skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But it wasn't always thus. In the dawn of time Lenat actually did stuff.

Funnily enough, I've been playing around with a port of AM for the past coupla weeks. I've had the code for years and never looked at it until now. What got you on Lenat, Peter?

I think the world's coolest AI programs are Eurisko, Copycat and AM.
It's truly a bummer that 3rd parties can't access the dock connector for data xfer. A card swiper would work great attached to the bottom of the phone.
Ah, OK. So now I will have to pirate the movies instead of buying the discs that won't play on my non-HDCP TV?

Great business model.
"What do most Americans live for? Buying cheap crap at WalMart? Buying better crap than the guy next door?"

That doesn't describe any Americans I know. On what do you base this claim? How do you know what most Americans live for?
And you may doing something involving randomness or chaos anyway.
Which is why 'the author' notes up front what his experiences are. Despite this, though, the author has traveled extensively throughout Europe, and while Oslo, Norway is certainly different from Braga, Portugal, the author feels that there is something of a common thread, even though the author realizes that the differences between, say, England, Portugal, and Slovakia are enormous, and far greater than, say, Vermont, Oregon and Texas.

On this topic, everyone, myself...err, 'the author' included, agrees that Europe is quite diverse. That said, do you think there are some commonalities that are applicable to "Europe"? If so, what are they?
I've tried to play build the idea cubicle67 mentioned to use relative mutations instead of absolute ones. What I've implemented is a function that does not limit the change at all, but simple makes it more likely to be small and less likely to be large.

The new value becomes either (MAX - current) * P or current * P (50% chance on each), where P is the product of two random variables between [-1, 1]. I'm not sure how that is distributed (been a while since that statistics course), but it obviously favors numbers closer to 0.

This optimization looks rather efficient, as the same image seems to get about 67% more beneficient mutations in the same interval of generations.

Another change I would like to implement (but haven't yet) is a low chance of changing multiple values at once, which may eventually escape from a "dead end".

The best improvement of all would be to allow users to airbrush "priority" onto different regions, which then get weighted in the fitness score. If I'm generating a portrait, I care a lot more about the eyes than the background, for example.
Reversed in Germany, too.

I guess it's just proximity to Switzerland that counts. ;)
Steve Jobs on managing through the economic downturn
I really don't understand the advantages of your approach. I'm willing to believe I'm just dumb though ;)

(One comment on the basic approach: many languages that use green threads don't scale well in multicore due to issues like lock contention or IO wait.)

Preemptive multithreading still leaves the OS with final control (for your "miserly time slice" comment. Which I find very problematic for things like say Loopt where for example you will spend more time waiting for a GPS fix or on network latency than actual computation time...)

How does a "virtual" exception handler become cheaper than any other implementation? It seems the work required is roughly the same (catch dangerous situations, jump to the correct handler).

I suppose there would be lower context switching costs with the use of green threads (skip a user->kernel->user transition), but I suspect it would require programming without any synchronous anything (all IO would have to be asynchronous probably in order for threads to "yield" back to the virtual task scheduler).

(Sorry kind of rambling, I'm pretty much curious about every sentence you wrote ;) I don't think traditional multiproccessing models really pose any control problems that are solved by running a single user thread that does its own scheduling IMO)
Ben Graham would buy sick cows for the price of dead cows any day.
http://sailthru.com has a/b testing on emails and social network invites (address book integration with aol,gmail,linkedin,etc). They get the invites in the inbox because users can globally optout so you are not having people repeat flagging you as spam. They handle all of our automated email, we've raised revenue in two weeks of a/b testing.
http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/
you are creating a false dichotomy between committing atrocities and losing the war

No. I defined war as something which continues until one side quits. I furthermore identified that you believe that in certain cases it is more desirable to quit than to prosecute a war in certain formats (such as the use of nuclear weapons) I observed that every war has had atrocities on both sides. Finally I observed that we all live in a world where we enjoy various freedoms, cultures, and science because of a lot of previous wars -- wars in which your norms (or any other norms for that matter) were disregarded to some degree.

It follows that there are always moral reasons for not fighting and that we would be living in caves had we all felt the way you describe. Therefore, if you believe that civilization is more important than your own petty opinions you're compelled to make muddy, ugly moral choices when it comes to the use of force. I made no statement that atrocities are necessary to win a war. I will say that war is about making the other side quit. Most often you end up doing something they really, really don't like in order to reach this point. Fire bombing Dresden, dropping the A-bomb on Japan, etc. -- all drew WWII to an end quicker and promoted the greater good. You may participate in a war and commit no atrocities at all. But by participating, you can be sure you are supporting actions and behaviors that on a clear, sane afternoon you would never do. That's why war sucks so much -- it drags us all down to the lowest denominator: survival.

