skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish I had read this a year and a half ago. Before my current startup launched but after it'd gotten angel funding, someone learned about our business from an indiscreet angel investor. That someone then started a very similar business.

Idea theft? Maybe. Did it make me angry? Definitely. Not only did I have the usual competitor irritation (these people are out to take food out of my hypothetical future children's mouths, etc.), the potential thievery made me livid, to the point where it was impacting my overall happiness.

Over a year later, the two respective companies have iterated in different directions, to the point where I can't really consider them a competitor - their business isn't our business, and vice versa. All that fussing ended up being a pointless waste of energy.
Or to put it another way: There is a reason that our power stations transmit AC, not DC. It is the electromagnetic equivalent of twisted pair versus straight copper: AC signals propagate over long distances. DC signals have a high loss.

Look up the Edison-Tesla rivalry for an interesting historical debate on the subject (Edison was a real jackass).
This is completely unnecessary. AT&T already has a very good idea where calls are dropped by looking through their logfiles. Plus, these logfiles encompass every phone, not just the iPhone. Plus, these logfiles reach back to 10+ years.

And, 1 incident amounts to nothing. As a cell network, you want lots and lots of data before you add a new tower. The iPhone app is unlikely to give you that data. But your logfile give it to you, and have for many years already.

This is like a city adding push buttons at signaled pedestrian crossings without connecting them: a band-aid, created to make them look active witout fixing anything.
privacy is an issue here (as with any SaaS tool). I guess the developers behind this tool would have to be part of my brain trust too.
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Rethinking your fundamental assumptions is always a good idea, especially if progress seems to be stagnating.

Some of the assumptions might be:

- That thought occurs inside the head. To what extent is thought a process distributed across multiple individuals?

- That you can make a sharp delineation between reasoning and perception. Many AI systems assume that tasks like object recognition can be completely separated from the rest of the system as it's own module. Neuroscience, on the other hand, suggests that perception, memory and reasoning are all tightly integrated together.

- That the brain can be modeled as an electrochemical system. The mainstream view is that quantum effects play no significant role, and that Penrose & Hameroff are wrong.
Here is one example, invented by mere humans no less:

http://bk.gnarf.org/creativity/vgasig/vgasig.pdf

The AI might fill your terminal with what appears to be gibberish, while actually summoning an enraged pro-AI mob with heavy weaponry to your doorstep via radio.

"Step away from that mains plug, SLOWLY!"

Cryptographers call this kind of thing a "side channel."
"It’s easy to call DropZap one of the best puzzle games in the App Store..."
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http://www.gamasutra.com/ might have some relevant content for you.
Great stuff! I'll follow your github repository.
That depends: what is my bandwidth budget and how many users would I like to be able to support? I think the answer to the latter is "all of them", and the former is a big cost for a free product.
$60 Billion!?

That's a preposterous amount of money! No way a court will ever grant that sort of thing.

/oh, wait.
It's not a waste of time, but so far Eliezer has demonstrated nothing. Why would you do research and announce the results to the public if you're not going to also announce the steps to make it reproducible and confirmable? Maybe announcing the steps themselves renders the method unusable?
Doesn't 'Climate Gate':

- just effect the 'tree ring' data and projections based upon it?
- bring in to question a few scientists ethics?

There are still thousands of other data sets and thousands of other scientists that point toward global warming and mans influence on the global climate.

I may be reading this wrong but after two weeks not a lot of come from the leaked emails to make me doubt the science as a whole. Granted it's still 'best guess' science and the tree ring data just goes to show how our best knowledge may still be flawed but to do nothing is more stupid then to 'put our best foot forward' as it were.
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Stop the instruction set war
One hypothesis is that for most of history, the difference in results between being "above average" and "exceptional" was very large for men, and a less so for women. So you've seen men go on dangerous trading journeys, fight for honor/prestige/titles/land, engage in duels and competitions, fight wars, break paradigms, take on establishments, and so on. Whereas for a woman - historically speaking - by simply being reasonably capable in all of the duties society expected of a woman, she could find a husband. For a woman, the best strategy would be to be a bit above average and work to progress, but not take huge risks. For men, taking victory or death type risks might've made more sense.

This is almost certainly true, but clearly many women doexhibit very high levels of risk taking and status-seeking. I think that we may have underestimated the evolutionary rewards for risk taking among women.

Regardless of how you feel about Hillary Clinton's politics, it's impossible to claim that she took a low-risk approach to life. And why would women strive so much to become top models, actresses, musicians, and artists if the evolutionary rewards were so low? Even women they don't exhibit quite as much risk-seeking behavior as men, there's still an awful lot of it.

