skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think people might overestimate the effect of machines being capable of improving themselves.

I don't believe in "magic algorithm"s, that we can't find, that perform dramatically better, but computer can find. I think we are capable of taking, in a few years time, advantage of most hardware. Dramatic improvements in performance thus require improving physical matrix the computation happens in. That means the prospective machine intelligence needs to have access to all the infrastructure thats needed to design and produce such matrix. It also will need to make experiments, and do things by trial-and-error, just like we do, even tho it could catch a hint easier than we do.

Think of chess. Seeing a couple of moves further in to the game might require 1000 times more raw computation. Such power might guarantee victory over lesser equipped competition. It still doesn't mean you'd be even close to "solving" the game. What I mean is, "intelligence" is not the only requirement needed for self-improvement. In the end, it might not even be the bottleneck at all.
For example, suppose we are planning the next generation of a transistor for some IC. Suppose a team of humans needs to do 100 experiments to get the process right. A perfectly smart AI might still need to run 90 experiments, no matter what, because it still needs to extract the same information that humans would from those experiments.

The machine needs to do all the chores (of R&D) that we already are doing. I'm not saying they couldn't be done better, but I'm saying they still need to be done, and any creature doing them still needs to spend the time and resources needed to do them. And it's not all brainwork.
I have no doubts vanilla humans can be outcompeted at some point. But even when human performance has been exceeded, technology might not immediately take off rocket-like to a world we cannot comprehend.

Still, I wonder, what the hell are we all going to do when paying the power-bills and capital costs of AI become cheaper than hiring a human..
Colordrop – Helping designers explore colors in detail
Wow, what were they doing? It's illegal to fly anything in Paris without authorization from the city. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31619099
WebSQL is SQLLite and making that a standard is very hard without including SQLite's bugs and non-standard behavior.

Mozilla had really good reasons for shooting it down. Calling them out on it is meaningless without specifying why you think they've been wrong. You can say anything about IndexedDB, but at least it has a spec.
I was initially skeptical of Keybase, but I was happy to see the comments on HN of letting people use keybase without installing the CLI client were listened to. Seeing how many of my friends are on keybase now, that never had gpg setup before, I can't help but think it's filling a need that's otherwise unserved.
Consider Kickstarter. Just because the public pays for the development of the product, does that mean the product should be free (or at least, sold at the cost of materials)?

I call this the "MIT model" of R&D. MIT, moreso than Stanford, is famous for participating in the military-industrial-educational complex. It's anything but ideologically pure, but it's also been amazingly successful at developing "hard" technology.
The letter containing that statement is a key to understanding Microsoft's goals and their success (in particular the key innovation that people should pay for software). If you haven't read it, I recommend taking a look: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/most-of-you-steal-your-...
PCs were lame for their time. They cost a couple thousand dollars, there was no software for them, and you really couldn't do much with them.

Search was lame for its time. You couldn't actually find anything, that's why we all had to use portals and directories instead.

Social networking online was lame for its time. What are you, some kind of nerd who doesn't have any friends?

I think the meta-lesson here is that you don't want your product to be lame. You want your product to be exceptional, given what's already out there. You want your market to be lame, but very fast-growing, such that in a couple years people won't think it's so lame anymore.
I was in college when google first launched. I remember distinctly at the time AltaVista was the best search engine, but I still rarely got relevant pages from searches. I dont think that in the early days I remembered getting much better results from Google, but eventually it was pretty clear cut for me. I do remember in around 2004-2005 some folks I worked with were thinking of starting a "new" search engine, and that it would far surpass Google. I can say I thought that was a pretty lame idea. Of course to a large degree I think that Uber and AirBnb are a bad idea, but you cant argue with valuations....
Show HN: Wikitropolis: The Link Structure of Wikipedia
Show HN: a binary clock widget for iOS
If I encrypt something client-side, the Patriot Act has no influence over it whatsoever. The only person who can decrypt it is me.

So, yes, they do need to break encryption. Especially as more and more apps move towards the "smart/encrypted client, dumb server as a storage dump" model.
Google's new “slow” label could revolutionize how we tackle web performance
Yes, but intelligence isn't magic either.
Wow. So as a United "elite" member, just doing searches on their app or site but with my account, is gonna cost me? Because I've never seen this happen. I seem to get the lowest fare they have. I've not done serious tests, just seen when other people look up my flights, on say, Kayak, they get the same prices.
That's amazing. I was going to post that here as a follow-up, but you beat me to it. :)
Bionic Leaf Converts Solar Energy into Liquid Fuel
I seem to remember that this was the idea in the development process of Lost Planet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Planet:_Extreme_Condition). My Google-fu is failing me, I don't see any articles that explain the developer's intent.
I have an experience to share with you: I taught English a a car factory for a year once, and the director of the paint shop was one of my students. He was describing the process for painting a car, and telling me that the hardest part was painting the inside, as you had to open the doors so that the robot paint head could get inside and do its job. So the body rolls into position, 2 guys open the doors, the robot painter goes in and does its thing, comes out and the guys close the doors again. Rinse and repeat for 20 hours a day.

