skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The comment about hooking up nukes was hyperbole - I know that's not what's being proposed. And I even agree that there could be real risks in building a self improving machine if coupled with self awareness and physical interaction. But the claim of the article is not that we could build dangerously intelligent machines. It's that every intelligent machine we could build would be inherently dangerous.

And to me, that's pretty clearly false. In your description of the threat above, you start with the assumption that the super intelligent AI is self aware and wants out of the box we have it in. How do you justify that assumption? I see it as science fiction. The parable of "the three rules" is: don't build super intelligent self aware machines, tell them to optimize ill understood models of the real world, and then give them the capability to implement their decisions. To extrapolate from there to a general concern about intelligent machines is just fuzzy thinking.
Why how is boring and how why is awesome
It seems to me it's a very flawed metric since one person in San Diego has a far greater influence on the center than someone in Oklahoma due to the leverage calculation.
I had an email from Google(docs) go to the gmail spam folder.
> More than 140,000 BitTorrent downloaders face lawsuits
> across the U.S., according to *Wired*.

It would be nice to have a list of all 140k IP addresses.
With robust server-side javascript... its not hard to see the application of this. It is easier to generate executable javascript for the client on the server in javascript itself. Certainly in Web2+ you want this for increasingly dynamic behavior?
Lasersaur Open Source Laser Cutter: First Fire
Lingo24: Launched to Earn Beer Money, Now Grosses $8m
Here's something I learned: don't be wishy washy. Avoid pandering to the person you're emailing - it takes up words and sounds pathetic.

I've done this in the past and been the recipient. It just goes bad.

Busy people work on short terse communication, unless they are actively in a conversation with you. And, in general, they will appreciate the first few emails you send them being of the same - condensed and full of content.

Never worry about being rude by not saying please every other word.

On another note, I mildly dislike this one:

Show your target respect by responding to everything immediately. Just because the VC you're emailing might not get back to you immediately, doesn't mean that you have the same privilege. Ron Conway famously makes immediately email responses a pre-condition for investment.

I'm a busy guy, I get a LOT of work email each day. And yet the people we work for seem to see slow response as an indication of laziness :S Even though it takes them a week to respond. Yes, you're important to me, you are potentially worth a lot of money to me and I really want to keep you happy. But give me a fracking chance!

So, investors, cut founders a bit of slack :)
I like the bus reminder. I need one of those.
For users who have optimized for the current pricing structure, this is an insane switch, to give you an idea I just did the calculation for our AppEngine costs. Ouch...

We currently pay about $0.60 a day, so $18 a month

On the new system we have 25 instances on average so 24 * 25 * 0.08 = $48 a day or $1440 a month, even with reserved instances this is $900 a month, a x50 increase....

We do thousands of small requests, optimized for low CPU usage and not instance count, guess its time to move.
I object to the mindless drive to increase school hours! Hacker News is full of good advice about lean execution and using constraints to produce high quality work.

That said, repealing a law that is apparently standing in the way of a future IPO bubble sounds like a poor idea.
Angry Birds Rio Beach Volley Releasing This Week [Demo Video]
one can, sort of, trace the "arab spring" back to some of the diplomatic correspondence they leaked... this lead to the initial protests in tunisia
Nothing. A cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind.
I don't care who is slinging the mud, but I do agree with the message.

Where in the hell do I opt-out of "Social Circle"?
There are obviously people whose views range from "he's a terrorist" to "he's the best man alive", and everything in between.

A quote from this article as one example of a possible justification:

"Assange himself claimed publication of the cables helped shape uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East and said WikiLeaks was on the side of justice."

If you are of the belief that nothing has so far made much of a difference, there is still an argument that by pushing for more openness from Governments he is helping move towards a better, and potentially more peaceful, future.
Thanks. Didn't expect as much interest as I got - would definitely have worked longer on the post if I thought thousands of people would have read it :)

My view is not that relational is bad, but that the world needs an alternative.
The reply I've always heard to this is: "Then is an empty desk the sign of an empty mind?"
Don't buy expensive ads, exchange them
Fortunately, romantic love is but one of the many reasons that marriages turn out to be fulfilling.
Social Media Suckers: Bleeding You Dry
Hi everybody,

I come in peace, and I feel a bit cheeky, but...

I wrote this, and I wanted to know what you thought of it.

Am I the only person who thinks that the Microsoft/Skype deal could be pretty smart? Especially when you take into consideration the values played on the various backslapping tech ventures around at the moment(and Facebook).

Feel free to read/rip to shreds. I actually think that Microsoft could have got this one right.

What do you think?
State my assumptions:
GAE allows you to deploy multiple versions of your app and access the same datastore.
Go should significantly out perform Python for certain CPU intensive tasks.

...

