skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me try to phrase that differently. I'm not trying to legitimize bad stunts. I'm suggesting giving them a legitimate way of getting that PR instead.

Researchers, hobbyists and porn sellers working on chatbots. The definition of success is the Turing test. To give themselves goals and brag about those goals in media, they enter Turing test contests and try to get a "passing" score relatively to arbitrary definitions of pass.

Some will inevitably get overenthusiastic about the achievements. It will go int the press and that's where overpraising wolf crying comes from.

I propose to fixe this by giving contestants a legitimate target to aim for. Something that naturally produces PR fodder in 256 characters. "New Chatbot achieves 38% on the Eugene-13 Turing Test." That could mean something real and honest.

Some variants of the test are complete BS. Some are not. They may not be an indication of consciousness (that's what the one we've got is for) but beating our previous best does represent a legitimate milestone.

A lot of them could be interesting. Some variants of the test could focus on tasks/scenarios. For example, an AI receptionist. Others (maybe Eugene-13) could be a handicap version to the real Turing test.
But then, contrast this with the Uber CEO's trying to get rich by essentially destroying the livelihoods of a huge amount of people. Ethics does play a part in this, and obviously what he says is true, but it's only true because there are so many greedy people out there that put their own desires over others' needs.

Disrupting markets may be sexy, but you always have to think of the consequences.

I was discussing the idea with a friend about buying a company in order to grab their customer base, which he thought was a fantastic idea until I pointed out that it utterly fucks over the employees of that company. Sure, if his company was good enough, he'd win eventually, but you can coexist and do things in a way that aren't utterly vicious and unethical.

There's a middle way, which is allowing evolution but in an ethical, considerate manner.
You're right they're pissed because it's a lot of time and money investment to drive a black cab but I wouldn't say they typically have poor language skills or are poor drivers, what makes you say that?
They trashed Mach and Rapsody and bought out NEXT to get Steve back full time. OSX is mostly updated NEXT, right down to Objective C and API names.
Has to do with the emoji support, I'm pretty sure.
Well, if you paid a tenth of a penny per whatever-the-unit-is, you presumably sell it for its actual current value.
Languages used by Y Combinator Companies
http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html
This is a clever idea, makes it simple to get ideas for things you already have in your cupboard. Although its in a simple form currently, you could do so much with this concept.
There's not much wrong with the University of Reading.

Kevin Warwick, on the other hand is a complex character who errs on the side of hype and unjustified self-publicity much too often. He is not taken very seriously in academic AI and robotics, except when he causes a collective face-palm with claims like this.

The press release people at Reading, or pretty much anywhere else, do not have the skills to assess whether their professor is begin daft or not.
A paywall? I didn't get one.
http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/vaop/naam/pdf/npp2014134a....
Strangely enough, this just seems to be a London thing. In Southampton we have a variety of cab companies, they all use meters and a few of them have apps to order them and track where the car is right now.
Here's Why The FDA's New Cheesemaking Ban Is Terrible News For Artisans
Yeah, exactly. We almost live in computers, most of our friends and colleagues do, but there are so many people for who computer is just a black box. And there is nothing to be angry about. You don't want car mechanic, or plumber to be thinking that you are an idiot, casual users don't want that either, they just have more important things to care about :)
I'm sure. And I'm not saying that the taxi companies are 100% in the right, but there's a question of balance - fair competition versus the careers/families that would lose out.

There are better, more ethical ways to do something.
> Would you get in a stranger's car?

Yes. And I do that when I get into any cab.

This is one argument I never understood. People providing taxi-like services for other people need additional licenses for street safety - sure. But what can be safer apart from that? The person inside could just as well have just stolen the car. They are complete strangers.
We used a db/seeds.rb file mainly for fake data to get our development environments going until there is real user data to work with. Can you use SeedMigrations to have a set of dev seeds vs prod seeds?
You could always offer cash to passers-by to use their debit card to make the purchase.
Problem source is not at the HTTP protocol layer, so probably not much.
> Taxi companies are regulated for extremely good reasons. I know people sing Uber's praises but regulations exist for good reasons. Some exist for bad reasons too but they are largely there to protect people.

