skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to the "Chinese room" argument, a machine is not capable of genuinely understanding a language (since it is only looking up and applying transformation rules). It is generally believed that a human can, so that would mean a human mind cannot be fully emulated by a Turing machine. The only alternative seems to be that a human actually has the same limitation as a Turing machine (non-consciousness) and does not really understand language either.
To play devil's advocate a little bit it's funny how all the negativity is now focused on Adobe when not many months ago it was all focused on Apple's App Store policy.
Find a partner to work with.

Another comment mentions finding a partner who can finish your work, but personally I think that's horrible advice.

The main things are sharing workload and working as peers. Review each others code, do some pair-programming even if it seems a waste of time to you (or the other person). Feedback and collaboration create action which moves your project forward.

Explain to your partner that finishing is not exactly one of your strengths. They're bound to have weaknesses too, ask them about that and find a way to help them with theirs. For yours, when you find yourself zoning out, getting bored, reading HN, etc, get your partner to do some pair-programming (or testing, documenting, researching, whatever) to get you back on track.

Forget about personality tests, medication and whatnot. Working with a partner will teach you the behavioral patterns you need and a lot more besides.
That's not what sandboxing means. Flash is in a separate process but not sandboxed. It has full access to the local system.
I appreciate the response, and continue to be a happy (paying) customer as I do think you guys do a pretty good job of working on stuff.

A lot of really nice features can be found on github, and a lot of interesting technology has come out of github since I've started using it (which is a few days short of two years now).

The wikis remain pretty much trapped in time, though. I can easily imagine what an awesome github wiki would look like, but I also understand that migrating to it would be a huge pain.

In the meantime, I just can't use it. github pages is awesome and it's almost, but not quite a substitute. I wonder how much of the problem would go away with gh-pages as a mob branch...
No. As poetry, this is fine. From a rationalist point of view, this is muddled. As science, this is not much less naive than, say, What the Bleep Do We Know. You seem to be motivated, ahead of time, to arrive at a conception of the universe that is inspiring, and makes you think life worth living. This is a sure path to rationalization. You shouldn't expect, ahead of time, that whatever the truth of reality is will turn out to be steeped in redemptive qualities. This will cheat you out of the chance to be ok with whatever is true, because it is true, and not because you find it conforms to your wishes after all.
I saw the talk in NYC. From the questions asked, I'm under the impression the system scales quite well. According to Crunchbase, they now have about 400k users.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/foursquare
That only works for one thread. Many (most?) cases for using multithreading are when you need to do something CPU-bound, for which event-based mechanisms don't help.
Buy tech company and ping pong table along with it
but there are those of us that would like to use alternatives or just prefer to keep everything on the phone itself.

So use alternatives. Searching Android Market for "calendar" and "podcast" comes back with lots of results. Unlike Apple, Google won't reject submitted apps for "duplicating functionality".
Apple's fixed the criticisms from a few months ago (long submission updates, poor/inconsistent private API policy, etc). Not to say that you wouldn't have to look far to find new criticisms (their recent removal of "adult" apps, to name one).

Adobe, on the other hand, hasn't fixed any of their problems. And they've had much longer to fix their problems than Apple has. Hell, it took less time for Apple to create a problem that had to be fixed then for Adobe to fix their problems.
Trying to wrap my head around that one - though I think you made a good point. Do you mean like super-luxury goods, haut couture, things like that?
Searle doesn't make an argument about formally equivalent Turing machines, he makes an argument about a person using an instruction book to manipulate strange characters.

Right, this discussion is imcomplete without bringing in Church's thesis.

* So to hold a conversation about the weather, we'll need to add some separate input channels to observe the outside world, and to talk about the Room's plans for today, we'll need to throw in something that can keep track of time, .... it just goes on.*

Or these could be predefined and static.

(And while you're adding all the extra machinery, don't forget that even the original book is incalculably large, not the merely hefty tome that you're picturing in your mind's eye.)

This is like objecting that a Turing machine would take too many steps to solve a sufficiently large instance of some problem (e.g. more than there are Planck times in the age of the universe). The problem is still Turing-computable.
I don't think the web-based graphic editor time has come yet. The user experience is not great. I have to wait for over a minute to start editing an image.
Interesting. Thanks for the info!
Hey andrew,

I've been working on launching a site like this for the last 5 months. Feel free to check it out:
http://www.caterpi.com/

Also some competitors in the same space:
http://onehourtranslation.com and
http://mygengo.com
David Noël: On Spotify
Its a few more lines to prevent trashing.
I think double-checking results would bring the most benefit, especially if done by a native speaker of the target language. They don't have to understand the source language, just point out that a sentence makes no sense or uses awkward grammar.
Read "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield. It's a very, very short read - modeled after "The Art of War".

