skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article has little to do with Asimov's laws. Asimov's laws address "three fundamental Rules of Robotics, the three rules that are built most deeply into a robot's positronic brain", i.e., an engineering construct. The article mostly addresses a legal issue: "Accordingly, robo-ethicists want to develop a set of guidelines that could outline how to punish a robot, decide who regulates them and even create a 'legal machine language' that could help police the next generation of intelligent automated devices."

I also love how the article ends with "Morality is impossible to write in formal terms", and yet, it expects to see complex enough robots to warrant the article in the first place.
Hydrolosophy: Harvard Startup Measures Product Water Footprint
i cant imagine Amazon would pay $840m just for zappos' culture and brand
MIT Electric Car May Outperform Rival Gas Models
Its actually impossible to make a good point on the internet without giving someone, somewhere the ability to call it an over generalization.

No, it's really not. The Internet gives you the ability to publish as much data and detail as you choose. It allows you to target a selected audience and provide information and discussion topics that relate to a specific audience that would not have been cost effective to reach in the past.

However, if you're more trying to promote yourself or your own "brand" vs. trying to provide actionable valuable data, then yes, you must generalize heavily.
Looking for startup funding, hence via TechCrunch.
Do both sides of a skype call need to use the super wideband audio codec to realize a difference..?
BizTeen is looking for a python(django) developer
Hey guys! Emil Hajric from BizTeen here. We're looking for a python developer with knowledge of the django web framework.

Interested? send us an email at hajrice@gmail.com
That's what makes technology industry interesting. Things are quite unpredictable and like it or not, none of us knows exactly how things will pan out.

Google's strength is obviously in brand penetration when it comes to search engine. After all, most people outside us hardly even know about "Google Chrome" after making such a huge splash all over the place. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ).

So, i wouldn't expect them to type in www.cuil.com or WolframAlpha without something is changing in the landscape that alter user behavior.
Matt Taibbi - Obama leaves foxes in the Commodity Futures henhouse
Stillwell knows what he's talking about. In his fantastic book "Mathematics: A History" he makes the point that calculus is taught entirely backwards from its historical development, and he says that approach ruins most undergrads in truly learning calculus. In line with Abel's dictum to "Study the masters, and not the pupils", it's obvious that sweeping the why and how of calcuclus under the rug, and instead presenting a polished and abstract end-product is a disaster as far as learning goes. As natural tinkerers and hackers, surely we can appreciate how much more you can learn by peaking behind the curtain, taking apart the machine and trying to put it back together again.

Sure we can thank Cauchy and Weierstrauss for working out the logical kinks and putting centuries of ungrounded assumptions on a proof-based foundation, but the FTC is a hell of a lot easier to understand on an intuitive level if you started with series, derived integrals and then saw how derivatives came out of that, rather than the other way around.

The real problem with mathematics education is that they are teaching to the least-common denominator on a mass-scale, adopting the attitude that 99% of students won't need to really know how it works under the hood. If students can just grind through the problem sets, it's good enough, so the entire curriculum, text books, and TA lectures are tailored to that. Unfortunately, this approach has infected even the pure math programs--I think it's silly to teach the group who will specialize in mathematics in the same way say biology and economics students are taught caluclus.
The actual letter from the CEO mentions that Amazon may be using Zappos' warehouse space, which is "closest" to the UPS Worldport.

(Incidentally, Louisville may be UPS' hub, but my Amazon packages arrive fastest when they ship from the Indiana warehouse.)
Every writer wants to reach more than 5 people in the tiniest sub-segment of any given topic of interest, which is about where you're at if you write generalization-free.

Which is to say that what you wrote is a terrible generalization! Its not always true - its only true for writers that are writing for groups of people numbering less than five.
"I go back and forth with humans having it fairly often even"

I'm curious what kind of things tip you back and forth. I've been a staunch "undecided" for quite a while on this one.
Graph: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hoyhoy/3743710781/
the term 'illegal' here is hard and complex.

Securities law is harder and more complex. :)

IANAL, but anything you do say on a deal can be used as evidence in a deal- even posts to twitter. Remember also, the deal may still not complete, depending on amazon's terms of business and if their shareholders need to vote on it.

The SEC's job is to try and protect everyone's financial interests - and to prevent people from gaming the system. Part of that is to regulate how and what people say during a transaction such as this.

But- the letter is being read, as will all the analyst reports and so on thru wall street... it's just that they speak in a different language- call it their own code. :)
Guess Who Lost Big on the Zappos Deal?
I don't buy that at all. That attitude is precisely what makes people think they can't "get it". As if they lack some sort of natural aptitude or genetic predisposition towards numbers.
Competition is driving down prices. Tariffs and minimum wage laws are just ways of redistributing wealth. If there were no tariffs or minimum wage laws, there would be more healthy competition which would raise the world's standard of living, not just local workers.
Those pics are great, though alas several of the more interesting ones are broken links.

