skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haha, thanks :) But do check out Yu's work on General Linear Cameras which is a more formal treatment of the same thing. He did his work at the same time as mine, and while I took a more practical graphics approach, his is more complete.
Beware: Skype Linux Reads Password and Firefox Profile
Yes, it goes with Paul's latest post. A crappy or messy work station can clutter your thoughts and keep you from "Holding a program in one's head"
How well does that extension work? Can I get web dev and firebug working with it?
Doing more with less: Apple's most controversial app to date - iMovie '08
Tim Bray: How Pantone missed the chance to become the color of the Internet
Goals and the GTD
A technique on integrating the goal setting process into the GTD for daily execution.
Mask Pro does not support the GIMP, unless I missed something. There is a faster way to do what I describe in the article. The link is in the comments.
The examples he gives don't support his point very well. The arrival of moveable type, for example, set off an era of exciting changes that lasted a lot more than a generation. I'm not sure what Mark Cuban has stored in his head on that subject, but I suspect it would fit on a 3x5 index card.

The wheel was the defining breakthrough for a generation? This is not a man you want to take history lessons from.

His fundamental mistake is that he doesn't realize that social changes take a lot longer than technical ones. And new mediums of communication cause a lot of social changes. The Facebook would have been possible in 1995. It didn't happen till 2004. There would be a lot more such innovations still in the pipeline even if the physical Internet stopped changing today. (Not that it will.)
The Web is Alive and Well (But on a Stable and Boring Platform) (response to Mark Cuban)
Idea: Blog + SocialNetworking = Blog2.0
I think that we can rewire the blogsphere in a much more meaningful way and extract so much more value. Plenty of opportunities of startups, for current companies, for writers and readers.
I've almost stopped using Firefox several times because of the frequency of crashes in stable versions, so I think I'll wait a bit.
I doubt a lego-scale model would help much, the forces and effects involved at the molecular scale are much different. However, K. Eric Drexler, father of the field of molecular nanotechnology, has done some theoretical work to show that it's feasible in his book "Engines of Creation". A newly revised version of it is available for free as an eBook: http://www.wowio.com/users/product.asp?BookId=503

A more technically oriented book is "Nanosystems": http://www.amazon.com/Nanosystems-Molecular-Machinery-Manufa...
The Singularity Summit 2007: AI and the Future of Humanity - Sept 8 & 9
A google search on this give over 250K results!
I just lost my SO a little over a month ago. In retrospect, I made a lot of mistakes during the time I was working on my little project.

I have no advice, but my opinion, for what it's worth, is that if this is THE person for you, I truly doubt you would even be capable of neglecting them anymore than absolutely necessary. Sounds a bit off, but I believe it.

If you are with THE one, you guys ought to be magical. That doesn't mean there won't be ups and downs (PG will tell you startup life is all-consuming, and personal experience says he's right).

I lost my SO, but it didn't really phase me too much. She wasn't the one for me. If you're asking this question because you're going through this problem right now, maybe it is best to free yourself of unnecessary entanglements. But if you feel the person you're with is the one for you, do your best to keep your startup worries to the computer screen.

Oh, during the "good times" with my SO, I used to be a pretty spontaneous person. Once the startup life began, I got pretty boring. Look out for that one. I hear women don't like boring.
Bloglines Launches Beta Re-design and Start Page
It works fine, it'll get all of your extensions working. Firefox 3 didn't seem to break extension compatibility so it's mostly just changing the flag that won't let them run.

Of course, some of them may cause crashes, but Firebug seems to work without a problem. I'm not running web dev, should I be running it?
This isn't directly related to the article (sorry), but reading about how Pantone's CEO didn't recognize the opportunity with the Web did make me think of something else.

It seems like every decade or so a new product/technology comes up that has a gravitational pull for a lot of other products and innovations; a lot of other stuff comes out that revolves around a central product. In the 80s, the central product was PCs. In the 90s, the product was the Internet, and later in that decade the Web.

