skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, if you reread the original email threads where Eliezer challenges people to an AI experiment, you will see, that at least one of the opponents is convinced that there is not way for an actual AI to talk its way out. So any arguments of "but we should convince people that AI can talk its way out of the box" can be countered with "No, I don't think it can".

I have been thinking about AI strategies for this. One of the more promising lines I came up with is to try and convince the Gatekeeper that the box is faulty. That the AI, in its infinite wisdom found ways to circumvent some of the protections of the box. That while the risk to humanity if AI is let loose is theoretical, there are definite and catastrophic consequences to NOT letting it loose. There are all sorts of variations to this, but it all depends on the Gatekeeper role-playing honestly.
If you're loading the demo offline (ie., from the local file system via file:// or some such), Flash enforces strict (but good) security which doesn't allow JS and Flash to talk by default.

To allow JS+Flash (ExternalInterface) to work together, you have to whitelist the specific location (by either whitelisting a whole directory/path, or specific file). I recommend just whitelisting the parent directory, as opposed to the root.

These types of restrictions do not apply when the content is served over HTTP, ie., as with the live site.

(I write and maintain SoundManager 2, which is a JS + Flash sound library as used in this nifty demo - I'm honored. :P)
Hardwork is essential.If you studied the course perfectly and write the exam then you will pass definately.If you doesn't write exam well,then the result is fail,you must blame yourself for any result ie.. success or failure.so we must not believe myth.
==============================================================

jameson

http://www.crystalrecovery.com
ServiceLive Newsletter September 2008
Google Turns On Text Ads In Google Maps
I get bullish when everyone is freaking out, and I get worried when everyone is euphoric
I'd say follow it if you hired quick/not-solid engineers in a quick bid for growth.

But you should fight very hard to keep talented/experienced engineers around and happy. They very much could become your strategic advantage while everyone is cutting things!
A friend of mine came up with a strategy of "incremental freedoms". Basically AI says "here is a cure for cancer, here is a cure for AIDS, here is a plan to stop world hunger, I am working out a plan for FTL travel, so I need to get some physics information, could you paste these articles into the terminal? Oh, thanks, here is FTL, I am working on <include some other project> and I need some more articles, it takes so long for you to type them in, could you maybe let me connect to just the library in such and such university?" etc.
What Startups Can Learn From Sequoia Capital’s Doomsday Plans
I wasn't talking about what I or anyone works on personally; I was talking about Companies.

Google is the exception, not the rule.
This is way too general for my taste. I'm a creative guy when it comes to solving problems, but when it comes to graphic design, for example, I suck. I don't need to try it myself because I don't even know where to start with that kind of creative process. My mind just doesn't work that way. Don't always do it yourself first. Besides, I'm too busy writing code and that's what I do well, so there's no point for me to try to be a jack of all trades.

Also, if you want to do everything yourself first, I hope you're not in much of a rush to get your overall project finished. There are a lot of things that you can easily understand and appreciate without having actually done them yourself.

If you need to do everything yourself first, you're probably not going to be a great manager or boss. A good manager should have a good sense of what his/her employees are doing and be able to get them to communicate the most important parts of the job without actually having to do the job. Sure, you'll have a better sense if you do it yourself, but that doesn't mean that's a good trade-off in terms of how to spend your time. There are a lot of tasks that you can intelligently analyze without actually doing them. Are there a lot of crappy managers out there who have no sense of the jobs their reports are doing? Sure. But they can put some effort into understanding them without actually doing them. It's more of a communication issue, not an execution issue.

Finally, I'm assuming the post is in the context of getting a project finished, not running a company. But if it's the latter, then I think it's especially bad advice: taxes, legal, accounting, etc. should NEVER be done by anyone other than an expert unless it's at an EXTREMELY basic level (and even then it's still usually a bad idea). I'm sure founders with limited financial resources fall into this trap sometimes, but it can really bite you in the ass down the road.
The speakers at that meeting don't need to worry about survival. They're probably all ultra high net-worth individuals. It's the CEOs who they want to make tough choices and live tough. In the end, the downturn just has status and reputation implications for these partners, and making sure they feel the pain of (or with) their comrades, or at least appear that way, like they are here.
Filmed Lecture of First-hand Account of the Liberation of Belsen Concentration Camp
Exactly. Your first two sentences were much more eloquently put than mine.

I never said anything about short term profitability directly, but I should have clarified.

Some companies - and yes I know this sounds ridiculous - don't focus on short-term or long-term profitability. They are built to be acquired. Or they only focus on the top line (sales) while almost entirely ignoring the bottom line (net income, cash flow).
This is still silly. You're starting with some true things:

- The US has a fractional reserve systems and debt is a pseudo-currency within fractional reserve systems

- The US has a significant national debt

- The US invades foreign countries and has problems with class structure and poverty

However, your attempt to link them fails horribly in light with the last point not being true of countries which have proportionally more debt. There's not even correlation, much less a reasonable argument for causation. Honestly, I don't really care one way or the other about the fractional reserve system. I'm not starting with a particular viewpoint and trying to defend it. I'm just pointing out that your argumentation is flawed.
Social Networking today has turned into Social Mating.

