skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's already been 4 extinction events, it's pretty safe to bet that it will happen again.

But they happen 50-100 million years between each other and usually take thousands of years to take full effect once they begin.

Even if technological singularity takes an extra 100-200 years to really happen, if any significant 'AI' is achieved, a lot could happen in a thousand years, let alone a million.
Indeed. It's something that we smart folks are aware of, but it's difficult to comprehend the effects on a day-to-day basis. Makes me wish I were a few inches taller!
Compound interest only works when the interest paid exceeds inflation. Your money is simply rotting otherwise and would be better invested in something that's appreciating at a more rapid rate. Maybe that's wine or stocks or a house.

Your parent's generation had savings accounts that paid actual interest. Today you get a token 0.25% on a good day. With the prime rate being so low there's not much to be made by leaving your money sitting around.

As much as it's important to save money, it's also important to not save too much. Living a life of frugality in the hope of having a happy future is the deferred life plan and for many it never pans out.

Spend what you need to have an enjoyable life now and if you can save, by all means. Life within your means and spend wisely, but don't be such a cheapskate in the hopes that your accumulated pennies will somehow make you a billionaire some day.
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation - http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-Innovation/d...
I hate these "it's the system" arguments almost as much as I hate argument ignoring the systemic issues entirely.

It's clear that in your world view, a bunch of rich, white "fat men" (read: Republicans, according to you) are controlling everything from banks to schools to everything else. I feel sorry for you. The world is not the gigantic conspiracy you've created in your mind.
Pretty much all DRM content has unique patterns.

Want to prohibit videos of the Starcraft game? Simple search for a few sentences like "more vespene gas" and "require more minerals".

Want to find online copies of "Aliens"? Just enter a few catchphrases or part of a dialogue like "They come mostly at night. Mostly."

And even then, you can't filter conversations in real-time, only maybe 'flag' people with forbidden words.

Yes, that's really assuring to know it's not in real time.
Matt Taibi: The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia
Actually I've tried it and got no problem. Have you tried it? Installing packages on NT-kernel OS is different than on *nix, BTW! I guess that's what it was with "programmatic".
Call it whatever makes you happy I guess - but personally, as much as I might want to, I htink it's abad idea to burn bridges. "go fuck yourself boss" is the wrong mentality - if the place isn't for you, you just go, move on, and leave it in the past.
Learn By Shipping: Lessons Learned From My Money Losing Startup
I tend to believe that QA should focus equally on function and experience. Consequently, I'd:

1. Unit test both front and back end code. This thread is full of great examples for tools that will make that process easier.

2. Use a tool (I like jmeter) to frequently test how your project performs. You would be surprised how often small changes result in massive slowdowns, especially under load.

3. Bring basic usability testing into the QA fold. Web dev is extraordinarily client facing - projects live and die according to the whims of clients. Consequently, if you bring things like simple hallway testing into the development flow, your whole team will recognize how important it is to make things elegant and simple to use.
The pale blue dot - by Carl sagan
Reality is Broken. Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, by Jane McGonigal (http://www.amazon.com/Reality-Is-Broken-Better-Change/dp/014...)
I use hetzner, they are based in Germany. The customer service is stellar and servers are priced very competitively. You can check them out at www.hetzner.de
The Smashing Book 3+3(1/2) is a great read if you are in the Web Dev (especially front-end) field. Not science or high-tech, but well put and designed content for the people working for the web.
I see where you are coming from, and it's certainly a choice up to the individual blogger. However, I wouldn't underestimate the laziness of the average visitor. Making it easier for them to share, definitely means more traffic.

For example, this article of mine has 1.2K Facebook Likes and 179 retweets: http://stacktrace.it/2012/01/07/10-consigli-per-interagire-c.... Of these, 400+ were made from the AddThis widget. It's hard to say how many would have bothered otherwise, but it'd probably be a smaller number.

Also keep in mind that they can act as social proof. Sure, a series of 0s look needy and desperate. But when you are good at promoting your content on your own, these counters may actually give people more confidence to share the content themselves.
> Nowhere else in the world would a criminal become the president of a nation.

You're overstating it; Berlusconi is a counterexample.
Roaming ElasticSearch
Depends on what you're interested in. Do you want something heavy and factual?

http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Epic-History-Medicine-Commerce/d...

Do you want a first-hand account?

http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Char...

http://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Naked-Mind-Field-Mullis/dp/067...

Any particular area of science that interests you?

Also, if you want something non-fictional and thrilling, look into accounts of epidemology.

http://www.amazon.com/Virus-Hunter-Thirty-Battling-Viruses/d...

