skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think age of spiritual machines is actually the perfect title. The whole idea of the singularity is that you can't predict the nature of emergent phenomena based on lower level inputs, specifically with regards to the future of technology. This is basically analogous to the fact that we can't predict consciousness or intelligence by looking at the properties of matter or even biology.

I also don't see anything religious about the concept. Religion by (etymological) definition seeks to understand or connect with ultimate source of things, whereas the singularity is A) about the future and B) says that the future is going to be impossible to predict or understand because of accelerating change. At best you might be able to argue that it's vaguely teleological, but I'm not even sure that that is correct because the theory doesn't make any real predictions for what happens in the longterm after the singularity.
Now, what would be really great is if all of you guys were offering these services for $37 for the first month or so :)
Bad work, whoever changed the title of this submission. Don't keep it up.
Iv'e been researching these kind of educational and cognitive topics for some time and it's quite obvious that writing code and writing fiction or non-fiction narratives are cognitively different tasks. However, further scientific research is necessary to obtain evidence whether or not retyping narrative (or even code, I might argue) is a good method.

This is the only article I know of someone using this method in narrative: http://www.publicationcoach.com/how-to-use-deliberate-practi... .

It's unfortunate the article is scientifically suspicious.
The responsibility is not Facebook's, but rather the news organizations that reported early rumors and reports as facts. IANAL, but i would expect that they potentially face libel suits for defamation of character.

In this situation, Facebook is merely a modern day phone book (albeit vastly more robust and complex). It is the news organization that bears the responsibility of gathering, checking and publishing verified facts. That's called reporting.
A Political Brawler, Now Battling for Microsoft
>> Because of his specialty in marketing, it’s easy to assume that these books are designed for spam-like purposes

I just want to know, is this even legal? Is he selling books?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book

"The body of all written works including books is literature. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature

"Literature is commonly classified as having two major forms—fiction and non-fiction—and two major techniques—poetry and prose."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose

"Prose is a form of language which applies ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure (as in traditional poetry)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_speech

"In the philosophy of language, a natural language (or ordinary language) is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect."

The answer is no, since the text did not come from human intellect but computer programming; they can't be classified as books.
NASA Eyes Mission To Icy Jupiter Moon Europa To Gauge Habitability
So, you are suggesting the following people are, "idiots" - or, at least, the only word that bubbles up into your mind is idiot?

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=anthropogenic+global+war...

I read through the article on "Global Cooling" (from the 1970s) - it was missing two things - one, a clear causative description - it was predominantly "observational", and two, a lack of scientific consensus.
Wow, there isn't much love in the comments below that post on dropbox.com. I find this is surprising to a point.

I love Dropbox, and I use it in exotic ways. That said, I don't "get" why Dropbox wants to be involved with my photos. I've balked at this, and I am surprised that Dropbox seems to be over-pushing in this direction.

Someone once said that 'Dropbox does only one thing, and it does that one thing VERY well'. I fear that this fixation on photos may be the juncture where Dropbox lost its focus, and ultimately loses the game.

As a succinct commenter posted on Dropbox.com: 'I don't need to post photos to Dropbox'.
'Where did the money go?' ask Code Hero devs
You'd run into quite a bit of trouble with the first amendment and freedom of the press.
Once upon a time I wrote Oink, which generates JS from Python on the server: https://github.com/alecthomas/oink

It has support for many of the Python niceties: classes, list comprehensions, positional arguments, and so on. Interesting experiment, but I ended up thinking that Python is not the best language for the browser.
While I wish Google wouldn't do this, I can't expect a company to do something for my benefit if it's not profitable.

Also I'm pretty damn glad I have an Android phone.
I agree hugely that computers are based on hard logic and this makes them poor tools to deal with tasks like 'perception'. I'd also add that most people working in the field of AI are trained in hard logic, and not at all in the subtleties of the perceptual world (not that there's a university course for this), which probably doesn't help.

I'm not so sure you start a good argument though. 'Harder' is all about the tools at hand. If you have the right tools, everything is easy. So to me this is all semantics. To me all the wikipedia page basically says is 'we haven't invented a good artificial tool for generalized, fast perception'.

Of course the other way to think about it is that humans and other animals devote generally much larger amounts of physical space (in the brain and otherwise) to subconscious things like perception and subconscious memory than they do to conscious things like logic...
>> vmail important from barackobama@whitehouse.gov

Mmm...yeah I think I'll pass but hey, good idea up to that point.
I'd like to mention vshnu, ranger and vifm for directory browsing and traversal.

