skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How can we "live" in these worlds? Are you talking about disembodying the feeling of self so it can be migrated to a simulation, or even to another material copy of the body?

Let's assume it's true that I can make a logically equivalent copy of myself somehow, and put it in a world where it won't suffer. How does that help the original instance of me, in this world?

Just knowing that it feels is not enough. I believe that this guy that stuffs himself with drugs and does Kate Moss feels (and probably feels quite good, much of the time). But when I suffer, thinking that other people are having fun is only of marginal consolation.

Finally, you can't say a simulation is real without emptying the word 'virtual' of meaning- and by extension, the word 'real' itself. By the same token, our imagination consists of systems in the electrochemical and topological mess that are our brains, so everything we imagine is 'real' too. If we allow this, how is the concept 'real' different from that of 'everything'?
"... Do you send your setup.py to those third party app devs? ..."

Along with the tests, docs the "setup" should be part of the files you supply. As for only using the mods that are part of the standard library, what happens if you don't do 'standard' things? Do you re-write everything (only using the standard library?)
I'm not sure what you mean by a software business, but I am not a programmer and I'm starting an Internet company. We are definitely software based and web 2.0.

There is no way that I could start this business without a programmer on board, but if this company was started solely by hackers it would not be nearly as good.
absolutely delightful!
"...	Can software start-ups succeed with non-programmer founder(s)? ..."

Well lots of startups succeed already with non-dev founders. But they also most likely have hackers on the founder team. Could a software startup be successful with all founders not being programmers, hackers or without the ability to write code? I imagine not many.

I can't think of any startups without a single programmer/hacker founder, anyone else?
Request: simple story promotion algorithm
Hi all,

I recently added a karma-like voting system to posts in a phpBB forum that was having some problems with spam (we have an point incentive system that users use to bid for real items - now instead of rewarding points for posts, they're now awarded for votes).

My question is; does anyone know a simple algorithm that can get a list of the "best-recent" posts based on votes. So simply if an item has a certain number of positive and negative points with each vote point made at a certain time, how can I combine that to get a list of highly voted, recent posts.

I could obviously research and come up with something myself, but there's probably quite a few people here who have experience in this area, so I thought it was worth a post!

Thanks,
James
Sarbanes-Oxley compliance costs prevent many legitimate companies from going public that would have otherwise done so. So this could definitely be an attractive choice for companies in this situation.

Too bad this market is only accessible by mutual funds and the super rich..
5 Tips to Speed Up Your Rails App
Posthumans? What? Since we're thinking in realms of "probabilities", what is the probability that the super-reality we are simulated in resembles our own reality? Why do we assume the agents that designed our reality are anything like us? Keeping in mind that we can't begin to imagine most of what is the reality around us (the "really big" or "really small"), what makes us think we can imagine what life of agents in a super-reality would be like? How broadly do we define "computer"? This article seems like a dumbed down version of stoned CS majors ramblings... bah.
Linden Lab's CFO explains how the economy works in the virtual community.
PG recently posted the algorithm that news.yc uses:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704
I feel cooler reading 'Hacker News', but where are the hacks?
Hacking and Refactoring
I don't know of any examples of successful startups who didn't have at least one hacker founder, though I hope that changes in the near future.

Neither my partner nor I are programmers--we're both researchers/designers (certainly not managers!). We're both willing to bootstrap an initial prototype--and maybe even up through the first phase. We'd like to take on a tech lead partner, though still wouldn't expect him to do all of the programming--would want someone to contribute financially and serve as a Tech Lead.

If there's anything I've learned in all my startup research, it's that if people tell you something can't be done, it probably can.

As far as VCs finding other programmers to do your project: VC's are in the investment business, they aren't entrepreneurs themselves. Otherwise, they'd just be taking all the ideas and implementing them themselves: why share ownership with anyone when you can pay programmers to build it for you?

Ultimately, I realize that I did not answer your question, but I say go for it. What have you got to lose?
That 'training' thing might have been more metaphorical than that..
I assumed as much. Thanks for clearing that up.
I started a comment and it grew into a blog post:

http://zachbaker.com/articles/2007/08/14/learning-from-goofy...
Just what exactly is an "ancestor simulation"? To simulate human minds, you have to simulate the universe, since that's where human minds get input. And you can't simulate a universe within a universe that's just like it. Not in 50 years, not in any number of years. Most crankbabble of this variety manages to at least be "not even wrong", but this is just plain-old wrong. Shame on NYT.
Just in Malaysia?! That seems like a very limited market, especially for an apparently English-language service.
"Posthumans? What?"

Nick Bostrom is an influential transhumanist philosopher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism

"This article seems like a dumbed down version of stoned CS majors ramblings... bah"

Non "dumbed down" version of the ramblings: http://www.simulation-argument.com
this is a hypochondriac's dream. finally they can find all the ailments they've been missing with Google's helpful auto-fill.