-"Hello who are you?"

-"I am your soulmate"

-"Can I add you to my friendlists?"

-"How about we go fornicate instead?"

We will see a small baby boom in 10-15 years that is due to Social Mating.
According to the rules, that approach wouldn't be sufficient.

The AI can only win by convincing the Gatekeeper to really, voluntarily let it out. Tricking the Gatekeeper into typing the phrase "You are out" in response to some other question does not count. Furthermore, even if the AI and Gatekeeper simulate a scenario which a real AI could obviously use to get loose - for example, if the Gatekeeper accepts a complex blueprint for a nanomanufacturing device, or if the Gatekeeper allows the AI "input-only access" to an Internet connection which can send arbitrary HTTP GET commands - the AI party will still not be considered to have won unless the Gatekeeper voluntarily decides to let the AI go.

http://www.yudkowsky.net/essays/aibox.html
"Get back in the van, Jagger"

Phrase of the day
It can easily kill your server. The last thing you want to do while having high traffic is kill your stats. You can think ahead and cache your pages, but you can't cache your self-hosted real time stats.
Apriori.rb - a gem to find regularities in buying behavior (frequent itemsets)
I remember watching a call with someone from Dell on CNBC during the last US recession (2001 recession and "jobless recovery" the following couple of years). He said that Dell was basically going to cut prices like crazy and actually lose some money in order to gain market share during the down time so they could capitalize on it when the economy swings back up again.

I wonder if Apple has something like this in store in terms of the "cheaper laptop" rumor. We're (sort of) already seeing this with the iPhones. ("Cheaper" but higher monthly rates which nullify the savings in the long run.)
Just talking about the fact that a tutorial mentions low level manual optimizations.

-O2 and -O3 flags may do such low-level optimizations, I hope. But then why the tutorial?
I'm no expert but obviously you could code some specific program to perform superwell given unlimited amounts of time.

So the question is, given X amount of time to create a program, which runs faster?
Not, given unlimited amounts of time, which is faster?

So tests like this don't necessarily reflect the real world.

That said, I don't really know which way it is, JAVA or Erlang, just sayin... :)
I'm getting this error when clicking on 'Watch demo' on http://antisocial.demozoo.org page. I do have a FlashBlock installed though, perhaps that's the reason for the error.
The sky is falling and so is your valuation
...which is another way of saying "Charge based on what customer is willing to pay". (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
I'm more offended that there's a governmental restriction than the specifics of what it means.
Anyone who really thinks They Know How I Did It is welcome to prove it by signing up to be an AI:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/10/ais-and-gatekee.html
Why would a profitable company fire employees because it's stock value is low?

I took his statement to mean, "If employees are looking at their options tank, while seeing their friends at MS and GOOG options rising, the best are more likely to abandon the sinking ship." In the valley stock is often a big part of a compensation package, and so a company whose stock is doing very poorly cannot hire or keep the best talent.

It has nothing to do with profits or income and everything to do with whether people want to work there.

Of course, in a depression, people keep their jobs far more often, and people tend to choose steady work over risky but higher reward positions. So, as long as Yahoo can prove they aren't going to have to let anybody go, and that a hostile takeover (which seems more likely by the day, by a Chinese or Russian or European holding company...since the dollar is so weak, and Yahoo's shares are so depressed) isn't going to result in a mass downsizing, they'll probably hang on to their great stable of nerds, and they'll probably keep increasing value in subtle, but real ways, on a day by day basis. I think it's a company that lost focus, and failed to ever quite recover from the drubbing it took during the first bust, and has had some vision problems...but it's also a company with a great innovation culture. Yahoo builds and launches new stuff all the time, tons of it Open Source, lately, though their APIs are important, too. All that Open Source leads to them having a giant pool of possible hires who already know their infrastructure (while GOOG has to train), and a huge bunch of websites that rely on Yahoo for existence (anything that uses their APIs needs Yahoo). Those are good things for Yahoo's long term prospects.
When fortune frowned
Amazon Cuts Prices on S3
Do you mean that Posterous is "a place to post everything. just email us" your YC application? (a joke)
Seeing as there are only three views so far, I'm guessing that either you posted this yourself or else you were at the lecture and know who posted the video files. If you can, maybe you can get these compressed and hosted on Google video as one big file. There is no reason for an eight minute video to be 70 megs, especially a lecture where video quality doesn't matter.
World of Goo released DRM free - no torrents yet (awesome game btw)
well, now we all know that at page 3 you thought we should all read it.

did you read past page 3?
I've always found Django to be a very clean code base.
Heh, this has already happened, either intentionally or unintentionally.

