skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To add to the many good responses here so far: AI is such an overloaded term with many negative connotations that it's no longer used. It's also now specialized into separate components, as researchers realize that it's not "cheating" to study e.g. vision separately from natural language processing. Even humans cheat, by having separate portions of the brain specialize in different parts of "AI".

So some of the major AI fields are now known as:

* machine learning - learning from data, aka applied statistics, aka how to "learn"
* computer/machine vision - how to "see"
* natural language processing - how to "read" and "write" and "translate"
* speech recognition - how to "hear"
* robotics - how to "do"
* affective computing - how to "feel" and "act"

There are others as well, but as you can see from this simplistic breakdown, the specialities loosely mirror those in biology/medicine/neuroscience, and indeed there are also researchers who straddle the boundaries between the natural side and the computation side of things.

As a vision researcher, I can tell you that there's a huge amount of work being done, and progress being made, in our field -- both in academia and in industry. While it often doesn't make the news, we consider this a feature, not a bug.

For following progress in these fields, I have two comments:

1. There's no good resource I know of to follow all the subfields of AI. Instead, there are different sources for each field.

2. While others have recommended journals and conferences, I think it can be tough to read them if you're not already immersed in the field. So instead, I'd recommend starting with the wikipedia pages for each field, seeing the general list of topics, and then finding the appropriate papers if you're really interested. A good way to find important papers is by looking on google scholar for papers with lots of citations (insert usual disclaimers here about citations != quality of work, etc.)

I can get you started in computer vision with two very influential papers in the last decade that have also had a huge impact on industry:

P. Viola and M. Jones - Robust Real-time Object Detection
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/viola/Pubs/Det...

This paper revolutionized face detection, and is the basis for automatic face detection in most consumer cameras.

D. Lowe. Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/papers/ijcv04.pdf

This paper was the culmination of many years of work on detecting repeatable features in images and representing them in a consistently-findable way and is the basis for numerous object recognition algorithms, as well as those for stitching multiple photos together into panoramas and Microsoft's "PhotoSynth".
I rarely take notes on anything I read, however, I will often write a reaction to something I read because of the ideas the material sparks (eg. this reply).

I also write when I listen to a speaker and often that writing is more notelike. I find the process of taking notes tends to cause me to pay attention to what the speaker is saying and thereby increase my retention. It also gives me the opportunity to doodle should the speaker be boring.
Ray Ban und Ray Ben Sonnenbrillen
Ray Ban Shop - Sonnenbrillen günstig, Portofrei in 48h, Deutsche Ware, Aviator RB 3025, Wayfarer...
1) You cherry-picked my "misuse" of a few words that I am certain are endonyms used by transgender people to describe themselves.

2) You ignored my conscious use of gender neutral language, including the much derided (by the transphobes) "biological" adjective.

3) You can't always tell if someone is transgendered, but there is that funny word, "passable". Yeah, I might be a hairy, straight Arab brute but I know my queer culture. Well, there are some non-passable transgendered people who, for some reason, garner the extraordinary treatment I described above.

4) God bless their souls, my fallen angels, my transgender brothers and sisters (in the most specific, "flesh of my flesh" humane sense of the word.) I feel their pain. I mean no disrespect, and my original post carried the apology without edit. But that still doesn't change my experience; maybe because I have always lived in tolerant, non-dipshit societies. In fact, I would say I have seen Free, happy and socially accepted transgender people in Pakistan, of all places.

[Edit:

5) What I wrote above was lamenting what I perceive to be unique treatment of transgender people. It might not be universal, but it's something I have witnessed, and I don't think it's right. FWIW. I don't kiss ass to biological women or take BS from biological men, so why should I with transgender men and women? Humanity, as a whole, can go fuck itself :-]
1) This is such a good collection of photos and many comments are pretty insightful too.
2) It was interesting to get familiar with arguments of anti-sprawl crowd.
3) I personally don't see any danger in the sprawl.
Quite the opposite -- it's scary how quickly abandoned development turns into jungle in Southern Florida.
4) It was pretty insightful to learn that real-estate boom/bust cycle is very typical for Southern Florida.
Could it make sense to buy a home there now while the prices are close to the bottom?
It's not so much the gender role or social norms that matter--not all effeminate men feel that they should be women, and vice versa.

By saying "incorrect genitals," I was simply using a shorthand for "incorrect biological gender," or a biological gender which a person does not identify with.

That sentence could be rephrased as "Transsexuals were born with the biological gender, compared to their psychological gender."

