skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Deep Learning and the evolution of data models
Trying to add something without logging in, it lets me type a few letters and then I keep getting this really annoying pop-up. Either allow people to edit without login or don't. This teasing is really frustrating.

Anybody can edit Wikipedia without logging in, why not this?
> It wouldn't be so bad if Kurzweil's dates didn't line up conveniently with his own mortality.

His age had probably little influence on his predictions. The Maes-Garreau law, as fun as it sounds, is probably not true[1]

> So combine that with the concept of a) eternal life, b) meeting your relatives in heaven (Kurzweil is planning to resurrect his dead father), and c) AI and post humans that are essentially godlike.

I'm personally skeptical of b), except for frozen people (cryonics). If entropy wiped out the information, there's no way to resurrect someone. a) and c) however seem to be merely obvious consequences of Friendly AI (I assume immortality and wicked IQ are good things). And intelligence explosion is quite plausible. You're a bit quick to dismiss those ideas just because they happen to pattern-match religion. (Now, I agree more with this[2] than with the specifics of Kurzweil ideas.)

> As far as I know, neither is God.

Current physics are reductionist. A supernatural God wouldn't fit into that. Current physics are deterministic (modulo the many-world lingering controversy), and universal. Miracles, as direct violations of the laws of physics, wouldn't fit into that. A Lord Outside the Matrix, maybe, but that's a different beast.

[1]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/e36/ai_timeline_predictions_are_we_g...
[2]: http://intelligenceexplosion.com/primer.html
Sorry I realy don't understand your question!
I agree, it's not a perfect comparison. It's appropriate, though: I can quickly understand what it's about. And they do use the word "like" - it's not exactly Google Docs, but it's LIKE Google Docs and can (for certain apps) be a great alternative.
A revolution from cafés
I noticed that as well and thought it was in bad taste. It would be like using the term "Reich"
The Pope is not fooling anyone on  Twitter
Must be easy to raise lots of funding from top investors when every investor worth is salt is a regular user of your product!
Roald Dahl came up with this idea decades ago.

For anyone not familiar with his work, I highly recommend his collection of short stories titled "The great automatic grammatizator". The major plot of the eponymous story is about a hacker who builds a novel-writing machine so that he can drive authors out of the market by out-producing them.

Very entertaining and, it seems, prophetic.
It looks like a total copy of the concept/interactions to be honest. Hopefully for Powwow GoInstant hasn't patented this stuff...

Good artists copy, great artists steal perhaps?
I thought the white tigers were Siberian tigers. Thanks for the information.
Disagree!

I often travel with my iMac, precisely because it is so thin. I can fit it into my suitcase along with lots of clothes and bring it on trips with me. Sure, a laptop would work as well, but it's not nearly the same thing.

Over time as Moore's law does its thing, we'll probably see a convergence of form factors and an iMac will simply be a larger MacBook/MBA/iPad.
The singularity (as conceived pre-Kurzweil) is the horizon beyond which we can't make any reasonable predictions about the future. Recursively self-improving AI is merely one potential path to that. But GP is right that the meme that the singularity is ridiculous tends to go along with the meme that intelligence is ineffable and can't be reduced to an algorithm in a computer.
One possible way is to use an extension called 'Vimium' with Google Chrome.
Maybe the edge case of being misidentified as your brother, the mass murderer, is not one that Facebook needs to spend any time solving.

And perhaps, despite some of the comments in this thread, strong traditions and protections for free speech are broadly valuable, and it wouldn't make sense for there to be litigious or legislative remedies that weaken them.

