skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Not to be a downer, but text-to-speech, speech recognition, music synthesis, and so forth are all fairly obvious applications of computer science that anyone could have pioneered without being a genius. Likewise, predicting self-driving cars is nothing science fiction has not already done.

What does "predicting" a thing has with actually IMPLEMENTING it? Here, I predict "1000 days runtime per charge laptop batteries". Should I get a patent for this "prediction"?

No, text-to-speech, speech recognition and synthesis are not "fairly obvious applications of computer science that anyone could have pioneered". And even if it was so, to be involved in the pioneering of ALL three takes some kind of genius.

Not only that, but all three fields are quite open today, and far from complete. Speech recognition in particular is extremely limited even today.

Plus, you'd be surprised how many "anyones" scientists failed to pioneer such (or even more) "obvious applications". Heck, the Incas didn't even have wheels.

(That said, I don't consider Kurzweill's current ideas re: Singularity and "immortality" impressive. He sounds more like the archetypical rich guy (from the Pharaohs to Howard Hughes) trying to cheat death (which is a valid pursuit, I guess) than a scientist).
I also found it annoying that in all his examples of exponential growth biological system he conveniently left out where the populations crash after reaching an environmental limit. I think it's just as likely that technology will send us back into the stone age with nukes or bio-weapons as it is we merge with AI.
gotta love this guy:

> 1%... you're pretty much finished... try that with product submission schedules [1]

...so now we know who to blame for future Google product delays.

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4

EDIT: added the source link
This is why code changes should not be moved to production late on Friday. Staff go home and problems don't get noticed or fixed in a timely fashion.
I kind of hate to say this but I'm glad there's at least one other person out there who has troubles with TeamViewer on Linux. My remote coworker uses Ubuntu with two screens and we're unable to make the mouse work on the correct screen consistently. That and the screen won't update properly.
I'm about to start a PhD in computer science. One might also think that CS research is something where you just live anywhere you want and solve interesting theoretical puzzles all day, but it's surprising to see how much communication is important (both written and oral). You need to tell people about your work and understand what other people do, but most importantly it's crucially important to think about hard problems together with other people.

It's true that you can work on your own, but (at least from my perspective) it's incredibly more productive to think about hard problems with someone. It forces you to spell your ideas fully in order to communicate them to the other person, which often deepens your understanding of the ideas (or makes errors obvious -- think of rubber duck debugging): it's true that you can do it through pretty much any medium, but face-to-face is still the best choice by a large margin. Besides, face-to-face has the added benefit that when you have someone else in front of you, there is a sense of urgency that prevents you from turning your brain off, whereas if you're thinking by yourself it's much easier to lose focus.

For this reason, even though it seems that you could do CS research your own, a vast, vast majority of papers (at least in my field) are collaborations, and 1-author papers are incredibly rare. Besides, though researchers are fond users of email and Skype and other such tools, they also go through the time and expense of moving to remote countries just to be able to collaborate face-to-face with the right people.
No promises on the hash tag, but I lend my condolences on any losses he may have in this awful scenario.
Indeed! Right now Coffee script offers more expressive power than this. So they should add these features fast if they want this to succeed in the highly competitive world of compile-to-js languages!
I'm a co-founder/dev at PowWow. VoiceChat is going to be in the next major release. We already have system audio being ogg/vorbis'ed to you so its not a question of expertise but simply time allocation. I completely agree that whenever we have PowWow'ed, we would have a active skype session since that's much easier than chat. That's also what a alpha release is supposed to be - to gather your inputs! So if everyone agrees that Voice chat is a must have it'll definitely be there in the general release!
GHD Scarlet
No, of course you've been pwned, and you should be more graceful about it.
How Redis, Node.js and Backbone.js Saved My Application to PCPC
the role is in MTV
No, it'll be done anyway. Do you think ppl got paid to make vlc or mplayer to begin with?

It seems too hard for the human mind to understand that the people who make 90% of the work for free going unrewarded is wrong. Now then again, it certainly fits the way the rest of the world works.
The point is to raise money, period. That's like saying a knife is not made to cut.
Whearther. Check

Location. Fail
Thinking about it, sure, 5 bucks is outrageously much. Didn't give it enough thought, my bad.

Anyway, my major concern is that somehow my data stored with 'enterprise-grade' paid service still gets mined and resold to 3rd-parties. I'm being forced to pay while still it's me that's being the product. Privacy is a hefty enough price to pay for a personal email.
Intel facing 'Margin Nightmare'
Thanks for your input evadne. You make good points. Kiwi Landing Pad (KLP) is a coworking space in SF for New Zealand and Australian startups. I am not affiliated with KLP, but was invited to guest blog because I used to live in New Zealand and am interested in helping Kiwi startups enter the U.S. market. My offer is for New Zealand citizens that are able to obtain their own visa and U.S. citizens.
>>enterprise-quality

You must be joking.
Falling slinky displays slow-motion causality
Thanks, I'll be sure to check out The Humane Interface.
That was my thought, is this a renewal of a 90s brand? The original PowWow was something that our QA people used for reasons I can't recall.
I don't understand people ridiculing him. This funding is for entrepreneurs and business projects with a particular profile. A project like Pinboard.

