skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's definitely true, and a major problem beyond friendliness (i.e. way before any singularity). A traditional assumption in machine learning and other areas of AI is that you can factor out the problem-specification parts from the algorithmic problem-solving parts, but it's very easy to get results that are unexpected, except in the rare cases where you have an 100%-correct obvious objective function handed to you by the structure of a problem. In cases where a human is writing down what they think the objective is, a very common case is that there are a lot of unspoken things that they intended to be included, "optimize [x], but without doing anything obviously stupid that I wouldn't want you to do". Hence a lot of iteration on objective functions is needed in real-world applications, and recent-ish research focuses on alternative formulations like interactive machine learning, preference elicitation, etc.
> Creating platform-specific packages is nontrivial, also it is platform-specific.

Unfortunately, Python-specific packages are Python-specific. I don't want to manage one package manager for Python, one for Ruby, one for Perl and yet another one for system libraries. And I'd prefer to have to trust only one vendor for security updates for everything.

And anything that is not Python depends on system libraries, which are supplied by apt or yum and live in an distro-specific namespace. How does setuptools declare and pull in a dependency on a system library?

I understand the need for Python, Ruby etc. to have their own packaging for cross-platform use, including on non-Unix. But system packaging tools have their uses too. There is no easy answer, and certainly no One True Answer.
Your Open Source Startup
Entrepreneurship is the quintessential American dream: a way to break out of a mold by your abilities and hard work.

If you're talking to someone on the fence, the risk / reward equation basically looks like this:

Real world problems creating a business vs making your dreams come true. There's a very obvious side of that equation to massage.
Agreed. My first reaction was "You're half a dozen zeroes short there chief".
I'm giving this talk at Open Source Bridge next Tuesday.
No, it isn't a freedom of speech issue, not in any sense of the term, and conflating this situation with it devalues the concept greatly. He has all of the freedom of speech he desires. One's freedom's do not extend to coercing others.

He was not forced to do anything - he was given a choice: either we continue to pay you, and you abridge one line that we don't like being associated with our product, or you keep on saying whatever you wish and we have no requirement to pay you.

Both parties are free to set any terms (as allowed by law) on the deal which both will agree to. If both don't agree to the terms, you have a standard failure to negotiate a deal. If one does something in the future which causes distress to the other party, the other party can certainly demand redress. If the party which caused the issue refuses this, why should they be forced to submit to his whims with no freedom of their own? And what does that have to do with freedom of speech? He's still saying what he wanted to say, is he not?
Our Top Funny 404 Error Pages
Online Hobby Shop Secret #1: Dropshipping
Read how to set up an online business with little investment.
Those who benefit from such an independent organization aren't willing to pay for it.
> Creating platform-specific packages is nontrivial

Not so much any more - for some platforms, anyway: http://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2010/01/msg00007.html
Just one comment on a minute quote from Penrose that happened to be in the article:

"To my way of thinking there is still something mysterious about evolution, with its apparent 'groping' towards some future purpose. Things at least seem to organize themselves somewhat better than they 'ought' to, just on the basis of blind-chance evolution and natural selection."

This is a common fallacy about evolution, and is explained beautifully by the anthropic principle, or in other words, the innate selection bias of our existence. We've self-selected for our own awareness of our circumstance and existence. Things are not organizing better than they "ought" to, they've just happened to organize to a sufficient point that we exist and perceive this process and say things about it like the above quote.

It is in the same way that someone who wins the lottery must think themselves exceedingly lucky that they, of all the millions of people participating, have won. They must think there is something mysterious about this, that things turned out somewhat better than they 'ought' to, just on the basis of blind chance.

Yet, what is the probability that some person, of the entire pool of people in the world, wins the lottery? One. It has necessarily happened by the nature of the lottery.

