skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think they aren't marketing the details like you expect because to most people it doesn't matter. Most people wouldn't know the difference if it had 1mg download or 1mbs or 10mbs (though they'll understand that the second is faster).

This is the marketing difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple says 'it's faster' and you believe them. Microsoft says 'it's 64bit and can run 192gb of ram, which makes it blindingly fast.', but the second only means something to a small percentage of customers, and the message that gets through is Apple's 'it's faster'.
I agree...any longer than 2 hours or so, and they should hire you as a contractor for a small project, and if they are impressed, hire you full time.
We don't know, which I think is Meyers' point. That is, until we understand all of these interactions, we don't know what the brain actually is.
My guess is, people who are willingly broadcasting their locations on Twitter aren't too worried about being stalked. Nor should they be.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/upload/2010/08/thinkingme...
why is this being upvoted
Composition solves that problem, but I don't know about "nicely". You end up having to litter each class with a bunch of boilerplate methods which simply call the same method on an instance field. This avoids inheritance problems but you can end up with a lot of extra code.

What I would like to see — at least in Java — is a keyword or annotation for instance fields to mark them as pseudo-superclasses. Then the compiler would generate all of those call-through methods automatically, unless overridden in the current class.
I thought HN frowned upon posting tweets, but they keep popping up. This one is particularly useless.
Sprint: http://shop.sprint.com/en/stores/popups/4G_coverage_popup.sh...

I couldn't find anything official on AT&T's, Verizon's, or T-Mobile's sites.
It's a good question. There's a saying that behind all successful men is a good wife. But it depends entirely on your personal circumstances, and the demands of your wife/family.

A start-up can be HARD. And there's no guarantees, and often irregular cash flow. If you can handle this (ie have sufficient float to cover) then ok. If not, it could get stressful.

The one great thing about being married is it forces you to be "real". When you're in your early twenties, foot-loose and fancy-free, you can embark on just about any flight of fancy without too much in the way of repercussions. But conversely you are not being forced to think too critically (financially). When you're older, with responsibilities, you can't be dicking about. You _have_ to appraise what you're doing in the context of wider financial obligations. This can be a good thing: it might stop you taking stupid risks.

But, fundamentally, it comes down to this: does your wife support what you are doing? Is she prepared to accept a reduced income/life-style for a shot at the big time? Is she comfortable with the odds against this? Is she gonna be happy you spending all your time in front of a PC with often little to show for it? Only you can answer these questions.
Like getting bought?
Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash
I completely agree, and I tend to pass that over into web apps that I build. Don't remove complexity, hide it. That's why I don't really buy whole-heartedly into the "less-is-always-more" school of Jason Fried and company (although you can't not respect the little empire they've built).
That's because we already know how a car works. We know that wheels and an engine are necessary, but a cupholder is not. Meyers' point, as I understand it, is our understanding of the brain is not yet sophisticated to know what we can exclude from simulation.
RIM Must Switch To Android Now, Before It's Too Late
To make the argument more clear:

Kurzweil says "The genome can be compressed into X bytes, so that's an upper limit on the complexity needed to simulate the human brain."

Meyers says: "No. The genome says 'make a protein with this shape'. We don't understand the full complexity of the brain until we understand all of the physics (including potential quantum effects) that go into protein folding + all the different environmental effects. Further, the information in the physics and protein folding stuff is much much greater than information in the genome".
Some anecdotes from running multiple forum sites over the years:

Most forums end up using flat replies because normal people don't understand threaded replies. A friend at YouTube recently said that their research backed up that anecdotal assumption.

A couple of the major forum vendors tried offering hosted solutions and it wasn't sustainable as a business model for them; they both went back to simply licensing the forum software itself.

Forum communities are like any other social system: network effects and "where your friends are" are what keep you from leaving. Most "power user" features go unused by the majority. Stats like only 3% in one community use the friends list, only 10% in another use the profiles, etc. It's never about the feature set, it's all about the community.

Existing forum software is basically a black box. It's hard to integrate with and expand. It's hands-off for the admin until they realize they want a site that's more than just a forum.
Although solving a critical problems is a significant advantage (especially in the b2b market), I think it is also possible to establish a business based on adding-value or improving upon various aspects of a business or consumer experience. Add-ons to existing products and web apps that simplify a more complicated workflow are good examples.

