skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Following your reasoning: on the one hand adjusting for volume easily gains three orders of magnitude.

On the other hand, there is the issue of power. The human brain takes about the same amount of power as a top of the line quad core processor.

For now, I do not think either of these matter, though. We simply do not know enough of how the human brain works to warrant attempting to build one. Physicists didn't start by building the LHC, either.
Well... you've upped the ante a lot from my earlier post. I only asked for the reason why people didn't think memrisors wouldn't lead to a break through when various people argued that it would. I'm not certain it will but I'm also not certain it won't.

Still.. Maybe, maybe, just by being slightly optimistic about this development, I deserve to be tagged as "propos[ing] memristors will lead to AI"

Fine, tag me as claiming that memristors will jump us to the singularity fifteen years earlier than Ray Kurzweil claims, with ponies for everyone!

But seriously...

Neural networks have been pretty standard AI model for a while now. Memristors claim to be able to simulate them on a chip rather than forcing them to go back-and-forth between disk and chip. Why would that lead to some level of advance?

I'm waiting for the argument...
I am happy to see that Mackenzie's comment has been voted up from -1 to 3 now.
Physical construction envy is naive.

Many bridge-building projects go over time and over budget.

Most bridges have a feature list fixed years before construction is begun.

Bridges are static. Even draw-bridges do not adapt to their environment automatically, but require human intervention.

There is a categorical error when you try to apply construction practices of static things to the construction practices of dynamic things, hence the failure of waterfall. Note that the original papers that introduced waterfall actually suggest a system that more closely resembles iterative development than BUFD.
Whether or not this pans out, I'm happy to see someone hold out on an acquisition. someone has to resist the temptation of an acquisition to be the next huge thing, and this means groupon has a chance at being the next 100 billion dollar company. Plus, there in the midwest!
> There are a lot of things wrong with this analogy

I think so. As a rule, when something can be developed incrementally rather than planned and engineered, it should be. This makes mistakes less expensive, allowing you arrive at a satisfactory end result in a fraction of the time.

This is one of the huge advantages of the web over desktop software. Initial delivery to the desktop and subsequent updates cost significant time and headache. Redeploying to the server is just a matter of running a script.
Hey, late reply but no I do not have zoom text only turned on.
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Without wishing to knock Kickstarter, which has provided a platform for plenty of great projects, it's fascinating that people are now willing to pay good money for an icon and a statement of intent (otherwise known as vapourware).
No, I wouldn't. But so what? Putting trust in a service just because it's running on a low-numbered port is ridiculous.

If we want trustable services, there are ways to do that, although with mixed track records to be sure.

To try to create trustable services by assigning a range of ports to the superuser is clumsy in the extreme, and has all sorts of bad side effects.
I think the bridge analogy can work a different, equally effective way: we can build software based on well-established and tested engineering principles, with tools and materials that have a known, verifiable set of behaviors.

I'm not a materials/mechanical engineer, but it seems that engineers can build bridges properly the first time (most of the time, right?) because they are working against a set of well understood, well tested physical laws (for lack of a better word). Even I write the perfect, say, shopping cart application, that bit of software still relies on programming frameworks, web servers, operating systems, and hardware systems that have known issues.
"The founders are already going to be super-rich. This isn't Twitter, Groupon is already profitable and raking in the dough."

Is there any chance that the founders of Twitter aren't going to be super-rich? Even if in 2 years Twitter is completely gone, I'm guessing that the founders are already incredibly wealthy.
Ghd hair news - Thursday 02 December, 2010
"So you are almost done ! Great! Here is $2000. Go build my GroupOnTwitterFacebook iPad client post haste !"
Show HN: My side project - Fmlfeed
Hey everyone,

I've just officially launched my web application, FMLFeed. It's a simple web application which is a spin on fmylife.com (which I may or may not have a small addiction to haha). Basically I decided to use public statuses from Facebook as my data source and then apply a filter to determine which are most likely to be funny. The filtering is pretty rudimentary right now and the site only has the "newest" feed live but I plan to slowly iterate and launch new features in the coming weeks. Like many of you say, launch early :).

I would really appreciate some feedback on the general concept and design of the site. I've got pretty thick skin so please be truthful. Thanks!

url - www.fmlfeed.com
If you ever want to take VC/angel money, you will most probably need to spend more to restructure and re-incorporate. The boilerplate that services like LegalZoom are not made for startups. They may be fine for other types of businesses, but not for startups. If you're one or two people running a small business, you should be fine.

