skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Didn't they design or build a Java co-processor about 10 years ago -- what happened with that?
Yeah, I similarly don't get the fascination with brain simulation. Say someone told me they had an exact simulation of by brain running, and I was convinced beyond a doubt they were right, would I be fine with dying at that point? No.

To paraphrase Samuel Clemens:

"I don't want to gain immortality through brain simulation. I want to gain immortality by not dying."
There are limits to computation, but nothing prevents computers from achieving human or super human level intelligence. I suspect that 50 years from now we will have human level AI for a wide range of things. We have already passed that point for Chess and one by one other things will fall.

What really prevents the singularity is the limits of the physical world. The speed of light is already a problem such that PC ram is never going to drop in latency without moving it closer to the CPU. I don't care how smart you are you can't build a 101% efficient engine etc.
And the 2nd law of thermodynamics is another gotcha, as I posted in the other Yudkowsky thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377510

Someone thought maxwell's demon and the fluctuation theorem provided a way around the 2nd

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110074

but I'm not convinced:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377625

"Thanks, those are interesting links. Still, nothing there that seems especially compelling.

Maxwell's demon assumes the energy cost for sorting the molecules is less than the net gain. That looks like another variant of the perpetual motion machine.

The fluctuation theorem says the 2nd law doesn't hold for very, very small entities, but its probability of being correct climbs exponentially as the system scales. So, it is fallacious to then say the 2nd law may not hold at the macro level due to it not holding at the micro level, since the theorem used to support this idea is itself an instance of the idea being false."
I'm about 3000 messages behind on my email. This article struck a nerve...
There's always Lending Club! They seem to have made it through the whole SEC process and out the other side recently. They do have some lender requirements that I don't meet, unfortunately.
Sell more hardware, stop wasting money, and keep your customers happy.
any body benchmarked the performance of CorePy?
Maybe they don't have a "killer strategy". They've been struggling for quite a while. It seems pretty plausible that the best they can hope for, for now, is a "survival strategy".
Guitar Hero Robot
Once a long time ago I saw that DJB recommended www.joker.com and I've been using them for the past 5 years. They're not the cheapest (it's been $12 a year since I started using them), but I've never had any problems. The web UI is fairly simple to use, and they don't spam your email inbox.
> Maybe they just trigger the "reassuringly expensive" button at companies that don't care about money.

Maybe in the past, but do you think they're going to find a lot of companies that don't care about money in the near future?
Ask HN: How to exit as a co-founder?
In the last 2 years I have been working at a startup which I co-founded. The company consists of 2 other guys, me and a business angel. Everybody put some money in, with the business angel the most. From the very beginning, the atmosphere in the group was often tense and there were discussions/arguments. I got more and more frustrated and lost my motivation. Now, I am at a point where I realize that I should quit: I feel bad and demotivated most of the time... it's not like my sanity is at stake, but I have to change something. I want to work somewhere else/do my own project, where I can contribute in a better way.

Problem is: Our site launched about half a year ago and it's not going too well. On the other hand, we have planned a big promotional "campaign" for the next 2-3 months. Past performance of our other activities indicates that we should gain at least enough users to survive as a company, maybe more... and with a small chance the site will really take off. If it doesn't work, then the company is dead in 7 months (more or less). So, the next 2-4 months are a critical stage.

I talked to the team with the following proposal: I leave and give them a (probably significant) part of my shares in the company. I am allowed to keep some shares because of the work that I have contributed in the last 20+ months.

Their side: They feel that I am letting them down in the worst moment (which is understandable). They also feel that my work and my productivity could have been better, which I don't deny. Therefore, they would let me go if I give away all of my shares. For them, being a shareholder is tied to being a part of the team. If I stop being part of the team, I cannot have shares anymore.

I feel that there should be at least some compensation for the work that I did (even if it could have been better/more productive). They cannot compensate me now, because the company's finances don't allow that. But even if I give away all my shares... I would like to get at least a small (percentaged) bonus if the company really takes off.