And if we're going to waste time worrying about people expressing their "hate" on Facebook, perhaps we could also solve the problem of pandodaily linkbaiting a "tech" article out of a national tragedy involving the slaughter of children.
MIT Media Lab Design Innovation Workshop 2013 in India
PES Institute Of Technology, Bangalore is collaborating with MIT Media Lab to host the third “Design and Innovation” workshop in Bangalore from 21st to 25th of January, 2013. The aim of this workshop is to enthrall and inspire Indian Youth to proactively involve themselves in designing a better future. The weeklong tour will involve engaging activities including, but not limited to ideation, design, and implementation of prototypes together with MIT Media Lab and local mentors.
I fully agree with you. Well said!
Google will build Skynet, and Skynet will take us over.
> That's not optimism. It's wishful thinking. If you can't see that it has all the fundamentals of a religion, I'm not sure what else to say.

Fundamentals of religion are irrelevant. The difference between singularity and rapture is that the first one - if we'll reach it - will be of human creation. Of our science and technology, not of supermagical powers. We can pretty much see the steps there, even though we haven't executed them all. Maybe it will take 200 years, not 50, but we will get there (unless we blow ourselves up before that).

Highlighting similarities between religion and singularity has no more merit than saying that addition is bad because Hitler and Stalin did it.
* The biggest offender is Obama. This guy hasn't got time for this nonsense. I can just imagine him saying, "excuse me, Prime Minister, I need to tweet my concerns about the Farm Bill."*

Obama is transparent about this. The tweets he writes personally are signed "-bo". The rest are written by staffers.
I hope you don’t mind, but I couldn’t stand reading that list and cleaned it up in a gist instead: http://pygm.us/cjvjHnCi.

The list itself is amazing and just what I have been looking for, though. :)
Wikipedia is in the list - under "Subscription", whatever that means. :)

It says the last update was five days ago, so I take it that you missed it. Either that or the "last update" feature is borked.
> I'm worried that people are so confident that the singularity is not only inevitable, but just around the corner, that they're simply buckling up for the ride.

That's a valid concern. But the nice thing here is that people don't only have to wait for it (like I guess many do), but they can actually work to speed it up.
What? This is insane. Python replacing javascript, insane as in that is super cool. If I could do the exact same things I can do in javascript/query but with python syntax, that would be magical.
Cool product, not so great name. Using pow wow like this can be considered offensive to native peoples.
Why It’s Better To Be: A Lesson From The Front Line Of Microfinance
No one is seeking to take away freedom of speech. Only to protect the rights of the accused.

For a more complete elaboration of the difference...

please refer to "To Kill a Mockingbird". A book you can find on Amazon. The author is Harper Lee.
I think people pattern-match singularity to religion because it, essentially, promises the same things - long life / immortality, solution to many problems of humanity, superhuman beings / intelligences, etc. But this match is wrong; it doesn't matter if religions talk about the same things. It only means that those are human needs and desires. In case of singularity, there's a real chance that we could do all of this without need for supernatural powers, so it's worth discussing.
Business Innovation Requires Successful Execution
right, i guess thats also why gmail/mail for apps has a message attachment size limit of 25mb, because it's so much more than enterprise-quality...

google mail for apps has still a long way to go to be real enterprise quality. but then again, it's simplicity to maintain and relatively low cost IS much more attractive than maintaining your own enterprise system.
What's changed? I'm not a big Autocad user, but the prompt's still there and everybody I know uses it all the time, and I've automated stuff using Lisp at least in AutoCad 2011
NASA Employees Share Inspiring Stories You've Never Heard
Skype marketing trickery
Maybe Google has a monopoly on all the smartest people anymore, or, is just one-stop shopping for support for the biggest ideas. Ray's worth 27 million and as you said has many of his own companies, he doesn't need a salary.
Facebook success highlights challenge of turning friends into learners
>Drugs are not an effective defense against an oppressive government. Guns are.

Yes, if you live in 1700. In 2012, not so much. And especially not at all in the US, which is HUGE, segregated into states, and the government has the biggest military power in history.

With a gun you're not even a match for the police, much less the government.

Actually, you only get to have weapons because the government allows you too.

If tomorrow the government decided to forbid private weapons, the writer would have returned his weapon pronto or face jail time or being shot by the police.

