skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well that's exactly my criticism: most of the author's objections boil down to "it's hard". Note that I don't disagree with him (nor with you), but this just doesn't help to expose the real issues with Kurzweil's estimates. To "protein folding is difficult" one can always reply "but we'll solve it in the next 10 years" - which I think is what the singularity-folks would say.

My simpler point is that Kurzweil's not taking a useful measure for the size of the system we're solving. (By the way, he plays the same kind of trick on his audience when he's pointing out there are only a few billion neurons in the brain - as if that were the only level of complexity in the brain).
Richness is relative. If you make $25k a year in NYC, you are not rich. If you make $25k a year in Zimbabwe, you are quite rich.

Richness is sustainable. If you make $10k a day, you are rich regardless where you live. If you make $10k in one day and nothing the rest of the year, you aren't rich, even on that one day.

Richness is based on what you can afford, not what you choose to have. If you have $500 million of assets and you drive a Ford and do all your shopping at Walmart, you're still rich.

In summary, you are rich when you can sustain a lifestyle requiring significantly more money than an average resident of your area.

"Significantly" and "area" are flexible and somewhat subjective.
Am I missing something?

Yes

= 5 C + 30 C
= 278.15 K + 30 K

30 C != 30 K
http://www.informatimago.com/develop/lisp/small-cl-pgms/aim-...
IBM launches 256-core Unix server
Firstly, a lot of studies (esp. in the USA) shows that corporal punishment have negative outcomes. This is because they do not control for other variables (such as socio-economic circumstances). Poorer parents often hit their kids more (and many studies do make a distinction between parental abuse and responsible punishment).

This is the same as the “powerlines causes cancer” research (people living near powerlines tend to be poorer and more prone to cancer). And powerlines is not even an ideological viewpoint!

The problem is that I can give you a slew of papers saying that “corporal punishment has no detrimental effects” and you can give me another slew saying it has detrimental effects. Such internet discussions will not go anywhere (the same as with the death penalty or gun rights). Perhaps I was wrong to bring this up in YCNews (since this is not the forum for such debates).

In any case, in the country of Singapore they have less crime and fewer problems that 99% of Western countries. Yet they have very strict laws (including corporal and capital punishment for drug offences).

EDIT: The original point I wanted to make was this:

In the USA, tough punishment only comes after the criminal has firmly established his bad behaviour. Any pet owner knows that at that stage it is the most difficult to change set behaviour.

You have silly things such as three strikes laws. Why? The third time that behaviour is fixed.

If that same person were punished severely for his first crime (however minor) he would think twice about breaking the law.

That is how it works in Singapore - the first crime is punished hard, and the behaviour doesn't re-occur.
''Wired September 2010 at the top. What? This is from the future''

I guess that's a habit left over from print journalism. It's their September issue.
Haha, well I guess the fact that for a moment I felt that was condescending mostly says a lot about me ;)
EuroPython 2010 Videos available
Doesn't averaging temperatures require addiion?
The parent's point was that only a myopic definition of the web does not already include video.
Thanks for the info, mate.

I believe you're slightly mistaken with your second line though - in this case it's showing the subdomain because the TLD is .in, and the 'www' bit is to just strip that particular bit from submitted links that might just be 'www.[blogspot|posterous|wordpress|blogs|etc].[in|jp|uk|za|etc]'.

[Further aside: I don't do much code any more, but it was fun to tickle that part of my brain! Thanks again!]
As a rant, it annoys me to no end that C is the SI unit for Coulomb, yet everyone uses C as Celcius. Someone should fix that.
Ask HN: When is an Idea/Startup Dead?
So i started a startup back in April with a few friends and we worked really hard to build a prototype and we talked with a bunch of potential customers; we pivoted twice and now its just sitting there not completely finished and making no money.

Is it dead?

When i tell people about the idea they say "thats a good idea." Which makes me want to keep it going and start working on it again but i dont want to waste time on something that is a dead fish.

