skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had to read the original paper in the first week of college, so my knowledge may be a little rusty, but wasn't the paper titled: Computing Machinery and Intelligence?

I'm sure the question was asked: Can machines think? But passing the Turing Test doesn't answer this question. It answers a different question: What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game? Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?

Its up to you if you take an affirmative answer to those questions to also answer the question it replaces: "Can machines think?" The imitation game does not aim to proof anything to this point. It aims to support its replacement questions, which we have to take at face value: that imitation is just as good (for all sense and purposes) as the real thing.

Also, you write:
>And how will we know that Watson actually feels fear? The answer to this type of conundrum is simple and well-known: a Turing test.

If I make a chatscript that tricks you into thinking it was a person feeling fear, by your own logic, you would deem that chatscript to be thinking and actually capable of intelligent conversation, even if you were told afterward it was just some lines of code, feigning you with a (if input, output: yes), it still passed the test, so your answer is: those binary bits must feel fear (or you agree that you apply the Turing Test where it makes no sense).

What entities are really feeling and how to communicate this, has no simple known answer. There have been century-old debates about Qualia. The answer certainly isn't an imitation game, if you insist it is, you are equating feigning with truly possessing. (Or you are suggesting I am a P-zombie and I take offense to that!)
It's more impressive when companies add people to their board who add a perspective other than the entrenched (dare I say evil) mindset of their competition. An example: Chipotle adding Bill Niman, an advocate against factory farming, fast food and cheap meat. A good move for Groupon would be to add someone who speaks for small businesses--the main Groupon customers--instead of a major corporation.
Classes Are Premature Optimization
The boolean equivalents of non-boolean values are well-defined and fairly simple in Python, and I believe it's encouraged (or at least extremely common) to use them as such.
"There's a big misconception that somehow security firms should strive to have absolutely perfect security, which is completely wrong."

I wouldn't use a dentist with bad teeth. I wouldn't get my hair cut by somebody with a bad hair cut. I wouldn't let my garden be tended by someone with an ugly yard.

You're completely right, they don't have to have absolutely perfect security, but it's a business card in the same way that getting all your data hacked and posted to the Pirate Bay is an anti-business card.
Do you mean VMs for IE9, the final release whenever it goes live? I haven't heard anything otherwise, so I would assume, "yes". We're very serious about Compatibility, and making it simple for web developers to build websites, so I would honestly be really surprised if we stopped offering VMs. That said, the correct answer is, "I don't know".
It's because HN doesn't have to show pgview growth to investors or sell it to advertisers that they're able to make a decision like this that ultimately improves the quality of the site (probably at the expense of drives of traffic)
I've setup a test alarm and nothing happened i.e. I haven't received a call ... I'm assuming it's not working for my country (as is mostly the case with such things :\)
Historically speaking, the majority of innovations take place as a consequence of war. Advancements in aircraft, electronics and industrial processes, medicine are all prime examples. Read up on the technological breakthroughs that were expedited by world war II that might have other otherwise not taken place. Think about the mass production of penicillin and skin grafts. Necessity breeds innovation.
It's not a loaded question, it's a statement of fact "100 upvotes", implied conclusion "community wants this", and invitation to provide alternative explanation "question mark".
is this a joke? seriously, who are these guys (either CIA, or this post's authors) kidding?

it all reminded me of all those Castro assassination attempts, each more perverse than previous, and of course all a complete failure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/638_Ways_to_Kill_Castro
Fair point. I understand. However, some people today are actually accepting Bitcoin as a method of payment. Not everywhere. Amazon doesn't accept it. Your local water utility doesn't take it. But somebody takes it. And then there are ways of converting Bitcoins back into say US dollars. And then you can pay Amazon and your water utility in dollars. And so on. It is happening already.

