skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It doesn't make sense to compare retail prices to wholesale prices.

It very much does. It gives you a sense of real world marginal costs, a fair assessment of fair market value (fair retail cost = reasonable markup factor * wholesale cost) and a sense of scale.

> If an average coder can't even get bandwidth at $0.001/GB with some serious effort,

If I can, you can. I've even given examples with links to order pages. Not that I recommend FDCservers, mind you.

> then how this this a valid point of comparison for how much bandwidth should cost for the average internet user?

It's a valid point because it tells you how much bandwidth ACTUALLY costs compared to what Comcast says it costs.

> I doubt you can get Level3 or Internap to beat HE prices.

How much money do you have on you? There's a bet I'd like to win.
Because the energy required to carry it there is approximately equal to lift it all the way up there, not "drop it down a hole".

You can't drop something into the Sun without first overcoming a huge potential energy barrier between here and there. Macroscopic things can't "tunnel" through so you have to go the long way round.
A bit off topic, but it'd be interesting to have a guild for the startup/HN crowd. I've been discussing returning to the game with a few tech friends and joining a like-minded group would probably make it a lot more fun.
Using UTM Tags to Enhance Your Digital Marketing Strategy
http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/20140724-flight-risk/

This may provide some useful insight.

207 crashes - human error; 82 crashes - weather conditions; 74 crashes - mechanical failures; 23 crashes - crime
Nice build using Ruby on Rails https://www.truejob.com/500.html
Your Technical Interview Is Broken
"A good response to Sarkeesian [a woman that gamergate hates] is to point out that she's blatantly misrepresenting various games in her videos. A bad response is to publish caricatures of her engaged in sexual activity and talk about how the world would be better if she were dead."

In that context, would you say "You have a right to say what you want. You don't have a right to have people continue to like you..."? Is that a reasonable response?

Certainly Sarkessian cannot have an "expectation" that people won't criticize her (if "expectation" means "belief about the future").
I would love this if they offered arthritis cream and edibles. Not so much with the smoking.
This is a pretty short and simple article but I think it is interesting and has been striking at the core of controversy of what AI is.

Is something that behaves like a human really intelligent? Google Search answers a lot of questions almost like a smart well educated person. Is it an intelligent entity? A computer plays chess better than humans. Is it intelligent?

In this case I think the author wants the entity to behave like biological organisms to be considered intelligent. This includes autonomy and self-replication. I can see that. This sort of points to robotics as the field that will produce these entities. Or maybe computer viruses...?

This is also a classic debate between behaviorists and those like Chomsky who want to understand the underlying processes of human cognition and intelligence. I can see both sides and maybe I like Chomsky's more idealistic view a bit better...

Here are a few easy to read articles that talk about this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-c...

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-f...

Another interesting one (a bit longer) in the same vein by David Deutsch (yes that Deutsch, the "multiple Universes physics guy")

http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/david-deutsch-artificial-...
Anytime I move I check out meetup.com You can find a community for nearly any interest under the Sun 5 to x miles from your locale. And, if there isn't, you can create one. In my experience, there is typically a Code for America division or some other general meetup group (Python enthusiasts, Node.js beer night, etc). Your mileage may differ based on the size of the city you're in.
Sales deals can be quite complex to measure as well.. IMHO is just that sales guys tend to be better negotiators, so they ask to get rewarded properly o go somewhere else with their skills.
Why is the brain the benchmark for "intelligence"? We already have machines that can run circles around the brain on very complex reasoning tasks. True, we don't have a talking robot that simulates humans, but in many other tasks we've met or exceeded what humans can do.

I would argue that we already have intelligent machines. What we don't have is a human simulator.
Yep! You can trace that thread back to Lamport's work some decades back.

The thing I find really compelling about this paper is that it's not tied to a single coordination method, though -- it pulls everything back to application level invariants. Human beings have a bad track record of reasoning about invariants in distributed systems, but computers are pretty good at that sort of thing... if we can specify our invariants explicitly, and let the machine figure out how exactly to spread that work out on the cluster, I think we'll come out far ahead.
Not so Fab- From a $1Billion valuation to $15M in a Year
This is exactly the sentiment I was going for - people who want to stay engineers should be compensated for their badassery, and respected for it, which is usually all they want. That right there is exactly the "power to say No" I was talking about.
And how do you know if an engineer wants to stay an engineer or not? By asking them.
And let me specify nice smelling natural arthritis cream. Like put something other than camphor in that stuff! A little lemon verbena... some lavender... us old lady hipsters are waiting. I just bought like $60 worth of hand lotion in Common Scents. Opportunity awaits you Marvina!
It can be both, like the annoying coworker who won't shut up about how much sex he had over the weekend, or the guy who raves about his favorite scotch at an AA meeting.