I asked him why there isn't a robot to open and close the doors. He said that there is, but in this country its much cheaper to pay people to do it. (I think he said the cost of maintaining the door opening robots to be about $1m a year approximately.

So until we have a world where every country has the same salaries as USA/Western Europe/Japan, I think you will always be able to find work.

Even if that work should really be done by a robot
There is a big leap between 'not being able to patent' and 'startup could never happen' that you need to explain.

Many, many people create businesses out of open source technologies.
It's weird to see photos on resumes. I know this is standard practice in the UK and other places, but it would be illegal to request it in the US.

Also, is having a sort of stylish resume a thing in Europe?
Indeed, we never took the time to plug a date parser. Any chance you've time for a pull-request? https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/blob/master/app/assets/... and https://github.com/algolia/hn-search/blob/master/app/control... :)

That would be cool!
> The USSR wasn't really capitalist.

The PRC isn't really capitalist either, consider how much of the economy is still state-owned enterprises. In any case, the reference class here is more 'fast-growing industrializing economies starting on a primitive agricultural basis', where regularly you see impressed people (and flacks) declaring that This Time Is Different and perhaps Western-liberal-democracy-plus-capitalism has been rendered obsolete. USSR, Japan - China?
Freebie:  Text Editor for Mac (Yosemite Only) Limit 100
Agreed. I did a 6 week stint at a largish software company. When I saw what was going on there, I couldn't get out fast enough. That doesn't feature on my resume. I was 9 months at another job. That one I did put on my resume.

Only once did I get a real sense that the interviewer was concerned about my job hopping history, but understood my reasons for leaving and at each point, I made sure to explain what I had learned from the experience and took responsibility for my role in it. Coincidentally or not, that is the job I stayed at the longest. They were filtering for candidates who would stay and grow at the company and created an environment that encouraged it.

So, if you are looking to do this, have a really good reason and be sure to take a lesson from it as well as claim responsibility if you entered the role with unrealistic expectations.
>If the university was not able to patent, then the startups could never happen.

You make some interesting points. Would you mind explaining this one a bit more? It's not self-evident to me.
Maybe everyone could go somewhere, study and be tested for a couple years, so they are certified as having basic competence?

I have a CS degree with multiple honors fron a top 10 university. What was the point of that? Can't I skip the "prove you have basic competence" pre-interview screening?
Flawed benchmarks. If target produces errors during the test, the result should be invalidated immediately.

You can't compare data from failed result to another failed result or a normal one.

In instances where flask/django started to output errors, the test case should have been adjusted until they could have completed operations. Otherwise you can't compare the results, since you have no baseline.

What this test tells me now is XY gives errors for this test while Z seems to process it. That's not a benchmark of any sort.
This is a good point I completely missed. Reminds me of Karl Popper qua philosopher (of science) : science.
I think it's a cool idea. I wouldn't really use it, because my wife wouldn't really be into that sort of thing. I don't think it will make you any money, but it was a sweet thing to do for Valentine's Day.
I suppose, but if you count 'pointing a rocket at something' then we've been dying to flying robots since WWII.
> which are nice tools for beginners but a complete pain in the ass for serious projects

I'd be interested in hearing more of your perspective here, because mine is the exact opposite. Newbie writing some small scripts? Don't worry about RubyGems. Writing a real project without Bundler? I think I'll pass...
$1 Meal for Grand Opening in SLU, Downtown Seattle by SpoonRocket
Having designed resume is more common in europe. US is the only country that seems to be kind of anti-profile photos. But startups and small-mid sized companies don't seem to care
Actually it isn't nonsense. Some people, especially those who are non-technical consider everything their phone/tablet/laptop to do as 'magical' and incomprehensible. And to that group you can explain something with only the positive aspects and they will endorse it. To use a contrived example you can describe outdoor playgrounds as a fun way for your kids to exercise, or you can explain that they create about a dozen ways for your kids to break bones and get concussions. Both are "true".

