skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing that the whole event showed was how the government websites don't stand up to high loads whereas the mega sites (google, facebook, twitter) have no problem with such a localised situation. To cope with emergencies like this, the relevant govt agencies will have to look at distributed architectures possibly incorporating offshore cloud based services.
Are you sure? Current human energy consumption is approximately 5% of insolation. Solar panels theoretical maximum is 25%, photosynthesis 10%.
when (and if) we will do it is even more debatable.
Show HN: Mathalon
Community Based Problem Solving Website. Users from 18+ Countries are now registered.

Would love to hear feedback on this.
It WAS supposed to be a rant.

And sure, the price movement was a "knee-jerk" reaction, and the price on US open will likely move higher - or lower. An instant drop followed by a flat market pretty much is a textbook example of the stock market reacting to unexpected events, though.
The "Rocklea (wide view)" one is particularly striking.
So 98.09% of the profiles on the site are for people who didn't sign up for it and don't want to hear from site members?

Meaning that from the perspective of a member of the site, if they contact someone on the site, more likely than not, they won't hear anything back.

Meaning that the site is unlikely to retain very many users - and so the future present value of a potential customer will be very low.

This in turn mean they can't afford to spend very much money to acquire actual users - and make the 98.08% even worse to the point where the only people to visit the site will be people trying to delete their profile and first time visitors.

One possibility: maybe they aren't actually going to do it, they are just looking for free publicity. Otherwise, why would they announce it ahead of time (or if they are just trying to inflate their numbers as a 'fake it until you make it' strategy, announce it all).
it's not real AI. Read "Fluid concepts and creative analogies". If you ask a human, abc is to 123 as abd is to... The human would probably say 124.

Ask watson the same and it would answer "jackson five".
I'm not at my computer so can't find the reference but there has been an ongoing experiment in Russia where they selectively bred Siberian foxes and after about 20 generations had a female that responded to her name and craved human attention. All her puppies (is that the right word for a fox?) exhibited the same behaviour and became more and more dog-like.

Edit: typos
> What matters more professionally is Frameworks, SDKs, Libraries, etc.

It depends. Frameworks and SDKs cannot overcome shortcomings of your language and/or language implementation (and often you don't have the luxury to switch gears, because there is only one reference implementation).

When I studied Erlang's support for concurrency, I realized how hard it would have been trying to do that in another language. Yes, you could somewhat manage to replicate that, but:

- your language implementation could lack microthreads, thus impacting how concurrency would scale;

- you may need to follow some protocol in using the framework, otherwise you could fall into one of many pitfalls, which aren't there in the language you're using as a model.
I find it really strange that the comments made here by Abinash, and those which he deleted from his blog, have a very different tone. You should have read the arrogant and immature comments that he made on his blog post. He just can't delete comments here..

I agree with a poster above, that the blog linked here is written by an immature person.
http://www.question2answer.org/
You should have read the comments over there before 50% of the comments were deleted from his blog.
that would be brilliant and uesful advice if we had a time machine...
What's the test data like ? Is it a sample of real anonymous data or random strings ?
You think Chrome is ugly and inconvenient? I think it's the best looking browser out there, and the omnibox is fantastic. The only thing I don't like about Chrome on OSX is some flash players don't play nice with it.
Direct link to the main site itself;

http://www.osqa.net/
If you'll pay me 20 a month (and give me the account info), I'll delete it for you.
Facts are not copyrightable, but a credible profile looks more like "Hi, I'm John Doe and I live in Austin, Texas [fact]. I like foo and hate bar. I'm looking for a girl/guy to love and go on long walks with. (etc)" Such text is copyrightable.
I think that there's a tradeoff between software engineers being able to work well on this specific problem, and knowing which problem is a good problem to work on. The first benefits from being isolated; the second from having the rest of the team nearby.
You are assuming here a faithful system that ,at least, let people work and move. They'll put obstacles in front of you whenever you want to do anything, you can't trade freely, don't think about industry here too, the new education system is miserable...

I'm not looking for a government, where people can hear my voice. I'm just looking for a government that just let me work (legally).

You can get abused by police for no reason.
s/lolcats/pet rocks/

Pet rocks, after all, are also cute. So, I guess, were Beanie Babies and Tamagotchis and... probably a bunch of earlier trends that I'm too young to remember.

What's interesting about lolcats, actually, is that the initial wave of popularity must have been way back in 2006 if I recall correctly. Those were the days when "Monorail Cat" and "Invisible Bicycle" had me chuckling at inappropriate moments for several days. But, like most people, I tired of them pretty quick. It's quite impressive that there's still a community dedicated to them.
I thought i saw a snake while i was cleaning out houses on haig rd. in milton, but it turned out to be a very confused fish!
Looks good!!
Some of the things/features i would love to see
1. Live tournaments or ability to schedule one
2. 1 on 1 battles possibly :-)
3. Possibly write code for problems and an automatic response whether the answer is right or not.

