skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you live 50 years from today you'll probably live 1000, but if you live 1000 years you'll probably live until the fundamental laws of physics leave no possible means for your survival. Why would you stop at the limits of biology?
Buzhug: a pure-Python database engine (no SQL)
There's no business in doing this more than once, but you could definitely have a squad of gorgeous young people wear the shirts as a campaign effort in Palo Alto or something.
Oh, whoops - I assumed it was a critique-my-site style post. Thanks.
Looks that way. Of course I can only speculate about the reasons, but if I were in his position I'd turn down a Google offer.
That's interesting, I actually plan to use half of my time scheduled to do practical programming using Erlang. But this is only for the first month, where I want to set up a good understanding of the language, then I can use it for real projects. I totally agree that practice is the best thing to do.
The Art of SATergy: Excerpt from game theory book concerning multiple choice
That is hilarious. If you call and ask for permission they may send you some glue to put it back together.
Escondido Asphalt
Escondido Asphalt offers California's most environmentally friendly asphalt facility. We employ the latest Blue Smoke Control System
[Book review] The Art of Debugging with GDB,DDD and Eclipse
Dell Studio XPS 13 leather-wrapped laptop revealed
I think Buddhism has very good explanation for such questions. I suggest you read some good Buddhist books or find someone who has a good knowledge about Lord Buddha's teachings (probably a Buddhist monk)
Good Luck finding answers!
Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits
Since posting this I checked the speed comparison page where buzhug is shown to perform well against some lesser known databases and poorly against SQLight. Now any new code base is going to start off slow but it begs a question. If you are aiming to serve the same niche as SQLight then why not simply develop a pure Python API for the SQLight database and get the best of both worlds? That way you could keep the Python abstraction clean and take advantage of a fast and very well tested database engine.
Apple TV at the center of Apple's latest lawsuit
That's current sales, not factoring in the devices that already exist which would give a large edge to WinMO.
NPR Now Lets You Roll Your Own Podcast Feed
Are you shitting me? I told my brother in law who drives trucks for a living (very non-geeky) about Android and 48 hours later he had hacked his HT Touch from Sprint to run a dev version of Android. He hates the baked in OS and absolutely loves Google's OS even with massive bugs (due to the hack) I told him in a year he's see dozens of phones with Android pre installed and he's already looking to ditch his months-old phone because of it.
In the past two weeks, I have done a huge amount to increase my productivity and manage my 'habit'. I have tripled my RescueTime (YC W07) productivity score in a matter of days, here's how I did it:

* LeechBlock for Firefox. There's always ways "around" these blocks, but it's more of a matter of disincentivizing the bad behavior, not disabling it.

* Use a feed reeder, keep it off.

* Working in an office. I've been telecommute contractor for 6 months now. I recently started working onsite for a company, and it's done wonders.

* Watching the "Productivity for Programmers" screencast at PeepCode. I am very anti-self-help, but this screencast has a lot of very helpful, practical advice rooted in common sense and backed by science.

Most of the advice my wife had been trying to tell me for months, but it took Lars Pind's explanation to really crack through my thick skull. It's not even about going through "the motions" of setting goals and all that. It's more about being able to ask your self - "what am I doing? Is this really productive?" - and being able to know when you're being genuine and when your brain is lying to yourself.
How Google Earth helped Mumbai attackers
I did think of it, but deemed myself not hot enough to pull it off. There's also http://www.girlinyourshirt.com
Another neat home office FAQ
For an interesting take on this, see Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Many of the cyborgs and secretary-bots have expandable spider fingers that type at lightning speed. People without augmentation can still use the keyboards, so it's device and space efficient and keyboards are dirt cheap and the keys can take a lot of pounding.
Wikipedia should display ads and donate surplus to charity
Coding Horror: Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive
> Efficient debugging can't be done without a debugger(but that sounds pretty obvious...still... there is evidence of people who doubt this or even disagree!). Of course, you can use printf and output variable values all you want, but that won't get you far and you'll still be a blind-foldedly
searching a needle in a haystack.

I strongly disagree with this statement. I only use debuggers for extreme situations and find that a good understanding of the code, thinking about the problem and a few well placed prints is all that's necessary for most debugging.
You all could be perfectly designed robots that are tricking me into believing you're also humans who experience consciousness.

If you rebuilt humans with whatever technology (we might use transistors, nature used neurons), how would they be different from real humans then? Why would you call the robot a trickster while saying you are no doubt conscious?
If you divorce all the products of consciousness from consciousness itself, then you could say consciousness doesn't matter. Also, any particular product of consciousness is easily produced without it. Given that evolution stumbled on consciousness, I think it's plausible that within the constraints of biology, consciousness is the simplest way to produce the behavior we associate with it.
Lessons learned from a real-world focus on performance
I actually have a hard time understanding what you can do with all this hardware. The monitors; ok. Monitor real-estate is important since you don't have to use time and effort to shuffle all the windows you want to use. But what about the rest of the systems, two laptops and three servers?