A correct observation does not shield it from being inappropriate or in poor taste.
Aereo's model wasn't limited to OTA. It wasn't publicized a lot, but Bloomberg TV was the first non-OTA channel to stream over Aereo.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873239815045781...
Developers, You Need to Stop Being So Stingy
There's a lot to like here and a lot of potential, but I'm not sure I buy the "OkCupid for Jobs" description. OkCupid matches people up based on answers to (multiple choice) questions (along with how important you think a prospective match's answer is to the given question). I'm not seeing anything like that here...

But I like the filtering features, and I'm definitely interested in seeing where this goes. Well done!
I think NetLogo is lexically scoped, maybe StarLogo too? A really long time ago I wrote a translator from Logo to Scheme: http://web.archive.org/web/20071231105705/http://www.colorst... – it translates fairly directly, and so it uses lexical scoping. The version is also lisp-2 by default, but has a lisp-1 option.
How can I, as an employer, get on the platform? (It's not very clear.)
It's mostly aesthetic, but lighter visuals (dark text on light background) are better on the eyes during the day and darker (vise versa) visuals are better at night.
No. The GP is merely clarifying trade offs.
Goodbye, Google:Mozilla makes Yahoo the default Firefox search engine in the U.S
> That wouldn't explain why one regex engine is 5x faster than another. Only looking at the regex engines themselves would tell you that.

It could definitely explain it, but it may not be the best explanation given the facts. I'll definitely concede that it's pure conjecture.

> A representative Perl program would use regexes and contain some logic that processes the results of those regexes.

Sure, depending on what you want to show. Nobody is trying to say Perl is as fast or faster than C, just that relatively, it's fast for the development cost it requires.

>> I think it's more related to the fact that the actions of the regex parsing implementation when optimized sufficiently is very close in implementation to C code that steps through a char array
> I used to think that, but it is really not true unless your regex engine contains a JIT compiler.

I think we're referring to different things, which is mostly my fault for being loose with my terminology. I really only meant close to C in a conceptual manner, which yields some performance benefit by keeping a large chunk of the looping and work storing specific chunks of text low level and in the interpreter. I wasn't trying to imply the regex engine's cost was negligible or the actual machine operations we comparable in a large way.
Knowing a defense has weaknesses doesn't make it worthless when it takes extra effort for an attacker to exploit that weakness. There is no proven secure consumer OS (I'm including common userland apps in that) so things like ASLR and stack canaries are just extra obstacles to get around.

Real security needs to be layered.
As a pilot who loves flying, I am sad to say I must agree with the article. Computers are ideally suited to fly planes, statistically will be safer and we like it or not, will be flying most large aircrafts in a future not to distant. (My guess.. 20 years tops)
That brings up another thing that the average Joe doesn't think about: that nuclear weapons are transported on unmarked trucks right along major highway routes. For all we know, a couple shipments might pass certain cities every day for months or years on end. Nuclear weapons have to be initially deployed, moved for repositioning, maintained, repaired, upgraded, and retired. All this is done in secret.

If only nuclear waste had also been handled in secret, the masses would have turned their attention to protesting chemtrails or something, rather than derailing the well-thought-out Yucca plan.
This kind of seems reasonable, why downvotes?
Air travel is already safe. Statistics show 1.27 deaths per 100,000 flight hours, or another stat in a single year you have the odds of dying as 1 in 4 million or so. You are more likely to die driving to the airport. How would having no pilots decrease those odds significantly? I would think that any decrease due to a computer doing it better would be offset by bugs in the software or unanticipated situations.
The problem is that the team that built Obama's campaign website cannot work on federal websites due to conflicts of interest.

So they use contractors, and the contracting is corrupt and there is politics involved on who gets the contracts. It always seems to go to some incompetent group that someone is getting kickbacks from and it costs millions of dollars to product a defective product. This is the same way that Haliburton got Iraqi oil and food contracts during the Bush administration.

Anyway there are two options, one public and one private for health insurance. By law, both produce the same coverage and co-pays. When you compare the price the public plan is only affordable when you make under 10K a year in income and get government subsidies to make it affordable. But that amount is not adjusted for inflation and so people earning $20K/year or more end up paying more for the public plan than the private plan.

So unless you are really really poor, the private plan will always cost less. Healthcare.gov is very dysfunctional and buggy and the private insurance brokers have a website that does the same thing but finds a private insurance and their websites work and the plans cost less than the public plans.

