skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe this would be more appropriate if the user was forced to set his own examples, though it'd be difficult to enforce a high level of 'challenge' to this test, if such a thing can be measured. The other problem with is that if you friends set their profiles to public, they help defeat your security.
This isn't the first time I've heard this gem (also repeated as broken gets fixed, shoddy lives forever). Anyone have the original attribution for it?
I quit Facebook back in May when their Turing test wasn't all that well thought out. My friends often posted pictures of cartoons and other drawings and tagged them with names. Facebook asked me to identify those. Something like this (http://www.michellehenry.fr/Emotions3.jpg) for instance. Pissed me off so much I deleted my account after taking 4 tries to unlock it.
I just created a user to say to the site's author:

Your site isn't HTML5 compliant, bro.

JUST SAYIN'.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpeople.mozill...
I'm a bit suspicious of their trends. It shows Perl significantly ahead of PHP, which is significantly ahead of Python. As a Perl programmer, I wish that were true, but I doubt it.

It also has COBOL ahead of Python up until 2008. I am skeptical of that.
What boggles my mind is that tech events in San Francisco don't print name badge automatically on admission. 0_0

I live in South Africa and pretty much any trade show or event I have gone to in the last 4 years have had name badges printed at the door on admission. Or am I missing something here?
I think there is a couple of things going on here, though. Decimalization made stock market-making less profitable for Investment Banks. And the re-regulation of stock analysis prevents banks from using research analysts to tout stocks. By making it worth less to investment banks to invest in research, every customer has to invest more in research. Arguably this isn't too bad a problem - until it comes to smaller stocks, where the knowledge-base of the market is getting hollowed out - and liquidity dries up since no-one who is not in the stock has much incentive to do the initial research.

The same thing happened in High Yield Bonds. The NASD (FINRA) brought in reporting system for bond prices (TRACE) that made trading bonds inherently less profitable for the middle-men (though much more transparent for investors). That meant that there was less incentive for the middle-men to do research, causing researchers to leave to join hedge-funds. So the end-game is a very fragmented market, where if an investor wants to sell a bond, they don't have an audience that's had any consistent commentary on the situation from a 'neutral' middleman.
My understanding of the new rule is if your app is used to consume content bought outside of the app, then your app must offer a way to purchase content/subscription through the app for the same price, with apple getting 30%.
That would be more "fair," by which I mean that it would remove the obviously computer-favored dynamic of buzzer reflexes. Of course, it wouldn't make good TV, it wouldn't really be Jeopardy!, and I suspect Watson would lose. Against normal season contestants Watson would probably fair well (in a buzzerless competition), but against human champions Watson wouldn't stand a chance.
A Cryptanalytic Time - Memory Trade-Off
For all the talk of the difficulties of playing Jeopardy! due to the "nuances of natural language" and "puns and double meanings in the clues", that did not really seem to be a factor in the second round -- most of the questions were quite plainly worded with answers easily discoverable just by searching. Accordingly, Watson performed dramatically better today than yesterday, when a larger portion of the questions did have nuance and plays-on-words in the phrasing. Note too how spectacularly badly Watson performed on the Final Jeopardy! question, where nuance _did_ play a much bigger role.

So today, we learned that machines can push buttons faster than people, and search is a great way to find answers for trivia questions. I doubt the former is a surprise to anybody alive in the past 50 years; the latter shouldn't surprise anybody who's ever used Google.
And if you read it a while ago, there is a good chance the author has added more chapters!
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=xa-4d4af7bd490341f6
You're glossing over the fact that Watson knew the correct answer most of the time. That's what this is about, and that's why this is a significant result.
You're presupposing (jokingly, of course) allegorical meaning behind the work, which Tolkien explicitly rejected.

Middle Earth was meant as a foundational myth of the British Isles. A sort of stand-in for the real history. A modern-day Beowulf.

If you're looking for parallels with The Real World, you might be better off comparing the war in LoTR to WWI, in which Tolkien served in combat and witnessed some of the most horrific combat in human history, caused mostly by industrial advances. It's a lot easier to see why his nostalgia might be piqued when you think of most of his peers getting mustard gassed, shelled, shot, stabbed, or otherwise dying horrific deaths.
I completely agree with you. I think that in the 99.99% of the cases the question of scalability is related with a pseudo-problem or at best a good problem to have.
Exception is Duke Nukem[0].

[0] http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/all/1
Also, if there is anyone who thinks silicon valley has the smartest people around, this type of stuff should change your mind.

