skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I live in the rural south. How rural? I was on the phone last week with Verizon begging them for some kind of internet access besides the crappy satellite I use now.

It took over an hour just to get to the correct department. What? A regular person wanting internet way out there? But I finally got an answer -- about 400 bucks a month for a 1.5MB T-1 line.

So it's not all attitude, but that's a huge part of it. There's also a lot of infrastructure problems out here that are, frankly, shameful. I know my state has had money for a long time that was supposed to bring broadband to the masses. But so far that's just a dream. [insert long, emotional rant here]

On the flip side, the net, what little I have of it, has helped out a great deal. On here I get to hang out with famous and not-so-famous startup folks, learn marketing, watch videos and read blogs on how to form and run a startup.

I see a great future for a lot of the South, but there's going to be a lot of bootstrapping going on. Startup growth is going to happen here in a much different way than Silicon Valley. The culture isn't going to be all in one spot, it's going to be spread out widely, with little "islands" like Austin, Raleigh or the DC beltway. Founders are also more likely to be individualistic and older. The crazy thing is how much is going on under the radar. I have no doubt that within a 20-mile radius there are a couple of hundred or more folks working on profitable startups, but heck if I know who they are. I seriously doubt the local Chamber of Commerce or government startup efforts have any idea either. Makes me wonder how trustworthy many of the statistics we see about entrepreneurship really are.
A memristor can be simulated by a couple of formulas and a few variables. (just like neural networks can be simulated).

In spite of our ability to simulate this sort of process for decades we have not succeeded in building a strong AI, the difference in having a hardware version is one of performance (just like Neural Network chips are typically a lot faster than their software simulated counterparts). There is no real difference in capability here, just a (possibly very large) speedup.

Now, I'm not ruling out that such a speedup will cause us to be able to create things that so far were not possible but I have a hard time convincing myself that this will almost certainly be the case.
I must confess, I don't understand your argument, nor the one at the linked blog post. Why do they need to show evidence against determinism?

There is a growing body of evidence that choices are "made" by the brain long before we are consciously aware of them. The most parsimonious explanation for these data is that the brain comes to a decision through a mechanistic process of integrating evidence and then the conscious self is informed of that decision. It's at this point that we feel that we have made a choice.

One nice prediction of this theory is that brain disorders that disrupt the communication of the decision making circuitry and the parts of the brain that are normally informed about it should produce the impression that ones choices are being externally controlled. And indeed there are a wide variety of disorders with these features (schizophrenia, alien hand syndrome, etc).

Some of the pieces are missing--what is this pathway and which brain structures are involved in the perception of agency--but I think it makes a lot more sense than believing in non-causal free will.

EDIT: Another compelling piece of evidence comes from brain stimulation. When you electrically stimulate the surface of the brain (say, as part of a surgical procedure to localize a tumor) you will find areas that evoke movements of the arm, eyes, legs, etc. The experiment is: you do this without telling the patient exactly when it will happen and then afterwards ask them, "why did you move your arm?" Many people will confabulate and say, "I felt like it" or "you asked me to". This isn't always the case: sometimes people will report that their arm felt like it moved "on it's own", but I think it is very suggestive.
I've always been a movie buff, and so as a kid I had some miss-conceptions and naive beliefs about the US.
Some random ones I can think of now (a bit busy ATM):

- Cops are nice and they are out there to help people.

- There are no criminals in US neighborhoods. It is ok to even leave your car unlocked.

- There's no unemployment in the US (or it's minimal). If you go to college you automatically get a nice paying job. Only college students or lazy ones work at fast food joints.

- Health care is widely available and easy to get by.

The first day I got to the US I was detained at the airport (in TX) because I mentioned to the immigration officer that I (had) worked at immigration in my home country. He freaked out for some reason and I was taken to a tiny room with some people where I was questioned about my "real" reasons to go to the US, I always replied the same (the truth) and they kept pushing like I was lying. This went on for an hour until I was release and allowed to board on the plane to make the connection. Obviously had to take another flight since the original plane had left.

Then that same day I went to a coffee shop with a friend in a quite nice area of Phx, AZ. While we were inside, someone stole the spare wheel from his Jeep. He then told me they had a car stolen a few months before.

I saw several homeless roaming the streets. Which I had always pictured (as a child) only happened in NYC or something, and only because they didn't want to work or had some issues in their personal life.

While talking about living in the US with some friends there, they explained how health care works in the US. Basic health care is free in my home country and higher end procedures are fairly affordable, so I was shocked to learn about the US system. I don't believe much in socialism, but I can't think of a good reason for people in a civilized society to not be healed for free (retirement is a different issue though).

