skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read that again and I'm not sure that summary helps a lot. I'll just write about what I've read turned into in my mind, where it merged with my own experience and other things I've read.

Schopenhauer's main point is that death doesn't exist because time is not real. This is not very comforting unless you can imagine what it means that time is not real. I can't.

He does point out that there is no rational reason to fear death. The fear of death is an instinct, like aggressivity for example, which you can repress and even overcome. It's useful in some situations, when it makes you go to the doctor because you're sick, and it's useless in other situations, like when you're terminally ill. People who know they will die can overcome the fear of death and learn to accept it.
( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model )

So fear of death is not a reason for avoiding death. Is there a rational reason to consider death as something to avoid? Death is as natural as birth. The process of evolution even requires the cycle of birth and death.

What bothers Eliezer Yudkovski is not death, it's the suffering caused by the loss of someone dear. Making people immortal however will never rid life of suffering.
There's not much technical in this article, just an overly dramatized account of the history of this vulnerability.

Not exactly a "summary", but... http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/iguide-kaminsky-dns-vuln.htm...
Fight the moonlight, drama queen. Death is not the problem, ego is. His sense of entitlement is baffling. Why does he want to be some sort of immortal god if he's an atheist?

I'm all for the progress of science toward a much, much longer life but demanding immortality right now... is quite over the top.
Just saw Startup.com last week, was great. I felt like it had a lot of holes in it, despite the leadership that seemed to be really good, they just mysteriously disappeared as a company.
One's local social network is a recommendation system for mining the long tails one is interested in.
Meaning... you'll need 15 trees in your backyard to power a small flashlight? So if you owned a forest with a few thousand trees, you might have enough voltage to power 4 lights in your home at the SAME TIME? AMAZING!
Fusion is Easy
This book seems to be exactly what I was looking for when I found this article, thank you.
I played the first few levels without any performance issues - on Linux x86_64 with Flash 10.0.12.36-r1 in nspluginwrapper (I haven't gotten around to switching to the native alpha)
I don't think that the iPhone 2.0 software had "many similar problems." It had some minor ones, but nothing like what Mr. Pogue described in this article.

I have not used a Blackberry Storm, but it the article makes it clear that there are a number of fundamental problems with the user interface.

There were a few hickups, crashing, etc. with the iPhone 2.0 software, but nothing significant has changed about the UI design (only the underlying system).
This is another example of how hard it is to make a good user interface.
"Against me, you've won 28 games, lost 14 games, and tied 18 games."

Is there an api that we can use to create our own rps decider to play against your site or other people?
This is at least a decade and probably two away from affecting clinical outcomes, if their hypothesis proves correct (not that they can build the device to detect the markers but that knowing the markers will actually allow you to impact the natural history of the disease (cure you or let you live longer than expected)). The point of these articles is to secure additional funding for research so of course the results are promising but they are non-specific about likely benefits.
"A BlackBerry without a keyboard is like an iPod without a scroll wheel."

Um. http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/
http://www.TalkingHeadTV.com frequently interviews start-ups. They have a YouTube channel and an iTunes podcast video feed.
3) Finding value in what you're doing right now.

Life should be like running a profitable business, which you know will not last forever. The point of your business is giving a value to your customers today. Eventually a competing business will cater better to your customers' needs and put you out of business. This doesn't take away the value you've given your customers, nor the money you made.

Going one step further, the business does not even need to be profitable. You can find value in activities which are economically and socially useless most of the time, like art for example.
Google trends doesn't show anything out of the ordinary.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=vim
Cable & The Internet vs the FCC
The replies were all removed, I've mirrored the page pre-moderation:

http://www.wabdo.com/fred/bugfinder.html
Intel has to move in this direction because they can't get beat out by AMD and their Fusion initiative.