Dterm is also great (OSX only, i think). Can pop up a command line from anywhere and copy the results of a command easily. (Come to think of it, its not a terminal app, but terminal lovers should like it).

What good music players are there? I use cmus, but it does freeze after a day. Article mentions screen, but not tmux.
Jason Calacanis Says He Will Shut Down Podcast Network ThisWeekIn.com
Here's Norvig himself on Kurzweil:

“Ray’s contributions to science and technology, through research in character and speech recognition and machine learning, have led to technological achievements that have had an enormous impact on society – such as the Kurzweil Reading Machine, used by Stevie Wonder and others to have print read aloud. We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we’re working on at Google.”
Seems Adam Lanza, Ryan Lanza's brother is the suspect and that his mom, a teacher was killed in the shootout as well. http://gawker.com/5968551/ryan-lanza-is-a-cold-blooded-murde...
Thanks in part to the popularity of his books, movie, and speeches, Kurzweil now knows pretty much every AI researcher in the planet

Um...

More important question: how many AI researchers respect the last 20 years of his work?
Do something different like this: http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/12/this-guy-really-wants-to-wo...

Maybe: Start an ad campaign on Facebook, targeting the founders of the startup. Title it: [startup name] or [founder name]- Hire Me! and link the ad to a website that tells them more about who you are and why you are the best fit.
That's good. I remember reading an article a while back about the working conditions in amazon warehouses and it sounded really unpleasant. I don't think it was this article exactly, but this one is pretty similar: http://www.mcall.com/news/local/amazon/mc-allentown-amazon-c...

I love Amazon, but I hate to think of people being miserable and in terrible pain as they put my order together.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
E Online has left a Gist url on the top of their site
It's very difficult in the US.
The argument will be he was a public figure, which would make it near impossible (actual malice)
His argument will be he was a private figure, which would make it possible (negligence, though state law varies).

First person to say "he wasn't a public figure, they made him one" gets the fun job of making new law about it.
This is not true.
The standard of actual malice applies only to public figures.
All this will do is push people to outlook.com web mail which lets you add GMail accounts (I also find it better).
I already had an onsite interview with them. Is this still a good idea?
Here are a bunch of examples of non-gun attacks on schoolkids in China that did kill people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010%E...
Bosch SHE3AR75UC Dishwasher
Watch this video of Bosch SHE3AR75UC Dishwasher to find out the complete Bosch Product's interiors, exteriors design and specifications. You can also find out customer reviews and complete details about product online at Goedeker’s.
EDIT 2: Funny/telling this is my highest rated comment on HN.
A Beautiful Brain
Sober Coach
Sober Restoration Coaching-Coach is surely an powerful restorative service for anyone beginning with healing coming from dependency and also alcoholism. A Sober Guru really helps to return to lifestyle following ones returning from a remedy centre.
Dropbox? I have switched to Cubby which has almost every feature of Dropbox(no photos, but Photostream does photo syncing well for me and I use Picasa for online backup).

The thing that I like about Cubby is that it is quite fast and you can sync any folder! And they offer more free space out of box. (I'm waiting for their pricing to be announced and will surely switch to paid version)

http://cubby.com
The singularity reeks of religious concepts.

If by that you mean that scientists are attempting to achieve what religions have been falsely promising, then ok, but so what? Before we had medicine, people could only pray to try to heal the sick. Then physicians actually started studying the body and figuring out how to cure disease, fortunately not abandoning the idea because religions had failed to deliver.

He literally thinks he's going to be able to live forever (and the technology to do so will be available within his own lifetime).

An ambitious and unlikely goal, but it's not prohibited by the laws of physics (ignoring the heat death of the universe for the moment). I'll take that optimism over the much more common attitude that accepts the destruction of billions of sentient beings as inevitable and often even desirable.
I charge $150-$200/hr in NYC (4 years experience). My clients find value in me. There are many developers that charge $50 - $100 but end up taking 2x time to get the product out. Lately I've noticed there isn't much iOS work out there. Consider learning iOS + Android + Windows Phone to make yourself appeal more to potential clients. Great portfolio speaks a lot.
Magic Submitter
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As a student/developer I'm excited about the idea of companies I've never heard of who match my interests approaching me.

I am a little worried though that this could end up like the common app for colleges and I'll become nothing more than an application.
Why doesn't PICPC-VC have a Dropbox or Airbnb in their alumni yet?
If they have a github contribute to one of their projects. This will also help you figure out whether or not you would actually enjoy working there.
>Sure, he did some interesting work a long time ago, before he got weird.

He was weird then too. That's why he did such interesting work. His work, combined with a lack of fame at that time, just kept the weird from showing through.

