skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Usual half-explanation. The CTO works on behalf of the startup's investors, working towards efficiency, calculating performance metrics and revenue/expense figures and whatever else the guys providing the money need to see. This is an executive role.

The VP Engineering is essentially a management role, coordinating the company's product team(s) and ensuring they implement the CEO's vision. Ideally, the VP Engineering should be inspiring to his/her subordinates, but this is not strictly required so long as employees are producing.
He joined Google as Director of Engineering. He didn't join Google as Director of AI Research. Yes, we all read that Ray's intended project was what got Larry Page to hire him, but Director of Engineering over an organization of thousands of engineers is a task all its own. I can't imagine that Ray Kurzweil shows up to work in the morning and tinkers about with his pet project all day; running Google's entire engineering team is something most of us should recognize that we are not adequately prepared to do at this point in our lives.

This entire letter just strikes me as in extremely poor taste. You disagree with Ray Kurzweil's views on AI, because they don't align with yours or your company's[1], so you write an open letter to Larry Page effectively saying that he hired the wrong guy and should have hired you? Very, very transparently self-serving. I realize the self-service was never written verbatim, but it is the subtext; what other purpose would there be to write this letter? "His AI won't work, mine will."

I also have a very strong and violent distaste for anybody who tells me something won't work before even daring to try it on their own. The contrarian engineer, "oh, that will never work," often muttered in reply to using some piece of architecture he has no experience with. He never apologizes when it works, either. Who are you to say what's possible and impossible? Maybe Ray Kurzweil knows something you don't?

Why don't we quietly commend a distinguished engineer and inventor with a decades-long career (undoubtedly, longer than this guy has been alive) for being offered a position worthy of his résumé and leave it at that, often-controversial views aside? Everybody gets caught up in Ray Kurzweil's futurist thinking and forgets that he invented some pretty pedestrian stuff that you and I rely upon daily.

[1]: https://embodiedai.pbworks.com/w/page/29940748/Welcome%20to%...

EDIT: Scott Draves corrected me on my assumption of what a GOOG Director of Engineering is, below. I'm quite wrong.
To Dauw - A simple tool to help you GET SHIT DONE.
I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. The police applying reciprocal violence is most definitely not appropriate in any situation.
Great post DJ. I'm excited to see where you'll be after this next year! I enjoy watching really smart people with dedication excel in programming when they don't have a traditional technical background, like a degree in CS.

"I thought that I could just read a book and know how to program."

I felt the same way when I first started with Django. I had been using Python for about 2 years and I assumed I could read a book and pick it up overnight. How naive I was! That was ~3 years ago and I noticed just this past year I've been diving into the Django source to see how certain things are implemented, like different decorators and middleware, so I could _properly_ write my own. I'm constantly learning how to make Django do what I want in the most efficient and pragmatic way. Programming is absolutely a craft that takes time to understand and master. The exact same can be said for the tools and frameworks we use.
Forcing modifications on a soldier is arguably ethically questionable but if these types of enhancements turn out to be safe enough (for some level of safe) then I and many others will voluntarily enhance ourselves.

I would like the gene that let's me eat without getting fat.
I don't want to eat more. I just want to enjoy food.

Needing less sleep sounds awesome. I enjoy sleep but I could mostly skip the unconscious part. Would like to keep the dreams though honestly I hardly have any.

Stronger or more alert sound like awesome enhancements.

Telepathy is already here. It's called a cell phone with wireless headset.
A year ago I would have bought that. Log out, look at the front page and repeat this with a straight face:

>It has the potential to affect and influence generations.
www.setu.ps

+ several 3 or 4 character .com/.net/.org domain names. E-mail is in profile if anybody is interested.
That's American culture, and to a lesser extent, Western culture. It might also be Asian / Eastern culture, I do not know about that.

But it is not universal - there are subcultures that pay more attention to substance than to form. I've seen companies like that before - if you look hard, I'm sure you can find one.
How should I contact you about one of these domains?
There are exceptions. I certainly listen to such people, but prefer to talk one-on-one rather than in the hurly burly of meetings. As @_Offh points out, in many situations the loud mouths dominate the meetings but not necessarily the results.