I'm not getting into current events. They are emotionally laden and simply confuse the issues. I will point out that non-state actors acting in non-standard formats have been with us for a long time. They're usually shot on the battlefield or very close to it by means of summary courts martial. I'll also point out that the word "war" is overused to the point to be meaningless. We have a war on terror, a war on poverty (which I believe might involve shooting poor people?), a war on drugs, a war on pollution, etc. Let's take war as something where one side can clearly quit, which ties back to our previous definition. Under that definition, the current war on terror is not really a war at all, since "terror" cannot surrender to anybody.
The obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/242/

Although I am not really comfortable implying that the Bush administration is acting more like scientists...
(Am I the only one who thinks the iPhone is actually a terrible interface for typing? Think about typing your password, now imagine you do it on an iPhone (so no benefit from autocorrection). I fat finger all the time, and I don't even have fat fingers! :(

Its good for scrolling and gestural input, but a very poor data-entry platform.
But it comes in 75cl bottles, mostly ;)
The comments here, are rather golden.

"Mike, you sir are an ass".
Ok, substitute Europe for France. The median for France is almost certainly above the median for all of Europe.
Very true, but ... my experience is in northern Italy, and I still think the US has it beat in terms of the environment. In terms of the people, I might actually give the edge to Italy. Just that the productive ones are still bogged down in a very bureaucratic system, and even in northern Italy there are tons of people who home in on the Job For Life as the ultimate goal.
Well, I'm married to one of the women from The Other Place, so yeah, I'd definitely have to give them the edge:-)
This reminds me of a Warren Buffet video I was watching yesterday where he talks about "You only have to get rich once." ..."To make money they didn't have and didn't need, they risked what they did have and did need. ...just plain foolish." (He was talking about the Long Term Capital Management guys.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1LiATYSajw&feature=relat...
Median wage in Portugal is below the US poverty line.
Although I agree with the point of his post, it seems like he should figure out whether or the bridge loan 21 years ago worked before adopting this mantra. Maybe forcing changes on average is worse? Doubtful, but maybe. Unless you keep track you won't know.
hg is easier to type than git. That's 33% better at least(with integer percentages, it's event better with float percentages... and even better with fractions).

Imagine typing git 20 times? Well can you see it now? Good.

NOW, imagine typing hg 20 times, that is 60 keys pressed, VS only 40 keys. You'll probably make less errors with 2 keys too.

git didn't bring anything new to version control... with it's 3 key system. svn had 3 letters, cvs even had 3 letters. However hg has brought a 33% improvement to version control -- with it's revolutionary 2 letter system.

Obviously a break through. Obviously fucking cool.
Surprised the guy's name wasn't Babba Booey.
> Everyday life in France for the average person is much like it is for the average person in the US, just a little poorer.

That is not my experience in Italy. To take an example near and dear to that country, the average Italian eats much better than the average American. Indeed, the basic, raw ingredients you find in supermarkets are far better than what you get in the US.

But it's not just that... I find that the relationships between people are genuinely a bit better in Italy than in the US. Perhaps one of the effects of all that "stasis" (jobs for life, people less willing to move around for jobs) is that people really get to know one another. I have several friends in Italy I've known for 13 years, but barely anyone in the US I've known for that long. I've heard some people say this is also true of small towns in the US, but I've never lived in one so I don't know how to compare it to Italy.

In short, in economic terms, you're correct, but the broader picture is more complex, and doesn't favor the US 100%. That's not to say that one is necessarily better... after many years of both, I guess I have a more nuanced view. I wouldn't hesitate to say the US is better for founding startups, but if you're just Joe Schmoe, life can be nice in Europe, too, even if you don't have an SUV and a fancy television set like your American equivalent.
Not silly: They are probably aiming at getting a ruling (or negotiated settlement) on the lines of requiring Cisco to contact those owners of infringing products for whom contact details are available, and to pay for some advertising to try to reach the others.

Scary: The penalties for infringement are deliberately set, by law, to be scary. It will be a deterrent to future infringement.
Is Perl like the shrine in that it doesn't change or improve? I think programming language technology has improved but Perl has yet to catch up. Nowadays one can be much more productive in other languages.
Why do we think it is "legal"?

Brad says "Use at your own risk, then." and "... it'd be a little hard to fingerprint."

Neither of which scream "legal" at all. In fact, rather the opposite.
Update:
http://www.getdropbox.com/faq#security-and-privacy
Here it says it does encrypt (256bit AES over SSL) the files before sending them to the cloud.

