skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see your point of view and understand that you will likely continue to hold it regardless of what I say, but none the less, I completely disagree with it.

What I'm saying is that even as it relates to aspects of people, or the actions they perform, based off whatever morality they follow, perfection is not achievable (see above quote from da Vinci). Greatness worthy of respect? Yes. Amazing deeds and ideas? Yes. But perfection? No. If you or anyone else has a different concept of what a word means than its actual meaning then that is up to you. But it doesn't make that concept correct and certainly doesn't make that concept easy to communicate to others who do not share your non-standard definition.

If one has to redefine the meaning of a word for ones philosophy to make sense, then maybe it's just best to use a different word and save everyone some time.

It appears that the meaning of the word "perfect" seems to be very elastic indeed, as it relates to it's use in Objectivism. One moment it actually does mean "perfect" as in "so good that further improvement is impossible" and the next it becomes this "relative" term, of fluid meaning.

Interesting.
You're right, it's presumptuous and probably inaccurate for me to say that.

My perspective (which I was mistakenly projecting on the rest of the community) doesn't have much room for being self-employed doing projects for other people as a long-term goal. But that's the angle the article takes I think.

I can see that some people here might see themselves staying a sole proprietorship for 5 years, and creating a lot of value in doing so. Just not my cup of tea.
That was interesting, thanks for the link.

However -- the neural functions cited by Kurzweil for which 'operations per second' have been estimated are:

1) edge and motion detection in the retina

2) computation of time delay between a sound arriving at one of our two ears versus the other

3) silicon computations required to model 10e4 cerebellar neurons

Let's throw out (3), since it's hard to know from the quick mention he gives what 'model' means in this context.

Now consider (1) and (2): they represent specialized, if experimentally accessible computations. The relationship of operations in the retina to operations in the cortex is unknown. (It seems, actually, that cortex reimplements certain retinal functions, e.g. directional selectivity, for unknown reasons.) Similarly, IIRC, the time difference between a sound arriving at the two ears is thought to be computed by the olivary nucleus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_olivary_nucleus), a specialized brainstem structure.

So what do the retina and the brainstem have to do with the cortex? Even if you accept (3), you can ask the same question about cerebellum.

In the link you give, Kurzweil says that these studies show that "it is clear that we can emulate the functionality of brain regions with less computation than would be required to simulate the precise nonlinear operation of each neuron and all of the neural components (that is, all of the complex interactions that take place inside each neuron)."

I hope he's right; but the evidence he gives is pretty thin.

[ edit to make each item on the list have its own line ]
Sling's SlingCatcher box finally imminent, and looks neat
They can offer not to screw up the economy.
Verifiable Functional Purity in Java
I think it has more to do with projected revenue growth. The big factor in stock price isn't profit, it's growth. During the past two years Nintendo's profits doubled year over year. As a result their price rocketed to ~$80/share. Now that their growth has started to stabilize, the premium paid for that growth has disappeared.
If the people who pulled off this attack are very smart, then they'll be shutting up about it.

The US Secret Service has a lot of resources and a pretty limited mission statement. It's not a good idea to attract their attention.
Nokia n900 tablet going to have 3G data and HD camera
Can a law create wealth?
Seems obvious once someone spells it out like that.

The complexity in deciphering what genes correspond to what expressions makes sense given how chaotic evolutionary changes are.
At least she has e-mail. John McCain's messages are delivered by horse.
a few unfortunate individuals
What percentage of Americans do not have access to adequate health care?

You guys keep thinking about this as if the economy existed in a world where buzzwords & their associated connotations are absolute. You are not choosing between US 2008 & 1963 Soviet Russia. The most radical model likely to ever be proposed in the US is something like the UK's.

The system tries to provide internal pressure to reform (just like big companies do). There will probably be a decline in mean medical care from an economic utility standpoint (to the extent that term has any meaning - I think very little) There will be a dramatic improvement in health to the bottom 25% -30% resulting in huge gains to life expectancy & similar indicators.

As a bonus that the fear Americans have of being left without health cover will lift.

Capitalist evangelists of various sorts are always quick to point out there are no good example of command economies performing well. That's fair.
But there are plenty of examples of 'socialist' health care systems that work. They perform well on any meaningful scales at a cost lower then the US's. From Cuba (an outlier but a very interesting one) to the UK to Japan. Pick one.
I'd go with a combination of (a) and (b)

Seems like it was 4chan/Anonymous, unless it started in a super elite IRC channel and was slowly leaked to 4chan.
This is easily the lamest thing I've seen in the top ten of Hacker News.

