skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's a solution to this? What if pharmaceutical companies creating vaccines were NPOs? Would that solve anything? What if the world could be structured so people can't get rich off of the sickness of others?
I dunno. I'd prefer it if I could:

a) See trailers for movies coming out further in the future than this week, and

b) Rate the trailers before the movie comes out (and more to the point, see what other people think of the trailer of as un-yet unreleased movie)

You could have two forms of voting: until the movie comes out the question is "What did you think of the trailer" and after it comes out it switches to "Was the movie better than the trailer?"
Shouldn't that be

print ((n-1)*n)/2
I use a kneeling char (like Lisa Simpson has). It takes getting used to, but once your back, thighs, and stomach muscles have adjusted it feels really good.
Apparently Google's Peter Norvig does, e.g.
http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-6754621605046052935&...
(he starts talking about the relationship between Google and AI at 06:40).
Courtesy of swolchok in item http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851755 - previous HN coverage of Vanish:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=815026 (Schneier on Security post)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762631 (BBC article on Vanish)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=717736 (physorg article)
When I find someone disagrees with me I tend to either try to elaborate on my point or present a counter point to their argument. Not just quote what I've already said. You should try it
Oh and...just to be clear: part of the initial reason for this post was because I was horrified at the Modafinil thing. Caffeine and sugar are one thing...they are well understood, they provide only a temporary boost, and they are commodities (i.e., equally available to everyone who wants them). Modafinil is a brand-new prescription-only drug. Although it's FDA approved, that's only for limited classes of medical treatment. There is little to know understanding of the effects from using it as a "competitive edge" drug. I don't want to possibly wreck myself being the guinea pig, and I don't want to have to compete against people who are burning shorter-but-longer (to paraphrase Blade Runner).
you mean mongrel? Monit is a monitoring platform...
Is that revenue per user, or overall? My barely-maintained blog makes more than $5 a month in revenue. Maybe some are having a low or no ad site to start out?
Well, he's obviously much more qualified than I am to make that observation. But that doesn't make him right automatically, or does it ?

AI has a certain level of expectation associated with it and I do not see google matching that level in any of their released products.

Computers to date do what we tell them to do. As soon as that changes we call it a bug, not a manifestation of intelligence. As long as that view persists I would argue that we have not yet achieved 'AI'.
Ancient Skeleton May Rewrite Earliest Chapter of Human Evolution
Good point, I just pushed a fix for this — a nice, big title right above the featured movies.
Fermi Teslas may not be that close; I've been hearing Q1 so they could be seven months away.
IPhone Apps can steal personal information
There are ways of avoiding the long compile/deploy cycle in Java development, but most people don't take the time to learn them. Just like there are ways of writing fairly concise, readable Java, but most of the code written day-to-day is garbage.
And compression artifacts. They used JPEG instead of PNG :\
Fortune 500 companies announce that they are killing their IT depts and outsourcing to $SERVICE CO$ all the time.

When you go for the next job interview do you want to say.

I was developing Rails apps to link facebook to Xbox for iPhone users.
Or

I was a level 3.2 group manager responsible for coordinating all inputs from level 3.3 staff and collating them for level 3.1s !
And I have technical experience writing macros in XYZ running in our custom ABC billing system.
> machine translation, data mining, industrial robotics, logistics, speech recognition, banking software, medical diagnosis and Google's search engine, to name a few.

Do these things really directly descend from pure AI reasearch? Or are they really the result of a bunch of clever, yet extremely specialized algorithms, independently developed, combined with an incredible increase in hardware power? Not to say such things aren't incredible (Google clearly has changed the world), but is it clear that pure AI research has paved the way?

From an outside perspective it seems the "God of the gaps" argument - AI is what AI researchers haven't done yet - is used as a smokescreen to cover up that AI research hasn't really done much in the last 30 years. (Counterexamples without hand-waving?) And not only that, but it consistently, wildly, and systematically makes incredible predictions that don't come true. For example, Kurzweil is clearly a genius, but also wildly deluded and wrong about his time-frames.

Some of you guys will down-mod me for saying this, and you're the same people who also won't admit my side was correct when, in 20 years, automated translation tools still suck and you'll still be making the same old arguments about how AI is what we haven't done yet... (but in ten years you'll be able to upload your brain!)
I've heard this same sentiment before many times. And it's pretty likely to be "true" in the simplest sense of the word. Smart phones will make huge inroads, even in the developing world.

But I've always found it to be enormously silly. It's silly to imagine that the entire developing world will gain access to smart phones and cellular networks and yet there will be no substantial change in their wealth. It also flies in the face of history. Looking back at the last 20, 50, and 100 years we see several countries, and hundreds of millions of people move from 3rd world to affluent, 1st world economies. To imagine that a future world filled with affluent individuals won't also purchase laptops or netbooks (devices which will undoubtedly be better and cheaper than they are today) is monumentally unimaginative.

