skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>But we are not much closer to for instance real AI than we were 30 years ago

This is very hard to evaluate. It seems unlikely that progress towards strong AI will be linear - and I'm not basing that on Kurzweil or claiming it will be exponential, I just don't see how the notion of making steady progress towards strong AI even makes sense.
Anyway the guy fooled Apple for 9 months with 900 apps.

hmm...
California to Ohio isn't jetlag. It's waking up a bit earlier than usual.
Try the vim plugin "fuzzyfinder_textmate"
You can't tie features, product, and code quality together either. Even the most brilliant code is worthless if it isn't solving the customer's problem. This was the issue with Eric Ries' first version of IMVU - they built an epic piece of IM integration software that they trashed because no one wanted it.
I see what you're saying… but don't confuse depth of a thread for quality. I think the first comment was down-modded for language and then typical troll-baited discussion took over. The second one is definitely a better example because the tone is better.

Actually, now that I think about it, I once got down-modded for a comment that I felt was reasonable in tone and content. A little snarky maybe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713004 It was political though and I think political topics encourage this kind of behavior. Makes you feel like giving up when you know that there are other users who just want to censor other opinions. That is probably why people rail against the political topic stories here on hacker news. It's less about not being interested in political discussions as much as they don't like topics that encourage division.

It's really crazy what attaching some magic reputation "points" to an activity can do to it. People go absolutely nuts over points. I would have to agree with a point made earlier on this one that it is time to consider hiding the scores, or at least de-emphasizing them. Mob behavior will be fueled by them.
alternatively if you want SYSTEM privileged cmd.exe on Windows XP (not on Vista, sorry) and you don't have SysInternal's psexec, you can try this:

C:\> time /t
9:42
C:\> at 9:43 /interactive cmd

then at 9:43 a cmd.exe shell pops up.

And HTTPAnalyzer could sniff HTTPS traffic easily. It's DLL injection and it can un-gzip data.
My local cafes with the best coffee don't take credit cards (nor EFTPOS).
Informing application users of the defaults is easy - and in this case, the defaults are what most people would expect.
I hope that's it. I don't want to become any more incoherent than I already am.
Remember when Google had an outage with App Engine a few weeks ago and afterwards, once it was resolved, they published a lengthy and detailed technical post-mortem on what wrong and how they were planning to fix it to prevent the same type of problem in the future?

Paypal is a service that people pay for too. Where is their post-mortem?
Marketing is important for revenue.

Code is important for profit.

If your code is buggy, difficult to maintain, doesn't do what it's supposed to, doesn't scale, isn't easy to enhance, etc., etc., etc., you will spend all of your margin on getting it to be what it should. And drive profit to zero. Or worse.

Actually, in the current world of try before you buy, test driving, and freemium, code is important for revenue, too.

Code not important? You're preaching to the wrong audience.
Actually, UM is offering 700 potential students money to defer their matriculation. I know that sounds less exciting, but please keep headlines accurate.
Inside your walls: http://www.hulu.com/watch/2905/burn-notice-ask-a-spy---burgl...
Ten Reasons Why "10 Reasons Why iPhone is STILL No BlackBerry” are Irrelevant
The reason they SAY they are angry is because the test is subjective and open-ended and there has been about 100 years of research into the interpretation of the results.

It would be very hard to replace the plates with new ones and maintain the same properties of the originals.

The reason I think they are ACTUALLY angry is because they make money selling the plates/diagnostics. If they are online for free why would anyone buy them?
Plus, FWIW, with MySQL I've had lots of table corruption issues over the years (although it's been a couple of years since then, so it might be more stable now).

Never had any issue with PostgreSQL.
What in particular does this have to do with Rails?
I didn't know that, but Rorschach tests can detect cancer (http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/cgi/reprint/48/8/549.pd...)

I love science :-)
Yes, that's why I recommended QEMU (which is a fast system emulator). A simple postmortem crash inspection will tell you what went wrong anyway. Simply write a normal micro handler to dump the registers at the end. Since you have the RIP, just objdump your binary and read the assembly from where it took the #GP or #PF. If you blew the stack away, you should automatically know from RSP, etc, etc.

Kitten[1] is the LWK which I work with, although my focus is on the Palacios VMM. It's quite a simple OS that is by no means out of a good programmer's reach.

[1] https://software.sandia.gov/trac/kitten
The net result was interesting, but the interviewer's frequent interruptions made it more grating than it had to be.
I can certainly see how the market has won over code in many situations.

I find it personally frustrating, because it goes against my ethical code: I care about what I create, and won't work for a company that takes short-cuts. I would especially walk out the door if it became clear that they were trying to hide serious flaws under the guise of a quality product.