Watson is an impressive achievement, but there are quite a few companies in Silicon Valley whose engineers could pull this off. It's more a matter of how much money management feels like throwing at it. It's great publicity for IBM, which has to put in a lot more effort than most Silicon Valley companies in order to look cool, but can afford it.
The fact that you can't delay "forever" is a cheap semantic trick. You can delay for so long that you run out of money / investor patience.

There's a vast graveyard of game companies which can attest to it.
Oh please. You can't just make up your own definitions of words and then use those definitions in discussions. There is a definition of what a company is, and it's not 'people it consists of'. The wikipedia article about Company is actually quite correct.
787 Dreamliner teaches Boeing costly lesson on outsourcing
IBM Watson Videos
HBGary used Google Apps for its e-mail services

So, this high flying super duper high tech hardcore company actually uses an external email provider for their (I suppose) super secret emails?

The more I learn about this incident the more Mr. Barr and HBGary look like a bunch of amateurish dolts that may give good power point presentations, but I for one sure wouldn't take my security business there.
For every single clue, there is an overlay showing Watson's top 3 answers, and it shows whether Watson was confident enough to buzz in. In day 2, I counted only 3 times when Watson had a confident response but was beaten to the buzzer.

None of this really minimizes IBM's accomplishment, but it absolutely means this specific presentation (Jeopardy!) lacks weight for those of us who understand what the game dynamics of Jeopardy! are. This is nowhere near as impressive a "man vs. machine" victory as was Deep Blue vs. Kasparov.
Thanks.

No - they don't partner with anyone when it comes to their content.
> Secondly, developers who might join your company are going to care.

He pretty much covered that by talking about the cool kids, and about the space he's in being about bodies.

His goals probably depend more on having average work done steadily than awesome work done when it's cool to do.
Citizen Space could potentially be closing
The one thing I dislike about Chrome is that I still find it buggy at times on my mac. Buggy in strange ways and especially with the inspector/debugger. That being said, I still use it as my main browser. Going back to FF annoys me when there are two input boxes (address bar and search) and that the tabs don't close under each other (for really convenient tab closing). Other than that I'm sort of indifferent.
> I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation

I find this hard to believe.

Why do you find it hard to believe? ASP.NET is really well documented. Is it absolutely the best documented product in the world, but it is reasonable that someone doing an investigation could reasonably believe that ASP.NET has the best documentation.
I don't see that option on Linux v.8.0.552.224. But maybe I need a Chrome upgrade. Thanks for the tip, I'll try and get it working!
It looked like Watson had the correct response about 75% of the time. That's probably better than most normal season contestants and home viewers, but I am highly confident that Ken and Brad knew significantly more than 75% of the correct responses.
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Nice work. How are you liking the flask/mongo combination?
A bigger problem (for developers and designers) is when people don't realise there's a difference between "Client" and "Designer".
I've seen similar arguments a lot lately. People are comparing ownership of the iPad to rent or lease type arrangements. Sorry, but you're the one who's just wrong on this.
IBM's Watson Dominates Humanity's Best in Jeopardy
I work for Mozilla, and we are watching Chrome. It's just not the right time to campaign against Chrome. Chrome is only eating away from IE's market share, and IE 9 could attract a lot of non-techie users.

Adopting a process-per-tab model is currently being implemented (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis), and I imagine once that's done we will be discussing Chrome a lot more.
I don't understand why the other incubators don't just copy the YC application. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's good enough. Better than losing good candidates because they didn't want to fill out yet another form.
So if you take a random dev out of the C# pool, chances are he'll be worse than a random dev in the Python pool.

That was probably true in 1995. But not today. Python has become the new Pascal/Java. Commonly the intro language in CS, so you have a lot of students who graduate using Python regardless of skill.

If you said Haskell, then probably. Actually C++ maybe more then either, surprisingly.
> don't ship the fucking thing then

I thought IE9 was still a work in progress?
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Ok if we are going to discus this all over again then it helps to first read the older thread at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2221831
I agree. Being "a leader" doesn't mean you aren't allowed to have fun anymore.

The blog post reads as, "I have some pet issue that I am not important enough to solve; so someone more important than me should solve my pet issue for me". Well, sorry. The world doesn't work like that.

(Maybe you would become a leader if you didn't spend hours of your day thinking about how one-off scripts could be hacked by a malicious server?)
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You're completely right, and I'm sick of people equating minimizing Watson's Jeopardy! success with minimizing the software/hardware accomplishment behind Watson. IBM has done something great here, but the buzzer dynamic renders Watson's Jeopardy! prowess unimpressive.

A good analogy, similar to your car vs. human analogy, is this: Hold a competition where two contestants much first pass some sort of Turing-like test. Upon passing that test, both contestants must sort one million 32-bit integers. The first contestant to finish both tasks wins.

