skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So your proposal to fight one of the biggest lobbying forces in the world [http://www.freepress.net/node/62059] is to demand that everything just be fixed all at once? You are out of your mind.
I think it would make things a bit easier. You won't be greasing landings but familiarity with controls and instruments would be a plus.

One of the things I remember when first starting was the sheer amount of "stuff" going on in a plane that I had to worry about. For example taking off you've got maintaining the center line/winds (aileron position) checking engine instruments, radio calls, speed, and traffic. Having seen some of these components virtually may alleviate some of that head spinning that goes on. You'd know what flaps are, and when they are usually used, you'd know what a flare is (and that you didn't need 37 pieces of it).

You would also have exposure to various IFR procedures commonly used in the real world, most useful being ILS, which can line up your aircraft with the runway and put you on the correct glide slope, and even land the plane.

I would also suspect you would have a bit of a confidence boost (that is if you're optimistic), something like "I've put a 737-700 on the blocks hundreds of times in MSFS/x plane - how hard can it be?"

Of course this is all wild speculation, and the odds of an "Airplane" scenario are pretty small.
I am sure that ThinkGeek has some cool gadgets, and I don't explicitly blame them. But items like that just give geeks a bad name imo. ThinkFreak was more aimed at the customer here, though - thinking more like a freak than a geek.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the #fail
We have a world in hand. We're not trying to build a world simulation, we're trying to build intelligences. By the time we get this far, the infant will probably be embodied, and we can use real "mothers". Some speculate that a non-embodied being can never become intelligent.

Bear in mind we are talking about at least 20 years hence, in my mind.
I really should not have been so surprised. The article may seem offensive to people who are not especially interested in doing a startup; it demands that they question their own motivations, and some people are quite content working for The Man. I can be, sometimes.
It's live now: http://vimeo.com/blog:334
Yep, down-voting isn't cool and I think bitskits has a valid opinion (even though I don't agree.)
I said nothing about wealth/opportunity inheritors being lazy. Many work hard and aren't bad people. I was commenting about the dream of success and how its skewed to tell people that they can do whatever they want, and that they can create a start up that will succeed on ideas and marketing alone...

There is much more at work in this society than whats written on paper, especially if you're reading Rich Dad Poor Dad.
Craigslist is a .org, but they seem to have the .com as well.

I definitely would stick with one of the long-time three-letter ones: .org, .com or .net. Nothings says spammer like .biz or .info.

But... when it comes down to it, better to have a 'creative' .com than a .net where the .com is taken.
I agree they aren't that far behind but it is frustrating that they have taken a while to do it. The reason I say frustrating is because I use Google reader on an iPhone/iPad and if the feed includes a Youtube video it gets pulled in as html5. Youtube has had support for html5 video for a while now. Hopefully this change by Vimeo will be reflected in Google reader now as well.
> My point had nothing to do with your ISP packet inspection argument

That's why my comment said you were diverting the point of the discussion. We are discussing ways to hide content from ISPs.
Looks like I placed too much weight on your parenthetical "and themselves"

> interactions between cell types and their environment (and themselves) is a giant information content multiplier

and we're actually in agreement; my first comment included:

> I'm not so sure about the simulation

> 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.)
That makes the term "purpose" rather useless, doesn't it?
Not the right question. Human nature works like this: If you think $5mm net worth is enough for you might get $1mm. If the figure is $20mm, you might get to $5mm. If you happen to achieve your goal, the figure will rise. Guaranteed.

If you focus on money exclusively you will be very unhappy. There are other accounts, which don't send monthly statements and don't allow wire deposits. I know plenty of wealthy people that are unhappy because they don't realize this. For some people money is even a poison. A sudden increase in wealth would lead to personal disaster. So you see, nobody is rich, envy is wasted energy.

Lecture over, here's the answer: Land investments, Equity + influence in a business.
Benjamin Zander On Music And Passion
In my own startup we're using git to handle our version control as well. As mentioned in the article, git is flexible enough to allow you to create your own workflow, which is what we did when we started.

However, our workflow became much too convoluted and we switched to gitflow by Vincent Driessen (nvie.com). In fact, there are similarities between gitflow and the braintree workflow but gitflow now has as a git "flow" module to help you out.

If you haven't checked out gitflow, I highly recommend it. Here's the original post that started it all: http://nvie.com/git-model

Has anyone else found git workflows that work well for them?
It has to do with entropy and thermodynamics and the fact that living systems are so far removed from thermodynamic equilibrium that they generate unpredictable, emergent behaviors.

The math behind is pretty gnarly but if you want to understand it I recommend his book:
http://www.amazon.com/End-Certainty-Ilya-Prigogine/dp/068483... .

A CA is not a good model for this.
That's why you don't rely on free third party API's.