Good going..
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8 Camera Type Choices Explained
To learn more about how the ways that people take pictures say as much as, if not more than, the pictures themselves, read on.
I honestly don't mind the curious reactions of people. I think it's helpful to know what we felt at the time of the posting and to see people's reaction changing as answers are revealed. If I can't laugh at us, who will?

- Ben Huh, Cheezburger, Inc. Founder and CEO

http://www.quora.com/What-were-the-VCs-thinking-in-investing...
Ask HN: Localization - Just say no, do it, or do it when the time is right?
We frequently get language/translation requests for our group deal app. The problem is that we get these requests from free users mostly, and it's not exactly a feature that we're excited about adding (more importantly, we can't afford a translator now). Do we cave in, or just say no and postpone it?
The idea is to have puzzle website. There are many coding website out there. You can check out SPOJ.PL for that.
My point, is that "80 lines of javascript" is technically incorrect.

There's no point to mention how many lines of code it is, unless it's actually true.
Gah! My eyes!

Seriously, I'm useless at web design, but whoever is responsible for this really needs to understand that scattering random <b> tags severely detracts from the readability of this site.
If we're going to argue from analogy: Man, that Vanilla Ice really has a hit on his hands with "Ice Ice Baby". I'm sure he'll continue to have an equal string of successes for many years to come. I definitely need to invest in him!

This is the point: making popular memes is unpredictable. I Can Haz Cheezburgr certainly has a pretty good system in place for detecting and capitalising on new memes as they come up , but what about the meta-meme upon which they're based... the idea that it's horrendously amusing to put a big 36-point Impact caption on a random picture? If people get tired of doing that, can they adapt?
I've been thinking the same thing lately. We've just barely entered this post-PC era and it seems like SmartPhones and tablets are going to be where its at for at least the next 10 years. 15? 20? I'm not sure there's another 'next big thing' waiting in the wings anytime soon.
Touch controls would have to be pretty limited due to the lack of tactile feedback, but I could see some motion-based controls (though an ipod/iphone is a pretty expensive gadget to be swinging around).
Too nice ;) Thanks everybody.
Even excellent counterfeit money is still called counterfeit. Also, the majority of pirated apps tend to not support auto-updating, as you need to go and get a new hack and you can't get support or advice from the application's author. I would say that is an obvious way in which they are inferior.
A micro blogger to record the history of your feelings...
A micro-bloger visualize/record/stats feeling by ability to be followed/ to follow friends/people and twit it!
Not sure that the idea will help people in general! please share your thoughts...
This dude has been marked down to hell, but I think he has a point. With the self-congratulation going on in a few other threads about how entrepreneurs are better than everyone else because they create (oh I'm sorry, "hack") amazing things which make the world a better place, it's worth noting that 90% of internet traffic is complete garbage.
This is actually a fantastic description. Very well put.
maybe they are working on the secret animal version of the site
I think you are right; the years immediately following Jobs' departure from Apple will be just fine.

Five or ten years after that though? When Jobs' influence and vision has faded a little bit, maybe some new blood has come on board, and maybe some of the guys there already have gotten more traction for ideas that would previously had been shut down by Jobs?

I'm not saying it'd be a disaster, just saying.. who knows what the admittedly brilliant senior vice-presidents would do if Jobs weren't there. I guess we'll find out sooner or later.

I sincerely hope that Jobs' vision and obsession has rubbed off, because whether you like Apple products or not, their influence in the tech industry is sorely needed.
They are making it up in traffic volume, I guess.
Really? I think it is a case of mapping onto the most obvious existing word. When you end up with something you did not pay for, most people would assume you had "stolen" it.

The fact the metaphor doesn't line up perfectly is a problem, but it is the closest word I can think of that most people would understand.
Ha, I'm on the other end.
I'm more excited about the product and marketing side of this business. But alas I know no coders so I had to learn all this coding shit myself.

I'm also on the look out for a technical partner and will actively start looking once I have my prototype working.

What I plan to do though is meet them in person or via webcam first. Shoot the shit, observe how they handle different situations, get a feel for their morals, talk about normal stuff friends talk about.

You want to know the real person you're going to share your business with, not what their CV says or what their marketing talk convey.

How would they handle conflict? How likely are they to use slight of hand tricks to better themselves at others expense? What do they want to accomplish and how would that tie in with your shared business? Do they simply want to make a quick buck? Do you?
Except for people who are interested in actual hi fi, as in high fidelity -- people who wouldn't be caught dead listening to anything as lossily compressed as an mp3.