Also, the line "won't be using HTML" is a great shock line, but it's just plain false on its face. The primary value of a smart phone is the ability to browse the plain-jane HTML based web. The "web as we know it" will become even more dominant in this scenario, not less.
I feel completely the opposite. I personally will avoid by any means to join a company who silences my thoughts and ideas. In a startups your ideas might not always be put into action, but from my experience they're heard and maybe discussed further. Do you know how long it takes to make a simple change to a production environment in a big corporation. It's called change control, I get it, a lot can go wrong, a lot can be lost. I choose not to be a part of it. I've been fortunate and have live through the journey of going from a startup to a publicly traded company. It was a great experience and I learned a ton. I've worked for a few big corp / business casual companies and It's not what I enjoy, it's not how I choose to spend my work day.
I would be using it if I had an invite...
Wouldn't unit tests help with this? I realize they are not the same as type checking, but, at least in the case of what arguments something takes, seems some decent tests would explain how to use it.
Data-Mining Medical Records Could Predict Domestic Violence
I agree. Also, even if all those things were the result of AI research, that wouldn't imply AI research made any progress towards inventing an AI, just that it's useful for other stuff.
Your statement about dogs is untrue. Dogs, and a lot of other animals, have the ability to think creatively, i.e. to come up with new stuff, new tricks. A lot of animals also have self-awareness* (e.g. dolphins, elephants, magpies). Of course, we as humans excel at the task of thinking, since it's one of our greatest advantages, but the task of thinking and being self-aware is found in other animals, so there must be a way of reproducing this.

What spawns creative thinking and self-awareness is of course a mystery, but I think it's a consequence of creating a complex enough system and creating a system that's built on ordered chaos.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness#Self-awareness_i...
A couch in my living room.
Negative Waves
And where does that equipment live?

Unless things have changed since I last looked, it's all labware. Sure, that's better than pure textbook, but still a far cry from reality.
I'm curious how they managed to dilute only the employees that left without harming everybody else. Can you please elaborate?
Norvig has made this clear: we don't have any better algorithms, only more data.
> From an outside perspective it seems the "God of the gaps" argument - AI is what AI researchers haven't done yet - is used as a smokescreen to cover up that AI research hasn't really done much in the last 30 years.

Here is what you don't understand: There are very, very, very few people who do research on "AI". People research medical diagnosis, or search, or data mining, or speech recognition, or vision, or chess. If you go to a conference on AI, these are the people you will meet. If you look at who the NSF is funding with their "robust intelligence" area, these are the people you will find. You can only say that "AI research hasn't done much in the last 30 years" if you also say "no one has worked on AI in the last 30 years".

update: if you want to see what people in the mainstream (Kurzweil is not mainstream!) are actually working on, try browsing the IJCAI proceedings:

http://ijcai.org/papers09/contents.php
I use a standard Office Depot leather desk chair. I think it cost around $180. It looks good, and more importantly it fits me like a glove. I actually went down to Office Depot and sat in all of their chairs that I thought looked nice, and then just picked the one that felt most comfortable to me.

I can sit in this chair 14 hours a day and never even notice it. I like that because I see my chair as being a productivity booster like using Zend Studio for php coding or Outlook for email. If I can sit comfortably all day (and all night, lol) I can really focus on what needs to be done.

If the Aeron Chair fits your body well go for it, but you can save a couple of bucks at a store like Office Max or Office Depot. They have the mesh chairs too, and you might find that one of these fits you much better than the Aeron.
Galaxy study hints at cracks in dark matter theories
Not only is a new OS scary, a Linux OS is even scarier.

While I don't believe it's so true these days, Linux as a brand still has has this negative connotation with average consumers and is associated with engineers, tinkerers, and geeks. It's largely an unfair stereotype these days but it's hard changing consumer perceptions.

I'd bet it would be easier for me to convince my in-laws to install Intel Moblin on their notebook over Linux Moblin, although at this point, my in-laws know better than trust me with their computers.
> Think about other moments in history when people justified their actions by this reasoning.

Yeah -- it's kind of obvious... except that it isn't just that easy for me.

There are many technical highly interesting aspects, and it's fun to be working with C and plain algorithm development after a couple of years more into application development. Also, I'm pretty broke because I mostly do free software, so the money is appreciated as well. (I know how this sounds, but I just try to be honest)

> Do other people you work with feel bad about what they are doing?

Most people I'm working with (which is just about 4 -- we are doing a small package of the whole project) are not feeling bad at all -- probably not even questioning the purpose and consequences of such a system. They are just happy about being part of this project. And there are enough people that would like to jump right in.

