skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before knocking Kurzweil's predictions, review his predictions of the 1990's and the people who mocked them. Kurzweil does not have a perfect track record. I think his accuracy in predicting the future is way above average.

Also, I find his views of the future enlightening and useful, as he illustrates lots of "just out of reach" engineering projects for me to consider tackling.

Between the years of 1990 and 2005, Kurzweil predicted the following:

* People will mainly use portable computers.
* Portable computers will be lighter and easier to transport.
* Internet access will be available almost everywhere.
* Device cables will disappear.
* Documents will have embedded moving images and sounds.
* Virtual long distance learning will be commonplace.

Mock his current predictions with care. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/8181399/the_predict...
What has happened to web sites is what happened to rap, just the same shit over and over, but with a new name on it.
I guess it depends on where in Germany we're talking. The Cologne and Frankfurt areas pay better than the East, from what I hear. But 70k isn't unusual; I was paid 60k straight out of college in Frankfurt, 10 years ago.
I might be in the minority, but none of these are things I do. I never need to check Twitter and Facebook at the same time, or play two games right after each other, or open several news apps. If I have a few minutes to waste, I open one of these apps. If I have a lot of time to waste, I open Instapaper or the Kindle app or a game I can play for a long time.

Even so, presumably, if these apps are important to you and you open them regularly, you have them on the first or second screen, so making the home button take you to the first screen doesn't seem like a huge additional burden.
Could you provide some examples? It's interesting to know what problems others come up against when working with frameworks...
Ask HN: Where were you when Harry Potter happened? 
The end of Harry Potter is the end of an epic era for a generation. We'll all be lucky if something as inspiringly grand comes along again.

Share your best moments, favorite stories, and thoughts on your Harry Potter experiences.
Rivalry is always good, it's essential for evolution.
I do not want to link my Facebook with anything else. Nor do I wish to link my Twitter to that.

I do not trust either of these companies, or have a strong attachment to them.

If they want to support BrowserID then they can - as username@facebook.com or username@twitter.com
You're probably better off heading over to reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/
Rocket Spanish Reviews
Many people have been asking more on rocket Spanish and individuals from all over the world are stating their comments through blogs and intern posts. Many say it is an effective way of learning the language and it is easy to grasp and master the concept. Others say the program is designed and dedicated to assist the client know to pronounce the words more clearly.
No edits.
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I've occasionally thought it would be an interesting project to try to organize some kind of "Let's finish Hurd for them" meet up, maybe in conjunction with some major conference that a lot of Linux kernel hackers attend.
Apple pays S.Korean user compensation over iPhone tracking
can't see it taking off only because it solves a problem that 99% of internet users do not know exists. I have never had a regular, average, non-tech internet user say to me 'you know what is a real pain in the ass - signing up for web applications'. Most of those users only ever signup for a handful of applications, and are using oauth for everything else (twitpic etc.)
I would agree he's certainly right about Kurzweil's unrealistic optimism, but I'm not sure our understanding of the brain (and other aspects of our biology for that matter) isn't increasing exponentially. Perhaps rather it just seems linear compared to the turbo-charged progress of these enabling technologies? Certainly we've come a lot further since Phineas Gage than a linear trajectory would allow.

He should have thrown around some numbers while he was at it. I wonder if he'd agree with clinical immortality by the end of this century, and mind-uploading by the end of the next?
very similar to the ones in MTV.

Google has an office in Mota Lava?
My big problem with Kurzweil's singularity is the massive handwaving he does between 'computers are getting exponentially faster' and 'AI will arise'.

This depends on the assumption that 'intelligence' (and nobody can really agree on what that means, which is a bad start) is representable in algorithmic form. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but the lack of progress in hard AI in the last 30 years isn't a good sign.
Implementing consistent hashing into your redis setup
History will look back at this decade as the age of social networks
Steve is the only recruiter we let into the Sydney Rails meetups. He used to be one of us and is a genuinely tops bloke.

