skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me this list sounds like a lot of occasions that you'd need a computer - but in actuality, my mother who is an early adopter at nothing except iPads, has been running like this since day 1.

And, as my life is itinerant, I've done multiple 6 week stretches without syncing. It works fine.
Its a programming language course in english. Am I missing something here or why is this worth reading?
Humanity is closing in on building machines to pass the Turing Test. Watson beat both champs in the demo round a few weeks ago and I fully expect him - yes, him - to beat them in the match coming up. I can't wait to watch this live. What an epic moment in the process of moving slowly from weak AI -> strong AI.

Watson can do amazing NLP (and presumably Machine Learning), which is something that the general public perceives as straight up "AI". NLP has been lagging far behind expectations for decades, but with Google's new Translate apps and Watson competing on Jeopardy, it seems like NLP is pretty close to being fully solved.

Very exciting. Very, very exciting.

Edit:

> Eventually the machine will prevail.

This sends chills down my spine.
I am not a lawyer, but I'd like to address your legal points.

Just as I don't need a warrant to view a publicly available website, he shouldn't either. What you are proposing is that it should be illegal to view public pages in a certain order or time. What is the difference of me viewing 100 of my new crushes friends pages over 2 days vs 2 years? There isn't, but the first is rifling, the second is innocent curiosity.

I don't believe he was cyberbullying anyone. However, to address cyberstalking and cyberharasamnet we first have to consider what a reasonable person would have felt had those actions been taken against us. Before the release of the data, and while this was going on, those on the list were unaware of what was occurring. Just as a reasonable person isn't threatened until they become aware of the stalking, threats, etc in real life. Being unaware of what he was doing would mean that no constitute cyberstalking, cyberharassment or cyberbullying took place.

Barr is a private citizen accessing public information and drawing crazy conclusions. There's nothing illegal about that nor should there be.
tl;dr:

The protests have a core leadership group which has pulled off at least two very clever feints. First, before Jan. 25th, they announced rallies at 20 sites within Cairo, to disperse the police; this allowed the rally at a 21st site, discreetly organized over low-tech channels (paper and face to face) to get all the way to Tahrir Square without much police opposition. Seeing that on TV, in turn, helped get the really big crowds out to Tahrir Square a couple of days later.

Much more recently, they pulled off a similar feint to establish a second encampment. They announced a march on government TV headquarters; while the army deployed to defend the TV station, a larger unannounced crowd marched on the parliament building, and set up camp right in front.
This is very much besides the point but I think that calling what you just described the end of the PC era is not hyperbole. When PCs stop to dominate personal computing – like they have ever since personal computing existed – that would be very much the end of an era. No hyperbole involved. That doesn’t mean that PCs will suddenly stop existing or even stop being made.
But once you do launch it, everything is faster than it would have been if you were performing full page loads at each step. For sites you "live" in, the application route makes a lot of sense. This is the way GMail works and people seem to like it a lot.

Unfortunately, web applications and web pages are growing increasingly divergent. It is simply not feasible to take the performance of web apps to the next level without doing away with full page loads. This is why Facebeook, Twitter et al are going the #! route. That's the cold hard truth.
Why Unattended Strings Knot (Research Paper)
I just read this after reading the "Making Crash Bandicoot" article. The contrast really highlights how mind-numbingly boring website architecture is. I gotta get into game dev!

Quora:
"So, the blue buttons are meant to reflect the blue links. Green buttons are for simple inline interactions. Grey buttons are for the least important and ancillary items. (The application of these rules isn't entirely consistent because of constant, rapid iteration.) Red is used for the logo in order to help it to really stand out from the other surrounding elements."

Crash Bandicoot:
"Red, for example, tends to bleed horribly on old televisions. At the time, everyone had old televisions, even if they were new! Crash was orange because that was available. There are no lava levels, a staple in character action games, because Crash is orange. We made one in Demo, and that ended the lava debate. It was not terribly dissimilar to trying to watch a black dog run in the yard on a moonless night."
Assuming:

We could make a complete physical copy of a brain with all state information (neural connections, blood & solute concentrations, etc.) - along with the exactly body of the person with that brain.

Result: The copy wouldn't "feel" what's happening to the original. For example, if I fly the copy around the word and burn their hand - we wouldn't expect the other to feel it.

Likewise, we may be able to copy the brain in a computer simulation but your initial self wouldn't "feel" what happens to your computer self. I think you're right in saying the copy-consciousness wouldn't know it wasn't "real".

