skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many of the people who ask this question don't really want an answer, because they're already committed to leaving "room" for an immaterial soul. So the simplicity of the answer depends mostly on the ideological commitment of the questioner.

I'm game if you are, though. You might start by thinking about a modern digital computer. It's made up of a very large number of very small devices (transistors) that sling populations of electrons back and forth. The brain is made of a much larger number of less-small devices called neurons, that sling bigger populations of bigger objects (organic molecules) back and forth. So according to the basic understanding of QM that tells us relative indeterminacy increases when considering smaller objects, the functioning of the human brain is marginally more predictable than the insides of a modern computer.
This was a great thing for him to do but I am a bit disturbed that it was made public. I think that such acts of charity should remain private and not aired to everyone- gives the donor more of an opportunity to become arrogant.
Jwz's guide to backups: "Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway."
I remember having a conversation with a couple coworkers and my former boss about the nature of "talent". My hypothesis is that what we think of as innate talent or giftedness really arises from slight differences in pain/reward pathways in the brain, such that "gifted" people derive enjoyment from activities that the average person finds very boring. This leads to them practicing those activities more often, which leads to them becoming more skilled, which leads to more enjoyment, and a positive feedback cycle ensues. The amazing feats we see are the cumulative results of years of this feedback cycle - at each stage, the gifted person is just a little bit better than the average folk and enjoys the activity just a little more, but over time that lead compounds.

That was my experience with math, and has for the most part been my experience with computers. Even when I was "on strike" in 6th grade and refused to do any schoolwork, I found it very difficult to avoid the math tests or homework. I tried once and found it so boring that on all further math work, if I wanted to protest how stupid the assignment was, I'd just do all the work and write down the wrong answers in the answer column or do it and refuse to turn it in.

When I quit my job to work on my startup, my former boss threw up all sorts of objections like "You have no idea if this'll work, and if it doesn't, you might find yourself writing lots of code for nothing, and that really sucks." And I just kinda looked at him a little funny. What I wanted to say was, "Dude, that's what I do anyway. That's what I do for you, that's what I do when I get home, and that's what I'd continue to do even if I cashed out for millions. There's nothing wrong with writing lots of code for nothing, and on the off chance it succeeds, it means I won't have to work for superficial idiots like you." (I didn't; I just said "Okay. I'm still leaving" and left.)
Concurrent and Multicore Haskell (Slides)
Basically he's saying that 'quantum mechanics' is the scientific substitute for 'magic'. Most people know jack about it, just that it's really hard and explains weird things.
Luckily annotations, like generics, are optional. Because damn is that syntax ugly.
Technology Strikes Again - laptop camera catches thieves
I think that Google probably knows who you are pretty well. How often do you log into Gmail and then forget to log out and do searches on Google? Even without doing that, it's still tracking you via cookies.

You're fooling yourself if you don't think that Google has been tracking you and your searches for the last ten years.

In fact, I would guess that it knows a fair amount of things about you that you would never post on Facebook.
Because quantum consciousness is a 'special sauce' theory analogous to what vitalism was in biology - the idea that biomechanical processes are not enough to account for life and that some magical 'vital principle' is necessary. Fueled by people with an emotional agenda, that debate went on for decades before being thrown on the same garbage heap as geocentrism.
YC startup looking for rockstar designer
New Incubator Model? Seems a bit familiar to me..
Yes, sorry no. This article, while well researched, is an ultimate fail.

I have both an iphone and a blackberry and there is no way in hell that an iphone can match the blackberry for what the blackberry is good for: email and communication.

I can and do type emails one handed, while I'm typing those emails it's not uncommon for me to receive instant messages (AIM/Blackberry/GTalk), recieve twits, etc. I can even type one handed without looking.

Maybe 2.0 will change this, but I doubt it. Blackberry will win for a long while. Furthermore, the stranglehold on the enterprise sector is going to be hard to crack because IT hates change that has no appreciable benefit.
add the textures and watch your browser slowwwww
I really like the job description web page. It seems you guys have the design covered!
Your boredom is a signal from within that something is fundamentally wrong. I would find out the cause of the boredom rather than work on the effect(s).