The book is composed of quick strategic/tactical lessons for fighting the battle against Resistance - that ever-devious foe that draws its strengths from our weaknesses.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/04...
There's a red arrow on the comic that turns the page. The same red arrow is at the bottom and takes you to a login screen.

Momentarily confusing design. It causes lost traffic.
I'm a burger king fan and always will be. I went to Burger King in Barcelona on New Years Eve, and I scarified my facebook friends for a whopper, but not realizing that the promotion was only for the States. Great memories
Please note this is an article by a "developer who uses Flash", not a "developer working on Flash".

It seems to me that most of the 'mouseover' problems described can be handled with click-and-hold.
Then you are a better person than I. If someone speaks too familiarly, acts too familiarly, or dresses too familiarly in a serious or business setting, I will not be thinking that he respects me enough to think that I am a person who can find more useful signals of respect than the ability to memorise and abide by arbitrary rules laid out of the unseen gods of grammar, social conventions, or menswear. I will be thinking that he has no respect.
I really hate to be "that person" but while I enjoyed the video, I really could have done without the vulgarity in the music. My kid was watching.

- Yes, I know there's a mute button, but I didn't recognize the song, so I didn't know to mute it until it was too late.

- No, I don't shelter my kid from everything, nor do I think I should, but I also don't think a 7yr old needs to be pointlessly exposed to such things in her own home, either.
The bar/restaurant down the street has a down-stairs lounge area. Five or so nights a week there is free live (acoustic) music down there. Many times the same band will play the same night each week. They have fun doing it, and play for tips (not a cover).

The bar opening up next door to it will have a performance space in the back.

There's a place a quarter mile away that is (coffee shop | beer/wine bar | performance space | thrift store | art gallery).

There's a performance space down the block in the other direction; usually they host plays. Right now a local band has been performing a play + music performance for the past month.

It was sold out last night.

Maybe you don't get the traditional resident bands much anymore. But here in Bushwick, local talent is playing for local residents and having a smashing time doing it. A friend's band is about to go on tour to LA with money they've saved up from doing local gigs.

Bands / musical performers are hearkening back to the concept of a traveling minstrel rather than the superstar performer of the last century. It's never something you did "to get rich" - only the very lucky got that. The best performers have done it because they needed to.
It seems to me that most of the 'mouseover' problems described can be handled with click-and-hold.

Nope; the "Tap and hold" gesture is used by the Safari (and the iPhone OS, for that matter) for other tasks already, namely to bring up the cut/copy/paste element.
The law sounds really draconian, however keep in mind that the governments wants there share of the money (plus your first born, a kidney and some blood). E.g if a person is an employee but is classified as contractors they can deduct their home office, travel to and from the office, clothing, going out for lunch, anything you buy computer related. The government comes up with some rules that determines if you are an employee or contractor. If the government decides that you should have been an employee they get all pissy since they perceive that you are trying to screw them out of money.
do you have any reference on how distributed algos and wave mix? I'm a little behind the curve in understanding wave but I can't see the link here.
Yeah .. not such a great idea ... looks like Googlebot is really aggresive (duh). It's still showing admin as the "main" site. Pain in the arse ..
I actually submitted this exact idea to YC last year. Here are some competitors:
http://translationcreation.com/ (site down at time of writing)
http://www.proz.com/

The YC-segment could probably be convinced to use something like this (I'd use it if the editing/checking worked well). I know of several tech-startups that use mturk in a way similar to what you describe.

A big hurdle for wider uptake would be confidentiality of texts to be translated.
Why do people even care about what computer uses its memory for. What I care is performance, as measured by wall clock, and energy consumption.
I find this argument uncompelling. Nearly all actions are committed on mouse-up. This is how the default "click" events work in every environment. Click and hold becomes mouse down and hover, dragging remains hover, release can fire a mouse up, the framework can then inject an extra mouse down as part of the click if necessary. Apps that need more sophisticated behavior can ignore click/tap events and handle mouse up/down on their own.
>Lastly, does anyone really think it would be a good idea for web content plugins to have direct access to graphics card hardware?

Well, since moving all applications 'into the cloud' seems to be all the rage these days, it's inevitable that browsers expose deeper functionality of the underlying operating system.
So, no, its not that unreasonable to expect it.
Video - How to Use THC-Hydra - خدمات العرب
Care to share your application, or even just the relevant business-plan type parts?
Thinking out loud here I guess, but I'd like to hear Eliezer's opinion on the interpretations of QM that do reconcile conscious experience with these probabilities in a way that doesn't require splitting worlds, like these: http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0603027
There is no reason that I can think of that just because Mobile Safari uses tap and hold for some functions, that it couldn't pass it along to Flash when performed on a Flash element.
In their 2 minute pitch video (on the homepage) they say over and over again how people shouldn't use photoshop. Even the first line is "do you want to be a photoshop guru but...". And how does it end? "so don't burn cash and harddrive space on photoshop". Really, that's the best they can come up with?