EDIT: My mistake, it turns out Sarah Palin's emails are also in the top ten right now.
I think that the article has a good point, but the play isn't in experience but rather in positioning for when HD streaming via the internet comes to the TV (cough Apple TV cough).
I doubt it, but the edge cases of what counts as wealth creation and what doesn't are so hard that I'd want to think more about it before saying for sure.
Matt, whereas arbitrage is a lucrative activity that's worthless to everybody else, this is a lucrative activity that's worthless and damaging. It hurts productive companies who are helping other people, at a 1:1 ratio. Each dollar Intellectual Ventures earns comes out of someone else's pocket, against their will, and in exchange for nothing.

Even if you look at it from your own self-interested perspective: wouldn't you rather they were making a useful internet service, something that might provide benefit to you? These are smart guys from Microsoft, why don't they make a company that produces a product?

This isn't a typical case of intellectual property providing a return. They're worse than the RIAA. It's an investment vehicle that provides revenue for the owners, with the added barbs that it 1.) Drains productive companies 2.) In the case of court cases, is subsidized by taxpayers.

Do you think that with $4 billion under management they only stop and enforce the legitimate and fair patents?

There's only one moral judgement to make. What they are doing is legal and unethical (hence morally wrong), and it should be made illegal, or rather, impossible under patent law. Arbitrageurs make a lot of money. They don't go to heaven.
99translations adds more integration features
I am happy to announce that we have deployed new software on the server to add many integration features to our translation software:

- VCS integration GitHub, SVN and others (based on HTTP fetch)
- Issue tracking integration for Lighthouse , Jira, Bugzilla etc (the web site shows number of open issues with tags i18n and 99translations)
- Ability to review the translations and submit issues right into the attached bugtracking system
- RSS feeds - allows to get notification as soon as project state changes
- Moderator role for access control
- Tracking author of the translations per key to see exactly who translated specific string (allows to have multiple translators for a language)
Because this is the opposite. It's more like 'it drink water like a duck'
The interview with Jessica is only in the paperback, as far as I know.
Cool!

But I still that in order for Google App engine to hit critical mass it needs to add support for Ruby on Rails and PHP.
I wonder if the financial breakdown will affect investments into the tech sector. From my understanding of VC firms, they raise funds a couple years in advance. From that perspective, the startups in the next year or two should still be in a good position, in my opinion (I hope).
hotmail inserts adds into my messages when I send them!

Hasn't stopped people using it.
I bet broadcasters will discover that when they put stuff online a surprising number of people will watch it, for all kinds of different reasons. In fact, I'm going to predict that the winner in the whole TV/computer convergence question will be simply the laptop, or its descendant, but something that runs a browser. TV will slowly die.
The thing that struck me in this is that being a Republican politician generally means you're going to have more people who know how to do this stuff against you than for you.

I'm not saying this is ok or making a political statement - just an observation.
Guarantees on something like this wouldn't be all that worthwhile, unless you intend to eat their brains when it doesn't work right. :)
No tabs, 2 space indent.
If the patent couldn't be transferred, wouldn't this mean that only the inventor, personally, was allowed to make the product?

Invent a new type of fuel pump, and you've gotta spend the next ten years on the factory floor putting together fuel pumps. Doesn't sound like much of an incentive.
Microsoft to announce Jerry Seinfeld ads cancelled tomorrow
Hahaha!

Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog
message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K;
and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=300541

everybody wins [...]except for the heavy users

That's a bad alignment to have if you want to make money. You especially want your biggest users to win. ISP bandwidth caps are a textbook example of how ISPs are struggling with this issue as we speak.
By these criteria, does the internet create wealth? Do roads?

All of these things provide services that allow others to be more effective.
It would certainly help, no question. I'm sure they'll support it soon. Django's honestly tough to beat, though, and GAE's tools for updating your app and viewing your logs and traffic are pretty sweet.

Google's mostly a Java and Python shop, so I'd guess they'll support Java before RoR and PHP.
Panic Grips World Credit Markets
I'm curious, has any company (IT or otherwise) ever beaten an incumbent with a long headstart & network effects by creating their own walled garden? I can't think of any, but surely there must be one.
Require brevity in documentation, E-mails, policies, etc. Then employees think for themselves, ask questions, and avoid a lot of BS. :)
If you want to skip the humorous intro, the juicy stuff starts after 20 minutes or so.
My Co-founder is Just Not That Into Us
This is irresponsible. For the same reason why one drives the speed limit, and only exceeds them when one has to, like, for example, if Rosemary is about to birth the anti-Christ in the back seat of your new Jag,so to does one not run as super user unless one has to. Both practices are dangerous.
Plenty of good uses for a service like this.
http://www.raptureletters.com/
Facebook makes hundreds of millions annually. They could have been very profitable years ago (but chose instead to try for an even bigger hit). I don't know why people on this site keep talking about Facebook like it's a failed business.
5 Regular Expressions Every Web Programmer Should Know
If you sell.
I think they'll have a worse fate than NeXT. When the time comes for electric cars to go mainstream, the big car companies will just muscle in on Tesla's territory -- there's no need to buy them since (as far as I know) they don't own any of the key parts of the technology.

