skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can't make a reasonable self study. People will say you can, but they are full of crap. There are maybe a few hundred people in the world who can do something like that, and they are all top caliber geniuses.

In reality, we need the pressure of school to push us into spending the unpleasent effort to get the hard stuff into our heads. Otherwise you skim books and dick around and have nothing to show for it other than an ability flip out buzzwords on internet forums.

After all, why do you think there are colleges that teach this stuff? If you could just pick up books and learn it just as well as you can at college, why do people who are at college have to cram and study so much? After all, they are reading the material just like you, and they have the advantage of TA's, other students, and professors to guide and tutor them along. The fact is that you have basically no chance if you go it alone. Good luck.
No one has a fitness function for a search interface. But Google does a lot of A/B tests and the interface evolve.

I think that they are not using random mutations in the code. They design the "mutations". But the important point is that they don't have a theoretical fitness function.
Just to be pedantic: a GUI can have exactly the same expressive power as a language, by implementing that language, i.e. allow nesting and iteration. I realize that by "GUI", the author refers to those GUIs that we usually see, that are limited to their creator's vision, but I just needed to get that off my chest. Whew.
Indeed - if you're definition was "getting people to realise search is important", then yeah, 90% might be right.

If 90% is "where did I leave my keys?", then I think we all have a way to go (me personally more than most).
i have a leafless bookshelf which is placed next to a bed

that way i no longer need chair+table (i sit on the bed and readjust the shelf's height to put my laptop on)
(1) It's considered off-topic by the site guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

(2) It's political silly season -- a presidential election year -- here in the US and every other forum without strong topical guidelines is already full-up with politicized crap. Having it here, too, is redundant and dilutes the unique value proposition of this site.

(3) If "happened to a sibling of a hacker" is enough to rate a story here, everything is again on-topic.
I wonder how whole disk encryption works with Time Machine.
I think that's called an "election".
thanks for this ^__^
Atlassian's 20% Time Experiment
Funny that they mention Kid Rock and the single-song sales being what keeps many labels away.

About 10 years ago in Kid Rocks basement I was present when he was laying out his instructions to a new band: Give me 2 good songs, and 10 fillers. This wasn't a revelation in the music industry, it takes a LONG time to produce one good song, and you want to have something for a followup album. However, almost every CD I've ever bought has had only about 20-40% "great" content, and the rest was "eh". This seems to be particularly true for newer acts.

The music industry is imploding on itself anyway, they seem forever determined to try to give their customers exactly what they don't want.
100 years, man I feel so vain
Since the local temperature maxima and minima are the only places without a temperature gradient, it seems logical that the physicists would have to be confined to the hottest parts.

Well, that or the coolest parts. But I suspect the hottest parts, as an additional punishment for trying to game the system.
When Everything's a Feed (it reads like poetry)
>Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)
Techcrunch 50 vs. DEMO
Deflating IT? Oversimplifying IT, rather.
Are you sure?

Quite.

http://www.nextag.com/bulk-flour/search-html

A day of working minimum wage will buy enough calories for a month. No, it isn't great, but we can't all have gold leaf ice cream after every meal.
Work through Spivak's Calculus, then Springer Verlag's Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics

SICP is as foundational as Spivak, however Comp Sci still doesn't have the equivalent of UTM, you have to target what you're interested in and go from there....
All the warmups and homework excersizes, most of the exam problems. Research problems not so much.

I'm still working my way through it. I'm not trying to say it isn't challenging - just that it's approachable. It's extremely challenging.
it has a huge glass window, all furnitures close to the walls, and theres a big free space in the middle... its good for walking in, you don't need to go around any obstacles... the bed is like a sofa, non perpendicular to the wall...
Of course they have a fitness function! What do you think an A/B test IS? It's a fitness function!
Why I Will Never own an E-Book
http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/handcuff.asp
ESR is a poseur.
Apple's Bug Reporting Best Practices
It seems like every great artist has around 5 good songs per career. At the extreme outside edges, you might get a "U2" who could have as many as 15 or 20, or a "Laura Branigan" who will have only 1. The rest of their work is essentially filler.

I like where this is headed. Its long past time to hear a lot fewer songs from a lot more artists.
Ask YC: Looking for Business Beta Testers
We're getting close to launching a new communications tool for businesses, and we're looking for a few more private beta testers before we go live; I thought HN might be the perfect place to find some good candidates. Ideally looking for companies with 10-50 people, remote or multi-location teams even better. If it sounds interesting, please shoot me an e-mail at michael (at) intridea.com.
All good points.

I wouldn't normally post something that just presents a political opinion, but in this case I felt that the story was more interesting than that. Here's a guy that wrote some software that I and hundreds of others use every day, and that's why I respect him. However, this is a reminder that there are much bigger things than software happening to real people every day, people who are just like us. These are issues we all have to deal with.

