skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quoting from the post, gratuitously, with minor modifications.

Like the AI-Box,the show is improvised drama (so is most of reality tv), the show operates on an emotional level as well as a logical level. It has characters, not just plot. The contestants cannot force others to keep them in the home. The could try to engender sympathy or compassion or fear or hatred or try to find and exploit some weakness, some fatal flaw in the other contestants.

Since the post is ultimately about 'transhuman artificial intelligence', focussing on the 'relativity' of the intelligence of the contestants, the show ultimately rewards the contestant with the most intelligence required to survive in the artificial environment.

The contestant only needs to convince others of their right to stay in he house while requiring others to leave.

The AI requires just the opposite of the gate keeper. This is specific to the environment set up in the experiment, and the experiment could probably be set up to let have the gate keepers primary function be to prevent the AI from entering the box'.

The escape from the box has been set up to exercise human fear of a being of greater intelligence exploiting us.
QuickMark QR code reader iPhone app is now free courtesy of Google (limited time).

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quickmark-qr-code-reader/id30... (iTunes link)
120-Cell Explorer
Well, not from their home IP they wouldn't anyway.
Google Books is a prime example, Enderle said. It's an open debate whether the plan to scan millions of books and make them searchable online will prove the benefit to humanity that Google promises - or hand it a monopoly over certain digital works, as opponents allege.

The issue I have with statements like this is that it is really searching for the "evillness" in something. If "doing it first" is the new definition of monopoly then that sort of sucks ;)
http://highscalability.com/ is a great resource for building scalable sites - it has consolidated architectural details (culled from presentations, blog posts, interviews, and more) for many large-scale sites (YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc).

As for testing environments, take a look into the principles of continuous integration (many resources available) and continuous deployment (especially Eric Ries's blog: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/). Some tools commonly used to this effect: Git/SVN for source control; Hudson/Cruise Control/Team City for builds; Selenium for testing.

Finally, applying patches and updates to a server falls into the domain of systems administration, so I'd suggest looking for articles on patching/updating high-availability sites. Note, however, that cloud computing is a huge game-changer here. Whereas at many enterprises, applying patches is an arduous (and tedious) quarterly effort culminating in an late-night maintenance window with many hands on deck (all crossing their fingers), clouds afford their adopters the ability to simply fire up new, updated servers alongside the old ones, allowing them to be thoroughly tested in place before any traffic is redirected.

-Mike (@mikebabineau)
Unfortunately, yeah, I'm just getting the HTML of the home-page and slicing and dicing it.

Oh, how I wish there was an API... I kept the HTML-getting stuff in its own class, so if HN ever adds an API, I can slot that right in there instead.
Virgin Galactic to unveil commercial spaceship
A real project is an excellent way to pick how to do web development.

Have you got any hobbies or interests?
Why not create a website dedicated to your hobby/interest?
That way it'll be something that you'll be able to run over the course of a few years.

Start with a small website, and slowly build it up.
Add more features, then tweak them.
Find out why it's loading slowly.
Read a few books on website that scale too.
Ubuntu has DKMS which automates this whole process. You just get a pause on bootup while it recompiles the driver.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_Support
Surely a command line browser like lynx, links, w3m or whatever would achieve this (and more since you can read the original page too)?

It might also prod pg or whoever to use better markup so you don't see "[greyarrow]" as link text instead of "upvote".
Neat! I hadn't heard of elinks before. Sounds like a good idea. Do you use it for many sites other than news aggregation sites like HN and Reddit? Do normal sites render OK?
I would like to note that the fear of something that could annihilate the human race is not an unreasonable one.
Google - from friend to foe?
Sometimes eight screens are better than one
Except in Australia and Asia.
I have a real problem with them jumping from intelligence to university academic success. When I was in school and had to develop team projects, if everything else was equal I'd go for a girl partner every time. Not that I thought they were any more intelligent on average but very frequently they just cared more. I could see it in their solo work as well - on average they just put in more hours than the guys.
BTW, the theory is pretty easy to summarize. At the risk of oversimplifying, the essential elements of a good story are:

1. A protagonist, who is a sympathetic character with a goal. In Eliezer's story the protagonist is not a single character, but all of humanity. Their goal is to understand the universe.

2. An antagonist, who places obstacles in the path of the protagonist to prevent him (or her or them) from achieving the goal. In Eliezer's story, the antagonist is whoever is causing the stars to blink.

3. A structure that includes (more or less) the following elements in order:

a) An introduction that establishes the characters and the basic ground rules of the world they live in

b) An inciting incident that launches the protagonist on a journey. In Eliezer's story this is the stars starting to blink.

c) The journey itself, which ultimately leads to some kind of catastrophe from which no escape seems possible.

d) A resolution, which results in the protagonist being forever changed in some way. It may or may not include the actual achievement of the protagonist's goal. It may, for example, be the protagonist realizing that they chose the wrong goal. Think "Wizard of Oz".