Seriously though I think this is pretty cool as you don't have to drive back to the state you just left because you forgot to get your medical records from your previous physician.
jQuery for JavaScript programmers
Introducing the YUI Compressor - new JavaScript minifer/compressor
The #1 reason excuse for programmers legitimately slacking off (not if you use Lisp ;)
In my case, I piss off zealots of all stripes by using both vi and emacs: vi when I just need to do a quick edit, and emacs when I need to get real hacking done. On rare occasions, namely when I'm logged in to another system where I don't have my (voluminous) emacs customizations and vi isn't vim, I'll use ed.
Black Hat USA 2007 Round-Up Part 2
Coding Horror: Measuring Font Legibility
Beautiful Code: The Forgotten Pattern
The open-source community's double standard on MySQL
Cool Workspaces
I agree with the edit. A good system should be working smarter and more pointedly. If you are already implementing a system that is smart enough to detect if votes agree with a editors system, wouldn't it be better to just detect if everyone else's votes agree with your own personal ones and then show such things?

The whole notion of having an ivory tower that tries to shut itself off from other people because they degrade conversation is like security through obscurity. What this and reddit needs are a proper recommendation system, which could be based on tagging. Reddit says they are going to do this, but even then I don't imagine it will be an overly complicated tagging regime (even though they are taking long enough to roll it out). Once you get into basic tagging (eg just a number of strings) you really have a subset of an ontology, so the next logical step is to build it into a big proper one like freebase is doing, which has proper datatypes for each tag value, which can then be other objects in a database. In this way articles can have a set of tags, like a category, a rating of intellectualness, etc. These tags should be modifiable and addable. People should be able to have different values that reflect what they think of them. The tags that are most relevant should be displayed. An article could have a quality value that some could rate highly, and some poorly. Then the system, based on your own past tagging, can predict what default value yours should have. It's much like the netflix challenge (which is 80% solved), only its not just for one value of one tag, and the values are more complicated.

Anyway, I've thought this through too much because I am half way to solving it myself (hopefully!). We'll see if it works when I start pulling people away from here :p
Blueprint CSS Framework: Typography matters
Seven monitors is a bit of overkill (no offense, Trevor), at least for normal hacking. I have three 22"ers and I think that's about the useful limit. Even with three I already need to use a keyboard-controlled tiling window manager (xmonad) because anything else is too slow/unwieldly,
This patent application seems coherent.  Then, a dedication to 50 Cent.  Then...
Scroll down to see the description.
bangalore ,india
Looks original and non-obvious to me.

But seriously... has the PTO simply given up trying?
Because not everything that you do in a software business is coding. Would you rather spend all your energy on coding and getting that thing to work or would you rather code a few hours and then try to sell your product and do team management for the rest of the time?

VCs won't go around looking for programmers to hire to implement their 'great' idea! Have you ever heard of a VC that said no to giving money to a company and then went and looked for a team to implement that idea? I'd also argue that they like it better if there is a business person in the team.
JavaScript:The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language
> It's also possible that there would be logistical
> problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations.
> There might not be enough computing power to continue
> the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual
> world started creating their own virtual worlds with
> billions of inhabitants apiece.

What a ridiculous conclusion. It seems to me, the logical way to handle this is to simulate an entire universe, galaxies to atoms.

That might sound like it requires an impractical amount of processing power... but only to us _inside_ this universe. If you think about it, it's obviously impractical to simulate an entire universe within the universe itself.

In our parent universe, this wouldn't be an issue. Their speed of light must be faster, their atoms smaller. Moore's Law continues apace for them, and they can build computers that seem unthinkably powerful to us.

And the weirdness of quantum physics shows the kind of hacks they've made to get it to run.

I'm thinking about writing a short story where a guy implements a universe in 7 days...
Norvig: How to write a spelling corrector
Peter Norvig does a very good job of writing a spelling corrector similar to the way google's works (although much simpler). This is done step by step in python.
Made to Stick - why some ideas survive and others die
I use an algorithm where recent votes and posts has more weight:

(votes from the last two hours times 1) + (votes from the next two hours times 0.75)... and so on. Do the same for posts. Because it's expensive to calulate these values, I have a cron job that updates the scores every fifteen minutes.
Moving to San Francisco
BarCampBlock in Palo Alto - this weekend - anyone attending?
I just found out about this a few minutes ago. I'd kinda like to go but it's rather late notice, I already had plans for this weekend. Are any of you going?
> How can we "live" in these worlds?