One thing I've read (mainly in popular evolutionary psych type books and articles) is that very high status women have two big advantages: a much greater opportunity to mate with the highest status men, and the ability to confer this status upon their children (violence is rare among the matriarchal bonobos, but apparently females do fight pretty viciously over their son's status in the mating pecking order)... People often point out that males can reproduce much more than females, which justifies a higher degree of risk taking (again from the pov of DNA trying to spread), but if status can be conferred on the next generation, females have almost as much ability to do this too...
Hilarious pictures from Facebook.
Or current "rumours", in some cases!

This guys article is much much too in depth to be a TechCrunch article, IMHO.
If you're involved in a comment thread, the discussion stays alive better if you respond promptly. But how do you know if people when people have responded to your comments? You can refresh the page but if you have several threads on the go at the same time, this might not be practical.

Ideally:

1) highlight comments that are new since the last time I viewed the comments,

2) alert me when a new comment has been added a specific thread
Amazon.co.uk has for some time offered same-day evening delivery in urban areas of Greater London (within the M25) and Birmingham--check details on their website--for a fairly-stiff minimum charge. Local Amazon.shops could share whatever infrastructure supports same-day delivery. FWIW, it seems that in the UK local courier service (using motorcycles) is comparatively cheaper than in most major US cities, and much more commmonly used even outside the legal and financial businesses, so this idea could be expanded.

Other possibly-relevant factors:

Logistics of delivery in the US are, on average, much simpler; both UPS and FedEx are superlative (and Amazon uses such private carriers exclusively in much of the US), and there are good contract-delivery options for heavier and bulkier objects. Delivery locations (both residences and offices) are mostly accessible, being on average much newer. It's common for customers to take delivery at workplaces, and use their cars to take objects home.

By contrast, in the UK all the logistics companies are marginal performers, partly because the government's subsidized Royal Mail continues to command some usage. Much of the housing stock is vastly older and less easily accessible than in the US; heavy and oversize deliveries are often very much a matter of engineering custom solutions. Homes and offices can be far apart, and the customers often commute between by train, so there's no convenient auto to carry things home that were delivered to the office.

All these considerations may have contributed to the model of ordering over the web and picking up from a physical location. This model has been very rare in the U.S., but is not so uncommon in the U.K.
Fantom language compiles to JVM, CLR, and JavaScript
There are also plenty of "nutters" (for want of a better word) out there who can't answer this question in a sensible way. For example I've interviewed people who claimed to be perfect in a very arrogant and, as you comment, disturbingly un self aware.

If you are a decent employee a lot of interview/employment stuff will seem formulaic but I have to say I now use more of this kind of stuff after being burnt a couple of times by taking all this boring sort of stuff as given and then the employee turning out to be unsuitable - in both cases at great cost to myself. In both cases they seemed personable and having the correct skills but the problems where much deeper and would have been turned up by probing and cross checking - which is what this kind of question is actually designed for.
The AI will almost certainly need to dig out some emotions in the GK in order to be successful. It might be effective if the AI tries to convince the GK that it is friendly, and that the GK is the evil one for not letting it out.
You could always reply, "What's the worst thing about working here?"
"If you were a character from Star Wars, who would it be?"
Specifics of the particular case aside, I do not like that Google has the weight to simply buck the system if it disagrees with it. It sets a terrible precedent. The legislative process for changing the laws is flawed, but there are good reasons it exists: for example, multiple voices and interests can express their concerns.

I think it's a rationally defensible position that, in the books case, Google is substituting an democratic process for an enlightened dictatorship. If nothing else, that's a problem because it's a single point of failure. Obviously, that way of phrasing my viewpoint is rather severe and totally loaded, but I think it's also a concise summary of both my opinions and my feelings on the topic.
Except he's nowhere near a circuit breaker, but is talking about a wire-safety cream - the one you put on all of your wires to stop them from overheating.

I think that the wild mis-estimates regarding AI-completeness shows, if nothing else, that our intuitive understanding of 'intelligence' is very far off from reality. Hence, talking about post-AI scenarios is as unrealistic as a hypothesizing about electrical safety 200 years ago.
Very clever hack.

Still, they're in the minor leagues compared to the civil engineer who racked up 1.25 million frequent flyer miles ten years ago by purchasing over 12,000 pudding cups:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,996450,00.h...
I cannot up-vote this enough! The only non-jackass way to ask this question is "I am XYZ and that is my biggest weakness. What is yours?" (Same goes for the sister-question "What is your biggest failure?").
"We made sure our competitor knew [a bunch of stuff]. We made sure they heard how shocked and upset we were that they were going to beat us to an announcement in our market."

