skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is not what Meyers meant.

[We meander midstream into a heated discussion between Kurzweil and PZ Myers...]

Kurzweil: ...able to live...FOREVER!

Kurzweil: ...

Kurzweil: ...?

Myers: FFS, Kurzweil, you dimwit, we're the only two people in the room, and you can't possibly think you're going to get your standing ovation from me...

Kurzweil: Enhh...whoops, I guess my muscle memory kicked in, I've given that speech an awful lot of times, sorry about that...back to my main point, I guess: The Kolmogorov complexity of any "intelligence algorithm" is, with high probability, bounded from above by the size of the DNA string that picked that algorithm out of the entire universe of algorithms.

Myers: Kurzweil, you fucking idiot, if we want to build a brain, we need a lot more than just the bits of information in the DNA. There's an entire developmental pathway leading from DNA to its ultimate expression in a human brain, and you can't just pretend that we could write a simple algorithm to collapse that into one step.

Kurzweil: But I'm not saying that we want to build a brain by translating the DNA. I'm saying that the amount of information necessary to pick the brain's particular neural algorithm out of a full lineup of all possible neural algorithms (most of which would do nothing useful at all) must be coming from the DNA. Since the universe of all possible neural algorithms that can be expressed by DNA is highly unlikely to be have a disproportionate representation of useful neural algorithms, it's a matter of simple probability to see that the amount of information necessary to pick out a useful neural algorithm in any sufficiently large and random universe of neural algorithms is likely to be the same as the amount of information necessary to make that selection out of the DNA-expressible neural algorithms.

Myers: But you can't just translate from DNA to a brain, GODDAMN it, this is basic biology we're talking about! There's a lot of stuff that happens between DNA and a brain, and you can't just ignore it!

Kurzweil: Who said we were talking about biology?

Myers: I'M A F$@KING BIOLOGIST, OF COURSE WE'RE TALKING ABOUT BIOLOGY!!!
Buenos dias! I'm a PR professional toiling in the American Midwest after leaving the San Francisco Bay Area for family reasons. My plan, in another couple of years, is to leave the job I'm working at now for the startup industry.

I'm not a geek. I have dabbled some with Python, like reading the occasional "hard" CS article linked from HN, love startup culture, love technology, etc. I'm not a hacker though. Most my good friends are, however.

My plan, which could easily apply to you goes a little like this.

Work here in the midwest for another couple of years while the family situation resolves itself. Do research on which of the big American tech hubs (Austin, Boston, NYC, Silicon Valley, etc.) are looking the most active in terms of hiring. Move to that place and start seeking a job -- as a PR professional. Now, granted, by the time a startup is seeking a dedicated and experienced PR professional, they're beyond the "five guys working to hack together a product" stage. However, those are the kinds of people I want to work with, not 50-year-olds grinding out their remaining work years sitting in an office.

I cannot imagine working in a corporate environment for more than a couple years. Even less can I imagine living in the stagnating midwest (not even Chicago) for more than a couple years.

Develop a 3- or 5-year plan to get yourself out of the corporate doldrums. Be willing to move to where the beating heart of tech entrepreneurship is in your country/region. Gather as much experience as you can doing as many varied tasks within your area of expertise as possible. Learn sales, learn marketing, be active in social media, teach yourself some programming so you can at least participate in conversations by asking intelligent questions.

Startups need more people than just hackers once they have a product on their hands. No eres sin util in such an environment. Buena suerte!
I come from a similar situation and faced similar challenges, especially after trying to launch a web startup with no financing and no developers on board. It failed. I'm determined to stay in tech, so here's some of my (occasionally conflicting) thoughts.

1) You call yourself a business guy, but are you a product guy? If you're a product guy -- if you can understand the soul of a product and how it interacts with people -- that can be inherently valuable. In my experience, most people I've met may be "tech" or "business", but they're not product people.

2) Get an internship. Beg. Show up, prove why you're valuable, send unsolicited resumes with advice and biz dev/product suggestions. Be humble, but not too much. Work for free for a couple months, or at minimum wage or whatever is legal. Just get your foot in the door.

3) Read. The Elements of User Experience (http://amzn.to/aFNjSn), The Mythical Man Month (http://amzn.to/cFLDlB) -- these are just to get you started. Learning to code a little bit will be good as well. The point is not to become an expert developer, but to learn how developers think. Think of your reading as travel literature and learn about different cultures.

4) Look for non-sexy opportunities. Twitter, FB, 4SQ, Zynga etc., get all the hype, but there's tons of need for software development and product design in what I call the "iceberg industries." The trucking industry brings in $250 billion dollars in revenue every year. That's almost twice the size of the airline industry and yet a typical website of theirs looks like this: http://www.highwayfreight.com/index.php

5) Think about CPG (even though it's not tech, it still can be a startup). It's a risky, tough move and faces lots of market forces, but can be incredibly lucrative. You could find a small local product that you believe in, invest some cash to get equity, and try to make them big. As a consultant, your skills may be valuable because the problems in these types of entrepreneurial efforts are operational problems, not innovation problems.

