skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For what this is worth, I cared for both of my parents through the end of their lives and found something interesting and here's how I try to assemble it in my mind. There seems to be a core connection between people that doesn't change over time. For example, when I met several cousins when I was visiting my mother's country when I was six, there were a few that I had a terrific connection with. Turns out that many years later, when in my twenties, I went back and met up with the plethora of cousins I have there, those same ones I connected well with when I was six were the same ones I connected well with as an adult.

How this plays out with someone who has lost a lot of themselves to dementia came into play with my parents when they could no longer recognize me. It took a lot of mind games on my end to think my way around this, but you can still have fun with them. The connection is still there, but you may have to hunt a bit to find it. If they're hallucinating, think of them as being someone who has taken a lot of hallucinogens and play with them, or if they have no time continuity, love them like a beloved pet who won't remember what you're doing in five minutes (or whatever it takes) and find that connection and experience joy together.

"Hey Mum, do you know who I am?"
"Sure I do."
"Okay then, who am I?"
"Ahhh, you got me on that one." [cue laugh track]

[Actually both parents tried to fake their way out of this one.]

The truth is that you can still enjoy each other throughout this time because the connection seems to still be there, even though all of the overlays the mind and personality provides is not. It might be a way for a child who has been having conflicts can reunite, and while there will never be any closure over conflicts, there still might be peace and they might find the love that they missed.

One of the good things that can happen is that old fears can disappear with dementia. Sourpusses become cheerful. Sedentary people start taking walks and their health improves. People lose their obsessions. They'll often remember lyrics.

My heart goes out to you, because there's no way that this can be easy. You can use this opportunity to forge deeper relationships with your siblings and invest in the dynamics of the family in the future. I wish you the very best.
The Big Ear Wow! Signal (30th Anniversary Report)
Housing has always been relatively expensive in Italy, with 60 million people in an area slightly smaller than California. But the problems go far beyond that, unfortunately. In my opinion, they really center around a broken political system that has neither managed the economy well, nor simply left the economy to its own devices without interference.

It costs something like 10,000 Euro to open the equivalent of an LLC in Italy, between mandatory capital requirements, legal fees, and notaries that eat up thousands of euros at a go.
The Depth of eBay's Problems 1: Disappointed Buyers
The network effect of 10x more users may justify 100x the price.
Wow, I looked at sugarloving, and my eyes immediately glazed over.

Booo-ring!

I have also always wondered about social slashdots. Especially, I mean - women, they love to talk, right? So how come the only obsessive online-communities appear to be dominated by males? It doesn't make sense.
Maybe it stands for "iterator"... who knows.
The US sub-prime crisis in graphics
Thanks for the feedback; that's partly my motivation with wanting to take logic--if math requires me to think more, then I should take that, because developing good thinking habits is so valuable. But a bunch of the comments here suggest that the networking material is very useful, so I'm leaning towards that now. And you're right, I have my whole life to learn new things... but damn it, I don't want to be at a disadvantage! :)
I must have missed the part where he explained why they didn't take ten minutes, make a new windows VM and try out the setup. Heck, they could have made it part of the build.

Setup programs have to be tested. Your solution is no good unless it installs. I must be mising something -- I read the whole article and am still left wondering how they let something like this happen.
Yeah the gimmicky feel counts against it (also the lack of web 2.0 slides compared to the other topics...maybe they just show the youtube bubble video?) But I know a guy who works at Google and has taken it and says he learned a lot, and I guess I'm willing to assign some baseline level of blind trust to a Googler.
Majority Of Americans On Google Docs: "What You Talkin Bout Willis?"
some coverage here

http://scribblesheet.co.uk/article/is_your_idea_any_good
The Green Car Revolution Will Start In Israel
Video: The Nobel Prize Award Ceremony 2007
I find that I learn things easier and deeper when I'm not forced to. Forced meaning I have to learn some person's way of learning the material, I have to know what someone thinks is the most valuable knowledge of the material, I would be influenced by the person basically...

