skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was a "pre-craigslist" affair. There were still dinosaurs roaming the earth!!! Instead we took a "the more cameras the better" tack. Not only did we have several volunteers with expensive high quality digital cameras, we also handed out bags of disposable cameras to all of the guests and encouraged them to snap away at whatever they found interesting. At the end of the night, they returned the cameras. 99% of all of the pictures were crap but among the nearly 10,000 pictures there were astonishing gems that no professional could have captured. It all came out to be less than half of the cost of the lowest price "professional" that we found.

The CD was mailed to all of the guests a week later and everyone was captivated by the participatory nature of it all.

Everyone has heard horror stories about the pro going out of business, or losing the pictures. When you have 300 cameras, this is not a fear that you have!

There's a startup in there somewhere I feel it! Anyone game to develop it?
What are you talking about? That's what it's called. :)
No offense, but these were the only links I could find with that format.

Just tried it while signed and still the link when I do "copy link location" is direct. Maybe they only do it on a small focus group or for users in certain countries (I'm in Israel).
Magic toolbar rearrangement is a world of pain. That's like having my SO notice that I always look for my keys before I go out the door so she moves them to the table near the front door, when I habitually put them in the vide poche near by desk.
If just a small portion of an application is non-parallelizable, then a million cores won't help you.
+1 Insightful

The Microsoft personal assistant example is just cracking me up. Firstly, Microsoft has been selling the whole 'automated assistant' thing to us for YEARS. Clippy is just one hideous example.

Secondly, automated inbox processing has been around for _years_. My POPFile open source program is now over 5 years old and there are older examples than that (I was doing automated emailing sorting in the late 90s and others before me). So multi-core machines are what's holding this back? What a joke.

Thirdly, it mentions features (looking at who I correspond with) that are already available (see Xobni and others). And automatic response systems are also around to deal with customer service.

Sorry, for the rant put two pages of fluff about multi-core processors with some freak out speculation about email processing that's been available for a long time.

How about talking about something interesting, like parallel aware languages (Occam, erlang, ...)?
I think it's time for a refresher on Amdahl's Law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

The non-parallel portion limits the available speedup.
Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous...
Facebook in 30 years (pic)
I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm saying there's a hoary old cliche that you can use to communicate the same thing: "He forgot to add Network Effects". Ebay relies on a network effect; Amazon doesn't.

I don't imagine that he forgot it; I think he's assuming most web startups rely on it. He is, after all, Pyra, Odeo, and Twitter.
Advisors, Boards, Companies, Partners, Oh My!
Checklist for Idea Evaluation
15 year-old considers startups 'common'
Silicon Valley Startup Ribbit Wants to Take On the Telcos
Ask YC: AI
The field of artificial intelligence has been always something I wanted to take a peek on, but never really had the chance. Could people here recommend me some good books to start my journey on this field?
F*cking programming
I was a bit disappointed that he didn't mention Kohonen's self-organizing maps, another interesting unsupervised method, or independent component analysis, which was also used successfully for image feature extraction.

Som was also used for a similar document mapping task, the demo is online here:
http://websom.hut.fi/websom/milliondemo/html/root.html
"Indeed, a leading computer scientist has warned that an easy solution to programming chips with dozens of processors has not yet been discovered."

weird I thought it was called erlang
I don't know why u got modded down - this is a submarine PR article for MS...
Spreading the load: volunteer computing
Couch Potatoes Get Exercise Help From Computer Calls
Those who say computers contribute to couch-potato-ism may want to take a look at a new study that says otherwise (at least in certain cases).
"Thanks to the exquisite pattern-recognition capabilities of the human brain, amateurs with just a little training can distinguish between different types of galaxy far more efficiently than computers can."

It used to be considered noteworthy when computers were better at something than people, not the other way round. The tables may be turning ...
erlang is not easy. At least, not for me, a mere mortal.
ok let me elaborate - it is "easier" to do parallel programming on erlang compared to other languages
I know this. I watched a video on this whole argument not long ago...link is floating around on YC somewheres.
Start with this book: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" by Russell/Norvig

It's one of the best books on AI and it's a "standard" AI textbook for most of the intro AI courses.

It's also great as a reference (I have it on my bookshelf beside me) and you can quickly look up algos and implement them in your fav language.
Here's the standard AI textbook: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

I'm assuming you mean "AI" in the sense of "fancy mathematical tricks to solve domain specific problems", not in the sense of artificial general intelligence.
I'm not saying that's what I would want, but have you ever watched a non-techie use the computer? Just looked over their shoulder and watched them? It's horrifying! I can only watch my wife for about 2 minutes before I start belting out things like "You don't need to double click links on the web!" or "If you double click on an app, you have to give it a couple seconds to load or else you're making the problem worse!"

