skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A neuron "could" store a generalized memory (the amount of information it stores is gigantic, w/o pendantically considered the DNA). However, it's more complex than that (there are many types of memories and many means of retrieval). Basically, memories are sets of synaptic connections, and a neuron has many synapses (average ~7,000 synaptic connections/neuron to multiply by our 10^11 neurons/brain). As you said, it may be a "key", but it should be seen more like the memory _is_ a complete list of hashes. Not {"key": memory} but {"key1": {"key2": {"key3": {...} } }, {...}, {...}, ...} and the set of {key1..keyN} is the memory. So if you removed whichever keyI in the middle, you lose the information. (That's not really true because there is high redundancy, but there are keys/synapses/nodes less redundant than others. The fact is, they don't fire on only "one" neuron, they fire at a very precise region but the light still goes through a population of neurons.)
> It honestly perplexes me how you can in the same breath admit that someone has done hard work and imply that you owe them nothing for using it.

I am quoting this example for the second time. MS made Office common place. It doesn't mean OpenOffice.org owed MS anything, other than "hey neat". As long as it's not infringement recognized by law, no body owes anyone anything.

> if you can copy something, than you may copy it.

"can copy" is hard, may be a little less hard than the first implementation, but it's still hard work. You don't get exclusivity by getting there first. In the cases in which you do get it viz. software patents, it creates more problems than it solves. So yes, I am pretty much in line with "if you can copy it, you may".

> If you value someone's work, I think you owe them some form of compensation.

It's entirely possible to value someone's work, but not agree with his exclusivity requirements.

> I agree that good ideas shouldn't be trapped or left to wither in isolation when they could benefit society at large. I just think this has to be tempered with some form of compensation to the person who introduced the idea.

And I think "I was here first so you all are prosecuting me by not going somewhere else and trying to get here" is a prefect way to let good ideas wither and die. More importantly, this sense of exclusivity and entitlement is misplaced.
Can Google Survive in the New Social Web?
I find the opposite version of that quite useful too - swapping SIMs lets me change my phone hardware out independently of my carrier/phonenumber. I can (with a $2 microsim adaptor) switch between an iPhone, a Galaxy SII, and occasionally a tiny not-very-"smart"phone-but-perfectly-adequate-for-voice-and-text Huewei device. Phone calls and text messages just arrive at whatever device I've got my SIM in.
I am French, working in Germany having founded a Limited in UK and I spent some years working in Denmark. If you factor everything in, the cost difference between the US and EU is negligible.

In the nuclear field, like in any highly skilled engineering field, the costs will come first from the salary of your employees. In fact, it will be cheaper in Europe, because in Europe, highly skilled engineers tend to work for less money because they have 6 weeks holidays (which you can take), 3 month sick days, very good health insurance and a 40h week. When you start to build stuff, the BOM is the same in the US or in Europe.

This is from my experience in the oil & gas and pharmaceutical industries (my field as process & chemical engineer).
That sounds very interesting. I could only find RRDTool which seems like a combination of a RRD and a graphing tool. Further some vague references about RRD in PostgreSQL. Am I missing something?
To me, many of them are not what I would call impossible. Looking them over I think I could recreate many of them in a 3D program easily enough. The only ones that fit that name seem to be the ones with a horizontal element connecting two vertical elements. Even then many of those where the horizontal is on the bottom or top, like T, U, V, W, seem to work. I wouldn't call this a collection of "impossible" letters but a nice typeface inspired by an impossible object, just like it says next to the name.
The math behind visual hallucinations
I agree with this. Because of the brain's ability to access things which are not exactly constrained to it's physicality, I think the brain acts as a type of radio and tunes into memories. Not exactly sure how they are stored.
I've written an alternative iOS browser myself, and my guess is this bug is due to the Safari UI misinterpreting the network events that get fired when pages and frames are loaded.

