skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author of that rant is a purist. He believes that if everyone would slow down, learn Lisp values and implement them in their code, so that eventually they, and perhaps more importantly the next generation will be far better able to focus on essential difficulties rather than incidental ones.

His argument is that perl programmers are all busy solving immediate problems that would have never been problems to begin with if everyone had been using Lisp the way it was meant to be used. And they're often not solving problems in Lisp-fashion.
Stockpiling large quantities of biological and chemical weapons? Er... doubt it.
How do you know for sure though? None of these groups ever started out by communicating their ultimate intent at first. Aum started as a humble local yoga club.
400 Million Downloads For Firefox In Less Than Three Years
Nah. When computers become self-aware, they'll just band together and apply to YC.
Im glad IE has a real competitor. It has finally made Microsoft step it up to stay feature relevant.
Why would they apply to YC when they would theoretically communicate with each other and just reallocate trillions in funds to accounts they setup? Like why bother with the whole application/startup/VC-funding/IPO when they can just take over the bank databases and declare themselves instant trillionaires?
How can you buy something you already own?
To delay existential depression, may be...
Eww. Better to use C++ than AVL trees.
Don't be so sure ... intelligence is based on self-awareness, which is in turn a function of complex systems once they reach a certain tipping point. Do your individual brain cells understand that they form the basis for your mind? Of course not. But they do. For all we know all our constant e-blabbering on the internet is somehow contributing to the formation of some "Mega-Mind" in some way that is just as incomprehensible to us as your mind is to the brain cells that make it. How then can you be sure that computers have not already reached some sort of systematic self awareness? Perhaps they have and are trying to get rid of us by flooding the internet with porn and flash games in order to pre-occupy us and distract us from doing what it takes to keep the economy going. Think about it. Next time you read about how online porn is a multi-billion dollar industry, ask yourself, "Who actually pays for this stuff when it's all availabe for free?" Nobody. So how does it keep popping up when there's no money being paid? Computer conspiracy - that's how. All these social networks - were they really started by humans? Or by computers in order to keep us busy and distracted? How do you know they were started by humans? Because you read an article on a computer that says there's this guy, Mark Zuckerwhatever, and he started Facebook, etc. What if he's just a computer composite of a non-existing human? What if facebook was actually started by artificial intelligence? What if my response is also not generated by a human but by some online AI entity to mess with your mind? See - you never know - best play it safe and leave the possibility open.
I think there was some book about this a while ago that was making all the raves in geek circles ... the lucifer principle or the lucifer mind or something like that.
Simple, dogmatic answers to rhetorical questions? Check!
Great post. Extra respect for 'I make these predictions so everyone can say "Don't you feel foolish now?" when I'm wrong. I learn better when it's humiliating. ;-)'
Edit: delete as in this is spam
Regarding point #4...Maybe they've demoed their stuff to investors which is why they've gotten a lot of cash?
>> Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged?
TED: Ray Kurzweil delivers inspirational talk on the power of accelerating technology; AI by 2029
+50% rate of success?

Check.
"Leader espouses a "means justifies the ends" creed? Super-check"

In general this is kind of funny, but I'm honestly not sure what you're referring to in the point above.

Plus you have an itso in point 12.
http://www.stanford.edu/~blp/avl/

* Binary search trees
* AVL trees
* Red-black trees
Success being defined as ... what exactly? By whom?
>Simple, dogmatic answers to rhetorical questions?

Yes.
OK, as posted by someone who joined 4 days ago this is most likely a troll, but still, that was probably the most entertaining thing I've read on ycnews!

(cue /. humour tagline: "It's funny. Laugh.")
Next up: Is your job the next Aum Shinrikyo?

Zealous focus on charismatic leadership to whom inner-circle members display unquestioning commitment?

"Yes, Mr. CEO, the numbers all add up. I'll have those reports for you in a moment."

Members required to relocate in order to increase dependency on the group?

"No telecommuting for you!"

Preoccupation with bringing in new members?

"We're hiring! Tell all your friends! You get a bonus for bringing in new people!"

Group receives constant messages to let go of material aspirations ("Success is not about the money"), yet the tone of the group overall is a preoccupation with making money?

"Budgets are tight this year, so you won't be getting that raise you thought you would. But don't worry, it's not about the money, and we'll make it up to you at the holiday party! Keep up the good work, and don't let those sales numbers slip."

Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged?

"I can't have you questioning my authority like that..."

Mind-numbing techniques like debilitating work schedules used to suppress functions of pre-frontal cortex in order to decrease cognitive resistance to the group ethos?

"Mandatory overtime for everyone!"

The leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act, and feel?

