skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think they're referencing the part about avoiding risk. i.e., "immortalists" are not as concerned about accidental death, but having the chance to (otherwise) live and die on their terms, when they have accomplished what they wish to.

That said (in support of the grandparent comment), I did think it was an interesting point to at least raise in your piece for those that might not have previously considered it.
I classify it as a search engine. I'm in to doing whatever produces the best results. I started with my own crawler before BOSS existed and then switched that piece to it (highly modified of course) to concentrate on where the marginal benefit lies. Techcrunch initially classified it as a "hybrid search engine," so maybe that is a better term?
I'm not sure anyone is arguing Flash will be better forever, it's just at the moment everyone is getting excited about Canvas even though it's not a viable replacement in most situations yet.
On Apple? I fixed this (I think) the other night. Can you verify?
Im surprised no one has put forward:

"revenge by china" slightly more on topic im struggling to belive they only have one load balancer for the whole of YouTube.
I noticed the same thing. I was getting ~70fps in the flash version, but it looked like it was stuttering and dropping frames. Try the link at the bottom that's rate limited to 25fps. It appears very smooth.
The "!Bang" page confused me for quite a few seconds.

I have buried in some old memory layer the use of "!" as logic negation prefix (for plain ASCII typing), e.g. x = !y

Curiously, I'm OK with the Unix shell "!cmd" to repeat ...
Certainly does, but I think the resynthesizer plugin does pretty well.
> And, like the first link I included, it's interesting to consider the possibility that you consciousness could be recreated sometime even after you die based upon a recording of your activity, whether a blog post, a 'brain dump', or something else entirely.

It's very interesting, that's why it makes for great science fiction. Science fiction can be an awesome inspiration for real science and plenty of things in real life today were science fiction not that long ago.

But the link between knowing that our brains store and process information and storing a copy of that state and bringing it back to life again in some other substrate (another brain or a digital simulation of one) is a very large distance away from our current capabilities.

> why shut down the sense of wonder and possibility?

That's not my intention. The thing that bothers me is that it seems as though a fairly large number of people are living under the impression that these things are 'just around the corner'. I'm all for trying to achieve some or all of this, but I think we should be realistic about our expectations.

The 'anti aging' market is the modern equivalent of snake oil and there are plenty of salesmen and more than a few of the gullible.

And 'uploading/storing/downloading' is another order of magnitude more complicated than simple preservation of what we have.
It's funny, because it's really designed for normals, and the early adopter types complain a lot (rightly so from their perspective) about things for them--bigger text, less density, lighter feel, etc. I do make features for early adopter/advanced users though. It's really a hybrid approach in attempt to "cross the chasm" and get these folks to help introduce it to normals, e.g. their parents and siblings.
The Legend of the Boiling Frog is just a Legend
The only thing that is keeping me from using Linux fulltime is Photoshop.

I had to literally get my officemates to see that video. It is unbelievable.
ah geez got some tight arses round here huh? a little bit of fun with a name, meh.
Thanks! Please let me know your feedback after a the trial.
Yes, most definitely plans for this are on the list! It's a recurring piece of feedback.
Living and dying with dignity is already possible in some parts of the world, I'm happy to be living in one of them.

It's only decent to be able to say that enough is enough. The case of Terri Schiavo shows that some parts of the world still have a long way to go in this.

The 'pro life' movement is probably going to transform into a 'do not delete' movement in the future :)
And on the short-lived SciFi series Lexx, at least the what to do with immortality aspect. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunnen-G)
Has Emily Howell Passed the Musical Turing Test?
Although to be honest, my reality is the opposite: my non-techie friends use facebook a lot, and I don't...
Heh, you think there is a better way to explain it?
Interesting, thanks ! I'll order it and read it.
That is basically a core piece of my strategy: http://duckduckgo.com/blog/what-google-cant-copy-easily.html

I hadn't considered that feature though. Don't you think the RIAA and MPAA would come after me in like 3 sec?
I'm not sure but I think yesterday and today all network is suffering from DNS issues.