When Y combinator started the amount of money was also ridicule.

What you get with his funding is visibility and this is rapidly growing in value because everybody will now look with high curiosity what are the 6 selected projects.

It looks like he is attempting to undercut Y combinator and might succeed. Look how he targets a niche market that is discarded by Y combinator : single founder projet. He applies all the advises given by PG himself.

I'm looking forward to see how he will execute, but this is already a very good start.

If I had a close to finished project and no traction because of no visibility I would apply. Because the visibility will be much bigger than with an article in techcruch.
He would have a much better chance suing media companies in the UK, Europe and Australia who repeated the claims, since the libel laws are much looser there.

Almost impossible to win a libel case in the USA, it will almost certainly be shot down on first amendment grounds or with him being/becoming a public figure after the police named him.
Worlds most expensive cupcakes
I'm one of the co-founders of PowWow. We're a lot like GoInstant — in fact their demo video does an even better job than ours does of explaining the concept to a layperson. It's interesting that while their product and ours have very similar use cases, the technology stack is completely different. They have a browser-within-the-browser, while we have an interaction layer over the OS — and we both do crazy hacks to make multiple-mouse live collaboration work. We've met the GoInstant guys, and they're an awesome team with a great product, and we're definitely fans of theirs.
> I just can't see Kurzweil being in the same league as Peter Norvig.

The problem with Peter Norvig is that he comes from a mathematical background and is a strong defender the use of statistical models that have no biological basis.[1] While they have their use in specific areas, they will never lead us to a general purpose strong AI.

Lately Kurzweil has come around to see that symbolic and bayesian networks have been holding AI back for the past 50 years. He is now a proponent of using biologically inspired methods similar to Jeff Hawkins' approach of Hierarchical Temporal Memory.

Hopefully, he'll bring some fresh ideas to Google. This will be especially useful in areas like voice recognition and translation. For example, just last week, I needed to translate. "I need to meet up" to Chinese. Google translates it to 我需要满足, meaning "I need to satisfy". This is where statistical translations fail, because statistics and probabilities will never teach machines to "understand" language.

[1] http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-f...
I almost applied for the $37. Then, by the time I typed out my email I realized how giving away your concept and plans for profitability with only a speculative offer for publicity and $37 dollars is a total rip.
FYI: Slide from right-to-left on a message to bring up the "archive" button.
Hey all! I'm one of the co-founders of PowWow. This has caught us all by surprise, but we're thrilled to see the response we've been getting so far. If you guys run into any issues, please let us know. We're in very early beta right now, so your feedback is very important. Feel free to reply in the comments here, or email us at everyone@powwow.cc. Happy PowWow-ing :)
نتيجة استفتاء الدستور 2012
نتيجة استفتاء الدستور 2012
نتيجة استفتاء الدستور 2012
نتيجة استفتاء الدستور 2012
http://www.yallamoviez.com/2012/12/NatigaReferendumConstitutionAlmasryDay.html
Have you tried Chrome Remote Desktop? https://chrome.google.com/remotedesktop

It has two modes of operation. One is where you work with a different person - whoever shares their screen starts Chrome and it generates a random access number which the other party enters.

The other mode is accessing your own machines which means there is no other party and chrome doesn't need to be running (the desktop is exported as a daemon/service).

It works really well in both modes, and supports Linux (which I use), Mac (also have one of them) and Windows. The viewer and sharer can both interact. The viewer is a tab within Chrome which you can also make fullscreen.

If you don't need to remotely interact then Skype works just fine and again has cross platform support.
How could facebook respond to this anyway? Do they scour all news for incorrectly attributed stories with facebook links? That would be impossible.
And the beautiful part of it is that the incentives work in the right way. The reason for that is pretty simple - code that you submit to projects is code you don't have to maintain when the next upgrade come.
Interesting that after canceling that joint mission Nasa then committed $1.5 billion for the curiosity based rover mission. It seems that it was mostly an excuse to keep JPL funded and this mission, which is similar to the proposed joint mission will be led by JPL as well.
I mean well when I say this but I think it needs to be said. My Bayesian probability sense is tingling. HN is comparatively small compared to the space of people-who-could-be-Ryan's-roommate.
Fun fact: nobody knows why there are 3 generations and two types of quarks and leptons, or why the family relationships of quarks seems to mirror that of leptons.
>a perceptron cannot perform a XOR on inputs

Multi-layer perceptron networks, however, can.
That’s why I prefer putting human dignity in front of freedom of speech (like, e.g. the German constitution does). That way you have to decide between the dignity of those whose names will be published and freedom of speech – and the dignity wins.
You're right. Suggesting that Gmail is merely an enterprise-quality mail system is crazy. It wipes the floor with every other enterprise mail system I have ever used.
it probably helps more to type out the program in a logical order - in the order of execution, like a pre-order traversal of the (module-dependency) tree.

say, in c, you could type the main, and when there is a function call, go there and type it, understand, come back.. that way you get the flow of it and you'll understand the whole code in one go.