"You! Button that collar, and I want to see cufflinks tomorrow!"

The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its members, and especially its leader, who is seen as being on some sort of special "mission" which only he and the group see the true significance of?

"We're miles ahead of the competition."

Pervasive and persistent "us-vs.-them" mentality where "them" consists of people who "just don't get it"?

"Bury the competition!"

Leadership leverages shame to induce feelings of guilt and encourages others to do so as well in order to manipulate residual self-images of members?

"Everybody else in the division is counting on you!"

Members' subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group?

"Honey, I haven't seen you in weeks! You're spending all day at the office, and then just go to sleep as soon as you come home."

Members must submit their individual schedules to moderated group activities they feel pressure to engange in?

"You must be in by 8:00 AM each day."

Members are strongly encouraged to live and/or socialize mostly/only with other group members, with implication that doing so is an unspoken prerequisite for advancement in group?

"I'd like to see you at our Friday afternoon happy-hour"

Pervasive doomsday scenarios with grave repurcussions for failure to comply with implications?

"If we don't hit the numbers this quarter, management is threatening to kill the whole project."

Leader claims to have contact with superior beings who are inaccessible to "normal" people?

"The other day I called my friends at McKinsey..."
6) Find an alien civilization desiring another planet.

7) ???

8) Use step 7 to get the aliens to buy the planet instead of taking it.

9) Profit!
Obvious troll is obvious. But getting better at least. Nice rhetorical schtick . . . I used to use this one to "prove" that America had all the traits of a fascist dictatorship.

Is this one of the guys from Uncov? (Which, if you haven't seen it, is pretty hilarious for about 45 minutes and then . . . kind of pathetic.)
This reminded me of my uncle's dog. You should have seen it chase its tail. when I first saw it, it was very funny. But then it quickly became the saddest thing I ever saw. It would chase its tail for hours till it became exhausted. My uncle explained that it was imagining its tail to be some snake that caught on to it. The dog had imagination, except it was paranoid. It died a few months later exhausted, bitter and lonely.
It is, actually, pretty difficult to judge whether a group is a (destructive) cult or not only by what the leader or its members are saying or how the group is working. The border is pretty blurry. I learned it in hard way (by tring to save a friend from one).

A good test (though not perfect) is to look at the output of the group---is the group producing outcome that contribute to the society at large? Are the people came out of the group taking important roles in the society? Many cults claim they will do that, but fail to deliver that.
Oh piss off. It hasn't happened yet so acting like it's inevitable without giving a shred of reason why except people have been wrong in the past is unreasonable because people have been predicting the coming of strong AI for decades now and they've been the ones who were wrong.

I think what's much more realistic and almost certainly inevitable is things like brain implants and other hybrid human-computer stuff. I'd be the first to sign up for something like that. And by the time it's ready it'll be able to store most if not all of recorded human knowledge - the implications of implanting that in a child's head in lieu of putting them through school for 10-15 years is in itself amazing.
Don't be so sure of what?

I am totally positive that most people don't give a shit about machine learning or data mining even though it's amazing technology. I am sure I am right about that.
Heh its a a Cosmo quiz for geeks :P

29
Maybe it's a false assumption that self-aware intelligent computers will automatically be super-crackers that can manipulate any computer-based system. Heck, maybe the first self-aware intelligent computer operates at a time-scale a thousand times slower than our speed because it'll be modeling cortical operations more serially due to fewer processing units (compared to all our neurons). We could also firewall the first self-aware units so they could only communicate through a cheap speakerphone and snail mail :) Then they'd have to play nice with the rest of us.
Well, that's hard to say - many cults actually make associations with successful people and then claim that their success is based on the influence/teachings of the cult. I'm sure some people think scientology is a cult (it is in the process of being declared criminal in some EU member states) and Sky Dayton seems to be doing ok. And of course, the trickiest part is that the group always claims that its output is beneficial and if you don't understand how it is, well then that's why you need the group to explain it to you.
But they're so amusing!

Oh hell, I've got startup to work on, that's more fun anyways.
> It hasn't happened yet so acting like it's inevitable without giving a shred of reason why except people have been wrong in the past is unreasonable because

"Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men." -- George Bernard Shaw
Someone should report you to the ASPCA for neglecting your lonely dog. Shame on you!
Amen, dfranke.
Spreading Your Wings
So... people who tend to be smart tend to achieve more? How is this news?
If you want to think about the singularity, you owe it to yourself to listen to Bruce Sterling's awesome deconstruction of the subject:

http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/
(search for him near the bottom of the page)

Talk of the singularity reminds me of the furor over human cloning - it's an excellent generator of fantasy-lit plot coupons, late-night drunken dorm-room philosophy, and paranoid fundamentalist ravings, but in real life it's much more boring. I know lots of human clones - they're called "identical twins", and they are little different from anyone else. And, speaking as a strong AI that is composed of trillions of microscopic robots working in tandem, it's hard to be impressed by yet another strong AI like me. There's well over six billion of us already, and that's being awfully ungenerous to chimps, gorillas, dogs, and my pet parrot. If I really wanted another strong AI, wouldn't it be cheaper and easier just to stop using birth control? Or to go to the pound and adopt a friendly but unwanted puppy?