Something like hooking your brain to the computer (like The Matrix) seems like it'd probably be the only way to make you experience consciousness - but that's of course linked to our death. Unless perhaps we could slowly replace neurons with computer-based copies over time so that the effect would be slow enough that you could adapt. Then you could perhaps over-clock the brain when all of the cells are the computer ones? Just a thought...
How is someone at Quora giving a retrospective like this? I personally don't see that the UI is so compelling or remarkable, and the site itself is a very fancy bbs.

I don't get it.
Buddhists say it's not.
This line: "Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly."

He doesn't bracket his law with exponentially to a 'certain point' or 'is currently happening'. He claims it is a law that all technological progress currently happens and will always happen exponentially.

Perhaps I am misreading him, but I interpret predictions as claims that exponential growth will always continue.

Anyway. That aside, You can't use an exponential curve to make predictions about the future if you accept that the curve will end at some point. If you accept the curve will change and you can't know the point of change then you can't use it to make a prediction.
"If it ever came time to switch payment gateway backends, in a Java application using DI you would just need to switch which implementation of your interface that the rest of your code is wired up with (either in XML, or if you are wiring up collaborators explicitly in your code, etc)."

You simply pass in the desired payment processor as a parameter. End of story.

This is part of the reason Java is such a terrible language for actually learning about programming. "Using Dependency Injection" is an absurd way of phrasing "pass in varying parameters as parameters to your function instead of using global variables". What should be the normal way of doing business has instead been elevated to Something Special (that Lesser Languages Can't Do because they don't call it Dependency Injection because they would never think of giving Passing Parameters to Functions a special name!) because Java makes something as easy as breathing and in some cases hard to avoid (try programming Haskell or Erlang with too many global variables) a production.

In Java, you use absurd and unnecessary machinery. In every other language, you just do it. It's hard to even explain how you do it because there's hardly any doing in the it. It's a parameter passed in. It hardly seems worth discussion.
4 pages with various e-mail forms does not a good "Show HN" make :/

edit to not be too snarky: I expected an actually working site, not a web 2.0-style "we're in beta, enter your e-mail address to be included in our private beta!" page
I didn't intend to imply app removal is difficult on OSX.

Merely a difference in philosophy; I can't be satisfied that any one default configuration will meet all my needs. That's all.

Hell I might spend hours themeing the visuals, that doesn't mean it's difficult or a failing of the OS.
Very true, Walmart is a bit of a loaded example.

But I found data more useful to the tech industry. If MS or GOOG pays their employees $200k/year, then employees are capturing about half of the value they create [1]. Worse than Walmart, but not that bad.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/14/congratulations-google-s...

[1] This is actually a fallacy, since it assumes all returns are due to labor, not capital.
This is going to be, for lack of better words, epic. On a personal level however, it's a reminder of how truly wondrous the future is.

When Deep Blue beat Kasparov I was a kid in an Italian high school, trying to explain to disinterested fellow students why that was a big deal.

Not even in my wildest dreams I would have imagined to be working for the company that made that and this event possible, in a different country than my own.

Sorry for the slightly off topic comment, but I just wanted to remind everyone that the future can be a beautiful and surprising time if you stick around long enough to witness it.
"There's simply no way that you can convey to a company that they need to pay you twice as much as they did when they hired you 3 years ago."

You can at smart small companies. My salary tripled in the 5 years I spent at my first programming job. I admittedly took a really small salary because I hadn't finished school and had no real world experience.
I think his proposition is roughly, that a singular technology grows on an S-curve, but as each one technology slows another picks up the baton and runs with it, and the totality (sum of S-curves) has historically looked exponential, and promises to continue.
Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior. We have no more to fear from it, than from a punch and judy show.

Cleverer and cleverer puppets will not become intelligent machines. A dedicated effort to build a massive neural cluster simulation might become intelligent, but it will think such incomprehensible thoughts as to be fairly useless to us (think intelligent rhododendon; what would you have to talk about?)

We will know when Watson is dangerous when it feels fear, angst, want. Not just an algorithm to sort facts and simulate speech.
For the sake of this example, let's say that the different gateways have vastly different APIs, messaging mechanisms, etc.

So in the code that you are passing a parameter to, you'd have to have some sort of branch based on the parameter value to choose to call Gateway A versus Gateway B - correct?

Which requires you, when switching gateways, to change the value of the parameter passed along with possibly updating the branch to be aware of what the different Gateway modules you might call would be - correct?
Using languages with runtime code generation is also quite difficult with modern consoles that don't let you change executable memory pages, or allocate new ones, which means you're stuck compiling offline. Even though changing PPU code is off limits, the PS3 does let you generate SPU code on the fly but it seems to be a capability that few (if any) use.
No, it's more likely the idea of "you don't get rich by writing checks" at work.

