skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I think we kind of agree.

Re: #1 personally I think the reason why Apple could make a good onscreen keyboard is because they tried, and tried hard. I don't think there was any secret sauce: it's kind of the only thing you can do if you decided to go full screen

As for replaceable batteries I am with you... though when you read these sites it seems like everybody does mind.

As for point #2 I think the point the author was making is along your same lines. Just that he feels netbooks have also got very poor satisfaction rates (and I actually think studies have shown that, unless you really know what you are getting or are a geek).

As for hardware vs. software, I agree the secret sauce of Apple is in the software, but they also have a solid hardware, and in the hardware they often need to take the tough choices that others don't dare take.
You sidestep the whole hardware problem like that. Computer code encodes software programs, not computers.
Short blurb on scalability by co-founder and fellow news.yc reader Matt Wensing (aka wensing). But nice to see us (I work for Stormpulse) in an alongside The Weather Channel and NHC.

Also mentioned here fwiw, http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/how-weath...
I am not sure you can classify "prejudice" as biologically useful in such a general sense as to include both racism and not sticking your hand in the fire
Ask HN: Control Gmail e-mail
I'm not quite sure if something along these lines is allowed on HN, but a few days a fellow posted a link to a script that allows you to control the time by which incoming and outgoing mail is shown on your gmail.

I was wondering if anyone has a link to that.

-Firstmate
Absolutely. I read up on a lot of science, and even chug through text books. As robryan says above though, reading a book on chemistry or functional analysis is long way from being ready to do research in the field.

One of the reasons I chose applied math was because I thought it was the best centralized position in all of science. It would take me years to switch to another branch of math, but in applied math I can at least switch the focus of application, possibly in under a year or two.
I'd take the imperfect studies listed in the article I provided over two anecdotes. However, for the scenario of using TDD with the Sudoku, where it was done with less chaos, other anecdotes are there: http://johannesbrodwall.com/2010/04/06/why-tdd-makes-a-lot-o...

I say this as a person who likes Norvig more than I like TDD (I'm interested in TDD to see if it is useful for my day to day work, Norvig is more of my high level guilty pleasure, such as his spell checker article or his speech on using lots of data and then algorithm becomes less important)
I'm sort of in your situation, although I do have some background in programming from college years. I also did the consulting thing before getting my MBA. That said, I'm looking for product management positions, and think that they might be a good fit for you too.

In theory, product managers should be able to take care of all the business matters to free the developers to concentrate on the code. Good product managers would be capable of defining requirements, deciding which features for which release, doing some level of marketing and analytics, etc. Your business and consulting background would definitely be a good fit for these kinds of activities.

tl;dr - look for product management positions.
Correct, all this is premised on the fact that we think that we can simulate a brain by using nothing but software.

If that's not the case then we will most likely have to revise our view of biology drastically.
I bought a TimeCapsule and pointed TimeMachine at it on my Mac, so I have hourly backups. Losing an hours worth of work is annoying, but considerably less annoying than losing a days worth of work.
It's probably not so much a predictor as it is one of many prerequisites.
The Odds of Finding a Set in The Card Game SET
Jacques, it was fascinating and terrifying to see how "over your head" the project became. Do you feel like hiring someone who had expertise in the industry would have been a good solution to the death march of iterative re-writes that you ended up locked into?
> I understand that we're all passionately devoted to truth and understanding

For most part, people are only passionately devoted to their ideas/ideals (which they perceive as truth often enough)
App Friday: Why Apple should Gamify the iPhone and the App Store
That should really be in big red text in the docs considering it actually destroys bits. The api also seems inconsistent wrt net.Stream writes are encoded in ASCII but plain writable streams default to utf8: stream.write(string, encoding='utf8', [fd])
Stanford sports nutritionist: fruit the ideal snack
Yeah, I think I get an extra half day a year. I forget, though, because I haven't been here a year, and we just got bought out and had all this stuff reshuffled.
If you have the chance, try and attend a hack weekend like http//:launch48.com . You will meet lots of people who are doing are interested in doing startups. You will get a healthy overview of what it takes in one short weekend.
2. Try and get involved in a startup project even if it is for fun and I promise you that it will jump start something in you.

With your skills (common sense) you could do learn HTML, UX and learn to create mockups e.t.c.

The most important thing you can do now is to take action.

best of luck man
Where Does Apple Draw Its Design Inspiration? Meet Dieter Rams.
Just for context, PZ Myers is a evolutionary developmental (“evo-devo”) biology researcher, which explains the thrust of his criticism. That kind of stuff (developmental processes in embryos, i.e. how the darn animal is built) is right up his alley.
I disagree! Prejudice is simply, "Any preconceived opinion or feeling, whether positive or negative." If we are brought up by our parents to believe that Jewish people have horns, we are prejudiced. If we stick our hand in the fire, and thus form the "cognitive shortcut" (to use kiba's extremely apt term) that fire is not something to put our extremities close to, we are prejudiced.