We as a species have won this lottery, by the mere nature of our sentience. We should not think it mysterious or unusual in any way. However, we are lucky in the sense that we are here; we are special in that we can perceive and understand. As long as we understand the fact that there is no "should" in evolution, this is a perfectly fine thought. it just happened, and on this planet, it produced something able to understand itself. As Carl Sagan said, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." Certainly there is much metaphysical and philosophical consequence to our existence, but scientifically and probabilistically speaking, it makes perfect sense.

Consequently, I believe it may be much more difficult to reach true AI than some have postulated.
this, I did that for my website.

if(ADMIN){
generate a random username from a dictionary (what I did was combining two words from a dictionary of words (english.txt) and then shorting it if was too long).
register the user
post from his account
}
Oh, the search feature! In Vim we call that '/'.
Yes it does seem like a decidedly half-baked plan. All the hassle and none of the benefits.
I think you need to be more careful with that argument. While I agree in principle that this sort of flaw is inevitable in the future, and puts a hard cap on the value of measures like secure boot (and I'd go even further and argue that it makes the costs of secure boot higher than the benefit), it's not correct that the signature process is inherently compromised. Public key encryption works, and it works very well. There have been a handful of goofs, and there will be more in the future. But the number of key regimes that attackers would want to compromise (consider even banal stuff like the signing keys for console games, which remain secure after many years) vastly (vastly!) outnumber the few exploits.
It's not electricity. It's energy. Electricity is just a medium for transferring energy from source to destination. The amount of usable energy at our disposal is proportional to the level of technological advancement. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
I second Hetzner. Moved back/forth between a number of hosts but always (ultimately) hosted my projects on a Hetzner VPS.
http://www.hetzner.de/en/ (English)
The Next Revolution in Personal Technology Will be Wearable
* The system just returns yes/no as to whether an image has a face in it, and if it was hard-coded to respond "no" it would score 64.8%.*

Yes, that is true. But ~80% correct is still a significant result.

I was hoping people would read beyond the 15% headline figure to understand exactly what than number meant.
Tell HN: Google Effectively Banned Me From Play Store Due To Chargebacks
August of 2011 I was out and when I got home I realized I didn't have my phone. I checked my email and noticed some purchases that I didn't make.<p>Initial Story Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2866422<p>Long story short... my phone was temporarily lost, and in the mean time some purchases were made totaling $344.97. I contacted Google who told me to contact Glu Mobile, who eventually told me they would not refund and to call my bank. So I did, and my bank provided a temporary refund while they did their investigation. After a month or 2, my bank contacted me and said they sided with me.<p>Now... this week I decided to buy an App from the Play Store. Rundouble's app which is $1.60 (or around there) ... I try and purchase using a credit card and using my Wireless account. Both won't let me. So I log on to Google Wallet, which informs me they need to verify my account. It asks me for a valid ID and some other document.<p>So against my better judgement I send them a copy of my drivers license and a copy of a credit card statement. No big deal, it said it was just to verify my identity... I had a sneaking suspicion it was because of the chargebacks but thought it would be no big deal after I verified.<p>I got this email back a few days after:<p>--------------------------------------------
Hello,<p>Thank you for your email. I've researched your account and found that you've reported some of the charges in your Google Wallet account as fraudulent charges to your card issuing bank. As a result, we have suspended your account to avoid any further unauthorized charges.<p>Below, I’ve furnished details of the orders that were reported as fraudulent charges:<p>Purchased from: Glu Games Inc.
Order date: 2011-08-09
Google order number: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Amount: 139.99 USD<p>Purchased from: Glu Games Inc.
Order date: 2011-08-09
Google order number: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Amount: 139.99 USD<p>Purchased from: Glu Games Inc.
Order date: 2011-08-09
Google order number: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Amount: 64.99 USD<p>If you are able to confirm that the charges were not fraudulent, please contact your card issuing bank and request that they reverse the chargebacks. Once you have a confirmation from your bank that the chargebacks have been reversed, please reply to this email so that our specialists can reactivate your account.<p>Thank you for your understanding.
---------------------------------------------<p>So they want me to dispute chargebacks from almost a year ago that were 100% valid.<p>Amazing... never thought I'd say this but Apple here I come.
Here is a clone which is still up at github: https://github.com/rayyan/android-nfc-paycardreader and this is the most "interesting" bit of source : https://github.com/rayyan/android-nfc-paycardreader/blob/mas... - it can identify card types and that's about it...
I understand Phoronix's stated reason for papering themselves with ads, though I think it actually does them more harm than good. (They state it's because they are a one-man show and don't make much money.)