Of course, there's a lot more to say than just that, but those are the fundamentals.
Physicists Ask American Physical Society to Rescind Statement on Global Warming
Only your comment made me realise that. And I was already excited about new year with a nice little astro-gimmick.
You're right -- lynx would do it (and even better with the markup change). Would it do stuff like remember the stories you'd read or the way you like looking at stories though?

(totally legitimate question, btw -- I'm interested in this stuff.)
I clicked on the article thinking it was going to be an application of "Temporal Priming" to fund raising, but it wasn't. So here to salvage your minute and mine, are some of my own pointers.

I just watched a program on SBS (an Australian TV station) about a study done in Yale where the judgment of human subjects were altered based on the temperature they were exposed to. Experiment participants were told they were interviewing a job candidate and they had to give their honest personal impression of the man. However, the examiners surreptitiously gave some participants a cup of cold beverage to hold, while they gave the others a hot one. Everyone who held the hot cup gave favorable impressions, while those who held cold beverages gave negative impressions.

Original paper: http://www.yale.edu/acmelab/articles/Science_coffee_study.pd... (just 2 pages)

Layman's intro: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/126674.php
This seems to be spam.
The people who stole these slides remind me of a child who cheats at spelling in primary school.

They may do well in tests, but as soon as they need to actually spell something they'll have no chance (hope my spelling is ok, by the way).

The other issue is that someone who would steel like that. Would probably also have other ethical shortcomings.
For example they may have no problems ripping off customers, employees or suppliers. Some people may think that is good in business. I don't.
It is great that they are releasing it. I do wonder why it was ever the idea that it would not be released though? I mean, shouldn't it by default have been released, as a matter of course?
It's a monopoly because Google has been granted the exclusive right (via a lawsuit) to digitize and distribute orphaned books. It would be a copyright violation on a grand scale if anyone else were to try.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/google_books/
The countries on the list are there more for "Screw you" reasons than actual security. That is why Cuba is on the list, and possibly first.
It is - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article694... - and I agree, instead of the stonewalling and name calling, more data and transparency is far more helpful.
Robots of future may need a good lawyer
Thanks, exactly the sort of resources I was looking for.

Perhaps I failed to introduce my questions correctly.
I have been a system admin for years on military server farms (100+ servers) and have been an embedded developer for a few years more.

Currently I am expending my area to web. After writing a few basic web sites that have all the vanilla stuff (Users/Messaging/Pretty JS&AJAX&JQuery stuff). I am trying to learn how to build large scale sites.

* High scalability [more then one server. both web&db].
* Deployment [how to upgrade/patch software on a working site with thousands of existing users with minimal disruption]
* Testing [both automatic and non-automatic, including different web browsers and OSes]
* Any other thing in this category

Thanks for your info !
not trying to be rude at all, but there is a difference between 'steel' and 'steal', and i believe you're looking for 'steal'
I haven't yet tried out HN on my new Droid, but I've found that I far prefer purpose-built apps over just using "normal" sites. For example, the twitter app is much easier for my fat fingers than using the twitter site via the Android browser. With an API,....
Indeed, and a bit silly, given how the southern hemisphere is in summer (australian christmas season is the hottest time of the year.)
the best way to learn is to try. all these things that only apply to "real" sites can be tested in smaller doses. try setup a "scalable" blog site.

setup an artificial system that can't stretch very far by limiting the memory / instances of your web server e.g. then hit it with more than you know it can handle. deal with that how you think it should be done. if it works for 1000 -> 10000 requests the same might work for 10000 -> 100000 as long as your scale technique doesn't depend on small numbers.

same goes for all the other things you mentioned, they can be tested and coded for without having more than a "blog site" as a test platform. just do it :) code away!

the same applied to a "testing environment" would be to make yourself a 2nd copy of your blog site. push to the copy, make sure things work, then push to the main site. possibly even automate that 2 tier push by writing tests that can be tested without user intervention :)
Just a teaser... he gives a lot of spoiler warnings, but doesn't actually reveal his method, which, by the way, has failed.
How does the new Google DNS perform (and why?)
Youtego Launches Tool For Self-Visualization
Apple's likely looking to unify their gui rendering path to the greatest degree possible, and moving things OpenGL is the easiest way to do this and have things still be nice and fast. They might might lose some on a $10 or $15 increase to the BOM on a laptop, but the potential savings in engineer hours might be tremendous.

There's also the chance that a desire to use OpenCL more widely for internal applications means that having a gpu that can run CUDA or the equivalent is becoming a defacto requirement for all macs.
ok, Thanks.
Google never fails to impress.
Am I the only one who is totally unimpressed by this? So -- someone can convince someone else to let them out of a cell. Ok. Fine. There have been prison breakouts before.

