skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would the Semantic Web (e.g. vertical knowledge graphs) qualify as AI?

We need business models which support partially-open graphs, e.g. object IDs and some metadata are open, some metadata is closed via API. Open metadata can be cached offline and standardizes models within a vertical market, driving demand for paid metadata. API revenue grows as the open graph grows.

Semi-open knowledge graphs reduce the cost of adversarial algorithms. Better to have many competing skynets than one big skynet. The open part of the graph lowers the cost of consumption. Multiple, closed annotations on the graph compete to support AI use cases, and can optionally become open as value moves to higher-order representations.
The halting problem forbids the existence of oracles which can decide with certainty in some finite time that an arbitrary program will halt. Loosen any of these qualifiers and the problem is not necessarily undecidable. Loosening the "arbitrary program" restriction, the problem of analyzing the termination of a subset of programs which doesn't encode looping or recursion constructs ( i.e. simply typed lambda calculus ) is trivially decidable. A totality checker like in Agda can decide whether some programs halt given a set of restrictions on the program.
Long Fall: The Most Famous 9/11 Photo Is Still Suspended (2012)
>This seems to us like something software should help solve. We’d like to see new services that make it possible to invest in super low-cost index funds (in a normal account or a retirement account), do some customization around individual stocks, and otherwise set it and forget it.

This exists already, there are a ton of discount brokers with very competitive pricing.
Yes, pcap is the right abstraction to program bare-metal network code to. It's how most non-kernel-resident tools that implement their own TCP actually work.
Visa/MC take very little. The bulk of the fees go to card issuers who would hate to see them dwindle. And this fee revenue now mainly goes to support rewards programs which cardholders love. At least, in the USA.
"Docker restricts the container to a single process only."

Nope it sure doesn't.
I had a pregnant wife and a kid at home when I went through YC last January. Another friend of mine had 3 kids and a wife he had to leave home.

Realistically YC doesn't care what stage of life you're in, they just want you in Mountain View for 3 months so you can significantly improve the chances of your company growing large. It's difficult to make it work, but I promise for me it was totally worth it.
Thank you! Really appreciate it! All the best to you as well!
I completely agreed with you in the weeks following the Facebook acquisition.

BUT in the months now following my opinion has changed.

There remains a vibrant and resilient ecosystem of devs working on amazing homebrew stuff that everybody on day-one predicted would close up shop.

But since a lot of the work is unity based, the end platform almost doesn't matter and people realize that.

Oculus will start out as the PC enthusiast / high-res experience and FB gives them the dry powder to actually get the hardware out the door.

But in the long-ball view EVERY smart phone, console, etc etc etc will be capable of VR and it's largely thanks to the preliminary oculus effort and their inclusive structure of opening the platform to small devs.

Think about MineCraft as an example.

Brilliant concept, single dev (then small team), and now basically universal adoption that is completely device and platform agnostic

And of course large studios will throw huge budgets against the VR platform, and maybe Oculus isn't the long-term leader but they are wholly responsible for the coming renaissance!
Biking Copenhagen – What to See and Where to Go
The Innovations Free Compute and Storage Unleash
Wow, cool to see Ben Heck featured in the BBC. If you want to see a lot of his recent stuff check out his youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/thebenheckshow
Videos for http://cppcon.org/ should be coming out soon
What isn't mentioned is the fact that British intelligence fed false news article back to the Germans saying that the bombs had fallen short of their target. The Germans then adjusted their flight paths to make the bombs fly further, causing many of them to fly straight over London and land in the countryside the other side.
Points – The Game: a satire of current mobile games
The last I heard OpenDNS was using it for some data processing and Skylight was using it - see "Is Rust Ready Yet?" in http://cmr.github.io/blog/2014/01/12/the-state-of-rust-0-dot.... This is 9 months old now, so maybe there are more projects now.

