skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So it's a bit like a program, with sequences also selecting a different Turing machine? (which determines how that subsequence is interpreted.)

Because the Turing machine is selected entirely by the sequence (the protein folding caused by the laws of physics is selected entirely by the sequence), the number of possible results (the number of different shapes that could result) is limited to the number of different sequences. That is, the information in the phenome seems to be limited by the information in the genome.

If you think of it as a two part message, with the first part encoding a model, and the second part configuring it, then the DNA can be seen as the configuration, and the laws of physics as the model (which isn't actually coded anywhere like DNA - we'd have to write that ourselves.)

This model is constant over all life, so that DNA from all species (plants and animals) share the same "model" (laws of physics that cause protein folding etc.)

Another example of a two-part message is that the first part is a programming language, and the second part is a program written in that language. For a high level language (esp with libraries), it's obvious that a very short program might do an awful lot; but the true information content is not that program alone, but the total including the language and libraries it uses.

However, and this is my point, I don't believe that the laws of physics have been constructed so conveniently that provide as much assistance as a high level language with libraries. At most, nature may have stumbled onto hacks in physics (like surface tension, interfaces and gradients) and exploited them. Actually, given how long it took to get life started, perhaps it had to find a whole bunch of clever hacks (randomly recombining for billions of years over a whole planet) before it came up with a workable model (that is the model that DNA configure.)

hmmm... we might be able to estimate the information content of the 'model' by how many tries it took to come across it.
So much nonsense in one place ...

>>Biological systems are nothing like anything we would ever engineer

You really believe, you can predict what human technology will look like in 50, 100, 10000000 years?

>>DNA is not a program

A hard disk platter is not a program.

>>Nature has had billions of years, and it is way ahead of us.

That's why birds are so much faster than planes.

>>Cells are not machines..."stochastic quantum probability field device."

All modern computers are quantum machines.

>>Biology is quantum-scale nanotechnology

And so is today electronics.
I suggest you give lots of detail on what value YOU provide to a potential partnership if you don't want to be dismissed quickly.

Any tech partner is going to be working his ass off for a few months and expects an equal amount of work from you. Too many wannabe business types seem to think their awesome idea for a business is a large part of their contribution. You need to sell yourself, as well as your project.
ach, tongue in cheek humour, no need to downvote!
What if I, like many founders, am young and don't have any cash or, for that matter connections?

I'm of the school of thought that it's best to wait until you have a beta/MVP built and getting traction before fundraising rather than trying to get cash based on an idea.

It's relatively easy for a business guy to HIRE a developer if they have money.

Convincing someone to have faith in your business ability and commit to work for equity as a cofounder is the bigger challenge.
I'd emphasize the brevity point. I find messages from my phone are more like text messages than full-on e-mails and some could interpret that brevity for rudeness.

Plus a brief message with a typo or two says "I don't care about you" if sent from the desktop. The same message says "you're so important that I responded right away" if it's from a cell phone.
Meet Swingly, a Q&A tool powered by robots
My company has a promising new product in development. I know that when the product is ready in about 12-18 months, that we will need some serious advice on marketing and selling it. Three developers are working on it full time.

I have looked carefully at attending BoS 2010 but couldn't justify the cost of travel/lodging and the ticket. So I thought "perhaps when the product is closer to release".

Pay It Forward: I have friend who has had a jewelry store for about 9 years now. And for 9 years I've been pestering him to setup a web site. I know that he'd do better if he had one. I went as far as sitting with him and his wife and working out a rough one-page layout in OmniGraffle, but never implemented the web site. His wife now opened a ladies accessories store as well. I promise to set them up both web sites and take it live.
I think this is best answer in this thread so far. Saying " here you can use cool technology to solve interesting problems" seems to be a very attractive part of a startup for many hackers.
Thank you, I can give you more examples of how people can use gmap:
- If you love travel, you can show a map of where you've visited.
- You can show direction to a place with Gmap Directions API

After Google Map, I'm not sure what other APIs I should work on next, any suggestions?
Yes, it was "about" power corrupting, but it absolutely did not demonstrate it, and it certainly didn't detail how pure individuals came to be corrupted by the acquisition of power.

It can't possibly show that power corrupts. All the author does does is talk about how there are powerful, corrupt people. For instance, he writes, "This isn't just anecdotal: Surveys of organizations find that the vast majority of rude and inappropriate behaviors, such as the shouting of profanities, come from the offices of those with the most authority." Except it is anecdotal: that's what a survey is designed to show--a systematic study of anecdotes. And we already know anecdotes aren't systematic surveys. If you wanted to show that the 'vast majority of rude and inappropriate behavior' came from 'the top', you'd have to design a rubric for what constitutes rude and inappropriate behavior, record all social interactions, transcribe them and attribute them to an encoded number, send off the transcriptions to people without the ability to deduce the actors, tally rude and inappropriate behavior, and then convert back to the original actors and see where the inappropriate behavior came from.

