skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My favorite part of the story:
"Pikluk's thousand or so beta-testers have given enthusiastic feedback, the company says."

There's a pretty big difference between good and enthusiastic. "Your site is the worst thing I've ever seen and I hope you die in a fire" is technically enthusiastic feedback.
No, he KNOWS people skim and he puts the bold in to acknowledge it. All of Jakob Nielsen's recommendations are based on testing and measuring those changes that increase client ROI. That's how he defines "useable". He'd rather you skim the bolded parts of the article than just hit the back button because it looked like too much reading.
The problem isn't that the field called "AI" is useless, it's just that they accidentally got away with being called "AI". Without the vast body of research done under the banner of "AI" you wouldn't have OCR, speech recognition, fraud detection, search engines, ...

That said, I also don't think you need to be an expert neural network wrangler and genetic algorithms shaman if you want to study "true AI". You should however have an understanding of the fundamentals behind the techniques used in classical AI so that you can rationally dismiss them, or hell, maybe you'll even find some amazing lead or inspiration in the existing work. After all, the field of AI did start out with ambitions of creating "true AI" (whatever that is).
well then why complain?
That's a valid point.

But there's value in studying things that didn't work. A huge number of obvious approaches to AI have been tried already, and the insights on why they don't work, or why they work on this problem but not this other one, are often the result of huge quantities of time spent on subtle traps and dead ends. To ignore them risks wasting your time all over again.

I think AI boils down to just the problem of managing complexity that all of cs is about. The eventual solution will be vast, and will require designing lots of separate subsystems that work in very different ways and yet need to communicate in subtle ways.

That emphasis on scale goes for research in general, I think. I recommend this video of Malcolm Gladwell talking about the nature of genius and how it's changed over the years.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/gladwe...
He compares the decoding of the rosetta stone and linear B 40 years ago with Andrew Wiles proving Fermat's last theorem in the past decade, and how fundamentally different their respective approaches are.

Both approaches may work, but you have to decide what attitude you want to take. You can either try to be a single monster-mind like Ramanujam sweeping through vast areas of research, or you can assume that won't happen and resign yourself to a lot of effort and learning before you're able to synthesize something useful.

To summarize: I agree that you want to avoid cluttering your mind with the ideology of past approaches. There's huge value though in simply studying the episodic history of a field, to be aware of what has been tried, what worked and what didn't.
Why Wikipedia Will Win
Michael Arrington sees, and seeds, dead startups
There currently are no good general solutions, so the best tool(s) to use strongly depends on the specific problem you're trying to solve, resources you have available, and how good the answer needs to be.

Reading through the Russell & Norvig book would give you a good overview of the sorts of techniques available.
thanks for that correction, i 'learned' that in like the 8th grade, but only just now researched it when the citation was asked for...
If you follow your own path, you will later find various areas of overlap and intersection, but you may avoid sinking into the tar-pit as you would when starting out with ALL the dead weight. It takes tremendous effort to load your brain with all the existing knowledge, and once you do, you may find yourself only able to think in terms of it, having conditioned yourself to other people's failed modes of thinking.
I recently read the book "Super Crunchers", which mentioned a medical database called Isabel. By googling I just found this link: http://www.openclinical.org/aisp_isabel.html

I think it is a kind of AI that seeks to extract medical knowledge from published medical research. So I think it is not just a search engine that would point you into the middle of incomprehensible scientific papers, it somehow helps you with diagnosis and treatments. (I haven't tried it myself)

Not sure how good it is, but as far as I have read, it is definitely a valid concern that individual doctors might not know about the latest research (where "latest" can actually be years and even decades). There was also recently another post on news.yc about the "Checklist", which might go into a similar vein: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=87167
My father (a psychiatrist and researcher) believes nicotine is a prophylactic against alzheimer -- he now chews nicorette, though he never smoked. This probably won't help your mother, but if you're worried about coming down with alzheimer's yourself you might look into it.

