skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seriously. If you're not dealing with another engineer/developer/tech-y, you should reconsider having your engineers interact with the public.

Actual entire response from one of our (very smart, social and senior) engineers recently to a customer who couldn't login:

"Hi (customer): I can't recognize the web browser you are using! Can you possibly try to login with one of our supported browsers and let me know if you still have a problem? -(engineer)"

Sure, it's exactly what he needs to know to start fixing the issue, but there's no chance the customer (a florist) is going to know how to respond to that. We're just wired differently.
Review my Perl module
Any perl hackers out there? I'd really appreciate if you could have a look at the blog entry at my site, and leave comments here or there. This is my first attempt at publishing a module, so any and all feedback is welcome!

http://www.26a.net/blog/show/Alpha_Launch_of_ParallelSupervisor_Perl_Module.html
Unfortunately, no, we're not talking about a hypothetical product; we're talking about an only slightly hyperbolic assessment of Tyson/Purdue chicken.

If you want to argue about the benefits of e.g. Quorn, I have no problem with it and won't be fun to argue with; it's basically exotic tofu.

But if we're talking about industrialized factory chicken, which is tasteless and loaded with antibiotics (because yields would dramatically drop if an unprotected chicken organism was exposed to the chicken-raising environment) and still arrives rife with salmonella so that cooking with it is a hazmat operation... I think you're on shakier ground.

Better that we not cook with chicken (switch to tofu, it's cheaper) than with crap chicken.

PS: for what it's worth, I don't care about the ethics of animal treatment that much at all. I'm not a fan of needless cruelty, and I do believe that happier animals (incidentally) taste better, but animal welfare is not one of my animating concerns.
I was also trying to be Intel/AMD ISA independent. The Intel is SYSENTER, the AMD is SYSCALL. He's right though, I probably would have used SYSENTER in production code. You probably want to use int $0x80 in shellcode, though (fewer save registers).
The amount of options is ok if there exists some easy way to handle them (and to hide the options away if you don't care that much about details).

For example, if there would be a service which would take care about all those traveling stuff (best/cheapest flight, way to/from the airport, best time) and print all the information I really need to know, like what Scott has written down for himself, that would be a better solution instead of just restricting all the further options. Not sure though if we will ever see such a service. Most attempts to do so failed because they miss too much information (mostly about the local travel possibilities and information).
It would be great if there was an algorithm that would pick out the best 15 HN comments for me to read each morning, instead of relying on other people's votes. That algorithm would necessarily have to process human language at a high enough level to distinguish good from bad. But would it necessarily have to be self-aware, considering the absurdity of its existence in its off-hours? We don't know. Certainly there are programs today doing many tasks that once we would have thought required a self-aware entity; composing listenable music, translating badly between human languages, and part-of-speech tagging, to name a few.
They're not the same for everyone. If you do your dishes in the sink more often, eat your veggies raw more often, open your refrigerator more often, your energy use might be lower than if you started optimizing for transportation costs instead.
It looks very impressive but I haven't started cooking with it yet; I will report on it shortly. Erin and I are planning on cooking through Ruhlman's _Charcuterie_ and reporting the results.

I can't recommend Slagel Family Farms highly enough; they were just awesome to deal with.
Intel will begin phasing out classic PCI slots next year
You're ignoring the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. I might agree that they can't hold onto the huge marketshare numbers they start with as the copycats move in and undercut them, but so what? Then they just go and revolutionize some other market.
This looks good to me. You've got a beta request from Voltage Creative as well. We're a marketing agency that actually offers SEO services, but we're always looking for ways to fill gaps for the clients that fall through the cracks. IE, the ones that are big enough to need SEO, but too small for an agency. It would be great to have some software to point them toward.
I don't think they're that mutually exclusive. "SEO" is mostly just a matter of figuring out some basic things, and if you're actually being professional about it, doing some testing.

After all, that's why he's able to automate it.

I'm much more impressed with people that do two things that are relatively further apart, such as someone who can hack kernel code and also has good design skills.

That's not to take anything away from what he's done, mind you - any startup is something to be proud of. I just don't think it's miraculous that a good developer is also able to get a good grasp on "SEO".
yes, more sites and more ways to view the information would help solve the overcomplication problem ;)
I will second that recommendation. It was a fantastic phone. One phone like that currently is the 6500, it's amazingly fast, cheap and only does a few things, but it does them well.
I was playing with FUSE, and had managed to mount a loopback filesystem. And then, for some ill-considered reason, I tried to delete the directory that I had mounted it inside.