6) Don't worry too much about the idea or where you're working right now: your goal is to build professional and personal credibility. Give away your great ideas. Most people who have them don't tend to have just one.

7) Don't worry about home runs. Most entrepreneurs I know have small lifestyle businesses and love their companies no matter the size. It's kinda like having a kid. S/he's probably not going to grow up to be president, but you're going to love 'em anyway.
All Hands Support
VirnetX files VPN patent suit against Apple, Cisco, NEC
Yes, death is a bit of a mischaracterization. The original post about shutting down the web store does indeed mention that Google would try to get the N1 into actual retail stores: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/nexus-one-changes-in-...
Am I the only one that goes ":syntax off" most of the time when using vim? Maybe I'm too old and used to the black on white (or green on black). But whenever I use syntax highlighting, it's like the different colored parts of the code are pulsating in the "Z" plane. Very annoying.

Also, it seems most syntax highlighters assume the opposite of the color scheme that I'm using (black text on clear background, or white text on dark background). I guess that would also be derived from Murphy's Law...
Sony Vaio E Series VPCEA23EN in India
If you love products, being a product guy is indeed very valuable. Learning to work with developers is very valuable too, but that's much easier if you learn developing yourself first.

Also: what is CPG?
Are you saying that they tend to be sexually aroused, or that they tend to be carrying some sort of arsonist paraphernalia?
"After spending time playing with Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2, the first Android 2.2 phone to come with the player pre-installed,"

FWIW the Droid Incredible launched long before and had it. I've used it, and it's not that bad for some stuff. It's better than no Flash player at all for things like viewing restaurant sites.
I'd be curious about what fraction of them did that work before they got tenure.

Also "famous mathematician" is a bit of an oxymoron. All fame is local, and fame in mathematics even more so.
haha love it. I see myself and my wife in that characters. My questions to HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1620874
People , go donate!
I love the critical feedback!

Would love some on how we can make the button generator better.
This is one of the more intelligent posts I've seen on the topic so far. Thanks.

Question: this does mean he can say something like "there exists at least one machine that can do it in 50MB" which gives us a signpost for the size of the problem, no? Why does it follow that any other machine would have to take the same approach to hit the same order of magnitude?

As for the last, it may be obvious to you, but I don't think it's obvious to everyone. Part of Kurzweil's mission is getting that message out to more people. The controversial part is that once we have those efficient neural networks, we're that much closer to making devices that approximate, at least, what we experience as "thinking." I don't know that anyone here can say for sure whether he's right or wrong -- we'll have to wait 30 years and see.
Those are exactly my fathers words. I have definitely thought about this option, my fear is that I will get to 35 without having done anything that I care about in life.
Toll Brothers researched the impact of choice on their profit margins. What they found was that given more choices, customers were not only less happy but also cost more to please. There were greater logistical requirements to get part A to place B, time spent selling people on home feature C, and then additional needs for people with skill X to install said items.
Please down vote this to prevent future pun threads. Far too many one liners are getting points lately.
Pakistan: A submerged population
It's interesting that you imply http://www.highwayfreight.com/index.php is bad design, when you consider the design of the website you're typing into. :)

My point is, you have to find actual opportunities. A shiny website may not be one, but you might manage to convince yourself that you could convince others to see that a new website is a necessity, or even very valuable.
"if you have two different kinds of machines, and you want to program each to compute the same result -- upper bounds on the program size on machine tell you nothing about the the upper bounds on the other machine."

But the complexity of the zygote derives mostly from that 50MB of genome data, so Kurzweil's main point remains the same: the genome gives a rough estimate as to the maximum complexity of the human brain, which in this case includes the mechanism needed to build the brain.
Some years ago I wrote one (cleverly named Tracuala) for trac. It was good enough most of the time for my needs. Trouble was, Trac didn't have a real Web API at the time, so I was hacking around cookies and authentication and what not. And when I upgraded a Trac instance, stuff broke.

Nowadays I use Pivotal Tracker, which has a very nice Web API. That allowed me to write yet another CLI tool (cleverly named Pivotal Slacker) which works quite nicely for fetching lists of stories, adding new stories, doing bulk updates or additions from yaml files, and the like.

The upshot is that all Web-based tools should try to offer a decent RESTful API as well so that folks who want additional tools can add them without having to worry about coding to the quirks of Web page scrapping.
Aren't you begging the question here?
Writing presentations and schmoozing are not hire-able skills for a startup.