I think I see what you are saying, and agree that it is necessary to draw distinctions between obviously biologically useful prejudices (fire hurts) and less obviously useful ones (purple people are stupid), but my point was that they are borne by the same mechanism of "educated" preconception.
The Paul Graham article "How to Do What You Love" has some tips in it that you might find useful.

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
It's like asking which terminal cancer is worse.
I've been using emacs for a few years for php/js/css/html. I think it's great as-is without any extra addons. I don't like context completion or tag generation though. Just not my thing.
What I've earned in the past 6 months on the Android Market
Ugh, I had heard that too. Sick days are completely separate over here. I don't understand doing it otherwise - do you want sick people to come in? Go home, recover, and don't infect the office.
Defensive patents can be turned offensive quite instantly. Look at what Oracle is doing.
People keep saying this about any project to build a synthetic brain, and it has a huge level of merit...but its putting the buggy before the horse. You have to be able to build a brain before differences in its experience start to matter, and you have to be able to build the software before the hardware matters. There'd be no point in building experience sets before you built the brain, much as there's little point discussing their importance on a brain as a reason for being unable to build one.

So what if all we can put together is a feral child? It still implies we've built a brain.
Take a Look at the Face of Today's Business Leaders
These make it so the next time you hit 'n' to continue a search, it centers the screen around the result.

" Mappings to keep the cursor in the middle of the screen most the time {{{
nmap n nmzz.`z
nmap N Nmzz.`z
nmap * *mzz.`z
nmap # #mzz.`z
nmap g* g*mzz.`z
nmap g# g#mzz.`z
"}}}
At our universe's speeds, but how fast can you simulate it?
MIT Startup Bootcamp open for registration.  (Event on September 11, 2010)
Intel's doomed McAfee foray - will history repeat itself?
I have an SSD, 8 cores, 12 GB RAM etc., but trying to get processes in the guest OS to scale across multiple cores is very much an uphill battle. VMWare's dual-core emulation was actually worse than single processor for my uses cases.
Everyone is comfortable with different levels of grooming. I've been on multi-week survival trips and backpacking trips where there was no grooming (except the occasional river dunk) to be had. I also presently live in a dense urban city where grooming tends to be a standard, versus when I grew up on my parent's ranch - grooming was more of an "option".

Saying that someone's "preference" is disturbing is a strong indicator of your limited world view; there's nothing scary or icky about being well groomed, clean, and sharp. You can also never take it too literally! There are people out there that like to bleach their anus and I don't consider them disturbing even though that's something I don't find necessary for my own bodily care.

Either way, do what you do, I don't care :-)
Trendy Styles of Funny Car sticker & Custom Bumper Stickers
If you want to know the latest craze, then it is none other than funny car and customer bumper stickers at all. That is why They are very famous and online company offers the best stickers printing service to its valued customers worldwide.
Some great lessons learned.
OH: Intel CEO: "We need an anti-virus..."
It was big, supported platform supported by big company. Until it was not. Overnight, you were told to rewrite all your sources to new, shiny language, also called VB.

Basically, VB1-VB6 were compatible. You made app in any of them, it required only small changes to build with never version, no big deal.

However, 2000 called and Microsoft came with new version, Visual Basic Net. It changed syntax, class libraries, everything. With the old VB, it had only name in common. It looked similar only on the surface (both are Basics, anyway). Sure, they fixed lot of warts, but broke many existing apps, that were in the maintenance mode for the time. If you relied on VB6 apps, and VB6 runtime had problem with new version of your OS, you just could not upgrade without expensive rewrite.

The message is: just because the language or platform is supported by big company, does not mean, that it is safe for your business to build your apps on it. On the other hand, ten years ago I took the risk to build an app in Python. At the time, it was little, unknown language (especially in the MS world). The app still works reliably today and is buildable (only .pycs were deployed) by modern Python.
Yes - it seems amazing that 90+% of web forums are the old php/vBulletin type. My major gripe with these is that they do not have threaded comments. Not to mention a very old-skool UI/UX as you say.

Interesting what you say about db ownership. And I guess for established forums there would be migration considerations too (maybe this is why they haven't upgraded?)

Customization would be no problem. You could allow users to source their own css for example.
As with any other group of people, lots of people who are Catholic don't even know half of the tenets of Catholicism. At least where I live. I basically slept through CCD, and even in my adult life, I've heard a 'huh?' response when I bring up something as big as Vatican II.