When do you know if an idea/startup is dead? Does anyone have any insights or a checklist?
At this point we don't even have accurate models for most proteins, let alone knowing how to predict what they do.

My current project is a search engine for protein chain geometry. We only have ~20% of the known proteins in our database because the data on the other 80% isn't accurate enough to be useful.
Twitter and the SQL Server community
Remember selection bias. There is usually a fair amount of luck involved in becoming rich, and asking rich people how they became that way just tells you how those people became rich, not necessarily how you can become rich yourself. It's a little like asking lottery winners how they picked their numbers (obviously becoming rich legitimately requires real work and isn't totally random, but you get my point).
I came across JFLI a Common-Lisp foreign-language interface to Java and was surprised to find it was authored by Mr. Hickey. I wonder how his experience with JFLI shaped Clojure.

http://jfli.sourceforge.net/
10 Deadliest Insects on Earth
Here are the ten deadliest insects.
Once you've got that much money, and therefore don't need to make a choice, this kind of information becomes a lot less useful.

It would be like wondering which car a top class football player drives, or which flight tickets the USA president uses.

:(
Ask HN: Any experimental Node.js Heroku users? 
I sent my request to nodejs@heroku.com two and half weeks ago but never heard from them back. No reply to followup inquiry. Anybody is using it? Any information to share?
I'm sorry, but who said the current situation is network neutral? There have been plenty of crazy situations related to throttling (like Comcast) and deep packet inspection and content modification (like the big case in UK.)

It's a legally grey area where different groups are asking different things. EFF, EPIC, and other civil rights related groups worldwide want content non-discrimination and permission of tethering for wireless devices. The telcos want carte blanche to block or throttle as they please. And I bet 3 letter agencies (and their counter-parties in other countries) are siding with the telcos for their own reasons.

Google changed their stance at least on content discrimination on wireless. A very meaningful example Skype calls or competing video distribution platforms. Google can't represent those competitors on this discussion. In particular if they are partners with telcos with their Android system. That's where the outrage comes from.
The Biggest Challenge for Infrastructure as Code
While that's a cute phrase (and true), you're missing the point: it's about collecting all of the fruits of your labor, rather than just some of it.
It's not even "only" GoogleBot-Image that's completely blocked, there are quite a few others.
The Early Facebook Employee Exodus
I fail to see the connection.

No, a computer simulation can never predict exactly what a physical system will do, even in the case of a single particle, due to quantum uncertainty. But so what? If I took out one of your neurons and replaced it with an identical neuron, that new neuron wouldn't do exactly the same thing, again due to quantum uncertainty; nonetheless, its long term behavior would be essentially identical and you, as a person, would be no different.

That is, neurons and brains are classical objects, essentially immune to the underlying uncertainty they're built on.
Turn that rage into a popular webcomic, then you could start a new career!
Synopsis: Kurzweil is underestimating the brain. Myers is underestimating technology.
My reply to the question "How did you become rich?" would be "I cut down on the amount of money I need to live".
Ask HN: anyone doing a start-up, but have a non-technical full-time job?
Does anybody here works on a technology start-up project and got a full-time job which isn't related to technology such as truck driver, nurse aide, carpenter etc. you know what I mean? Like for me, I work full time as a nurse at night and work on my start-up project at daytime or during my days-off. What is the rate of success for this kind of situation in a start-up? And how would you do this if you're in this situation? Are you gonna quit or just keep doing it?
See my response to rfrey above; I'm not saying that people shouldn't work, just that keeping all of your economic output is preferable to giving some of it to someone else.
The site doesn't even render correctly in Internet Explorer. I really hope this was a mistake release to production for the Flight site, it still needs some love to be finished.
Brighter Planet launches web services for climate change
You'd have to read the papers cited below to get the meat of the theory but the gist of it is that you can't model proteins by looking one level down, i.e. by studying only the properties of the atoms that make them up. Proteins have emergent behaviors not entirely predictable from the behaviors of their constituent atoms.