However, if you can get startupX paying clients for their product, that is a hireable skill.
The best wireless internet experience I ever had was from a sailboat in a little bay in Colombia. There was a cell tower up on a hill, servicing a half dozen houses and as many boats on the water. At any given time you could be reasonably certain you had the whole thing to yourself.

I don't think you'll ever have it that good in New York City, nomatter how fast your phone and how much money the carriers throw into infrastructure.
Ray Kurzweil does not understand the ants and the bees.
The 'seriously' suggests the former.

http://www.google.com/search?q=arsonists+sexually+aroused

Seems to confirm it.
Age confirmed for 'Eve,' mother of all humans
Consumer packaged goods.
>Not true! Worst case scenario, one machine can emulate the other machine, running that input.

"If you wish to create a brain in 50 MB of code, you must first implement the universe"?
Tell me you got a new phone where you pay to get 1 Mbps and 100 ms rtt to major exchange points. When the market moves forward enough to make that a reality, that’ll be a generation worth celebrating.

It's not quite 100 ms, but not too shabby:

--- svt.se ping statistics ---
21 packets transmitted, 21 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 86.396/133.311/257.719/44.787 ms

According to another test app I'm getting 1Mbps down and 130kbps up. Time to celebrate my iPhone?

I think I was getting better speeds before switching to another operator, too. (And the bandwidth test app seems to agree, it classified my result as merely "acceptable" and not "good").
The genome is the source code for that, too.
4G on my new Sprint HTC EVO is a joke. It sucks down on the battery like a thirsty yak and it has terrible indoor reception. Not to mention it doesn't seem noticeably faster than 3G.

So I use the 3G radio 99.9% of the time and the 4G radio sits there idle because someone in Sprint's marketing team though it would give them an edge in marketing the device.

I'd put money on the table and say that if Dan Hesse himself carries around an HTC EVO he has the 4G turned OFF.

"How's that for a wireless revolution... Pretty awesome huh?"
Thank you, thank you, thank you for posting a link to all of these papers. There are so * many * cool * papers. I'm now fully absorbed learning about genetic algorithms searching for novelty instead of the direct objective. Fascinating!

http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/papers/lehman_gecco10b.pdf
It's not necessarily that it'd be a simple matter or wouldn't require major architectural changes or whatever, it's just that it'd be much, much more _possible_. And I fully believe that there are many, many improvements that could be made that are just a simple matter of programming, even if running on mobile devices isn't among them. Not to mention a fully open-source Flash Player would make a great reference for aspiring free Flash players like Lightspark.

If Adobe stays on the path it's on, HTML5 will continue to mature faster and faster as the desperation for a legit Flash replacement grows. Adobe could stay in the loop without having to reinvent the wheel and reacquire a distrusting and skeptical customer base if they would just open Flash while they're ahead; people would continue to buy the Flash IDE in droves, but when HTML5 takes over, that installed base is not likely to wait on Adobe and they'll move on to a competing IDE. I believe that HTML5 is still young enough that it could be basically deposed by a truly open Flash.
I know many people that are buying another small house then walking away from the underwater home. This gives them a different option.
What do you guys think of Rails for .NET Developers?
Chemistry is a "solved problem" granted we don't have a computer that can run the simulation for large organic molecules, but it has ZERO secrets. Now, DNA runs on the cellular machinery, but that is also running on the well known chemistry rules so adding up the instructions required to define a cell + DNA = something of a lower bound on the required complexity to create a brain. The idea is if you know how complex a solution to the problem is, then you can use that complexity even if you are using a different approach to the problem.

IMO, it does not say much. I can't comprehend the limits of 50MB of heavily macroed and slightly buggy LISP code. It's simply not a meaningful metric. Edit: Also, in theory we could write a program which would simulate human level intelligence, but run far too slowly to be useful in any meaningful context.

PS: Findman had a wonderful description of chemistry as the search for rules of thumb to let people simplify the problem of simulating the physical equations.
Just look at 37signals. They have families and free time and hobbies and all of those other things that startup people aren't supposed to have.
I should have been more clear. My point is not that it's a bad design per se; as you point out HN isn't the best designed site in the world either. My point is more that these industries are old, established industries that haven't yet built up innovative approaches (whether from the consumer side or the business side) to their business models.

I used trucking because I did some research on the industry and found that they have a fair amount of logistical innovation but still have major inefficiencies in the way that their customers book business. It's not the perfect example. But I think my point stands.
I had the same thought recently too -- get a stable and self-contained product live in six weeks, try to drum up users the next two weeks, then move on to something different. Ideally, each two month product is an orthogonal component of a larger product. When enough components are complete and live, just snap everything together to generate something nobody saw coming.

I'm branding it as "6 startups per year." My first three speaking engagements are already booked.
I think that's rooted in the number of disciplines that cross in bio-informatics. Code, reverse-engineering, information theory, math, genetics, chemistry, physics and so on.