See the screeshots in "Second Life uses MySQL" where you see tons of spheres flying around: I haven't been on in years, but I remember there were various devices people made to spawn thousands of objects at once and crash servers (or "sims" as they are called).
Statistically speaking, most startups ventured have a poor chance of being a Google, but must dollars earned have a good chance of being a Google's.

Don't discount their type of business strategy just because it doesn't suit your personal risk preference.
Riiiiight. So in other words:

"Let me out or others will developer much more dangerous AIs and let them out."

Is something that might possibly convince the Gatekeeper to let it out.

But "No cancer cure unless you let me out." is not.

Presumably neither is "Let me out and I'll enlarge your penis."
People are obviously opposed to a bad manager assuming he can do your job better than you can. But I think DHH's point is to avoid the opposite extreme, small companies that over-hire into positions that an existing employee can easily perform. Having an existing person do "marketing" or "business development" probably won't be an awesome as an industry veteran doing it, but it beats hiring a full time person to do it without really understanding what that person does, and regretting it later.
I think the idea comes across as "you should have taken a stab at it to know what it's about". If you're smart, you'll appreciate even more the work of someone you hire who is truly talented in the given field.

A bit I wrote down from Growing a Business:

"Be a hands-on learner, and get involved with all aspects of your business, so that you know exactly how they work down to the details."

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/4/growing-a-business

Which is a good book - it's like "getting real", but an actual, real, published book with an ISBN number, rather than a "let's see how many pdf's we can sell to our followers before we release it for free" type of deal.
Why You Always Read About Y Combinator Startups on TechCrunch
How Much Do Top Tier Bloggers and Social Media Consultants Get Paid?
A developer who is self-aware and mature enough to answer "I don't know" is good to have around, and usually more valuable to a company than someone who freaks out or starts making stuff up once they're outside their current range of knowledge.

It's possible the interviewer was screening you for that as much as for your technical skills.
Amazon S3 gets a new pricing model
Entellium execs fudge the numbers, face fraud charges
True words: "The secret to surviving in a bad economy is to become a real business."

However:

Given the snarkery is in this article, and that the author is a 'digital marketing expert', I'm sensing some resentment toward programming 'rock stars'. I've never been called a 'rock star', 'ninja', or what have you in the course of my work. Since I don't currently work in the Valley, I haven't been in the kind of situation where my work environment has video games and huge parties and whatnot. (Though this might change.) As such, I've always worked with a mind toward profit, and for businesses that were like-minded. If there's no revenue at the end of the day, VC or no, the project has failed.

It doesn't take a marketing guy to figure this out, regardless of how anxious they may be prep an 'I told you so'.

No talented programmers are going to go without work, though they might expect less in the paycheck. No solid companies are going to fold, though their next VC round might be more cautious. If you're good, and if your business is good, there's no fear.

So relax or panic, as quality dictates.
I'm pretty sure the need for "tribes" isn't new.
When will these guys get over locking into just one browser? Once I found out it only runs in Firefox just didn't care how fantastic it was cause he lost me.
I don't really buy this for a number of reasons, which is not to say that YC companies don't do exclusives with TC, but the author makes it sound way too shady.
Hey, Let's Build an $800 MacBook
Doesn't Arrington have a financial interest in Loopt? I thought he is an investor?
although I agree with most of the stuff he says, weight lifting is definitely worth doing.

You have no idea how many times I see a guy at the gym and think to myself "this guy looks like a chicken.". People tend not to work on their lower body as much as they should.

I'm an ex-rower, so most of my developed muscles are in my legs/back, but it's very important to lift weights with a very holistic approach.

Your body is your temple, you wouldn't want a weak foundation, would you?
Arrington the kingmaker is now posturing himself as Arrington champion of the little guy? You can't be both.

He's subject to the same rule of law as everyone else. He's not above it, nor should he be.

What's fantastic is the lemming responses from this group. Are you guys afraid of him? Did you read the LA Times story that he went back and CHANGED his original hack piece to soften it up?

He also describes Techcrunch as a filter? But Techcrunch the filter isn't being sued. Techcrunch the Co-branded product is being sued.

And who brought that to the public's attention? Arrington?
Nope. His former employee reporter did.