> Then realize that they keep doing it because you keep doing it, and you do because they do.

Probably. But I think they are not doing it because I do it, but I do it because they do... Still I think critical about all this, and will try to make up my mind in november on how I want to go on.
Lambda Calculus Introduction
I've always wondered why companies spend so much money on making packaging that requires a sword to open? I guess it ships better and has less theft of internal parts. From what I've seen products from Japan generally have a clear way to open them (little tear-away tab), but American products are made to need a chainsaw.
The writer does not make clear what is meant by "dynamic languages". It could mean any of (for argument's sake) Lisp, Ruby, and PHP.

But I can't see anyone putting those languages on equal footing. Merely being "dynamic" in some sense is insufficient.

Further, the author says, 'I never really considered the “why” of Java, as that would interfere with my unbridled hate. ', leading me to think there's been very little investigation into different type systems.

This comes off as simply "I like Rails over Java".
When I was doing JSF development, I found the real problem was that libraries were often developed without an awareness of how to make it reload-safe. So yeah, it's theoretically possible to hit Save and Refresh and have Tomcat automatically pick up your changes, but in practice I found that all sorts of strange things happened in the 3rd party libraries that made up the middle of our technology stack.

I think one of the main strengths of the Python/Ruby communities is that it's expected that you'll be able to edit a file and immediately have the changes reflected. If this doesn't happen, people complain! While in the Java world, a lot of people (including myself, eventually) just accept it as business as usual, because so many libraries and apps don't work like that.
Sometimes superstitious things like moving the monitor come to very rational causes. There can be a loose connection that tightens with monitor's pressure or an electrical leak prevented with that particular positioning of it.
I initially misread its name as Posterious, and haven't been able to shake that pronunciation (like "post" + "serious") in my head since then.
You've missed the point.

They won't get PC-netbooks not because they couldn't, but because they don't need to. What use a netbook is if there's little-to-no electricity, no broadband access, no wifi or cable router, and you're illiterate? Zero.

With regards to HTML - perhaps author is mixing protocols and markup languages up. But that isn't the point. The point is that a lot of the "development" like Web 2.0 won't be accessible to people in the developing world. Show me a smartphone (well maybe except highest range iphone-android) that won't choke on your average DHTML/AJAX site.
For the vast majority, consumers don't change OSs and will just live with what comes with their netbook when they buy it. The real battle is with the manufacturer and I don't see how Moblin can compete with those two giants trying to get bundling deals.
There is no such thing as "missing" links.

We have a theory about descent with modification, and we have a theory about the age of the earth and together they make useful predictions about where you are likely to find bones similar to older and younger bones.

So far these theories have not been falsified.

Missing links on the other hand, are pure media made up, attention grabbing fud.
But that's not the topic author is writing about!
LYSP (a really tiny lisp)
Dutch Study Finds No Heart Benefit from Fish
The referenced link is far more interesting than the resulting discussion.

For persons who are designing web applications, the post outlines considerations that are not generally known or well understood. Some considerations, such as managing the number of round trips also apply to app<->database connections.
Ask HN: Does a startup always need a new idea 
I have finished my graduation, I am from India and with couple of my friends i am working on a Location based services start up..we are in development stage of the product..But the big question i face from everyone is. aren't such services available already...My answer was yes, there are..but in India there are no players right now with market penetration and yea definitely we have features which make our product standout from the existing services.

My question is does a startup need to have entirely new idea(My take is: we dont necessarily need a new idea but a better execution than the existing would be enough) or is it fine to launch a similar product(with better features) in a market place where there would be customer base...
Experts, please advice me on this...thanks

thank you for the answers...other big problem is getting the funding in the initial stage..Our revenue model is location based advertising..but to get that running needs lot of money..but without userbase VC doesn't seem to be interested..So we are planning to launch our service before end of this year and get a reasonable user base in say 6 months and then look for the VC funding to get the ads running on our platform...is that the correct/good approach or if not please suggest your thoughts ..thanks
Ancient Genetic Defenses Against AIDS Virus Reactivated
Crazy. What on earth are Vivi Down hoping to achieve?

EDIT: ok, it appears they want Google Italia to switch to premoderation.
WAP strikes me as an odd horse to hitch your wagon to in the first place. It may be that it's popular elsewhere, but I haven't had a phone that relied on a WAP browser since maybe 2002, and between iPhone, Android, Pre, WinMo, and Blackberry, I don't think most of them even support it, let alone rely on it.
Facebook’s Faith: A New Scareware Attack
If anyone tries to correct you on the pronunciation maybe you can tell them:

"Post-erous, posterous, smackerous... They're too busy putting in new features to care about stuff like that. They care about results, not pronunciations. That's the start-up way."

