skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nobody is pointing out Twitter's and Facebook's role in this affair. Sure, they are just tools (pun intended), but their very nature (short statuses broadcast directly to social network) makes rumors and heresay take on more sinister proportions. Everyone praises the services when they enable Tunisian or Iranian protestors or supporters of the Oatmeal, but there must be thousands of these "minor" witch hunts going on in schools and other small communities such as that of indie writers.

ilamont's top comment sums up the set of circumstances (I would be less generous and call it a "mentality") that led to all these knee-jerk reactions. Heck, it didn't use to be called a "vanity press" for nothin'.
Well, don't be then. I didn't find it painful to read. Why did you?
I meant as widely deployed as PHP. I'm not sure that that is a measure of anything at all though, except that itself. It's certainly not an indicator of any kind of code or API quality.
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What I do (I'm in France) to avoid that problem is that I bring the team and the candidate to a restaurant and we all order "Apéritif", so that there is no pressure in what the person order. I think it relieves the tension by having a relaxing and informal setup. When he's well fed, slightly drunk, slightly sleepy, we do the technical test :)

I ask by phone before if there is stuff they don't eat/drink to choose the restaurant, or avoid this protocol.
Ask HN: Help beta-test cansend.com and I will help promote your website/startup
The web service: http://cansend.com

What does it do?
Automatically posts the most popular pages on your website to your subscribers on Facebook, Twitter and even email newsletters.

Requirements?
You will need to run a website with more than 100 visits a day and generates more than 1 new page a day. For example, a forum site, photo site, video site, group blog, news site, etc. You will need to sign up on http://cansend.com and connect your Google Analytics account, and activate sharing to any of: Facebook page, Twitter account, Mailchimp list. Once done, drop my a line by clicking ‘contact us’ on the website.

What will you get?
I will link to your site, your Facebook and Twitter pages, and your email newsletter archive from my customers page: http://cansend.com/customers
I may also mention and link to your site in my marketing and promotional efforts.

I know it’s not much, but I would be really grateful for anybody’s help to test-drive cansend.com
Only if they order red wine with a fish dish. Its a test to see if you are "one of us".

If you are taken out to luch as part of the process they are looking to see if you are properly socialised and know which knife and fork to use.

The same as when you asked which newspaper you always say a broadsheet Times or Guardian some even accept the Telegraph these days.
That is like claiming the universe is more intelligent than we are because we could never hope to calculate one millisecond of what the universe does if we all had IQs of 200 and 15 billion years with pencil and paper.

What computers do is not intellectual. Intelligence is probably just a stochastic random process of clawing one's way up a hill, but even with enormous computational power, it took the solar system 4.5 billion years of not-well-directed effort to produce us... (and to produce whatever creature that blotch was on the curiosity camera :). Only once we existed could the universe, through us, produce the works of art, literature, culture, and scientific knowledge that we've accumulated very rapidly.
The information revolution must be accelerating the speed of scientific discoveries. In the past scientists would make paradigm shifting discoveries that would be forgotten or that would be confined to a specific region. It would take other scientists centuries to rediscover them and build on top.

Many discoveries come about by improving on and combining previous discoveries, so what needs to be improved to speed up science is better access, categorization and distribution of discoveries. And this is where I think a human-level AI would have an advantage over a human. Even if the AI is unable to retain more things in memory than a human it could clone itself and have an army of scientist AIs in charge of analyzing each new discovery and seeing how it might fit in with all other discoveries. Depending how resource-hungry the AI is we might be able have millions of brains working on every potential far-fetched hypothesis to see if it leads anywhere. It would be an industrialization of science.

That seems like it would have to lead to faster discoveries.
Sorry, I think my point wasn't properly explained.

My point is that intelligence isn't everything.

An AI may become more "intelligent" than a human being, but it doesn't mean any singularity will happen. It does not mean it can self-improve. It does not mean it can find solutions we did not think of.

It's a bit hyperbolic to say "we don't know what greater intelligence can do" and conclude "it will therefore do incredible things".

And to bounce on your answer, are we more intelligent than ants? Does it even make sense to say "we're more intelligent than ants"? Our differences with ants go far beyond intelligence.
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> only 15,000 users

Right now. Is there any kind of hard limit on the number of users a site like that could have?
I really wish people the best in their careers. As far as attending college, I know the things that you don't and won't and that is good enough for me.
What he wrote about Microsoft is completely unrelated to the rest of his post. It says nothing about the company's culture and software development processes.
He could have saved himself the embarrassment of writing that.
Dunbar Number, and how many friends does one need
Okay. I'm just telling my stories, I'm not entitled to the #1 spot and I'm not canvasing votes (ok, I asked my husband to vote). If a couple of people read this and got fired up to have some balls and take some risk, that's good enough for me.
You know, I'm flooded with job propositions for PHP / Zend Framework ...
Show HN: moarcatgifs
Now the Economist is normally great, but this line

"This may help to explain the success of Silicon Valley, one of the last workplaces in America where hard and soft drinks still jostle for space in the company fridge."