But what does this have to do with a powerful AI vs. a human? Obviously Eliezer was not to his interlocutor as a human is to an animal, even if his partner was really dumb. Moreover, two trials is not a trend. This AI experiment was not a well designed experiment and did not involve an AI.

...and that "two trials" thing is not just a nitpick:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/up/shut_up_and_do_the_impossible/

So, after investigating to make sure they could afford to lose it, I played another three AI-Box experiments. I won the first, and then lost the next two. And then I called a halt to it. I didn't like the person I turned into when I started to lose.
I don't believe it's malicious—the "handshake" is just the device requesting that the USB port switch to high-power mode. The line is always 5V, but the device needs to request to draw anything more than 0.1A.

In the case of wall-transformers for iPods, phones, etc, they're either using an unstandardized handshake (such as the phone shorting its two data lines, which can be recognized by the transformer with just a relay), or they provide power all the time, which could damage a low-power device that was inadvertently plugged in.
Does it worry you that you are working on a challenging 'prediction' problem (anticipating and constraining the behavior of an AI) while unable to even make accurate guesses about human behavior?
The only small problem I would have with it is the inability to be in multiple chatrooms at once. Very nice though.
That's actually hosted by cryptome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptome
When you consider the aforementioned $10 USD for 10 hours, and the fact that Guru.com takes 7-15% of the fee, it's practically free.. :)

What would be the motivation to code a product for someone else for free? Especially considering they might profit off of it, or that you will likely hand over the rights to it afterwards. I'll admit that I am interested in coding fun projects, but that's questionable.
A horribly titled article by Steve McConnell.

I can't believe he is writing entry-level industry advice now. My my, how things have changed.
We intend that as soon as possible we will also publish the specific computer code that aggregates the individual station temperatures into the global land temperature record.

No dates mentioned, but hopefully this will happen soon.
On first reading your comment my reaction was, "No way." With a little research though it appears the angle for a 747 is only 5.9 degrees.

Thanks for the perspective.
1) notorious HN spammer.

2) PPC is dead. Let it rest. The botnet operators killed it.
Same five physicists who sent a letter on 29 October 2009 to all 100 US Senators titled "A Gaggle is not a Consensus", which was several months after their letter titled "TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES: YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING." Signed Bob Austin (self-described as "alarmist skeptic" in posting from 2009/08/14), Will Happer ("reportedly fired by former Vice President Al Gore in 1993 for failing to adhere to Gore’s scientific views"), and others I don't care to look up.

There's nothing new here. They already had skin in this game.
Any idea what the competitor is? I ask because I went through an upgrade where we helped a client move from Epiphany to Sugar CRM/Lyris ListManager (assuming this is the Epiphany I think it is)

if you want to know my experience... both are TERRIBLE products.
Cheer up, for a million years, it was a lot worse than this.
Hey ajaimk, I'd love to get a copy of the contract (with personal details redacted, of course). Could you send it to me at kaffeinecoma@gmail.com ?

Thanks.
What annoys me is that the transcripts have never been revealed.

To the OP: you must have reached that article through the same sequence of links I followed when I (re-)discovered it this morning!
(warning: going a little off topic here, sorry)
Might I ask how you got started in the first place? I've got a fairly reasonable background regarding the theory of it [programming], I know the principles of OO and basic algorithms, etc., but in school we don't cover the actual writing of code. (And even if we did, it's probably safe to assume it'd go nowhere near as far as I'd like it to.)
Anyway, I picked up some Ruby lately, worked through a bunch of tutorials, and it's been going decently - at first much too easy for someone like me, then challenging, but then there's stuff I just don't know how to do.
On the one hand, I've repeatedly had big problems with blocks in Ruby - I can't seem to grasp why to use such a weird format when you could just use regular loops instead.
On the other hand, and much more importantly, I don't really know where to go from there. I can't write any real programs, and I'd like to get into Rails eventually (as a gateway to Web developing as a whole).

Edit: Out of the tutorials that I did, this one[1] was the one I liked most, as it had a lot of cool tasks that you could just try and solve for yourself, it really helped me get the basics down. However, none of the tutorials have gone any deeper than that one, and as I'm sure you'll agree, I'm not exactly a programmer yet after that tutorial :)
Additionally, I've started to read this[2] book, but it appears to follow a really strange direction and is generally not very pleasurable to read (IMO). And, again, the moment it tries to explain blocks to me I just stand there puzzled.. dropped it after I hit that point, as I did with all the other materials I've tried out so far.

