skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Ideas for algorithmically-challenging autonomous web-based apps
Thinking of something like search, where scalability becomes an issue without having to serve a large number of users.
Oh Jesus. I did my 2 years of C++ development over 10 years ago, but I don't even mention it in my CV, because I am not going to use the mess that is C++ ever again. If I need something low-level, I will use Objective-C.
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This was already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2761514
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Hackers strike at a foe (Anonymous)
The thing I liked about standard pace was that I had plenty of time to fail in boards of student societies, events organizing and an own company and whatnot.

I always wonder a bit whether the people who skip years and study super-fast really know anything about the world.
There's something rather disingenuous about your phrase: "not sure our understanding of the brain isn't increasing exponentially".

I think the claim that our knowledge (_actual_ knowledge, mind you) of anything is increasing exponentially (with the usual implication that the exponent isn't 1.01 per decade :-) ) is the claim that requires proof.
tl;dr: The work was varied and interesting. We were trading time for money. We feared firing customers for lack of cash flow. There is too much competition, and margins are thin. We failed to expand our market. We took almost any work, so felt we could not control our wider contribution. We started to create a product, but could not stay away from getting paid for our time. Eventually we cut the web design work, as the margins were getting even tighter. Now we have two products, which we are proud of, but don't know if they will make a successful business.

Sounds a little to me like the story of Pyra Labs, and many others that I can't recall.
And yet another good read is Erik Naggum's "The Long, Painful History of Time"
http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
which describes better way for storing date(time)?s.
I find a lot of people complain "C++ is too complicated", but personally i don't think its that hard to get your head around... apart from the cryptic template handling.

Some of my more interesting projects are C++ based so i have a feeling it's going to stick around for quite a while yet.
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Show HN: 9cloud, Photoshop Bridge in the Clouds
My project is 9cloud, an aims to do all the things that Photoshop Bridge does on the desktop, except in the cloud.
I've been at this for a few months, but I've reached a crux where either I'll go full time developing it or move onto other things.
If you're interested in integrating VIE into that system, then the EU-funded IKS Project might be able to help you with that: http://www.iks-project.eu/get-involved
My project is 9cloud, an aims to do all the things that Photoshop Bridge does on the desktop, except in the cloud.

I've been at this for a few months, but I've reached a crux where either I'll go full time developing it or move onto other things.
I don't use C/C++ for the same reason I don't use assembly. There are superior languages out there that do a better job with everything important for building complicated software that is robust, easy to use, easy to maintain, fast and scalable. C++ is on its way out, it is still relevant and will be relevant for decades though. As is Cobol.
It is true that in a bubble everyone is telling you to buy. But I don't think we're in a bubble for the gold price for a couple reasons. The first is that most people with an unsophisticated financial perspective (eg: hair dressers) are not aware of gold (in the countries I've visited.) The slightly sophisticated (Eg: people who invest in mutual funds) have been claiming there was a gold bubble going all the way back to when it was only $400 an ounce.

But the other reason is we haven't seen gold take leave of the fundamentals. The financial crisis that has been unfolding since 2008 has revealed that the only response governments seem willing to take is ever more monetary inflation. The more money out there, the higher the price of gold. Secondly, most gold trading is at the level of very sophisticated people, not the average joe. When average joes start piling in and blowing up the price, then gold may take leave of its fundamentals and we'll have a bubble.

The thing is, in bubbles, supply rushes in to meet demand-- but you cant' scale up supply of gold like you can dotcoms or houses. Environemntal regulations and kleptocratic governments keep new mine production opportunities limited.

Finally, mining companies-- which should be the darlings of the gold bubble if there is one-- are trading sympathetic with the rest of the stock market, not contrary to it. If we were in a gold bubble, then good news for gold (eg: bad financial news) would cause those prices to go up-- but they don't they go down now. This indicates that they are not seen as an alternative, but as being subject to the bad news the same way General Electric, et. al. are.

We won't enter a bubble phase until that has changed. When people start seeing gold as a safer asset (or as a bull market "you just gotta get into!") then we'll have entered a bubble. At that point, when there's bad news for General Electric, you'll see a bump in the price of GoldCorp. We saw this in the dotcom bubble-- a big IPO for a tech company would cause a decline in General Electric or Gold for that matter.