(N.B. I'm not sure if "psychological gender" is the commonly used phrase, but I think it's adequate to communicate my meaning.)
I hang out with my fiancee, we love cooking a lot and watching movies, especially old ones. I practice Starcraft II with a coworker, which works out the strategy-planning part of my brain. Every other Sunday or so I go R/C racing with my future-father-in-law. Otherwise I'm hacking on a project for pay or for fun, sometimes both. ;)

I am also never bored. There is just so much to do! I'm a stickler for writing down random thoughts and ideas, like "I want to try hang gliding", or, "I've never been whale watching", or, "I wonder how much plane tickets are to Paris right now". My someday/maybe list is sitting at 249 items.

Just ask yourself, why are you bored? Be honest with yourself. Your answer may surprise you, but that's fine. Try new things, different things. Break away from habit and routine. Do a hand-stand, then go run in the park. Smell the flowers. Think about their life-cycle, and why humans think they're pretty, or why they smell so good. Is it genetic or learned? Like coffee, you probably hated it at first, but it's grown on you. Or maybe we were meant to drink coffee!

Then go work on something you're passionate about -- create. Just like _why said: "when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

Bring things into the world. Beautiful things. Things that should've been here in the first place, you were just the one to think of it and do it. Share whatever defines you with people. Get surprised or angered or duped into believing something fashionable. Live.
can't help myself.

http://cakesy.com/8f0f94220.jpg
I'm going to say if anything, one should optimize for 768x1024.

1) The ipad / tablets. I want to imagine that most users want to use it them in portrait mode when browsing sites.

2) Not sure about others, but I like keeping my browser resized to take up around half the screen width. Newer revs of windows seem to make the process easier
Leadership advice from the CEO of VMware
How can you drop that which doesn't exist? There's no DB behind this site.
I am finding it difficult to believe that I have been downvoted into troll-town for suggesting that legislation enacted by the Federal Government of the United States over the course of the last 62 years might NOT be unconstitutional.

Some of which were contested and deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court (though not the one I mentioned as far as I am aware).

Are people downvoting me because they hold an honest belief that the Federal Government of The United States is an illegitimate illegal entity backed by a corrupt Supreme Court? Just curious.
Thank you, this is very insightful, this idea that some problems are amenable to just trying things and some problems require thought before starting.
Lots of other people commented on the fact that this could be changed, so I won't get into that – the fervor of state vs. federal debates in the US always surprises me, and I don't want to get shot at the next time I enter Ohio…

But would you actually need to have constitutional amendments to do that? Let's say a court decides that not giving your employees leave would be abuse, wouldn't that create a de facto mandatory leave, as you could claim a precedence against contracts without such provisions?

(Not a lawyer, not American, generally too naive in these matters, so be kind…)
There is a good reason why good computer science doesn't come out of a hackathon type setting. Good computer science that shows us something new really requires at least 6 months of solid work to get up to date on some of the research in a narrow field. Even after over 6 months of reading academic papers I realized I would have to keep my focus narrow because some of the other things I thought about would have required much more reading.

In a short period of time you can't really hope to produce anything meaningful in new ground, you can however produce interesting little ideas and mashups which is what hackathon like events tend to focus on.
I don't think it's Flash they're using, but rather the HTML5 <device> tag. Expect that in Chrome very soon, and in IE16, probably by about 2021.
I try UTF characters in everything which displays text, especially when it's graphically manipulated. It's slightly amazing how few handle it, even if there's little reason not to (unless a library along the pipeline only reads ASCII).

I think it's just that most people are used to dealing with / have encountered C char arrays, and 8 bits per character just makes sense to programmers. 'Tis why I jump for joy when I hear about framework-X fully supporting UTF - IMO, they all should, from day one, but I realize it can sometimes be a lot of work, and is always a performance hit.
HP calculators defy Moore's law far more dramatically, after nearly 30 years the price has dropped slightly more than 50%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-10C_series#HP-12C

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/215348-215348-...
"I read something on HN a few weeks ago that claims top CS students start at $80,000 these days. Having worked with people straight out of college, even the best colleges, I don't think I would have any trouble doing twice as much work over the course of a year."

Companies don't offer fresh college grads $80K/year because they think the college grads are worth it, they do it so that they can have their pick of the litter for $100K 5 years later, when they're actually worth like $150K, and not have to spend the extra money poaching them away from other companies.

Your value as a developer goes up pretty fast as you gain experience, but most people have some semblance of company loyalty, particularly if they've never worked anywhere else. Outsize salaries for fresh grads are an investment, a hopes that they can retain the best of those fresh grads for well below market-rate salaries in the future.
Looks like it was $3, but now it is free. They added page sponsors instead - http://blog.onemillionpeople.com/joining-is-now-free
The face of change
4. Work for yourself. A fully-loaded consultant will easily make mid-$200k and I know several people who are consistently grossing in the low $300ks.