Intel got absolutely spanked by the Athlon64 for ~5 years and they're not about to repeat that again.
As a comparison, does anyone know the contract rate for Android or other smart phone developers?
I think email "works" for 99.99% of the people, who get reasonable number of emails from family, friends and collagues. I don't personally know anybody who is having these problems.

There are a few personalities like J. Atwood and M. Arrington, who are in the fortunate situation that everybody wants to talk to them, but email works for everybody else. Also, it seems to me that if everybody would call them, or text them, or IM them (as is suggested in the article) it'd be even worse.

If I'd be in their place I'd just set up an auto-reply that says "Sorry, I'm overloaded, I may be unable to reply to your message."

I do agree that it's an interesting question how their Inbox could auto-prioratize their messages so they can respond to the most urgent ones. But 99.99% of people have no need for this feature. (Being subscribed to tons of mailing lists doesn't count, those are easy to sort out.)
Bush's secretary of education is even an advocate of standardized tests for college students, like they have in high school. The federal government doesn't have the constitutional power to impose them, but it can withhold funds from institutions that don't make their students take the tests.

If the bureaucrats have their way, our colleges will one day rival our primary education in quality.
I can grab all of those on Ubuntu in a few seconds.

You're absolutely right, but when it's time to do something serious - in the Cal Henderson, irony laden, finger quote sense - you'll recompile them just the same.
I think I will finish this com
Here is a snippet from my Windows hosts file...

# DONT DO IT!!! DONT DO IT!!! DONT DO IT!!! [times 30]
# DONT DO IT!!! DONT DO IT!!! DONT DO IT!!! [times 30]
# DONT DO IT!!! DONT DO IT!!! DONT DO IT!!! [times 30]
127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
# DONT DO IT!!! DONT DO IT!!! DONT DO IT!!! [times 30]
# DONT DO IT!!! DONT DO IT!!! DONT DO IT!!! [times 30]
# DONT DO IT!!! DONT DO IT!!! DONT DO IT!!! [times 30]

The line in the middle changes from being commented to uncommmented several times in the day.

Sigh
Title is quite misleading. I'd expected a (hyperbole) story about how tel-com SMS revenue in Canada is down because people use Twitter over data instead.
I always said that if I would start up a company I would paint every wall with chalkboard, especially the bathroom walls. I would also make a ball pit and have 'flexible' desks. That means everyone gets a desk and a laptop but are free to move as they want. Meetings should not be held in some room, but in the open. PM's should sit next to the developers and managers should know people's names. But as you might notice, most of those things are not something you should buy, you should create an atmosphere of innovation. And that is something that is only possible with open-minded people, freedom, flexability and happyness!
If only that was true. :D
Lets not forget to give their iPhone app credit, too!
That wasn't a draft.

;)
He seems to define religion as "stories you make up to convince yourself you won't die".

Religion is a lot more than that, but this part of religion does seem a bit dumb.
Because it's ugly, there are few submissions, and most of the submissions are parroted from Reddit.
Intel has revealed a lot more about Larrabee since then. If you are interested in GPGPU, you might want to check out the paper Intel presented at SIGGRAPH : "Larrabee: A Many-Core x86 Architecture for Visual Computing"

http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/attendees/program/item/?type=p...

As a person currently working with both CUDA and the AMD Stream SDK, I am pretty excited about Larrabee. If nothing else, I hope Intel will simply provide better documentation and perhaps better software tools :|
Btw that other msg was in reply to @RKlophaus
Correction: everyone thought they needed
It feels a bit awkward to use: three stories at a time, and they're all displayed so big! No idea how you're finding these readable stories.

The problem with this is that I feel no need to continue using it. No incentive. Part of that's because I know you'll keep giving me a stream of items, no matter what my limit for reading stories is.

I think it would be neat if this could determine what things attracted me to stories, and ONLY showed me ones that I'd be interesting in. A site willing not to give me content is one that I'd possibly become a diehard fan of.
I didn't find it misleading at all, but after you comment I can see how it can be misread.
They have an iPhone app? What's it do?
Cuil Killer.
I really did... my tactic was to loan to high risk people that were homeowners. I was making money until the whole subprime troubles started bubbling up.

