skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a nice glimmer of hope, that we may be the slaves that build the interstellar rocket ship monument to our AI god so it can beetle off to a nicer looking star system (or super-massive black hole?) better suited to it (e.g. more energy, more matter.)
Coding evaluations are one thing, but this seems a bit overboard. Did you actually read the spec? If I was going to do this properly, it would probably take me a full day. Perhaps even a couple of days. Is it worth that amount of time?

The other question in my mind is whether the company is actually going to use this code for free.
Is that a proper response to criticism? Labeling every dissenting opinion as a conspiracy nut's crazy talk just because the project is open source?
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reactjs%2C%20Angular....

;)
SourceTree is that app: you know how git works but you don't want to fiddle with CLI commands and text output limitations. 99,5% of the everyday workflow is covered by a nice GUI.

Alas atlassian decided to go after the "Github App - no clue of git" population by "simplifying" the UI in 1.9. It's my impression that that move backfired hard in the existing SourceTree user-base.
Ask HN: Should I Quit My Job?
I'm a software developer, and I've been in the Bay Area now for a little less than two years. I first moved out here to work with a large tech company whose products I knew I wasn't passionate about, but who could give me a great job with a lot of learning. Eventually, the lack of passion got to me, and I started seeking other opportunities that more closely aligned with my beliefs. A couple months ago, I left that company and joined a small startup who is building something I believe in. I think I made a wrong decision. I'm confident now that I want to leave this company too, but I'm worried about what that means for my resume and what opinions future employers might form. Two jobs in under two years? I think I could explain, but I might not even get that chance. If I left this company, I have no idea what I would do next. What should I do?

The software quality here is a major step down from my last company. I expected this to a certain extent, but I'm realizing now that the difference is so drastic that I don't even feel I'm learning or growing as a developer right now. There exists a complacency among the team with throwing code at the next task in the queue until "it works" and then moving on. In that regard, I feel alone in my endeavors to better the codebase, and my efforts get quickly overshadowed by the other developers because there's no management structure for aligning on a clear path to betterment. I think the problem is actually more nuanced than complacency - I think some of the developers here truly believe they're writing high quality solutions. I feel like an arrogant asshole for even having this opinion, but it worries me that I'm working with people who don't know they're just digging a deeper hole, and who will defend their ideas eternally. 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, which makes me think I need to be in an environment where I'm still learning.
Since you seem to be well-versed in this world, do you know what reputation Nick Bostrom has in these circles?
Yeah, I can imagine in NYC things are different. I live in a town of about 50,000 though the courthouse is still a pretty good size with a couple hundred for jury duty.
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head.

Right now it's Orwellian and sophisticated-- if they have Amazon's level of data crunching and prediction ability, they might be able to predict certain things about you, and, on average, be more right than wrong.

Wait until they have 20 more years of data on you, and 20 more years of advancing the quality of their algorithms and machine intelligences. You will be owned, and your buttons will be pushed as necessary to maintain what has already been built.
That's good information to know for comparison -- I'm with T-mobile, and when they switched to the BYOD model, they got rid of the subsidized plans. The replacement plans look like a good deal, but it is hard to compare because plans were getting better every year anyway. And providers went from making money on voice to making money off of data.
Just to extend your list.

dub for D, http://code.dlang.org/

cargo for Rust, https://crates.io/

biicode for C and C++, https://www.biicode.com/

NuGet for C and C++, http://docs.nuget.org/consume/support-for-native-projects

OPAM for OCaml, https://opam.ocaml.org/
Fixing 409A
I don't know for sure, but AirBNB had the weird domain name airbednbreakfast.com or something, and it still has pretty weird company name too. It's not really what you would choose for disrupting the hotel industry.

By decades of media coverage, "Microsoft" evokes images of a behemoth. But try to imagine what the name "Microsoft" must have sounded like -- it doesn't sound very ambitious. It sounds a little lame. If you planned to be the biggest company in the world, would you name your company "Microsoft"?

Microsoft was started when Gates was 20 or something. I think a lot of 20 year olds are just trying to make something interesting. Some are dreaming of taking over the world, but those are the types that probably don't actually do it.

I think you can see a similar thing with Linux. If you look at Linus's original mail announcing Linux, it doesn't sound like he has any goals to run on the majority of servers, mobile phones, many desktops, and tons of embedded devices.

He even insisted it would never be portable past i386!!!