Is there such a central product/technology area right now? Is it the concept of Web 2.0, or is something else lurking around the corner?
makes sense. you eliminate the wrapper called facebook or myspace, where you have to log-in to be your real/wanted self and see your real/wanted friends, and you just enter this world directly through your browser... blogging tools and platforms need to become more integrateable and people need to actually start doing it more. the foundations are in place - the blogroll meets the friends list, etc...
Not So Fast: AT&T Cracks Down On Commercial iPhone Unlocking Groups
Boeing: Commercial Airplanes - StartupBoeing - Starting an Airline (interesting to look at)
Prediction: Strong AI will not exist until human consciousnesses can be copied to computers.

http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/OldArchive/bbs.searle2.ht...
Tech companies, VCs, swing to Democrats
Genetic engineering is going to be huge, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Searle is old hat. He's just playing word games. He assumes that "really understanding" something means something deep that he has left unspecified. The beautiful irony of his argument is that Searle's brain itself is a freakin' Chinese Room, and this is basically a Chinese Room claiming that it itself cannot be sentient! :-)

What's so special about human consciousness, anyway? or at least please provide some sort of rationale for your claim.

Here's a kinda long talk that explains why Strong AI is feasible, skip over all the introductions at the beginning: http://ia310111.us.archive.org/2/items/FutureSalon_02_2006/ Same thing in Google Video format (lower quality): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-821191370462819511
http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=146209889&size=l&...
iPhone web app development has its limitations
Thanks! I'll back up my FF folder and give 3 a try.

Yes, WebDev extension is awesome! http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/
I have a problem with the example, which I quote at length:

"An industrial company had called Lehman with a problem. It operated factories in Japan and California, both near fault lines. It could handle one of the two being shut down by an earthquake, but not both at the same time. Could Lehman Brothers quote a price for an option that would pay the company $10 million if both Japan and California suffered earthquakes in the same year? Lehman turned to its employee with a reputation for being able to price anything. And Seo thought it over. The earthquakes that the industrial company was worried about were not all that improbable: roughly once-a-decade events. A sloppy solution would be simply to call an insurance company and buy $10 million in coverage for the Japanese quake and then another $10 million in coverage for the California quake; the going rate was $2 million for each policy. "If I had been lazy, I could have just quoted $4 million for the premium," he says. "It would have been obnoxious to do so, but traders have been known to do it." If either quake happened, but not both, he would have a windfall gain of $10 million. (One of his policies would pay him $10 million, but he would not be required to pay anything to the quake-fearing corporation, since it would get paid only if both earthquakes occurred.)"

"But there was a better solution. He needed to buy the California quake insurance for $2 million, its market price, but only if the Japanese quake happened in the same year. All Seo had to do, then, was buy enough Japanese quake insurance so that if the Japanese quake occurred, he could afford to pay the insurance company for his $10 million California insurance policy: $2 million. In other words, he didn't need $10 million of Japanese quake insurance; he needed only $2 million. The cost of that was a mere $400,000. For that sum, he could insure the manufacturing company against its strange risk at little risk to himself. Anything he charged above $400,000 was pure profit for Lehman Brothers."

My question:

Shouldn't the text instead read "Anything he charged above $2,400,000..."? Suppose the CA earthquake occurs _before_ the JP earthquake. After the JP earthquake the insurer receives $2M but it's too late to buy CA insurance on a past event.

To use one policy to pay for another, the insurer must buy both policies at the same time. Otherwise the risk of an uncovered event would occur.

It would be cheaper to merely buy $10M worth of either CA or JP insurance alone (but not both), since, certeris paribus, either would cost only $2M.

Am I missing something?
I probably shouldn't have posted that link because it doesn't provide any evidence for my claim. It should be seen as something separate for discussion, and I agree with your refutation of Searle's claims... no one said anything when I posted that paper a week ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43996

My belief that consciousness uploads will come before AI doesn't have much of a basis (or any basis) in fact. My intuition tells me that reverse engineering the human brain is easier than making a recursively self-improving AI.

