skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I came storming into this thread ready to post exactly your statement. The title is way over-blowing the situation. There are so many caveats here its hard to do it justice.

First, they found single neurons which trigger memory, a far cry from containing the entire memory. Think of them as gateways to a house. A gate does not hold the house, but it does let you access the house.

Second, they didn't remove any neurons (from my brief skimming of the press release at MIT[1], I don't have time to read the paper now). There is almost a 100% chance that there is a large subset of neurons which will trigger the same memory. Which means this house has a lot of gates. Nothing is becoming "unreadable" here.

Third, this trick of using optogenetics to trigger a memory has been shown several times over already. Here it was reported by Boyden and Hausser in 2009 [2]. Presumably this piece is being reported because it was performed by Tonegawa's lab. Not discounting the research, there is likely a lot of advancement on the underlying science, the optogenetics (which are undoubtedly being borrowed from Boyden's lab across the street) and the understanding of mechanism...but it isn't new.

[1] http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/conjuring-memories-artifi...

[2] http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23767/
This was presented last night (2012-03-22) by @jtauber at http://meetup.bostonpython.com/events/56404642/ - great event!
This doesn't do one quarter of the things that I need from Photoshop just to get basic work done. I understand your urgency to upset Adobe's monopoly. I too have toyed with ambitions to take on that great juggernaut. But it doesn't do anyone any favors to claim you have a Photoshop-killer when you just don't have anything of the kind yet.

As an ambitious in-progress project that isn't ready for prime time, this is a respectable effort. But as "simply the best online image editor" that is claimed to be a "variant" of Photoshop, it's embarrassing.
High Availability for Web applications
Follow that line and you will end up with two to three websites in the whole world of internet. He did not rip it off, in fact I see it as a favor for the original author, since its clearly stated that the second work is based on the first. If I release an HN simply for handful of people who I think are worthy of using it, then I should be dead ready for a crazy torrent of HN alternatives.
Ping.fm Founder Back with Stopped.At, Foursquare for the Web
It's pretty clear that the innovation in Dustin's work wasn't the code -- it was the interface. Pointing out that Nate built Obtvse in a day from scratch is pretty meaningless and the fact that he bothered to recreate it makes it pretty clear that Dustin built something cool. As a designer... it just feels like this wasn't Nate's to open source and hopefully this will transition further from the original.

On the flipside, if the Samwer brothers launched a version of Svbtle next week in 15 markets, would the reaction be the same?
If you paint Starry Night from scratch and hang it on the wall at a strip club, that would be a parody, and would constitute transformation of the original.
It seems ironic for someone not interested in "social bullshit" to have what is essentially a Like button on each post.
Will H.264 Codec Support Come To Fedora? Nope.
Haters gonna hate, but I enjoy PHP. For those who say PHP is sloppy and lacks substance, that's because you write it that way. A lot of the complaints that people have are long gone: - lack of namespace: they exist
-goto lines: no one forces you use them!
-inconsistent function naming conventions: you choose the names...
-magic quotes: no longer exist

My point is there are a lot of people who hate on PHP, but the majority of complaints are issues that you bring to the table. Regardless, I enjoy other languages too. I've been picking up on python recently and it's very enjoyable.
I saw his responses and realized how fortunate I was to not have read Gizmodo in several years.

Here are some of my other favorite quotes from him:

"The burden of proof is on you. These guys did something, showed it to the world, and the typical armchair experts who usually scream PHOTOSHOPPED! or FAKE! are doing exactly that from their offices, dens and basements."

"Yes, and the go camera video is also faked. And all the newspaper and TV coverage. I'm so tired of the armchair FAKE experts who don't have a fucking clue."
I'm pretty certain there'll be many an unexpected incident when/if people start up something like Tacocopter. Specifically, how many drones you're going to lose to seagulls and hawks tackling them for food.

You'd be talking custom made machines, because you just know some idiot is going to hook a box of chow mien noodles onto the skid of a robocopter and it'll get dive-bombed by a pigeon and land on someone's wind shield in the middle of rush hour traffic.

The problem that robotic helicopters, and other flying devices, are going to face is that they're legally liable for anything they damage below them if something falls. When you're 50' up, you don't want to be dropping a single thing over a roadway or side walk. It also brings up the questions of insurance, registration (to ensure all UAV's flying are insured and maintained) and more, because any accidents have the potential to be equal to a motor vehicle accident in terms of personal injury claim.

Operators literally have to have no choice to make sure there's the ability for them to get sued for accidents/drops, otherwise municipalities will quickly outlaw them and once that happens it's going to be decades before those municipalities change their minds.
Exactly. The function of a neuron is to trigger other neurons. If you removed a neuron, but manually triggered exactly the neurons that the removed neuron would have triggered, it is to be expected that the same memory would be recalled.