Wrapping UIWebView makes it really hard to distinguish between page loads and iframe loads to figure out which URL is currently displayed. While Safari uses lower-level interfaces, I'd guess this is happening at a higher-level than webkit, so cross-domain restrictions should still be in place.
There's two of us at 37signals building projects on top of the HttpLua / ngx_lua module. The OpenResty (http://www.openresty.org) project is absolutely worth a look if you are willing to live on the edge and you wan't incredibly fast performance. I can't say enough good things about the work agentzh and chaoslawful have been up to lately -- just check out their Github profiles.
Java enum - constant-specific method implementations
Wouldn't making more copies of the files be exactly why they are taking the site down in the first place?
Pretty sure this was discussed on HN before when he wrote the blog post describing how it was developed: http://acko.net/blog/making-love-to-webkit/
This is an excellent point. If his goal was to get attention, he got it. What he didn't count on was that some of that attention would come from people who strongly didn't agree with his style, and the consequences thereof.
People who find this stuff interesting should also check out Larry Hasting's talk "Stepping through CPython" from this years PyCon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGF3Qu4dUqk
Facebook Buys IBM Patents
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3741776
Dare I be the first to offer what some may think of as cliche advice: find the language(s) you love working in first, then make money at them (and that might require moving to a different market). I was a data warehouse architect for a while - and was paid more than most of my time as an app dev, but I was miserable doing it. Then I spent time in all layers of .NET (C#), and while I enjoyed it, my passion is really open web tech (focusing on the client mostly). In Nashville, .NET is one of the top money makers for devs, so whenever I discussed moving out of .NET to focus on HTML/js, the conversation always turned to "but .NET pays the bills!" Thankfully I can say that I've landed a job that lets me do what I love, not stressing over "OH man, I have to learn platform X - which I hate - just to the bills." My own personal version of hell would be having to specialize in SharePoint....
Poll: What is Your Favorite Programming Language?
These languages are only the most popular. If your favorite language is not listed please pick other and then comment below what it is.
How Banjo was built using Heroku
Dear HN, what is the conventional wisdom here on the merits of this course vs. other Python methods of learning, tutorials, classes, &c?
JavaScript's Two Zeros
I'm not a lawyer, but it appears to be covered in the Berne Convention [1] as "works of applied art". The copied design we saw this morning was probably "substantially similar" [2] to the original. Apparently designs are copyrighted in the US as well, in contrast to what I thought [3].

[1] http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/treaties/en/ip/berne/pd...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity (in US copyright law)

[3] http://norcal.gag.org/legalities/2004/legalities_no03.html (first question)
"People are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true." - Zeddicus
I should add that I do appreciate how the article encouraged more than one language, and emphasized that you need to think through how and with what kind of development do you want to make money - not just 'which language'...
Just a load of.. well..
Do you also refuse to use Linux because Linus Torvalds is a scumbag who ripped off AT&T?
New update? I've seen this posted here before, sure enough. What part of the course has been updated?
Well said. Most of the discussions are all about whether or not stealing designs is justifiable... and thats really missing the point. /btw welcome back unalone.
Tanenbaum wasn't that far off.

1. In terms of pure Micro-Kernels he was off. It was tried, the benefits didn't outweigh the drawbacks so people moved to Hybrid Micro-Kernels (Windows NT, OS X, iOS et al) so from that perspective he was about 50% right.

2. Given the way ARM is trouncing everybody in the mobile space, unless Intel manages the biggest comeback since Lazarus the future is almost certainly RISC. Whether this feeds back to the desktop space remains to be seen.

3. Unlikely to happen, although the future is most likely Open Source in some form or other. GPL v3 has largely ruled out GNU dominating as vendors that previously shipped GNU components replace the GPL components with other Open Source Licenses because they find the new terms a bit much.
> Wienert is not trying to pass this off as his own work. He's not selling it.

He can pass this off as his own work and sell it for all I care. I don't know who created the first blogging engine, but do you believe all subsequent blogging engines owe something to the first one, and shouldn't have re-implemented and sold it without making it substantially different?
The Opera Web Standards Curriculum, though it isn't a reference, is a fantastic resource for beginners.

Unfortunately they seem to have moved it onto w3c's domain and now it looks completely awful: http://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/Main_Page
"the brain's ability to access things which are not exactly constrained to it's physicality"

What does that mean? Not being snarky, just interested.
> Your nonalogy makes no sense whatsoever:

I'll agree it has several flaws. Still.

> Addresses don't significantly impact the phone's behavior (and its costs)

That would be a reason to keep the interface a physical token? Elaborate, please.

> phones don't need to reboot when changing SIM

The stupidly designed ones (with the sim behind the battery) does, but I see your point.

> people who criticize iPhones for not having a µSD slot

I was under the impression they miss the ease of data transfer and cheap storage space, not the act of changing the card to access other data. Please elaborate.
Small, Life Problems? Just a Matter of Programming
Guess What's the Fastest-Adopted Gadget of the Last 50 Years
I couldn't pick between C or Python as I use them both in different circumstances and adore both of them. Tis a shame I can't use either in my job - I'm a PHP developer by day and not a big fan of the language at all :-(
Business cards are hardly ideal. But, knowing that someone now has your correct contact information, because you just handed it to them is worth something. The problems only really show up when you want to keep several addresses at the same time and for most people that's rarely an issue with SIM cards.
There's a very strong urge to believe that the brain "tunes" into some kind of non-meatspace realm (spiritual, quantum, etc.)

