skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, the candidates are not all alike, even though Barsalou cites Spivey, who is really in the analogue camp. In contrast, the "Grounded Cognition" idea revolves around simulation - which may or be not work in an analogue manner -, and only denies the existence of amodal symbols in brains, as opposed to, say, Jeff Hawkins (who didn't do any experiments, either, AFAIK). Bringsjord is still another case; he's an Ex-GOFAI guy who, together with David Ferrucci, built the storytelling system BRUTUS.

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~sousa/BRUTUS_rev.html

Bringsjord makes another relevant contribution to the debate in "BRUTUS and the Narrational Case Against Church's Thesis", which used to be available from citeseer, but that site is down ATM, so I cannot provide a link.

But since you're asking a question of your own instead of answering mine, I take it that you don't know of any evidence, either.
One cannot present evidence to differentiate between two theories unless they are both coherent and make clear and different predictions. Arguments against theories is a valid way to deal with them; so is asking questions to clarify what they are saying.
Two simple web businesses
I hate the style of this writer. So many adjectives and for meaningless things. Why does a piece need to be kicky? Why do the goals of a manufacturing firm need to be animated?

A tiresome piece and not fit to be read on a Friday.
Idea for a media startup
Wired Magazine's Editor Serves Up Nonsense on "Demise" of Scientific Method
It seems like what IT really wants is trade school graduates.

No. What IT really wants is "problem solvers".

It doesn't matter what technologies you learned at college, high school, trade school, or from books. Whatever it is, it won't be enough anyway. You'll be expected to get to work, use what you know, and pick up what you have to. For the rest of your life.

More importantly, you will be expected to understand abstract ideas (people and tech), break down complex issues, develop effective work habits, and communicate intellegently with many different types of people. Aren't these exactly the type of things that college is for?
"the petabyte scale [...] forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later."

Doesn't establishing a mathematical view require one to posit a theory? I'm not seeing anything profound here. When did we stop treating mathematics as a branch of scientific inquiry?
Funny you should say that... There are ads plastered al over the DC metro system for nothing but using Adobe PDF to simplify government forms.
computers can be programmed to do estimation and statistics and that sort of thing. they can also have sensors and feedback mechanisms, and calculate anything the forces of physics would do. evolution can also take place within a computer.
I'm actually relieved no one has commented on the weight being unsafe, like in the wired comment thread.

I'd just like to point out that some titanium alloys have the same strength at only one-eighth the weight of the strongest steel alloys. However the titanium alloy only carries one-eighth the kinetic energy and would greatly increase road safety if used extensively in cars.

I mean if a pickup weighs 4,000 lbs, and it can carry 2,000 lbs of materials before it doesn't have enough torque, reducing the trucks weight by 50% and not even changing the engine would mean it could carry 4,000 lbs of materials before it doesn't have enough torque.

That's a highly simplified explination, but the general principal is there. Any weight not wasted on the chassis, means the vehicle can tow/carry more at the same fuel consumption rate. What's even better is, like the 1L, if you make your car lighter you increase fuel efficiency greatly.

I mean I wonder how many Ford F-150's are out there that spend half their time wasting fuel as they're pulling around 2,000lbs of chassis they could do without, and could do with another 2,000lbs of extra carrying capacity when they are working.
This dude is a little late. Macs have been interesting since the release of OS X and have been really interesting since OS X 10.3 when things finally started to speed up an stabalize.
What cracks me up is the ReadMe.html that is being installed next to the application. Do they have so little faith in their own PDF format that they decided to use an HTML file?
I don't understand you there. Spivey can make experiments which lead him to conclude that there may not be any fixed representations of anything in the brain. Bringsjord can manually solve the Busy Beaver for 6-state Turing Machines, while the machines themselves can't. These are examples of what I have; what I'm now looking for are examples of experiments from the results of which the opposite can be concluded.
No, I round up to the nearest hour, though.

I don't do a lot of consulting, but that's the going rate when I do.
How is it relevant whether there are any fixed representations in the brain? self-modifying code could achieve that.

there is no reason to believe that bringsjord can solve that problem and a computer can't. divide his method of solving it into very small steps. then answer which step did he do which a computer can't do?
Every time I see a stupid and provocative title, I am hoping that it's something interesting and title was chosen only to attract attention.

Yet again, it was just that - stupid: if you're afraid to deal with usernames/passwords in a secure fashion, how would you deal with credit card numbers for recurring billing? Or how would you approach a task of writing a billing system for someone like AT&T?
I think Stallman was referring to this: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx0...
Nut launches death threats at Debian women
10% would not surprise me.

