skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say that this is true only as long as this "adult intelligence" pretty much remains within a single "logical frame" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_%28artificial_intelligenc...).

I would claim that while a single logical frame is easy to simulate on a digital computer, creating and balancing multiple, not-necessarily consistent frames is very difficult and requires as much computer activity or brain activity as the also difficult activities of raw input processing.

One might argue that neural system began as very different systems from digital computers but the evolution of the large human has allowed them emulate discreet, including a computer's digital logic while still doing the balancing of multitudes of environmental constraints which neural system have excelled at for millions of years. And letting "us" conceive-of and to even build computers perfecting this discreet logic. Pretty amazing.
Hm, but then they let it through:

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/08/xscreensaver-for-ios-now-ava...

I fail to see the point of your tangential vitriol.
Apple is just as interested as locking you into their world (itunes, app store, icloud, etc.) as google is. And apple gets I believe 30% of the ads you're shown within their ecosystem so you are the customer AND the product.
Intel Perceptual Computing Challenge with 1M in awards
So, it doesn't implement VIM's remapping commands?
I wonder if his political/visionary/famous aspects played a positive, negative, or neutral role in the hire.
Surely at the claimed 25-sigma point, the problem is more with our ability to measure than the probability itself? Claims about the space shuttle's reliability come to mind.

Am I the only one who feels that a claim of probability on this level is basically religion on one level or another?
Google continues its move towards the ad-driven singularity.
you could try stripping comments before diff'ing. If you have single line comments you can use diff -I otherwise try this: http://freecode.com/projects/stripcmt
Callback Patterns and Idioms in Python (Vid by Google's Alex Martelli)
I would counter that you need to go back 70 years to see how well a disarmed German population.
I think he's eying their massive server farm as a spot to park his brain. He just called shotgun for the Singularity.
Right, even Hitler was worried about public opinion... but presumably the DoD fighting Americans would not? And this is before we even get into the issue of telling American soldiers to shoot at Americans who look, speak, act, and pray the same as they do.

I'm just not buying it. Even with their massively over-inflated budget and their guilt-elimination drones there is no way the DoD could maintain an armed occupation of America. They are having a hell of a time doing it in a country less than one-tenth the size with less than one-tenth the people, filled with people who have been thoroughly dehumanized by popular media, people with far fewer connections to the outside world, and people for whom the soldiers have no tribal connections.

Thinking they would do better occupying America than Afghanistan is a really strange form of patriotic hubris.

(Lest you get the wrong impression, I support gun control and think that worrying about the possibility of Americans having to fight the American army is incredibly silly.)
Director is generally the management level just below VP.

I don't know the specifics of this situation though, so take it with a grain of salt.
reply
FWIW, this is one of the things that Big Nerd Ranch makes you do when learning iOS development (probably all their programming classes).

It is one of the key things that helps you get a "feel" for writing code, imo.
I'm looking at that table and I can't see where the Higgs boson would go either. Where would we put the Higgs?
A few years back I researched for a scripting language for an embedded project. The choice came down to Tcl, Lisp and Lua. We went with Lua and liked it a lot.

After reading this article I wonder how Lua and Tcl compare. It seems like Tcl is more like Lisp than Lua really. Does anyone have experience with any two of those languages and would care to comment on their differences and similarities?
this is a little ridiculous, three discussions on the same exact topic on the home page at once?
you can't tell me all of those votes were legitimate.
How Walmart is Taking Over the Food System
A Bad UI Pattern
Thanks, I actually began teaching myself HTML and CSS two years ago and a few months after, I learned PHP. I created a few projects and feel PHP is currently my strongest language. I'm now learning RoR and taking a Java class in my High School but it's fairly easy because I already have some experience with C++. I'm also in an HTML class currently (not my choice) and the teacher recognized that I already know the curriculum so she lets me use her Lyna.com subscription to learn things that interest me (currently RoR). My first impressions of RoR are that it's awesome! Each video I watch I think to myself, "Wow, this simplifies some of the things I used to do in PHP immensely." Anyways thank you for the advice, I definitely plan on going to college and I've already been looking at some schools. I've also already created a few websites for some local businesses. I believe the company MediaFire is actually based in my town so I was considering possibly reaching out and asking them if I could be some sort of intern. Thanks for the comment!
And yet we seem to be taken by surprise, well, almost every time. The nature of the business is such that we just have to trust that they're actually doing something besides sitting on their collective asses in Langley and counting down the days to retirement.

I realize we need a foreign intelligence service, but I'm not sure we need this foreign intelligence service. There are 14 separate US government agencies that collect intelligence in other countries as part of their mission. We might be able to do without the CIA.
I think there is a Director of Engineering at every Google office (or even multiple, like each for a group of product)? Otherwise he would be listed as "Senior Vice President, Engineering". Minimally, he's going to be the manager of the managers of some related teams.
I'd love that too, so I know how much to trust it
I agree.

