skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do Boys and Girls Learn Differently?  (video)
World’s Smallest Snowman Just 10 Microns Wide (Video)
9 European Countries to Build North Sea "Supergrid" for Offshore Wind Power
Aside from the public watching people having unprotected sex (which isn't really unprotected - they are extensively tested and the chain of sexual partners is well documented in case there is an outbreak. Plus every female actor is on some form of birth control), what is the problem that they are trying to solve here?

Like he said, there was only one outbreak in that community, which is far better than your average college campus. Plus aren't these films intended for people 18+ who are supposed to be able to separate out fantasy from reality?
Eh, I don't know about this. It sounds like it has a plot and conflict, but will it be good storytelling? However, it's kind of cool to see so many big AI-community/singularitarian names in the cast credits!
No doubt. It isn't the first singularity movie anyway; Terminator, Matrix, Eagle Eye, A Space Odyssey..
Big businesses often avoid that by giving separate profit & loss responsibility to each division. That way, each individual group competes on the marketplace, and incompetent groups can't hide by breaking up competent ones.

It's an open question how to adapt this to "infrastructure" groups that are shared by the whole organization, which may explain why there're so many horror stories about corporate IT and HR. I guess technically QA is also an infrastructure group, so it's surprising the Black Team survived for so long, but I guess the improvements they made were visible enough that they had senior management's protection.
Ask HN:  Now That GIYS has a plan for relaunch - How would you get clients?
It should also make an exemption for allowing employers to refuse to hire HIV-positive actors. In most cases, this would be horribly discriminatory... but when your job involves putting your sex organs inside other people's bodies... I don't think that restricting the job to the HIV-negative is going to be too damaging to society :)
Every patent application that I have been involved in, I and my co-developers are listed as the inventors, not the company. All inventions are assigned to the company by our employment agreements.
NoSQL Required Reading
Just an FYI, the article is 11 months old

(which I think makes the article more interesting, as we can see the results of his predictions)

And while I'm here, he isn't saying the iphone wasn't/isn't important, just that it probably isn't the the most fertile field to spend time building a business on.
Frankly, that sounds like a bullshit policy, and certainly doesn't apply to all universities. Students are paying for access to the resources of the university and shouldn't be giving up IP. UMich has a much more reasonable policy here: http://www.techtransfer.umich.edu/resources/policies.php

........

The University will not generally claim ownership of Intellectual Property created by students. (A “student” is a person enrolled in University courses for credit except when that person is an Employee.) However, the University does claim ownership of Intellectual Property created by students in their capacity as Employees. Such students shall be considered to be Employees for the purposes of this Policy. Students and others may, if agreeable to the student and OTT, assign their Intellectual Property rights to the University in consideration for being treated as an Employee Inventor under this Policy.

........
OK I have been in this business since the late 70s. There did not exist CS degrees back then. Managers in their zeal to convert people from diverse disciplines into programmers devised tests to ascertain that the could think logically.

Some of the best programmers I have encountered in my carrier started out as Zoologists, Philosophy majors, some English Lit Majors, etc. etc. These people were able to make complex systems run an very limited hardware because the emphasis back then was to "Do the most with the least". Please see some of the early Unix tools for proof of concept.

As time went by, schools started to turn the crank and started to generate CS degrees. While this is good to a large extent, it has lead to an increase in specialization which in my opinion is detrimental to the industry overall.

The adage "When life gives you a hammer you tend to look at all problems as if they were nails" is an apt one, and is illustrated by the advancement of theory over function ( please look as most Industry Popular OSs for proof of concept ).

No longer are engineers required to "Do the most from the least", They are conditioned to build in obsolescence in their code by requiring that the users buy better hardware in order to accommodate the grandiose theoretical marvels.

The type of question that I have asked of the most successful programmers in the projects I have managed are simple direct questions that probe the individual's ability to deal logically with problems. Than explore their depth of understanding as far as the consequences of the decisions they make.

I have worked with far too many engineers that look for esoterica where simplicity is sufficient, and mistake density for elegance.
I'd be most interested in finding why Twitter selected some partners and not others.

I spoke with some people that had Firehose and said that they mainly just had to sign lengthy legal documents, but that they didn't really pay for it (or not much).

Then we hear of MSFT/GOOG paying for it.

But I had a startup that was providing strong value to the community (http://webecologyproject.org) and we offered to pay for it- whatever they were asking, and they said, "No, we'll call you when we think you should have it". Maybe we'd have offered the same money as Google- they didn't know what we'd pay. But our money wasn't good enough.

