skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blogger/Blogspot is down half of the time ATM... Sorry about this.

Here's the full text :

Vernor Vinge recently reviewed various singularity scenarios advanced by experts in the field in the latest issue of the IEEE Spectrum magazine:

- The AI Scenario: We create superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) in computers.

- The IA Scenario: We enhance human intelligence through human-to-computer interfaces—that is, we achieve intelligence amplification (IA).

- The Biomedical Scenario: We directly increase our intelligence by improving the neurological operation of our brains.

- The Internet Scenario: Humanity, its networks, computers, and databases become sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being.

- The Digital Gaia Scenario: The network of embedded microprocessors becomes sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being.

He gives lots of insights, but I think there's an option missing which has never discussed as far as I know. I already posted this as a comment on the journal page, but I think it's worth it's own entry.

Here's the idea: what would be the implications of using micro-electrode arrays currently used for BCI to implement direct, bidirectional brain to brain communication?

Since it has never been tried, even in animals, and since we have no idea if it could ever work, the following points are strictly speculative (yet not gratuitous, but very exciting as it's often the case with speculative stuff ;-).

Here are a few topics worth envisioning, assuming the feat is possible:

Technical issues.

- Avoid triggering epilepsy because of the new neuronal circuits (duh...)

- Where to put electrodes? A priori I'd put the arrays on the fronto-parietal associative networks of the convexity. Connecting medial (self related), or prefrontal, volitional structures could also be interresting, as would connecting together areas naturally unrelated to each other (even in a single brain, this could enable great synesthesia... yum!).
- Learning to communicate at a low level should't be problematic. The fundamental function of any cortical module is to communicate with another cortical module. I don't think that they would be affected by being located in different heads.

Ethical / transhuman issues.

- Higher level cooperation: assuming that communication is really possible, would we become smarter or dumber? Would we be able to cooperate, or would it be distracting, disruptive, and in the end ineffective? Would we simply tolerate the process?

- First person experience / phenomenal consciousness: Would we experience another person's perception/cognition? What about a non delusional influence syndrome?

- Identity and individual self. Would this create a human "super-being", or two superhuman beings?

- Trans-species, hybrid communication (assuming some animals are better than us at processing some kind of specialized information).

- Developing a Brainternet? Could it be possible to scale B2B communication beyond a one to one setting, allowing global cognition?

... all of this assuming that the monkeys we'll use for preliminary experiments don't outsmart then extinguish us ...

runs away
I could see people choosing the Goog for the sheer numbers. There's simply more inventory (impressions). But with clients who have a budget and therefore aren't maxing the inventory, this advantage is lessened.
For my Firefox keywords, I have g for google search, map for google maps, gis for google image search, imdb for guess what, w for wikipedia search, py for local python module documentation lookup, modindex to flatly take me to the local python module index, def for google define, dict for dictionary.com, doc for local docs, and yt for youtube search.

Between that and having the left Windows-key bound to "Start a new terminal", I'm never more than a few keystrokes away from my thoughts.
As for me I just love TextMate. "E" is a good alternative on Windows platform.
Really basic. Not bad.
Wakoopa Secures $1 Million for App-Monitoring Social Network
http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mysql/article.php/31...
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/query-cache-how.html
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/01/29/how-mysql-que...
Congratulations PG !
You're kind of asking what's better between vi and emacs.

I would recommend spending some time checking out either Django (http://djangoproject.com/) or Pylons (http://pylonshq.com/) on the Python side and I think Rails is probably going to be the best place to start on the Ruby side of the equation.

Any of those should be a good place to start, it's really a matter of personal preference between the three at this point.
Clay Shirky: Changes in Society caused by the Internet
someone who could be a fine contributor to society in lots of practical, necessary fields that don't require lots of abstract thinking -- could be inspired to throw away lots of time and risk lots of frustration

But the bottom line though, is that it's none of your business to determine how one should spend ones effort and life. Nobody asked
for your take on parameterizing their lifes limits. Thats what living is for. I could tell you what you should do with your life after
a test or battery of tests and send you on your way. Like that idea? Even if you do, let it apply to you and you alone.
... unfortunately still necessary. The link to the pdf:

http://www.pawfal.org/dave/files/scheme-uk/scheme-uk-fluxus....
Honestly, does anyone know where Steve Gillmor even came from? I had never heard of him until 2-3 months ago, when TechCrunch started making a play at the "Gillmor Gang", and then gradually started phasing in his posts.
As bad as his prose is, he's not much better as a podcast host-- he's rude, unapologetic, and generally condescending to his "guests". You get the same sense from his writing.
Python will crush your crush your competitors, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their users!
How did they choose Google when Yahoo was bigger?
Perhaps differential equations for me. But that's more a question of motivation. I like optimization more and look forwand to having more lectures.
Start working as a freelancer and you will see a lot of ideas floating around.
I just ran into a case where I needed a FULL OUTER JOIN and MySQL let me down. It looks like PostgreSQL would have saved me from UNIONing two queries.
How do you go from "Nobody should prevent someone from aspiring to do what they want to do" to "It is wrong to point out that people with low IQs are very unlikely to succeed at tasks which require high IQs, and telling them that these real constraints are not real at all is cruel and insensible, since it's factually incorrect advice that will lead them to make poorer decisions."?

