skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rather than quibble over what "intelligence algorithms" mean I am going to pretend you said "human brains or things very similar to such".

I think this pretty well illuminates the source of our "disagreement" (and resolves it), apart from this we're on the same page about the details, I think.

To me, there's a very big difference between what I would qualify as successful AGI (artificial general intelligence) and "human brains or things very similar to such", in that successful AGI could work very differently from a human brain (and IMO, probably will, if/when we ever get there) and still qualify as a bulls-eye hit.

Taking that as our (relatively wide) target, I don't think protein folding and all that fun stuff adds much information.

However, if our target is narrower, simulating a brain or something close to that, then I agree, the details of biology do shift the estimates considerably.

Looking over one of Kurzweil's actual statements:

It is true that the information in the genome goes through a complex route to create a brain, but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.

...it appears that you're right, he's talking more about creating an actual brain than creating some algorithm that solves the same problem (possibly in a different way). Mea culpa: I unwittingly altered his argument before defending it, so I've really been arguing about what he should have said rather than what he actually said.

Not all is lost, though: the fact that his claim can be fixed up so that it's got some actual teeth is still worth noting, and I think Myers criticism is a bit too broad (he essentially claims that you can't say anything useful based on the length of a DNA string, which is not true). I think the real lesson here is that if we want to use DNA length as a proxy for information content, we need to be exquisitely careful about what "information content" means relative to the systems we're discussing, and nail down exactly what systems those are and how we're defining our problem.
I think the point about Google vs. government and who should have our private information is one of the crucial points.

Google is a company and there's very little that we (the citizens) can do against it. Every citizen holds a vote for the government, but only the shareholders have any vote about Google.
Well sure, that would be ideal.

But as an engineer, are you even remotely interested in learning good customer service skills... or making sure the site doesn't come crashing down in an hour?
In the Euripides play about Helen of Troy:

My life and fortunes are a monstrosity,
Partly because of Hera, partly because of my beauty.
If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect
The way you would wipe color off a statue.

Strange as it seems to our modern eyes, they really did consider this beautiful. I'd guess that such bright colors were rare (and expensive) back then, so anything that vivid would have been extraordinary.
I just really liked one of the comments:

"(Steve Jobs = Angelina Jolie; Mark Zuckerberg = Scarlett Johansson; who's Paris Hilton?)

Well, Paris Hilton is pretty but dumb. So the "wealth anorexia" version would be someone who's insanely rich, but dumb. So Paris Hilton is... Paris Hilton."
Back in the dinosaur days I worked with DG minis running AOS/VS, a Multics descendant. From time to time an operator would run the equivalent of cd /; rm -rf, halting everything. The neat thing about the delete command was that would zap the PMGR, peripherals manager, quite early on; unable to communicate with the disks, the delete would fail. Generally one could then locate an older version of :PMGR to rename, then recover. Failing that, one could boot off a "systape" and recover.

Not as hard-core as the recovery through emacs, but greatly welcome under stress.
I prefer the sketches of cartoons to the finished, painted product. Perhaps I appreciate the texture of shapes, or seeing how things are made, or their underlying structure; but successful cartoonists tend to go on to paint them. It may be to do with mainstream art (which ancient statues were in their time) tries to be as vibrant as possible, like commercial art today.
There's definitely some truth to this, but it has more than a hint of the old trope that "the king is virtuous, but misled by wicked advisors".

If Larry and Sergey have a problem with Google's actions or Schmidt's channeling of Larry Ellison in interviews, no one is in a better place to know or do something about it.
that's what Authority Labs built :)
That was a flippant Sagan reference.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s664NsLeFM
As long as its easy to hack up a script to parse the output of the discussion, what difference does it really make where the discussion happens?
He's not creepy, just honest. He knows in the future what we call "privacy" won't exist anymore. Every new innovation gets regulated by the government so that politicians get their cut. Right now we're seeing them redefine "privacy" to mean privacy from anyone other than this corporate/government partnership knowing everything about you. This is what he's talking about -- and it IS inevitable.

Here's the real privacy question: will you be able to keep other PEOPLE from knowing everything about you? I've contributed recently to speakerwiki.org -- they are building a massive database of every public/tech/motivational speaker in the world. Rated and Ranked. So what happens when everyone has a Yelp profile that they don't control? Or do corporate/political interests prevent this from ever happening to control their monopoly on data? To me that's the real privacy question for the next 5-10 years.