Though Phoronix occasionally puts up a plea not to do this, I just installed AdBlock Plus.
You don't: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
Master's dissertation on Lolcats
Perhaps because Microsoft's pre-existing ARM competitors (iOS and Android) all have locked bootloaders as well.
"The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" http://www.amazon.com/The-Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules/dp... was a great book that showed that not everything is under your control
It’s a backward perspective: running a company involves considerably more risk than choosing a programming language.
If they wanted to get people angry, they should follow the money and show where all the money used to build a new hospital goes, but Taibbi's axe doesn't grind that way.
The conditions for OpenCL adoptions just aren't there yet. There were just two major players and nVIDIA didn't regarded itself as obliged to comply with external (neutral) specs. Now when Intel is planning to get in with it's on processing array, it might get different at some point in the future. A standard is usually adopted to solve a mess. The current state in the field is not messy enough right now.
Concatenate images into one image easily
I think the point was that Flame was signed with a Microsoft key.

It's true that key shouldn't have been trusted for what it was used for, and that the MD5 attack basically elevated the rights of the key, but the parent's point isn't 100% wrong (nor is it 100% right..)
Looks like it's not quite up to date - it doesn't have the latest pull request in it
Chromium "WontFix" persistence of delete on close cookies
Steve Jobs at the Smithsonian
Well...if we are allowed to change language completely we could change to a type safe language (as most systems programming are) and we wouldn't have this discussion in the first place since it would be impossible to call the function with a string parameter...
What Windows 8 Means for Tablet PCs.
Thanks for posting this. As someone who lives in the Detroit-metro area, Detroit certainly needs all the help it can get.
Along these lines - are there any good 'hacker' tools out there for the various phone platforms? I know there are port scanners and some other things out there but is this a well-developed space?
I have studied hypercomputation and so far it seems like there is nothing there yet or anything useful. No feasible models have been implemented.

If there is an unknown process in reality that does this then why can't a computer be designed to take advantage of this once we know that. The burden of proof is on you to prove the process not hand wave it away.
Strange that a browser overrides a developers cookie settings.
The app is designed to be used with the German GeldKarte which appears to use an old NFC technology. It isn't a credit card, you have to load cash onto it before you can spend it, and doesn't use the same security as modern contactless bank cards.

Also it appears this isn't the first app to do this:

http://www.nfc.cc/2011/12/11/nfc-geldkarte-broken-by-design/
I've hijacked a couple of components at Game Closure in Clojure, much to the chagrin of our CTO. (Just kidding, kinda.) For the places we've used it, Clojure has worked wonderfully. The only disadvantage is that few engineers know it, and few are willing to pick it up because they're afraid of it.

But if I were starting a new startup, I'd pick Clojure over anything else, hands-down.
Large junk of Polish startup Fablo (fablo.pl, e-commerce instant search engine based on natural language processing) is written in Clojure [1].

[1] http://jan.rychter.com/blog/2010/7/5/clojure-w-fablo.html
If you'll forgive the self-promotion, you might like to check out my web app, Testpad (https://ontestpad.com), as a lightweight tool for organising manual testing. It's basically structured checklists rather than formal test case management, and has been doing well at agencies both big and small. Because it's lightweight and flexible (think cross between Excel, Notepad and OmniOutliner) you can start out as simple as you like and iterate the complexity as and when it's appropriate.