All of these are subjective observations, so neither of us can really prove the other wrong of course. I found it interesting is that we use the same signal to detect a bubble-- the hair dressers and MLM schemes. I'm impressed to see how much more popular gold is outside the USA than it is inside the USA. I take that as a sign that it is heading towards a bull market.

However, if you're right and I'm wrong, I will be very severely punished by the markets. I'm not too worried, though. I got punished by the dotcoms. I played the housing bubble successfully going up and going down and got out a bit early, but am happy with the result.

I remember being told I was crazy on forums because I said there was a bubble in housing. So, you're not crazy, I just think you're too early.
Or creating a windowing UI and calling it Windows?
Anyone who truly believes that the "authorities" in China are any more capable than the "authorities" outside of China isn't very smart at all.

A representative sample of China's Politburo:

Hu Jintao, 62, president of the People's Republic of China, graduate of Tsinghua University, Beijing, department of water conservancy engineering.

Huang Ju, 66, graduate of Tsinghua University, department of electrical engineering.

Jia Qinglin, 65, graduate of Hebei Engineering College, department of electric power.

Li Changchun, 61, graduate of Harbin Institute of Technology, department of electric machinery.

Luo Gan, 69, graduate of Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, Germany.

Wen Jiabao, 62, premier of State Council, graduate of Beijing Institute of Geology, department of geology and minerals.

Wu Bangguo, 63, graduate of Tsinghua University, department of radio engineering.

Wu Guanzheng, 66, graduate of Tsinghua University, power department.

Zeng Qinghong, 65, graduate of Beijing Institute of Technology, automatic control department.

-------------

A representative sample of the US Senate:

... 100 people who are pretty much all lawyers

Not saying this implies anything, but my money's on the government run by engineers.
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It seems to me that a lot of the problems people have in discussing this field are founded on difficulties in agreeing a common semantic framework.
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There's never any progress in AI, because once we figure out how to do something, we stop calling it "AI".

In the last 30 years, computers have won at chess, won at Jeopardy, learned to recognize spam with better than 99.5% accuracy, learned to recognize faces with better than 95% accuracy, achieved semi-readable automatic translation, figured out what movies I should add to my Netflix queue, and started to recognize speech. We've seen huge advances in computer vision and statistical natural language processing, and we're seeing a renaissance in machine learning. Most of this stuff was considered "hard AI" as recently as 1992, but the goalposts have moved.

And if intelligence can't be represented in algorithmic form, then what's the brain doing? Even if we have immaterial souls that don't obey the laws of physics, why do some brain lesions cause weirdly specific impairments to our thought process? A huge chunk of our intelligence is clearly subject to the laws of physics, and therefore can be wedged somewhere into the computational complexity hierarchy.
Regarding breaking the communication barrier - if you hired someone from another side of the Earth and he is doing really a great job and you are fully satisfied with quality and price - visit him or her, air tickets are quite cheap and this will be great experience both for you and for your employee
It's not that simple. The gold standard basically established an international monetary union, similar to the Euro today.

In such a setting, long-term trade imbalances cannot be balanced out by exchange rate adjustments, so there is a very real danger that countries are drained of money by running net imports in the long term. While this then prevents the country from net importing even more - which is only fair - it also reduces the purchasing power of the country's population internally.

The circulation of money is slowed, causing unemployment and the very bizarre situation where people cannot afford to buy desired XYZ, while at the same time there are involuntarily unemployed producers of XYZ. Everybody's unhappy, simply because the social construct of money ties their hands.

By decoupling from the gold standard, countries left what was effectively a currency union, which enabled them to restart internal circulation.

This is also the choice that Greece has right now, which this supposed "smartest man" does not, or for ideological reasons refuses to, see: leave the currency union to restart internal circulation of a new currency.
Not if your trying to pick one over the other, we're not making some abstract theoretical comparison here about the fundamentals of the two programs.

If Harvard is better at producing startups than TS, regardless of the reason (alumni, experience), then Harvard would actually be a better choice than TS for someone looking to found a startup.
Original thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760466

It would be nice if Hacker News would merge duplicate threads/stories.
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Agreed. I only realised it shortly after graduating, slightly too late :(
I think you might be missing the point, though. The argument is that we're collecting exponentially more data about the brain, but that data doesn't translate directly to understanding.