I think most programmers dislike the idea of what they see as kissing their boss's ass so much, that they'd rather start their own startup to get what they want (more interesting work, potentially higher pay, more amenable working conditions, etc). I can't say I blame them.
Thanks for the recommendation. Unfortunately, we've been with Braintree so long that we're on their original platform, and the gem only works with the new platform.

The migration to get on the new platform wasn't worth it for us right now. It definitely looks nicer, though, and I'm a little envious of those that signed up later and get to use it.
Free is an option. You could also slap a big "Or Buy This Better Thing" button generated by PayPal somewhere on the signup page. Thats a better option.

Why?

Because, its a great way to A/B test if what you're hoping to sell will get traction even with one person.

Set the expectation for payment early, Dan Martell wrote a solid post on why this has worked for him in the past. If you give it away free with no expectations of payment, it de-values your product. So set the expectation of payment, slap a "Buy This" button ont there.

I sold 6 tea kettles once before knowing where to get them myself. I sent an email to 3 saying sorry were out of stock (fairly true). Then I searched the web for kettle distributors. Sent the email to other 3 asking if its ok if they are a few weeks late. All 3 sold, and several dozen since then. All from a Buy Now Button on a landing page.
Which sucks, because I frequently end up "launching" it by clicking a link to a Twitter profile or tweet on another site, so every few minutes I have to wait for the entire thing to load - and I often end up with a dozen tabs containing the Twitter app when all I really wanted was a few hundred bytes of HTML containing a single tweet!
"Demands will be met", "Mubarak will meet with the people". Hopeful! But the headline should be "Mubarak may step down tonight"
Blog Comments: Revealing the Differences between Trolling and Discussing
Any word on express.js and connect compatibility?
I agree, that's what I ended up doing yesterday.
The vice president that will take over was trained in Fort Bragg, NC. He has been the head of the Egyptian side of the "extraordinary rendition" joint-US torture program.

If you want some scale for the corruption going on in Egypt, look into why Mubarak is wealthier than Bill Gates.
There's a problem with statistical significance given that the match consists only of two games:

http://www.quora.com/Does-IBM-Watson-Jeopardy-match-contribu...
> Watson is comprised of 90 Power 750 servers, 16 TB of memory and 4 TB of disk storage

4TB disk? something is wrong here.
Sci-Fi short story: Fredric Brown, "Answer" (1954)
This changes everything.

I have been trying to sell enterprise to universities. They are slow, bureaucratic, cash strapped, risk averse, willing to take time with making a decision since they do not face competitive marketplace pressures (at least when it comes to software) etc.
What a conspicuous absence of Russian books! To mention only a tiny handful:

- Mathematics: Its Contents, Methods and Meaning by Kolmogorov, Alexandrov, et al

- Shafarevich's Basic Notions of Algebra

- Arnold's Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics

Another favorite (though German, not Russian) is Brieskorn and Knörrer's Plane Algebraic Curves.
Yoshi's in Oakland CA is a jazz nightclub that is right next to the train tracks. IIRC, they spent over a million dollars to isolate the performance space.
The crazy thing is that Watson is < 5 years in the making.

On PBS last night - http://video.pbs.org/video/1786674622

The "Making Stuff" series on Nova that's been airing the last week or so is very interesting: Making Suff Smarter / Stronger / Cleaner / Smaller. Watson was first mentioned during the episode of "Making Stuff Smarter" but I guess it merits its own segment.
I worry about the scenario of building something that people are unwilling to pay for. Also the service can get rather resource-intensive so I can't afford many free users.
Guitar Hero - what went wrong?
Adobe AIR/Flex has the option to export files to iOS, Android and Blackberry. I tried exporting a demo app to Android and it worked well. I havent tried the other platforms though. Obviously, I doubt the performance would be as good as a native app but a mobile application for a school which doesn't require a game engine, I would say Adobe AIR/Flex is the way to go. But since you require Wifi triangulation or GPS, this might not be an option.
Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life.

I am a theist because I believe that human beings - flawed, fallible, finite, and mortal - derive ultimate meaning and hope from believing in something that is bigger than themselves. Now, some will say that this is a delusion and that it is vital to maintaining an intelligent outlook on life that one stay with what is observable, verifiable, and controllable as a way both of explaining and living life. All of which is fine, as my point here is not to enter into non-hacker-related topics. But, that said, when I read statements like those quoted above from this article, I can't help but think that statements such as these reflect what is merely the scientific equivalent of needing to believe in something that is bigger than ourselves as part of retaining hope in this life - this taking the form, in Singularity thinking, of something akin to attaining human perfectability via an exponentially expanding knowledge base that presumably will be applied by humanity toward good and not toward evil. Obviously, this view is grounded in the science of what computers have done and potentially can do in the future but the final step in the analysis - that immortality will be achieved and that (it would seem) all major human problems will be solved through this superior intelligence - strikes me as being more about faith than about science.
Eventually the machine will prevail

What a great ending line. The NOVA special last night was great!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth....
IT staff to be 'consolidated' as three London councils merge
Is this similar to those social clothing sites where everyone votes on a item that they would be willing to buy and is made available once it gets enough interest?
Anyone see the wikileaks connection?