In that hypothetical competition, it would certainly be impressive for a computer contestant to pass the Turing-like test. (The human contestant would probably have no trouble doing so.) But the sorting task would seal the door, and the computer would win every time it is able to pass the Turing-like test. The sorting task is known to be dominated by computers, just like buzzer reflexes are known to be dominated by computers.
American Public Broadcasting Infographic
None of the above. Projects are in my profile.

I think substantially identical or better products are often outcompeted either by niche selection or marketing execution, and think that if price matters in your market you already have a problem in your business plan.
Poll: How long did it take you to build your prototype?
I'm trying to get a poll from HN members to see what the typical average time looks like for you guys to build your prototype.
Less than a month
1 to 2 months
2 to 3 months
3 to 4 months
4 to 5 months
5 to 6 months
Greater than 6 months
I wrote the article and I initially offered 100 GBP (160 U.S), the domain owner counter offered with 4,977 GBP! (8,000 U.S) I think with that range difference it's an end to all negotiations.
That's my go-to argument when choosing languages.

Whenever someone says to use Java or .NET rather than the relatively obscure Ruby (or Node.js or whatever) because that makes it easier to find programmers, I always ask why they want to staff up on average to below average programmers. (Edit: sure there are good ones, just far more bad ones)

At least if they use the obscure language, you know that the programmer in question has his eyes and ears out there, finding things out on his own, trying things, reading stuff. There are a lot of cubicle programmers who simply don't; that find out about things when things are added to Visual Studio.

Not saying obscure languages are better in and of themselves (well, maybe just a pinch), just that the opposite isn't true. Easy access to droves of average to poor programmers is not a feature.
6 month ago I have quit my job a product manager to provide the exact service you are seeking - I work with startups and individuals to design and build a first version of the product they need. I have a pool of local US developers that I work with, and do rapid functional prototyping myself. If you are serious, ping me info(at)popsolete.com
Having inadvertently chosen something (almost) no one was using, except us, I mightily regret not doing a sanity check to get the big picture. It made hiring really expensive and slow.
I seem to be the only one missing this, so just wondering how it's been concluded that it was strictly due to timing? Watson didn't miss many and the one's it didn't answer, it had the correct answer most of the time. Just wondering how that means it would have gotten the lowest score but managed to beat everyone to the clicker. Am I missing something?
It's actually a little more complicated than that because there are many reasons for one company to acquire another one, and many of those reasons have nothing to do with the performance of the actual product in question.
Company? Hell, government, military, it goes on and on how many vulnerable networks are out there.
Trick question. Respond to customers, not competitors.
Cool, I will just simply tell you my opinion, in the end it is you who should make the decision, for me school is for people who don't have imagination and courage to learn by themselves. But in early age and with lack of experience it is easy to get carried away and take the wrong direction.

If you already found your passion and you are sure that whatever is it, it is what you want to do for next few years of your life. Take the 6 months off and go explore in that direction and see what you get. Otherwise if you are not sure yet, stay in school and try to find what you like to do, you still have long way and if the next 6 months are not them, be patient sooner or later you will find what you like to do. Then everything is going to be clear.

Explore and try to meet people and talk to them whether in school or off school.

Check this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

Good Luck.
I'm in Afghanistan, invited to demo at LAUNCH PAD, any ideas?
Founder can't attend LAUNCH PAD, be there virtually?
so true... i would invest into it, only if i knew if it has a future or if it will end where the free anonymous wireless idea went. (how did they call that software again for your router? i cant remember...)
I'm just cracking wise. Watson is a very impressive project. Nonetheless, throw four to seven Google researchers and engineers at this project and you'd achieve comparable results. They've been cornering the market in this area.

But instant button pressing is not terribly impressive and yet is Watson's critical advantage. This match is framed as a battle of knowledge, not a struggle for humans to overcome the massive disadvantage of their meat-based nervous system, which it is.

This is largely glossed over. Watson would lose horribly if one of its engineers was pressing the button. If its electronic advantage on the button was taken away, it would be the kind of fascinating match I and a lot of people were expecting.
Entirely true. But the point I was trying to make is that the current batch of dotcoms isn't even in the same league as the bigboys. IBM, HP, SGI(?), part of oracle, google, parts of oracle.

There's driven and then there's Smart.
You're right. However, it's not fair for you to say that they just chose not to implement it. You don't know that. (unless you have some insider info)

While yeah it's not like they lack the ability to add the feature, it's entirely possible that they have been focusing their attention elsewhere and possibly just haven't gotten around to it.
"... Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers. ..."

