skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The question on the table, I think, is whether a brain that's pretty darn similar to a working one will still work or not - does it just have to have similar statistical properties, or are the explicit details of the connections important, does the chemistry have to be just-so, if we replaced neurons of type X with pseudo-neurons of type Y that do almost the same thing when viewed at scale Z but are completely different underneath, would it still work, etc.?

A lot of these questions are completely unanswered. We do know at least that the brain is extremely resilient to changes in chemistry and can work quite well even in the face of extensive damage, which is an indication that we might be surprised how little of the overall arrangement is actually necessary to keep it working properly.

We need to make sure that we're being careful with our language, too: the complexity necessary to specify any brain is a whole lot lower than the complexity to specify one particular brain. In AI the goal is the former, but for the latter, we really do have to worry about each strand in the carpet. An AI researcher might not give a rat's ass about reproducing your memories, and will be more than happy to construct something that can form any memories; on the other hand, to you, your memories (and the detailed wiring inside your head, which we might be able to alter substantially without "breaking" the brain) are vitally important.
I hate you for asking me this because it is such an emotional issue for me. I've been asking myself the same question for over a year now. The answer has almost always been savings. I have a wife/house/car/loans and need at least $3000/month. The good thing is that I see the light at the end of the tunnel. July 2009, I thought I'd start in Feb 2010. Feb 2010, I thought I'd start in July 2010. Right now I'm aiming for next month. I know it's a moving target but it is getting really really close. If magic-pixie-unicorn-fairy gave me $6k no-strings-attached, I'd do it today. Otherwise I think by mid-Sep, I'll be in a good position to dive right in. Counting days at this point...
Ask HN: WHy isn't everyone given a parachute when on an aeroplane?
Just wondering. It makes sense doesn't it. I would feel much safer and you only need to buy the parachutes ones.
It's missing the megalithic yard and related units.
http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/megalithicyard.htm

This turns out to be a really cool system of measurement involving distance, volume, mass, frequency, etc, all based ultimately on the rotation of the earth.

Edit: the book Urial's Machine and its successors expand a great deal on this system of measurement, and how there are echos of it in Old English and Babylonian measurement systems. I can't find an online description, though.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=why+don%27t+you+get+a+parachute+on+plan...
P vs NP timeline visualization
This is a nonsense discussion. Finding a cofounder is hard because everybody is looking for a cofounder.

If that's the case, I would think it would be easy to find a match, not unlike drunk college kids looking to hook up (but hopefully a little more discerning in this scenario).
I was the operations manager for Smartgroups.com an egroups (yahoogroups) clone.

We used two small Sun E250s to send upwards of a million emails a day using qmail and a tweaked version of the Solaris TCP settings to close connections as quickly as possible. These two servers also handled the bounces as well as the usual spam attempts. If I was doing something similar again I'd still used the Solaris/qmail combo as it was very reliable.

Our biggest problem was with people marking us as spammers even though they had to sign up to groups to use the service but that's a constant headache in this game. We also had some shell scripts that culled SMTP connections (either incoming or outgoing) that had been help open too long as that helped us deal with DOS attacks.

The site also throttled SMTP traffic to give HTTP traffic priority if required as that's OK for SMTP with its store-n-forward architecture but not for HTTP
Are you talking about the actual SMTP server part, or how they would pass on those messages to the SMTP servers?
Gotcha. I've also thought about producing similar dumps. Feel free to email to discuss.
Salford in Greater Manchester (UK) is the antithesis of startup hub :(
Acne Antibiotics
Interesting, I missed that one.

Though I hope somehow comments are pooled before sending, otherwise this would really be overkill for major threads.
No need to go looking for conspiracy theories. The reason they don't do this is simple: It's hard.

Look around at the plethora of ways to accept payment and send money online. Dozens of them, right? How many of them allow payouts to non-US citizens? One.