Obviously, this argument breaks down at some point, since by induction we could remove 100% of the neurons and manually trigger the axons to the muscles that would have been triggered by triggering the single neuron in the intact brain. This would give the same observable behavior, but it is not clear whether the same experience would be had. But this is getting into the area of consciousness, which is something that nobody understands (yet).
Fascinating, thanks! Have you got some links or keyphrases I should feed Google or Wikipedia to learn more (at a "curious but not neuro-science trained dilettante" level of understanding)?
Maybe it sounds like there's more to the story because the link goes to page 2 of the article.
Why Facebook works people far too hard
In 1982, when I was 10, I was in a personal computer club, run by a guy called Alan Pearman, who had his own company, APL. He ran the club from the back of his office, games, programming, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Dragon 32, BBC Micro, Oric. He had his own machines that he programmed using APL. It just looked like line noise. I was in awe.
Sounds like less of a war story and more of a fatal leadership mistake. There was no "war" - Rather than inspiring his team, he gave a frantic ultimatum.

Sadly ironic name, hopefully he can pull it together.
This is a great suggestion.

A while ago I did some benchmarks with hooking up APC and Squid proxy to the site I was working on at the time. The results were pretty amazing. I saw an increase in capability/performance of 400-700%. I'd probably choose Varnish over Squid if I had to do it again, however. The Squid configuration file is a bit of a nightmare.

http://randomdrake.com/2009/07/14/benchmark-results-show-400...
Your story is probably the most common outcome of a startup failing, except that in most cases if you're a founder not only have you not been paid but you're also now in a poopload of debt.
CoffeeScript?
Why is it that php, despise of being the most used server side language, (almost) never receives any love (i have noticed it too many times to ignore) whereas python and ruby, despite of getting alot of love, doesn't show usage numbers. i have seen alot of big sites using php, Facebook is the biggest i can think of right now, but python (.py extension) or ruby (i don't know file extension) is not that common (or at least i don't see it). i don't know either ruby or python so there might be some bias in what i see, but i strong feel there isn't.
I prefer to think of it as a toolbox -- the right tool for the right job.
Most of the people who hate on PHP are likely not programming the sort of application that PHP is used for. I generally ignore a .NET/Java/C++ developer crapping all over PHP.

Ruby/Python dev's I pay attention to on the other hand, if only because those two languages interest me. That said, where I am, PHP/Javascript is where the money is, so clearly they are my favorites!
What Do People Click On When They're Shopping For Sex Toys?
No, it's a problem.

The idea that law firms don't do IT is born of ignorance. Even the idea that the most used tool is a bookshelf of common interpretations of law is wrong, unsurprisingly all that stuff is online these days. Why on earth would anyone with two brain cells to rub together search for case histories on paper when there's Lexus Nexus which will do it in fractions of a second and is updated on a regular basis?

Yes these people are pretty conservative they're not stupid and they have money (a lot of money). Large law firms will typically have IT departments of hundreds and there's a significant market for companies specialising in supporting the legal sector.

But this is a tough problem because not only are there huge amounts of data involved but because people are actively trying to hinder your search. The law says that you have to to disclose everything relevant but it's pretty much common practice to also disclose a bunch of things that might be and a shed load of stuff you know full well isn't. This is a double win for the defending firm - not only can no-one accuse you of not providing everything they might want to see, but you get to do so in a way that makes very very difficult for them to find the stuff that matters.

Think of it this way - the problem is basically the same one Google have (already a pretty tough problem) only instead of the people providing the pages being keen that their information be discovered, they're actively trying to hide it.
Well, there is also this part of svbtle that seems pretty ripe for mocking:

The writing platform that helps you liberate ideas. With just two features, it's the essence of blogging.

Membership by invitation only.
While it might be unnecessarily punishing, Forth could be an interesting introductory language. I think it says something very positive about a language when the first thing[1] you learn to do isn't how to write an expression, make a loop or describe a conditional branch- it's how to define a procedure and break a task down into parts.

[1]http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/sf1/sf1.html
Auto drivers are no bigger assholes than us software engineers, to be really telling frankly.

If a software engineer can hop jobs every year without adding even 6 months of value to a company and he submits false rent receipts to save taxes(Which is stealing or fleecing as your describe the national treasury by the way)or when he reads online forums in the day time instead of working(which is fleecing the company by the way) etc.

We should not point fingers at other occupations and pass sweeping generalizations on other people.

This is the classic Indian mentality. We expect the poor to remain poor. An Auto driver is not supposed to earn well. The son of a cab driver like me is not supposed to be an engineer and earning well. And if we work hard and succeed we are assumed to be crossing our bounds. And the traditional Indian crowd can't stand this.

But my point stands true right.

The digital meters sell because there is a demand, and there is a value to it.