I apologize if it's not appropriate.
Is North Korea using doubles to hide the death of Kim Jong-Il?
Two comments - one snarky and one not. (1) I have problems with a "great artist" and "Laura Branigan" used in this context. Assume you need 2-3 hits to demonstrate you're not just lucky... (2) I think the Beatles remain more than two standard deviations beyond the mean. More than 15-20 hits, and how many bands have done 2-3 albums/year for more than one year?
I used to use a lot of Ian's earlier work on webware back in the day. I found this much more interesting than the article about the guy who scrubbed a Lamborghini for 2 days straight.
>But if you are saying that there is no test for AI, you are just basically defining AI as an impossibility.

What I'm saying is that to evaluate AI you need I (artificial or otherwise).

So I don't think random permutations will ever get you there, because if we ever manage to write the fitness function, we are almost there anyway. (And no one knows how to do that.)

Maybe one day all of humanity will take part in the great AI race, and every person will help evaluate AI's to find the best one. I'm not sure it'll be enough though, you simply need far far too many permutations for it to ever work.

It would be interesting to use say WoW as a test bed for AI, make sure it always joins a team and see how good you can make it (emphasize the helping other members of the team part). Then send it to second life.

But, I still don't think it'll ever be enough. In particular it'll never be able to design for creativity.
I Mr. Arrington here confuses the process or algorithm of search with the data on which search operates. Apart from talking about natural language, everything else speaks to the data, which is of course an interesting problem (decoding data in streams computers can't currently interpret), but it's not a search problem.
Ha! Touche! FTR: I typed in "One Hit Wonder" into google to get "Laura Branigan". And the Beatles, yeah, complete outlier. Probably shouldn't be categorized in the same universe as todays commercial music acts. A Beatles album is something you can put in and listen to in its entirety and its a work in and of itself. Theres a few others like that (Pink Floyd maybe?) but they are so extremely rare and, (I assume so very difficult to produce) that they should have their own category.

The point of it all was that I'm looking forward to a shift in the market that allows me to here more peoples' best shots and less big-label bands' mediocre filler.
what is the meaning of 90%?
Apple admit Briton did invent iPod, but he's still not getting any money
Hmm. No. That's called a "revolution".
Inspecting/Testing My SQL queries in Rails
Except we used the 2006 election to enact a large Democratic majority in Congress, and yet nothing has been done by them since the election... What say you to this?
10 New Cool Pictures : Sk8prK - The Best Skateboarding Community
Market research question. Are there more people starting to exercise and looking for help or more people who already are exercising and would like help?

One difference between the two groups is that the former hasn't gotten past the "most people quit after 2 months" stage. Is that more of a need than better recordkeeping is for the latter? (Successful first products tend to be painkillers, not vitamins.)
Well, "viable" precludes that in many cases, like most national elections in the US.
Interesting note about the ruler. I've been curious about what other people have for playing with while thinking, actually. (I seem to have settled on dice, except they're a bit noisy, so I save them for my desk at home.)
I'm not sure I'd call that "viable", either. The vast majority of revolutions do not accomplish their goals, even if you only count the revolutions that succeeded in overthrowing an existing regime. The US War for Independence is remarkable in large part because it actually worked and the result was more freedom (for a while), rather than less.
Fuzzmail
Prions jump species barrier
"...the [Eagles] had received less than $500,000 from its iTunes sales at that point. The band's iTunes income has increased since then, Mr. Azoff adds. Nonetheless, he says: "I'm underwhelmed by the number of sales I see on iTunes for the classic bands."

I still find it humorous that these people expect sympathy from the masses.
However, speaking as an anarchist, not all anarchists are against institutions in general. That is, all anarchists (I believe) would say they're against the State, but some anarchists include more than some of us would in that term.
The main result was that a lot of officials in the administration resigned. ie: Rumsfeld.

The only inherent goal of any political party is to stay in power so it isn't surprising the democrats haven't legislated any drastic change. Allowing the mess to perpetuate itself serves to further their political aspirations.
Good Luck to All Presenting Startups (@TC50) and a Tip
The article didn't say. Was there ever even a prototype or was this just a 60,000 pound worldwide-wide empire of patents based on that little sketch? Wouldn't they have all expired anyway by the time the Ipod hit the market? (even with extensions)

I drew magical music players that could hold all my tunes when I was 12 too. I even tried to make one with the innards of a vhs tape, reel to reel heads and an MC6800 microcontroller. Locating a specific spot on a big ribbon of tape is damn hard with only 128 bytes of ram...
How to fix location bar search?
I didn't finish it. I browsed the author's website a little. He seems grossly arrogant.
Python could then evaluate the fetchmail --configdump output and have the configuration available as the value of the variable “fetchmail”.