If complaining about their competition is their best strategy... well then they deserve to fail.
I really think it comes down to video. Video being the one thing that is easiest to replace. Many sites already do and it works like a charm. It’s a problem and it sure would be nice to watch The Daily Show but it’s down to inconvenience, not deal breaker.

If you want to make pretty much anything else work you will have to put serious work in. Just making an iPhone run Flash won’t it a pleasant experience. Some people might prefer that but there is probably nothing Apple hates more than those kinds of trade offs.
Neat! I can't say I'm familiar with the paper, but I'll check it out sometime.
"Searle doesn't make an argument about formally equivalent Turing machines, he makes an argument about a person using an instruction book to manipulate strange characters."

In what way is a hypothetical person using "a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program)" different from a universal Turing machine executing the same instructions? When Turing manually executed his computer chess program, how did this differ from having a computer execute it?

"It's a perfect trap for your intuition. You have an intuitive feeling that if you were to have a conversation in Chinese by following mechanical instructions from a book, you still wouldn't "really understand" Chinese."

I fail to understand how this portion of what you're saying disagrees at all with what I said. I don't really see the rest of what you say as disagreeing with what I said, but it is at least not identical to it.
Oh, groovy!

I like your site. It seems fast and simple, though I didn't step totally through the process. You don't require a lengthy sign-up, and it's obvious what I pay and what I get.

You have set up your site a lot like the traditional sites it seems, whereby you manage the stable of translators. Did you consider doing the site more like 99Designs, where the crowd decides without mediation?
Recognizing that everything has a wavelength is science. Interpreting the interactions of those various wavelengths as "music" (rather than merely "noise") is poetry.

That interpretation is neither muddled nor naive. It's just not science.
I believe they (McDonalds) are also the owner of Donatos pizza. At one point in the past they tried to start up a chain of restaurants modeled after Boston Chicken but it didn't last long.
They've learned a few things since the Arch Deluxe fiasco.
No; we already know that the FBI does not know how to make PDFs properly. (Page numbers and redacting -- not something they are good at, apparently.)
Well, then you'd have to expect the user to know what is a Flash element and what isn't.
I disagree. A lifestyle business is not acceptable for a VC model - they only invest in businesses that operate in large markets and can take these markets by storm. My guess is that the founders realized that they cannot create a scalable business by charging for the products - not enough people would be willing to pay for them. However, they could take the market by storm if their products were free. From a VC's point of view this makes perfect sense because a lifestyle business (despite how great it is) does not justify a VC investment.
What does that mean, precisely?
I quite easily recognized it as sarcasm. But it still wasn't funny. It was just kinda dumb and obvious.
That was a nice thrashing of some of the silly numerology that seems to collect around the Fibonacci sequence/golden ratio.

I do wonder why phi gets so much attention (pi as well), but e doesn't? My suspicion is that it's because logarithms are "harder" to understand...
> Hard to argue that a browser plugin should have direct GPU access when it clearly doesn't need it.

Straw man. Flash doesn't need direct GPU access, just access to video decoding APIs that are accelerated.
On a related note, has anyone been able to get any interactive canvas demos to work on Mobile Safari? I've tried a few, and it seems like there are some related input issues there as well.

e.g. Sketchpad: http://mugtug.com/sketchpad/
Test it.

Ask everyone what problems they can think of. Look to historically similar things. Look to known human biases and see if you are falling to any of them. See if anyone is confident enough that they will put their money where their mouth is and bet on it succeeding if done as described. If you're still confident, build it ( note that lack of immediate success may not prove the idea is a bad one - maybe implementation or marketing).

You want to know if your model is a good model of reality then you need to test it against reality - but actually trying it might be the easiest way first, depending on what the idea is.
Well, it's inconceivable to Searle.

Searle's problem is that, much as we can't imagine how silicon can be conscious, we can't imagine how squishy physical brains are capable of conscious experiences either, even though we know they are, because we are. His solution is that biological stuff just has these special properties, that's a "brute fact" about biological stuff and it's not true of silicon stuff. And I think most philosophers of mind (who are, by and large, nonprogrammers) think that's too 'magical' to be true.

In fact a very popular idea now in philosophy is that consciousness is (in some sense) a fundamental physical property, and when physical things are arranged in the right way, they become conscious like us or any other animal. And the proper arrangement of particles to invoke these high-level conscious properties must help organisms survive, or else it'd be unlikely that we have them. And so machines structured the right way can probably be conscious too.
It wouldn't take 100 to 200 million to develop a quality mmo experience with social hooks and way above average art.