I would like to think that the person you mention is being appreciated by their boss. They did hire him for his/her skill and knowledge in the first place. Sadly style often wins over substance. You only need to look at the many missteps by executives in our top companies for evidence.
Not sure what I'd use it for yet but I'd take your first one.
I think that is a very slippery argument when it comes to (magnet) links, and the Internet. I can tell you where you can buy drugs or prostitutes in the city where I live. If I do, am I "aiding" you in committing a crime? If a newspaper reports the same thing, are they "facilitating" a crime?
If you used this many gratuitous visual effects in a Power Point presentation I'd think you were an idiot with no sense of taste, but because it's being rendered in a web browser I think this is impressive for some reason.
Reasonable offers considered.

If you really do consider reasonable offers you are part of a rare breed :) I have yet to email the owner of an unused domain name, Godaddy parking page still intact just like when they registered it three years ago, offered them a few hundred dollars and not gotten a response back that would be more appropriate for haggling over the price of their first born child.
Ignoring the arguments about the direction of the company, I'd like to restate how bad hbo.com was.

Upon reading what you'd said, I opened a new tab and went there. I had 2 seconds of a white screen. Then I had 21 (!!!) seconds of the black screen you described, with no indication that the page was still loading any content. At second 22, a loading icon appeared in the middle of the screen, then from second 23 - 25 all the website content loaded and rendered at once.

Those results are truly terrible, especially given my internet connection (100mbps+) and computer (high performance).

If HBO wants a web presence, they should really get it together (although maybe they don't want a web presence...).
Why Facebook Poke Scratches A Much-Needed Itch
"Following strict TDD doesn't prevent this"

Actually, following strict TDD does prevent this.

You must see a test fail before you make it pass. It goes "Red -> Green -> Refactor" not just "Green -> Refactor". Even if a valid test case passes on the first time, one should modify the test (or the code) in a known way to cause an expected failure.

Your premise (tests are only as correct as the spec of initial assumptions) is correct, but your supporting example is not.
IDEO's David Kelley on CBS' 60 Minutes
I don't get this. It's a multi-GB game that already needs to be downloaded over internet. Why don't they just bundle the dependencies, or at least make it installable via steam as a separate component? There should be no reason for a game to ever ask you to become root.
What if most of the historical records are work of fiction. ;)
> it is not corrupt

Well, time to cross that one out of the list. It might just be a small part so far, but since there's nothing to oppose it, it will spread like a disease.

Quickly or slowly, depending on lots of factors. But with nothing to oppose the spread, it is unlikely to stop.
100% of US RDA of feeling of superiority, no matter who you are or how much you've fucked up your own life.
How, at all, is that in poor taste? If you believe in something, believe it!
Perfect for a startup within the online education space...

classroom (dot) me
Imprisoned by the Haskell Toolchain
"Impeccable" in this case only means, "not as bad a job as Digg or Quora".

Reddit has clearly meddled with the site in the past for business reasons (e.g. the Sears thing, /r/jailbait), and the hands-off-unless-we-change-our-mind policy of the administration has led directly to extreme frustration among the site's biggest influences and moderators of larger subreddits.

The only thing that separates Reddit from Digg-2.0 at this point is that there is not yet another site for disgruntled users to migrate to.
Timidity tends to read as lack of confidence, which is a social cue suggesting they don't really know or aren't really sure. Most people base their conclusions on that sort of social cue, in part because they frequently lack sufficient knowledge to judge the substance in any meaningful way.
It never crashes my browser, but does stop reloading, or hangs, or whatever, so I have to reload the page. It's only been getting worse over the past 2 years.
If you're interested in these new blogging services, check out Medium[1] which is built by the same guy who build Blogger, and Feathers[2] which is also in the "distraction free blogging" space. I like this trend of minimalism and clean layouts but I do not like the same idea being repeated over and over again without good execution (How do I view posts? Where is the post index? Where is the submit button? Where is the privacy policy and ToS? How will you attain user engagement with such an app? Who owns the content?). More importantly, what does your application offer that other applications in this space do not?