(Unless of course it's Garry Tan trying to correct you on it.)
It seems like you could verify this by pinging all the dom0s; I wonder if anyone has done that.
Yes, but when will this be in PCalc for OS X?
IRobot Alums for Startup to Build Robot-Vacuum Accessories
Hi SamAtt.
You know, your posting is fun to read. Nice.

Still, the reason "Software System Architecture" or anything with the architecture name on it, has become a dirty word is because there is no understanding between an abstraction and a concrete thing. What you picture is known as Intellectual Violence, an architectural antipattern. In my case, if I want to talk about data, I say data. If I want to talk about information, I say information. They are not the same thing. SO, if I say resource, it means it is not data nor service. A resource can be a document, data, a service, a process, a whole system, anything.

So, as you can see, that is no mental circle, I really mean anything. If you think a resource is just data exposed as a service, then you are missing thousands of other resource implementations. Why call it resource and not data, service or system? Because resource is an abstraction, that allows me to work it without knowing what the final implementation would be.

Cheers!
The Worlds concept, as far as I can tell, is actually more general than STM and what you described

Where in my comment did I describe Worlds in a limited way? I just gave one small example of one possible application of them, in reply to a comment specifically about their relationship to transactions.
That difference in kind is probably an illusion created by the magnitude of the difference in degree.

From what I've gathered, the consensus, both in neuroscience and in philosophy of the mind, is that consciousness is totally emergent from the "simple" building blocks; there's no specific component unique to higher primates that explains the difference.
Don't want to be a stats-nazi, but no sample size is adequate when the respondents are self-selected :)
the job of HR in a post-A-round startup is mostly to screw you on health insurance

That goes only for the USA. Sorry to touch that topic, but it's true.
It would do no harm you say? Consider what it would actually take to make this work. There would have to be a standard of labeling, there would have to be laws, there would have to be consequences for not following the law. There would need to be efforts expended to police those laws.

This translates into the government spending money, which comes out of tax payer pockets, or public debt, or decreased spending on USEFUL public works. None of these are good things.

This also translates into greater reach of the state into everyone's business. What happens if some small-time 'zine writer fails to comply with the law? Do they get fined, hassled, thrown into jail? How do we prevent abuses of power in enforcing these laws? Perhaps some enforcement agent closes down a news outlet they don't like with false claims they are breaking this law.

All of these things are very real concerns, even for such a simple law as this one. And ultimately what you end up with is greater power in the hands of the state and an ever increasing infantilization and disempowerment of the individual.

This, I put forth, represents harm.
It's so it looks nice on the shelf - you want every piece to be visible and tastefully displayed but hard to steal. Once it has been bought, dealing with the packaging is your problem.

This serves no purpose for something bought online, hence Amazon as the driving force. Toys R Us would never push for it because they want attractive packages that sell.
The sad thing is that it is incredibly easy to catch pirates if only Apple allowed us to.
Two typos: odd and even should be odd? and even?, since they are predicates. I'll cross-post this to the google group.

Thanks for this. Much needed.
Google on Trial in Italy
The trouble with that argument is that if you'd have asked anyone (anyone!), in any AI related field in 1980, where AI would be in thirty years what would they have said?

Surely not "Well, for instance one of the greatest achievements might be that we will work on chess algorithms, and we will see some incremental improvements resulting from tweaking certain heuristics and more intelligent pruning through more specialized algorithms and hardcoded chess knowledge. The programs still won't be able to learn in any interesting sense, but with the help of several orders of magnitude of hardware speed, they will be 200 ELO stronger than the best human!"
Unfortunately I used them all, and they take forever to arrive.

I just waved myself though. ambivalent hand waggle so far.
Do these things really directly descend from pure AI research? Or are they really the result of a bunch of clever, yet extremely specialized algorithms, independently developed, combined with an incredible increase in hardware power?

Is there a meaningful difference?

There's a good case to be made that the human mind (AKA "natural intelligence") is "a bunch of clever, yet extremely specialized algorithms, independently developed, combined with incredible increase hardware power"
Very well said, sir.
"Study co-leader White sees nothing about the skeleton "that would exclude it from ancestral status." But he said more fossils would be needed to fully resolve the issue."

Headline is misleading, this species isn't officially a human ancestor.
I don't think this is entirely accurate. There are a lot of companies out there that end up being bought by wealthy investors or companies. These investors or companies may have gotten their riches through inheritance or by some other means.

Even then, The Man may have been a startup, but money and power can transform people in surprising ways, or they might have been The Man from the beginning.

I think that generally you don't really want to be working for the man whether it's in the context of a startup or a large company.