skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suggest you read Prigogine's book if you're really interested but his work demonstrates that the problem isn't having detailed enough information about state, it's the irreversibility of time, which makes physics fundamentally non-deterministic.
I agree, with one stipulation. As someone who legally carries a concealed weapon and frequently returns from the range to carry several locked cases from my car to my door, I get annoyed when I hear stories of people panicking, just because of the presence of a weapon. I always take care to be cheerful, so as not to scare people, but at the same time I take a great deal of care to ensure that my weapon is NEVER visible at all, and there are some places I don't take it, even when perfectly legal, just because I don't think it's appropriate. Apparently this happened close to a few recent violent events, one of which involved a sword.

Do I think he has a right to have the umbrella in public? Absolutely. Do I think he should exercise a bit more discretion considering the circumstances? Yes. But there was some serious overreacting here, either by the person who reported it, or the police.

edit: My university has recently had several occurrences of 'alleged' gun sightings (that turned out to be cell phones), and each time the police has responded with one or two armed officers to investigate the situation. A measured, but conservative response.
Wired's bullshit "The web is dead" graph
Agreed. Aren't these apps just an extension of the web anyway? If it's sent over HTTP and is accessible to virtually anyone who had access to the "normal" web, then isn't that the web.

I know many people are excluded because they don't have iOS running on the machine they use for the web, but not everyone had the means to surf the HTML/Flash-based web on Opera's web browser a while ago. Were they not part of the web?
The market has already been proven by usertesting.com. Small to medium tech companies are very interested in testing like this, particularly for SEM pages.

Proper A/B testing, even with Google's Website Optimizer, can be pretty daunting. Having a heat map (and in this case, one that is very simple to generate) to see where people are looking allows you to understand the performance of your page very easily.
How Wild Apricot Became A Hit ...
The only thing I see here that can't be done in dhtml is recording. Everything else has prior art in a browser without resorting to flash.

So, as I said above, use a hidden Flash component to handle the recording (and the timing if you can't make it work with intervals), but do the display and manipulation in the browser itself.

It's not particularly hard. I've personally done most of it on past projects. With a bright team, it's really not any more effort than doing it in Flash.

Try not to read what I said above as a knock against the product. It's pretty cool. But because it's written in Flash, it's no more technically spectacular than the dozens of Windows and Mac versions of the same thing, so it probably doesn't need to be posted here.

In other words, Flash has advanced to the point where it's no longer newsworthy that you can build things with it.
No, I don't agree. Maybe you should explain each step so that I can follow along. I am probably not as smart as you are.

Update: I think you are being a bit literal. The two SKILLZ aren't the same proposition. The first is the proposition that a particular person has some characteristics I value. the second is the proposition that a particular team has some characteristics I value. So if you want to get really serious, you might call the first one SKILLZ-sub-candidate and the second SKILLS-sub-team.

Thinking this through was valuable, thank you and have an upmod.
CwC is very much what you want.

The focus on lambda and record optimizations is because ML code is usually heavy with sum types (tagged unions), and it's often possible to completely unbox things at compile time.
The Secrets of Effective Technical Talks
Sprouter Answers - Live Q&A on Startup/Biz
I'm working for someone else precisely because I'm a developer. I like developing. I don't like running a startup.

Is it really that hard to understand?
By learning what 'enough' is for me.
Come to Startup Fair at Hacker Dojo
Color me daft but I don't get it. What does Reddit have to do with it? Is it because 'in other news' is used on that site often (I don't if it is, I don't visit it)? That's an idiom that has been around since before internet let alone some website...
"I think it's now possible with a big rack of multi-core machines in an MPI cluster to approach the capabilities of a fruit fly's brain."

This seems so unlikely. Isn't it more likely that it takes a rack of multi-core machines to simulate a fruit fly's brain using our extremely primitive algorithms for approximating intelligence?

In other words, it's a software problem.
Startup Makes Probability-Based Chips for Big Data Apps
Myers is attacking Kurzweil on the assumption that Kurzweil is actually proposing that the brain's structure should be reverse-engineesed from DNA, which would be intractably hard. Only Kurzweil isn't saying this anywhere. Instead, he seems to be using DNA as a measure for the amount of irreducible complexity that needs to go into a system that will end up with the complexity of a human brain.

This is like saying that the underlying complexity of the Mandelbrot is the set of pairs of real numbers.
I like the book Trustworthy Compilers by Vladimir Safonov. Written by a guy who has been doing it for 40 years. Currently works on MSFT Phoenix.