From what I can tell, they are fully registered as private hire cars. The ones I've seen in Manchester have the same taxi branding as any other.
Where I live (Australia/Melbourne), something like 95% of the taxi driver demographic are fresh immigrants from India with typically very poor language skills. I won't say they're unbearable, but I would definitely opt for someone with better language skills if I had the choice - something Uber facilitates.
Yes, but they could have issued 30m each to 5 different ISPs that are only half way through their allotment. If I want a fixed IP at my house or my school I don't get it from the internet address registry, I get it from Boston University or RCN.
This was made by a friend of mine. It uses only CSS and DOM elements, no WebGL/canvas/anything-else. You can also check out the actual repo here:

https://github.com/likethemammal/css-visualizer
See T-Mobile's latest presentation for details on 464: https://www.nanog.org/meetings/abstract?id=2359

Personally, DS-Lite seems cleaner but I don't think it's worth arguing about.
Senators weigh tax 'holiday' to help fund highway repairs
I haven't figured this part out yet. I've been billed for 10 domains but they are all listed as 'payment pending'. It's completely crazy. If you figure any of this out please post here, I promise to do the same.
Not if it reacts to spot market prices.

I'm sorry.
But as she mentions, just wait for driverless cars. Or should they be pre-emptively banned as they'll destroy the livelihoods of millions?

This isn't Uber's CEO being evil, it's simply that they found new efficiencies to squeeze out enabled with newer technology.
Swype had cried a river when CM tried to do so. Guess, data mining companies who're interesting in obtaining customer data have their ties with Google.

Oh, well, Google is one to begin with.
I see they got rid of that peanut to manage widgets in the panel. I never liked that.
Just saw this bug, thanks for letting me know. Will fix it asap.
Manufacturing software firm Plex nets $50M and invests in Google Glass
So I checked out uber for the first time this week to see what all the fuss is about, and it actually seems more expensive than a cab. Can anyone explain why it's so popular?

Bonus points: why is it so expensive? It seems like most non-professional drivers would be happy charging a lot list than a cab charges, especially if it's somewhere you're going anyway.
The text prediction still works fine locally without the cloud feature. The data gathering is probably to refine their algorithms. Which I'd expect would include raw text input. Which in a surveillance sense is a bit scary, someone seeing your unfinished thoughts or pre-self-censorship messages.
What makes you say KDE is badly integrated in Kubuntu?
Not quite sure. Unlike US ( at least according to HN readers experience ), most of the booking side features of Uber have been available for years in London. GPS tracking, pre-pay, price compare, ...

I guess the problem is on the driver side. Black Cabs had the same battle a decade ago with the minicabs / private hire. The result have not been bad from a consumer point of view: all minicab service now have mandatory car inspection, driver and insurance inspection checks. I guess Uber style is able to workaround and that pisses off the cabbies ?

Uber is not cheaper than the taxi service I have been using for years. Not quite sure what's the business model of Uber in London and why would people rush to it.

note: The main difference between regular black cabs and other regulated taxi services is that only the Black Cab can pick people up in the street and at Station and Airport pickup points. Minicab need to be booked in advance, which nowadays, means the taxi will come at your GPS coordinates within 10-20 min.

Edit: well according to other comments, it happens. I guess that's why I will never be a startup billionaire, I don't understand people.
I just heard about smoothsort: http://code.google.com/p/combsortcs2p-and-other-sorting-algo...

Also, nice little write-up, thanks. I also dig the extracted sort implementations you dug-out: https://github.com/matslina/qsort
>Fooling people into mistaking a submarine for a whale doesn't show that submarines really swim

Why not? Presumably part of the act of fooling would involve 'swimming' submarines.

I think passing a __strong__ Turing test actually does say something about our brains, cognition, and consciousness. And by a 'strong Turing test', I don't mean dinky 5 minute tests with a "Ukrainian boy". Imagine you carry on a 20 year relationship with a computer pen-pal, having in-depth discussions about every-day things from movies, to music, to sports to family and relationships. Imagine such a computer program fooling every human it interacts with for decades at a time, I think that would say something about ourselves and I think it would render the question of consciousness meaningless. If it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and you can't tell the difference between it and a duck, it's a duck.

Another problem is that philosophers and even regular people tend to relish in ambiguity when it comes to certain ideas and concepts, even trying to elevate them to supernatural levels. Things like free will, love, or consciousness are apparently outside of the natural world, and not subject to natural laws. I think that's wrong. I think the answer is much simpler and much more humbling than we are willing to admit.
How to build an autoupdating RSS feed using JS and python
How is this different than Gojee? http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/21/recipe-finding-app-gojee-qu...
As long as the butchers get to validate their own meat this won't happen. Nobody in the run for PR will allow you to rain on their parade with a 'not good enough'. Essentially what happened here is that the grades were lowered until there was a pass. If you set up shop next door and you refuse to lower the grades until there is a pass they'll go elsewhere, and claim victory.
I could not find a demo. It would help a lot if there was a working demo.
Very simple compared to other apps I've seen do this, which is much appreciated.

