skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, in that I think we can't make a machine that is fundamentally smarter than us.

But I think it's possible to create a machine that is as smart as a human. Now, since some human beings seem to be smarter than others, I think it's possible to build a machine that is closer to the "smart" end. And, of course, with the help of such machines, we will be able to do this better and better (as with knowledge and technology in general). Therefore, we could build many Einstein-level intelligences (or a bit better, since he wasn't perfect).

Behind this, my key point is that "more intelligence" is an illusion. Einstein was a function of his times (there was the unexplained lack of motion through the ether, for one thing) and, like Newton, saw further than most because he SOTSOG. He wasn't fundamentally smarter than you - though he might have been able to keep track of more ideas than you, and track their relations to other ideas, and he might have been more free of convention (the humility to admit he didn't know, and the arrogance that you don't either), and more dedicated than you. Ie. he was probably smarter, but not fundamentally.

Being able to accept that you don't know, and therefore to be open to see, is the important thing. Not intelligence.
UbuntuForums is one of the best-run forums I've ever used. Not as good now as it was a couple years ago, but it's a good model.
The study analyzes happiness data since 1981. Of course the world's a happier place -- think of everyone who lived in the USSR before.
First off, it's slow. Not ultraslow, but slow enough to be considered impractical for when I feel the urge to write something.

Then, it's online and there's no good way to access it. I set it up to work with Prism, once upon a time, but Buzzword couldn't remember my password and I had to log in each time.

Formatting messes up when it's between any format and Flash. That was an annoyance.

Finally, getting a hard copy of your stuff if you've got a lot is tedious. Docs has a gadget for mass downloading. Buzzword can't be modified in that way.
"What's missing knowing how to do it (software inventions)".

Not really, the scope of the hardware plays an important role.
Consider: that you could perform the processing needed to play Half Life 2 on an abacus. But even if the abacus wielder followed the commands exactly and emulated the x86 instructions with paper and pencil, would anything actually emerge from the exercise that would be enlightening in anyway?

Probably not, since it would take a few thousand years (I'm handwaving here) to compute the contents of the first frame.
Fear Looms Over Scientist's Experiment to Uncover Secrets of 'Big Bang'
I understand that. But at the same time: Word is a current standard. If other products want to win me over, they can't cite lack of time and expect a good response.

Pages has been around for about as long as Google Docs, I believe, and it's a much better program. So, again, timing is nothing but an excuse.
You took your smart, decent, criticism and made it inane and irrelevant with an ad hominem attack as your snappy conclusion. You related the singularity to this year's US Presidential candidates, two topics that have completely different contexts.

Please tell me the irony was intentional... :-)
A mess.

And after every time I have a serious go at cleaning up, it seems to devolve into something messier...
So, when I was creating Adonomics I considered using scRUBYt for scraping Facebook. Here's why I didn't go with it:

1. It was hard to get scRUBYt to learn the "correct" rules. It tends to be over-specific or over-broad.

2. It was slow. Really slow. Using Ruby Mechanize was at least 2-3x faster, and even that was pretty slow.

3. The learner doesn't like bad HTML, but as a practical matter you have to deal with poor markup all the time. scRUBYt makes it hard to get to the guts of the system.

YMMV.
Google comes to mind. The traffic you get from bloggers/early adopters is rarely useful anyway, unless your service is particularly targeted at them. Before you spend resources on marketing, make sure you have your product where you want it. Unless you have a vast budget, the only way to do that is iteratively.
Closest Look Yet at Milky Way's Black Hole
Historic track of Battleship Bismark of World War II.
What the EFF is this doing on the front page? I usually (until this point, I think always) moderate my desire to post 'wtf?' comments.

But seriously, this is a story that's been around for ages and has -zero- to do with HN. This is "news for nerds" content, not "hacker news". Can we get some divine intervention here?
You're right, if the difference is that great. e.g. your handwaving of 1/50 sec to 4000 years, is about 50*10^11= 5,000,000,000,000 = a factor of 5 trillion (12 orders of magnitude).

I was thinking that 1 second's thought in a few months would be reasonable - but you are quite right, I don't have any real idea of the factor. Maybe that would be plausible if we found very efficient AI implementations, but the initial attempts of actually doing it at will undoubtedly be quite inefficient. And the slowness of feedback is a huge factor in coding, as well....
Bright sparks shine brightly in the gloom
We could still build faster Einsteins.
When I did http://zerodaydeals.com (not mine anymore) the biggest pain was scraping all the sites, since there was 50+ sites... and people would constantly change layouts, breaking it.

I tried using plugins but ended up resorting to pile of regular expressions for each site. I wonder if this would be better as I don't think it was around at the time.
> And then there will be no difference between a web app and a desktop app.