In prisons, cigarettes are often used as a form of accepted currency. Weird but, as you said, cigarettes have functional value before and beyond their arbitrary assigned role as currency. Now take these little pieces of green-ish papers in my wallet, with the funny markings on it. I heard a rumor that others will take it as a unit of payment, even though in reality, it's just a little piece of paper with some markings on it. It's actual functional value could maybe be that of a piece of tissue paper to wipe my ass. Except it's not very good at it. So I wouldn't even use it for that. The US government says, "Forsooth and yeah verily, these pieces of paper shall be the currency we use!" and couple that with a promise to accept it themselves as a unit of payment, and therefore, poof, it now has value.

Last point, if you parachute onto a tiny uncharted Pacific island and contact a lost tribe there, and offer them $20 USD for their food, they will most likely say, "Sorry, we only take melons and womenfolk as currency. We don't take US dollars, and we don't take American Express." Lesson: what is accepted as currency varies by individual and culture and time period. It's totally arbitrary.
This is a bit off topic, but what are your opinions on the validity of the 80 character width restriction? I think the 80 character limitation is increasingly rarer to actually encounter these days. Even people developing via a shell will almost certainly have much more than 80 characters of width to play with.

We've finally accepted that web developers can expect visitors to have a higher resolution than VGA, and those are potentially non-tech-savvy users. Can't we expect developers to have more than 80 character width editors? Plus, I think splitting lines is pretty ugly.
I agree that companies with 3-100 employees will just not appear in SP500.

However, Mercury Interactive was included when it had around 1000 employees. 1000 is a lot, but you can still learn by comparing a company with 1000 employees to HP with 300,000.
I agree with everything the author said save this:

> "Then only allow people to access others they are likely to match against."

This only works if you are 100% confident that your matching algorithm is infallible. The odds of this being the case is about 0%.

I've thought about this problem some, and I think there are a few unacknowledged issues:

- Who you will get along with, and are a good match for, is often different from who you think you will get along with. Dorky Dillon, taking from the author's example, doesn't want page after page of plain janes similar to himself - like all humans he wants to date upwards... even though it is against his long-term interests and reduces his "efficiency" in the system.

- We have solid predictors of long term relationship success. Similar politics? Check. Similar religious views? Check. Suffice it to say, the odds of a hardline Republican and a extreme Democrat working out in the long run is pretty low, but would they enjoy hanging out for 5 minutes? 10? A month? Part of the dating site's job is to find dates, long term relationships build themselves out of that. IMHO there's a big difference between long-term compatibility (that the poor lovebirds will discover for themselves with or without your algorithm's help) and short-term compatibility (e.g. the ability to carry a conversation through dinner that won't put the other side to sleep). We have good predictors for the former, but IMHO not so much for the latter... and the latter is also much harder to infer.

So far dating sites - and even the vaunted OkCupid is guilty of this - conflating personality with opinion. Personality is what matters most in the initial stage, but none of the sites are collecting meaningful information on it.

I almost feel like matching people based on relationship compatibility (i.e., mid to long term) is the wrong way to go. IMHO it's a far better bet to predict whether or not two people can get through dinner without trying to kill each other... and just send them on a date. If they click, great. If they don't, spin the wheel again. The modern dating website, with its hyper-focus on long-term compatibility seems to be optimizing prematurely.
Also check out Aleph by Zach Tellman https://github.com/ztellman/aleph

It's an easy way to do websockets in clojure.
A quarrel -- Pygments is written in Python, and is appropriately modular. Why did the author use subprocess and create new Python interpreter to run Pygments, when he could have just imported it and run it directly, without kicking off a new interpreter?
This is going to be a big problem for companies that are doing analytics with twitter data. If I were twitter I would allow other companies to sell their data so that developers have other ways to obtain twitter data. Having GNIP be the only reseller of twitter data will keep the price too high. Maybe twitter wants to discourage people from accessing twitter through other platforms thereby forcing people to have to go through #newtwitter. What ever the reasoning, this results in less innovation on the twitter platform.
The first section is pointing out list comprehensions as a better syntax than lambda, I believe. Also, the zen of python has been around for a long time: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/.

