skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No way man, if I was immortal, I could work on stuff without worrying that I'll get old and never finish it. And there's plenty to work on, for sure...
The weird thing is that sometimes it does work.

I called Yahoo on the 4th of July 2006 because of a password problem relating to my Flickr account, and Ronald answered after two levels of voice menus (the number I used: 408.349.1572). I doubt they still offer this sort of service (having a phone bank of people dedicated to customer problems, let alone being paid to work on holidays).

As crappy as it is on a user side, vendors that offer pay phone support have a pretty good business model. I'm willing to bet that a company with a lot of nontechnical customers (such as Intuit or similar) makes as much or more money on it's paid phone support and consulting than on actually selling their software.

But in reality, the invasiveness of phones is a liability. Being able to barge your way into absolutely anything else the person is doing (no matter how important) via phone is somehow tolerated as not rude, when in any other circumstance it would be.
cue the theme music for "Burn Notice" ... :-)
aka the nanoreplacement procedure. A few more ideas are listed here:

http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Uploading/#METHODS
Results of the Drug War: Cocaine 74 Percent Cheaper Than It Was 30 Years Ago
That may be, but you can get rid of the memory that chrome uses. Just close the tab, which releases that memory - since one tab is run as a separate process which then exits and releases all memory.

With Firefox, you have to restart Firefox. All tabs run in the same process, and memory is generally not released back to the OS when someone just calls free() or delete.
Obj-C Overtakes C++ In Language Popularity
Is anyone involved a lawyer? After reading the discussion that went into the removal of the acceptance clause I became a little worried.
Another way to think about it would be how high would A class programming rates be if programmers had to be members of an official organisation and if the education for skills at the high end was only accessible to those who were already members.
I'm really interested in the Facebook message they describe in the article. Anyone have the number they are referencing?
It is not always that ergonomy is the same as satisfaction.
Do you have any intention of open-sourcing this project?
Fix PC Registry Errors easy and very fast
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I'm inclined to agree! The way they structure the competitions does not allow users to become sophisticated modelers!
Those people are NOT customers. Customers by definition are paying for a product or service. Their customers are the advertisers. And I'm guessing it's at least somewhat easier for those people to get someone on the phone.
External Energy Source Caused Samsung Galaxy S III To Explode
the companies they refer to are primarily getting their income from ads, most likely a very low income per customer. So a single phone call would properly cost more than their average revenue per customer.
Great, that's real democracy at work there. But, well, how is this HN news ?
Smartphone patent war talks to be hosted by the ITU
You can create your own public cloud on AWS VPC.
@ksajadi, I suppose we must trust your word regarding the donation. Will you share how much will be donated?
Some of those stories seem rather stupid, for example this one: http://playsquad.commongate.com/post/Second_Life_has_ruined_... (first one I clicked on)

Mother claims her son was diagnosed with Aspergers but now blames SL for him not having a normal life. Perhaps she should be happy that her son has found a way to be happy instead.

Edit: OK, I clicked on some more, most seem to be about infidelity in Cyberspace. Blame SL? I think not. Not saying that it's impossible to neglect real life too much, but if there wasn't SL, those people would find other ways to drop out.
2044: The Year of the Zombie Apocalypse...
Why there are no space in the email market for thunderbird
It's worse, far worse: he even omitted the title text! ;)
First day  first Job
Tynan’s Rules for Living :zenhabits
The next GPL: Why it's being shaped on GitHub
So you're saying that it's more like a normal sieve than Eratosthenes' sieve?
I'm sorry, I read the whole article and could not understand it. perhaps I need more sleep. Are doors cheaper than desks? Why is this a cost saving measure? Did the desks double as doors? I guess there is some industry insider stuff that I am just not getting.
Is there really a project here? Or are you just gauging interest in the wake of the face.com acquisition? According to whois this domain was created only a few days ago.
i see face.com is giving extensions to devs who ask for it (i did, thanks @face)

i hope it'll be back on graph, too good to let go...
Discussion thread on LWN (with the author, Richard Fontana): https://lwn.net/Articles/505589/
Sigh.

Not that I don't love the idea of revolutionary technology, but the very idea betrays what seems to me a fundamental misunderstanding:

Man, as in mankind, already is immortal. We seem to stand a decent chance of outliving our star, anyway.

The desire for one individual, by which we really mean the one ephemeral brain-state that happens to exist at this moment, never to cease to be seems positively juvenile. For life to be, change must happen; for change to happen, that which is must end. Demanding that thought continue to happen according to my design is a selfish idea of the mind that shouldn't make intuitive sense to anyone with a materialistic conception of consciousness.
How the Rich Got Rich
So?