I will second that one. This seems to be about the norm for a developer turn consultant (at least in my group of freelancers) with a decade under their belt.

I don't think you are at your upper bound of your career level, but you are not far off, 150k seems to be the ceiling where you are going to start bouncing up and down.

A recruiter called me the other day to see if I had a flash developer in my network looking for a long term gig. They where offering 90k + 15% bonus for a flash developer with 3 years experience. So you are not that much higher than a mid level flash developer, I would not worry too much.
There's no boredom.

After family time, I have two areas on which I concentrate. One is algorithms, though I'm stuck on an intractable problem at the moment. (I haven't figured the way to go around it yet. I will; it will just take time.) The other is photography, which is my latest obsession and has been consuming most free time and fun money. :D
Most influential Github users by location
Are you saying the cake doesn't exist? That it's... a lie? Why would anyone lie about cake?

For that matter, why would anyone intentionally drop cake? That's a waste of good cake! Shame on you, dr_lego!
Reminds me of http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/07/wizard-school.html
Same here (south Texas), been working for 7 years, expertise in both java and .net but making mid 70k. I feel underpaid and thinking about jumping ship too.
odds are, in this instance its because it looks nice on a resume.
Hard to read in the video -- the buttons are:

Zealot | Dragoon | Observer | Reaver | Carrier
Attack | Defend | Expand

The expand button is my favorite...
That would be fair, except that the mouse was invented at SRI. Also, Xerox did release a commercial GUI product before the introduction of the Mac, as did Three Rivers (PERQ) and AT&T/Teletype (the Blit). So there's that.
Yes, I think it was not clear to everyone that izaidi was quoting, from the movie, Sean Parker's advice to Zuck about thefacebook. A comment that can pithily cast an ironic sidelight on a sober request for precision in the naming of a company by alluding obliquely to the movie whose title is being rejected is, as you say, clever and funny, and, as I think you imply by saying it "completes the forum," interesting to those with an intellectual curiosity that is not strictly one-dimensional. Your comment, I take it, is being downvoted because it's complaining about downvoting, however legitimately. And this one probably should be because its author takes the whole question seriously enough to compose this excessive reply.
Yeah, I thought I was hot shit in college, thought I was fairly hot shit in my first job after college, then found I was barely average at Google. I think that's a good experience to have, though. If you work with people who're better than you, your natural tendency is to improve, and it's a nice way to disabuse yourself of the programmer's arrogance that so many random coding cowboys have on the Internet.
The Survival of the Safest
Downloaded, installed and re-measured today. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...
This is the A-Number-1 reason for having a cofounder. Inevitably, you're going to get burnt out, you're going to lose faith. It's at those moments that you talk to your co-founder and he tells you why you're out of you're fucking mind, that this thing you're building together is going to be amazing. And you get re-energized.

And two days later, you'll be doing the same for your co-founder :)
I don't think I can even remember being bored. Even stuck in an airline terminal with a long wait and no internet, I'd still find something to amuse myself with, even if it was just a local paper or a conversation with a fellow traveler.
Ask HN: How important is a phone number on your site?
A little background: a company I work for has been up and running (profitably) for about ten years now. However, they have reached a plateau, and we're brainstorming on ideas which could get more money in the door.

One idea which I brought to the table: simply putting our freaking phone number on our website and asking people to call. We've have a number of customers saying how great it is when we give them calls back to handle their issues quickly over the phone, and wonder why we don't have a number on our website for customers (both new and existing) to call.

The question is: is it worth the extra effort in providing phone service and support? Could it help us break through the glass ceiling?
Reminds me of this article about a scientist that underwent a sex change:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07...

From the article:

"After he underwent a sex change nine years ago at the age of 42, Barres recalled, another scientist who was unaware of it was heard to say, "Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister's.""
As a Canadian and a Buffalo Bills fan, this pleases me to no end. Driving through Buffalo is very depressing. Abandoned buildings and empty streets are in abundance. It's amazing to think Buffalo was a thriving part of the US only 30 years ago.
demand a full refund.
I'm a raving TDD/BDD fanatic, and this kata still makes me cringe a little. At least they finally converge on a plausible-looking solution. Sadly, some TDD katas on the web turn into train wrecks. See Ron Jeffries' Sudoku solver, for example:

http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s...

If I were implementing this algorithm using TDD, I'd first write down a bunch of test cases, and then try the obvious algorithm. If that worked, I'd test a few more corner cases. There's really no reason why you have to blindly stagger through the design space when the algorithm is obvious.
The idea I had behind this came from noticing my friends count drop and there's no way on Facebook to see exactly who the user was.
cough yahoo cough
College yearbook collections go digital
That sounds good in theory. Everyone keep saying good developers are 10X more productive than average ones. However, I rarely see companies paying 10X salary to top developers. The top salary is usually at 2X of the average, with some industries paying 4X or 5X for bonus, like trading firms.