Some DOD contractors were attempting to hire them to put out miss-information to discredit wikileaks..

Which might explain the original Anonymous insvestigation
Respond to Different Devices With CSS3 Media Queries
Are you going to let them resell your stuff? They may bespoke the bespoken. You have to be careful in your contract with that stuff as well. And if thats ok with you then you should charge for that.
Luckily, Quantum Mechanics has that covered: the notion of swapping 2 identical particles doesn't make physical sense (that statement has testable consequences). This notion of "no swap" can of course be extended to larger things, like a whole human body.

Therefore, a sufficiently perfect copy of you _is_ you. For instance, if I freeze your body, copy it, then unfreeze the copy, it will not even end your conciousness and replace it by a new "identical" one. It simply does not make physical sense.

Now, uploading may be a bit different, (you wouldn't run on biological neurons any more), but it still looks like it should work. First, if the upload is of sufficient quality to permit a later download (I expect it to be), then when you're back to your physical body, QM says that your conciousness didn't end, but merely lived something while in a computer. I therefore expect my conciousness not to end, even if I'm never downloaded back. Further, I strongly suspect that conciousness is nothing more than a not yet understood mathematical property of running software.

For further reading, I strongly recommend the sequence on quantum physics by Eliezer Yudkowsky, on lesswrong. The introduction about philosophical zombies is also quite interesting. It's long, but you can absorb it in chunks.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/
Watson is not a simulation any more than your brain is a simulation. Your brain is (likely) mostly just algorithms and data structures, albeit on an enormous scale. This could be wrong, but I'm betting not. What else could the brain possibly be? It's not magic.

> We will know when Watson is dangerous when it feels fear, angst, want. Not just an algorithm to sort facts and simulate speech.

Nah. Look at good science fiction to see why this is false. The most dangerous AI ever conceived might be something like Skynet or HAL 9000; machines that are cold, calculating and have no emotion whatsoever. But they do hold weapons, they do speak English and they are intelligent. I'm not suggesting we'll ever build anything like what we see in science fiction, but good writers often are able to predict - or even influence (see Clark, Asimov) - the future.

Algorithms to sort facts are indeed the beginnings of machine intelligence.
Freeze, dice, slice, scan with an electron microscope, interpolate into a 3D model, analyze into a map of connections, construct the equivalent with software neurons, simulate the sense inputs, throw the on switch.

http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3...
A lot of geeks' girlfriends are going to be disappointed on 14th (aka Valentine's Day, in case you're wondering ;) ), as they huddle around a TV like schoolgirls watching a Bieber concert.
This looks like the DEKA arm. Here is Dean Kamen talking about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoY1cItRiHA

Even if it isn't the same thing, this is a pretty interesting video.
Science PhDs Have Very Low Jobless Rates
This makes me want to read _True Names_
I deny that the human brain IS algorithms. It is neurons connected by dendrons/synapses. Right?

Small bits of it can be algorithmically simulated. Large processes can be algorithmically simulated. But to call the algorithm "intelligence" is sympathetic magic.

Algorithms work in a different way; they break in a different way; they are hard-coded so don't change. They are a simulation.
SnūzNLūz - Wifi Donation Alarm Clock
If Nokia starts making Windows phones they will be following the trail blazed by Palm. I had the Treo 650. PalmOS. They started making Windows Treos. Strategically I guess Rey figured it would buy them time to update their own OS. It didn't. And the Palm Windows Mobile phones were entirely forgettable. I owned them.
NYU Prof Surgically Installs Camera in Back of Head
snarkyness aside :)

what do you mean? I'm ultimately looking for feedback / questions on the idea based on the info provided in the site. Should i have named the HN post something different than Show HN? I read HN a lot and it seems there's no 100% right way to put your idea / product in front HN.

but yeah, feedback is what I'm after. Not to show of a launched product.
I'm not sure if you're answering my question or not. I've inspected the source of both libraries, and they both use the JS method toFixed().
There's more detail over on Al Jazeera English:
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2011/02/10/live-blog-...
I’m not an experience-seeking user, I’m a meaning-seeking human person
We all already know that this is absolutely insane.

That's $100 Million a year for the next hundred years.