I mean, I could tell you that if you are really super-passionate and very very outraged, you can convince me to abandon my factual beliefs for some kind of feel-good claptrap. But that might lead you to make another comment of similar tone and content to the one to which I responded, leaving us both worse off. Do you see where I'm coming from?

I am in a business that most batteries of tests would predict I'd fail at, so I clearly don't follow your parody of my thought processes.
Social news does work, you just have to take it for what it is
The biggies have been mentioned. Ruby/Rails has a very fast time-to-market, but suffers runtime performance issues. However, it might very well be "fast enough" for what you want to do.

Python has a screaming gajillion well written and supported libraries, and the language itself is very...orderly. That suits some people very well, and others is an anathema.

A new one on the block is Scala and /Lift/. Probably not as mature as either of the above, but runs on the JVM so you can stick it on Tomcat or any other java web container, and as such you have a lot of hosting opportunities.
The Humans Behind the Google Money Machine
Sci-Fi Show to Tie into Virtual World, and Visa-Versa
Microsoft loss of credibility
Google analytics (http://analytics.google.com)
Ask YC: Server Administration?
I've never had to set-up my own server before, thanks to hosting providers (like media temple / dreamhost / etc).

I recently realized I am deficient in that area and would like learn the basics, enough so I could (hypothetically) buy a slice from slicehost and set it up.

Does anyone have any good primers/online tutorials?
I program in PHP and Perl (intermediate skill in both) and had to decide which one to use recently for a new project I'm starting. I plan on using Amazon Web Services including SimpleDB and SQS. This made my choice of language a little easier.

Perl natively supports multiple threads whereas PHP does not. Multiple threads can assist greatly in speeding overall access to SQS, etc.

I also prefer the structure that Perl provides. Coupled with the Catalyst framework and lots of module availability on CPAN, I'm happy with my choice for now.

Does anyone else have any feedback on my choice of Perl for its multi-threaded capability for use with AWS - I'd appreciate a sanity check :)
Adventures in Office Space
Avatars are just pictures next to user names. Digg has them and it doesn't make the conversation all that better. I actually find clicking on user profiles to be a lot useful. It gives me context as to who you are, Mr. Gabriel Weinberg of Ask YC Archive, as well as memory retention.
You should set up a poll.
We've built this already:

http://searchyc.com/user/izaidi?sort=by_date

http://rss.searchyc.com/user/izaidi?sort=by_date
It seems to be natural to do GUI-centric programming as in Visual Basic. People like attaching ideas to things that they can see. I think that the real problem is that there is an Impedance Mismatch between current GUIs and the domain. Once we have solved this, then the natural way to program won't conflict so drastically with good Object Oriented practices.

I'm not sure if we can get there before we reach the level of GUIs in Minority Report, but I think we won't need quite all of that.
To everyone who is listing google time out errors - this is in beta. 0.4.1-beta #1

I think it's an interesting idea. I like the idea of being able to use something like this when I'm on a "foreign" computer. Like a computer at my parents, friends or at school. By providing a web front end you don't HAVE to be on your perfectly configured box at home...
I suspect flash may be a greater learning curve, but I could be quite wrong.

Flash actually doesn't have much of a learning curve - in particular, actionscript doesn't have many ideas you won't have seen already if you know javascript.

The trouble with flash development isn't that it's hard to learn, it's that the environment and tools are incredibly ghetto and hard to integrate into a sane tool-chain.
CRC cards on 3x5" card-stock are better than UML. Otherwise, I agree. Until GUIs for applications are as natural as passing 3x5 cards around, there's going to be an impedance mismatch between the GUI and the domain.
Not a good start. I went to "acrobat.com", and I see a blank page titled something like "Flash Player Installation" (but of course, I have Flash already).

There's no paragraph blurb, no E-mail link...just a black background. So I can't even let them know about the problems I'm having, and of course they haven't presented me with any actual information about their product.

In 2008, from a company the size of Adobe, this is an incredible blunder.
The given implementation of a language may make scaling easier or harder - though.
Of course, that's only true if you're using a totally flat heap. I don't see any reason why you couldn't be a little more clever about using a hybrid GC approach (generational + thread-local allocation pools, for example) to minimize the size of the dataset that had to be paged in or out in a given sweep.