Then again this theory of learn is completely out the window when it includes someone of expertise. I would be much happier and consistently motivated to take an intro to high-level programming class from Guido (Python) than some recent grad student.
I think that some progress in sensory systems would make AGI easier. Obviously, humans spend most of their time structuring the complex, physical world around them, not a stream of text like most AI approaches dictates.

Our genetic code isn't that huge, but the amount of information contained in our brains is. All that information must be coming for somewhere. I refuse to believe that evolution has managed to create _that_ awesome compression algorithms.

Maybe this is what Google does, in a way. They happen to have a huge corpus of machine-readable data, which is in a sense equivalent to what a sophisticated sensory apparatus would give you. I intended to disagree with you when I started writing this comment, but now I'm not so sure. Human intelligence obviously doesn't spend its time reading petabytes of information on other people's search habits, but maybe Google is actually onto something.
While we're generalizing women do seem to like to talk to each other and they seem to exchange all sorts of information and experiences that way. But have you ever noticed that they also look at each other when they are talking, I think women like to actually exchange a lot more through non-verbal cues. Perhaps that's not true of men.
It's for just those sorts of situations (and a few other good reasons) that I use source code control on my local machine.
Black hole 'bully' blasts galaxy
I'd prefer to evaluate my product using the method of the other EW (me):

if (customers.want) {return success} else {return regroup} ;
Thank all of you for your input! I will forward this link to my brothers and sisters and I'm sure we'll follow up on alot of this right away. Spending "quality time" with her and bringing her fresh fruit are no-brainers. I also thought about hiding a reefer in her pack of Marlboro's on the way to the all-you-can-eat buffet. I dunno about that one.

My instincts were right. In less than 24 hours, I got high quality feedback from this group that would have taken much longer googling. (Perhaps there's a business opportunity hidden here somewhere: Need Smart Answers? Ask the Hackers.)
Business to Business Directory, Exporters Import, Shipping and Transportation
B2bdirectory.biz is business to business web directory. Our site provide accounting, dvertising, company, shopping, wholesale, travel, jewelry, advertising, manufacture and more.
= majority of Americans on Web in 1995 = majority of Americans on Microcomputers in 1975.
As I understand it the patch would install just fine and was perfectly playable. Until the user restarted the computer and then windows would not boot. So thats a little bit harder to catch.
I'd guess that the networking class would include a lot of "lab" or opportunity to try something, fail, get help, try again, and succeed. Mathematical logic, OTOH, is probably a little easier to learn on your own. I'd take advantage of the interaction you'd get in the networking class.
Also, perhaps for women it is more a tool of trading, maybe they don't like to broadcast to the world. Rather, they like to be able to be picky in chosing people they relay information to.

Just guessing (stereotypes)...
and the answer: what ever works for you(the programmer)
I live in the city and drive about 50 miles a month, while paying about $150 a month for insurance. This will be a Godsend for me. I can't wait.
From the article: "Unlike some older technologies (notably, Flash and PDF), Web 2.0 ideas are not inherently bad for users. They can be highly effective; we sometimes see examples of usability-enhancing Web 2.0 designs in our studies."
Nice idea. I drive about 500 miles a year.

Now that I think about it, this will give people an incentive to drive their cars less, which can only be a bonus.
I'd suggest writing an add-on or utility for a popular data-managing server. You'll learn a lot and perhaps create something many others can use without having to get in too deep.

Here are some suggestions. I personally like the databases listed but I put the cache stuff first since thats what you seem to like.

Cache / Proxy tools:
http://www.squid-cache.org/
http://haproxy.1wt.eu/

Web Servers:
http://www.apache.org/
http://www.lighttpd.net/
http://nginx.net/
http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/

Databases:
http://www.postgresql.org/
http://www.sqlite.org/

Version Control Systems:
http://subversion.tigris.org/
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/
http://darcs.net/
http://git.or.cz/
RFC 3092: The Etymology of 'foo'
Interesting. I thought women drivers paid lower rates because they have fewer accidents. Not so?
SEED Conference
I just signed up to go to this conference. Anyone else out there interested/thinking of/signed up already?
Why Does Vista Suck? Blame Automated Testing
Let us know when you find it.