The reason why I like this book is that it has a gentle slope for the reader but also discusses pragmatic ways for how you can increase confidence that (a) you implemented it correctly (b) the users of your compiler trust the code does what it says it does [such as good error messages essential to a compiler for an IDE]

I have lots of compiler books, too, including all editions of all Aho/Ullman books (going back to their pre-lex/yacc books that used the string processing language SNOBOL). This doesn't mean the others are bad or hard to read. On the contrary, you need to pick up skills over time from somewhere, and I usually pick them up from other books on compilers or LNCS's on compilers, etc.
Our Git Workflow: Private Development, Public Releases
But I agree with the article that video is not an integral part of the Web -- up until HTML5 the browsers even didn't have the ability to play video natively, relying on plugins like Flash.

If you watch YouTube videos on your iPhone, you don't even have a browser to play the video at all. It's true that it's still transferred using the HTTP -- the Web protocol -- but that's the whole point of the article: a new Web, which uses much the same protocols but don't rely on the browser for consumption.

I've previously given a thought to the whole concept at http://berislav.lopac.net/post/615858128/the-future-of-web-b...
Saying it's NP-complete doesn't prove we can't solve it well enough for simulation. As a physical problem become "pathologically NP", Nature becomes non-deterministic too; it seems unlikely that Nature will make extensive use of a protein that doesn't reliably fold in a certain way, or some small constrained set of ways.

See http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf
Static typing means structuring your code in a way that the language itself can mechanically verify some of your assumptions. Certain attributes can be exhaustively proven, rather than requiring "lots of redundant typing (the keyboard kind)" to write out test cases.
The idea is to post a single idea at a time? Not such a good idea.
If your Ajax code is reloading the whole page every time anything changes, that's some awful code. I have seen such designs in the wild, but that's just because whoever wrote the script was a lousy developer. It's not supposed to be that way.

Here's how Ajax works: A whole page is downloaded once from the server, then the page's Ajax functions start running — and then when part of the page needs to be updated, the Ajax toolkit only has to reload that specific data and render it on the page.
Sounds like Freenet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNet
You are making the assumption that the information quantity is a good measure of the complexity, which is far from obvious. It is also wrong in general for the genetic code (for example, many organisms have a much bigger genetic code than human, even though they are arguably much simpler - e.g. rice has more encoding genes than human).

Also, having a few set of simple rules is not enough to understand or reproduce a system in general.
Shopkick's Special Sauce: A Box In Every Store That Verifies You're Really There
I want to say something that will no doubt be wildly unpopular.

What are the chances that the author uses programming as a method of escape? The reason I say this -- he discusses his social anxiety at the bottom. Makes me think instead of interacting with new and random people, he would rather be in his own thoughts (either because it is less painful or there simply isn't an interest in new people).

Many people, even several that I work with, do not program much outside of the job. I would virtually always rather be out at an event or by the pool or doing just about -anything- other than be on my computer after my work day is finished. Important stuff comes through my phone and I'll address it if necessary, but I am not dying to get right back on the computer when I get home.

I should note however, that my job is transitioning out of developer and into a more outwardly facing role. I've been developing for several years and I've just grown tired of it. I get to solve new problems now.
Oh I see. It's work but you have a bug and one or two minor "irritant" :

- If I check the checkbox, I have to input a valid email or I get a something went wrong error. (bug)
- The person received an email even if the checkbox was checked (bug)
- I have to input a description of the file requested (not needed)
Bill Cosby: Hey @KevinRose where is my ...
Most people suspect it to be NP-hard or NP-complete.
There's actually been a bunch of katana attacks around the country in recent months, including one incident where the police shot a guy in Boston this past winder: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20100127cops_...

All in all, the cops seemed to handle the GT situation well.
Don't know why you are down-modded.

It is completely idiotic to walk around with something that looks like a samurai sword only few months after someone ran around the campus with the real thing injuring people.
I still do not get why Buxfer wasn't acquired.
Ask HN: Book trading service
I have a Kindle, but for programming books, I prefer paper. The problem with them is that they are usually expensive. I really want to read SICP, and I know I can read it online, but I would much prefer a paper copy, as its much easier to flip through pages. This all leads to my question:

Is there a site that brokers book swaps?
Schools are no-weapons zones. You may not like it (I don't) but everybody who doesn't realize that he'll get the cops called on him when walking around with something that looks like a weapon on a school campus is an idiot.

Having the cops check out a guy with a sword is not 'chronic distrust of anything and everything'. It's a prudent move that is standard operating procedure around the world.

On top of that, this appears to have been at a school where there was a violent incident with a freaking samurai sword not so long ago. How can you reasonably maintain a position that in those circumstances it's irrational to go look for the reported sword carrying person?
Malstone B benchmark: 2TB/Hour on a single Intel 7500 server
The author is arguing that reference counting is superiour to garbage collection, because it provides deterministic resource deallocation.