RScheme and other persistent language implementations have certainly been able to use the underlying OS paging mechanism pretty efficiently, and the performance numbers Varnish HTTP cache seems to suggest that it can work well for some kinds of web application workloads, too.
If you really want scalability take a look at Erlang
though ErlyWeb (erlyweb.org/) is not that mature, Yaws (yaws.hyber.org) really is. Ruby and Ruby on Rails are really great for development i had never been that productive. Rails seems to scalo quite ok wenn adding more servers and rewriting som/lots of code. In an feature product I seed more safety and scalebelity so I will implpmpnt it in Erlang
"...a point release...[that] doesn't seem to change the overall API too drastically"

In other words, you mean "a point release," right? I know that many open source projects (I'm looking at you, Drupal!) may not care about this, but when I see a minor revision number change, I expect my applications and plugins to keep working without a major overhaul.
I was more talking about the "Event Horizon" from your link. You can look at the limits on what can be designed without the ability to design it yourself. We already use computers to look though each variation in boat hulls to find the "best" design. Adding 2x more processing power is useful but there are rapid diminishing returns. In the same way "Intelligence Explosion" assumes x IQ would let you build an X * n level of IQ but it's more reasonable to expect that at some point x IQ let's you build an x + (n / x) IQ.

In the US we talk about what level of battery technology will finally let EV's take off, but adding an electric rail to all roads is the limit on how useful battery technology would ever get. AKA you endup removing the limit how much energy you can move from the power plant to car but that does not help you generate energy.

Edit: I still think AI would be useful but I don't think it's going to change the world as much as people might think. It's like the internet it's new and useful but it's not all that much better than POTS + library + a good local collage.
Let's give these guys the benefit of the doubt. Let's go ahead and assume that what they claim is going to happen. Let's look at what is necessary for that to happen:

1: Bandwidth providers will discover that their costs are rising (thanks to that evil Google machine).

2: and so they consider throttling or otherwise restricting access to various high bandwidth sites (Keep in mind that Google and other high bandwidth sites pay these companies for their end of the bandwidth usage).

2b: We'll assume that for whatever reason, the bandwidth providers don't mind the loss of their biggest customers. We'll also assume that regular users don't mind the fact that their favorite search engine, social networking site, and torrent sites are unavailable.

3: For step 2 to occur as planned, all (or most) bandwidth providers will have to collude to make this a simultaneous change, and to agree not to go back and un-restrict the access to steal customers (here is where you should read up on the Prisoner's dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma)

The market alternative to this is to simply raise prices on the bandwidth hogs and charge maybe on a per GB basis. While I don't like that idea (I do use a lot of bandwidth), I doubt that our bandwidth supply is anywhere near to its full capacity, or that bandwidth costs to suppliers are going to go anywhere but down, as all technology has pretty much ever since the inception of the microchip.
Slicehost has a few good articles:
http://articles.slicehost.com/

I have used them for setting up my own slice and it worked out really well.
A new photo everyday, very creative
This might be informative: http://blog.screen-scraper.com/2008/04/21/screening-scraping...
Ask YC: name your own price?
I'm a regular slimtimer.com user, and it now supports a premium-level membership with a "name-your-own-price" subcription model (http://blog.slimtimer.com/2008/05/07/data-export-backups-and-premium-subscriptions-are-here/). I'm curious about how this works as a subscription model with my own product in mind.

Anybody have any experience with this? How well does this work in practice? How do you prevent "gaming", whereby someone either asks around to figure out which of their friends gets what price and everyone just clusters on the local minimums, or just trying to fill out the form with lowball numbers and then incrementing until it's accepted?
Now that is ironic.
If you use the example code as-is and the blogblogblog page is compromised or malicious, it can inject arbitrary javascript into your page. Best to html encode all input from third party sources, especially users.
well, their child is likely to be a boy. statistics show most hackers are male.
Check out "Tom Lord"'s comment towards the bottom of the page-- interesting take, but definitely a reach.

Nevertheless, it's something to consider, that maybe the growing popularity of the Singularity notion is the next sociopolitical movement on the scale of the 60's counterculture era... allowing people to escape from where they currently are by considering and believing in the vague notion of a distant future where things are different, but they're not sure how... and that is why they spend time thinking about and working towards their vague, alternate perception of what reality is.