Agreed. The notion that 9 out of 10 CS graduates are capable of useful work is beyond laughable.
Is it safe to get it for free through the TrialPay offer, or am I going to get spammed/abused for going this route?
Time wasted, Not forgotten (youtube & viacom... in verse)
The Busy Beaver is a classic example of a function which is not computable by a Turing Machine.
I personally think that Macs are eating into the Linux crowd. Haven't you noticed that in the past year or two how the buzz over Ubuntu has dwindled, and now all the "cool" developers run around with macs? I wonder what those official stats are.
I second http://www.wickedfire.com
It doesn't matter what technologies you learned at college, high school, trade school, or from books. Whatever it is, it won't be enough anyway. You'll be expected to get to work, use what you know, and pick up what you have to. For the rest of your life.

That applies to everyone in any field, whether you went to school or not.

My point was that while IT (which to me, means IT department, not software companies) may want those things, what they hire for are the tech skills primarily. And by tech skills, I mean a laundry list of frameworks and APIs.

The skills you mention seem to be reserved for the managers at the places I've worked.
And of course, now the Wall St Journal has published an article about it, the Chinese Government is going to close the loophole. Thanks, WSJ!

Of course they would have figured it out eventually, and of course the Chinese censors probably pay more attention to Chinese blogs than they do to the Wall St Journal anyway. But even so, the morality of publishing this article still seems a bit iffy to me.
Is anyone actually using one of these? I don't really see the point.
Yeah, it's scandalous. Steven Pinker is in at 57, Craig Venter at 71, even Malcolm Gladwell made it to 77. But Steven Hawking is not intellectual enough, it would seem.
And:

Also announced was the decision to "... spend all of [the Trust's] resources within 50 years after Bill's and Melinda's deaths

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

Most foundations exist eternally to provide welfare for social workers. I'll credit Gates for preventing that. Stallman didn't do basic research on the matter.

Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and the rest, offer you software that gives them power over you.

Nope, sorry, you're wrong. I don't mind laying down 40 dollars for a million man-hours of work. I don't consider this an unethical requirement. What I do consider unethical is expecting developers to work for nothing as their moral responsibility to me.
Do we really want a Valleywag for every college?
I doubt that this nutjob has made any contribution other than spreading hate.
If the Mac can get the apt-get system working really well (not like fink or ports, but really working in a hassle-free way), then I think it will be unbeatable. Right now, I still prefer Linux. It's just a lot better for development work.
Google is just one buyer of these sets of photographs. Google shares them with the world, the other buyers use them for some purpose you don't hear about behind closed doors.

Who's evil?

Anyway, I don't see how opening up our society is a bad thing. For years, people have been afraid to be themselves because of taboos. When Google (or whatever) makes it clear that everyone else is just as weird as you, maybe we can stop being so secretive and embrace our real human nature.
I actually learnt more outside my CS course, experimenting in my own time, than on it. People should be encouraged to experiment more in education and not spoon-fed.
I used to be a hardcore linux user, then I got a Macbook. But I got the Macbook for aesthetics. I still run a VM for Ubuntu and use it for most of my development that involves any form of compiling.
I don't think linking to tools to aid piracy really is acceptable. As much as I think Windows isn't worth paying for you still need to respect M$ property.
on the bright side it's good news for AIR developers since AIR is part of this bundle
I think you're missing the point, mainly that all that is programmed. There is no way a computer can truely evolve, only its software can.

Evolution is the response to external factors, mainly death, which prevents the spread of genetic material.

Now if you were to make an android that had all the risks a human does, like being hit by a car or eaten by a lion, and gave it two ROM sequences of commands that its consciousness is based on and whenever two androids 'reproduce' they only pass on one ROM sequence, then you would end up with genetic selection. Essentially all new androids would end up with the ROM sequences of the most successful andriods.

Factor in that there might be write errors and data corruption from radiation turning a 0 into a 1, then they might get true evolution.

However, a desktop computer or mainframe cannot evolve as it's one entity. Even thousands of them won't evolve as new computers aren't made through the joining of two hardware parts of two older PCs. It isn't like "aww he's got your webcamera, honey" or "Oh no, he's got a cooling fan defect, one of the heat sinks isn't working properly".

If PCs suddenly started becoming self-aware, every single one would be an alien to each other as it would be fundamentally unique.

A large portion of Asian people descend back to Ghengis Khan, Irish descend back to some warlord there. Our genetic tree as a species is illustrated by irregular growth and random dead ends, a computer won't achive that ever until they become so unrecognisably living that they risk being killed or eaten or choose not to have offspring, or conquer a country and have 500 kids with random androids.

Then there's things like Founder effect to consider, like a Micronesian islands population has 5% colour blindness and 30% carry it even though it's a 0.003% prevelance in the US. Why? Because everyone but 20 people died after a typhoon and 1 of the survivors had it, and since 1775 1/20th of the population is totally colour blind. If he'd have been killed, they'd have had 0% prevelance of colour blindness.
You haven't said which step he took to compute it which a turing machine can't do.
Maybe (I hope, but doubt) Gates is investing in such companies so that he can influence them to 'clean up' their act.
free software is the major reason why PG, YCombinator, YouTube and Google are possible

This is not the argument that Stallman is making, and if he could fully grok the simple fact that business and not mankind is that which has benefited from free software, he'd probably go hang himself in despair.