I can't think of any phenomenon less likely area to have a simple algorithm than intelligence.
"Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it"
Do you know how to manage your application's passwords?
Sorry for repeating myself (comment lost in this huge thread), but I think it's the definition of intelligence we should look for first. Once we have a clear and unambiguous definition of intelligence, only and only after that we may be able to think about implementation. And I'm sure implementation would be straightforward once we know what we are trying to achieve.

It's actually amazing if not ridiculous that researchers always start from the other end of a cigar: they raise ideas, one after another, but they don't even try to explain what problem exactly they are solving.
Intelligence is about finding algorithms for successful survival within a given environment. It's some sort of a meta-algorithm, although I have no idea if it's simple or not, but we can be sure it does exist.
Actually, if I read correctly the issue was that if the boot.ini file is stored on the first partition of a hard drive it will be automatically restored at startup without any indication of a problem to the end user, which was the case for their test environments. Their tests have been since been broadened.

I have to say, props to them for standing up and taking responsibility, integrity means a lot in a world with very little of it left.

Thanks
Mark
I wonder what less technically inclined users are doing without their boot.ini's right about now.
If it's done right: easier to do simple things with, faster development cycle, run time evaluation of code... all the usual reasons why people use interpreted languages instead of compiled ones.
Ugh, I really detest those sites. They're obviously scams and it bothers me to no end that someone would actually fall for it.
Finally! Car insurance for hackers! I dial in to clients for about 95% of the work and work on my startup from home. A quick back of the envelope calculation would reduce my bill by about 80%. Can't wait.
What Started The Downfall of Digg
Yeah, this seems great. I wonder if it will be available in all states.
This particular article is rather poorly written, but if its title has a ? appended it makes a fun discussion topic.

My take is that Digg's downfall (if it happens :-) was sealed long ago by Kevin Rose's personality. One only has to watch Diggnation with their stupid drinking antics and Beavis and Butthead humor to know that the audience Digg was courting was pretty low brow.

Then, suddenly, Digg tried to extend outside tech news and be a general purpose new site. Big mistake since low brow doesn't mix with Science, World News, etc.

The only positive thing I can say for Digg is that at least the comments there aren't as bad as on YouTube.

Or maybe I'm just bitter because I got banned from Digg and publicly branded a 'spammer' by a Digg employee.
Technology is killing the art of photography
I think the "why do social sites decline" thing has been pretty thoroughly examined, but they all seem to trend downwards.
"So this is basically a JavaScript wrapper for Cocoa on the iPhone?"

I could be wrong but I don't think so. I think it's more akin to http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ where it's just all javascript/html/css running in a browser locally and data storage is done by saving files or by adding more xml entries to an existing file.

davidw is right. Stuff like not having to manually manage memory is a big deal (not to mention not having to deal with stuff like pointers or waiting for Apple's SDK to come out)...
Personal private trains for Heathrow. Very sci-fi.
Digg is hardly worth $300 Million. $11M Tops.
What the site needs is a de-boldify button that takes the bold away. Only veteran users would ever find such a thing, but those are the users that are most likely to want to read every single word of Nielsen's peerless prose, anyway.

Looks like it's a simple matter of adding:

.maintext strong {
font-weight: normal;
}

to the page CSS. Any Greasemonkey hackers in the house?