I managed to Ctrl-C it before it ate any files in /home, but I still had some nasty cleanup work to get the computer back in working order again. Thank god for LiveCDs.
So, I don't think protein folding adds much complexity to the result; it's more like a general purpose programming language than a set of specific library functions.

This is dead on.

The reason that library functions enable great code compression at higher levels is that they are designed specifically to enable code compression for the expected high level uses. Library designers pick out a small subset of all possible programs, and write their library code so that those programs can be expressed efficiently.

Unless protein folding has, by sheer chance, ended up working just right to make wiring up an intelligent brain especially easy (and I'm not talking about the physical wiring, but the logical wiring), then it's silly to expect that it adds much information.

On the other hand, the complexity of protein folding is vitally important for efficient evolution of any structure, and this is something that we need to take to heart: even if the complexity doesn't add much information, it allows small differences in the genotype to create massive differences in the phenotype. This shuffles regions of the fitness landscape around, so that in certain areas evolution is not so much climbing a hill as it is bouncing around atop a frothy unpredictable fractal. It's a fantastically clever way to avoid getting stuck in local maxima while still retaining a lot of the advantages of local search, as long as your fitness landscape has enough high points on it and the shuffling is not too severe.
Just wait until this article hits 4chan or fark, and you'll get your Lady Gaga / Venus de Milo mashup.

I think the Rome TV show had lots of color all over the place, which appeared a first to me, compared to the classic peplum movies.
Something funny about the subject and this site giving me a "Error establishing a database connection" error.
Interesting, but not new. Mark Brown did this two decades ago at DEC SRC (and probably others before him). http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-76A.html
Thanks for your geeky response - upvoted with a smile.

>you're implying that it's the obvious solution that I haven't considered

I didn't mean to imply this. I was (and remain) genuinely curious as to why you think hiring someone to tell a family member they're awesome would be more effective than simply calling them up and telling them yourself.

I took your reply as rude because you had introduced a personal issue on a public forum but didn't define your boundaries of what aspects you were willing to discuss publicly; and when I inadvertently crossed one such boundary you cut the line of questioning off abruptly rather than offering an explanation.

Again, thanks for clarifying where you were coming from.
If this is a real problem I'd say it applies less to successful entrepreneurs who try too hard, but more for semi-successful middle-managers and sales people etc who put themselves in debt to gain the appearance of wealth. I mean isn't this partly the root cause for the housing bubble and subsequent collapse?

When you walk into a swanky club, the guys getting bottle service, that buy Range Rovers and overpriced condos they have to make ridiculous payments on - I would say these are the guys with wealth anorexia.
Considering that "Fred" deliberately burned down a client's factory during payment negotiations, I think that "asshole" is quite an understatement.
Intel Buys McAfee
I'm considering integrating their service. Using ffmpeg can be a bitch when you have to deal with many combinations of input codecs.

How does it run when you send a request with hundreds of jobs? They autoscale so there is little waiting time on queues, but I don't get if that means if the scaling is per job or per user.
I wanted to apply, except they used the term baller in the job description.
I need to try some of their products.

My monthly CSA is Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm and I supplement from Mint Creek (amazing lamb) and some others from around the area.
Foursquare Has Been Trying (And Failing) To Trademark “Check-In”
In a completely efficient market, any stock is just as good as any other - you make or lose money solely due to chance. Nonprofessionals will only take trading losses if they are unlucky .

(Of course, a non-professional who wishes to treat eTrade as a casino may lose money on transaction costs.)

You absolutely can say the same thing about internet startups extracting value by providing you information - but you are incorrect to conclude that the space of internet startups will shrink. In fact, what will shrink is profit margins - as more startups are created, all the easy alpha is off the table. Witness what is happening to newspapers right now.
Thanks for the design comment.
Yes, it is a bug (only with chrome, apparently). I'll investigate, thanks for letting me know.
I have this kinda particular interpretation that "the best science is the one that makes fewer assumptions", or that, at least, is better equipped to access and deal with its own assumptions. In that vein, what bothers me about Kurzweil is that he seems to be just taking some assumptions and running with them.

Specifically, i believe that he assumes that intelligence and computation are the same thing. At least, he asserts that both are equimaterial --- that a sufficient powerful calculating machine is bound to be able to generate intelligence.

I do not know if intelligence == computation.

I do accept that, in many domains, the two things are interchangeable. Like, for example, if you are interviewing for a programming job and you can't do division in your head, that is a bad sign.

But if we are looking to build intelligence from computation, then i think we will bump into any differences that exist.

If computation and intelligence are equal or at least similar, that would be an interesting fact. It would teach us a lot about ourselves. To my taste it is a very interesting line of questioning. But it is not proven.