There's literally zero evidence that supports the argument of this article, that being: "The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power."

The "Machiavellian" study, for instance, says nothing about whether or not Machiavelli was right. It only says people who are perceived as being 'malicious gossips' are shunned. GROUNDBREAKING!? No. Nowhere does Machiavelli say, "The way to power is to be known as a malicious gossip."
The idea that if you don't program outside of work you're not a good programmer is just silly. I can understand that you might regard with some suspicion the abilities of someone who has never in their entire life written code outside of work. But, the idea that you must always continue to do so even when you have a day job programming is utter nonsense.

Programming isn't my weekend hobby anymore. Why should it be? I get to do it every day at work and get paid for it now. That was the point of making it my career. It was something I already enjoyed doing and was good at that I could also make a living by doing. Am I automatically less passionate about it because I'm doing it for profit now? Of course not. I use my free time to do all of the other things that I enjoy doing. It's ok to have more than one passion. It won't harm your programming ability for you to program during the day and paint or write music in your spare time. On the contrary, you are more likely to show up for work each day refreshed and enthused about what you are doing precisely because you are doing other satisfying things after work.
Feynman explains why school textbooks are bad
Recursion in C++ is really cool until you add threads or too many items and blow the stack and start getting random seg faults. I speak from experience. I tend to avoid it now and iterate instead.
How common?
If you want to read some hard science fiction about how AI might be developed and how an AI might think, I'd highly recommend the in-progress series Life Artificial: http://lifeartificial.com/
The better you understand the way DNA works the less elegant it looks. It's a steaming pile of Hacks on top of Hacks and frighteningly buggy.

This encodes protean X, however it only folds up correctly 15% of the time. However, Y bumps things up to 70% and Z get's you to 90%. The other 10% well that depends on the shape some of these are used by Z to do... Why do we know this? Well both Y and Z are defective 2-3 percent of the time resulting in... etc.

PS: Don't get me wrong the happy path works well most of the time and when it fails early it's just a non viable embryo so no problem. However, saying it's elegant is like saying all airplanes in the sky must be easy to maintain because you never see anyone outside fixing them.
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html

Assuming that is your daily pageviews, you could run that app for free on Google Appengine.

The only down side to Appengine in my experience is the cost of rewriting the app and migration, and performance issues (and cold start up times) related to Appengine's architecture.
"... you can train yourself to make the best of it when it happens ..."

The standard (and best) answer. From experience there is another factor to take into account, randomness. Each situation is unique making how you adapt important. It's never quite like the drills. Training allows you to adjust quickly. With training the skills are there ready to be applied and adapted to the situation at hand.
Sitting in a dentists chair makes minutes seem like hours, sitting on a couch chatting with an attractive member of the opposite sex makes hours seem like minutes.

Mortgages make months shorter and years longer.

Time is pretty weird, our perception of it changes all the time depending on the circumstances, it shouldn't be a surprise that extreme circumstances change our perception of time in an extreme way.
I took a course based on the Java version, and it felt very clunky to me - the sample project code was very verbose and used the Visitor pattern whenever it could possibly be wedged in, making it a bit of a nightmare to understand the flow of the code as a whole. A good IDE would probably clear up a lot of this confusion, but it always felt like we were fighting the language. Take this with a grain of salt, however, since I'm fairly certain my professor edited the projects quite a bit before handing them to the students; perhaps the original book material is less convoluted.
oh noes, you must be a hacker!

On a different note, this is not surprising in the least (although quite clever ;).
The "simulate at reduced speed" theory appeals to me, but I think the actual numbers make it implausible. Assuming Moore's Law, 30 years is a 1,000,000 speed up, plus let's say 4.5 years for 3 more doublings, giving us 8,000,000. To simulate 1 second would take 3 months. Debugging would be frustrating. (assuming 35 years from now; seems an arbitrary figure.)
I understand the sentimental value of a site like 1000Memories, but I'm having a difficult time seeing how they will monetize the site. You're dealing with a very sensitive issue, so you can't really display AdWords or product placement. And if they charge money, will it be a lifetime fee or annual fee? Who will the custodian of the memory be? Who will make sure memories aren't vandalized?