You've done all this great work and now it's time to share it. (Don't even use the word "market". It's so overused, it's meaningless.) You should be having a ball doing that. Why not?

Have you lost passion about your "mission"? If so, why?

Is there something wrong with your site that makes you reluctant to promote it? Then maybe you should fix that.

Is this a startup or a hobby? If it's a hobby, then forget about "marketing"; just move on to the next one.

Would you be more comfortable on a team? If so, then work on that.

This is simply another puzzle to be solved, but instead of data and algorithms, it's people and ideas. Hope to soon be hearing about how you solved it. Good luck.
DRM and other crap is already common in gaming.

For instance, Valve's Steam service is quite successful (it has major titles like Team Fortress 2, the Half-Life franchise, Call of Duty 4, etc.) and won't let you run any games without phoning home to it (and running a packet sniffer shows that it's sending some kind of packets home once every 15-45 seconds). You can't even play single-player gamers without it connecting over the Internet.

Also, the Need for Speed games have advertisements in them, when you've already bought the game. Like, you crash into an SUV and you see a big car insurance company logo on the side, and every time you get a call on your phone from one of the NPCs, you see a Verizon logo. If that isn't enough ammo to help people rationalize copyright infringement I don't know what is.
There you go. MS manages to mess up their last good OS.
My point was more that he dismissed the viewpoint right away because it disagreed with something he was passionate about. I still think "no" is the wrong answer because both of you are responding to a question the article doesn't propose. The title was an eye-catcher. The article was about the hype dissipating.

And of course, because I'm not super enthusiastic my post is downmodded. The community on YC is alarmingly sensitive...
Pissing contest, I know, but that doesn't necessarily hold at all top tier schools. At MIT I've found pretty much every professor to be willing to chat with students, whether just after class or at office hours. At the same time, I have noticed a general lack of students wanting to...
Awesome thanks for all the excellent links. I find my way to your posts often, but didn't realize how often I bookmarked them in delicious.

Keep up the good work.
I agree completely, gscott.

You do whatever you gotta do to get the sale.

That's no excuse, however, for sales people to operate in a vacuum. It's better for everyone if the entire team understands the plan.

And it'll be a lot easier for angstrom to become "Super Angstrom" if he has a clue about what's going on instead of being nailed with an unreasonable demand at the last minute.

If you want anyone to do anything "above and beyond the call of duty", doesn't it naturally follow that you should do everything you can to help them do it?
Although Gladwell would argue that Lisp, too, was as much an invention as anything done with it afterwards, insofar as the person who invented, say, CLOS was simply discovering it (in McCarthy's terms) before someone else did.
Yahoo purchased Inquisitor search plugin for Safari
Ask YC: What's the most hacker-friendly keyboard?
I'm using a Logitech Internet Navigator Keyboard that I got for $6.99 over 5 years ago. Since then I've tried a lot of other keyboards (including some really expensive Microsoft and Logitech models) and found that the flashier they are the less coder-friendly they become and always came back to the same basic keyboard...

Which keyboards do YC members use? What's a good keyboard for someone coding/typing 18 hours a day, from a purely tactile-feedback, key-layout POV?
Tomorrow Google decides that they are going to do IP based filtering, on spam sites...

... and you switch web hosts? In, like, a day?

... or buy a static IP?

... and/or you and every other customer of webfaction.com threatens to switch, whereupon webfaction.com, faced with wholesale erosion of their business, gets medieval on the "spam sites" and Google forgives them?