I'm seriously thinking of starting a Freebase alternative, but where you can pay to replicate and run your own copy of the database. Anybody think this would catch on?
You haven't read the site, have you?

> If, however, a Tcpcrypt connection is successful and any attackers that exist are passive, then Tcpcrypt guarantees privacy.
A123 Spin-Off 24M Lands $16M To Explore Next Frontier Of Batteries
It's not really that linear because of compression. As an example, I shrunk a bunch of photos to 1/4 the resolution, and they only dropped in size about 1/4.

Plus, video can get even more aggressive about compression because it can reference between frames.
The Truth About China As #2
Original Sketch of the Ethernet Concept
The last time I tried it wouldn't work on a Mac. It seemed to require a very recent version of Silverlight and it acted like it was going to do something then gave me a bunch of blank boxes.
What is sad that all the cool hardcore C programming jobs are going oversees - unless you're a computer engineer and deal with hardware. Everyone is looking for php, ajax, python, etc, basically C-based type-less languages which anyone competent in C can pick up in a matter of days. But try to apply to those companies with C, C++ and x86 assembler on your resume, no one will get back to you.
The Chris Anderson Plagiarism Controversy
Part of the reason behind Squeezed Books (which I recently sold on) was to 'deflate' books like that. Why buy something that's just a fad and can be summed up in a page or two.
Super lame that people upvoted this story. Way off topic for HN.
Sun employees competed to see who could file the goofiest patent
Xbox Live on Windows Phone 7 Hands On: Mobile Levels Up
What does a previous incident involving a real sword have to do with this? Is the risk of sword related violence higher because it happened recently? Is the heightened fear any more justified? Should I always be afraid of people carrying swords because one person in millions used one to hurt somebody?
In case you are not aware, '419' refers to Nigerian scammers.

419 = scam/fake/fraud (loosely)
Youtube started testing this about a month ago: http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/07/new-way-to-embed-youtube-...
I haven't used Google Reader on an iPad/iPhone but I think it's unlikely YouTube is using HTML5 there. Mobile Safari actually has a built in parser for YouTube embed code, so nearly any YT embed will work even thought it's clearly an <embed> tag right to a SWF. Normally Mobile Safari will completely ignore *.swf URLs.

So in some sense we're just now getting feature parity, in another we're ahead.

Disclosure: I work for Vimeo.
I'm for net neutrality, but the argument that they are "selling bandwidth" is ridiculous -- in fact that's the very argument ISPs have for disallowing it! [Pete Ashdown is the president of a Utah ISP called Xmission: http://peteashdown.org/journal/2006/05/04/net-neutrality/] As providers of a service, they argue that they should be able to "deprioritize" garbage traffic so that all their customers don't suffer, and you might argue that this is not the real reason they de-prioritize, but regardless, your argument is just as easily turned in the opposite direction.

Bottom line, is that net neutrality is about having an accurate picture of the internet, and not a picture that Comcast (or whoever) decides I get. THAT, as well as maintaining user privacy, is the goal here.

EDIT:

I should also add that ISPs have throttled upload-heavy traffic WITHOUT inspecting the packets for a long time, so even if you didn't inspect packets, the issue of net neutrality persists.
Was researching whether LM could be applied to bicycle frames - probably not, as per this Slashdot post:

This isn't going to replace structural metals any time soon. How do I know? I did dynamic planar compressive strain experiments and ABAQUS on this stuff and composites with this as the matrix for my senior thesis.

Being a metallic glass, it has all sorts of crazy properites, as mentioned in the articles, but when it reaches the yeild strength it shatters (at least in non-composite form).

Also, because it is a metallic glass, it is inherently a meta-stable solid.... metals usually have relatively simple crystal structures, and thusly crystalize quickly with relatively small undercooling. The clever trick with this stuff is that it's a mix of four or five metallic elements that have a large span of atomic radii (this stuff is Zr-Ni-Cu-Ti-Be, various weightings of each, usually the Ni=Cu=Ti). Anyhow, when it finally does crystallize, whether due to heat, fatigue or constant strain, it forms a pretty complex crystal structure (I don't recall which one offhand) that allows very little motion of dislocations. Thus, it's super brittle when in it's thermodynamically stable state. Moreover, even with this clever alloying, it still requires high cooling rates to avoid crystallization from the melt, and is thusly hard to cast into large ingots.

Thus, whether it takes too hard an impact (can never be a tooling metal or knife, in pure form) or is under strain for too long (can never ever be a structural metal - too flaw sensitive in pure form and too expensive to process and machine in composite form) it will fail catastrophically.

