skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Overall, I'll say that the general sentiment of this panel is half true.

On the one hand, machine learning research has grown to such a large field that the signal to noise ratio has dropped dramatically. Lots of people try to squeak out another ICML or AAAI paper by making an incremental improvement that gets 94% accuracy instead of 92% on some set of benchmark tasks. This phenomenon is true across almost all academic disciplines, however, and is more an indictment of the "publish or perish" environment than anything else.

On the other hand, some of the things these (famous) researchers are noting is complete FUD:

>The answer is that there was a lot of progress in the 1960s and 1970s. Then something went wrong.

Yep, things got hard. People early on thought that the difficulty of picking fruit would increase linearly over time. If they could pick all this low-hanging fruit in such a short span of time then surely in X years we'd be at point Y! Unfortunately, it turned out that the landscape was much steeper and fraught with local optima.

As a machine learning researcher, I do try to focus on high-level problems that haven't be tackled before. My startup[1] is an example of that, and the extensions to it that I'm researching are as well. But does it really count as revolutionary from an academic sense? Probably not.

The fact is that at this point, everyone has thought of something closely related to whatever you want to work on. Even if you've found an institution that enables you to explore freely, big impacts are really hard to come by these days. And when they do, older academics like the ones on this panel don't want to give credit because it's just another incremental improvement in their eyes.

I suppose it's just frustrating to hear these guys sit at a panel and complain that AI researchers need to get to work-- they're AI researchers! Why aren't they doing anything? They have tenure and all the free time in the world. But they don't want to do that. They want to sit back and judge people while pointing to contributions they made forty years ago as proof that they can judge.

Being critical of others' work while not producing anything of value is just mean-spirited. Put up or shut up.

[1] http://effectcheck.com
100 Per Developer, and now it's open source, meaning any developer can package it distribute it via this method.
80% is a gross overestimation.
What about printable?

One of my major uses for Readbility was to format articles so that I could print them out for later reading. But a recent change to Readability made it so that (at least under Firefox) the browser print function will not break an article into multiple pages. And that makes it pretty useless for printing.

Whatever the problem is, Readable has it, too. Can something be done about this? (Also, does anyone know what the problem is?)

In any case, improving the readability of the web is a worthy goal. Thanks for your efforts.
I'm curious as to why you care.
This means that now anyone can implement PowerShell on any platform they want to. We know some of our most passionate customers sometimes work on platforms that can’t run PowerShell today, so when writing this specification, we wrote it in a platform neutral manner.

We hope to see implementations on all of your favorite platforms. This would benefit the industry, our partners, and our customers. We told you that you should learn PowerShell and we would do everything we could to make it the best investment you ever made. Specifying the language and enabling the community to implement it is yet another step in that direction.

It's interesting how many open source projects are expected to, and do, port their projects to Windows, but Microsoft expects the community to do the work of porting their projects to other platforms. Now obviously, Microsoft isn't usually the one doing the expecting, but Microsoft has a lot more resources than any random person doing a port in their freetime.

I remember when Apache wasn't available for Windows; and I remember when Microsoft "let" the Mono team write their Silverlight port.

This is all just marketing. They can say they are open and working with the community, but they are offering something empty: anyone who wants to use Powershell, or has experienced its value, is already working on Windows and most likely isn't interested in working on any other platform. And thus there is no one (or close to no one) who is both interested in doing and qualified to do a port. And I think Microsoft has shown their track record of working with the community only to continuously leave community products at least one step behind the moving target that is their "standard", often defined as whatever the latest from Microsoft offers. Everyone else's ports are seen a lesser because they are behind the "official" release.

Now, obviously, different implementations are good for the standard and market overall, and only serve to strengthen it from a diversity standpoint. But it's interesting that Microsoft is actively encouraging forks of their projects when they've, in the past, cited forks as a deficiency of open source.
maybe they should say: "This would benefit Microsoft, our partners, and our customers"
The financial geeks are conning the tech geeks…again
How many imprints does Amazon run?
I like Blekko. The question shareholders should ask Steve Ballmer is why this small team is out innovating the Bing guys with a tiny, tiny fraction of the money they've spent. Just aiming to recreate Google's search isn't going to win the race.
This isn't pointed at you, keyle, but here PowerShell seems to be one of those things that's universally panned by people who don't understand it, or who refuse to give a serious chance to anything that isn't a traditional Unix shell...

To answer your question, PowerShell's big win is that it's an object-oriented shell on top of .NET. Where the Unix shell pipes flat data, PowerShell pipes .NET (and COM) objects.