That said I think the language is still too much in flux to really use for production systems. It seems to still be undergoing syntax changes, standard library changes, etc that might make code that works today not compile tomorrow.
Vern Paxson taught me a very simple trick to implementing TCP reordering:

For each TCP flow (each side of an open connection), open a file. Remember the initial sequence number (ISN) for the flow. Now, when a new segment comes in, use its seqno delta the ISN to seek to the correct offset in the file; write the segment contents to that location.

This is, like, 10 lines of code.

Naturally, in a production application, you won't really use FILE-stars or fds to track connections. But it's very straightforward to build an array-based ADT that provides the open/close/read/write/seek semantics of a file --- much simpler than TCP. Meanwhile, you get to start with working code to test against.
These are really cool! Great job, thanks for sharing.
Is he forgetting that these are credit cards? People need/want credit.
Would the Semantic Web (e.g. vertical knowledge graphs) qualify as AI?

Anything resembling OpenCog or Freebase isn't AI—it's just a database with clever retrieval through traversal hierarchies.

The world does need better ways to analyze data sets, but conflating information retrieval with self-directed AI is misapplying the term "intelligence."
"Movement" ... ugggghhh...

The instant something becomes a "movement" it loses 50 IQ points at least, and this one is no exception. They start by having something to say, but they quickly turn into ends-in-themselves circle jerks.
I have the same problem. Somewhere around Team Fortress 2, I just stopped liking modern games for much the same reason. I don't have time to really dedicate to games anymore. I just want to fire it up and get playing.

I've found huge amounts of joy at reasonable prices with Indie Games, retro games and emulation.

I've absolutely fallen in love again with the Dreadnaught Factor for the Atari 5200, it manage to convey a sense of mood and has amazing gameplay, all in just a couple kilobytes.

Granada and Ranger X on the Genesis/MegaDrive are also games I've just discovered.

Ranger X is a AAA title from 1993, and feels innovative and fresh and never gets bogged down in useless cinematics. You fight in the set pieces instead of just watching them. The first part of the game has you tearing along the desert on your robot bike right outside the ruins of an old fortress as you fight enemies while outgoing artillery fire shoots off into the distance over your head.

Granada is an old-school style top down tank shooter with great music that's perfect for a 10 minute game session.

There's hundreds of thousands of old games you can cheaply mine through, and they're well emulated. I play Granada and Ranger X on a portable emulation device for example. My 2006 netbook is more than capable of emulating just about anything up to the SNES era...add in XBOX controllers and hook it up to the VGA input on my TV and it's basically like I'm console gaming again. Except it's better with save states and filters.

There's also tons of great indie games with smart sensibilities and great gameplay. The Humble Bundles come fast and frequent and usually have great games. You can usually score a half dozen games each time for under $7.
At some point the credit card industry is going to get disrupted. It's so broken + they take on so little risk that it's just a matter of time.

My belief is that bitcoin coupled with the right payment experience will disrupt the industry at some point. I would highly suggest reading Marc Andreessen view on the subject: http://blog.pmarca.com/2014/01/22/why-bitcoin-matters/
Is that the case when you have guaranteed recurring revenue for a long time? The only reason they care about having money left for living expenses is that they're afraid you'll die or declare bankruptcy. For example, it's fairly easy to exchange an annuity for a lump sum. But then the question is, what is "recurring revenue"? If it's not guaranteed then it won't work.
You've missed another big advantage of credit cards in most places — they almost always come with more legal protection. If they're stolen, there are limits as to how much the card owner is liable.
Fascinating articles, and judging especially by the "SexTech Startups in a Hostile Business World," it seems like sextech would do well to be added to YC's 'New Requests for Startups' list...
Is there any video of that around? I'd love to see it.
Love this game so much.
Why is localhost 127.0.0.1?
> The personal savings rate has largely been falling since the early 80s.