I say this is wrong -- object lifetime and resource deallocation should be entirely separate. He should use with and using(), not depend on a quirk of a particular implementation of the language.

If an object's lifetime ends while it still holds an open handle to a resource, this should be considered a programmer error.
It definitely won't give you a surefire recipe for money, but the human brain is an amazing pattern-matching machine and someone might be able to derive some useful insights from seeing enough examples of "How I became successful."
This all depends how we define the Web. If we focus on transport protocols like HTTP, then you are correct; but the whole point of the article is that you don't need browser/HTML/CSS/ajax/whatever to consume the content.

All that is no news, and the whole concept was very hip back in the days when XML and Web services were all the rage, some ten years ago. In my opinion, it's not about who will take over -- we will simply have different forms of content transfer over the Internet, and will decide on a case-by-case basis which is better in each particular situation.
I would tend to agree, although the Hindenburg omen might easily be explained by publicity like this submission on HN. Investors read about the Hindenburg omen and the fact that it has occurred twice this month. They assume that a crash is imminent, so they start selling stocks, which causes the market to collapse.

In this way what is drivel could be made reality because too many people don't believe it to be drivel. There are some really interesting analysis of stock market dynamics such as this in the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki
I must say it's very funny to read your reasons to move to China.

Among them, there's this one :

«There are so many little ‘unfreedoms’ in europe that seems insignificant, but together they add up to a society that advocates safety over freedom.»

Ok, but this is vague. Luckily, you provide an example, about a friend of yours :

«she went online to some review forum for such services and wrote a long and scathing review about the company. A few days later, she received a letter from a lawyer informing her she was being sued for defamation, and she should delete her review and pay the lawyer costs, which came to 600€.»

And this is the reason why you're moving to a country where people who criticize the government online end up in jail. (this guy, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Xiaoning)

Thank you for not letting us believe that this is a clever kind of joke, but is really the way you think.

Good luck, you're going to need an unusual amount of it...

Typhon
Wow that joke had a long set-up.
> but Ray's right that the brain cannot be more complex than the data that specifies it

Indeed, however due to the Kolmogorov complexity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity one can argue both for DNA being a resource and, with more common sense, that DNA and all appropriate resources during a lifetime up to a point where you take a measure of a whole brain all funnels into a resource from which you can describe a brain.

And this is only about Kolmogorov Complexity and under assumption that brain is a discrete set. I am not much well read on biology, but I think there were recent advancements where some organisms also showed quantum effects playing a biological role. Even with disregarding our current lack of knowledge we can still argue if brain is a discrete set or not, proving either would be a major contributing factor in our understanding of it I think.
Dry Mouth Upon Waking As Part of Candida Symptoms
Rich: you have so much money that you cant find a way to spend it, no matter how hard you try, in the next 100 years.
31. The first computer they probably touched was an Apple II; it is now in a museum.

People born in 1992?
Grooveshark iPhone app pulled from the appstore
Craig Newmark takes Down Meg Whitman on eBay Porn
FWIW the grandparent is nothing like it was when I wrote this.
"For the first year and a half, none of our 13 employees received a paycheck."

How did she find / convince 13 people willing to work off of sweat equity?
formal logic isn't something you're supposed to get "hand-wavey" with, especially if you're trying to show off your geek-cred.

and I found it happily ironic that he preceded the statement with "i think we can all agree"
The Hollywood Cookie Diet
The article says that the HP model is NP-complete. But water folds protein very quickly. I may be misunderstanding things here, but if protein folding (as opposed to a particular model of protein folding) is NP-complete, shouldn't it be slow in real life too?

I recall reading an interview with someone who founded a company that builds computers for simulating biological systems in silico who thought that there were much better algorithms waiting to be discovered because nature can do it quickly. I can't find it now.
Monodroid (C# for Android) is coming
Uncle Sam, Venture Capitalist
There's a psychological principle that I've forgotten the name of that observes that by setting the stage correctly you can cause people to accept assumptions without even thinking about it by framing the debate correctly.

This conversation here on HN is a great example of that. Simply by the way the article is written, it is being taken nearly as fact by most participants that a human-scale AI simulation must work by physically simulating the brain. This may ultimately be true but there is no a priori reason to believe it. The brain may implement something that can be simulated "close enough" by a much simpler computation system.

Chaos is chaotic, obviously, but the human brain is a pretty fuzzy system too. It can't be too pathologically chaotic; people speak as if getting the 15th decimal place wrong will blow up the system but the brain simply can not be that sensitive or the removal of a single neuron would break our brains. Our brain state must be at least metastable to work at all. Removing a neuron or getting something wrong in the 15th decimal place may result in some small change of behavior three years later vs. not removing it or getting it right, but our brain states are already so fuzzy and noisy that's not going to be the stopper.

