skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One only needs to look at history to see our capacity for rapid improvement in retrospect. One of my favorite metrics is life expectancy. In 1800, most people wouldn’t expect to live past 30.

It's hard to take someone seriously writing about science who makes such a dumb mistake. The life expectancy for a 20 year old in 1800 was 64. I don't see how it can even pass the smell test for an intelligent person to assume that a couple hundred years ago people systematically keeled over at 30.
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get it from Amazon App Store

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004R1LNGS/
Where do you see that I was suggesting that having a quote from a single economist proves that "economists in general believe something"? My complaint was that the headline lead me to believe that I would get some perspective from at least one (and hopefully more than one) economist. Instead, it seemed to repeat the criticisms that I've read on a few random blogs (i.e. from non-economists).
I don't understand how he got through this entire post without mentioning AIM, Facebook, Live.com, and Gmail, which are doing their damnedest to make his vision come true.
Hmm, do you really think most criminals believe themselves to be acting justly? I think they know full well that what they do is "wrong" but since they can get away with it, they figure why not?
Barriers to Improving the Accessibility Game Plan
I see it as unlikely there'll be real consolidation, ironically for a language with a "one obvious way to do it" philosophy there many different opinions about how a framework would work. That said there is progress on consolidating some of the infrastructure, e.g. discussions on a creating a unified request objects for frameworks, a GSOC by Armin Ronacher (author of Jinja and Flask) under the Django banner to create a unified template compiler framework for both to share, and a work-in-progress PEP by Laurens Van Houtven about unifying some APIs that asynchronous frameworks have and bringing some useful base classes into the stdlib.
I'm skeptical about TS because it seems to good to be true (or too terrible), but every time I hear about it I can't help but think of this clip [1] from Neil deGrasse Tyson about how aliens would only have to be less than a percent smarter than us for us to look like peons to them. So it makes it seem inevitable that if strong AI comes to pass and AI is measures more intelligent than us, it's the end of human civilization and the begin of the era of machines. Our only hope is they decide to keep us around as pets, and are good owners. If so we'll be able to kick our feet back and enjoy eternity (should we choose to live it) debating iPhone vs. Android on Hacker News.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-uZZ7RdL5E
Who’s your Doktorvater?
Now I may be missing a crucial bit of information, but I never got it why one wouldn't rather create a company and/or host the web site servers in some country with less ridiculous patent laws... Just move the servers to Sweden, problem solved. Now, I'm not sure what would happen to the U.S. developers that would contribute infringing code, so to make them safe, you would simply need to erase the records of who contributed what, or keep a system of anonymous nicknames...
Writing an RSS-feed and location-based iOS application (with code)
I think people are overlooking the fact that everyone has always lived in a filter bubble. There's an undeniable influence of your surroundings on your beliefs and knowledge about the world. To follow up on the example Berners-Lee gives: rich people are already unaware of the existence of cheap alternatives. On a fundamental level, they know they exist (if not because of direct contact, then because of fundamental knowledge of the way society works), but on a practical level, these alternatives aren't considered and they aren't advertised by their friends or by the media the rich consume.

People are only more broadly aware if they are open for, and looking for, alternative information. This has always been the case.
I've been reading up on GAE+Django and it doesn't seem to support RDMBs or installation of libraries. Has this hindered you in your coding?
as much as I'm sure it's not a trap it's still a pretty bad practice. In theory your site could also get hacked and people could start collecting new usernames and emails not in the database.
I created a CSV version. Will that help?

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/70442/TedTalks.csv?dl=1

edit: I've noticed some slight errors, but they should be easily fixed. It was a quick copy paste job, and a quick edit in TextMate to remove extraneous rows. Sorry about that. If I had the time I'd clean it up nice. Maybe someone else would like to.
I've been working on a new site in Pyramid (the successor to Pylons), and I have to say so far it's been an impressive experience. They took a bit of a different philosophy than Django and Rails. In those 2, you can customize some things, but there are also default options, and particularly things like the ORM are built into the framework. Pyramid behaves more like an application widget where the pieces of a modern web app (ORM, security, templating, URL routing) can be fit into its slots.

I did enjoy the article's touching on Django. It looks like it has gotten less monolithic than in prior versions. As I recall several years ago, Django really was like the Rails of Python, with tons of default options but some difficulties in customization. It looks like they have moved away from that somewhat.
I agree, it can be a fantastic interview question.

For the record, though, they did questions of the "reverse a string" type too. Which is necessary, in my opinion.
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Apple iOS 5 details spread like a wildfire after its announcement at WWDC 2011 by Apple officials.
IPhone 4 Clone: GooApple from China
Robinson is not making a good case here - the Federal Reserve Act was, at the time, seen as strengthening banks by making their reserves more liquid. If Robinson wants to argue that it had the opposite effect, he will need a lot more than his opinion. If he is right, then there should have been fewer bank failures in the decades preceding the FRA; but in fact, history is full of them. The post-1913 banking system functioned well for decades, including during a world war. Obviously it had its weaknesses, but where is the proof that the pre-1913 system would have been better in the same circumstances?