What do you think:

1) Keeping a percentual share/bonus... is that greedy/unrealistic of me? (given the current problematic stage of the company) How would you see the situation if you were part of the team and I left?

2) What do you suggest I should do? (I don't want to do behave like a jerk towards the rest of the team... one of them is a good friend)

For explanation:

a) They cannot simply fire me/take away my shares. I cannot leave without their consent either. So, we have to find an agreement. If I stayed after openly talking about leaving, it would be very uncomfortable for everybody.

b) There is an especially strong conflict with the 3rd guy. He feels that I don't deserve ANYTHING if I leave... if I get the rest of the team to a more favorable agreement, the 3rd guy might bring the whole project down!!

c) anonymous post for obvious reasons
Drawter: Visual Web based HTML tool
Your comment was similar to one I was going to make... It's interesting to see that man still seeks that feeling of meaning (in life) and hope (after death) even when they do not believe in a God/afterlife.

How does one find value in life when - in the long run - their entire existence will be forgotten and their species just a blip on the timeline of Evolution? If you think about it, on the infinite (or even extremely large) timeline of this universe, our individual value pretty much equals 0.

Sure, in the short run it is evident that one's life can have value and purpose to humanity. Many powerful leaders and wars have proven this. But so what? Our egos won't be around to reap the glory of knowing that either. Zooming out to the larger timeline - or the big picture - of this universe, I can't see how someone finds value in this present life without a convincing belief in either:

1) God/Afterlife

2) The existence of a solution to mortality

Life without one of those beliefs would be like working hard with the goal of a profitable business but knowing that in the long-run my business would never turn over a single dollar of profit. It's pretty obvious that the big picture negates the short-term goals and meaning of that work.
A few comments from using it:

* The installer is utterly terrible and gave me no options whatsoever like installation location or where to put icons, which is just outright obnoxious in the Windows world.

* The application installs it itself in C:\Windows\system32\BaseShield\BaseShield\Data\AppStore. This is extremely bad karma - I have /never/ used a legitimate application that did this. Hiding your application amongst the operating system is just something you outright don't do.

* The uninstall is flawed. It did not remove the applications and left data in c:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\BaseShield, c:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\BaseShield\ and c:\Windows\System32\Baseshield\Baseshield. It also did not uninstall the application I installed to test (Abiword), leaving 24 megabytes of data on my hard-disk drive, and I had to uninstall it by hand, along with removing its icon from both my desktop and start menu.

* Using an application's icon in the application stub that launches the main application is dubiously legal at best.

* The user interface is bad, and makes Steam look good, which is a scary state of affairs. Please use Windows-native widgets where possible.

Personally, I would not use, nor recommend anyone use, the application as currently designed.
Am I one of the few people who looks forward to death? To know that there WILL be an end to things is something of a comfort to me.

I'd like to live for a time, sure, but even five hundred years might be too long. I'd either get driven insane by the constant bow-shocks of ever advancing culture, or I'd lapse into some kind of boredom-induced stupor.

I have my little slice of spacetime, to do with as I wish. I could live a great and noble life, or a horrific and cruel one. I could live another five decades, or if I wanted to, end it all tomorrow.

No matter what I may do, or not do, in the end.. there are no regrets, no looking back. Just.. the steady decay of my body, the essential atoms of my makeup being reused by other organisms, processes, chemical reactions.

And I like it that way.
why not try and ride out this campaign to see where things go. whats another 2ish months?

then if the direction doesn't change, tell them that you can't keep going and want to quit. if you explain politely that you feel you should be compensated for your work, they'll hopefully understand.

if not, let them know that it really comes down to two options -- either you're quitting with a cut, or you're not quitting but you'll be keeping all your shares and just not doing any work anymore.
Sun want to sell servers. They can either become a commodity box-shifter on razor thin margins, or they can make their products better so customers want to pay a premium.