Is a little stupid.
if your in london, going back to work after a pub lunch of 3 or 4 pints seems to be the norm
There's a new book by Pragmatic (I personally like many of their books), it might be helpful.

http://pragprog.com/book/msraspi/raspberry-pi
"Raspberry Pi: A Quick-Start Guide gives you everything you need to get the Raspberry Pi up and running and doing cool stuff." - their website.
before it started I knew it was going to be another typing rant. I think you continue to present a false dichotomy on typing, as well as missing some of the reasons people desire it.

In particular, I like typing as machine readable documentation, that makes IDEs simpler and more accurate in code navigation and refactoring. Dart in particular shows this false dichotomy really well, but having a type system for human and machine readable docs, making the IDE experience far more pleasant, but which can be turned on or off. Unsound, untyped, programs can still run. Yes, dynamic languages can have nice IDEs too (Smalltalk), but they are harder to engineer.

In terms of optimization, typing is a must for many types of hard real time programming. You can bet that the Mars Curiosity rover isn't using a garbage collected dynamic language. Nor are the inner rendering loops of most mobile games or console games. (Lua is another story when it comes to actual game logic)

Lots of bold claims have been made for Javascript JITs for example over the years, include a lot of hype about tracing JITs, but the reality is, Javascript still doesn't even come close to native performance, and it's hideously slow on mobile platforms in comparisons, with basic, idiomatic programming (e.g. dictionaries with fields) having terrible numeric performance. All this has actually served to threaten the Web with a native-takeover because we don't have a fast web language CPU and memory efficient on these devices.

I don't think that Tim Sweeney or John Carmack are prematurely optimizing when they decide to write a game engine(rendering) in C++, because experience has taught them that it is highly unlikely they'll be able to optimize a dynamic language implementation later to a satisfactory level.

I think many people use a mix of languages depending on the context. I certainly wouldn't write a web service in C++, nor would I write a 3D game in BASIC. I wouldn't use anything but Perl to masage text files, and I'd use R for data analysis. ﻿
I can't speak for WiseWeasel, but for me the spelling errors made some sentences hard to parse on first read. A bit of proofreading would have caught the worst of it, like these:

"My wonderful friend David Weekly probably remembers me angsting in his kitchen over whether or pursue this idea vs. what ultimately became Referly."

"I pondered him comments though"
I haven't even found a link to change my personal security question, if it was hacked, my account is doomed now no matter if I change my password ..
I'm not sure how ID cards work across the globe but usually they have some code on them that is supposed to be unique.

So you would have to scan your name _and_ the other data, which you would not trivially know.

(Yes, I understand that there are ways to get those too)
Not quite - it's still the same res, but bigger.
Who is more of a 'liberal' programmer, RMS or Linus. Think about it.

In my estimation, if the answer here is unclear, then this metaphor breaks hard.
As long as they aren't being creative with their clients money and no consent, go right ahead.
What about people living in small villages? They date and break up as well and then continue seeing the other person everywhere.

And yet they can cope, even lead a socially healthy life afterwards.
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her* I think.
One of my old companies also did this. It worked ok most of the time but you just need to be that little bit more careful that your changes don't affect other's since it's a shared database.
Yes, it doesn't really matter how intelligence is defined, just that in aiming at creating an artificial mind, we'd try to include whatever was useful, including imagination. My reasoning is, if one machine can do it (us), it's possible for another machine to do it. (Though there's a question of whether we are smart enough to create that machine.)

Exponential search space is a killer. Some form of heuristic seems necessary. Perhaps we will one day be able to simulate the heuristics we ourselves use - and then improve on them (e.g. apply them to more data than we can; use more complex heuristics; etc along the lines you say). Given variation between intellectual abilities of human beings, it is does not have an obvious fixed limit, and we may be able to extend the range of that variability. Though I expect increasing the associations an "imagination" can find suffers from exponential explosion.
I'm beginning to come to this realization myself - having balls is one of the most important factors of having success (no matter what success means to you, whether it's social, financial or something else).

If you don't have the balls to do the things necessary to archive the things you want, with all your energy and will behind it, you simply won't archive it.