But definitely strange, yesterday Google Analitics,reddit,Wikipedia(EN) were down,and twitter and gmail behaved strangely.
Maybe was just the bad day for the network :)
I listen to music through noise-reducing headphones. This doesn't work if people are being really obnoxious, or the person next to me is on the phone really loud, but it's fine most of the time; certainly it works for filtering out repeated automated announcements.
101 Ways to Promote Your Web Site
"Paying people to be motivated to bother to work on open source code seems odd."

They're not paying people to be motivated to bother. They're paying people to work. Therefore they "create and release open source doe for the benefit of all". Done. Tick.

"in something like open source, does it make sense to wave money at people who aren't already intrinsically attracted towards the cause?

what cause? open source is not about charity.

"If they're not familiar with these concepts and they're taking software engineering classes".

Concepts are one thing "exposure to real-world" is totally different.
it's not going to effect my day

Sorry to be a pedant, but: affect

Thumb rule: when used as a verb, it's pretty much always "affect"; when a noun, "effect".
BitTorrent Inc. is hiring. You can send your resume to jobs@bittorrent.com
If I ever get a female child that is smitten by the scourge called Barbie (oh please, O [Insert Deity Here], make her a Lego child), I'll at least give her one like these so she can have an Engineer Barbie (oh, the bragging potential, "My Mum is a computer engineer just like Barbie!"). Not that my grandmother's misguided attempts at girlifying me with Pink Mermaid Barbie ever worked, anyway.
Ads have been on and off, but subtle. There's an issue with the ad feed that I was using that caused me to turn it off for a while. I've been so busy I haven't fixed it, but I'll get to it soon :).
What Would Facebook's IPO Look Like?
Flash does have hardware acceleration support, but it wouldn't be helping in this situation. It actually makes things slower in most cases apart from video playback.
I have been considering using Clojure for Android, too. My primary concerns are that it takes a long time to start up, and runs slowly. My understanding is that by default, Clojure depends heavily on a dynamic runtime, and Dalvik, the Android virtual machine, makes introspection quite expensive. See Remco van't Veer's posts on the clojure group. (He's the guy behind the clojure-android fork.)
It used to recognize which one you chose, then it showed you the first page of N amount of results, which for some categories is over 200,000 reviews, in alphabetical order. I got advice from HN'ers that it needed to be changed :)

The account simply narrows down the results for you based on your selections of categories and locations. You can enter just one location and it will still work, it just doesn't tell you that.

The account is barely an account, just pick a username and e-mail address, click, your password is in your inbox. Simply used to remember your preferences since it's pretty heavily customized (narrowed down) for you, to be relevant.

Now that I've explained it a bit more, do you have any suggestions?
Would you like to go into specifics and teach us something?
Next week Jacques tells us there is no Easter Bunny and that Santa was really a communist.

:)

Best point in this article is the one about working memory. This is something I didn't understand at 20 but know too well at 40. The human mind is made to forget things -- lots of things. In fact, the ability to forget things is probably what keeps us sane and able to focus. Otherwise one thing would trigger another and we would just spin off on tangents all the time.

Having read the article, and agreeing with the points and sentiments, I still think the Great Singularity Cometh. Just nowhere near 20 years. More like 500. And I think by that time we will have a much different idea of what is human and what is not. So it all works out.

I've been meaning to set up getting frozen when I die. Not for immortality -- I think the problems Jacques mentions will work out but take a while -- but simply for life extension. I think the definition of "die" is a lot more flexible than we currently imagine and I think there's a chance that sometime in my lifetime we'll work out cryogenics to the point where there's a shot at getting another 20-40 years at some point in the distant future after you die the first time. (Although coming back to life with everybody else you know gone for hundreds of years has to be a very sobering thing.)