If you want a Ruby (or other tech) job with the big end of town in Sydney, Hit up @stevelikesyou.
I really like the constraints you set on your project: "Build a CMS, no forms allowed". Aloha and other wysiwyg editors can hide the CMS almost totally. Using RDFa to store content is not a bad idea.
The sign sheffield are used for shops and business outlet
The sign sheffield are used for shops and business outlet, these sign boards are used for vehicles as well. The vehicles having these sign boards appear attractive and attention diverting. The vehicles having these sign boards look elegant as well. The cars carrying the sign maker sheffield appears modern and trendy.
Actually the french is correct, it's more that it's doesn't sound like a good writer.
News International facing email raid as Brooks steps down
Ask HN: Successful Outsourcing for MicroISV's
I really enjoyed Rob Walling's book "Start Small, Stay Small", and of course everyone here knows patio11.

I'm trying to follow their path with a project of my own, LiberWriter: http://www.liberwriter.com

So far, so good, I'm having a lot of fun with it, it's generating paying customers who are very happy to have someone to take care of a source of great frustration, and I have a lot of room for improvement on many fronts, including improving and automating the service itself, marketing it, etc... So far so good!

One thing, so far, that's been difficult to follow is the book's suggestions about outsourcing stuff. I've found a few people, and... they do get things done, but getting them to communicate is difficult, and overall I'm a bit worried that this will be the weak link in making the project scale. I'm hiring from oDesk, people from here and there, including a few in the Philippines as per the books' recommendation. I'm not 'scraping the bottom of the barrel' either; I tend to pick people who cost a bit more and have some html/ebook skills already.

I want at all costs to avoid simply creating myself a new job where I must be present to make things work - that's the point of creating a real business rather than just doing client work. I don't mind 'being the business' initially, but I won't consider the project a complete success unless I get it to run mostly on its own.

I'm looking for advice on how to best accomplish some outsourcing without spending inordinate amounts of money. In my case, the people involved will probably do both tech support and work on people's books, so they have some HTML/CSS skills.

I'm also curious about what you guys would consider normal. I'm not paying these people full time, so I know they have other priorities, but some of them seem to do things that I am not very happy with: I hit the 'hire' button for one guy, and sent him a welcome email and heard nothing back, for instance.
It would probably be useful to simply ban anything Microsoft related from HN. The comments sink to Slashdot levels.

I mean, your comment jumps to the conclusion that a MS social network would be a failure, and yet Google has failed at "social" at least three times that we know of and still gets an immediate pass here.

sigh For what it's worth, I don't see why MS would want in on this space when they're probably better positioned to take advantage of the network effects of twitter, facebook and G+.
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Montreal is the metropolis of Quebec in Canada; Montreal is the second largest city in Canada after Toronto. But Montreal is the first French-speaking city in North America.<p>Montreal is now regarded as the cultural and business city in the province of Quebec.<p>Montreal hosted in 1967 the World’s Fair and the Summer Olympics in1976, the practice of English and French makes of Montreal an intercultural city.<p>Here is some recommendation to prospective immigrants prior to their installation in the great city of Montreal.<p>1) The Labour Market<p>Because of its large French-speaking community, Montreal is often the first choice of French and European immigrants as their residence.<p>Montreal is a great cultural, financial, and industrial city and despite concerns from new immigrants in their ability to access employment in Quebec, Montreal is a pole of attractiveness in several areas:<p>-Telecommunications, petroleum products, high technology.<p>-The pharmaceutical, aerospace, transportation, textiles.<p>-Digital Media (Computer Games), Health and Government Services.<p>-The market for environmental products …<p>Montreal is also home to a major stock exchange in collaboration with Chicago’s place on the Climate, the two cities are working on the emergence of green products.<p>2) Life in Montreal<p>Montreal has been classified in the top 20 cities in the world to live in. Montreal is known for its quality of life and its diversity.<p>Montreal life is now channelled into several distinct zones in the city:<p>-“La Crescent Street” for its bars, restaurants, festivals and events.<p>- “Plateau Mont-Royal” is the trendiest and most artistic place Montreal.<p>- “Boulevard Saint-Laurent” that is known as the “Hand of Montreal” with restaurants, bars, always crowded as its located in downtown Montreal.<p>- “McGill-Street” with its chic boutiques and glamorous nightclubs, business centers Institutions and other offices.<p>- “The Quartier Latin” which is historically the district of the French bourgeoisie surrounded by cultural institutions and the University of Quebec in Montreal. (UQAM).<p>3) Montreal culture.<p>Montreal is buzzing with festivals and other cultural events, the presence of a strong French community make Montreal a city that seats apart on the North American continent.<p>Because of its cultural character, Montreal even has an area dedicated to entertainment, which is regularly the scene of events.<p>Montreal hosts the Festival of Laughter, but also the Film Festival, the Francofolies Montréal, The International Jazz Festival, the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal contemporary museum of arts.<p>The cultural mix of the City of Montreal makes it certainly a distinct place in Canada and in the world.
The problem is that many, many PHP sites were created by people with limited budgets that will avoid all types of maintenance in the site code, because that means paying the developers more money to do those maintenance tasks, if they ever have a clue that they really need to update their site code to work with newer versions that shared hosting providers eventually will impose.
I find two aspects of the singularity compelling.