I agree with you on the matter that you don't place sensitive stuff on it. But my 'accounting' stuff isn't that interesting for 3rd parties; as I also said in the comments on my blog:
"I get your concerns and need for a private key. Also a key based on a combination of username and password would be the simplest solution to this problem. For me the encryption isn’t that of a big issue since 3rd parties viewing my files aren’t going to get anything out of it that should do damage to me. Of course, when you store sensitive data on it, you should also invest in some security on your part (like the mentioned TrueCrypt)."
Why John Maynard Keynes is the man of the year.
In my account, I'm forced to use Google's viewer before I could download. I wish gmail let me decide whether I want to download or view.
Not quite -- these are the demands they made before the lawsuit. The actual lawsuit demands are even more astounding -- including cease & desist and the turning over off all profits made from the alleged infringement.
He's going to increase funding for R&D in the downturn. I think, we as individuals, need to keep investing in ourselves during the downturn. Build our knowledge, reputation, connections, etc.
If I may write a completely frivolous comment, I would go on the record as saying that I would just about kill for a decent burrito, something which is pretty much impossible to find in Europe.
Mostly it is just hype/marketing: technically, it's a wash.
The answer you're looking for is that the cool and/or hip Rails kids decided to back git.
I had a hard time drawing the heart of the argument out of his talk. But many of the points he makes are strong in isolation, and come from someone in a unique position: tremendously successful (in monetary terms, at least); now broke; aware of own luck and shortcomings; simultaneously dispensing advice and admitting advice from others is most often bunk.

Here's what I took away:

- Can't decouple risk from return and risk from impact. Risk takers must be ready to lose.

- Entrepreneurship might not be for you. Do you love what you're doing even in a terrible climate?

- Good people mandatory, smart people who have done real things. Not "smart-asses."

- Build on revenue.

- Act instead of talking.

- Frugality and focus on value, not cash in the bank, is healthy.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morten_Lund
The story behind that term:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/microLenat.html
You're arguing that the sentence contains enough information for the author's intended interpretation to be understood (which is true); in practice, however, customers expect developers who answer questions at small companies to be more knowledgeable than they are, and often take comments, advice, or instructions almost literally. Along similar lines, most customers of most software companies are not developers, and therefore are not used to reading text carefully, like we are.

Regarding the author thinking his customer was pissed, this helps prove my point that the author needs to work on his written communication skills. He not only fails to realize that he really did phrase his words incorrectly (instead of the customer misunderstanding the sentence), but also incorrectly misread the customer's reply as being "pissed."
Incredible. I wonder if he kept notes on what he learned from each book. I've wanted to do that.
Sure I can!

>> Kernel.rand
=> 0.639396625161958
>> Kernel.rand
=> 0.492774449558796
>> Kernel.rand
=> 0.510863071464651

Your results may vary.
Do YC startups use the same design shop? Seems that, beyond clarity, they have a similar look. Also, do you publish publicly the ideas the influence YC companies' layouts?
Ask HN: What's your favorite embedded system?
I'm looking for something rugged, capable of running Linux, and cheap if possible. I'm just curious what you guys have actually used and liked as I evaluate which one would work for me.

I've used this in the past but I'm curious what else is out there: http://parvus.com/products/MilitaryAerospace/EmbeddedBoards/CPU-1421/
Mercurial is widely used...

> Has mercurial failed?

I'm not sure why you equate hype with success. Anyway, Hg is an awesome tool. I love FreeHg too. I use it to manage my .vim/vimfiles, amongst other things.
Why doesnt anyone think he said to his sons... "look im old and done for, turn me in and I will take all the blame".

There is no chance he acted alone.
I just watched it, it's excellent.
Cracking TootSweet's Masyu Format
I think this is great, tho' I'd never buy one; I think everyone who wants Solaris on a laptop is already running it inside VirtualBox on OSX.
Awesome. And regardless of whether this is "legal" according to FB's TOS, I'm incredulous if you think it's anything but perfectly ethical to copy the phone numbers of your friends to your own computer.
Rails: Support for "418 I'm a Teapot"
I used to play Traveller, and our group at college didn't play the ship-to-ship combat part, just the role playing game (think of it as D&D with only 6-sided dice, space ships and other planets instead of dungeons).

Thanks for bringing this story back up.
Thats really inconsiderate... There a lot of people who are completely wiped out because of this. Not everyone was a high net work individual that lost money. For example there are more then one charitable organizations that closed their door Friday and plenty of average folks who just lost their retirement money and more.

Its really easy in hindsight to say the returns are unrealistic and everyone should have realized. But some of the most intelligent investors around missed this one. Some investors saw physical returns for the last 10 or 20 years, you try and wake up one morning and say its all false.
That REI link was meant to say that it's cold in Boston.
I strongly stick to "The Right to Read". To quote from the old-new thing, the cisco affair:

"I fear the Cisco experience has done unseen damage to Stanford in the form of creating inhibitions against sharing ideas, information and developments with possible commercial value among our groups which have need to benefit from each other's work."