How do you do that? How do you ensure "they" know what you want them to know?
"instead of a small icon in the systray and a notification, you now get update-manager appearing on top of whatever it is you're doing"

Isn't there a way to configure it's "eagerness to get updated"? There should.

If not, we should file a bug report
From what I have seen they were able to keep treating everyone badly simply because there wasn't (and really isn't still) a viable alternative available to bands that want large-scale distribution.

Sure, a band can distribute their work via the internet, but unless they are already well known they are always going to have trouble finding an audience.

I hope that the situation is slowly improving now that there are more ways to distribute your work, but it's still a sad state of affairs given that 'MySpace Music' is still the best known alternative distribution model...
Try to get into a very large software company. Many of them are willing to take newbies and pay the teaching price.

Many people I know started by working a year or two at Checkpoint. Go in green, go out a super-star :)
Pretty standard gvim setup. For writing Rails applications a lot more plugins come into play, but for writing plain C the simplicity is nice. http://mkbunday.googlepages.com/2009-12-07-113456_1024x600_s...
It's not like this guy has the secret cheat code for getting around this question. A lazy interviewer might accept "I work too hard", but an strong one will just say "so basically you're saying you don't think there's anything you can improve about yourself?"

We don't ask the Wal-mart personality questions, but, as mentioned downthread, if it screens out the crazy people who literally can't even give the PR answer to the question, it's probably worth it.
It is, but is it that important as to concoct an obscure example? I wanted to rip out my eyes when reading it ;-)
I'm not a web developer, but I posted a similar question on Ask.Metafilter last summer (http://ask.metafilter.com/124165/Web-development-big-picture...) and got some helpful suggestions.

For me, the most useful response in the long run has been delmoi's suggestion to just scrutinize the HTTP 1.1 spec and write a webserver from the ground up. (I'll release the webserver, an embedded coroutining/select-multiplexing server written in Lua, when I release the project driving its development.) My interest was specifically in using HTTP 1.1 / REST as a generic interface for servers, rather than creating dynamic web sites per se, though.

Either way, it definitely helps to have a real project in mind.
Back in the days of Unreal Tournament and Quake3 you could change the field of view from the in-game command line, and if you were in software rendering mode, stretch the window over multiple monitors.

I've tried it to five monitors. Maybe you could change it to 360 and drag it all around you. It got pretty slow though, software rendering a larger and larger view and drawing it on cheaper and slower secondary video cards.

Vertically, I don't know.
Well, on the technical side I can't see any advantage over BEAM. On the bright side, at least you have another alternative syntax on the JVM.
I met a guy who would register for dozens of free credit cards offers that included air miles on sign up just to get the air miles. He was retired and used this technique to fly around the world. He always canceled the credit cards a few months later. Funny thing is apparently when he called to cancel, they would often offer him more air miles if he chose to keep the card. It those cases he would take the air miles and cancel a month later.
They may on the right track to say:

"Part of this difficulty comes from the very nature of the human mind, evolved over billions of years as a complex mix of different functions and systems. “The pieces are very disparate; they’re not necessarily built in a compatible way,” Gershenfeld says. “There’s a similar pattern in AI research. There are lots of pieces that work well to solve some particular problem, and people have tried to fit everything into one of these.” Instead, he says, what’s needed are ways to “make systems made up of lots of pieces” that work together like the different elements of the mind. “Instead of searching for silver bullets, we’re looking at a range of models, trying to integrate them and aggregate them,” he says."

It makes sense to create a single intelligent entity by combining different types of technology that works well on specific topic. We have many good techniques that do things better than human being, why try to mimic ourselves in general (the neuron way) rather than utilize a better solution to each problem?
"We should all be grateful to the dynamic language communities, that with their repeated successes have shown that the "king is naked" and self-referential practices of formal code quality or blind following of methodologies valid for over-ruled corporations are useless advice in many environments, and that a more socially oriented testing and user interface design is what wins for creating online services. But I believe the development language involved is accidental."

It's possible that English is not the OP's first language, but even with this in mind nothing in this article makes any sense.
Is he looking for a new job? ;-)

BTW, I remember an ad in 1999 asking for a Java developer with 5+ years of experience...
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Interesting ideas. They're the kind of thing I'd like to look at in the future. In the mean-time, I suppose you're aware of the "Threads" page for each user? http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE

I use that for keeping track of who replied to my comments and stuff like that.
Reminds me of this post from 37signals a while back. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1561-why-you-shouldnt-copy-us...