Castro St. and the surrounding area almost seems more built-up than it is today. The landscaping (apparently done this decade) really makes a difference.

The real surprise for me was California St. That's one of the most densely populated areas today, but back then it was just trees and small houses on big lots.

The Hunt Foods factory is very close to where FriendFeed is now, I think.
he suggested men might have a higher variance in their distribution, meaning more men in the tails at both sides

That's my understanding as well.

A professor I respect a lot presented his analysis of Summers' argument in a lecture I went to. This professor said that Summers' argument was statistically invalid, since the number of outliers in the tails of the IQ distribution was insufficient to tell if the distribution was in fact different at the tails between men and women.

It's fair to say that this rebuttal was not the one Summers got when he presented his idea to the faculty. :)
So what exactly did engine yard get out of this? The contest showed that neither Ruby nor "The Cloud" were useful in solving this (useless, admittedly) problem. As a company that sells Ruby cloud services and consulting, that doesn't exactly sound like great marketing.
Wanted to purchase a lappy and a friend of mine posted my doubts here. Seeing the quality of response I started hanging out here regularly.
Promotion of unimpressive new Facebook features hardly qualifies as something which "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", which is, roughly, the most important measurement of weather something should be posted here.

Begone!
Business cards finally useful again with augmented reality?
the security forces use these paint balls to single out protestors, who they believe should be arrested

If this is really their goal, then I would think accuracy would be high up the list of concerns... i.e. nailing the right protester to be arrested.

Sure, they could just nail anyone but then that sort of defeats the purpose of marking the protesters they really want...
My own writing has adapted to this. I now ONLY make brief generalisations, because I've learned that argument or reasoning or evidence is a waste of effort. People either already agree with you, or as far as they're concerned, you're wrong and always will be wrong. And furthermore you're a fat stupid troll and so is your momma.
Yeah, I predicted this to happen in some blog comment two years ago. Amazon is great in doing what they do, I think what they would pursue now will be companies like them that are already well represented and branded in a certain segment and niche.

Shoes are a good segment and niche. It doesn't spoil so it can be inventoried, it's fashionable so it can garner high markups, and it's compact and not hard to handle.

This was a cheap buy to pick up a brand, marketing, warehouses, labor, and management talent. I think a real game changer would be if Amazon bought Newegg.
Interestingly the fonts are actually more readable to me than google's (slightly bigger, slightly more kerning). Perhaps he's only testing on linux - and I'm also on linux.
The New York Times discovers the local (in San Francisco?!?) potentials of Twitter for small businesses. Yes, even street cart vendors.

I'm still waiting for AT&T to function well enough in my little backwater to make iPhones feasible... not to mention for 1/4 of the population to be internet-savvy (or have heard there is a "tech revolution").

If anybody wants to move to a high desert town with huge hours of sunshine per year (and in need of a revolution/awakening)... email me.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. I am not a historian. I know little of the industrial revolution. Could you please be more explicit?
Look up the definition of Zero-Sum:

In game theory and economic theory, zero-sum describes a situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.
This article is lame.

So, had Draper Richards converted their $250,000 loan to shares, they would have made out big on this deal.

OR, the whole outcome could have been totally different. If they would have been a major shareholder, it stands to reason they would have also had major influence, both on this deal and everything leading up to it.

It's quite possible that this deal would have never even existed had they not demanded loan repayment instead of shares.
Oh, I know that latter well enough. I used to blog for AOL (Weblogs Inc), and it's the reason I left.
My boss used to live in communist poland, and this was a very common tactic. Instead of shooting paintballs, they squirted people with liquid that would only show up under a black light. Police would later hold checkpoints with black lights to scan potential protesters.
Eh, I have yet to have good luck & longevity with WalMart clothes.

Edit: Not that I have examples from the 80s or 90s to compare with.
Great article. I'd this analysis is about 70% of whether I'll be productive or not in a particular day.

Anyone solve this by setting aside a few half-days each week for manager stuff, and reserving the other time for maker stuff?
Designing for Creativity
What would Newegg add for Amazon?

Admittedly, Newegg is the first thing that comes to mind when I want computing hardware (i.e., a motherboard or something), but Amazon apparently has all that stuff too. I just did a search and found that most of what I would need to build a computer is available via Amazon Prime.

Hmm, now I want a new computer :)
Unless Draper Richards was under huge liquidity crunch, probably any investment at the bottom of a bubble would have paid out. Just a case of poor timing and judgment. And Techcrunch being smug.
Here’s Why Amazon Bought Zappos
This is not a good UI for tagging.
Standing on Principle
If they can't afford to get about with a doubling or tripling of gas price, they probably wouldn't be able to afford to move to the city center either.

