skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cynical people will see a new fashionable language and dismiss it as a pointless new thing to learn. Eager early adopters will jump right in and swear it's the best thing ever. Look, it even makes program X a one-liner!

Both strategies will make suboptimal decisions, but both have their benefits. Sometimes the reason a new language or framework or abstraction or whatever is a bad idea isn't immediately obvious. It takes real experience with something, including the process of learning how to use that thing effectively, to work out when and where it's useful and where it falls down. Cynics are late to see the good. Early adopters are late to see the bad. Hipsters never get around to seeing the bad, or they decide it's irrelevant… until the fashion shifts, anyway.

Whether you pick up every new technology that comes out or whether you wait until they've matured and proven themselves, you'll spend some time using less than optimal tools for whatever you're doing. But I don't think that's avoidable.

Incidentally, I'm not convinced I truly understand a new tool until I can rant about its shortcomings at length and I've spent enough time with it to be reasonably sure it's not just that my brain hasn't yet warped in the right way for it to make sense. And even then I risk being wrong about it.
Starforge
Don't put it past the Chinese to put out something for show without actually having the functional equipment under the hood. Stealth is hard -- sensors have the potential to leak radiation, communications can be picked up on, etc. Just because the Chinese have something flying that looks stealth doesn't mean they're any closer than we thought they were.
They don't seem to do anything. Searching without the brackets seems to give the same results for me.

https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Abcode%3D*%2Bn_m%3D*+...
"Some people's emails got out into the public internet, and were indexed. Some of these emails were from Facebook, and included links..."

Doesn't Google's toolbar phone home with the URLs you click on? That could be a way to get supposedly-private URLs into Google's list of URLs to be visited.
This theory seems partially supported by the fact that a lot of email addresses here are on the same domains:

yahoogrupos.com.br
yahoogroupes.fr
asdasd.ru
blogger.com

Seems like emails on these domains are much more easily viewable/leakable/indexable than normal personal email addresses?

EDIT: Googling one of the discovered gmail address revealed a Facebook email (with 'bcode') being auto-blogged at weight-loss-information-123.blogspot.com https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=danielsams20... - some kind of malware maybe?
Exactly, and Stallman's proposal represents a viable path forward to effectively abolish software patents.

It avoids the messiness of invalidating existing patents or determining during patent examination which patents are for software and which patents are for hardware. Effectively, it shifts that determination to the implementer.

If I'm able to implement a patented idea in software, then it was a software patent. And I'm not infringing.
A Honeypot for Customer Happiness
This article is fairly old (well, 2009), any idea if there has been some progress in that FOXP2 research since then ?
Waterloo, Ontario is a minor Canadian tech hub, and the climbing gym here is definitely full of programmers, mathematicians, physicists, and generally nerdy types.

This came up a few weeks ago when I was discussing a ray tracer with a classmate in the locker room and everybody else in the room had something to chip in. I wouldn't even expect that programmer-density on campus, never mind a gym 30 minutes away.
in my case, i need to do

rvm install ruby-2.0.0-preview1 --verify-downloads 1
Exactly. If there are two things the Chinese aren't good at, it's science and engineering.
That's an interesting idea, but as someone noted, most of the emails involved here come from a small set of domains, such as blogger or anonymous mailinator type emails (emails which are possibly crawled by google often!)

I think if it were google's toolbars picking up urls in emails, that there would be many more email domains here.
A signature is not the same thing as a hash or checksum. You could modify an ISO and replace the signature, however that would be your signature. To create a signature as say, the OpenBSD project, you would need their private key, which is (hopefully) carefully hidden on some private machine.

So, putting the signature in the same directory as ISOs is a perfectly safe practice (assuming that strong asymmetric cryptography is used, and the private key is kept private).
Both practices are pretty much useless. Vocab is best learnt within a well established scaffolding. Drilling verbs are best suited to animals, which is why most people are put off by them. Here is a post I wrote about learning vocal which will shed some light on alternative methods: http://www.strategiesinlanguagelearning.com/how-to-remember-... I have some other ways of learning grammar on site as well...if you are interested
For me, this perfectly sums up the futility of the Strong AI / AGI research project. So much of what we consider to be 'intelligence' or repercussions of intelligence are in fact language-based communications and culture - with an immense genetical legacy, bias, and quite frankly, burden. To create human-equivalent intelligence, most or indeed all of these evolutionary biases would have to be built in.

Consider a different example: constructing artificial vision. Human vision is the result of evolution, of course. It is incredibly inefficient, but evolution is blind (sorry). When we now construct computer vision, we capture an optical image and transmit it optically as long as possible, since this preserves information. The human eye does not: it sends information via neurons to the visual cortex, compromising immensely in bandwidth. That's why we need visual error-correction mechanisms in the brain, and redundancy of visual information (achieved by the eye moving rapidly many times per second, for example).