On second thought, he is pretty creepy.
It could be as simple as an "advanced" tab in case of configurations

Please God no. "advanced" tabs are the absolute worst plan for configuration problems...
NATCracker: NAT Combinations Matter
Food for thought for the coming age of IPv4-IPv6 "coexistence."
I spoke about this just the other night, supposedly a company wants to implement a city wide retina scan system for criminals and for opt-in people it would act as a payment gateway. We both agreed that a company that isn't controlled in some way by the people should not have that information because they can't properly be held accountable through due process. The government having that information isn't much better at all but if you have to choose between the lesser of two evils I'd pick the government.
HTML5 raises new security issues
You can't escape from the government. You _can_ abstain from google's products.
I see "don't be evil" as Google signalling that they were playing a long-term strategy rather than short-term one. When that "motto" came about in the early 2000s, the web experience was crap because so many companies were trying to cash in for short-term gain. Instead, Google eschewed short-term profits to be in a better place down the road (and look where it got them verses, say, AltaVista). It's not that Google is benevolent per se, but that by concerning themselves with the long term, a nice side-effect is that users are happier.
I'd be much more interested in seeing something like this arranged by drinker-ship of each individual beverage; Coke, Pepsi, Diet Coke would all be massive bubbles, etc.

Still, interesting.
Apropos of the 1 person design thesis, the Antipatterns book said that only 1 in 5 programmers "get" abstraction. That's why democratic design processes tend to fail: the ones who get it are outvoted by the ones who don't.

And that certainly matched my quarter century experience in the field, and boy was it frustrating to watch teams try to build frankly impossible systems.

Heck, I'd be happy if more people got and could use big O notation. In one particularly unhappy case my peers just couldn't grok that the design would vastly outstrip the database's maximum transaction rate in normal customer configurations (number of client workstations).
Not always! A good design(er) would make them useful.
"The most common result of trying extremely hard to be ridiculously rich is becoming modestly successful"

The most common result of trying extremely hard to be ridiculously thin is becoming modestly healthy.

The analogy stands.
It's not in the other half of the genome. All cells in an organism share the same DNA, but different cells develop in a very differentiated manner depending on the cells around them (e.g. should it be a neuron or a connecting tissue?). The "decompression algorithm" is in the laws of physics, biochemistry, and the way life works in general. Since we don't understand these well enough, we can't make reasonable information-theoretic claims about the "decompressed" genome.
my guess on the pricing jump is because culling keyword suggestions from the Google API get's real expensive (if that's where they are getting them from). Going to get the rankings from the SE's is a free API call, but suggestions cost money.

But the idea of adding incremental cost is also a good idea, but it has to be engineered into the merchant system and upgrade page, plus it really gives nobody an incentive to jump up to the next pay level. But I see your point.
Pretty sure TC never works that way.
If your emulator requires substantially different space to encode the raw description of the program than the original, then the emulator sucks.

I can't try to help you any further. You have a conceptual bug in your understanding of the relevant math / CS.

Last I'll say is that your emulator doesn't necessarily "suck" - it may be that it is the best that is theoretically possible and still result in exponential growth in emulated program size.

And, you also don't seem to be following a relatively simple argument about Omega.

It's interesting stuff and we started down this thread on an interesting foot... I only mean here to explicitly sign off and note that, in my opinion, you're just not getting a few basic things I'm not too sure how better to present to you (which is not to say I'm normally particularly good at explaining such things -- only that for whatever reason, in this case, it ain't working).
SpaceX's Dragon Spacecraft Successfully Completes High Altitude Drop Test
glad you spotted that ;) internal mockups actually had the giant dragon mk logo.
Facebook Name Trees
I don't think this is a fair point as most people who are engaged in anything online don't have the technical wherewithal to correctly abstain. How many people do you know who are not directly involved in tech that would even begin to fathom what you meant if you told them to "add a 127.0.0.1 alias to your /etc/hosts file"? Breaking it down further, how many would know what "127.0.0.1" meant, or even what "/etc/hosts" was?
Speakers Needed for Event with Entrepreneurs
Maybe it's prescient if it came from you and me. But if it comes from the CEO of one of the companies that has never seem to care much about privacy it's another matter. They _can_ do thing, change them. It seems to me that Schmidt has not problem with such a future, and that's creepy.

There is no reason why Twitter, Gowalla, and the rest could not have good privacy settings. But that would be horrible for Schmidt since he makes money from knowing what you like or what you may like (and you don't even know it yet).
The more I read about Schmidt the more I think he's soon to be replaced by Larry or Sergey as CEO.

The guy has a knack for putting his foot in his mouth in interviews, and he's been publicly identified as the guy who wanted to stay in China, wanted to abandon Net Neutrality, and who made a few gaffes in reference to the captured wifi network info, etc.

Schmidt is also the face of Google in Washington DC, and has led the Company's efforts to innovate via legislation. He is also very tight with the Obama campaign and campaigned overtly, which is not (in my opinion) an appropriate thing for a CEO to do.