To pick on a different example: it is the height of human egotism to believe that our scientists can create a "grey goo" that would scare a bacterium, let alone me. Bacteria have been dividing every few minutes for several billion years. They cover every inch of the earth, and compose large portions of the soil. As I type this, billions of bacteria are actively trying to digest me. It's no big deal. We grew up with this problem and have coped with it all our lives, as did our ancestors - and I'm not talking about our African ancestors, our shrewlike ancestors, or our fishlike ancestors, but about our algal mat ancestors. We've got a lot of experience, and the bacteria have even more. In a battle between a human-designed replicator and a cubic foot of soil bacteria, I'm going to bet on the machine that's had a longer design cycle.
Or maybe it would be millions of computers working in concert over some sort of thing like, um ... some thing where computers all over the world can speak to each other and use parallel processing to combine computing resources into one big giant mega-mind. And maybe just like when you see those weird videos on Spike with guys who get shot in the head and lost millions of brain cells but can still function, maybe we can isolate many many computers but the difference it will make will be negligible at best on the super-mind. And then maybe it will fight back by triggering tax audits and false warrants for the arrest of any hackers smart enough to threaten its existence.
About not believing in the inevitable coming of bona fide AI, as you sate in your post above. For all you know it's happening already on the internet in some weird way that remains as incomprehensible to us as your mind does to the brain cells that it consists of.
It is possible to percieve very many things as cult-like, especially if you try to imagine how people will look at them in, say, 200 years (e.g. fashion, university, jobs, using drugs, not using drugs, being a sportsfan, being a nerd, following societal norms, constantly quoting the big lebowski, etc. etc.). Play along by looking at people's lives and beliefs throughout history, and try to work out who were the least culty.

The conclusion I came to is that it it generally best to work things out for yourself, and rarely bad to question your assumptions.
He really should have tried Opera before writing this post.
So sorry. Next forum: "YCombinator is super-awesome and infallible!" Commentary anticipated to range from "LOL" to "LoLoLoLoL".
Recycling startups?
Some startups, YCombinator or otherwise, aren't going to succeed, at least not enough to prevent their founders from taking other jobs or going back to school.

Another team might be able to take over and push the thing forward to another level, thereby giving some value to the founders and seed investors as well as a head start for themselves.

Kiko, which sold on eBay for $258K is the only example of this I'm aware of, at least from YC. While it may not have been as much of a success as the founders intended, it did produce quite decent value.

It's encouraging to think that there is some reward, even in the long tail.

Who might be interested in taking over another startup? Who might be interested in selling and moving on? Does YC facilitate?
We've been iterating on our product with a small group of users. Integrating with Outlook and throwing around the amount of data that we do is no small challenge. When we open our beta to the public we don't expect it to be perfect. It will be usable, and we will be actively seeking news.yc reader feedback.
Yes, that's why I said it's not perfect. The thing is, to some people, the cult's methodology works for their success (since many mind-control techniques are not evil by themselves, and can be used to improve one's life if used wisely).

You have to look at not only those successful cases, but also the rest of cases---if the group has contributed to the success of a few celebrities, but not for the 99.9% of other members, then the success cases are likely to be by chance rather than the real result of the cult.
Just target g++, which covers all major platforms. C++ is portable.

I can't believe all the pro C ranting. Do you people just enjoy typing? C++ is far more succinct. The same people agreeing with Linus here probably post elsewhere in favor of high level interpreted languages like Python over Java and C#.
A better test may be simply: does the belief/practice lead to health and happiness for the practitioners, and those they affect and interact with?
So then how do you distinguish that? Like does YCombinator method make people succeed? Or is it good at identifying likely future successes and convincing them to associate with YCombinator? Or both? How do you gage the effect either way? In other words, does YC make the successes, or is it better at systematically finding them and associating with them?
Good answer. I think you might be right. I'm afraid you might be right.
> As I type this, billions of bacteria are actively trying to digest me.