If Backends are available at versioned URLs too (and I suspect they do/willdo) then there might be nice opportunities to build little Go Backends to do heavy lifting within your main Python applications. Sounds cool.
Was it you ms-redmond ?
Media coverage is not necessarily indicative of the effect on the world produced by a given individual or group. Especially for an individual who is hated by many people in high places, be it for good reason or otherwise. To comment that there was more in the mainstream media about Assange's Swedish affair than about the information disclosed in the leaks does not mean that the leaks did nothing.
And herin lies the problem of this attitude.

The original commentator posed a solution, "Call them" but no phone number.

The second commentator realized this gap, and asked, "What is the phone number?" One could reasonably expand upon this, it certainty hasn't occurred to me that you could call them and talk to them either. Do you need to be enrolled? Is the number secret? Where is the number. Clearly the first commentator must know this and more, as he is posing it as a solution. At the very least, he must have the number, or know where to get the number.

You, the third commentator, come in with the Google Result. Obvious to some, just Google it. Not obvious to others. If it wasn't obvious that you could call them, it would be less obvious that the number is simply publicly available. Further, search results can sometimes be inconclusive, and while this one was the first result and directly on Apple.com, other queries are not so obvious. Again, the first source clearly had the information, and he was directly asked when he did not provide it.

That is why communities, question and answer sites, forums, Stack Overflow, and everything else exist. Direct knowledge from people who are verified or profess to having the information that you seek. Some people feel better about direct conversations or direct answers from people vs. casting their fishing hook out in to the giant open Internet and hoping they catch their answer. Some people aren't any good at searching. Sometimes just asking someone who knows can be quicker.
This article has also been submitted some days ago with a different URL. Here is the discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2494013
Bard College - unlimited, no logins required.
It's just the average
Open-source project sponsorship vs corp-to-individual contract
God, I tell you what. That sodding Swedish affair caused more trouble on Wikipedia than the whole of Wikileaks so far (i.e. people desperate to gleefully discredit the guy at any cost). Painful to the extreme. Now, I am not his greatest fan, but it is a strange society where people seem more concerned with the reporting of serious allegations compared to the publishing of classified information.
Here's a nice write-up about this site -
http://www.cringely.com/2011/05/what-the-heck-is-a-clickoche...

If this gets popular, I agree with the above that it can significantly alter the ad-buying space
Hacking Small Town America: The Unexploited Market of Tyler, Texas
I do believe that you've picked up what I put down.

Seriously though, my desktop is essentially bare. I like the space to spread my arms out as I think, and I find that a large clean surface allows me to concentrate better than a desk full of books, knickknacks, and office supplies does.
and what criteria you're friends use. I don't have much of a handle on the latter.
i can't say.

i noticed that busy people themselves tend to write very short letters: a pair of questions, no hello/goodbye, nothing personal. seeing that, i started to think that writing five sentences is a respect for their attention and time; i include the disclaimer (signature) to the bottom to indicate that i am not just a dumb, but trying to be short for the recipient's sake.

if they ask specific questions, i elaborate in many sentences (just like i do now :), and then they sometimes don't respond (if we didn't met) or respond after a month (if a person knows me personally). i right imagine how they see the Tolstoy's War and Peace novel, get upset, but as they generally like me, move my lame english masterpiece to some Later folder and move on.

the initial cold emails of any number of sentences stay 90% unanswered.

thrice i shot messages on facebook to the complete strangers that i read about in press (3 sentences: "cograts with new post, would you consider project like ours, if would, i'd be glad to blah blah blah"). and once i got a respond, which forced me to write a long letter which was also answered...

so i dont know if it really works (cold emails are unlucky by nature), but i like to think that being short is a new form of politeness.

(i even tend not to write cold emails at all now! zero sentences, hehe)
"Don't be wishy washy" he said and than goes on writing 1000 more words about that topic.
Cool, thank you :-)
Which I suppose begs the question: Are automatic updates the silver bullet they seem to be sold as? I don't unequivocally disagree with them, or rather I disagree with them, but based on principle. In practice, it seems easy to argue that the benefits outweigh the arguments against. Still it'd be nice if there were at least an option to turn off the updates. (Perhaps there is and I've missed it in the settings?) Nonetheless for the time being I'll stick with my old fashioned browser, just because I'm a kind of a geek that prefers to initiative his own updates.
Ask HN: Outsourced HR as an indicator of company quality?
If you take Craigslist's word for it, companies all over are using Jobvite, Captain Recruiter, Brassring, and others as their first point-of-contact for prospective employees.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Should I be forced to participate in and support a third-party's business model in order to get a job that appears to be a good fit for mutual benefit? Frankly, it casts a pall over the company as a whole for me, and doesn't leave me with the feeling that the management is engaged with staffing. I imagine them sitting back and checking their phones for whatever list of applicants have jumped through the hoops the outsourced HR agency requires. If I actually went through the process I dread that it would just be a rehash of DICE-type forms and a worry that I will soon be inundated by recruiters. I don't think it's controversial to note the past techniques of HR/staffing agencies.