And to answer your question: I am of course using it to test itself! Plus some selenium for basic automation, but without going overboard as the app is very javascript-heavy and interactive, which limits how much can be usefully/cost-effectively achieved with automation.
Haskell powered companies
It's a standard problem for all engineers -- being forced to interact with managers instead of users.
Facebook like photo gallery with comments with jQuery and PHP
The national tourism year 2013 in the Red River Delta | Vietnam Travel News
What "permission"? The key is open to anyone with the $99, or at least that was my understanding.

Also, slippery slope. Cmon.
For the record, this received 2 upvotes :-)
"Just for a moment, suspend your scientific beliefs and imagine that electricity suddenly ceased to exist. Waking up, your alarm wouldn’t work. Unless you have a gas grill, you can say goodbye to your morning toast."

Uh, I'm not a scientist, but I imagine you would just die instantly.
Dammit Chrome, Y U capture C-n ? :(.
It's always a little weird when I see the topic of health insurance come up (and it comes up a lot). When I hear this argument, it's very apparent that this is a large emotional risk, but not a large financial one. In fact, this fear is a very illogical one compared to other risks.

Let's quantify real quick so we can remove the emotional barriers and just deal in numbers. According to AHIP's 2011 survey, average monthly cost of family insurance for a firm with less than 50 employees is $13,400. How does that compared to the risk of losing a salary of $50k, $75k, $100k+? (Btw, any firm with 2+ employees can qualify for group plans)

The problem here is that leaving work and thus losing that salary is a form of freedom for most. Again, this is our emotions playing tricks on us. Both can be quantified, but one is villainized and the other martyrized.
Also: DNS response forgery, bittorrent throttling via packet inspection and clear violations of the network neutrality principle by discounting their partners' content over their IP network. I'm as pleased as anyone with this, but honestly I think the scale still tips toward the "evil" side for Comcast.

That said, I'm a customer. They're my only good choice in broadband. And honestly I've been reasonably pleased -- it's reliable and fast, if not cheap.
See http://www.microsoft.com/education/facultyconnection/article...
StartUp The Game (let the competition begin)
The article goes on to focus on the need for advancement in battery technologies. Although the specific examples in view were mobile devices, I think that is one of the most interesting aspects of the work Tesla(TSLA) is doing. They are extremely motivated to make breakthroughs. Their business depends up on it.
My sentiment exactly! We are dependent on energy itself. Numerous projects have proven themselves feasible for generating energy in a cheap & clean fashion. However, with all companies out to "make a buck", such innovations often get swept under the carpet.
Example? Think back to the decision of the motor vehicle industry's choice to offer hydrogen-powered vehicles instead of water-powered ones.
Git Workflows
php, perl, python, ruby and R are the GCD, it's reasonable to expect an experienced dev to be productive in them in 3 days.

If you offer to teach the other devs scala or Haskell you'll probably get interest. Probably they won't know what SML is, unless they went to one of the few schools that use OCaml/ML to teach
Graduate students are typically well above the poverty line.

Graduate student stipends run from $15,000 to as much as $40,000 (for 20 hours of work!) The median wage in America is around $26,000. Many graduate students make more money than the average worker.

This is a perfect example of how out of touch we, the professional class, are. Most of us have no idea how little capital (social, financial, and otherwise) the working poor have at hand.