PayPal, that's it. That's the only company that's managed to even partially solve the horrible problem of how to put money into a non-US bank account and not immediately go out of business due to fraud. They solved this because solving fraud issues is the only thing they do. And it took them a long time. And still they can't figure out how to do it for over half the countries in the world.

Google doesn't hate Hungarians. They just don't know how to send you money. Try not to hold it against them.
They use companies like Silverpop
I typically just close the door, and my wife knows not to disturb me when the door's closed. It's pretty darn simple, really. I agree with the other post - have partners and family that understand "when I say I'm at work, do not disturb me". Perhaps a 'do not disturb' sign would be more effective?
Chipping in on Textmate to Vim switching
We actually don't make any money on the print subscription. MagCloud charges $0.20 per page + $1 for perfect bound, and charges at least $2.15 per issue shipping in US/UK.

So yes, if you do the calculation, we actually 'lose money' on each print subscription.

The print subscription plan was made available thanks to the advertising deal we managed to strike with MagCloud, which now only 'break even' with our cost.
It doesn't make any sense at all. The chances of being in a situation where you need one are infinitesimally small. The chances of being in a situation where you need one and it is safe to use one and still having the presence of mind (and time) to find it, put it on and properly use it are even smaller. If you want to make air travel safer, demolish all the roads in town and have everyone walk to the airport. You're much more likely to die on the way there.
Yes. You'll get all in a zipped file delivered to your email.
Thanks! It's taking me a while to get through all of them now, but I should get through the backlog this morning.
We will create a 'Content' section in magazine issue page on the website, where we list and link to all the articles appearing in that particular issue, along with its HN discussion.

Hopefully this provide an alternative for other readers.
We're arguing different things. You're talking about the information content required to reproduce a particular brain, which I agree, has a massive Kolmogorov complexity (even if we decide, as we might want to, to factor out many equivalence classes based on behavior). Far more than a DNA estimate would hint at.

But I'm just talking about (as are most AI people, and I think Kurzweil, as well) the informational content required to build a brain. Any old brain, could be yours, could be mine, is probably neither. The information required to do this is much lower, and corresponds loosely to your first example, a kilobyte with alternating ones and zeros.
Seems like there are some interesting monetization strategies. Collect my entries for a year and then offer to sell me a stunningly-bound printed collection of my last year's entries, perhaps interspersed with news snippets relating to specific entries etc. Or let me select a particular range of entries talking about the start of my new relationship and have them bound and printed as an anniversary gift for my loved one a few years down the line.

I guess online sharing in a kind of mini-blog format for a few trusted people is also an interesting premium service.

There must be dozens more of these...
REQUIRES php 5.3, won't even run on 5.2.x

That's a tad overboard.
It costs - The parachutes cost. The fuel to carry a plane load of parachutes for all the passengers costs. If airlines pass on the cost, I doubt passengers are willing to pay extra, even if it might save their lives.

Image - there are only so many precautions and safety demos before passengers think "Hell, this is just too risky"

When something goes wrong on the plane, it's probably too catastrophic to get your parachute on and wait by the door.

If there comes a point when passengers need to 'chute out, there's going to be a stampede.

Issues of liability when landing passengers break limbs, dent the roof of your car, drown in the ocean under their parachutes.

Any more reasons anyone?
What amazes me is that this is presented as somehow novel. Quotes about power corrupting have been floating around for 100s of years. The most famous, "…absolute power corrupts absolutely", is from 1887 (see http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/288200.html), but similar quotes go back to at least 1770.
Do you want to help Google make its ads more "interesting" to you?
Cicky: http://github.com/adn37/HNCommentsHighlight
If by "start" you mean "quit your job and start full-time" then I won't because I have an unemployed spouse and 2 young children (and my current salary doesn't facilitate any savings).

