 1px png (adding an additional http request) and JavaScript to achieve an effect that CSS can handle all on its own. We use browser extensions because specs like CSS3 aren't suddenly turned on one day like a light switch.

You can make your layout look nicer on cutting-edge browsers and by the time the old browsers are no longer around and the spec is in widespread use you can remove the extensions. It's trivial to remove CSS from a stylesheet. It's usually a pain in the ass to re-implement CSS functionality from 1px pngs and JavaScript hacks once all the browsers have caught up.
This is something I've been wanting to see:

Virtual animals/monsters roam the earth (probably relegated to streets/parks for property issues), and with your phone app, you hunt them, collecting trophies/treasure.

You could join safari parties with friends to hunt the scariest of monsters, or to share resources.

Fun fun fun.
Users weren't even aware that there was a problem to be solved
It is no less reasonable than accusing Google of having "betrayed … everyone" by still fighting harder for network neutrality than anyone else but not doing it in the exact way that you'd prefer. There's no real counterargument to be made against what basically amounts to unsubstantiated smack talk.
Photographic Proof that I am not a Ninja | startupSQUARE's blog
On Social innovation
That was really a very useful reply messel. However in our case the crawler code etc is ready. The only thing we need is some powerful infrastructure to run it on.

We have certainly considered all the factors you have mentioned while implementing our crawler however unlike typical crawlers the objectives of our crawler is purely a research goal and completely different than what most have done.
FCC's document about Network Neutrality (Oct 2009)
Then I know a lot of people with >$30 million who are not rich, and I know a few with <$1 million who are rich.

That doesn't make your definition wrong, but it does point out that being rich is a matter of personal choices on expenses just as much as income/gross worth.

If you go to West Chester county NY you'll find hundreds of ex-Wall Street guys with foreclosures on their 5 million dollar houses and annual salaries >400k and little to show for it after the crash.
I'm ignorant of this theory, but reading the link I don't see that it shows that protein folding can't be modeled.
What's so odd about that?

All bots get a long list of directories to not crawl, and only GBot-Image is blocked from the whole site? Seems quite normal for a large website like Oracle's.
The old UUNet IPs (now maintained by level 3) work as well:
4.2.2.[1,6]

As does running your own DNS.
Cindy Padnos, Illuminate Ventures, on Venture Chemistry[video]
That's the extra-infuriating thing. In theory, I'm completely down with the project of using parables based on science to convey religious ideas. Religion is built out of the raw materials that the world gives you. If we live in a world full of science and technology, we should expect our parables and our myths and our stories to be filled with science and technology.

(Cue a chorus line of Doctor Who cosplayers.)

So, in theory, I could have been okay with What the Bleep. In practice, however, it is just horribly grating -- way more grating than any SF, even the dumbest SF.
Perhaps I shouldn't have used "initiate." But the proposal by Google/Verizon states a position while the FCC document "seek[s] comment." It's new that Google, a content provider, answers that question jointly with the 2nd largest telecom. And both companies are partners in the mobile business.

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-09-93A...
This is a really bad idea. All it takes is one ice storm and those things will fall: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_ice_storm_of_199...
Isn't Iceland broke?
The relevant section:

> Application of Nondiscrimination with Respect to Access to Content,
> Applications, and Services, Subject to Reasonable Network Management

In particular, the FCC was seeking comments. Google/Verizon are proposing a way to do discriminate services running on wireless.
Moral of the story: Google is a bunch of cheeky bastards.

It took me a while to understand the reasoning behind that as points on a scale versus actual temperature values ("Celsius degrees" versus "degrees Celsius," respectively).

Googling "0 Celsius degrees + 0 Celsius degrees" returns 0 Kelvin, which would be expected given the technicality in wording.
No, I'm poking fun at Kurzweil's 2020 deadline, not at you. You appear to have been wise enough not to specify a deadline...