I'm not saying this is true, that technological trends do not point in the sign of the concept of Singularity- in some way, shape or form- actually happening. This viewpoint merely resonates with me because of the historical reality of what we've seen with previous movements (and this extends beyond just 60s United States).
I don't think it sucks much at first at all... Most people I know that have a hard time with emacs don't want to learn anything fancy and think the arrow keys are fine for navigation. Let them watch you program for a few minutes and they'll be so impressed that they'll happily learn the new commands. OR, they're not cut out for technology anyway...
Darn. I had hoped this was an article on the implications of various scoping techniques in computer languages.
The Strange Case of the Missing Microfiber
Most of us have forgotten how to do long division on paper - I guess. It is quite a nice exercised (if a bit geekish) to rediscover it on your own.
ive never done it, so this is purely hypothetical... but assuming you know js:

you can drill down into the google adsense iframes and modify each onclick event to have googles onclick event plus yours.

which would also require that you somehow inject your tracking function in there as well. which hypothetically add an img tag that has a url you control.

then at that url you control you could set up some file that uses GET to grab the url params you pass to it and saves them in a database...

you can do that if you're interesting baking your own solution which is probably against the TOS.

or you could just google it..and find these:

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001370.shtml

http://www.shawnhogan.com/2005/11/track-adsense-clicks-with-...
Anybody looking for jobs...
who are only considering places near public transportation or within walking/biking distance?
I really enjoyed reading that. Shed light on the things you do for a small company that few people ever talk about.

Makes me wonder how much revenue they're pulling to be able to afford that.
If you search long enough you usually hit upon a prove that does looks more like a really explanation than like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
It's not as "hip" as Python or Ruby, but I remain a big fan of Perl for server-side self-hosted web/database applications -- depending on what you're building, you can often find pre-existing modules on CPAN that provide a lot of the plumbing you'll need.

And of course, Perl's syntax is very similar to PHP, so the transition might be a bit easier than to a Python, although your milage will vary.

Lastly, it's worth noting that the choice of server-side and client-side technologies are mostly independent... You can use either HTML/JS or Flash as the client interface to talk to server-side logic written in any of the PHP/Perl/Python/etc. languages discussed above.
First, I'd recommend using a debian-based distro like Ubuntu. From my experience, it is much easier to use and configure, and the amount of tutorials, etc, available for it is overwhelming.
Good point. My mother is on Twitter and I wouldn't want to disrespect her. Check the updated post...
There's really no substitute for setting up a system that you can break without negative consequences. Also, putting a public server for which you have root access out on the Internet entails a degree of public responsibility: if your box gets 0wned and becomes a DDoS attack node or spambot, it's your fault. (I say this coming from the POV of someone who had their first "real" server cracked wide open within 90 days of putting it online due to an OpenSSH remote exploit many years ago.)

If you haven't already done so, download an install ISO for Debian/Ubuntu or CentOs/Fedora, and install it on a spare machine, or even in a VMWare image on your regular workstation. Work through some of the examples on HowtoForge, and learn to install and configure Apache, MySQL and/or PostgreSQL, PHP/Ruby/Python, and Postfix or Exim w/basic spam filters.

Running a virtual private server (VPS) is a bit easier, in the sense that you don't have to manage the actual hardware, but the fundamentals are the same, and you'll be glad you have physical access to the system when you screw up the configuration or forget the root password. Get comfortable maintaining a machine locally, then go out and inflict your administration skills on the 'net at large.
Building dev tools for Ruby hackers, fill out this short survey to help us solve your needs
By the way, I'd probably recommend Linode over Slicehost; you get more RAM for the same price.

But besides that; I can't really speak to either of them.
Emacs works nicely on Windows now too, and with a decent installer.
The fact that the guy thinks OOP is the pinnacle of the dark art of programming doesn't bode well for his credibility on the topic of designing programming paradigms.

I can't even fathom what would be difficult to understand about OOP, unless, like I suspect, he is forcing the Kingdom of Nouns onto a problem that isn't well suited for it.
And the key there is being able to look at your everyday life and get annoyed by things that aren't as easy or as good as they should be. It takes a certain combination of imagination, creativity, a tendency for thoughts to wander off the task at hand, and persistent dissatisfaction with regular habits and with the way things are.
Google phone Delayed to 2009
Programming is hard. Let's go shopping. The article comes near, but does not directly address the fact that OOP is just one of several techniques and language features that have, over the years promised to make programming easy. People either fail to understand and properly adopt the new techniques or they do adopt the new techniques and simply find something else that makes programming hard.

The best we can hope for is that a technique expands what is within the reach of the average programmer. The problem of the day gets moved to the solved category and we move on to bigger and better things, which are also hard. Those of us who enjoy programming and earn a living from it should hope that this cycle is not broken.
I'm going to buck the general trend here, and recommend that your next language not be Perl, Python, or Ruby. If you really want to become a well-balanced programmer, you should either learn a lower-level, compiled language like C or Java, or you should stretch a bit and try Lisp/Scheme or Erlang.

Working only within the "scripting language" space of the typical LAMP stack will limit your thinking in ways that could hurt you later on.
test
httpsd://asdf
Diff. Eq.: Difference Equation or Differential Equation?