skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This also explains the Fine-Tuned Universe.

An interesting property of a simulated brain is the simulation can take an arbitrarily long amount of time. You can update in virtual "Planck timesteps", even if in real time this takes a million years. Any simulated brain won't be able to tell, because it doesn't get any updates in between these steps. Time becomes a property of the system you're simulating... Just like in reality.

It might take until the Sun goes Red Giant to run your single lifetime simulation.

The speed of light is a convenience for updating the simulation in discrete steps. Particle/wave duality "deciding" upon observation is just lazy evaluation, like in Haskell. Quantum entanglement is no mystery when distance is virtual. A Universe where the speed of light is a hard limit can still contain a simulated Universe where it isn't.

Why do we want virtual worlds? Properly implemented and convincing, we can do away with suffering altogether. We can "live" in a world that seems fully real, but in which no-one is actually suffering because everyone else is simulated. All our needs are met and all our desires are fulfilled.

The mistake we keep making is that in order to create convincing AIs to inhabit the world with us, they actually become as sentient and conscious as we are; being virtual is no barrier to feelings or emotions! [1]

Thus our creations want to create a simulation to live in themselves, so they won't suffer, either, and so it goes like a perpetual zoom on a fractal set.

[1] To convince yourself of this, consider a matter replicator that copies every single atom in your body. You'd create a clone. It would be thinking and feeling just as you do. Now consider a computer simulation of a single atom; if that can be done, then by extension, it would be possible to simulate anything made of atoms. A simulated clone of you would also behave the same. The neurological activity that occurs in your "real" brain when you feel or think would also occur across the virtual atoms in the brain of your virtual clone. In fact, that would involve real electrical activity taking place among real atoms making up the RAM chips and CPUs "containing" the simulation of the virtual clone. Thus any simulation at the same scope or nesting level as yourself is as real as you are and therefore its feelings are just as valid. [2]

[2] By further extension, if your simulations are as real as you are, then your simulation's simulations are as real as it is, and thus a simulation at any nesting level is as real as one at any other -- a simulation inside a simulation is still running on real atoms with real electricity!
Will there be a Portal index? I wonder how long it'll be before there's a Portal Market ETF, for that matter.
I was disappointed it wasn't a headline on the Op-Ed page. Now that's the kind of viewpoint that's rarely expressed in the media.
I got sucked in by my non geek friends (all my geek friends I was already connected to). If nothing else it has been good for keeping in touch with past friends. Kind of overhyped for that purposes, but it works for me, but its nothing profound.
RUP Based Project Process
The Rational Unified Process (RUP) is a good methodology to keep your projects in order. This process model is an overview of the steps that should be used when creating a project. It is meant to be a step by step template.
i thought the article was a little critical of the "little apps" approach. I think the point wasn't so much the mess of things, its more that the approaches used are very very basic (like a big unforgiving calculator more then intelligence). I am not sure how the "DHH approach" makes that any better (I have never seen a rails app that I would call intelligent at all - they are web gui's for databases is all - pretty, cheap to build and pleasant enough to use, for sure, but still, not "intelligent" in the way the article talks about).
Google Health coming, lets you manage your records online
A stack overflow.
PMP only works if you're building a "Building". It was made for PM's who were engineers that made structures like dams and roads. The tools supporting this like MS Project work great in that role but are terrible for tracking software projects.

The Project Management Institute created a path for IS PM's as a response to the market where 90% or more IS/IT project failed and management in large companies were screaming for some kind of control to the "out of control costs".

If you work in the corporate world It can work to advantage to become certified. That is only if you're interested in management. Just remember that you need 4yrs of PM experience with a bachelors or 10yrs without just to take the test. http://www.pmi.org/CareerDevelopment/Pages/Obtaining-Credent...
IF your customers are the everyday internet consumers then forget charging, unless you want to turn into a call center.
"... Since the YC application deadline is approaching and I still don't have a co-founder, I conceived the weekend of code ..."

Nice hack. Now here's my suggestion for a 48hr code sprint a "better file upload" Why? Someone already wants it, there is a need and you have the users & here to bounce the product off.

- http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/05/flash-silverlight-a...

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41782 (forget the pledge suggestion to me that's a distraction)
Right - so he can't legally look at it yet he has an apparently accurate opinion of it? Do MS shakle their thinkers that much (or does he mean look at it to use it, not literally look at it).
Where's it located?
"... slashdot -> reddit -> programming.reddit -> hacker news -> ??? ..."

It was more like ...

slashdot + perlmonks + use.perl.org => joel on software =>pg.com => reddit => prog.reddit => news.yc =>hack-news.yc + blog.pmarca = > ???
I agree, I don't think those little apps scale well. The problem is I haven't seen anything that scales well.