To make their boxes better, they'd have to come with pre-installed server software, all the normal stuff you'd see on a web server, and tightly integrate the OS / file system / database so that (e.g.) MySQL is running very fast.

Kirk Wylie is right that no-one cares anbout Solaris anymore. If they'd open sourced it ten years ago, things might be different. But today, Linux is king on servers. I use Ubuntu on the desktop; I use it on the server too out of convenience -- I know that i can install new package on both systems in exactly the same way using apt-get, I know that the diorectory structure is the same, I know that I can test a feature on my desktop then port it to the server without getting wierd incompatibility problems.

The only way I'd consider using Solaris is if it worked exactly like Ubuntu, i.e. make the Solaris kernel a plug-in replacement for the Linux kernel in the Ubuntu distro. Fortunately, such a thing exists: http://foss-boss.blogspot.com/2008/11/nexenta-can-you-say-so...

Then, in order to be a one-stop shop, Sun should get into the hosting business, setting up datacenters around the world running their hardware/software solution. They could even do a system that automatically mirrored a web server at different locations around the world to make it more resilient.
A Comparison of Amazon, Google and Microsoft's Cloud Computing Offerings
Software Transactional Memory: why is it only a research toy?
It bugs me a little that he starts using the phrase "prior probability" before defining it. If your vocabulary already included the word "priors", you probably wouldn't need a Bayes tutorial. :)
The guy who wrote Super Crunchers did the same thing. Drank his own Kool Aid.

http://www.google.com/search?q=super+crunchers&ie=utf-8&...
Well, I believe the authorities were more concerned about the perceived security risk. Male homosexuality was not decriminalised in England and Wales until 1967 (and not until 1980 in Scotland and 1982 in Northern Ireland). Before that there was the concern that someone like Turing could be blackmailed for state secrets (he played a key role in the wartime code-breaking effort).
I read this review as somewhat satirical, but I could be mistaken.
Caffeinated energy drink?
Server != web server. I think that's something that a lot of "Linux has won" people miss.
Vietnam Travel Guide Online 24/7 - What major sights do you recommend in and around HCMC?
Point taken--we're often a little too casual with our remarks and approach. Could be something for us to be a little more careful with.
Learn Haskell well before you graduate from college. It will change your view of programming.

If you ever at any point have an "obscenely high" return on one of your investments (other than a startup you own), always liquidate it if possible to realize your returns.

In May of 2003, check out http://crossfit.com
There's no contradiction between Malthus and the coming of the singularity. Malthus essentially said that resources tend to be scarce, but there's no reason that they couldn't be scarce post-singularity.

This line of thinking leads to doom scenarios, when you think about how scarce resources would be allocated (bottom line - probably not to humans), so it does contradict singularity-as-the-promised-land scenarios.
Likewise, if you usually drink those, you probably associate those with trying to be more awake as well.

(I'm assuming that's what you meant.)
What should Sun do? (Deliver apps not infrastructure)
Making the Case for Digital Asset Management
Ivan Mironchuk of DPCI, an interactive technology company based in NYC, blogs about the top ten justifications for why companies should invest in digital asset management.
Holes in the Dam
Craig McEldowney of DPCI, an interactive technology company based in NYC, blogs about the changing face of digital asset management.
No, but I'd assume any intense math operations that happen inside a loop would be much faster.
Ask HN: Help me find a good databases textbook
I'm looking for an excellent academic textbook on databases. The following two seem to well thought of (by some, at least):

Database Management Systems by Raghu Ramakrishnan and Johannes Gehrke

An Introduction to Data Base Systems by C.J. Date

Are either of these any good? (== accurate, clear, comprehensive, concise, rigourous) Are there any good alternatives?
Scarcity means that the curve will break. The singularity is the notion that the growth will continue indefinitely at an ever wilder pace until it reaches a singularity. I'm saying it won't happen because technological advance will run into scarcity of resources, just like any other complex system. Malthus was just an example of this, since his thinking was much the same as Kurzweil's in regard to extrapolation of datasets.