A square foot of housing in the city center is much higher priced than a square foot in a rural area. Ditto (but to an even greater extent) for land prices. Doubling/tripling the price of gas still wouldn't make it advantageous cost-wise to move from a 3000 sq ft/280 sq meters residence in the countryside to that same square footage in the city, at least not in Cambridge/Boston from say a rural or suburban area on 128 (the ring road). (And this would be even more pronounced once energy tax policy made city property more valuable than rural property.)

To whatever extent that I am after change, I'm after change that taxes energy consumption with the aim to discourage wasteful or "frivolous" use of energy. One or two people living in a 5000 sq ft McMansion? Wasteful, IMO. They shouldn't be barred from doing it, but I don't mind if their energy is taxed to discourage it. Same with my cars, airplane, or 2400 sq ft house for the 3 of us. I think that economic [dis]incentive and personal choices given that landscape is the most fair means to allow people to decide what's important to them and act accordingly.

Should we ban cars older than 5 years, or 10 years from now ban non-electrics, or mandate that you can only have 600 sq ft + 400 sq ft/person, mandate thermostat settings, insulation retrofits to existing buildings, etc? Absolutely not; just adjust the energy rates until you get approximately the macro effect you want, and people will make choices within that framework.

For the record, I'm not strongly advocating that we should triple energy cost via taxation, merely observing that small behavior changes came about from $4 a gallon gas, and that larger changes would come from $10/gal pricing. On that point, I strongly suspect you and I agree.
I understand satire, you moron. But I also understand when someone is trying to veil an accusation with satire and 'fiction.' The irony, you dolt, is that you failed grasp that idea.
I found it interesting. This feature seems like it obviates some of the value provided by services like Posterous, at least for Facebook users.
The massive supplier relationships and pricing information and logistics and the west coast / east coast warehouses / fulfillment centers that rivals Amazon's operations.
This is the same kind of 'loss' that the RIAA claims every time somebody downloads an mp3, money that you didn't earn is not a 'loss', it's a missed opportunity.
Amazon Stock Goes up 20% or over $7 billion after hours
Hey, I would rather have cash in hand than a lottery ticket. Especially if I'm not in the business of big dreaming.
"If you're starting your own company, you certainly don't need to prove your credentials to anyone by having a degree - if you know enough to start the company, more time in school would just be wasted time."

Starting a company is easy. Finishing one is hard.
> "Meetings suck."

Is that really all you got from this? Did you actually read it?

The thing I find about PG's essays isn't that his points are revelational, unexpected or intrinsically new, but that he so often manages to explain why these things are true, in such a way that I find myself nodding along with (nearly) every point. And he doesn't say "Meetings suck." He says:

> Those of us on the maker's schedule ... know we
> have to have some number of meetings. All we ask
> from those on the manager's schedule is that they
> understand the cost.

And that's the difference between PG and so many others. He explicitly recognises that it's not a binary "Sucks" versus "Doesn't Suck". Meetings are essential, but costly. KNowing why they're costly is of enormous value.

I'll be pointing my co-directors at this.
If you want to separate yourself from the world, then you could still use typewriters. Typewriters can't receive e-mail. Similarly, a Pentium can't run modern Web applications at a reasonable speed. A ten-year-old cellphone won't have a camera and all the associated applications of that. You can stay with old hardware -- but at the cost of eventually giving up access to contemporary applications.
Heh, heh, I feel your pain buddy. I'm in the metro area now but i've traveled around CO enough to have pity on anyone doing tech work (that expects any local receptivity).

(But, sorry, that doesn't mean I'm interested in moving to your wasteland.)
Free will is a hard problem; but my response is - I believe in free will, because either I have no choice (no free will) and thus am choosing incorrectly but in reality no choice has been made, or in the case that I do have free will I am correct.
The purpose is fear.
"Grab coffee" meetings can be particularly bad (in terms of time lost) because of the extra cost in getting to and from the cafe. When I had a normal job, getting to a meeting meant putting my shoes back on and walking down the hall. Now I have to consider which bus I'm going to take...
But what did Draper Richards end up using that cash for? What other company was it invested in? Perhaps this loss isn't really as bad as it seems.
Are Marketers Causing Twitter to Be a Less Effective Marketing Tool?
I think your division into two camps is missing the largest cohort of math students by far: those who are taking math because it is required as a checkbox item on a "before you get your degree <or diploma>, you must have passed at least this much math classes".

"Will this be on the test?" is a far more common query in my experience than "Could you show me some additional math so that I may better understand the universe and world that I live in?"
Just look at the stock market as an example. Many people speak of the stock market in terms of a zero-sum game, because on any given transaction if one person makes money the other loses money. However, every day more and more money gets pumped into the stock market, so that, on aggregate, everyone makes positive interest.