I find that much of the functionality of many successful web apps can be replicated in a spreadsheet, but the added value of the time savings, improved functionality and simplified workflow make the web app worth the price (although not necessarily critical).
we need to model everything that happens to the brain before it becomes a brain

Perhaps the disconnect here is that Kurzweil, operating from an information theory perspective, is neglecting the possibility that the biological environment in which a brain grows effectively adds a ton of "data" to the system. That is, it's not as if brains can spring fully formed from the genome itself, and a few basic rules--it requires a very complex environment. So we're probably talking far, far more than 50MB of "data" here.
In Death, Nexus One Does What It Couldn’t Do In Life: Sell
> the decompression algorithm, i.e. the route from the genome to brain, is insanely complex, but it doesn't say anything about the actual complexity of the brain

This is where both Kurzweil and you are wrong. A very complex compression/decompression scheme can achieve much better compression. Intuitively, you can encode some of the information in the decompressor itself, even if it is in a very abstract form. This is the reason why compression competitions include size of the decompressor code, e.g. http://prize.hutter1.net/
I don't agree.

I think you underestimate the degree of development and learning that takes place in the womb (language starts developing for instance). Feral children were still incubated by a mother.

If you were to mash together a bunch of neurons, you won't get a brain. You'll get a mess of neurons and random firing. That's the thing, that development of the brain and the arrangement of and connections between neurons is the critical component. They're dictated by genome, yes, but also by biological environmental factors (hormones), but also by external environmental factors (auditory through the womb).

Maybe you can grow a bunch of neural structures that look like a human brain, but it's just as likely that you'll only get an undifferentiated mass that's as smooth and intelligent as a bowling ball.
"I am skilled in many technologies such as Adobe Photoshop CS3/CS4, HTML 4/5, XHTML 1.0 Compliance, CSS 2/3 Compliance, Windows XP/Vista/7."

If it were me I'd drop all those versions (just say Photoshop, HTML, CSS, Windows) and focus on the marketing side, which seems to be your strength. Good luck!
Here's a pretty good comparison of the two techniques: http://www.artima.com/designtechniques/compoinhP.html

Having worked with a lot of C++ code recently that employs both methods, I personally prefer inheritance for the majority of cases. One of my primary goals while writing code is to write as little code as possible. If I have to write wrapper methods to expose the interface of the back-end class I've composed, then I'm not achieving that goal.
For everybody else having trouble with the information theory aspect of this argument: Pop quiz, how many bits of information are contained in the Mandelbrot set? When you figure out the answer to that question, and really internalize the answer, you'll be in a much better position to understand Kurzweil's argument here.

(And forgive me if I think understanding it should be considered a prerequisite to refuting it. Most commenters here are skipping that step. He may yet be wrong, but surely we can at least do him the courtesy of engaging with his actual argument and not dim reflections from a funhouse mirror?)
Why Does It Seem That American Society is in Decline?
VMware's James Watters Interview Only on TWiCC (video)
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Also, a lot of early blind computer users liked ed(1) and other console-based editors.

One even wrote a browser (with JavaScript support!) with an ed-like interface:
http://edbrowse.sourceforge.net/
There is kind of an odd tone to this article as if the shrinking of the quant economy is a tragedy when in fact it should be the natural course of this sector if it is not too corrupted. The efficient market hypothesis and information theory tells us that using probabilistic models to extract a competitive advantage can only give good returns when your method is better than all of your competitors'. When two firms have similarly optimized tactics, they bet against each other and the margin of money than can be skimmed off their betting market will shrink to almost nothing. I don't mean that the profits will be split between the two. I mean the bidding war will push the price towards its optimal value where no money can be extracted.

In a competitive quant market, as all the firms perfect their mathematical models, they should all move asymptotically towards the best probabilistic model possible given the available information and eventually erase each other's gains.

The boom in computing technology of the past thirty years was an immense opportunity for mathematicians to make money by racing to perfect their models before others. However, as this industry matures it should eventually take only a few very good systems to extract a thin margin that will barely cover the cost of running the systems themselves.

Moving towards that point of efficiency is a capitalist and libertarian victory that people (at least those who believe in capitalism) should celebrate. The conclusion is a market so efficient that little money can be extracted by betting in it. That means money going to the real economy instead of the wall street casino and more value for everyone. The fact that the sector is shrinking indicates the free market is actually working.

I don't believe in the free market everywhere but I think when it actually works well and create value we should be glad, not lament the loss of the casino profits.

This allegory illustrates the efficient market hypothesis nicely: http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2005/03/doing-lines.html
You mean how Oracle took Sun's defensive patents and unleashed all hell?
Science explains the mystery of ‘beer goggles’
The movie example reminded me of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKF1u-TOXuE
oh teh irony of an article about "less" a being wall of text / tldr.
A Mouse Gesture App That Really Should be Touch
Given the idea that consciousness is related to complex quantum interactions at the molecular level, and the fact that computing power hits hard limits with regard to physical complexity at nano-scale, it seems unlikely that we'll be modeling human brains well enough in 20 years to reproduce conscious human thought.
There was a Joel Spolsky talk on this sorta thing on why Apple's way is better than 37 signals, unless you're really small. Anyone have a link?
That quantum-mumbo-jumbo brain thing was just that: an idea. I don't think Penrose has many serious followers with that one.
Researcher: Code-execution bug affects 200 Windows apps
Here at TripAdvisor, we give engineers root on EVERY box.