I ended up on disability and used to work as a programmer I could tell healthcare.gov was a mess and I went the route of an insurance broker and saved money on my Part D. Had I gone with the public plan I'd pay more.

It is like they are selling apples, and the government's apple costs more than the corporation's apple.

I got one of those "Zero Plans" that replaces Medicare and costs me $0/month but it is run by a private insurance company. If I went to healthcare.gov and picked a public plan it would be $800/month for me. I'm on disability and it should not be that much.
Two ancient human genomes reveal Polynesian ancestry among indigenous Brazilians [pdf]
This is excellent. Very useful with plenty of polished features! Kudos

Now I don't need to worry about getting shadowbanned! I figured out where the line is. Thank you for showing me `The Way`!

You positive[ly] useless nerds.
> Plus.. the director job is generally going to mean a
> more relaxed job

If you believe responsibility over people, budgets, liabilities and policy is less stressful than responsibility over systems, you're high. As a programmer, let me tell you: people who have only ever done programming for a career have no clue how relatively easy they have it.
What about the gigantic incentive to live resulting in poorer performance?

We saw this on Air France - where the pilots' panic caused them to ignore readily available information that would have saved their lives.

On the whole of it, I'd rather the plane be flown by a computer, with a remote pilot jumping in for extreme edge cases.
"Planes are mostly already flown on autopilot already."

Well, yes, the easy bits. The problem is that you still need pilots when things don't go exactly to plan, and they never do: http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths/

This is not to say that passenger planes can't be automated someday, but we're nowhere near there yet.
The reason why they are indistinguishable stems from our ignorance to learn about a deeper abstraction. We cannot simulate further than what we already know.
I agree, stenotype's advantage is not chording and I think our insight is similar; it's the phonetic shorthand which is breaking a word down into syllables which is always shorter than the number of characters (for English anyways).

I think of it as a readily available syllable->word database, which any chording mechanism can take advantage of.

You're right, arbitrary symbols is not stenotype's strength, but chording is somewhat, at least when number of key switches is limited and the whole keyboard size is really small.

I suppose the question is whether chording in a confined space is any better than a full size keyboard, because there is zero or less wrist movement and fingers do not need to reach out (no positional issues).

The answer to that question is yes, chording is better in a setting like mobile phones, which by the way is where we do most of our typing these days, so you shouldn't lose interest.
I was thinking this would either be about running a tiny subset of linux on a Teensy, or running a Teensy binary on ARM linux. https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/ Interesting anyway.
>This kind of information on context is much more difficult to find

Yes, but its also highly subjective & imho useless information. Emanuel Derman often writes about this problem, and it is something I have observed very frequently at workplaces - this present generation seems to be obsessed with meta-knowledge rather than actual knowledge. He points out its better to know a few things but know them indepth, rather than have an ability to talk about everything without actually knowing what those things really are. When I ask people to implement ordinary least squares from scratch, literally like 5% of the people interviewed manage to do that, & they are very, very good. The remaining 95% "know about ols" but don't "know ols" ie. they will give me lots of mumbo jumbo about how ols is the building block of statistics & how it is affected by outliers & so forth - but can't implement one to save their lives. When it comes to sorting, I vastly prefer somebody who can implement atleast one of O(n) ( postman sort), O(n^2) ( bubblesort) or O(nlogn) ( mergesort, several others ) rather than somebody who can give me all this context & then say I will google the actual algorithm. CLRS teaches you how things actually work. ADM is imho good for acing interviews conducted by managerial types (PMs/EMs) who want you to namedrop & give lots of context & color without actually doing any real work.
So is this something I can use in place of an auto-generated self-signed certificate for that headless linux box that I have running in the back of my closet and which I optimistically refer to as "my web server"?
It is not a benchmark but a target to be reached. Once we have models of human simulation, we can treat the human brain as a benchmark.
Ha! Artificial intelligence us always whatever we can't work out what to do.

As a general principle, if someone claims X is not AI, then they need to define a test they will accept as a true test of AI.

"The agency and awareness of an amoeba" is achievable now[1].

[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/weve-put-worms-mind...
Produces 10x what? Lines of code? Don't make me laugh.
> But lets not kid ourselves. This isn't anonymized data. Uber's publishing in a format that is unspecific, but they have all of the detailed data and can poke through it and infer things at their leisure, and they have no compunction around how they're doing it or why.

That's a fairly large accusation to make.

This blog post was originally published in 2012 - two years ago. Since then has anything come out that would confirm your suspicions? I haven't seen anything.
Barbie the Debian Developer
It's explained in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. If a story hasn't had significant attention in about a year, a small number of reposts is ok. HN will let you repost it if you use a slightly different URL. Also, please don't delete and repost.