Of course, once you press the button you are committing to actually reading the whole article. Don't blame me if you find that you unconsciously preferred the skimmable version.
US, EU Reach Internet Gambling Agreement
The fact that one is submitting a story to an entire community means that users will resort to submitting stories that are either very sensationalistic or are 'funny', to appeal to the widest audience. And that's where I think Digg's flaw is. They put too much emphasis on 'making the front page', so users then adopt the motivation of submitting the most ridiculous garbage to get on the front page. On Diggnation, frequent front pagers became celebrities, and being a frequent front pager was a status symbol. Unlike here, where we're not concerned about making it in the top 10, but rather that we submit quality stuff. It really is all about the niche.
How do you see this impacting technologies, and what opportunities does this present?

Very interesting way of demonstrating the issue.
How to become a programmer
Hello,
I have been doing some web programming during the last few months and I'd like to become much better at it. I am trying to learn by reading programming (php) books and doing the practice exercises. I have also tried to write my own code for fun. The problem is that the stuff I do from books are really, really boring! The stuff I do on my own is more fun, but I get stuck quite a bit. Last week I spent an entire day trying to debug why php was not connecting to the mysql db. Once I figured it out, it was great, but I was beat. Is there a better way to learn programming?
You might like to read this article which discusses the specialist/generalist issue:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/30/070430fa_fact_...
He's writing to two audiences at the same time but favoring one over the other. The bold, etc makes it hard for readers to read, but since they are readers, they'll read anyway. If they can't read it, at least they'll skim.

He's writing for the skimmers, which happen to be some very large percentage of web users. But these articles are mainly just loss leaders for his books, full reports, and conferences, which are all media where people give full attention by design.
The Upcoming Face-Off Between Microsoft vs. Google : Battle on the Horizon
The widget takes some input that the server knows. Instead of having the widget make a request to the server to get it, can the server somehow include this input in the web page so that the widget can take it directly from the web page?
I think that what Google is doing is along the same lines of what human brains do. Google is crunching a load of mainly textual data to create an accurate statistical model of context. Humans use a much smaller amount of text but use visual, audio, and touch sensory input to create context. Humans also have the ability to refine their mental model by doing experiments on the world, whereas Google, as an observer, has to just use what people create. This means that Google (or any AI) needs a lot, lot, lot more of data to train its accuracy, which is now possible due to the internet.
Daily WTF: ITAPPMONROBOT
That's along the lines of what I was thinking: you don't have to find a small project. Just find a small area of a big project and start working on it.
Several urban/economic studies have shown that if insurance was added to gasoline (about $.45/gal I think), it is cheaper for almost all people, prevents the uninsured motorist problem, and is more equitable. I think this is a move in that direction, although as a single small company it can't solve the uninsured motorist problem of course. Hopefully it can get people used to pay by the mile so we can more towards a more sensible solution.

http://www.google.com/search?q=pay+at+the+pump+auto+insuranc...
Its interesting how they come up with $300 million valuation.

This is the second post I've seen where they value each user at $77 Dlls, which is exorbitant based on click through monetization, simply look at a how much Google is really willing to pay for an actual user having Google as their home page and monetizing their searches, which is likely more profitable to them than content.

I'll give you the Firefox/Google Toolbar signup with numbers, via AdSense they pay out from $1 dollar to .10 cents for each user you sign-up for Firefox with the Google Toolbar -- the range depends on the country the user is in, with $1 dollar going to north america and .10 cents to the lower bracket countries, those which I assume have less advertisers.

With this model Google ensures that each time a user opens Firefox and makes a search they will exposed to their ads, even considering a huge premium on the signup, its a long-way from actually paying $1 dollar for every user to $77 dollars.

If Google's 'user value' is any indicator, then at this rate Digg would be worth something around $3,896,103, assuming the user count is accurate, all users are located in North America and they don't apply some type of discount rate for not being able to make Digg a user's default home page.
Well, if you are Goldman Sachs, you find a way to short CDOs, profiting ~4Billion or so.
Brilliantly wrong.
Peter Seibel's talk at Justin.tv (why syntax [does|doesn't] matter).
Part two: http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/53442/Peter_Seibel_on_syntax_p...
utter bullshit.
I am Mr. Sachs...so I get a real kick out of this reply...