Singularities have happened in the past when life evolves a solution to a local problem such as photosynthesis, the social primate and agriculture.

Kurzweils singularity is just one of many potential signularities but the near future seems either contain major innovation with great generality or collapse.
Even though there is a lot of hate for C++ as a language due to its complexity, it does fit in a niche (cross platform, object oriented native language) that no other language does, although D, Objective-C and Go come close.

I wonder if it'd make sense to develop a Coffee Script style language that compiles a "sane" subset of C++, gets rid of some of the nasty\annoying aspects of C++ (header files), and helps enforce good C++ coding practices (const correctness) but is close to C++.
Another good time read is "Time, What Every Programmer Should Know" (http://unix4lyfe.org/time/) -- in short, it's usually best to store time/dates as Unix time (it's UTC and a single number).
A couple of feedback points:

- Go to themeforreset and buy a design, $20 will get you something 10x better than your current design. I don't mean to sound harsh, I'm guessing you're a developer who did the design himself (?) I was the same, decided to outsource the design on my projects was one of the best decisions I ever made.

- Your site touts security, but there's no SSL, not even on the signup form, namecheap can sell you an SSL certificate for $10 (about £6)

I like the idea, but I'm not entirely sure how it will work, how do you know that the okayid name a seller give you is actually them?

Hope that helps.
There's a lot to be figured out before neuroscience even becomes a "proper" science, with laws and all. Even the most sophisticated methods have not been able to figure out fundamental things like plasticity or the nature of neural code. Neuroscience needs its own LHC-level projects. I mean it's surprising that we can figure out what happens to physical particles down to attosecond resolution, but we still use crude manipulations and indirect measures to figure out how plasticity works. But one can be optimistic, in the past decade there has been impressive progress in optogenetics. And another thing: science many times evolves in leaps.

The whole idea of neuron level manipulation is of course science fiction, but it's not so implausible as the author presents it to be. You could simulate experience by just stimulating the afferent nerves or some relatively organized structures like the hippocampus. It's just been demonstrated that you can use a machine to restore the memory encoding process http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/uosc-rmr06121... .
HP execs on the future of webOS
Brilliant. Password security needs to be improved on large screen mobile devices, it has to be easy to use and hard to crack.

What if the touchscreen computer took a short video of the user making a facial change, like smiling and showing the teeth. The algorithm would take hundreds of short videos (during usage of the product), and learn what it's user looks like to a very high degree over time (hair changes, skin colors, etc).

So an attacker would have to acquire a high definition video of the person showing the teeth. If the user only performed the maneuver for the device, then it would be hard for the attacker to reproduce it. It's not perfect, but it would be superior to tapping a 6 digit code that anybody can see from 20 feet away.
Assuming you dont believe in mind-body duality, why would it not be representable in algorithmic form, since it can be mapped all the way down to deterministic chemical reactions?
Well, it's definitely an iterative process. Over time, you'll converge on a "management style" that works for you and for your contractors.

Here is a good starting point, though -- Derek Sivers has a really good blog post that outlines a concrete process for hiring on oDesk: http://sivers.org/how2hire
He's not 'mocking' the predictions, he's providing a compelling, well thought out argument as a counter to a prediction, particularly interesting due to his neuro background.
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If Google ever does end up facing an anti-trust trial, your second point will likely form part of the case against them. This could be considered direct evidence that Google are using their dominance in search to favor their own properties over others.
Richard Smith does not propose a voting system, but the complete elimination of gatekeepers. It's worth emphasising that he is talking about biomed exclusively: other disciplines have different scholarly cultures. Most crucially, the commercial impact of biomed papers is higher than in other fields.

When you write

>reading research papers and judging if they are new, correct, and significant is TOUGH work.

