skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never had this problem, I finish work when my shift ends, no earlier and no later. I take no work home with me; my home is for my home life, and my work is for my work life. No employer will ever be capable of paying me enough money to sacrifice my personal time.
I have a great aunt who eventually got it in her head that my job was "trying to make computers better." I let it go at that.
That's a good one.

The analogy I often use is cooking: given a set of ingredients, there's a lot you can do with it; and the order in which you do it determines the end result.

This, of course, does not take into the account the iternativeness (that's not a word, is it?) of the programming process.
I firmly believe that the ebook/kindle market thrives off the possibilty of replacing books in this enviornment.
Technological progress is much faster now than it was then, the problem is that we've already gotten the low-hanging fruit. The type of advance we need to make a proportional impact to that of something simple like the internal combustion engine is arguably impossible. If we invented an instant teleportation device to anywhere on the planet it's not going to make as much as an impact today as the difference between a year-long life-threatening journey by ship and wagon.
Thanks for the link but that's just drivel. The scenario is designed to eliminate every other factor by creating a situation in which the interactions can only be superficial (as the article points out). If you do a study in which you deprive people of every other factor but attractiveness than sure it's going to make it look like attractiveness is the most important factor.

The question has never been "is attractiveness a factor" but "how big of a factor is it". So a study that artificially boosts the importance of one factor is useless is answering that question

Also, why aren't supermodels relevant? I think they're the most relevant in that their physical beauty makes their choices almost limitless so when they choose an unattractive man it shows how little that aspect means to them.
Storage and use of electricity, the lightbulb, the personal computer, the telephone, and the cathode ray tube.
Computer science is not real science
Things can be different when you're starting your own company and have a massive stake in success/productivity/etc...
I do this all day long at work. I'm a consultant who both teaches programming to people as well as develops full products for them.

There are three keys to remember: These people aren't stupid because they are uninformed about the thing you know alot about. You will lose them very quickly if you go into jargon. You do not need to explain every intricacy, you can be more accurate in the large by being inaccurate in the small.

So for instance, someone wants to understand what goes on in an iPhone app. If they're completely non-technical, I often call programs things like "very talented guy with no common sense", "idiot savant", "well trained dog that knows a lot of tricks", etc. This is getting across by analogy the idea that the program will not figure out how to do ANYTHING on its own, by implying it only knows what to do what we put in it.

So then I tell them "the way apple makes all iphone apps, there is a place to put things we want to happen when the application starts running. What do you want to happen there?". Then I toss that in there, and then ask them all the other niggling details, explaining if we don't tell it what we want those details to be, it will be "whatever standard thing apple decided will happen", like just ordering a salad at a restaurant without specifying further.

Then I ask what you want to happen in this location in the program, and that location, then we go through exceptional conditions (for an iPhone app, that would be stuff like "No network available" etc).

When you do this for awhile, you often want to stop, otherwise you're not explaining programming, you're actually programming. But they get the picture.

Another analogy:
When programming you're basically telling a very stupid, very detailed, very dedicated person how to build a very ornate house from the ground up. In that analogy, the program is the "process of building the house". The house is analogous to what is made every time you run the application.
> I have long felt that there is a massive and well funded lobby for curing things, but an impoverished prevention programme. There is no real financial incentive to prevent cancer etc, but lots of money and glory for curing people who have got cancer.

I see lots of people spending money on things that they're told will protect them from cancer, so there's clearly a huge financial incentive.

> Similarly there is a massive and well funded lobby for power production and very little for power efficiency, which effectively achieves the same result.

Likewise.

And, I see people buying things to get them better mileage too.

In fact, it's hard to avoid seeing this stuff, at least in mainstream US.

In short, I'm pretty sure that the "there's no real financial incentive" stuff is "why don't the proles see what's obvious to people like me". The only question is whether it comes from cocooning or just not paying attention.
People usually think programming is very cool when they understand what it is, normal people included.
History also suggests that Jobs would have been better off not asking him that question.
People of walmart (funny)
> But he _defines_ intelligence as the science of making machines do things that lead us to believe they are intelligent. A chess computer that outsmarts me most definitely fits that definition of intelligence.

No he doesn't. He defines AI that way, and that's the point. AI is an illusion of intelligence. He sees a danger in mistaking it for the real thing - in effect mistaking machines for people.
Turning the page on Google books
> I think thorough testing and a long approval process is certainly in order.

Huh?

Suppose that it costs $1 and a quick test shows that it seems to help "a bit". Why not let folks skip a Coke for on the chance that the benefit is real while "thorough testing" goes on?

