skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Windows has its own share of del /s or format c:. Once I did del /s * instead of del /s *~ to clean up temp files.
>I think this dynamic is built into the business models of some companies, especially consultancies. You feel guilty if you go home to sleep while your friends are coding 'til their eyes bleed, even when the overwork is brought about by extrinsic factors (see above).

why do programmers allow this tactic to work?

This is the problem; if you give me better work when I pressure you and treat you like shit than when I treat you respectfully and let you set your own hours, what do you think the result will be?
Ask HN: When will the toolbar madness end?
I just logged in to Amazon to purchase an item. This is a company I highly respect as an engineer.

What greeted me was a series of prompts for "Your Amazon Browser: Internet Explorer 8 Optimized for Amazon.com"

Clicking in, there was an ad copy that mentioned a custom toolbar that makes shopping easier, and a disclaimer that the toolbar features Alexa and will collect your browsing information. Having Amazon peddle this made me feel cheated.

I use Google Chrome and couldn't be happier. But I feel incredibly bad for the average computer user with Internet Explorer (unpatched) with 10 toolbars for Yahoo Search, Bing, Amazon, et cetera.

It's the direct opposite of the Apple App Store experience. Any company can make a quick buck by spreading their toolbar. Microsoft doesn't curate the browser plugins in any way. A typical user is not savvy and installs everything "free." This results in a terrible computing experience.

I'm not even mentioning spyware -- only the "legitimate" browser plugins such as Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, etc. Some friends have every single one installed.

This is a problem that bothers me as a hacker. What can be done? Some thoughts:

- Promoting platforms instead of toolbars (e.g. Chrome plugins). More useful features (like Rapportive) instead of yet another search box.

- Browsers that implicitly force good UI (e.g. allowing no more than 1 toolbar to be installed)

- Curating plugins, App Store-style.
On standard machine architectures

Yes, right there you are demonstrating a deep misunderstanding of what you are replying to or how it relates to Kurzweil's arguments.

On Omega, you say: all that is necessary is that the programs from A have to be lost in a much larger sea of valid programs in B

You left out that we're comparing sets of A and B programs of similar length -- the "sea" is not so large. Actually you kind of acknowledge this but then say bogus things about what it implies.

You are confused or else just b.s.'ing on purpose. It's been fun. We're done, please.
With such technologies, it'd be fun to see a face recognition pattern which finds people with similar faces on facebook :)

I remember some experiment where they merged hundreds of photos of people from the same country and you could see the emerging patterns of big heads, big noses countries, etc. Fascinating.

As to why google would buy like.com, no idea!
In theory, if mortality rates did not increase as usual during aging, humans would live hundreds of years

----------------------

duh.
Entertainment, connection, discovery
Having been in a variety of companies and positions, I've observed that it varies quite significantly -- more between roles than between firms. Some of what I've observed has been quite disgusting, and frustrating when the slackers get in your way.

You'll have to decide your own career path through this, weighing the situations you actually encounter. I'd recommend using spare capacity to educate and train yourself further -- in things that interest you and appear to have a future, not necessarily their crufty, anti-pattern systems. If your employer ends up actually using your talents, they win (and hopefully you do, too -- but beware). If they don't, you're in a better position to move onto something better.

P.S. While you're there, be open to learning about what other people do. And when you encounter someone you really do respect, cultivate a good working relationship with them. This shouldn't be forced nor manipulative; you'll actually enjoy working with them, and if you have genuine interest and some ability, they'll probably enjoy working with you as well.

You may have just found a mentor.

These days, it can be increasingly hard to make a ("Big Co.") career out of such -- the layoffs and inanities are just too great. But maybe, and maybe it will lead to work that's genuinely interesting. And when you're in a bind, you'll have some resources to reach out to and some people who have an interest in watching your back.

Countless times, I've been able to get "the impossible" done because I can pick up a phone or send an email to the effective (sometimes regardless of formal management) point of control. They already know me and that I know my shit and don't BS. Maybe also I've done them some favors, in the past. So, if they can do what I'm asking, it's done.

(Regarding the last part, sometimes its helpful -- necessary -- to know when to keep your mouth shut, afterward.)
I know a fact about "zygote machines": they are the only machines we know of that have ever successfully constructed intelligence algorithms.
I'm really curious on who is more naieve about the Google "don't be evil statement" the founders for thinking a public company could be like this, or the public for believing it.
The problem is reality has become kinda creepy.

Reality has always been creepy. Imagine living during the 13th century and the plague? Mega creepy.

