skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always wanted a job where I could get paid for thinking big thoughts and sometimes writing about them. Then I found out that the jobs that fit that description, such as "university professor", are typically scarce, highly sought after, and guarded by layers upon layers of BS to protect the interests of people who already have them. ("First, we're going to have you go through seven years of indentured servitude for a shot at getting one of these jobs. Then, we're going to subject you to a toxic hothouse of petty politics about trivial things.")

So I started a business to write my own job description: think big thoughts, sometimes write about them, avoid BS to maximum extent possible. It turns out this actually works.
Insuring illegal, undocumented immigrants would be good for the economy.
Agreed agreed agreed.

I'm a huge Apple fan, I root for them loudly and occasionally drunkenly, but they don't rule video. The nano release was a backstep for them in that it doesn't unify their product category. If they'd released a camera with the iPod touch, as I think they will, then suddenly they've got a chance for a powerhouse, but the nano is a music product, not a multimedia product, and this camera is as close to lackluster as Apple gets. It will sell nanos, but this isn't a competitive product like the touch-with-camera would have been.
Why we use Magento and Silverstripe | one2crowd Blog
I think you misunderstood what I meant. That's my, fault, though; the bit about software being pure design wasn't my main point there, so I kept it very short. Plus, people use the word design to mean a zillion things. I'm using the word in its broadest sense.

Even if I'm making something with no user interface at all, creating source code is still purely a design activity. The source code doesn't actually do anything; it's a blueprint. When you create the UI, that's designing the UI. When you create the API, that's (as you say) designing the API. Even when you implement the guts, you're still designing them as you go.

I agree with everything else you say, though, especially about the warning bells!
Keeping it Real
Mobile advertising needs a fresh approach
it's almost as if google is waiting to launch stuff until _right after_ a new feature comes out on bing
If you are trying to find 'ultimate truth' in ethics you misunderstand the field. (You might like teleology.)

My point isn't to say that there is no right answer but that if you can never get to the point where you can definitively say that this one is right, or at least more right than the alternative, then you are wasting your time. I have no patience for moral relativists that dabble in ethics. If you approach the problem from the standpoint that there is no right and wrong answer, then there is no progress to be made.

Ethics is a difficult subject as it deals with the entire scope of human action. It ranges from emotional and intellual states, to changing subjective circumstances, to general (dare I say "universal") principles.

Wether I should kill one man to save many depends on more than wieght of the collective needs of individuals. Do I have the right to kill even for a good cause? Does it matter if the man to be killed is at fault for the predicament of the many? Is allowing someone to die morally equivallent to actively killing them? These are hard questions, and and I can't answer all of them, but they do have answers.

Moral questions aren't 'fuzzy,' they're subtle, and their applications are even subtler. This means that we have to work hard for answers, and sometimes we may have to settle with that we don't always know. But when people take the genuine difficulty of finding good answers as evidence that there are no answers, and present this as wisdom they are wasting everyone's time.

I am not sayting that anyone here is guilty of this; I am just expressing a pet pieve of mine.

edit: spelling & grammer
To pass the Turing test AI would most likely need to be a lot more intelligent than humans. Being able to convincingly emulate something is harder than merely running your own 'native operating system'.
We mathematically-inclined folk like elegant systems. We like systems that have a few set of consistent rules. We don't like exceptions.

The problem is that we can't make a system like that for ethics. There are too many variables, they don't always fit well together, and often the "correct" ethical decision depends on what ethics others are using. Some ethical systems only work if everyone uses them; others cease to work if everyone uses them; others only work if nobody tries to game the system. It's a messy topic, and not one that can be easily reduced to an elegant ruleset.

Not that this should stop anyone from trying. Just do it for the exercise itself. Don't expect a particularly useful result.
I have one minor nitpick -- the open-source philosophy is not socialism; socialism has to to do with lack of prices & the use of force.

In a capitalist society you can have communes of any size that function in any way. For example a family is shares, as do clubs, free hospitals/charities... the key is that it is voluntary interaction.
That couldn't be farther from my experience - for me, the automated transcriptions are impressive in speed alone. They're usually so far off as to only give a vague impression (often wrong) of what they called about.

It's good as a constantly fresh source of amusement, I suppose. :-)
Remote Pair Programming Resources
The Coming Technological Singularity (original essay on the Singularity, 1993)
There are animals living freely without humans growing them. In my area there are boars, horses, rabbits, badgers, mice, rats, gebrils, wolves, and all sorts of birds large and small. Not very far away (like 200km), deers and bears. Don't get me started on sea life.

Oh, and cows too, in natural reserves (we have zoos too, but I'd rather shut them down.)