Many still believe in the reductionist idea that a perfect understanding of physics would lead to a perfect understanding of chemistry and then biology. This is not the case.
"We can’t help but note that Google’s proposal is in essence very similar to the (widely praised) Net Neutrality regulations that were suggested a few month ago by the FCC. On several points it’s actually an improvement, as the EFF also noted."

I Wonder why none of the bigger news outlets tried to compare between the two proposals.
Hard to take this criticism seriously when it starts off with so many ad hominems.

I haven't read Kurzweil's specific claims, but I'd guess he's claiming we can simulate brain function by 2020. We can already simulate simple organisms and neural networks. You can already accomplish quite a bit of complex emergent behavior with those.

Simulating the entire brain would require an enormous amount of processing (though surely feasible some day, if not 10 years, how about 20), but most likely we'd make some trade-offs and sacrifices and still get a close approximation (like we do with virtually every simulation).

Of course simulating a brain and simulating a human are not the same thing. You can't really avoid having to simulate the entire body and its interactions with the environment.

And of course we wouldn't suddenly "understand" the brain just by simulating it. It would still be the same complex system, it's just we'd be able to inspect it more closely. Such a simulation would at least help us understand a good bit more about the brain's role in our cognition and actions.

And yeah, who knows, maybe in 20 years we could have some kick-ass AI in counterstrike.
Yeah, sorry, bad phrasing. My "only" was for the "only Google bot", not "only bot". Most of the others that are completely blocked are just bad behaving or spammy bots.
The consensus here was that this was drivel the first time it appeared (2 or 3 days ago).
The persecution of the geeks
Please Help Us Find The 100 Most Valuable Private Internet Companies
Reflections on Trusting Trust [ken thompson's turing award lecture]
This is a good list to progress towards: http://vmathew.in/lisp-repl.html
Do computer models promote top-down control?
So the Flash-based cookie is basically spyware or am I wrong?
That is, neurons and brains are classical objects, essentially immune to the underlying uncertainty they're built on.

Absolutely not. Prigogine's work demonstrates that systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium (of which all living systems are an example) are intractably non-deterministic. The issue isn't the underlying quantum uncertainties, it's the macro-uncertainties of the higher-level system.

In other words, you won't predict the behavior a neuron by modeling the underlying physics. You have to learn to model the macro behavior in a statistical way.
Best Buy Launches Shopkick Automatic Checkins and Rewards at 257 Stores
>We haven't solved the protein folding problem? So solve it.

It's not a trivial problem. There are lots of bright minds working on this problem. If you understand the difficulty behind it, you wouldn't make such ignorant statements.
I'm not so sure about the simulation, but Ray's right that the brain cannot be more complex than the data that specifies it, speaking information-theoretically. A biologist probably wouldn't get this, because he has too much knowledge of how difficult and complex the actual translation is. It's a mathematical idea, like non-constructive proofs, which freak out sensible folk - and rightfully so. (EDIT no offence intended, they freak me out too)

The only other source of information is the non-genomic environment - extra-nucleur DNA like mitochondria, and the womb (which is arguably already specified in the genome, unless mother nature has done a Ken Thompson http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html at some point.)

But it's weird to claim that 50% of our genome encodes the brain. Really? Perhaps it's just that 50% is required by the brain, much of it being foundational to the whole organism (like standard libraries.)
Rich: having passive income that satisfies your material needs/desires.
The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat

This is one reason that many, many times on HN when there is a link to a blog post about some news story on a science discovery, I post the link to Peter Norvig's article on how to evaluate research,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

as it seems to be that most readers need more practice in critical reading of statements about science. PZ is one of the few bloggers who knows most of those points already, but he frequently writes about other people who forget them, so here in this thread too I'll remind HN readers about Norvig's advice on how to read about science.
You really think that's the average story for both SF and Paris? Quite a lot of people actually live in Paris, and quite a lot of people have to commute in the Bay Area. I'm gonna make a guess that the average for the US is definitely higher than the average for France. And if I remember correctly, you'd have to go to South Korea or Japan to beat the weekly hours of the average US worker.
It's not just about reference counting though. It's a weakness of deterministic destructors. When you have a reference cycle, it's impossible to call destructors deterministically even if you aren't using reference counting.
Awesome stuff. Did you write a script to find all the Ask HN posts?
You are diverting the discussion. The main point of that comment is the ISP can inspect those packets just like if you use their servers (and probably by exactly the planned way to do it in the first place.)

