skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The world will change, news at 11.

I agree with the skepticism about his panic. There has always been the optimists and the pessimists, nothing new there. Projections >30 years into the future are mostly doomed anyways.

Moreover what often amuses me is how these analyses tend to ignore the predictable part of technological progress and how that negatively affects the relevancy of their projections.

We went from the first flight to the moon landing in 66 years.
Autonomous cars are performing their first test-runs in real traffic today.
Asimo & friends are demonstrating quite impressive tricks today.

Call me naive but personally I don't have the slightest doubt that a large portion of all jobs will be taken by robots in 60 years from now. This will not just change the job market or certain industries, it will fundamentally change how our societies work. He doesn't seem to consider that at all.

So, he's worried about the global population being half of what it is today in 2150?

2150?

140 years from now?

I guess his musings about 2150 are about as relevant as those that a person in 1870 could have made about today...
Suprised they only used the continental USA in their visual figure and yet used the whole entire USA area in their number chart. Maybe they enlarged the USA to make up for the enormous amount of area that Alaska is.
Amazon Announces New Product: Kindle Singles
Project homepage: http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/
No source but you can browse or download the database.

NELL even has a twitter feed: http://twitter.com/#!/cmunell
I find the story very inspiring, but as some others noted, it would be nice to see a working model of the unit, or at least some pictures.

Now on a more substantial level, the claims of "60% efficiency" and "on part with coal" claims are interesting and need a little more explanation, in my opinion. How are these numbers being calculated? We aren't told.

One might guess it's based on a bunch of manufacturing and startup costs, along with operating costs, for an unknown number of years (probably many) along with projections about various other future costs. What power levels will a prototype produce, and how will it be scaled up?

I think the concept sounds promising, but a lot of questions remain to be answered.
> I suspect the "anti-elite-educationism" Bell predicted is growing now

Much of this article would be improved if it could cite any other sources.
Maybe it shifted behind the star when they looked...?
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The mid-sized (but nationwide) courier company we use in Canada for our web based business does not have a web service interface for us to add new customers to our customer database on their site. So when we get an order from a new customer, we have to log in to the website and enter all this information manually. This seems to be considered reasonable, according to several people I talked to on the phone.

They have much lower rates and we have low volumes for now, otherwise we would have switched to one of the big names long ago. If these guys are still in business, it makes me think the big, efficient couriers must be hugely profitable.
You're right bro! I need to put down the NEWSPAPER (which is read by DINOSAURS) and get AMPED about some SWEET SHIT. If I can't chill out like a COOL DUDE, then I should just go narc out. With the narcs. In narctown! Thanks, guy! Dudesef! Broheim!
Well go and create such legal counter measures. For now these guys are making money and I'm happy for them.
I don't believe so, unless you know exactly what asynchronous IO is and why you might need to use it then it might just seem like a more complicated method of programming. The "why" of asynchronous IO is very well explained by the C10K problem <http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html>.
It's quite common for the trades to take place in an off-shore location.

The dealers in NY aren't actually buying or selling shares - they are only making recommendations to brokers in an offshore office.

The fact that those recommendations are all automatically acted on in milliseconds by the offshore office just demonstrates how good the advice was!
---
Simply text "otp" to 32665 on your mobile phone, [...]. We're rolling this out gradually, and it should be available to everyone in the coming weeks.
---

To everyone in what countries? I guess US users only?
Why would you have to accept a cut in your nominal wages? I'm pretty sure the era from 1860-1900 was generally deflationary in the USA, and I don't think that there was much of an issue with people taking cuts in nominal wages. Most jobs in our inflationary real world have promotions, which, typically outstrip the rate of inflation. Where is that money coming from?

You also have to consider why the price of widgets is going down because of deflation. If it's going down because the widget is obsolete relative to other technologies, then either the manufacturer is beating margins by improving efficiencies (and growing the scale of the company), leaving it okay for the employee to be paid the same nominal wage... Or else, yes, the person will lose a job. But if it's the case that the manufacturer isn't able to keep up with developing technology, then not even inflation will help that person keep a job, or at the worst, it's just keeping a person in a job that is inefficient for the economy and society.

All this hoarding stuff is nonsense. If people keep hoarding money, then in order to compete with saving, (absent a centrally-decided interest rate) banks have to issue loans at lower interest rates... Which, of course, expands the money supply, and creates competing inflation.
Good question. I've added a note addressing this: http://railstutorial.org/screencasts#prerequisites.
While client side and server side validation aren't necessarily the same code, the fact that it's the same language makes it possible. If you have JS on the client and Python on the server you will have to write validation code twice regardless.