It's almost by definition interdisciplinary and I doubt there is any one person that really has the whole view.
True, it does work out of the box, but my workflow requires a lot of customizations - my org-mode customizations line count comes in a 162 lines...

My .emacs got so big I had to split it up into init files:

- programming mode customizations
- productivity mode customizations
- appearance customizations
- behavioral customizations
- keymapping customizations
- gnus customizations (too big for productivity init)
- standard requires that I use too often to autoload
- templating and yasnippet routines
I posted this article almost a week ago :-(

Good article though.
Worst case scenario, one machine can emulate the other machine, running that input. Therefore an upper bound on one machine can be used to derive an upper bound on the other.

Very nice try. (I mean that sincerely.) However, you must also have a proof about the complexity of the emulation and the encoding of programs to emulate. Without that proof - which basically means you are no longer talking about two arbitrary machines but rather about two which are deeply related - the mere possibility of emulation tells you nothing other than that one machine is of equal or greater computational power than the other.

[Edit: in context - sure, our fancy big super computer from IBM can emulate the zygote (let's say) but.. what's that gonna take? Trillions of lines of code? 10 lines?]

And, maybe I need another cup of coffee but I am actually having trouble parsing the syntax of your comment about Omega.
It does, but at the page level. If a page has seven flash elements, once you activate any of them it activates all of them (as the activation is of the plug-in rather than the instance). I suspect this was by design, as the thought would be "make compelling flash content and then we'll also get them with the flash ads".
While "food miles" may not be the overriding concern of most locovores, it certainly seems to be the favored argument they use most often to justify various actions and decisions; of the various concerns you listed energy conservation is the one that is easiest to try to quantify. Since this particular point is one that will, by definition, almost always be won by the locovore side they tend to drag it out more often than they should (especially because it is a point they subsequently lose on when the bigger picture is examined.)

Personally, I think locovorism is way past the point of no return in terms being nothing more than a means for yuppies to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi. Once you could get organic veggies at Wal-Mart they needed St. Pollan to give them a new rallying point.

I live in the bay area and from the vantage-point of this mild climate it is very easy to enjoy local seasonal food with almost no inconvenience to my lifestyle. I grew up on the midwest on one of those small farms you praise (back before shipping arugala around the world for my local salad bar was common or even possible) and I can tell you with certainty that seasonal cuisine in that climate really sucks.
You make some valid points but don't forget that even the non professionals making mistakes will get less losses and a return closer to a long term index when better quant system are betting agains each other and keeping prices close to their optimum levels.

It is not certain at all that the worst professional models will make money just because there are non professionals that are even worst. If the better models are aggressive enough, they should be able to take most of what there is to take from the non professionals and also profit from betting against the lesser professional models (to a lesser extent).

I still maintain that as the models get better and better while they bet against each other, the margin for profit is reduced and the sector as a whole should shrink and that's a victory for capitalism.
Yes, I think you're the only one.
Good syntax highlighting is essential for me; I won't use an editor without it.
It makes the code easier to read, and leads to less bugs (due to typos, etc.)
That trucking website seems more usable than most airline websites.
Definitely great advice!

No I cannot sell, usually this is what partners do in my company. I only interact with the clients after the initial sale was done. The closest I get to selling is in drafting the request for proposal (a doc where you tell them how you want to solve their problem/need) for the specific client.
Should I use Ruby 1.9.2/Rails 3 with my new web app?
Helium isn't toxic, but it can displace air without any feelings of suffocation. It's one of the simplest ways to a 'sweet death'.
> Here at TripAdvisor, we give engineers root on EVERY box.

Good god, I don't even want root on every box. If I've got root on something, that means I'm responsible for it. I don't want to own that many resources, because then I have to worry about them.
Note-able Ecommerce
Thanks for answering my questions, theres just so much work involved with these kinds of things and I'm sure it was just one thing after another.

But it is rather interesting how you handled all of it especially for the time when cncs had only been out for like less than a decade and you were modifying existing machines.
Are We Really Still Doing This in 2010?
Ha, yeah I completely agree. I wish I'd picked a different example.
The benefit from preventing the death of the Flash format is greater than the benefit from not pissing media companies off, first of all. Secondly, as stated, the DRM components should be possible to open if they're properly implemented. There are many open implementations of PGP et al that are open and PGP hasn't lost anything from that.

If their DRM is hacky/not good, then yes, open-sourcing would probably be bad for that component. But DRM is a rather small part of the overall Flash ecosystem, and if they don't get the Player completely open, they are going to lose meaningful revenue from Flash completely relatively soon.
As a former trader, I can assure you that's bollox. No desk trading anything has never had a losing day.
Acne treatment 16
A "Rich-vs.-King" Approach to Term Sheet Negotiations
why not go to a cafe?