skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we are close to having the software engineering ability to create the infrastructure needed to support a self-improving optimization process. The feats of software engineering in the last decade or so seem like strong evidence that we can develop the tools to support mathematical models and methods at a large scale, when we really understand the problem.

What I don't think we are close to understanding is how to actually make practical self-improving optimization processes and especially ones that are actually beneficial, rather than detrimental, for humanity. I feel like we are just getting started on this. If progress is going to be made at the rate that Kurzweil has predicted it is going to take more than just faster processors and better supporting software infrastructure.
I started disliking Apple way before it was cool.
> For the first set, I meant to write:
> [Prepend each string with infinite zeroes]
> ...000
> ...001
> ...010

...

If there are infinitely many zeros on the front, you can't actually append anything. That doesn't end up being well-defined.

(Well, actually, there are transfinite ordinals, but that would confuse the issue. It's not what you mean, and it doesn't help)

> Now all bit strings here have infinite length.

If you want to talk about an infinite "decimal" string, you need to talk about the things that come after the decimal point, in order. As such, they come in order, and you can't have infinitely many zeros and then a finite string on the end.

> The string is still enumerable since this is just binary
> encoding mapping to the set {0, 1, 2, 3, ...}

You need to be more careful about how you actually define the strings. Strings have a start, then they go on one place by one place.

> The question still is if it covers all possible bit strings of
> infinite length.

Well, you haven't actually properly defined strings, but even so, no. Everything you have starts with a zero.

> For units place, we covered both zero and one.

No, you don't seem to have.

> For (n+1)th place, we cover both zero and one
> together with all combinations for the first (n) bits.
> As n -> infinite, all possibilities get covered.

No, because as soon as you have a one in your expansion the string is finite, so not all possibilities are covered.

> The question is if 111111111... is also there in this set.
> But isn't it there too?

You defined the set - tell me where it is. Even leaving alone the fact that these aren't proper strings, it doesn't appear to be there.
I share your pessimism. I think attempts to make a mind in code are a modern attempt at alchemy, and just as doomed.

My sticking point is consciousness. I don't think it's an illusion; I think it's both real and essential to intelligence. And we have no idea what it's made out of. We can break it. We can characterize the hardware conditions under which it works. But build it? No, that's completely beyond us, and I think it will be for many centuries. We don't even know where to properly start.

I had a pet rat, once. I think it was conscious, in a very small way. It visibly related itself to the world. When they can convincingly simulate that level of alertness and presence, when they can build a machine that appears at least as conscious as my pet rat did -- when they produce the tiniest amount of genuine gold -- I'll concede the singularity may be on the horizon. Until then, I'm a skeptic.
He is asking for the other side...
>Also, you're assuming that a charge of hypocrisy automatically means the idea is voided. It's not - a charge of hypocrisy is an accusation of a serious character flaw.

I'm not assuming it's some general law. I know that it happens in lots of real life situations.

E.g people throwing the baby (idea) along with the bathwater (hypocrite).
Maybe this is another part of the problem. Limiting ourselves to port 80 limits the types of services we can create. But on the other hand, if we really wanted to run a service, then we would just open up the port.

But yes, NAT does complicate things, particularly for home users, but I guess that's a limitation of the universe.
A new shop opened on Diagon Alley this week. It is called Merlin's Marketing Marvels. Their owner is a an emancipated house elf who has a curiously eccentric rule: you only ever get to buy one thing from his shop.

I submit that, if you choose the Wand Of Always Hit The HN Front Page, you've made a clearly suboptimal choice, and if you've chosen Wand Of Sometimes Complain About HN Front Page, that's just nuts.

There may or may not be voting rings. A particular article may or may not have them behind it. If the truth of the universe about either of these facts changed, would that affect what is the rational course of action for your business today? I strongly suggest that it wouldn't.

In a universe with or without vote rings, one would be well-advised to start building a permission channel under one's own control, such that one can routinely get into contact with people who will like what one has to offer. Get folks' email addresses. Send them stuff they'll like.

I will guarantee you, from a wee bit of experience, that the business value of X00 people who are actually in your market greatly exceeds the value of an HN frontpaging, and you can send things to a mailing list bi-weekly, whereas a) waving the magic wand of HN frontpage bi-weekly is taxing even if you can do it and b) you will probably burn out your wand's welcome.

If you hate email, you're handicapping yourself unnecessarily, but you can do similar things with RSS feeds or Twitter accounts. (But seriously, email ROFLstomps those alternatives.)