Even YC advises against incorporating using generic paperwork (I would imagine the YC paperwork is pretty similar to what other Silicon Valley startup attorneys would use):

"Don't incorporate, though, if you can avoid it. It's easier to start with our paperwork than to transfer an existing LLC or S-Corp to a C-Corp."[1]

[1] http://ycombinator.com/faq.html
Does anyone remember Facebook? In 2006, they rejected an acquisition offer of $1 billion from Yahoo. Four years later, they're clearly a juggernaut of social networking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#Financials
Wonder what the minimum bid is on this thing, it would be a hell of a super-yacht.
Comments like this reflect more on their author than the startups and management teams they're about. Have you ever been inside a startup, and seen how one one-thousandth of the relevant information ends up in the press, and even then it's distorted? We don't even have more than rumor that this deal exists -- that should hint to you the quality of your information. These players aren't stupid. You have no idea how much you don't know here.
I did. The password ONION results in garbage, AFAICT.
"So, i didn't get what exactly $600 piece author referring to. i dont know any sw that costs $600 and can be replaced by these 100 lines."

Sorenson Squeeze. It's right in the article.

Now, whether this Ruby code replaces all of what Sorenson Squeeze does is another matter. (I'm betting the answer is "No." http://www.sorensonmedia.com/quality-video-encoding/details/)

ffmpeg is pretty sweet, but I've run into problems converting one or another video (swf, for example) so as you've noted it won't solve everyone's conversion issues.
Minimizing the cost of producing secure, reliable, efficient systems that fulfill business objectives and are inexpensive to modify (where modifications preserve reliability and performance.) Included in the cost must be the risk of finding engineers to provide maintenance and changes.
This is the Google Chrome OS netbook keyboard -- Engadget
but! sure, an early exit would be a tough decision if you already have FU money--but what about 6 billion dollars? you're talking about being unconditionally in love with what you are doing in this particular business to pass on 6 billy.
Been there too mate, though I dealt with it in different ways at different times. In the first few cases I felt obligated to stay - I'd given my word, right? But the bullshit just meant that I just ended up contributing to the toxic environment by being an asshole out of resentment. I began to wonder if it was just me. Others certainly insisted it was. About six years ago I got a therapist and a psychiatrist. Best thing I've ever done. It was clear after talking to a professional that the situation was toxic. I got myself onto a smaller team within that company with some awesome people and really enjoyed myself. Unfortunately the toxicity remained, our lead quit, and we instructed to do what our lead would not. I'm quite proud that our team said "no", and said that the plan we already had was the right one. We were all let go. Ok, that was the best thing I've ever done.

My advice, then, if you are up for it, is to imagine what would light you up at this company. What would get you excited about it again? Figure that out, and do it. If you really are that good, then have faith in yourself. Give yourself a shot. Give your partners a shot. And if it doesnt work, quit. Unless this company is curing cancer its just not that important.

PS What amazes me about toxic environments is not the number of toxic assholes (actually quite small), but that most everyone else chooses to be enablers for these people.

PPS I did go on meds, but as another poster says here, it can take a while to find the right one - one can make you wired, another lethargic. The best thing to do is exercise and eat right; but the meds can help you get started (IMHO).
I'm just brainstorming for something fun to work on, at the moment.

I haven't really thought out all of the different in's and out's of it all, but I think the issue you bring up would be easily overcome. It's more of a presentation issue than something going on in the back end, I think.
Maybe part of the problem is that they are in Chicago. Seriously. They aren't in the Silicon Valley ecosystem which if they were they would know that there are tons of scary smart people at well funded startups working lots of projects in their space. That might make they realize what they're up against.
And they said mathematics has few practical applications.
Looks pretty cool!

What did you use to build it?
Supposedly they are at $0.5B/quarter, so the $2B is an annual rate.
I would agree the devil is in the details because from the outside this doesn't seem to make sense.
Looks nice. Are you planning on having one for Twitter too?
Note that upon attempting to do this your wife will laugh at you during the several minutes it takes and then laugh more when you have to cut it to put it in the toaster to eat it. Oh and the bagels at the store were all pre-cut requiring extra work to find the bagels. Still worth it though :)
It's been reported[1] that revenue is actually $2 billion, not 500MM.

[1] http://kara.allthingsd.com/20101203/exclusive-groupon-annual...
Or maybe add multiprocessing? In Chrome it uses less than 1/6 of the available CPU's on this machine.
Doesn't this ultimately mean that bandwidth for content providers should be free? After all, the reason Comcast "should" add this capacity is to satisfy demand for Netflix content. L3 is just acting as their agent. Is it the case that then that the next Netflix should just be able to demand bandwidth directly from Comcast?
"This is one of the huge advantages of the web over desktop software. Initial delivery to the desktop and subsequent updates cost significant time and headache. Redeploying to a server is just a matter of running a script."