I'm no audio geek, but I can easily tell the difference between CD and mp3 for some of the music I listen to. I even have a CD of Beethoven's Ninth which I've never actually listened to because the audio equipment I have can't do it justice.
I think it's more a matter of scale. If Facebook are serving 260 Billion pageview a month then even if they were making $3.1B a year we'd only be talking about $1 CPM. That is ridiculously low by industry standards, especially considering how well segmented they can supply an audience.

As an advertiser buying on any other network I'd expect to be paying $20-30 CPM for the exposure so that's the scale of Facebook's underachievement.
Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day
No, Jobs doesn't design anything. Although, he edits everything. And that part is as crucial as the design part.
I've used them and had some good results. By "good results" I mean a 1% CTR, which is actually an order of magnitude higher than a typical Facebook CTR.
But because you can choose to pay CPM or CPC, for a high performing ad like mine I might only pay £0.20 per 1000, which means I can get a click with tight demographic targeting (and they weren't junk clicks) for only £0.02.

Try doing that on Google!

Of course, the other reason is that Facebook is the new hotness and lots of companies feel they ought to up their "social media spend". But if you're smart you can get yourself a pretty good ad deal there.
It's pretty tempting to rattle something off about the patent system with a story like this, but given that IBM has so many research facilities and an R&D budget rivaling the NSF's, I'd guess IBM has more legit patents (non-frivolous) than other company.
Maybe: "Don't rant about ignorant Americans to Americans unless you're willing to burn karma"? I guess they're all asleep now so you can get away with it. But this one is in Tokyo!

The German market just opened and Apple is now going up:

http://www.boerse-frankfurt.de/EN/index.aspx?pageID=35&I...
> The question is whether Apple can come up with the next ipod or iphone without him.

I think the question is more 'Will people BELIEVE they can come up with the next ipod or iphone without him?'. The confidence that Apple products will win out has helped drive their success and allowed them to popularise novel products like tablet computers where others could not hope to. Whether the confidence and the 'reality distortion field' will be retained without Jobs is what I see as in doubt. If they introduce another great new product - will they get the same rate of adoption?
I'm not so sure this is the case. Even though finance is usually an easier environment (e.g. the markets aren't open 24/7 so the apps usually don't have high availability) the people hiring there think that if you haven't worked in finance you can't work in finance.
That's a counterfactual, which most scientists and economists won't bother to address, because there's just no way to know.
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That actually sounds like a great work environment.

Kinda like coding at a Starbucks, where there's nonstop conversation on all sides, but a near certainty that none of it will be directed at you. White noise + Social Energy = Productivity in my experience.
The second point is the important one... news that there was a really big problem was slow to come out. Eventually BP lost 50% of its value, but it took many weeks.
Clojure Conj (not= DSL macros) video
Young bloggers
Not a particularly detailed article over at Slate posed the question as to whether details of Jobs' health should be disclosed as "material" to stockholders under the spirit (though not the letter) of SEC laws.

I don't really know, so, discuss...

[http://www.slate.com/id/2281452/ - as I said, not that detailed so I didn't submit it separately]
I disagree. I thought lolcats were funny for a week or 2. Then I moved on.

I absolutely do not find cats cute though. I'd happily kill the whole species off if I was allowed to.
This is purely anecdotal, but I've seen a wider range of ads beyond "Sign up for expensive college degree", which I wasn't al all interested in. Now I see very targeted ads that I sometimes actually click.

Increased inventory diversity = better targeting = more clicks = higher revenue ????
Latency Bandwidth Tradeoff
The click prices are ridiculous.

Expect to pay $.50-$1 per click on facebook.
Canada has advantages for someone coming from the developing world. Better internet infrastructure than many countries, educated workforce, socialized health care, a culture very welcoming to immigrants, easy access to the US market, and proximity to Canadian and US investors (particularly Bay Area and Seattle).

It's also easier to get foreign workers, generally, into Canada, so you have your pick of the local workforce, as well as the rest of the world (even Americans!).

I've worked for a startup in Vancouver that took advantage of all the above. Vancouver is one of the best places to live in the world, period, and it's especially great for raising kids or if you're into outdoor sports. So it has its charms even if you already work in a startup hub like San Francisco. You could probably do something similar for Montreal or Toronto, although it would be a harder sell. And the startup would have to be pretty hot or pursuing a unique niche.

If opportunities were equal, there would be very little reason for a startup to choose Canada over the USA. However, since the USA seems determined to shut the door here, Canada can take advantage of that.
Actually, having no "https:// into the browser address bar does not mean your password is being sent unencrypted. The password could be into an "https:// form. I discovered this when I tried registering an online bank account and was stunned at not seeing "https://. A right-click on the form, however, showed the form was encrypted, just like a note on such form said.

I'm still convinced that this is bad UI, however.

To tell you all the story, once I gave up subscribing to such online bank and switched to another one, which had proper security measures in place when dealing with passwords during registration, then the latter immediately sent me a confirmation mail with my credentials! Damage done already.