The idea that reality is not creepy is a relatively recent invention (see Television, also Radio somewhat).
There's an interesting seasonal trend: a decline at the end of the calendar year, followed by a big jump in January. Why? Do lots of US people traditionally get laid off on Dec. 31? (The data is for US search traffic.)
Unwarranted assumptions in telecoms
I see lots of people recommending K9, but despite trying it several times, I can't figure out why. It does support some additional features, but lacks features the stock Android mail app has (like push Exchange). It's also just as ugly and unresponsive as the stock mail app.

Other than the gmail app (which I think is pretty decent), decent mail apps are still a wide open opportunity (IMHO) for Android developers.
You are apparently talking about "Turing machines" by which you mean finite automata connected to a 2-d tape or things very close to that. That class of machines is a tiny subset of turing complete machines and that class of machines you refer to is irrelevant to the arguments to which you are responding.

When you argue that a simple (just a few rules of physics) emulator could, in principle, do the job -- quite right. Unfortunately for your point, Kurzweil is making a much, much stronger claim. For, surely, you agree that that physics emulation isn't going to result in a practical program in 20 years, yes?

The way you are using "upper bound of the problem in terms of complexity" there... I could use your same logic to argue that the design of a brain can be encoded in exactly 1 bit.

The design of a brain, by your logic, contains 1 bit of information. (In particular, that 50 MB of compressed genome data? I'll give you a better compression algorithm for this purpose and it will, indeed, compress a particular human genome down to 1 bit.)
+1 for the effort.
For a company with $50M in revenue and $50M raised in venture funding, $100M is not a very big acquisition. It is interesting that despite the big revenue figures, it is never mentioned if Like.com is profitable - so we can only assume that it isn't and this acquisition is another asset sale.

Google offered them $30-40M before they launched in '05. They should have taken that.

Back then Munjal (the CEO) was writing an interesting blog about starting Riya - worth reading the old posts: http://munjal.typepad.com/
Good news, although a utility that works around OS problems that should never have existed isn't exactly a good example IMO.
I've seen this on my street - I wondered how they got away with it. Guess they didn't.
I think that tactic only works on the inexperienced (with people), as I was.

If you tried such a trick on me today I'd catch on in 5 seconds flat.

Part of it lies in that programmers are fascinated by technology, which means that if you give us shiny toys to play with and the occasional interesting puzzle to solve we'll take a good bit of abuse before throwing in the towel. We're also much too eager to show that we can do stuff.

Another part is that you have - as an inexperienced froggie - too little feeling to sense that the temperature in the pot is rising and that if you don't jump out now you may lose your ability to jump at all.

Finally, and perhaps crucially, the more you have invested in a project like this the harder it becomes to walk away.
And The Facebook Checkin Abuse Begins
Calling it a "book" is weird, but in the right context, culturally/technically/socially significant games aren't any weirder a required item than, say, films that also meet those criteria, and studying important films has been pretty well established for decades. Portal is a slightly strange choice, though, because of how new it is. I would imagine the course doesn't usually choose books or films from the past 5 years, but instead looks for things that are more classic?
My guess is seasonal retail employees, who were hired just for the Christmas rush.
Notice the shutter lag in #27... a century-old annoyance still with us courtesy of digital cameras.
When I connected my freshbooks account I got this email. Pretty clever, they probably get good feedback from this by offering a seemingly direct connection to devs.

Hi there,

Hope the FreshBooks integration is working well for you! Wondering if you have any additional ideas or suggestions for us?

Thanks :)

- Chris Zhang
(the engineer who built the integration with FreshBooks)
The new App Store for iPhone Developers, Buy Source Code, IP Licenses.Rocks!!!
I think one problem with the idea of the 'zygote machine' is that it leaves out the fact that zygote machines only make brains in the environment of the womb, which is an environment controlled by the whole system of another human being. Can we concretely say that a zygote machine has enough information about making a human body (and brain) that it can reliably do it without hormonal signals from the brain of the mother?

If not, then the size of the genome is irrelevant -- a nontrivial amount of information could potentially be being passed on by the gestation process itself, and that may indeed involve trillions of lines of code.
I believe this is blogspam. Actual source:
http://esciencecommons.blogspot.com/2010/03/rock-climber-tak...
Video Interview With Belinda Benn (Fitness model/writer)
What a load of crap! This is some strange entitled rationalization of his friend's fear of commitment. And it's an attempt to legitimize the author's own fear of commitment.

> I’ve worked for a handful of companies over the course of the last 6 years. I started all of them with a fair amount of enthusiasm, but within 5 months of each I dipped into a depression. By 7 months the work was having a tangible effect on my mood and outlook, and by nine months, I’ve quit almost every job I’ve held.

Does the author really think that the next job will hold something different? That somehow there's some magical workplace around the corner where reality never sets in and the inevitable drudgery of "work", creative or not, can be put off forever. Pure fantasy.