Cf. The Matrix. Except with enough processing power, instead of sharing a simulation, you have it all to yourself -- so you can always be the #1 Most Important Person in the world, if you wish. Everything will work out the way you want it to, whatever your particular ethos; you'll set things to rights. AIs will be programmed to seem like fully convincing humans, but secretly they'll be on virtual happy pills so they'll never suffer.
I can't doubt the motives. But I have a theory on why some days there isn't much to read and why reddit had great links in 2006.

At that time people put the best of their bookmarks on reddit. Later there wasn't much good content left in the stash.
IMO link submissions are unlikely to change. No matter what you do.

I think one way we can have interesting dialog on the site is by asking really good starting questions. Most questions so far have been about asking for feedback. Which are interesting for the people asking for feedback and the people giving feedback, but not that great for the rest.
Do you think it would be better to turn the whole thing into a competition, like "who writes the best file upload within 48 hours"?
Tip: Don't Ever, Not Reply to a Sales Inquiry
Sounds perfect - thanks.

Presumably after several hours you could discount the votes altogether since they would have such a little influence on the final result. That would stop the system getting bogged down over time.

Out of interest, what is your "and so on". Do you go to 0.5 for the next 2 hours?
Even though I think that astrology is scientifically a blatantly idiotic field of study, I think that it's effect on human psychology can't be ignored.

Same for religion (I mean whatever religion you're not, of course). There's something about religion that convinces Joe Average to run over that hill armed with rifle and a prayer.
yeah - well I guess its easier to "hope" as the article says that technology can solve the problem, when really it is a people problem. I think we put too much emphasis on the tech as to why things go right or wrong. We should just shut up and do stuff (plenty of people do, they just don't necessarily blog about it 24/7).
Hitting the Memory Wall
Fake Steve Jobs, SCO, Linux, Microsoft, and the History of the OS -- Excellent Ongoing Series
OLPC speed improved
Facebook + iPhone = UltraCool
Jimdo competes with YC-funded Weebly
Interesting. So can you increase your voting power by simply upvoting stories that are already popular?

Or does the system favour people who upvote good articles _before_ they become popular?

By the way, I don't bother upvoting articles that already have huge scores (because really, what's the point?) Will this have a negative impact on my voting power?

I suggest the "good voter" system should ignore upvotes on articles that are above a certain threshold.
One of the huge advantages of doing your own projects is you can focus on real value and not the shiny things that make a suit's eye light up.

This "Cool Cam" story has a lot in common with the Bike Shed story. In both cases the no-vision executives latch onto small mostly-pointless things they can understand. Real users are much smarter.
You could skip the split-your-brain-in-two step and skip straight to a mind upload. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading

Interesting thought experiment nonetheless.
It turns out to be a pretty long story... :)
The "20%" hunch kind of made skim from then on, but:

What's the definition of computer, exactly? Even without any magical circular reasoning, the computer built on atoms and physics that we're being simulated in is just as deterministic as the computer I'm using, so I'm not sure I even see a difference.
I probably wasn't the only one who wasn't too sure about refocusing the site. One negative is that for those of us outside the Silicon Valley or YCombinator, it's possible that the articles and comments would focus more on programming than startup advice. On the other hand, maybe it would be great to refocus every 6 months. It would be a very unique idea. This is not to disrespect what you've done--thank you for the articles, startup school, this site, community, and ycombinator.
I own that game and I can't seem to remember all the faults as mentioned. I do remember the "cool cam" which was featured in demo mode. But far from being the technical failure looking at how the graphics have been upgraded and mods contributed I'd say this game is a roaring success. Maybe there's a lesson there to learn. Don't believe all you read. As a user the bugs mentioned did not distract from the game & game play. And just because there are some failures in the product doesn't mean you can't make money off it.

Check the Hi-Res terrains in the link below.

- http://www.xmission.com/~mmagleby/eaw/downloads.htm

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Air_War

Makes me want to find the disks right now to use the mods and look for those pesky bugs!
I think Tcl is certainly a competitor in the 'misunderstood' category:

http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html
Their name is somewhat misleading, because it does not appear to be from the YUI (Yahoo) Javascript API team.
My reading was that the Cool Cam galvanised the management and the dev team, when they were feeling pretty stuck. It gave them a taste of the coolness that the project would be when done.

I sometimes do something a little similar, say I'm bogged down in something frustrating and complex, knocking up a protoype of something cool can breathe new life into a project. But its entirely possible that you're better at keeping yourself motivated and focused (without shiny things) than I am.
Also Prague! Abhishek2, contact me: david(at)anemach(dot)com
The point, as I understood it, was that the Cool Cam was instrumental in turning the project from a failure to a success.

From the last para: "Tim's "cool cam" saved European Air War. It went from a money-leaking embarrassment to a top-tier release for MicroProse. The weekly meetings got easier, more developers were brought on, and the team managed to put together one hell of a game."
Finally something I know a bit about...