Costs and benefits apply to testing as well as deployment.
Trade secrets are intellectual property too. (As are copyrights, but I don't see how they'd apply here.)
You have to post 50-100 times a day because Google rewards the creation of new URLs above the creation of great URLs.
There are other treatments for cancer.
I've got a similar setup but I've been using ack recently and have been very happy. Definitely give it a try as a grep replacement.

http://betterthangrep.com/
I for one wouldn't mind seeing a "TechCrunch Weekly", which would present me with the top-10 or 20 news items of the week that I shouldn't miss to stay current.

There is a market for the tech-news junkie (read 20 articles a day). And there is a large market for people who want to stay informed, but don't have the time to read blogs hourly, but also don't want to miss on what's really important.

Anyone care to write a filter? How would you know what is important and what is not? (I guess HN is supposed to be the answer).
What's "the real thing"? Of course you could always define AI as "not real intelligence", then by definition AI will never be "really intelligent". It would not be a very interesting claim, though.
So that means the CollegeBoard is a scam too?
http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/clep/ex_ca.html

Furthermore, AP is college level material..
http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/about.html

But seriously, what you're essentially saying is that higher education only really matters when it's for the wealthy and/or elite...
It's actually a lot better than using credit cards to fund consumer purchases...

With a startup, there is at least a small chance that you'll make back your money. With an IPod, and blu-ray DVD, and the latest clothes, and various other consumer knick-knacks, it's basically guaranteed that money is down the drain.
EveryBlock is proudly staying in Chicago.
You didn't say that women don't care about attractiveness, but you did say that attractiveness "isn't all that high on a woman's list." So while your position was a bit misrepresented, I don't think you can quite claim to have said "the opposite."

This is all a question of degree. I do think that physical attractiveness does play a very big role in both directions. But clearly women do place a somewhat lower premium on it than men do.

Just to add to the anecdotal useleness, rich men do attract women, but women swoon over Brad Pitt or that twilight star waaaaaay more than they every will over "the donald".
The filter is aggregators like HN or Metafilter or Reddit, which all have their own flavor and quality. They work fine; you just have to go find ones you prefer, which is unavoidable, since everyone has their own unique definition of "what's really important" or "what you shouldn't miss."

I don't really understand why the guy in the article has BoingBoing and Gizmodo in his feeds if he doesn't like the quality and quantity of the articles they produce. Why would you read a site where only (in his words) "ten or fifteen" out of 400 posts are ones you really care about?
The cupcake bubble
I have overdosed on new, brilliant ideas
Derek Sivers: My Heroes
There are programs that can listen to a composers music and then compose music in that composers style.
Regarding astroturfing: I work for Microsoft. It's no secret.

Regarding promises of a happy happy fun fun friendly new MS: I have no illusions. All I'm saying is assume incompetence, not malace. I'm also going further to say assume there are lots of smart, well intentioned people working hard on things that involve problems and complexities beyond the understanding of an engineer who has never worked on anything the scale of the Windows ecosystem.

For the record: I don't have Windows installed at home. I run Ubuntu on my desktop and Snow Leopard on my Macbook. I have an iPhone and primarily use Google web services. Hell, I was an intern at Google.

Personally, I'm at Microsoft to work on Xbox/Gaming. Among my co-workers I'm known as that guy who won't shut up about open source software, startups' web services, and Apple's great taste. You can call me culpable if you want, but I'm part of the solution, not the problem.
Curious if anyone has compared it to the Ruby chronic gem ...
Giant crystals and spherical flames: science in microgravity
> The human ability to recognise text as it becomes more and more distorted is remarkably resilient, says Gordon Legge at the University of Minnesota … But there is a limit. Just try reading small text in poor light, or flicking through an early issue of Wired.

I love when the Economist is feeling saucy.
"The collateral damage isn’t so obvious but it’s undoubtedly there. Amidst my 400 unread Boing Boing links are probably ten or fifteen that are probably real gems. But I’ll never know and Boing Boing sure as hell isn’t going to help me out."

I have to disagree. Lots of blogs, such as Boing Boing do help you find the 'real gems.' (see Don't Miss) The author mentioned Gizmodo. They do the same with their header.

"If Samsung comes out with a higher capacity battery for one of their mobile phones, Gizmodo is going to write about it."

True, and as brandnewlow mentioned, this is for SEO purposes. I scan the RSS feed and click through to the articles that look interesting, while passing over the latest battery news.

Finally..not sure what the overall argument is here? Most newspapers have more stories in them (especially on a Sunday) than the majority of people will ever read. Just because it arrives once a day doesn't really change things. The author would like blogs to list all of the previous days posts the following morning? Can't you already do that by browsing archives by date?
World's Most Outrageous PC Cases
Two examples come to mind:

1) cooking - following a recipe is like a CPU executing program instructions

2) Giving directions (follow the street north, turn left at the second crossing, ...)