I agree with pg that a lot of these people are living in the future and don't necessarily realize that they're going to be riding this hockey stick growth. Even if you're doing it, I'm sure it's hard to predict. There's hundreds of decisions and improvements you have to make along the way. There's no one idea or feature to implement to get that big.
Innovative here are the promises to do anything, just by texting. Calling up the Amex concierge service seemed like more of a big deal. And explaining to them I'd like them to get food delivered to me... Dunno how'd that go. They certainly don't market it for stuff like that.
This varies between schools. At my current school it's fairly straightforward to say "I saw this student looking at X's paper" and show that the answers are more similar than would be expected. Multiply choice would be harder of course, but free response or incorrect math calculations are pretty convincing. Students have recourse, but the appeals process here is not much work for the faculty member making the accusation until maybe the final level.
Bill Gates's vision was about a "wallet PC", "information highway" and software based "personal agents". You can think of smartphone with BitCoin wallet, 3G web connection, Siri meets Watson.

He hoped Microsoft's "pen-based computing" (later Pocket-PC/WinCE) would get traction. Microsoft Bob (from Gates wife) and Office agents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant) flopped. The Microsoft Network 1.0 (short MSN 1.0) integrated in Windows 95 (was a serious Web competitor based on Win32 controls and Explorer as browser instead of HTML and Mosaic/Internet Explorer 1) flopped. The second edition of the book features the Internet/web instead of "information highway".

Bill Gates vision can be seen in the Comdex 1995 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XxeY-OchwY&feature=youtu.be... (shows the "wallet PC")

General Magic was definitely a competitor. AT&T was on the General Magic bandwagon, see their TV ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8 (triva: Jenna Elfman of Dharma & Greg in her first role in 0:48)
> Universities trying to protect their franchise as businesses rather than advancing their core mission.

While I'm generally skeptical of Bayh-Dole, in part because it incentivizes universities to fake their research results, I also think their actual points may be valid. E.g. because the private sector has more money than them to spend on lawyers, this would leave them unable to enforce their I.P. rights, which would cause their patents to become basically worthless.

Even if you could make a good case for eliminating the patent system, which I think would be difficult, undoubtedly it's much more difficult to make a good argument for why only the super rich should be allowed to own intellectual property.
This is a concierge service by text. It makes sense as an idea for two reasons: first, most people don't know the variety of things that a concierge (at a hotel, or credit card provider) can do; second, I've met many people even of my age (31) who are pathologically incapable of making a phone call, even to a pizza parlor.
So the NSF should attach strings to the funding.
I think it's about the MVP - minimum viable product of the company. The first product which is going to bring in revenue and keep the lights on. You will obviously consolidate further and build a business plan around the MVP. Basic for Altair was Microsoft's MVP. Offering air mattresses was AirBNB's MVP.
I see a lot of very opinionated dissent to even discussing the ideas presented in this article. Let me try to paraphrase in a way that hopefully levels the playing ground and maybe removes some biases or irons out some personal wrinkles we all may have for one reason or another:

It is conceivable that we (humanity) may one day obviate ourselves. Arguably, most of us would prefer that does not happen.

That's it. That's really what I see the discussion being about. I think it's a worthwhile discussion to have.
Yeah, and they're mainly talking about two specific proposals in the currently proposed bill too. I'm not sure what effect those two proposals would have, but instead of discussing said proposals the comments here are rambling about vaguely related issues.
Astronomers find an ancient black hole the size of 12B suns
This is solved because you can scale each service differently. Too many DB queries from your messaging service? Upgrade the DB, add another read slave. Too much CPU load on your image processing service? Add more image processing nodes.

Breaking your system out into multiple dependencies means you can not only scale your infrastructure, but you can scale individual parts of your infrastructure based on demand, bottlenecks, usage, etc.

Netflix has talked about in the past how, because their systems are broken apart, they don't have to deal with these issues. Rating service having problems? Don't show user ratings. Search service offline for updates? Disable search. If Netflix was one giant (Rails? Django? Node?) app, it would be very difficult to cut out poorly-performing parts temporarily.
Scientists discover black hole so big it contradicts growth theory
Jinja2, the results of the postgres kickstarter coming in, DurationField/UUIDField, integration of django-secure... this release is massive, almost bigger than 1.7.
To be fair, I don't think that the reason why Chimps haven't hunted something to extinction doesn't stem from a built in morality or sense of balance with nature.

I'm not trying to put words into your mouth. I was just thinking of some of the new research that shows that primates of all kinds actually commit organized violence that mirror human violence in many, many, ways including war and capital punishment.(It's not a one for one thing, but similar.)
In Finland going to a sauna is often a social activity. You catch up with your best friends in a Friday sauna session. If you use the sauna a lot, maybe it means you have more friends?