I would like to see more before passing judgment.
See also:

?intitle:index.of? mp3

# -FrontPage-" inurl:service.pwd

intitle:"Index of" config.php

Not to mention the credit card number hacks... :)
BGP, the Internet routing protocol, was sketched out similarly, on three napkins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAOVNYSnL7k#t=5m35s
The MP3 one doesn't work nearly as well anymore. Spammers figured it out too.
For me, it comes down to not being taken advantage of and being sure that we are truly contributing equally (or proportional to our equity). As a business person, if you tell a hacker that you are going to do the "business side" while they build the website, that is a very vague concept.

- In the weeks, months, or years before the first version is ready, what are you going to do?

- How are you contributing right now?

- Have you raised money?

- Do you have contracts with clients already?

- Do you at least have non-binding statements of intent?

- Do you have full sketches of the app or is it just a blur in your head that you assume I will translate to code magically?

- Have you had the respect to discuss the business model with me or do you assume I am not interested (or unqualified to make judgements)?

- Why are you better to work with on this project than some other business guy?

IMHO, a good business guy would need to answer all of the above very well. I work for a registered investment advisory that was started by a trader and a famous AI expert. The trader had no coding skill but tons of experience and insights, he funded the initial research, and he handled the legal/tax issues.
I've had this happen to me, falling roughly the distance of the article's subject.

Over the years I really thought time slowed down, but I guess I can see what he's saying. Still, I doubt we'll ever definitively know until we have some way of measuring thought.

This does bring the interesting follow up question of why we're remembering so much more? To avoid the same fate in future (seems a little late, in a Darwinian argument).

Or are we perceptually processing so much more in order to try and find a way out of imminent death (which does suggest faster brain processing and is actually the opposite of what he is suggesting).

It seems to me his interpretation of the data could be wrong, there are more than one way to read his results. We may not be processing more 'frames per second' in order to read the watch but we may be consciously assessing more items in our vision than normal in order to try find an escape route.

Instinct hasn't worked and now the brain is trying higher order conscious brain power to find an escape route from imminent death? Now that you could easily argue from a Darwinian perspective.

I'm just guessing here.
BT used this kind of time stretching on one of the tracks on This Binary Universe.

I don't recall which one, but he took the entire drum stem for the song and compressed it (rather than stretching it) to run in some special ratio to the length of the song. Sounds fantastic.
Colleges breaks down when trying to turn qualitative experiences into quantitative data, I don't like how the models come out. (Doesn't mean they don't end up successful, obviously.)

My fave approach in the space recently has been Unigo.com, nice aggregation of user generated content to great effect.
Elusive Innovation: Inventing Stuff is Hard
Hand waving: the adult brain is the output of running a program stored in DNA for twenty years on a runtime (the physical universe) we can barley understand. To produce a brain from the data stored in DNA, we would need to simulate the runtime environment. To do that without simulating the whole universe, we would need to work out which subset of the universe to simulate. We are far away from knowing what shape that subset takes, let alone what the minimal number of bytes required to simulate it is.
So much confidentiality, yet so little desire to actually read any of these documents. I hear Area 51 is cool, though.

Public is the new private - if you're hiding something, I'm not interested. If it's in plain view, I feel especially cool for seeing it.
The slow-motion effect may be the result of the mind mapping the experience to a single timeline afterwards.

I was at the Enschede fireworks disaster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enschede_fireworks_disaster) ten years ago and experienced what the article calls turbo perception. It is not like overclocking a single processor by pressing a turbo switch. A better metaphor may be temporarily having access to more processors than normal that operate in parallel. In a short time frame you make a lot more observations and decisions than normal to improve your situation, apparently some simultaneously. Because it is difficult for the mind to deal with parallel timelines of observations it maps the observations to a single timeline which results in the slow-motion effect that people recall afterwards.
Yea, I was thinking -> not greater than. see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1612073
Does DDG have a search by date/range option? This is one thing that keeps me going back to Google. If it's there I can't find it.
They will CAPTCHA you if you go too far with SSN/CCN regexes.
- Offer a fair amount of equity.

- Be able to articulate what you bring to the table.

- Demonstrate that you're able to at least 'talk the talk' when it comes to tech.