A lot of people in my family unfortunately got this disease. I don't know of anything that can reverse its course and I've looked. There are some drugs that are supposed to help a bit but no silver bullet. Google is your friend here (can't recall what they're called, but there are ads for them in all the psychiatric trade journals.)

So much for the wonders of science.

I further suggest you might join an alzheimer's support network to see how other people cope with a loved one that has this. I'm sorry to say, in my experience, alzheimer's can almost be harder on the caregiver than on the afflicted. So your top priority should be taking care of yourself, so that when you are around your mom you can give her the love and affection she needs and be tolerant of her lapses.
Would you buy a telephone from a company named Ribbit?
I think that is a function of attitude, and not a function of how much existing material you've read.
Speculatively, Quercetin (a bioflavonoid, available as a supplement) might help:

https://www.alzinfo.org/newsarticle/templates/archivenewstem...

Alzheimer's is also speculatively related to CJD, i.e. mad cow. That is, many cases of Alzheimer's may actually be undiagnosed CJD. New application of existing drugs may help:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1490177.stm

Of course for prevention, and/or avoiding re-exposure, I'd avoid anything that came from a cow, or anything fed on cow parts (which pretty much means to avoid any animal product from a factory farm). U.S. food practices are exceedingly ill-advised.

Edit: I recall something about aluminum build-up in the brain, though I'm not sure of how well correlated it is.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_216a.html

Aluminum-free deodorants and baking powders are very easy considerations.
Digg hires bank, hoping to sell for $300 million or more
Striking writers in talks to launch Web start-ups
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=R...

This is based on computational modeling only and it is very early research, but there still might be something there.
Long tail evolution
I bet that's just because you're not used to it. Neither am I, but I get a strong feeling that the concepts that Erlang lets you program in terms of are extremely powerful for writing efficient, correct code for multi-CPU systems.
Where in the world is ... (imagery update)
It's pretty hard to learn something just by reading. It takes doing. That's where you get stuck in someone else's mindset.
Why we use i, j, and k in for loops
When someone says "AI", I think they mean AI, not e.g. path-finding for writing a Quake bot.

Of course a real AI would be much better at all those things you mentioned anyway -- like deciding which of my e-mail messages are spam.

Or carrying on a conversation.

P.S. I'm an AI.
A protocol for secure distributed social neworking (with prototype)
Netflix Prize - is RMSE a good measurement? No.
Do you Market to ALL The Senses?
The Polarization of Extremes
Surely Fortran merely copied existing math conventions.
Not in academia. In academia, as far as I can tell, they pretty much exclusively mean narrow AI when talking about "AI". Us lay people might be thinking of HAL and Skynet when we say "AI" though. ;-)

Yes, I fully agree that a "real AI" would be able to do those things better, but my point is that we do have real practical utility from the narrow AI tradition, and their work isn't for nothing.
I used to write a daily Alzheimer's newsletter for a small home-business based in Cummings, GA. Part of my job was to cover upcoming research studies, recent findings, and that sort of thing.

Music therapy seems to be developing as a respected treatment method. Anything that promotes a patient's creativity is highly recommended.

I can remember covering at least one positive story every week about Omega-3 and/or antioxidants.

Other than that keep your ear to the ground for upcoming research studies looking for participants.

I've been up for a couple days or something, so I'm losing my coherence here. E-mail me and I can put you in touch with some really good people who are more up-to-date on current progresses in the field than I am. They keep normal sleep hours, too.
What is "AI proper", though? I am fairly certain that when the true AI will be built, it won't be an expert system or based on first order logic.

The classical AI stuff is still interesting, of course, and still has practical applications (ie A* search for games). But I tend to count "the other stuff" (ie Data Mining) as AI, too.
I don't see what's wrong with Skype, frankly. The boast about it being the first Silicon Valley phone company seems silly, like saying Skype is Europe's first phone company (is it Dutch?).

