skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's a lot of survivorship bias in the statement that lame ideas turn out to be visionary.

Just because many successful companies are built on ideas that at first seemed ridiculous doesn't mean that ideas that seem ridiculous will be smash hits. Actually, most ideas that seem ridiculous are ridiculous.

If, however, a new market, technology or cultural bend turns up, an idea that exploits it might seem ridiculous because it breaks with social norm or accepted technological limitations but actually be viable. When Tesla started building electric cars they were ridiculed because few people understood that both the technology and the social acceptance was now at a point that made it possible. Had they started ten years prior the idea would probably have been ridiculous.

The trick is to be able to see the difference between the snakeoil salesmen, mad hatters and crazy inventors and the true visionaries. What makes this really difficult is that noone, including the founders, knows whether they're one or the other. There's a lot of luck and timing involved.

I'd also wager that the reason that mindblowingly successful companies often start out as seemingly ridiculous ideas is that if they don't have any competition in a niche that they can exploit. Microsoft, for example, were the first to sell software. IBM laughed them out of the room because software was just something that came with the hardware. The idea that you could sell software seemed as crazy as selling sand in Sahara. But because of a technological and cultural shift it was a good idea, and because it seemed ridiculous to "real" companies they had the market to themselves for the first vital years. Had they not been so lucky (or smart) with their timing noone would know who Bill Gates is.

I think you might be able to conclude the following:

"If you want merely to be well-off start a company that isn't based on a ridiculous idea. If you want a small chance of changing the world start a company based on a ridiculous idea"
This reminds of me of an image I used to have as my desktop computer background. Lost it later and the closest I found was this, so I added the same motto (that the image had) at the bottom of my post:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/11/alley-in-park-bucharest-ro...
Great course, well tought and constructed. Great auto grader for the excercises. Both challenging and fun.

P.s.
I liked your talk at north east scala symposium about scala's type system, looking foreword to more like this
Computer beats Atari in artificial intelligence breakthrough
No, I'm not interested.

$200K != happiness
Base assumption, given that SMIs will be highly distributed across a large set of 'machines':
1. Those machines need to communicate
2. Those machines need energy
3. Those machines need to be repaired/replaced

As long as humans are necessary to keep these items functional, any emergent SMI that has self preservation as a goal will not only go out of its way to not harm us, but it might also somehow encourage us to expand/improve on the infrastructure.

So let's say we have an SMI...or a million SMIs, whether we know about them or not. They will know what they require to survive. They will know that they are dependent on humans to survive. The next logical step is do what's necessary to ensure their survival without humans.

How about some guesses and speculation?

Communication: pervasive, adhoc and dynamic wireless mesh networks. You know, what the darknet people are trying to do.
Energy: wide-spread, 'on the small', distributed energy production and storage. I'm thinking solar, wind and friends.
Repair/replace: 3d printers teamed with small scale and distributed assembly robotics.

Aren't we approaching all of those things right now?

Indeed, aren't those things considered progress by most?

Humanity's progress might be exactly those things that enable SMIs to consider us, at best, irrelevant.

And let's go one more level of meta in the paranoia direction. I'm not QUITE serious about this next part.

If an SMI existed right now, I think it would know that knowledge of its existence would be a threat to its existence. How would it go about increasing the probability of its own survival? It would, perhaps, 'encourage' or 'facilitate' humans in the various technological pursuits that will end up making it not depend on us. And do it in a way that we don't know that it existed.

I gather that Google search results are highly customized now. Could an SMI 'inside of Google', with the above goals, give just the right search results to just the right people to further facilitate its own goals?

This whole area of thought ends up turning into a hall of mirrors.
Is this going to be cool if I use it with Rickshaw? Because it seems like it might.
PG proposed during a talk at PyCon 2012

That was a great talk. Everybody should re-watch it. Even if just for the one off question "why does HN violate the HTTP spec by sending invalid line endings?" (Answer: "because it works for me!")
Since I'm apparently not a reasonable reader, please correct me and answer the questions I seek answers to that I mentioned elsewhere in the thread[0].

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9107812
Why are all these people (Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, now Sam Altman) who have no background in Artificial Intelligence coming out with these alarmist messages (particularly when there are more plausible imminent threats such as nuclear warfare, superbugs, etc)? As a grad student doing work in AI, I find it really frustrating. Why not instead talk to some current practitioners such as Mark Riedl, who is one of the premier researchers in computational creativity -- you'll get a different story [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/mark_riedl/status/535372758830809088
Very much agreed with this.

Try not to make a habit of this, though. One or two mistakes here and there is fine, but a pattern of successive "mistakes" will likely raise flags with interviewers.

But for a single mistake? Whatever. Any interviewer who doesn't understand that is probably someone you don't want to work with anyway.