Of course, nothing stops me from working it once the kids go to bed but it's frustrating, tiring and is taking a very very long time... and then lack of motivation and/or distractions are big problem.
I'd never pay for it, either. Since you're one of the biggest stars on HN, it might annoy you that some editors are choosing the stars for this monthly publication. But, that's the "killer feature" of the "old media" approach. Curated content has some big benefits. It saves people from the hassle of wading through a lot of marginal posts. It also helps me when I wind up occasionally missing some gems.
It just about kills me to disagree with you publicly, since I so often find myself up-voting your comments on this site.
Hyundai to launch Hyundai Santa Fe in October 2010
Hyundai Motors Limited is looking forward to launching their new model in the Indian market. One of the new launches will be SUV model Santa Fe which will be launched in October 2010. Speaking on the launch Y K Koo, Senior Director, HMIL said “Santa Fe may be launched in the month of October and its price can be in the range of Rs 20 lakh to Rs 22 lakh which will be very competitive”.
Most crashes happen during start or landing and involve lots of fire and g-force.

If you somehow had the chance to leave the aircraft in mid-flight, the environment outside the plane would kill you. Very, very cold, very high speed winds (besides the plane moving very fast through the air) and no oxygen. If the pilots could maneuver the plane safely to lower altitudes, chances are very good they could also just put it on the ground.
Try jumping from a 747 next time you're flying.

The thing that kills you is the ground, which is an obvious enough statement, but overlooked I think.

If you're flying at any reasonable altitude you've got a reasonable chance of gliding, recovering. If you're too low and something goes wrong then you're screwed either way - no parachute's going to help that.

Why's this on the front page?
So the next step is going to be working out payments for people who's articles are included right?
Maybe you should ask how http://sendgrid.com/ do it. Probably like terra_t said, with tons of SMTP senders in parallel.
We just hired an iPhone dev from a freelancing agency for about 100EUR / hour. So yes, that's the normal rate right now.
Hmmm, hows about seats with built in parachutes? Kinda like ejector seats, but without the ejector.

If the plane disintegrates, the parachute deploys at a certain altitude. That would be a good reason to keep your seatbelt on through the flight. There'd be issues with oxygen and pressure at height... but it's a start.
The point is to print the best articles, its easy to miss a good article with the sheer volume that goes through this site.

Charging for the digital version is strange...
Here's one for Sizes:

"How big would the map on the BBC Dimensions website look on your monitor?"

(answer - a small rectangle about 10% of the screen's size that can't be made bigger, partially obscured by a big textbox).
We are trying hard to reduce the cost of the magazine (especially deliver international) and by having the subscription plan is our first step.

Let me explain.

Firstly, the readers get some savings by subscribing other than purchase individually (not to mention the hassle). Secondly, when we reaches a certain number of print subscribers (let say 500), we could confidently do a print run with our local supplier for a cheaper price. Then, we could significantly lower the cost (and thus lower the subscription price). And to be fair to the existing subscribers, they get to extend their subscribing period for free.
I think davidw has referred you to the right place for this question but I want to address on point: "you only need to buy the parachutes ones (sic)".

This isn't strictly true. Typically you'd replace a nylon reserve parachute every 10 years irrespective of use or UV exposure. You'd also repack every 6 months - some people repack much more often.

Also, having jumped from C-130s and DHC-4s I think the exit from a modern passenger jet aircraft would be very unpleasant, and without training, specialist equipment, and luck, not survivable.
The Emperor's New Mind was (IMO) abysmal, and I was really embarrassed to see someone with such indisputable genius as Penrose put out such drivel. You're very right, the strongest evidence for his theory there is that an eminent physicist wrote on it. That's not a good thing.

Please, if you've subjected yourself to that nonsense, cleanse your palette with The Road To Reality - math/physics is where Penrose shines, and that book is him at his brightest.
I've noticed that HN users are often thoughtful enough to write short summaries of linked articles in the comments section. For instance

Summary: Wired.com graph shows that while the web continues to grow (in terms of bandwidth consumption), it is not growing as fast as other internet services such as P2P and video and consequently has a lower overall % of traffic than several years ago.