Never ever do it. Python has very good parsers now. Using "eval" is crazy. Python is not just a scripting language like JavaScript, it has a full power of C under the hood, thus it's evaluation must be restricted. Or someone will set your or your client's “fetchmail” environment variable to '__import__('os').remove(...'.
Five tips for developing Rails applications
Sounds interesting. How?

"exactly the same expressive power"

No, surely it would be less expressive in some cases, more in others.
I think it's important to consider Fred's clarification in the comments section: "when i say "feeds" I don't really mean RSS/google reader/blogines/netvibes they are part of what i am talking about, but just a part of it the facebook news feed is the biggest thing out there today in terms of aggregating info you'll likely care about and that's a very mainstream service. twitter and the smart aggregators like techmeme and hacker news are also a big part of what i am talking about and they are also easier to consume than RSS for the mainstream user. i am sorry i wasn't more clear about that in my post."

So I think Fred's point is simply that there is a trend towards using feeds for finding relevant stuff on the web over search. And that there might be monetization opportunities latching onto that trend.
Letter to a Young Procrastinator
True, but while many do not have google ads on them, many do as well. By expanding access to the internet and by expanding the amount of information displayed on the internet, it will improve upon the amount of people who use Goodle Advertising. If Google makes the internet available to 360,000 more people, and 10,000 new web sites start using their adwords, they'll have dramatically increased their profit margin. Not only will the new sites on their advertising bring in money, but all the new people now clicking on their ads will too. Win-win.

So, you are right. Not everyone is bothered about revenue, and not everyone uses their advertisements, but more people online and more websites online means that Google will make more money.
All engineering majors at MIT were not required to take SCIP, just the EE/CS majors. Back when I was a student, the rest of us either took 1.00 (C as taught by civil engineers) or 2.10 (Fortran, by mechanical engineers), or we simply learned a language on our own time.

That being said, the purpose of 6.001 (SCIP) was not to learn Scheme, but to use Scheme to introduce students to some of the fundamental concepts of computer science.

As for Feynman, the reason he only taught the class once (over three semesters, I believe), is that there was only one Feynman, and he had a pretty full plate of other things to work on. The "Feynman Lectures" were never meant to be textbooks. They were what they were: lectures, to be read by students seeking additional insights in physics.
[shameless plug] Our startup - Feedity - (http://feedity.com) provides custom RSS feeds for virtually any webpage, which helps many small-medium online services in data integration.
I am implying that on HN "anarchist" often refers to a particular niche, anarcho-capitalism, which is mostly unconcerned with notions of cooperation, voluntaryism and humanism.
Caloric content isn't the only part of nutrition. Try looking at a variety of foods, instead of bulk, processed flour.
As does MzScheme.

This rift and indecision in lisp implementations only exists as long as we continue to allow it. If people just start hacking and using a system in larger numbers, it'll grow. The world is so ripe for the next big language to be Scheme.
How to make the Web OS viable
I think a key distinction is whether we are talking about the science or business of search. The science of search is AI-Hard -- good luck with that.

I think it is reasonable to claim that the business of search is 90% solved. To me this means that Google has reasonable solutions in place for what they see as 90% of the search market (by revenue/profitability/etc) in the medium term. They still have plenty of things to improve upon, but what is the likelihood of another Google (in terms of growth, dominance) coming out of search?
A set of half-a-dozen or so candidates goes into the primaries as potential winners. Last time they were McCain, Romney, Guiliani, Obama, Edwards, and Clinton. Those were the only people who could have become president. The composition of that set of people is more-or-less outside the power of any democratic activity. The people who decide that are the only real voters.
The short answer is that search isn't even 10% solved.

It's mind-boggling to me that people are so content to accept search the way it is right now. All anyone has right now is the first step.

And I'm not just talking algorithmically, I'm talking about user experience and interaction as well! Right now google's linklist format basically does nothing to help you refine and dissect information from your initial search. It doesn't extract meaningful data and bios out from links. It doesn't help you do common word sense disambiguation. It doesn't help you when your search terms can be taken in multiple ways.

And there is more yet to be done even in the keyword space search. For example, if I type "Who is running for president?" (or the keywordese: president candidates 2008) this may mean something different for a frenchman than an englishman than an american. Google doesn't really do a lot to help you here
The importance of good documentation cannot be overstated. Clean code is not enough. While it can simplify the process of understanding its behavior unambiguously, it is limited in conveying its intended behavior. If a certain set of inputs doesn't work correctly on a function, is that a bug, or a known/intentional limitation? Tests play an important role in this as well, since they can convey intent in an executable format. Anyway, for what it's worth, I've got my eye on Clojure also.
> Chrome will not and will never have an (official) ad blocker.

Pardon my ignorance, but what web browsers actually have "official" ad blockers?

> With Microsoft controlling the browser, they could conceivably release an ad blocker in IE8 and turn it on by default.