Clearly, I didn't do a good enough job of BD there, but I was talking with their API team nearly every day in the mailing list and in private emails. I wasn't having lunch with Biz, but honestly we were too busy researching and developing for that.
half an hour a post really shows....

does hn count as a destination site? cus i come here an awful lot.... also to webcomics websites.... i don't use a rss reader, i just rely on firefox's url bar autocompleting when i type a letter.
Granted, I haven't really followed Dilbert since shortly after it's popularity.

But isn't every Dilbert about corporate nonsense?

(At least, those that are about work at all. I recall some odd Arbuckle-esque comics, but those are neither here nor there.)
As your codebase gets large, modularity becomes more important - so it might be time you refactor your code with greater size in mind.

Another crucial aspect is unit tests - as long as you know the project well, you can go in and make a change relatively easily, as long as you know that a system of unit tests will catch any unintended side-effects.
I've not read that the United Arab Emirates policy on guest workers included encouraging them to settle permanently and marry local women.
Ah! A modern example of Zeno's Paradox! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes

I bet Douglas Hofstadter would appreciate at this one.
The Iterative Conception of Set
Maybe being an assistant professor of Native American studies is a lifestyle choice to be indulged in by people who are either married to or descended from people who did commercially valuable work? The engineering department has spots available for us kids who have to work for a living.
One problem is when external forces bring in incompetent management. Being part of such a team may be a great experience, but you are always at the mercy of higher ups. Your one real point of leverage is to walk out the door. If the people managing you don't respect what you bring to the table, you lose even this. And if they don't understand it, which is what often happens with "interchangeable" management, they are unlikely to respect it. Then, reflect that there is the potential for this disconnect at each level of management. Start counting the levels that exist in your organization.

If you are smart, you will develop an informal network of contacts/relationships throughout your organization. And keep your resume up to date. (I think that smart people develop such a network not only or even primarily out of a calculated decision to manage their career, but because they find interesting what other people know and do and struggle with and solve, and helping them.)

Perhaps this is one reason social skills (of a certain sort) tend to predominate in large organizations. Given the situation, they become the most essential tools to a career.

Also, regarding social equanimity, a large part of corporate life is "not rocking the boat". At lower ranks, this can imply a strong uniformity of treatment. Your increase will be between 0% and 4%, regardless, because those are the absolute limits that have been chosen. If someone were to receive 10%, there would be a lot of jealousy and unrest. The only way to larger increases is promotion. Promotion changes one's duties. Ergo, certain duties will never be compensated beyond "industry standards". The social structure caps their compensation and so, minus the individual who 'self-sacrifices', their effectiveness.

And this is, in part, where your "average or below-average" coworkers come from. Management won't sweeten the pot, even if, as the posted story implies, going after the top of the talent pool produces far greater returns than the additional investment.

I guess this comment is kind of thrown together. Large social structures tend to enforce norms and drift towards a lowest common denominator. Exceptions occur, but over time, they are fighting the tide.
I wouldn't call those singularity movies.

Maybe movies with transhuman/posthuman themes, but the singularity implies things about the rate of technological progress - certainly there wasn't much rapid progress in Terminator after the machines nuked the earth (except, maybe, in the production of new terminator robots, but even that wasn't fast, really).
Honestly, I don't see the problem with this. Some of the people who are least likely to get health insurance are the most likely to engage in risky behavior and end up with health care bills they can't pay. Those costs have to go somewhere and they end up on the plates of those who made the decision to get health insurance, unfairly penalizing them. When you expect something from society (in this case health care when you need it most) you should not be surprised that society demands something from you and collectively decides to punish you if you refuse.
I'm surprised by the lack of common sense on this topic.
(1) China doesn't just exports goods. It is a leading (if not the leading ) exporter of people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese
(2) Extrapolating birth ratios stats into "unmarriagable men" doesn't work if you ignore the large difference in marriage rates due culture. Mainland Chinese has a relatively simple old school culture. People marry earlier than in the US and therefore "utilitize" their women at higher rates in the US and have lower divorce rates. I know an surprising number of decent guys in the US in their 40s of all sorts of ethnic backgrounds (white, latino, jewish, asian etc) that never married - sometimes never had a girlfriend. I know an equal number of women in US that have never married into their 40s and dont' look to marry soon. American culture simply does not PUSH as hard as Chinese culture to get married therefore the real gap is not as big as one might assume
"Some individuals even grew long mustaches which they would twirl with melodramatic flair as they savaged a programmer's code."

Love it!
If she is current on other financial obligations, should't she be able to finance that $30K at much less than 10%? So, the interest portion would be $3K/year. Is that a significant portion of a Dartmouth Assistant Professor's income?

I live in the MidWest, and cleaning "ladies" want $20-$25/hour under-the-table. Perhaps she should take on such work on Saturdays to reduce her debt load.