I've read Stefan Didak's home office description as well, and he says that having a massive amount of storage and cycles can help you if you're doing complicated work. Does someone have an example of jobs that become easier with 4 terabytes of local storage and thirty CPU cores? It seems to me the overhead of administrating these kinds of system would dwarf any benefit.

Obviously I am wrong, but how? This stuff looks fun, and it definitely sounds fun to be more effective than your peers by making "unacceptable" choices regarding the tools you use.

[Edit: If you have the same questions, have a look at http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/04/03/home-office-usa.... It's really cool.]
Financial Twitter Feed Aggregator StockTwits Raises $800,000
That's true, but most people really mean artificially generated consciousness when they say "AI". A few people, like Yudkowsky, really don't, but the original post here was about consciousness, not really powerful optimization processes.
"better suited for a philosopher rather than a biologist" just means that not enough is known about the subject to speculate usefully.

Usually.
I use a text based wiki synced via git. The advantage for me to use a text based system is that I can access it from different text editors, without the pain of custom vendors formats. For example I'm currently using textmate with this plugin: http://interconnected.org/home/more/2007/05/textmate-wiki/ but you can find macros for all the major text editors.
No, it doesn't really. Buddhism doesn't concern itself with the question of "why." That's ego talking.
When I started as a programmer in the late 70s the relationship between hardware costs and programmer costs were just about the reverse to those described by Jeff. It was always cheaper to optimise the code than it was to invest in new hardware. I must admit that it is hard to shrug off the frugal approach to the hardware that I adopted at the start of my developer career - I think it still pays off to err on the side of low hardware overhead whenever the option arises.
I'll give you $8k and two months this summer. If you come up with an answer, we'll both get rich.
I recommend either Gary Drescher's "Good and Real", or the relevant parts of Overcoming Bias (which aren't exactly collected into one place yet).
Dude, there's lots of empirical evidence that introducing certain chemicals into a human body result in certain feelings. It's not 100%, but it's pretty causal.
I didn't infer that she was a transexual from the name change; I read it when looking for the name change.
The problem that started illegal filesharing still exists: the music industry still hasn't developed an acceptable and effectual model of digital content delivery for end users.
Love the site, but they seriously need to clean up the amount of illegal ebooks being shared.

I mean, http://www.scribd.com/search?query=wrox&x=0&y=0 says it all doesn’t it.

Wouldn’t even be hard to filter this out, anything uploaded over 200 pages should be investigated.

Ofcourse, much of their growth may come from these illegal downloads (we don't know)... So until they start getting complains, they'll probably let it slide: the youtube way.

Edit: what the... I posted this comment on techcrunch a few hours ago, and now I recheck the search results, all 600+ ebooks seem to have disappeared.

No matter, just search for something else. Plenty of examples still. Seems they deleted this quickly perhaps because of the comment, but are not addressing it globally.
Yes, the leverage the banks asked for was a bad idea. Coincidentally, 4/5 of those banks either don't exist or don't do i-banking.

But quants along with other strats (macro, long/short, etc) all had bad risk management models. You can't blame only program trading when there was so much human error.

Also: quants (meaning algorithmic trading) did not show how MBS were good. That was human error; Moody's and S&P ratings, for example.
Why not follow both your passions AND the opportunities around you? Why does it have to be an either/or thing?

If you're passionate about something, chances are you'll spot opportunities to do it. "Follow your opportunities" is good advice, but this article fails to realise that some (most?) of us won't feel that we've fulfilled our purpose in life (irrespective of religious considerations - I'm talking about that sense of self-fulfillment you get when you're doing something you think is worthwhile) if we spend it castrating lamb with our teeth.

So follow your passion AND your opportunities. Don't settle for only one.
I like http://hnr.dnsalias.net/wordpress/ . And just reading the papers that won awards at VLDB and SOSP.
RTFA. In the interview, it's mentioned that most of the expense was in infrastructure on the company's end for handling the call switching technology. This part of the investment would probably work as is when they announce the BlackBerry and Android versions of the client app. They just chose to try and deploy on the iPhone first due to its buzz and early adopter momentum.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=403320

EDIT: This is the first social bookmarking site where I feel like I should have the ability to link the same comment as a reply to multiple messages. I don't even remember wishing for this back in my USENET days. How can the userbase of this site be so clever and intelligent, but yet seem so redundant in the posted responses?
I checked. They're .github.com. Dunno why I was downvoted, I was right.
Does that copy link work for people in Firefox? Fails in FF+Mac for me
There's not redirect trick, the cookies are just set to .github.com.