I'd love to see some innovative thinking from HN, but this thread is mostly the same pro anti gun ravings; confusion about mental health and mental health treatment; etc.

It's intensely interesting, but mostly shallowly so.
I wonder if this will be a wake up call for some of the people who think his predictions of super-human AI are a joke.

I mean even if you don't believe in the Singularity, you must believe in Google, right?
Have a contract directly with the owners, I guess.
Consider something like the start of instagram - no revenue and huge data transfer costs after getting tons of users. Although I realize OP is suggesting building something with revenue that is sustainable.
Why the iPad mini Will Eclipse the iPad
For a long time it was the highest grade you could be hired in as since Google didn't feel like the title "Vice President" in Google meant the same thing as other places. I know VP's they gave offers to, who turned down the offer on the basis of having to take the title of director. At one time you had a limited amount of time post hire to 'prove yourself' or be managed out of the organization.

I found the hire curious from the standpoint that Kurzweil's tendency to handwave rather than retreat to data has historically been a red flag in the hiring process at Google. This tended to unfairly penalize theorists over experimentalists at Google. One wonders if they've changed.

I remember him giving a tech talk and talking about how many computers you'd need to simulate a brain and how nobody would put that together for years yet, and chuckling knowingly :-).
I find it humorous that the comments on that site are only enabled if you login with Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail.
I'm not a programmer but interacting on the Internet is not the same type of social interaction as in real life.

I've been pretty quite all my life and when I first got on the Internet in the early to mid 90s it was amazing for a shy person to interact in real-time with other real people. I'm not talking about a person thousands of kilometers away I mean 'a person'.

But still my job as a vending machine repair man was a solitary job I had done it since my teens. The Internet was amazing but it was no substitute for real face-to-face socializing that still terrified me, still does.

When I got a job at a casino I was forced to interact since I was in a contained busy noisy very social environment no longer driving the highways. I changed a lot but I'm still not much for social activities, I call work "acting" because if I am off work and go back I feel very exposed socially.

I think I'm like children who are locked up and lose the chance to develop verbal skills, I missed my social training and that part of my brain is dead.

Anyway, it's different.
There are several UI prototype builders out there. Most of them are built on top of Twitter's Bootstrap. ie. http://jetstrap.com/
Just to clarify: are you more concerned about the Googlebot reading your documents to sell you consumer products than you are about employees attaching business or customer data to email or shared docs?

Because I'm operating with a much different threat model. Email is not and never has been secure. It is sent in plaintext unsecured from one unauthenticated mail server to the next. The moment the user attaches data to an email the game is over and we have lost. Sensitive data must be kept in systems that are designed to store sensitive data, and which do not have a "forward to my gmail account" feature. That's how IT can be relevant: provide that system. You might prompt the business to reclassify some formerly sensitive data as rubbish they're allowed to play with, but then their fingerprints will be all over the corpse.
Very nice. Can this approach be generalized to embed Clojure, Haskell, and other languages into the browser? I love the pervasiveness of JavaScript but I dislike writing it. This is a very good tradeoff.
MP3 Rocket PRO Required Software Update
Same here. I write a lot of notes in markdown that I sync using Dropbox. I often want to read and edit those notes on my phone or ipad, but I don't remember the exact file names.

Similarly, I wish photo apps had a "use most recent photo" button, instead of making me select my photos, scroll down to the very bottom, and click on the last square.
This is exactly how I handle learning languages/frameworks. I wrote a little something on it as well [0]. I value thorough comprehension over "how fast can I finish this book?". I try to get my hands as dirty as possible. I want to see the warts of this thing I plan on using to build projects. Trying to rebuild book examples from memory forces you to consider the requirements and the end goal. This was particularly useful when I first learned about linked lists and queues in C.

[0]: http://vertstudios.com/blog/how-to-read-programming-tutorial...
> I doubt he got the class & metaclass semantics right.

Brython doesn't implement classes at all, so you're right!
Seeking expertise: how to fund MIT's virus cure
There's been a recent surge of interesting activity on this post from 13 months ago (which hit 423 on HN back then):
http://www.process.org/discept/2011/11/17/draco-death-to-the-virus/ -- now they're talking about registering a corporation and building a simple site to accept funds kickstarter-style, which they can (in turn) donate to the project. I've seen several similar efforts collapse after a few months -- anyone have good advice for them to make this real, or want to lend a hand?
Media mistakes wrong Ryan Lanza Facebook page for killer
Saw him give a talk promoting his latest book last month, was heavily disappointed. Ideas are presented in a way to fit nicely together, but ultimately lack any depth or critical insights. I recall someone calling it "creationism for people with an IQ over 140"; it's a fair description.