There's an import statement that will print it I believe, but I'm not sure exactly what it is.
Does the universal sim mentioned in this article mean that it would be possible to have a tethered iPhone not locked to any one network? It could thus potentially work like a multi network MiFi. Imagine an app that tells you which data signal has the fastest speeds and allows you to switch between networks seamlessly. Perhaps Apple will build it into the OS..?

I know that there are broader implications for the market if Apple does release such a device. But it just occurred to me that you could potentially manage multiple pay as you go accounts for data with such a device and always have a data connection. Such a feature could lead to a more ubiquitous mobile web experience for many of us. This I think would be possible in the UK where most places, apart from the remotest areas, allow you to get at least some data signal from one of the five main networks.
The Boston Hack Day Challenge
Creative knowledge workers make more than those operating their creations. And companies that can really scale have many more of the latter.
Email spammers try to open massive amounts of webmail accounts and then exploit those accounts to send tons of email spam. Do a search like [gmail accounts in bulk] to see people trying to spam the Gmail sign-up process. Things like a real-life phone call or phone number/SMS add friction and make it harder for spammers.
It's fairly hard to tell from the graph, but it seems that if you look at any particular industry, the gradient is much less steep.
Mobile trends expose
I'm in London next Tuesday and Wednesday - if you email me and we can make the arrangements, I'll buy you a coffee or other beverage of your choice. Email in the profile - take note of the comment about anti-spam.
Lots of spare time
Show HN: My super-viral threewords.me clone
The following HN post prompted me to make this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2168220

I have created http://onememory.me

Alright, so it's not super-viral. It has been online for about 3 hours, so far. I made two or three tweets about it, and posted it on my Facebook wall.

Within the three hours, I've seen ~200 unique visitors and had only 31 of them register. A very large percentage of that traffic all came from Twitter. Not many people seem to be sharing their URLs by way of my "tweet this" or facebook share buttons, though. I'll be making those more prominent soon.

It's a similar concept, but instead of describing people in 3 words, you just share a memory that you have about them with them. After reviewing some of the data coming in, I'm not sure if that concept is made very obvious by my wording on the site. Many people left their memories of themselves on my page. Haha.

Anyways, just thought I'd try this out and make one. Maybe it'll go super viral, too! (nobody I ask in person has ever heard of threewords.me, so it may be a new thing in my area)
But it is more than that. In my opinion there is kind of a nasty aversion in start up culture to permanence. Think food trucks vs opening a restaurant, outsourcing vs managing in house, renting a space vs building one, tele-commuting vs a vibrant office. It's not evil or anything, but in the aggregate I think it does lead to less commitment--building the type of foundation that other brick and mortar business do. Kind of a sad example is Amazon and their crazy Amazon Associates schemes to avoid paying taxes. Does it make sense from a maximizing shareholder value sense? Definitely. Does it maybe skirt some ethical obligations as a business and as people? Maybe.
Clickable: http://onememory.me/

My page: http://onememory.me/ryancole
Seems like it might be down. I tried sending an example to my cofounder because I wanted him to answer the phone and have a rooster scream into his ear but so far all I've got is an ajax spinner going. Now all the giggling I was doing on the other side of the office just seems extra creepy.
Enlightened man, you have my vote!
I'm not a scientist, but isn't it super cold in space, just above absolute zero? If you can keep the (direct and hot) sunlight off the boxes with reflectors, I'd think the ambient temperature would be far lower than anything attainable by earth-bound datacenter cooling systems, so therefore radiation would be a most excellent cooling system. In fact, you might have the opposite problem, and have to figure out how to reliably prevent the boxes from freezing when not exposed to sunlight.
Indeed it was

Update - I finally received my rooster call and it was glorious
Regardless of your question, the answer is that it's an appsite.
Yeah, I don't think you can use i % 2 as an equivalent of i % 2 == 0. Maybe it's a python 3 thing, but on my 2.6.1 the mod operator just returns the remainder, it doesn't change its output if it's a boolean context (which would be perlish and highly unpythonic).