The industry is so young, that it is difficult to protect consumers. There are people being fooled into purchasing all kinds of things, but at least with a toaster there are regulations like "can't electrocute people". With software, no one demands to see the source to ensure they haven't invested in an unmaintainable piece of garbage; and license agreements are laughably evasive, ensuring that companies aren't really responsible for anything.

That's why I am still interested in seeing where open source goes. In just 5 or 10 more years (a lifetime for maintaining code), some of the worst offenders in corporate environments could be really screwed, as their rickety messes start to crumble. Their most talented programmers will likely have left in disgust. Marketing will becoming increasingly the task of putting lipstick on a pig.

Whereas, many free software projects are basically honest: you can't really hide ugly hacks in open source, and maintainers are already highly motivated and eager to show the world how they think something should be done. Young people are already more likely to be knowledgeable about software, which will lead to more forms of marketing based on quality (e.g. writers, colleagues, neighbors, friends, who can guide your decisions based on quality and not flashy ads). For the rest that isn't open-source, government may catch up a little and start bending the industry to avoid some of the worst offenses.
It wasn't much of an argument for Postgres either. He said it had lots of features, kinda had speed, but oh wait those things don't matter because it works with Rails and MySQL got bought by Oracle.
Turn a Pair of Water Wings into a Travel Pillow
The app would be so much better if apple allows a setting such that you dont need to run the app to do it. As soon as the iPhone bumps another iPhone, the contact is shared with a notification.
What you call "not speaking English" I'd just call "speaking Welsh". Your framing such self affirmation gestures negatively, as an aggression to the other, only shows your bias. The world will hopefully keep one more language around thanks to the people that make that perfectly legitimate choice. In any event, I bet any adversary feelings towards the English language are not due to the name but to the fact that it's been dislodging Welsh out of existance, as your reasoning illustrates.

A Gov employee should be expected to know all official languages in the country where she'll be serving. Especially if she is going to have to face public.

Considering to move or home school your children only to keep their minds uncontaminated by Welsh sounds more like political or social prejudice than actual educational concern. Trust me, knowing Welsh will only make it easier, not harder, for them to learn Urdu and Mandarin. In Spain, students from nations with one or more languages of their own average a higher proficiency in foreign languages (including Castillian, AKA Spanish) than those of monolingual provinces.
Making a 64-bit Operating System
great post, it takes courage and restraint to not gold-plate a feature, but instead to just do what is needed to make most of the people happy and get the feature out there and see what your customers really want with real user testing.
>but there's got to be some value if it's been in use for almost 100 years, no?

You might want to rethink this statement.
Nice combination of freakonomics with hypothetics.

I can understand a discussion of $8 and $18 gas prices without factoring in the effect of new technology and energy sources over the next decade or so - it's just adding made-up stuff on top of made-up projections.

But not factoring for more predictable things like inflation and wage rises over that time? It's a recipe for scaremongering or, worse still, an article so far-fetched nobody takes any notice of the serious underlying issue.
i just saw it on cbs. Its pretty cool to have your app in apple ad. Congrats.
Techzing 11 - For The Love of Money
a corporation is so much more than a legal tool because of the effects that emerge from it. a simple example is your number 3 - a description of the conflict of interest inherent in corporate structure (and the source of much controversy lately).

while a corporation is a collection of people if it is successful it buries every one of them, until the end of time. the behavior that emerges from the simple act of self-preservation over time is complex and very different from entity to entity (see evolution).

more personal, accountable structures do not require feudalism or regress. what they require is communications technology like that we are utilizing right now (and real names help).
I think some folks sense blood in the water around MySQL, and are trying to grow marketshare.
As usual, Skepdic has a good page

http://www.skepdic.com/inkblot.html

on this unvalidated test, which I took when I was a kid.
You'll like this: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail188.html
Best Vim Tips
but there's got to be some value if it's been in use for almost 100 years, no?

No. It's possible for an unvalidated test to have no value at all and yet be used for decades.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=078796056X/
Five Firms Hold 80% of Derivatives Risk
Tooth Regeneration is Coming Along Nicely
A good hiding place is an exterior-mounted metal box with a sign reading "Danger: High Voltage."
The Mandelbrot Set by A. K. Dewdney (1985 Scientific American article)
On OSX, at least, Komodo Edit was not a very polished experience for me.
Did you read this article in 1985? Did you code your own Mandelbrot Set program? For which computer? How fast was it?
I think it depends on the stage of the company:

Early on? Marketing is the most important thing you need, since you need the users. You can get away with a crappy code since people are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Customer service is more or less useless too, since you don't really have any users to customer serve.