Which is exactly what OSX is going against, with digital restrictions management, the appstore idea and the rest.

Given the choice of windows tax or an outdated intel platform, I'd rather go for this one -- it appears to be the only credible alternative to OS X, supposedly working out of the box with dtrace (w/o arbitrary iTunes sh*) and the rest: all being more or less open. Otherwise you need to rely on good luck with the wifi/suspend/resume/acpi etc.
It is not true that hg doesn't have something similar like github.

Hg has a better Github which is BitBucket - http://www.bitbucket.org/ .

At least, BitBucket offers at least one private repo for free accounts.
You know how we can get different results? By letting these inefficient companies fail.

Bankruptcy is the better long-term solution to the problem. These workers won't be unemployed for long. Responsible managers, who have been making the right decisions, should get the opportunity to buy up these assets and restructure a more efficient business.

I agree with FW's take, but I don't like government intervention in private enterprise. When the government decides to bail a company out, which they shouldn't do in the first place, they sure as hell shouldn't have any say on how that money is spent.
If your plan is to make a lot of money, you only need to get rich once.

No disrespect to Mr. Buffet - I hold him in the highest regard in terms of character. However, his goal is to make a lot of money and have his companies achieve this as well. He does an amazing job at this.

My slow/inarticulate point is that Lund seems to have separate goals so you can't hold him to this same standard. It isn't foolish for Lund to lose all his money with a risky venture. From my perspective, Lund wants to grow companies and create the next big thing. I commend him for going after that 100% regardless of the risks involved.

edit: OK, watching that video showed Buffets point a little differently. He was meaning never risk more than you can afford to lose regardless of the return, which is true.
Any employee in my office could use this app to quickly sell merchandise and products on a convention showfloor.

It may not be free and similar services may be offered elsewhere, but this still looks very quick and friendly.

People here have suggested leaving paypal or authorize.net open on their iPhone, which I can only assume means "in a Mobile Safari window," which, in reality, means "you will be re-loading the full page multiple times over your Edge connection every time you wish to make a transaction." That's already a shot in the head for that method being anything resembling realistically efficient, in my opinion.

This app may not be perfect, and doesn't seem particularly tuned to hackers (based on the response here), but it seems like a fairly simple front-end you could distribute to a small team at a trade show, convention, or fair, and not really have to think twice about it beyond that, which is a huge plus.
You think people should be allowed to keep the profits they made by the infringement? Then where is the deterrent to future infringement.

As for the cease and desist: they want them to stop infringing - what do you expect? That they will say "we are suing but they are welcome to carry on doing what we are suing them for".

I do not know what you find astounding. If these remedies were no available, you might just as well abolish copyright law as it currently exists.
Alas neither can support effective work in large repositories: at my day job we have about 100gb repository (just one branch), but most people only use 4Gb at a time. Except the build servers - they get the most of the stuff at once. Perforce lets you create partial enlistment and only get the 4gb you need, while both Git and Hg require pulling entire 100Gb over the network.

There's been very little progress on these issues as well - both communities seem to be content with relatively small repositories. Sad.
The number 1 as in 1 percent is the least suspicious number, so Benford's law is unlikely to help.
CS Broke
Nice - but one thing I noticed - the ORM link points back to the same page (probably was meant to be wikipedia? )
Oops sorry I was moving to a new server.
People wonder why multithreaded development is so difficult. I have to use external libraries just to get threading working in different OSes.
It seems that LeWeb never released the startup competition videos?
Attempt at a proof of the complexity of graph isomorphism
"We're building a machine that will be proud of us"
I first heard about Git when the guy who wrote most of of stood up and did an empassioned Google Tech Talk about it. I'm loathe to pick it out as marketing, because that invites the idea that any communication is marketing communication. But communication is important, I've never heard a Mercurial dev get up and talk good about their project.

Is git technically better? I have no idea, git works fine for me, someone will have to get up and point out why Hg is so great before I even try it.
I think the flexibility and portability is interesting. It could be a neat universal remote. I could program the "remote" to have a back button like a browser, instead of last channel. Also, program suggestions, rotten tomatoes ratings, imdb info, etc.
My favorite embedded stuff has always been self-designed.
I'm also a big fan of Perforce for large (especially internal) repositories. It handles just about everything smoothly and is also free for Open Source.

That being said, I've really been enjoying working with Mercurial. I think the biggest shortcoming I feel is not being able to branch (easily?) subdirectories rather than repositories.