[As an aside, I can't understand how bad America can be if one can make this much cleaning houses. Some of these people aren't even all that good at it!]
One Blog Post, Five Business Models
I think a crucial reason this worked is that there was a measurable objective, the value of which was universally understandable. Find software bugs. This is how they measured and selected the initial team, and this is how the team itself could prove its effectiveness in a management-compatible, objective manner and therefore defend its existence. Finding other areas where this could work is an interesting excercise.
Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Ok, so basically corporations can "own" patents and copyrights because nobody's made a stink about it, and it seems to be working out pretty well?

The big reason I've been thinking about this is because I'm wondering what would happen if inventors and artists did own their work, and license it to their employers. Would science become a personally profitable career, or would contracts be written up that continued to pay out 5-figure salaries in exchange for the occasional billion dollar invention? Would a contract exchanging a five-figure salary for perpetual rights to an invention that earns billions per year be valid, or would terms get better for inventors? I really have no idea, but the thought has been bugging me for a few months now.

EDIT: it looks like HN has decided we've been talking to long, so I probably won't reply to any of your replies to me in a timely manner. It's been an interesting start of a discussion, anyhow :)
Much, much discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=982237

FWIW, I think most of the discussion is barking up the wrong tree, arguing against a straw-man.

I explain my view here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=982430

In essence, when I ask questions like this I don't really care about the answer. I care about the candidate's ability to reason, and sometimes, their ability to change their mind.

Arguing that the question is stupid is stupid. Talk about the process.
And I was talking about the value of that 'more business' which comes from Game Mechanics. Whether you're trying to sell sneakers, services or page impressions, changing the user's focus on the site will necessarily change their behavior. Which will cast doubt on the applicability of your old knowledge of how the site works.

Suppose you're trying to sell shoes and you notice that shoes with reviews sell better. So you add a karma reward system to incentivize reviewers.

The very act of soliciting those reviews with rewards will be reflected in the average review. And the relationship you formerly noted between reviews and sales, may no longer hold true. It may have been that the former relationship was truly between informative reviews and sales. And your reward system has created a flood of preference reviews which don't have the desired effect.
It was actually a few annoyances with MPD that led me to create Dhun. This was a while ago so things might a have changed. But my main grievances were:

* Installation on OS X wasnt very straightforward. I think the MacPorts version was broken and I had to do some stuff manually to get it to install

* Some of my ID3 tags and MP3 files were not recognised properly, even though they worked fine on iTunes.
I have been to China, but not to the regions we are talking about (and given your response I doubt you have been to these areas either.) While I am certain there are many women desperate to get into China for an MRS degree, I am also certain that they are looking for an educated upwardly-mobile man who has good future prospects; these women are not trying to get into China so that they can marry a poor, unskilled rural worker whose condition is no better than the one they left in the first place. It is this latter group who are screwed in this situation. These men have little to offer a prospective mate and the smaller pool of women have no need to settle for a local villager when they can gain the benefits of supply & demand working in their favor. Please explain why women from surrounding countries would consider a cross-cultural marriage to a man whose general poverty matches their own...
They have two mallocs?
What do you think is the best A/B testing for rails?
seems horrible to take something that is so spontaneous and real and turn in it into a distant computer experience.

if the user were listening on their phone while walking around the streets or riding the bus, then it would have a certain art-y feel to it that would make it ok.

still, much of the good feeling busking and giving to buskers to the face-to-face aspect.
> If you have never worked with the puzzle that is hospital billing and regulation, you really have no idea at how helpful many of the clauses in Obama's bill will be at lowering health costs in the U.S.

It's unclear how more regulation solves the problem of too much regulation....

> we must...MUST provide health coverage to ALL americans especially the youth of this nation.

CAPS are always a reliable indicator of a sound argument.

The "youth" actually has health coverage. As a "not youth", I'm happy to see that said youths are going to be forced to subsidize the "not youths" even more than they are today.

The best part of the whole thing is that said youths are pushing this.

Yay boomers! We got subsidized our entire lives.
Agreed - pretty good implementation.

But I wonder how sales in the higher price range (> $500 or so) are going. Historically, fine art pricing (especially as prices move out of the range of the casual shopper) has been very much tied to the identity of the artist. Am I going to pay $2000 for a painting from an artist that I know next to nothing about? And from a virtual gallery? Probably not.

The brick and mortar gallery model relies on this kind reputation and identity. And even when an artist is unknown, the reputation of the gallery is shared with the artist.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure about the consumer fundamentals here. Etsy's pool of sellers is quite different in that prices stay for the most part under a hundred bucks. With lower prices comes higher volume. And Etsy's model ($.20 per listing per four months) exploits that volume. Etsy also takes a percentage of the sale, which Zatista is doing.