Ugh. I understand the principle of empowering developers, but some basic security would be nice...
7 of the Greatest Scams Ever
For me personally, have to disagree with you. A lot of "self-service" stuff can be annoying but for the most part I really like having self-service travel. I see the options and can quickly make the tradeoffs that are important to me. Sure, you can waste hours micro-optimizing everything but you don't have to. But that's more an issue of self-discipline than self-service per se.

(Obviously if you an admin who knows how you like to do things, that can work pretty well too but my general experience dealing with corporate travel departments vs. just going to Expedia usually favors the latter.)
Check out local b-schools. Many have competitions with a lot of flexibility. You don't necessarily need to be attending that school or even be from that state.

We won $8,500 at our b-school competition and it gave us runway for 10 mos.
Just look at the Goldman Sachs Alpha Fund as an example of a quant fund with a big firm that had terrible performance.

To clarify: the size of the fund is not necessarily an indicator of whether it will be successful or not.
Oracle's Android lawsuit: A Pandora's box of serious evils
Command-T is a pretty popular new plugin for selecting files in and below your current directory; it makes heavy use of the Ruby interface.

http://github.com/wincent/Command-T

It also uses a small C extension to Ruby for speed, because for this particular scenario Ruby is a bit too slow to be comfortable.

Since Lua is so lightweight and fast, I think it should be an alternative worth considering in situations like this one, since it offers a reasonable compromise between the speed of C and the comfort of a high-level language like Ruby or Python.
There's a delicate balance between "simple" and "too simple."

I've considered buying a cell phone that only acts as a phone. No text messages, just some buttons and a "send" key. But some people only text. So I need a phone that can text. And I use the phone's clock instead of a watch. Oh, one more thing, I also use the alarm clock when I nap away from home. And I use the address list quite a bit, because I've only memorized 4 phone numbers.

Unfortunately for me, it would be stupid to design this phone! It reached a tipping point where it makes more sense to use a real mobile OS. Then they can add apps and settings and make it appeal to more people. These demands are very inelastic. I need an alarm, and others need a tip calculator, and others need to take notes, and some people need a calendar.

The real irony is that I would love to select my phone features à la carte past the point of just adding and deleting apps, but that defeats the original problem - too much choice.
I think the debate is this: The CS people see the biologists as overcomplicating the problem while the biologists see the CS people as oversimplifying.

I do understand that eventually we will be able to simulate the brain of an adult without having to simulate all the development that created that adult brain and all the minute chemical mechanisms that enable fat and protein to think. You can simulate important parts of the basic components and get the same output as a real brain doing the same thing.

However, I think that since many computer scientists see the brain as a chemical computer, they misunderstand how close we are to knowing how it actually works. We have conceptual holes in our understanding in how the brain actually processes input. We are not at the point where we can start simplifying: if we want to truly simulate what we know about the brain, we have to include the activity of every molecule, since we don't yet know what activity we can ignore.

We want a Newtonian physics simulator, but we only know subatomic interactions — we have to simulate the entire universe even though F=ma is underlying it all. [Edit: yeah we understand a lot more than that but I think the analogy still applies.]
You didn't mention what kind of web development you are doing. If you are into node.js, ruby or modern nosql databases, you should definitely install cygwin and mingw. These environments let you compile most posix stuff, like you could do on Mac OSX. Plus they have nearly a complete set of all command line tools you might know. (bash, grep, find, awk, sed, ...)
I found some unexpected wisdom, along with a lot of things I agree with.

"If you haven't built your website on top of your API, consider doing that -- or at least what it would be LIKE to do that. If your API couldn't reproduce your website, your API needs fixing."

At first, I was going to argue with this. But then I realized: You don't have to actually -do- it, just write like you would. You don't have to give third parties the ability to do everything you can do locally, so long as you program in such a way that it can be done. It helps decouple things better, and make things more testable.
Yes. There's been a huge hedge fund boom for years, and it'd been buoyed by the rising market. (a proper hedge fund ought to be uncorrelated to the market, else it would be cheaper to go long the market more directly. But I digress)

This is the natural evolution of an underperforming asset class.
Unleashing Your Enthusiasm: Grunts Making a Change
This was a really interesting interview and I was surprised at some of the technology stack in use.
I can't believe people still use mod_perl...
Well how much information is encoded in the brain making process? Isn't most of it the same that is used for manufacturing all other living tissue?