There are enough companies doing their own hiring to tell me we're not quite at the "take it and like it," step of the game, but there are a worrying number of seemingly-decent companies using these services, so I have to wonder if I'm just clueless. Is there a feature, aspect, or quality here that I'm missing that could help me be more OK with this state of affairs? What is the benefit for me?
It would seem so.

It would probably always have been creating on-disk temporary tables because text columns aren't permitted in memory tables. It was probably just that the fixed-length row format forced them to become extremely large.

The performance advantage that he expected from the schema change would only arguably make sense with respect to whatever storage engine he was using, and it's actually not really true for InnoDB. [Actually come to think of it I can't think of any advantage do doing it for MyISAM either, I don't think it has a concept of overflow pages. InnoDB 1.1 has a lot of performance enhancements for text/blob columns, though...]
They generally flip a shit about anything beyond the basics. I haven't been able to get a Cr-48 to even see the wireless around here. Apparently, the guy who set up the network hates Ubuntu and did his best to make it a pain to connect. Not good IT people.

How I think it works:
You have to register the computer with them to get on the network at all. So when I was using wireless on my laptop and trying to get a wired connection for my desktop going, I got a screen saying that I can only register 1 computer at a time.

Would a router be able to get around that sort of thing? I am not too great with networks, but it seems like it would run into a problem of having another machine on the network.
I think most of the points are important for every way of communicating. You can exercise them every day.
Unless it did.
I think i've read this before, maybe from Paul Graham?
That is only a problem for Java apps (and for Python apps using things like Django that were never really suited to AppEngine).

None of my AppEngine apps ever had any problem with 'cold' startup speed, and now with Go startup speed will be even less of an issue.
I would be more comfortable with the original author's goals if he wanted to augment conventional math education with simulation. Perhaps "augment" is too weak a word, perhaps they should be done equally. But I certainly don't want it to replace manipulating abstract symbols. I think that understanding one helps understanding the other, but both are much less meaningful in isolation. In particular, I think that symbolic manipulation is important because it is both simplified and precise; simulation and visualization is important because it appeals to our intuition.
The food crisis of 2011
anyone got a link to the keynote video?
Justin Kan is speaking about the Socialcam launch this Thursday in SF
Do you know that the sample size was small?
It's not what you know, it's who you know
you always hear stories about some ex-googler or ex-"big startup" made their own site and got it funded and sold for millions pre-launch which proves the fact that i made the exact same thing, it'd still be running on my own home web server!!

so how do you break this cycle when you are not in the "inner circle"?!

i have a site that's 4 years old, makes around 80-100K per year with no money on marketing and no social media presence or anythign. only incoming money from adsense and couple of other ads. it's grown on pure word of mouth and google search. It has a page rank of 4 with around 200K uniques a month and 14pageviews per visit.

if i want to sell this site, how can i go about it other than posting it on flippa.com? how would I see who is interested ans get the word out?

any people interested on this board?
Rob Pike is giving (or has given already?) a talk on writing web apps in Go at Google I/O today, it is not livecasted, but the video should be up tomorrow.
What are YC's weaknesses?
Groupon Now
yeah, app engine is pretty limited in that regard. that's why my current go webapp (which needs to send sms and IM) won't run on the app engine. ec2 ahoi ...
also as a side note, this website is a side project since i have a fulltime job and since it's 3 of us, the money isn't sufficient to just let it sit and live off of and we don't have enough time to put into it to take it to the next level.
Loud. Arrogant. Rebellious. Asian.
Accelerator outperforming Y Combinator and TechStars?
Unspoken Truths: Hitchens on speaking, writing, and speaking no more
i think responding immediately makes sense: the other party is at the computer/by the smartphone. they tend to read the freshest emails that come, and if they have thought on the topic just a few minutes ago, they may jump to your letter and respond to you with more useful info.

wait half an hour, and the emailing session of your potential investor could be over, and your response would be buried under other important bullshit in their inbox.
Enlargement Help 4 U
Ask HN: Best sites to find an apartment in the bay area?
Making a move from LA to SF. Can anyone recommend some good sites to look at other than craigslist?
Such a smart idea. Anything to make the airbnb model appear more trustworthy is worth it. Airbnb's biggest hurdle is the "weirdness" factor of staying with a total stranger.
Lonely, Tedious and Wonderful
http://www.khaaan.com/
The non-PC-Mag-regurgitated original: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/biggest-bittorrent-...
Well most of the arguments are the same, Richard Gabriel is just less tactful than pg.