As for this statement:

physical simulations have been very successful at reproducing complex behaviour from simple rules

Absolutely, but it doesn't follow that every complex behavior can be reproduced from simple rules. To overgeneralize from success in one field is the occupational illness of futurists. It's certainly a key problem for Singularitarians, who tend to get so enthusiastic about Moore's Law that they forget that most of the world has nothing to do with microelectronics.
I've been following the TDD stuff as an outsider, and hands down the article that makes me consider it with the least skepticism is this one: http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/10/07/tdd-derange...

I'm sure there are issues w/ the various studies it cites, but it is the only one to actually address TDD from a productivity standpoint with some research data that I've seen. (More / better links welcome too!)
The Web is moving to include video. Just look at the <video> tag in HTML5.
I didn't mean that definition of "fail", but I guess I was cheating a bit with the "creating something useful", in that I was assuming that you already know what would be useful - whereas that is often the difficult part.

In my defence, I say that finding something to create that is useful enough to give a modest one-man income, is a lot easier than finding one giving a multi-billion dollar payout. The main way to make it easier is to specialize: a niche that is complex enough to require a lot of work, yet small enough to not be worth >1 person's time to serve. From there, you can grow to other segments if you want, or just enjoy your little place in the world. The key is to know about those specific problems, so it's invaluable to have worked/studied/played in a field. Hence the saying a problem is an opportunity.

Of course, we all have different motivations/passions and abilities, and that influences what niche will be doable and satisfying for each individual. Currently, I have a technical/academic idea about data integration and evolution that I really want to make work, which isn't specific to any industry (except the data integration and evolution industry, I guess). My last idea was about a specific problem I encountered in industry, and that was much easier to create and sell. Much easier.
I sold my bike to a friendly pair of VAX SysAdmins a few months back, in exchange for the largest stack of twenties I've ever touched. It must have taken north of a week to get those out of the ATM. My girl has commandeered my "disposable" maxima (now that I finally replaced the window and fixed the brakes, it's a reasonable ride. Man, that window was out for two years, and it turns out that replacing the window was a 20 minute job and a $40 part. who knew?)

My current ride is a 2002 Toyota Sienna with the seats ripped out. It's damn useful, really; I now have freight capabilities, and the seats are serving in my new office. But it's about as far from a bike as you can get; I get to keep it until my parents decide if they want to actually get rid of it or not.
I don't think there is any current rule or dominant etiquette around down-voting, only people that follow different rules or etiquettes, all of them self-imposed. Since Paul Graham is fine with down-voting for disagreement (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171), you can't really object if others do the same.

I recommend just taking karma points less seriously.
Walking to/from work, while cooking.
Corporal punishment addresses the consequences of problems instead of the causes as well.
I took a few stabs at expressing that idea before giving up. I like your attempt better than mine:

Even the 800MB of base pairs may have higher entropy than the machine language we're used to. 2000 lines of lisp or haskell are worlds away from 2000 lines of assembly.
Ultimately the criticism of hard AI that sticks is that its enthusiasts are using a faulty "brain as computer" metaphor as the basis for their theories. The brain and digital computers do NOT work the same (the brain is not digital) and assuming they are, and that therefore clever-enough computer models can replicate the brain, seems to put very intelligent / brilliant CS people at risk of banging their head against a wall for decades.

More generally its fun to imagine things like this but also good to realize real world limits as we live in a finite world with limitations such as living 700 years not being at all likely (or desirable, IMHO).
I'm perfectly fine with that. What I don't like is the anonymity and 0 cost of down-voting and the gate it opens to groups gaming the system like it was found on Digg.
While the Google argument is an easy argument to make, it happens to not have merit.

From: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html

We don't correlate or combine your information from the temporary or permanent logs with any other data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network.
High in the Andes, Keeping an Incan Mystery Alive
The "public" sphere is dead there is only the private sphere that is accessible by everyone. The notion of public is slowly eroding, see the death of print news media.
> Sort of - if he hired an employee to develop it, then it'd be a cost but I don't think his time really counts here.

Time counts if he eats, has living expensese, has a finite lifetime, etc.