There's apparently a connection between social integration and health: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23681602
Gigantic Black Hole Discovered from the Dawn of Time
If you take it as a given that the NSA is spying on all parties, that includes those supposedly providing oversight. Those providing oversight can then be coerced into rubber-stamping whatever the NSA wishes. Therefore, "increased oversight" is all but impossible.
Great idea. If you're not in the gig economy, you're a turk.
Just wanted to say thanks for the chance to try it out. Looks pretty awesome!
Martin Pall hypothesizes that sauna therapy increases the availability of tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4) through multiple mechanisms [1]. A small study with people with chronic fatigue syndrome provides evidence to confirm this [2] (I don't think this publication is peer reviewed). I believe there is an association between BH4 and cardiovascular health, but this is not my field.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19581054
[2] http://www.townsendletter.com/Nov2013/sauna1113.html
Nk-mysql – A native data tool for nk and other FROSS software utilizing Node.js
It was actually at an ivy league school. But you're right in saying that I did have a bitter experience with college.
Quit your job. Find another one. Leave your current one off your resume. Mark Suster talks about this here:

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/04/22/never-hire-job...

"If you worked somewhere for 6 months leave it out. It’s not worth it. Listing it is a negative and unless it was interning for Ted Kennedy or Ronald Reagan it’s most likely a liability. A resume does not require you to list absolutely everything you’ve ever done. Do not lie. If asked in an interview about the gap you can simply say, “I joined a company for 6 months that was a total mistake. I regretted it. I figured I didn’t accomplish enough to put it on my resume. Trying to make what I did there sound good on a resume would have been false."
I wasn't even aware of Google Flights until I saw the article posted on HN. Go figure...

For some of us, the constant deluge of info, along with work and family life, makes it tough to stay on top of all the latest developments. Glad this service was "re-announced".
The problem isn't "machine intelligence", it's "hooking up poorly understood adaptive algorithms to real-world systems". Which is something that happens plenty often now.
Some people actually draw parallels between robot abuse and animal abuse, for reasons I do not know. And some of them take robot abuse seriously, as a proxy for animal or people abuse.
"Modularity" is nearly defined by the ability to forget certain details of an interface so as to leave freedom to change the underlying details while maintaining the behavior at the interface (Reynold's Abstraction Principle). In almost the same breath one would declare that types are a primary mechanism to achieve this. [0]

Type structure is a syntactic discipline for
enforcing levels of abstraction.

Modularity is more or less required in order to take a stab at defining or talking about composability, but is "good" modularity necessary (or sufficient) for achieving composability?

I don't have a bulletproof argument here, but essentially I'd like to say that greater modularity allows you to forget inessential details and subsequently increase the surface area with which you can compose your modules.

So finally, we come to generics as a powerful tool for using types to erase inessential details. Generics essentially operate via providing a new logical structure to types, the ability to introduce and operate sensibly over type variables. So I would argue that a type language without generics is much like a programming language without variables [1]. You are perhaps not completely crippled, but pretty close.

So, my argument is something like "without generics your type language is crippled so as to make control of modularity very weak which will prevent you (syntactically) from ensuring composability".

The "(syntactically)" bit is important since, as we all know, you can achieve modularity and composability "by hand" through code generation, copy and pasting, creating commenting policies... but then we've stumbled back into the "static types versus dynamic types" argument, so let's not rehash it.

[0] https://wiki.mpi-sws.org/star/paramore?action=AttachFile&do=...

[1] These kind of variables, not "mutable cell" style variables: https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/words-matte...
A Powerpoint of Canada's email surveillance program just leaked
Eolas, one of the more notorious patent trolls to hit the web, began as a UCSF spinoff, founded by a UCSF employee in 1994.

Eolas claimed to have invented the first interactive web browsing experience, and patented[1] the concept of interactive web browser plugins (applets). Doyle (founder of Eolas) first targeted Microsoft in what would turn into a long streak of litigation; he initially approached Microsoft with an offer to license his invention. The company declined, and Doyle sued. After drawn out legal proceedings, the parties reached a settlement, with a $30.4 million chunk [2] going to the University of California. Eolas went on to sue[3] 22 other of the largest internet companies for violating the same patent.

Eolas wasn't claiming to have invented "interactive" computer programs in general, since this would be absurd. Eolas simply had the foresight to be first in line to file for a patent that combined the idea of interactivity (via external programs) with the nascent technology of web browsing, which was, to my knowledge, still "non-interactive" in 1994. That said, Eolas might not [4] have even been the first to demonstrate the idea of interactive web browsing. In fact, I'd be surprised if Engelbart's line of research at SRI in the `60's didn't establish prior art decades before.