Though I wasn't using 35:1 leverage.
I second the stanford podcasts,

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
http://videolectures.net/
www.ted.com
http://omnisio.com/startupschool08
http://blog.mixergy.com/
http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/content

all have interesting videos. id advise just going to www.google.com/videos and searching for those particular people if your interested in them.
Access to all your files, one-click view for any items MobileSafari can access (doc, pdf, xls, html, etc), and the changes feed for quick access to your most recently used files.

screenshot: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3168/2850385526_fcb31449a4.jp...
I disagree.

Is money the only motivation? A ton of people blog for the attention, to feel smart, SEO for future endeavors etc. Forums, blogs, and blog comments are full of people tossing out trollish or evocative statements for all sorts of motivations. This post exists for the same reason that any trollish forum post exists.
If you're merging a branch into trunk, and your working copy of trunk is out of date, then you're still doing it wrong. Update, resolve conflicts, commit, then merge.

If you're just complaining that sometimes you have to resolve conflicts on update, and that if you don't want to lose your local work by throwing away an update (aka "a merge"), then I have three responses for you:

1) You've got to update trunk someday anyway; suck it up and resolve the conflict.

2) If you're truly terrified of this, work on a branch (aka the Git solution -- which is totally supported in SVN!)

3) If even that doesn't work for you, just copy the files to a backup before you update.

I think you're just inventing problems for the sake of finding problems with a system that you don't like. Subversion is very simple; these situations aren't that hard to figure out.
Dropbox saved my ass when my computer completely fried (I tried installing Windows on Boot Camp using a Dell install disc and my computer just refused to turn on). About 6 years' worth of essay drafts, stories, and poetry all got saved and backed up instantly - despite the fact that I'd deleted those stories from Dropbox months ago! I'd moved them to my computer from Dropbox and deleted them, but it saved it in my history.

It's not one of my most-used sites, since I rarely have need for it, but I wish I needed it more, because every time I use it I'm blown away by how easy it makes things.
3) The possibility that after fulfilling the manifest destiny of implacably rampaging across our universe our descendants will eventually tease apart the fundamental mathematical equations describing the foundations of our existence and find our universe not alone with nothing but the greek chaos surrounding it but amid a vast collection of universes for our future generations to spread to and conquer.

Goals of Man

☑ Don't get eaten by a lion
☑ Get out of Africa
☐ Get out of Earth
☐ Get out of Solar System
☐ Get out of Galaxy
☐ Get out of Local Group
☐ Get out of Earth-Visible Universe
☐ Get out of Universe
Its not about hope, its about a belief giving you that ultimate existential succor. Its particularly noticeable in this article which is so dismissive of religious hope in the afterlife.
I find the same (hence this comment), but it does a great job to break this habit: http://xkcd.com/477/ .
It is true - I've heard a similar range.
Google using private iPhone API, unfair? Thoughts?
It was Allan Konigsberg, not Samuel Clemens.
"Angry at the way things are" is like saying things are not as they should be because someone fucked up. But who is responsible for how the world is? The creator?

Having this kind of anger is like believing in God.
There are a few apps on the App Store that clearly break Apple's rule regarding their private API. I feel like this is a bit unfair because the rest of us play by the rules.
The Malthusians have had egg of their face for the better part of two centuries now. Maybe one of these days they will be right.

Still a pretty bad record overall, though.
This isn't my site. I just stumbled into it.
Of course there's a rational reason to avoid death (and hence, to consider death as something to avoid -- which, yes, is not at all the same thing as fearing it). Aren't there a whole lot of things you want to do? Well, if you die now then you won't get to do any of them. If you've achieved everything you want to in life, then perhaps you no longer have any reason to avoid death. Most people haven't.