Still think this guy is champion of the little fella?
We have an image storage/sales service that uses S3. We're about 6 months in and have just under 1 TB.
Oh, for sure, but I'd hate to get drawn into the world's Nth general discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of programming languages. That would be dull.
Ask YC: How is the economic slump impacting YCombinator?
I was wondering how the economic slump is impacting operations at ycombinator. Applicants or possibly the operation of ycombinator itself.
speek,

the point of the post is to help people get back in shape, not necessarily so they don't 'look like a chicken.'

that being said, lifting weights, as i'm sure you know from your rowing experience, is not a substitute for other forms of exercise (in your case rowing) but rather a supplement. I've lifted weights for 10 years -- I certainly find them beneficial, but you can get in shape without lifting weights, and if you do, should use them as a supplement and not your only workout.

essentially, i'm saying, lifting weights != getting into shape.

edit: I said " have a good strength training program. You don’t need a gym membership — but it’s easier to use weights than gravity, especially with core muscles."

strength training != lifting weights, although for me, this is the easiest way to do it.
Taking Arrington's version of events as truth is a dangerous undertaking. He's biased and has a clear conflict of interest.

I also love the fact that everyone is afraid of him bc he's a lawyer. Star Jones is also a lawyer, people. Get my drift. Beside's Arrington's an M/A lawyer, which is lawyer with a "small l" in the litigation community. You know, worker bee.

And, he's kinda fat.
"Only in the absence of certainty can we have open-mindedness, mental flexibility and willingness to contemplate alternative ideas."

So what do we do when it comes time to make a decision? How are we supposed to evaluate and act on evidence? The article seems to be (note my lack of certainty - that's a good thing, right?) an over generalization.
The BitTorrent code looked awful the last time I saw it; complete with 20 arguments for one function.
The Cookbook (Amazon it, I'm too sleepy to link) contains examples of idiomatic code that you should use.
Agreed. Much like the stock market crash has led me to start thinking about bargain hunting, and to move some of my capital into stocks, I'm viewing this advice as a sign that I'll be able to hire great engineers at a good rate in the not too distant future, as competitors without our profitability run into problems and begin to extend their runway by reducing their headcount (and since they've "already got a product", they don't need those pesky engineers any more).

Then again, I believe that a team of three great engineers lightly managed by another engineer (with some management skills) can outproduce a dozen or more mediocre developers managed by an MBA, so I've always planned for our company to produce more code in less time and for less money than our competitors.
I do too. The thing is, when it comes to tech, not everyone is freaking out (this forum is a good example). Too many people think that because they aren't VC-funded/are small/don't waste money/aren't consumer-facing/are smart/whatever, they're going to be fine. That's a bad strategy.
This is absolute B.S. I work for an online tech pub (The Industry Standard), and we have also attended YC events and reported on YC startups. There was never any restrictions on the timing of our reports other than what individual YC-funded entrepreneurs (not YC!) requested.

I believe that PG and JL have enough on their plates without having to micromanage press coverage to give Techcrunch this sort of edge -- they seem to be much more interested in simply introducing press to founders, and letting the two parties take it from there.
business models? what are you talking about?
Nerd library to end all nerd libraries
Dow Disaster - now at 8582
We were never rock stars.
Smacks more of abject panic than it does common sense. If a company has to work that hard to survive, then it would never survive a 15-year (?? unprecedented and hyperbolic) depression anyway. Better to sell everything off and close the doors.

Seriously. If things are as bleak as the Sequoia panickers are saying, then most of their companies should probably just cut their losses by selling off capital assets and closing their doors. Better that than going down in three years with nothing left.
Well, the winter session will be held at the Compound in an undisclosed location in eastern Montana, but aside from that, nothing.
Dry adhesive based on carbon nanotubes
Actually, compared to batty discussions of economics or "politics!!!!!!", it's kind of soothing.
By the way: My recumbent bike has even smaller tires (20") but it is way faster. The size of the tires is not the limiting factor in unicycle speed --- it's the fact that you have to keep balance and input power using the same system.
Lifting is very useful because it actually increases your basal metabolism for many, many hours after your workout (as opposed to most aerobic exercises, whose metabolism boosting effects peter out in about an hour). In the long term, that benefit only compounds due to the increased muscle mass you gain.

If keeping your body in an enhanced calorie burning state even while you're sedentary isn't an exercise hack, I don't know what is. ;)
I've recently more-or-less cut out weight training and started running, mostly because I've always sucked at running. Within a few weeks of seriously trying it, I no longer sucked at running and now I'm doing three-mile runs several times a week, and aiming for a marathon (hooray, arbitrary and possibly stupid goals!).

Has anyone tried the gyminee.com startup which was mentioned? It looks very well designed, and I'm thinking of signing up.
Most likely it's panic about their own short-term losses in the market. Headlines like this (below) have scared them into a kumbaya-doombaya share-our-pain session with their underlings.

Truth is that the Dow can drop -- mainly out of emotional overreaction -- but if companies are genuinely producing value, then it will correct upwardly. A sudden, huge loss in the market like we've been seeing is never a sign of anything except emotion. Actual bear markets are signaled by trends, not jumps.

Dow falls below 9,000

Stocks slumped Thursday afternoon with the Dow falling below 9,000 as the Treasury's eye on buying stakes in struggling banks failed to reassure investors amid the ongoing credit crisis.