In a conversation with the Sr VP of Eng in my last company on why so many engineers have become managers, I mentioned that the pay scale for the top engineering position (architect) was equivalent of a senior eng director and it was very hard to become one. He said, well, he could talk to the board to create a Sr Architect position equivalent to VP's pay. The problem is there are more management positions than senior engineering positions like architect or principle. The engineers end up going the management route to get better pay.

But you can tell the general mentality that engineers should not make more than the management's pay structure. It's very hard to justify to others to pay someone 10X of the average.
Complete false in Japan. People here DO care about all of those things, including the number of employees, capitalization, etc...

I don't know too many customers who read the "about us" section of the website other than because they want to be reassured about the company in general.

Feels like ranty link bait without the benefit of being entertaining.
Chicago had an abandoned city block in the middle of the loop for over 20 years.

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/146.html
"Where has Microsoft been the past couple of years with these suits? I’ll tell you where: waiting to spring this on OEMs when they had their own device out there that they need to gain traction against Android."

The author had me until this. Whenever someone tells me "I'll tell you why..." in that tone, it is usually because they are angry, and anger is usually not the best ingredient for clear thinking.

First off, Microsoft has been floundering around in the mobile space, because:

1 - Windows Mobile was just a disabled version of Windows, just like J2ME was a disabled version of Java. It was a whole new environment. They should have developed Win Mobile from scratch.

2 - Windows Mobile is no iOS. iOS was adopted by users because of the great hardware and software design. Win Mobile- design stuck in the early 2000s.

3 - Android was well adopted because (a) it was Google and (b) it was free. And oh yeah, it is pretty good, even if not as snazzy as iOS all of the time. So far Windows Mobile, not so much.

MS had a number of opportunities to position itself as a "real OS" running on a mobile device and do something with that possibly, but it didn't.

So MS screwed up and has now decided to go on the attack to divert attention from the recent press on Ballmer losing his bonus because of Win Mobile, as well as Win Mobile being a failure in the news.

MS also probably smelt blood with the Oracle suit and Wifi spying and figured Google's lawyers and PR were as weak as they might get anytime soon. Also they don't come off as the bad guys like Oracle, and their suit probably gains more legitimacy when there are other high profile suits.

But seriously, were they waiting on this opportunity like hungry wolves to gain traction on Android? No, Win Mobile is nowhere near Android, so it wouldn't make sense to take a slash at them to try to gain on Android. It would just mean Apple would get more sales. They want to take down Google.

Despite all of this, MS is still worth watching. Even though they shouldn't try to head to head with Google so much, and they'd do better by focusing efforts on new products and markets and pretending Google and Apple didn't exist, they aren't going away anytime soon.
Nice, maybe Google would be interested in doing something similar in the Bay Area? And by next September please so my high-school aged junior nerd kid can enroll? Thanks!
I don't think it's true that it's no longer used; I certainly still consider my primary research field to be "AI", and the main journals and conferences I publish in have "AI" in the title. I do agree that some subfields have split off more, especially machine-learning, robotics, and vision, but there's plenty of stuff that still goes on under the rubric of AI. Even the more split-off fields are still very present in big-tent AI conferences and journals, especially when presenting work on integrated systems.

Despite being mostly known as an ML researcher, Leslie Pack Kaelbling's AAAI-10 keynote slides make something of an argument for why AI is important as well: http://people.csail.mit.edu/lpk/AAAI10LPK.pdf
[JavaSpecialists 181] - Generating Static Proxy Classes - 2/2
I think this is a problem with a lot of methodologies, in that they often obscure that the point is to write good software. If you can write good software without following the methodology, do that. All these techniques - agile, scrum, stand-up meetings, CRC cards, TDD, pair programming, code review, unit tests - are just tools at your disposal to make writing the program go smoother.

Google's methodology for writing quality software is basically:

1. Hire good people.

2. Let them do what they need to to get the product out the door.

This seems to have been adopted by FaceBook as well. I wish more companies would consider it instead of adopting the snake oil that a bunch of consultancies peddle.
See http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryWThirtyTwo for a discussion of versions of Emacs for Windows.
Yeah I was subject to the "Curse of Knowledge" - believing everyone who read this thread was someone who had seen the movie. I added an edit likely after you started this and before you published regarding that very fact.
To most people I say I sell software. This is what I primarily do today. If I write something, it's in the realm of hacking and to the right crowd I say I'm a hacker.
Bored is a choice.
Did you know that China is run by engineers?  I didn't.