But, actually, I think you'd have reason even then to avoid death, if like most people you instinctively hate or fear it. It's rational to pursue things you like and avoid things you dislike, if anything's rational at all.
Then why does he say as an atheist its basically the only thing that makes life bearable. I don't think he has a realistic 'just make it safe' attitude at all.
There's the official rules, and then there's the actual rules. The official rules might say "thou shalt not use these APIs", but the actual rules say "thou shalt not use these APIs unless we've looked at what you're doing and we think it's ok".

I'm sure that Apple knows what Google is doing by now, so as far as the actual rules are concerned, Google isn't doing anything wrong.
This article is so stupid it has literally drained my ability to point out how stupid it is.
My first reaction to this was "why would the carriers strangle their business this way?". You'd think that they'd want to encourage innovation to increase consumption of high margin features like SMS.

It occurs to me after a moment of thought that the farther these devices get from voice, the closer they get to straight IP connected data devices, which is a comparatively low margin future.

I can say that at no point do I desire to use SMS, just that it's convenient compared to the web experience on the typical handset. The sooner devices do IP well the better as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, mobile IE is awful. Mobile Outlook is pretty awesome though.
http://intruders.tv is the best source of recent videos of startups on the web.

It's broken down into countries: UK, US etc.

Front page of US (http://us.intruders.tv) has interviews with Mark Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman, Evan Williams amongst other big names.
This one has been around for a long time:
http://chappie.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/roshambot
Why the singularity may never arrive
There are a ton of apps available. People have been developing for WinMo for a long time.
Fight the moonlight, drama queen. Falling is not the problem, ego is. His sense of entitlement is baffling. Why does he want to be some sort of flying god if he's a human?

I'm all for the progress of science toward winged machines but demanding flight right now... is quite over the top.

(Edit: I do understand how someone could be surprised by his sense of entitlement. I don't see, however, how it follows that we should not at least try just because the problems sounds really, really hard. Humans had never flown, but that doesn't mean humans will never fly. Same goes for many things, including death.)
It's been my experience that ping-pong tables, foozball tables or TV's and such quickly devolve into two use cases:

1. A vast majority of people never use it (after the initial cool factor period), you lose the balls and it just collects dust.

2. You get a small subset of employees that spend all day playing ping-pong, and do nothing else.

I've never seen anyone play a quick 15min game then go back to work.

Again, I don't have an issue with them per se, but I think there are better places to spend money.
One problem you face with your plan is that there isn't actually a concrete idea presented. Building a platform to 'insert generic statement' is almost always a bad idea, and rarely results in success. My advice: define your idea so well that you could "shoot your target market with a rifle in a crowd".
I remember reading through some Nehalem articles mentioning that Intel will actually beat AMD to the CPU/GPU on the same package with AMD delaying Fusion.

Ah, here it is: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=34...

Of course, if it ends up being a G45 class chip, it's not going to be much to write home about (performance wise). Hopefully it ends up being a Larrabee variant, but that might be hoping for too much.

I'm interested to see what AMD and Intel end up doing with an on core GPU. It could be really interesting from a GPGPU perspective as you could eliminate the current need to ship things from main memory to GPU memory.
Good read, thanks for posting.

His essay on perfectionism is great too http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/light/perfectionism...
Heh, you sure don't like appleinsider, do you? :)

Incidentally, given the self inflicted wounds Microsoft has given itself with vista, and the ability for Mac hardware to run Windows now, should you want it, it doesn't seem impossible to me at all -- implausible, maybe, but definitely not unbelievable to me.
And what if somebody was slowly replacing your real neurons with artificial ones?

Start with one chip-neuron, finish with the whole artificial brain. In all steps of the process your "self" being preserved.