The stopper will be to see whether or not there is a higher-level simulation that can be run that is less complex that simulating the physics entirely. The secondary question is whether we can make something that we would call human-intelligent even if it turns out we can never "upload our brains" without critical data lossage occurring. That would be something as intelligent as us that is nevertheless fundamentally incompatible with human biology, with neither able to simulate or understand the other. I can make coherent arguments either way, as can many people, but by framing the question as physical simulation this has not been one of the more intelligent debates on the topic we've seen here. Physical simulation is one possible path, and not even the most likely or interesting, to AI and brain upload.
I find it interesting to see how so many people try to sound "reasonable" and find value in "compromise". Which is a good thing, 99% of the time. Except when the issue falls into "you can't be a little bit pregnant" category. IMHO, that is the case where Net Neutrality concerned. You can debate how to enforce it, or even if you should enforce it, how important it is, if it should be law, the ethics of it, whatever, but there is no such thing as "a bit of" or "an improvement in" Net Neutrality.

Any law or proposal that leaves gaping holes to manipulate traffic at will is against Net Neutrality. And so, apparently, is Google.

And btw, Net Neutrality did exist, for the longest time in the Internet's history. That's kind of the whole damn point, it brought us to where we are today. The fact that it wasn't enshrined in the law doesn't mean it didn't exist. All of which means that Google's proposal is a proposal to bury it, not defend it.
This is not at all what doing SICP was like for me. It was fun. There is an interesting idea on every page. The exercises are challenging and interesting.
I've been playing a lot of Starcraft 2 lately. To me, this whole Oracle v. Google debacle looks like Oracle playing 1 base terran vs. the 6 base zerg that is google. Oracle seems to be trying to hold of the speedling harass, but against 6 bases, they can't hold that long.
> So if I want to hire MMA fighters for a programming job (or give them bonus points, at least), I can do so.

You'd be implicitly selecting against gender, which is illegal.

There are girls active in MMA but it's not like it's 50/50.
Nice round-up of new Real-Time Apps
It kind of works because everyone else thinks it works. Self fulfilling prophecy. It's like looking at traffic lights and thinking traffic should move the way they dictate it - it works because, almost, everyone participating in traffic follows the same signs.
Yahoo API Updates - BOSS no longer free, WebSearch gone, changes to geo APIs
Swingly’s Answer Engine Comes Out Of Stealth Swinging And Killing Zombies
13 into 100% (even if a few get a little bit bigger cut) is a whole lot more equity than you'd get out of the typical post-VC employee equity pool.
My definition of human intelligence is intelligence that is broadly adaptable, self-training, and able to communicate via a system of symbols as ambiguous and semantically rich as human language.

For instance, an intelligence that could be taught to read English and then have a reasonable conversation about a contemporary novel, with its own insights into the style and themes of the book, would qualify.

That said, I do expect to see great strides in the sophistication of machines in the next 30 years. They don't have to think like people to be useful.
But 9 times out of 10, I'm viewing video in a web browser. Splitting it out only makes sense if they track which videos are being viewed in a web page and which ones are viewed in apps, and they aren't doing that, so the graph is meaningless.
Where did I say it was a trivial problem? I was assuming (perhaps incorrectly according to other commenters) that it's a tractable problem that may someday be solved, like putting a man on the moon was.
Feds: No charges in Pa. school laptop-spying case
Tripleseat is a web based Sales and Event Management application for restaurants. Our software helps restaurants book more business and decrease the time it takes to plan and execute events.

Restaurants are one of the largest employers in the country (behind the US Gov't) but in the last 2 years they have hit hard times with the economy. Every restaurant that closes effects everyone from the employees to the local farmer.

Our goal at Tripleseat is to make sure restaurants not only stay in business but make a profit so they can grow. With a free ticket to your event we will provide a independent restaurant in the Boston area a free one year subscription to Tripleseat and our lead gen product PrivateDining.in

This free subscription will enable a restaurant to grow, become a viable contributor to the community and in turn they will be able to pay it forward in countless ways.
First, perhaps you don't know this, but: "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together."

Next, how about I write my words and you write yours, and furthermore I write mine for my reasons, and you write yours for your reasons?

Because if what happened was that you understood what I was saying and you agreed with it, then I suggest to you that it worked JUST FINE, geek points be damned.
Surprising properties of floating point computations
The main thing Kurzweil has missed is the even though we something like the 'source code' for a human brain, we don't have the compiler.

If you're taking the (pretty weak) 'source code' analogy further, the compiler is... A host human embryonic cell, running on a womb in a mother.

So thinking about the problem that way is a non-starter for obvious chicken/egg reasons.
Thanks again for all the tips! Much appreciated. :)