Also, he is carping about the wrong thing - he complains that the Fed was only 40% secured by gold, but the Fed is not the entity that failed; the banks did. It wouldn't have mattered if the Fed was secured by pure unobtanium.

In short, I'm not convinced by any of this - it's basically just one guy's opinion from 1935.
One of many many fails was:

Don't use IDs in selectors.
#nyanCat {

What's the thinking behind disallowing ids in selectors?
A documentary on the ghost cities/malls - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E
I have one account for myself.

I also manage one for my baby boy, so that I can keep baby pictures all tagged and organized in one place. I don't consider this to be my account, I consider it his.

This points out an ambiguity in voting. If you register an account for your kids, should you count it?
Day to day, I'm not even sure that Facebook has enough value, much less the applications.
When Apache 2.4 is released, hopefully the event MPM will help with this.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.3/mod/event.html
What, no man -k (or apropos)? Without apropos, I'd still be running random commands I found in [s]bin directories.
That's not true about rails. Neither the ORM, templating or URL routing are built in. People use Datamapper or ActiveRecord, ERB or HAML and routing is handled as rack endpoints.

Rails 3 is much easier to pull apart and put in pieces that you want. I believe this will be even easier with rails 3.1 introducing engines as a first class citizen.
I did not get worked up about that.
As I said, it's close to being bullshit. It's not entirely, I just think it is a little bit extremist. There are more businesses that don't have problems than ones that do.
I also think that a lot of what the article says is true, but also think that a lot of it is extremist.

P.D.: I happen to work at one of the companies you are outsourcing to :p
But that's less profit specifically for a platform that is already lower revenue.
You have to interpret the headline in the context of the publication. It's an article in The Economist, whose main target group, not surprisingly, is economists and people who are generally interested in economics. In the headline, when they said "economists", they have clearly meant their readers. The article leaves it to its readers to decide whether BitCoin is exciting or not. In context of all this, I think it's a good subtitle for this article.
Unity for Android is an extra $400 license once you've bought Unity for iPhone Pro. https://store.unity3d.com/shop/
I'd like to see their numbers after this - how many readers are they going to lose? And what will their advertisers think?
"A leading neuroscientist describes how the foundations of our criminal-justice system are beginning to crumble"

Well, it's a blow to the foundations of revenge-based justice systems, like the US one.

In rehabilitation-based justice systems like the ones in Europe, this is not a problem. It's simply more tools to diagnose and rehabilitate prisoners.
Obligatory XKCD link: http://xkcd.com/869/
Yes, as cited it's dumb, and a good example of why averages can be so misleading (if he had been looking at median life expectancy charts, would he have made the same claim?)

But on the other hand, the improvement is very real - it's not fake data. Where did this massive improvement come from? Orders of magnitude improvements in infant/child mortality!
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Watch,movie,online,megavideo
watch,movie,online,megavideo
watch these television channels. Surely it would be very good, if parents have locked the television channel for adults so that children can not watch channels that originate mainly from abroad.
However, that also tends to promote funny threads, in-jokes, etc.

Still better than the average front page for sure, but don't expect it to be the reddit of three years ago.
New favorite snippet
Heh. Exactly.
I found this gem there: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/3719
Open Source Business Models, Revisited | Kellblog
Using evolution to understand life in the struggling city of Binghamton, NY
>I'd say you overdid it.

That is certainly possible. I've often thought that was true for my friend (who would read worst case scenario trip reports so he could know what he was "dealing with"). The year of preparation wasn't intentional actually, we were just unable to get our hands on any and weren't in a position (living on campus) to be growing ourselves.

>if you are over 18, this should not be for the government to decide.

In an ideal world, I would agree with this. But I think the reality of the situation is that, unless it accompanied some broader systemic change, if psychedelics alone (or just mushrooms) were legalized and nothing else changed, they would be immediately abused and the media would cover sensational stories of people hurting themselves, driving under the influence, freaking out, etc. Take salvia as an example.

Again, I agree with you in principle. I just think pragmatically it's not that simple. Perhaps legalization would be better, perhaps not.
The point of TS is that once you get to 1.0001x smarter than human you get to wall really quickly. If the wall is 2x or 11x, self-improving AI will reach it in no time. And we'll still have tremendous benefits from it, no matter how close the wall is to human intelligence. AI only need be a tiny bit smarter than humans to achieve things such as interstellar travel, eternal life, etc.
A great response! Let me see if I can shed some more light on this topic.