The key idea behind the "Freedom box" is to own your logs and not let anyone else infer without your express permission. The idea was discussed in full in his speech, "Freedom In the Cloud" at the NY Internet society, 2010FEB05. You can read speech ~ http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomIn... or listen/watch here ~ http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338
The problem, of course, is that what is considered "benevolent" is entirely up to the dictator to decide. That alone makes it a non-ideal government type.
Freedom In the Cloud
Did you get an office, free food, an on-site gym, etc., etc.? If not, then that's what people call "not very nice" these days, at least for programmers.
Watson has no clicker advantage. There is a human backstage that decides when Alex Trebek has finished speaking, and he lights up a board so the players know when they're allowed to click in. Watson gets the same signal and has to also press a physical button. There is a 300 ms delay penalty if you click in too early, and there was a question in tonight's show that seemed very much like Watson knew the answer but couldn't click in. He may have been estimating the clicker and getting it wrong.

While his mechanical finger might be a few ms faster than a human hand, it does not provide any significant advantage to him.
http://www.premium-cola.de/ is my favourite.
http://www.fritz-kola.de/ comes next, then afri cola.
what is this article about? It is totally random, not edited. It clearly lacks lack of thought.
I'm not saying I agree with this move by Apple, but it's worth mentioning that browsers/the internet =/= the app store.
I didn't want to feed attention to the particular domain if for some reason my post gets enough attention elsewhere.

But needless to say the domain as it stands parked, gets 30 hits a month, according to the broker(sedo).

The domain in question is a combination of three words in the following list:
fun, video, happy, great, media, top, 10, easy, clip, cd

I ended up settling for a .net domain also made up of the previous words. Cost: The regular $10 U.S per year from a registrar.
You are completely wrong to justify people using the same passwords in multiple places because it is convenient.
As Angel Investing Booms, So Does the AngelList
Best one I know is the Silicon Valley HackersDigest: http://thehackersdigest.com curated by Santiago (@dfect).

covers lots of bay area user group meetups, hackathons, & hacker dojo events.
Rewards for Interaction on Social Networks - semilshah's posterous
Lots of things that you or I think are unique and special can be modeled as commodities. VCs model startups as commodities when they're preparing forecasts. Recruiters model high powered executives as commodities when they're preparing an interview pipeline. Like all abstractions, it's sometimes useful, and sometimes misleading. Certainly it's nothing worth getting excited about as a passing comment by the author.
anyone else thinks google could produce a better watson on a weekend?
google because of the bigtable access to basically everything ever written (books, news, meds, tweets, groups, oh and the whole friggin internet)
Hey, wait a minute. Just what are you trying to say here? That business and technical people do better working together than ignoring each other? Next you'll tell me business people are human beings and not drones some cruel hacker made to torment other hackers.
Leaders of the People’s Media: The Top 50 Social Media Blogs
harakiri.
The Last Ring-bearer - English Translation
Hopefully both :). In reality, I just needed to make the headline more concise.
Tungsten shell inlaid Ring lady's jewelry with shell inlay
They are talking mostly about the escrow, which is held back payment to cover any legal issues that come up. 10-20% of the purchase price is typical.
Why I Chose Python as a beginner
Edward Tufte's 1-day course in NY $140 March 4, 6, 7, students & faculty only
. <- if this period is my point, then what you're saying is somewhere on a completely different website (probably digg :-)

I'm saying that maybe people should think outside the acquisition box. I hear that some businesses actually make money by making something people will buy.
I'm already doing a research on 3 big names in the web framework competition (Yii, Django and Rails), and would like to share my experience in a longer animated movie.

My observation is that it generally depends on what kind of people you work with (their experience and their geekiness matters the most), you prefer stability over bleeding-edge, what support you expect from the community, and more importantly, what the technical requirements are for your application.

The language itself (PHP/Python/Ruby/other.) has almost the least impact on what you should choose, in my opinion.

(The movie won't be available till next year, sorry.)
If you do client work, you gotta be prepared for these questions and more.
Frankly it's instructive to have a high profile snafu.

And how can you get upset with someone with that twitter pic?
We'll try to make it relevant. It's still evolving in our heads now. Probably a combination of programming meetups, hackathons, and possibly a cool party or two. Depends on what people want to hear about.

Going to try to swing more towards tech things and away from businessy things.

What kind of stuff do you want to see on the list?
Come on, outside of these academic exercises, IBM is now just a giant consulting firm.
In what aspect do you seek similarity? Project management tools, company philosophy, company with a book or two, company with a design blog?

37signals rightly makes designers addicted to their culture, but if you ask me, I don't like their products.

I bet there are tons of companies in Korea whose products I would not like.