skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I welcome the debate, I don't think this is the forum for it. All we will end up doing is insulting one another leaving opinions unchanged. It's been proven time and again that this type of stuff only results in flamewars. !HN
And who stands outside time and space to define the tautology?

That statement has no meaning.

There is no fundamental understanding regarding the concept of "outside time and space", because our knowledge of them both derives from experience. To have some understanding of 'outside', you would have to have received that information a priori. That would mean that everyone had received that information, however.

Since, we can readily determine that the difference between believers and non-believers is a matter of experience. The difference between the two has nothing to do with "outside" either time and space, because that "outside" is not experiencable (at this point in time).
I find the theory full of holes...
1) Just think about the amount of power needed by a system to maintain such a virtual world
2) Consider the magnitude of the power needed to further maintain a nested system/S within itself???

[....besides.. i doubt amazon ec2 could scale this kind of thing anyway \)
I think it's hard to come with a good business model for browser extensions that do not require the users to register/sign up.

The author also mentions the idea to capitalize AdBlockPlus. Well I think that is a kind of extension that you shouldn't capitalize. When you do business, you have to do marketing and one way to do it is by advertising. Isn't that irony for you to advertise a product that blocks ads?
if(god.exists()){
return to_your_predetermined_role_in('work','play','etc');
}else{
while (true) { rage_against_the_machine(); }
}
Even if one doesn't get YC funding, working on a startup is probably better for your career than cleaning toilets.
Sparklines are good. The Book the text came from is better. The three previous books and "Beautiful Evidence" stand next to Knuth in my estimation. For Perl fans out there check out CD-Graph-Sparklines on CPAN.
Google is "fast becoming just another company"
I thought the name of your new app (MyJuaad.in) was a play on mujahideen (Afghan religious fighters from the '80s) when I first read it.
Not too impressed with this article, I have to say.

It seems pretty obvious that people will not switch from the GOOG just because MS has attained search quality parity (which, incidentally, I doubt). If they built a _better_ search engine than Google, then people would go there and use that instead, and the advertisers would follow. Then they wouldn't need to buy Yahoo.

The Yahoo strategy to me seems to imply acceptance that they just cannot equal Google in terms of search quality, so they are looking for another way to compete. Saying they're of equal quality doesn't make it so.
Frankly, I believe that a lot of people who call themselves Athiests are in fact Agnostics; and don't really stop to think about the difference.

I would venture to guess that most scientists especially are agnostic because it fits the scientific method better - we can not presume to know what we cannot measure, and all that.

Atheism is the idea that we know that there is know higher power. Any scientist has to know that it is impossible to have that absolute knowledge because we have no tests to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
There's really not much here. Reads like a political hit piece, with "anonymous sources" relaying embarrassing quotes from Sergey Bin. I usually expect a lot better from NYTimes.
Further evidence that Google is NOT all that it is cracked up to be. The days of Google subsidizing child care would seem to be gone. Not that any other organization is much better at this particular problem, unfortunately.
>> (which executed Lisp directly)

Uh, the machine's architectures were probably designed to be more amenable to Lisp-esque features (e.g., garbage collection, tagged types at runtime, native pair operations, etc); I suspect the machines didn't execute Lisp directly for the same reason that an x86 doesn't execute C directly...
One would hope the reason is: geeks more often manage to understand evolution properly.
The Google index algorithm is a trade secret. Whatever they published while at school is available and is often studied in search engine classes, but the most recent version algorithm is probably only available to only the most necessary people. PageRank is part of this algorithm but isn't the only part in determining where a result will fall.

This "FriendRank" algorithm will also be a trade secret. The patent here based on my quick scan is patenting the method that they will use to advertise to people using this FriendRank through Google's services or future services. For example, where it will be placed on the screen and how it will look.
A few years ago I was arguing with a mormon that, if he wanted some scientific theory to attack with bile, he'd have his best shot at gravity. Evolution, on the other hand, has been very well explained from all possible fronts.

The problem with gravity is that, as a daily experience, it fades out into uninteresting routine (except perhaps for rocket scientists and other specialists.)
Don't Be Evil seems a bit like a levee system. Its easy when your town is small to keep it surrounded by levees and the flood waters at bay, but there comes a point when the town is just too big, a weak spot inevitably occurs and the flood waters come roaring in.
All reasoning requires some unprovable axioms. That's Godel's incompleteness theorem. A religious person can simply take the divinity of jesus (or whatever) as an axiom and use reason from that point onward.
What about the examples they used in the article?
After having just spend a bunch of time reading the "Why are geeks atheists" thread, this article cast an entirely new image of the phrase "Jesus saves" into my mind...
From the article:

"Meanwhile, someone at Google woke up one day and realized that the company was subsidizing each child to the tune of $37,000 a year — which nobody had noticed up until then — compared with the $12,000-a-year average subsidy of other big Silicon Valley companies like Cisco Systems and Oracle."