Can't type much more now. Hope this helps!
What our home pages are really saying (a dialog)
No, not at all. Properly used, the interviewed party is supposed to be instructed that if they already know the answer, they should inform whoever is interviewing them so that a different question should be picked.

The goal is not to see if the person can get the answer. The goal is to see how the person approaches unexpected or novel problems.

That is why the person being interviewed is instructed to "think out loud" when asked these sorts of questions.
Thanks, will check it! :)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3122000

And there was a whiff of astroturfing back then as well... Or perhaps I'm just being cynical
No. A15 > A9 > A7 > A5 > M4 etc.
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I'd give my left nut to fail as hard as G+ has. 70M users in a couple months is the kind of failure I can get behind.
Some of us favor the old web 1.0 interface. It's clean and simple and it renders fast.
lol.. hn is on the list.
Would you measure quality in number of pages? I was just being honest, and I think it's quite pricey for just some "notes". Maybe the notes are of exceptional quality, in which case I'll be happy to pay 8 dollars. I will have a look at it though.
Remember there is 3 main schools of thought regarding the "Singularity" concept, which are more or less compatible.

Accelerating change. Basically Kurzweil's view. Exponential improvement of machines, which will eventually reach then exceed human intelligence in every single domain, or something like that.

Even horizon. If we ever build something that achieve greater-than-human intelligence, we cannot predict whatever it will do to the world, because we're just not as smart as that thing.

Intelligence explosion. If we ever build an AI (or something similar) that is more effective at doing AI research than we are, then that AI would be even more effective… and foom you have something that would leave Skynet in the dust, so it'd better be our friend[1]. Note that the first iteration of that thing may not need to be smarter than us: it just have to be able to build something smarter than itself[2] (and of course, the self-improvement cycle must not hit a ceiling too soon).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_AI
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_AI
Because a Google founder and current executive doesn't have half an hour to devote every time an employee writes a long post about the company.

I'm not downvoting you, but I disagree. If somebody took the time to write something that long, there's probably a reason. Taking some time to suss out that reason might just be a good idea. There's quite a bit of management literature that advocates "managing by walking around" and that hammers home the point that the "rank and file" actually have more knowledge about what needs to be done, than the high-ranking execs, exactly because they are closer to the problem(s) on a daily basis.

OK, granted, if every employee is writing manifestos that take 30 minutes to read, and doing so on a daily basis, then it would be hard for the CEO / CTO / etc. to keep up. But is that really what we're talking about here?

> That's what underlings and assistants are for.

I'd argue that underlings and assistants don't (necessarily) obviate the need for the CEO to read things himself... maybe they should act as a filter, but if the "underling" reads something and realize "Oh, shit, this is good stuff" then he/she should probably hand it to their boss and go "You really need to read this."
WHAT IS THIS, I DON'T EVEN..
Immigration lawyers love to to offer asylum because these cases can go for decades and anyone can "participate". It also looks attractive to the prospective immigrant when an alternative would be to go through EB or investment immigration. However, if you are deciding to seek asylum on a lawyer advice you are most likely not qualified. Real refugees don't become refugees voluntarily. They also don't have lawyers.
Yes, it's much easier to claim asylum than go through non-fraudulent immigration. However the consequences of an asylum case falling through are also much harsher.
There's a difference between "making shit up" and pre-announcing.

It's not unreasonable for them to hold back the source code until the first phone implementing the phone (the Galaxy Nexus) is available next month.
The headline is off. The linked announcement by Dan Morril said the source will be released after the devices are. So it should be future tense.

But neither is it closed source: there's been no release at all yet, so if you need a term, use "vaporware".
UK here. PayPal Website Payments Pro via Recurly. I rolled my own PayPal solution previously but bugs messing with recurring payments is way too much of a problem to work through if you can avoid it. Better to leave it to the experts.
This looks pretty useful. I'm curious why you used class to store the "category". Wouldn't it be cleaner to store it in"data-category" or just Javascript? Or is that less browser compliant?

