skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The claim to the identity is not the issue, the issue is that the person who got copied will die and experience that death.

The existence of a copy does not make the original person to resucitate or otherwise keep perceiving and thinking.

To express it in a bad analogy: you can have a bit by bit backup copy of a harddrive, but when a power surge burns the CPU and the disk, you have to throw both away. You can buy a new CPU and place the backup, but the hardware is different, there is a shutdown moment, and when you power back, the continuity is lost, it's a different entity what gets booted up.

To preserve the consciousness of a person, between the "hardware change" I see no other option to the existence of something like a central repository of consciousness outside both the body and the computer hosting the simulation that gets automatically attached to a particular set of memories/perceptions/experiences (and whatever else defines a consciousness), so when you die, it stores your consciousness and when the simulation is booted up, the continuity is triggered. I find that far fetched.
"You can't even play devils advocate on this one."

Very insightful comment. I don't think they should delete it at this point though which would be covering up what they did at this point.

As far as what to do about this, word for word plagiarism that is barely altered so that it's technically not an exact word search isn't a mistake or momentary slip up by a paid author/journalist/blogger, it's overt plagiarism and fraud. There is absolutely no other thing to be done when it is found but to openly and publicly FIRE the fake "author" who stole another person's work, and issue a public apology to the true author.

That would have resolved it and enabled this company to save face and appear on the up and up.

The handling by the CEO was so abysmal and so wrong here though that it destroyed the entire reputation of the site. His continuing to trying to spin and lie is just an embarrassment to himself, his reputation is ruined.

As far as whoever owns this company, at this point the only thing they could possibly do to recover at all is to fire both the CEO and the plagiarist and issue a public, heartfelt, sincere apology.
I found it interesting that Peter Thiel invested his own personal money into it.

Does that mean the Founders Fund wasn't interested?

Is it common for a VC (especially a prominent one) to invest their personal money into startups, as oppose to their fund's money?
Clever! Can't wait to try it out...
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That would be true except each vnode (by default 64!) has its own backend database. That means with 4 physical nodes each one gets 16 leveldb/bitcask/whatever database backends.

LevelDB's write batching and caching is completely void when thats considered in many circumstances.

Its something that I think Basho should consider changing. Its a trade off of fault tolerance or performance, and I would personally love to see riak go a lot faster.
Front page reddit is pretty awful with the exception of /r/askscience (and well, honestly, I subscribe to /r/aww because I love looking at pictures of cute animals), but reddit is actually REALLY great if you find a couple of high traffic subreddits that don't hit the front page and turn off all the default subscriptions. I just wish they'd let subreddits arrange some sort of feeder model amongst themselves. (So stuff posted in /r/haskell could bubble up to /r/coding with sufficient upvotes, for example). That subreddits are siloed is the biggest technical problem.

The front page just has the lowest common denominator problem.
Ask HN: Does anyone else hate consulting on a per hour basis?
I have my own startup and I have worked for other startups in the past. Consulting has allowed me to work about 1/4 to 1/2 time from home, while still allocating a good amount of time to my startup. However, I've often found myself justifying my hours to the client and am levied with more and more forms of hours documentation.

I'm disgusted with the whole thing. Hourly billing is hard enough because even when I'm asked to complete tasks outside of my realm of expertise, I have trouble billing for my learning curve. On top of that, I'm working on an under-producing e-commerce site and I see the figures, I'm sure money is tight for my client. However, I find myself disgusted, because I'm working less, doing less-than my all, because my client isn't willing to pay for the time. To add insult to injury, the client is non-technical, so he doesn't see the value in anything but more sales.

Have other people run into this problem? Is this how most hourly consulting gigs go, or is it just my client? Did you switch to project related fees? Drop consulting for a salary job? Any advice would help.
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@timdoug, could you share specific problems with Mongo that made|forced you switch to Riak please? "Operational qualities" are little vague
For those who are confused about what plagiarism looks like, here's an example from 1918:

Plagiarism In 1918
http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/plagiarism-in-1918...

Looks awfully similar to Plagiarism in 2012.
Groupon (and the million of copies) only proves the need for better marketing options for businesses (all sizes).

It has broken the barries of online marketing by showing the common person that they can profit from internet marketing.

There is so much potential and money in this area that I sometimes wonder why more startups are not attacking it.
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It seems pretty obvious why they raised so much -- I don't get the confusion. They're settling in for the long haul. Remember: these dudes are already rich from their Facebook days. They wouldn't even be doing this if they didn't truly want to.

They raised $50 million so they can keep going on this project until it's solved, which may take 5+ years. The financial resources issue has been solved. It's what most anyone who's truly dedicated would like to be able to do. They just happen to be in the position to do it.
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I think there is an overarching issue here because I've experienced it myself several times.