That's not because saving is complex or low-yielding, it is because middle class non-disposable expenditures have gone up. (see Elizabeth Warren)
I have the exact same feeling about Quake 2. I have a feeling many people feel this way about many different id games. I really felt part of the when playing Q2 in a dark room when I younger. The music and the general dark art direction sucked me in.
While people contemplate things like containers, it's worth noting that modern hardware virtualization imposes a performance overhead of low single digital percentage points, and with some technologies like deduplication of storage and memory can paradoxically improve performance over bare metal in many scenarios.

Containers are interesting and the technology is emerging, but for 1-2% overhead it just isn't as critical as its often held.
That whole paragraph was bizarre. Yeah, lots of people are doing things wrong, but there is a competitive industry of index funds and ETFs out there. I'm sure they could be squeezed a little bit more, but not much.
The credit card companies don't do fraud protection - they practically encourage it with how little of checks they provide.

When customers issue a chargeback, they almost always side with the customer, leaving with the merchant with very little recourse. As a merchant, you just lose the money.
How is this wrong when even children benefit from keeping violent criminals isolated from the general population? Besides accounting for just adults still doesn't detract from my main point: the vast majority of people in the US benefit from keeping violent felons locked up
> So someone who is highly trained could continue to work while they are asleep. ie, an expert stock broker could classify market data (as interpreted by EEG readings) throughout the night. Interesting, and a bit worrisome to think that some corporations could use this technology to get 16 hour days out of employees.

I just can't throw it out of my head that this would be a step towards ending like in this poem:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8o6/the_gift_we_give_to...

("em" in the poem means "emulated human", i.e. a mind running on computer hardware)
Aren't all unixes a single process (plus its children)? :P
What's wrong with “if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to worry about”?
Most these formats are very proprietary, so no.
You should probably check out the Serious Sam games. No real plot, just run and gun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmIzCztjSRQ
You're correct that Visa/MC take a very small portion but wrong that most of the rest goes to txn risk. In fact, much of it goes to support loyalty/rewards programs (which can easily cost issuers more than 1%).
This is also what happens a lot of the time, interestingly, when a Hollywood director makes a movie "from scratch" without it originally coming from a screenwriter.

Maybe we could learn from that. What if the games industry followed the more standard Hollywood pipeline of "screenwriter writes a screenplay, shops it out for publication; some production company buys it and starts making it"? Imagine if we had indie game designers making their living writing game design documents and shopping them around to AAA companies--there would actually be a coherent game that the AAA edifice was hung upon! It might even be playtested and prototyped so as to guarantee it's fun before the AAA company even buys it!

Effectively, in games industry terms, you'd have the indie game makers creating the initial "game", but never publishing it--and then the AAA company creating a souped-up clone of that game, which is the first version of it anyone will ever see.
Because the Go runtime is statically linked into every binary built by Go. This is nice for deployment, since you can just plop the binary onto any ol' server, but makes for large binaries.
Stunning Map Shows Just How Much of Iraq and Syria VICE Now Controls
The really interesting story here is that if drivers are so willing to switch networks for better opportunities, there isn't a compelling reason for Uber to have the valuation that they do.

The value of Uber isn't really in the tech or the app - it's in the networks of riders and drivers in each city. If each of those can be aggregated into some other kind of service, where Uber, Lyft, etc. are just providers of payment processing, and possibly some operations expertise, that middleman network will capture all of the value.
Show HN: Hello - serendipitous SMS reminders to say hello to loved ones
Am I the only one who sees the "holes" in this?

> without any contact between the two

Well, the "thoughts" were sent through the internet, so there's a link there

> "You can actually transmit information directly from one brain to another brain without intervention of the senses."

I guess that if you are interpreting the information as light, there's intervention of sight.

Still interesting though, huge pontential here.
We haven't discovered any computation problem that our universal computing architecture can't compute because... universal. It's not "universal \ things-that-can-generate-thoughts." Universal simulation machines can simulate things... universally.