Some of the abovementioned animals are hunted, but that's not the reason they are there.

What country are you from, that you don't have room for a little wildlife? Luxembourg, Holland?

That said, it's not all black and white. Between having animals spend all their lives in a cage and leaving them free and wild forever in their natural habitat, there is the option of free range herding. I have recently seen a herd of cows go to the beach in Wales, and take a bath amongst amused surfers and tourists (e-mail me for pics). In these times I count those cows relatively lucky, even if they are eventually killed for food.

While I don't support the guys who broke into MIT, I don't think their goal was to reduce birth rates.

After having accusing the OP of simplism, one would expect more cohesion and rigor in your counterarguments.
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I doubt it. I'm willing to bet that they did a case-insensitive search. Not only does it make more sense for making these charts, it's also the default in SQL and in most full-text search tools.
The thing I don't like about optparse is that the documentation only mentions about half of the features. Sure, it's the most useful half, but every other standard library module has an API reference that at least mentions all the methods on every class.

For my current project at work, we're using optparse along with the configparse extension to read config files, and a bunch of monkey-patching to make it all work well together. Further development in the realm of runtime configuration is welcome, if frustratingly diverse at times.
You're right; Google code confuses me sometimes. :) It's owned by Steven Bethard.
Totally disagree.

I really hope Facebook will add a "Public" tab under my profile. More and more I find myself posting status messages that I would LIKE to make public.

Personally I was very pessimistic about FB when they made status messages the focus. Months later, I have to applaud them. My engagement on FB has increased many folds since.
"how's it going. in your profile, you mention zombie metal bands. they're pretty awesome."
This essay by Vernor Vinge is the first thorough non-fiction description of the Singularity. While the Singularity is often discussed on HN, I get the impression that many people's ideas about it have been more influenced by recent press accounts, and by Ray Kurzweil's writing, than by Vinge's essay. Since the essay is very stimulating, and I don't recall seeing it posted recently, I thought it was worth posting, despite the fact that many here will have seen it before.
For example eating meat: if you don't eat meat because
you love cows, becoming a vegetarian might actually hurt
cows. If people weren't eating meat, there would
certainly be a lot less cows around than are now.

I like books covered in human skin. The best skin comes from babies. This is OK, because if I wasn't supporting the market for baby skin then there would be less babies around than there are now. Phew. Think of all the good work my passion for skin-covered books is doing.

I like to start with the rotary mechanism for evaluating the ethics of an action:
- Is it based on the truth?
- Is it fair?
- Will it build goodwill and better relationships?
- Will it be beneficial to all concerned?

It's not perfect. It tends to give priority to the people in your immediate vicinity over people who are remote. Also, people need to accept responsibility for their actions in some cases, and it's unrealistic to expect that the rest of the world will invest in mind games to overcome your folly. But I like to use that as my starting point.
I think what you're looking for is the parse_args() method, which returns a pair; one part is the named option values, the other part is everything that's left. So you handle positional arguments by iterating over the "what's left" part.
Why use this instead of google reader?
I found it enjoyable how well the use of the word "sorry" did. Seems true to life ;-)
perhaps in certain domains of knowledge such as chess.
The "nano" is all about size -- it's right there in the name!
Only being 99c helps. Who cares, if it is only 99c, you probably spent more on coffee in the last hour, or at least a lot of people have.

I think the big attraction is the great design. it is a beautiful looking app. There are plenty of free apps that do the same thing, but loop rubbish. People pay for beauty, otherwise that $10 hooker down the road would be laughing.
I would not be so optimistic about other countries. Both United Kingdom and Canada closed their immigration programs (former closed the program completely while the latter removed all CS and IT-related professions from it). AFAIK, today only Australia has a meaningful immigration program, however, there is no guarantee that it won't be closed next year. European Union has really, really strict policies not only on immigration but on temporary workers.

Edited: European Unions -> European Union
iPod launched in 2001 and by the end of 2002 it already dominated US market share. The music store was not launched until Q2 2003. Certainly the store helped Apple solidify their position, but the iPod stood on its own before that. You can argue whether it was design, usability or marketing (clearly all three had an impact), but you can't argue about the iPod's success even before the music store.
Duplicate of

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=822617
Interesting. And predicatable?

I suspect that incorporating the second date conversion rates would skew this data significantly since vegetarian atheists are rarely alike.
Pretty sure all the comparisons are case-insensitive. Several are even explicitly stemmed for plurals.
I don't think this is a product intended for hackers who are connected via RSS and the such, but it's a fun product nonetheless.
I think a lot of people become vegetarians out of love for animals.