The thing about Skype is it puts the workload on the desktop CPU, not the server, and puts the bandwidth load onto the Kazaa-like network. Clever stuff, which means they make a lot of profit (barring acquisition write-downs).
Yes I know people skim, but he makes it worse and actively deters from reading by doing it.
My day job is as an ER nurse, so I'm afraid that I'll only be able to give "inside the box" advice. Although, I don't think that you're going to hurt anything if you try herbal stuff. But, the problem is, with the brain, once the damage is done, it's done, because the hardware/software is broken. And, certainly, if you want a second or even third opinion, by all means, go ahead and get them. Be sure you've gotten an MRI at some point, and seen a Neurologist. There are a few diseases like heavy metal poisoning that can cause similar symptoms. But again, even with those, once the damage is done, it's done, and there isn't much you can do when it's rea

About the only good thing about Alzheimer's is that the person really doesn't suffer much, because they forget what they are going through. Although periods of agitation and frustration are common.

The worst thing about Alzheimer's is it's effect on the family. It's known as "The long goodbye" because it is such a slow, debilitating disease. The family slowly sees the loved one disappear week after week. It is heart wrenching.

Keeping the patient as mentally active as possible has been proven to delay the progression of the disease. Surrounding the patient with familiar objects that they've had around for years can be reassuring. Some of the best dementia units in skilled nursing facilities that I've seen have an "antique row" or a hallway filled with antiques" that the patients can wander back and forth in that often reassures them.

But, probably the best thing that can be done for the patient as well as the family, is to sit around and talk about memories. Talk about the good times, and tell stories about each other. It helps the family to grieve and because the long term memories are the last to go, it helps give the patient a sense of the familiar, and that's usually reassuring.

Hang in there, man. It's tough.
Ask YC: Do you register more than just the .com for your site?
Also curious how many years people register their domains for.
I remember reading some months back on reddit I think that exercise has been shown to promote neuron growth in rats. I searched google just now and found this: http://www.paulspoerry.com/index.php/2007/09/14/excersize-ma...

Also, from my experience and from what I've heard/read from others, periodic fasting helps renew the body and slows aging.

So here are my suggestions as a non-expert:
1) Exercise as much as possible: at least an hour per day, the longer and more strenuous the better. Exercise in the sun and the open air is preferable.
2) Eat a simple vegetarian diet with lots of colorful fruits and vegetables.
3) Restrict calories, eat slightly less than needed.
4) Fast once a week.
5) Use the mind: converse, read, write.
6) Find something useful to do, a reason to live. Victor Frankl's experience in the concentration camp comes to mind: a person with a strong purpose can endure much.
7) Play music, sing, or at least listen to good music.
8) Avoid contact with cats, because of Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that gets into the brain of its hosts and affects it.

To me, these all seem like common sense measures for good physical and mental health, maybe to you too, but I've been to nursing homes and hospitals where the patients are treated in the opposite way: kept sedentary and indoors, overfed greasy processed foods, relieved of responsibilities that give purpose, and fed an intellectual diet of TV. This regime seems designed to make a healthy person sick, not vice versa.
I used to do this (back in 1998-2002 or so), but it doesn't really make sense to do so, unless you intend to actually use them differently, or if your domain somehow makes more sense with ".net" after it or something.
It's amazing how people just don't get what Google is doing, and why. As with Microsoft, they do lots of things that are failures on their face but serve secondary purposes.

A free 411 service that is promoted in lots of odd places. Duh, they want to train a speech-to-text parser, and that's the best way to do it.

Gmail is much better than Yahoo Mail but lags behind, it was invite-only, etc. But they have a very valuable probe into people's mailing habits. Spam usually needs a link, so they can better detect and remove spam pages from their index. And via the invite map, they have a nice graph of connections and influences between people. I'll bet cash they've used email analysis to gauge the price of new keywords or even the "buzz" index of startups.