What a smart OS would do was watch you for a while and notice what you do, and then make a decision based on the statistics: let's say 85% of the time, your keys are in the vide poche and you find them immediately, and the other 15% of the time they're somewhere else and it takes you 5 minutes to find them. Then it would warp them to the right place (the place your actions showed them was right) with a note and an option to "always do this". I shudder to think of MSFT's implementation of this (Clippy), but if a smart company along the lines of Humanized did it, and used statistics instead of some clever algorithm (didn't we just read about Google doing that?), it could be a godsend for average users.
Norvig, Mitchell, Thrun have good books

Also, google "Andrew Moore CMU"
his homepage is full of useful tutorials

That said, "AI" is too vague. What do you want to be able to do?
Maybe "Programming Collective Intelligence" would also be a good start.
Back in my day, starting up "web design" firms on a GeoCities account was considered a success too!
surely if MS could make it so threads were processed by spare cores automattically then this would make life easier.

Servers could use the cores to process more connections and lessen the need for more servers. I guess virtualization could be used.
Having looked through the introductory texts, I am left wanting to better understand current state of various parts of field.

Any suggestions on where to get more of that higher-level commentary?
"If you're a mainstream business site (including government and non-profit sites), your user experience needs are very different than those of the few hot sites that attract all the attention."

This is a great point... If your audience is mainstream, you need to keep it simple. I worked at a job/employment site recently which was doing some cool-ass AJAX UI for the consumer part of the site. The entire product team LOVED it. Usability tests were a disaster. Users were confused and frustrated. The time saved with AJAX was lost when the user had to actually THINK about what to do on the page.

"For website usability, the problem is not whether a specific operation takes 1 second or 10 seconds; people typically perform each operation only once or twice. The problem for websites is the 5-10 minutes users lose when they do something wrong because the site is too complicated. (After such an experience, they usually leave -- and you lose the business.) Simplicity is more important than efficiency for done-once actions."

Of course, if your audience is geeky, go nuts! :-)
Toolbar rearrangement was a bad example. Try this: I wish like nothing other that Windows Mobile 5 would realize that when I press Text Messages with no new messages, go straight to "Compose Message" and rotate the screen to landscape, or if there are new messages, go to the oldest new message. I've done that for 98% of the times I've opened Text Messages, and I'd imagine most usage of most apps by most users fits into a few similar buckets.

Don't underestimate the value of saving every user 5 seconds each time they use your app.
Isn't this the same thing as jumpbox?
Getting your Eee PC Ready for Serious Use
I mean AI as Learning Algorythms and Decision Making programs.
I recommend "Beyond AI". It gives a high level history, present, and future of AI. It looks through the lens of a search for artificial general intelligence.

http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/1591025117
I wouldn't say Arthur C Clarke is the father of sci-fi. Jules Verne, HG Wells, or Gernsback (creator of Amazing Stories) might take that honor.
While he makes some good points, he also makes some hasty generalizations. You could just as easily have a complicated, poorly designed interface with or without AJAX being involved.
The article seems to be a retread of the same thing that's been printed every day for 20 years. "New processors are going to make all these new things possible." And yet there's still no computer holding a reasonably intelligent conversation with you if you call Dell customer support. Actually, there isn't even a human doing that.
Eating Your Own Dogfood: How Not to Do It
Announcing Hecl Android Alpha and Hecl Android Developer Challenge Entry
Also see Mitchell's machine learning: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html
my TA secretly recommended Norvig's book over Winston's, but we used Winston's "Artificial Intelligence"

For more philosophy, read Minsky's books / papers, and the readings outlined here: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

Minsky's paper "Steps toward Artificial Intelligence" reads like a summary of 6.034 at MIT.

Speaking of which: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...
I decided that for the time being, Hecl is the thing that's most interesting to the most people, of all the things I have going, so I'm going to focus on it and see what happens. It's also one of the more difficult things I've ever undertaken, which makes it a little bit more unique. Sure, it's hardly the only open source programming language project out there (hah), but it is in a good niche.
How do I tell if it was modded down?

Maybe I should explain my terse comment. But first, I agree that it's a submarine PR piece for Microsoft. How many software companies are cited in that article? How many technologies are mentioned and/or explored? In short it says "Multi-core processors have potential, and [only] Microsoft has the best minds trying to exploit that potential."

Parellelism has been available in less local forms for decades. Supercomputers, clusters, more recently grid computing. These aren't new problems for computer science, they are only new problems for desktop software developers that have always assumed a simpler processor architecture.