- Demonstrate that you have the domain knowledge to complement their technical knowledge.
Contrary to what seems to be increasingly popular belief, you don't need to cite studies to criticize an article like this. One can point out things like flaws in reasoning and logical fallacies, without having to cite any studies or research.
The point was that only the Linux and Windows ports of VLC have GPU acceleration currently.
What did surprise me was that when I changed it from gov to mil there were only 7 results. Expected more from the military. ;)
Arch Linux does.
Credit goes to Dan Crowley: http://twitter.com/dan_crowley/status/21426534709
Microsoft Flight (tease of revamped Microsoft Flight Simulator)
Speaking for myself: you need to bring something to the table other than an idea. Ideally you should bring cash, at the very least the cash required to buy the hardware and software you need, even if the technical co-founder agrees to work for free. Even better, bring connections and customers. Best, bring a throwaway prototype, built by coders-for-hire or hacked together with your limited technical skills.
For very hard problems, a prototype may be too difficult, in which case, you're asking your technical co-founder to try and build something nobody is sure can be built. That's a huge risk, so then bringing cash to the table becomes even more important.
I honestly think it would be easy to monetize; merely a matter of public perception. Consider that it hasn't stopped people from spending on coffins, dirt plots, tombstones, mausoleums, funeral parlors etc. The departed may or may not baulk at the cost, but affected next of kin are easily influenced when thinking of ways to commemorate a loved one. Keep it tasteful and you could easily eke a good profit.
Changing it to site:gov.uk doubles the number of results.
Assuming web traffic means HTTP, it's curious that it's not zero in 1990.
try:

filetype:rtf | filetype:ppt | filetype:pptx | filetype:csv | filetype:xls | filetype:xlsx | filetype:docx | filetype:doc | filetype:pdf "this document is classified" site:mil

EDIT: Actually most of this stuff is false positives, but I'm sure you can fine tune the search query.

EDIT 2: This is quite good, for UK (I'm a UK Citizen):

filetype:rtf | filetype:ppt | filetype:pptx | filetype:csv | filetype:xls | filetype:xlsx | filetype:docx | filetype:doc | filetype:pdf "this document is confidential" site:gov.uk
If you don't have any money or any reputation, just an idea, you need to bring one hell of a convincing story. Try getting non-binding letters of intent from potential customers.

But really, you're in the toughest position. Most business co-founders who didn't start with money were working with technical co-founders who were already their friends. If you don't know many nerds, start buddying up now :-)
It's only 10,000 lines of code! How hard can that be? All we have to do is write the code, plus the frameworks, programming language, and operating system, plus do all the hardware design.

Except that DNA doesn't even come close to being a high level language, since the low level details were not specifically designed for compressibility of the code (in fact, the low level details, the "bare metal ops", are pretty much fixed by the for-all-intents-and-purposes random laws of physics, which means we shouldn't assume that they enable any particularly high compressibility ratios for anything).

So a more apt comparison would be if we saw an assembly language program in some strange incomprehensible assembly language and said "It's only 10,000 lines of operations on the bare metal! Now all we have to do is figure out how the hell the system this runs on works, and how we can translate that code into a more sensible (and probably vastly more compact) form."

...which might even be a harder problem, to be fair.

Kurzweil's essentially proposed evidence of existence of an algorithm of length N that does whatever it is we mean by intelligence. Which is fine, and I think is probably correct (IMO, even his estimate about the minimal amount of code it would take is probably too high, though that's another story).

But he's overlooking the fact that the mere existence of such a compact algorithm doesn't help us find it at all, and I think a lot of the complaints others have made about his statements are more aimed at that leap of logic, not the existence claim itself. I completely agree that even brain scanning tech might not help us simulate the important bits very well, even if we did have access to that tech and computers fast enough to run the sims.
Ha, you get even more interesting results if you change the domain to .mil.
> I've always been a fan of their numbering scheme and regular release schedule

We've started to replicate that as well. It works so much better.
This can't be emphasized enough. Herman Miller chairs were made fun of during the dotcom boom as an example of lavish spending, and it was totally unfair. Those chairs come with 10 year warranties, so they're still around today. $1000 might seem like a lot for a chair, but not when compared to how much we spend on computer hardware.
Prolific maker on a mad manager's schedule (read: 1. The Everything-ish)
Here's what I look for, in addition to what others have said:

Be honest. Do not hype things up for the sake of hype. Do not tell lies of any kind to prospective customers.
Radio, RIAA: mandatory FM radio in cell phones is the future
I knew it! I only ever get 1.5 Mbps and I have the "up to" 10 Mbps connection from Rogers. What a joke.
Really interesting stuff -- thanks for reposting here.
And "PDAs, and other portable electronics." All part of a "grand bargain" for the RIAA to start getting money from radio stations.

It's not often you read the phrase "incandescent with rage" in the tech press....
The article has a point that Ray Kurzweil's claims are nonsense, but lets not focus on his claims on genome-to-protein-to-brain cells mechanism. What's rather more important is how the brain does what it does and how that compares with today's computers.

There are 50 to 100 billion neurons in the human brain and the power of the brain comes from the fact that you can create many orders of magnitude more neural circuit combinations with those neurons. Each cell may be part of many circuits, and learning involves the forming of these circuits. Now, lets compare that phenomenal power with the power of the computer. It becomes especially laughable when you say its 50MB worth of information.
No.... :) I hear fake 25 yr old female analyst profiles on Facebook work well. :)