We're working on a better de-dupe system but it will be a while before it's out.

(In the future, please email hn@ycombinator.com with such questions, as the guidelines ask.)
It's not that developers are stingy, it's that people are stingy.

We live in a stingy age. "Cheap and tolerable beats expensive and excellent" has been the #1 rule of the marketplace for at least fifty years now. And not just in software, but everywhere: garments, furniture, housing, cars, airlines, food... the list goes on and on.

Maybe at some point in my lifetime the pendulum will start swinging in the other direction. I hope so, but given that this is a macro kind of trend, I kind of doubt it.
What does that mean?

We can tell when our simulations behaviour doesn't match the goal. But when it does, then what?

You seem to imply there is some (actual, literal) magic we are missing.
Absolutely! We have our eyes on topicals, edibles, and concentrates. That's really where the market is moving. Look out for an edibles only Marvina box soon!

Until then I'd recommend docGreen's cannabis infused creams. I think you can pick them up at SPARC in San Francisco.
Take a look at the Stony Brook Algorithm Repository: http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~algorith/

A lot of the examples are excerpted from the book.
Lets see it this way, does the amoeba simulation ever begin to show signs of evolving? Even if given a millenia? If no, then it's not intelligence, call it video playback if you will.
You raise a valid point but for an orthogonal question. When I first saw a calculator, as a 5 year old, I thought it was the most amazing and intelligent thing ever.

The original point discussed above was about how unnecessarily complex the brain is if its function/intelligence is so simple. We may or may not want to treat it as a benchmark, but the fact remains nobody understands it or can mimic its function even after trying for a very long time. (though believe me you, that's what most of AI is trying to do, even if in a simplistic way)
Please don't post comments about downvotes. They add noise, and typically are soon out of sync with reality.
Actually, we have made dramatic strides in AI. 2 years ago we couldn't classify multiple objects in a photo properly. Now we can, and within 2 years I would bet we will be approaching human performance on that task.

Watson can do medical diagnosis better than most humans.

We understand some parts of intelligence quite well, and others less so.
He definitely knows his stuff. I played on the original Sojourn MUD and when EverQuest came out I was surprised at how much they straight ripped off Sojourn. Most MMO players haven't even heard of MUDs, much less Sojourn.
I enjoyed the game so much because of the great people I met and played alongside there. I also think the startup/HN crowd is really great, and I'm sure a guild with that mindset would be very fun and rapidly improve. It would be interesting to be a part of that. However, I believe most in the startup/HN crowd can't afford the time required to be active in the game while also working on whatever drives them. And guild chat would probably be similar to but more limited than HN.
Have you heard of Eve Online? You can lose your virtual shirt if you just bound about obliviously. It happens quite often and the game can be ruthless at times.

I'm also surprised Raph didn't bring up Eve at all. It's a pretty successful and significant sandbox that takes its lineage from Ultima Online. It's nowhere behemoth level that WoW is but it fills its niche.
Very well designed. However what advantage does this have over browser bookmarks/tags?
Thanks for sharing!! Like this story a lot better than the linked blog article. A positive example of real evidence is so much more effective than an essay of meta.
> Now my grandmother will end up seeing 0 organic search
> results above the fold

Part of the deal is that Yahoo improves the presentation of search results so that this doesn't happen.
Is this talk recorded? Morrowind is my favorite video game of all time and I would love to watch this.
Heinz forwarding that woman's personal information unsolicited to a third party without her consent is awfully flaky...
Europe has already looked at industrial freezers as batteries.

Take them to -40 when electricity is cheap let them get to -20 during peak.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/swiss-wareh...
What an astonishingly vapid and frustrating article. We need to get past these semantic arguments about what constitutes "intelligence." The "do submarines swim" analogy is cliched, but perfectly appropriate. It doesn't matter how you define "swim." Submarines are better at certain tasks than human bodies on their own. Likewise, computer systems that we label "AI" systems are better at certain tasks than human bodies (brains) on their own.

The author seems to use "intelligence" and "autonomy" interchangeably, which is troubling, mostly because he makes no attempt at actually defining either. His claim that amoebas and plants "exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips even the most powerful computers" is ludicrous under any remotely plausible definitions of the terms. If humans genetically engineer an amoeba or a plant to change its behavior, is the magical "autonomy" suddenly gone?

Also, his argument is ridiculous even as semantic arguments go, since "artificial" isn't supposed to mean "synthetic." The standard dictionary definitions are "made by humans" and "false or pretending."