skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html

the tilde operator (for synonyms) is pretty useful.
Actually I think the European thing is just an example of a broader phenomenon: democracies never go to war with other democracies.

(I went googling to make sure that was true, and found this: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm which goes through all the potential counterexamples. So I'll amend my statement to say that democracies hardly ever go to war with other democracies.)

So the idea is really a bit redundant -- two countries probably won't go to war if the people have anything to say about it anyway. Only when you have decisions being made by a dictator on at least one side are disagreements likely to turn into wars; democracies tend to compromise.
Slick hack if you switch between development/production servers frequently...
As improbable as it is, I've pondered the exact same thought experiment. I came to a different conclusion. I think consciousness is like an instance of an object in the computer world. Consciousness is entirely materialistic with the material being like the location it resides in(in a computer, the memory addresses). In your example you've copied it, but into a different set of material. It's a different instance of the object--a new copy which just happens to have the same memories. So I think it's possible to create consciousness and to copy it, but not to have it be the same consciousness. I think your question is one of identity, not materialism, though. Thoughts?
The terms are utter bullshit.

You may not write any data to the drive or disassemble it . . . .

The Gutmann paper referenced elsewhere in the thread concludes that overwriting the drive (something like 34 times IIRC) with zeroes is important because a dedicated analyst can measure the residual magnetism of each sector of the drive to infer the most recent "long term" binary values. Not allowing the drive to be opened makes this type of analysis kind of difficult.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97752

:(
Bottled water "is portable"
Portable Linux for Everyone - Introducing the Asus Eee PC
I agree. In this thought experiment, the consciousness is just copied. It wouldn't affect his original consciousness, though the "new" version would also feel as though it was him.

I've had this same thought experiment many times when thinking about the philosophical implications of teleportation. Even if the brain is disassembled and re-assembled, it would still be a copy. The original would cease to exist, effectively killing it. But the teleported copy would be none-the-wiser and think everything went fine. The only way around this I could see was somehow slowly moving functions of the brain to the new copy while disabling those same functions in the old brain. Perhaps this could be done with a form of entanglement, but it would have to be on a very large scale (ie entangle entire cells). Basically, the consciousness couldn't be interrupted while being transferred to the new copy.
If you truly want to understand the x86, you should first learn the 4004, then the 8008, then the 8080, then the 8088, then 8086, then the 80186, then the 80286, then the 80386, then you can go in a number of directions that others have suggested.
Two bytes are better than one
Hmm? Nickb submits more links than anyone else here.
In terms of interruption, under anesthesia, I had no sense of time passing and woke up as if I had fast-forwarded. I imagine it is exactly like being dead. The world moved forward, and I wasn't in it.

What if I joined my consciousness with a machine and slowly moved into it, then killed my physical body? I'm not sure if this is different than the gradual replacement of my body's cells. Maybe identity is a more hollow concept than we like to imagine. "I" am continual change. Where do you draw the line?
Ultimately, the word is "virtue".
I think we possibly have a different understanding of what is a lesser or second tier school. I based my opinion on the original poster's response to pg's comment, where he states that his cs program is like "trade school". I doubt that a 4.0 from such a program would count for much in comparison to an applicant from a top CS department.

As for your anecdotal example, could it not be that the other factors were the deciding ones in this case (like the student from the lesser school having much stronger recommendations or published a paper)? In any case, all I meant by making up this 3.6/4.0 example was that the school matters too.

If I read you correctly, you also seem to be saying that GRE scores are more important than GPA. This is not true at all. In fact GRE scores count for very little compared to your GPA (which counts less than recommendations and research). Remember that we are discussing admission to top-tier schools. MIT does not even consider the GRE in their admission procedure.

Also, what makes you assume that I'm talking from a hypothetical perspective? At my undergrad school, I have personally known about 50 people who've applied and gone to grad school, and GPA correlates very strongly with the ranking of the department they joined. Since then these views have been confirmed by the faculty (including my advisor) that I have talked to at my grad school.

In any case, we have our grad recruiting weekend coming up next week, and I'll do some field research and report back :)
Rename it the Zero-Clue Challenge.

They haven't learned a single thing from the recent uptick in challenge interest (RC4/5, DARPA, Netflix, etc.)....
I agree and I like that line a lot. I moved to the US, from a Eastern European country, as I was fed up with the retards that had taken over my country, and ruin it down. Unfortunately, who screams the loudest, often wins.
In the anesthesia, you would not be dead since there is obviously still brain activity.

With moving your consciousness into a machine slowly, that would work for the exact reason you said; it's the same as the body replacing your cells.