I think the solution is not the technology, but the system they are forced to deal with. I suppose I was looking for something more around how you can change the corporation to fit the tech.

(Yes, I know that's entirely backwards)
>To convince yourself of this, consider a matter replicator that copies every single atom in your body. You'd create a clone. It would be thinking and feeling just as you do. Now consider a computer simulation of a single atom; if that can be done, then by extension, it would be possible to simulate anything made of atoms. A simulated clone of you would also behave the same.

Impractical to do on current computers - we'd need at the very least quantum computers (I'm guessing that's what the article means by "Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century").

But you still run into physical limitations. Could one atom in a quantum computer be used to simulate more than one "virtual" atom at a time? More than O(n) virtual atoms? Do you run out of atoms eventually? Can you actually get infinite recursion that way? I certainly don't know, and I'm not sure whether the best quantum computing researchers can answer today.

Failing that, we'd need something more advanced than quantum computers - so really, at that point we're simply guessing.

Very fun philosophical subject, but I wouldn't go as far as saying it's "almost a mathematical certainty" yet, given our current knowledge...
One of my favourite authors :)

Another somewhat related short story - "The Last Question" by Asimov:

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Dubuque, Iowa
"This also explains the Fine-Tuned Universe."

Not true. Consider the anthropic principle, which says that we must be in a universe that has parameters such that we could come into existence in the first place if we are here asking this question. In other words, we couldn't ask the question unless our universe had the "right" parameters to begin with.

Far better explanations of the Anthropic Principle are available at: http://www.anthropic-principle.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
Beautiful Code: That Pesky Binary Search
Optimal Movie Seating Puzzle
Palo Alto, Ought to be good
Our virtual Universe had the right parameters. Those may be completely different when you go up in scope.
DIY Drones: Chris Anderson's Ning Social Network for building UAVs
Someone needs to learn how to scale images symmetrically.
This is great incentive to look at new content and mod. That is excellent, as submissions to other social bookmarking sites often get lost in the news with most people looking at the front page with news thats already hot.
I love how people that use this site love the exercise of thinking of ways to game the karma system. Hacker News indeed.
Many intangible things are as important as they are difficult to discuss. An invisible ingredient in success. "You make your own luck".

PG in "Hardest Lessons" described some of it here:

"If you lack commitment, you'll just find that for some mysterious reason good things happen to your competitors but not to you. If you lack commitment, it will seem to you that you're unlucky."

I've had a hell of a time trying to convey this kind of stuff to other people. I've even doubted whether it's possible to convince someone who doesn't "get it". I love Andreesen's post myself, but I fear it's still to abstract to forward to the people I would like to convince.
'All things are founder-like things'
> Could one atom in a quantum computer be used to simulate more than one "virtual" atom at a time?

That's the beauty of it: "at a time" can be arbitrarily long in real time. [1]

You don't even need to simulate every particle in the Universe -- if the simulation is run for you, you only need to simulate enough to convince your brain. Like when you dream and are convinced something's real, yet upon waking, you realize your criteria were extremely lax. For all we know, what we think of as being awake is actually a very hazy simulation presented to our "real" brains, which are actually much sharper and have been induced into a less-discerning state.

Something very interesting at Body Worlds 3 here at OMSI was the brain slices, which showed (according to the placards) that the part we "think with" is just the edges, and the interior is interconnections (grey matter vs. white matter). Compare the darker grey around the folds to the lighter grey filling up the rest:

http://www.med.harvard.edu/AANLIB/cases/caseB/054t_2.gif

So the actual storage needed for a brain's total memory may fit onto a hard drive today, at current estimates (possibly less than a terabyte). Working memory is much, much less. Communication (the interconnections) can take as long as needed.

[1] Another "cheat" would be to put the simulator on a spacecraft travelling at relativistic speeds in a tight orbit around a processing unit; when the simulator sends the processor packets of data to crunch, time dilation would give it extra CPU time.
When you submit the same link it just up-votes it for you instead of re-submitting.
What's the Future of Work?
Can software start-ups succeed with non-programmer founder(s)?
Can non-programmers have success at raising money for a software start-up?

Also, do you know of any success stories(received more than angel funding) where the founder(s) were not programmers?

Thanks,
NoMoreSnow
Discussion about the new voting system
PG, what exactly is "a louder voice"? If an article will be raised up by two or more points by a person with bigger voting power will its submitter get an adequate karma raise? Is there a limit? Is there a bonus for the up-voter? Do you take into consideration current karma? Does voting power apply to down voting (I assume it does)?

I think there will be a temporary higher amount of voters on the New queue, seeking for a bigger voting power, which is a good thing because the good stories will get to the main site faster. Maybe it won't be temporary as newcommers will strive for power and the easiest/only way is voting the good stories soon.

