I like this one, everything in one place:

http://georgenava.appspot.com/demo/hn/index.html

* Mockup, nothing works.

So you need a war to unite the country?

How about the 'War On Corruption'™?

While I applaud creative thinking, I want to say no, thanks.

I hate scrolling to be honest, I lose concentration when everything moves and kind of makes me dizzy.

I like some ways I've seen on the ipad to paginate info without scrolling. No, I hate the pagination effect.

So, in essence, no scrolling, no visual distraction, just show me a page on the screen, then the next, then the next.

Like a magazine.

It is your business, as web designer, to fit content in a page and auto adjust it to my resolution, without breaking the intended relation between text and images, and without distracting me.

Like a book.

"Out of the ~250 programs I wrote last year, 2-3 would have benefited from being written in a functional style."

Donald Knuth

One of the things Knuth is famous for is writing a lengthy program for word counts that was equivalent to no more than 6 lines of shell script.

I highly doubt that he's wrong regarding his own programs, but it's most certainly wrong for the majority of programmers.

PS if we're going to appeal to authority, Church and Lambda Calculus were there first.

Discussion of the word count problem Knuth vs. McIlroy http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4304696

And out of the ~250 programs that Knuth wrote last year, 2-3 would have solved a similar problem that your typical professional programmer would solve.

Functional programming strikes me as most useful for software engineering. I'm not sure how that applies to Knuth, but my understanding is that most of the programs he writes are more oriented towards computer science than software engineering.

2001:0db8:85a3:0042:1000:8a2e:0370:7334

That's the internet of things.

  |2001:0db8|
  |85a3:0042|
  |1000:8a2e|
  |0370:7334|

Or that, if you like squares.

That's a beautiful way of formatting IPv6 addresses.

URLs killed QR codes. Get over it.

Easier to read, easier to share, easier to remember.

Harder to enter on a touchscreen. There's no reason they can't coexist...

Tell me how you enter a QR code on a touch screen. At least the url you can enter, QR code fails, as your argument 'entering them on a touch screen is harder'.

That problem is pertinent to both, so QR codes are still worse than urls.

Your argument is invalid.

Now, if you mean reading the QR code or URL on any device, let me tell you that QR codes are dots, if you misread a dot you fuck up the meaning. So OCR engines can EASILY read a URL and the same rule applies, if they miss a dot, they may confuse an I for an L or a 1, but still easier than a QR code, because 26 letters an 10 numbers are easier to configure in an OCR engine than irregular dots on a square.

URLs win.

I rest my case, your honor.

s/touchscreen/touchscreen device/. Even iPods have cameras now.

OCR has been failing us really badly for 40 years now, and not for a lack of trying. In fact, OCR is so bad that the one way we use to distinguish humans from machine is by forcing them to do OCR.

QR codes were designed with targeting/aligning areas as well as tons of redundancy built in, there's a reason why they can be easily scanned in realtime from a video feed at an odd skewed angle in the dark, whereas OCR doesn't even work properly on books scanned on a flat scanner.

OCR has always sucked and will always suck. Sorry.

QR codes are annoying to use even on phones that support them. Get a short URL and forget QR codes.

Typing proving to be too much? How about working on better OCR?

Homographic disambiguation. It's hard for even the best AI to tell the difference between 1lI!| etc.

If the AI has a hard time differentiating, I'm sure your human users will have as much of a challenge.

Pro tip: Don't register A1lI.com and expect people to be able to type it in.

The amount of time it takes to make an OCR-friendly URL on a product is zero.

Mark Shuttleworth. I've seen your balls, and they are big and brassy!

I've been a google supporter for years, until they do something ugly to you, and now that love is gone. Fuck you google, if you don't listen to your users you're doomed to extinction.

You stole my hard earned money in adsense for over a couple of years. All of a sudden you decided to close my account for activity fraud. I swear to god I never clicked a damn ad. My stats show no abnormal visits (analytics from google) just a steady flow of a hundred visitors a day, just ten cents a day in adsense.

But you stole it without any explanation, just that you can't give any info to protect your algorithms and your sponsors.

Well fuck you, then who protects the user?

You stole just $100 from me, but I hope you lose it all. I'll do all I can to see you on your knees.

Fuck you google.

This isn't really related to this post. Also, this is just childish whining that your precious ad sense revenue account gets banned. Well, shit happens. 100$? That sounds like your first ad sense paycheck, so call me skeptical but you probably did click your ad, maybe without knowing or violated some other term of service.

Google can't answer the millions of cases like yours one by one specifically, nor should they since somebody who's trying to game the ad sense system shouldn't be told where they messed up anyway.

Why not start your own version of ad sense if you think you can do this better.

If that is stealing at all, it is on behalf of advertisers. Google doesn't get paid when you don't.

Not true - inventory availability and user data are gathered. Google receives value from a publisher using Ad Sense tags, if they chose to use that value by returning ad (getting paid by an advertiser) then Google makes money. At the end of the day an unused impression opportunity by Google may cost a tiny bit of computing resources, but its an unused opportunity for revenue by the publisher.

We will never achieve artificial intelligence unless we create a program that can differentiate good from evil, pleasure from pain, positive from negative.

The basic building blocks of life.

If we continue making faster and faster machines at calculating formulas and storing knowledge we will have just that, a giant calculator.

I definitely think you are on to something. The attempts at artificial intelligence I am aware of all consist of some sort of optimizing, so trying to find a good thing to optimize seems a very reasonable thing to try.

(This is just my speculation, so take it with a grain of salt)

Here I think it is reasonable to look to human motivation. Maybe by making an agent that optimizes what a human brain optimizes, we could see similar behaviour?

A reasonable start is Maslows hierarchy of needs.

1. Biological and physiological needs. For an embodied AI, this could correspond to integrity checks coming up valid, battery charging, servicing.

2. Safety needs. I think these emerge from prediction+physiological needs.

3. After that we have social needs. This one is a little bit tricky. Maybe we could put in a hard coded facial expression detector?

4. Esteem needs. Social+prediction

5. Cognitive needs. I have no idea how this could be implemented

6. Aesthetic needs. I think these are pretty much hard-coded in humans, but are quite complex. Coding this will be ugly (irony)

7. Self-actualization???

Now, from 1 and 3 it is reasonable to suppose (provided the optimizer is good enough) that we could train the AI, like one trains a dog. You give command, AI obeys, you smile/pet it ( -> reward).

It does something bad, you punish it.

In order for the optimization procedure to not take unreasonably long time, I think it is important that the initial state has some instincts.

Make sound if you need battery. Pay attention to sounds that are speechlike.

Maybe give it something aking to filial imprinting could also be a good idea.

Extensive research on neural basis for motivation should be prioritized in my opinion.

Good and evil is subjective, and therefore not a "basic building block of life".

Pleasure and pain require emotion, something most researchers don't assume an AI will have.

What do you mean by "positive and negative"? Like, positive and negative numbers? Good and bad business decisions? We already have computers that can do that.

you're talking about what it means to be human, not what it means to be intelligent. you can't judge good from evil if you're not intelligent, so AI's first goal should be just that: intelligence, not morals

All forms of intelligence find their own versions of 'right' or 'wrong' in time. If we did it, there's no reason the machines won't.

Please, if you want to go postal, don't aim at our kids, aim at the politicians.

Drain your frustrations with those who destroy our future, not those who will build it.