Fairly sure that it'll turn out that it just depends on the massive complexity of neuron/synapse connections, though.

But then you think of concepts like 'group psyche', and twins that are separated from birth but share the same thoughts/feelings over a distance...

Hopefully science will get to the bottom of it soon :)
No, and I probably agree with you, but I'm just trying to point out that you don't have to subscribe to what appears to be a more controversial idea (that copying and possibly selling a piece of software is OK) in order to support what Wienert has done.
but in such case innovation is not an option. if the other person can copy current app why can't he/she copy the innovation too?
You left off Clojure
http://www.pluggd.in/forum/discussion/524/flipkart-flyte-get....

Its just the beginning. I am sure that its going to increase. A lot.
No Erlang?
Not to get too meta here, but unalone and I have continued this discussion in email, so I'm not going to bother with a large reply here. In short, I apologized for writing him off so quickly, but disagree with his assessment of Svbtle's elegance.
Fell in love with Python the first time I saw it. Most of my projects are written in Python. It is simply elegant.

I really like CoffeeScript as well. (Javascript is a real pain to handle sometimes!)
Adobe Photoshop CS6 gratis
This is the best line I've read all week: 'it took six months to persuade suspicious taqueria owners to switch to a salsa with lower magnetic permittivity'

(I know this is likely to be downvoted as being a joke comment but considering I don't believe the original site to be more than a funny joke I would expect upvotes for all funny comments)
That's a good point. Ultimately it's going to come down to risk versus benefit.
Well said. I can't wait until my side project (oops... startup... uh, I mean Rockstarium-ninjai fusion device) goes live and I get to satirize this trend with the site design (up until a point, probably the end of beta; at the end of the day I'm still trying to build a real service and a joke only goes so far). I may even be looking forward to this more than the end product.
Yes, totally agree with this. There is a comment further down here that someone says they swap out their SIM into an old dumB phone when out biking since if they fall the phone is less likely break. I've had the screen crack on a phone when it was in my back pocket and I sat on something. It's also handy swapping out to those basic dumb phones when you have no recharge facilities available, like when you are at a music festival, or out camping for the weekend.
Just a few quick things to say on RISC vs. CISC.

Back when this debate was happening CPU design teams were a lot smaller, meaning that any given feature hadn't had enough effort put into it to get as far into the realm of diminishing returns, so there was a much bigger payoff to be had in reducing the number of features you implemented.

You also weren't devoting most of your die to huge arrays of cache, so adding - say - more addressing modes would tend to mean you couldn't have as many pipeline stages. Any given feature will still make the overall design more complicated and so will make it more difficult to add any other feature you want, but the issue isn't as pressing as it used to be.

One area where RISC does still has a big advantage is instruction decode. When you run into an x86 instruction you have to read a lot of bits to figure out how long it is, and its not self synchronizing so you could read an instruction stream one way if you start at byte FOO, but if you start at byte FOO+1 you can find an entirely different but equally valid sequence of instructions.[1] So decoding N bytes of x86 instructions grows in complexity faster than linearly. In fact, I suspect that modern processors have to use some sort of "Guess the three most likely solutions throw out the results if we're wrong" solution for current processors to get the performance needed.

If I were to design an ISA I'd probably want some sort of UTF-8 style variable length scheme, where you can always tell where an instruction boundary is without reading from the beginning but with the space savings from having the most common instructions be shorter than the least common ones.

[1] This apparently also annoys my security researcher friend.

EDIT: Found the link to that really good explanation Mashey had on RISC vs. CISC:
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~vijay/mashey.on.risc.html
Ahhh, it was the old analogue phones I was thinking of. I never had one, my brother did though. I remember the big sim card and the perforated ones too :)
Anyone thinks to create a WordPress Theme out of this design? That would be huge.
Right. I think what Tannenbaum overlooked was the massive transistor budgets that were on their way thanks to Moore's law. Where early CISC chips had to spend a substantial fraction of their transistors on instruction decoding, the absolute number of transistors required for that didn't increase nearly as fast as the total on the chip. So now we have quite complex instruction decoders that translate CISC to RISC, and they're still just a small fraction of the chip.
A more down to earth explanation on where the information is stored, if not in the neuron, would be other neurons that the neuron is connected to (and neurons they are connected to, etc.). In fact it seems fairly likely that information in the brain is just stored in the strength of synaptic connections. Just like in the computer memory case, really. Even though a complete data structure might is not stored in a single bit, all data inside it is eventually stored in bits and not in some magical realm "outside of physicality of the computer".
This sounds very important to you, but please consider this:

A significant part of hacking is getting a project and/or product into the hands of users to whom it can give value.

Sometimes that involves founding a company.

Most of the time founding a company involves work with other people - co-founders.