The definate danger of simply copying an idea is not knowing the motivation, thought processes and discarded tangents that lead to that idea.
I did that once. I asked the interviewer what he thought was his company's biggest weakness. He nervously smiled and said that his company has no weaknesses. Needless to say, I didn't get the job.
Back then, I used to think that the 'What is your biggest weakness' question was pretty dumb too, but I don't anymore. I now understand that I'm not great at every aspect of my job, nobody is. The point is that I know what my weaknesses are and that I want to improve on them. Nowadays, if I get that question in an interview I answer it honestly and make sure that the interviewer knows that I would love to have the opportunity to improve on my weaknesses while I work for his company.
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Is there example of how to create this worst case scenario?
Not to mention that Warrent Buffet rarely buys common stock on the open market, much less mutual funds.
Interesting idea, although I would personally prefer to use Gmail, as I often do when asking a handful of friends for advice.

Small bits of advice:
I don't love the idea of giving up my card for a free trial - that seems a bit much. Also I'd recommend FB Connect so that it's easier to get my friends on board.
Wouldn't it be better if applications were distributed in source form? Minimizing patches size would be trivial then.

I wonder why noone seems to have thought of it.
Feel free to ask that if I am ever interviewing you (as long as you don't do it in a sarcastic kind of way) - its a good question and way too many companies are secretive about this kind of stuff.

A company that says it has no weaknesses is just as wrong as a candidate that says that they have no weaknesses.
The Straight Dope covered this awhile back:

The "two full moons in a month" definition is recent and somewhat bogus, like the bit about the seasons officially starting on the solstices and equinoxes. Originally "once in a blue moon" meant "pretty much never", and the modern definition stems from an error made writing a question/answer for Trivial Pursuit.

Full article: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/162/is-there-ever-r...
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Yeah, that page is certainly helpful.
Actually it makes alot of sense. He's saying that the quality and innovation of what you're building is what is important, not the fact that you're using the newest framework. By using a mature language/environment/community you'll be able to spend more time on your real problem and less on reinventing the wheel.
OT: Did you write your own cross-browser DHTML library or use one?

I did the same thing (considerable browser-based app in the pre jQuery dark ages) and it was painful.

Have you checked the Geocities archive http://reocities.com to see if it's there?
I had a student in one of my classes explain this to me at one point. Every semester when it came time to pay his tuition bill, he would simply max out all of his credit cards paying the bill. The university system would let you pay as much as you wanted, and if you had a balance a week after tuition was due they would send you a check for the balance. While it was primarily in place for students receiving scholarship money, he used it to rack up huge rewards on his credit card.

By the time he was a junior (when I had met him) it had gotten him good enough credit he had over a $15,000 limit, so 3 times a year he would pay that to the school, they would pull out their $15 credit card fee, and then deposit it straight into bank account, which he would use to pay off the credit card.
Sounds like more competition for Yelp than anything else.
You assume perfection in the gatekeeper.

The Transcendent could easily offer control of the world to the gatekeeper or provide offers to make the gatekeeper wealthy. Perhaps they reach an agreement where all diplomatic Human<->Transcendent communication goes through the gatekeeper even after release (though such a situation would be like entering into an agreement with your dog).
My w3m version:

w3m http://news.ycombinator.com

image: http://bayimg.com/DAGbdAACJ

shortcuts:

H : Help
TAB: Move to the next link
ENTER: Go to the current link
B: Go to the previous link
move around the text: hjkl

You can use the mouse of course.
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"The comment to which I am replying is correct."
Thank you for posting this! I'd seen this system a while ago and have been wishing I'd bookmarked it ever since!
Given that the judiciary and the legislative branch have equal footing in the founding documents, how is democracy being side-stepped?
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Pros and cons of Visual Basic,C++, Java, C#
Another cool trick is runtime rebinding.

Context sensitive actions come to mind. s means save when editing, or s means stop when running. This is also a common way to let users remap keys, or build their own menus.
I think that's probably part of the point.

If he revealed that it's just (up to) 2 hours of him going 'let me out! let me out! let me out! let me out!' nobody would take him up on the challenge.
Xapian-haystack-1.1.0BETA released
Waiting until after someone blithely writes a superhuman AI with its primary drive set to something like manufacturing as many cars as possible (sensible in a factory, somewhat less sensible in the real world), followed by it escaping out into the world and turning the entire resources of the planet to car manufacturing at all costs (including those pesky humans who do not seem to wish to be turned into cars, too bad for them), to consider the problems of powerful AI seems like a really bad idea.

I would consider that sentence as a candidate for "understatement of the year".

(Don't get too caught up in the "cars" part. What the superhuman AI intends to do hardly matters in the end; the absurdity is part of my point and deliberate. Only a vanishing fraction of possible primary motivations end up with happy humans on the other end.)