"Ownership" is missing the point. If you believe you must define your creation or contribution in terms of some neatly measured production (like code or design) you are missing the point of your own existence. If you think that there's some fixed body of work you have control and ownership over -- that you must defend and slave over -- you are missing the point.

Every second you exist at your job (and everywhere else for that matter) is an opportunity to create the world as you see it. Every second is an opportunity to be creative, to express the person that you are in see that borne out in your work and with your coworkers.

The depression and negative outlook the author points to is a failure to be. It's a shrinking away reality -- the reality of the opportunity and commitment that he faces each day he comes to work. He does himself and everyone around him a great disservice by shrinking and turning away like this instead of waking up to what is in front of him.

I've been at my job for 8 years and there were many times I wanted to storm out in disgust or just not show up in the morning. But then I realized that every job will be like this if I do quit, that I was bringing my own fear of being or committing with me wherever I go and finding perfect opportunities to manifest it.

I stood up and took responsibility for these fears and the negativity and said "enough". I still occasionally find myself doing work that doesn't "inspire" my "muse"... but it really is only a matter of perspective. My muse can be inspired by change in attitude, but a positive conversation with a coworker, by seeing change manifest around me as it manifests in me.

I'm no longer defeated by this negativity. I no longer seem my work neatly delineated -- I no longer need to defend anything or pour enormous effort into some limited creative endeavor. The opportunities in front of me are always limitless. Every second is created anew.
The most common result of trying extremely hard to be ridiculously rich is becoming modestly successful, except for the cases in which someone throws their entire life savings into a business that fails. I doubt that is common.

I can't tell you exactly how common it is.

But one have to imagine that the sale of lottery tickets is strongly motivated by the desire to become ridiculously wealthy. This isn't something that generally results in improved savings...
While part of a team of students at a hacking competition I was VNC'ed into an owned 2003 server, I was trying to get to the network settings properties menu, when my VNC session lagged and I clicked at the same time that my mouse reached the Disable interface.

Yeah ... I didn't live that one down, lost my team some points.
I am certain something is brewing inside Google behind the purchase of like.com

They also invested in the company called http://www.pixazza.com which is doing something on the same lines. Basically trying to monetize the images on web.

Maybe Google is planning to incorporate the various bits and pieces of facial or image recognition in order to monetize it.
That was my first guess, but then why would these people expect any unemployment benefits? Isn't 26 weeks minimum employment required? Other possibility is that it's in bad taste to lay people off during the holidays. Makes more sense to do it after they've splurged on gifts...
Punk Mathematics
A few centuries ago, europeans had only ever seen white swans.
You're stretching this metaphor further and further into absurdity. The author of the post wonders why "wealth anorexia" doesn't get similar attention to that of actual anorexia. The answer is because anorexia actually has negative effects on the lives of many people. "Wealth anorexia" does not.
I didn't want a subsidized one, since part of the attraction was that it would work with any GSM carrier.
Best books for a Ruby beginner, plus general feedback
Give me one example. I'm fairly certain I can tell you how it's a terrible idea.
I have a whole new respect for the ball now! One of my major complaints with the N1 was the awkwardness of taking photos with the screen facing away from me (e.g. self portrait). This tip pretty much addresses that.
> You are apparently talking about "Turing machines" by which you mean finite automata connected to a 2-d tape or things very close to that. That class of machines is a tiny subset of turing complete machines and that class of machines you refer to is irrelevant to the arguments to which you are responding.

Since all Turing complete machines are functionally equivalent I don't think it is quite that irrelevant.

if the brain can be simulated by any Turing machine at all it figures that a 2-d tape Turing machine can do the same thing.

The question then becomes how big is the total information content of both Turing machine + tape.

The rules of physics are Turing complete, we use them to build computers with and nature uses them to build the physical universe, including computers and brains.

Kurzweil is not making such a strong claim at all I think, he merely argues that there must be some upper boundary to the starting configuration from which you should be able to arrive at a working brain.

And much as I would like to I can't find fault with that other than that the embryotic development is chaotic in nature and that a very small change in input conditions can easily produce nothing of interest on the output side.

The conclusion that we can draw from that is that the brain (and in fact probably every cell in our bodies) must contain a great deal of machinery to make sure that the process stays on track and does not veer off in to chaos and unpredictable outcomes. For the most part, it works, most of the fetuses carried to term are able to think.

> For, surely, you agree that that physics emulation isn't going to result in a practical program in 20 years, yes?

Some people claim even shorter times than that (which I think is highly irresponsible):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1201724/Artificial...

Personally I would put the time required for such a project in the multiple decades, probably 50 years at a minimum, maybe much more assuming that it can be done and that there is no quantum component (as proposed by Penrose, rather weakly) to intelligence.