In practice this means things that may require complicated and often fragile text-wrangling in the Unix shell are straightforward and robust in PowerShell. For example, suppose you wanted to kill all processes with a private working set greater than 1 GB:

ps | ?{ $_.PM -gt 1GB } | %{ $_.Kill() }

Here ps returns a collection of all current processes, then pipes it to the where-object cmdlet (abbreviated "?") which filters the collection to those with a private working set greater than the given size. The filtered collection is then piped into the foreach-object cmdlet ("%") which invokes the Kill() method on each object passed in – these are real .NET objects being passed around, so you can invoke methods, set properties, etc.

You can get the same result with a Unix shell script, but you have to be careful to count the columns output by ps correctly, skip the output header, pass it through awk, save the corresponding PIDs and then invoke the kill command on them... and then it all breaks if you run it on a different Unix system where ps outputs a different formatting. In practice you usually leave the shell environment and write a Perl or Python script instead for this sort of thing.

In PowerShell you can directly instantiate .NET and COM objects, and you can implement your own cmdlets and modules either in the PowerShell scripting language or in any .NET language like C# or F#. So e.g. you can access the .NET class libraries to get the time as so:

[System.DateTime]::Now

And this makes PowerShell handy for interactively developing .NET class libraries (at least until C# gets a real REPL, and if you aren't using F# anyway). Of course this object-oriented approach is all the more necessary on Windows, which is inherently an object-oriented system (think OLE automation, WMI, etc., let alone .NET) than it is on Unix-based systems.

Some people will complain about the PowerShell scripting language... and sure, it's not perfect, but I think the team did about as good a job as possible satisfying the various requirements involved in building a new Windows shell language that could be used both interactively and as the basis for writing scripts. Superficially the language is heavily influenced by Perl, and while I'd still rather use Perl for "serious" automation tasks, PowerShell gets the job done... and it's nowhere near as ugly as scripting in the traditional Unix shell, nevermind the old Windows command shell.

For more on the design rationale, in the words of one of PowerShell's creators:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/573623/powershell-vs-unix...
Yeah, I was probably writing back more to assure anyone else reading it that I wasn't bashing you :)

Thanks for some great work, by the way!
Ask HN: Hiring for a non-technical position
How do you hire for a non-technical (non-executive) position at a startup? How do you look out for and qualify candidates, especially if their background is non-traditional, non-cookie-cutter?
They've taken a great OS and put it in a somewhat poor smartphone. I found they keyboard on the initial Pre to be very bad. I've heard it has improved since then, but as they saying goes, first impressions count a lot.

I really thought with HP they would make significant enhancements to the hardware, but so far I haven't seen anything too compelling.
Still, it's a great OS and I wish them luck. I may take another look at it in the tablet form.
"And that I'll be totally dependent of my children, since it's unlikely I'll ever see one cent of my pension."

Have you considered saving money in addition to your ephemeral pension?
I don't see them as opposed to statistical techniques, at least in this interview, just a focus on methods as ends-in-themselves, rather than tools to be used.

Plenty of statistical-AI people themselves hold similar views on that subject, and almost every machine-learning or AI conference has a panel or keynote that expresses dismay at what the field looks like (balkanized, too focused on methods rather than problems, too focused on incremental algorithm tweaks).

For example, Leslie Pack Kaelbling's AAAI-2010 keynote had the thesis that we need to stop focusing on incremental algorithm improvements in tiny sub-areas of AI, tested on implausibly pure toy benchmark problems with a focus on optimality proofs, and start focusing more on putting things together into integrated systems that handle real-world problems, which will probably require more hybrid methods (like statistical-AI + logical-AI). Though she expressed it a bit more diplomatically, with the tone that we're not fulfilling the potential of the field with the current approach, and has actually done some concrete work following her own proposal. (Slides: http://people.csail.mit.edu/lpk/AAAI10LPK.pdf)
And bash is so much superior ?
I know absolutely zero about WebOS development so this is probably a very naive question. Isn't Node.JS available to WebOS, couldn't you use something like http.request()? http://nodejs.org/docs/v0.4.7/api/http.html#http.request
Could libfaketime be used to speed-rip streaming videos where the rate limiting is done on the client rather than the server?
How many Russians on Y Combinator? Does Hacker News better that Habr?
Hello, everybody! I`m far away from Silicon Valley, but find this site very interesting. My question is simple: are there Russians/ex-Soviets on this site? Uncle-Sam(Russian irony in nickname?=)) posted Russia related news at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2507006. And question for them(if they are). Do You agree that Ycombinator is more informative even for Russia(not local news, of course) than habr?
My last and only post about Russia and hacker-news users. Just want to check status.
"AI" nowadays is a mess. I could write a book on why I feel this way, but a lot of it has to do with the prevalence of narrowly defined, domain-specific algorithms that need to be heavily tuned to fit your usage parameters. Even then, you can't always be sure they'll work well.

AI is not an easy problem, otherwise we'd have made more progress by now. And unfortunately, barring a major breakthrough, there won't ever be a "one size fits all" approach to AI (or at least a less fractured algorithm landscape).