Yes, it helps to type.
So ... automated content aggregation in book format?

Is it it just me or does it seem odd that the agents with the most,

* technology

* resources (spanning all non-technology areas including business and legal)

* digital content access

* familiarity

* etc.

chose not to create such offerings, not even via subsidiary or ex-employees.

I'm talking, of course, of agents such as Google.

To me this speaks volumes of whether this is ultimately (legally) viable...

Note. Publicity around this particular offering has been around since at least 2007, from what I can tell.
I use the iOS Dropbox client mostly for uploading & syncing pictures and videos between: iPhone, iPad, desktop PCs and laptops. Sometimes for checking files in my Dropbox folder.

Dropbox works well on all three OS I use of which Linux is my main. I don't know what iCloud and Photostream (no syncing of videos?) are like now but it didn't really work well when it was introduced and I'm taking a guess it doesn't work on Linux natively.

I guess I'm the reverse of you: I've already got photo and video syncing with Dropbox so why use Photostream? If that feature wasn't in Dropbox's client, I'd rarely use the client.
I don't understand all this angel investment speak but the thing I am curios the most is simple.

I apply
I make it "big"

Does pin board owns any of my company because they invested $37 a month and provided exposure?

I really don't understand who doesn't have $37 a month to be self-funded but I'm interested on exposure.
Right. According to my old notes you need:

* at least one layer to handle linearly separable functions,

* at least one hidden layer to handle continuous functions,
and

* at least two hidden layers to solve continuous and discontinuous functions.
I find it quite interesting how PHP developers try their best to encrypt their function names as much as possible? rdmFloat? Why not randomFloat or random_float?

This particular example isn't very problematic, but I see this pattern in PHP way more than in other languages.
Yuri Milner will match with his usual $150K... because that how they print them US money in Russia
This extends into lots of areas on the marketplace. I spend a bit of time looking at some of the listings our products have been matched to by UPC and working out just which product the listing is trying to sell. Often the title/ image/ description can be describing different products.
Probably because it had the PowWow Robot Voice to read your chats for you. Not that it was super useful, it just sounded funny.
Design 0 ( use bootstrap)
Video 0 ( who needs video to get started?)

Seriously, why over complicate things?
That's pretty neatly written code!

If you've mastered PHP then you could easily make the switch to C or C++ for a very large speedboost while still being able to recycle a large chunk of your code. PHP and C look quite alike (drop the $ signs and add declarations and you're halfway there).

Neat to see you interested in doing more advanced stuff than just web bits and pieces.
It is also pretty awesome that Naval tries to help out startups outside the valley (and outside the US). In fact, not just Naval but other people in the team really want to help startups succeed and will reach out to you and talk to you. Great company DNA. Congratulations!
If only there was some kind of social platform where Facebook employees could share information like this and it would end up being forwarded to the appropriate people...
Your logo is very SquareSpace-ish.
This has been posted before and it goes a long way into explaining why your reaction may not be the more appropriate:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/
I will apply twice and get one rejected on purpose. Funnel for free FTW!
At this point I'm out.

This much money, I mean... what would I do with it. I think I can build a sustainable business but I fear at this point that the sums involved are forcing me to give up too much control and to grow faster than will be sustainable. I have legitimate concerns that this will ultimately be bad for the company and that it's helping to fuel a salary bubble.
Yes, this works fine. Been using it for quite a while now for contacts and calendar (and maybe notes too, I'd have to check).
Yeah, there might be more of a market for actually buying these books as jokes.
A/B testing gun control laws.
I personally don't care for guns, I don't own one and never used one. I come from a country where gun ownership is rare and very regulated.

Today I read lots of arguments in favor or against further regulation but none of them were very convincing. In most cases correlation is confused with causality. For example, most developed countries have much tighter rules on gun control and significantly less violence. This only shows correlation and doesn't prove or disprove that more gun controls will reduce violence. One could simply argue that there are many other variables that correlates with violence and COULD explain higher crime rates in the US compared to other developed nations.