But the main, critical point here is that yes, you will die. And, apologies for the existentialist plug, but how you deal with your impending death, in a real and immediate fashion, is what separates you from a lawn slug. The denial of one's death through whatever fashion is a great travesty on what it means to be human.

And I'm almost certain the Easter Bunny isn't coming for somebody here, but I'm not going to mention any names. Starts with a J, though.
Not only would you have to perform a 'near perfect' programming of such an intelligence,

No you don't. You need to perform a near perfect simulation of the physics of a brain. It's not nearly as difficult as intelligence, since you only need a low level understanding of what is going on.

We are considerably closer to this than we were in the past. We can already simulate nerve clusters and some parts of vision processing.
How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords
Alternately, John might actually mean he doesn't think YouTube being down will cause his day to happen enormously. :)
Audiotool from Hobnox is out
Who said they only have one load balancer?
I actually have a button budget. $400 this month.

I'd like to tell you "And they're kicking my old, cheap buttons' hindquarters in an A/B test" but that would be the exact opposite of the truth. sigh Can't win them all.
TVS Motors to Launch Hybrid TVS Scooty in India Soon
Wow still dead wonder how much money this costs them? Guess it would be offpeak time right now which would be something I'd be thankful for, which is why we're shutdown and am running maintenance right now.
Cyber Crime &amp; Terrorism Take a Dangerous Turn
Besides The Reasoned Schemer, another excellent logic programming book is _The Art of Prolog_ by Sterling and Shapiro. While it uses Prolog rather than Lisp, it's overall focus is more on Logic Programming than Prolog specifically. It starts with the big ideas in Logic Programming and what they're theoretically capable of, and then shifts to Prolog, the most mainstream implementation of an LP language, and the design trade-offs it has made. (There are other great books more specific to Prolog, if you find you like it.)

Also, it has been out of print for a while, and the second edition can be pretty expensive ($90-100ish used). The first edition is much cheaper ($2-5), and while the second covers a newer version of Prolog and greatly expands on the "projects in Prolog" chapters, the first still covers the core LP concepts pretty well.
When I was young and learned that, I equated "Affect" to "Action", making "Effect" "Not An Action." It's silly, but I still use it to this day.

Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosey.
Knuckle Months.

And so many others.
Building Sand Castles in Time
It works the same way as Citysearch or Yelp, in that aspect, anyone can review you. Members need to be aware of their local laws when writing potentially libelious or hateful statements - you open yourself up to lawsuits if you go on the site and start stirring up lies.

It's pretty easy to make your point, even a negative one, without being libelious/hateful/rude, which is the way it should be done.
Interesting to see the variety of results people are getting here. If anyone is using the Flash 10.1 beta they'll probably find the tests never get above 60FPS due to alterations in the timing system from previous versions.

The one slightly misleading thing about this test case is I'm pretty sure canvas would fall behind quite quickly with a scene with more complicated shapes (understandably so, you have to call JS functions to redraw everything every frame, whereas in Flash you could draw once and then move objects around and let the renderer deal with it without the overhead of calling the drawing functions every time).
Showing Appreciation for your most loyal Users
But bodies, like all machines, really do wear, and eventually they wear out.

Wow - imagine if we could repair machines! We could have vintage cars that were actually drivable instead of mounds of rust. We could have planes from WWII that, if anything, fly better today than the day they were built. We wouldn't have to throw things away the first instant they exhibited any sign of trouble.

Oh, wait. We do have all those things.

Sarcasm aside, you know what, give me the indefinite lifespan and I'll take my chances with the boredom and accidental death and brain overflow and collapsing society. Cause I'm sure all those things are bad but guess what, it's better than being dead.
You lost me the moment you mentioned Penrose. I've seldom read a more tedious fumbling for mysteries, all but Luddite in their hope for some deep mysterious law of the universe that would prevent computers (machines working in the universe) from emulating brains (machines working in the universe) than Shadows Of The Mind. I haven't discarded it only out of having respect for books, but I have too much respect for my fellow man to risk having it sold in a second-hand bookshop.