To a product designer, it no doubt sounds great that you can share ideas with your customers based on things they are looking at. They probably don't probe too deeply into either how that works, or in the hands of someone unscrupulous what it might allow. Because they are shipping stuff an moving forward.
Landing a man on the moon was not an adversarial problem, whereas flight bookings are. If flight bookings were like you want them to be, airlines might find themselves asking how we were able to land a man on the moon over 45 years ago, but can't create a booking system that makes it sufficiently difficult for consumers to find our cheapest flights?

Unsurprisingly, we're somewhere between the two. Most determined people can find flights that are at least close to being the cheapest.
Build Measure Burn
Do you have a library for your project? It sounds really interesting. I think this space is interesting enough that would benefit from a GutHub project to collaborate.
I'd like to see that as well. Machine intelligence is certainly an existential threat, but on the other hand, it's also one of the single largest improvements we could possibly create (insofar as it'd be the last we'd ever need to).
* The argument that WebSQL was tailored to a specific SQLite version is nonsense. SQLite supports the official SQL92 standard, as do several other SQL embedded engines like the SQL engines from MS Access, MS Outlook, MS SQL Embedded and many others. Also Firefox already ships with SQLite for its "awesome bar" and bookmark feature. SQLite is in public domain, so every company can use it (even Microsoft products already use it!)

* Also the argument of them that it's "hard" to sync a client side database with a server side database is nonsense. But the two argument basically stopped Web SQL as HTML5 API :( The developers who voted against Web SQL were (former) employees of two big server side SQL db vendors (see the related mailing lists and blog).

Nowadays with the rise of NewSQL movement of people who burnt their fingers with NoSQL, one can only hope someone gives some love to Web SQL.

To sum up, NoSQL has it's place and SQL has one too.

We had this discussion already this week, hopefully W3C board members and Mozilla devs read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082847
It's a good thing all possible CVD risk factors were measured without measurement error, included in the analysis, and had exactly correct coefficients despite sampling error.
Disagree to disagree. I explained politely why I wasn't interested. I work in Denver and have the ability to work remote which only expands mt reach. (plus I have other clients on the side.) The recruiter will forgive me, if he wants to make his numbers and a commission.

But you are right 2008, will happen again in some form... (US oil, banks?)
I could make a lot of comments here but I'd just be reiterating what people much more qualified than I have already said. People who are at the forefront of AI and have actually developed state of the art AI technologies for many years, in some cases decades:

Andrew Ng:
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/ai-wont-end-world-might-take-jo...
"I think it’s a distraction from the conversation about…serious issues,"

Yoshua Bengio:
http://www.popsci.com/why-artificial-intelligence-will-not-o...
"What people in my field do worry about is the fear-mongering that is happening,"

Yann LeCun:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...
"there are things that are worth worrying about today, and there are things that are so far out that we can write science fiction about it, but there’s no reason to worry about it just now."

Ryan Adams:
https://twitter.com/ryan_p_adams/status/563384710781734913
"The current "AI scare" going on feels a bit like kids playing with Legos and worrying about accidentally creating a nuclear bomb."

Rodney Brooks:
http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/artificial-intelligence-tool-... "Recently there has been a spate of articles in the mainstream press, and a spate of high profile people who are in tech but not AI, speculating about the dangers of malevolent AI being developed, and how we should be worried about that possibility. I say relax. Chill. This all comes from some fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of the undeniable progress that is being made in AI, and from a misunderstanding of how far we really are from having volitional or intentional artificially intelligent beings, whether they be deeply benevolent or malevolent."

The fear that the whole AI community is asleep at the wheel, and that we're unable to adequately extrapolate our algorithms is difficult to falsify. How can we possibly prove that AI is not some kind of magical emergent property, "one simple algorithm away"? We can't. All we can do is make our best educated guesses, and we're consistently seeing the same ones over and over from the people who are in the best position to make them.
letsencrypt.org looks like an awesome project! Can't wait to try it out.
I'm in an almost identical situation. calcsam is correct. Leave, don't put it on your resume, don't lie about it, find another job where you'll be challenged. That's what I'm doing. My rationale is that it's very difficult to fight organizational inertia from the bottom, so instead find an organization that's moving in the direction you want your career to move in.

The market is in our favor right now and my suggestion would be to take advantage of that to build up some 'career capital' (and hopefully some cash money capital) to see you through whatever's coming next.

BTW 'career capital' is a phrase I lifted from Cal Newport's "So Good They Can't Ignore You", which was an interesting read regarding passion and career development. I'd recommend it, it's pretty light reading.
I worked at a startup that was awarded SBIRs. We were developing e-learning software and our government client was an Air Force base. It's true that being able to retain copyright ownership was the reason the startup existed. However, no patents were ever filed.