Honest question. So, what?

Provided I don't make/imply a claim of authorship—and in this instance he clearly hasn't—I simply don't perceive a duty of attribution when I'm sharing things to friends.
It'll be interesting to see how many people would actually want to become immortal. For example a lot of religious people would be against it as they want to go to heaven or be reincarnated when they die. If you were trapped in poverty with no obvious way out you may not want to live forever. Even taking those factors out of your decision living forever isn't, I don't think, something a lot of people really want and it would introduce incredible challenges for mankind to overcome (population size).
otherwise why else would they be pulling the EPEAT certification from their products?

Apple probably did not see certification as important to its future growth. Apple was probably also dealing with pressure for EPEAT - and decided the hassle just wasn't worth it. Dropping governing bodies is never an easy decision, but Apple has so much influence already, that it's difficult to say whether trends will follow Apple, or stay with EPEAT. Considering Apple actually provides the value, my bet is on the former.
Girls education in India: E-Learning Solution to security problem
Mobile + web app
Thanks for participating.
Yes. We are going to publish three pieces of information after this: survey results for anyone who's interested, a blog post about the process of getting a survey in front of early adopters and communities like HN and how successful it was and the details of donations to the charities.
Serious question. Do you genuinely not see the qualitative difference between that kind of cartoony game involving a major public figure, and the game with the images you can see on the original post? In your mind, are they essentially the same thing? Not trying to be nasty; to many, many people they are of completely different intent, but I am aware that some people just cannot sense that kind of thing.
I like the charitable donation incentive, but I'm not so sure about the specific charities you chose. That money could do a lot more good per-dollar if it went to a more efficient charity, such as one of GiveWell's top-rated charities (currently the Against Malaria Foundation and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative). Would you consider adjusting the list to include them?
Master forger comes clean about tricks that fooled art world for four decades
You've just described the basic difficulties and market pressures faced by all companies recycling just about anything.
Assuming we are defining consciousness objectively as the pattern which encodes my brain state:

I would continue to be me through the copying procedure, which can presumably be less disruptive to my consciousness than falling asleep. I would then begin to alter my brain state (without which process I would not be me), and, in the course of time, become something which bears no more resemblance to Me' than any other biological brain does.

At this point, the effort of copying my brain state may begin to feel like a waste of time.
The duty still exists, regardless of your purpose or audience, or whether it's convenient for you to say "and btw, this is from XKCD"; however it's rather unlikely that anyone would try to push you to uphold it in those circumstances.

The claim here seems to be "as Editor-In-Chief of a site dealing eminently with the Web, he should know and follow it"; but indeed - trying to stir up a storm in this very tiny teacup sounds forced and sensationalist (there are much more interesting cases, such as The Oatmeal versus that "fun-something" site).
I can definely see myself using this over objective-c if it proves stable enough for production usage.
You take that risk in contacting a random person. If someone does it, you probably won't contact the person again. There might be published stats on how frequently the bonds are redeemed per inbox.
Yes. We chose the charities in the list based on the top five biggest charity categories: Children, Health, Animals, Environment and Poverty. We also tried to choose international charities that people know and trust.

If you have any suggestions about the charities please leave a comment here. We can't change the list of charities at this point as our survey provider would break the results already gathered. But we will figure out a way to cater for everyone's charity recommendations.
Are you his friend? Am I his friend? Clearly, this isn't "sharing things to friends".

I don't attribute either. I don't need to because I only post a link to the original. XKCD is best delivered with the title and hover text which is impossible to do correctly on G+
Can you share with us the source of the 0.7 mean friends for Americans? I'd never heard of a number that low, and some quick googling suggests the number of "close friends" is reported to be around 7-9:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/10891/americans-satisfied-number-...
Maybe, you could tell us about it, when you finish.
While it looks interesting and probably has some use cases,
the syntax puts me off a little. YMMV.
Yes, Obj-C has many brackets. But I find them supporting
reading by grouping relevant elements together. I assume
if you dislike lisp like languages, eero might help in this
regard.

What I particularly don't like are the tailing return types.

I also assume apple is actively working to reducing the Obj-C
verbosity to some extend.

Regarding the website, I miss a "get started" link. How do I
take it for a quick test-drive?

EDIT: It sais: "Eero is a fully binary- and header-compatible dialect of Objective-C". Does this mean, I can write a module in Eero and have it derive the correct header files for me? Or do I need to re-write the header file to be consumed by (legacy) Obj-C?
How is feature engineering not allowed?
You're just scratching the surface, don't be so quick to dismiss it. Most of those stories are too personal to post here.