It's a shame, he's brought many great contributions to our field, but I fear he has jumped the shark a while ago. Maybe going to Google will force him to work on solutions to problems of which the correctness can be more easily assessed.
Clickable link to the post: http://www.process.org/discept/2011/11/17/draco-death-to-the...

Original HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3771214
>. And yet we seem to be taken by surprise, well, almost every time.

Don't forget about the possibility of the two following scenarios:

1.) The CIA succeeded and therefore the US Government weren't taken by surprise - even if the general population were

2.) They knew about something and therefore prevented or countered it, therefore the public never heard about it.
Rumor about Intel Buying Nvidia
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/08/google-to-buy-mobile-loyalt...
Is there anyway to get gmail push on an iphone without EAS?
The big advantage of Brython is that it has a very fast workflow, much like JavaScript. A server-side compiler approach would have a slower interactive workflow.
You just need a more risk-seeking landlord and grocer.
Same here with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTJFgDpXigc An Interview with Johnny Diggz
How to hack your way to the top of Google Rankings in 2 Months
To take this to the next level, I vote for crowd-funding at the end of it all. I'd put $20 behind my favourite startup from the class and cheer them on. Almost like fantasy sports, but for startups.
Yes, but not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they have a completely different business model.

As someone else already succinctly put it: for Apple, users are customers, for Google they are the product (to be sold to advertisers).

But the difference goes further than that. I don't know if Apple actually cares about privacy or it's just a side-effect of their business model, but Google is blatantly politically anti-privacy, and seems to revel in provoking controversy by ignoring privacy protection laws.

Google Maps is just another example: the surreptitious way in which Google "asks permission" for exploiting location data has already come under fire as being in blatant violation with privacy laws in several countries. Google has been playing this game long enough to know exactly what they were doing.
Does that mean that recipients can legitimately tell the press and other investors that a16z is one of their investors?

Assuming that the recipient can keep a straight face?

EDIT: Perhaps having a16z as the only VC in your seed is a very bad idea. Chris Dixon (now a partner at a16z) cautions enterpreneurs against the risks of having a sole VC in your seed round:

http://cdixon.org/2012/04/02/revisited-big-vcs-investing-in-...

"I can think of about 15 founders I’ve spoken to recently who tried or are trying to raise Series As but are seriously hampered by the fact that a big VC invested in the seed round but isn’t participating in the Series A."
Two of the most powerful languages I know are also very simple. Lisp and Lua come to mind. While they can't compete with Python or Ruby in therms of libraries, their syntax is far simpler and more powerful than any other language I know. I wonder why they are also much less popular, especially given that both are relatively fast.
In overly simplistic terms:

That $50 would be converted into stock at the time of their next fundraising. Uncapped means there is no cap on the valuation at the time of the next round. So if one of the founders raised money at a $100,000 valuation later, the $50 investor would get 50/100,000th of the shares.

If it were capped, say at a $50k valuation - the investor would get 50/50,000th of the shares, regardless of the valuation.
TCL has the closest syntax to English in term of defining DSL. Other languages claiming DSL support is just glorified functions.
The definition of "reality tee vee" given: shows about "talentless narcissists who like to talk about themselves and go shopping".

This is the kind of material that has endeared North Korea to propaganda cognoscenti everywhere.
Look more people need to be coding and understand as much as possible about frameworks, databases, javascript, RoR, NodeJS, responsive design, dev time frames, Agile, etc.

I am a UX Designer who can code (Rails, Javascript, CSS etc.) and it embarasses me when I talk to others that are just 'wireframe monkeys'. If you don't know HTML how can anyone trust your designs?

I can only take so much - UX people need to step up and LEARN this stuff. If you don't you will just pave your own path to irrelevancy.

If it were up to me there would be some other way to describe UX ppl that know tech and those that can merely hit something with the pretty stick and leave devs scratching their heads...
This disables contact syncing for iOS devices. I hope this gets solved before the cut off date.
This is pretty common, but yes, it is annoying. Try going to the "About" page on Quora while logged in without accidentally following random users or topics: http://www.quora.com/

A fixed footer could solve this issue.
LinkedIn's shy footer is a drop in the bucket of troubles for their dev staff. Things are so horribly broken. For instance, I have a notification that will never go away: http://i.imgur.com/cgJbc.png

Their UI is noisy, broken, difficult to navigate, and seems like it was designed entirely by MBAs who know nothing about their computers, let alone design.
I would never give lots of money to people I love. For the most part, they've struggled to get where they are in life, and that successful struggle is a source of pride and self respect.

If you give someone like that a lot of money, it makes all their own accomplishments meaningless in the same way the subject of the story had his own accomplishments made meaningless by such a big windfall. They'll lose a big source of self respect. They'll resent you for it, even if they don't understand why.
The answer changes significantly if the question is phrased as "How many bits of information can a human possibly recall (if given enough time)?" Estimates of this from a few studies are at about merely 10-30 MB [1].