I think where it's easy to believe the simulation theories is where they're so in line with what our brains do on an everyday basis. We simulate reality when we're getting ready for the day and deciding what to wear. Or when our stomach rumbles for lunch and we mentally compare General Tso's finest masterpiece against the toasty cheese of Quizno's. Indeed, I'd argue that the human brain is at it's best as a simulation engine - predicting the future and understanding the present based on past experiences

Don't fall for the 90% myth. We can't be sure where it came from, but it simply isn't true. The brain is a simple organ only in the sense that if you don't use it, you lose it.

Consider: You were born with 10x the number of cells you end up needing. The ones that survived are ones that found connections and strengthened them with their neighbors.

Indeed, that's what makes "mind transplants" so difficult to pull off. Your mind is a unique product of your development.

Now, neural implants for boosting abilities and restoring function after damage....
In that case you can't run the simulation until the sun goes red dwarf, unless you are ready to extend physical human life that far.

It would be easier, as the article suggests, to just stimulate the spots in the brain responsible for pleasure. If the point is artificial happiness, why all this simulation stuff at all?
The article doesn't say that the game shipped with these bugs, just that they were there at some stage of development.
Good itch I wanted scratched. I started a group.
Networking Tips from the White House
Heh, will we end up with a full stock market, where you invest your karma in stories/comments hoping they will go up in popularity? That would discourage upvoting stories that you think may have already peaked in popularity. You'd be better off upvoting the stories/comments that you feel are most underrepresented. The challenge about implementing something like this would be to keep the UI simple.

This would lead to uniformization of discourse, but I'm afraid any global opaque karma system will do that. If I was to do a news system, I'd make it so you could somehow select people so their ratings have more weigth in your view. So content would be rated on an affinity graph that is personalized for each user. A way to do this without complicating the UI is to just derive your affinities from your votes. Now this would be an incentive to vote on the stuff you find interesting, rather than on the stuff you think will be popular.
Yahoo: Bear Stearns must stay out of subprime hedging.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jun2007/...
Thanks! Keep 'em coming!
He should fork Oz :)
What makes you think they'd have anything like light or atoms in our parent universe?
How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary
The nerdiest nerd test around
Disrupters are agents for change -- what makes technology disruptive?
How to Give a Kick Ass Presentation
Entrepreneur.com launches "Entrepreneur Assist"
To stop people trying to game the system, ratings of articles probably shouldn't be visible.
Great explanation about why the name "JavaScript" has done so much harm to the language.
Rank = ( ( current_time - post_time ) / number_of_votes )

Simple enough!
20070156594 - This number refers to a published patent application, which does not mean that a patent has been granted.

I have a 98% confidence rating that you can only enforce rights from issued patents. An application means that it has a chance of being issued, but normally does not have much value until it is actually granted.

When a patent has been granted, you'll see a number similar to this "5,146,634 6923014 0000001"
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm
No we're not.
Not that some people wouldn't find it entertaining, but this is just the sort of thing that I was happy not to find at YC.news in the past. The question is: is it just me being a grumpus, or is it indeed not "hacker-worthy"? The expanded scope makes it a little tricker to judge content.

No offense meant, LaurieCheers - it's not like it's some horribly lame and offensive site, just not the sort of 'usual fare' for this one.
I agree with everyone who've said that at least one founder needs to be a programmer/developer.

The initial technical assessment on the feasibility of an idea or feature is within the domain of a programmer/developer, but I think it would require a non-developer to help do the cost/benefit trade-off. The reason for this is I've worked with so many developers who are excited by a technical solution, when the cost of it is prohibitive. It may have been the "best" solution, but it would have been very costly.

I intend to submit my startup idea as part of the YC winter funding event, even though I do not have a developer on-board yet. It's been hard finding a developer who is able to take the plunge and sacrifice the security of a cubicle farm. I have advisors/friends who are developers, but they don't want to take the risk, despite agreeing with the idea.

Thank you to everyone who have shared their thoughts.
Chocolate Rain: What can it teach us entrepreneurs?
I think there's more to the song than just 19 couplets with the same repetitive intro. There's an underlying meaning there that the creator himself describes as "a process of internalized racism". And with lyrics like "the Bell Curve blames the baby's DNA", I have to agree.
i constantly get distracted at the day job when i have to compile, like now ;) it's amazing how much more focused i stay with a repl. (and a better language than C#)
yes but remember, most Indians are LEGAL Aliens ;)
At the moment we know of only one definition of 'existence'. By that definition everything you mentioned - the earth, humans exists.
Open Letter to Anyone Asking Me For Computer Help
Do we really need another personalized home page? This is idea is getting a little worn out, don't you think?