My claim comes because I have the atheist's fear of my own mortality and I have to cling to my faith. I also like telling myself that my ancient, infinitely dimensional consciousness is choosing to live out a life in a computer simulation as a successful entrepreneur living through the peak of American civilization.

So there you go. My claim is completely irrational, which means you can't refute it! :)

I'm going to watch that video now.
I agree. Stability in Firefox 2 is significantly worse than 1.x. I have to restart it at least once every couple of days, and frequently have to wait 20-30 seconds for random things to complete, during which it is completely unresponsive. If 3 beta is even slightly less stable (which would make sense) then I'll wait a while. Hopefully those issues will be resolved.
&#8235;&#8236;&#8237;&#8238;&#8234;&#8235;&#8236;&#8237;&#8238;&#1161;( cool
And even if they did, they wouldn't be able to explain it well enough for you to implement it.

People say they want "The Homer", but they buy...well, actually, sometimes they buy "The Hummer" which is two letters off, but very very similar in concept, style, and execution.
news.yc doesn't work with unicode..
Firefox 2 being unstable is all the more reason to try Firefox 3! A lot of the instability comes from the Firefox 2 rendering engine breaking down when you have Gmail and Google Docs and Meebo and 12 Youtube videos open at once. Firefox 3 is using 230 megs of RAM for me right now. If I was running Firefox 2 with the same tabs it would be moving at a crawl and using 750 megs of RAM.

The bug I notice the most is text entry/dropdown boxes sometimes not working correctly, this happens most often in a really poorly programmed game I play, http://www.hyperiums.com.
Firefox 3 doesn't overwrite Firefox 2. You can choose to run either Firefox 2 or 3, it just won't let you run both at the same time.
If you don't now, you will in a few years. It gets more painful as you get older--by the time I was in my mid-twenties I had to have a good chair or I'd have serious back pain. I also had to find ways to work with less mouse usage, or it would lead to shooting pains in my forearms.

I've settled into a nice place now, with a good monitor that raises up almost high enough (a Dell 2005), an Aeron chair, an IBM small form factor keyboard with good IBM keys, and a Logitech mouse that I still try to use as little as possible. I still have occasional back and shoulder pain, but I have some injuries from bike accidents in my youth. But I definitely take ergonomics seriously. I can't concentrate when I'm in pain.

One thing that I've found makes a big difference for me: Exercise. Almost all of my various aches and pains are less pronounced and less debilitating when I'm getting regular exercise.
Oh ok. :) But as a thought experiment, let's warp back in time 150 years. Some random guy you're talking to at the local pub claims that within 50 years, man will build a heavier-than-air flying machine. Would you intuitively predict that this is going to happen? Or would your intuition suggest that we'd have to wait until we can build a mechanical replica of a bird? What if someone said that within 150 years you'd have a little machine you could hold in your hand that could bring up all of the world's information, and let you talk to anyone on the planet in real time?

Human intuitions are great for hunting, gathering berries, navigating social situations, and other situations present in the ancestral environment, but evolution hasn't tuned us to be able to predict the future with our intuition. Just how bad are the cognitive biases employed by humans? Pretty bad: http://www.singinst.org/Biases.pdf

Anyway, not trying to pick a fight here -- I appreciate your reply above. Hope you enjoy that video.
Nick Cave's letter to MTV (from 1996)
Ah, so that's where "Make something people want" came from.
Here's mine. You ever play Erotic Photo Hunt? It's a game on those touchscreen video kiosks in bars. Each round, you're shown two almost-identical pictures of a scantily-clad girl. You've got a minute to find the 5 subtle differences in the two photos. (It's embarrassingly addictive -- for both men and women alike.)