Overall a great script though.
Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet
What happens in the EU zone?
Tratamiento Laser para Estrias
North Carolinian here. I wrote a study on entrepreneurial opportunities in the area.

tl;dr: The startup scene is definitely booming, most especially in Durham. Due to cost of living, there aren't many places that are better to bootstrap than here. But local investors are far behind. Starting a funded startup is still extremely difficult here.
The Basic Facts of Compatible Horoscope Signs
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Finding puts brakes on faster-than-light neutrinos
Let's admit that customer development is awkward
It's not "unexpected" or "uncommon", maybe. I think it's entirely unreasonable for an entity calling itself an "open source project" to withhold code under development from the public. There's no project here. But it's still better than we got from Honeycomb (or Apple, or MS), so I guess beggars can't be choosers.
Congrats. Just some feedbacks.

- I don't know if "ショーケースサイト" will be understood. Actually the most I learned what Limelight is was by mousing over the tab and reading the title in the tooltip.

- If you click "blog" you get English.

- If you click "mailing list" you get English.

- The pricing plan is in US dollars.

- I wanted to follow your Japanese twitter account, but there were no tweets.
So you're saying he should have made an empty PR statement instead of something with more character in it?

It's funny how that works. On one hand, when someone says 'We value your inputs and are looking into the matter' we dismiss it as PR speak. When someone comes out and says something a little less politically-correct we jump on him for not running it through the PR department.
Given that they've demo-ed it at the launch of a handset and that there are videos of it running I think vaporware is both inaccurate and needlessly harsh.

It's an announcement of a future event. If we're calling this vaporware are you also referring to Windows 8 as vaporware?
I agree there's a difference.

"Pre-announcing" suggests that the announcement will be followed by code release. In the case of 3.0, I think the first devices shipped back in May-- that's about 5 months ago. With that history, this seems more like "making shit up" to me.
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Much as I appreciate rules fetishism, this is the sort of view that screws up my country.

Look, elsewhere we've seen the wide variety of visas aimed at the "rich", "investors", and "job creators". So, clearly, enforcement isn't uniform across people who are immigrants.

Moreover, in your presumably simple moral system, any law regardless of how unfair in specification is fine so long as the implementation is uniform.

(note here I'm interpreting "fairness in enforcement" to mean uniform, as if we actually take into account "fairness" in the conventional sense your own statement is reduced to uselessness... and I'd rather not believe HN is frequented by the sort of drooling pedantic imbecile that would be necessary to make such a claim)

This being the case, you apparently would have no issue with a law that requires police officers to beat twelve citizens every day, provided they aren't biased in their selection?
Well, I'll tell you what tipped me over the edge was when you played the "whoa, tell me what's wrong instead of downmodding me" when timestamps show at least three people engaging with you before this post you made here.
This whole fiasco is just a standard example of the mismatch between the sales/marketing/pr view of a product that the world normally sees and the what engineers think of it.

PR people talk about what's good about a product all day. That's their job, and it's whose words you normally read in the press. Engineers' jobs are to focus on what's bad about the product and to improve it. People saw Yegge's post and it was an engineer's view and they're flipping out. If Brin has ever talked to an engineer in his life he knows it's no big deal.

I personally have seen sales people who have been touting the virtues of a product for months have a single meeting with the engineers and come back absolutely devastated that things aren't all roses and unicorns.

I've also seen engineers brought into sales meetings and then talk about everything that's wrong with the product he's supposed to be helping to sell. (The engineer typically then gets his ass handed to him by the senior salesperson as soon as they're out of the customer's earshot.)
Glad to hear you had such a better experience. There are definitely a lot of factors to consider.

Luckily since our initial terrible experience, we've had nothing but good ones with the US Consulate in Buenos Aires. So I'm hopeful that if we ever decide to move back to the USA, being married for 5 years and having a child will count in our favor and make the process much easier like it was for you.

As it is though, I've grown pretty comfortable here and don't know if we'll ever move back. All's well that ends well, I suppose. :)
So now the guy posting positive comments the last time this was on HN [1] is here claiming ownership of the site ("we changed..."). Same new accounts throwing praise on the last submission are back praising it here, along with accounts created solely to post on these two submissions.

Spam and astroturfing. Flagged.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3122000
A sense of home. The US is now his home. This is a very valuable thing.
Fantastic script. Nice work!
And I thought I was dumb never having worked out a way to make a decent living wage out of the places I patronize. It turns out most of the owners didn't either.
...except I actually am the worst coder in the room. :-(

My zpg car race simulation will never be made.
I don't see many arguments in Wilkinson's article. All I see are assertions, spiced with a unsubtle comment that neuroscientists are fabricating their results.