I appreciate that this would be a major expense and hassle if it happened very often. But (a) this is still a hypothetical example: does Google actually do this? And (b) if this keeps on happening to you, you need to re-evaluate your methodology for choosing web hosts. :)
He's in his 30s; young but not exactly a "boy...."
Yes. They migrated most of the app to Java and made it web-based. Eclipse plugins and java for extensibility are going to replace the VBA.
DRM is common, and it never works. Valve's single player games are as easy to pirate as anything else. Has there ever been a single player game where DRM succeeded?
Just curios, how does the karma point work?
Aside from the last clause, I'd have gone ahead and said it.
The founder's dilemma: How to play the final sale
I've seen it, and have it running on my server in alpha.
Hmm .. is it really accurate to say he is testing "Einstein's theories"?
I don't think you can dismiss Sir Roger Penrose like that. He may be wrong, but it's not for lack of understanding of quantum mechanics.
I tend to post in bursts, so most of my karma comes over periods of a week or two when I'm posting several times a day. It's actually a bad sign, because it means I'm not working on my startup. ;-) Then there are periods where I'll post like twice a week and my RescueTime log'll show that I'm spending like 80-90% of my computer time coding. So yeah, it's a tradeoff, and ultimately the code is more important, but I find that I burn out if I spend too much coding.
I carry a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite with me wherever I'll be for longer than a day.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-det...

Not the new crappy ones, but the old ones (I've got about 4 and they are all turning a nice yellow patina).
the same YC startup is also looking for rockstar python / rails coders :) ftravis1@gmail.com
Well, that's very interesting. Although this article is merely a pro-journalism example of the very same "consider the case of sites X and Y, where X and Y are cannot be named" phenomenon, so it still isn't clear to me how large the risk is.

And I'm with justindz, who doesn't understand the proposed defense. If a competitor decides to cross the ethical line and take your site down by "generously" having spambots put up links to your site, thereby causing Google to conclude that you're a spammer and shut down your pagerank... can't they do this to all of your sites at once, not just one? My understanding -- correct me if I'm wrong -- is that the cost or supply of spambots is not the limiting factor here.
The 5 Stages of a Consumer Web Startup
I wouldn't agree with your first statement. In any job, no matter how enjoyable or rewarding overall, there are elements which are more interesting and others that are less so.

In my job, the ratio of fun stuff to non-fun stuff is quite high, but still finite -- there's still a fair amount of boring stuff I need to work on periodically. I find that one technique which works well is to try to pipeline my work (if possible) such that I can work on multiple aspects of it simultaneously. Then I can devote a few hours per day (or days per week) on the boring stuff, with the thought of working on the exciting stuff immediately afterwards as a strong motivator.

BTW if anyone finds a job that's uniformly exciting/fun throughout with no boring parts, let me know =)
The real upgrade Apple should make to .Mac: Set it free
It sounded overdramatic in my head at the time, and I was sick of arguing about whether or not it was a good idea. I'd argued enough with myself about whether it was a good idea; I didn't think that either me nor my boss was going to convince the other, so I didn't see anything productive that could come out of the discussion.

Interestingly, our sales guy (who'd been sent to me earlier to get me to stay) saw this immediately. After I explained why I was doing this, he said immediately, "So, even if the Goldman Sachs deal came through tomorrow, and we were rolling in customers, you'd still leave?" I said "Yeah. This is something I have to do, regardless of what the outcome is or what I'm giving up in the process." And he just said, "Interesting. I see where you're coming from. You should go do it; when you're this set on something, you're doing a disservice both to us and to yourself to not pursue it."
IBM Model M

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_Keyboard
what we think of as innate talent or giftedness really arises from slight differences in pain/reward pathways in the brain

Wrong.

There's nothing wrong with writing lots of code for nothing

Wrong.
It is possible to prove, mathematically, that DRM cannot work when an attacker has physical possession of the machine. It is simply impossible - unless the CPU can execute encrypted code where the decryption key is a galactic secret and cannot be found using an electron microscope.