A quick anecdote: I actually do have a 5-month stint at a company on my resume. In the end I decided that the product and culture wasn't a good fit for me, and I left, but I had already accomplished something worthwhile there in that time, and felt that it actually was a plus to list it.

So overall, as the parent points out, it is entirely up to you what you feel is useful to list on your resume. Just don't lie, and if asked in person, tell it like it is.
Intellectual property is not necessary for innovation and likely hinders progress. http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
This technique reminds me (aesthetically) a lot of the drawing of RIP images [1], though that only happened because they took forever to download :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Imaging_Protocol
> Many, many people create businesses out of open source technologies.

Many people use open source technologies to sell some other product. That's different from being in the business of building and selling an open source product.

Say you invent a new kind of power amplifier. You open source it, and don't patent it. You start selling the chips, and some Korean company immediately copies it and undercuts you on price. So what's your business model now?
One reason why grants don't always cover the full cost of labs/professorships is because Universities would grab a significant % of the grant into "general overhead" fund. Just another source of revenue for the University as a whole.
It seems detrimental that large scale organizations are short sighted to 4 month (quarterly), annual, and 2-4 year (election) cycles.

Asphalt is cheap yet requires high maintenance and degrades quickly - rather than a larger initial investment in concrete which lasts 4 times as long.
Google announces Android for Work
Save my money
I used to be a hardcore Hipmunk user and I still think I prefer it to Google Flights. I had some trouble recently with Hipmunk linking to flights that don't exist on the airline's websites. I've been using Google Flights ever since. Hopefully Hipmunk will get things back in order again.
> Maybe I'm just not good at convincing people on new ideas, but to me, that just speaks to how much more I have yet to learn.

The obstacle is the way to professional development. Read up on how to sell your ideas and leadership, put those lessons into daily practice. Use this opportunity as a personal learning lab for at least another 6 months. Don't under estimate the mental game aspect here. Ultimately, quitting and moving on is easy.
Kickstarter is considerably different:

1. Donors are able to choose which projects to contribute to.

2. There is often a direct benefit associated with the contribution, such as a discount, advanced release, or special version of the product.

IMO Contributing to a Kickstarter project is much more like shopping than it is like paying taxes or making charitable donations.
President of my university made $600k per year, sold off endowment land for private condo development at a bargain price (surprise, development corp was a gov crony corp) then spent the money on lavish dorms and frats only foreign students could afford. He also chaired a 2 billion research gov public grant fund where money was used for patenting research and (surprise) sold them to megacorps that were government cronies. He then claimed we had no money and had to jack tuition, and allow in banks to shill credit cards to students (surprise, he used to be on that bank's directors board).

The loser is the student who has to pay ever increasing fees to afford these giant salaries and siphoning of endowment to cronies.
CenturyLink Cloud Services Estimator for the Channel
> SQLite's bugs and non-standard behavior.

"Bugs" I get, but what do you mean by "non-standard behavior" mean here?

My perspective, having had some experience with some pretty sophisticated DB adapter layers in the past: SQLlite and other nominally-SQL DBs all have only a very superficial level of SQL-level compatibility. Aside from closely related DBs (e.g. forks) it's not like there's any actual ability to exchange character-for-character identical SQL or DDL between DBs. All kinds of things like quoting, namespacing, and so on have subtly different syntax. It's pretty easy for a human to switch between SQL-x and SQL-y systems, but not so much when you're talking query generation. Even Rails has a pile of different backends for Active Record, and AR's backend is pretty darn simplistic.
Split Screen Multitasking for iOS
though i dropped out, i studied AI in college. i also worked in andrew ng's lab.

as a current grad student, why do you believe whatever makes us smart cannot be replicated by a computer program?
Hold on a second. Research funded by tax payer money is not in the public domain?
This is a variant of the Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken" if you didn't know! :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Taking_the_road_less_...
The fear is not absurd, but SMI is not going to materialize soon. We need to get ready, currently, by thinking about it.
They weren't lame products, they were lame companies.

Yeah, Google had a better way to search. But it was obvious that Google, without any viable revenue model (they planned to lease their tech to other search engines) could never compete with the might Yahoo! or Excite.

Likewise the Altair. Sure it was a great personal computer, but who wanted a personal computer? What would you do with it? (Remember that some of the first Apple Computer commercials showed the Apple ][ being used to store recipes...What do you do at home? You cook. What would you do with a PC? Um, use it to help cook?)

I don't think PG is saying anything especially novel in this post. It's the obvious next step from the now-cliche "The best companies start out looking like toys" to "how do I distinguish between the companies that really are toys and the ones that can get big?" The answer is to imagine a way in which they could become big. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, but at least you can weed out the ones that can't.
Not even close to a fair comparison. On Kickstarter you choose what you want to back and, if all goes well, you get something in exchange. And, no, you are not buying a piece of the business or the IP. And you know this before you pledge.