Neuroscience can shed light on the philosophical study of free will via empirical investigations, specifically the study of human brains. After all, if a philosopher wants to describe a property of reality, it must submit to empirical results. Philosophers can abstract away from reality if they wish, but they should come clean and rename themselves logicians.
WanderPlayer Turns Your Phone Into a Controller for Any Computer Game
Also... 6.899kb is confusing. In many countries/locales(?) that would mean almost 7MB. Maybe 6.9kb should be used instead, or 6899bytes or something like that.
Why would an American want to live illegally in spain?
I think your comparison to arguments about religion is apt. Many of the opponents to Kurzweil's ideas remind me of those whose opposition to the possibility of a godless universe amounts to, "I can't imagine it, so I don't believe it."
That's generally their style - Even AdSense and Gmail - two successful Google products - were initially met with skepticism and disinterest.

(Not that I have first-hand knowledge - I read this in "In the Plex")
Note that even hardware speedup need insights to be successfully implemented. Seeing that hardware does improve at a regular pace, it looks like insights do pop up regularly.

Therefore, it isn't such a stretch to think that (i) insights may continue to pop up reliably for "a while", and (ii) not just in the domain of hardware speed-ups.
1) old news.

2) give it time...
Substitute space with "Google space", add in Google becoming an online/offline identity provider without the same access(or oversight) as your local County Clerk of records, add in shareholder value and the the innocent concerns of networking with friends and co-workers(oh, Google is considerate enough to add companies and other entities to the mix to increase the fun party factor because nothing is free right?) becomes apparent.

Yah, nothing could go wrong. Joe user's medical practice's patients, his frat buddies, the parents of his children's soccer league, his NRA buddies and the local chapter of Curious Men all are interested in the exact same photo of Joe? As I said, perspective is interesting. Lack of understanding is less interesting.
Regarding the examples: Does anyone have a quick readout whether the "edit" button could cause edit-in-place behavior?
Or just 7KB
It's startling to me that everything I do comes from 50 megabytes of source code.
I see your point about vaporware, but I think that term generally refers to software that will likely never ship. I don't think Google will fail to ship 4.0.

Right now, the source exists, and I can't get it. I think it's pretty straightforward to call that closed source.
The movies in my country are about one man fighting another for the love of a woman, gunfights between families, going from a rural town to the big city and getting robbed then having to return home defeated. They are about things that make a difference on a personal level. American movies are about fighting to save the world. Fighting everyone to protect your family. Doing the right thing. They deal with so much money that the translation seems outrageous. Americans in the movies are kind, wise and noble, but in the real America, people are petty. Walking down the street someone will try to pick a fight because you looked at them. You get hundred dollar tickets, if you cross the street anywhere except the corner. Buses kick people off, if they are missing ten cents. People are quick to point to their Constitutional rights, but are offended by everything save smiles. And that is when you find out that few Americans fit the Hollywood American archetype.
Android is Open Source in that Google dumps the source code into the open periodically. It's not developed in the open.

Honeycomb's source was and never will be open.

This is way farther on the 'open' side of the spectrum than any other major mobile OS.

Is this, along with Android's open app marketplace, ability to install arbitrary third party software, and installability on any compatible device enough to warrant Google's marketing as 'open'?

I say yes.
Read the paragraph as the "--". His point is really clear: the only time hacking is wrong is when you're not enjoying it. Comparing your projects and tools to others is meaningless.
Jacques points out : "My heroes are not 'sexy', they don't wear hip gear or use cool gadgets...", but, Woz owns every apple product ever made... He was also in the line for iPhone 4S. An exception.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/health/19babies.html

And yes, it's not clear that iPads are a problem. But it's not clear that they aren't, and you are messing around with their brain wiring.
I have found that being personally interested in the product has a lot of benefits. First, if you're a user/consumer, it's easier to determine which features are most important as well as usability issues. It's surprising how unusable some products are because the developers never actually use them.

Second, and most important, a personal connection helps to get you through the dark days at the start. It's very emotionally draining to work on something that has no traction, no supporters, and just a bunch of naysayers. If you love the product, though, it can offset this emotional drain quite a bit.

In my case, I built a tabletop gaming (ie. DnD) CMS. In the beginning, nobody used it except me, and it was tough to go upstairs and hack away every night and weekend. However, I used it and that was enough to keep me moving. Now, we've got thousands of users and paying customers, and the motivation is much easier to find. But, I never would have made it this far if I didn't care so much about the domain.

Unfortunately for me, I think there's probably a lot more money to be made in "boring" areas. If you can keep motivated to work on a CRM or medical billing system, you'll probably end up making way more than my DnD website. But, it will definitely be harder to keep the momentum in the beginning.
It's been pretty fucked-up before Obama, too.