skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why we need the third way: “What Are You Going to Do With That?”
I believe the Fermi Paradox[1] is very compelling evidence that the evolution of computation is logistic[2] and further that saturation comes before practical interstellar travel. Otherwise I feel it's likely we would have already seen evidence of Clarke's Overmind[3].

That intelligence becomes increasingly specialized rather than general is a reasonable explanation for why such saturation may happen (in a hand wavy way).

I also think that much of the discussion about the Singularity, downloading brains, etc, makes many anthropomorphic assumptions that are entirely unjustified. I suspect it's more likely that we'll have better luck building artificial chemical brains than we ever will simulating some captured representation of the state of a human brain on a digital computer.

On the upside, if computation's growth is logistic then certainly we're in the exponentiation portion right now, which means humanity still is likely to see generations of at least near linear improvement. We may be essentially trapped in this solar system, but we'll likely have quite astounding information processing capabilities.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhoods_End (a good book if you forgive it a few mystical characterizations of psychic powers)
The Epic Fail of Personal Media Player Syncing under Linux
It was thinkvitamin, I'm still a member paying 25 a month.

Also the same situation on 1and1...

Actually I should do something about that.
More important than the fact that the announcement was made on the holiday...

Is clearly what is implied there.
I left Firefox for Safari because Safari was prettier, faster and used less memory.

Lately, I'm close to leaving Safari for Chrome because it's faster, uses less memory and crashes less (in fact, it's never crashed so far, vs 100's of times total probably with Safari.) Unfortunately, Chrome is a little uglier, and has certain less user conveniences. So it's not an easy jump to make.
Other markets have nowhere near the liquidity of the market where AAPL shares are actually bought and sold. If you think the US market will wind up where the european one did then go ahead and make that trade.

The opinion of the market will change as time goes on and people process the information available and more information becomes available.

I don't think its fair to say "another American ignoring the rest of the world" when his whole point is that what matters is how apple does on the NASDAQ after the earnings announcements. In this case, how Apple stock traded in european markets over the holiday really is irrelevant to AAPL. It's nothing personal.
The human brain doesn't need to build a smarter brain. It just needs to build something of equivalent smartness (which should be theoretically possible, there's no reason to believe the human brain is the upper bound for all generalised reasoning ability) on a substrate like silicon which is subject to Moore's Law (and thus gets inherently faster with time) and which is immortal and duplicable.

Build 1 functioning brain in silicon, and:

- 18 months later you can build one that's twice as fast using the same principles

- duplicate this brain and get the power of multiple people thinking together (but with greater bandwidth between them than any human group)

- run this brain for 100 years and get an older intellectually functioning human than has ever existed before

- duplicate whatever learning this brain has accumulated over 100 years (which, say, brings to the level of an Einstein) as many times as you have physical resources for (so, clone Einstein)

All those are paths to super-human AI from the production of a human-intelligence brain in a non-biological form.

So, if a human brain can make a computer brain, which is a reasonable assumption, then a human brain can make a brain smarter than itself.
"This ignores the fact that if we ever do make a computer smarter than a human it will either be via (a) reverse-engineering of the human brain or (b) some kind of evolutionary algorithm."

Citation please?
Agree that ipad promotion at the end is not really a fair comparison. I'm assuming he's speaking of the twitter app on the ipad. For it to be fair he should install a desktop client for twitter on his pc or possibly tweetdeck and make a comparison.
Do you have a reason for doubting that? Steve Jobs has been an amazing leader for Apple but he's not an engineer. For example the iPod and iTunes came from external companies (PortalPlayer and SoundJam respectively).

I suspect Jobs' influence pushed them from great products to fantastic ones but that's a role the executive team should be able to fill at this point. Look at the numbers...

Tim Cook (COO): Been working with Steve Jobs since 1997

Jonathan Ive (VP of Industrial Design): Been working with Steve Jobs since 1996

Bertrand Sertlet (VP of Software Engineering): Been working with Steve Jobs since 1997.

Scott Forstall (VP of Software Design): Been working with Steve Jobs since 1997

That's the bottom line for me. After working with Jobs' for 13 or 14 years you have to assume some of the magic has rubbed off. So this is a fairly competent group that should be more than capable of creating great products.
For some definitions of 'smarter' we already have made computers that best humans.