When we construct optical computer vision that achieves the a similar thing as human vision, the two have nothing in common. You can't plug in the artificial front end into the biological back end. The two systems produce literally different images, that are not comparable. The systems will not communicate with each other. We have skipped the legacy of biological evolution completely. To create an artificial system that accurately corresponds to the biological would be an immense waste.

The same goes for intelligence. Our 'wet' evolved intelligence is an entirely different picture from the project of Strong AI. They will produce very different manifestations of interacting with the world. Why would the latter ever result in the illusion of free will or the self-referentiality of personal identity, two things we assume are parts of human-level intelligence? They are like the neurological channels for conveying an optical image: hopelessly inefficient, but the ones that make sense in the light of our evolutionary legacy.

As a side note, yes we know of a time when there was no language, but it not a good representation to consider that a binary switch. We know of complex communication between other animals, and given that even current languages are in rapid flux, I think it is is fair to think of the transition from pre-language to language a continuum. Language is still arising.
Are dirty tactics like these that common in enterprise software?
https://www.Facebook.com/scott.monty/posts/10151080784021625
I owned a Dell Mini 9 hackintosh and recently sold it. I absolutely do not understand how Joey Hess uses it everyday for the sort of work that he does - the keys are roughly 90% of full-size, and I couldn't type more than a few words without hitting the wrong key. I feel admiration mixed with, "why?".
Pirates challenge Russian government
Creator of Dolphin WII emulator, releases new PSP emulator.
Creator of Dolphin WII emulator, releases new PSP emulator. Still in early beta, but an Android APK is available, and binaries for windows.
Yeah? Proof?
It's funny that rt.com, who is always first to point out things like this in the west, is suddenly moot on the issue.
L’élection présidentielle américaine monopolisera la France
L’élection présidentielle américaine du 6 novembre prochain est l’affaire du monde entier, dont la France. TF1 et les autres chaînes sortent l’artillerie lourde. Barack Obama affronte Mitt Romney.
<sarcasm> Every time I hear Janet Napolitano's voice over the airport speakers, I think to myself, "I'd really like to work for her organization." </sarcasm>
Maybe you should re-title this "Generate REST APIs for Existing Databases". IMO, database != application. I opened this in anticipation of something that would generate REST APIs for legacy (ws, corba, rmi, etc) interfaces.
Mumble mumble mumble eventual consistency mumble mumble sharded MySQL mumble mumble
I had this problem right when I started using rbenv. Eventually with some help I realized that just starting bash was slightly slow, and that all the various bash scripts that rbenv runs were compounding this for a 2+ second startup.

In my case, everything was fixed by moving the the things that only need to be run in login shells out of my ~/.bashrc (where they should have been in the first place).

See the bug I filed against rbenv at the time:

https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv/issues/70

Since that time, I've been using rbenv exclusively (development and production) and it's been great.
I think people are suspicious or dismissive of AGI, HTM, etc because...well...there doesn't seem to be anything really to it. People who know AI I've talked to in the know about HTM don't know anything about it or have mildly negative things to say. Ditto for AGI. It's a contentious topic and people just get defensive.

Many of those links in grandparent post were from or about opencog. I can make long blog posts about opencog that refer to opencog as proof, too...but it wouldn't mean anything. Religious people do that sort of thing all the time.

The proof would be in the pudding, right? So if AGI at least has some hypothesis, then it should be able to produce some results, right?

I very much want AGI to happen. You want AGI to happen. Our interests are in agreement. However, there isn't really much proof about any current hypothesis, as far as I can tell, that can produce any real system. It's a dream so far.

I don't mean it has to be a really solid understanding of conscience but it's so undefined, unknown area right now we can't even approach it.

Instead of making long blog posts and replies to comments, and then get offended when people don't buy into it, the most people can do right now is to go investigate, hypothesize and try to build something.
Seconding this... I see just ordinary account numbers from here.
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Please help women in tech by your upvotes at least!
If you read that original article, they were harvested from a 3rd party Facebook App. http://talkweb.eu/openweb/1819
Fancy Car For Sale Outside Zynga Taken Way Too Symbolically
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." -- Mark Twain
A large number of the emails are from 'blogger.com'. Aren't google and blogger one in the same? Are the urls being crawled because google is reading its emails and crawling contained urls?
>1. Senses to obtain features from ‘the world’ (virtual or actual),
>2. A coherent means for storing knowledge obtained this way, and
>3. Adaptive output/ actuation mechanisms (both static and dynamic).