Basically, this means it's pretty useless for most applications metals are required for (due to lack of crystal structure it's also a poor heat conductor - sorry overclockers). And because it is opaque, it can't be used for traditional glass applications. Liquid Metal has been around for a while trying to push the golf clubs, for at least three years, more like four or five, so I'm not sure what the sudden attention is for. We ran a back of the evelope calculation in my research group: Say you're on the links, and you mis-strike the ball, and hit a large rock in the ground with a non-composite liquidmetal club... basically you'll shatter the face of the head (only the face is amorphous due to process/cost/strength issues), sending shrapnel flying into your ankle. Yum.

Still, from a physics perspective, this stuff is really interesting due to its completely artificial nature (you'll never find anything close to this in nature) and odd mechanical properties (it's the metallic version of flubber). Commericially, in bulk form, I'd say they should shy away from structural applications and perhaps try transformers, where the thin film versions of amorphous metals have significant gains over silicon.
If they do this, I would go back to Iceland to see this. So from the tourist point of view... success!
I find the last clause of your post to be a bit ludicrous. Arrington seems to still have some kind of reputation, but not because of the quality of his postings. There's been innumerable speculative and generally shoddy posts over the years.
Bouillon Cubes for your Soups
one thing he doesn't factor in is that when you get FU money, you suddenly find that you have a cadre -- a virtual entourage -- of friends, family, and hangers-on who you never realized were (according to them) supporting you for years with your crazy dreams, and therefore are morally justified in expecting you to enrich their lives along with your own.

This can happen in more subtle ways than "yo gimme some cash for dinner". You find that scads of folks have their own zany startup ideas; your wife is ready to fulfill her dream of big-home ownership; your peers expect you to send your kids to the same fancy schools they send theirs to (and your kids agree).

People have written about this, esp. wrt lottery winners, but the same mechanics apply to the Silicon Valley lottery.
Or 500, or 10,000, who is to know. The problem is that the way the brain seems to be organized is around very simple (at face value) processing components that operate at a ridiculously low frequency in a massive parallel manner that we programmers can only dream of, at a power budget that would make Ebenhaezer Scrooge look very happy indeed.

If 35 years (according to Henry Makram, linked below it's only a decade) was all it took then we could simulate the brain today at a reduced speed and get meaningful output, after all, all you'd have to do is slow down the inputs accordingly.

We're as far away from having a universally teachable computer (not programmable!) as we were in the early 70's when true AI was only about a decade away.

Some interesting reading about the 'state of the art':

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/bl...

http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/

http://www.technologyreview.com/biotech/19767/
Youtube has a custom player built into the iPhone/Pad - it's not standard HTML5 afaik, though they are experimenting with HTML5 embeds (see my comment above for link to the GOOG blog w/ deets).
You equate the chains of oppression with the completely voluntary choice to excel in life?
A Lecture about HTML5
This reminds me of The Myth of the Genius Programmer. I.e. the developers who don't want others to see them make mistakes and instead want to look like geniuses.
I don't see how they "dig" Open-Source when they really are just releasing their source publicly. No one can see the progress of their projects or participate in their work.

It also amazes me that they consider branches to be cluttering.
"the brain may very well be a quantum computer"

This is the minority view in neuroscience.

> In quantum terms each neuron is an essentially classical object. Consequently quantum noise in the brain is at such a low level that it probably doesn't often alter, except very rarely, the critical mechanistic behaviour of sufficient neurons to cause a decision to be different than we might otherwise expect...
—Michael Clive Price
Gotta get RSS subscribers somehow, right?
You don't read Wired for the articles.
Writer for TechCrunch here. There's some good advice in the linked article, and ilamont's comment is great.

That said, I disagree with the linked article's advice on how to personalize a story for the writer you're targeting. Their example is to use a subject line like:

“Cindy – Loved your article on Buena’s robot makers + story idea”

This would be a great idea if it wasn't already abused to death. Unfortunately we constantly get pitches that begin in this format, and I now find it more annoying than anything — the compliments just seem really artificial. The worst offenders are the ones that craft subject lines to be misleading (i.e. making it sound like they have additional news to add to a story I recently wrote when their pitch is entirely unrelated).

All of that said, it's still great if you identify that a writer has expertise in a certain area and say that's why you directed your pitch to them (just hold off on complimenting them on some random article).
I think the discussion of fear in society and overreactions by the police is interesting.

I have owned one of these umbrellas for about a year and regularly carry it onto the DC metro. I have been stopped by metro police once. They calmly asked to see it, were generally curious about where I got it, quickly returned it and went about their day.

I think it's a disgusting over-reaction to deploy more than one officer to investigate a report of someone carrying something that might be a sword. If they're running around clearly attacking people with a confirmed weapon, sure.. send in the necessary resources. If they might just be carrying an umbrella, send at most one person who can handle it even if it does turn out to be a weapon. And that's assuming weapons are banned in that area because it's a school or something. In other areas of the same country I think people have a constitutional right to own weapons in which case this wouldn't even need to be investigated.