Both even come with loops: "follow the street until you see the red building", "stir until it boils"

Therefore I claim that almost everybody could program.
So far, I know arthurk and Sam_Odio will also be there. qhoxie lives up there so maybe we do have enough people to try to do a small HN meetup if enough people are interested.
50 things that are being killed by the internet
The next sentence says: "Whenever the in-house attacker appears to be making progress, the team responds by adding new distortions to the puzzles."

So he is still apparently contributing to the difficulty of breaking Recaptcha, even if he never makes enough immediate progress to break it completely.
You just have to be willing to reset the cycle when enough is enough. Don't code on Monday mornings just to have something to debug on Tuesday afternoon! ;)
In addition to whatever Ubuntu/Debian/OSX puts there, I have

bin/ --- for scripts I wrote myself
notes/ --- for notes from talks I've attended, or researched online
posts/ --- for things I will post to my blog
stories/ --- I used to fancy myself as a writer
tmp/ --- anything that doesn't need to be under version control
vc/ --- checkouts from other repositories
www/ --- scripts and config for my web server

The whole things is in a mercurial repository.

I have my web server set up so that `*.markdown` files are piped through pandoc when I view them in my web browser.
Odds are 90% that the "different guy" will be you.
You should probably just read Eliezer Yudkowsky on this topic. http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/ai-risk
as an entrepreneur: wow, that's a pretty good hack. not many people could have pulled that off.

as an iphone owner: oh no WAY am i going to pay extra for that. at&t already charges through the nose and gives me lousy service in return.
I dunno. I keep trying, mostly to practice being able to talk about something I know well in terms to outsiders. It helps when pitching.

But also, seeing similar plights for mathematicians and biologists, it's important to let lay people know our contributions since lay people affect other aspects of our world that might come to affect ours, whether they're politicians, policy makers, or even a disapproving mother-in-law.
"Large line of one year 0% interest credit." Where's the sense in that for the CC company?

edit: It seems that some work is required and there are some costly pitfalls, so the game won't be played by many. Thus losses will be small.
So, effectively it still needed the composer. Imitation is not exactly a great example of intelligence I think.
I can understand the sentiment but not the body of the argument. We may be bombarded with information, and that's why many of us turn to aggregation sites like techmeme itself to pull out a subset of the news we want, for the quantity that we what. That's why many of us no longer subscribe directly to gizmodo or techcrunch, but to HN or techmeme.

The author may be able to pull out a date in may where techmeme had questionable 'news', but how is this different to the slow news days in print media mentioned in the introduction? Techmeme's job is to provide a page or two's worth of tech-related news a day, just like a newspaper provides 60 pages of world news daily. TM applies it's own 'judgement and discretion' (both with it's algorithm and with human editors); HN does the same.

Such aggregation sites are the solution to the problem, not the problem itself. I personally find that hackernews is a 'twice daily' type product, where a single check in the morning and the evening keeps me up to date with the right dosage for my technews. For world news, I read the Guardian's G24 PDF for a daily summary (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g24). These are solutions the internet provides for the issue of constantly streaming news.

Now if you find that the 'refresh rate' of HN or techmeme etc is too frequent, i'm sure there are sites out there that aggregate in a bi-weekly, weekly or even monthly rate. If there aren't there's certainly a market for it (for the same reason there are weekly and monthly magazine publications). But it's not beyond the capabilities of 'the internet' to find a solution that fits you.
Ge is quite the impressive founder. I've been following other stuff he's done, and it's all been fantastic.
But he's being biased when he inevitably says "Mine's better".
I had to write Prolog code at University to traverse one of these. Pretty interesting!
I agree that ebooks will eventually take over a large share of the book market. Wondering though, why do you think ebooks are particularly suited to subways?
I can't think of a single reason to pay credit card level interest. If you get free interest for a limited period and manage that extremely well, I suppose that's a cool trick. Any other use is a fools game.
I see what you're saying and I agree. I was being somewhat facetious, hence the wink.
URLs for Twitter are facing the same problem that transistors are facing. People are going to have to start parallel tweeting.
processing.js.
He tells me his son, a standup comedian, has just got into Cambridge to study politics. Amazing, the lengths they go to to get new material these days.

:-)
I'd try to use similar analogies to the examples that _why used at the Art && Code Symposium (the examples would be those used in Hackety Hack). http://www.vimeo.com/5047563
Show them the inside of a mechanical alarm clock.
I beg to differ.

According to that logic reading a physics book is "dumb", I should derive all physics knowledge myself. Reading a book is precomputed knowledge, and that's no different from precomputed chess strategies. If I'm allowed to use books as a foundation for my intelligence, then computers are allowed precomputed knowledge also. They're just better at retaining it. Good for them.

The problem with your definition is that you can have a humanoid who speaks a dozen languages fluently, is great at math and physics, can answer any history question, can correctly understand and act in different social situations and despite all those things, is still classified as dumb.