Really, we can't even really define intelligence! (As a sidenote, i think that is exactly the point of the "Turing Test", not to prove AI, but to show that intelligence is not clearly defined.)

If intelligence is a kind of computation, then Moore's Law means AI, definitely. And in that case, Kurzweil estimate of 2 decades is as good as any. If intelligence != computation, then some completely unrelated discovery has to intervene.

There is one thing that makes me doubt the assumption of equality, though. Namely, computers are already extremely better at computation than we are. I am 30yo and i can't recall a time when i didn't have available calculators way more powerful and fast than myself. If the translation from computation to intelligence was straightforward, my feeling is that the exponential nature of Moore's should have already made AI a reality before i went out of college.
It just occurred to me that Ray Kurzweil's claim entails that we can solve protein folding.
I think they were little too focused on the US market. Here (in Costa Rica) almost everyone I know with a smartphone has a N1. There is a monopoly carrier here and no phone+service package, so N1 makes perfect sense - just plug the chip in and go - no unlocking or rooting required. I bet there are a lot of other international markets where the N1 would do just as well.
Location location location.
Where there are more eligible men than women - men have to work harder.
There's nothing wrong with this article in my opinion, except for the title.

« Some lesser-known truths about programming » sounds better than « A few things that those of you who never read Dilbert don't know about programming with a team for a big company », i guess, but the latter is much more accurate.
great illustrative story. But couldn't this be more a matter of learning good customer service skills, not a matter of intrinsically being "wired differently" as an engineer vs. non-engineer?
Maybe a morale can be: "Start with small projects before going for big ones"?

I mean, there are a lot of important lessons you learn when you have a "project from hell", so my reasoning is that the project better be small, so at least the price will be low.
>There may not be much variation within a particular customer's preferences, but there is a great deal of variation between the preferences of different customers.

>Eliminating choices might make things simpler for some customers but it will also shrink your market by alienating those customers whose preferences differ from your new standard offering.

That's true, but its not clear cut that its a loss. I mean, lets take everyone's favorite poster child for this: Apple. I personally refuse to use Apple products for precisely the reason you describe - they simply don't accommodate my preferences. However, the fact that Apple products do not accommodate the preferences of people like me has had a negligible impact on their success.

Why is that? Its because the majority of the variation in preferences occurs in a minority of the market. In other words, there's a small population of people like me, who have widely varying preferences and a large population of people whose preferences are similar enough to be served by a device with limited features. From Apple's perspective, people like me aren't worth the expense - its much more profitable to drop the features used by the minority in order to hone and polish the features used by the majority.

Sure, Apple will never have me as a customer. From their perspective, that's an acceptable trade-off, since the effort required in building features to attract me isn't worth the opportunity cost.
God forbid I say profit rather than revenue (though it seems you used them interchangeably as well in paragraph 2).

I just don't think you're thinking through this completely.

Expenses would be lower after the infrastructure is built, yes. But there would be minuscule revenue also.

The new deficit, however, would likely be comparable to the current deficit. The reason private delivery services (UPS, FedEx, etc) haven't put the USPS out of business is because they only deliver where it is profitable. Live too far away from the drivers' regular routes? Too bad, no package for you.

USPS's UJP (unique justification proposition) is that they deliver anywhere, no matter the conditions.

The implication of this is that there would still be a great need for postmen, but there would be substantially worse economies of scale for the shipment of items. In addition to the worse EoS, there would also not be the revenue from stamps and associated products to offset the costs.

There are other possibilities that might be better, but ultimately the problem is the distance between the goals of public institutions like USPS and private, profit seeking institutions like UPS and FedEx.
I'm still not sure I understand. While most of those companies are owned by "The big three" they act as independent companies.

Even if this is something to be worried about, I'm not sure there is anything that could/should be done about it. People like these brands and the products they make and thats why the sell 80% of all soda.

Maybe we should be cognizant of the fact, and it is possible that is all you were saying, but anything beyond that I'm not sure is a good idea.

Just my ramblings.
Not a hotkey, the button near the omnibar.
Next, I have told you about machine A but now I also give you a 50 Megabyte program (called "GENOME") that runs on machine A. Now you must write your emulator, encode GENOME for your emulator, and run it on B. We know you can do that since these are both Turing class machines. What we do not know is how many bits it will take to encode GENOME. It could be 50 Megabytes. Or it could be 50 Terabytes. You just can't tell without proving things about the specific details of machines A and B and your emulator.