Again sorry for hijacking the thread and apologies for being unable to offer any advice on your situation. Regards

[1]
http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/

[2]
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/

Edit2: Alright, just saw you've been a developer for longer than I've even used a computer :)
So I suppose you can't answer this question either, bah. Wish there were more people that didn't get into programming either 1950 or at age 5. Really, where does someone start nowadays when they're 20 and have no clue.
Record industry faces liability over `infringement'
Nairobi, Kenya Car Hire Rental - Self Drive, Chauffeur Driven, Unlimited Mileage
Rackspace Cloud Servers vs. VPS Platforms
Ask HN: Is a proxy service best way to test your website from other locales?
Hi,

I have a website I that I want to test from other locations e.g. USA, Asia, Middle East, to see how it performs, ensure that locale and other information is correct, and test some international payments through the system.

I was wondering what is the best to do this?

I was thinking of using some proxy services (ideally supporting HTTPS) to do this e.g. such as those used by online gamers to play in/from different regions, but am not sure if they are trustworthy i.e. firstly they constantly seem to be coming and going and secondly many of them seem to be blacklisted by popular services (e.g. if you try to visit Amazon/eBay using them you get blocked) and hence I worry if I use them my payment gateway (yet to be finalised, I am assessing several) may regard it as bad activity and I don't want to tarnish any account with them.

Thoughts and suggestions appreciated. Thanks.
BBC News - India's Tata launches water filter for rural poor
Justification behind the development of Erjang
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth
To be perfectly honest all the waffle gives little information: I think he is way off base in terms of how Eliezer managed this "trick".

I do think the original is a trick as well...
First, to be clear, I agree with your main point ... I'm just arguing off-topic about Jackson vs. The Beatles. :)

Second, these minor differences between the two are not relevant ... they amount to nit-picking. My point is that they Michael Jackson and The Beatles are in the same equivalence class. Who sold more records or whatever really isn't particularly important.
I worked a bit on Lyris's email thing (they were one of the few people hiring Tcl people the last time I was in the area). The GUI was a bit wonky, but it was pretty good at sending lots of email fast; and they were actually very good about not using it for evil.
If you are young and just starting, try to find a position with a web dev company who uses the technologies you want to learn. Pick an agile company who doesn't need a load of sign-offs to get something done. Don't worry about your $/hr. Worry about what you can learn.

Basically I'm trying to get you to find a good mentor. You can learn more in 1 week from a good mentor than you can by reading PDFs and blog posts for two years.
Since I am coming from a long background of embedded programming, I guess my starting point is different.

But, since my last company loved hiring bright college kids with 0 experience (and I was usually in charge of training them), I have to say. Work with someone experienced.

You can re-invent the wheel a thousand times, but you will get much better if you learn from someone else.

And until you do that, I have found a few blogs/videos that show how professional developers write a simple site, start to finish. Since they annotate the process, you really get to understand not just the how but also the why.

So IMHO best:internships second:the blogs above third: programming yourself (and if you ever decide to switch to embedded programming and move to Israel, I can hook you up ;)
Type in a question and it will find people on Twitter and Facebook in your social network who are best able to answer that question.

It is for the specific situation where (1) someone you know should know the answer to a question but you don't know who and (2) you don't mind everyone in the world potentially knowing which question you asked and (3) you haven't asked too many questions like this which have been answered by the same people.

For example, any blog or twitter posts asking for advice might be turned into aardvark queries. Some emails as well.

The most killer app could be within companies. If this actually worked it would be like a telepathic routing protocol. Better than the distraction of a mass email, and potentially less maintenance than a wiki. Getting it to work in a biz environment would probably require a whole different set of features for prediction (especially mining of email networks like Palantir and Cataphora).

My main problem with it is that as currently formulated it would have to get amazingly intelligent to beat the speed and privacy of a search box.

Perhaps a revised version would just take my query and tell me who to ask rather than directly routing the query there. This way I can bother them only if I think they'll actually have the time, give a good answer, haven't bothered them before, etc.
Yes, but the Saudis are our rich friends so we wouldn't want to bother them with anything like pursuing real justice.
My sister is an attorney and asked me about software that can catch things like this, remove metadata, etc. Does anyone have experience with something along these lines?
Venture Capital 2009: The year in review
Mostly, they do. I use it for lots of web browsing, and most sites are fine, and it even obeys much of the styling, etc. However, some sites, like overcomingbias.com, get partially corrupted (like bad-decompression-corrupted, not looks-kinda-odd-corrupted), sometimes. Reloading often fixes the problem. I assume there's some issue with the gzip integration.
Ethics aside, if a company/startup can't be bothered to make new slides after stealing an idea, it will likely make similar inflexible "shortcuts" later on and fail miserably (as the article showed).
Ask HN: Do you have business advisers?
I'm writing an article on why every startup (and startup founder) should have a set of business advisers -- whether it be for product, design or business advice. While conceptually this seems like an obvious thing to me, I'm curious to know how you think about it. Do you have a set of advisers? How do you typically communicate with them? Do you pay them? How do you go about finding advisers? Please share your thoughts...
MIT Group Builds a Balloon-Finding Team to Take Pentagon Prize