I don't think that there is a difference between a simulation of a brain and a simulation of the mechanics of a brain. I believe that's the whole point of the Turing Test thought experiment. If it talks like a mind then it is a mind.

Actually, you're argument seemed pretty weak up until then, but Penrose was the last straw. The only thing worse you could have done is brought up the Chinese Room. Re continuity of the self, that's an interesting problem for philosophers, but it isn't a practical problem. You aren't your memories; more than your memories, you are your patterns and habits. But those also change, though not all at once. At 30, I am not the same person I was at 25, much less 20. For identity, there is just an apparent continuity of existence.

Personally, I think cryogenics is the key, as I don't think the technology for proper life extension will appear within my immediate lifetime.
It doesn't seem risky in the US, I'm not aware of any similar laws here.

Fortunately, I don't live in the UK, so their laws don't apply to me, even if they say they do.
They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
> I don't think the technology for proper life extension will appear within my immediate lifetime.

Looks like we agree after all then.

Penrose's point is that the brain might be quantum mechanical in nature.
We discussed this yesterday.
It's easy to get hung up on finding "the right (perfect) idea", but the highest probability for a new business to succeed is to do something that is already being done by others, who are making a living at it. Add to it, change it, innovate on it, but start with something that's already a proven model in the world.

In other words, pick something (a piece of software?) you care about, that others are making a living with, do a knock off of it and then innovate.

People think the challenge is succeeding, but the more important challenge is starting at all.
You've done a great job at pointing out the weaknesses of the arguments -- bodies do get repaired, people manage to find things to do, and accidental death is a much easier risk to deal with than certain death.

However bodies are not even in the same few orders of magnitude of complexity as an old car, spending 200 years plugged into Facebook probably isn't the most productive thing for the rest of society, and your brain still can only hold so much and you still be you.

So -- points for pointing out the flaws, but no credit for failing to see the larger truth. Yes, being alive forever beats dying. Now on to step 2, where you start critically thinking about the odds of you personally living forever and the real trade-offs with not dying. Which is Jacques point.

The main point where Jacques blew it? He used our current definition of human as a working definition for the future. This species is evolving, and evolving at a super-fast rate. I don't think we would recognize our descendants ten thousand years from now as being human in any way.
Yes, we can repair machines. And to some extent - and in the future to a further extent - we will be able to repair our bodies. But that's not the near future.

> give me the indefinite lifespan and I'll take my chances with the boredom and accidental death and brain overflow and collapsing society. Cause I'm sure all those things are bad but guess what, it's better than being dead.

The reality is though, that chances are much better than even that those things will not come to pass in our lifetimes, or even in our grandchildrens lifetimes.

So in spite of it being 'better' than being dead, chances are that you will die. What's so hard about it?

There are billions of data points (all the creatures that ever lived have died, with the exception of those that have not yet lived long enough to outlive their natural life span) and there isn't a single one that lived longer than 1500 years (an Olive tree, if I'm not mistaken).
Aren't they cash flow negative? If so, they're actually saving money the longer they're down. Maybe it's a cost-cutting maneuver. :)
Drupal in Rackspace "Cloud Sites" platform - some tips from our experiences
Benutzerkonto | Scoop.at - Social News aus Österreich
I disagree. You can search DDG with !scala {}{}{}{}{syntax-laden thing}{}{}{}{} and get results. Google doesn't really have anything that compares to language-specific search functionality.

The 60-70% of things I don't find on DDG immediately, I don't find immediately on Google either. Creative queries win at the same rate on both sides of the equation IMO.

I use DDG as my default and won't be going back just out of principal. I think DDG has a fantastic search engine in the works that could rival Google's "relevant" ad-laden results within the next year and a half.

My only complaint? Color scheme and logo. It just seems IDK, sort of... McDonalds? Gabriel, can I change your logo, please? :)
It seems more of a DNS round robin thing. I did jump to think of China when I first saw the headline also.
Frenchman Arrested After Hacking Into Obama's Twitter Accounts
SmartZone Communications Center: Inbox
If you search for "reddit", you get a reddit icon in the yellow box.