Also, I read alot of medical thrillers which are fiction by the author Robin Cook. There are many true facts about science mixed in so you might want to consider that.
It seems it is extremely hard to grasp the simple true: only minority of the population is interested in being hackers, programmers and IT guys. They just want to use computers — much the same way like they drive their cars without any wish and ambition to be a car mechanic. It is not "dumbing down" — it is freeing them from caring "how do I make this fucking thing work" to just doing what they want to do: be it browsing Facebook, writing a research paper or calculating orbit to Mars.

Being that the case, what does DRM and the secure boot feature in UEFI add to that experience?
Personally, I feel that ear plugs make me look rude. So I get the next best thing, in-ear headphones. A good pair should cost anywhere from $100 - $400 (Good as in last for years, and you can get stuff that doesn't hurt your ears and fits well). I listen to mainly instrumental and consistently use the same playlist so that it eventually becomes background noise.
NatWest and RBS customers react angrily to technical problems
Here in the UK, it was something that I didn't have to worry about.

Which was a good thing. Shortly after I had committed to my start-up my wife became pregnant, with twins, and ended up with a reasonably lengthy stay in hospital due to complications. My start up ultimately failed hard, and my savings were wiped out. But her and my health was one thing we didn't need to worry about.
Suing Our Way to Better Security?
Could you explain how Christoph Gohlke's .exe installers solve the programmatic deployment problem (clicking through an .exe installer is not "programmatic deployment")?
I studied in a school that uses the Moore method along with the Professor's notes. This meant that any analysis textbooks were kind of banned. Rudin however is supposed to be fine (a bit harder but that is what you probably need). Also, Spivak is so freaking good that once you are done with that, Rudin should become much much easier to grasp and follow.
http://www.hn-books.com#B0=133&B1=69&B2=63&BC=3&...
"An image is a lot more complicated than a pair of ids and a rating."

Predicting someone's reaction to a given movie is a lot more complicated than a pair of IDs and a rating, too, it turns out.

Let's take the speculation out of this.

You can get features of an image with simple large blob detection; four recurring boltzmann machines with half a dozen wires each can find the corners of a nose-bounding trapezoid quite easily. They'll get the job done in less than the 1/30 sec screen frame on the limited z80 knockoff in the original Dot Matrix Gameboy. You'll get better than 99% prediction accuracy. It takes about two hours to write the code, and you can train it with 20 or 30 examples unsupervised. I know, because I've done it.

On the other hand, getting 90% prediction accuracy from movie rating results takes teams of professional researchers years of work.

.

"I can build a reasonable dataset for a prediction task from a set of 100M rows from a database that I maintain in my spare time"

And you won't get anywhere near the prediction accuracy I will with noses. That's the key understanding here.

It's not enough to say "you can do the job." If you want to say one is harder than the other, you actually have to compare the quality of the results.

There is no meaningful discussion of difficulty without discussion of success rates.

I mean I can detect noses on anything by returning 0 if you ignore accuracy.

.

"What's cool about this is that Google hasn't given the learning system a high level task."

Yes it has. Feature detection is a high level task.

.

"They basically say, figure out a lossy compression for these 10 million images."

I have never heard a compelling explanation of the claim that locating a bounding box is a form of lossy compression. It is my opinion that this is a piece of false wisdom that people believe because they've heard it often and have never really thought it over.

Typically, someone bumbles out phrases like "information theory" and then completely fails to show any form of the single important characteristic of lossy compression: reconstructibility.

Which, again, is wholly defined by error rate.

Which, again, is what you are casually ignoring while making the claim that finding bounding boxes is harder than predicting human preferences.

Which is false.

.

"they find that it can effectively generate human faces and cats."

Filling in bounding boxes isn't generation. It's just paint by number geometry. This is roughly equivalent to using a point detector to find largest error against a mesh, then using that to select voronoi regions, then taking the color of that point and filling that region, then suggesting that that's also a form of compression, and that drawing the resulting dataset is generation.

And it isn't, because it isn't signal reductive.

Here, I made one for you, so you could see the difference. Those are my friends Jeff and Joelle. Say hi. The code is double-sloppy, but it makes the point.

http://fullof.bs/outgoing/vorcoder.html

See how I'm getting a dataset that isn't compression? See how that dataset is being used to make the original image, but nothing's being generated?

Same thing.
Taming the SVG Beast
Megaupload: U.S. Intentionally Disrespects Foreign Sovereignty
We may now construct a machine to do the work of this computer.

Creation.
Most agencies that size do very little testing. Typically any testing is manual and done by a mix of developers and account managers. Not saying that you have to operate that way, but be aware that automated testing is a relatively foreign concept for most agencies.

I try to write unit tests for internally developed libraries. For some projects, Selenium tests will be written as well.
I find AngularJS the best.
How do those nice .exe files work with virtualenvs?

You are using virtualenv, aren't you?
Hope I'm not hijacking this post, but does is the CLR version of Clojure any good? We have a lot of code in C#/F#/IronPython and am interested in trying some new components in Clojure just for kicks.

