skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
| The question is, as it has always been: now what?

| Decades ago, the answer was, "Build the Internet." Fifteen years ago, it was, "Build the Web." Five years ago, the answers were probably, "Build the social network"

In other words, when you read near future sci fi and think, "that's a cool piece of plausible tech that I really want right now!" what is it?

"We are prosthetic gods." That quote dates back farther than you might think. Printing, telecom, radio, the internet, the web, the social network, the smart phone... all of these take the sum of human knowledge/experience and inch it slightly closer to my brain.

The next step is to have it rest right against my temple while we debate whether or not to break out the scalpel.

Hate to jump on the bandwagon, but I'm ready for the Goggles. Google's commercials don't scrape the surface of what it could mean to have internet-enabled constant-on cameras on everyone's face, for better and worse. But that's the next space I want to explore.
It depends on your yardstick; from an evolutionary perspective, eunuchs are still extremely new, and I'm unaware of examples in other species. Also, most eunuchs had it forced upon them, so it's not really a fair comparison.
@DannoHung

I want to set every single person who works for PayPal on fire.

While I can understand your frustration, I think you should cool off and think before posting such extremist views here.
I did this on a smaller scale within our SOA environment. We're told our DEV must connect to everyone else's DEV. The problem is everybody's DEV is unstable, because by nature, everything deployed there is a work in progress. If someone's service goes down, it can prevent me from testing and block my progress.

So early on when I developed a mock web service which could serve mock data based on the service I was calling. As a result, I always knew what data was available, had coherent data (foreign keys across systems were always valid), and whenever I needed to, I can bring a system down and test my own system's rigidity and error messages. It was great. And then we reengineered all the systems and everything changed.
It's interesting to think about what intelligence really means. In some ways, this has been frequently discussed (ie multiple types of intelligence) and in other ways it seems that this has never been discussed (ie what are we actually talking about when we call someone intelligent?) Is intelligence the ability to learn something quickly? Is it the ability to understand something quickly? Is it the ability to solve a particular type of problem quickly?

Depending on what we mean, "Can you make yourself smarter?" has fairly obvious answers.

Start by looking at children. In one regard, we rarely learn faster than when we are kids. Everything is foreign to us, and we are constantly learning, our brains little sponges in a wet world. But clearly, our 25-year old selves could solve far more complex problems than our 6-year old selves. Did we get smarter between 6 and 25?

In the same vein, think about how severely retarded people are described: "He has the mind of a 4 year old." Whether that description is medically accurate or not isn't the point. We certainly think of children as intellectually inferior, even though all of our brains started out that way.

So what changed? Why is a 25 year old "more intelligent" than a 6 year old? Is it the creation of new neural pathways? Is it simply the way they've learned to look at the world or quickly apply answers and processes they already know to fit new problems?

Maybe you can provide more answers? Because it seems to me that the fact that we got to where we are today indicates that you can absolutely make yourself more intelligent, depending on how you define that. But I'm open to objections.
No, the point is that all of the current & older versions of software would still be GPL. Only the author's next release (possibly released today) would be under different licensing terms. You can't revoke the GPL.
Google throbber using only css
Another PITA issue I've hit with PayPal is trying to link Bank Accounts or Credit Cards from multiple countries to the same account... can't do it.

So even though I'm an Australian living in Canada, I'm stuck charging my Australian Credit Card and Bank account whenever I use Paypal. Sigh
Startups Should Not Be Scared of Big Companies
Why is that something that we should not worry about? (I am not being sarcastic, honestly asking, nuclear physics is not my primary expertise.) Yes many of them seem to have short half-lives but one of them has a half life of 1.5 million years.

Also I am not sure these are the only iron isotopes. This seems to be a list of "naturally occurring" iron isotopes which usually means "naturally occurring on Earth".

Also another thing to worry about is the isotopes of platinum and platinum group metals that seem to be the main and most lucrative target of space mining.
There's a layer of indirection that I don't think people are considering: The OP is wanting to build an incubator for transpeople. The startups it funds will likely pass your test and focus on being the best at what they do.

The only difference is that they had an additional funding avenue due to their founders' identities.

The real question is why that additional avenue should be available at all, and I think there are at least two good reasons:

1. Allison has compelling social motivation, meaning that she doesn't need to maximize her financial return to achieve her goals, so long as the investments are sustainably profitable.

2. If there's an institutional bias against funding transpeople, her willingness to provide funding may work to her financial benefit.

I have my reservations, but they're not related to the target audience.
United Launch Alliance - a consortium of the two biggest US defense companies, that due to a series of mergers own all the other US defense companies, who make the only launchers that are used in the US.