Business demands value.
Is VPS The Right Choice For Your Business?
Yes, Windows developers with a very Windowy lineage of experience (something like DBase -> FoxPro -> Delphi/VB -> C#) don't get Unix tools at all. Someone could make a lot of money on a Windows git tool done right.
The laser can't be aimed at an individual neuron; it is aimed at a cluster of neurons. Besides, activating a single neuron will strongly activate the neurons it has strong synaptic connections to. The key here is that an individual cluster of neurons is directly correlated with an individual memory.
One word: sense of entitlement
Boot2Gecko on the Nexus S video
No, in PR perception is reality. If the audience doesn't see you as being a dick you can get away with it.
Besides the point brought up by jeltz about what "renewable" includes, I fail to see how the speed of innovation, or the fact that people can "hack it", will determine which energy source is "the future".

Argentina, a developing country with a history of social turmoil and a relatively high level of goverment corruption, has been using nuclear power efficently since the '70s.

Probably "the future" will need mixed energy generation. It won't be only nuclear nor only renewable.
Currently, the deaths associated with a great many UAVs appear to be a bug, not a feature.

I'm talking, of course, of the 'killer' app - assassination!

e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_drone
J? K? q?
Tangent, but I really wish Speakerdeck wouldn't make each slide transition a new history location. I don't want to have to hit back 30 times after viewing 30 slides to get back to the page that linked me there.
Your API does REST, but can it SLEEP?
I don't know if it was used in this paper, but you can obtain single-neuron targeting using two-photon microscopy.
While I'm generally sympathetic to the plight of people who have their work ripped off, I can't muster a sense of outrage here.

Fact is, one guy cloned what was a closed platform (that had been openly announced and displayed) based on the idea and screenshots alone in about 11 hours (based on the HN submission interval).

If someone can do that--and does--you really haven't invented or created anything (substantive).

This just leaves the issue of whether the design and the assets (CSS, images, etc) are substantive and have been used without permission. Based on other comments, there seems to be no issue of asset "theft".

So does the minimalist design copy warrant outrage? Honestly, no. Someone has basically invented what amounts to a Wordpress theme.

If dcurtis can create a scalable, reliable platform for hosting it then great. It worked well enough for Wordpress.

Exclusivity and invite-only are time-honoured ways of scaling controllably and--let's be honest--creating hype and desire but if you're not ready for the copycats and it takes the copycats so little time that their HN submission makes it to the front page while yours is still there... that's your problem.
Python and Ruby based websites use routing frameworks, not isolated files, so you don't see extensions.

PHP has routing frameworks too (Kohana, CakePHP, etc), but plenty of (most?) sites don't use them.
The better you learn a certain PL the more you realize how it sucks. Eventually you realize that all languages suck.
P.S. I mostly use python.
Interesting. This doesn't happen here (Chrome on OS X).
Because Python and Ruby sites are built properly, and don't expose their filenames as extensions in the url (.py or .rb). In fact, their urls don't even map to actual files to begin with, which immediately avoids several large security holes in PHP-built sites. With PHP you have to do some clever url rewriting and redirecting all your traffic through one central "index.php"-like script.

PHP is the training wheels of the server-side language world. You can pick it up and almost immediately see results on any number of popular hosting providers that provide support out of the box for it. That's why you see it so much.
Python websites made with Django don't have a fixed extension for the urls. I expect it's the same with ruby and many other more advanced frameworks.
Why not deride the film maker?

The problem i have with him is the same problem that i have with all liars. Namely, that the world is such an interesting and fascinating place, that wasting time on hoaxes and stupid "ha ha! i tricked you!" sorts of media is largely pointless.

This dude can claim that his effort was really an "experiment" about online media and how to tell a story, but frankly, I think that's bullshit. This guy isn't doing research about what it takes a viral video to study viral videos so that society might better understand how it is that information is passed between members of a network (and there are folks who study this sort of thing).

This dude is just trying to make a project of his go viral. I really see very little distinction between this project and any other sort of fame-whoring, save for the amount of effort put in.

So, please tell me if you can, why this hoax is an improvement, or even a useful fiction in the face of real science/engineering awesomeness like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E77j1imdhQ
The Amiga Mini PC
Didn't see this and brought up the Samwers as well. I think we're still in a transition around here in terms of how "design" is valued but overall it seems like things are improving.
CDMA also has better voice quality, although I'm not sure if this is a bandwidth thing or a codec thing, and not sure how universal it is on deployed networks.
I don't understand your post at all. There are hundreds of highly successful long running open source projects and its absurd to imply that someone is more invested in a project purely because it is closed source rather than open.

Further, my comment was merely a testament to the elitism mentioned elsewhere in this thread in regards to Dustin's comment about how his private network is full of geniuses.