So imagine a program that could identify parallelizable sequences of instructions in other programs, and split the program accordingly. Such a program may be able to exist, but it appears to be a very hard problem (it's even a hard problem for humans). Vista is definitely NOT this program.
How GPS Can Prevent Tanker Truck Spills, Explosions
A new GPS-based service will allows trucking companies to alert driver when they're speeding or the trucks are swaying too much.
[SF/NYC] Heysan! looking for a PHP Web Developer
"How do I tell if it was modded down?"

your 1st comment had a -1 point on it
The point is that more processor speed expands your possibilities only if you are smart enough to actually use it. Lazy (dare I say "blub") programmers are being left in the dust.

(Of course, this isn't the first time some programmers have resisted change. I remember a great rant about how if you program in assembly and never hit in the cache, the Pentium 4 was no faster than the Pentium III and thus useless. That guy probably quit programming entirely when multicore arrived.)
I recommend starting from scratch and ignoring the field. All the field will teach you is very complex ways to NOT have AI.
The Vista DRM complaints are ridiculous. For one, it's ironic that everyone I know who bitches about it owns an iPod, which is basically the reason we're in this DRM quagmire to begin with. Nobody ever complains about Apple's DRM policies, and if anyone, they're the ones who should be telling the studios "we won't sell your products until you ditch DRM". They have game-changing power there, MS does not, as they're still an also-ran in the media sales industry.

For another, I've never had a problem with any DRM on Vista because I just don't have DRM'ed files, and like 99.9% of America, don't have an HD-DVD or Bluray drive. It's certainly not box-breaking by any sane definition.

And lastly, but most importantly, Microsoft (and any other consumer OS maker) has no choice. See http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/hdcp-vista.a... for details. We may all hate DRM, but it isn't Microsoft who is at fault. Not that any of that is at all relevant to the NYT article.
Ask YC: Suggestions for Loved One's Dementia/Alzheimer's
This is slightly off topic, but not really, because it's still science. This is one of the smartest groups I know, so maybe I can get help with a personal issue. I am specifically NOT addressing this to a board that specializes on this topic, because I seek "out of the box" hacker-like thinking.

My mother is suffering from extreme dementia with a probable cause of Alzheimer's (her physician's words). She has reached the point where she can no longer care for herself, so she is now in a skilled nursing facility. She has stabilized and is receiving excellent personal and medical care.

She is 77 years old, ambulatory and active, lucid about 80% of the time, recognizes everyone, and interacts fairly well. She has a lot of trouble verbalizing and gets confused quite often. We are also starting to see classic memory loss.

My brothers and sisters and I intend to take full advantage of the expertise of her physicians whose specialty is "geriatric care".

Here is my concern. Just like the blind men and the elephant, medical practitioners only have solutions to the problems they see all the time. Like many other types of problems, in health care, sometimes you have to go "outside the box" to address things more effectively. I know many people who have helped loved ones with many different health challenges by going outside the system. But we know nothing about this condition.

In 2009, I don't want to say, "Gee, I wish I would have done something back in 2007."

Is there anything we should be aware of that our doctors don't know about (or won't tell us)? I plan to email this link to my brothers and sisters, so any comments, suggestions, or referrals would be greatly appreciated.
No, Jumpbox provides virtual appliances (i.e. they run in VMware) while these are regular packages.
Oh my, relocatable self-contained binary software packages! What will they think of next?

What is it about open source culture that prevents the upstream developers from providing working packages?
Apple's Strategy is to Partner with Leaders
People seem to think Apple is a big, risk-taking company. That is true, but the risks they take are calculated ones. The switch from IBM PowerPC to Intel x86 chips was a big risk at the time -- given the possibility of alienating Apple's customer base. The risks to branch out their product line from the Macintosh to the iPod, iPhone, and AppleTV were big changes. But even though these were game-changers, they still fit within Apple's core competencies. So, while Apple takes some big risks in some areas it is also conservative in others.
In that case get "Programming Collective Intelligence" like Tichy said, probably the best place to start.
In addition to this book, you're probably going to want a good book covering the history and development of the field.

Keep in mind that AI is a broad field. As such you might find it more helpful to identify which computer intelligence problem(s) you want to solve, then start accessing the AI writings that discuss how to solve your problem. This won't give you a general overview, but it at least would reduce what you'd need to learn about to produce something useful.
Why would you want someone to do this? Wouldn't that simply lead one to remake all the mistakes that have been made in the field?
You might want to look at 'cognitive science' as well because that field tries to explain how humans think and make decisions for use as AI construction models.
Amazon SimpleDB: Winer & Scoble Fail In Tandem
Sometimes, You Gotta Ignore the Experts
Jey I agree, I highly recommend Norvig and Russell's book. I had a one semester course back in college that used this. I actually just recently have been programming some of the exercises up in Ruby just to stay sharp with some different kind of coding than the standard webapp stuff. It has some great problems, and has source code available in many languages (not ruby unfortunately, but I guess makes it more of a challenge).