Windows + IIS + VS + SQL Server is not that expensive. Altogether, it's still much cheaper than starting a lawn-care business.
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/why-not-pdf.html

Synopsis: PS or PS.gz is even better than pdf.
This reads like a PR plant from IBM trying to bend public opinion so they can outsource their career development responsibility to universities.
collegeotr.com for editors, and juicycampus.com for the UGC.
I have just been reading your blog and macrumors (which I had never heard of). It is actually good to see you have done well especially as your success is based on the model I like best - organic growth based on delivering value to people.
YouTube didn't give up because Google launched Google Video. And as it turns out YouTube did it better and sold to Google.

Press on!
Agreed. With the myriad of VNC, sharing, etc apps I just can't find a use for web OSes.
Italian soldiers floored by 77-year-old Japanese woman (Samurai Granny)
Wow - fun for hours... ;)
Diane Greene prefers her competition virtual
Let the microblogs bloom
There's a rider to that headline. The effect is in UK, not the US. Here in the US, I do find that in the entry-level employers are more than willing to recruit people who get on-the-job training.

That said, I hope they find decent jobs.
So after all that work and school, you're giving it up for MacRumors? What led to your decision? Did you have a passion for medicine?
Where did you work?
Firstly, with the simplistic view that there are a finite number of problems - how do you know that you've reached 100%? Isn't the point of getting more people in because you don't know about all the problems? So how can you ever say "I've found 100%"?

Next problem is how do you define a universal usability issue? What might cause problems for one person is a feature for the next. I suppose you could argue you've at least identified a concern, but even then you still need a very large n to say with significant certainty you've found most problems. But it's only ever certainty, unless it's the world's simplest interface.
How To Raise Money For Your StartUp
If it works for him - it works for everyone.
"Revolutionary theory" is overdoing it, but it'd be interesting if it were true.
The issue is with false negatives (not finding real problems). It is hard to say that 100% of issues were found, because how can you quantify the number of problems that weren't found?

The claim of this article that you can somehow quantify the percentage of usability problems is rather absurd. How can you quantify the total number of usability issues in a program a priori?

Also, I don't think that graph ever reaches 100%, I think it approaches 100% (but then I'm not a math-whiz, so I will gladly accept correction).

They've successfully performed statistical sleight of hand. The assumption that you can quantify the total number of defects is untenable, but they leave that part out of their article and just show the nice charts and math to provide strength to their broken hypothesis.

I think this is unfortunate because I think that there is probably some great insights in this article and the intent is good.

Usability and Human-Centered Computing/Human-Computer Interaction has a tendency to suffer from this type of "pseudo-science" of using fuzzy statistics to present great sounding finding. I was made aware of this trend by the following article:

Wayne D. Gray and Marilyn C. Salzman, "Damaged merchandise? A review of experiments that compare usability evaluation methods", Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 13, pp. 203-261, 1998.
How Many Web 2.0 Services Have Gone Mainstream?
But how things should be is the way they are, with both existing and the market deciding. Why should RMS decide how they should be, rather than the market and the individuals who comprise it?

Comparing a free market, in which free software competes with proprietary, to an oppressive theocracy is pointless.
Four Reasons Why Apple Is To Blame For Everything
I can typically speed through them faster, but the speed of the code execution is so much faster in C. Especially in basic number crunching.
Now Linux users can too!
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gloobus
Only because they are lighter and slower. I'm sick of people complaining about how much energy an aircraft consumes. No traveler is willing to submit to a 4-hour airplane ride to travel a few hundred kilometers, yet this is an excellent way to give the airplane both better mileage and higher speed than a car.

We could easily design a powered vehicle that has weight on the same order as a bike, while getting better mileage. I can just hear the customers queuing up to buy it: "A motorcycle with a top speed of 40 kph?"

Perhaps this mindset is about to change. But I wouldn't bet on it.
It doesn't matter how strong it is, if it weighs sod-all then you're going to come off pretty poorly in a collision with something much larger.
Happy Birthday to US(A)
I probably don't have a "passion" for medicine, but few people do. I personally don't know any doctors that truly have a passion for it. (I doubt, for example, that many would continue to do it if they won the lotto.)

I felt like I was good at medicine and enjoyed it day to day, but given the choice of doing it vs being able to just do something I was doing for fun anyway and spending more time with my family, I think the choice became easy.