I suspect that genius is made up almost, but not quite, entirely of crazy.
This makes me think I should upload my random computational intelligence assignments and get sweet, delicious karma.

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

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

I don't see people upvoting "My First Stack" or "Check out this Pet Shop I wrote in J2EE". Computational intelligence is not some land of super wise geniuses that mere mortals cannot ascend to. It's all pretty straightforward.

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
Oh sorry, and yes, you are right. It's kind of a screwed up system either way.
Exclusively due to the political costs of waging real war. Modern first-world countries have become too "soft" for war. (Which is a good thing of course.)
If Kurzweil's technological miracle predictions come true, one of the side-benefits will be that we can start talking about them in phlegmatic, everyday language, and forget that there used to be religious undertones to it.
Web Revenue Models
Does Windows Phone have a chance without Google services?
Ask HN: Open source app idea. Get rid of my gun app
Hello There

This is in response to the horrible story from Connecticut. I live in Massachusetts with a little child. I was concerned and thought of creating a website/app in AWS that would basically let people give away a gun for guaranteed destruction.

Let's say it would be a webapp, developed on github and deployed to AWS with money raised from say Kickstarter. The web site would give away tweetable/facebook badges and would profile people who give away their guns in support/memory of victims.

The features of the web could be developed through an open source community. We may be able to enlist help from sympathetic celebrities.

Please respond with what you know about the below.

1. Will you be interested in a weekend hacking session on a Python or Java app. We could launch a Google Hangout and put a website/raise money over kickstarter.
2. How can somebody in US get rid of a gun legally. I'm talking "assault weapons". There should be a guarantee that this will be destructed and not resold anywhere(Except may be resold to US army or so for a charge that would go into say gun control legislation lobby).
Meet the World’s Cheapest Venture Capitalist
The math works, based on the model. The model works based on the human guessing what the model should be. The real problem is that '25-sigma' events in the model are completely overshadowed by the not-all-that-small chance that the model is wrong. So talking about 25-sigma events as if it was something you could manage and control, when they are so far below the noise level of human error (or lack of information/understanding) is nonsense. It tells you something, but if you throw away the context, it will happily lie to you.
Why wouldn't you just focus on graduating? If the startup is any good they will be there in a year or two. If they have an api build a startup of your own that uses their stuff. Maybe you can get acquired instead of hired.
Shorter Tcl Complainers #1: Why does Tcl require me to learn how to use it instead of just letting me carry over my assumptions from other languages?

Shorter Tcl Complainers #2: Why does Tcl punish me for my insistence on following bad programming practice?

Shorter Tcl Complainers #3: I hate Tcl because of traits it shares with several popular languages which I love!
Credit should go to avc.com's Fred Wilson (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/12/mba-mondays-revenue-models.h...) ... this provides a good map.
Check the weather before you leave
How school killings in the US stack up against 36 other countries put together
You're looking at the wrong page: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssync

I would expect this to keep working. According to the original article, this affects mobile devices using the free Google accounts.
I think he's talking about a data breach or an untrustworthy middleman.
github? They're gonna use it eventually anyway.
Of course but it's nothing more than bureaucratic red tape. This was simply the call that one junior reviewer made at one point based on a strict interpretation of the rules that had to be appealed. Obviously there will be some false negatives. The quality of the App Store is certainly better than Google Play.
I actually quite like this but what scares me is I see no mention of an export. A startup could never use this if there is no simple way to leave at some point in the future.
Perhaps you could all use the money/freebies to fund this.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924650
Noticed this as well... "Co-Prosperity _____" should sound hauntingly familiar to anyone with any amount of knowledge about WWII.

It seems like the "Co-Prosperity Cloud" is a joke, but even if it is, it's a joke in poor taste considering the atrocities committed by Japan, and not even an especially clever one (annexation and abuse for profit is not really the same idea - I hope - that Pinboard is expressing).
"You don't exist, go away" - what does this heroku error mean?
Moments that restored faith in humanity
Wired: Hardware is the new Software
I am building a bookmarking site. Can I apply?
Wrong.

Floating footers/headers are VERY ANNOYING for another reason: when you press Space or PgDown to scroll down, browsers scrolls by 1 screen, scrolling past the content that was hidden under the footer. So you then have to scroll up by a few lines to see it.

In other words, to scroll through a page: Space Up Up Up, Space Up Up Up, Space Up Up Up.