So no, it's not a given that you will avoid duplication but possible trumps impossible.
You can always use jruby
Can you elaborate on Africa's inhospitality?
Exactly what I was thinking. One feature you'd have to include though is a way to back out transactions at end of day. A lot of small, independent family run retailers (especially coffee shops, corner stores) have software mods to their cash registers for reversing sales at end of day so they can remove them to avoid paying taxes.

If I was doing this, I would be very leery of accepting an advanced, internet connected POS device into my store rather than my trusty old, hackable offline cash register. It would take a huge increase of sales to overcome the money saved by not paying taxes on a portion of sales.
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Most of the elderly will not need to be cared for, and will in fact be capable of working.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/329/5997/1287

(Ungated summary: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/INF/PR/2010/2010-09-09.html )

The issues are political, not demographic. In many western countries, old people (in their youth) voted in governments which promised to force their children to pay for them to comfortably retire.
I joined the group -- may organize an event in Portland
Wow, excellent idea!

" Just like someone should check voicemail every few minutes (30?) someone could check serviceX, and reply if they have the item in stock with the price, terms, etc"

This could presumably be (sometimes) handled automatically with an interface to common inventory/POS systems - and the retailer could handle exactly which items to be exposed in this way, price differential, etc.
This is basically irrelevant to the linked post, but I have to ask: Was I the only one who felt crushed, betrayed and crestfallen upon making the terrible realization that space doesn't actually look like all of the awesome "photos" floating around? Like the Eagle Nebula's "Pillars of Creation" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nebula). Sure, that's technically what it "looks like," but the colors are all determined by the artistic license of whoever processed the X-ray information and composite photographs of light in the nonvisible spectrum.

Drat. :-(
I generally hate casual swearing only for the fact that it degrades the shock value all of our best swear words.
Screencasts are such a time-intensive thing to record, especially high-quality ones like these seem to be. Great to see these being made, though, because for a lot of people visual learning is irreplaceable.
That link may be exactly what I need. Thank you!
When I hear the word 'elitist', for me, it means 'one set of rules for me, another set for you'. Or, in another way, 'do as I say, not as I do'.

I'm not sure if that's the context of the word as described in the article, but I get the suspicion that it's not an educational consequence, but an attitudinal one. It might be a backlash against perceived favourable treatment of one sector of the economy/group of people rather than an attack on education alone. If Sarah Palin is getting traction on terms like 'elitist', then it must be because this feeling resonates with the voters. And I don't see that one's education level is the sort of thing to really provide a rich wave of support. Which, to me, means that it must be something else.
Texas Governor Talks About Taxes [2008 YouTube]
IO Ventures launches startups from a San Francisco coffee shop
What's the Javascript story on the server side when we have real interoperability needs? For instance, in the corporate world where there are huge Java or .NET libraries that I absolutely need to access with good performance.

Is there an easy path to access JVM and .NET code with V8? And if not, has Microsoft released an interoperability story for the ie9 javascript engine?

Clearly there is huge momentum with javascript as a dynamic scripting language, which probably is going to last a while given that the client side is going to stay javascript for a while. But I'm wondering if it can replace Jython/IronPython where those are needed.
site is a on SEIU's site! Flagged
Just for a heads up, here is a 7 minute candid talk, by the Governor of Texas on you tube from 2008, about how Texas views taxes including its sales tax.

With all of the discussion about Rackspace and etc... servers creating a nexus to the state of Texas for e-commerce sales tax collection, I thought since we are in the Austin area I would give everyone a heads up on some of the Governors thinking behind it.

The Governors name is Rick Perry, and he is currently up for re-election right now, so he might be more willing to listen to your views now than later. Texas is very business friendly, and as Californians that is why we chose to locate here.

Austin is the heart of the Texas start-up community and the government here is well aware of it.

If you are concerned about the Red Tape or cost impact of the "Sales Tax" Nexus situation, here is the Governors contact page where you can send him a message and any suggestion you may have:
http://governor.state.tx.us/contact/
Good luck. Bureaucrats are unelected. For example, exactly what has changed at the USDA since the E Coli outbreak?

Government isn't 'the regulator of last resort'. In this case, it's suppressing the ability for private monitoring agencies to come into play. Except for a few corner cases, I think it would be incredibly difficult to create a competing, private monitoring agency. Why? Because government regulatory agencies are privy to the money spigot. They can print their own money.