Edit: Removed link to article about the wrong game (duh me).
We have gotten phone calls from people wanting help running and installing completely unrelated software, in some cases on platforms we don't even develop for. We don't publish a phone number for tech support anymore and this sort of service request is more common than actual tech support on our own products, which is nearly always done through email. The people telephoning fairly often will say something like:

"I didn't want to waste your time with an email, I just have a quick question that won't take a moment. I am having trouble installing Outlook 97 on a computer I got at an auction, it's an SGI Workstation?"

"I'm not sure why you're calling, we don't produce or support Outlook, that version has been obsolete for many years, and was not written for SGI."

"You were so helpful getting your software installed before, I really appreciate it, and no one else has been able to help me with this."

"We don't support that, also it's not possible."

"Surely there is some way. Let me read you the serial number of the computer plate. Do you need the Outlook license key?"

"I can't help you."

This goes on for a while. I stay on the line mostly because I am amazed by the call.

Anyway the basic insight I have is that anyone with a reasonable request understands the information we have about email and forum support and uses that. It's only the unreasonable customers who feel sufficiently motivated to track down the phone number and make a call. As the parent post mentions, these sorts of calls often come in at weird early morning hours and weekends. We also get calls from people wanting advice in their life about non-support related things like where to go to university to learn to write software like we do or whether to buy a new car. Again, reasonable people understand that support is by email, unreasonable people don't and this explains why most phone calls are unreasonable requests. I still handle these politely, perhaps so I can later tell the stories to people as I am now. Maybe also I am a bit of a sucker for whackos!
Yep and then when the computer hangs up, or a lightning hits your plane and burn all the electronics, or the turbulence is so hi that the autopilot simply disconnects, or a sensor breaks in the middle of the flight and the flight computer throws erroneous predictions, or a software update introduces a bug that is active just in certain circumstances, etc... I think that eventually it will be possible but ( and I am talking of 30 million $ planes) actually there are simply to many failures too many times ( once a year is enough and I assure you that potentially dangerous failures happen far more often than that) to have a fully autonomous plane flying with people inside. Don't even start thinking of consumer grade planes.

A robotic car could be made to Self stop whenever a failure happens, that is a luxury that planes don't have.
It's not a guarantee :) But if you think for 5 minutes about how you would go about decreasing the volume and the toxicity of the electronics that gets landfilled every year, you might come to realize (like I did) that what EPEAT is doing is a more effective way to reach your hypothetical goal than a corporation's undertaking to take old products off the hands of consumers if the consumers bring them to their retail stores. (It's more effective because there're so many ways that the corporation can directly or indirectly put the old products on a boat to China or India.)
Buying Good Quality Camping Equipment
Thanks for explaining the rationale behind such a use case. Sound reasoning indeed.
Reading "Thinking, fast and slow" right now, it resonates strangely with this article.

For those not in the knowing, this book proves how most of our reasoning is false most of the time, shows that people vote based on facial features, that success is luck, that the world is out of our control, that experts are worse forecasters than monkeys randomly picking options, and the better the experts the worse the forecast. Depressing.

Edit: one thing reassuring is that it explain rationally how random people moderately clever and sometime plain despicable can become the head of very successful companies.
We probably won't witness a spectacle like the one with The Oatmeal again in our lifetime! Yes, the title is needlessly sensationalist but it astounds me how we can't even get media professionals to get these things right. Would TNW be very accommodating to people who share their content this way?
Well, again, I don't see any connection between this game and the fact that Anita is a woman. Yes, it's clearly harassment, but it's NOT women harassment.
Using ELB to achieve this means they are doing SSL termination on the ELB itself which means the request is no longer encrypted within heroku, unless of course they are using another cert for the connection between ELB->dynos.
Ever since I read Tipler's wildly speculative book The Physics of Immortality http://amzn.to/MarYjA (affiliate link) I've been a fan of this line of reasoning.

Critics say it's all pseudo-science, and they're right. but pseudo-science is not necessarily a bad thing. There's really not much difference in some smart guy thinking through what might happen in 50 years and some other smart guy speculating on how man might have lived 120K years ago based on a couple of bones and an arrowhead. Educated creative speculation is fun. It's not physics, but it's fun.

Having said that, my money is on 300-500 years as the time frame for consciousness transfer and the beginning of the singularity. These are just really difficult problems, and it's always very tempting to project out some great breakthrough within your own lifespan. My money is on a lot of "little" breakthroughs in both biology and information technology that take us in ways we can't predict right now, but which converge in some sort of Omega Point immortality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point
Feature engineering is allowed, but some of the competition datasets are very "black box" in that very little information is given about the nature of the data.
Could you explain what you mean by its 'designed not to allow for this'?
That seems a very sweeping criticism.