Mid-Stage? Coding is the most important. Best example is twitter. At this stage you are growing more or less organically, so you need to have great code in order to scale properly. You also need that good code to release more and more features to keep up with the competition.

Late-Stage? Customer service is the most important. At this stage your product is more or less polished, and you pretty much got as much market share as you can get. At this stage you need great customer service to keep the users you already got.
Compared to `xterm -e vim`, yes. By that measure, so is gvim and every other GUI vim wrapper. MacVim just comes with quite a few plugins, which may explain the commenter's experience.
The audience does not make the facts though. In practice crummy code + excellent marketing win over excellent code + crummy marketing.

Code is important, but unfortunately - I'm much more of a coder than a marketeer, in fact I have a pretty strong antipathy towards marketing - marketing wins out.

There are a few exceptions to that rule, but not enough to hope that your reincarnation of an IT business is going to be that exception.

Write good code, but please do not forget that if you want to turn a buck that you'll have to spend as much attention to the marketing of your product, if not more.
I believe bike infrastructure, in terms of road markings, can increase danger to cyclists in many situations.

Navigating junctions from bike lanes is often inconvenient, leading practiced cyclists to leave them for the main road, but the lanes increase car drivers' perceived sense of ownership of the road, and they can end up more aggressive towards cyclists.

With respect to red lights: my (albeit short) experience cycling in California has been strongly affected by so-called smart lights, which have vehicle detectors built into the junction approach roads and help control signaling. The trouble is, bikes usually don't have enough metallic mass to affect these detectors, and early on in my CA biking career I once spent about 15 minutes in the middle of the road vainly waiting for a red light to turn green.

It never did.
Inventing a New Paradigm: SugarLabs and the Sugar UI
Yeah but he was comparing it to TextMate.
Google’s Schmidt quits Apple board
I can identify with this. I had to stop playing piano for about 20 years before I could really start playing piano.

I always did enjoy the flow experience, though. Mastery is its own reward. (not that I'm there yet...)
That's a good point.

Ok, how about this then, if IQ would be some measure would you accept that even lower animals have an IQ of sorts and they can solve simple problems on their own ?

And that we still can't get a computer to solve anything on its own without very precise instructions ?

A first step towards AI would then be to get a computer to be goal driven enough that it could solve a simple problem without it being foreseen (and the solution spelled out) by the programmer.

It could still be years before that would lead to a true AI in the sense that it could do something that we could not but it would be a step along the way.
"sniffing the unsniffable" sounds way more racy than it ought to.
...I have a pretty strong antipathy towards marketing...

I have never really understood this.

I'm as introverted as the next guy and find pleasure in the endless hours of building something out of nothing.

But I get just as much pleasure talking about what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, what can be done with it, and who it can help.

When you get right down to it, isn't that just another instance of marketing?
The Ug99 fungus could wipe out 80% of the world's wheat crops
so, in sequence then:

1) identify a problem that your customers want you to solve

2) solve the problem, sketchy at first and sound out your market about the solution you are offering

3) iterate a couple of times between (2) and (3)

4) your initial users are now your most valuable marketing tool, by now they have built a relationship with you and they should be happy

5) big rollout to all the users that you have that are comparable to your 'pilot' customers

6) back to 2! keep doing it, improve the product, fine tune your marketing pitch and do not ever forget about the one at the expense of the other.

With some variations this scheme works for both b2b and b2c.
That's true. But there are shades to marketing.

I find it perfectly ok to talk to people that are interested in my product, and I'm pretty good at it. But I'm allergic to cold calling prospects and pushing my product where no real interest exists.

That is how the big money is made though. So I'm happy with my little niches, I'll probably never be a billionaire, on the other hand my 'startup' has been putting food on the table to the tune of about 50 manyears in the last decade, which is not a bad score for what was essentially a single good idea and a crappy implementation at first.

EDIT: Honestly, I wished it was the other way around, that code really would trump marketing and that all customers were informed about the products they are buying. Unfortunately that is not the case, so if your competitor is selling slickly packaged junk that is of a lesser build quality than your magnus opum and you hope to compete on that you'd better be better in marketing than they are or you will lose.
ec2 and cloudservers/slicehost = apples

appengine and cloudsites = oranges
The Guide to the Freedom and Responsibility Culture at Netflix
I think that's a nice sequence for product-marketing development.

At some point you'll have to deal with all the business support stuff (Premises, HR, Accounts). And then when you get big enough and start hiring people to do most of the product-marketing work, then you'll need to have some business management aspects like Vision/Strategy, client base management etc.