And the notion that there will be zero tolerance for regulatory failure is absurd. It's going to happen. Private or not. Here's the difference. If there's a scandal in a private monitoring agency, then there's a good chance that word will spread and nobody will trust it anymore. And someone else will step in. Look man, government can get away with slapping a gps device on a kid car just because he's egyptian - a blatant violation of the rules that it itself wrote. Even after that, nobody is calling for the FBI to be disbanded.
Are you making an actual argument here? If so, what is it? It seems your argument is that one shouldn't be criticized on ethical grounds for legal activity, or that if something is legal and can be done to make money it should be praised regardless of the negative impact it can have on people's lives.

It's probably clear that I don't respect either of these opinions, so I hope that you're arguing some finer point here that I'm missing.
Start by looking at geothermal heat pumps. They basically use the earth as a heat source or a heat sink to maintain the temperature of your house at a comfortable level.
You're right. It's a fucking tragedy, is what it is.
I was inclined to say "yes" but then again, $10M and 15 engineers is peanuts for Google; just the publicity Google being the source of innovation and cool may be worth close to that amount.

Google is standing on the shoulders of other efforts in this case, e.g. DARPA Challenge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge).
> At 13, he bolted a discarded lawn-mower engine onto a homemade go-cart

Hmm... Getting that to work is quite a feat for a kid. Lawn-mower engines usually cannot be operated sideways. I wonder if he was lucky enough to have a 2-stroke motor, or if he managed to keep the engine vertical?
Definitely my favorite.

A: Well...what if Google got in the venture capital business? Oh wait, they DID. I suppose that means your model is obsolete, right? Bummer, dude...
The size of the Sahara Desert is often compared to the US, so maybe that's why.

Also, on this map, the southwest US overlaps a very densely populated and well-watered part of Africa.
So this service is for someone who can't sign up for a credit card, but can sign up for a service that reads their bank account, anticipates future purchases, and tries to keep the balance up?

Yeah.

But this might be an appropriate area for an industry consortium or even regulation to create a clearinghouse. If you're about to fine someone $X for an amount due up to $Y, you have to broadcast it on some confidential national clearinghouse an hour before assessment, allowing a contracted representative of the target to settle it on their behalf. If you do this, your fine is considered reasonable and customary; if you don't, it's presumed to be trickery and held to a higher standard.

Who pays for this? What's the penalty for "trickery"?
second that, lots of fun to attend. The presentations I have seen so far have been awesome. It's nice to go to a tech event and not look at a powerpoint preso
Curing aging doesn't necessarily mean changing lifespan, although that's usually taken as a given, but what it really means is not degenerating with passing years.

In that case - even if people still live roughly 65-90 years, the age distribution of the population stops being such a matter of importance. If, at 80 you still feel and heal like a 50 year old there's much less problem with a) who is going to work and b) who is going to look after you, since you can work and you don't need anyone to look after you.

And isn't that the main concern of this kind of examination of age distribution?

That is sort of how we ended up with an excess of old people today.

Excuse me? "excess"?

But since the magic that doubled our life expectancy probably didn't also double our food, oil, and fresh water supplies, we'd soon see birthrates drop to maintain equilibrium.

Yes, and that would be fine.

Why not make humans immortals? Oops! Now you have abolished children!

What do you mean "oops"? Also, people would still die from other causes.

In summary: changing the nature of life expectancy and changing the nature of aging are different things. Anti-aging research isn't supposed to be focused on the "surviving 90 times round the sun" bit, but on the "chronic disease, weakness, and disability" that comes with it.
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Good point. Ukraine is missing which is quite large.
Cockle Doodle Doo - Coder retains his crown at the HackNY Hackathon
The laws of thermodynamics do not prevent energy from flowing from cold to hot. They just say that for that to happen, entropy elsewhere must increase more.

As a trivial example disproving your claim, energy from the Sun can be collected in solar panels that can be used to run devices that can hit any temperature you want. For an extreme example, for fusion experiments they produce temperatures of over 11,000,000 degrees C.

For another trivial example, most of us have refrigerators that can transport heat energy from a colder place (the inside of the fridge) to a warmer place (your kitchen).
Education systems "educating" kids away from curiosity
"and meanwhile Google has more immediate problems." I think they have more opportunities than problems!
Note they are looking for developers, not sysadmins.

Yes, 1000 servers translates to roughly 40 racks and you'd better have a team of sysadmins to babysit them.

Imho that doesn't have much to do with hiring 40 perl developers in one fellow swoop, though.
There may be problems, as others have pointed out, but it still seems like a valuable tool for me. After all, I don't need it to be perfectly accurate.. just ballpark accurate in order to take advantage of it.