Another option is finding a "beat" for yourself (journalism term) and owning the "'$(#'% out of it. I'd tend to suggest high-value beats with low-competition adjacent to spaces of commercial interest for you. You'd be amazed how short the path to being "the acknowledged expert" on a particular subject is if you pick your subject well. After you're the expert, you'll start just showing up in places without actively inserting yourself there, and your perceived expertise will tend to snowball. (Both because organic mentions of you tend to be perceived as more credible than tooting your own horn, and because you will be given credibility-enhancing opportunities by other people because they perceive benefit from association with you. You can also explicitly pitch that to them.)
Normal users (ie, users behind NAT) shouldn't be running their own Tent servers, period. People who run their own servers are geeks by definition and can/should host in the cloud. Where "cloud" means "that part of the Internets that actually works."

But your second point is unanswerable. I'd go a little farther and say HTTP is actually a pretty good fit for Tent.
Create your own local Dropbox with AeroFS
Survey for Product Development App Aimed at Entrepreneurs. Take it.
World peace day - remind us all, we only have one earth.
I'll definitely suggest that to somebody in the office :)

Thank you for your comment.
I'm a techie, and for me, it's always been natural to build stuff like LangPop.com, made for other techies.

But with LiberWriter, I really branched out into something that is not at all for people who read this site: they could figure it out themselves pretty easily, by and large. So I'm almost proud to say that when I get prominent links to my site here, I get almost 0 conversions. In and of itself, that's not that hard - just have something no one wants. But I do get a lot of conversions from other sites that are more relevant to my target audience. I'm proud that I managed to do something that was for "regular folks" rather than an apple that did not fall far from the tree.
How exciting! Are you going to pitch an idea?
> All ports should be open between servers.

No thanks.
http://hackmyfacebook.com

People are hitting the site and using it. I wasn't sure if it was a real use case either; but our conversion rate for hitting the site and actually using it is even higher than before, so I guess some people think otherwise.
Evolution may seem like a "precariously balanced collection of hacks" but it takes a long time. As an analogy, the singularity is so far off because our current computing power is essentially invertebrate multi-celled organisms. Computers still need a backbone, get out of the oceans, and breathe air - and this is long before they can store a human existence.

Kurzweil seems to think it's close out of hope. I think he's just insanely afraid of dying.
Exactly, 2x people != 2x productivity, it simply doesn't work that way.
That button was actually just a joke; it brought up an alert saying "Come on, you can't really be that mean!"
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/02/13/singularitaria...
Bing allow OSM users to trace from their aerial imagery all over the world. Yahoo used to let OSM do it. Google never have.
This is based on IMDB, right? Explains why the godawful "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Avengers" top the chart.
Destroying the ozone layer also helps cooling.
Should be "Go forth and pull"
The random query value is probably the best solution. We have had this in our app for years, because it has been an issue in both java and IE for a long time.
He was in a treatment program for marijuana. Most would agree that marijuana is portrayed by the US government and its law enforcement as being far more dangerous than it actually is. I wonder if someone who hears this portrayal of marijuana and realizes it's inaccurate also questions our government's accuracy when characterizing other more dangerous drugs like bath salts. If he had checked less biased sources like Erowid, he might have learned that he wouldn't be the first person to have a terrible experience with MDPV.

Also I liked the following quote:

“It's so hard to understand how something sold over the counter can result in death,” Julie Sanders said. “I can't grasp it, I just still can't grasp that thought.”

I guess she's not too familiar with Aspirin.

Drug education in the United States is dangerously flawed.
FWIW, because of your comment about "before 2011", I was purposely looking at data from 2008, to help control for that (when the iPhone wasn't yet that popular as the original device kind of sucked; the 3G had just come out, however, as had the App Store, so things were already on an uptick).

Looking at data from 2007, it seems like Apple was spending a third what Microsoft was on marketing, and had half the revenue; arguably then, Apple was spending 33% less than Microsoft on advertising per revenue, not really "a fraction".

However, you seem to be correct about now: I pulled some 10Q's from this year, and it seems Microsoft is spending $3.4b/Q for $17b/Q in sales ($6b/Q profit) while Apple is spending Apple is spending peanuts (although I honestly couldn't find the data I needed to verify this from the 10Q) for about $35b/Q in sales ($9b/Q profit).

While looking into that further (as I was especially bothered that I couldn't find the exact advertising numbers), I then came across this article, which looks at yearly data and comes to the same conclusion.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ycharts/2012/08/02/who-spends-mo...
>And he does think he's going to be able to live forever and essentially reconstruct his dead father. And he does take 150 (previously 250) supplements and 10 glasses of alkaline water per day. And he did write a nutrition book about avoiding fat, particularly butter, organ meats, and eggs.

Yes, and Michael Jackson avoided germs at all costs, and slept in oxygen tanks. I wonder how that worked out...
neat idea, I would be interested in how the score is calculated.

I tried restricting it to TV series, and I noticed an interesting trend that anything older than 2000 is pretty far down the list.

This is probably just a factor of pre-Internet TV shows not being well represented by number of reviews.