Free website analysis? Free wireless? Free "web accelerators"? Beautiful way to get the information they need to make their index better. There is no need to be #1 n any of these things.

The same thing can be said for News, etc.
Well have you written an automated email your-life-understander and automatic-reply-drafter to use people's 2nd CPU?

Well there you go, left behind.
I was going to say that his site seems surprisingly badly designed for a usability expert. The jittery typography makes it exhausting to read. And yet maybe it does appeal to some people. Or rather, work on them. There may be a reason all those sites with PROVEN techniques for generating a six figure income all look so similar.

http://www.leemarketinggroup.com/page/page/5189275.htm
1 + 1 is 2, not 3.
"About the only good thing about Alzheimer's is that the person really doesn't suffer much, because they forget what they are going through. Although periods of agitation and frustration are common."

In my experience, that is one of the new things they remember.
That was exactly what I was thinking. n is used for naturals, i, j and k are used for variable values in sums, for example (which, when programmed, would require the use of "for" loops).
I always thought it was because programmers were too lazy to write a couple of extra characters to make a nice descriptive variable name. At least that's why I do.
Summize: A Sentiment Engine For The "Reviewosphere"
I register all available major TLDs (com/net/org/cn/jp/kr/etc) and I register them for 10 years (because of SEO).
For Sale: Used Social Voting Site, Asking Price $300 Million, Goes By The Name Of Digg
You should try the authors of hippocratech.org

They might be able to refer you to health websites or answer your questions. They only write about finding health resources and they're drug specialists themselves.

Doesn't hurt to try
Clearly it is in deference to D i j k stra. ;-)
Yeah, that's a good solution. I guess I just didn't understand that from what you posted originally.
Orson Scott Card on software companies
Here's a chance to share the best corporate euphemism I've ever heard:

Explosions = "unscheduled releases of energy"
I see it has been mentioned, but I'd also like to recommend omega-3 supplementation. Seth Roberts has experimented a lot and recommends a dose of 2-3 tablespoons every day. You can look at his blog if you're interested: http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/category/nutrition/omega-3/.
Sure, we are... But the question is why did we arbitrarily start incrementing from 'i' instead of 'a'?
What's the advantage of their solution over VoIP, and will they be hit with the same lawsuits that are rocking Vonage?
Reducing day-to-day information noise
Some thoughts on the madness of information noise that we struggle daily with.
Does i stand for 'integer' or possibly 'index'? I also wonder how far into the past it goes, 19 century?
Wow! I did a global search for the variables "i", "j", and "k" in this 2000 line program I have to enhance, and I got all of them and a whole lot more! What a great idea!
int i; float f; char c;
Jiggy: An Easy Web-Based IDE for iPhones
Goog-411: Google is just using you
float f;
unsigned u;
char c;
key_t k;

That's how I swing, man.
"... Yeah, that's definitely a nice, practical book for machine learning stuff (but not really AI proper). For a practical book on AI itself, Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming ..."

It is ironic that the man who wrote the book uses different methods (maths) to extract meaning from data at google ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=90298

Something smells about AI.

It has been well funded, attracted the best minds (Minsky, McCarthy, Newell) at places like MIT, Stanford and resulted in lots of useful languages & tools. [0] From Cyc to Powerset companies have tried to use these techniques trying to assign human like intelligence to machines yet have failed.

Why?

Bruce Stirling reckons it has to do a lot with the language. [1] Assigning intelligence to what is essentially a 21'st century equivalent of knitting mills or steam engines of yesteryear. Maybe thats why Google has taken the approach it has. Instead of creating intelligent software to find the meaning, take an insight into users who have pre-assigned intelligence to documents. And use well known sorting, linking techniques and software engineering along with not-so-well applied math techniques. Thus make google appear to make sense of what we search for.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

[1] ITConversations, 'Bruce Stirling, The Internet of Things, 58m, 26.4 mb, 2006MAR06' ~ http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail717.html
That seems like a huge price to pay for digg - especially since I assume the way to make money off social news sites is with ads, and the type of community digg attracts is the type that blocks/ignores ads. Maybe I'm way overestimating how many people use that, or maybe that's why they haven't been bought yet?
"... That seems like a huge price to pay for digg ..."