It's about as 'commercial' as Ariane
How does a degree in computer science be anything but a B.S.? It would seem a bit contradictory the other way, or in the least a misnomer...
Research paper saves UCSD scientist from $400 traffic fine
Some people want to change gender. Its probably not uncommon. We all look ridiculous sometimes; usually as a result of vanity. This is part of the human condition, and again not uncommon (see teenagers).

The proper response is to treat difference with humour and good grace.
Most of the stuff added are librarys, just stuff that is used often enougth to role it out in the 'standard library'. The only languages changes are some syntax cleanups and the new reader features.
The usual measure of aggregate demand is GDP. The United States is by this measure experiencing fairly weak growth, and so it isn't an open-and-shut case that the country is in a liquidity trap the way Spain and Greece are.

If you want me to take a position on the United States - sure - I'll believe the US isn't facing a problem with weak aggregate demand when borrowing rates increase, inflation picks up or unemployment comes down. Right now the American economy looks a lot like the Japanese economy in the 1990s, a flight to safety among investors reflecting a preference for liquid assets over real investment. The most vehement critics of Keynesian models tell us this is wrong, but they've been predicting soaring inflation and spiking interest rates for FOUR of the last FOUR years. And these were also generally the same folk trying to invent a debt crisis at a time when the US was unarguably in a liquidity trap and could essentially borrow for the long-term at zero percent.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that right-wingers hate Keynes because they associate his ideas with some vague notion of socialism, and most aren't educated or well-read enough to understand what he is actually saying. I'm not putting you in this category since you clearly state you don't believe the United States is in a liquidity trap and that removes any unambiguous point of contention between you and Keynes as far as I can tell, but I also don't think your critique is necessarily on-topic since you seem to have something against Keynesianism and I can't tell why: Keynes never advocates inflation and doesn't advocate subsidizing bankers. It sounds like you're bothered much more by monetary policy than anything else.
Creative endeavors are not regular or predictable. Manual labor is. That's the difference, as writers and painters figured out a long time ago, but we seem to be struggling with. (For understandable reasons - it's often a team sport and not a solo one like those other two are)
Couldn't agree more, the subscriptions API is so well designed...and surprisingly complete. Every time I think of something I need to add, the API already has a simple, logical method for dealing with it. Top-notch work.
Normal Paper Can Become Waterproof With Nanoparticle Doping
I feel in chess it's about concentrating your power with the goal of total elimination of the other side in one battle. With go, there are multiple battles where you make trade-offs - short term vs. long term, territory vs. influence. Focusing on solely one part of the equation is almost always not optimal, yet you can still develop your unique style of play. You would often feel it's not a zero-sum game where both sides are taking what they want(though in the end only one can win). Also with the huge branching factor, go feels more dynamic and fluid.
This reminds me of an old New York Times article that categorized people into two categories:

1. Those who believe that intelligence is fixed from birth, and

2. Those who believe that intelligence can be improved

The finding was that folks in category (1) tended to be fearful of being wrong, and had trouble succeeding in life whereas the folks in category (2) felt it was OK or good to make mistakes, and tended to be more successful.

EDIT: article is http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/business/06unbox.html
Someone might be able to use the dozens of accounts for fraud before they could catch them and put a stop to it. If the money is already gone, Paypal would suffer the losses.
The moral of this story seems to be that if you're too passionate about your passion, and become too emotionally invested, it can destroy you.

For this guy, the solution was to quit his passion and do something different. That may not be the best solution for all. By all means, try to do your passion. Sometimes it won't work out, but please don't let this discourage you!
I hope Elon Musk gets all the "man of the year" awards.

The man is brilliant, and there's so much resistance to what he's doing, it's insane.
Sorry to hear that. I hope you can find work quickly.
Well, all situations are not the same. Obviously things will be different when managers are knowledgeable. This doesn't mean that they have to know it all. I like people who come right out and say "I don't know much about this" because then everyone starts learning. It elevates the conversation from nonsense to something constructive.
I especially agree with your first point. In Go, I often play moves just because I find them beautiful. Even in life-or-death situations, I begin by finding the "most beautiful" moves :)
You only have to be first to get the network, and they already have the network.
Interview with WeWereMonkeys, directors of "Little Talks" by Of Monsters and Men
great concept. will use it this weekend.
At Hybridgroup (http://www.hybridgroup.com) we cater to that exact working environment where anyone can work from anywhere (For the most part. Timezone seems to be an issue so we stick to the Americas/Can for now +3/-3. You still have to treat it like an office.).

It's a new age. The workplace of the future is everywhere.
You wrote:

If musicians (etc.), overall, are unable to afford to produce, so everyone is, in general, short of music, then we need to address the matter somehow. But the article did not seem to prove that problem actually existed.

I fix:

Musicians (etc.), overall, are unable to afford to produce, so everyone will soon be, in general, short of music, so we need to address the matter somehow.

You said:

But the article did not seem to prove that problem actually existed.