It seems that Google was quite generous over the years and finally realized that given the difficult economic times that they as a company must do something to bring their internal spending in line to a more realistic range. I don't see why Google should be penalized for such a move.

Unfortunately for Google, the fact that this is a move that affects children and families such a story becomes even more sensitive. Google is a business like any other business out there. Why are they being treated as though they are something other than a business?
do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon.
Whoa. Déjà vu.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality#We_are_living...

http://cosmicvariance.com/2008/01/10/is-the-universe-a-compu...
Outside of math, you can never be sure that something is false. But if someone asked you whether the Red Sox won the 1950 World Series, it would seem pretty bogus to say that you were keeping an open mind. There's no distinction between atheist and agnostic on that question. The only reason there's one on the question of God's existence is because people have a much stronger desire to finesse the answer to such a historically loaded question.
But a non-believer can attack that axiom through historical record or the definition of divinity and point out how Jesus fell short (prophecies, etc). So if the axiom is falsifiable it is useless.
There is some confusion here, I'll agree.

I made the argument earlier in this thread that not only do we have no tests to prove or disprove theism, we cannot have any such tests, because theism and atheism are statements about what's beyond our (philosophical) universe. Any god you can formulate a test for isn't really God-the-Creator-of-All in the first place.

So, belief in God, or the lack thereof, is just an assumption. This assumption will influence your actions, of course, and belief or the absence of it may well be beneficial or harmful. Either you live your life as if God exists, or you don't. If you don't, you might as well call yourself an atheist... and that's why I do.
Right now we're all communicating across a tiny rock in the middle of nowhere. Yet we have the rational means (linguistic, mathematic, scientific) to ponder the depth and extent of our own existence.

Maybe the ability to "ponder the depth and extent of our own existence" isn't really such a big deal after all. As humans we tend to exalt the things that separate us from other species on this planet without much analysis as to why those traits should be exalted. What if such "pondering" is just the brain's way of filling in idle time with junk to fool us that something is there, such as when it fills in areas of low resolution in our visual field to fool us into seeing a full picture?

The concepts of "ponder", "depth", and "existence" originate within the human brain, as does the very concept of "concept".

I'm not saying your statement is wrong, really. Just pointing out that you're making a big assumption that the act of pondering existence and the like are some kind of mystical thing.
I think it also gives a clear example of out how brittle "don't be evil" truly is, when administered by a "management committee" consisting of people who are mostly multimillionaires.

Perhaps a more equitable and user-responsive way to provide day care would be to let local offices or workgroups organize their own childcare groups, with some degree of corporate subsidy and other support.
Adobe 9
Atheism is the ultimate negative statement "there is no such thing as I cannot define"

No, it's just concluding, as JMC puts it, "the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question."
I've made a habit out of asking the doctors that I work with "Would you do it over again, if you had to?" I have about a 60% "Hell no" response rate. And, only about a 5-10%, "Yeah, I love what I do" response rate.

Especially nephrology. That's a brutal specialty. You watch most of your patients slowly die over 5 or 10 years while they are linked to a dialysis machine 3 times a week. The happy stories in nephrology are the people who get kidney transplants, but then you're only trading one disease for another: kidney failure for chronic immuno-suppression.

Congrats, on making it out! And, here's wishing the best for ya.
I've always found it extremely ironic that the religious crowd (yes, I know I'm over-generalizing) spends so much time arguing against evolution, which has nothing whatsoever to say about gods or the origins of life. But they say nothing about quantum mechanics, which not only elegantly eliminates the need for any sort of "prime mover", but blows the possibility of a god existing completely out of the water.
the failures of modern physics (and soon neuroscience too)

Since I understand you're a neuroscientist by training, what do you mean by "and soon neuroscience too"?
Why I Still Use Windows 95
In the graphs comparing stocks to gold, it's important to realize that the gold supply has been increasing.
> what's a few more kids?