Whether this will happen before or after transhumanism I don't know. But like any other exponential curve it won't go on forever.
So IM is better? 3000 messages in my inbox that I can attend to when I'm ready vs. IM - where I'm dealing with everybody simultaneously and live? That's worse than the telephone, IMHO.

Anyway, if you get the same query more than once, it is time to put the answer into a wiki or blog.
The Roots of Power: How Voltree is Tapping Tree Energy to Save Forests
Europe unveils 20-year astronomy roadmap
I use Dreamhost. That's where my hosting is and registration is $9.95/year with free privacy. I've never really had any problems with them. They can handle the Digg effect and their customer service is decent.
My response to the proposed Australian net filter
Online shopping spend in decline
Wow. So cool.

Thanks for this news.
If someone sends you a long email trash it or call them once. I find I can process around 300 emails an hour if I just trash most of the unimportant ones. The secret is the one line response. Yes, No, Sorry I don't have the time etc. The older an email the more willing I am to just dump it into the trash.
Why the web standards world appears to be choosing Django
Erlang and Map-Reduce
Bay Area ferry fleet welcomes new green boat
But then most atheists also succumb to comforting lies, and make excuses for death even less defensible than the outright lies of religion. They flinch away, refuse to confront the horror of a hundred and fifty thousand sentient beings annihilated every day.

I would like to think that I, as an atheist, don't have to rationalize the unknown and accept that we just don't have the answers to the "why" of death. I realize he is in pain, but I don't think I'm lying to myself about death just because I don't have some over-arching dogma to believe in.
Black Friday Coupon
I'm not going to continue the attack/defense of Card, because I think its in poor taste. I will, however, correct your statement about media bias.

Google "Conservative Media Bias" -- lots of folks see conservative media bias. We have a few liberal friends that fall into this category, just as we have a few conservatives lambasting the liberal bias. Try visiting Media Matters for America, an entire non-profit "dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Lots of folks think the media has a conservative bias -- usually because most media organizations are owned by large corporations with corporate interests.

Media bias (and the way news stories are put together) in my opinion is a fun topic in which all political views can play. Things like selection of stories to appear above the fold, the increasing use of commentators as anchors on some networks, the way most reporters vote, whether or not you can truly separate yourself from the story, or the competition between wire stories and local reporters -- it's all goodness. The idea that somehow we shouldn't "play ref" with media sources is rather odd. I usually multi-source any significant news. And people of like opinion would obviously "play ref" in the same way, right? Sounds like a natural thing for left/right entertainment people to talk about.
StateStats: Explore the popularity of search queries in U.S. states
Granted, it's painful to lose a dear one.

But there are so many wrong things with this article, it's difficult to know where to start.

Angry at the "way-things-are"? Does that even make sense?
It feels like he's saying "everyone is dying, and what is the government doing?!"

"When Michael Wilson heard the news, he said: 'We shall have to work faster.' "

I mean, can one really say that seriously, outside of a poor SF story? So this is a rational, skeptical person, and not a cult member? Although I'm not religious, I think his religious relatives seem to have a much wiser attitude to life.
Nimbuzz iPhone app and social networking partnership
That would never... Wait, what?

Oh I get it.
I use gandi.net for my .com, .org and .net domains. Their interface is great, but I can't comment on their support because I've never had a problem =P

For .ca domains, I use easydns.com .
How are your shares granted/allocated? Do you have a vesting schedule? Are they "yours" or the "companies"?

It seems that there is a legal answer here, as well as a philosophical answer.

Figure out who really owns the shares and what you are legally entitled to, and then process your decision.
The Upside to the Market Crash
I think there will always be companies with too much money. It wouldn't be my preferred strategy, but still...