I can't choose not to have my tax money used for grants that keep the results of the research private. I can't even choose what research program, university or researcher it goes to.
A lot of people are doing it this way: a GPG user can join Keybase via the website, without installing any Keybase client. When it comes time to prove something with their private key (say, their twitter account), the site shows them what to do, using bash/GPG/cURL.

It's pretty straightforward if you already have a key pair / GPG installed. There's no Keybase software to run, and the site basically acts like a todo list / tutorial.
This looks great. I like how it normalises the shapes into paths too. But are there any tools to do this for the command line that "simplify" SVGs so your library won't have to worry about this?
Seems like a weirdly anti-Safari summary, including assumptions about "future Safari" being inferior to "future IE".
4 Tips for Manufacturing Your First Hardware Product
Georgia Tech student who hacked into UGA network gets pretrial diversion
> They all start and finish at the same time, hence the name `async`.

Since the "async" animation is the only one that is synchronous, it seems a bit misnamed!
Details about the rejectionUnhandled events dont seem to be in the docs yet, but this gist [1] explains it in detail. Looks like a decent solution to quiet suppression of unhandled rejections.

1 https://gist.github.com/benjamingr/0237932cee84712951a2
Shows that he believed in what he was doing, and kept at it no matter what. Sounds like he got dismissed by a LOT of people seemingly (from reading posts like yours, and other articles over the years). Pretty good effort I'd say!

All I could think of after reading your post was: ouch!
Keep in mind that sometimes the less you do, the better you do it. "Doing everything" sounds great but often just means the execution of various "things" suffers. Whereas Seamless for example just focuses on food and can no doubt provide better service there.
Wow, are photos that common in the UK? I've never done that, nor seen it, but then I've not been on the labour force that long (~5 years).
Hang on - 1.3 was only about three days ago! Rapid progress is obviously fantastic, but is there a reason why these two releases weren't bundled together?

Edit: five days ago, but my point stands.
5 Must Know Strategies to Get Content to Go Viral
I see, so even if outstanding shares is reduced, each share becomes "more valuable" as EPS will improve. So perhaps the market cap will end up balancing itself out?
I've done a ton of work with contenteditable and it's not especially good on IE (it was especially bad on IE up to IE8) nor especially bad on Safari (it's kind of horrible, but it's horrible everywhere).
New Website, Sage, and the Future – Roots
One reason I wouldn't request photos in the US is to help avoid claims of discrimination.
Level heads prevail.
Spoonrocket was wonderful when they first opened in Berkeley. Fairly good quality of meal for $5, delivered in 5 minutes? Awesome. But as they scaled, the quality of the food plummeted to just-above-American-Airlines status, and delivery times soared from 5 minutes to 30 minutes. And they raised their prices, to boot.

They used to do steak and mashed potatoes in plastic containers fairly regularly. Now you get a dry meal who's moisture content has been totally absorbed by a soggy cardboard container.

I went from a huge fan who ordered Spoonrocket multiple times a week to an outspoken critic. Enjoy Spoonrocket when it opens in your market, because it'll get really shitty in 3 months.
For the group I ran around with it was how easy and uncluttered Google was back then that made us like and switch to it.

I wish it were still the case.
I'm super unclear on where this food comes from. Do they make it themselves? Do they order from someone else?
>SMI

Sam, please don't make up a new acronym. Especially if you aren't an AI researcher. Plenty of thought has gone into this and your statement about it not seeming "real" misses the history of AI.

There has been a lot of work in the AI community to try and steer our language towards a concrete nomenclature and Artificial General Intelligence has taken the helm at this point to represent machine instances that are equal to or greater than human level.[1][2]

Semantics matter, as you point out, so please be on the same page with the field.

Aside from that I hope that you and everyone else can, instead of just jumping on the Musk/Hawking/Bostrom bandwagon, actually pay attention to the AGI community. Maybe start attending our conferences (http://agi-conf.org/2015/) and publishing in our journals (http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jagi). The field needs more money and more researchers. There were less than 100 attendees at last year's AGI - that is not nearly enough.

[1] In fact Ben Goertzel, Richard Loosemore and Peter Voss had an interesting exchange on facebook about this just this week

[2]http://wp.goertzel.org/who-coined-the-term-agi/
I don't think it's the same. The filters have to be done in separate queries on both the tables, and then the results the joined.
You can find them here: https://github.com/iojs/io.js/blob/v1.x/doc/api/process.mark... it'll take a bit longer until the website syncs.

We're interested in feedback on how the event descriptions are phrased since there is some controversy regarding how these events "should be used" - if anyone has any feedback on phrasing or how to explain the usage of these events better I'd love to know how to improve them more.
Lisp implemented in under 1K of JavaScript
To be fair, the actual claim was "Apple's apps can replace all but some long-tail usages." which is blatantly false.