In a lot of ways, his instincts clash with the values that Larry and Sergey seem to be trying very hard to perserve... My prediction is one more gaffe, particularly one accompanied by a stock price dip and he's out.
Could Steve Blank have saved my last startup?
About 10 years ago I was working for a development house that built sites for some well known companies, like Egg and LastMinute.com. But I wasn’t on those projects. I was project managing the build of an employee benefits platform and this particular afternoon found myself in a the board room of a well financed start up with an address close to Buckingham Palace. Picture the scene as the newly appointed, and rather aggressive, CEO/bulldog circled his board whilst smacking the soot blackened fire poker into the palm of his hand. Menacingly. Actually I’m not sure that you can do that without menace.

He was enquiring as to why, after spending £2m, they still hadn’t released a complete offering. He turned to me and everyone else around the table breathed a sigh. I ventured that it was probably because the specification was limited to four screen sketches. This for a site that had many layer of user interaction, and at least 40 separate pages.

At this point two things happened, firstly the sky outside darkened, and secondly the product owner seemed to slide down his chair heading for the safety of the space under the impressively robust mahogany board table.

I turned to my boss, and in retrospect this may have been a mistake, told him to finish the biscuits because I didn’t think that we would be invited back.

I wish I could have suggested that we took a step back, spent the weekend getting familiar with “Four Steps to Epiphany” and regrouped in few days. But to be fare, Steve hadn’t written his book at this point.

So now I’m the guy charged with defining the product, for a our startup, Gruvi. We are one of the 10 teams in the Startup Bootcamp http://www.startupbootcamp.dk/ program in Copenhagen (which is a Nordic take on Y Combinator or Tech Stars). I don’t have a fire poker so I’m hoping to discover our product by connecting with potential users. We’re not fussy, we’ll take anyone that is familiar of with the concept of going to the movies with friends.

To see a little more you please watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw-qrttdiZg (I’m the rather unimpressive guy sporting way too much forhead).

If you are interested in engaging, and I hope you do, you can find us at any of: guineapig@gruvi.tv,
Gruvi.tv (our blog)
Gruvi fan page on Facebook (it aint pretty yet) http://www.facebook.com/pages/Gruvi/141938032505639?ref=sgm

Cheers,
James
Not only are there multiple paths to becoming good, but "good" depends entirely on the requirements. In a start-up, a good programmer often is a programmer that has the ability to complete requirements as fast as possible. You don't want a start-up developer writing 10 lines of code a day on average while being on the hunt for the "best" solution, if there even exists such a thing.

It all totally depends on context, and these articles always use the context from which the author is biased.
Did they also use ultraviolet light to determine the colors and patterns painted on the missing quiver of the bowman statue? Amazing. Also, could it be true that the colors are not exact? Certain pigments could degrade more, leave less of a trace, so assuming the reconstructed colors might be off slightly, they could have been significantly less ugly than these depictions.
On a related note, most people today associated ancient Roman art with their statues. In fact painting and portraiture was a widely practiced art; it's just that statues stand the test of time better.

There's some roman paintings here: http://www.art-and-archaeology.com/roman/painting.html if anyone's interested.
We all suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect, to varying degrees. I would never dream of arguing I don't suffer from it. I though do not go around claiming I know the truth about programming.

I think that perhaps there are two types of programmer - those who like to spend most of the time researching, drawing diagrams and the such like, and the others who just get on with it.

The suggestion of this article is that those who spend most of their time planning, rather than programming are somehow superior - my experience with developers has been the exact opposite.
Can startups learn business models from the SMS habits of the developing world?
I think we are all in violent agreement here about the main points and have a few minor quibbles about small details. The dismal cuisine of which I spoke was probably more of a visceral memory of early-80s winter food options in the midwest than a reflection of current choices (and as much as I may complain I know I was luckier than most because my mom would visit a sister in Chicago every three months or so to hit the ethnic markets available there and stock up on neat things -- back when an eggroll was considered "exotic" ethnic cuisine for midwesterners not living in Chicago, Madison, or Minneapolis this variety was quite welcome...)

One point you sort of touch upon is a constant mystery to me. Canned/frozen/preserved fruits and veggies have come a long way from the cooked-to-mush-during-canning state I remember from my childhood, but there seems to be some "freshness" fetish that was drummed into the collective consciousness during the 80s and 90s which is no longer serving us very well. I am a fairly sophisticated and knowledgeable customer when visiting the market, but I still find it hard to not be influenced by this fresh > preserved idea. For most tomato use cases a high-quality canned variety will taste better than a "fresh" tomato that was shipped more than 200 miles, but it has taken me quite a while to feel comfortable avoiding the produce section and head for the canned vegetable aisle during large swathes of the year.