Instead of: Space, Space, Space
Introducing Minimax: an LP solver for iPhone
This is unpleasant for many, and will hurt a lot of people who use personal devices at work. Why would Google do something like that? It's not inexplicable:

Perhaps the board feel that they aren't growing or earning fast enough to keep their shareholders happy. Maybe Google have some fears about the future of online advertising and want to diversify their sources of revenue. It could be that the service's free users are costing too much and are an easy way to save money. Either way, it's very unlikely to be a simple matter of avarice. Companies act greedily, but usually for sound (or at least consistent) reasons.

One possible benefit I haven't seen anyone else mention: they might finally improve their miserable customer support. That's easier to do when the product you're supporting is bringing in money directly.
Life in the Future: Why Self-Publish?
The 1st Moleskine notebook + analog application for iPhone
How would you make that case? There are plenty of restrictions on free speech as well as freedom of the press, which is far from absolute, and is most certainly regulated.
prank Perf?
losing, not loosing
foul?
Turning this into a pro-Google, anti-Apple thing was really not an easy piece of rhetoric. I applaud you for even trying.
cool thanks for the response, that makes sense. I have my code working again but I'll check out the new fetch param as well.
The second dyno brings your total to ~30/ month. Still quite cheap. Youd only need more if you have users, and at that point its a worthwhile expense.
I think it's pretty obvious, but let me quote Neal Stephenson:

>I can never get past the structural similarities between the singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. This is not the place to parse it out, but the key thing they have in common is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind.

Poll Americans (most of whom are Christian). Close to half will tell you the end of the world and thus the rapture is going to happen in their own lifetime. Christians have been believing that the rapture was around the corner for literally the last 2000 years. Arrogant if you ask me.

It wouldn't be so bad if Kurzweil's dates didn't line up conveniently with his own mortality. He'll be around 97 at the time he's predicting the singularity will occur.

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. Sure, Kurzweil will show you a bunch of exponential graphs to make it all seem so reasonable, but that's why Kapor says "creationsim for the IQ 140 people."

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.

>An ambitious and unlikely goal, but it's not prohibited by the laws of physics

As far as I know, neither is God.
To be fair, this was not a rumor...their police sources had been mixed up because the shooter died with his brother's ID....that is the explanation, anyway...so much of this story has been contradiction after contradiction that it almost seems like someone in the police department is a 4chan troll
I wonder if they raised the round on... AngelList? :P
None. The news agencies claim it came from the police, who had been confused. There was no malicious intent, no gross negligence, and he is a limited public figure no matter if he was the shooter or the brother of the shooter
To put it another way - if a visionary isn't controversial, she's probably not a visionary.
It seems like it's everyone but paid Google Apps users that are losing the ability to set up new devices: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/winter-cleaning.html

(My reading of that is that this effects gmail users as well.)
Sloppy journalism, for sure ... but libel? Maybe. If so, by carrying his brother's id, the shooter may have left him a parting gift of financial security. Surely not planned ... (?)
Here's an interesting article about recent actual lynchings in Nigeria, pretty frightening stuff: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/10/per...

Sometimes it can be frustrating to operate within the rule of law, but the alternatives are pretty scary.
Even if the name was 'right', it was still the news organisations getting the wrong individual with that name.
> it will hurt a lot of people who use personal devices at work.

No, it only affects free accounts, not business accounts.
I am a gun-toting country boy, who has no use for any type of automatic weapon or handgun

The article seems to point towards needing tighter gun control, but I would lean more towards a systemic failure. Why do many of our fellow Americans hold so little value for human life? Why do they feel they deserve to strike out? Why does the media lavish them with the media attention they so desire?
Am I missing something here? Aren't these results basically useless beyond trivia unless you normalize for the characteristic of routes. If an airline does mostly short haul flights, which are obviously more expensive by mile, then any graph proving that a short haul carrier is expensive seems to just show a tautology
I have 1 patch in the git kernel. I barely knew c when I did it but I did tons of research on what to call and how. Junio (maintainer) took my barely workable patch and told me what to fix. Let me do it, then pulled it in. Amazing experience in a very scary environment, eg non-minimal chance Linus tears into you.
Sure, but people don't generally write large programs in shell scripts.

If you want to relegate TCL to short scripts, i guess it's the same as shell scripting, but if you want to use it for more than that this behavior is dangerous.
Always nice to see these pet projects as proof of concept for ML in PHP. There's a bunch of them, but the more, the merrier.
I would believe you if you said buffer overruns. There was an understanding about buffer overruns, but the tools to help protect against them weren't developed until much later.
I respect what you are trying to do, but do you really think the ones who commit these types of crimes will be using your system? In all honestly, anyone who would voluntarily give up their firearm, probably aren't someone we need to worry too much about.