1) Person writes about something out of passion and posts it for free (the blog carries no ads)

2) Person who gets paid to write reads it, has no record of ever writing about that topic before, and then does his/her own take -- hitting all the same key points (including using quotes from others that were in the original post) making him/her look like a thinker.

3) Original person is never cited, never acknowledged, while paid person merrily collects paycheck for "work."

Having experienced it firsthand, I at least know several people never to take seriously as "thinkers" ever again.
The genie is really out of the bottle. Yes, OP acknowledges that North Korea will be crumbling, static strategy. The alternative merely prolongs but hardly extends.

Consider that people can emigrate - but they still need to communicate with their family back home. That cannot be prevented ideally as remittances would be a major economic boost. However one cannot allow open exchange of liberal ideas _into_ said represssive country. Censor such communication? People start using homonyms and code-words. That road only serves as an excellent recruitment funnel for the dissidents. Stop emigration? Welcome the Berlin Wall aka swiss cheese

Co-opt private enterprise ? Here I'm slightly optimistic that the degration of service over the medium to long term will be just enough such that a better competitor will emerge that _won't_ co-operate. Even if say 80% of tech people co-operate, there will be 20% who won't give in (thanks RMS, Linus for the inspiration) -> ergo the good guys win in the end, eventually

The said dictators only real long-term hope is for global melt-down, reducing economies to 1850 standards when people may actually put up with repression in exchange for food.

PS. Hell, Strategy A Depoliticization is too cunning !

PSS. Knowledge is power. This satirical article is an example of the genie being out of the bottle too.
I could imagine how a suficiently advanced machine could simulate one or more consciousnesses.

What I can't imagine is how you, the person sitting in front of the computer will somehow wake up in the computer. I can only see copies waking up. Even if you are dead. For the people who love you, having a copy would be great, but you will still be dead.
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"20-30k daily active users."

That seems rather...low for a $400 million valuation.
I think that's a very credible middle ground interpretation between the poles of "nobody pays, everyone pirates" (which is what I think) and "everyone pays, piracy is just marketing" (which is what HN believes).

But, obviously, that middle ground still represents a transfer of wealth away from the people who actually produce music and towards a new breed of networked middlemen who capitalize on other people's work and couldn't give a damn about the future of music. Oops, I let my rant seep back in there. Sorry!
Sorry, in retrospect that first comment came across as super condescending when I didn't mean it that way at all.

How do mandatory pre-reqs fit into this?

I agree with you here -- they suck and shouldn't exist. I had the luxury of attending a school that (with the strange exception of the Econ department) didn't allow mandatory pre-reqs as a matter of policy.

You want to know what kills the desire to seek harder things? When you have to complete a mountain of tedious bullshit that you largely already know to get anywhere, and there is no getting around it.

Sure. But that doesn't mean that the opportunities for hard things aren't there, just that you weren't motivated (and perhaps rightly so) to pursue them. Also, these things are only tedious because you already know them. It sounds like you went back to college because you saw an economic advantage in doing so and are upset because it wasn't also intellectually advantageous. In other words, you were optimizing for economics and not knowledge. If you were instead optimizing for knowledge, then it sounds like going back to college would not have been the best choice for you, although I still stand by the claim that it's impossible to go through college without being presented with an opportunity to learn something of deep and meaningful value.

Anyway, I think the problem is not so much that college is generally useless, but rather that there is an economic benefit for seemingly smart, self-educated people like yourself to go back to college even though the experience is perhaps not that useful for you otherwise.

EDIT:

My point is this: Just because you can pass classes you already know everything about with an easy A in college doesn't mean that there isn't an opportunity to learn more advanced things via the faculty and resources provided to you and it's partially on you to take advantage of those opportunities. Moreover, I think it's impossible to go through college and have none of those opportunities open to you.

With that being said, college isn't necessarily the best way to learn things, and whether or not it is is completely dependent on who you are. In your case, college was probably economically advantageous in the long run, but sounds like it wasn't the best way to learn novel skills. This doesn't mean college isn't a valid way for people to educate themselves generally, as not everyone comes to college able to place out of everything.
I agree with your 1st sentence, but not your 2nd. Citation is the act of declaring a source.

http://web.mit.edu/academicintegrity/citing/whatandwhy.html

(To be honest, I got this link from wikipedia :)
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$400M... let me guess: no revenue at all? but it was started by a couple of Mark's dorm pals from college! not a bubble, not a bubble, not a bubble, not a bubble....
Alas, not gonna happen indeed.