Tesla might survive as a niche manufacturer in the long run, but their small head-start in the electric car game isn't enough to make up for (say) Toyota's huge existing infrastructure.
hey I'm just saying... gotta be aware of potential agendas
What is the difference between creating wealth and having "good effects on the world"? Wealth is what people want, and people want good effects on the world, presumably.

While we're on the subject: one thing has always bothered me about that definition of wealth. What if you make people want what you're selling? According to your definition, if politicians brainwash two nations into going to war, they're creating wealth. That doesn't seem right.

For the theses of your essays this doesn't matter, of course, but it's still interesting.
If you really believe the unlikely proposition that one political party is honest and the other is full of liars, then I'm sure you can find other sites upon which to put forth that argument.
I'm not a network admin but I don't quite understand his logic... why can't you enforce group policy on a higher level (something like how OpenDNS can filter specific sets of sites)? Am I missing something?
Lush probably has them, maybe biolisp.
Helping New Technologies Grow Into Businesses, the San Diego Way
Chrome reached nearly 2 million in U.S.
Google And GE In Energy Tie-Up
Peer to peer insurance (question for a class)
(I asked this a couple of days ago, but I'm going to ask for more feedback now that I have more specifics.)

I'm writing a business plan for an entrepreneurship class, and I want to know what you think about the idea. Particularly, I'm interested in what you would think of the idea as a customer, because the customers will be from small communities, including startups.

The business idea is a peer-to-peer insurance company that creates marketplaces in small communities. Community members would be able to select pre-defined contracts (for health insurance, life insurance, etc.) and divide them into units. Other community members could then act as insurers. For example, you could create a health insurance contract for yourself with a $1,000 per month premium and a $10,000 per month maximum coverage and divide the contract into 100 units. Each person who takes part in insuring you would receive a $10 per month premium from you and would be responsible for up to $100 per month in coverage.

I understand that there may be lots of issues with this idea due to industry regulation, legal issues, breaking into the industry, etc., but I'm most curious about how peer-to-peer insurance would work in small startups. What do you think?

Thanks,
EN
As far as I can tell - IBM have finally finished porting all of their intranet apps to support firefox.

So there 350,000 users or so..
How to Never Forget Anything Again
I would establish the rule that any unilaterally established rules should be ignored.
I got a lot of mixed feelings about this one.

First -- it's a crime, plain and simple. Somebody should go to jail. Sites trafficking in stolen goods should be charged.

Second -- glad it happened in September. Can you imagine something like this happening, only in the last week of the election? Heck, you could put any kind of flamebait stuff you wanted in the screen shots. It doesn't even have to be real. It could easily throw the election and you're left with a mess and nobody to blame for it.

Third -- How was the system breached?

This is definitely hacker news. As an example, I had an idea last year for a site/app to keep track of breaking election-year news. As the emotional juices roil in the 40% of die-hards on each side, there's this incredible thirst for up-to-the-date, cutting-edge news and insights. It doesn't get much more up-to-date and insightful than reading the candidate's email. (Note earlier comment about legality, though)

Where there's a great thirst, somebody is going to be selling trips to the water fountain. Not only is there lots of money in this right now, elections are predictable, repeatable events and piggybacking on people's emotional investment in them is only going to get more and more profitable.
Windows Without Jerry: Microsoft to Can Seinfeld Ads?
Are OO languages Autistic?
This would be better as a paid service, where a large sum is deposited up front and placed into a financial instrument that then would guarantee the delivery (such as an annuity to cover operating expenses)

The owners need a coherent and persuasive argument that they are providing a service just as important as a will or a trust. For that, you can (and should) be charging money. This ain't twitter, it's your legacy.

You could even do tie-ins with life insurance policies and pre-paid burial plans. It'd be a nice add-on and there are lots of existing potential partners in place and with tight customer contacts.

Gee -- now I'm almost at the point where I'm starting to outline a business plan. Better shut up, or I'll want in on the action :)
I think a good law will create wealth if it enables a mutually beneficial transaction that would not otherwise be possible.