In that case (which is not very far-fetched) I don't see him fighting with his weapon for what he considers his right at all. Does anybody?
I've seen people talk about infinite scroll usually as an alternative to pagination. Outside of infinite scroll and pagination, are there any better UI patterns for the desktop web?
"resell data advertisers."

FYI that's not how google makes money.
Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Writers
We cannot work parallel with this screen sharing right ?
So it just looks juicy with cursor look like google docs :D
it would obviously be a good idea to stop children from viewing porn

I don't think most children really care about porn before puberty. So, I don't think it's really an issue.

PS: Most of the reasons to block porn also apply to adults. Why not block it from everyone?
My Top picks for iOS productivity apps
Choosing The Right Home Base Business
That's great hacking guys.
I am waiting for the Windows version, where i think you'll have a hard time escaping the "only one window has focus" dogma.
Btw, if you need beta testers i am here.
No. The idea is validated once you get enough paying customers. Good luck.
Main problem I see with infinite scrolling is that it is simply impossible to scroll by dragging scrollbar, as once you get near the end of page it shrinks and jumps around. Combined with arrow keys repurposed for something else than scrolling (G+) and PageUp/PageDown scrolling by slightly more than viewport (because of fixed elements on top/bottom) it makes some sites highly unusable without scroll wheel (which reasonable laptops does not have :)).
Quoting the article: "By the end of the evening, he had upward of 40 applications, as well as offers to supplement each of his investments, to the tune of $50 apiece, from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (of the aforementioned Andreessen Horowitz) and tech entrepreneur Thomas Ptacek."

I think this is great. Many ideas suffer from lack of publicity and not lack of usefulness. His own Pinboard took a long time to get noticed and to become the sensation it is. I offered to contribute $20 per startup, but I am sure that he is already overwhelmed with support.
Uh, it is.
The "HTML5 versus app" debate continues at Business Insider's..
Promiscuous Males And Choosy Females? Challenging A Classic Experiment
The Most Depressing Screenshot Of All Time – eHarmony
Extrapolating future-history is extremely difficult. You get into this mode where you extend the current set of capabilities and limitations until you hit an edge, and to get past it you invoke magic.

But it is so enjoyable and useful to creatively extrapolate or generate history, if only to encourage us to sink our time and energy into pushing that edge.
Superior blog content makes you money
Valve boss says living room Steam PCs coming with Linux support
Do you have experience in using Opus for something else than speech? I'm currently in a project that deals with audio streaming and I've been exploring my options. Would love to hear about your thoughts!
This is just spam, right? Why does it have three upvotes?

Here's a guy who (a) just created an account a few days ago, (b) doesn't appear to exist in real life (https://www.google.com/search?q=lewis+sharder), and has no history here.
Top 5 Linux Predictions for 2013
My first thought when I saw the title was that Paul Allen has some patent and obtained an injunction against the singularity.

Somehow I cannot bring myself to think about the whole idea (of singularity, economics of emulated minds, etc) seriously. Whenever Robin Hanson (of Overcoming Bias[1]) writes about it, I usually skip the page, even though his ideas are new and insightful. I also read some stuff from Eliezer Yudkowsky (of Less Wrong[2]) and again it's a great concept, he even wrote some cool stories about it[3], but despite all the emphasis on correcting own biases and other follies of the mind, feels way too much like some sort of techno, cyberpunk religion from the 80s.

[1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/future

[2] http://lesswrong.com/about/

[3] http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/
Snapchat Adds Video, Now Seeing 50 Million Photos A Day
"it would obviously be a good idea to stop children from viewing porn"

Nonsense. I'm bloody glad I had access to porn as a closeted gay teenager. Without access to Internet porn, my teenage years would have been far more miserable and lonely.