What does that even mean?

If it's so easy to sum it up in a chapter of a book, why don't they build it and allow others to examine it, submit it for review, write papers and submit to ACM, build fantastic machines based on it? All I want is a bit of proof.

You and I have similar interests: we would like for AGI to happen. Even though I'm not sure what AGI means. It's a sort of dream right now for me, but perhaps more of a reality for you?

Most of that large post is neat, but it's not going to convince me if I've never heard of AGI and if I currently know something about AI.

The most you can do is to go do what I mentioned earlier: go build systems, investigate, write papers and go to conferences and I don't mean conferences where it's just AGI people.
right. "it's not about the money". let's check that out:

here's the GS pay schedule, for reference: http://www.opm.gov/oca/12tables/html/gs.asp

note how you're not going to crack 6 figures until the end of your GS-14. How long does it take to get to GS-14? somewhere between 5-10 years in service, if you're lucky. if you're not lucky, you might never make it.

why so long? because advancement through grades is entirely based on time in service. there is nothing your management chain, up to the president, can do to pay you more. it would take, literally, an act of congress.

hooray! oh yeah, as a graduate with a CS degree from a good (CMU, MIT, etc) school, you will start as a GS-7 or a GS-9. which is about 40k. 2nd tier tech companies and consulting companies will start you at literally double that. if you are really good, companies like msft and amazon will start you at literally TRIPLE that.

so... how is this a choice for anyone? why does the government delude itself that it isn't about the money?
Y Combinator and Hardware? Beware
Google France Faces Fine Of $1.3 Billion For Tax Noncompliance.
Programming is pop culture - but it is not about rejecting science it is because the science is mostly irrelevant for the day to day programming. Parser combinators might be cute - but you don't need to write parsers in your day to day job - you just use a library that does the parsing. In a way you do use the science in fact it is just so isolated that it is not really your job.
1) You should read The Language Instinct.

2) I don't think the problem with learning about language from the genome is specific to language. There are just so many layers of molecular interactions between the genetic code and activity at our level of reality that trying to link the two is incredibly difficult, and we are not even close to having the computing power or theoretical models necessary to link them up. But that doesn't mean that language and genes aren't linked.
Ever tried http://whatthefont.com? Pretty handy, not sure if it knows this font but always good to try.
> and AI mostly doesn't try to do that anymore,

I think part of the problem is that we don't even know what AGI really is. How do you define conscience in a rigourous way. Doesn't mean it can't be done without such work but it just seems soooo undefined right now that people are suspicious if someone comes along and claims to have a partial solution.

Do we even know what we're looking for? When we do know or have an idea, I am willing to imagine that we'd have more AI research in that area and the AGI would be taken more seriously.
What Happened to Zynga?
This is awesome. I look forward to seeing this project grow in the future.
20 Best Ways to Learn Programming Online | ZoomZum
I'm interested to speculate on how to best mitigate:

delete all bcodes? Ask Google for a full list of results, regex and a delete statement? Disable the bcode login and then re-ask the question?
Spiritualité et confusion mentale : | Spiritualite-Pratique.com
I'm not anti-Google, I just don't see how their product adds value to the equation in any payment scenario. I use and like a lot of their offerings. But I'm in the payments industry, know what can and does go wrong, and would never touch an offering from a company notorious for being so hard to get in touch with (unless you're giving them tens of thousands of dollars in Adwords revenue; even with our paid apps accounts I have no idea how to get the support we pay for)
Look like Biology Letters accept articles from even younger people: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/12/2...
As a fellow Singaporean I feel the same way about NS, and also regret not investing in personal relationships as much as I should have. I'm trying to fix that now, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

I actually kept away from programming and tech for many years because I felt it wasn't "practical" - instead I went towards business and finance because that was where the well-paying jobs were. I regret that choice now, because I always really enjoyed the times I dabbled in coding.

You can still leave everything to discover yourself, even at 30. But I think if you really like tech, you'll come back to it soon enough - whether in a town in Vietnam, or a hostel in Europe. Good luck.
It would be nice if the images in the documentation were full-sized (they're just uselessly small), otherwise this is quite an effective way to learn.
Sweet Tabs using pure CSS
This is how everything started:

A friend forward me an email from a FB group notification

Something like:

http://www.facebook.com/n/?groups%[id here]%2Fpermalink%[id here]%2F&mid=[id here]&bcode=[id here]-mjoi&n_m=[email adress here]

When I clicked the url I got automatically logged into my friend's account.

So is definitely a Facebook security issue.