[1] www.amazon.com/Ai-Tumultuous-History-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0465001041/
On the other hand, that might have been a political statement, specially if he really was an asshole and other people agreed with the assessment.

It wouldn't be surprising if some people left on their own after the incident.
It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/douglas-r-hof...

I see what DRF means, and The Singularity is Near did seem mostly a perfunctory literature review, with important issues not discussed, just skimmed over. (For example, he doesn't discussed the causes of accelerating returns, doesn't support the causes with data, only the effects. Another example: is it necessarily true that we are intelligent enough to understand ourselves? We're effective when we can something decompose hierarchically into simpler concepts... but what if there isn't such a decomposition of intelligence? i.e. the simplest decomposition is too complex for us to grasp. Hofstadner asks if a giraffe is intelligent enough to understand itself.)

But I thought he supported his basic thesis, that progress is accelerating, compellingly. Really did a great job (seems to be the result of ongoing criticism, and him finding ways to refute it).
Why investor require start-up having a co-founder?
I contacted a lot of investors and accelerators. I found most of them don`t care about the product itself too much, but strongly requiring start-up should have a co-founder.

Why?

Perhaps some of founder them don`t know about programming or designing, so they may need a co-founder like CTO to responsible for that.

But what if the founder is good for both programming and designing skills and more, managing the start-up petty by one person?

I think finding or hiring an excellent A-player co-founder and employee is hard and impossible for start-up in early stage, but it may be possible after the start-up received funds from investor.
I posed two scenarios where a libertarian view doesn't introduce any penalty for externalities, and so he world goes to shit.

The point I'm trying to make, is that the current system has pathologies where it doesn't impose any penalty for externalities either. So pointing out that the libertarian position is less than perfect is hardly an explosive revelation. I don't believe any political system is perfect, but I think more people will achieve more happiness, overall, under the libertarian model. But, again, I'm somebody considers freedom (in the "freedom from force & agression" sense) to be it's own end, which is sufficient apart from any arguments related to economics, punishment for crime, etc. It also happens that I do believe that the libertarian model can address those issues as well as, or better than, other models, but that's actually a secondary point to me.

I think that's a perfectly valid viewpoint, and getting all in a lather abut why roads are bad just confuses the issue.

I never said roads were bad. I'm all for honest, sincere debate and reasonable discussion, but I'd ask you to please not put words in my mouth. Just because there's a weak stereotype that some people try to play up that "libertarians are against (roads|feeding the poor|fire protection|etc)" doesn't make it true.
>It's a shame, he's brought many great contributions to our field

What field? The fluffsters? Saying stuff like, "Ideas are presented in a way to fit nicely together, but ultimately lack any depth or critical insights.", is saying nothing.
This is hardly the worst UI pattern in existence, especially when you consider that even a poorly implemented autoscroll is an order of magnitude improvement over the UX experience it replaces.
LinkedIn releases new version of Data Fu (UDFs for Hadoop/Pig)
I don't understand why people building these infinite-scroll pages don't just make the footer float at the bottom of the screen. That addresses this problem and lets you keep infinite scrolling.
3.) The CIA knew, and were ignored.

4.) The CIA knew, and didn't know that they knew.
Yet another GCC oddity
Thanks I will check it out. Like I say I hope to do a few more blog posts around this topic. Feel there isn't anything like it on the web.

Also thinking about maybe a course to help teach younger/new web developers.
Everytime I hear about Google starting to charge for something, or taking something away, I remember the time someone just told me to use Google because it was free, and easy.

I should have noted that they hadn't been on the internet in the 90's when Microsoft did the same with Hotmail, and others.

Ultimately, nothing is free.

Still,I can't help but wonder if ads in emails didn't generate enough cash so now it's tiem to charge.
They don't want to lose the vertical space?
Show HN: Open For Business Plans - No templates, no signups, just business plans
http://www.ceoe.udel.edu/windpower/resources/BudischakEtAl-2...

And I haven't read it yet, but I guess storage costs rise very sharply for every additional 9 you want in your reliability. 90% could mean a month without power each year. To get from there to 99% or a week one very two years by improving storage capacity, you would likely need capacity for at least three weeks of full load.
Nate Silver Talk at Google (Nov 26th Video)
IMAP and CalDAV will still work, so non-Android users are not going to be left out in the cold. Contacts can be synced with CardDAV. I get occasional errors syncing with CalDAV but I haven't tried to debug them or anything so it could easily be my stupid.
Must work at microsoft, only once actually mentioning the word "great" and "windows 8" in the same sentence do to make it seem better than it is.
Apparently all devices currently using Google Sync will continue to work. The suggested route for new devices is IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/winter-cleaning.html