I see the same bias on sites like Rotten Tomatoes where if you look at an excellent movie before 1995, it will have few reviews (unless there were a bunch of reviews collected for the DVD / BluRay releases)
I love the simplicity of the data! The alignment of the checkboxes/filters in the top left bothers me though. With everything else aligned so well, anyway you could do the same to those?
>> 0.333... = 1/3

Indeed, I was aware of this. And as you said, it does not really answer since it just leads to the same question for 0.3333...

I understand the piece on calculus too. My maths background is mostly related to engineering mathematics, and I have generally excelled at it. I later discovered that I am not clear on some "pure" mathematics things. Hypothetically, if counting were taught to me in adulthood, I may have asked a lot of relevant questions that I did not ask in my pre-school and later lost them without knowing them. I am rediscovering some of these questions now.
Considering the "readable" example:

(define (factorial n)
(if (<= n 1)
1
(* n (factorial (- n 1)))))

define factorial(n)
if {n <= 1}
1
{n * factorial{n - 1}}

The first one looks more pleasant to me. The second one looks broken and disorganized. My brain can't parse it as easily without the visual cues provided by the parens.

Of course, it looks better to me because I'm used to lisp. When I first saw lisp I thought the syntax was nuts. Point being - what looks "good" can simply be a matter of what you're used to.
Honestly, this is the first time I've ever heard the words "godawful" and "Shawshank Redemption" in one sentence. We got ourselves a movie hipster, here.
Exactly. iOS and Android are based on Unix but they're easy to use. There's nothing stopping the same thing from being done to servers.
What are you talking about? If a non HFT buyer/seller both want to buy/sell at 20, then they will go to the market and that will happen. In fact, that happens all the time.

This is precisely the point about HFT. If you are a seller, there isn't always a buyer. HFT is there when there ISN'T the other side. The scenario you described is absurd. How often do a buyer / seller want to interact within the same millisecond?

They can of course. HFT does nothing to stop that. Two people can trade in the open market with each other whenever they want. The reason most of the time HFT is involved is HFT gives the best price. That's why it's become so big. They provide the best price to their customer, not attacking some "flaw" in the exchange.
This is awesome! Only minor suggestion is to improve readability a little more. Font is way too small with too little space in between each entry.

Also, I got this error: http://cl.ly/image/2D2S1E020e0W. I think I clicked on Stanley Kubrick and then came back to the home page.
I agree with the logic but let me propose some additional benefits/reasons to do it yourself.

Freedom from responsibilities to others (employees, investors) could allow creativity.

Singular vision for the product without compromise.

No need to describe requirements to others.

Get a basic understanding of all areas while it is fairly simple before scale up (accounting etc.).

Also the pure logical case only really works when you have enough cash to invest yourself in building the business or you would have to put the effort into finding and managing investors.

The low quality version might actually be a good investment in the shift it makes in the external perception of value is sufficient.
Linux desktop user experience
I have always described such processes as "wedged".
"Horrid" is a bit harsh, but the typography choices are hard to understand, at least as rendered on my screen:

* http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/sg.png

The font for the main text is oddly changing between being very thin/light and on some select letters quite fat (v, A). The links are _very_ bold, impeding reading.

Other than that I think your design nice and simple.
> If infinity was in the original set,

What does this mean? Your complete imprecision is making it impossible to answer the questions, despite wanting to help, because they don't make sense.

What set? Define it clearly. Don't talk about infinite strings of zeros followed by stuff, because in the context of decimal or binary expansions that doesn't make sense. Strings have a start, then they go on one place at a time.,

> I am flipping all the bits along a diagonal and they
> are all zeros before flipping.

If they are all zero before flipping then 0.11111... isn't there. You've stated that the n^th number has 0 in the n^th place. That means 0.11111... is not the n^th number for any n.

If 0.99999... = 1, then using my argument of flipping the bits around the decimal, wouldn't infinity be in the set?
As hinted at in the original article[1], this sort of attack relies on running code during the EFI boot phase, and so it would be prevented by secure boot, since the attack code would not be signed and thus would not run.

See also Matthew Garrett's coverage[2].

1: http://www.itsec.it/2012/09/18/uefi-technology-say-hello-to-...
2: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/16987.html
Do you mind sharing a bit more about cost? Heroku has a free tier; has the project already outgrown that?
Gene flaw linked to low back pain
And most startup founders aren't successful.
Senator Wyden Introduces Bill To Bring Some Sanity To Webcasting Royalty Rates
Deployment with Heroku: Write app. 'git push heroku master'.
Scaling with Heroku: Drag the scroll bar in the admin panel.

Deployment on EC2: Write app. Provision EC2 instance. Ensure instance has all the software you need (Framework, nginx, etc), and install it if needed. Pull code from repository. Start all necessary processes.
Scaling with EC2: Repeat deployment steps (but this should be easier because you know what needs to be done with the image you've selected).