So my suggestion is, add a new HN section called 'Summary' which finds all these comments (which will be recognizable by the 'Summary:' text at the start of the comment) and lists them in one place for quick reading.

Obviously the more people that do it, and know to use the same 'Summary:' convention, the better it will work. Bad summaries will be handled naturally by the downvoting in the original threads.
Designer Hopes to Bring Chic to Geeks
I'd second that. Things may have changed recently, but historically, Linux hasn't been a great platform for mail servers because of the file system semantics. (Linux systems can get very ~weird~ under heavy email loads, kinda the way that Windows systems get ~weird~ in everyday desktop operations.)

Solaris is very good, and the x-BSDs often do better if you're a free software fanatic.
When passenger jets disintegrate (usually by crashing into the ground) then so do the seats (and passengers).

The "ejection" component of an ejector seat is just as important as the parachute - it needs both to do its job of saving your life.
If you really want to have a parachute that badly, why not just bring it on as one of your carry-on bags?
Moral of the story: Anything that could simulate FTD would be temporarily would be one hell of a drug.
I'm starting my new job as Lead Architect at Experian Cheetahmail at the end of the month; I understand their system can send billions of emails in a month. I'm looking forward to finding out how they do that. It sounds very impressive, even before dealing with spam filtering.
Would like to have a print friendly version.
It doesn't seem to work very well here.
PCI Data Security Standards Rock (video)
It is true that I shouldn't send passwords unencrypted, but the passwords I send are not those I am concerned some government agency gets their hands on, nor are they useful for industrial espionage.

I am simply trying to avoid having the passwords ending up in some log file somewhere where a second-rate cracker can get access to them and spam my webpages. Honestly if you have the power to fix the Border gateway protocol, chances are that you are not interested in spamming my redmine installation.
Check out: http://slowitup.com. Every day I hope to collect and curate the best slowed down songs submitted by readers. Should be online within the hour. Inspired by and dedicated to the awesome Reddit sub-topic (http://www.reddit.com/r/slowitup)
Nice.

The first study I've heard of of it's type and it confirms the anecdotal evidence I've been reading about for years!

Hope there are a few more studies like this around so doctors sit up and pay attention (pun unintended).
Social innovation - entrepreneurship for public services.
I've got 4 children, and while they can tell the difference between play and work, it still confuses them when I am around and visible, but not available to help, or talk, or whatever.

Having an office outside the house is well worth the expense; it makes it the distinction between "work" and "home" very clear to everybody, and when I am in either place, I am able to give my full attention to the task at hand, be it work or family.

By the way: you might want to ask your 4-year-old for some details concerning what she thinks "work" is all about. When asked what job she wants to have when she grows up, mine says "Tinkerbell."
My point: I think I have pretty good spatial reasoning capabilities, and it took a few seconds of thinking to figure out which way I should draw the letter on my own head for other people to read it. If I had to use reasoning - that is, rational thought - then I doubt their claim that people who were subconsciously thinking of their own power would also subconsciously draw the letter so it was easier for them to read.
How Customer Development Failed Us
I dont understand fully the point of this web store from a consumer stand point. If i can go play the same game at www.x.com what is the advantage of buying the same game in the Chrome store?
Simple. Not come up with the right idea yet. Whenever I do come up with something, I either find that someone has done something too similar, or I talk myself out of it.
I'm sure someone can come up with a justification for this, but coming at this from a C# background, why is this desirable?

Now you have to carry around the fact that == sometimes isn't a reference comparison, even though that's what Java claims it always is?

Seems like a pretty poor design decision.

If I'm missing something basic, please correct away.
I work at home and it's not ideal. I think the ideal thing would actually be to have something that's very close, but physically a separate building.