When the code executes on a remote server, however, you have a completely different kettle of fish.
My guess is different kinds of products need different amounts of travel. You don't design an iPod while jetting all over the place. This article seems to be an excuse for getting excited over Steve Jobs' private jet.
Fascinating article! The history of color is oddly neglected, it seems to me. Any subject good enough for Newton and Goethe to weigh in on ought to be worth taking another look at...
Yeah, but is that really a viable revenue model?
Hmm, well, I guess it's about as good as I'd expect from a CNN article attempting to talk about relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory. Which is to say: all over the place, without any substance whatsoever. PR piece for CERN maybe?
Wimpy: Why is Yahoo so afraid of Microsoft?
I guess I've never gotten in deep enough to get "stuck". If I want to keep up with my friends, I've got e-mail, IM and their blogs-- why would I need/want/care about Facebook?
Ask YC: Android Developer Challenge results are in. Did you win? What did you make?
I didn't make it into the final 50, I guess an app that "makes your notes more useful" isn't uber sexy but I do believe it is something people want.

http://groups.google.com/group/android-challenge/browse_thread/thread/41c9ebfcbffc77c7

One of the things that is really cool is that Google is letting you Opt-In if you want to get contacted by the judges to do consulting work.

Dear participant,

During the past few weeks, 100+ judges around the world reviewed over 1,700 applications. They were extremely impressed with the diversity and the large number of high quality entries submitted. It is clear that the number of great applications far exceeds the 50 top scoring applications that will move on to the final round of the Android Developer Challenge.

We regret to inform you that your entry was not among the top 50 submissions. However, we'd like to bring a couple of interesting opportunities to your attention:

1. Due to the high quality of the submissions many of the judges who are also members of the Open Handset Alliance have showed interest in contacting some of the participants regarding their applications to explore further opportunities.

2. In the near future, we'll be creating an Android Developer Challenge Gallery where you can showcase your application. We'll be providing more details shortly on how you can participate in this gallery.

If you're interested in either one of these opportunities, please fill out the following form: [url deleted]
The happy hacking lite 2. I use a mouse & graphics tablet, so the small width helps a lot. I wish it had a separate fn key row, however.

http://pfuca-store.stores.yahoo.net/haphackeylit1.html
(With default viaweb store ugliness! :)
I need marketing for my astrological moon calendar, too. In fact, I have not updated it for months. But maybe if somebody else became interested...

While I was at it, it was lurking around page 3 or 4 in Google searches. Now it is not even among the first 10 pages anymore :-(

Lesson: only take on projects that I can really identify with (astrology doesn't fall into that category...).
"In any job", "In my job", "if anyone finds a job"

Notice a pattern?

You're right, most jobs can have boring elements.

I assumed that OP was talking about his startup, not his job.

I am building a startup that, by definition, is what I want it to be. I can't imagine anything about it being "boring".
+1

I've been using a QWERTZ Natural Keyboard Pro [1] since 2001, and I love it. I keep meaning to try a more effective keyboard layout such as Programmer Dvorak, but I'm finding it hard to find one that appeals to me. I don't want to lose the extra Umlaut and Accent keys so US Dvorak isn't really an option.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:MS_Natural_Keyboard_Pro.J...
Um, no, that is a quantum mysterianism line.

This might have been true in the days before anyone had the concept of macroscopic decoherence (popularly known as many-worlds) but quantum physics is pretty normal these days. See the recent series at Overcoming Bias.
That is why I am not updating (that and I haven't booted windows up for quite some time)
I was thinking basically the same thing. If I'd submitted an essay like that at college, it would have come back dripping with comments like "please justify", "what exactly is your argument?" and that old favourite "you need to develop your ideas".

Also, this: "The user doesn’t care about sophisticated interface features. Locating the desired information is the primary focus." I do care very much about sophisticated interfaces, maybe the author meant "interface bling"? I suspect, in fact, that is what was meant -- fancy but pointless DOM effects are on their way out. We can always hope.
In his books he is rather humble about his knowledge of the subject. Yes, he proposes this hypothesis and supports it, but stops way short of "i know more then the specialists". It's a lot more like "from what i know, it seems very probable".