And yet, the Game of Life is completely deterministic and is the opposite of real life in pretty much every way, even with the new advances. Quantum may change this.

There are certainly problems which are tractable only on quantum computers. Shor's algorithm is of course the classic example. Saying that Von Neumann architecture is a universal problem solver is a rejection of the idea that quantum computing allows any new problems to be solved, but we have evidence that that's not the case.
http://i.imgur.com/NgmuHGn.jpg
Depends a bit how you define it. I quite like (output of stuff)/(hours of human labor required) going infinite which should happen when robots can build better robots without us. Unlike the 'singularity' in most of the literature that one is actually a singularity in the math sense. 2040?
According to Nikon's user manual for the D810, a 14-bit RAW file from the camera takes approximately 73MB. It's a 36MP sensor. So, it's more than 3x as big a file and would only fit about 14 images per GB of storage...
Semantic Web Design
No Android release? :-(
Reminds me of how all HyperCard stacks ended with the Swedish phrase "Nu är det slut..."
Uber Just Caved on a Big Policy Change After Its Drivers Threatened to Strike
I would use the term "wrapped-up" where you've used "encapsulated", and in fact I specifically avoided talking about wrappers for this exact reason :)

Maybe my terminology could have been better, but I meant "encapsulated" in analogy to OOP, which advocates "encapsulating" all data via methods. The OOP definition of encapsulation includes using getters/setters, which is like having "wrapped-up" properties, but the idea is that we can go beyond this to calculate the data in arbitrary ways without our clients having to know about the implementation. That's what I was trying to get at here; for example, the implementation of IO involves horrible imperative yukiness, but we (the client) don't need to know that: we just use the interface, and if our functions ever get called, they will be given an appropriate argument.
Most "blue sky" innovations have come from the state sector (either universities, publicly funded research institutes or majority state-funded private companies). They are commercialized by private companies afterward.

Why does YC think that it will be different now?
HP Pleads Guilty to and Sentenced for Bribery of Russian Government Officials
I'm surprised no one has commented yet on the first couple of these - Energy, AI, Biotech, and Drug design.

These have traditionally been domains requiring a huge research apparatus with tremendous manpower, for only very long term gains. Not good for startups. In AI, how can a startup hope to succeed when academia has had almost no success in 50 years (and I am doubtful throwing more CPU/neuron layers will 'solve' the problem).

In addition, the people with the skills necessary to make progress are going to be advanced researchers with PhDs, who are good enough to remain in academia if they wish or who have already developed a proven-enough idea through their research career that they don't need Y-combinator-style money.

I am not trying to be a downer on the idea, contrarily I hope there can be success. Really I am fishing for anyone with a good perspective (or an answer) to these points.
There was a company advertising on HN's latest "who's hiring" about specifically improving government IT. They don't seem to respond to email, though.
Did it bring down Christianity, Islam, and Judaism? Also, buzzfeed link, really?
exactly! In effect subsidizing the very startups who have the money to pay for hosting. Absurd.
Update -- Uber reverses policy: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/09/12/uber_drivers_...
ODNI/DOJ statement on the Yahoo/PRISM document declassification
luckily that didn't happen with the hacker movement... oh wait.
Microsoft paid NFL $400M for Surface deal; announcers call them iPads
On Death and iPods: A Requiem
I shortened the title because the actual tumblr post title is obscenely long.
It's a lot of work, but there is nothing complicated about getting it done. You tell the art guys the specs and they spend a few days getting all the images and then move on to the next monster.
Welcome to the Engine Room – A new blog about software engineering
Three Ways to Make an Innovative Digital Product (Choose One)
Which is sorta confused. V/MC have a very small take (despite having organized one of the most impressive networks in the world). Almost all the fees go to the card issuer.
Yep, that's my target audience: gamblers and those that play fantasy sports or are in pickem pools. I've thought about how to add credibility to submissions but decided to leave that out for now.
The photos aren't on the forum, they are on an image hosting website. Other images on the forum are hosted on the forum. If the guy knows how to host his images elsewhere, he should be able to figure out how to host the images someplace with a robots.txt that he likes.
Another fledgling industry rescued by Apple?
How to Avoid the Big Data Black Hole
Did the author claim Morte was Turing-complete? I don't think I saw that claim, but I'm a newcomer to all this computer science theory stuff. I think these Wikipedia links answer your question:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_constructions (What morte is based on)