It's all pretty disillusioning, especially if you started out as a bushy-tailed CS undergrad with visions of a grand unified theory of artificial intelligence.
Has anyone put it on a Cydia repo yet?
HP has been shipping Splashtop (as "HP QuickWeb" and "Voodoo IOS") and on many models for several years now and nobody cared. Why would they, when Windows is right there?

WebOS (though better than Splashtop) faces much the same problem. It's going to take bolder moves than just making it available.
The site has great interactive tutorials (well in hungarian) if you want to learn some haskell. Check them also! [1]

I learn by that in school, so good you posted I almost forget my homework :)

[1] http://pnyf.inf.elte.hu/fp/Index.xml
I'm not aware of the problem you're describing. And I can't seem to reproduce it.

Could you provide more details, please? -- URL of an example article, more details on what exactly happens that shouldn't happen.

If you'd like, you can get in touch, to do this (http://readable.tastefulwords.com/about-and-contact/) -- as a matter of fact, it would probably be preferable, as opposed to using HC as a bug reporting forum.
You are most welcome.

It was -- and still is -- my pleasure.
Anonymous responds and dismisses accusations of hacking Sony PSN
...here are some things that didnt exist 50 years
ago...terrorism...

Terrorism isn't new. See the Wikipedia list of terrorist incidents: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_terro...

Also, it could be argued that the early American revolutionists, especially those who participated in the Boston Tea Party, were terrorists. What seems to be new is the widespread paranoia regarding terrorism.
But one thing I'm rather certain about: the world will be significantly poorer in 50 years.

That's the one thing I would most resolutely bet against among predictions about the future fifty years from now. I've been hearing predictions of a poorer world to come throughout my more than fifty years of life, and they have consistently been proved wrong.

I may not have total buy-in to the views of the author I cite below,

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/books/rational-optimist-how-...

but he is on the right track about the long-term historical trend, which is increasing worldwide prosperity. That's a trend I have observed in all the countries I have lived in or visited, on two continents.
The making and remaking of Malcolm X
"Yet, at the time of its IPO, Microsoft’s Windows was already the world’s dominant operating system."

Is it a small mistake? because the dominant OS was MS DOS not Microsoft Windows.

Also, can you compare Facebook, Zynga and Twitter to Cisco, Microsoft, Google and VMWare ?
Most people interested in Bitcoins right now are geeks and the majority of geeks should have jailbroken their iPhones.

80% of the whole iPhone user mass is a gross overestimation, but I don't think that it's an overestimation to say that 80% of huge geeks have jailbroken their iPhones.
Our ability to fight aging is greatly dependent on people's willingness to spend , the intellectual resources that we pour into it, and the speed at which innovation happens. (hampered or speed up by political institutions)
More precisely, 'being from a background where you can get a higher level of education and then actually getting that education' is a sound strategy for improving your employment prospects.

Seeing this chart broken out by, say, parental income and assets would be interesting.

I'm not trying to make the absurd point that education is useless/bad, just that this is heavily conflated with all sorts of age/race/class confounding factors. The factors that might lead to outcomes like "less that a high school diploma" or "_some_ college" include things that won't be great for employment either - chaotic home life, illness or disability, requirement to care for illness/disability, being a participant or a victim in crime, drugs or alcohol abuse - or having parents that are affected by these factors.

Not wanting to be too snarky here, but a lot of posts (not yours, specifically) on inequality and social problems here on HN take on a unpleasant tone of undergraduate geek self-congratulation - "how _smart_ I am to be getting a degree with teh computers, if only all those poor people were as hard-working and clever as I am".
Recalculating ranks for everyone every time the score changes seems like a difficult task no matter how you approach it. I don't think you really need that for most use cases though. Some reasonable simplifications I've seen are don't rank anyone below a certain cutoff score, only calculate rankings periodically, or only calculate rankings for a subset of the data.
To be fair, many things that exist today would have been considered AI back then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
The custom matcher idea for technologies is really cool. I was thinking about doing a similar thing, but as an open source project that people could contribute matchers - but your approach is a lot easier for people to contribute.

Think there could be a problem where people might not want to contribute when they can't use what they contribute outside of your system. Have you considered extracting the matcher into a gem (or _your language equivalent_) and allowing people to use the matcher? Might not be the best idea because it opens up competition, but if it became the defacto tool for analyzing sites, there would be a lot of trust back your way.

On a side note, if this was an open library, or you did have an API to pull information, I'd contribute and definitely use it on a site I recently built ( http://lineofthought.com/ ).
It seems that it only handles wall clock related functions, not various timers and other timing related functionality, so almost certainly not.
I got my free Pre 2 on Thursday and have been using it as my main device. My biggest gripe with the Pre 2 is the small screen. It is a great OS, but my enjoyment of it is hampered by the small screen.

I agree Just Type, multitasking and notifications blow iOS's counterparts out of the water.