Heroku is easier and removes the headaches of running your own server. If you like running your own server - and know how to secure and optimize it - then EC2 (or linode, rackspace, etc) is a good option.
Are you sure about that? Outside the USA (which has a nice "lots of government work is public domain" rule, which lots of countries lack), there is very little 'freely available' map data from countries. One of the first non-USA countries on Google Maps, the UK, even now does not have freely available map data from the government (this is partially why it was people in the UK who set up OSM)
!@#$%^()()&(&_)(*()
LightSquared redux: Lawmakers admit lack of expertise, but blame FCC
Thanks.

The ranking criteria - basically, I combined ratings from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, with additional heuristic tweaks. The ranking method I use for is different than the popular IMDb method aka "True Bayesian estimate", which is not really a Bayesian estimate. I wrote more about how I approach ranking in my e-book http://arek-paterek.com/book/ , for people who are really interested in such technical details.
"Get folks' email addresses. Send them stuff they'll like."

Let me add to that.

Find any reason you can to reply to both customers and non-customers (we happen to get misdirected inquires all the time. We try to convert these inquires that we take the time to answer with a coupon and a "use us next time" blurb).

Anyway, for customers, this "legit" spam if you want to call it that takes the form of helpful, personal, genuine "follow up" emails (pre-written in a conversational tone in advance and with things that make them look as if they are unique (we use quicktext on thunderbird but there are other ways to do this obviously)) which could say something like "we made that address change that you requested let me know if you need anything further" (more involved but basically just a nice note). So see the idea is not to always have everything to be "self service". If you can afford the labor hit, or the labor hit leads to actual sales maybe encourage customer co-dependency because it gets them to contact you. Of course this is going to totally depend on the business you are in and of course you don't want to annoy customers by doing it to much.

The bottom line is "always be selling". Use any interaction by email as a chance to either enhance the customer relationship or make a suggestion for something else they might need.
To piggyback on jd above...

"I think you're trying to do both business and charity at the same time, and that doesn't really work I think."

You need to charge a certain set of clients more to afford to do the rest for free. Business and charity can exist side-by-side but they can't really be combined. Charge more for 75% of who you help, then be really picky about the remaining 25%. You'll have the same warm heart and be a lot more sane. Happy workers work better and that helps everyone.
Accomplished and crank are not at opposite ends...

Especially when you are accomplished at complete irrelevant fields that one you are blathering about...
Also as very much a generalist (everything from server admin to dev to SEO) it's difficult to find an area where I would feel confident speaking as an "expert" on any particular subject.

This is a common worry in our field, even for people who are absolutely drop-dead world-class experts in things! You do not have to be absolutely drop-dead world-class expert in things to teach hugely valuable things to people, because the overwhelming majority of people are not experts at $FILL_IN_SUBJECT.

You do server admin? Hypothetical example: Have you ever administered a MySQL server? Have you written a backup strategy for one? Once? Jiggy2011, you know more than I do about a subject which very nearly cost me $$$$ and a heart attack last Thursday. Would I be listening to hear you talk about MySQL backup strategies? Heck yes. I burn with need for that right now. Are there other people who know it better than you? Yes. Do I know who they are? No. I know almost nothing about this field, which includes not knowing the straightforward paths to learning more about this field. You know this subject better than I do, maybe you could tell me who they are, but you can probably also tell me that they're busy building Facebook and since you aren't you're the one actually talking about this stuff.
just tested if there is any restrictions in forms but sounds there is none.
How about we put a 1-900 number on the resumes? That way if a recruiter wants to get in touch, he/she has to pay a premium.
As someone that is interested in possibly working with developers in the future but does not have a programming background. Can you elaborate on number 7. Would practicing on something like Codecademy help with this or are there better ways to improve your technical knowledge.
This is one of my biggest issues with a lot of the projects being posted lately - they look great but I don't know the tech stack until I finally look at the code. Would be great if people at least mention if their project requires node.js, ruby or what not on their homepage.
Yes! I agree. Here's a graph of the number of exoplanets discovered by year: http://exoplanet.eu/diagrams/?t=h&f=&x=discovered...

I consider it the most exciting graph I have ever seen.
Mutual funds do buy HFT services in executing their long term investments...they do so by going to the open market, where HFT dominates. They pay HFT services by paying the typical 1 cent spread.

One of the greatest examples of how nothing nefarious is going on is from a large multi billion dollar hedge fund I used to work at. They have both an equity investment group, as well as a HFT equity liquidity providing platform. I worked on HFT, and knew the equity guys. They always wanted to execute with us in the open market. It was so much better than what they used to have to do.

Why would one of the most sophisticated equity investors in the world want to run an operation that "skims" from the other? Because that's not what HFT does, and of course they know that. They use their own product (their HFT system) to execute their own buy orders. If that's not a testimonial, I don't know what is.