skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, let's forget about NKS, I just thought that is what you have your grudge about. I am not very concerned about NKS specifically).

But I am also not sure exactly what you want. For example, would it be strange to you if I found ants fascinating? Even though there is no scientific idea at first. Maybe if you look at ants for a while, you'll generate all sorts of ideas (and even in Goedel-Escher-Bach, which I guess is very classic AI, they make an appearance).

So I am not sure that I accept your complaint that you can see no scientifical idea. Actually I am not sure, what is a "scientifical idea"? (Honest question)

Looking at cellular automata I get all sorts of ideas. So I find them fascinating. And why is it not a "scientifical idea" for you to build complex things from simple rules? I don't think it is such an obvious idea.

I am willing to try to answer your question, but first please explain to me what aspect exactly you want to hear about ("scientifical idea").

As for McCarthy, I don't really worry much about what he thinks, especially since LISP is actually from the "classic AI" side of things (I don't mean that as disrespectful - but he is a specialist for LISP and computation, not for complex systems). I think finding the smallest Turing machine was just something to be done for fun - I don't think Wolfram thought much more about it either. So that finding it did not blow McCarthy's mind hardly disqualifies the whole subject in my opinion.

Also, could you link to the No Hidden Variables vs Wolframs suggestion please? It was only a wildly speculative thing, even in NKS, though - not the cornerstone of his world view.
Promotional Sunglasses 
Unlike other promotional material, promotional sunglasses are not hidden in pockets, but worn on the face itself. Any advertiser can hardly ask for a more prominent positioning of his advertising message.
I got rid of my internet connection. the frustration from using slow free wireless is enough to get me using way less than before.
Couldn't you just emulate multi-key with tokyo cabinet? You'd just have to write the code to union sets of data... it's what databases do anyway.
"The harvest is great, but the laborers are few"
I have an encrypted file of my passwords, encrypted with a password of over a dozen characters, containing uppercase and lowercase letters, as well as numbers. It has no meaning whatsoever, and I have no trouble remembering it. The author thinks no one can remember SIX random characters?? How many phone numbers do you know? Zip codes? Addresses? URLs? Email addresses? Really, I think ANYONE can remember 6 random characters, especially if they type them all the time.
You are testing it as a basic lookup engine, which is fine, but it's just a part of the offering. I tried to exercise the inference part.

Q: goog trading volume

A: works! I get a chart, but the volume is in shares, I want it in dollars but haven't been able to get that. From all I tried, only "GOOG trading volume / volume in dollars" seems to understand but doesn't show me anything. OTOH "GOOG trading volume monthly" works as expected. So basic unit conversions work, but not something like "for all days calculate number of shares by closing price" which would give me the volume in USD.

I also wanted to see a histogram of the daily volumes, but hasn't been able to. All "GOOG trading volume distribution | histogram | variance" just don't work.

A look on another domain shows that it knows something about movies (e.g. the name of the movie shows me a list of actors and other info), but doesn't cross-reference this information (the name of an actor gets me nothing, I expected at least a list of movies).

If anyone succeeds in figuring out how to get some of these answers, please reply! W|A doesn't seem to have a place where I can ask for help. Probably it just can't make those inferences though.
I guess there's a distinction between remaking music and copying it (bit-for-bit) that people aren't seeing.

Define it.
Yeah that's a tough one. I have a musician friend who was obsessed with figuring out what equipment the neptunes used on certain songs and then remaking the instrumental part of the tracks. to my ears, they were pretty much indistinguishable from the originals. what's the distinction?
We are all ripoff artists, myname. Every sound, thought, experience is nothing more than a rearrangement of what already is. There is nothing new under the sun.
The grey album was never officially sold by Danger Mouse from what I remember.

Most albums that contain samples go through a legitimate clearing process. Many songs never get released because of sample clearance issues. People who truly profit from stealing someone else's work are generally sued.

Danger Mouse has a lot more on his resume that the Grey Album and other chopped samples. He's clearly an extremely talented producer and songwriter, as already mentioned.

Next time before you go on a little rant, you should at least know what you're talking about. I've made songs out of samples before and many without. I don't think their is less merit in either method. Some songs with samples are significantly more difficult to put together than 100% original compositions.
I was going to ask you if you are testing the demand for such a thing without building it first - I'm glad this is not the case.

I work in natural language processing and couldn't figure out what should I expect from the demo. It is all marketing speak to me. I upvoted the submission in hopes someone would summarize it. Would you please try to explain it to a hacker in one paragraph here?
The point he's making is that Erlang grew organically into its current form by way of continual sculpting during use by its creators

I've never really designed a serious language before, aren't almost all languages done this way?
I meant specifically for lithography and silicon. You've forgotten the precise wording of the first part of Moore's law, I see.
> you'd have those needs even if you were the only person around

This is only partially true. Food (and, due to the existence of land ownership, shelter) is more scarce today (in the sense of requiring more effort to obtain) than in the age of hunter-gatherers.