I think we should just do away with software patents. Math formulas and rules to games are not patentable and I think software is exactly a fusion of formulas and rules--apps in pure functional languages are functions after all.

The exception could be firmware/software driving machinery where the invention is more than software (or the combination of software and commodity hardware).
They clarified specifically what they meant. Zero reasonable readers came out of that article confused to any degree.

This is classic HN autism, and this "hurr durrr drone" bullshit appears in each and every thread that mentions "drones", even if every single participant knows what they're talking about, without specifically declaring that it's an XYZ.

Don't be the problem. Don't be the noise. Don't be the stupidity.
Why We Killed Off Code Reviews
Setting aside Facebook -- Apple, Microsoft, and Google were all technically impressive early on -- it's as a business that they were kind of pathetic. It's easy to think of similarly technically impressive products that never turned into megacorporations -- e.g. UCSD Pascal did not create a software empire.
>but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it?

Sometimes I think people look at where a company is, rather than it's direction, it's velocity.
My own side project sounds so comically bad that I don't even bother describing it to folks anymore. Usually when they ask why anyone would use it, I just pretend to be surprised and say, "Oh, I guess we never thought about that." Multiples times people have gotten so angry by how bad they think the idea is that they've actually started visibly shaking, which is a lot of fun in public at meetups or whatever.

The good thing though is that it keeps us totally focused on building our MVP.

I think part of the issue is that the most successful startups aren't successful because of new hardware or software, but because of the new social practices they enable. And while Apple releasing a new iPhone every year has gotten people really good at evaluating new hardware and software, most people don't have the same level of proficiency at evaluating novel forms of social interaction. (Even though it's totally learnable.)
That's only true if the price of robots doesn't decline rapidly. Which (I believe) it is, and like virtually any other technology, will continue to do.

Even if not, we don't need that many people to open doors. So perhaps an office building will have 2 human janitors and 10 robot janitors; it doesn't really change the problem caused by souped up roombas putting the vast majority of janitors out of work.
Awesome ZSH Plugins and Frameworks
Perl programmers – Booking.com is proof that the world is still your oyster
Just to play devils advocate:

One can be pretty innovative if he has to develop CPU without using XOR operation.

Are there technologies developed solely as alternative to patent? I can think of PNG x GIF, OGG x MP3, Display Port X DVI...

I would say that patent creates sort of monopol, which forces others to go with open solutions. Similar situation was when Windows caused Linux to emerge. Without patents we would be stacked with whatever comes. And that would be probably badly designed proprietary technology.
> I remember five years ago when you could make enormous amounts of money if you knew how to send a tweet

What? Do you mean programatically send a tweet based on some event? I think you can still make money from that.

> ten years ago when you could make enormous amounts of money if you knew how to install anti-virus software

Still don't know what you're talking about. While the demography that had difficulty installing anti-virus on their windows box 10 years ago, now get a bare-bones anti-virus bundled with windows 8 -- this same demographic still need help with a lot of the same things they needed help with 10 years ago. So I'm not quite sure what you think have changed?
Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning
I just put DDG as my default address bar search, and taught myself a bunch of !bang commands, since for much of the stuff I'm looking for I already know what site I want to end up any way (!w, !wnl, !yt, !gi, !wayback, etc).

In the mean time for general searches, I either use DDG's results or slap on a pre-emptive !g on a hunch, randomly or just-in-case. My idea behind this is that, as DDG's results become better, I'll habitually start using !g less and less.

And indeed, DDG's results have become better, and indeed I have been using the !g command less and less.

Google Search with !g is slowly becoming "just another one among the predefined !bang commands", a command I will append after my searches when I specifically desire to find out what Google has to say about a certain query. Though in comparison I hardly ever use !y and !b (Yahoo and Bing, respectively), mostly because I have no clue in what vague sense those results would be better (with DDG vs Google, I sort of have a feeling when asking for something really mundane and stupid, Google always hits the spot exactly, DDG sometimes misinterprets--though less so lately).

For image searching I really use !yi, !bi and !gi pretty much randomly. They all give quite different results, but as far as I've been able to determine, none of them are of particularly better quality than the others. Yahoo Image Search has a nice integration with Flickr though, so I tend to use it more when my target may be found between high-ish resolution photography.

I already named !wayback, anyone got any other cool !bang commands they use often? For instance, any good documentation searches for JS/DOM/HTML/CSS etc? I tried !mdn but I don't like their search result pages. Same for !python, if I do "!python itertools", I want to be taken straight to the itertools module documentation, not a results page of all python docs that contains the term "itertools".
Richest != Best to Work For
This is super cool! Good work!
Biicode: A Modern C/C++ Dependency Manager