It was only a decade ago when Section 28 was still the law of the land. Internet porn was giving plenty of gay teenagers the sex education that society and the education system was too prudish and/or fearful to give them.
Are you guys aware of powwownow? it's has voice/video conferencing. Although not exactly like your product, it does share some similarities.

http://www.powwownow.co.uk/
Seems very slow.
Help improve LibreOffice 4.0 in a 'test marathon' this month
Facebook has the ability to look for trends and spikes in activity. If fb start seeing lots of new pages and groups springing up called "$name is a killer" then you can know something is going on
not for me - when I view "ask" - its not there. It only shows up under "new"
With a gun you're not even a match for the police, much less the government.

pretoriusB, you have your position on this and I understand that, it's a hot topic, but from the sentence above it is apparent that you lack knowledge of tactical warfare. I would suggest you review the footage of the LA bank shootout, to get an idea of what two men with rudimentary tactical training can do. A well trained squad of 4 to 6 can be absolutely devastating and it is why guerrilla warfare is such a hard and gritty fight to endure for a traditional force. It's why we lost to Vietnam, superior firepower cannot compensate for strategical and tactical advantage. The reality is, that the US could be disrupted by as little as 10% of it's population resorting to guerrilla warfare and quite possible loose. That being said, there is still a need for the government to be balanced by fear of the people, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia is not that far in the rear view mirror, and the evils that lurked in the hearts of those men is not confined to Europe, they walk among all nations and desire the same darkness. The idea of the right to self defense is not an antiquated notion, it may not be as sacred now days but it generally only becomes sacred when you need it, usually by then it's the most important right.
Sometime more specialized/specific is better.

For instance, Gmail does support IMAP but also has non-IMAP features. Being too abstract would mean avoiding providing these features.

Another point is the easiness of installation/configuration/usability. For instance, with Emacs, you can use GNUs to read gmail. However, it is so generic (you can read usenet news and any kind of e-mail), that it's really a pain to get started. There are terminology confusions (i.e. you need several hacks to have a gmail-like inbox) and overall, it just doesn't feel like g-mail..

Also, by starting very specific for our own problem, it's easier to create a meaningful product that solves a real need. (Like startup!) I think it's easier to start specialized and then grow larger, than start too brood.
This whole thing (futurism, the (+-Not)singularity, what may one day come) is fascinating to me and clearly pretty much everyone.

Getting aside from the pseudo-religious arguments which are often raised in objection (and, personally I believe legitimately), I think we are left with 2 options:

1) the Singularity is a real thing which will happen at some point in the future

2) Consciousness is not able to be crafted by man and the logistics of downloadable consciousnesses and infinately extendable lifespans are forever beyond us, and life will continue pretty much as it has since pre-history, with better technology making a 'richer' life a possibility for a greater and greater proportion of humanity.

As much as I would hope for option 1) the question I feel needs to be asked is why have not other conscious beings (which logically must exist elsewhere in the universe regardless of the numbers you plug into the Drake equation) come to us in their flying robot suits?

The complex interplay of neurology and computing is only in it's infancy, and I wait with bated breath at the advances we are making in our understanding..
Is it possible to include class files such as ieee.cls?
http://mocha-java.uccs.edu/ieee/
Sounds like a bug in how the first amendment is written and interpreted, you should fix that.
JClarity Offers new Tools that Simplify Java Performance Tuning
Be sure to read Kurzweil's well-argued response too: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425818/kurzweil-respond...

(imho, more convincing than Allen's).
Founder of http://www.ShareLaTeX.com here, the guys at writelatex have done a great job of making a new clear home page since last time they were on HackerNews (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4385300) the example presentation and no sign in required is a really great touch as it helps quickly bring down the bar for those new to LaTeX.

The online LaTeX editor is not an easy problem to solve, compiling massive projects (hundreds of megs) elastically with several different compilers is not something you can crack in a weekend hence why I merge with http://www.scribtex.com.

Good luck to writelatex!
Lean's Great Dilemma: Persist or Pivot
Thank you, Paul, for speaking out against this cult.