You mentioned Phineas Gage. That case led to the idea of regions of the brain controlling different things, which led to lobotomy as a psychiatric treatment, which was used up until the 1960s or so. Then chemical methods improved, and people came to understand that neurotransmitters played a role too, which led to antidepressants and other drugs. Those drugs have improved, but their design hasn't changed that much in the last few decades. Obviously this is over-simplified -- but it doesn't sound like an exponential growth of understanding to me.
One suggestion I received is to simply look for people in the US, and pay them a bit more, which could work out too. Anyone gone that route, and how did you do it? People willing to work for lower wages in the US are not exactly lining up to respond to oDesk announcements, it would seem. Craigslist? Anyone else gone that route?
No, Java is that language
It would be nice if everyone take some time off linux to help with Hurd. Participation and write 1 line of code can go a long way in helping them along :). I really want to see Hurd completed.
This strikes me as a massive waste of time. I would expect Google to release their own native RSS/Atom feed functionality in the not too distant future.
I just started LW this year, so I'm off to the left of "this" graph: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month

That's not really a feasible suggestion at this point in time.

My concern is that I won't make it further right without first finding the right people.
I have been using tmux occasionally to, but the key mappings kill me. I just want it to be one stroke, not chorded...so what I want really is for an iterm window to behave like a tmux session, with tabs being windows etc
Appreciate the kind words chubs.

You've done a good job of hiding your identity on HN. Drop me a note so I know who to thank :)
Last year at DICE, Jesse Schell gave amazing presentation on the topic:
http://www.g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-th...
So I've been coding for about a year and a half now and had to learn all this the hard way. Which isn't a bad thing at all.

It's little stuff like this that really makes it true that you should try to build an app or two like a blog-n-whatnot so that one's ignorance of these issues can be exposed.
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.

We have a working definition and know that it is algorithmically representable nowadays (http://www.hutter1.net/ai/aixigentle.htm). Now the question is how you can make the algorithm efficiently computable.
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A few years ago they had an ad for Blogger, which was not actually an AdWords ad, shown if a search request contained a word "blog". It was placed above AdWords.
Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for the explanation. Although, I must say, that it's odd statistic to look at, for proxy-style service.
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> 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.

The object is basically just a wrapper around that number anyways. From the programmer's perspective there is not really a difference.
China's errors seem to be ones of engineering: Overbuilding.
America's errors seem to be ones of lacking fortitude: constantly increasing over spending.

If neither change, china is headed for continued growth and maybe some painful re-allocations of capital, while the US is headed off of a cliff.
This is a story from three years ago. Why is it being reposted?
And because we already have proof of concept machines that perfectly exhibit intelligence, we can be sure that the intelligence spot in the complexity hierarchy isn't somewhere in the intractable regions.
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I don't like C++ as a language AT ALL, but the fact is, for cross-platform native app development, it's the only game in town unless you want to write C. Do you want your app (or some part of your app) to run on Windows/OSX/iOS/Android/Linux? Then you're writing it in C++.

It sucks, in many ways, but it's what we have.
All this talk of "but they have no other choice" amuses me. Yes they do. And they will probably exercise it.
That depends. I use 5 pages but each page has a clear purpose. From left to right:
Games, social, organisation (calendar + clock), Internet (bookmarks + search widget), media (music, videos, YouTube and so on). The only app I use on a regular basis that could fit on multiple screens is YouTube, and I can easily remember the position of one app. Swiping the wrong way does not cone into that.

Your point only applies if you fill the 5 pages with apps as they're installed, iPhone style.
There are superior languages out there that do a better job

Your statement is false, because the choice of language depends on the job. For example, when I need to make something simple quickly I will do it in C#. However when I need to write an add-on to an existing application that doesn't have an official plugin system, then C++ and Assembly are really awesome.
Help me out, fellow pedants.

Shouldn't it be either "makes finding what you need and sharing what you know easier than ever" or "find what you need and share what you know _more easily_ than ever"?
> They asked me for my credit card website logins, I provided them, and they took down all the transactions

Now that would make a juicy, tempting target for a hacker.
How do you know what/how to ask? I'm learning all the time, wide range, and I often have to learn more, or ask people who know more, just to know enough to ask Google. What good is Google if it can't help with the furthest reaches of your knowledge, if you can't form questions in a way it (or any other search engine) can answer?
How well does Hurd compare to Linux?
This is quite interesting to hear. So in the US it hasn't taken hold yet? Here in Europe the buzz is starting, the MLM aspect has been less than a year old. So I have caught this in the early stage?