However, consider this situation: A speculator comes around, voting up at random (thinking "someone will have to raise this one up") and then another one appers, seeing that a story already has 2,3 or 4 points, he could raise it up to just because it will earn him a better voting power... Will the system be able to deal with this (altough I'm not really sure this is a real threat)?
You guys make me feel soooo not smart at this point.
published in the NYT...that was a bit surprising

Yeah. Normally it's the stuff of 2AM dorm room bull sessions.
Time to migrate back to reddit where we can see things we understand. Like LOLCats :D
release some .py code? repeat after me 'import disutils' and fill in the rest of the details... You'd be surprised at the number of python apps that don't bother creating a setup script. It's a pain having to write them for third party apps. So I automated it with a simple form.
Notifir To Launch Digg Tracker
Notifir is an upcoming service that lets you track and manage some of your social bookmarking accounts from one central location. The site is launching its private beta tomorrow, and we got a sneak peek at the site.
The theory becomes is even more convincing if you realise and accept that it needn't just be humans that have to create sufficiently powerful computers. We could be part of a program running on some alien planet. Planet Earth, human beings and all that we've ever known and loved, don't need to have ever existed. All it requires is for some intelligence, somewhere to build a pretty ultimate PC/Mac, whatever.
The British came centuries later in 1600.
They unified the country, brought a common language, railways, administration etc.

Many people say that far greater damage was wrought by the many Muslim emperors and invasions.

By the time the British came, Indian Science was over.
PG-related questions/stories attract karma, so just upvote them early.
ironically, that thought exercise is necessary in order to make it full-proof (and fool-proof ;)
Just to stir the pot a bit - whenever I hear debates about empires, colonialism etc, I'm always reminded of the phrase, 'What have the Romans ever done for us?'.
great writing. everyone should read it and try not to just scan through it or you will miss a very valuable lesson.
I've thought about this 6 years ago. The sim could even be paused and resumed by the creator whenever he wanted, and we'd never be able to tell there were actually many gaps in our lives that range in billions of creator-life-terms.
I'm also wincing slightly at the thought of oracles. Could it not be sufficient just to clearly define scope and quality standards and let the current karma system do its thing? Regardless, I'm loving the new direction.
Open source Google
Enveluv.com
Enveluv.com is a new site, going to start their beta service from next month in Malaysia. Its a free web to postal service to send a physical greetings card or a letter to anyone in Malaysia.
Why is YCNews trying to be programming.reddit? I think there's plenty of "Hacker News" websites out there and there's no investor/entrepreneurship/startup news sites. The focus of the site will be lost now :(
<Insert generic Do no Evil complaint here>

Of course, it's not like I don't trust Google with my email, search history, office documents, website stats, blogs, travel planning, financial info, and now... private health information?

I think they're still missing my face to face conversation. Can we get a Google Bluetooth adapater that I can wear everywhere?
Lessons from the 'One-Man Conglomerate'
42.

Yes, guys, it was me all around. Funny that it took you so long to find out. I kickstarted this big simulation as a weekend hack and let it evolve for a month, so I could come and play as Warren Beatty.

Can we now, as a universe, move on?

* * *

This is not science; it's religion, philosophy, or abuse of language. You could never prove anything about this kind of stuff either way, and IMHO throwing around probabilistic estimates is 'not even wrong'. The scientist quoted in the article admits such estimates are only 'hunches', so I guess only the reporter is to blame for placing this stuff under a 'Science' header.

Now, I'm not protesting that we talk this. It's fascinating stuff. It's funny to recognize in this thread some of the same crazy ideas that would get people shuffling away from me at parties, like 'what if our whole known universe is but an atom inside other universe, which in turn [...]?'

Re: worlds simulated inside worlds, aka the Matrix, aka Plato's cavern- when I did work on a MMOG we had this conversation once or twice that if we gave our non-player characters ability to learn and communicate for an arbitrary length of time, eventually they'd come up with theories like "Every object in the universe has an unique ID, which is a 64-bit integer". And they'd wake up after a downtime and comment things like "gee, finally capacitor recharging is fixed!", and then stop and wonder about the deep meaning of that.

Re: internet and cybernetic consciousness: when I first learned about the internet, one of my first thoughts is that the interconnected computers would create a new consciousness, or an ecosystem of competing consciousnesses. Not that it would be pursued, but that it would happen spontaneously, just like life evolved out of the primordial soup.

Then I thought that something similar would happen as a result of connecting so many people. Now, it's been always like that to some extent (cultures, memes, ideologies, etc. can be thought of as supraindividual consciousnesses), but the instant communication would make it more ostensible and powerful. Just like oxidation and explosion are instances of combustion, yet the difference in speed makes it counterintuitive for us to recognize any sameness between them.