If you search for "hacker news", you get ... a reddit icon in the yellow box.

(And no, it is clearly not an accident.)
Semi-public information, such as address or phone number, isn't allowed on the profiles, even though a simple whitepages.com search allows that.

The amount of information in the more than 1 million reviews that would be considered "private" is less than what you would already find through available avenues such as a Google search or even public records.
I think it helps solidify the brand. Makes it seem more like a services company that won't go away over night. Not a bad idea.

Hell, just offer an extremely tiny "DuckMail" beta with 8 users and never take it public -- it's the thought that counts IMO.
This is a very superficial article. Yes, immortality will be hard to achieve. Yes, it'll have all sorts of issues. Yes, we'll have to rethink a lot of things about how we view life and the purpose of life. That doesn't mean we won't resolve those issues.

Are you suggesting the current system is flawless? I think we're pretty good at dealing with systems with problems.

I'd say it's a miracle it works even as is. I don't see how tweaking the miracle is any less realistic than the miracle itself.
Uhm, these would be more like garbage-collection 'best practices'...
Have (tried to ;) read it, but this just describes patterns for constructing the smallest building blocks for what I described.
Precisely. He did that on purpose, and I remember him saying so at the time. I trusted CACert a long time ago so I forgot all about it. Otherwise I would have posted the http link to avoid the fuss.
You make that sound so easy.

We can't even simulate a single drop of water with any chance of fidelity, and we probably won't be able to do so in the near future.

These problems are hard, very hard. Hundreds of millions have been spent, and many billions more will be spent before 'a low level understanding' of what is going on will be available. And then you can begin to solve these problems.

A famous scientist is on the record for having said that within a decade they'd have a working simulacrum of a human brain, meanwhile they are slogging it out with others that claim to be simulating the brain of a cat: (http://news.techworld.com/personal-tech/3207325/scientist-ca... and http://www.brainmaya.com/neuroscience/neuroscience-videos/su...) but meanwhile we can't even vat-grow a cockroach from scratch.

I'm all with Dijkstra on this one, whether computers can think is just as meaningless as asking whether a submarine can swim.

A molecular simulation of a brain is extremely interesting but I doubt that that is the shortest route to AI, especially a simplified simulation.
> you just wrote a "tends to" point about micro-benchmarks

I am not a database guy. I also don't know enough about Digg's set up to say with authority if these comments make sense. So I specifically wrote "I feel," "tends to," and "imply" because I'm not comfortable making an absolute statement about the issue.

However... I don't see how this test is in any way relevant. a 30GB database? Running on totally different hardware?

In any case, re-reading the article again, I see that relevance paragraph now. I guess I missed it the first time around between all of the flaming, trollish comments about both NoSQL and MySQL. But I still don't see how we can extrapolate this test in any way to imply anything about Digg's practices at all. Then again, it's 8:30am.
Who's exhibiting at huge PAX East gaming expo -- and who isn't
Who's spending 200 years plugged into Facebook? I don't use it now and I doubt I'd suddenly start. I've got things to do!

your brain still can only hold so much and you still be you

Well by that logic I've died several times already. I'm very far from the same person I was at age 5 or even 15. I don't mind changing and evolving, even if you want to call that a kind of death. It's so gradual that I doubt I'd even notice.

on to step 2, where you start critically thinking about the odds of you personally living forever

I do not pretend that the odds are favourable, but that is orthogonal to all this justification about why dying is good and healthy. Dying sucks, man, no matter how much you try to dress it up as a good, socially beneficial natural part of life.

the real trade-offs with not dying. Which is Jacques point.

Well, I guess my point is that I could not care less what the trade-off is, anything is better than dying, because any problem can be solved, but you can never come back from death.
Git snapshot
Tropo.com Cloud Communications Platform Adds Twitter and goes International