If your emulator requires substantially different space to encode the raw description of the program than the original, then the emulator sucks. So if GENOME takes 50 MB to encode in one place, it should take 50 MB to encode in another. Certainly in any emulator written for real computers, it wouldn't take more than that.

But we're lacking the emulator. That's important because nobody knows how big or little that will be. The point that the biologist made boils down to saying that the emulator is an incredibly complex thing that has to encode an environment whose complexity is much, much more than that of the genome. So one flaw in that line of reasoning from Kurzweil is that we have no known upper limit on the size of the emulator itself. The biologist's argument basically comes down to, "The emulator itself needs to be much, much bigger than GENOME, and we have no idea how to write it."

(Note that I'm not arguing that Kurzweil is correct, but merely that your arguments against him were not correct.)

Yes. You are correctly observing that Omega is not really a constant - it is a class of constants. For machine A there is Omega_A. For machine B, Omega_B. That is why Chaitin lectures about Omega but only after several reminders that it's really "Omega_X for some specific machine X -- but I'm mostly just going to say Omega and let X be understood."
So, now, think that through with Kurzweil goggles on. In Kurzweil's world, a program of 50MB on one machine can't be 50TB on the next machine -- that's just silly, right? Well, if he were correct then, in general, Omega_A and Omega_B, for any machines A and B, would have to be somewhat close in value. We know that Omega_A and Omega_B don't have to be close (other than that they both come from the same (0,1) interval). By contradiction we conclude that we don't live in the world Kurzweil is describing.

Not so fast. As I pointed out, even if the emulator was just a ridiculously small 50 bytes, then Omega_A would tell us very little about Omega_B because only about 1 program in 10120 on machine B would be programs that are emulated from machine A. You know nothing about the halting probability of the rest, and so Omega_A says very little about Omega_B.

(Obviously that 50 bytes is ridiculously small. But in http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/lisp.html Chaitin has an interesting example of a Lisp variant that can run a theorem prover against itself with only 410 bytes of overhead. So with pairs of machines, you can get away with surprisingly little.)
I was thinking about the metal ones, and a comment in the site said "And yes it is generally thought that the bronze originals were painted too."
Guide to the LA Startup Community
> While the predictions of scarcity are likely correct, the predictions of the consequences of scarcity likely aren't. For example: Once the cost of helium increases, substitutes will be found for many applications. For a buoyant gas, people might use hot air, or hydrogen mixed with some kind of flame retardant. Low temperature research might rely more on computer simulations. MRIs and other devices might use high temperature superconductors bathed in liquid nitrogen.

Those are cool speculations.

Hydrogen is probably the only option for a buoyant gas. I don't think mixing flame retardants in with hydrogen will work; you either need something lighter than nitrogen (and hydrogen, helium, and neon are the only candidates) or something that can retard flame appreciably in such small quantities that it doesn't counteract the buoyancy, and I don't think any such substances exist. They'd either have to produce a lot of non-inflammable gas, the way sodium bicarbonate does, or absorb a lot of heat like tetraethyl lead, and in either case they have to be pretty heavy.

For superconductor and other cryogenic coolants, as they said, liquid helium is already recycled.

I like the idea of using high-temperature superconductors. Maybe invest in yttrium mines? (I guess there are lots of high-temperature superconductors today.) Why don't these devices currently use high-temperature superconductors? Are they too expensive? (Edit: http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/archive/ci/31/i06/html/06chem.... says that 123, YBCO, and its family are only superconducting within a single crystal, which makes it hard to make large coils out of them.)
Three Ingredients for Murder: Neuroscientist James Fallon on psychopaths
Websockets using Ruby EventMachine
Anyone who bought that "Don't be evil" could be a legitimate mission statement for one of the most powerful companies in the world is kidding themselves.

Evil is quite relative, especially when billions of dollars are involved.

Google (and Facebook) should be held to a higher standard since there has been no company in human history that knows (or has the potential to know) so much personal information.
Textbooks Up Their Game
It started out as a small project. Little did I know.

I had done a large number of smaller projects and several mid-sized projects, as well as one very large one by the time I started working on this though, so it's not as though I was green behind the ears or something.

Maybe the morale should be 'know when to walk'. And I should have walked long before I did. The violence is what made the coin drop for me, it was a realization clear as day, 'I'm being abused here'.

Suddenly the veil came off. After that quitting was relatively easy.
If said schmoozing can get you press, investment or blogging attention then I'd say that's valuable. But sure, paying customers are the best!

Edited to add: a traditional powerpoint presentation may not be valuable, but if you can create a good video, slideshow or pdf and make it generate traffic to your website, that's valuable.