So why choose to write a "web app" in that case? What distinguishes the two - what is the defining characteristic of a web app? (One comes on a CD, one is downloaded - no) (One is written in C++, one is written in a vm-hosted language - no).

Is it just that you use HTML/JS to write the app?
whatever you call it, please respect real operating systems enough NOT to call chrome an OS.
It's been fun so far, but with some really odd oversights.

For instance, as far as I can tell there's no way to change the 'mode' of travel in cell mode. Ever since "Asteroids", we've been trained that "up" is "forward", "left" is "left of forward motion," and "right" is "right of forward motion." From what I can find, the only way to move about is in X,Y mode where up is up, down is down, &c. That's regardless of your current "direction". I'd much rather have an asteroids-like motion.

Second is that cell and creature stage make a lot of sense. Moving to "tribal" stage, things get confusing with not a lot of in-game explanation (and it's a tiny manual). Hopefully that flattens out.
Where do you get those numbers from?
I don't see how you possibly could make any guesses about the state of the world so far into the future.

You just mean it is a hell of a lot longer than 20-30 years before we are there?
Thanks for the spoiler, guess I won't have to watch UFC 88 after all.
Richard Davisson (of Manhattan Project fame):
"There are no physicists in the hottest parts of Hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of Hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible."
Controlling an Inverted Pendulum with a Microchip Microcontroller
Controlling an inverted pendulum using a Microchip microcontroller was possible at a University in Switzerland. The FLEX Base Board (hosting a Microchip dsPIC - see the Datasheet) and the FLEX Multibus Board with a CAN module were used for swinging-up and maintaining the inverted equilibrium. The Source code was entirely generated using Scilab/Scicos , an automatic code generator for control systems.
I mis-read "The Singularity is Fair" at first. I am slightly disappointed. An article about distributional aspects of ever-increasing technological progress would have been interesting.
Yes, and more of them.

But they're not fundamentally smarter than us; it's just another technology (which is a great thing).
I read it during summer break back in school.

"People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."
How many of the problems did you do?
Google Chrome Receives Heavy Criticism in Germany
For me it's easier to put in hours each week if you have a professor to go to -- instead of sitting at home.
Marissa Mayer talks about Google at 10 -- and 20
Can you publish the results that this assertion is based on please?
disruptive adoption: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297597
I'm learning Scala as a first JVM language, and it is definitely great to be able to access so many Java libraries so seamlessly (Mina, Apache commons, Hadoop, ...), all the Scala syntax/type inference goodness just works and in some cases make the libraries significantly nicer to use in Scala than in Java (IMO).
You're right, Chrome won't do 3d. But that doesn't mean you can't look at 3d things through Chrome. Didn't we have the about:internets article just a few days ago?

Chrome isn't going to be an OS; but it might be a desktop environment. Which, to the casual user, is the same thing.
Compilers are an excellent choice to deepen your knowledge. I fared well with 'Modern Compiler Design' (http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dick/MCD.html).
> “I was convinced that something big was about to happen with software in India,” he explains. “I wanted to be part of it.”

> Customers must be convinced that they can entrust their business to the software.

The first kind of convincing is harder.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "

~Hacker News Guidelines.

Seriously, calm down. It might be old, but I still found it interesting to reread. Don't like it, don't read it.
43 Folders' guide to solve procrastination
REREAD: Something everyone has seen before and provides nothing new, but is still pleasant to reread.

Please, paraphrase people correctly :P
Sun 2 Nov 2008: 20th Anniversary of the Morris worm
SO old I once had it faxed to me.
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/wp-content/uploads/2007/0...
I'm very interested in knowing how you guys grew so big so fast under the radar without much evangelizing from the SV scene. Hope to read about this in your next blog post!
Space Tourism - Space Tourists Really Take Off
You can usually just add repositories to get almost anything into Synaptic.

Compiling on your own does not need more than calling configure and make in most cases, though.
IT needs are a moving target. I don't see how you can commoditize custom software.
Actually, the author says this in the first paragraph:

"...nor do they obviate the need to address mundane matters such as war, poverty, disease, climate change, and helping Democrats win elections."

So I'd say that it was a fair statement by the commenter above.
HTML5's canvas tag has an OpenGL ES 3D API. Well, that's what they've said. We'll see.

And frankly, they should've gone for the more DOM-like X3D.
This is a very, very good thing. It will reduce mortgage rates and reinvigorate the housing market while ultimately reducing our economy's dependence on housing. In summary, here are the four key parts of the plan:

(1) The Treasury purchases Fannie and Freddie preferred stock

(2) Treasury purchases Fannie- and Freddie-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities

(3) Fannie and Freddie are put into "conservatorship," meaning that the government takes control of their day-to-day operations. Their common stock dividends are eliminated.

(4) Fannie and Freddie can buy modest amounts of MBS in 2009, but ultimately will be forced to reduce the size of their mortgage portfolios.