Not to mention, the need for "shelter" in a heavily populated world implies as much the need for protection from other people as for protection from the elements. Thus, in a very real sense, it is a need imposed on me by other people. Even the need for protection from the elements falls into this category. If there were few enough people, everyone could (theoretically) live comfortably in those parts of the world which have a temperate climate year-round.
No discussion of greed is complete without a word from Milton Friedman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A
He's contrasting it to languages that are closely based on a mathematical ideal, such as Haskell (pure functional programming, category theory, etc.) or Prolog (Horn clauses and logic), minimalistic Scheme/Lisps (lambda calculus) or, to a lesser extent, SQL (relational theory, albeit a far from perfect implementation).
Hmm, what would be the analogous strategy for dating sites? Finding the most unhinged desperate losers and the unacknowledged hookup junkies?
i like the idea of any vr, or augmented reality components being brought into the programing language environment.

the way i see it, text based languages lend them selves well to linear thinking and linear processing. i think we are moving to a place where we need to move passed linear thinking and move more towards networked processes.

it seems to me that on large sites, you might want to do A/B testing on a number of features to see which ones work better, this means staged deployment, testing and programing are done in a really complex way. we should accept this as part of the pattern and design environments and tools to make this easier to debug, without a whole bunch of "if" statements cluttering the code to determine the configuration state.

i also see writing functions now as part of the design process, and i always like some of the metaphors in UML, but UML also always lacked into translating directly into code.
I would agree with also checking with the employer. Any time you want to utilize open source in a project you should see what the employers policies are on this.

You will also need to be careful about contributions back to your open source stuff. This is one of the areas that open source foundations have done really well. The dojo and Apache foundations as an example have you fill out a contributors agreement to ensure the IP of any code that is submitted to them is "clean".
A lot of interesting mini-languages (e.g. make, regular expressions, and yacc) have formed that way.
This is not sound logic. Did you get everybody in your real estate office to sign up for a YCNews account and upvote this comment?

The mortgage problem is resultant, largely, because of lack of information between buyers and sellers. Note that I didn't say lack of information between a homebuyer's Realtor and the seller's broker. In economics, we learn about the concepts of buyer's surplus and seller's surplus. In real estate, there is this third entity (usually colluding brokers, agents, etc.) eating away, often entirely consuming all potential surplus. Why else would this mortgage meltdown have happened?

People make decisions based on information presented to them. Mortgage brokers and their Realtor friends go out of their way to throw up as many brick walls and make the process as overwhelming and confusing as possible. If you're a Realtor, you surely are aware of the antitrust case against the National Association of Realtors:

http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/nar.htm/

Home buyers are usually required to sign STACKS of papers during closing. During this process, they rarely notice that one most important to the Realtor & Co which is the one they slip in there that states the "percent" that the Realtors are making and the "percent" that the brokers are making in the deal; this number is NOT mandated by any laws, but Realtors and Co. always give homebuyers the impression that it is; after all, all the other papers they're signing are supposed to be for their "protection". After all who would hire a Realtor who didn't claim to "be working for you"?

They talk dollars when it comes to house prices and percents when it comes to what they're making in the deal. This is evil, deceptive practice and it should be illegal.

I think most rational people would think twice about taking out a loan to pay five or six figures to somebody who calls shuttling around in an SUV and counting their riches "work".

I'm not even remotely "communist" as you seem to be implying; I simply think that this "rolodex" argument you're making is beyond outdated in the 21st Century.

After all, your risk-reward argument only makes sense if there's competition. And if you'll look over the DOJ case I linked to above, you will see that the National Association of Realtors does everything in its power to restrain competition.

Need more evidence? Watch the video:

http://themermaidtavern.blogspot.com/2009/02/realtors-are-ev...
This is a horrible documentary.

Don't get me wrong, introducing foreign species like the Nile perch is dangerous at best. And it's a tragedy in this case.

But the movie tries to imply that the Nile perch related trade is worse then the alternative. That's despite that every person they ask TELLS them as much as this sucks, what we did before sucked worse.

Then there's the whole SPOILER alert: Africa exports fish, imports guns for war and European kinds get grapes in winter while Europe exports guns.

Except that's racist B.S. Africa is continent, South Africa is the country that export the grapes. Poor eastern European countries exported the guns, rich Western Europe imported the grapes. And it was African countries at war that imported guns. This is nothing to do with Nile perch.

And then there's intercuting the fish factories with the steet kids. What's that supposed to tell us? That the exporters don't care enough the poverty at home? What about all the jobs they create. Perhaps that more money should go toward eradicating the Nile perch, is that even possible?