[1]http://medium.com/

[2]http://feathe.rs/
There's a difference between believing in something and explaining it, which I would have loved to read, and openly criticizing Larry Page's hiring decisions because you disagree with the hire's views.

How would you feel if you got hired somewhere, it was a big enough event to make news, and I wrote an open letter saying "bummer you hired geofft; his views on database scaling will never work. Oh, by the way, I run a company that's doing cutting-edge research on database scaling. Glad my name's out there now!"

It's just shitty and low-brow.
Thanks, Jordan. I think traditional schooling conditions us to believe we can just read a book and learn something. It seems to be all about content knowledge instead of process knowledge. One of the most valuable lessons I've learned as a developer is learning how to learn.
All these domains should have been set up with a contact form. If not, please leave a comment.
You have conflated "dating" with "picking up".

Single parent status is not baggage, it's a perk!
I'm pretty sure he was lampooning you. Your reply here makes it hilarious. :-)
An IRC bot in Brainfuck
I think he is arguing that we have an existence proof of exactly one type of intelligence and to assume that we can skip understanding that one and create a new kind is pretty far fetched.
awesome landing page!
The Ultralight Startup
"why don't these idiots recognize how brilliant I am!!!?"

We all know where this is going, he is going to prove how good his AI is by making and selling a kill-bit to the government s of the world and will go down in history as the evil POS that have indiscriminate killing robots to the world just because Google hired Ray and not him.

While Ray will go down as building the helpful AI UI in the worlds self driving cars.
Considering that both of those are in private betas, I can't say either is really relevant to someone wanting to use a service right now. Kudos to sfard for actually launching something.
I understand why they have the requirement, it's because of exclusive and short sighted contracts like this one. And that's what is pathetic.

I have Comcast internet. I asked if they would just mail me a cable box that I could "install". No, a technician had to come out. This was when Comcast had a 4 or 6 hour service window, on weekdays. I actually booked an appointment for them to come out, then cancelled when I realized I wasn't willing to miss work to sit and wait for a technician to deliver something I didn't want.

So yes, if I really wanted it that much I could have found a way to get it. But forcing me to jump through hoops when all wanted to do with give them money so I could use their website... that's pathetic. The entire media industry is stuck in their pathetic ways, and it's pathetic exclusive contracts like this that are preventing innovative companies from disrupting the industry.
> openly criticising Larry Page's hiring decisions because you disagree with the hire's views.

Not forgetting that the letter is based on the misconception that he was hired to work solely on his AI project, rather than Director of Engineering.
Explaining quantum computers with scoops of ice cream
The Millionaire Fastlane, don't let the title fool you. Great advice and insight from the founder of limos.com
Agree. The arguments put forth are nothing but romantic appeals to human supremacy. First, that you can't have intelligence without meat. Second, that you can't have intelligence unless it learns by the same bumbling process that humans use. (An assertion that early intelligent behavior is inversely proportional to later intelligent behavior.) Third, "build a body"? Really? Please email your recipe for building a body that will exhibit intelligence without Darwinian selection across the entire universe to...I don't know...quack.com.
Rails Tutors is now Tealeaf Academy
I, and by extension, you, are assuming it was a misconception at all in the first place. My jury's still out.