I still think that you're right, but you'd need to do a little more market research to prove it out. Even people who know it wouldn't be 'real' might still think it amusing enough to do it anyway.
I want to stress that we have the math to do that...and on regular chipsets, its just rather slow..which is inherent to the key to kurzwiel's points, that we're building faster and faster computers, and that brains (and likely the universe) are not the simplest possible expressions of themselves.
There is strong evidence that the neocortex works on a common algorithm; vision, hearing, touch, language, behavior, and most everything else the neocortex does are manifestations of a single algorithm applied to different modalities of sensory input.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory
http://onintelligence.org/
http://www.numenta.com/Numenta_HTM_Concepts.pdf
Don't Lose Yourself in a Startup
Who needs a Microwave? Tracking Perceptions of Luxury and Necessity
I do this, too. Great computers, great Linux support. It's a win-win.
Agreed. I got Divvy when it was being offered on sale, but I totally would have payed full price for it. The ability to map out sizes to custom keybindings is priceless.
Kurzweil, I think, comes off better in that respect, using phrases like "some of my critics claim that I underestimate the complexity of the problem" which neatly remove the personal jabs while still responding directly to the argument. Myers's style is to get personal and it does occasionally get a bit tired, but usually he gets away with it because he's right. Probably they'd both get on a bit better if they actually met and had a reasonable discussion, rather than relying on reports of what the other said.
This is a question I've been giving a lot of thought to over the last 6 months or so. My conclusion:

We should be attempting to create an ethical, moral set of rules first, and then optimizing for efficiency, rather than creating an efficient system and then moralizing it.

Not that I have any answers for how to do this yet, but that's where I've decided my priorities lie.
FiOS Internet| fios_online_nat
I'm obviously not an early adopter :) Actually, in seriousness I'm probably not. But still, I like to remain anonymous and only reveal personal data when I have absolute control and trust in over who/where I am releasing it to (and I don't mean I don't trust Quora, it's exposing myself to their users that I have an issue with)
does the analysis also includes HFT traders?
Also I remember hearing that Goldman Sachs didn't have a single day of trading loss. Maybe the smaller Quant funds are loosing out on talent to the bigger firms?
Any married women founders or anyone whose wife is doing a startup ? Would be good to get tips from you.

I multitask fairly well but have always feared juggling married life with a startup. I am getting married this october. My fiancee is supportive, an engineer & workaholic himself and to an extent understands startup. I have known him for many years and he stood by me even before when I almost went bankrupt being part of a startup. I think his support and the possibility that I could discuss things from work (which I can't do with my parents/siblings) gives a good feeling.

Only concern is I feel he doesn't "yet" get the stress part and the variable low morale issue at times. It is very weird to him if I say that I am feeling low today and by evening if I am excited that we got 20 more hits on the site.

edit: emphasis
That is what I got from the previous article as well. However, from reading Kurzweil's article get that this point is irrelevant, because he never suggested to reverse engineer the brain in that way. He used the genome argument as an estimate on how complex the brain is, basically viewing the genome as a data compression of the brain.

Myers argument only shows that the decompression algorithm, i.e. the route from the genome to brain, is insanely complex, but it doesn't say anything about the actual complexity of the brain.
So in essence, yes, if we would choose to model the brain in a highly compressed form like the human genome we would potentially need a computer that could model it's own subatomic physics, but that's not likely the way we would want to approach this.

Anyways, this doesn't mean that the brain isn't very complex and impossible for us to model at the moment. They main question is how long it will take for us until this complexity is manageable (if ever).
Pakistan floods an Infographic ( Facts of this Disaster)
Can Computers Pick the Next Big Thing?
Interactive Alphabet Rockets to #2 in iPad App Store Education Category
I'm a singularian, but much more long-term that Kurzweil. Like 500 years, instead of 20.

I think the much more interesting question here isn't "Can hardware simulate the brain or not?" We'll figure that one out eventually. The interesting question is "As hardware and software begin simulating the brain (already happening), and integrating with it (already happening), what are the implications for the species?"

What's a half-singularity look like? Because that's very well how this century might turn out, and instead of arguing at the extremes, it's probably much better to focus on the immediate practical implications of what's already happening.
Summary of the article:

Pareto improvements are changes in allocation that harm no one. State A > State B if A is a Pareto improvement on B, i.e. if no one in State A is worse off than in State B and at least one person is better off.

This is a partial ordering, which means that for some states "A > B == undefined". The example is that (2,2) < (2,3) == TRUE (and similarly, (2,2) < (3,2) == TRUE), but (2,3) < (3,2) is undefined.