It's very hard for me, as a programmer, to take this idea of a singularity seriously. I know how all of the technologies that Kurzweil is banking on work at a very low level and I call bullshit that this is ever going to happen. It would require a type of software that simply does not exist yet, something akin to a self-programming software, and we are so far away from that that it might as well be cold fusion.

I think it's much more valid to call the "singularity" the point in time when technological expansion started occurring at an exponential rate. Thus I would put the singularity at about 200 years in the past, right around the time the spinning jenny was invented, and right before the industrial revolution. Now there's a point in time that I can point to and say "something meaningful happened". This is complete pie in the sky stuff, and I'm extremely cynical that it's not just something that Kurzweil talks about to sell books and conference tickets.
Move Over Amazon—Here Comes a Chinese Online Juggernaut
I agree about the importance of ability to come back and immediately navigate to the same scroll position. Especially since most browsers have a built in capability to do this, which I have learned to rely on.

Most techniques of dynamically loading content or messing with the scrolling seem to break this, the worst being badly implemented "address bar hiding scripts" for mobile devices. You return to the page using the back button and the browser scrolls you to your previous position on the page. Then that script kicks in and scrolls back to the top.
Opt-in government maintained filters, like as an optional service?
GitHub re-writes Gist code sharing service, adds history tracking,..
We're quite nice in ##C. Try ##C++ next time. :)

Although the channels are meant for discussion about standard C/C++, in IRC it seems that many people actually try to master the standards of these languages and use that as a weapon to mock other people. It really feels like that at times. And it's understandable though - a question for which the answer can't be found in the language standard is off-topic. In such environment and "culture" it's inevitable that people start raging after the third "What is the best IDE/I mixed pointers and arrays and why not work they should be the same, no?" question for the day. At some point you just wish to kick these people off the channel the moment they voice their presence.

I can totally see why this would not be a case in a channel related to Haskell or Clojure where talking about anything related to the language is the point, rather than the point being the language standard.
The market should be large enough for both of us - but obviously time will tell...
why have not other conscious beings

1. We are the first, or we are the first to get close to the singularity in our light cone.

or

2. Generating energies or over coming the challenges of even traveling close to the speed of light is hard.

or

3. Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.

or

4. They have.
Yeah - I meant "validated" in terms of taking the project to the next level (i.e. turning the idea into a MVP), not "validated" in terms of guaranteed to bring in lots of cash.
Not available on Verizon.
Does scribtex do latex compilation as a service? (I emailed you guys about this at some point, and you said you had no plans to do this yourself, but how do ya'll work with scribtex?)
Programming Without Coding Technology (PWCT)
Programming Without Coding Technology (PWCT)
New Linux Foundation Members involved with Telecoms
Concerning your question, you're probably familiar with these arguments, but here goes.

Assuming it's true, the main conclusion from Fermi's paradox (which is really an observation more than a Paradox) is that there is some kind of "cliff" that vastly reduces the number of civilisations that achieve the technology required to come visit us with their robot suits.

The interesting question is, where is this cliff: before where we are now, or after?

If it is before, then that's great for us. What it means is, for example, that perhaps the evolution of life, or multi-cellular life, or animal life, or intelligent life, etc - is so unlikely that even though there are trillions of trillions of attempts, those that succeed are so far apart that they will never meet (perhaps thanks to the expansion of the universe, or through the difficulty of travelling across interstellar distances, etc). That's the lucky scenario.

The unlucky scenario is that this cliff is after where we are now. Perhaps there are millions of intelligent species even in just the Milky Way, but perhaps intelligent life is doomed to self-destroy eventually (for example by reaching a Singularity, building a Dyson sphere, and then basically disappearing up its own arse; or perhaps by ending in some kind of nuclear war, or biological wipeout after someone's biology experiment goes horribly wrong, etc).

That latter scenario would mean that we're likely to kill ourselves before we get to the stars.

I hope for the first scenario.

Edit: Of course, as pixl97 points out, perhaps Fermi's paradox is an incorrect observation, and the aliens are already here, they're just being really cautious about being observed.