It could be done for under 500k from a reputable studio.
The overall experience is worse on Linux, with sound issues and on 64-bit Linux, clickable areas that don't line up with the visible controls. I was just talking about CPU usage.
Comparing Colour Space Conversion Libraries
If it's significantly faster to do what you want in Flash, do it that way first. Your users are almost certain to have it.

Most of the conversations of the evilness of flash are limited to the HN sort of audience. I don't think that the internet audience at large really cares about it all that much.

If the features end up being really useful and you decide you hate Flash, you can revisit it and write it in something else later.

If the features end up not getting used, then you saved yourself a bunch of time on a feature that didn't end up being a big deal.
EDIT: It was called Hearth Express. I didn't realize they later bought (and then sold) Boston [Chicken|Market].
The problem seems to be that the only event that can be passed to the page is a click, and it's sent on touch-up. Touch-down does nothing (since it could be a click or a drag), and a drag scrolls the page. The only thing they currently send through is a mouse-up, which seems to be sent through as a click.

In pseudocode:

on touch:
# do nothing yet

if drag:
scroll page
else: # was just a tap
send click to page

Granted, this is just how Mobile Safari is handling things, but how else could Mobile Safari handle things?
http://www.autistics.org/library/inertia.html
This article doesn't directly deal with the iPhone or app store. It's talking about Flash on desktop/laptop Macs, and as far as I can tell, the vast majority of the problems with that are Adobe's fault.

I hate that Apple has made its phone OS a walled garden. I won't buy one, and I won't develop for it, but this article doesn't really have anything to do with it.
If you go to Whole Foods Market, all of the salespeople there are in the second category, which is why people enjoy shopping there even at the price points they charge.
X.org lost $5000 from their Paypal account
this has been their stated direction for a while now, just wish they'd hurry up and release the updated version of gmail that doesn't require gears..
Possibly sell things like tools, filters, palettes, textures, brushes, etc
> Trying to list all the unpublished author-hopefuls

> I know who just stopped submitting stuff would be

> an exercise in futility.

That seems a little ironic in the context of this thread. :D
You completely missed the point of the unlock (and pretty much the rest that followed). I WAS talking about the defaults. Take a look at the Nexus One and iPhone unlock screens.

http://www.simonblog.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/1...

http://www.thesearethedroids.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/...

The nexus one is far more subtle - first time users have no obvious way of knowing they have to drag the green unlock button except for a small green dot that appears when you press. The iPhone is certainly more user-friendly here...except after that first time, it becomes annoying, whereas the N1's button remains pleasing. This isn't about replacing the lock screen, its about how the default works. This is one small example of how many other things work. In their endless praise of the iPhone, people are not aware (or refuse to acknowledge) the sacrifices and tradeoffs that go into making things obvious for first time users.
"Boreout is a management theory that posits that lack of work, boredom, and consequent lack of satisfaction are a common malaise affecting individuals working in modern organizations, especially in office-based white collar jobs. This theory was first expounded in 2008..." (emphasis mine)

2008? We've had a generation of movies, books, etc. in which this idea is one of the main themes at the very least. Office Space, anyone? Fight Club, even?
Thanks, this is a very interesting read. Also, I'm jealous of your adventures to Mt. Everest, the Great Barrier Reef, and MIT :)

I made it up Kili once, but Everest is a different beast.
I may be misremembering, but I believe QTKit basically just lets you hand it encoded video data, and then it decodes and renders it to the screen (where you tell it to, of course).

Because of how browser plugins work, Flash needs an API that will let them decode the video, get the decoded YUV data back, and then do something with them. I don't think QTKit provides this.

This is why VDPAU on Linux is also unsuitable for in-browser video acceleration.
Maybe this is a function of who I hang out with, but I haven't found poor slobs to be incredibly easy to find since I left the public school system. And would you really want to hire the poor slob at all?

Ideally, your organization would consist only of people who can both start and finish projects. Something seems to get lost in translation when you have one group of people responsible for starting projects and another responsible for finishing them.

(Disclaimer: this may not apply to big companies. I can think of a few people within Google that I definitely would put into the "starter" category, and a few more that I would definitely put into the "finisher" category. Google is big enough to support that division of labor. Your startup is probably not.)
Element 112 is Named Copernicium (Cn)
Make users more like people (to make discussions better).

Thought of this after watching a recent frontline: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/

One interesting thing that the creator of Second Life said: when discussions happen in a virtual work they are much more like real interactions. So if all HN discussions moved to 2nd life, that would help solve some of the issues with trolling, etc. This then begs the question: would other less drastic measures like avatars help?