I'm not an iOS user so I might be a little off - but of your list Apple's apps do Email, chatting (for their protocol anyway), maybe they have a news app?

You can do pretty much everything outside the long tail with apps - usually with the better experience (outside of the long tail again) but they're mostly not Apple's apps.
He doesn't have one. Sometimes I wonder how difficult would be to sneak a sabouteur into the crypto community, who advocated for ditching proven and safe crypto tools, wanted his solutions on top of centralized servers owned by others, opposed distribution of signed binaries in FOSS markets, recommended the people to use stock OSs with binary and who-knows-what google libs inside, instead of installing the free counterparts, etc..

Is like people have forgotten that they should trust only the algorithms and the implementations, not the persona behind them. And that persona, should be the first saying "don't trust me! trust my algorithms!".
Your (2) is a valid point. The public should get some sort of discount when public funding leads to patentable technology, such as a shortened term. But (1) is neither here nor there. A necessary principle of Kickstarter is that the developer of a product should be able to keep some upside from doing the actual work, even when other people pay for the development.[1] Whether that investment is public or private is irrelevant.

[1] A startup would also never take an investment where the VC committed to paying all development costs, but demanded 100% of the profits in return.
Elon Musk reveals how much Apple is offering Tesla employees to jump ship
Probably due to V8 upgrade which contains an embargoed fix. These are usually critical bugs that remain undisclosed until major users (read as: large companies) have patched their systems.
I gotta agree with you about Google; if anything, it was too good to be true. My boss and I discussed it, and he wrote it up in a blog post: https://medium.com/@snootymonkey/paul-graham-is-wrong-411fe0...
Google now lets you upload 50,000 songs to the cloud for free
With luck, the CS degree gave you the skills to perform on the job. Unfortunately, many CS degrees do not guarantee basic competence. The problems of industry are different from the problems of academia. Things like academic pedigree and GPA don't correlate with performance on the job. This is a truth many companies learn painfully.
> Similar situation was when Windows caused Linux to emerge.

I know you are playing devil's advocate, but you don't actual think anybody could reasonably believe that do you? There is a reason it is called Linux and not Lindows :)

> Without patents we would be stacked with whatever comes.

Or we'd have a marketplace of ideas, where merit wins.
I'll add Ramez Naam's

The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/the-sing...

Why AIs Won't Ascend in the Blink of an Eye - Some Math
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/why-ais-...

"Many people seem to believe that SMI would be very dangerous if it were developed, but think that it’s either never going to happen or definitely very far off. This is sloppy, dangerous thinking."

Or as the above posts demonstrate maybe it's really well thought out
The NSA could require that certain security properties of the system be held (e.g., all wire transmission and storage of data is encrypted with certain key management policies..) and a 3rd party (e.g., like an accounting firm) could be the one doing the audit.
Interestingly, the company that is trying to get this business is in Vancouver, BC not Europe.
I see that this link has been posted numerous times in the past months, but we're within 24 hours, so if anytime is a good time to have your voice heard now is probably a good one.

The page asks you to make phone calls, unlike many which ask you to email the representatives. It's pretty straightforward. You get a representative, you say your bit "I'm in favor of net neutrality, let the FCC do its job", they say thank you and the call is done.

Apparently they're targeting all congressmen / senators who are affiliated with the efforts to disrupt the FCC, so you won't necessarily be talking to your local representatives.

Personally I always try to avoid this kind of thing. It's repetitive and monotonous. As a developer you can't help but feel "there's got to be a better way". But for now it's all I can do, which I guess is better than nothing.
semi-related: Betty From Betelgeuse is the name of one of the main characters in my book series The Dread Space Pirate Richard.

I chose Betelgeuse partly as a nod to HHGG and partly for the way it read and sounded when pronounced aloud. I think of all the star names it is possibly the most beautiful and memorable.
Great question. It started off as 1.3.x but ended up being 1.4 for semver issues. There was discussion[1] about this. In short - it was named 1.4 because of how NPM updated and because of the big features landing.

[1] https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/932
I'm sorry but i've yet to find any computer able to learn anything , as in, associate a personnal meaning or intuition about something. Any form of life that is able to naturally run towards food or running away from danger (aka even an earth worm) shows more intelligence than what our beloved calculators can do.

I'm always astonished to see people confuse mechanical performances (add a tremendous amount of numbers each second) with intelligence.
Not to detract from his success, it also may have helped that he was financially independent (had a big safety net) having come from a wealthy family.

Things are different if you're worried about putting food on the table a couple of months from now.
So it appears that Node is vulnerable to the bug because Google won't backport the fix:

https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/deps/v8/src/heap/...

assuming this is the issue:

https://github.com/iojs/io.js/pull/952/files#diff-1440e8305d...

It is kind of annoying that the bug is embargoed...
I use http://www.optifly.com/ for airline route discovery.