Most people doesn't even try to do the things they fear, just a small minority does. Of the small minority just a few tries with everything they have, most of them unfortunately holds back because of their fear of failure. A fear of failure is preventing them from giving it everything they've got.
This is akin to the so-called AI effect: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
An AI would be able to self-improve its software (unless artificially limited, and it's not clear to me whether that would be effective), and with enough initial robotic and sensory capabilities it would be able to self-improve its hardware, both computational aspects and robotic aspects.

The only reasons it wouldn't are if it didn't put effort into it (too busy watching Lost), or if intelligence cannot really be improved.

Humans might do the equivalent of rewriting software through thinking. But it's a more limited and slow process than could be accomplished with full read/write access to software running an AI that's completely malleable and rewritable in moments.

There's plenty of evidence that intelligence can be improved. Working memory is important. We have very limited working memory. We are frequently distracted by emotions. If an AI can operate at roughly equivalent speeds with greater working memory, and if it's not distracted by emotions, it may miss some of the "finer" points of life, but I can't imagine it not leapfrogging ahead of meager human progress.

Maybe it's not possible. Like the thing at the beginning of Fire Upon the Deep, if it is possible, we won't really know if it is until it exists. If it's got the temperment of a class 2 perversion or the Blight, we're toast. If it's a Power that finds us amusing or irrelevant, we might be okay.
Even in small villages there is more separation than small companies (or small divisions of a company), plus there's an option of one or both moving out of the village - obviously also an option with companies, but one that the company would rather avoid.

Even if only 1% end badly enough that it would impact negatively on the company, there's surely a valid argument that it's worth preventing to avoid those occasional cases.
Yes, it was written by Danielle Morrill.
Interesting positioning of languages:

Assembly language: Batshit liberal.

Perl, Ruby, PHP, shell-script: Extremist liberal.

JavaScript, Visual Basic, Lua: Hardcore liberal.

Python, Common Lisp, Smalltalk/Squeak: Liberal.

C, Objective-C, Scheme: Moderate-liberal.

C++, Java, C#, D, Go: Moderate-conservative.

Clojure, Erlang, Pascal: Conservative.

Scala, Ada, OCaml, Eiffel: Hardcore conservative.

Haskell, SML: Extremist conservative

Woud be nice to overlap James Iry's chart[1] with it...

[1] from http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2010/05/types-la-chart.html
The difference between Go and Java is one issue which I have no interest to argue, but if you read the whole article in detail and will find `most of the features` he discussed are already provided by Java.

1. Golang is a compiled language with a static type system. You have no chance to confuse veriable types

2. You must have already felt some powerlessness to PHP. It dosen’t have concurrent mechanism build-in..

3. Golang has GC, there is no need to care about memory management

4. Golang is also a C family’s programming language. Eh… with a litte syntax difference.

and more..
Hey, ya know what? I loved the post. It's exactly what I needed to read this morning. Thank you!
Sure it's possible to lose weight on a Twinkie diet but who would actually recommend that instead of just plain, simple eating healthy through whole foods?
I think many peoples interpretation of this site, is that since it's related to start-ups that it's supposed to be the typical vapid conversation you might find at a start-up gathering. The thinking is that everyone has to be super positive because they can't afford to be negative whether in dollars or in social cred.

However, there are also readers here that don't need to put forth an image because they're not trying to make the start-up scene or maintain a persona. Many of these same people also feel a moral obligation to keep the truth, which can clash with other HN participants' motives.

Maybe textmate 2 is shitty. You have to ask yourself what is the reason you think that idea should not be put forth here.
In the dialog for calculating one's calorie needs, one can input everything in metric, or everything in imperial units. I am 6'1" and 65 kg. I don't know my height in metric, and I don't know my weight in imperial, and I'd guess there are other people (in the Commonwealth) who are in a similar situation. Best to convert between the two instead of erasing when one switches between metric and imperial.
Very awesome. I'll look into watching this later! Thanks for the headsup :D
While I would consider Newtionian physics to be much more fundamental, I would challenge the notion that it had the most impact. Compare the ~1900 feeling that almost everything had already been invended. Newtonian physics impact to technology was mainly mechanics. Then came thermodynamics which gave us (steam &) combustion engines and more. Nuclear & quantum physics lead to bombs, reactors and finally seminconductors and so on. I would say todays thnological relevance of thermodynamics and quantum physics is at least as high as that of Newtonian physics. Also: most of todays physicists do not look for Bosons, they do things like advancing semiconductor masking technology, liquid crystal physics and the like - i.e. they are not "fundamental" but "applied" physicists.
Also - with respect to the original article - isn't the much faster exponential growth of the resources invested in science since around 1900 mostly an indicator of expected technological returns by society at large? Science is a huge economy success story since about a century ;-) The question then would be how long can we afford to sustain the current exponent?
I don't think you quite understand the difference between cropping and compression. Cropping an image is the equivalent of choosing which part of the image Facebook displays as your profile picture. While this method could reduce the size of the image to transmit down to '2MP', there's really no purpose in taking photos that are essentially cut in half.
> Why not keep the same enclosure, the same lens assembly,
> the same mechanical parts and simply swap the 2MP sensor for a 20MP sensor?