What I want to know is whether Richard P. Gabriel ever had business success with LISP rather than just academic success. A quick scan of wikipedia doesn't mention any modern businesses.
Where did the demos go?
If you're relatively socially aware you should be able to tell the difference between being the weird older guy who is nonetheless awesome to have around, and the creepy older guy who can't tell when someone wants him to leave them alone.
That's fine and all, but if this continues to be a pattern then everything else will be crapfloaded off the front page. There is little end to the slightly geeky stuff on wikipedia that most people probably don't know of.
I've been thinking the same thing.

Look at the modern smartphones. The lesson I take from iPhone and Android is that if you build a device that has a fair amount of memory, a modern processor, and an array of interesting sensors and input devices, developers will build for you amazing applications, killer apps even, in ways you're not able to imagine.

I imagine a next-gen xbox. It has kinect built in. Great APIs for that. It has Skype and Xbox Live and the various Windows Live services all built-in, with great API's for those, treating them as services.

You push the appstore model via xbox live on that device and I bet $10 that developers produce some amazing things for that platform. Perhaps even game changers. It revolutionizes computing in your living room the way that the iPhone revolutionzed computing in your pocket.

I also think... you'd have a very powerful remote control and connection ability to that device using every new Nokia phone (and any new phone on WP7).

Final thought along those lines is that WP7 is really a great mobile OS. I bought a new phone just last week. I'm on Sprint, so the HTC Arrive was available to me which is a new WP7 phone. I had to decide against it and went for an Android device but that was begrudgingly because there's no 4G WP7 phones in Sprint's line-up. (Ended up going Evo).

Here's the thing... WP7 just FEELS good to use. Way moreso than Android and also moreso than iOS. It's very snappy. It uses screen space well. And the Arrive has a GREAT physical keyboard, the best I've ever used on a phone.

No 4G killed it. Also, no removable SD card. And finally there was the Apps issue but they've put out some great dev tools for WP7. I think it's only a matter of time before they catch up.

Also I'm skeptical that the voice UI works as good as it does on Android.

Sorry for taking this slightly off topic but to bring it back around it's this: Microsoft could really do some great value-adds with Skype on a number of their platforms.
I'm curious. What are the major gripes?
2 factor auth support?
Exactly. An AI machine made by digesting all of human knowledge and then capable of advancing it will not do it unless it was built with the specific "motive" of advancing that knowledge. Without that "purpose" it will just sit in an idle state waiting for the next input and trigger the next deductions. Only an evolved AI or one integrated to wetware brains will be self-aware enough to pursue higher goals like understanding and controlling the universe.
You've never debugged really bad spaghetti code, I'm guessing?

After a certain level of complexity, it becomes impossible to tell what thing does what, and sometimes all, none or some of the levers must be pulled in a particular, or no particular order to get the behaviour you want.
Sucuri - Because a hacked site is bad for business (big appsumo deal)
Your question highlights the fundamental problem. All the hype about acquisitions of young startups, funded by seed programs, has created some sort of widely held belief that you have to participate in an accelerator to launch a startup.

It's also causing investors to be more aggressive in pushing their money on startups, whether they need it or not. Inexperienced startup founders will mistake their fervor as an indication that they should take the money, instead of an indication that maybe their startup has real potential and they should be slower to give part of it away.

"Would you advise someone not to start a company instead of accepting this deal?"

That's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of companies (ours, 37signals, etc) that started without any funding at all. Then when we decided to raise funding (debt in our case), it was easy to get because we had real revenue and clear growth. It made sense for the bank to loan money to us because it could see we that we were going to pay it back.

Let's all stop spreading this bizarre myth that you have to take part in an accelerator to start a company.
Sketch Lab - User interface / website sketching tool
An awesome user interface / website sketching tool was just released a few days ago. You can try it out at http://www.sketchlabhq.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_Inc.
Correct, Dick didn't really get any business off the ground, and he's probably ashamed of this email, looking back.

For quite a few years now, he's been the chairman of OOPSLA (now renamed to SPLASH), which I find quite ironic.
I'm going! Would be cool to learn some inside tips on how to get early users.
Things You Can Do Without
Rosetta Stone for math? I'd like to see it.

I have a friend who was able to buy a laxative in Italy without knowing a word of Italian. It's a funny story. I doubt the same approach would work with math.
Federated Social Web Europe (keynote by Tim Berners Lee)
I do want more dynamism, but I don't see why you should be passing and executing arbitrary code from a source you can only verify with the greatest of difficulty. And having executable code be your communications protocol seems like an absolute nightmare if anything goes wrong. Hell, just versioning it will be hard. It might work for some simple demo apps, but I seriously question the wisdom of such an approach with a team who's size is >1.

Why not pass Json, and write your client code. It's not like Node is so expressive that it's a big win on server side code (especially with the flood of great altjvm & altclr languages these days).