"This phrase is the anti-science. No science operates based on \"commonly accepted\"."

Exactly! And, there is a very good reason for this. Economics is not a science. It is a social science that makes some use of the scientific method. Within this context, meta-analysis becomes extremely important for drawing pertinent conclusions. This is just a side note, because it seems that we have crossed our wires somewhere.

"Consider how absurd it would be for any modern economist to claim that a form of money, which was banned in 1933, was the cause of prolonging the great depression."

I should have been more clear. I was referring to the global economic instability (generally manifesting itself as a number of depressions across the Bretton Woods countries) that preceded the collapse of the Bretton Woods System.

I have to apologize, but when I see "gold standard" I immediately start my Bretton Woods rebuttal. It is a reflex reaction from spending too much time arguing with Austrian economists.

Of course, the grandparent post was referring to the Great Depression. Well, all is not lost. Dr. Scott Sumner (my favorite practicing economist) has a nice starter post on the Great Depression:

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=4161
Parallel and Distributed Computation:Numerical Methods
It sort of annoys me that whenever people discuss technological singularities its always through Kurzweil's ideas. I feel that Verner Vinge, the guy who invented the term, had a much more interesting take on it, and there are other schools of thought as well.
http://singinst.org/blog/2007/09/30/three-major-singularity-...
I'd be surprised if the kind of people who use iPads also desire to read the New York Post.
Hey writers live for revisions :) Wouldn't be surprised to see it show up in a while. You did leave a comment--yes?
Kind of a link-baity title, but the idea is worth merit.

Note that you can replace "church" with "library", "park", "rooftop", or any other place where you can be left alone in peace and quiet.
I expect the government will eventually force Facebook to open up and support a common federated social networking standard

Seriously? This will never, ever happen.

Ever, ever, ever.

That's just not how life works. Or businesses. Or how the US government works. It's the total antithesis to the American ideals. It wouldn't even have a chance of happening in social democracies in Europe, let alone America.

Ever.
I think the fact that Bitcoins is being discussed in the Economist is an interesting data point unto itself. Just means its awareness is entering mainstream media territory.
Very exciting to see more start-ups focusing on health and wellness!
Actually, now that you mention it, I believe Plato was (consciously or unconsciously, due to his aristocratic background) referring to the unjust in positions of power, maybe not so much criminals. As in, unjust men with long-term planning.

In that case, it is a convincing argument. Consider that most dictators and despots seem to think they are in the right (Ww2, etc.) Compare this to "normal" criminals, who seem to have poor impulse control (lack of long-term planning. )

Of course, that has nothing to do with the article. I've brought up an argument and then dismissed it just as quickly :)
Right. For example, Linux distros have been able to significantly defray the costs of digital disc image distribution by using torrents.
Very unlikely, I would think.
Probably policy imposed by Murdoch as part of the News Corp paywall. Whether it makes sense or not.

They did have one of the best headlines ever though http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NYPost.jpg
Soviel ich weiß ist Hackernews immer noch englischsprachig.
smells like spam
Very cool. But can you use it to take vector screenshots?

I manage to take screenshots as pdf:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf
killall SystemUIServer

Unfortunately, this just gives me a pdf with rasterized graphics.
Based on what? Never heard of XSSI in this context, isn't XSSI used for extended server side includes?
> Most people would rather devolve this sort of responsibility to the authorities.

Evidence?

As others have pointed out, this article lacks some research.
There's not much nicer in the world than sitting in a lawn chair on a hot tar roof in the middle of the summer with a gallon of water and a good book. I absolutely despise that my current place has a slopped roof.
NY Post is also the kind of newspaper that should be avoided, it's an American version of The Sun.
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Might want to try being more accurate with the title next time. I was hoping for something actually about terminals/terminal emulation.
And World of Warcraft uses the protocol for patch distribution. That's a pretty sizeable number of people using bittorrent for legit purposes.
I don't think Lettvin really cared about the books themselves - he just wanted to meet the type of people who reads them.
Delete your homepage
I agree.

I recently started getting hot and heavy with Linux after moving my stuff to EC2. I thought package managers were the bee's knees until I realised that my production server and my development box (at home) we're running drastically different versions of the same program/library. This of course caused a whole bunch of incompatibility problems and headaches when it came to building other stuff.

If you care about versions and stability, it's just safer and more reliable to compile from source that you know that works. Package managers can sometimes be a crap shoot.
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I just knew someone else would have done this when I looked at the original story, that was the first thing I thought was missing - some context as to which ones are popular. Awesome!
Because it's a widespread problem across the web. Even from startups that read hacker news!
I was skeptic at first too. Read the first few dozen pages of The Singularity Is Near and you'll be impressed the quality of the data. By almost all accounts, technological progress datapoints match very closely an exponential curve.