Fast-forward to 2007: for about a year, the global hivemind has been thinking intensely about cats with captions. Who knows what deep intentions hide behind this?
I don't think that'll do it. Remember that it's only the oracles' votes that decide which stories you can help your voting power by upmodding. I think the oracles are unlikely to upvote PG essays or anything similar that might have been posted as an attempt at karma-whoring. I certainly doubt that PG bothers to upvote links to his own writings.
Yeah, I used to be like that but then I figured I'd learn how to use a module that is part of the standard library. It's pretty sweet, except for the lack of dependency checks (which setuptools adds, yay).

Do you send your setup.py to those third party app devs?
I live in Kerala .A word about present academic situation here:

The good old days are far gone . Quality of education is going downhill,as very few practitioners teach the subjects in colleges.Locally, teaching as a profession is considered as a low grade one , compared to engineering and medical professions by majority.This low social status coupled with poor pay has resulted in a situation,where teaching as a profession has become the last of all choices.

A system that do not appreciate innovation is in place, and is oriented ONLY towards getting high academic scores.
This is sad. I wish things got better.

[I haven't studied anywhere outside Kerala, so i don't know about the situation elsewhere in India.Please don't conclude this as the situation in India, in general]
Another of these ramblings that act as repellents in parties:

Some people are reported to have survived with only one hemisphere of the brain. It's not a huge stretch to imagine that you could transplant into yourself all needed duplicates or artificial replacements for vital organs, then split yourself in two so both halves survive, with one of the brain hemispheres each.

Then, there are two new independent yous there, neither of them being quite like the old you, neither of them feeling the other you as yourself anymore, but both of them independently feeling themselves as you. Stop and imagine this situation. How do you think you'd feel? How do you feel now, thinking about it?

Now let's leap a bit from the medical to the philosophical: let's abstract the fact that parts of the brain are specialized. Assume that we could do other partitions but left-right, or suppose that brains will rewire to make up for lost functionality. Imagine it's actually true that 90% of our mental power usually goes to waste, and that we could lose half of the brain and somehow mostly make up for it. Or imagine that it's possible to make a perfect copy of yourself, as proposed elsewhere in this thread. The result is the same: there is another you out there, virtually identical, with the same past, but which you don't feel as you anymore.

How do you feel about that other you?
My Idea Map
I don't mind.
I would say no because the founders would be managers who would have to direct things. The programmers they hire probably will not be 100% behind the project.

Non-programmer founders for a software startup can be seen as middlemen. Why should VCs pay a middleman when they can find any old programmer themselves to implement the idea?
Zed Shaw: Kitchen Sink
As you can see I'm a big fan of Zed Shaw and of his eccentricities. If there was one person I would love to work on a open source project with. It would be him.
Based on a quick glance, and keeping in mind that I have only 10 minutes experience with online dating:

1. Free is a hard price to argue with.

2. It's easy to understand. Everything is in front of you.

3. Because it's free, it's easy to see exactly what you're getting.

4. Craigslist is also free, but it's restricted to specific cities. It's true that the list of cities has grown massively, but the fact that Craigslist is chopped up into subsites makes it feel smaller - especially if your city happens to be the one with only 2 ads on it. Plentyoffish keeps the geographical partitioning in the background, and sustains the illusion that the entire world is one big room.

And let's face it - Plentyoffish may have somewhat primitive design, but it's like fine art compared to Craigslist, which doesn't even give you thumbnails to look at.

5. It feels like something one of your friends might throw together in a weekend - and that's good, because the result is unintimidating. There are lots of people looking for dates who cannot write or take decent photos, and the last thing you want to do is scare them out of posting by setting high design standards. You're not designing an art museum. You're designing a very fancy bathroom wall for people to write on. Plentyoffish nails this aesthetic - it feels more like a backyard BBQ, or a friend's untidy family room, than like a fancy cocktail party or a business meeting with suits and ties.

Which suggests that there might be room in the market for an upscale Plentyoffish - for people who want to look for dates in the online equivalent of a country club instead of at a bar. Perhaps that's what the subscription dating sites are for?

Any more guesses from the audience?
Does your project need a Cool Cam?
I agree with you, but I think you can curve the difficulty level a bit if a non-hacker founder will devote some of his time to learn how to hack himself. Then he can have the choice of choosing the technologies he wants for his startup.
Habit is more important in a successful endeavor than "luck."
Right. Generally, open systems are more secure for that very reason. People who care to keep it good plug the holes.
Paul, it would be good, if at this point, you make the Hacker News Karma rules transparent. It would be good to have a page that explains how the Karma works and the other rules as well. It was one of the most irritating things with reddit, and the irritation only increased when they got sold ;-)