Credit goes to Stanislaw Lem "Do you exist Mr Jones?"
You should be able to make requests of the form:

http://iterationprojects.com/rps/?mode=p&id=<integer player id>&rps=<r,p, or s>&result=<t,w,l>&r=<random # between 0 and 100000>

where:

r,p,s represent your rock, paper or scissors choice.
t,w,l represents whether tie, win, or loss against previous prediction

The response will be like:

Prediction: p I have played a total of 25751 games. I've won 40.895% of those -- 33% would be chance

. (7537 ties, 10531 wins, 7683 losses.)<font color=white> strat1 (0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0) using prior</font

><p>

where the computers next move is charAt(12), in this case 'p':paper
This is one of my projects. I made it a while ago. I'm glad you guys are enjoying it! It implements an approximation of this strategy: http://www.ofb.net/~egnor/iocaine.html
I can't shake the feeling that sensational reporting of terrorism is complicity.
A full-time contract iPhone developer costs $5,000/week
Ask HN: Buying a new laptop, any suggestions?
I'm in the market for a new laptop this holiday season. I sold my old Macbook and was considering buying a new one, but I need a bigger resolution (1440x900 at the least) and more power.

My work primarily consists graphic design (Photoshop, Illustrator) and programming (Notepad++, Textmate), and I'm fine with any OS.

The Macbook Pro would've been nice if the screen wasn't glossy and it didn't cost so much. =/ My budget is about $1100 and right now, I'm looking at the Lenovo Thinkpad T400 or a Dell E6400. I've had a Thinkpad before but I've heard their quality has gone down. I've also owned a Dell desktop before and their quality used to suck, however I hear they've improved.

Anyone have any suggestions? I've been pulling my hair trying to find the ideal laptop for a week now.
wow.. how would one go about finding such work... and here ive been just wasting my time "playing" around with iphone dev...
It's not private API, it's undocumented API. There's a difference.
10 BEST way to check your Internet speed
These Are the top resources to check your internet speed connection.

Make sure while checking your internet speed do not download or upload anything.
I always thought that Kurzweil was too simplistic in the way he comes to his conclusions and this points to just a couple of the reasons.

I think if we ever hit singularity, it will be because of some black swans spikes and leaps, not because of a gradual curve.
Yes, randomizing the order of the links for the user each time would let the user press the first link every time and have an unbeatable strategy. :)
The other founder here.

Newsbrane is still in its infant stage, and your criticisms are entirely valid :). The first 10 minutes aren't very satisfying.

The site actually does exactly what you want it to do: it learns your tastes and shows you only the things you're interested in.

What you experienced was the "Explore" mode, which is designed to figure out your tastes, not give you the best stuff. Explore is the 3-at-a-time mode you start out in. Once you've done some voting, you can use the "Recommended" mode, which does what you want.

The site works great for people with 50 votes or more. We are still working on the new user experience, and we are ravenous for feedback like yours, so thank you.
gees where was this 10 years ago when I got "tricked" into working for a telco... was an absolute waste of 3 years of my time... i had cancelled another interview at a really fine tech company to avoid the uncertainty...

ok again "tricked" is harsh as it was still my choice, prepared or not... well live and learn!!
Yeah, that's much better!
When they stopped the SMS service in the UK I cared for all of the five minutes until I got my iPhone. Obviously in the short term this is a major loss of functionality for a lot of people, but give it a couple of years and, if we're all still using Twitter, no one will care too much about SMS integration, because the real web will be everywhere.
Would this be the right place to advice a bit of caution against tech companies that institute psychometric tests??

"would you run over a lady crossing a street? Yes, No, Maybe!"

Cant believe I didnt see that warning sign!!
I was following #mumbai on twitter for a while and I have to say, It was more noise than signal. People retweeting the same thing again and again, some idiots guessing the names of the terrorist organizations which might be responsible and others talking about War on Terror with some random country which they assumed was part of it.

It was pure nuisance on twitter, there were no facts at all. It looked like a game where they were competing against each other to spread rumors. Twitter and Flickr will never replace my news because i overestimate the collective stupidity of the masses.
A 10 HP steam engine should do you. It's going to take a fair number of trees to fuel.