The same is true of our standard of living. The standard of living index, so to speak, has been increasing for a long time (forever, maybe?), and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Everyone's standard of living will increase, in aggregate.

However, if people in poorer parts of the world start commanding higher salaries, people in more affluent areas won't be able to buy things as inexpensively as they do now. That's exactly what FSJ is pointing out here. I don't understand why I'm being down-modded for echoing it.

There was a time when Kings built huge castles and palaces. Those times are behind us now, because the standard of living is more evenly distributed. It's only going to continue to become more so.
Couldn't agree more. Spammers and marketers on Twitter are ruining the user experience.
My adult son was talking about one of the articles he read by Paul Graham. I told him to send me the link.
I posted this before but it also seems appropriate here. It's David Langford's Three Laws for military robots:

1. A robot will not harm authorized Government personnel but will terminate intruders with extreme prejudice.

2. A robot will obey the orders of authorized personnel except where such orders conflict with the Third Law.

3. A robot will guard its own existence with lethal antipersonnel weaponry, because a robot is bloody expensive.

Langford is an SF writer. You might know him from his "basilisk" stories--if not, go read them sometime.
David Ogilvy’s best advice for business
The situations are very different.

The investors faced a dilemma, they had to make a decision. They made a poor choice (perhaps only in retrospect), and missed out on a bunch of money because of it.

The RIAA doesn't decide whether people pay or download. The people face the dilemma: download and possibly face consequences, or pay. Since the RIAA doesn't have a decision to make, there is no missed opportunity either.

Or take a poker analogy. Suppose you have the best possible hand at show down. If you then muck your cards regardless, you forfeit the pot. This is a missed opportunity, and definitely also a loss.
I'm sorry, I basically go back and forth between we don't have free will or I don't know. :)

My line of reasoning is that free will would appear to break causation and I'm not sure what the ramifications of that are in the grand scheme of things (i.e. magic?). I'm more inclined to think we're just an insanely complex chaotic system, but then what is consciousness really?
Well, the GSM standard requires the SIM card for one.
This was probably a blip. I don't see it now. There is low volume available after hours and one transaction can cause it to spike. That or sometimes Yahoo Finance just bugs out.
I've found a way to partially counteract a manager's meeting schedule: splinter my work into extremely small pieces, and write them down in a TODO list. These tasks must have a clear DONE/NOT DONE boundary, and shouldn't need to be revisited. You should also break it up so that every time you finish something, you should be able to check something off of your TODO list. If it's not already there, add it, and then check it off.

For instance, if I had to write code to read data from a GPS unit, I might break it up like this:

* Find data spec on new GPS unit.
* Look up current GPS interface.. if none, write an example and design an API around the example.
* Write out header file (We use C++... that's another story :D)
* Write function 1.
...
* Write function n.
* Procure GPS unit.
* Debug.

I always feel some personal inertia against doing a task like "Write class to load data from the new GPS unit", but it's pretty hard to look at each subtask and say "err, I guess I should organize my inbox." Which I would probably do otherwise.

I have trouble finding tasks that are indivisible, but they exist! Designing and implementing custom data structures is one that I've run into recently... it has an ambiguous up-front design cost that makes it hard to divvy-up work.
I think I saw something about YC on VentureBeat, but I didnt really start reading HN until an angel investor recommended it to me.
Modern, first-world standards cannot be applied to the third world - I am a prime example of this. I owe my life to child labor and sweatshop labor, allow me to explain.

My family is originally from Taiwan, and both of my folks grew up when Taiwan was still an inconsequential tropical island consisted mostly of fishing villages and a hodgepodge government-in-exile. Both of them are beneficiaries of the "abusive" practices of foreign businesses. My father worked in a plastics plant, and once had to outrace a cloud of deadly chlorine gas, and survived by the grace of a low wall surrounding the factory (chlorine crawls along the ground). Safety practices were almost non-existent - my mother is still missing a small chunk of her right index finger (and she was lucky). My mother's family was desperately poor - my grandfather eventually succumbed to years of breathing in coal dust with no protective equipment, and all of his children worked from as young as 10 years-old to put themselves through school.

But here's the thing: people in that country could not afford to educate themselves, and if it were not for the willingness of employers to hire child labor and form sweatshops, they would never have had the opportunity to climb out of that hole.

If you had insisted on no child labor, minimum pay standards, and rigorous safety adherence, there would have been no reason to set up shop in a backwater island like Taiwan, and then where would we be? My family would likely still be living in the jungles up on some mountain somewhere, starving.
Looks like the winning team was able to generate more than 400 million keys per second.

"With all the machines running we got up to a total of 3079431974 hashes/second" (via http://www.win.tue.nl/cccc/sha-1-challenge.html)