This is all good news. It will reduce mortgage rates (by providing a backstop buyer for mortgages), yet ultimately reducing our economy's reliance on the housing market and gradually reducing the housing market's reliance on the GSEs.
Agreed. Also, it's finally a way to get customers onto subscription models, which has seemed the holy grail of desktop apps for some time.

Write once, bill forever...
I'll call it an OS when it boots.
Project Longshot: 100 Year probe mission to Alpha Centauri
Find Who Unfollowed Or Ditched You On Twitter
Have you ever wondered these social networking sites do tell you - who befriend with you or who followed you recently, but they do not notify who removed you from their friend list or dumped you!
Is it because most of developers, people with adequate knowledge about browsers use firefox and they are trying their hands on Chrome?
a "to do" bookmark folder would do, with visited pages automatically archived.
maybe u could throw in a star (quick) rating system to set straight the priorities
Otomobille kamyonet çarpıştı: 5 ölü, 4 yaralı - Hürriyet
I studied AI at University, and it was mostly about search.

I learned Prolog, which was a real eye-opener about functions that can find paths backwards, a kind of reverse search.

I also learned about Bayes, and have come up with an algorithm (myself) which is similiar to Bayes, but it's top secret at the moment.
I think businesses have to pick and choose, but: if inhouse CRM is part of the competitive advantage, then it makes sense. If it isn't, and the only goal is for it to be acceptable, then it makes more sense to license an existing product.

Except for state/government institutions, which very often have many other regulatory hurdles that commercial software doesn't handle well. That's one of the ways in which regulation can be very expensive.
Missed that. My mistake.
There is a bit of a renaissance going on within some arcane fields of AI. There is work underway to try to create a real thinking machine, with the idea that we have come a long way in our understanding about neuroscience, etc.
So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers.

I thought that was the entire point.
The audience of SICP was just the people who were planning to major in EECS at MIT, making it only impractical for, at best, the subset of the major that was interested purely in hardware. Having not been privy to the internal discussion that came before the decision to drop SICP at MIT, I can't say I understand why they did it, but my best guess is that it was too hard. It serves as an excellent separate-wheat-from-chaff type of class, but at the cost of decreased enrollment in the major.

As far as I'm concerned, though, you can basically ask someone how they liked 6.001, and if they have any positive words, you can pretty much hire them on the spot for any programming job you've got.
The essay seems directed against a straw man. The author implies that because people think a singularity is near they are somehow expending energy to bring it to fruition instead of spending energy on what he feels to be more important problems.

He would have a valid target if he was only talking about a small number of people involved in projects like the singularity institute, but he seems to be aiming wider. He even acknowledges that the people working at the institute are justified in the same way people worrying about asteroid collisions are justified.

So who is he criticizing, then? Who are these people who are wasting energy chasing a singularity instead of solving modern problems? The only other targets I can think of are scientists and engineers moving their respective fields up the exponential, but they are doing their respective work precisely because of current problems in the world, not because of some far off possibility.
You have no idea how tough it is to run a steel mill. I've been to many mills to observe their operations and different mills have different operation styles (I've been to one of Mittal Group's mills and their operation is the most minimalist). You definitely need skill in order to run the factory efficiently.

Especially at this current period when steel prices are plummeting faster than prices of raw materials are.

Managing a steel mill is not for the faint-hearted. It's nothing like running a tech company.
The Omnigoogle
Despite deepening economic gloom and impending climatic destruction...

Sheesh. Even back in the dark ages, people didn't start off unrelated discussions with "Despite the impending 2nd coming of Christ and our eternally burning souls..."
search tab to go with header new/threads/comments/leaders/jobs/submit
http://files.dangrover.com/markerdesk.jpg
And they manage to pull it off without an explicit wipe-off of the common/preferred shareholders. Bravo.
http://www.justin.tv/officecam

The white couch towards the top-left corner is my workspace - I don't like desks.
I don't believe large employers really care. The top management get enough benefits and pay to stay. They feel anything lower then the top management level is more like expendable cogs, replacable any time, so why bother going an extra mile to keep employees regardless of there worth.
My Stupid Site Killing Mistake
"Microsoft, having grown up making money selling traditional software, will have a hard time being successful online, he argues. He thinks Google is unlikely to invest much in enterprise applications, because profit per employee is much lower than in its advertisement-financed consumer business."

I hope for his own good that he's not staking the future of his business on those basic assumptions. If Google and Microsoft were to ramp up their development of online enterprise software (which IMHO will undoubtedly happen), he'll have very little room to maneuver and no time to react.
Start on basic hosting and upgrade as needed.
Ultimahosts.net, ASmallorange.com, Webfaction.com are good.
Move up to Slicehost.. Rackspace... and if you're too big for Rackspace... you might already have the resources to start your own hosting company.
The six degrees of seperation is now three
Don't quote me on this, because I do not have much experience, only what I have learned through reading.