Could be a "his views on AI will permeate Google as a whole, too, who happen to be in a position to execute on it" sort of thing, too, knowing full well why he was hired. I agree with the tongue-in-cheek jab above, though, sounds more like a "I know the answer, why don't you?" sort of letter.
Zipcar, Under New Ownership, Tries Fee-Free
Diving into source code is a really great way to learn. You see not just the nuts and bolts described in documentation, but examples of how the parts fit together in actual software. I wish CS degrees included more of this sort of literary analysis of software.
Infinite scroll + History API is sexy, I'd encourage them to give it another shot, this time without breaking the back button.
Pretty minor detail, but got me thinking. I like that the site has a Markdown video tag using the following form:

|video|(http://youtube.com/watch?v=abc)

Haven't seen that in any other Markdown implementations (always hate having to copy the embed code in for Tumblr's half-assed version of it). Is it new to Throwww or is it from another Markdown variation?
I agree with your utilitarian approach to coffee, I drink it with the same mindset. The only problem is I love the taste, the smell, just the whole experience of a good cup of coffee.
Provide a solution for a pain experienced by the masses.
Ask HN: What problems are you working to solve? Why?
Just curious. I hope 2013 will be a big year for technological innovation and scientific discovery. I'm tired of hearing about smarter smartphones and bigger social networks all the time.
Some letters are best left closed. "An Open Letter To..." is just short hand for "blog entry I wrote with link bait name drop".
"A promiscuous imagination like this is dangerous for writers. As an editor, I can see that clearly."

I can't. Why?
Made with Meteor
Well there is a phone with e-ink and 7 day batteries. It's called Motofone F3.

It didn't had much success in Perú. (although I'm an avid fan an ex-user of it)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone
Try youlookgoodtogether.com. It's crowdsourced matchmaking...very interesting idea if I do say so myself.
You are running a Mozilla browser. [...], this presentation has only been tested using WebKit browsers such as Google Chrome or Safari.

sigh Didn't people learn when it was "This has only been tested with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6.0" ?
Hrm. This is a valid critique, I'm sorry it came off like this.

Let me say this, if I'm wrong, and I very well might be, I won't have a moments hesitation in lauding his success. Just as you rightly point out Mr. Kurzweil should be lauded for his many past successes. I wrote this because I care deeply about this topic and want very much for Mr. Page, Mr. Kurzweil, all of us to succeed. I happen to have a bit of experience and knowledge that inform these beliefs but to me this is a goal far too important for ego, so if I'm wrong it won't stop me from cheering.

I appreciate your comment and will try to take your viewpoint into consideration in the future.

Thanks.
There are a number of things we try to stamp out and it is damn hard.

I mod a subreddit with over 100K users. It's difficult to control trolls and others...

At the same time I have petitioned to Yishan directly several times to block /r/picsofdeadkids to no avail.

I use RES to heavily filter out the content I don't want to see.

And while that works wonderfully, I am often turning off the filter as well just to see what is on /r/all...

It is more successful to self-temper and manage your own experience on reddit than to try and change reddit.
focial (dot) com

My contact info is inside my profile.
Regardless of adjective, the choice to characterise children as baggage indicates the mindset of the writer.

If you don't want to be involved in the responsibilities of raising children, make sure your filter has "no kids" set. If you can't set a filter because you are so desperate for any contact that you "cast your net wider", the problem is you.

Feature, not baggage. Unwanted feature? Filter out the undesirable profiles.
This is the tongue-in-cheek slide that McKinley used:

http://image.slidesharecdn.com/continuous-experimentation-12...

I didn't rewatch the entire presentation but McKinley does discuss the user makeup in the experimental groups...yes they do account for different kinds of users, and the most drastic difference between user behavior are between sellers and non-sellers. Someone from Etsy would have to talk about how much slicing-and-dicing of the demographic that they do...but even if infinite scroll was good for some users (new users without pagination-related habits) and not for others, it's probably not a good idea to have two kinds of search experience in the hopes that the "oldies" eventually figure it out...based solely on how hard it is to implement infinite-scroll in the technical sense.
Power surges in Britain caused by millions of people making tea [video]
Seriously. Google is doing what it can to snuff out Firefox.
I'm very skeptical of this recent emphasis on the theory that our complete sensory experience has to be simulated (or replicated via robotics) in order for a strong AI to learn.

All you need to do is read a bit about Helen Keller to know that language should be a sufficient window into our world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller
It depends a lot on the structure of the course.