Timing is everything. Given the current situ, digg may end up being a web2 wallflower as the capital to make such big purchases dry up.
The price isn't the only thing that's high.

Bill: Dude, are we better than Reddit?
Ted: Like, yeah, man, totally.
Bill: Dude, like how much better?
Ted: Like a hundred times, bro!
Bill: Then we should like sell it for... like... a hundred times as much!
Ted: Whoah, do you have any idea how much weed that would buy?
[They look at each other]

Wyld Stallyns!
This should work
http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=%22this...
or this might work
http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=%22this...
(response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=90476)
Could it have something to do with the keyboard layout?

On standard keyboards "i" is just above "j & k". Also in basic typewriter tuition, your right hand apposing finger starts on the keyboard at the letter "j" when you commence typing. "k" has your right index finger. Most people being right handed these letters are pretty much the first & most intuitive letters to use.
Yes, learning by doing is good. But learning by doing involves feedback loops between reading about what others did and trying to do your own. Artists must both learn to appreciate art and keep practicing their own craft.

I'm not saying that you have to learn everything before doing anything. That's a strawman. I'm saying you shouldn't ignore any source of knowledge, that you should look everywhere taking the good and leaving out the bad. And that's a Bruce Lee quote as well.

The concern about contagion is valid; my attitude towards it is that it happens not so much from what you read but who you talk to and the social circles you move in. Keep those diverse and you should be fine.
(response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=90481)
Language Pissing Match - My language can beat up your language
Yeah... he had such an awesome name for who he turned out to be.
Errr... i, j, k are often used in mathematical proofs in summations and things like that... are we sure that's not why Fortran used them in the first place?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Math or Fortran?
I don't understand a basic concept here. How does Netflix assign a monetary value to the improvement in rating prediction?

For example, does rating prediction affect their inventory management? Or is it more of an issue of customers trusting/liking Netflix better if it's recommendations are better?
> I always thought it was because programmers were too lazy to write a couple of extra characters to make a nice descriptive variable name.

Nah. A variable name's descriptiveness (and length) should be proportional to the size of the scope in which it's used. A simple loop index should almost never be longer than i, j, k, etc.
If you can get stuck in a mindset by following a specific trajectory of action then it doesn't matter whether you're following somebody deliberately or just blindly finding the same path.

In fact, reading what somebody did will often help you avoid going down a path. I've read of many many more algorithms, successful and unsuccessful, than I've ever implemented.
Well, I'm just using Google, so I don't feel so bad about it... ;-)
> The idea that you have to learn everything before doing anything is a strawman.

If you don't learn everything, then you must have some independent criterion with which to pick and choose; and having such a facility, one may as well simply start down whichever path one feels is most appropriate anyway.

In other words, if you can somehow rule out large swaths of possibilities without even trying them, then you must have some intuitive feel for the problem (or at least, have an intuitive feel for what you think the solution is likely to resemble, whether or not you turn out to be correct). In such a case, you are investigating based on your own intimations and your efforts will develop from there, rather than from from a top-down view -- which has so far been amply demonstrated not to work.

Edit: The recommendation to look "everywhere" is untenable, because at some point you have to stop casting about if you are going to get anything done yourself.
Do you think that FB will last 30 years? I don't.
You don't really understand something until you implement it. And AI is unlikely to be an algorithm like those we are familiar with...
If you're Guy Kawasaki you spend over $1000 (just for the first year) registering 55 domain names for a single website:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/by_the_numbers_.html
Is this a direct competitor with tsumobi?