(I think the idea of 'The Singularity' is bunk for other reasons though)
Why would it suck? What's wrong in paying for the product?
He took the June 2010 WWDC numbers of $1B to developers ($1.43B gross) and 5B downloads over the first two years of the app store to come up with $0.29 revenue per download over the lifetime of the app store. Then he applied that $0.29 per download to new download figures. This assumes that the percentage of free downloads or no cost upgrades has stayed static over the app store lifetime.
Whether or not we reach "The Singularity" doesn't matter much to me, I just want us to reach a point where there are hundreds of thousands of nanobots aiding our individual immune system along with preventing degradation of our internal organs, is that too much to ask? According to all the research we shouldn't be too far off from that, though probably not in my lifetime. Whether or not we reach an AI singularity doesn't matter to me, so long as we have our nanobots.
I think of it as kind of an inverted religion. Instead of having faith that something magical happened in the past, a singularitarian has faith that something magical (or maybe terrifying) will happen in the future.
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His one good point is that "The Singularity" is a bad name for a concept that doesn't refer to a single event, which makes it easy to dismiss with the "rapture of the nerds" strawman. Aside from that, it's mostly an argument from personal incredulity, which is even less valid here than usual. I wouldn't have believed you a year ago if you told me that a search and advertising company had self-driving cars roaming around Mountain View, but here we are.

Despite all the sensory inputs we can attach to computers these days, and vast stores of human knowledge like Wikipedia that one can feed to them, almost all such data is to a computer nearly meaningless.

IBM's Watson might disagree (http://money.cnn.com/2011/01/13/technology/ibm_jeopardy_wats...). But of course responding to natural language questions (er, answers) will be moved to the "not real AI" category once it's commonplace.
There is a process by which analyst make their official predictions. I'm not an expert in that process but I know enough to say it assumes the mean value between the best the company could have done and the worst.

So if the company manages to do the best it could have done it will beat the official estimates (And it's not at all illogical for an analyst to expect a company to do that even when their official analysis assumes an average)
Think about this rationally: How much software do you actively use on your computer? I use perhaps 20 types of software. In total, I may have used 50 or 60 different software in my life.

In contrast, I have about 4000 songs. One conclusion that one could make from that is that the app market will stop growing at some point because people will have the software they need. Seems like the logical step.

But I'm in the app market, and the market is not what you think it us. People are not buying utilities, they are buying consumable software. For an example of what I mean, take a look at KreciDevs android apps: http://www.kreci.net/reports/android-developer-income-report...

X-Ray Scanner

Daily Beauty Tips

Those are consumable software and they are the most popular. WP Stats, what seems like more traditional software is the least popular.

And I'm not pulling these numbers out of my arse, I write such software also, and I have 40k downloads a day. FourSquare boasts about gaining 100k users in 2 weeks - I do that in 3 days.

I believe the nature of mobile software is fundamentally different from the nature of desktop software, and that growth could indeed follow the same curve as the music store.
The fact that PT_DENY_ATTACH can be easily patched by modifying the xnu source code made me wonder about the politics of open source inside Apple.
The voice memo part kinda lost me.
Do you have any other ideas on how to do it?
These guys got sued to bring you a way to filter out app spam!

http://www.fbpurity.com/

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100324/1806018708.shtml
For those that are behind the paywall: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=128...

Click the first link.
No, but that movie/book is likely the closest most people will get to a personal perspective on what a schizophrenic's life is like.
His one good point is that "The Singularity" is a bad name for a concept that doesn't refer to a single event, which makes it easy to dismiss with the "rapture of the nerds" strawman.

Right, so why are we even still discussing the concept? If we want to discuss what's likely to happen in the future then let's throw away the silly term "the singularity" and start talking about specifics.
And for some definitions of "Queen" and "England" I'm the bloody Queen of England, but they're not very good definitions.
Nicholas Carr reviews Douglas Coupland's biography of Marshall McLuhan
Whilst I agree with he author that there are religious aspects to the whole Singularity with a capital S movement, it seems to me his arguments are equally unsound.

First of all, this is not an attack on the singularity idea, but on the "strong AI" idea.

With respect to strong AI, Nick is very close to the problem, and that's the issue. Like any good engineer/scientist, he sees problems everywhere. Yes, there are many problems before we get to strong AI. That's not news. There were many problems to resolve before people could pay a small sum of money and let a giant metal tube take them through the air to a destination halfway round the world without killing them - but those problems got resolved, one by one. Many problems do not amount to an impossibility, only a damn hard problem (which we knew strong AI was anyway).

As for his other assertion, that the concept of the singularity is a fantasy, Nick's main argument is that the singularity will only last "for a time", and that it will turn into a classic S-curve. He waves Feynman's name around as supporting evidence, but does not address the fact that intelligence (and artificial intelligence in particular) is not subject to the Malthusian laws which have caused other phenomena to follow S-curves. Yes, we only have access to so many particles, but the whole point of exponential AI is figuring out better ways to use the same number of particles. There may be a theoretical limit to how efficiently we can use those particles, but even so there are a lot of particles, and if we can manufacture even just human-equivalent computing matter in factories, that's already enough to achieve a singularity.