With regards of privacy, Google's definition of what's identifying or not is very dodgy. From your own link, the permanent record includes the timestamp, domain, geolocation and ISP. That's a lot of information if you aggregate it.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was such a genius product due to the number of add-on planes, scenery etc., that could be integrated into the sim due to the open-ended nature, SDKs etc.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555857

I'm hope I'm wrong, but a diluted-down, closed game is going to disappoint many of the enthusiasts who've supported Flight Sim over the years, and even in the best-case, the likelihood is that much of the talent and knowledge that built Flight Sim X is gone for good.
I may be a prude for not having added any "extra" facebook apps since I registered back in 2005. I always found myself outdated but still refused to accept friends' request for quizes, games, buttons etc. Now, I am not as embarrassed after all of my plain old page with standard options.
Small world... my girlfriend just applied to a position with Quirky and today I see it on HN.

I once helped build a site for a client that sold all sorts of one-off stuff from around the world. Last I heard her site really took off and she's been contacting some of the orig devs about more work... it's definitely a niche market but I guess there's plenty of folks with disposable income seeking novelty.
Git and Mercurial Branching
Eric Schmidt, Web 2.0 vs. Web 3.0
Paul Graham is a Brilliant Recruiter
I'm not "rich", but I'm cashflow positive.
> Modern attackers are active by default; they proxy connections from phishing sites or attack the DNS.

The biggest attackers by far are the NSA and similar agencies -- that's passive attack -- scanning your emails, VOIP calls, browsing habits, etc.
They do have an incentive... but an incentive to make developers use ads-subsiadised apps. Maybe that was their main strategy all along, and they told the carriers they could keep any money made on the store to get some traction (and to avoid the carriers creating their own stores).
I'm all on my lonesome atm, so all these choices are mine. The college IT guy at my university (he's just completed a PhD in quantum computing - and he's been forced to work as the maintenance guy because of the recession, poor guy) works with linux, and I imagine I'll be able to ask him for help and tips. So linux it is! Cost is also a consideration, and while Macs aren't bad value for money (http://bit.ly/3SGXeJ), but they're still expensive. So linux suits me fine. :)

I think I'll go with Ruby too. I had a look around both sites (Ruby's and Python's), and decided superficially that I liked Ruby better, as I've nothing else to go on. Plus, Ruby's online trial thingy (http://tryruby.org/) is pretty cool. :)

As far as programming for science goes, I'm not sure tbh. The main program I use at uni is ChemBioOffice (by Cambridgesoft), but I'm not sure what that's programmed in. Any ideas?

Can you recommend any particularly good ways of learning a language? There seems to be some debate over rote learning, then programming vs. practical learning. Any good tutorials etc that you know of?

Thanks to both of you!
i've found it's helpful to start building relationships with people BEFORE you need the coverage. for example, i'm always on the lookout for stories i can send over as a tip to TechCrunch. sometimes they cover them, sometimes they don't. the important thing is now they know my name and will read my emails.
It could be an indirect way of saying everyone, everywhere buys a copy of Mathematica.
Even if you accept the author's premise that the world is moving to "apps", how many of those are just built on a webkit core? I'd say half of the "apps" on my iPhone are just wrappers of varying complexity for good old port-80 HTML and HTML5 content.
Tesla was digging ditches for influential ex-Wall-streeters after quitting the Edison company. During lunches he would tell about his ideas - this helped him to get financing a few years later. Just an example
Not really. Google's answer is correct, in as much as it can be without mentioning the materials involved.
Trying to hold my tongue because the whole Flash vs HTML 5 thing is so tired on HN, but this comment is just so wrong and borders on outright insulting the developers.