Please do Austin. :)
> A huge unmet need is extraction of heat energy at lower temperature differentials

That, of course, would still be a real challenge. I didn't see any specifics, but notice his ceramic membrane was built to withstand 400 C. That's very hot.
A witty retort is 95% of a comment.
By that same interest rate argument, the marginal utility of money should increase on both ends the further you get from zero, since interest earned on the money you have compounds, too. That said, the interest rate is much larger when you're in debt than when you have money (actually, in this case that's not 100% true, because DMV suspension fees don't accrue interest, nor do tickets or court costs after the late fees max out, but in general, you're right), so this could be a real concern.

Even in the face of marginal utility differences, though, if you were to accept (unreasonably, of course; thought experiment disclaimer goes here) that you only had the two options given (do nothing and owe another $100 to the state, or take the bet, coming out $130 ahead or $230 behind), would you really suggest that doing nothing is the better option? How good would the odds need to be (and how little variance) for you to take the bet, if so?

If I laid out this payoff structure without placing it in a real world context where there are many other obvious potential solutions, I think you'd probably argue in favor of taking the bet - the expected loss is so much lower that I think it's difficult to make a marginal utility argument against it. I suspect that what's really making you argue against it in this example is that there are so many better ways to deal with the situation in real life that it's hard to even imagine having to make a choice between the two alternatives on the table.
You could also buy a regular pool heat pump and stick it in your house:

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Pool_20Heat_20Sink
Newton devoted much of his time to alchemy and theology.
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> Please don't give me the stuff about MS promises against suing, it's totally unrealistic.

You're wrong. It would be pretty much impossible for Microsoft to sue over Mono at this point, even if they wanted to. You gloss over the fact that Microsoft has issued a thorough, unrevokable, legally binding Community Promise to not assert patent claims over .NET implementations:

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx

The purpose and implications of the Community Promise are clear. Microsoft has sanctioned Mono, and no court in the world would let them take the CP back and say "nah, we were just kidding."

> What I am peddling here is FUD, but it's warranted FUD, there are too many unknowns for what amounts to a buggy C#.

Oh please. Ignoring the fact that you appear to be confusing C# and the CLR here, do you actually have any concrete complaints about mcs, or is this just more unwarranted FUD?
A dentist in Michigan (Robert Nara) came up with a way for his patients to avoid all cavities. The state dental association had his license revoked or imprisoned or something. A threat to their summer homes and boats I guess.

I've tried his approach for a few years and so far no cavities. It comprises a hygiene regime designed to minimize the oral bacteria load by brushing immediate after eating and using salt water rinses.
The Comptroller's response here is the exact opposite of the language, based on what I'm reading. If "the language was not intended to be construed as so broad as to extend nexus to anyone using a server in Texas" then why use the language "A person is engaged in business in Texas if the person has nexus with the state as evidenced by, but not limited to, any of the following: [...] uses tangible personal property that is located in this state, including a computer server".

The "sale of data, such as music files" is a specifically defined process, wholly separate from "using personal property, including a computer server."

IMO, the state got caught trying to overreach, and they're playing the innocent "oh that's not what we meant!" hand. If it's not what you meant, change the language.

Words have meanings - someone knew exactly what he/she was doing when that was drafted. Especially given the large number of data centers hosting servers in Texas, with its central geography, cheap land/power, etc. The pain of migrating away is too great and expensive - people will just comply with the new taxes and most will stay. Some may leave, but it'll take a long time. In the short term - few years, TX will get extra income.
Mono is free software. At this point you're more likely to be sued by Oracle over Java than Microsoft over Mono.

FUD is FUD, intelligent people make technology decisions based on facts and costs, not fear.
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Using a virtual dev environment (with vagrant) seems like a good move if you're stuck on windows. You get to develop with software that runs on linux using whatever tools you're comfortable with on windows.
If it was indeed some members flagging the post, perhaps the style of your post wasn't ideal. It's very conversational and "out-there" — really hard to get to the meat and real information of the post around all the jokes and silliness. For me, your post looks really interesting initially, but the way its written turned me away from reading it. No problem having some personality in a blog post, just don't let it distract from the content and your point.
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Do any of you have any evidence that there is even the smallest correlation between a person having negative views of homosexuality and that person treating women poorly?

It's fun to just make up shit about people we disagree with, but it's still dishonest and wrong.
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It looks very good. It made me very hesitant to price
Fully in agreement here. And actually, I agree with the moral of what you've said almost elsewhere else on this thread; I meant this post to be a bit more tongue-in-cheek than I suspect it came across, I definitely should have made it more clear that I don't really think poor people should be heading to the casino every time they come up short when rent's due. :)