Norvig also has some great essays and example AI code on his site, http://norvig.com/
well, they do statistical learning of inflections and closely related terms.

google "knows" (believes with high probability, I guess) that PWC is an abbreviation of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, for instance.

you can see this directly in how google highlights terms in search results. you can certainly find instances where they "should" have gotten something but didn't, or made a mistake, but it works well enough most of the time.
Those lessons can be useful, though. You might make the same mistakes.
Doing what has been done in the field would repeat the mistakes.

Doing something original might actually be, you know, original.
Microsoft wants to be first in parallel software
Pikluk on VentureBeat
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:

http://norvig.com/paip.html

is a great book, and a nice complement to Norvig and Russell, which is somewhat more theory-oriented.
Maybe it was the article or lack of Google-able content but I just wasn't as impressed as I was prepared to be. I couldn't find a site for Cyquester Technologies other than freelance style systems and couldn't find any additional details on the sale of the Facebook app by the other kid but it seems to be a low dollar sale for a simple application. If anyone has additional information I would love to take a look!
"Doubt clouds the family itself: 70 percent of Italians between 20 and 30 still live at home, condemning the young to an extended and underproductive adolescence."

Cost of living. In the U.S., most college graduates can't afford to live on their own in major cities. Jobs require ever-more qualifications and advanced degrees. Productivity goes out the door and escapism comes in when you're stuck with your parents.

That housing bubble was horrible for the economy. Far from a sign of good things happening, it meant owning their own home was out of reach for the vast majority of young people. The amount of productivity and joie de vivre lost cannot be overestimated. Being stuck living with people you don't want to live with is toxic (that includes non-family members, too).
Or you might come up with something that works, by avoiding having your mind crammed and distorted by the classical mess.
A quick introduction to Everyware
you may want to change the title of this "ex-yc Applicant" or the moderators will...

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

P.S. congrats on the product, sounds like you're getting some great reception.
"Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there." -- Bruce Lee
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee#Philosophy
Running out of things to post, I see.
Ah, the joys of having fine grained control over every user's experience with up to the minute modifications. Hooray for web-delivered software!
It's one thing to notice that beginners can sometimes make contributions by luck, just by not knowing how hard something is supposed to be. It's another to use this reasoning to glorify lack of knowledge.

Whenever I see someone succeed rapidly I assume it isn't a newcomer, that there are depths of effort I cannot yet see.
Very interesting to me. But I know very little about Artificial Intelligence or ML.
They're not talking about straight web applications, they're talking about using the internet as a new distribution method. The financial requirements of filming a TV show still apply, no matter how it's distributed, so they obviously need to to negotiate with investors to get the money for something like this.

If the buzzword "web 3.0" could be applied to anything, it will probably apply to this kind of stuff.
I never noticed these and figured other people also hadn't.
Soviet Microsoft: How Resistance to Free Markets and Open Ideas Will the Unravel Software Superpower
Ohio Elections Official Calls Machines Flawed
That's referring to refusing to use something you KNOW works, simply because it is traditional. Quite different from seeking your own path.

If you follow the classical path, you will become bogged down in the vast field of AI.

Ramanujan started from first principles and worked from there. My guess is that the person(s) who create "actual" AI will use that approach.
See:

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/kautz/ac/
I actually don't find this sort of research all that interesting.

I like out of the box solutions more:

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143
I hate his excessive use of bold. It's like he's encouraging skimming and he doesn't even want people to read carefully. I always feel like a chump when my eyes wander.
This guy makes a similar case:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/10/in-search-of-stupi...
Many, many people have gone into the field to study the traditional techniques, and glorifying this knowledge has not led to AI.

I don't think a beginner is going to create AI by "luck". But a beginner's mind is not cluttered in the same way as an expert's. This may be what it takes to get working AI.

Expert knowledge is appropriate when discussing proven solutions. AI is speculative at this point.
Really cool stuff! This is a daunting task, my hat goes off to you for attempting it. Your work also sets a nice example for people who eventually might want to wrap other languages over Andriod.

Just curious, how is performance when wrapping Hecl over the Java API? Are there any particular bottlenecks you've run into so far?

Good luck on the Android developer challenge!
For those who want to watch it all in one go I put together a playlist. Go to http://uk.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=C19504751ED647B6 and hit "Play All"
Digg Hires A Bank to Assist With Sale
So far it's a bit slow to start up, but I'm not worried about that too much... I'm concentrating on functionality - optimization comes later.

That said, I've written real applications for phones like a Nokia 3100 in older versions of Hecl, so I'm confident that Hecl on the Android hardware will work just fine.