An insurance liability, for one thing.
ICANN Loses Control of Its Own Domain Names
The difference is subtle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism

And largely an exercise in classification. Still, it's handy knowledge to have, should you enjoy that sort of thing.
The MIT CONS computer and its commercial descendants at Symbolics and
LMI was not a parallel architecture. It was a fairly conventional
uniprocessor CPU which happened to have a register and instruction
architecture that provided some hardware acceleration for typical
"LISP" tasks (specifically tagged pointers: the "pointer" value had a
bit telling the CPU whether to load the value as-is or indirect
through it to load the next value).

As for why they were expensive: they were small market pre-VLSI
minicomputers being sold in the late 70's and early 80's. They
competed most directly with machines like the MicroVAX, and weren't
particularly expensive for that market, AFAIK. Assembling and testing
a few thousand ICs into a single computer is just inherently
expensive.
Let's give them twice a year. And by reading here instead of there, I get it all filtered for free.

Edit: I went and looked at them. They're very similar to the NYT piece, only shorter. Perhaps HN should ban the NYT? :)
I have to say that this thread shows why I'm so impressed with the YC community. Ordinarily this sort of discussion is very thorny; and almost always ends up as a flame fest within the first 10 posts.

Instead, we're drinking tea in the middle of the brier patch.
Because the impression is about that they are different, an impression which they have fostered themselves. The opening words of the Letter from the Founders in the IPO prospectus reads: "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one." (http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/0001193125040...)
Celebrity Pics Now: Kate Hudson
From the FAQ:

Do you really believe that we are in a computer simulation?

No. I believe that the simulation argument is sound.
I know what you mean. I have a fairly good layman's understanding of evolution. Whenever I've been engaged in a discussion on the topic, I'm amazed by the level of ignorance that's often displayed. Especially when people repeat absurd statements like "survival of the fittest" which have no bearing whatsoever on evolution.
I know one shouldn't question orthodoxy, but it seems insane to me to have children and then dump them all day, from a young age, with strangers. What's the point of having them if you're not raising them?
That doesn't bother me. Presuppose a fancy, futuristic computer that can handle it, and -- bam -- problem solved.

What bothers me is that it's tautological. It's meaningless and banal.
> All reasoning requires some unprovable axioms. That's Godel's incompleteness theorem.

No, that's just reasoning. Godel's theorem is about the limitations of what you can build upon those axioms.

I'm not sure those limitations even matter much. What use is being able to prove "this statement is unprovable"?
Well, evidently the processors worked with binary instructions, but these were based on primitive Lisp operations. There's more information in http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/5731 and quoting from the wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

These machines had hardware support for various primitive
Lisp operations (data type testing, CDR coding) and also
hardware support for incremental garbage collection. They
ran large Lisp programs very efficiently.
Maybe you should define the "they" you're speaking of?

I've noticed a disturbing trend on the internet with this case specifically. Google did not OPT to give this data to Viacom. They were ordered to by the U.S. Government. Instead of accusing Google of somehow now being evil, maybe we should be complaining about a court system that doesn't understand technology at all.

Until the courts have a grasp of technology, we will continue to see these overreaching orders on a regular basis. The courts just don't know how to be more specific, so they grant access to everything.
I've always paid for our day care. But this is a bad idea because googlers would be more comfortable and spend more time working if day care were right there at work. Near work or near home are the two most convenient places. I'm told Mountain View is a cluster fuck for day care.

Of course they are missing a bigger opportunity in improving education here. Like universities, google should be experimenting with different kinds of education. They could make a big difference.
If anyone's still reading this thread, I ran across a great little analysis by George Packer that is both admiring and critical of Hitchens:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2008/07/i...
How not to do customer retention
The microarchitecture really implemented Lisp primitives like cons, car, cdr, array ref as opcodes, etc. That's about as close to executing Lisp directly as you can get.
I advise anyone who meets someone afraid of s-expressions to send the fearful here:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Talks/SwineBeforePe...

It doesn't address the s-expr situation directly, but Dr. Krishnamurthi plays a devious trick to show you why they aren't scary.
The big issue that Google has (incidentally the same issue that MS went through) is the two classes of employees that they now have and the resentment and disconnect between the two groups. The two groups, of course, are those who are millionaires and are 'fully vested' and those new googlers who are not millionaires (and probably never will become millionaires). The latter group relies on a salary to live in a very expensive area and they count on every perk as a way to reduce their bills so they can make the ends meet each month. One site recently showed that average salary at Google is around $110K. In the valley, that's not a lot when you factor in the cost of living. So this increase in daycare is not a big deal to all those millionaires and yet it is a huge increase to those that can't afford it.