Worked well on desktop but unusable on my iPhone5 in either safari or chrome. There seems to be a polling script or something that's causing a page refresh every half second or something? Safari continuously shows the loading bar preventing you from selecting the ingredients bar and Chrome just flashes the page continuously.

Great work though!
That's not the black cab driver demographic in London. It takes something like 5 years to study "the knowledge" for a start.

Illegal minicab driver demographic maybe!
Tweetdeck vulnerability lets attackers execute code remotely
I've seen better in the 90's.
When WALL-E restarts the sound is the one from the Mac boot.
This would be great for integrating into CouchDB for entering common types of documents into Futon.
I wonder if there's an analogy to be made here with security competitions. I'm talking about the "Earn $50,000 if you can hack us" events that companies use to illustrate the integrity of their systems.

The problem is that security competitions usually involve a carefully constructed definition of "hacking" and what makes a system "secure." Many people become so engrossed in the terminology that they forget to think about security from a practical standpoint.

"In the wild," as many people say, the lexical questions are largely irrelevant and the practical ones are king. It's hard to predict exactly how someone will conceive of and interact with a system. Trying to define those interactions with restrictive terms and metaphors tends to be counterproductive.

Admittedly, some of Chomsky's writing goes over my head at times, but that's what I take away from this small snippet.
Anyone else experiencing huge amounts of lagg on that demo page? Am on a 100/100 connection with a decent graphics card and all..
Tunnel Vision NYC
You do know that in the US counties (and possibly cities, I need to double check cities) can leverage sales tax as well. However, it should only really be an issue of where you have nexus.

It's probably just how their system handle's orders (you need home address for CC for AVS, so it's probably just required everywhere in their code.
>
Turing never even mentioned the criteria that participants should be aware that they are possibly talking to a computer.

What? Here's what he said. It seems pretty clear that this version of the game involves one human interrogator, one human and one computer, and the interrogator has to decide which is human and which isn't.

> The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

> C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

> Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:

> "My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long."

> In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as "I am the woman, don't listen to him!" to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks.

> We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"
Why can't we just do like they do in America? Uber's been there for a while now and it works incredibly well. Apparently Uber cabs are safer than minicabs:

http://blog.uber.com/chicagotaxicrime
The article's title is "Response by Ray Kurzweil to the announcement of chatbot Eugene Goostman passing the Turing test". Pretty critical distinction between that and reacting to it actually passing a Turing test. If the HN title is going to be changed for brevity, then it should probably be changed to something like 'Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatpot Eugene Goostman "passing the Turing test"', or something else that conveys the actual sentiment of the post (which is that this chatbot isn't anything special and isn't close to being able to pass any real Turing test).
>Would you get in a stranger's car?

I do, all the time.
> Namecheap's recent re-design is also a mess. They added some fancy sliding menus and animations on top of their old design and made it even more confusing. But at least their system works.

Eh, Namecheap didn't really do a redesign (of their service); once you hit the domain management pages it's the same old 1995-looking views embedded in their new layout. It's just the sales funnel pages that changed.
Absolutely not. The US courts used the argument that in last resort a US clearing house _may_ have to survey the transaction because it was in US$. However not a single dollar went through the US.
Or rather think about all of the new drivers enabled by Lyft, Uber, etc. These new drivers now have a livelihood that wasn't possible under the medallion taxi cartel.
How does this deal with damage deposits? Why would I pay with bitcoin when many rewards cards pay out extra when you use them for travel-related use?

Honestly, the cynic in me says the use case for spending bitcoin is a quick way for speculators to "cash out" in a way that makes it easier to hide earnings from the tax-man.
That's a really great idea. I'll have to work on setting that up.

edit: here is a demo: http://magpie.sknkwrks.net/
How To Develop A Growth Mindset
I wouldn't go so far as to say the test is crap, but I agree it is given more importance than it deserves. It makes sense that if humans are intelligent and a machine behaves in the same manner, we would have to conclude that the machine is also intelligent. That cleverly punts over the entire discussion of the qualities and mechanism of intelligence. Another thing to keep in mind is although the Turing test could prove an entity is intelligent, it cannot prove that a thing is not intelligent. The most intelligent non-human species on our planet won't pass, but it doesn't mean they are stupid, it just means they aren't human.
The Turing test is crap, here's why.
Show HN: IndexedDB, unlimitedStorage and captureVisibleTab (Oh Myyy)
I would argue that Nepumok, Cairo and WinFS failed because of the project management failed to meet the milestones, not because a filesystem with an index and query interface is a bad idea. Please point me to research documents.