So, in summary:

- Yes, there is a problem with Singularity stuff being quasi-religious (I've been to a Singularity event and agree - though the proportion of kooks was relatively low, there were certainly a few, some of them on the podium speaking)

- No, this article is not a convincing argument against either strong AI or the potential of a singularity-like event to occur.
Your second, third, and fourth sentences do not support your first. Copying software without paying for it (when the author has not licensed you to do so) is arguably immoral, often unethical, and nearly always illegal...

...but the claim of the gp was that it is not "theft" as such. Copying something from someone and taking something away from someone are not the same.

Drawing a definitional distinction there helps us to have a meaningful debate about the moral, ethical, and legal dimensions; the only benefit to muddying the distinction is as a rhetorical tactic to confuse the issues.
Actually it helped me realize certain things in other libs.

For example using std::<pair> more after spending time with Common Lisp.

Also it made me realized that certain building blocks, patterns, etc. are not that great when looked through a different view.

For example the "factory" pattern is needed in C++, because objects can be allocated on the stack... Wait... what?

Well, because C++ allows allocation of objects on the stack, obviously one cannot think in it, as if "new" would've returned object with different size than the one declared. e.g. "new SomeClass()" is known by the compiler how much space would take, hence "SomeClass someObject;" is known in advance and can be allocated on the stack. Cool, isn't.... Actually not so cool - because of that you can't return proxied objects, hidden implementation, etc... Hence you need factory - instead of "new SomeClass" -> CreateSomeClass() function that might return object of different size... Where I got aware of this - by spending some time with Objective C and it's objects.

Then comes the holly OOP, especially the C++ way - but then one discovers lua, javascript... Or Common Lisp... and understands - "protected", "private" are not that important, and the GOF patterns are not that needed.

Okay, so you go back at your work to code in C++, and just take it easier, because you have realized there is no point going hard-core and doing it the C++ way all the time. Hell it's even okay to have this macro called "HASHED( "SomeGameResource", 0x123123 )" that... gets preprocessed by external tool, that replaces 0x123123 with the hash code of "SomeGameResource" and puts it back in the source code.

#ifdef DEBUG

#define HASHED(s,c) hashed(s) // e.g. call function in debug to return the hash-code

#else

#define HASHED(s,c) c // replaced with the precalculated value

#endif

Now try doing that with templates.... But my point is - there is no need - just use an external tool that does it for you. Inform your programmers that if they want to change HASHED("BlahBlah", 0x123123) to HASHED("BlahBlah2", 0x123123) then they have to run it through a tool (or have such step), or just make them use the debug version. Or change the language... Joke! You are doing this for the Nintendo DS - "C/C++" is the only viable option for large project.
I wonder what their business model is. Thoughts? I'm thinking that they want publicity to attempt to gain a majority of the test prep e-books.
May be you can have a look at it backlinks and alexa rank to see if its popular.
This is, typically, yet another diatribe that generalizes various "the Singularity" concepts and denigrates them in a single fell swoop.

I adhere to many of the arguments put forth by Ray Kurzweil, who many dismiss as a crank. However, unlike any (at least, most) other self-declared prophets Kurzweil has a solid history of predictions going back at least 21 years. While of course not all of the things he has said have come to pass, or they come to pass at slightly different time periods, more than not they have been spot on.

Of course, some nutcases really do subscribe to The Singularity as a faith. These people don't pay attention to the various sub-disciplines of biology, computer science, and materials science that are among the core fields generally related to The Singularity.

Folks like myself who think that something like TS is ahead of us base our reasoning on the rapid advances that humanity is making in the core fields, not on some religious belief. I'm an atheist and don't believe shit without proof.

Its easy to tear down, but much harder to make a valid argument. Nick Szabo's stating that something will never happen because it hasn't happened yet. I suggest he start listening to what's going on in science.
From memory (and I could be very wrong here) Bush's response to Katrina was to not address it for a few days - exactly the wrong thing to do. http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/was-bush-slow-to-res... says it was four days before action started to happen, and I recall at the time there was a lot of anger directed against the inactivity of the feds.

Compare to Bligh in QLD, who was doing two-hourly media stops packed with information, keeping people abreast of what was going on. The second day of the recovery they realised that they had so much volunteerism that they had to tap it - and there's aerial footage of volunteer centers with queues literally over a kilometer long. Compare to Katrina when the feds had no idea what was going on and where they also copped flak - rightly or wrongly - for not letting volunteers help in a timely manner

Even on the information front alone, if people know what's going on, they feel in control of the situation as the 'what ifs' are minimised. QLD flood victims felt acknowledged, Katrina victims felt abandoned.