As Google matures and they start cutting even more of these perks, the two groups will start growing even further apart. It's a serious organizational issue and Google will need to tackle it quickly.
Well, given that Sun workstations started running commercial Lisps at some "reasonable speed" around this time, that pretty much doomed Symbolics/LMI/TI's efforts. The cost differential between the specialized hardware (ca $100K) and the commodity workstations (ca $10-20K) was just too much.

When you think about it at another level, there's not enough difference between a decent Lisp compiler producing 68K instructions for the Lisp primivites on the Sun workstation, and the microcode in the Lisp machine running micro-instructions implementing Lisp primitives. So the commodity hardware won out, as it usually does.
Reminds me of the quote:

"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."- Les Brown
"They" I didn't mean Google
Didn't anyone learn anything from Bubble 1?
Loved the filename: icann-pwned.html! Thanks to the anonymous web monkey with a sense of humour. And no offense about the monkey think, I hope - I am a web monkey too. Aren't we all.
Well, nowadays philosophy is often meaningless. But I think it's a good exercise only to train our mind to think about non-conventional theories. Probably it's a lite version of 'What you can't say' http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html.

Evidently, it's a question whose answer is unreachable and, in my opinion, completely irrelevant (i really don't care if there is/isn't god, if we are a computer simulation, or if I'm a potato).
We could argue with you, but it would accomplish little.

1. I'm not looking for a satisfactory answer. I'm looking for the answer that is most plausible. I go where evidence leads me. In this case, there is as much evidence for god as there is for unicorns. This is not sufficient to dismiss the concept of god entirely, but it should at least give you pause.

2. I have debated religious people for hours and hours. I don't know any atheist who hasn't seriously evaluated his beliefs. My position is very close to the one of Richard Dawkins. Read his books (especially Selfish Gene and The God Delusion). The last book is not as confrontational as the title suggests. Dawkins has done a few programmes for the BBC, you can easily find them online.

3. There doesn't -need- to be an answer. When a problem is very complex, it is always better to honestly admit you don't know than to make something up that sounds nice or gives comfort.

4. You can't expect people to explain their position again and again on forums like these. Reading books is a far more efficient way to understand alternative points of view. Only when you have -specific- questions does it make sense to challenge people online.
That reminds me of something that happened a few years ago. I was sitting in my cube working. I shared a cube wall with the office secretary and she was chatting to another woman who had stopped by. It was typical girl-talk. I pretty much drowned it out until the woman said: I don't understand why all the really smart guys never believe in God...
I burst out laughing. I don't know if they realized what I was laughing at.
Why bother with redefining someone else's term for your own use?

If you think that someone stole your term, or at least your term's historical meaning, then it's fair enough to fight to take it back. You'll have problems communicating with people who don't remember the less-common meaning until you remind them of it, but that might be a price worth paying.
I agree. I've had some serious, work-affecting problems with caffeine addiction. After a while, it stops keeping you awake and simply becomes something you must have in order to survive. It's fine for occasional stretches, but it's a really bad idea to develop a high-coffee lifestyle.

You're right on with the power naps-- they shouldn't last an hour-- but I'd add that meditation and brainwave entrainment are probably better. If you can coax the brain into a theta state, that seems to have the same positive effects as power naps, if not stronger ones. It's in the theta state that the brain reverses some of the effects of mental fatigue. To combat the grogginess coming out of the theta state, either entrain a beta state, or exercise. Power naps can be dangerous, especially at 2:00 in the morning.

Facebook is the wrong kind of distraction because it breaks flow. It's possible to walk to the kitchen and get a sandwich and still keep one's state of flow, whereas checking facebook (like an interruption from the boss) tends to break it, because there's too much higher cognitive processing involved. Since one of the sharpest declines throughout the day is in the ability to regain one's concentration, this is a big problem.
As the parent of a 2 month old, it's a difficult question we're facing right now. Who? How? When? Should my wife, with a doctorate in biochemistry, abandon her career completely and stay home? Should I? I'm not enthusiastic about those options. Should we hire someone? Not wild about that either. I think the best would be to kind of try and switch off, but it's going to require a lot of flexibility, and perhaps earning less money. The second is probably ok, depending on wherever it is we settle, the second may not be forthcoming from many employers. Sigh...
man you all really hate this idea. why? I hope its not just because its a thought experiment you guys are afraid to think about.

I personally love this thought experiment and the consequences one can reach from it.
"To have some understanding of 'outside', you would have to have received that information a priori. That would mean that everyone had received that information, however."

No it wouldn't. Perhaps I'm just special.

a priori knowledge is knowledge gained without experience. There is no reason it has to be universal.