I once believed that BSD with an Apple interface was the Utopia of computing, but no. And it took me a couple of years to understand why. I came up with a different way to say the same thing: Apple is about productizing computing ideas. But it does mean closing them down. A product is not a platform. And Xcode is just a nuisance to Apple, a requisite rather than a goal.

Sometimes productizing means making the same thing much cheaper, like their first mouse. Sometimes it is making the same thing much more expensive than necessary, like present Macs.

But the common thread is to upsell your costumer. To make him come back. This is all Apple is about. It has the advantage of pampering a prized costumer, but it has the disadvantage of locking you.

To the people saying Apple is the new MicroSoft, at first Apple was the one and only personal computer company. It used to be king of the hill. It was busted when the open-ness of the IBM PC turned out to incur cluster effects.

For all we know, this post-PC era can also witness a similar disruption. esr really thinks Android is already doing it. Lets hope.

But Apple can't do open. It is not that it would "diminish returns". It is that it goes against the very company strategy. It is cute that Woz prefers not to acknowledge it, but that is all.
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Thiel isn't beholden to time cycles that the funds are. So I wouldn't read into it that Founder's wasn't interested.

This might help:
http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2010/08/vc-insanity-economics...
Yes I was paid. It wasn't much, but it was a good learning experience.
100% likelihood of being accepted. We accept everyone who can ship products.

I'm sort of with PG on this one though. I've tried to do startups alone in the past. It's such an insane amount of work, stress, and pressure that doing it alone is quite a challenge.

But if you think you can do it, we'd love to have you!
They have a reasonable diversity of backgrounds (it feels about on par with Reddit or MeFi in that regard) which leads me to think it's not entirely a tech industry phenom.

Also: they have an interesting strategy of courting mainstream media distribution; there's a "Quora" section on Slate now, for instance. They could keep doing that.

9 figure valuation? No clue. Valley numbers, agreed. Just saying.
Human mind keeps only few key details about "copyrighted works" we observed. These are not enough details stored in order to violate copyright.
Let's imagine you run the simulation when you are still alive. Are both copies you? Wouldn't each copy believe it's a full consciousness and not half a consciousness?

Assume you do a regular (or even automatic and continuous) sync between the copies. Which copy would you prefer survived, if one of them were to die?
$10k+ a month right out of college? When did this become the norm?
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For the record, I'm pretty sure this doesn't happen at Stanford. It certainly didn't happen at Georgia Tech (I placed out of Python with Java and went right into circuits and assembly. Awesome.)
I love the FNAC acronym, if only because FNAC is an actual company, not a feature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fnac
> I view quora as a highend QA website that connects me to experts.

I've thought of Quora as having everybody except experts on it. Here are the first five questions I see on Quora's quantitative finance page:

1. Who (companies or individuals) are some well-respected recruiters in quantitative finance?

2. What metrics do you use to figure out if a commodity is undervalued or overvalued?

3. For a fresh maths/stats PhD, are there any advantages to starting a career in an investment bank instead of a hedge fund?

4. What is the purpose of Financial Engineering?

5. What is the most common topic beginners struggle with when it comes to Computational Finance?

Now here are the first five I see on StackExchange's quantitative finance page:

1. Nelson-Siegel model is not arbitrage-free

2. Autocorrelation and Markov Regime-Switching

3. What are some examples of non-financial risks and contingency plans?

4. Is it ever possible that---because of illiquidity---exercising an out-of-the-money option is better than directly buying the stock?

5. What's the best way to test/validate an interest rate lattice model

Only one of these sites has experts on it. (Full disclosure: I'm a moderator on the Quant SE site. It took a lot of work to get that board up to expert level. I don't see the same kind of effort applied from Quora.)

http://www.quora.com/Quantitative-Finance

http://quant.stackexchange.com
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I'm not sure if that's the point he was making. It's that making it socially acceptable to do, is annoying. At least that's what I think he meant.
Highlight it then and read it. Or change your browser colours.
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I thought ENCOM was worth more than 50M.
By that, you mean used effectively on some of the largest, most profitable websites in the entire world? ;)
Wow I thought this too. :(
Yes, it does seem kind of low when you look at the activity compared to other sites like Stack Exchange sites. However, something I've noticed is the higher percentage of well known people answering questions on Quora. I could see them making a play for increased participation among well connected or high expertise individuals and focusing more on the quality of content rather than quantity. It would certainly be an interesting avenue to exploit should they choose to.
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Shoot me an email (contact info in profile) if you think you'd like to give interviewing a shot. Who knows, you might know more than you think!
There is an awful lot of 70s tech that is still in constant operation, and is highly relevant to the types of work you're probably doing today. TCP, C, Pipes, etc.
It might "seem" that way.