How about we run a large scale A/B test instead. We pick two states with very similar characteristics, percentage of gun ownership, crime, poverty, income distribution, similar gun control laws, etc... We completely ban guns in one state and measure how crime evolves over a long period of time : 1 or 2 years. If we observe a significant drop in violence in the test state compared to the control (where gun laws will remain the same during the test) then we can start arguing that banning guns will reduce violence and less violence means less needs to own a gun for self defense. A less emotional/more data driven approach to policy making.
That's $37 on Internet fees.
Some people tend to assign a fair bit of trust to the Amazon brand (which may be eroded by things like this). The fact that a book is on Amazon may convince some people that it is a book of a quality you would usually expect from traditionally published works.
You haven't used any good ones.
> This makes me think I should upload my random computational intelligence assignments and get sweet, delicious karma.

Does karma matter that much to you?

> Edit: OK, I was a bit snarky, but I'm serious.

Well, what's stopping you? The fear of getting people to hate at you like this in comments? Really, you can do much better than this.

> I see these things on HN all the time. These are, quite literally, undergraduate projects.

They are people taking steps on the ladder to proficiency, as such they should be encouraged rather than be beaten down.

> I don't see people upvoting "My First Stack" or "Check out this Pet Shop I wrote in J2EE".

I don't see people submitting those either, which is one reason they're not being voted up. Once upon a time you too were a beginner. And in the eyes of many you probably still are.

> Computational intelligence is not some land of super wise geniuses that mere mortals cannot ascend to. It's all pretty straightforward.

Exactly! And what better way to demonstrate that by showing it, in a language that is generally despised.

> Eg, my Ant Colony Optimiser for a Travelling Salesman Problem:

> https://github.com/jchester/ruby-ry48p-aco

> and my Genetic Algorithm for optimising Ackley's Function:

> https://github.com/jchester/ruby-ackley-genetic-algorithm

That's pretty neat code ;)
If you are paying for Google Apps, you can disable ads.
This is about the existence of institutions of government

We learnt a long time ago that two sides who cannot trust each other must have a third party whom they can trust to behave in a particular (fair) way all the time.

That third party becomes a mechanism for government.

Facebook cannot be trusted because Facebook has no controlling mind. Just like HN here.

Institutions cannot be crowd sourced or socially generated.
They must be based on principles and be independent and incorruptible.

We give professors and judges lifetime contracts with no get out clauses - and we do it for a reason. When Facebook is public ally funded we will need it to have a controlling mind
I wish someone thought me code with this.
DMCA Takedown of Far Side Comic Panels in Quora Answers
this is awesome, any chances for a PC version?
six successful applicants at $37 each = $201
This is not Facebook's responsibility. This is everybody's responsibility not to be an idiot. Unfortunately, too many people fail at this responsibility. But enabling them by saying "it's the press" or "it's the Facebook", not "it is you - personally you - being an idiot by believing unchecked information" is not helping either. When "the nation" - or, more precisely, a bunch of very foolish people - seek to lynch someone, they should be told "you are fools. Not go home and think about it", not "is Facebook to blame for it? Is Reuters? Can we find anybody - preferably big faceless corporation - to take the blame?"
Perfect Audience (YC S11) seeks full-stack engineer
Come build the advertising platform marketers love.

Perfect Audience (YC S11) is looking for awesomely talented developers to help us build the best retargeting platform. We're on a mission to make real-time bidding effortless and effective for companies of all sizes, not just the big guys with huge budgets. Broad swaths of the digital ad industry rely on obfuscation and scarcity of information. We're fighting that by making complex but easy-to-use tools that solve real problems.

http://perfectaudience.com

We launched just 10 weeks ago and have grown at an explosive rate since then. We're a small team that pushes new code every day and listens carefully to the many hundreds of professionals using our tools to learn how to make them better.

We enjoy database design, code that scales, application logic, and standards-based frontends. We are always looking for more smart generalists to come join us. Our applications process billions of transactions every month. This is a chance to work on every facet of a successful web app and grow your engineering skillset.

What we are looking for:

- Solid software development foundation

- Ability to architect, develop, and test key infrastructure

- Understanding of performance and design tradeoffs, without compromising quality

- Experience scaling up webapps and services for rapid growth is a plus

We offer a generous salary and equity grant, free lunches, your choice of snacks in the kitchen, and a desk in our sunny, beautiful office in downtown San Francisco.

Office pic: http://i.imgur.com/aL4Mc.jpg

To apply, write to hello@perfectaudience.com

----------------

Further reading:

Launch story: http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/04/perfect-audience-launch/

Follow-up in Techcrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/25/perfect-audience-test-campaign/

Coming out ahead in an agency shoot-out due to killer UI, great performance and listening to stuff our customers asked for: http://www.pearanalytics.com/blog/2012/perfect-audience-outperforms-adroll-in-retargeting-test/

The enemy's gate is down.
Its a funeral program generator so I charge for each program created
It's in the pipeline :)