Katrina was indeed much worse than the QLD floods, but that doesn't absolve a politician of having to provide good leadership.
Facebook Suspends Controversial Data Sharing Feature
When somebody knocks at your door, peep through the peephole first. It might be some stalker who got your address from an app.
Tron Toaster
A standard alternative path to superhuman intelligence (which is the precondition for a singularity.. NOT AI specifically) is IA: Intelligence Augmentation. I.e., work on making humans smarter than they are. It's reasonable to say that the Internet has achieved a lot of progress in that direction already. Get brain/computer interfaces working, and suddenly everyone will gain 10 effective IQ points through instant access to encyclopaedias and calculators. Etc, etc.
e.g. significant effort by a major corporation leveraging work done by academics, open-source contributors, other corporations.
A lot of companies have adopted apps such as UserVoice(http://uservoice.com/) for different purposes.

If you want to investigate the idea of using it for your own company, people have already built services that hosted reddit/hn clones.
http://slinkset.com/

and if you need more meat, reddit is opensource
lessons from floods, reinforced for the 9,753rd time:

1. __have home on high ground__

2. see 1

3. see 1

all else is bullshit and/or out of your control (eg. level of flooding, degree of local or government competence/planning/assistance, etc.)
Wonderin' how it feels to be zapped by a Taser gun?
Igbinary v1.1.1, a drop in replacement for the standard PHP serializer, is out.
How about now? Did you see that you can play The Incident on TV via iPhone and iPad TV out?

http://www.ipodnn.com/articles/10/12/02/the.incident.uses.ip...
Eliezer Yudkowsky has actually gone and laid out just what the different things people seem to mean by "the Singularity" are: http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools ; of course, this may be incomplete, but it seems pretty good.

The problem then is people just referring to "the Singularity" without specifying what they're talking about.
Meh, that argument is just a sideshow distraction. The real issue (as stated elsewhere) is that you are using something for which you are required to provide recompense. Avoid that recompense is depriving the distributor.

While the semantics of "is it theft" does have a slight relevance, the overhead of how this concept completely derails the legitimate debate is far worse. Theft or not, it's an issue that needs to be addressed, and the "it's not theft" folks always seem to want to avoid addressing it.

A bit like how those folks who always say "but information wants to be free / you can't stop it" never want to divulge their bank account details and passwords...
It's a splendid idea for a startup, and could get going with almost no real effort. Just a domain, a few example videos, a tutorial/blog, and a request for more videos. See if there are other people willing to film and upload their videos before sinking real time into it.
Xetra stars and whatnot have pretty decent trading volumes, esp on news.
I thought the hardware was way too underpowered for that sort of thing, hence the price. screens are expensive, but that wouldn't explain the > $300 price difference the apple tv and an iphone or ipad. now an apple tv 2...

edit: the ipod touch is only $229, but that's still $129 more than apple tv. anyone have more info about the possibilities of apps?
"To the older generation, privacy is about secrecy. And, as the Supreme Court said, once something is no longer secret, it's no longer private. But that's not how privacy works, and it's not how the younger generation thinks about it. Privacy is about control."
-- http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/05/google-facebook-twitter-tec...
Octav, I've spent a bit of time staring at your signup page because it wasn't clear if you're asking for my full name or for a login (here — http://cl.ly/1E2e1S3B2y2J3R0N2r3U).

Other than that, looks terrific.
Build 1 functioning brain in silicon, and [...]

That reminds me of Chesterton's definition of Western science: "Give us one free miracle and we'll explain everything else." :)

Edit: Wish I could remember where I originally got that. Googling it digs up not Chesterton but Terence McKenna.
In my case, the fbs_APPID cookie isn't being set

instead I get this: http://grab.by/8rmQ

does anyone know why these cookies are being set? the PHP library doesn't seem to work with those.
Yeah, not saying they don't exist, but good luck finding them.
Facebook to alter policy on sharing address and mobile phone number
Yea, artificial scarcity is fundamentally flawed. I even wrote a series about the various attempts on my blog.
Travelzoo’s Groupon Competitor Already Valued at $400 Million | Yipit Blog
Of course a cheaper option is to allow remote working to those who want it, at least for most days of the week. Use the office for client meetings and the occasional get-together. That way I get to have my private office with a window, coffee machine, private snack bar, XBox console and anything else I want, and it doesn't cost you a penny.

Besides, groups of developers in large open source projects, distributed around the world, seem to manage fine.
Wow, your comment made mine go from +7 to +1.

Trading on Xetra was quite active yesterday, but certainly less than a typical Nasdaq day. You should not discount that price movement as irrelevant.

And Gruber's point on earnings releases was a separate one, IMO.
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Oh, give me a break. You don't have to be an Apple fanboi to understand the difference between "some smart analysts" and "the consensus." He's saying most analysts predict X, while a few (smart ones, apparently) predict X + $2 billion.

If you think he (or the "smart analysts") are wildly optimistic, fine. No need to beat up on strawmen; simple skepticism will suffice.