I didn't say anything about JavaScript being disallowed, the cookies are HttpOnly. So I said that you can't do things on the server.
They probably qualify for the DMCA safe harbor so one of the few incentives to act are complaints. Also, one can assume they are getting complaints given the volume of documents they host.
This is a ridiculous myth that I wish we could just put to rest once and for all. If your overpaid programmers are writing O(n^2) algorithms then that cheap hardware is going to get expensive real quick. Even if hardware was free you still need to put it somewhere, power it, cool it and so on. There's no excuse for sloppy coding.
I think his point is that, dude, there's a lot of empirical evidence that by introducing certain electrical charges into a computing device results in certain outputs. In other words, he's saying that when you say "You change the chemical composition of the body in X way, and this causes feelings," everything after 'way' is redundant.
Ha, it's zero docs, but it still says 658 up in the tab. It's a cat-and-mouse game and I certainly don't envy them.

Congrats fellas and ladies!
I imagine it's exactly the youtube way. Bootstrapping from illicit content to legitimate content. scribd is probably the second biggest repository of illegal books online (after irc book bots) and probably the easiest to use.
The Silicon Valley tech celeb quiz
Protecting e-mail confidentiality
News Quiz: The week in tech
I don't recall seeing implementation details in OB, and the description of that book doesn't indicate there are any in there, either. Of course, that's because the real answer is "no one understands it, yet". A bunch of jargon and entertaining stories can be used to show that some proposed implementation isn't the right answer, sometimes, but it can't be the answer.
Computer ownership by country
Optical computing: Bouncing ideas around
Dataopedia: All You Need To Know About A Website
Mine definitely has limited utility! But no less utility than ifart or whatever. I guess I'll give it a shot. It won't bias them against my future submissions, right?
That's not evidence, it's just a story. I could offer a better OS than most phones, and a good percentage of people would switch. What the people like is not 'android', it's multitouch, organisation and so on. If people really jump on the UI bandwagon, whoever wrote the OS in the phone will make their own OS look that way too. What does Android offer then?

Maybe I'm wrong - we'll see in a couple of years. But looking at things from the perspective of now, Google has bungled this big time. OS Platforms are a market with a lot of money behind it, and the mobile OS market has people with money that can rival googles and a lot more experience.

Google can win if the people want Android. And right now, the people don't care.

I can match your anecdote with one of my own - a geeky friend of mine wanted to get a new phone. He liked Android, since it would be like the iPhone but more open. He waited, and then that fugly phone came out. And a few weeks later, Nokia came up with a phone with just as nice an interface, but with well designed hardware. He went with Nokia.
I'd be rather curious to see how advanced the Android hackers have gotten. Something I'd really like to see would be the ability to run apps outside the standard Android framework/jail, so that those with a dev phone straight from Google could, for instance, run an SSH server, or run X11 apps written in C/Python/etc.

I have a Freerunner, and I like being able to write my apps in Python/Gtk, and while the Android port for it looks really interesting (once Android finally gets a real on-screen keyboard that is), I don't want to give up my ability to write in a language that isn't Java.

Edit: and the Dev1 case looks a lot better than the standard G1, too. ;)
nice article dude
congrats clickpass!!!
It's about time!

Soon enough to save the music industry? Probably not. But at least, many thousands of people who, 10 years from now, would be considered totally innocent and within their rights, won't have to go through this needless nightmare.

On the downside, it sounds like they're planning to get the ISPs to do their dirty work for them, which no doubt the larger ISPs will willingly bend over to. Good bye net neutrality.

The recording industry needs to go bust in a hurry. (and without bailouts)
I wonder how effective a prize like this is for marketing? I've been considering doing a prize for http://utilitymill.com. I certainly couldn't do 25K, but maybe $500. Would that be enough to entice people? Think it would be worth it?

I don't see a lot of legal stuff for this resolver prize. Is that not really necessary?
What are the options? The current .99/song method, $20/month stream-all-you-want, or possibly a per month fee for a universal licence. (Then, instead of suing downloaders, they could just force them to pay the fee--not too onerous.)
5 Exciting Things to Look Forward to in HTML 5
Sorry, I should have spotted that!
I got the impression he was trying to focus his free time rather than be more productive.
InfoQ: Rhodes Brings Ruby Apps to iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry
Blog Writing Techniques and Resources
Sophie Wilson, formerly Roger Wilson, designed the ARM's instruction set. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson

Also wrote the BBC BASIC ROMs used on Acorn computers in 6502, and later BBC BASIC V (five) in ARM. (ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine.) Being able to successfully run the 6502 BASIC ROM is considered a test of how good a 6502 emulator is; his 16KiB of machine code, generated from hand-written assembler, used every trick of the CPU to squeeze in the code. This meant that when the BBC Master 128 came along, with its slightly later 6502 deriative, he could re-write some of it to use the new op-codes, taking less space, and thereby getting in a few more BASIC commands.
You should checkout my post-commit script. It does essentially this, but for remote checkouts over SSH.

http://htrm.designsauce.org
Hmmm. Some of the jobs are extreme examples but a smart kid I knew since he was a toddler - when he graduated from high school in his valedictory address said, "Work doesn't necessarily make you happy. but it may give you to means to do the stuff that makes you happy."