This raises a good point about reuse. You wouldn't try to re-use the same bridge across a different span without modifications, but we require our software to run in different contexts (be it different web browsers, operating systems, versions of the language, et cetera.)
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I'm up for equality, and I mean real equality. We will be equal when a woman hits a man in the face, and the man responds in kind by punching her, and nobody says anything about "hitting a woman".

There's a reason that social moor exists. Until women catch up in physical power, or men regress, most men will have the power to seriously injure a woman and walk away unharmed, unless the woman is trained or armed. As such, it is a man's duty to take responsibility for this difference, and that is where the taboo on striking a woman came about. There's a partner taboo as well- regarding children- that exists for exactly the same reasons.

Would you argue that someone more powerful does not have a responsibility to manage their strength, and using brute force on women and children should not be considered reprehensible?
Samsung sells a million Galaxy Tabs, ups 2010 estimates 50%
Worst ever in existence. Nice.

(The track record I was referring to was prior convictions and sentences for people whose computer crimes included intrusion in .mil systems.)
Yeah, but where's their moat? Contrast to FB -- the value of the network increases as more people are in it. How does groupon build a moat? Just because more people groupon, does it make competitors less valuable? Is it a barrier to have emails from livingsocial and groupon arriving in your inbox every day? Groupon is almost the complement of fb -- fb had huge lockin, but no obvious monetization method. Groupon has obvious monetization, but no lockin that I can see.

I also question in the long run how many businesses have large enough customer LTVs that selling stuff below cost is worth it to hook customers. Hearing from eg hair salons that groupon people aren't customers but are bargain hunters isn't promising.

My prediction -- in 3 years, groupon will regret this if they haven't found a different sucker. Maybe comcast?

I'd be happy to be wrong -- it's always awesome when people succeed.
You can use whatever license you want (MIT, BSD, etc.)

This is geared towards applications that wouldn't work without JS anyway. But you could always degrade gracefully by providing some default css in a <noscript> tag.
The Mathematics of Terrorism
A Call To Assassinate Julien Assange
So is selling someone dental insurance. Doesn't mean it's not spam.
While I agree those are worthy goals, the middle two are CS, not SENG. Real AI is probably the loftiest goal in CS, but it requires a lot more theory work before anyone will be able to implement it.
"Don't be evil" jab in 5... 4... 3...
Mine was

"This deterministic approach has the advantage that migration of code from one imaginary symbol to another is as easy as:

sed -e 's/k/l/' -e 's/j/k/' -e 's/i/j/' -e 's/l/i/'

provided that you restrict yourself not to use the characters i, j, k or l in identifiers, keywords or strings in the source code."
Could you elaborate?

The survey says that Groupon promotions are profitable for two thirds of businesses and three of five (of all businesses) would run another Groupon promotion again.
There are far more Pointcasts than there are Facebooks.
I love working with this guy. Not only is his energy infectious but he's self-aware and constantly tinkering with improving himself. Like he's simultaneously both the bionic man as well as the doctor that's adding a shiny new limb.
To make software so extensible that you never have to rewrite it, or so painless to rewrite that you never mind.
They would be wrong. Calculus is huge. Linear algebra is huge. Boolean logic is insanely huge. The things we can do with numbers now make possible our modern world, something that members of HN don't need me to tell them.
But the existence of Facebooks depends on at least some founders believing that they're Facebooks, not Pointcasts.
I would speculate that the reason it didn't work for Watson is the unacknowledged use of Rosalind Franklin's data, with the resulting belief by many that Watson couldn't have done it on his own. The fact that Rosalind died in part due to radiation absorbed during collecting that data adds to the controversy.

Here is a piece of interesting trivia about that. Rosalind Franklin was a true expert on x-ray diffraction. However there are 230 possible space groups. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_group for more on that.) The x-ray diffraction pattern you see depends on the space group, and so one of the first step is to go through all of the possibilities and identify which one you have, and only then can you really start figuring out what you have. Rosalind Franklin knew about all of them. But by luck Watson's PhD thesis had been on a protein with the exact same set of symmetries that DNA has. As a result he was in a much better position than she to interpret her data.
Turning Kids from India's Slums into Autodidacts
Call the seasteaders. It's right up their alley I think.
Your analysis is wrong; here's why. The founders, employees, and other insiders of Groupon have already been handsomely paid off. For them, Groupon represents a free option. If it sells for $6 billion, great! But what if in 12 months it could be worth $10 billion? That's $4 billion more! And, compared to a site like YouTube, Groupon looks like a much more stable deal. They're already immensely profitable (something YouTube never was, and still isn't). The $5.3 billion offer, as a multiple of revenue and profit, was a surprisingly cheap offer for Groupon!

Maybe Groupon will look back in 2 years with regret. Or maybe they'll have an offer of several billion dollars more. For the people in the position to make the decision, the risk is worth it.