I will be very tempted to try out the Pre 3 (with its larger screen) and have been excited about the TouchPad even before I set fingers on the Pre 2.

There's a lot of competition for #3 in the phone space, but HP could easily take #2 in the tablet market given how rushed Honeycomb and the Playbook appear to be.
More like the electric go-kart.
Roll a D6: Why is it so hard to tell people you play D&D?
I don't get it,

How would you use this approach to find say, the 195687th largest element in O(log(n)) time?

Edit: However, I do know I can write a SQL query to find this - an ordinary index plus limit should do this. It's just such an approach gets really awkward and so unpredictable when you are dealing with a lot of distinct columns and tables - why I implemented this with key-value DB (a custom index on top of Kyoto Cabinet).
"May 10, 2011 at 07:00 PM": in which date zone is this guy living?
In theory, and practice, you can build a site in anything with enough effort. Scheme, Scala, Go, Haskell, Clojure, etc. However, it's good to know that other big sites are using your preferred choice. A lot of usage usually indicates mature frameworks, larger user community, ability to Google common issues, find developers as you grow, etc.

What was that YC site that initially used Lisp but switched to Python at the end because they couldn't get something to work?
A lot of my friends are "geeks", and none of them have a jailbroken iPhone. In fact, the only person I know who has a jailbroken iPhone is a regular teenager, and that's because he refuses to pay for apps.
Is anyone on hn working on technology that is similar to a human (or even a rat) in it's ability to learn and form hypotheses? I've only known one or two people who actually tried it, and it usually didn't last long.

Personally I feel that most of the benefits that come from "strong ai" can be duplicated with basic statistical analysis. In the spirit of Peter Norvig's "more data beats better algorithms", I think we might all be better served by making an effort to gather and structure as much data about the world as possible. It's not as sexy as creating an artificial sentient being, but over time I think the results would be similar.
I am amused at how wrong SF authors often get the details of every,day future things. In Stranger in a Strange Land, set around 2000(?), one of the characters mentions a mobile phone the size of a brief case. Or in recent David Weber novel, the heroes get through customs, because the agents hadnt received their photos. In the year 4000 something. I will admit that with a 2000 year advance in security the book would have been a lot shorter.
Superior alternatives such as...?
Hey good luck with your project.

Personally I'd love a good place to get recommendations on contemporary fiction. Good Reads just has a "ask for recommendations" section which I can do myself with friends, y'know?

That said, I recommend Arthur Nersesian. And I've been re-reading the old Fletch series lately. Man those were fun.

Also, I'm squarely in the aforementioned "nerd" demo.
Pure AI doesn't need a reboot, they just need to start solving practical problems, if you look at what Google does it's essentially AI. The problem with AI as such is that it over promises and under delivers while there is tremendous benefit possible to society with the existing research that has been conducted. The essential problem are there are few vertically integrated companies that can turn AI R&D into commercially successful products which can further fuel more AI R&D.

AI needs to move out of subsidized R&D and into productization similar to how Bell labs worked. I actually think this is a much bigger problem that extends to most sciences. There is a lot of scientific research out there that is being poorly monetized.
Grooveshark realtime 10 million user countdown
I have to admit that trying to find an error in a book is a strange vacation goal

Come on, I can only wish I was smart enough to set myself such a goal realistically. And to reach it? Would make this a vacation of a lifetime.
But if there is a straightforward solution that allows you to not make these concessions and it can do so with great performance, I'm not sure how you can continue to claim that relational databases are the right tool for this job. Sure, it can do it, but it seems like something else does it better.
http://www.zenithsolar.com/ looks more advanced - pv and thermal.

What are the efficiency of mirrors these days? I'm sure better mirrors equals more power.

Concentrated solar power (solar thermal) also uses mirrors but in closer range to the water:

http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/en/power-generation/renewab...
http://www.israel21c.org/environment/siemens-buys-israels-so...
Using Twitter for SEO
I'm on a David Foster Wallace kick right now: Working through The Pale King, his collected essays and his short stories. Already read Infinite Jest. It's hard to say what qualifies as "essential reading" when it's impossible for a human being to read even one tenth of the great, all-time classic books. There just isn't enough time. My advice would be to read at least a few books that have reputations for being difficult. War and Peace, Gravity's Rainbow, In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, etc. (The reason I'm only listing near-undisputed classics here is because these books are difficult, and in some cases very, very long [looking at you, Proust], and the assurance that it is all worth it helps you keep going when your brain hurts.) These books survived despite their difficulty because reading them is a mind-expanding, sometimes life-changing experience. Reading shouldn't be essentially passive.
You might know it as a web chart or spider chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart

It isn't just that it resembles a radar chart, though: on the site the (Flash) logo mutates to reflect the current temperature and wind conditions.

http://www.visitnordkyn.com/