For example, a law against breach of contract makes you more likely to hire someone you don't know well. That person gets a job, you get an employee, so you're both better off. As long as this benefit is greater than the cost of enforcing the law, that law has created wealth.

I recommend Law's Order by David Friedman for a whole lot more on this subject. It's a fascinating introduction to the application of economics to law.
Leave Wall Street and Join A Startup
Right but downloading a DVD is definitely more demanding on any network than routing text messages and micro-blog posts. The revenue would make the product far more compelling for every-day use because there would be a guarantee of reliability, funded by subscription fees or rates. But infrequent users could use it for free (cap free messaging), and see ads.
Not really that surprising if you take seriously the idea that natural selection also applies to humans.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99feb/germs.htm
Would be slightly better if the good ones listed weren't almost all Dilbert or xkcd comics (which aren't as funny without the mouseover imo).
Except that government, almost by definition, deals with goods that necessarily involve lots of externalities, involve a public good, or require transaction costs too great for any one entity to pay them.

Interesting. Most of the big expenses my government pays seem to involve some sort annuity scheme in which everyone is required to participate in the same retirement plan, even though the plan doesn't have nearly enough capital to handle its obligations. They also do health care, and they blow stuff up. It seems to me that most of the externality-based arguments can be taken care of with insurance and derivatives markets.

For example, if we decide it would be a Good Policy to make everyone eat an apple a day, because it would increase life expectancies by one year on average, we could just mandate that they all do it. But we could also make a bet on the average life expectancy in the US, pay people to eat apples, and pocket the cost differential. I'm not sure the transaction costs would be lower, but 1) the incentive to lower costs would be there -- no bureaucrat DMV ever got a seven-figure bonus for cutting costs, but plenty of bankers, consultants, and private equity executives have, and 2) it would have lower exit costs than our current democratic experiment.

But then what if that service itself breaches its agreement? Who do you go to?

David Friedman claims that they'd form little federations predicated on adhering to certain standards. If one company didn't follow through, it would have to renegotiate separate treaties with every other enforcement agency (and would lose lots of goodwill).

Democracy's a pretty shitty solution, but it exists for a reason. All the alternatives seem to be worse.

Yes, yes, and no. It would be pretty weird for Democracy to be exactly the wrong way to run almost every human institution, even though almost every human institution is run better than the average democracy.
Democracy is not designed to be efficient, in fact, it is designed to be the opposite. Why? Because with efficiency comes power to the top, and with power to the top comes dictatorship - which is the whole thing that democracy is trying to avoid!

This sounds like a tautology. Democracy avoids centralizing power, which is good because that's why we have a democracy. Not even circular logic; I feel like I just walked along a semantic Möbius Strip.

Don't compare government to business. It's apples to oranges. Government is designed with checks and balances - which are by definition inefficient - because bickering about the same thing for six years is better than making the wrong decision - we've all ceded the control of our lives to this thing, I want them to take all the time they need.

Again, circular logic. We must have an inefficient monopolistic provider of oil|cars|operating systems|law enforcement and defense and pensions and healthcare and education and mail delivery and a host of other unrelated services|hula-hoops because, when we are betting everything on a single provider, it's better for that single provider to muddle around than to do something bad.

I think you just made the argument for splitting the government up, not for keeping it running the same way.

Be careful not use the current American experience with government as an excuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Our crazy populists haven't killed very many people at all, and the rise in crime (and the money paid for crime-avoidance) is much lower in this country than in others that democratized even harder and faster. So it would be unfairly generous to your position if I used the US as a single example -- think of it as a way to handicap my arguments so things will stay fair.
I can't wait until Muffin (Alexis) gets back from Thailand.
Greed isn't necessarily bad. If it means figuring out what service millions of people will pay money for, then yes, you're making money. but you're also creating a useful service. The two often go hand in hand.
Microsoft cancels Seinfeld ads
Django as cool as it appears
Don't you know Cake is a lie. ;)
But you've just made my point for me. If you, Rand, Brook and anyone else used the word "unparalleled" in place of "perfect" as it relates to this discussion, then at least the majority of our conversation probably wouldn't have taken place. It's not the same as "perfect". It's not even the same as "having all desirable traits" which is in fact identical to the actual meaning of "perfect". If one has "all desirable traits", "all" being an absolute term, then logically there are no more traits worth acquiring.

You started out asking me what possible downside there could be to a person believing they are capable of perfection. After I answered, you took the fallback position that perfection isn't actually perfection. You seem a bit all over the place justifying your argument.

Sorry I'm just not buying it. And I'm sure if you were going to buy my argument, you would have done so by now. so I think we will have to just agree to disagree.