I agree, but when you write:

>The present process makes a good effort at this tough work

I am surprised you say this. Smith points to studies that show that referees' opinions have very little correlation, which suggests the minimum level of filtering actively done by referees is very low. It does not follow from this, though, that the institution of journals considered as a whole does not perform a useful filtering function, which is to say that I agree with you about your point about successive filters.

>Publication delays
Many journals follow anonymous reviewing and forbid distribution of preprints.

The other point, which he does not make, is that referees have very little incentive, besides the opinion of the editorial board, to do their job properly.

>His point about novel, original, or innovative work being rejected is poorly considered. ... If after that the paper is also wildly 'novel', so be it; it still got published!

There's no doubt in that case that the journal has been an impediment to science.

I don't advocate abandoning peer review. I do think we should be more open-eyed about the problems with it. It is a costly system, and one that does not work the way it is intended. Science needs gatekeepers, as you argue, although they need not resemble the current journal system.
Yes, but a lot less than would be required to code the things that are actually being stolen.

That's the art of plagarism - knowing enough to steal well.
The likelihood of Kurzweil's particular vision of the singularity in this case doesn't say anything about the likelihood of the singularity in general, i.e. by the creation of artificial intelligence through methods that are nearer at hand than nanobots or whole brain emulation.
Storing time as Unix timestamps is often not possible. Often you need to be able to answer questions like "did this moment fall on a weekday?", "what day was it 3 hours after that moment" and so on.

My rule is to either work with integer Unix timestamps or timezone-aware datetime objects. A naive datetime object is, well, naive. If it's the number of seconds since the Epoch, represent it as a number, not an object.
RIM working on a media box?
This is big. But at the same time I bet that many other wireless carriers have similar flaws in their micro cells, where their infrastructure blindly trusts them to have not been tampered with.

They are products developed by teams independent of those who designed the security of the backbone of the phone network.
That's a good article, and has some useful stuff.

Let me add a bit more:

I've done my best to document how things should be done, step by step, and continue working on that. I don't expect these guys to just go do various things and get it right without some detailed direction.

The parts about programming aren't as relevant to me, as I handle that side of things. More than technical skills, I need people who are going to be good at getting back to my customers in a 'reasonable' period of time and not leave a bad impression on them. That, and people with some basic HTML/CSS skills to work on customers' books. That much, people do have... I guess I'm looking to figure out what's normal in terms of communication skills and turnaround time, and ... how other people deal with the huge gap between themselves, who are quite dedicated, get stuff done quickly, and have every incentive to get things just right, and 'hired guns'. There's going to be some of that gap in a normal startup where you hire people to work alongside you, but it's even bigger if you're outsourcing, and can't provide incentives like stock options, and don't even see the people in question.

In other words: as long as it's just me answering tech support requests, I'm generally very quick to turn them around, provide quick, helpful answers, and seem to be getting very positive reactions from people. I'm scared of things taking a turn for the worse when other people start answering support requests.
(all of mine are gone, hope you all enjoy spotify!)
Any data mining jobs here in Germany?
Hello,

I know python, R and SQL. I studied economics and business. I am now working as business analyst.

No chance to program with this job. So...

Someone knows about data mining jobs where coding and math are important here in Germany?
AIDS drug study
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Idea: Digital Will Agency
So slightly morbid but I suspect HN users would be the type of people that would desire something like this.

A lot of us build up significant digital footprints. Web sites, blogs, source code, artwork, etc. We might desire some of these resources be transfered to family or published in perpetuity.

A prime example I can think of and the spark for my idea is the work of Richard Stevens:
http://www.kohala.com/. It would be nice to ensure things like this survive indefinitely. Perhaps also unreleased works that an author, coder, or artist may wish to pass on unfinished if something bad happens.

The technical side would be fairly commonplace. Basic file hosting like rsync.net but HTTP interface as well. In your actual will you could have instructions to find a private key that "activates" the service, whatever that entails. Perhaps the company has agents that carry out some sort of actions too like shut down accounts, provide notice to user groups, or whatever.

Legal regulations might be hairy and of course some assurance that the company itself isn't ephemeral, perhaps by affiliation to some long standing institution.

Just a passing thought. Plausible or craziness?
We too are getting some significant revenue from Adsense. The income has been stable for last 2 years. It dropped by around half as well in last 3 months. It is worrying. I am not sure if ad blocks are the cause when the drop has been quite sudden.