The article went into great detail about how:

* Revenue to musicians is down industrywide over 60%

* The economic models that supposedly offset the decline in recording revenues are counterfeit, in that they were present before the drop in revenue, never accounted for the majority of most musician's revenue, and in many cases are equally susceptible to piracy. Specifically: this article states that bands earn less than $200/night for playing concerts.

* The studies that suggest the contrary are misleading, use cherry picked examples, and even in those cases discuss professionals earning less than managers at fast food chains.

* After a very brief period of opportunity for direct sales revenue on the Internet, musicians (not labels, musicians) got squeezed out of the picture by Facebook and Google - specifically: their audience has been captured by Youtube and Facebook and with it their opportunity to build customer relationships and conduct financial transactions with them.

* He knows professional musicians who are living out of their vans and eating out of dumpsters.

I'm trying to figure out how that last sentence of yours could not be willfully obtuse. The only explanation I can come up with is that you think he's baldly lying.
>> The BPP was constructed to be similar to the CPI. If you constructed it to be close to the CPI of 30 years ago, it would have been higher.

> so the BPP people are part of this conspiracy too?

You insist on not reading what you are replying to. I see no point in this discussion.
It wasn't raw economics, it was politics. Thatcher saw that the miners helped bring down the Heath government, saw an opportunity to break the unions and consolidate her power. (Creating the insane social and economical inequalities in the UK today)
If a striped shirt makes you vomit you have really bad motion sickness.
It's only worth a few trillion dollars if you don't actually sell it to anybody. Every kilogram they actually introduce into the market reduces the total scarcity of the resource, which means every kilogram they introduce has a lower marginal value.
Joe Stump and Sprint.ly move to Portland
I actually was trying to use hub as part of our workflow (pull request from feature branches) and it requires a user token that's no longer obtainable (that I could find) as github is deprecating it in favor of oauth. So I'm now building a cheap set of scripts using curl. If something has changed since this weekend, or if there is a fork or branch I missed that doesn't require the user token (or if you can get the token somehow), I'd love to know about it as hub fits all our needs perfectly.

EDIT: just checked on the issue and it looks like it had movement recently, so i'll be trying the possibly working branch.
You are too much empiric, there is no need to build something right now: writing some generic patents will to the job.
Giftag, a Pinterest clone that went live in 2008
I was one of the guys that built this. I still use it and love it. But a few minutes with the site and you'll see why it didn't succeed.
Treehouse is moving to Portland with $4.75 million in their pockets… um branches
2 in 1 day?
Yes and another thing is that when you want to use Clojure Data together with other languages. You cant calls (mydate "15.11.2000") to a python runtime, to understand it you would need a clojure runtime. When you send #mydate "15.11.2000" you only need a clojure reader. What to do with the date literals can be handled in a python function. The reader is a rather simple peace of code.
"it's harder to make a critical, near-irrecoverable mistake in Go"

You must not have seen me play :-p
I worked on UCT-based (one-arm bandit algorithm) go players for 3 semesters. It was truly a great, if often frustrating, experience.

It's a tough problem to get your head around. Sure, the premise makes sense- that the Monte Carlo heuristic plus the UCT tree-exploration algorithm balances promising nodes with uncertain ones to intelligently expand the tree. But tweaking that algorithm usually hurt performance more than helped, and the tweaks that did improve gameplay were non-intuitive.

One semester our goal was to improve the random-playout generator to play slightly more human-like games. It turns out that almost any play enhancements made in the Monte Carlo simulator crippled performance (for instance: instead of playing randomly, search the board for an opportunity to capture the opponent). The best result we had was achieved by applying the capture-if-possible heuristic on only two positions per random move (ex: at the beginning of the MC-simulator's move, pick two positions randomly- if moving in either one captures the opponent, do it). Applying that heuristic on any more than 2 positions per move made the random games play out more slowly than it was worth. Needless to say, a lot of time was spent testing our tweaks (which itself was quite time consuming).

It was frustrating to see our initial seemingly sensible tweaks cripple performance, and it definitely took some time to calibrate ourselves to the problem at hand. But I probably learned more about programming while working on Go than in any other 3-semester span.

Peter Drake's Orego player is a great starting point for exploring the UCT algorithm (Peter Drake wrote a popular Java textbook you may have used in undergrad). I highly encourage people interested in AI to check it out:

https://sites.google.com/site/drpeterdrake/research/orego
Singing Goodbye - Karen Leaves Microsoft for Exec
I left a big tech company a couple of years ago for a less than certain path. Never had the guts to leave with such flair. Good for you Karen. Anyone else have a unique c-ya later story?
Of course! I'm in favor of body hacks of all kinds. My point is, I view people who change genders in the same light as those who get devil horns, split tongues and stretched earlobes. It's your absolute right, and I celebrate it. But by making that choice, the tradeoff you accept is that some suits might not take you as seriously, and grandma might have a heart attack.