I think you're tricking yourself with words. When I say "I love brownies" I don't mean that I desire the existence of as many brownies as possible, even if I can't eat them.
NB: The graph in the link shows only male occupations. If you click through the graph you can see both male and female occupations.

Two major trends: the near disappearance of Farmer and Farm Laborer; and, the sharp influx of women into the workforce from 1950 to 1960.
Apple going after the flip makes perfect sense; there's not a lot of difference between them hardware-wise except for the camera. It might just take another generation before the nano is superior to the flip (factoring in it's size) -- It's already a pretty good value.
So the Ellison Medical Foundation isn't on your radar I take it?

http://www.ellisonfoundation.org/adsp.jsp?key=01misstmnt

Admittedly I don't agree with their approach - very staid, very stuck in the NIA approach that hasn't done a great deal to advance longevity science - but you can't say Ellison isn't putting money towards grand goals.
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Slight tangent. Greater automation and the necessities of life driving toward a zero cost -- vs -- the ever bigger dreams of humanity, employing greater labor / more minds. I wonder if anyone has tried to quantify the two fantasies against one another.
TC50 Backstage: Why PG Was Mean and Which YC Companies Will IPO
The original iPod predated even the flash-memory iRiver products by at least a year.

When the iPod was released its sole competitors were the Nomad Jukebox and the Compaq PJB-100 -- both of which were HUEG (2.5" hard drives), had shit for battery life, were made of the creakiest plastic, and took several minutes to boot up and index your files (due to not having an index (drag-and-drop has consequences!)).
In 2009, yes, it looks like a sure bet that AI will pass human intelligence by 2020.

In 2019, yes, it will look to be a sure bet that AI will pass human intelligence by 2030.

Meanwhile computers will continue doing more and more important things by the boring expedient of taking lots of data and crunching on it. See: credit scores, which nobody considers "artificial intelligence" despite the fact that it essentially involves having a sophisticated algorithm make evidence-based predictions of the future based on what could easily be confused with a character judgment.
No. Like Flickr, Delicious, and YouTube, their brand will be the death of them. Flickr can't diversify (at scale) beyond a photo sharing site, so they'll be killed by a service with really great photo sharing as one feature among many. Same with the Delicious = bookmarks mapping, and YouTube = videos. They'll all just be forgotten fads from the twenty-oughts.

Unless they let themselves get acquired, Posterous will beat every other sharing service. The brand will probably fade into the background though, and we'll all just have a "page." They seem close to the platonic form of electronic posts already. They're not there yet, but they're at least moving in the right direction, toward something like this Model M I'm typing on, or humanoids or sharks or Lisp.

Edit: Rescinded dumb comparison to telegraph, changed 'niche to 'brand, and a few slight rewordings. Posterous won't "wipe out" anyone; in fact, that's exactly why they can win.
The indentured servitude can be cut pretty short if you go out and out to apply yourself. If you get into a decent program, your Ph.D. will be fully funded: a full ride plus a stipend for living costs. Unlike professional education and masters degrees, Ph.D. programs realize that you'll never make enough money as an academic to pay them back, so they actually pay for you in the interests of reproducing academia.

You can get through your coursework in a year-and-a-half if you take courses over the summer. Take your comps over the next sixth months, so that by the beginning of your third year you're ABD ('all but done' or 'all but dissertation'). You can write a dissertation in two years, one if you have an amazing work ethic and an original idea going in.

It's not actually that terrible a proposition. Four years, getting paid (although admittedly not a lot) to sit around reading lots of books that you're interested in, write a couple seminar papers, and TA two or three classes.

The petty politics, however, you will never have a chance of escaping. If you want a job getting paid to sit around thinking interesting things, try a think tank. I worked for two years as a research assistant at a major bipartisan foreign policy think tank in Washington DC. Had a great experience.
Can't they render the page images on a decent system like a Mac, with anti-aliased fonts and decent kerning? Horridly ugly images.
Kurzweil on 2029: Although computers routinely pass the Turing Test, controversy still persists over whether machines are as intelligent as humans in all areas.
The tiny bit of truth that you seem to have choked on is that the 1st generation iPhones in 2007 had an issue with the case interfering with large plugs.

The contacts were all standard, but most existing cables had big clunky molded plastic plugs that wouldn't fit past the case to fully engage. The iPhone case was redesigned in 2008 and no longer required the recessed jack.

It's all tradeoffs. Extending the jack would have had it protrude past the semicircular profile of the case, that would make a lump and spoil the look and feel.