That the Nile perch was introduced for trade? But it wasn't, people were stupid and it was introduced for food.

That allowing trade makes things worse? But the gun trade has nothing to do with the perch, except they both happen to use the same planes. Does that mean the airports are bad too?
One of the most financially successful "dating" sites, Adult Friend Finder, targeted those very groups: unhinged losers and hookup junkies.
I think you might want to take a look at this:

http://ffnnkk.org/

Fact is that graphical programming languages are only good for certain kinds of programs which is why they have only gained traction in the data acquisition world ( labview, lego mindstorm..etc ) where the metaphor of "data-flow" fits in very well with the domain. Sometimes they are just really slow to create general purpose programs compared to traditional text-based programming. I still remember the labs I had to do in Labview where to insert an element into an array, I had to drag like 3 different blocks unto the screen, convert the data into right types the and then wire them up, just inefficient.
I guess it doesn't seem too hard to define, but maybe the confusion is philosophical. When I say bit-for-bit, that's what I mean. When I say "remake" it involves using your own voice and instruments to make a new recording. That's actually been the default through all history. There's no "original recordings" for Beethoven's music. If you buy a pop song's sheet music, never having heard the song, that's a very traditional kind of making music, and completely appropriate.

But really, philosophically. Here's an original recording (couldn't find the studio version):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzZHmHqEE7k

Okay, and here's a great remake. I say great because it's so completely original at the same time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVuh1Ymve2I

And here's a ripoff (sort of. The sampled parts were paid for), which you probably already guessed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx3m4e45bTo

I really like that song, but that guy added very little to the original remake, so to speak.
It's difficult to get a non-x64-capable CPU these days :)
Same here - I waste a lot of time with the internet, including watching some TV online.

It's said that alcoholics and drug addicts have a clear path to getting clean - completely cut out the addiction from your life. But people who have problems over-eating can't make as simple a change to solve their problem. After all, you need to eat to live.

The internet is kind of like that for me - it's something I need to do work on and learn from, but is something I frequently over-use.
Were you thinking of Nexenta http://www.nexenta.org/os ? They use the OpenSolaris kernel with their own GNU/Debian linux distribution.
killed firefox for me too, using 3.5
Box2D Physics Engine in Processing.js
All you need to consider:

- Is it useful?
- Is it fun?

Just OR these two to see if the language has justified its existence.
Thanks, but WAY outside of a consumer price range :) Nice to see, though.
The fact that employees are willing to cash out now might mean that they are less confident about the potential of cashing out big in the future. I'm sure no early Google employee would even think of cashing out pre-IPO.
Way too many glyphs to be syllables.

If I were doing something like this, I would assign new glyphs to each letter (as not to break the image of a fantasy world), and then encode the whole thing with a one-time pad. Doing so can give you all sorts of weird-looking words that have actual value.

Does anyone know how many unique glyphs there are in his book? For that matter, how many are there--including both uppercase and lowercase--in French (I don't know how many accented characters there are)?

And if there are still too many to be such an arrangement, it is possible that each letter was assigned multiple sets (a set being uppercase and lowercase) of glyphs and picking a random number between 0 and twice the total number of letters in French, counting accented letters as unique letters (manually picking the proper case).

I'm not saying that he did this, but it's what I would do.
It's the first time i hear about the site: It's great and promising. however if i happen to use it a lot in the future (and may be several times a day) it'll not replace Google.

This is not exactly an engine, it's a precious scientific tool

edit: i looked for Google and this showed me the last trade in our local currecncy (DT)!! this mean they have care about visitors from all over the world
You raise an interesting point here - why is Kenny G's clarinet so insufferably cheesy to so many (including me), but Danger Mouse doing the same thing with a drum machine is hailed as a visionary (though I'm personally indifferent).

I think the difference may be that while DM is no different, his contributions are at least contemporary; that doesn't make it better, just more fashionable. Clarinets used to be fashionable, and Kenny g's stock-in-trade is musical nostalgia: so nostalgia^2 is not an improvement to most people.

On the other hand, this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ9iNoTKMAs (same song mashed up with Radiohead) presents the same melody in a different but interesting harmonic context - that is, in the same key but with different chords behind it. To me that's innovative, although I don't personally like Radiohead. On the other hand Kenny G's clarinet vampings seem completely unoriginal - as someone who uses sequencers because I'm poor at actually playing bass or piano, he's much better than me at operating his instrument, but isn't doing anything remotely novel with that ability (like introducing new rhythmic or harmonic tension, he's just echoing what's already there with a clarinet).