There is a point that some of the most profitable jobs are those that people don't like to do and/or niches.
Maybe a robot that perfectly mimics a human does have consciousness, but we don't know that, and I don't think we can know. That's all I'm saying.

For all I know I'm the only "being" in existence who really has this thing called consciousness that I know I experience, and all the rest of you aren't really "real".

I don't know why that would be, but it's a scary thought. Kind of like "The Matrix"...
I really like the custom tag names rather than constantly doing <div id="something">.
Cures for the Inevitable
Yeah I'm with you - I can see the need for two systems, one for real work and the other for all the other crap (email, music, etc) but not 6. I wonder if it's like getting tattoos - once you get more than one, it spirals until you're covered.
I'd very quickly pay a monthly fee for a universal license, provided it's free of DRM and anything like it, lets me use it how I want and pretty much exhibit the common sense rights that come when you purchase something.
You can git clone it from http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/tinybootstrap.git if you like.
An interesting application of game theory to standardized testing. For the record, the single best approach to learning to score better on standardized tests is to read avidly in the language of the test. Here's how I put it in a FAQ message for high school students:

READ, READ

To learn how to score well on a standardized test reading section, the number one piece of advice is READ, READ, READ, and READ. Read about what you like to know more about. Read things that are fun for you. Find books and magazines about interesting topics and read them. Turn off the TV and read. Put away the video game controller and read. Read hard things, and read easy things. Read a lot.

For years, I wondered why it came so readily to mind to write "READ, READ, READ" in all capital letters like that when I give advice on this subject, as I have frequent occasion to do. Recently, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original).

Also for the record, the SSAT test used by some secondary schools is not developed by as elaborate a process as the SAT test used for college admission. There is a rather higher likelihood that the SSAT will have poorly constructed questions. But for any entrance test, the first form of effective preparation is to read widely and avidly.
putting python code in spreadsheet files?

sounds like a security nightmare unless they sandbox with pypy.
If *forge, as you say, had at least decent and responsive service with CVS and SVN then perhaps it might be worth it for some people. But it doesn't! It needs to die.
Browser version 10 the new Y2K
consciousness is simply the state of being responsive to one's environment.

it can boil down as far as gauging the responses of one neuron, but the "environment" of that neuron is its connectivity to others, so it's far more comprehensive to total consciousness up as the whole collective.

ideally, you'd be able to single out a singular and distinct "thought" and trace the workings of all your cognitive elements involved. the result of this thought then loops back through the system and re-patterns it with a "conclusion".

the chemical nature of one's neurons is the important part whether malleable or incorrigible, allowing us to exhibit unique traits and personality.
This is Nick from Lion Burger, the folks behind Snipt. We're still toying with some better copy functionality - our current solution is a little flaky. Stay tuned, thanks!
a per month fee for a universal license

That's it, most likely. Sooner or later this will be the most viable strategy for making money on music. Even if the internet were turned off tomorrow, the continuing presence of rippable media (analog media, if nothing else), the easy availability of ripping tools, the fact that most people can't hear the difference between a really good recording and a merely average one, and the prevalence of terabyte hard drives with ever-falling prices means that sooner or later we will all have the recording industry's entire back catalog stored in our homes. It's just a question of how much time it will take, and whether the primary medium of transmission will be P2P downloading or face-to-face swapping of the contents of physical storage media.

Ironically, perhaps the best way to prevent the music lover of the year 2020 from energetically acquiring his or her own private Universal Music Library is to give out reasonably priced universal licenses. Once I know that I don't have to own my own copy of (e.g.) the complete works of Yanni -- that, if I ever feel some strange desire to listen to them, or to force someone else to listen to them, I can always P2P them from NapTorrent 4.0 in three minutes without any additional cost, difficulty, or risk -- I won't actually have to own them. The cloud can take on that task.
Check out "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter, he tackles that question and argues from the point of view that hard ai is possible. Check out "Emperor's new mind" by roger penrose for a conflicting viewpoint. Both books will teach you much, much more than it's central thesis and is a tour through other important topics in science.

Also, you might find the brain science podcast ( http://brainsciencpodcast.wordpress.com ) interesting. She tackles some of these questions also, summarizes current research and interviews other people in the field.
How to see in stereo on your iPhone