[And I agree about you about Pollan; he is much like Jared Diamond IMHO, great when doing science/history reporting and it goes downhill fast when they venture closer and closer to politics and policy.]
Three firms control 89% of US soft drink sales [1]. This dominance is obscured from us by the appearance of numerous choices on retailer shelves. Steve Hannaford refers to this as "pseudovariety," or the illusion of diversity, concealing a lack of real choice.

If you assume that people have the same values as the author and want to establish their class credentials by buying from a minor player, then it's proper to conclude that the only reason they buy from the big three is that they have no other choice. If you assume that most people follow their friends' tastes, are responsive to advertising, and don't care much about the minor differences in taste between one sugary drink and another of the same kind, then you can restore common sense and say yes, if there's a beverage on a shelf in a store with a price on it, then anyone who walks by it has a real, non-illusory choice between that beverage and another one. They drink Coke and Dr Pepper because their social norms don't oblige them to take a symbolic stand against the financial dominance and boring aesthetics of major corporations. Their desires and norms tell them to drink a mainstream, ubiquitous brand.
He also takes the "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place." quote out of context, as so many did at the time. Schmidt was pointing out that the government can demand access to data about your searches, and that you need to be conscious of that and be careful.

Between two misinterpretations and quoting a 'quip' to imply that google somehow things it should make all your decisions for you, it is a pretty shoddy post.
This is what I do, although it took some practice. Not only did I like trying to optimize something like a flight, but I was also competitive about it for some reason.

Now I usually check flight twice depending on how far out in the future the trip is going to be. One time to get a base price, and then depending on the trip (and how many flights I saw while checking the base price) I'll book the second time I check. Do I end up with the absolute best price? Probably not, but it also means that once booked I don't have to think about it again.
Folding is easy in comparison with precisely simulating protein interactions that make cell work. I think we have only satellite view on that and are largely unaware of many emergent elusive but necessary phenomenons that occur in that network of interactions.

Also if you think about protein folding like about calling library functions don't expect sane interface and clear separation of abstraction layers there or in any other place. It rarely happens with intelligent designers. Evolution used every dirty hack in every place it could. Everything is so heavily interlocked that I think we will be able simulate living organism right after programmers will become obsolete.
Ask HN: What big successes have come from people involved in the startup scene?
It seems to me that the people who start big, successful web businesses do so from outside the 'startup community'. By that I mean that Mark Zuckerberg wasn't on HN (or the 2004 equivilant BBS). He wasn't blogging, or going to meetups - he was quietly building a product (and working freelance I believe).

The same with the Skype guys.

So I'm wondering, can anyone point to a web presence from someone who built something big, but from before they built it? I'm looking to be able to follow someone from 'Hey, is this a good idea?' to 'I've just sold - I'm now an angel'.
"only the shareholders have any vote about Google."

Although not really, because of the special stock that Larry and Sergei have. They own ~30% of the stock but their shares have 10 votes apiece, so they have complete control of the company, even though they share the financial gains of the company.
They don't have to. If enough people wanted it, anyone one of us on this forum could build a "Google blocker" that would effectively remove google from the user's life and give it away or sell it.
From the article Gruber quotes :

>Fortune magazine recently called Google a "cash cow" and suggested more attention be paid to milking it rather than running off in search of the next big thing.

I think any creator worth his salt would hate this line of thinking. The premise that since Google is sitting on pile of Cash and should pay large of chunks it as dividends rather than spending it on "next big thing" is ridiculous. Apple hasn't paid cash dividend since 1995 (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL+Key+Statistics). Well it was so steeped in bad journalism, I couldn't finish it.

Coming to Gruber's article, first - why get personal? And none can deny that Google (or Facebook) wield tremendous power by keeping so much of personal data, but seriously what alternatives he proposes? I can't go back to stone age. Anyone who asks Google, "oh-but you keep so much of our data?" is basically asking a rhetorical question. Personally, I am not afraid. If Mr. Gruber got better ideas if not 'internet', I am all ears.
From the article: "Still others say their models simply failed to predict how the markets would react to near-catastrophic, once-in-a-lifetime financial events like the credit crisis and the collapse of Lehman Brothers."

The fact that they still believe those events were "catastrophic," or "once-in-a-lifetime" means they still haven't grasped the fact that markets aren't Gaussian. As first Mandelbrot, then others showed, financial markets exhibit a much larger number of extreme events than a standard Gaussian distribution. Therefore, any trader that doesn't update his or her models to use a non-Gaussian model won't just be wiped out once. They'll be wiped out again and again as they get blindsided by the "once-in-a-lifetime" price swings that happen to happen every decade or so.
How can you predict the future? Simple. It's easy when you're building it.
Bitstream shareholder pushes for the sale of the company
I believe Elon Musk had a post-nuptial agreement