Although we disagree, I think your points are interesting because I find myself wondering about things like this when I reach a site that mashes up (say) Craigslist with Google - is there really anything original going on here, or is it just digital glue, something the browser will do by itself in a few years?
I doubt if the loss of Wikipedia would affect Wolfram Alpha. they'd just license the information.
But it’s another sign that large private companies like Facebook are desperately seeking ways to find “liquidity” for their employees — especially now that the IPO market remains difficult, in particular for unprofitable companies.

Well, this sounds fantastic.
Ok then, how about saying what the demo would have done, had it worked?

If the demo is impressive, it should be the only thing users see when they visit the site. None of the copy on your website means anything to me at all. Like some other people here, I thought it was a joke.
You bid on the job. Eh? ;)
Whoever made the logo copied it from this one -

http://logopond.com/gallery/detail/42366
I wonder whether the researchers have thought through the ethical implications of this.

I've worked in the gaming industry, and I'd consider this predatory.
If you call Paypal with a US phone number and a foreign IP number, especially when the IP number is linked to a country with loose money laundering rules, you are going to have problems.
It's been a few years since I saw the book, but the total number of glyphs seemed a lot closer to (for example) the number of hiragana + katakana than the number of kanji.

(Also, I don't know if you picked just French at random, but Serafini is Italian.)
> What's the solution then?

One solution would be to put an end to usury. Houses, cars, etc. will have to become far more modest, but in the end they will be affordable without debt slavery.
> The war on drugs has made it illegal to purchase common laboratory glassware without a background check

If only that were all. Try getting Aldrich Inc. (or any other chemical vendor) to ship anything at all to a non-corporate address. And may the gods help you if your neighbors catch a glimpse of glassware through your basement window or smell a solvent: be prepared to stare down a SWAT team's rifle barrel at 3 in the morning.
The goal may not be to maximize return.

For instance, if I could stop working tomorrow, and maintain my current lifestyle, I would take that over promises of more cash later. I might do this even if the payout were not enough for me to fully retire on.

As long as I can take an ~5 yr sabbatical with no strings attached, I'm confident I can create enough things to keep the money coming in, on my own terms.
The article says, "Furthermore, everyone knows we are in our current economic pickle because greed, which slept through the Clinton administration, was awakened by the Bush administration's tax cuts and deregulation."

However, many attribute the decline to the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, during Clinton's reign: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/071603.asp
For the record, I only made this post in an attempt to get a link to the search engine somewhere in the article, in this case through the Sphere-powered related posts section. It didn't work :(

Story: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/12/future.search.engine/inde... (YC's Scoopler is mentioned in the article.)

Snapshot: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/cnn.pdf

FWIW, here's the funding breakdown mentioned in the blog post...from crunchbase:

Wolfram Alpha: ?

Search Me: $43.6M

Kosmix: $55M

Hakia: $21M

Twitter: $55M

Duck Duck Go: bootstrapped :)
I tried "ethnic groups nigeria". Wolfram Alpha gave me a |-delimited string of them, Wikipedia gave me a much more comprehensive list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Ethnic_groups_in_Niger...) and each one is a hyperlink.

Perhaps the author prefers to use Wikipedia for "facts and trivia", but I find myself enjoying the site for providing a detailed and thorough introduction to almost every non-trivial topic.
Examples of similarly interesting ideas:

1/ Aristotle's classification of forces and the idea of quintessence;

2/ Plato's idea that planets move necessarily in circles, because it's the most beautiful and simplest shape. That one witheld progress in astronomy for 2000 years;

3/ Beautiful idea that the market is a statistical system, and thus can be modeled by tools of mathematical physics. That the assumptions of these models are not met in economy, no one bothered much till just recently.

So you take some guiding rule first, and then force world around to accept it.
Prepare for an ocean of (paper) spam.

Ever register a domain with your real snail-mail address (rather than the ubiquitous proxies most registrars offer)?
But why would facebook encourage that? Unless they are really trying to cut down on payroll by incentivizing people to cash out early and leave.
If your model is compatible with sending traffic to Amazon for final purchase, you might be able to use their commerce APIs.
Be flattered!

If your site can be cloned, launched AND cause a serious dent in your business, you need to think of better ideas.
Congrats Gabriel. DuckDuckGo trumps these guys, and I'm glad CNN got you guys into the article. Best of luck.
I wonder if those who so abhor paying for a social safety net secretly want life's losers to wither away and die? (But leave behind a lot of their money to bilkers on the way to the grave.)
> So I think what businesses wanted was a cheaper/lighter version that was entirely manager focused and didn't offer quite as many employee controls

Know this: you are selling lighter, stronger, cheaper, etc. manacles for the powerful to chain up the powerless. Justify it however you like.

Not all technology is morally neutral:

http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/global/the-second-amendm...

In order to make a buck, you are shifting the balance of power from workers towards their exploiters. Do you deny this?
I am excited about drobo but I've heard too many horror stories.
Fun with type functions