Build a web-based version of that. After every round, the player is given two options... "play the next round" or "see more pictures of this girl." The latter is a paid link. Weekend hack => goldmine.
That's a great idea. Any reason you're not doing it? Can I do it?
This is true for all kind of work you are doing with your head - and even if -like me- you are a surgeon! I guess I am "programming" my hands to do the work! Your essay gave me a better understanding - thanks
I know I'm probably just bringing up an issue that has been beaten to death somewhere in a hideously long thread, but consciousness makes me think strong AI is impossible. This is my line of thought:

1. Consciousness is essential to human intelligence, because our great mental advances come from our awareness, and objective description, of our own mind and thought processes.

2. A consciousness is by definition irreplicable, since two different consciousnesses are essentially different.

3, If strong AI is possible (and computational), and there is no essential difference between copies of the same code, then multiple identical copies of the same IA mind can be made.

4. If 1 and 2 hold, then 3 is false. Therefore, strong AI is impossible.

If any of these assumption need elaboration, let me know. And please, by all means, direct me to that hideously long thread instead of answering my argument in detail. I don't like to waste people's time. Much obliged.
Regarding point 2: why can't you replicate consciousness? Of course we can't today, but I don't understand why it is inherently impossible.

Just because my consciousness is different from everyone else on the earth doesn't mean future technology couldn't copy my mind to a computer fifty times over. It will be very controversial when technology progresses far enough to allow consciousness copies.
rms hit on point #2, so I'll respond to point #1:

a) Why should an AI be similar architecturally to a human? The size of mind design space is much larger than the space of possible human minds. There's many more ways to build an intelligent system than to copy a human. Humans were incrementally designed by evolution, and are by no means the only possible design.

b) What's consciousness? Is it real? It seems likely that consciousness is simply an illusion of sorts; after all, isn't it more useful for you to model yourself as being "in control" of your actions? Look up the experiments with split-brain patients; you'll see that one hemisphere will simply dream up explanations for what the other hemisphere is doing! Your brain is a chunk of matter operating according to the rules (physical laws) of our universe. It's a pile of biochemical processes. You understand yourself as "being in control" as a model of your behavior, but really, you're a chunk of matter running according to the Universe's physical laws. (I'm not saying we shouldn't act as if we have "free will"; I'm just saying it may be a meaningless abstraction.)

c) Even if we assume consciousness is some property needed for an intelligent system, why couldn't we implement consciousness in something other than a human? Isn't a human an existence proof that it's possible to implement an intelligent system using just matter?
Startup: eliminate junk mail
I've been getting especially pissed off at junk (snail) mail lately. Here's a business idea for how to eliminate junk mail: one mailbox for life. Set up one central mail facility which your customers use as their mailing address. When their mail comes in throw out the obvious junk mail and email scanned copies of the rest. Incinerate every piece of junk mail which comes into your facility.
Nokia's new N-Gage service enables multiplayer gaming between phones
Hey, thanks! Why am I not doing it? Um, all I can come up with is, "I'm working on other projects... that are more complex... and less of a sure thing." =P

Anyways, if you're inspired, go nuts. Lemme know if you want any help building it. Also lemme know if you want to hear the rest of the idea. (I think Phase 2 could get you one or two patents, and Phase 3 could disintermediate some dirty old men.)

Uh, is it weird that I've put so much thought into this?
You should add your email address to your profile so I can let you know if I get something together. Or just email me so I have your address.

I wouldn't worry about having put too much thought into this, I'm sure we've all spent a lot of time thinking about some really far-out things.
http://teppo.tv/pelisali/index_en.html (I haven't played the game on Megatouch, is this the same thing with more boring pictures?)
The "problem" with Lisp.
Interesting comments.. I suppose I am an 'SO' (girlfriend/partner/lover etc etc...) But for me the boot is on the other foot.. I have managed to get a new job teaching cybercultures/new media stuff at a University in the UK, and also work on a media streaming project. It is keeping my boyfriend enthusiastic that adds spice to our relationship... I have also done a lot of new media work with the British Association of Sex and Relationship Therapists.. and they are having lots of difficulties with their clients complaining that SOs are spending too long online or are disinterested. It's also revealing to see that the problem of the disapearing SO has manifest itself as a piece of software too. And yes.. I guess we are mythical beasts but the best way to solve this is being honest with your situation in the first place, and don't take for granted that your SO will understand or appreciate your devotion to your project. The best thing is to try and get them involved in some way.. .or end/put on hold the relationship. This works for me!