So every time you notice that your new headphones no longer have a giant molded lump on the end of the cord to make it look like a serious 1970's 1/4" jack, you can thank us 2007 iPhone purchasers. It's ok, I can wait.
Yes, Facebook is going to be worth billions. Since you can't short the stock yet, we have to make a bet on the side, but I'd be happy to.
"If Sam Altman wants to go public, Sam Altman will go public"

...

"If Sam Altman wants to whoop Chuck Norris' ass, Sam Altman will whoop Chuck Norris' ass"
I could not agree more as starting your own venture is the ultimate liberation. After spending many years working for someone else I have finally decided to take the plunge and implement one of my ideas. I must say the dreariness of the day-to-day working a job under management that sucks the fun out of life has motivated me to make this decision.

modoc's earnings analysis should not be taken lightly. It is what separates the working poor from the comfortably wealthy.
It's already "worth" billions. My question is will it ever make billions in profit?
I think I admire Ellison more.
Then the discrepancy baffles me.
As a 19 year old budding entrepreneur, I can say this without reservation: I want to grow up to be Elon Musk.
Their infrastructure makes it ridiculously inefficient to support on-demand erasure.

In a system designed to never lose data, where most things are stored immutably in a log-structure, a delete feature is an unwelcome opportunity for massive failure. It's much better to delete things passively, even if it means waiting indefinitely and just not copying them in the next system migration.
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You know that really is a sweet face at 3:28.
Sigh. Having to publicly share information with the SEC is different from "going public", which implies an IPO/listing on a major stock exchange.
I would feel more comfortable with such predictions if research were clearly walking the wooded path to AI. Moore's law works because

1. We already have processors
2. We have a metric to measure processor speed

Then the path we're hiking is one mostly of incremental improvments, with occasional boulder of innovation.

Whereas the 'intelligent' agents we currently have do not seem particularly similar in quality to intelligence we already know; the path from contemporary AI to strong AI is hardly a trail at all --- it's all boulders; innovation all the way up.

[The claim I make about 'quality' is vague; in part necessarily so. If I could pinpoint my discomfort with current methods, I could propose a new course of action based on a new metric. Nevertheless I feel that the high-mathematical bent of current machine learning techniques (proto-value RL, statistical relational methods, etc) will lead to excellent answers, but does not point towards the flexibility of general intelligence. Yrom the other camp, low-level connectionist methods have not to my mind offered significant results in problem solving.]
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I'll just address this bit since it seems fundamental: So how do we decide what good things are? Doesn’t everyone have their own idea of what’s good? Instead of trying to promote one particular person’s notion of what’s good, it seems like we should balance everyone’s good. In most cases, it’s impossible for us to know what’s actually good for a person, so this usually means taking their word for it and trying to give them what they want.

How can one balance everyone's good? In order to do so you would need to be able to take the world in its entirety as those in the thought experiment do. We can't do this, so the suggestion is that we trust what people want. The problem is not only do people not have the foresight to know what they want their wants change relative to their haves. 'Need' would have been a better choice with a given definition. Because we can not balance everyone's good I suggest everyone must be chiefly responsible for themselves and their charges. They should be expected to be honest about their desires and, to be fair to others, they should be as little burden as possible. Such that the greatest good is caring for ones own needs first while avoiding hindering others from acquiring their own base needs. The only thing needed now is a definition of 'need', but I would probably just choose a level on Maslow's hierarchy.

I probably communicated as poorly as the author, so my point is: communication is an interesting problem, and these are week assumptions and poorly communicated as it is too easy for an alternate, though in my case similar, theory of ethics to be built.

I have friends who, to save money, break into buildings on the MIT campus to steal food and drink and naps and showers. They use the money they save to promote the public good. It seems like these criminals, not the average workaday law-abiding citizen, should be our moral exemplars

What if every student, faculty member, staff member, alumnus, and donor want food, drink, and grounds to be used in an ordered way. How are their collective wants less important than some few "poor" people? I don't see how that jump was made.
What makes Sam Altman so amazing? What attributes does Sam Altman have that make pg such a fan?

I was annoyed by the reporter's "holding back?" attempt.
I agree with you to a certain extent and would have upvoted if rather than pointing out all the ways of gaming it, you could have at least mentioned 1 way of solving the problem.

I agree that people will be gaming the system. There is no policy which cannot be gamed, but we have to look at the bigger picture. How many VCs do you think will put their reputation at risk to earn $50k pa? I am not saying the solution the author mentioned is perfect, but its a start. A system can be put in place similar to O1 or EB1 visa but with startups in mind. Every startup will have to go through certain conditions to be eligible to apply. The founders can have 1-2 year temporary visa and if things work out great, they should be granted Green card, or they should be allowed to go through the cycle again.