But this process should serve you through ramen profitable, and beyond.
Even configuring Emacs through the .emacs file I find that it treats things different enough from Vim that it's painful to try and switch. Every once in a while I get excited that maybe I'll switch, but then I pretty quickly fall back to Vim.

There are so many things in Vim that 'just make sense', at least to my way of thinking. Things like tabs. Why is it that in Emacs you can't just define a soft tabstop of 4 spaces? Why do I have to define a list of column numbers? Don't get me wrong, the idea that I could manually define a bunch of column numbers so that the tabstops were uneven for a particular application would is cool... by why can't I just say "every 4th column is a tabstop" and have Emacs apply that until infinity columns? And there is the lack of things like Vim's ":set list" mode to quickly visualize if a bunch of spacing consists of tabs, spaces or a mixture (and to quickly figure out where trailing whitespaces are).

These are all things that I can get on default Vim without any configuration. I'm sure these are all programmable in Emacs -- it is a full-on lisp engine afterall -- but it's too steep of a climb for me (or at least has been thus far) when I'm already productive with Vim.
I'd only own a phone for the computer/WiFi part. And I won't have some freaking manufacturer telling me what software I can and can't run on MY computer.

That HTC Hero that's in the pipeline looks awesome. (Price??) I saw an advert & review for it yesterday for the first time. (It runs Flash! uses SD card.)
[correction] how sad, but true.
I've got a much better idea. Find a room in your house that no one is really going to see. Then, get some tacky "$100 bill" print wallpaper, and put it on the walls in that room. Then, take your real $100 bills and carefully paste them on top of the wallpaper so that they aren't noticeably different from the rest of it.

Install a camera in the room to enjoy the sheer hilariousness of when someone breaks into your house and enters said room.
Yes, when learning it it is useful to know that :wq can be decomposed in to :w and :q and combined in to :wq! and :w! and :q!

But once you know that I think it's simpler to just type ZZ
Auth.net did have a twitter account where they were keeping everyone posted on the progress.
OSDev and OSDever ( http://osdever.net/ ) are both great resources in general, but I can't help but mention #osdev on Freenode. Incredibly useful resource if you're in need of assistance.
That may have something to do with the immense budgets for defense the US has, a portion of that money goes towards research in universities.
I agree with most of this and disagree with a little.

You see, I think there is great hope for us. I simply do not fear slick marketing and packaging any more. The world is slowly changing so that prospects are more willing than ever to weigh a proper demo over all the slickness. A proper demo that clearly shows how this offering solves their problem. 30 years of crap and vaporware have produced a slightly more saavy buyer of software. One who is also more willing to try the little guy who didn't have a chance 10 years ago.

Has it changed enough? Not yet. Do we still have to market? Of course. But I think the glass is more half full than half empty. IMO, delivering real solutions to customers' problems is about the best marketing you can do.
Natural Image Statistics (Book pdf + Codes)
Why 9-5 Must Die
Fast ICA Package for MATLAB
I think genetic algorithms have been able to surpass that standard a long time ago.

While the developer has to define the playing field and the rules, the solutions the computer comes up with are way better than randomly searching through the solution space. check out http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2006-04/john-koza-has-...

Of course that is no way near strong AI, it is still a step in the direction.

And we are working on simulations of the cortex of simple mammals. (read a bit on Blue Brain).

I am not saying we're close to strong AI, but we are making small steps in the right direction, and if philosophically speaking you are a materialist like me (believe that consciousness can be explained in theory using nothing but physical/chemical terms) than it is just a matter of time until it happens.
Fascinating idea of having more personal, accountable structures - is there a write-up somewhere of what legal form these might take? Or are you talking about LLCs and the like? I have been doing startups for a long time now and cannot imagine them (nor most other forms of enterprise) without some form of limited liability vehicle.

Or is it the idea that communications technology will somehow transcend the form of the structure and lead to better results simply because people relate to one another differently?

I am asking this sincerely. I guess my imagination does not easily comprehend the potential alternatives. If you can give me some pointers to discussions on this, I would appreciate it.

I have often seen corporations criticized but have never heard of any formal structure along the lines you describe (again, unless you mean LLCs or the like).
IPhone Whine #4 - Stop Blaming AT&T
vim can give you more advantages if you have a wider screen. tab in tab, editing two file in the same tab, etc. it's very flexible. http://journal.kilabit.org/?p=81.
One step further: If you think that learning a specific language in university is going to get you a job you are not studying computer science, you should be going to a trade school.

A cs degree is universal, it should be language agnostic.

One computer language or another, it doesn't matter one bit, they're all functionally equivalent. Just like a chef cook has 30 knives to choose from you have a palette of languages that you could choose from to solve a given problem.

If you really understand computers then the languages are just a means to an end.