EDIT: Moreover, having a weak password isn't that a big deal provided there is a maximum attempts count. For instance, my online account password isn't that strong, but after three failed attempts, they lock your account.
> IANAL either, but anything that happens with regards to forced property acquisitions also means the person with the confiscated property has to be compensated fairly at full market value for said property.

What you say is true of acquisitions made by the Commonwealth. The Federal Constitution makes that explicit guarantee (Section 51(xxxi)) -- incidentally the High Court have taken the view that "just terms" does not necessarily mean "at market rates". My parents got diddly poop for land compulsorily acquired by the Whitlam Government near Darwin.

But the states are not bound by that guarantee and each State Constitution may or may not have requirements for just terms acquisition by the states. Moreover, State constitutions are generally amendable by State Parliaments without requiring a referendum, making them much less robust to policy pressure than the Federal Constitution.

If it so happens to be that Queensland's "just terms" rules are in an amendable constitution or are an Act of Parliament, then there would be no legal barrier to the Parliament removing or drastically reducing compensation for compulsory acquisition of land.

However I suspect land along the Brisbane river will not be acquired because of the politically poisonous nature of compulsory acquisitions generally.
> After all, we know that human brains can be built in some
> way: we have the evidence for that claim inside billions of
> skulls

Exactly. Skulls. With connection to living and feeling flesh.

> After all, we know that human brains can be built in some way: we have the evidence for that
> claim inside billions of skulls

We cannot even model the brain of the simplest worm…
ASK HN: (What) Would you pay for this Google Chrome Web App?
The thing is saying no to alot of stuff. If the voice of the new CEO isn't as hard as Steve Jobs, Apple might say yes to often, and make some not-so-great stuff.
>and if you figure in the cost of living in NYC you're probably making less.

This is hardly that simple. Lower cost of living means lower wages. That will be a wash with cost-of-living type products and services but not with, for lack of a better word, "international priced" items [1].

I don't understand why so many people in the self proclaimed capitalist hub of the world believe things like living in a lower cost of living area means you have more money.

[1] A closer word might be "luxury" items but it's hard to call something a luxury item that people of literally all classes have (e.g. an iPhone).
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David Brooks column on "Amy Chua Is a Wimp"
and if not, what's missing so that it would be worth your hard earned money?
The article and related discussion five months back http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1557209
That someone would claim to "debunk" the entire Singularity concept without showing any indication that they've ever read anything written on the topic by Eliezer Yudkowsky is laughable (in particular, Szabo doesn't appear to really grok the difference between the time scales of exponential growth in Moore's law and the exponential growth we envision when we talk about an intelligence FOOM).

Yes, if what you mean by "Singularity" is "that thing that Kurzweil says will save us all, and it will happen by 2029 because Exponential Curves Are Awesome And Go On Forever", then sure, it's a religious and borderline psychotic idea.

The rest of us realize that exponentials don't last forever, that strong AI is a hard problem, that brain-scans won't solve the whole problem even if we did have the tech to do them, which we won't for quite a while, that the ML algos we have today is not strong enough, that even defining a metric to optimize against is extremely difficult, etc. We got it - we live in the real world, AI is really tough, and we haven't solved it yet. Further, we're mostly worried about the prospect of AI, rather than naively hopeful for some geek rapture, because self-improving AI is likely to turn out quite badly for us unless we're exceptionally careful.

"Faith" only enters into this when deciding whether you believe the probability that we can build self-improving AI any time soon is significant or not, and I'd argue that it's not so much faith as slightly-educated guessing (predicting the probability of a tech breakthrough is an extremely difficult thing to do, so sure, there are high margins of uncertainty). You may disagree as to whether that probability is 1% over the next 20 years or 1% over the next 100, but we're hardly talking about the odds of virgin-birth here, so I find it completely unfair to call the whole idea "religious"...frankly, either of those probabilities is, IMO, worth worrying about, given the stakes. And you're flat out delusional if you don't admit a 1% chance of strong AI within 100 years.

I was going to more specifically tackle the other claims in this post, but ultimately, it's not worth it. When it comes down to it, Szabo assumes that the main thing that would make strong AI "easy" (or at least relatively easy), the existence of a general algorithm for reasoning, doesn't exist. If you take that as gospel, then sure, it's going to be pretty difficult to construct AI. I can even see why he'd think that, having used genetic programming and other ML techniques and finding little success (IMO we haven't pushed the genetic programming paradigm anywhere near far enough, but that's a story for another day).

Plenty of people see things differently, and think that a general purpose intelligence algorithm is within our grasp; I'd argue that there's some loose evidence that human cognition largely owes itself to exactly such an algorithm, though in our case it's probably a bit more complex than we'll be able to come up with from scratch.