Because:

> The other advantage of the Truesense Imaging chips was the team's familiarity
> with their behavior. 'We've built-up decades of cumulative experience of working
> with Kodak and now Truesense interline sensors. We know how to clock them and
> drive them - they're a very easy CCD to drive,' says Ravine. A similar level of
> confidence was needed for the cameras’ memory, he says: 'the flash we ended up
> using was because we had a lot of radiation test data for it.'

http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/08/08/Curiosity-interview-...
Just a nitpick, the hot coffee case wasn't as frivolous as it sounds. McDonalds had been serving its coffee unreasonably hot (190F instead of 140F, which causes third degree burns almost instantly) even though they had previously been warned of the dangers. At one point you have to put a cost to it, so it doesn't just come down to them saving money on refills.
3D images are not possible since the two cameras have two different (fixed) focal lengths (for wide and tele shots). There were plans to add zoom lenses (which would make 3D images possible) but they couldn’t make it happen (mostly because of technical issues, it seems).

(Hm, well actually, technically 3D images are possible, just not because there are two cameras. Since rocks tend to not move, Curiosity could just snap one image, drive a bit and snap a second picture.)
Are you familiar with the 'hot coffee' case? I mean, have you actually looked into it, beyond "someone decided to sue for getting burned by coffee"?
It used to be in my industry (banking), but in the last few years nobody seems to drink at lunchtime any more.

15 years ago Friday afternoons used to be pretty much a write-off in terms of getting anything done. We had one project sponsor that would agree to something, then go down the pub, get lashed, and reverse his previous decisions. That was... fun.

I also knew one guy that used to get wasted at lunchtime, and then lay down in the data centre to sleep it off. Different times.
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A great idea - it looks similar to the excellent NodeBox for Python (http://nodebox.net). I'm very much in favor tools that make experimentation faster and easier, for all the reasons that Bret Victor explains so well in Inventing on Principle (http://vimeo.com/36579366).
"Painful to read" is a valid comment - because it's expressing what you felt. "Drivel", you could have saved because it turns the tone of your comment into something much more mean-spirited.
That list made me smile.

The reason it made me smile is that whilst I find myself agreeing with the whole conservative/liberal thing (I despise JavaScript, and yet fall firmly into the Hardcore liberal camp), my mind is still screaming "I'm unique/unclassifiable/obviously an outlier," and had to wonder how much a). my experience and b). my liking for Steve Yegge influences that juxtaposition.
> Collecting 1% of that energy could easily support a western style lifestyle for 10 billion people.

Yes, but how can we collect that 1%? Even considering 100% efficiency for solar panels, we'd need to cover 1% of the global Earth surface (land and oceans). Even more, we'd need at least to double it in order to have a 1% covered 24h/24. I'm afraid we don't have all the required material.
I guess that depends on where you live - In a densely populated area like New York City, or San Francisco - there is less need to drive to work, because you have mass-transit that can get you anywhere you need to be. If you know you are going to be driving home, I'd hope that people would use their better judgement - same if you were out drinking on your own time. Have a beer - relax a while - maybe a water and then drive - there is no excuse for belligerent or reckless behavior regardless where you obtain your alcohol from!
The bonuses of occasionally working from home.

There is nothing like a glass of wine to make a two hour conference call more bearable.
There it is then, going around and taking pictures. A bit lonely out there though, I must say.

Space programs are always, by nature, unbelievable stunts. There are so many things that can go wrong and then they don't, and you end up landing a tonne of sensitive equipment safely on another planet and there it is then, sending vacation pictures to Earth.

If they can do that, what could we do or what could I do that I don't?
Being "the product"
Haha, you assume my code follows good TeX style and conventions. If the only code sample I ever saw by myself was that, even I wouldn't hire myself. (That was a confusing sentence to write :P.)

If you can imagine a site with IE-specific code and a layout that's half specified with absolute positioning and half with &nbsp;, you wouldn't be that far off from what my resume code looks like. It's essentially held together with metaphorical duct tape and \vspace{}.

It's like sausage--tastes great, but never visit a sausage factory :).
its not always fear of failure. Sometimes you have to pragmatic too. For instance, doing a startup in Bay area with a family is not practical for a lot of people, especially given the current rental/living expenses.