Can someone else from the US confirm or deny econgeeker's claim?

This is the specific scheme I was invited to: http://www.securitas-aurum.com/

But its hard for me to believe that Slovenia (where I am from) is ahead of US on this one. We usually lag a year or two in such phenomena.

So I can explain it in 2 ways -> You are either a nugget of gold, if your statements are legit, then there is still money to be made from this one.

The other explanation is that you are one of the team doing the pumping.

What does the hive mind have to say?
There's a few restaurants in London which do this like http://www.inamo-restaurant.com/ but it's never really taken off. There's not much value add for the customer.
Very interesting experiment, and suprising that the Google bot appears (in this instance at least) to be ignoring robots.txt.
You can convert unix time to whatever format you want.
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Switzerland still has a conservative financial system, and may benefit from a "flight to safety" as the euro deteriorates. That might be his reason for buying francs.

Francs used to be backed by gold, and might still be partially backed by gold. I think they are not redeemable in gold anymore, but that the country keeps a large supply of gold onhand. So, sort of a partial fiat currency.

However, one can own gold directly, which provides a hedge against all currency risk. It sounds like this is what he is doing, and then also holding some francs against a panic in europe.
Is there a transcript somewhere? I really need a transcript to be able to remember anything :P
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Please re-read my comment.
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Yeah we're currently trying to do a similar thing with our company except we started in IT Support
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bartonfink,

I would certainly be able to describe the Australian employment market. Happy to fill you in on the basics of immigration too. But just the basics, what I don't know about visas could fill a warehouse :)

I emailed the GMail account listed in your profile and look forward to having a chat.

Steve Gilles
@stevelikesyou
On my desktop if I'm in a stack of dialogs I often use the ESC key as a back button. iOS has zero meaningful inter-process communication (which is why every app has to have a piss-poor re-implementation of Safari and Twitter) so it doesn't even have a concept of "global".
Well, maybe you went to different classes than I did, but none of those things you mentioned would ever have been considered hard AI as I was taught it.

Hard AI == generalised problem solving (or as wikipedia puts it, 'the intelligence of a machine that can successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can'), soft/weak AI == problem solving within a specific defined area (such as all of your examples).
I'd like to see a similar service, but for merchants. That is, instead of alerting consumers to bad credit card charges, alert merchants to bad consumers.

For instance, there are consumers who if they decide they no longer what to subscribe to your service don't bother trying to cancel--they just call their bank and claim they don't recognize the charge, and so generate a chargeback to the merchant. (This is bad for the merchant because not only do they have to give back the money, they get hit with a charge back fee in the $15-30 range...in fact they get hit with the fee even if the successfully challenge the charge back).

The idea would be when merchants make a sale, they would report to the service a hash of the credit card number, the amount of the charge, what kind of merchant they are, what kind of good or service was purchased, whether this was an initial charge or part of a recurring service, and whether the charge was accepted or declined. If a customer of theirs charges back or refunds, the merchant would report that, and whether or not it was reasonable.

From this data, the service could develop a profile for each card concerning its refund and charge back behavior. The service could also develop a profile of the merchants, noting merchants that have unusually high charge back and refund rates, and so weight data from those merchants less when developing the card profiles.

Merchants, before accepting a credit card, could query the service and get a report on that card's charge back and refund behavior.

One might note that some of this seems similar to the systems the banks already have in place to detect fraud. It is, but those systems are not for the benefit of the merchant. They are primarily for the bank's protection and secondarily for the consumer's protection. The system I'm suggesting would be for the merchant's benefit and protection.
Off to buy a Touchpad today. As a long-term webOS user (2 years on a Pre), I love the platform and I am always supprised that more of my technically-minded friends choose Android over webOS, given that webOS has such a better multi-tasking experience and they are both based on Linux. Did I mention that the hacker community on webOS is thriving, via excellent projects like Preware (http://preware.org/)?
I never thought I'd say it, but I was wrong. I thought Poulsen and Wired were being shady with the redactions, but they were absolutely right. It was just a bunch of chatter about his depression and identity issues that nobody needed to know about. I respect their decision to redact far more, now. Not sure why they're being released now, but I guess it doesn't really matter anymore.