I think that consciousness is overrated. It's simply a product of this computer and the programming that we call the brain. It's more an illusion of consciousness, but I would have a hard time actually proving that and will save it for another post.

With just a copy, there was never any type of physical connection linking the two. They are two separate physical entities, which would include the consciousness. An analogy is two identical computers running the same software. However, if they were one entity at some point and things were gradually turned off in the old brain, I think this would preserve what we call consciousness because our brain, including the copy which would mimic the brain, is very malleable and adaptable. It would transition into the new system. An analogy here is gradually replacing the parts in a computer. You upgrade the RAM, upgrade the motherboard, the processor, etc. You even image the hard drive to a new drive, but keep it in the same case and running the same OS and software. At what point is it no longer the same computer?

With creating a copy of the brain, if the two are connected and then the connection is simply cut, then I don't think the new copy would actually be the same. If it's gradual, then yes. I'm not sure if I can say where the line actually is though.
"Chuang-Tzu had it right. No more need be said. But such is human nature that the more succinctly we state the truth, the better we become at ignoring it. So, despite the completeness of the above homily, I'll proceed, hoping that my volume may insinuate into your worldview what Chuang-Tzu's brevity might not."

I think I like this quote -- especially the part about volume insinuating into worldview -- almost more than the quote it's referring to (http://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/T...)

Heh, and it's directly in contradiction with what I said here recently (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117233).
Company-Customer Pact
The "me" brainwave seemed to be off while I was under.

>> his team found a marked drop in the gamma-band activity (25-50 Hz) during anesthesia, a range of brain waves that is often associated with consciousness.

http://sci-con.org/2002/05/consciousness-under-anesthesia/

Is a computer dead when it is unplugged? It seems to me it is in some sense. I could mail its parts around the world separately, reassemble, and restart it.

I think of consciousness as a meta-phenomenon (I am inventing a term here). When watching a movie, there is no movie--only colored pixels changing at various times. Reductionists would like to deny the movie, but it is still there. So maybe I'm a materialist, but not a reductionist.
Google research on online malware distribution
Woops -- that was an honest accident. Didn't mean to rob the Aiken of credit due!
Tip the Odds in Your Favor: How to Count Cards
You Need A Ride Or Die Chick?
This girl has been through the fire and back and now she is sizzlin hot,,sexy butt, classy Megan is a cut above rest.
If you find this sort of thing interesting, Johnny Long's "Google Hacking for Penetration Testers" is a worthwhile read: http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/news/book-releases/book-list.ht... , scroll down.

Long also maintains the Google Hacking Database: http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ghdb.php

Fun stuff therein.
"cause harm to others" is such a loose phrase you could drive a bulldozer through it. It could encompass everything from flatulence to the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

I'd tighten up that language a little bit if you are trying to make a point.
Somaya Reece grew up in some of the poorest neighborhoods in L. A.
She studied acting in UCLA and became a part of the Actors Guild. She made her acting debut in the movie American psycho and made and has acted in several other movies. And find out the number one question. Are they real?
Wish I Had Created…Stardoll
Twitxr - Like Twitter, With Pictures. Yeah, It’s Photoblogging.
You know, the questions you're asking are valid. But one might well ask "When there are other sources of clean, potable water available, why is it necessary, or even desirable, to drink water imported all the way from Fiji." Is Fijian water qualitatively that much better than it justifies the relatively monumental effort of transporting it to Manhattan for consumption?

I certainly won't deny that there are trendoids who glom onto this sort of thing as the latest cause célèbre, but to pass it off (as some commenters are doing) as mere trendy moralism or yet another "cause" repugnant to whatever brand of libertarianism is hip this month, is to ignore valid questions about the justice and justifiability of your actions.
Web Tech Directory
A Weekend Incubator for Facebook Apps - Feb. 22nd
Because the price of fuel doesn't account for the damage fuel consumptions costs in the long run.

We do very little to assess and monetize the environmental damage corporations cause, especially over the long term.
"And, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product."

Indeed. Nor to they care what technology you use (assuming it isn't thrown in their face).
I've done a bunch of these job interviews lately, and if you want to "work for the man", this advice is spot on. At the same time, this is also relevant to entrepreneurs, because you'll (hopefully) be recruiting employees at some point. It always makes you a better interviewer/interviewee if you've been on the other side of the table.
So what should one drink while driving long distances? Will they install water fountains at gas stations?
The United States has excellent drinking water, pretty much everywhere. Issues of taste are usually caused by old pipes on the "last mile" of the water's path. So, buy a Brita filter. That's a market that actually makes sense.
Yikes, that surprises me. Here's why I think it belongs here: it's a simple web page that does one thing well and solves a problem that at least some of us have. I'm talking about programmers who make web apps and aren't good at graphics. Okay, that at least one of us has. :)
I've already convinced myself that FP is worth my time, but this article is great to help along your friendly neighborhood "Java programmer." I just wish I had read this 5 years ago!
Is it snarky to ask what you mean by "big physical object?" Most things are big on a relative scale. Besides, what do you plan to do in the interim between now and whenever the proposed future arrives?
so are reusable water bottles that cost about as much as one bottle of water would have cost.
How To Negociate a New Job: Research
Native English speakers no longer own the English language with exclusive rights.
"why you should buy an emotional planner".