Here's a good mashup from a number of third party sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ParadigmShiftsFrr15Events....

This is hardly a wishy washy thesis by a history major. The data are pretty robust.
Would it really matter if they had quoted some economist, honestly? As cynicalkane said, for any one virtuous, wise economist they had chosen to hear, they could get the exact opposite position from another one...lending the whole exercise to be another form of mental masturbation. Not very informing or interesting.
I totally agree. I think that Carl is just a little old-school to fully open it. Walter Bright of 'D' had similar problems that limited the initial take-up of the language.

Its a shame really as I imagine many net hackers would love Rebol, especially those with a penchant for Lisp and lisp-a-likes.
I thought it was going to be a guide about wiring terminals -- completely disappointed.
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Hmm... I think I disagree with this approach. This assumes $USER already knows what your service is about, before they get to your home page. If that's true, then no problem. If not, how do they know what they're signing up for? How do they know what Housefed even is?
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What struck me was close to the opposite. The proposals in the article make me fear a future dystopia, where no one believes in free will, where the average person is degraded by a dehumanizing science. Like some science fiction horror story.
"These problems are easier than human-surpassing machine intelligence. While I don't have a problem with believing machines will one day be smarter than us, I find it offensive that this guy continues to sell us on it happening within our lifetimes. It almost certainly won't."

So, I am assuming you think the EU's Human Brain Project is a waste of $1.6B?

From my point of view, our ability to engineer, augment and replicate intelligence has very little to do with our understanding of biology. I really don't see your expertise in the complexity of biology as lending any insight into the ability to predict the evolution of intelligence capacity of our species. Strong AI based on emulating biological design is only one of many, many approaches to engineering intelligence..

Additionally, both your links and the basis of your arguments attempt to make a strawman of Kurzweil by attacking auxiliary points that are not critical to his primary empirical insights - rather you chose to attack choice speculative predictions.

I'm no Kurzweil fanboy, but I think his empirical insights have done nothing less than frame the discussion of the technology singularity, and I enjoy his predictions for what they are - speculation. If you are presenting yourself as a scientist looking at this argument critically, I would expect 2 things: 1) an understanding of where your expertise has, and does not have relevance, 2) a critique of Kurzweil's empirical observations, not his speculative predictions.
"So, its sort of this thing that everyone must do. The emphasis on that aspect is so much, but the opportunities to meet potential life partners is very few."

--
Anupam Mittal, on recognizing an opportunity of high demand without low connection to supply
My assumption is if you came to my site, you obviously were intrigued enough by the service to visit. I want to put as little between you & that service as possible. Without taking a signup out all together, this as close as I can get.
Seriously. It's effectively deep voodoo; to talk about it properly you kind of need to know a fair bit about things evolved in the 70s-80s.

In some ways the best part of the Unix Hater's Guide is that it chronicles a lot of the history of those early systems that still live on in the guts of our computers.
You haven't read the rest of the comments here, including the links to the specs for this feature. The entire page is loaded in a hidden tab and all scripts are executed.
How quickly would the difficulty factor snap upwards when a couple of extra Terahash/sec suddenly show up from a botnet?
You are deliberately disregarding the improvements in modern medicine that caused such a dramatic drop in child/infant death. This seems like a pretty classic example of people not realizing how wildly spectacular modern society is, because they're living in it.
This assumes that you're doing more marketing of your service than you are coding of it. Otherwise, how will the general public know who you are, what you're about?

Putting this info on the homepage almost seems like free marketing, in a sense.

Are you assuming that if you build this "product" (housefed.com site) that people will come? Is there a market for what you're making? It seems to me that you'd have the greatest degree of success in finding your market first, and then building a product/service to meet that need that you've already vetted... instead of making a product and trying to convince people they want it.
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That'd be ret-ARD, rather than RE-tard.

Or do Americans put the stress on the first syllable even in the verb? Stressing first syllables is a pretty common feature of American English.
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I've found Google Docs very useful. You can point "normal" people at it, and suddenly they are doing collaborative editing.

I just hope it maintains sufficient stability for work like this to remain manageable. For example, they describe the disappearance of XMLRPC support:

Parent links to -->

http://dev.bangordailynews.com/2011/06/13/bangor-daily-news-...

in turn links to -->

http://dev.bangordailynews.com/2011/06/16/marrying-google-do...

Then came an upgrade, which was on the whole a good one. It combined what they’d learned building Wave to bring real-time collaboration to a new level. But it also eliminated XML-RPC support, and docs aren’t marked up as nicely as they used to be.

So, we delved into the API, and I think what we have now is an even nicer system than XML-RPC could provide. You can find a version of what we built in the WordPress Plugin Repository.