I think i % 2 is just straight up incorrect.

If we're talking about style, I think i % 2 == 0 is much more clear than (not i % 2). It says explicitly that the remainder of i divided by 2 is 0.
20-line python Valentine's day gift from TotalFinder
Are you working for github yet?
> I believe it's because it's far harder to find people with good people skills than find people with good technical skills.

I disagree emphatically. Good people skills are far more common than good technical skills. However, it is incredibly rare to find someone with both the technical skill and the people skill to be a technical manager.
I see a Reddit icon next to "Recite the top technology stories."

Can it tell us the HN frontpage as well?
It's amazing how many web ui's fail at navigation hierarchy when its a solved problem (see Apple UIs like the Finder, iPhone and iPad).
There is a bug in #1. The condition should be `i % 2 == 0` to get even numbers:

def halves_of_evens(nums):
for i in nums:
div, mod = divmod(i, 2) #NOTE: it might be slower
if mod == 0: #NOTE: `not mod` is not explicit enough
yield div

#2: Function level import is a bad practice though it might be justified in this case.

#3: `users` is not defined. `sqlalchemy` names are not defined. The file should be opened for writing in the json example.

#5 It is simpler to allow the animal to know its kind:

def identify(animal):
return animal.__class__.__name__

or just:

animal.kind

#6 `elem.xpath('./a/@href')` is simpler than

[a.attrib[’href’]
for a in elem.find(’./a’)
if ’href’ in a.attrib]

Also `elem.iterlinks()` could be used
http://codespeak.net/lxml/lxmlhtml.html#working-with-links

There is no `lxml.CSSSelector` (python-lxml 2.2.6-1). Use `elem.cssselect`

#7 You don't need to add `ifmain` stub in every module:

$ python -mdoctest module_with_doctests.py
$ python -munittest module_with_unittests.py

# 8 & 9: The first variant of `make_counter()` won't work without `nonlocal i` -- it leads to `UnboundLocalError` otherwise.

Despite the fact that it works on my machine on all available Python implementations such code should be avoided:

assert float(’0.20000000000000007’) == 1.1 - 0.9 #XXX horror!

# 10 & 11: Use stdlib's version:

try: import json
except ImportError:
import simplejson as json

It is a matter of preference but it makes testing more predictable.

#13 `__builtins__` is not defined on jython:

try: import __builtin__ as builtins
except ImportError:
import builtins # py3k
Very interesting, I assumed someone would be working on something like this. I guess it's a big market, if you can convince bigcos to trust the phone to be secure.
Developing Facebook's New Photo Viewer
Agreed. It looks like you can't work at zappos without at least 15 pieces of flair. You want to have flair, don't you?
I can think of one valid reason why managers get more than programmers. Jobs don't pay people based on the value they're providing the company. They pay based on supply and demand. The best managers are ones who have been programmers before. Now how do you incentivize programmers to be managers? One possible way is to give them more money.
Introduction to Nanotechnology
"... That Wiki link is rather devoid of information about the Marathon des Sables ..."

It's always a balance here to go to the original technical source or a general one. I read http://www.darbaroud.com/uk/html/mds/general/uk_26mds_regula... but most might want a quick overview.

"... I'm not sure how the Foreign Legion factors into the race ..."

A fair portion of the participants are military - I know of ex Legion who have completed this.

"... would know, as I ran it in 2009. ..."

What time did you complete in? You gave the UK url where did you train to acclimatise to the heat?
Try now. Server was having trouble with the traffic.
The CSRF token is generated and stored in the user session, so rather than just X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest, you now also get an X-CSRF-Token: <some token stored in the user session>.

Rails doesn't check for XRW anymore; it just cares that you passed a valid CSRF token through, either as a POST variable (normal POST/PUT/DELETE) or in the X-CSRF-Token header (AJAX).