Is the CLR version have parity with the JVM version? Is it worth using at all?
One of the problems I really wanted to tackle was ensure consistency in web rendering across browsers and over time. Basically, automating the process of "does this page look right?" That culminated in my startup (Mogotest) and the concept of Web Consistency Testing. Neither are right for everyone, but check them out. Feedback is always appreciated, too, even if it's about how I use Bootstrap :-)
I think is related to bandwidth and processing power, internet connection speed increases and if the page can be loaded in some short time like seconds then is okay and more content will be added.

Some years ago video on the web was a crazy idea now is something normal.
I would have liked to see a rationale for using virtualenv and all this python-only stuff, when rpm/apt/msi had more mature tools and would have given sysadmins a unified sanely manageable view of what's deployed and their cross-language dependencies.
ICANN gTLD director resigns
His linkedin page:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-salazar/3/136/314
Yes, setuptools is broken. Proposal: don't use setuptools!

It's funny that the author doesn't make any mention of this, which is not new news:
http://docs.python.org/dev/library/packaging.html

Maybe not every use case anyone ever proposed needs to be standardized.
Microsoft is requiring companies that want a 'Works with Windows 8' sticker to, um, work with Windows 8.

The logo program doesn't stop manufacturers creating similar unstickered hardware or putting more than one key in the stickered hardware.
Normally I advocate adherence to posting the original article title on HN, but if that had been the case I doubt this article would have ever got enough attention to be upvoted. Singularity is near is over the top.
I disagree, Phil. Blogging should be part of your marketing efforts. And your team does need marketing, regardless of how good your product is and how well you understand your customer's needs. Definitely spend time understanding your customers, but don't ignore promoting and marketing your product. It's a common mistake among programmers who tend to believe in an absolutely utopic meritocracy where "if you build it, they will come".
How much of it is "been there, done that" knowledge for your average HN reader?
That amount of money would pay the mortgage (and nothing else) on a 30-year loan on a $900,000 house in the place where he lives, given a 20% down payment:
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2012-Coralbells-Ct-Longmon...
It wouldn't pay for anything else. He's just giving it as an example of what that amount of money can buy.
Same for me. Very sad.
Instead of reading this persons take on it I would much rather read the original paper. (1)

I don't see how darwinism is even related at all. Penrose likes to say that there is a fundamenal limit through either a quantum process or computers can't comprehend godel's theorem (2) .

Aaronson in his quantum computing from Democratius course says that if our brain is a quantum computer it isn't very good at taking advantage of it. (3)

Personally I think we don't have good abilities of understanding godel's theorem (one of Penrose's arguments) . Our pattern recognition is basically learned through induction and it just increases its optimization.

1 http://orium.homelinux.org/paper/turingai.pdf

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperors_New_Mind

3 http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec10.5.html
Salazar's linkedin page:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-salazar/3/136/314
I have used Pip, Virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper-win on windows with very little trouble... except for anything that isn't pure Python.

In order to install PIL in a virtualenv on windows I ultimately ended up downloading the PIL windows installer, extracting the required files and placing them in the virtualenvs site packages directory.

This is what needs fixing! Pip with access to compiled windows binaries.

Install Pip on windows: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4921215

Virtualenv Win: https://github.com/davidmarble/virtualenvwrapper-win
Beta App that is set to earn you cash
If a function in case of bad inputs returns a value in it's codomain, you can't distinguish it from a value returned by a normal call (except in cases where it falls outside of the functions image). This in my opinion is same as undefined behavior. Don't trust the value returned, if inputs were bad.

You know, I didn't actually know that. Thank you for enlightening me.
If the boot loader is required to show a splash screen the user will still get clear evidence that something strange is going on.
moustagram clone?
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moustagram/id531864119?mt=8
Well, after the third time, it worked Oo
I am very aware that it is trivial to handle notices, errors and warnings. The problem is that PHP does not do this by default which allows people to exploit undocumented behavior.

As for handling invalid input, I think you should actually check what some of the functions output some day.

For example, decbin clearly states that the input should be an integer but if I pass it a string.....

Code/ctsr » php -r 'echo decbin("invalid input");'
0%

Zero is clearly not a NULL value. This is one I ran into this morning with php 5.3.8, I've seen this issue crop up in many other functions, they don't return NULL. Some return NULL, some return 0, some return '', some return '0', some return FALSE.
Here's the github link to the App for anyone who wants more details: https://github.com/thomasskora/android-nfc-paycardreader#rea...
Society's power structure doesn't matter. If it did, pivots wouldn't work - ever.