I also had one person tell me they thought they saw me carrying a gun. People aren't just afraid of sword shaped items, they're afraid of any long black narrow item. Just like Boston is afraid of anything with batteries, wires and LEDs.
It took several weeks until I got mine. You have the correct contact address. There are no replies, but you are on their waiting list. They seem to send out invites in batches. I can say, it's worth the wait.

BTW. Existing users cannot invite new users.
I think the article's original point (and mine as well) was that considering the size of the code (i.e. the DNA) as a measure of the complexity of the task is totally disingenuous when you don't have (to use your analogy) the web server, the libraries you're calling, the parser/compiler/linker for the language, the operating system for the server along with its drivers/TCP stack/etc., the processor it runs on, the mother board, or the storage. In order to turn 10,000 lines of code into a web application, you need millions of lines of code (and Verilog or whathaveyou) in terms of infrastructure.

The problem for AI is not just encoding the DNA, as it were, it's in building all those other pieces around it. Estimating the complexity of building a software brain based on the amount of information in DNA is like estimating the complexity of building a web application using 1950's hardware. "It's only 10,000 lines of code! How hard can that be? All we have to do is write the code, plus the frameworks, programming language, and operating system, plus do all the hardware design."
Does anyone remember ye olde times before 2000 when we all still had to rely on DNS? Good thing that clunky crap is long dead!
I find it incredibly goofy that he uses Mathematica for everything.
This is quite correct.

The real problem with JavaSchools is the lack of higher-level concept exposure... things like higher mathematics, machine learning, combinatorics, really deep algorithm analysis, etc.

We all have supercomputers on our desks and we're using them to do stupid stuff because most programmers don't know enough real theory to make them do better.

Programming languages are more of a pragmatic choice. You can do cool stuff in C, Java, C++, Python, etc. I care more about what you do than what language it's in.
It wasn't intended to be a comic one-liner. I think it's idiotic that someone is surprised that they went into a dormitory carrying something that looked like a samurai sword strapped to their back and the cops got called.

Was it a women's dorm? What would the story look like if it was an actually sword wielding maniac and they only sent 2 rent-a-cops?

I don't know what sort of thought-provoking commentary there is to provide around what's essentially an irresponsible advertisement for a thinkgeek product.
The nitty-gritty of whittling down your possessions
#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# you insensitive clod!
On designing UIs for non-robots
For the moment we seem to have enough trouble modeling (relatively speaking, to the brain) simple proteins reliably.

It's quite a leap of faith to make these statements about the technological future with so little in terms of progress to show in these fields for the last decades. I think the most impressive a-life demos are now almost 10 years old, the best we can really simulate is (drumroll) a cockroach. And personally I think that's a milestone achievement because it means that at least we have a principle that works.

Going through the DNA route to get to a working brain seems to be a very roundabout way of getting there, it will require all of the embryonic mechanisms to be modeled accurately as well as something like the first several years out of the womb before you'd know if you had created something insane or something resembling intelligence.

Assuming you'd recognize it as intelligent even if you succeeded, there may be more ways of being intelligent than we know about.
> That's only half the story though isn't it? The reality is your $40K a month is made from these apps (http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/feather-moor-ltd/id3053457...) 1 star apps with content ripped from sites like ehow.com.

So what? HN also rabidly follows a guy that sells bingo cards. It's not about what you do, what's interesting is how you do it, and the story you tell doing that.

Project management and bug tracking software is pretty boring, if you ask me. But the lessons from joel and 37s are anything but boring.

In fact, I would be very interested in blogs from someone who runs a sucessful porn site, just because the challenges involved are emblematic of any startup -- how do you acquire customers in such a commoditized market? How do you keep them coming back, how do you monetize them? The technical side (scaling, etc) would make for good reading, too.
My thoughts on Startup Hiring interviews
You are talking about bandwidth in the aggregate (to multiple users, aka overselling) I'm talking about bandwidth on an individual basis.

Different things.
I'm sad that it's necessary to hide things we're allowed to have because other people are easily frightened and chose to over-react to something that isn't a threat.
You would flag a post because you're cheap? That seems really unnecessary.
> The genetic system is beautiful and elegant.

Only because you don't have to maintain it
Sorry, that seemed more clear when I wrote it. I meant (risk -> reward) as in your paid for the risk you take.

You want to be the House charging people because you risk something, not the gamblers paying someone to let them make bets. In the startup world that seems to be VC's who charge people money to invest in startups while sharing the startup's upside.

Risk less than Reward seemed like a poor way to express it.
For some reason Squeezed Books sounds like a more modern version of Readers Digest. What could possibly be lost by reducing 'War and Peace' to a 20 page summary?
Is This the Birth of the Copyright Troll?