Do you know somewhere else with as good a chance as Groupon of making several billion more dollars in a year?
The Singularity.

http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

I think Vinge explains it better than Kurzweil.
You could probably take your pick of overvalued companies from the 1997-1999 dot com era. Even if we are in another boom period, Groupon has the revenue, growth, P/E, and market potential to justify the high price tag, unlike it's boom counterparts Twitter and Facebook.

If Facebook and Groupon both IPO'd tomorrow, something tells me Groupon would have the higher market cap, and without looking at numbers, my hunch is it would be the better long term investment too.

Remember, Facebook is already over the uncanny valley - they have 500 million users, and starting to enter a saturated market. Groupon is still relatively small and has a long way to grow.
Management's fiduciary duty to a company's shareholders is to protect the shareholders' investment. The duty is not about "returning money". If it was, then dividends would be mandated any time a company saw profit, and management would always have to accept buyouts returning even the slightest iota of gain.
Doing correct time estimates? Finding an engineering methodology that actually works?
Honest question: How many companies have had multi-billion dollar acquisition offers from large public companies and then NOT gone on to have valuations much higher than the offer? Obviously the ones off the top of my head-- Google, Facebook, whatever-- could be entirely survivorship bias.

Even so, my instinct when reading this article is that Google was stupid not to double their offer, assuming they were going to be competent enough not to ruin Groupon once they bought it.
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Do those kits actually teach principles? I know what each of the components do, but I lack a broader conceptual framework...

for example, I don't know how to build a circuit that would plug into a headphone jack and switch a light on and off based on the volume level...

I also don't know how to build a simple audio amplifier, timer, etc.

Do you recommend any specific kit based on the above? I mean, I could read instructions and hook components together but I want to be able to build novel circuits that I dream up.
Groupon has a great network effect. They have 25MM users and tens of thousands of local businesses. It's not as good of a moat as FB but still damn nice.

Also, I'd argue that FB has a very obvious monetization: advertising. They supposedly generate $1B+ in ad rev.
GOOG itself has a P/E of 23x [1]. 40x for a fast growing company is not crazy.

[1] http://www.google.com/finance?q=goog
Eduardo Saverin: What I Learned From Watching “The Social Network”
As mentioned in the article she is quoting gross merchandise sales not the gross revenue. As with groupon's business model, they pay ~70% of that to merchants.

Refer the first link from businessinsider.com on the estimations.
They also are really pushing international sites onto their own domain. If I put in vancouver.craigslist.org it shoots me over to the .ca domain name. Mexico goes to .com.mx and so on.
He forgot the third option! Learn to program, found a startup, get acquired by Google... I liked reading the nuances, though, it's fascinating that a HS degree has become almost completely worthless by itself.

It always seems, at least anecdotally, that for the tech industry degrees hardly matter at all, in the cases they do it's because it's a company policy to reject all non-degree-holding applicants. Any Bachelors, Masters, or Ph.Ds willing to share their incomes?
Your mirror-world example leaves one important factor out: context. That is, the larger social context is a world of unequal gendered power dynamics. I think your thought experiment is accurate in its depiction of what that flipped situation would look like, but you are implying the difference is in sensitivity or disposition.

I think the difference is actually that men can laugh at that stuff because a) it's ironic in that those images are typically the other way around and b) that sort of objectification of the male body isn't reminding them that they're at greater risk for sexual harassment and assault. Because they aren't.

The problem is that those images and that humor, in public, about women, happens in the context of a world where women are more easily abused, assaulted and harassed, and men more easily get away with it. So context matters, and in this social context, that "humor" shouldn't be acceptable.
> [..] they are all but begging Google to compete head-to-head

Except for the part where Groupon provides an amount of hand-holding for businesses, that G has neither history, nor reputation of doing.

Historically relevant datapoints: G has both a buying service[1], and an affiliate network[2], neither of which seems anything remotely close to the success that Groupon is enjoying already.

[1] http://www.google.com/prdhp?hl=en&tab=wf#t:0

[2] http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/
The Speech Accent Archive
I don't remember the exact reference on HN but there was a similar discussion on Quora which you might find useful.

http://www.quora.com/Etiquette/How-do-you-politely-turn-down...
Let's Code an MMO - Movement and Collision Detection
Groupon just earned themselves massive exposure. The media coverage of these negotiations elevated their profile beyond their existing user-base and solidified their reputation as the preeminent group-buying site.
Is that true? How would you know?
a) I thought the whole AAA thing had been found to be bankrupt? (Honest confusion.)

b) How many companies who turn down seemingly-huge acquisition offers turn out later to be 'just' whatever they were doing at the time of the offer? Most startups at any stage don't stay fixed at doing 'just' whatever they're doing at that stage.