Stop reading so much Occupy BS.
Learn coding by doing? Make some stuff - Mozilla Webmaker
Sit Down and write two letters ...
Skillendar: A neighborhood network. Please give us your valid feedback.
Quadcopter drone group held in London airport on suspicion of terrorism
_Trading and Exchanges_ by Larry Harris.
When I add a tag to a bug and go back and view the same bug the tag I added has been replaced by:

music, Koala, Suche, test, thing, asd, dasd,asdasd ,asdasd ,asdasd, asdasd , Buggr, Buggrapp, Time, Start, one, one two
Meanwhile the gTLD director resigned yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4147181
A Map of the Whole Genome Tracks Outbreaks
That's great as long as it's a common package, and you want to install it globally, and you don't care what version you get.

But if that's all you want it's easier to type eg. "apt-get install python-reportlab" on *nix.
obfuscating the js would still be more important, as there are probably some simple hacks to get all the javascript back from the web view or the js file used by the app.
"There are a whole lot of very different things called "The Singularity" "

If the singularity was a legitimate concept with anything approaching experimental evidence, then this could not be true. This observation of yours - with which I agree - suggests to me that The Singularity needs a pope hat.

It is instructive to notice that all of "the singularities" are the products of science fiction authors, and in the case of the original, a particularly bad one.

There is a delightful level of schadenfreude involved in observing the multiplicity of "The Singularities." In two different ways its name says "there's only one," and yet they still can't agree on topics that are critical and fundamental to the concept itself, like the definition of intelligence, or whether or not to circumcise.

Pass the sacramental chalice, please?
I'm really having a hard time getting worked up over a $99 key which will all but completely eliminate boot sector infectors and the like. I think a lot of this storm and strife comes as a result of who is pushing it, less than the concept.
It seems to pull all available tags out of the database and line them up in the textarea...
And, that experience is exactly? (I am asking)

In my opinion secure boot just means that my computer is owned by the company that has certified it.
Despite all the hate, Maven solves a lot of problems in the Java land and I couldn't be more happier.
"[Top executives were] plunged into years of nut-crushing negotiations [...]"

Perhaps unnecessary hyperbole, but entertaining nonetheless. If you want "just the facts" without the hyperbole, read the indictment [1]. FWIW, I find the RS article to be a more pleasant read.

[1]: http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f261600/261602.htm
Another post on the same subject written a few years ago: http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/dec/14/packaging/
Just found that out though a tweet from Codecademy, I think this is again another very interesting platform for people who are interested in coding, like me. I think I am so lucky to have start learning to code at this period, people make learning how to code more practical and let us see the power as well. Awesome
I really enjoy "the Bastards Book of Photography". There are a few reasons:

1) The sequence feels right. Everyone can start with photography, you don't need the fancy equipment, and you can start with what you have.

2) The text starts people on the road to manual settings, i.e. learning the camera. The mechanics are not what photography as art is all about, that's composition and creativity. But, without practice and understanding the mechanics until they are second nature it's very hard to realize your composition and vision efficiently.

3) This is a starting point with some help to novices. If this helps someone take a slightly better vacation or family photograph, great. The text straight off the about page sums it up.

There are concerns:

1) "Wow" is what teaches?

There seem to be two major paths to learning from experts:

If they are dead there are books. Review: The Camera, The Negative, and The Print by Ansel Adams. Highly technical from a master who had a nervous breakdown after putting everything into his art to for a showing. Still not a great starting point for the novice. They are fantastic books for someone who's more advanced and ready to get into the minutia. This is contrary to the message that people should just go look at compositions and dive in.

Expert workshops: If wow is what teaches, than there are many expert photographers who conduct workshops. For the majority of novice to curious photographers my advice has always been to save the money and go out with a photo club or some photo friends. None of the people in these clubs are probably "wow" experts, but it's a bit like learning a sport by matching up with someone of equal skill rather than paying to be taught by a pro before you know what you are getting into.

2) Technical Details: These are common practice. The body of the site directs people to learn their own settings and exposure. I'd read more into the text and intent than the photo details.

3) Photography is art? Not to the majority of people who just want to take photos on vacation or of the family. The most common questions I get are: What camera to buy (well addressed here), what do those settings on my camera dial mean (addressed fairly well here), and how do I take better pictures (good starting points to think about composition).

4) Go look at good photos. Agree. Fair? No. The big investment for most people is time. From point #1, there are a lot of good books at the library... if you are of the willing.

As for disclaimer about skill, &c: People have paid for my photos as well. I have an art degree. Look, I'm not great but I'm handy with a camera.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kanemoto/sets/72157621724362081...
The GPLv3 does not require you to provide a key. It only requires you to provide a way to bypass the need for a key. Allowing a user to add their own keys or even the option to disable the need for a key is fully within the bounds of the GPLv3.

There's also the outstanding issue that if you only supply software, then you might not even need to do anything to comply with the TiVo-ization clauses of GPLv3.
Yet, their proprietary drivers are a problem for many clients. If I spend US$ 1000 troubleshooting a multi-GPU number crusher that's money I could have spent in better hardware with drivers that just worked.