The Cairo project documents never specified the query-language and UI part of Cairo. And this was basically what never got implemented, eveything else made it. WinFS was doomed to fail because it run in user-mode in dotNet (in Longhorn era PCs were slower), instead of adding the query part to the NTFS driver in kernel mode. The Shell integration with only UNC path and dotNet only API was bad. And the object oriented metadata scheme was way to complecated, especially if used on an SQL database

WinFS beta1 worked okay, it was just very slow (dotNet services + SQL server in background, stored in hidden directory on NTFS). WinFS never made it because it was way behind the shedule and too slow.

NTFS and similar modern file systems are modular enough that would make it possible to add the missing feature a query interface directly into the kernel driver. Operating system of course would need to expose the API too so that C functions like fwrite() and WinAPI WriteFile(), etc. could be used to access files using the file directory tree as well as using a query language (e.g. Windows search exposes in Explorer address bar)
> Why on earth wouldn't normal taxi regulations apply to Uber? Surely it should be counted as essentially a cab company with a fancy app, and this would solve all of these issues?

In many areas, taxi supply is regulated. The fact is Uber can't be like a taxi because the laws restrict or prohibit more taxis. The analogy Uber would prefer you use is that they are a private car service, like a toned down limo with an app.
Stuff I work with still uses rs232. In fact rs232 is still being used in new systems today :-)

Edit: before anyone thinks I'm stupid: it pays well, I get to work in interesting places and I dont have to wrangle appstore guidelines, java gc, android etc. Have to wrestle some windows systems though.
You might say he is the Ken Rockwell of Computer Science.
I don't get why Uber is better than taxi drivers - aren't they a taxi, as well ?

In London, they're cheaper than black cabs because they aren't regulated. If they're taxi, they should be regulated - same regulation, or lack of, for all.

I don't get why you think Uber is not a taxi ?
I use KDE at work and rarely touch the mouse to switch between windows. I have two monitors, and a couple of keyboard shortcuts, but power-usage comes with a price. I bet i3 needs a little tinkering too.
> this really is such a niche feature

Yes, it is. However, it's relatively easy to implement and the performance improvements and battery savings are fairly huge. All things considered, it's a pretty good deal.
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Yeah that's true. It's a bit like Industrial Revolution, when workers were breaking and burning machines. Progress has a cost, and it's not completely morally right in this case.

But drivers, companies and governments are picking the wrong fight. Even if they shut down Uber, there will be more similar companies which will find loopholes and etc. It's better to spend the energy, time and money on making cabs more attractive and competitive. Because like I've said in other comment, cabs haven't changed in the last decades, while everything else around us has changed a lot in the last decade alone. Less than 10 years ago, a cellphone playing MP3 was omg.
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^ This. Ever since Namecheap went through their 'rebranding' the site has been slow and at times completely unusable. I consistently get timeouts when performing basic tasks. The old site was ugly but it worked. The new site is slightly less ugly and it barely works. They had a lot of goodwill built up which they are slowly chipping away at.
Most of them are very generic, pragmatic & terse statements. It depends on which side you are looking at.

> 14. Do something creative with the design of the box and separate yourselves from the pack.

99% companies would benefit from this.

> 10. Get a great image campaign

Sure, why not? That's true for every company, Intel, BMW, Microsoft, you name it. All want a great image campaign. Ultimately it's the product that makes the image campaign 'exclusive'

> 34. Port the OS to the Intel platform

That was an obvious one.

>> Apple switched to USB pretty quickly if I remember correctly

The 30-pin dock & then the lightning connector. Not exactly industry standard at both ends
I don't know anything about Cloudflare, but isn't using a CDN with dynamic web-apps difficult? Sure you can host static content like javascript, CSS, images, etc. but caching stuff like what feeds, articles, etc. you've read can't be easy or efficient for a CDN.
While the article stress the importance of understanding your power requirements on the server side you also need to be very cognizant of the power restrictions in your colo contract. Often times power draws will be your biggest limiting factor and it is very easy to buy a rack and fill it with equipment that surpasses your max allotted power draw. Depending on your host your only solution may be to buy additional racks to spread out your load even though you don't need the physical space.

Another power gotcha comes with the redundant circuits provided. For example if you are allocated 15Amps total that usually means total across both circuits not 15Amps per circuit.