i'm almost scared to look.
My post was based on my own knowledge of the recruiting process (and the background of many fellow grad students) a top-tier school:

1) GPA and GRE scores are typically the basis for an include/exclude decision to filter a large pool of applicants down to a smaller pool. They don't typically play a primary role in determining the ranking of the candidates after this step. That's a far more holistic (read: subjective) decision.

2) In terms of #1, committees tend to weight both GPA and GRE equally, with a slight preference given to the GRE, because it is the only direct quantitative comparison available between all applicants.

But this debate is mostly navel-gazing, because admissions committees are famously capricious; the exact method used depends on the members of the committee, and their particular biases. The only point I'm trying to make here is that your chances to get admitted to a top-tier school aren't necessarily higher if you went to MIT as an undergrad. That's a myth that is dearly loved -- by MIT undergrads.

(And by the way? Two seconds of googling tells me that you're wrong about MIT and the GRE:

http://web.mit.edu/admissions/graduate/requirements/testing_...)
GMail Task List Feature
The Inevitable Rise Of Web Gaming
A somewhat simplistic strategy, but the right idea: the odds are in favor of the house, so you need to have bet big when you win.
No, they don't cost nearly as much as a single bottle of water. I buy bottled water in bulk.

I also use a reusable plastic bottle. I don't have it with me all the time.

Bottled water is like SUVs and large homes for upper middle class people. People get irrationally pissed about them and ignore much more important things related to the environment, like single pane windows and other poor insulation. The difference between an SUV and a prius is small compared to the energy lost in a poorly insulated home in New England or Arizona.

[edit: don't forget to account for the energy of washing the reusable bottle. I've heard for a ceramic mug you need to use it 1000 times before it uses less energy than 1000 styrofoam cups]
My brother was threatened with expulsion were he to not stop 'having his parents write his essays'. But they were entirely his own. It took until eleventh grade before teachers started to appreciate this.
Shiny graphics do not a user experience make.
When you own the browser market, whatever you implement becomes the de facto standard.
Damn, stars are aligning.
or write both your essay and your SAT writing sample well
On a screenshot kick today. . .

http://www.zentu.net/open-space/wildcards

I sometimes think about how the top (10 default in this case) results are influenced by physical locale of the searcher. The whole conceptual lightspeed thing is really quite interesting.
Actually, the argument being made is that you're _not_ paying for it. The externalities -- degraded environment, pollution, economic damage, etc. -- are being passed on to the powerless in other countries, or to future generations. In economic jargon (or as much thereof as I remember from college) there are negative externalities which are unaccounted for in the current market price.

I believe one of the arguments being made is also that if those externalities _were_ incorporated into the price, bottled water would be much less appealing on the basis of cost.
It's true that you do generally have to take the GRE to get into MIT grad school, but it's not really what you're being admitted based on (although you might be rejected for sucking).

It's funny to even see an MIT-wide admissions page, since it's department based, and especially so for CS students.
don't worry about it, I just upmodded you.
A doctor told me that if you don't have a water filter, you are the water filter. That being said, the difference between the quality of most municipal tap water and bottled water is marketing dollars. In some countries, it is a fact that you have to boil the water before drinking it. I was so nervous about avoiding sickness on my last trip to a Latin American country that I used bottled water (on my doctor's recommendation) to rinse out my toothbrush and avoided salad.
Thanks
i already have Detmer
I'll start using it
Perhaps my comment was a little harsh. I just don't want news.y to devolve into the type of neato-esque conglomeration that digg is. (I saw this on digg like 2 years ago). Thats all.
> Loading water onto a ship to ship it across more water to sell in a place which already has plenty of water seems pretty wasteful.

Gee, I thought we were talking about California, for a second.
http://www.viddler.com/explore/Coderush/videos/1/
This reminds me of the people who shop at Whole Foods yet dont recycle and celebrities who drive hybrid cars yet live in 10k sq. ft. houses where the AC/heating bill is hundreds/month. Classic human paradox of how hard it is to do everything right and/or people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones
Feature Request: Automatically append " [pic]" at the end of the title of submissions that link to a URL with an extension known to denote a picture (such as jpg).
this is stupid. the usual managerial crap.
This is a great list and nicely expands "(b) overlooked problems." In his book "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" Peter Drucker offered the following observation on the frame of mind need to spot opportunities for innovation.

"Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred but whose full effects have not yet been felt, and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires existing companies to abandon rather than defend yesterday."

He goes on to suggest seven places to search systematically for opportunities

The Unexpected
The Incongruous
Weak Link In Existing Process
Industry Or Market Structure Change
Demographics: Size, Age Structure
New Zeitgeist: Perception, Mood, Meaning
New Knowledge
In other news, the music industry reports that CD sales are down and does dumb things on the internet. Is there something interesting about the newspaper industry? I don't get why pmarca is writing about this. "Zzzzzzzz"
I spend a year in the USA and I can tell this will work, the feeling for that country gets very close as home or your native country.
Google "helicopter parents" Some parents feel that it is within their rights to write their children's high school papers.
With multi touch and backlit keyboard?
Outsourcing in a nutshell
"A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable before they explore it."
Google might be a little to late. The battle will be between apple and google on the hand held front. However apple will need to crank out a new iphone design if they want to compete with the new android phones that will be coming out. Consumers have grown to think of any phone over a year old an old model and inferior model.
Edw has a great story from personal experience. Why not respectfully ask how Ford's quote fits with this story rather than post a sarcastic reply?
EvilChuck: Tell Python to Shove it (module for storage that hooks into S3, svn, and more)
I respect the time PB has taken to write this post, but think this advice is aimed at beginners. In my opinion, the most important thing about new startups is to do it in an area with others your age trying to accomplish similar feats, many of whom are slowly succeeding, and where tech savvy investors and employees are. Smart people who can accurately assess your abilities as well as help each other with honest feedback.

I've seen many variations of the same insightful opinions like that one, but something very important that actually requires more than just product or language choice is getting up off your ass and moving to Silicon Valley. For that reason, that should be the most covered topic--at least in my experience.
Social Design Best Practices
By the way, if you know graphics designers who might be interested, we'd appreciate it if you pass along the invite. We have more developers than what the 4 graphics designers who have signed up so far can handle.

And we're open for more speakers. If you have good experience building apps and would like to help other programmers with a quick 10-min presentation, please drop us a line at: info at weekendapps.com . Thanks.
Shit, I was going to write a greasemonkey script like RTM's!
Whether or not such a program would stop wars, it would still be a good thing to do, especially for Americans.
As much as I adore Gmail, some of the recent additions seem to just slow down my browser a whole lot. Please, please don't make Gmail bloat.
Wil Shipley reviews the MacBook Air
And taking your own risk. I know the crowd here (hacker/entrepreneur) doesn't always think this way, but many (most?) people don't live to build wealth and influence and instead just work for an income that allows them to play in their spare time.
Someone needs to send this guy a copy of PG's "Trolls".
That's a great quote. It's important to understand that _listening_ to your customers isn't the same as having them design the product (which would be a mistake). In this case, the message that you should get from the customer is that "my horse is too slow".
That's probably a valid consideration, but whether you should take it into serious account depends upon your aims: Are you trying to shift the paradigm, and introduce something entirely new? Or are you simply trying to produce the best refinement of an existing process or technology.

Not every change is revolutionary, nor does it need to be. Constantly reinvent things, and you'll wear your market out. But customer-sensitive refinements are frequently welcomed by consumers (depending on what they cost), or at least accepted without complaint.

You can't simply blow your audience off, no matter how visionary Henry Ford might have been. Development of anything...a process, a product, an image, a brand, whatever...is a never-ending set of nested feedback loops from the target audience, or else it's eventually a failure.
Hip Hop & The Inter Have Fully Connected Now Hip Hop Honey Incons
Guys you have to look at this im 43 and made me wanna make a video

hiphophoney thats cool
I'm glad you went through and found that; the US has ravaged third-world democracies for a quite a while now.
Fake. I know. But...

"10. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and this is for your own good."

This would, in fact, be rich coming from a Brit. Really. Hah!
News.YC statistics - community cohesion
Interesting. I wonder how Slashdot maintains a high level of commenting over time. Thanks for the tip. Perhaps I'll revisit them in 18 months...

;)

(This place is too cool at the moment!)
Another model for keeping out trolls is Metafilter's. They require a $5 donation when an account is created, and kick out assholes. Of course, this keeps out a whole lot more than trolls. It's certainly the wrong way to do it for most sites, but it works for them, and perhaps for others.