I suppose that's the hair I'm splitting: homosexuality is generally not a choice, nor is being born with an internal gender conflict. But the way you alter your body or social identity is a choice, and you should accept the consequences of that choice, or not make it at all.
> Yes many of them seem to have short half-lives but one of them has a half life of 1.5 million years.

Which means it's completely safe. If it has a half-life that long, it won't be releasing radiation at a very high rate. Hardly enough to register above background. The isotopes you have to worry about are the ones with in-the-middle half lives- long enough that they don't deplete themselves in a conveniently short period, but short enough that they produce a dangerous power output.
Partnering up with Apple. Am I doing it wrong?
Get rid of all those asset lines on your Rails app logs
Is there a Social Network For Coders? (GitHub Redux)
I do quite a bit of open source work. I do this because I feel a genuine sense of camaraderie between me and fellow contributors. The people I know through FOSS (and development in general) are smart, interesting, and always involved in events I want to know about and go to. Github does a pretty good (nope, I take that back, they do a GREAT) job at keeping me in touch with projects I care about. I value the updates that Github displays to me about the various projects I watch, but I'd ideally like to receive updates in a Facebook/G+ timeline-esque view on repositories and coders I'm 'watching'. Additionally, I'd like to have events, conferences and other gatherings where these coders I follow are going to be.

If I had something like this, Facebook and G+ would quickly become useless to me, as the people I really care about (in a professional context) are all on Github.

Are there any (grin and bear the buzzword here) 'social' layers on top of Github to enable more seamless social collaboration, as well as more genuine social interaction?
OT, but I do believe one of the important reasons why many people considered math hard is one letter names.

Optimizing for writing is not optimizing for reading.
Go problems feel super compelling to me. Typical problems can be boring "counting" exercises, but I find it hard to beat something like the ear reddening move: http://senseis.xmp.net/?EarReddeningMove

There is a great series on youtube on fantastic moves from professional games with commentary in English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ9Oexs59CE&feature=relmf...

They are really beautiful in part because they become tesuji through a confluence of factors that reverberate across the entire board. It can be hard to see for amateurs (including me) but once you give them the right context and insight, they become startlingly brilliant.

Also, it's interesting you find it hard to make a critical mistake in Go - this feels very common to me. For example, a decision like deciding to defend a group instead of sacrificing it (which comes up all the time) often snowballs really quickly.
I'm curious, what is it that your friend doesn't like?
Little metaphor I wrote up for the halting problem
Pretty awesome FUD here. Ben (the author) was a hack when he wrote game articles on Ars Technica--glad to see he hasn't given up on the muckraking.

EDIT:

To elaborate, he makes one good point--you need a good pitch to expect funding on kickstarter. The bulk of his argument, though, seems to stem on a conversation about how there is no way you can make a game for less than X, where X is some arbitrarily impossible-to-obtain value for indies. This is mealy-mouthed repetition of the same garbage that publishers want devs to believe.
[dweck mindset] will find the work of the researcher most associated with that result.
This is interesting - I actually wrote a tool very similar to Grc a while back:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/rad

It uses the same idea of config files specifying what regexes to look for and how to color them. This tools looks a little more full-featured and tested though.

Also, I only thought of applying it to highlighting log files. I didn't think of using aliases to improve the appearance of regular terminal commands.
> Sometimes the word "it" is descriptive enough all by itself. Other times it isn't. It's a more subtle matter than "worst variable names".

I see what you did there.
This post is very accurate. I build APIs for a living (CUDA), and this lines up pretty well with my experience. Writing APIs is very tough, you will get a lot of things wrong, and the fixes available to you after you realize your mistake are all ugly at best.

One quick example:

In CUDA, you have to explicitly copy memory to and from the GPU. We have two basic kinds of memcpy functions--synchronous and asynchronous. Asynchronous requires some additional parameter validation because the GPU has to be able to DMA that particular piece of memory, etc. After we had been shipping this for a release or two, we noticed that our parameter checking for the asynchronous call was missing one very particular corner case and would silently fall back to synchronous copies instead of returning an error. We thought, okay, let's just fix that by returning an error because surely no one managed to hit this.

Absolute carnage. Tons of applications broke. This particular case was being used everywhere. It provided no benefit whatsoever in terms of speed; in fact, it was just a more verbose way to write a standard synchronous memcpy. People did it anyway because... they thought it must be faster because it had async in the name? I don't know.

In the end, we made the asynchronous functions silently fall back to synchronous memcpys in all cases when the stricter parameter validation failed.
I left a big tech company a couple of years ago for a less than certain path. Never had the guts to leave with such flair. Good for you Karen. Anyone else have a unique c-ya later story?