But as others have pointed out, there is indeed another major open source media player.

At what point did VLC start using the ffmpeg libraries?

If I'm not mistaken mplayer has used them since its inception.
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Apparently I wasn't fully appreciating what "internet content" is. I was assuming this referred to content that is already accessible through a browser - so yes my daughter wants to show us all something funny she saw on YouTube - we put it up on our TV rather than hunch around a monitor.
I was also assuming the discussion was about only accessing that content, not completely replacing the current cable TV model. I agree it is inevitable but we aren't actually there yet.
I'm not a big consumer of TV content but I had thought services like netflix and hulu were already taking huge steps in this arena. One (two) of the only shows I do take any interest has been available online for a long time already - Comedy Central's Daily Show and Colbert Report.

I think this situation is going to resolve itself when the generation shifts - I don't think the next generation will ever subscribe to cable the way their parents have, and the perceived tech barrier will be less with the next generation.
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Not necessarily if you're using the same metrics as Pinterest's valuation..
And in the OS X context the better form of it, MPlayerX: http://mplayerx.org/
Why is something like this being posted? It's been in the docs for ages. Seems like link bait to all the folks drooling over Python lately(of which I am).
while he may be being an asshole, your comparison is ridiculous.
This number is based on users logging in through FB connect only. From the Techcrunch story:

"According to AppData, 20K daily active users and 180K monthly active users log into Quora through Facebook Connect — Bear in mind that this is a small fraction of its total number of users, which Cheever and D’Angelo famously never reveal."
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I have FUD about patent trolls
I have fear, uncertainty and doubts about patent trolls. What should I do if the patent trolls ask me for too much money and I run out of money? What do you do when you are sued?
Aren't they trying to eliminate illegal BitTorrent traffic?
You are a hoot.
Lord knows I wish I were "overwhelemed" with resumes. Unfortunately I'm not sure everyone experiences the flood he mentions...
So if these incredibly mature and robust systems are an 'operational nightmare' I'd like to hear what software systems ARE up to your operational standards?

How often did you manage to spectacularly fail PostgreSQL to qualify it an 'operational nightmare'?
I know these are your heuristics, but find it quite puzzling that you think the average web designer using ASP or Windows is an immediate rejection. What are you saying here?
Yeah, I did something like that -- put off a digital electronics lab course until my last semester. I was so engaged in my pet project by that point that I almost completely blew off the lab course. They were very generous to give me a D so I could graduate :-)
The announcement mentions that the iPhone does not support QuickTime. Is this a sign that QuickTime is on its way out?
I didn't upvote this because of the Buchanan note - although I found it fascinating - but because of the discussion on "chronological ethnocentrism." Worth considering...
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I'm not a huge fan of this .net hate. It smacks of fashion. Yes, .net is used heavily in the enterprise and probably 90% of the time .net projects are CRUDdy big balls of mud, but C# is actually a great language, visual studio is an amazing environment and (from what I hear) ASP.NET MVC is pretty great too. A good hacker who made the informed choice to use windows and .net would get unfairly penalised here. Just because it isn't cool doesn't mean you should throw the baby out with the bathwater.

(I speak as an OS X/emacs/go/prolog/javascript/... hacker, who was up until recently using .net/C# a lot)
from this answer and your blog post it appears you were not using mongodb replica sets. is this true?
Regardless of what happened, I don't think Toy Story 2 really would have been lost. The writers and animators would at least be able to recreate the general idea from what they remembered.
Generic software development posts on craigslist can often net you a flood of resumes -- there's quite a few unqualified people you have to filter through
What about Apple TV? I agree, the TV based systems are "clunky", but Apple TV works perfectly, and Roku only seems to have hickups with slower internet connections.

I have an answer for Time Warner's CEO -- "there was no simple way to get Internet-based video onto the television screen" -- Apple TV is easy. There is nothing about modern cable that is that easy. Last time I moved I did not reconnect my cable. I never plan on intentionally becoming a cable customer again in my life.
Indeed I am!
lol "Windows is a deal breaker?"

I know quite a few RoR/Java/Linux/Unix sys admins who still use Windows on the desktop (inc. me).

OS choice shouldn't be a deal breaker.

Is having a Windows Phone also a deal breaker?

As a side point, is there really that much difference between OSX/Windows now a days? I've have Macbook Pro's, Imacs and Windows things as main machines and nowadays I don't see that much difference between them (esp if you're working on web dev). From Mac -> Windows or back seems like just a new novelty tech to learn not a deal breaker any more. From your article it seems unlikely that Mac OSX or Windows is running your servers anyway.

(Same with Android vs iPhone - both are so similar now)