Graduate student pay: http://www.cas.usf.edu/business-services/data/osu-survey.pdf

Median wage statistics from the SSA: http://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2010
If you already know some JavaScript, Titanium (http://www.appcelerator.com/) seems pretty interesting. It compiles down to the native language of iPhone and/or Android. I haven't used it extensively, though, and am curious what others think about it.
Also look at fpm: https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/wiki

This sysadmin uses it frequently and it's a big time-saver for many software packages.
Unwelcome unfilterable emails from Twitter
I guess I take the opposite suggestion from the flight example: we succeeded in flying once we started focusing more on the physical/mathematical research of aerodynamics and lift, and less on attempting to mimic biology, in copying the biomechanics of bird wings. We ended up producing something that flies, but not in exactly the way that birds fly. That's what I tend to view as the better route for AI as well: instead of trying to copy the details of how a brain works, focus more on first-principles mathematical/logical principles of inference, whether they're symbolic ones (e.g. theorem-proving) or statistical ones (Bayesian networks, etc.).

Admittedly this is a big area of disagreement both within and outside the field.
Problem is, at that point you have built a lot of business on top of it. So the issue of whether or not it is "free" is moot because it has a very real dollar value to you and also probably to the boss who is breathing down your neck.
I know how you feel. I always enjoy his stories. I just feel that I'd enjoy them more if someone else wrote that.
Ask HN: Is any bootstrapped startup running their own servers?
I know it is not recommended to setup your own server at home etc. and go with the pros because that is not what a startup should focus on. But just wondering if anyone is successfully running their own server from home/office etc. while they bootstrap ?
If you'd like a great non-technical tour of how computers really work conceptually, starting from simple morse-code switches through to assembler, Charles Petzold's "Code" is awesome:

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...

Even having understood for years how computers work in principal, nothing quite put it together for me like this book.

There's a similarly great book on the history/methods of cryptography called "The Code Book" by Simon Singh that I recommend too - http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Book-Science-Cryptography/dp/...
It's great because it traces the history but also walks you through how the cyphers actually worked, and provides the best intros I've ever seen to public key and quantum cryptography.
Doug, just leave the whole thing alone and worry about solving real problems not invented ones.
Yes. The only mystery is how the universe got here, and if you want to get super metaphysical, why math and logic work at all.

Evolution as a process is entirely reasonable when you look at the details if the logic.
On another site, I would say “TRWTF is using PHP for taxes”. For that, give me a language with very strict numeric types!
Yes!

Every developer should know one of the very helpful and working ways of doing things in open source software development: "Stop complaining, fix it."

It's one thing to complain about closed source software that you have to use and probably paid for as well. But a very different one to complain about free and open source software that you want to use.

Stop the bickering, start the work on fixing the problem instead.
One of my clients has been looking at implementing back-end communications between processes, including transaction handoffs... using RPC calls. We had been looking at using dnode, but I've noticed zeroRPC before as well. Is there anyone out there with experience using both or programming for both at least that has any input?
Then you're not paying attention to the society around you. You really think women and men have equal proclivities for engaging in public competition?
Another important one to add is not to host your blog on a subdomain for SEO. http://blog.example.com is inferior to http://example.com/blog

Has anyone recently moved a blog from a subdomain to a directory and seen observable improvements in search traffic? I find this incredibly difficult to believe these days. Google can sniff out content farms, but somehow blog.domain.com vs domain.com/blog is a mystery? (Yes, I've read Matt Cutts' ancient and ambiguous post on the matter).
Why would you want to make hardware which is compatible with open source Nvidia drivers?
Don't Be Represented by Contingency Recruiters
> aren't a good reason to trash pip

Good thing that never happened then.
Classic case of a visionary genius crossing the blurry line from physics to metaphysics.
Okay, where are the private keys for Apple's iOS signing key, Motorola bootloader for the Droid phone, XBox360 bootloader signing key etc. etc.?

Are they imminently going to be released?
While there are definitely flaws in implementations and leaks, assuming them to be foregone conclusions is a mistake.
And I'd be willing to bet that much like with gift cards, there's a nontrivial number of time cards which have been bought but will never be used.
Does it make sense to try using both Clojure and Rails in web app, Rails for UI and Clojure for more sophisticated business logic?
It looks like they were only held for a couple of hours and released. Not that I think this is right, but they are flying with lots of wires/electronics/batteries.