Happy days!
I suspected that my former employer was not unique in it's organizational misfits and reading your essay confirmed that it was indeed part of a larger picture. Of course. An organization cannot really tolerate indivduality as a basis for their development. Everything must be coordinated -> politics -> bad decisions. After working in a large organization for 8 years I quit, but not before I sent a letter to the man on the top. I conluded that my problems were due to his (bad) descisions:

1. The leader of 130 IT workers was not educated in IT. None of the top leaders were into IT. Not even the lead architect!

2. The economists think of everything as a "factory". Therefore, IT is produced the same way. I call this the "factory-view". If you add more money, more developers you will get this done faster. If you need something, go buy it. It's always better to outsource.

There were other things as well, but these factors may probably be more widespread than I like to think of. Finally I left for a small firm. What a relief!!
Except that, apparently, in the case of Movie 2008 it's doing less with less.
Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google's butt in four years
Yahoo Mail Out of Beta; New Features
Twitter's Big Week
What does this have to do with "Hacker News?"

I think I liked "Startup News" better. It may have gotten boring sometimes but it was on-topic, at least.
Submissions about startups or technology? What do you think this is? Startup News?
From an email from a friend of mine from a while back:

I use PaperlessPOBox for my mail scanning, and they don't require you to choose if mail should be scanned or not--they scan it all. I
noticed that the service you mentioned [remote control mail#] only scans the outside of the mail (probably the envelope) and then when you receive a
notification, you have to tell them to open it and scan it. That's
kind of lame, but they're probably still buying mail scanning
equipment and can't handle all of the volume yet.

I also use MyEZBills for the scanning of all my bills. They receive
the bills, scan them, notify you when they arrive, use OCR to
determine the amounts and dates due. You can also set up automatic payments to pay fixed amounts or the minimum balance due.

# http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/22/remote-control-mail-che...
Write your projects as successful outcomes and make sure each has a physical next action. Review your entire system weekly.
I went last year. Lots of fun. Cory Doctorow was probably the best speaker. I hadn't read BoingBoing much before that, and now I'm a rapid fan.

I think the discussion with Luddites was fairly useless. It shows a fair amount of due diligence, where dissenting voices are given a podium far larger than the they "deserve" given the popularity of their opinions. I did enjoy that the Luddite gave a talk through teleconference.

The format last year was pretty bad at times. The Open-Mic questions wasted lots of time. Written questions were submitted but not used. There were no break-off sessions.

Also, the moderator, Peter Thiel, is as boring as watching paint dry, and didn't actually do any reasonable moderation of the discussion.
Digg is down
FYI, Digg is down.
read this great post: http://www.gobignetwork.com/wil/2007/1/5/forget-about-the-so...

The smartest entrepreneurs aren't the ones who figure out the solutions to big problems, they are the ones who actually understand the value of those big problems. Smart entrepreneurs focus on the very essence of why the problem exists and the pain it causes. Then, when they find a solution that works, they know how valuable the solution really is.
Can you judge a book by its cover?
bilbo0s,

I don't think you read the article. The interest rate was 0% in 2001. When Japan suffered a financial crisis brought on by a lack of liquidity. The article talks about how Japan has reformed itself since then.
Ten Steps to Organizing a Barcamp
How does Pantone make money?
Or it means that you're actually doing your job.
Google Will Be Beaten By Facebook, Mahalo: Scoble
licensing to adobe, microsoft I would expect. That or those little color swatch thingies ;)
Hackers & Painters -> Painters -> Muse -> Artists -> Nick Cave

OK, to be honest I was expecting flames (again). I just thought it was an interesting counterpoint to the usual competition driven startupping atmosphere.

What if you would try to create something because of the inspiration by a muse, rather than because of the prospects of making money.
PG to speak in London on 2007-10-04: The Future of Web Startups