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_property_(abstrac...

answers the point on Turing completeness.
If you think about this in minimal terms, you have a merchant(pos), a purchaser/consumer, and an intermediary (though this would not be necessary for direct non-credit payments, like non-escrowed bitcoin for example). In an ideal world, a pos could publish a message like "transaction #N initiated for $X" to some "payment bus". Then the consumer would have to then publish a message like "User $Me agrees to pay $X for transaction #N".

If this were something like bitcoin, the payment could be wallet to wallet. If it were credit, some processor would have to know that they process transaction for "$Me" and find transaction #N to settle it back with the POS.

So the question really comes down to how you would implement this "payment bus". It seems like it could theoretically be something like the stock market. In fact, credit companies could be market makers and offering to settle transactions for consumers at different rates. This would have to be fast enough to be usable, but it seems like that issue is solvable with HFT solutions. But how would you get existing companies who make their own custom and profitable buses to all agree to use one generic bus and move the money making to the credit side?
If that were the motivation, then why are PayPal, Dwolla, Venmo... etc. still in the store? And why would they have changed the rules to allow BitCoin apps into the app store?
After NSA Revelations, Why Aren’t More News Organizations Using HTTPS?
On the other hand, it is Huffman-coded: "fn", "impl", and "mod" are quite common, compared to, say, "continue", which is rare.
That's still an incredibly unclear definition (c.f. the Chinese Room Argument, P-zombies, etc., etc.).

And that human intelligence is an entirely computable process isn't exactly universally accepted.
Why am I being modded down?
What I find most amazing about Windows is how -- in the vast majority of circumstances -- modern versions will still run programs written for 3.1 (et al).

If there's one thing MS can be relied on, it's backwards compatibility for applications.
And who verifies these things? How often? And by what rules? And why bother, when just limited it to accelerator startups is much easier and most likely will pick up the majority of successful long term startups anyway? I don't like it either, but it's obviously a logical move.

By screening for "you are in an accelerator" you not only have ensured some due diligence has been done, but you also know someone else's money is on the line, so they will keep tabs on them.
Game of Life is completely deterministic and is the opposite of real life in pretty much every way

My computer also can compute 5 + 5 and that is the opposite of real life in pretty much every way too. Not every algorithm results in life [and it requires algorithm + data + continual input, which the GoL doesn't integrate].

is a rejection of the idea that quantum computing allows any new problems to be solved

Because the idea quantum computing solves new problems has no basis in research or reality?

"Quantum" != magic

A tiny, currently impractical, factorization algorithm isn't a new problem current computers can't solve. They just take the long way 'round.
Painful mistakes to avoid when starting an online business
What sold me about this game is that it was made by the creators of Soldat. I have so many good memories playing that game.
What Happened to U.S. Plans to Raise the H-1B Visa Ceiling?
Exactly. It is quite optimistic and borderline naive to believe that YC can replicate the Manhattan project in every one of these fields with a few hundred grand and a few months in a dorm.

This is just a huge lack of perspective by people who've only worked on commercial software. Real science is very hard, very expensive, and does not result in billion dollar IPO's within 3 years.

I'm hoping that once YC realizes that such projects will never succeed through a startup incubator, they will become politically active and spearhead the reversal of the current decay of government funded science. Only the government has the resources, time and foresight to fund 50 year research projects in the fields listed in the RFS. I hope this becomes clear in time.

EDIT - Here's a bit more of my thoughts on this issue from a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614344