The flip side to that, is I do have a passion for what I'm doing now. If I won the lotto, I think I would continue to run MacRumors, and still try to launch some other web projects I've had in my mind.
Downside of Affluence..
At first this is surprising but then I suppose once you have enough "stuff" you start craving more...
I love MacRumors because even though they are huge they are still are in some arenas an underdog (e.g. full-time staff of Gizmodo)... Like other blogs I am addicted to, I manually type in the site address at least once, if not twice a day.

> My other projects will not necessarily be blogs in the traditional sense.

Maybe we can look forward to some custom iPhone/iPod Touch apps that are a different way to read/change the way we read our news?
And if you're spending 40k on a 1 seater car, why are you complaining about gas prices?

Because everyone else is doing it? It's pretty much a social obligation nowadays to complain about high gas prices at every opportunity.
collegeotr.com seems right on. ivygate.com is similar too -- the big thing these people need to work on is distribution strategy. Gawker had a great one - write trash about other media companies (NYT, Conde Nast, etc) because the reporters at those companies are self important and always wrote back. It became an endless loop and drove tons of traffic to Gawker. History of it is here:

http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=gawker-2002-2007

(n+1 magazine, great article)
"So after all that work and school, you're giving it up for MacRumors? What led to your decision?"

The insane amount of money that MacRumors makes?
True, but it's also informative that he's not replacing a career of telephone tech support with blogging.
10 changes Steve Ballmer should make at Microsoft
Mac: <Spacebar> or Preview or indeed Skim... slim and functional, thank you! :-)
Petabyte Scale Data-Analysis and the Scientific Method
How can people not use Firefox 3?
This maybe isn't suited to Hacker News but is there anyone on this forum that don't use Firefox 3?

I just switched from Firefox 2 and having both Safari and IE installe don my computer and while I thought Firefox 2 was really good it wasnt superior but Firefox 3 is just awesome.

The smartbar is awesome, Im having an evergrowing list of bookmarks but Firefox 3 handles that so nicely by suggesting and saving from previously visited sites.

IE is unsafe and slow, Safari doesn't handle everything and is ugly.
Firefox 3 is very fast, much faster than the previous and can handle much more tabs and windows, very welcome.
It is very customizable
(well entirely you could say considering it is open source but I mean for average Joe it is still fairly easy to change basic stuff).
Well done, all features are welcome, none are annoying.

A good example of how good open source can be!
Quite an impressive married couple. Dr. Rosenblum met and married the woman who would make VMWare a leading product in an industry that really started (timesharing mainframes aside)

"But the deciding factor was when my wife, Diane, got interested in it. That made it incredibly easy for me."

"I had confidence in her dealing with the business side and she had confidence in what we were doing on the technical side and so we just partitioned up the company that way."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230637
Woah, since when did Foxit Reader become not free?
Yeah. PDF is awesome. Acrobat Reader isn't.
Really? You think passion for medicine is that rare? I sit in biology classes with my mouth wide open, in absolute awe at the principles that guide the human body. Then, when I think about applications of that knowledge in clinical settings (especially relating to the brain, in the same way that V.S. Ramachandran practices and researches), it excites me.

When I think about practicing medicine and helping people by embarking on a journey of diagnosis every day, I get the same burning sensation of excitement in my chest that I get when I think about starting a company.

I don't know how someone can endure the torture of medical school, residency, and then a practice without being passionate and absolutely in love with what they do.

Most of the "I quit my job!" posts I read here are about people who code in a dead-end corporate job who are escaping for entrepreneurship (still coding). You had a completely different, successful career that you gave up. I find that interesting.

(Also, I read MacRumors every day. Thanks for that.)
His views are a religion, and he essentially calls Bill Gates something worse than an idiot: evil.
thanks. I stumbled upon coodeigniter ... seems pretty promising.
Developers Wary Of iPhone
But forcing you to open source it prevents you from being able to, generally.
There are many steps. You have a set of different Turing Machines with alphabet {0,1}, each of which has, say, 4 states. You want to know which of these is the one that, starting from a tape filled with 0's, can write the largest number of consecutive 1's onto the tape, before it halts. If it halts - you don't know that in the beginning. A human can find out, by manually simulating the sequence and counting the steps. It's a lot of work - there are 61.519 possible 4-state machines -, but Bringsjord (or more likely, a group of undergrads available to him) has/have done it. A computer can't do it. For details, please read the paper.
Based on CPM/monthly uniques, I'd hazard to say it might be a bit more than his physician salary. We might have to add Arn to that News.YC thread about notable people here. I'm still amazed he ran the site on auto-pilot part-time while holding down rotations/practicing. And he reads HackerNews!
"When I think about practicing medicine and helping people by embarking on a journey of diagnosis every day, I get the same burning sensation of excitement in my chest that I get when I think about starting a company."

I'd love to hear your thoughts about it when you are done with it all.

I think people's beliefs and passion about it change significantly over the course of their training. And again, I am setting a high bar in defining passion. If you could do whatever you wanted, what would you choose to do with your time?