You can define intelligence as the capacity of learning, taking knowledge completely out of consideration. It does not, however, match the definition of intelligence in common language. It also means that when you have a robot that knows everything it is by definition dumb, because there's nothing left to learn.

> But they are all at heart still simply ways to manipulate numbers, basic arithmetic if you want.

And humans are just a bunch of atoms. Atoms form molecules. Molecules form nucleic acids and other building blocks. You can build things of immense complexity with primitive primitives. That something as complex as a human can consist of a few elements is pretty hard to grasp. But if I accept that, then why can't it be simulated with bits?

Art created by computers is primitive, sure. But human art started out pretty primitive too. I see this as a difference in complexity, not as some magic line computers have to cross for their output to become art-worthy.
Re: 1) If one of your ingredients name is really long, and the word of the ingredient that starts on the next page says "Some Dish: 1 cup of poison, etc.."

that's how a buffer overflow works.
Funny, what with the Apple / Jobs etc. in context, I read that as Antichrist...
Your ROI is highly unlikely to exceed the interest rate on the card.
Interesting. I wonder how technical you could get by taking a Socratic sort of approach. Perhaps you could get people to understand basic first-order logic, or at least that logic can be codified. When I start off by trying to define first-principles like implication and Boolean algebra, eyes start glazing over. But in my head, the conversation could be steered by acting like a human REPL while talking about a hypothetical first-person shooter or something:

"When does the player die?"

"When their health is 0."

"When do you decrease their health?"

"When they get hit by bullets."

"So, you tell the computer: if the player gets hit by a bullet, then you should decrease the health. If the health is 0, then the player's dead. How much damage should they receive from a bullet? What if it hits their head?"

etc., descending into further complexity until they get the idea of how much they take algorithmic thinking for granted (which I think is probably the most essential thing to realize about programming).

Of course, actual conversations consist of me yakking about over-the-top technical details, amounting to the usual response: "Magic. Got it."
Try this: Imagine you have a machine to create fabrics that has a set of spools of various colored threads. Now this loom also has the feature of being able to read a sheet of paper punched with holes that automatically selects different colored threads whenever it reads a line, so that by changing the pattern of punched holes in a given line, a specified pattern is woven in the fabric. So by feeding the machine different rolls of punched hole paper, we can create distinct fabrics.

The computer is the loom; information and data are the colored threads; a program is a sheet of punched holed paper; and I, the programmer, am the guy who punches out the holes.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3015/2589909998_6572e538c3.jp...
New computer system to classify music on its beat and tempo
This, of course, does not take into the account the iternativeness (that's not a word, is it?) of the programming process.

I would disagree. Cooking is very iterative; I know some people that are amazing cooks, and when they make the same thing, its rarely the exact same thing, intentionally. They'll vary the amount of spices, for example.
I believe that is what he was getting at. So parents can see where their kid's phone is.

We all know that teenagers are plenty creative when it comes to sneaking around. 1) drop cell phone at friends house and enable call forwarding. 2) do whatever you want.
I use the following analogy, which seems to get the point across most of the time.

Imagine you're catering an event, and you need to make 500 identical sandwiches. Now, the usual approach is to get out the bread slices, lettuce, tomatoes, turkey, etc and set to work constructing each sandwich by hand. And what if the client suddenly tells you they need 1,000 sandwiches? Your work doubles!

But what if you do this instead: build a machine where you press a button and it creates one perfect sandwich, exactly to specification. Then even if you have an event that calls for 1,000, 100,000, or 1,000,000 or more sandwhiches, your work doesn't really increase. You just keep pressing a button, and any number of sandwiches pop out of the machine, exactly to specification.

In this case, the machine is the program. More accurately, the machine is the CPU and its instructions for creating a sandwich are the program, but you will lose people going to this level of detail. And the sandwiches are the output.
Adding Trust to Wikipedia, and Beyond
Why we don’t need phone numbers
No references?

http://www.odd-info.com/biblio.htm
Very interesting.
This was about managers and executives, but are there any companies out there that are known to have a poisoned technical or design culture?
This has already been done (although the original site seems to have fallen offline).

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=hotornot+captcha
And especially Bardolino
You're right, he defines AI that way. He seems afraid that robots will take on human responsibilities even though they're unable to feel or understand human emotions. That, I agree, may not work out so well.

I don't see why we should have a different metric of intelligence for computers and humans, though.
From OO to Lisp style
Thinking it's kind of a scam. I think those videos are misleading. I think the good reviews in the app store are paid for. I'm going to request a refund, not because it just doesn't work for crap, but because it's scammy.

Edit: Does anyone really believe the 75 5 star reviews it had instantly? All of which sound fake as hell?
Care to cite references for that? That's a very interesting fact if it's true...
Now? Probably not. If most of my friends were using it? Definitely.