Robert X. Cringely? Is that you? (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080905_0054...)
...and is convinced of its righteousness in pursuing its cause.

Reminds me of the noble end pursued by the Machines/Robots in I,Robot.
I think there are an incredible number of technical challenges for web applications that are more interesting and important than consistency (focus of article). How about scaling on the backend, performance on the frontend, reliability, security, having a sufficiently rich browser platform... I'm sure this list could go on for hours.

I don't do much frontend web programming, but is it really the case that no framework is providing native look-and-feel via js/flash/etc? I mean, Java has been doing this for a while and it is certainly not the new hotness. Chrome (among many others) also allows web apps to snap out of the browser and appear as a desktop app to OS GUIs.

Confused as to what the big problem is.
Just for fun, in my wardrobe you'll find:
http://www.threadless.com/product/487/Procrastinators_leader...
Like a HN obSICP, equivalent to 1. X, 2. ??? 3. Profit on /.?
It would probably return as V'ger and try to destroy the Earth when it realized that nobody was able to recognize its primitive protocols.
Are you saying you would have turned down the 4.2 billion dollars of stock?
wait.. you have the subwoofer on top of a glass shelf? that cant sound good. subs are supposed to be on the floor
Startup Riot 2009 will be in February. Details should be on http://startupriot.com/ soon. It's in Atlanta, free to present, and cheap to attend, not like the $1250/seat TC50.
Everything is relative. No matter what you have, there is always someone with more. If you have $1 million, there's someone with $10. If you have $10 million, there's someone with $100. If you have $100 million, there are billionaires. And if you're the richest of the billionaires, there will still be people who are better looking, healthier, younger, and happier whom you can feel inferior to.
Google Code as Personal Wiki/VC Tool
I hate to submit something I wrote but I thought other ycombinator's might find this useful.
It's not particularly more effective, but much more fun.

I usually use markers that have erasers on the end.
I see, thanks a lot for your reply.
have none of you seen the thirteenth floor, we are already living singularity.
My first thought on skimming the article: 16 tons, and whadda ya get? Another day older and deeper in debt...
10 Years ago Yahoo thought they had search figured out.
It stated in the article that there was infact a prototype it just could only play 3.5 mins of music.
> Sexual activity aside

That was my point. That there exists a process (evolution) where greater intelligence can spring from lesser intelligence. I agree the mechanism is quite different but it demonstrates there is no fundamental obstacle to the process of increasing intelligence.

Perhaps this is one of the mental leaps that creationists are not able/willing to make. Their belief in an ultimate intelligence producing lesser intelligences is at least logically consistent.
One distinguishing factor is that the "authoritative" copy of the data is on "the server", not on your disk. Web apps may not have full functionality unless connected to the 'net. (Think about how apps that use Gears work now.)
You (and the parent comment) seem to have conflated "hits" and "good songs." which some of us would violently disagree with. Anyway I can think of dozens of bands with more than 15 good songs (and often they have done 2-3 albums/year for more than one year).

I don't want to turn this into a music discussion, so I'll just pick one band I love - The Jam, who actually had hits (in the UK) - 18 of them between 1977 and 1982 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jam).

There's plenty more, which I'm sure others can contribute.
I'm reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" - great book btw - but it mentions in passing that we still feed cow nervous tissue to pigs and chickens, which seems kind of scary in light of this article.
Very useful. I've tinkered with a Rubik's cube, a yo-yo, a paperclip, a piece of foam rubber...
Totally.

Google has it locked up as far as profitability goes but the user experience has a long ways to go. Until I can spawn off a search to find the cheapest VPS host, returned with a spec sheet of every offering alongside speed tests of five sites hosted on each, we're not even in the ballpark.

Search should be able to solve problems all the way through, not just offer possible resources that may or may not help in your hunt for a solution. Which is, as you say, AI-hard/a mindbogglingly batshit crazy undertaking.

Which, in turn, means that someone will eventually succeed and make a lot of money doing so.
I'd imagine chewing on a wooden ruler tastes kind of like chewing on a wooden pencil—yuck :P Bic pens are where it's at!
The New Browser Wars: The Best Features of the new Generation of Browsers
The 3 Laws of Platform Adoption: Why Developers Choose Platforms and What it Means to You
Thanks for the clarification. This is why I like posting random scuttlebutt on the web; I get authoritative corrections from people who were there!

Yeah, the Feynman lecture analogy should not be taken too far. Like SICP, the Lectures were aimed at the very interested majors, possibly at the expense of others -- but perhaps that's as far as the analogy goes. The Lectures were indeed a special event, whereas SICP was designed as a proper textbook: It was used for many years and by many teachers besides its authors.
Done. I am settled and would love to meet with people around :)
This helps explain it: I've encountered quite a few MIT-trained EE hardware engineers. Perhaps that's where I heard the grumbles about 6.001.