Since Pareto efficiency can not evaluate all states relative to each other, economists must define a total ordering which introduces subjectivity and ethical choices.
I think everything runs over XMPP just like Google talk.
docs are wrong, it defaults to utf8
Extra Lives running new Marathon for Clean WAter
Holy Crap, You and I are the same person. I am 28 and got married 12 months ago. My marriage is still strong even with all the odds against us: 1st year living together, 3 year old, my wife moved to a new city, started a new job, started two startups (1 already failed not because of the marriage). It all depends on the people, if your wife/girlfriend/finance thinks that the work you are doing is a waste of time then it will greatly impact your relationship BUT as in my case my wife is a staunch supporter of my ambition to make something great, she pushes me to work harder and SMARTER not wasting time on irrelevant stuff. She has no technical experience or knowledge and is not interested in it, she is only interested in seeing me succeed which makes her a great sounding board when i have difficulties.

I think the key in our relationship is that each night around 11 we stop whatever we are doing and just spend the rest of the night with each other, talking about our days what was good and bad then we watch some tv and relax. Another important thing for us is to eat dinner together, especially since we have a daughter instilling family values is the most important thing to do as parents.

I think if you put your family first, then your partner will support you in your startups because they know that when you have time you will spend it togeather.
Is there a corollary for this that includes the 3 warning signs your blog post sucks?
It's probably a mistake

Nah, it was probably just developed for internal Google consumption.
One problem to consider if you are working on your startup from home is the danger of constant interruptions. It can be hard on your family, especially your wife, to "not be allowed" to interrupt you. You have to remember that your family interrupts you because they care about you and they want you involved in their lives, but at the same time you have to find a way to tactfully get them to stay away from your office during your workday.

Sitting almost perfectly still in front of a computer and concentrating for hours and hours at a stretch is not a natural act. Humans are wired to get involved with the social activities going on around them. Depending on the difficulty of what you are working on, a few family interruptions per day or a too-high noise level from elsewhere in the house can destroy the quality of your work for the entire day.

Interruptions are also a big problem in a traditional office environment, but there you have much less invested in your efficiency. If management isn't willing to pay for private offices where the staff can concentrate properly -- then they get what they pay for and its not really the programmer's job to question it. At least everybody in a shared office area is in the same boat and everybody suffers from the same distractions.

In a startup, however, interruptions can ruin you and must be dealt with.
Hi Ben - a couple more questions: what kind of APIs do you envisage? And what sort of plugins?
The cool things about starting a startup is that you make the rules. I know most people think they need to take the "work-12-hours-a-day-approach" when they start a startup, but that's not mandatory. Not sure who came up with that one.

When you're starting your startup, you should think about what kind of time, energy, etc you want to put into it. I really enjoy what I do, but I also realized working all the time gets in the way of other things I want to do (i.e. spending lots time with people). When I started my business, one of the rules was to work only in the morning, and because I had this mindset from the beginning, everything has worked out great. Sure, sometimes I'll work a little more, and sure, I really enjoy what I do, but if spending time with your wife/husband is really important to you, you can dictate that as long as you do it early.
That's close, but you have to bring in the idea that the ultimate choice is life or death. Life (each individual's) is the standard of value and the starting point from which morality is derived. As long as someone chooses to continue to live (most of us do), they need to use the best means - that is, they should use reason, etc.
If there is I haven't found it yet. Thanks for checking out my post.
Common Hemorrhoid Information
Man, I want more than not burning out.

Heh. My manager emailed me today, reminding me I have 10 days of holiday left in the year and that I should remember to take them. I'm planning walking along Offa's Dyke with my brother, and also taking off some days to work on side projects. And maybe a skiing trip...

(and my dad had the same problems - I think it was one of the factors in my parents breaking up. Now he's remarried and he takes far more time off, despite being in an yet-higher position. I think he's a fair bit happier, too.)
`When I tried going to famous Flash game sites like Newgrounds or Addicting Games, I found that, as Steve Jobs said, “Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers.”'

This is why we at Kongregate created our mobile-optimized site that features only mobile friendly games. Of course, you can still browse the full site if you like.

http://m.kongregate.com/
The issue as well, not just with companies having to NAT now, is that some of them are using their IP block for internal IP addresses that are already NAT'ed. Changing entire network infrastructures over to non-public routable is a costly expense as well.
I think it depends on the type of company. Some big companies dont like it and others promote it. Like everything in life "it depends" is the best answer.
The erosion of America's middle class
> The brain is a product of not just the genome but the environment in which it develops. You are not just the product of your genome. You are the product of your genome and the womb in which you were incubated, and the environmental stressors on your mother.

While I may be a product of my genome plus a specific womb with specific stressors (which affected that womb), we're not trying to duplicate me.

It's sufficient to generate a brain from a genome and some womb, aka "development environment".
How the LA Times used statistics to rank teachers
I don't get it, all I see is a bunch of junk sites.
I know the author is showing that he is disappointed, but we all know he is proud, more than anything else.
The latest YC companies, like all YC companies, are encouraged to launch as soon as they've built something with a quantum of utility. Of course such things are small initially.