Then I tried some google searches to see if I could find some urls containing the parameters:

bcode=
&email=
n_m=
mid=

Not a big deal, really.
SEEKING WORK: Remote

Hi, I am an iOS dev looking to build some nice apps. You might have used one of my apps "HackerNode" for reading HN on your iDevices.

My linkedin profile - http://lnkd.in/dk8Gme

Some Apps - http://www.nodemesh.net

nodemaker@gmail.com
So I guess most of the 'real' work will be done by private contractors.
I'm sure lots of people have had unwanted encounters with Google's crawlers, but here's mine:
I used to have a subdomain pointing to my home IP which was protected using Apache htpasswd. I naively had all of my clients' credentials stored in text files (conveniently named credentials.txt). Somehow I accidentally removed the htpasswd authentication and it was publicly exposed for a day or two. Of course Google indexed it and you could view everything in Google's cache.

There was a process for removing content from Google, but it took a few months to get completed. I never told anyone and I'm pretty sure all that info is now purged (I've tried to find it multiple times and it doesn't seem to exist anywhere).

I also downloaded a WoW guide that I had temporarily thrown up on one of my servers and forgot to take down. Like a year later I randomly was running a Google image search for 'Northrend Map' and happened to notice my site was the THIRD image. At first I thought it was a personalized search result, but I checked from multiple other places and it was still there even though there were zero inbound links.
Once upon a time a mathematician, let's call him M, applied for a position as a mathematics professor at a postgraduate institution. During the interview, M proposed an unusual salary arrangement to the department chair--let's call him D.

"I'm not asking for anything exorbitant. I ask only for $1 per year more than the salary of anyone else here, as a token of recognition that I am a better mathematician than anyone else in the department."

D said that he would think it over.

During their next meeting, M asked D what he thought of his proposal. D replied that after the deepest consideration, he had decided against it.

"Why?" M wanted to know.

"Because the reason for paying you that additional dollar isn't true," D replied.
Well, the government has never been directly competitive on wages- things like job stability and pensions have been offered to help balance things out.

Aside from that, DoHS may not need $80k CMU/MIT grads. There is a whole middle of the pool to draw from that didn't go to CMU/MIT. They probably don't intend to develop the next SELinux as much as apply existing technology in an intelligent way.
I don't feel that it's getting worse. It just annoys me when stuff keeps getting reinvented and nobody takes the time to check what's already been done.
> when I visit them a few times per year

Easy, leave the EV at home and rent a gasoline car a few times a year.
What, of good Wikipedia roundups of a topic, or topics that would be good in concise, summary form?
At least in university I went, first 2 years was pretty much general engineering, with chemistry and biology etc. included. Even now, most of grantpas and grantmas around, I'm speaking with, if I tell them, that I'm engineer, they trying to ask me to fix their TV/computer/washing machine etc. In most cases, I'm trying...
Video Tapestries with Continuous Temporal Zoom
solid programmers are valuable

I wonder though if even a mediocre to weak programmer could be a solid programmer, in the right kind of organization?
Simple Traffic Solutions
Nice one, sir ji. Good luck with the upcoming launch!
The Document Foundation Announces LibreOffice 3.6.3
How To Do Scary Things
I make a point about salary because in the article, a DHS official is quoted as saying that the retention problems are not caused by money. I claim that's BS. they're totally caused by money.

even if you go to a crappy school, if you are a solid programmer or system administrator, you should be able to walk into a tech job out of graduation for no less than $60k. I was able to get an IT job in the private sector with just a HS diploma that made more than ($40k) what new government workers with relevant skills and a 4 year degree were offered/making, and after 6 months at that job I had offers for 50% more (how long would you have to be on the GS scale to see this kind of movement? a lot longer than 6 months).

also, no more pensions for government workers (AFAIK), at least many of them. you do have essentially job permanence though, is that worth only earning 1/3rd of your potential?

the salary thing is initially okay though, cos you were broke in college so whatever, you're still broke. later, when you're 26, making $60 doing computer programming, your friends are 26, making $140 doing computer programming, and your wife looks at you and says "hey so why can Tom and Nancy have children and also live in a house instead of share an apartment with another couple?" ...
Common misinterpretation on how Google handle `Disallow` in robots.txt

Q. If I block Google from crawling a page using a robots.txt disallow directive, will it disappear from search results? [1]

robots.txt Disallow does not guarantee that a page will not appear in results: Google may still decide, based on external information such as incoming links, that it is relevant. If you wish to explicitly block a page from being indexed, you should instead use the noindex robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. In this case, you should not disallow the page in robots.txt, because the page must be crawled in order for the tag to be seen and obeyed.

[1] https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index...