I meant more from a hacker standpoint.
A downfall in the economy is apparently a good time to startup as a previous article showed.

Any way to effectively short against this housing trend with some technology?
The upcoming increase in housing supply could mean some sort of algorithmic housing search could be very useful.
Any other ideas?
> Let us know when you find it.

I can't think of any phenomenon less likely area to have a simple algorithm than intelligence.

Cf. Evolution.
Who in their right mind would pay full-price for a vehicle they know is going to be inoperable within a year or two?

Someone who thinks that they can sell it to a bigger sucker in less than a year or two?

...

Someone's holding the bag on these mortgages, and it isn't the home"owner" usually, who probably went from zero to zero, or from bankruptcy to bankruptcy. Investors who believed the credit agencies are the ones who had something to lose. Bad bets happen all the time in the marketplace.
I thought this was going to be about Intel on-board graphics chipsets displacing expensive enthusiast add-in cards from Nvidia.
Photographs have become cheap and expendable commodities, so the value associated with pictures is essentially zero.

This is the reason you never see photographs any more.
Hmmm, I'm going to call bullshit on this. When it comes to technology, people often use the word "killing" when they should be using the word "advancing." It's OK, we all get scared sometimes that we may be irrelevant soon, or worse, that we never were.

"1. While advances in technology have allowed digital cameras to come down in price, the quality has yet to come close to 35 millimetre cameras for the average snapper."

By what standard is quality being judged? It is not being judged by the standard of information captured, or by the standard of ease of use, or by the standard of portability, or by the standard of adoption cost, and most assuredly not by the standard of medium manipulation.

"2. Cameras are everywhere now. It seems like everywhere you turn, someone's got a camera in your face. And all of these cameras are producing too many pictures. (Just look at the number of photos on Flickr!) The results are generally crappy, with pictures that are too grainy, out of focus or over/under exposed."

This is utter bullshit. Beyond the argument-weakening statements like, "it seems" and "the results are generally", saying something like "there are too many pictures now" smacks of hubris. What number, specifically, is the correct number of pictures that should be in existence at any one time? The number of photos hosted on Flickr has exactly 0 correlations to the quality of said photos.

"3. The blame isn't restricted to just hardware. The access to, and ease of use of, image altering software has allowed for a quick fix to otherwise bad photos. While some may argue that this is part of the creative process, there are very few artists that use Photoshop as part of the medium."

More emotional responses used as supporting statements. Fixing a "bad' photo still leaves you with a fixed photo. And the last statement about very few artists using Photoshop as part of the medium is wrong-coated-wrongness with chewy wrong filling.

"4. Photographs have become cheap and expendable commodities, so the value associated with pictures is essentially zero. As few pictures are ever printed out and the cost of storage being negligible, snappers don't really care how they come out. This definitely breeds an attitude of quantity over quality."

Ask someone to spend one week setting up a photo shoot, and then have them take one shot. Give another person a 1000 picture quota and then pick the best one. Who do you think will win most of the time? Anyone who knows anything about photography knows that quantity breeds quality.

"5. With the ubiquity of digital cameras, everyone thinks that they can take good pictures. The truth is, very few people know how to take a proper picture. As eloquently put by Smittymike19 here, "i guess what i am trying to say is taht digital photography is to photography what pornography is to sex. there is no way taht your sex life is as good as a portrayed in pornography. same can be said about digital photography."

In what universe does this pass for "eloquence"? I guess the same universe in which all "good pictures" are taken by luddites.
The way I learned PHP is by developing two apps that I really wanted to build. I set aside three weeks for each app and coded PHP day and night.

One thing I realized was the importance of rhythm. If I code for a day and then come back to it after a week, it was almost like I was starting from zero.

Coding for sometime continuously is a good way to pickup a new language.
I'm not sure PHP is the best first language.
Join some Opensource project at sourceforge.net