When I first saw the screenshots I was impressed. Its nothing terribly new but it is simple and streamlined... but I've been using drafts and published posts in blogger and WordPress for years to do this

I was much less impressed after his comments about geniuses and his big play about exclusivity. Its basically straight up "look at this cool thing that I have, that you can't have, because I'm more of a genius than you."

This us of course isolated from the ethics of cloning the idea... but jeez, at least don't act so damn surprised. This is typical of these scenarios.
The Student Debt Slide
..that's the power of MUSIC!
Thank you, SandlerSales.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLJGshNl2ec
I'm using the same combination. Either they just changed something, or I was hallucinating five minutes ago :)
You have to replace the handset too; calls are likable both to sim and equipment. Buying a prepaid handset with CDMA account esn built in is just as anonymous.
Tanenbaum wasn't wrong and neither was Torvalds. The fact is that these are complicated matters that you can't make black-and-white.

Microkernels are the future

And they are, the future just hasn't arrived yet. But microkernels see more and more adoption every day. They offer a degree of reliability that is unprecedented. But they also come with a performance penalty that is for a lot of people enough of a drawback that they would rather have 'good enough' than 'perfect'.

For software that needs to be 'perfect' microkernels are the way to go and in fact in the embedded world there are more microkernel varieties that you can choose from now than ever before. Once performance penalties are no longer important and people will start to demand software that does not crash with every change of the weather I believe microkernels will see another wave of increased adoption. As far as I'm concerned this can't come soon enough. Userland drivers are so much better than a monolithic kernel.

x86 will die out and RISC architectures will dominate the market

And in fact, in the mobile arena this has already come true. And the way Apple is moving I would not be surprised to see an Arm powering an Apple laptop one day.

(5 years from then) everyone will be running a free GNU OS

I think both parties underestimated the strength of the windows lock-in here. And many people still underestimate the strength of this lock-in, even here on HN the demise of Microsoft is announced with some regularity.
Well, of course they are mass-produced. You, him, and everybode else here knows that.

But there's craftmanship in design: Read something about how Jobs/Apple goes about designing a product. There's an intense passion to get the look, feel and functionality about a product just right. Down to having several iterations of design on the packaging alone.

There's also craftmanship in production. There was an article about how Apple was buying up high powered lasers to puncture microscopic holes in the macbook casings, so you have lights that are invisible when they're not on.

I wish more companies would care as much about the whole experience of a product, rather than just getting more dots on the feature list.
Record magnetic field (100T) achieved at Los Alamos
The Los Alamos campus of the NHMFL achieved a record setting 100.75 Tesla (T) magnetic field. This is approximately 1.5-4 million times Earth's magnetic field and 70 times the strength of a typical MRi magnet.
Windows 8 refresh feature makes it easy for you
File extension is just a part of my observation. It also includes tutorials, how-tos, questions/answers on stack overflow-like sites, etc. all of these are more for php than any other language.

example
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/php

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby-on-rails

the difference is huge.
Flask-Adminex: Django style admin
Someone clones a project after its introduced with neiner-neiner look how cool thus is and you can't have it... and this is reason to bag on all of HN? Or better yet, its a reason to abandon all of open source? Better go back to using IE. Have fun.
I'm sure you could get a bulk discount though.
Tbilisi Hotels -  Ambassador  Hotel
This hotel is located in old Tbilisi, on the right bank of the Kur river, between the Anchiskhati church and the Marionette Theater. The hotel is within walking distance from the center of Tbilisi, where the shops and theaters are as well as the cafes, museums and the main sights of Tbilisi. Rustaveli Avenue and the metro station are also not far away.
My brain hurts now
Why ACTA must be stopped [Infographic]
I'm in this lab http://www.lppa.college-de-france.fr and mostly learned through colleagues (I'm doing CS/AI/ML, not neuroscience). I've read some parts of "Neuroscience 3rd edition, Purves et al., Sinauer Eds." which has nice pictures but I think there are better books and better advices than mines on this. Perhaps start with Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampus // https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_consolidation
What do you mean by "you choose the names" with regard to PHP's inconsistent naming conventions? I think most of the upset is due to the standard array functions which can be either array_action($array, $arg) or array_action($arg, $array).
Because not everyone is writing code for the web. And because this poll is about your favorite language, not the language you use the most.
When I switched from my old MotoRAZR to the iPhone, I used the same SIM. Just popped it in and I was good to go. My SIM still has the Cingular logo on it!
The current state of styli and the iPad: does the stylus still blow it?
I think this is somewhat standard practice in classes where the prof is writing a book. I think I've done it a couple of times, at least. (By the way, you should've taken it F10!)
Human beings have the luxury of being irrational about their finances, whilst publicly traded corporations are supposed to be able to justify their financial decisions.

If a CEO says, "I hate stealing, so I'm going to spend 10 million dollars year of the company's money to stop 10 thousand dollars in power theft." then I don't think that's going to impress the company's shareholders.