As for your 1 bit description, you are not taking in to account the information content of the guts of the compression algorithm, and you'd find that algo+compressed data would work out to a nearly constant amount of information.

That 50MB has been created in a way that the size of the algorithm required to compress it and decompress it is relatively small compared to the size of the data.

As soon as you start embedding codebooks inside your algorithm the size of the data will go down but the size of the algorithm goes up correspondingly. Also the algorithm loses its universal character, it's ability to encode multiple data sets with roughly equal characteristics in terms of information content in to roughly equally sized output.
If we think it's incredible to look at these high-fidelity color pictures of 100 years ago, imagine people 200 years in the future looking back at our perfectly preserved digital images.
I did this as a result of following a (poorly-conceived) iptables tutorial.

'Step one: configure iptables to deny traffic by default: iptables -P INPUT DROP'

There's also the time that I learned why you should think twice before setting a default policy of DROP or REJECT - iptables -F will clear all rules that allow you in, but not the default policy that keeps you out.
Another possibility is that the already un-/underemployed are simply not looking as hard for jobs toward the end of the year because the relative emotional warmth and focus on family typical of the "holiday season" (Thanksgiving to New Years in the US) distracts them from their job search.

It is also possible that white collar un-/underemployed aren't looking as hard during the holiday season because most offices are themselves so distracted by the holiday seasons. Anecdotally speaking, I've noticed a trend toward reduced hiring by companies during the the holidays.

Finally, purely speculative but American companies may tend to avoid firing people during the holidays. Firing someone before Xmas is one of those tropes that appears in television dramas and comedies and is often performed by the "evil boss". This myth likely has some basis in fact.
That was my original point, that it's our culture that makes us consider these statues garish and tacky. Back then, they were (obviously) the height of fashion and pleasing design.
You can also fire people before any incentives / bonuses would be received... though I don't know that that would really move the needle.
The Hollywood Stock Exchange
I understand.

In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulson.
I wonder if there was certain lightning requirements.

For example, the famous bust of Abraham Lincoln requires light over head and behind it to give it a serious, solemn almost brooding and suffering look

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3504/3753443355_6ed82e886f.jp...

In full light, though, it looks less impressive.
Another contentless post from Gruber. Seriously, why does anybody want to support this asshole by linking to his posts? He's a whiny apple shill.
damn. i wish my family pics from the 1970s and '80s were that perfect.
Facebook Feeling Unfriendly Toward ‘Social Network’
>at least our government answers to its citizens through elections.

It answers to lobbyists, actually.
I thought these were terrible - just grafitti / vandalism. Acting macho on some of the ads and declaring "hey, we killed trees, definitely not recycled!" wasn't really warming my heart to Mafia Wars either, whether true or not. The glued-to-the-sidewalk effect was just lame, though!
I bet a lot of people may not know they don't qualify, Google it, and then discover the news that they can't collect on unemployment insurance.
Ask HN: What if the iPad came from Microsoft, first?
Many commentators is stating after the fact that the iPad succeeded because it had less features. Somehow I think it was because of the brand. So the question is, what if the iPad came from Microsoft or HP, or say Sony. Would it have caught on?
Man, that is scary. These days with Dropbox and github and TimeMachine, I rarely worry.
Every time I try the site on my iPhone, safari crashes immediately. I can share details by email.
Introducing a New Theory: The Recommendularity
Pretty incredible. What would be even better would be if it was smart enough to predict a few months out based on historical data.
Right you are. The OP breaks out this old chestnut:

...but at least our government answers to its citizens through elections.

but frankly, corporations are a lot more responsive than governments--I can choose which corporations effect me more easily than I can choose which governments effect me, and while one marginal vote has literally no effect, one marginal sale has at least a marginal effect. So while one political party can happily ignore maybe 1% of the population entirely (polyamorous people trying to get polymarried, perhaps) in favor of an antagonistic 55%, in a business situation any old fringe group can get some business to cater to them (http://www.utilikilts.com/).
In short: It's the typekit fonts. I had experimental iPad/iPhone support enabled, which works fine with iOS 4 Mobile Safari but likes crashing previous Mobile Safari versions. I just disabled it.

http://blog.typekit.com/2010/04/05/experimenting-with-web-fo...

Long version: we have a dedicated mobile version of the site but we never got around to updating that before the launch so we disabled it.. had some other issues too and the content was all outdated. So a mobile friendly version of the site will be built soonish. I just wish jQuery Mobile was here already so I could build it with that. :)
Stating the JA-Problem
That depends; are you supposing Microsoft/HP/Sony had the iPhone and App Store too?

Part of the reason for the quick uptake was what already existed that made it immediately useful.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/business/smallbusiness/08s...

Honest Tea is the name of the smaller company.