I also think he's wrong, but at least he's not infatuated about it.

edit: I love his books. Well worth the read, and for those concerned he puts his speculations in chapters very clearly marked "speculations". From his books I first learned the details about Turing machines and lambda calculus, and a lot more.
Whenever I read about a stealth mode start-up I always have a 'omg they're doing the same thing we're doing' moment.

Does that happen to anyone else?
Try to think more carefully about why it is boring. Examine the boringness. What's boring about it? What is there within you that is unable to connect with it? Don't worry about blame, or being judgmental-- just try to figure out what's really going on beneath the surface. If you do so, the answer to your problem will be apparent.
He does know things. For Windows users, Cygwin is a decent alternative to fucking yourself, in case that's the situation on your work computer (nevermind bootability):

rsync -rlpv $HOME /cygdrive/e
The Product Guy’s Weekend Reading (May 9, 2008)
GrandTec Virtually Indestructible Keyboard. I happen to use the glow model: http://www.grandtec.com/products/video/vik_glow.html

It took a little while to get used to it, but now i am quite happy with it.

Also check out: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126360
Kensington SlimType; thin like a laptop keyboard, clicky and fast (unlike new imac keyboards):

http://us.kensington.com/html/5463.html
You may be on Facebook, but the money's in the Long Tail
Why on earth not? Because he's got a knighthood, and might smack me with a mace?

It's not as if there aren't many, many great physicists who have failed to understand quantum mechanics. Max Planck invented the field but never understood it. And Einstein, if he did indeed understand it, never stopped wishing that he didn't have to.

Anyway, I haven't read Penrose's arguments -- geez, I barely take time to read credible science these days -- so I'm not dismissing him: I'm outsourcing my dismissal of him to guys like Dennett. Meanwhile, I'll happily accept your assertion that Penrose understands quantum mechanics perfectly well even if he enjoys abusing it for philosophical kicks, kind of like how the screenwriters who wrote Gladiator claim to have actually read real Roman history before they reinvented it for the screen.
i'm not that picky about keyboards, as long as it's not the white/clear plastic Apple PoS. i do like the matias mac models, besides the cheap wired Logitech and Kensingtons:

http://matias.ca/products/index.php
Ask YC: Anyone else headed to the Semantic Technology Conference?
I'm heading to the Semantic Conference (
http://www.semanticconference.com/) in San Jose in a couple of weeks. Wondering if anyone else from here will be there to meet up with.
Seconded. I'm still using a 15 year old buckling spring keyboard, they're robust and they have great tactile feedback. Although if I were working in open plan, I'm sure the noise would drive everyone else spare.

You can get new keyboards from here: http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/cus101usenon.html
IMHO the Kinesis Advantage is the Rolls Royce of keyboards. After having used it for over a year, I can't imagine going back to anything else.

http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/contoured_usb.htm
When faced with a bug, a non-expert will fix the bug. An expert or prospective expert will ask himself "What caused this bug, and how can I prevent it from ever happening again?"

True, true. And, the further along the path one is, the more different ways there are to analyze "what class of problem does this one particular instance represent?"
It's like asking Hawkins about black holes. These people have huge careers that are not limited to what every digger knows about them. For one thing, his most recent work - Elephant - is a lot more about production software then about AI, and for another they must be pretty bored to answer the same "what is consciousness" and "does light really disappear in a black hole" questions.

Also forgive me about wanting to be a better programmer, especially here on hacker news. What was I thinking.
I couldn't agree more. I use the professional version with the blank keys.

The Happy Hacking keyboards have a great feel (the keys are weighted individually) and give a good boost to typing speed.
If nothing else, it's legitimate to filter non-participants before doing a regression analysis on the rest. It's technically true that you can't predict karma over time, but that's not really an interesting statement until you eliminate the large number of people who sign up, then never post or comment.

My instinct is that once you filter these people, you'll see a much stronger linear relationship between time and karma, since karma isn't normalized by the number of contributions, and number of contributions is probably a poisson process.