Sorry for a little ambivalence.
You are living in a fantasy land. If you actually had the time to talk to real porn stars who aren't being managed by a handler, they would tell you a completely different story. What you say may be true of the really big, "high brow" porn companies, but it is certainly not true for the bulk of the porn that is produced in the US.

Ask one of the doctors whose job it is to do this testing, not just for HIV, but for the whole range of STDs. I was told by one former porn star who has interviewed said doctors that somewhere around 65% of the porn stars he tests have Herpes.

I have also heard Audrey Hollander admit, in an interview, that if you have been in that industry for any amount of time, then you have herpes, period.

There is so much evil crap going on in this industry, but there is also a whole lot of denial among porn consumers who justify their habits by statements much like yours.

http://www.shelleylubben.com/porn-stars-speak-out-stds-drugs...

http://www.jupaman.com/2008/04/23/genital-herpes-and-pornogr...
Don't listen to lists telling you what you should or should not build.

Any one of the points he lists could have been acceptable if explained, but so many are dismissive and not fully reasoned.

For instance, it blows me away that people think cloud computing is a fad, when I know for a fact that computing power-on-tap has changed the way we and most of my startup friends do business.
Museum unearths world wide web origins
Reading The Singularity kinda reminded of a Neal Stephenson novel. You start off with well-grounded reality, you progress smoothly, then you finish and you wonder...wait, wtf just happened? How did I get to this wacky place?

I mean, we'll all me omniscient, immortal demi-gods in 39 years? Really?
there's something particularly barf-worthy about not only renting a mob to advance your political agenda, but paying them with play money into the bargain.
In the Copenhagen interpretation, the wave function represents our ignorance of what the system's state will become when observed, but it's taken as an accurate description of the system's actual state prior to observation. That is the point of the "Schroedinger's cat" paradox: that under the Copenhagen interpretation, the cat actually is in a superposition of alive and dead states, until someone looks in the box. Quantum computation crucially depends on the objective reality of this superposition. It seems likely to me that the superposition in the formalism actually just represents our ignorance of the system's state, not the state itself.
Try this link: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/user/138148/

(I'll let you figure out on your own why that particular link works so well)
Journal article (open access): http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...

It's a really neat application of General Purpose GPU programming:

http://gpgpu.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU
New Ruby on Rails Tutorial book-in-progress
Eagle Eye was a singularity movie in potential, but in essence it was no different than War Games in that it was about a rampant AI with no progression beyond. I, Robot had a far greater display of the advance of technology than virtually any Sci-Fi movie (except maybe the bicentennial man) and only displayed ~3 generations of robots (the replaced, the being replaced and the new) but is in no sense a singularity movie.

I doubt we'll ever see a movie truly depict the singularity in any way other than a glimpse and will be akin to virtually any sci-fi movie in any setting. We might get there with a great TV series, but that's doubtful.

IMO a singularity TV series would have to take the story progression of Taken in the generation skipping, but instead of giant leaps, it would be a leap of decades, years and then months as technology advances up to the '2030' mark.

For movies we'll be stuck with a BS intro that pails in comparison to the introduction of each Fallout game but will inevitably be describing similar events.
Study: Americans consume 34 gigabytes of information per day
I did some work earlier this year making some machinima video in Second Life for this movie. From what I've seen so far, it's just a documentary-style movie.
Yeah. Unfortunatly, the OTM website is apparently down: http://www.otm.pitt.edu/

As luck would have it, my cofounder here used to work for them... he says that you're probably fine, but you should go to the office and double check. Or you can email Dan Bates at dbates@provost.pitt.edu, who's apparently a reasonable dude there.
Actually the "build" isn't all that straight-forward either. A common observation is that ideas are easy, what really matters is execution.

(Running through my head is that mousetraps execute mice - not sure that's helpful or useful.)
Wow, and so the circle of evil is now complete.
Check the CDC site for info on herpes. Something like one in 5 people have it, that means if you're even moderately sexually active you probably do as well. The vast majority of the population is asymptomatic which is why there's such a stigma over the virus. In reality it's not a big deal at all. Freaking out over herpes is as silly as freaking out over HPV which is so common it might as well be a genetic marker for losing your virginity.
I agree with the sentiment - anyone expecting to make a ton of money off of a career in Native American studies is naive at best.

That said, the author did manage to be hired in multiple tenure-track positions, and made it to an Ivy League school. One would hope - expect, really - that with that level of career success she should be able to at least pay off their college debts, especially if she was as frugal as she claimed to be in her essay.
My ancient history and the art of software