I took part in the last essay scoring competition on Kaggle.

In that competition, the data set was the original text of the essays, scored by human raters. A lot of the effort in our submission was in developing features. We didn't spend much time on our entry, but we did use domain specific features (e.g. writing code to calculate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunning_fog_index), implementing spell checking, etc.

That entire competition took place within the Kaggle framework.

Furthermore, in addition to the training-set (which we did most of our development with, using cross validation) and the test-set, on which the final scores were calculated, there was also a validation-set, from which the public scoreboard was calculated. We could only submit our predictions for the validation set twice a day, and were told only our overall accuracy on the set -- not given the scores of each essay.

The role of the validation set in Kaggles framework was surely to prevent errors such as overfitting. In fact, we had a situation where our cross-validation accuracy increased, and validation-set accuracy decreased, because of a bug where our feature selection didn't properly implement cross-validation (similar to the linked article).

The difference between the cross-validation and validation-set scores drew our attention to this problem.

That all happened within the Kaggle framework.

So I don't really understand criticisms as general as 'Kaggle is doing ML wrong'?
There's something interesting called the no-cloning theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem). Basically, it says it is impossible to copy an unknown quantum state. This could have implications on "copying" vs "moving" human identity (whatever that is) around.
Not being able to teach the server about spam is really a big shortcoming. I have it on my todo list for years now... Apparently there even exist standard protocols for that, perhaps there are already plugins for TB that can do that? And of course the server has to play along, too.
Just How Interested Is the World in SEO?
when we see these reports/analysis it seems the answer is always the same: Capital Gain.
However, I think this whole line of inquiry is mis-titled: these reports always tell us how the rich people are making now their income. Which, I feel, is not a good hint as to how you can become rich.

For the greater public, the question of "how the rich people went from 0 to $1B" might more interesting than "how the rich people maintain their $1B+". Definitely I find the latter more interesting than the former (probably because I don't have $1B+)
For those looking for some context, I found some slides:

"The Decline of the GPL, and What To Do About It"

Richard Fontana, Red Hat - Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2012

https://events.linuxfoundation.org/images/stories/pdf/lfcs20...
'It's only a matter of time...'.

Somehow, I doubt it. Louis C.K. is in a pretty unique space to try and do this kind of thing, and as mentioned in the article he would have no obvious reason to do this for his own show. To my, admittedly limited, knowledge no-one has managed to replicate the success that Louis has had, so if the implication is that we're on the cusp of major disruption in the distribution model, then I remain sceptical. In the next 10-20 years? Sure, why not.
The name plate on my desk says "Software Architect", and honestly I feel kind of silly repeating that when people ask what I do. I usually just tell them 'I write software'. That said, I've worked in a bunch of different C#/.Net/SQL Server shops (IT depts, educational, shrink wrap apps, advertising), and I can see in some of these places why the role can be necessary. Not because .Net demands these over-architected enterprise uber-solutions, but because a large amount of developers in those places just don't seem to care about what technology choices and design methodologies are out there. And there's nothing wrong with that, so long as there are some there who are thinking beyond the next sprint, regardless of what their job title is officially.

I'm also pretty sure the role itself means different things depending on the scale of what the company is doing. At my current job (a recruitment advertising company w/ some very large clients), we have a lot of traffic and only moderate development resources in-house, so you really need to depend on proven technologies to prevent the whole thing from falling apart. So part of my job is making sure we are using the right technology where we need to and only rolling our own when it makes sense.
A car is a machine made from a bunch of parts. If you could upgrade those parts bit by bit, a car could run forever.

You could look at the internet as a single machine made from a bunch of parts. Those parts are distributed all over the place - but still. And unlike a car, the parts of the internet do get upgraded bit by bit. The internet has been running non-stop for decades, with no end in sight.

You could regard dna-based life as a kind of machine - one machine, whose parts are the organisms which carry dna. These parts are distributed all over the place, and are continuously upgraded through evolution. The dna in every organism results from an unbroken chain of upgrades that goes back billions of years.

So by this definition, there are machines that go on without end. And if you could change your perspective, drop your identity as a human organism, and instead say "I am dna-based life", then you are already immortal. Congrats! :)
Thank you for your interest and feedback. Yes, it's not on the short list at the moment but I am definitely planning to add integration with Google Calendar and other calendars in a future release.