HTML5 is far enough along to do this with no problem

Simply not true. Not close to true. Unless you have a very loose definition of "problem". There are all sorts of problems trying to do this with HTML 5 right now, from the audio generation parts (and no, requiring a patched version of Firefox does not count as "no problem"), to the visualization with canvas (consistent framerates across browsers, no tooling for editing the code, etc), to the drag and drop of audio tracks (you did claim you could do it just as easily in IE6 right?)

In 2010, the fact that they built the whole thing in Flash just seems like laziness.

I simply find this comment baffling and asinine. Seriously? An amazingly polished app that pushes the boundaries of in-browser music editing (regardless of your assertion that no Flash app can ever push boundaries, which in itself is a ridiculous claim). And you call them lazy because they didn't do it in a way that is simply infeasible today? Too much HTML 5 kool-aid my friend.

This isn't a proof of concept demo built in a weekend. This is an app with serious time and effort invested in it. I'm just tired of all these "this is trivial in HTML 5" comments that are so dismissive. It's not being done in HTML 5 by anyone. Not even close (and yes, I've seen the Firefox audio demos). If it was trivial to do in HTML then someone would be doing it, but they're not. They will be eventually, I'll give you that, once the technology can handle it. But calling developers lazy for not wanting to inflict pain on themselves while wrangling with immature technology is just silly.

</rant>
Why Gandhi hated iodine
GoDaddy disables RescueTime.com with No Warning
Ah, you're right. So crazy domain names get a subdomain to show up on HN. Very cool.
I think all of us have encountered examples like this.

I consider myself a fairly savvy user, but a few years ago, I was caught by geni.com's invite policy (it was endorsed by Time Magazine, so I trusted it more than I should have).

I entered the email addresses of a few family members, expecting them to be invited to join the family tree. Instead they were automatically opted in to a deluge of daily email updates about family activities/events. It made me fairly unpopular for a while at family gatherings, especially with older family members, who couldn't find the "unsubscribe" link. I think some of them still have to manually delete messages every day.
In terms of thermodynamics, it's correct. What makes you think it's a bug or a joke?
The quest for the next Journeyman Programming Language
Ask HN: Started a new business, need to keep track of finances. 
I know Quickbooks is de facto standard with most businesses to keep track of finances. But before I commit to something, I really want to evaluate all potential solutions. What do you use for tracking your finances, and what do you recommend?
This is one of the problems with the Silicon Valley echo-chamber effect. Everyone things that they deserve (must!) hire the "rockstars" who hack 24/7.

I'd rather hire someone who doesn't spend all of their spare time programming because they're going to be more rested and fresh when it comes to their work programming. Spending time with family, outdoor activities, cultural events, hell even reading and not being in front of a computer are all vital to the brain.
It's failure if the energy spent on the project is more than the return. Sure you may learn something, but if all you learned was to become a better web developer at the expense of relationships, physical health, your bank account, etc, then perhaps it would have been better to just create a casual, hobby webapp for fun.
Yes, grepping for '(format t ' would seem to confirm this.
After reading this some time ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353050 personally i don't care anymore, if some of what you write is fiction just put a disclaimer somewhere and go on writing. As for other blogs if the content is ok i'll read it, otherwise i'll use my time in some other way.
The physics can be modeled, but according to this article (http://techglimpse.com/index.php/ibms-blue-gene-exploring-pr...) a 1 petaflops machine is estimated to take 3 years to crunch through 100 microseconds of simulated time. And that's just for a single protein interacting with itself and a bit of water.
Whats your Twifficiency score?
New site for Montreal founders created
See previous discussion, when only one of them had left: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=399661