However, creating a service should be fine as long as you can prove there is a market for it. I am currently working on a service/product that I know for a fact there is a market on (its a large enough market to know that there is an opening for this service). You also need to either have alternate forms of revenue, or know that your market can afford the product.
The first half of the last century was defined by physics, the latter by chemistry. The first part of this century appears to see technological advances at simlar rates on the biological scale. We're still making headway in physics and chemistry, but it's in the fields of genetics, stem cell research and so on where we're doing things that were unthinkable less than two decades ago.
Whilst I agree that the problems with AI are more due to a lack of knowledge of how to implement ratherh than a limitation of current technology (i.e. our approach sucks rather than the tech), I believe that our singularity will arrive when we stop having to think about how to translate the carbon wetware to silicon hardware.
U.S Startups hiring non-U.S citizens?
Hi there,

I was wondering how common is it for U.S startups to hire immigrants from Canada, Europe or anywhere else? For example, a Canadian citizen can come to the U.S to work on an Employment Visa (TN For example) and I know it's common in larger corporations but how about the little startups?

As far as I know there isn't much paperwork apart from a letter of employment a company has to do for something like a TN Visa but is there any other hidden ramifications or reasons why a smaller U.S company wouldn't hire someone from outside of the U.S?
I'll call it an os when i can make toast with it:
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2005/08/11/toast...
TN visas are interesting times since for Canadians they are issued at the port of entry. Because of this some places are better for people to enter than others. Ask your Canuck friends if you plan to bring people down using this method.
I've spent a couple of days playing Spore, and whilst elements of it are great, there's some really dull moments. I think it's very 'Sims-y' and I've found the control mechanism massively irritating.

Having said that my race has just started to build a galactic empire. I find that whilst the game has massive breadth, it's lacking in depth and is highly repetitive, but it (especially the space stage) reminds me of Frontier, Elite II in the sheer scale of it all.

Oh Frontier, how I yearn for a remake...
Are you talking about Arrington or someone else?
I like the sketchpad on the writing surface. Do you find it more effective than pen & paper or a whiteboard? How do you deal with the mess (assuming it's based on dry erase markers)?
http://www.morleyfield.com/course/bench.jpg
Getting a song stuck in your head (commonly called "earworm", but I think that's a terrible name for it. I think "memelody" makes more sense) when you hear the tune or someone says something that reminds you of it I think qualifies as a meme but not an idea, especially if there is some shared culture reference that makes multiple people think of the same tune from similar stimuli.
This is pretty cool!

Meanwhile they've sponsored a private moon landing.

I wonder if it's better to design a satellite than to make orbital trips cheaper (aka Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk of SpaceX).
Well I am Canadian myself, and the reason I posted this was to see how plausible it would be for me to work in a smaller environment when/if I made my attempt at getting a TN Visa.

I'm just curious if a smaller U.S employer would actually do this
All the more reason to post your own review of places you've been. Don't just be a consumer, man. The most powerful review sites let you find out about the people providing reviews, so it is easy to determine if you should trust a specific reviewer or not (if they like the things you like, or if they review only certain kinds of places, or if they say they don't like cheese but still order it everytime).

If someone bought your book because something about it gave the impression that it would contain certain information and it didn't, then I think that's a legit reason to not like it. However, I agree, the simple review you've pointed out isn't adequate. It would be nice to know why the person thought the book would cover what they thought was missing.
There appears to be an update on this story - from the Venturebeat article
http://venturebeat.com/2008/09/01/when-selling-your-company-...

The company says he used a personal email ID to conduct company work. All the email was on the company computer, and they looked at that account to get the business related stuff.
Seems to me like this is a case of an ex employee that is pissed off and seeking personal revenge.
Anything on that commputer belongs to the company. Cant comment on the contract stuff, but given the inflamitory way he talked about the email - who knows what the truth is about the contract.
Sour grapes - I think his ranting is doing him more harm than good. who will want to do business with him now he shows how he deals with issues in public and not through reasonable normal business channels
"For example, one of the respondents Katrina, 27 from Brighton, is a classical musician and leads a jazz band. She was asked to make contact with a Japanese jazz singer, Natsuo Murakami, halfway across the world. She contacted her record producer in Berlin via an email. He called his opposite number in Tokyo who had a register of all jazz singers in the country. Therefore making the link from Katrina to Natsuo in three personal steps."

Whether or not their conclusion is valid, that is a terrible example for making their case. I wonder how many steps it would have taken her to reach a 72 year old male working in a cattle processing plant in Arkansas. I suspect her record producer wouldn't be able to help her with that one.
The news.yc code should have a third-level domain exception for *.name.