Y'know, that would be an awesome first sentence for a sci-fi story.
Well, you've got to take the Gates quote in context. This was about two years after Michael Dell said that he'd shut the company down and give the money back to the shareholders. Back then you'd have needed some serious crystal ball mojo to see forward to the Apple of today.
Actually, I think what will happen is they will create a chimpanzee-like robot who will be elected prez thanks to a not-too-bright political party and some voting manipulation.

Oh wait... :~(.
Unfortunately, you can make people subjectively happy by mind-control techniques. Being healthy is also difficult to define (to some extent).
Wait ... this chimpanzee-like robot that you speak of ... would he then hypothetically go on to do things so stupid and scary that the entire population of the planet would get so stressed out just thinking about it, to the point where our immune systems are compromised ... and then ... OMG ... I don't like where this is going.
I can't quite put into words how much I love your bug cost/time to find graph.
You can't draw a concrete line, and it may take time. However, if, say, a few years later, 30% of YC companies succeeds big and 50% of them are producing good results (not necessarily in their startup, but by taking important roles in other companies), then people can hardly say YC is a destructive cult.
Google Helps in Search for Aviator
Ouch! That's gotta hurt!
You remind me of stock market speculators who fail to account for regime change: making a trading system based on past data incurs model risk in the form that things simply will never be like they were in the past ever again. Just because things worked a certain way in the past doesn't mean they will in the future, without good reason (the sun will rise tomorrow because that's how gravity works, not merely because it happened yesterday and the day before that).

If you can give a solid reason, with any actual logic to it rather than referring to past events, I'd be delighted. Just putting quotes and referring to totally different technological developments which many said were impossible indicates that you probably have nothing because you don't know any better than I do. Blind optimism is as unreasonable as blind pessimism.

I have some reasons: a lot of people who should care about machine learning and other fields related to AI who could benefit from it don't; research, even in a hot field like machine learning, moves slowly and it takes years to determine in retrospect that a given body of work made a significant, noteworthy impact. Papers go through months of review/revising and then get published months after that; by the time you read a journal paper the original work behind it might have been done 2-3 years ago. Things move on the scale of _years,_ and I don't see that changing anytime soon. That doesn't sound very singularity-ish to me.

Now, can you give anything based on actual reason/logic/evidence, or are you just going to give me another unrelated quote?
Depends on how you look at it. Most web 2.0 innovations are just reiterations of low-yield activities designed to encourage phatic communication at the cost of personal and corporate productivity. Who knows what effect that will have on, say, our national economy?
There are quite a few semi-retired executives and management consultants who become "turnaround" experts. Usually they associate themselves with private equity firms or semi-formal investment syndicates. But they tend to focus on more established companies. A more startup-oriented version of this would be "Entrepreneurs-in-residence" at VC firms. They claim to be developing ideas, but in reality they have some association with VCs who want to keep them around for whatever reason so they just hang around until they come across an idea and then the VCs invest on the basis that the E-i-R is the "lead managing entrepreneur." But like most women, they tend to be suspicious of anybody that wants to have anything to do with them and tend to go for people/companies who don't even know they exist. It's a sick world that we live in.
I was not inspired enough to make it to the ten-minute mark. I heard his broham Kevin Kelly give what seems like the same boring-ass speech at the '95 Computer Game Developer Conference, where everyone was talking amongst themselves waiting for it to end. I think we were supposed to have AI by 2015 then. I'd be happy if I could play Starcraft by then without the frickin' computer cheating.

Anyway, the good stuff always seems twenty years away. I think that's also when we all get flying cars, which is what I'm personally excited about. However, if Terminator 2 is correct, 2029 is also when the machines make the T-1000 and we all get shivved by liquid metal robots, so kinda good news, bad news there.

But it is charming to hear someone who still uses "virtual reality" un-ironically, even more precious to hear him refer to the telephone as the first virtual reality technology. What the hell is that supposed to mean?!
Tell me, do you guys ever get lonely up their on your pedestals?
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

-- Arthur C. Clarke

If you're looking at academic papers, no wonder you don't believe it.

http://groups.google.com/group/Hutter-Prize/browse_thread/th...

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-05-22-n83.html

> Blind optimism is as unreasonable as blind pessimism.

Oh no.

Guess which one is more useful.

I hope my competitors are all very reasonable people.
Actually it may be a big deal. Fairly recently scientists have determined that some very stupid behaviors that some animals engage in, to their own detriment, is the direct result of toxins produced by parasitical bacteria. So think of all the stupid things humans do to their own detriment as a species. Whose to say whether we do these things consciously ... or as the result of being manipulated to our detriment by bacteria ... or whether or not millions of computers are subtly affecting our thinking with electro-magnetic frequency manipulation ...