Either way, I don't see you or any other naysayers giving any numbers. Just a vague "it's all too complex we'll never get it". Maybe, maybe not - but it is just a claim, which hardly seems enough to justify trashing Kurzweil.
That was sort of the point, given that the mandelbrot set contains very little real information and that you can express the whole set in one line of math you can take a stab at thinking about the complexity of the structures that you can generate when your input is substantially larger than that.

Find the formula and you have a shot at computing the end result but we're very far away from being able to trace the path from DNA to deep brain structure. Right now we're stuck solidly on being able to figure out the structure of the proteins fast enough (Anton?), once that's more easily done we can move on to the next level of the problem, the interactions of large numbers of proteins in a soupy environment.
on an unrelated note: I monitor visitors to my online resume and I just got an email saying someone from GS.com visited my resume. I guess there is an GS developer amongst us, may be he can elaborate.
Completely off topic but you mention that you will start something with people from Hong Kong. I'm looking for a merchant account with a payment gateway in Hong Kong but haven't had any luck... Do you or your partner know anything that could help me?

You can contact me at hn - squiggly sign - gom-jabbar.org Thanks
Zed Shaw: The Revenge Of PowerSet
He may have actually lost some credibility there.
If you're in a place to make big $ w/o doing anything creative, you're in a privileged position in life. Most people are making just a little $ w/o doing anything creative or having any meaning in their life.

Doing anything that matters is a lot of work with just a slight sliver of reward. If you're in a position to make it as a rent-seeker, I say milk it for what it's worth.
Click-through rates fall
> JS implementations have gotten hundreds of times faster in the last three years, while Flash has gotten slower.

I don't know about that. Flash may be proprietary, poor coding community, etc, but to suggest it is creeping down to JS performance is pretty outlandish.

Flash has two communities. One: Designers trying to do timeline animation with a mix of code snippets they've found. Two: Decent coders who implement the safest, best methods.

When Flash performance is subject, it tends to be Flash's poor design that gets the bad rap even though it tends to be the poor developer community at fault. In the same way, JS-based interactive content can also be coded poorly and perform poorly as a result.

Honestly, I've seen some pretty intense, balls-to-the-wall sites that I know would absolutely work at a crawl or snail's pace in JS, but work elegantly in Flash.

A full open-source file format would be a great move for Adobe.
On a widescreen I sometimes setup a file in multiple vertically-split windows, offset by one page, with scrollbind turned on. With scrolloff=999 I can now set 2 or 3 or 4 screenfuls of context around the current line.
interesting http://www.forbes.com/2007/08/09/goldman-sachs-alpha-markets... says that the fund failed in ~ 2007, while this article talks latest debacles.
Thanks for the reference.
Given the idea that consciousness is related to complex quantum interactions at the molecular level

Yes, that's an idea; it just so happens to be (at least outside the world of philosophy, where it's still easy to find people that don't believe in special relativity...) a fringe, unpopular one with pretty much no evidence whatsoever to back it up, because there's still no consensus on what "consciousness" even means, or whether it's definable even in principle, let alone measurable.

But in any case, consciousness has absolutely nothing to do with strong AI, which is defined in terms of what the AI can do, not whether its internal states are conscious or not.

it seems unlikely that we'll be modeling human brains well enough in 20 years to reproduce conscious human thought

Sure thing, I can agree with that, practically as a matter of definition.

Luckily, in the practical AI community "conscious human thought" is not what anyone's trying to create. They'd be perfectly happy with non-conscious, non-human thought that can learn a wide variety of things, regardless of how it's implemented.
It's gotta be JIRA or AdWords. Those are the two most widespread apps with crappy UI that Performable is likely to use.
I wasn't going to read it as I skimmed through, but I recognized the lathe (minus the computer and shield) and am glad I read through.

Having worked metal with these things and mills you can easily understand why cnc machines are so damn expensive. There is so much to deal with and I think if you would have chosen a mill instead this would have ended in more headaches more quickly.

One question that has more to do with the tech than the hell part I have is: did you have to deal with the excess strips of metal (which I've seen build up to dangerous length of spinning razor metal when people were being stupid) in the computer or was it under manual inspection? (There's plenty more that I thought about but that was my first)
Honestly I don't know what it does. I presumed it was a joke website, like http://www.nakatomiweb.com

My dad is dentist. He has a practice. In his practice every morning there are people.

Can you give a concrete example of what exactly this tool will do for him, his customers, or his office?

It looks nice, but I'm really stumped as to whats going on.
I looked for examples in the FAQ but couldn't find any.

Sorry if this sounds blunt, but I do believe it's an issue.
They announced the death of the nexus one?

If i remember they announced the death of the web store and said that they will bend over to sell in the operator's stores.