Among other things, don't they say it is easier to raise a lot of money than just a little bit of money from VCs? So if you business plan lists 10 Sun servers instead of 10 cheap Linux servers, you already increased the money at stake by a large margin (I presume).
Ditto. I just finished moving everything off of godaddy recently. Another thing I like about namecheap is that they provide you with nameservers, which was a big plus for me since I didn't want to host my own on the same box I put everything else on. Pretty sure godaddy didn't, but I could be wrong.
We have a form linked from the front page of the App Store just below the featured apps.

You can also just get in touch with me: pat (at) baseshield.com and we'll get you going quickly. Because of our secure virtualization layer apps can run safely with no modification needed.
Spam on rise after brief reprieve
What scares me is that I have given up on the spam problem months ago and now just rely on the Thunderbird spam filter. So email is no longer a reliable way to contact me, because of the danger of false positives. Meanwhile, the junk mail folder contains thousands of emails, so there is no chance for sifting through it by hand.
But then most atheists also succumb to comforting lies

"Succumbing to comforting lies" is like being a tourist: only other people do it.

On another note, the Singularity is an amazing social example of what Freud called the return of the repressed.
Nokia 3220, 6020 Lcd Connector Ways
3220, 3220 lcd connector, 3220 lcd ways, 6020, 6020 lcd connector, 6020 lcd ways, connector, connector ways, lcd, lcd ways, Nokia, problem, ways
It is a big marketplace with huge players (i.e. Microsoft, Symantec, Citrix, etc) already doing app virtualization/streaming. Still, since it's so large other major companies will be looking for a good platform to build upon if they can get into it, too.

I made a comment above which is probably better suited for this thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377308
Are there any real signs of progress in computers that could lead to them achieving human level intelligence? Look, computer beat world champion in chess over 10 years ago, but is nowhere close to doing that in Go anytime soon: http://ru.ly/34
A traditional Spanish village instead of Silicon Valley and the launch of a startup
The shares are already mine, but I have to work there for one more year before I can sell. A year that I'd like to avoid. So, legally, I am asking for an option that is not part of the contract yet... therefore I need their consent in the decision.
I second. Have all my domains with them and am very happy. The one minor complaint I have is that they do not let you manage your DNS records very easily. I usually switch my name servers over to Slicehost and manage from there.
Uh, I'm not the one who made the original point about tofu. You should be more careful about paying attention to who made what arguments when replying.

I'm not sure what utility you see in pointing out that I did not present any evidence when I plainly said myself that I am not presenting any evidence.
Poor people spend more of their money than rich people film at 11

Yeah, duh, but even if you gave poor people $20,000 and they spend it all, how does it do anything about the housing crisis?

Without lending, that $20,000 won't change the market at all.
What do you use for transfering domain names you buy from some unknown person?
escrow.com, moniker.com or something else? escrow.com is rumored to be ripe for getting scammed.
Google is still hiring, got an email from them today.
How science supersized your turkey dinner
I didn't realize the issue was that his e-mails HAD to be public, but I did find it strange that the blackberry encryption would seperate it from the pack to such a high degree that Obama is not permitted to have a blackberry. Can he have a Windows Mobile, or iPhone? I assume so.

So, why not just have a blackberry but not use blackberry's e-mail address and pass it through a regular email address anyway?

I'm clearly not understanding the problem.
But if he gets to keep his blackberry, what a PR opportunity for Blackberry. The device the worlds most important CEO couldn't live without.
Just ask the company who makes them to come up with something. You really think they'll be willing to pass up the "official phone of the President of the United States" angle?
I am a lender to the tune of a few thousand dollars. I actually recently pulled all my cash out of it in a transaction that completed on the 24th. Still have a lot of outstanding loans though. I was doing pretty well, I got hit by one big default early on in my experimentation with the site and only recently came into the green again from that. If I discount that one poor investment, I was actually making a pretty decent return of about 13%.