In case you're wondering, yes, this does make caching with Varnish a bitch and a half.
Try again now, the server was having problems with the traffic.
Try again, the server was having problems with the amount of traffic.
It's loaded because it sets up and destroys a straw man. The great-great-great-grandparent never argued that the community doesn't want this, only that it's not supposed to.
anyone figured out what does it do? i ran it for 1 minute, no results.
I pretty much agree. Raising awareness is a good thing. However, as far as actual implementation, Do Not Track seems about as useful as the Evil Bit. All it means is that well-behaved services have agreed to not track you when you've flipped this switch. What about the not-well-behaved services? It seems that potential danger from them is even greater.
It is very hard to define "production ready". I think that one could say that a new version of a software tends to have a lot of bugs. The more work you put into fixing this bugs (assuming you are not adding new code), the more stable it starts to be, and discovery of new bugs is more and more rare. It does not mean the software is bug free, but that the bugs that it contains are either edge cases that is rare to run across, or they manifest very rarely as real world consequences. I guess that what we call stable is just the state where no obvious bugs arise in normal usage and at the same time is pretty rare for the developers to discover, get notified, and fix, new important bugs.

It seems like that under this assumptions node.js is stable enough, but what are you doing with it? Maybe it's not going to be "mission critical", but good enough to run production web applications.
Something tells me that if someone at 37signals put up a huge green and blue tent around their desk, they wouldn’t get a high-five in the hallway. The unspoken message to 37signals employees is this: “Don’t touch. Don’t put your stamp on this office.”

Or maybe the 37signals employees had the good taste to pass on turning their workspace into a kindergarten classroom when given the option.
Why the Arduino Won and Why It’s Here to Stay
In the future ;)
99 problems but a pitch ain't one.

pitch, please
I have an unhealthy amount of love for this.
Despite Leave, Jobs Keeps a Hand on Apple
That's the recruiting pitch they use, but in all honesty, I think it's bogus. Things have changed. Researchers are now more likely to take a job elsewhere than volunteer to be locked away in the depths of Langley. We have no grand enemy and those capable of developing such technology are choosing to work for contractors instead

Background on this device: has been declassified for some time and it's main defect was that it can not function in over 2-3 knots, both from an acoustical recording quality and navigation standpoint.
That's a great feature for bigger projects.

I would love to see a similar grep-type feature, where I can quickly search through the files in a repository for text. (Yes, I know there's advanced search, but that's so disruptive to my code reading.)
>Also in terms of stability ive yet to hear of a jvm based project with 99.999% uptime.

Azul systems has said that for many clients, they've achieved perfect reliability in terms of uptime, and that the only reason they don't have five nines uptime is because deployments happen often enough that it doesn't count as uninterrupted uptime.

> Finally, I wait anxiously for the day that a single jvm can handle as many concurrent processes as a single erlang execution environment.

It sounds like you are talking nonsense. Do you understand that a 'single jvm' is one process, so to say that a single jvm can handle as many concurrent processes is meaningless. Do you mean threads? I'm quite certain the JVM's thread scalability is much higher than erlang's vm. Are you familiar with the architecture of either?
Not really, the streaming API is key for this and this says nothing about being granted additional streaming API permissions. In analytics terms being able to stream based on keywords and follow users is much more effective than anything having all those queries was giving.
My favorite feature is that it's around $60 dollars cheaper than Textmate.
Ooooh: "Fail Early, Fail Fast"
It created coupon codes for free licenses to TotalFinder e.g.

http://sites.fastspring.com/binaryage/product/totalfinderfre...

This does not look legit. There are 175,760 possible permutations of coupon codes, which looks to me they are trying to brute-force which coupon codes work. I'm not downloading a copy.
Don't say you're looking for students from all majors

Why not? If you're smart and are interested in programming, it's quite possible that I am willing to "take a chance" on you. It doesn't really matter if you studied data structures or English literature; CS majors have as much experience writing real software as English majors do.