Regardless of whichever party happened to come up with an idea as simple as interactive web browsing, it hardly makes sense to give this party such sweeping power to extort the rest of the industry for the decade or two that follow.

[1]https://www.google.com/patents/US5838906

[2]http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2007/10/10/microsofts-eo...

[3]http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2009/10/06/after-beating...

[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1995JulAug/0446...
What are they protesting?
Census Bureau: 2014 Housing Vacancy Survey Annual Statistics
Staying Sharp with Angular.js
Spark announces new microcontroller with built-in cellular connectivity
Docker's rise from sleeper to open source king
This is a pretty ridiculous claim considering that iPhones get updates for four years while android devices get updates for less then two years.
Funny he failed to mention that the blog post he found the fix for... was the result of messaging tech support on Heroku!!! Surprisingly their internal knowledge didn't make it across all their own systems....
I was under the impression that software engineer interviews at Google were for generalists, since they want employees to be able to move on to other projects in the future. Is there any reason to suggest that Google/Amazon/Facebook is currently saying "no" to exceptional generalists?
There's a very fine line between AI futurist and best-guess scifi writer. Most "AI thought leaders" are scifi writers, not technical researchers. They take preconditions, generate a story, think how it could happen given plausible technology, then market that as soon-to-be-fact.

It's an entertaining society and endlessly fun to read, but still complete fiction based on internal brain states of individuals and not necessarily based on real world interactions.

Also see: Eliezer Yudkowsky — great writer, fun to read, but largely scifi thought experiments masquerading as research.
Starting a company to make a paid browser when Mosaic is already free.
Awesome! You can use our API for 360 video and photos. Tons of content already that you can use. http://developer.littlstar.com/ We already have people building Gear VR / Rift apps on top of it.
http://developer.littlstar.com/docs/
The link to "This World of Ours"[1] is gold.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thisworld...
Laura Scudder: The greatest woman entrepreneur who gave us the joy of chips
I like this debate, It's useful to have it but all these doomsday articles in my opinion are always missing a point, the main one: society comes first, society it;s driving technology not the other way round.

We will not suddenly realize: "oh machines took all our jobs", it's a slow process and it's lead by society, not technology. When technology will create more problems than solutions than it will die or adapt to what the society wants.
From poking around on the web it actually appears that Mr. Siegel might be one of the good guys here. He was recently elected and unlike past members of the city council seems to be in favor of building more housing in Mountain View.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/11/06/mountain-...
Artificial intelligence is a tool, not a threat (2014)
The only times I've heard him mentioned the impression was negative and that he didn't understand any of the actual science.

People hear "machine learning" and they think it is about machines that know how to think. Machine learning is actually just optimization of high dimensional functions. If this language were used it wouldn't sound as sexy, but no one would think machines are going to take over the world.

AI isn't magic. It's really just clever search techniques and mathematical optimization.
How is it that we were able to land a man on the moon over 45 years ago and we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates?
I find this really baffling. It is a service all customers want yet even the great Google can't seem to provide this.
Meanwhile Google puts out so many "experimental products" that they later dispose.

There is talk of Google getting into cell-phone service and the are already getting into Google fiber. I wish Google would use its pricing power and buy entire flights between major cities domestic and international (eg, NYC to Chicago, LA, SF, Miami, Atlanta, and London).
Moreover, an airline can really make its profits on airline fuel speculation since this is the most volatile component of airline costs.
This reminds me of my experience with Microsoft very early in my career. Way back when MS was working on Windows 1.0, I was working for a start up company and we were developing network management software for SNA Networks and Mainframes. It was very advanced for the day and used a GUI but was done on Mainframe computers and terminals. The company sold out to IBM and I chose to take the money and run. A friend of mine referred me to MS because they needed people with graphics experience. So I met with one of the team leaders and went over and talked with them. At the time, Windows was very very primitive, they had not yet figured out how to make the windows overlap and re-paint (which we had figured out a long time before that). I actually felt sorry for them at the time because I just could not imagine how they would ever catch up with Apple, the Mac was just so much more advanced. It seemed to me like there was no doubt that they would be out of business in a few years completely replaced by Apple, it was just so obvious at the time to me. They offered me a job but it was less money in terms of salary than another offer I had from a Fortune 500 company, but at the time MS had a great stock option plan, but I felt that was worthless based on my brilliant analysis of their prospects. So I took the safe bet. I tell this story occasionally to younger people who are trying to decide about what to do in terms of career choices. Sometimes the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path. It is no guarantee of success, but neither is taking the safe choice. Do what excites you and put your energy into that. Just my view from the cheap seats.