At my university the freshman course was, for two years, taught in Haskell. To my eternal shame I managed to dodge most of the first year with a fistful of RPLs, so I never got to sample it.

The result was that lots of students dropped out of computer science and went elsewhere. More than had when being taught something else.

So they switched back to a intro course based on Java (which is their main teaching language for the first two years, C is the second language which is picked up in the 2nd half of the first year). Then you go on to bog-standard Data Structures & Algos / Computational Structures courses, Algo course etc etc which is where you learn the ins and outs of sorting, trees and so forth. Or, in my case, you barely do so because you are a lazy student who didn't do his homework.

The upshot is that you wind up spending most of the intro course teaching the mechanics of Java and motivating students with "interesting" examples. Various graphical geegaws, basically. In such cases students usually aren't using the standard lib, they're using a provided library.
I don't, but let me talk louder and slower in case I'm being unclear.

The goal is to sell subscriptions and in-app upgrades to game softwares of exceeding depth and breadth that are operated primarily with a keyboard and mouse.

The Windows PC has arrived at an unsubsidized price floor of about $300-$400 and is unlikely to go lower with Microsoft charging perhaps $40-$80/unit depending on who's licensing. This market sells ~350M units a year with a total installed base of 1.25 BILLION, yet unit sales are declining, desktop Linux is doing nothing to change this, and Blizzard's flagship title is in decline.

The Linux PC cannot go lower than $300-$400 despite essentially $0 licensing costs because virtually nobody is selling or buying raw Linux PC hardware. So the platform is drafting on boutique sales, whitebox sales, and repurposed Windows PCs while still offering no benefits above and beyond standard Windows PCs. At best, it's (currently) worse.

The classical consoles are off limits. Nintendo has no coherent Internet strategy evolving and a severe lack of onboard storage. Sony has allowed a single third-party platform which has no billing support, subscription or otherwise. Microsoft has no third-party platform support. All of these consoles come with significant licensing expenses and do not support software subscriptions. All of these consoles require major rework when porting existing PC titles due to custom CPUs, GPUs, and input frameworks.

Mobile as we understand it is either completely off limits (iOS) or unaccustomed to keyboard and mouse input (Android).

So if you are in the business of selling subscriptions and in-app upgrades to game software that requires keyboards, mice, and untrammeled billing pathways, what are your options for addressing new markets?

There is one: quasi-consoles. Stationary (TELEVISION OR MONITOR OVER HDMI) Android (LINUX) Consoles (MOUSE, KEYBOARD, CONTROLLER SUPPORT) with untrammeled billing pathways (BATTLE.NET) at dramatically lower price points than the existing options ($100) that will enable less-engaged gamers (ME) easy one-click access to pre-existing titles (WORLD OF WARCRAFT).

And in order to do that you first need your titles running on a Linux stack, addressing OpenGL hardware.

Which is what Blizzard Activision is (allegedly) doing.

Ta!
I wonder what manner of chat/discussion tool they'll use to enable this sort of remote-bootcamp experience. Basecamp? Something similar?

If students could watch other people be guided through challenging problems, even a day or two later, replete with code snippets, that might be quite effective.
> Reddit has a unique and incredibly community.

No, it doesn't. Reddit is not a "community", and it does not have "a community". Reddit is millions of people, some of whom form communities in only the loosest possible sense of the word.

There's nothing inherently incredible about Reddit's "community", because Reddit's "community" is a mix of the same people that frequent 4Chan, SomethingAwful, and Fark. Reddit's user base includes people from nearly all walks of life: scum and villains, heroes, poor people, rich people, lonely people, and people who are friends with 500 other people on Facebook.

Reddit's "community" includes /r/askscience, /r/picsofdeadkids (you probably don't want to visit that), /r/bestof, /r/ShitRedditSays ... these things have nothing in common with each-other.

The only reason the various Reddit clones haven't taken off is because they aren't better. Reddit was not a Digg clone, Digg was not a Fark clone, Fark was not a Slashdot clone. Each of these offered a unique experience, some thing that the previous sites did not.