Recommendation: If you don't want to read about co-founders, skip those threads and save yourself the frustration.
Google looks to patent tech that listens to calls to promote ads
Forget about closed source, invite only bloging network.

We can not even read HN comments you write ?
If you are interested in this sort of thing (memory storage in the brain, recall etc.) you might be interested in Wilder Penfield's work. (e.g. http://primal-page.com/penfield.htm)
People can do 2kW for a little while, you need closer to ~50kW or really really big and light wings. At which point your 200lb of battery's and moters bump that to ~100kW.
Also, 1632 by Eric Flint (and its numerous sequels) about a Virginian town circa 1999 that suddenly and inexplicably gets transported to 1632.
I'm sick of that invite-only horseshit too. If you're gonna share it privately don't announce it to the world. Don't wave a steak in front of my face and then walk it over to the VIP section.

I don't care if this is petty, I am serious as a heart attack about it now. I refuse to use Google+ for this reason, and a couple other things too.
The great thing about the left is that it provides me a choice. I appreciate the opportunity to have a choice.
Really, they give you a new sim on upgrade? I can understand this if you are upgrading TO an iPhone since you need a micro SIM, but rather pointless otherwise.

I think I've had the same SIM card for about 6-7 years now!
>What makes less sense is the choice of a fully-featured Windows 7 Ultimate OS. Surely loading it with a minimal version of Linux and only the software they needed would have helped squeeze more out of the battery? But then maybe Windows is required to run the software they need for the scientific experiments.

Or they are used to Windows, and learning enough Linux to be able to handle any software contingency that might occur on the trip would be an unnecessary distraction from their careers.

I don't get some authors. How do they not notice that it is time consuming to get up to speed with a new OS?

EDIT. Oh, now I get it: the purpose of the quote is to signal allegiance to the tribe or rally the troops.

DISCLAIMER: GNU/Linux user since 1992.
You are getting into classic Nerd rage.

Lets take the example of Flipkart. It might not be the epitome of tech innovation. But Flipkart is sheer awesomeness.

Let me tell you why! They might have built their site with php, and they might use MySQL and they might use Java. None of that matters. It doesn't matter that they don't use Python, or NoSQL or Ruby on Rails. It doesn't matter if their webpages load 0.01 ms slower than others.

Let me tell you what matters.

What matters is, somebody with an email can go on their site and order stuff even without a credit card. And they are trustworthy to deliver the good at your doorstep. And they do this with several thousands of customers everyday.

This is what matters! They solved a problem, they do it efficiently and they do that several thousand times a day.

Code is not an answer to all solutions. In case of a business many things matters. Business is a proposition of a many things and tech is one of them.

Merely writing efficient code is not going to make you successful. Although writing efficient code will help you to be successful.
I agree with you in that people seem to be making waaaay too much out of the fact that one of the two did it first.
I read the MIT news piece and didn't find any reference to the removal of a neuron that would eliminate the memory. Was that in a longer research paper?
http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/karnataka/article4475.ec...
Post that announcement in 2009, new autos have had only new meters. If the notification is issued the day after a new auto is bought, it will be a loss of money to the auto owner. The notification was issued in Jan this year if I'm not wrong and it is now compulsory to have digital meters. The reason why it took from 2009-12 was because of auto-drivers resisting the change. Of course, all this because a majority of auto drivers are assholes whose only aim in life is to fleece passengers. It amazes me that of all people, you are bringing up auto-drivers as an example of technological change.
It would be wrong if NateW hacked into and stole the source, or stole the design source/code of Dustin's project. But reproduction of someone else's work isn't ripping them off but is a compliment (it means that it's worth reproducing).

As good as Dustin is, neither his ideas or implementation of his blog/cms platform are that unique.
Harsh, but with a core of truth.

In my opinion, if Dustin is showing off his thing with a key "feature" being "invitation only", then it seems open season for someone else to think "Fair enough, if you think curated bloggers is a key differentiating feature, then me launching a similar service _without_ that key feature seems OK".

In one sense - people seem to love having their ideas "validated" by new startups claiming "We're $existingThing for $newMarket". "We're HipMonk for dogs!" We're GoogleAnalytics for yoga retreats!" "We're Svbtle for non-celebrity-bloggers!"

What Dustin made is very nice. He may very well be able to curate bloggers in a way that makes it wildly successful - I hope he does, I'll cheer him on. Maybe though, Obtvse will gain a bigger or different userbase. Maybe someone wil be able to take the Obtvse codebase and do a better curating job than Dustin - with the right code ready to roll, I'd bet on Maria Popova or Cory Doctorow or Rob Malda or even Nick Denton to win at the blogger-curating role over Dustin…