Part of the problem is that, if you're anything like me, computer time isn't all work time. Sometimes for instance, my 2 year old and I look at videos of animals on youtube or talk to grandma and grandpa on skype, and at 2, she's just beginning to acquire words like 'work', let alone fully understand the implications.
Barely.

A friend of mine has been having success with a TV show "startup". I appeared on one episode to "teach" him how to weld (the backstory is true, I'm among other things a self-taught goober-weld hack). Looking back we could have done more with the episode, and I plan to come back to film some followup episodes with him.

Anyway, you can see my 15 minutes of fame here:
http://www.motorz.tv/blog/1480/learn-how-to-weld/
I'm looking for a good personal finance tool that is not US-centric & actually considered giving buxfer a try. Not sure now with their ghost-town status. Anyone know good alternatives?
Helioviewer. I'm currently working with the backend team to get stuff pushed out on 8/20 and should be able to submit the app to Apple after that. This is my first app, so I suspect it may take me a little while to get it up there. If you do download it, please review :D

Also, it will be free.
Title could include that the implied question is being answered by Sir Richard Branson, of Virgin (and lots more) fame. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Branson if you need a refresher.
Unfortunately, this article is not empirical research. It points to empirical research to back up its claims, but I suspect the conclusions in the actual research articles aren't as clear as this summary.
I am surprised it is licensed as GPLv3. That limits it to in-house projects unless you want to license any of your reusable code in a project as GPL to your clients.

If you are looking for a routing library that works with 5.3, but also 5.1.6 and 5.2, I recommend checking out Moor (http://github.com/jeffturcotte/moor). It is licensed MIT so it can be used on any project.
It defines "hundred" = 100, and likewise for other spelled-out numbers. I don't think it has any way of making it mean 100 in one context and an area (of, AIUI, indeterminate size) in another.
Wow, what interesting feedback. Also a good (and common) example of when what I say and what I mean don't match.

Here at hn, we are all stars. If it wasn't for us, hn would just be another read-only website. Probably better content than most, but still just a web site.

Make no mistake about it: Hacker News Monthly is gorgeous. I've read every issue and appreciate all the hard work that has gone into each. I understand the value for those who don't visit hn regularly, but there really are enough links and gadgets here to catch almost everything important.

This kinda reminds me of being on a cruise and getting a chance to pay for pictures of your good time at the end. They do a nice job of capturing memories, but can't possibly replace the experience. That's all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdVHjDA-Nhk#t=4m15

Good energy, but you'll want to work on control, mister.
Chrome Desperately Needs Proper Hardware Acceleration for Its Browser Games
Google is getting ready to launch Webstore, but is Chrome ready for more than basic games without proper hardware acceleration?
I spent 6 months working at home this past winter and I personally found it hard to seperate work and house work when I'm at home. I'll be working on stuff then random things need to be done. the issue with people bothering you is usually because it's so much easier when you are there. If you are gone, or close the door(lock it) then it's more work for them to interrupt you. It's still not the same as an office. An office or starbucks fixed that.
You could answer that question for yourself by reading my comment history. A substantial portion of my last ten comments have positive sentiment, and some of the negative ones are about other negative comments (e.g. The one where some idiot floated the idea that the US will shortly go the way of post-Communist Russia). I daresay if we compare mine to yours I come off as downright cheery, not to mention largely civil.

But it is true that I don't think a piling on of "this is awesome" comments are particularly useful in the average case.

I do fucking love automatic memory management.
I assume that this web store will launch simultaneously with Google's Chrome OS, where it will make lots of sense for you to use their store to browse for games, apps, themes, and everything else.

It also seems that we're moving to a place where people are happy to pay $0.50 for a game if they know that paying means the developer will make more. Better to use the official app store on your new Google computer and pay small amounts for the apps you like than the old way of not being able to find a Flash game hidden among a page of Flash ads.
Oracle vs. Google... and the web?
Actually, that's a terrible criterion for choosing a partner in my view.