skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hrm. I guess the guy cited in my online journal was really thinking ahead:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/12/04/the-economics-of-progr...

It's an extract from a paper from the 1950'ies by Backus (yeah, that Backus) saying pretty much exactly what Atwood says.
Ah. Israel has more computers than people.
Microsoft joining the ranks of referrer spammers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_L...
That seems more to the point, being that it's US-based. Thanks for the link. Here's Victor Wong, the Yale student who started paperg, talking about it in this article:

http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/23170
I'd asked about the application of Benford's law to the Madoff case in a previous thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396942); this is one take.

Note from the item's comments, though, that someone else ran the same analysis and came to a different conclusion:

http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/benfords-law-catches-...

(There's also some discrepancy in the numbers each used, so I expect further corrections.)
Samsung i8510 INNOV8 16GB, 8 MP
Samsung i8510 INNOV8 16GB Unlocked Alright let’s go through the checklist. 3G Yup, Digital Camera 8 Megapixel, Wi-fi Yup Large display 2.8 Inches. Internal memory 8-16 Gigabytes. Is this the phone for you.
You've linked to a PNG file and said "see! semantic web!"

I tried to dig into it, looking for some data and to see what you are talking about, and I finally find a piece of RDF, real semantic web stuff:
http://dbtune.org:3030/sparql/?query=describe%20%3Chttp://db...

Um, ok. Now what? This is short XML file containing links, half of which are dead. The biggest problems with SW is that no one agreed on the labels, inputs and outputs, and that there are no mechanisms for data preservation or trust.

How have those been solved now?

(edit) I'm not hating on the idea, btw. It just doesn't seem to be a technological problem. It's a social one. The second you find a way to get people to structure their data for fun & profit, the SW will blossom. And then it will be spammed. And then someone will find a way to index it and filter out the spam, and by then it will be something good, but quite different from what was intended.

I am genuinely curious to know what has changed in the last few years that academics now take SW for granted.
>"Will the web ever learn?"

No
Can you describe the most convincing evidence for reincarnation?
That is very interesting. Know of any good links about the non self-aware people?
Top Digital Lifestyle products of 2008
Intelligent soldiers most likely to die in battle (WW2 case study)
No I'd say that the last 10 years have shown that this question is actually better answered by biology than by philosophy (who haven't come up with a decent answer in 1000s of years).
Chimpanzees have actually genetically progressed more than us since divergence. http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=5808
The Upside of a Down Economy
Seth's Blog: Interesting new media charity efforts
Maybe a little off-topic, but something I've been thinking of for a while. Has anyone ever tried to build a mesh network of nodes that react to signals and fire outputs? I'd to build a few million of these and evolve them to see if they'd ever do anything interesting.

Does anyone know if anyone is working on something like this?
They need to seriously get rid of that flash viewer or at least provide a link to a real pdf.
thanks for this. I will work on it.
One approach is to say consciousness is properly basic like science assumes matter and/or energy are/is.
I recommend Dennet's book. In a nutshell, his thesis is that our subjective experience of consciousness in the here-and-now is an illusion, that what's really going on is the brain is writing and re-writing its memories to build up an internal model that is consistent with all the sensory input its receiving. This crazy-sounding idea is actually consistent with experimental results. You aren't really conscious, you just think you are. :-)

You might also enjoy: http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf, especially sections 5 and 6.
Yes, I'm interested in this too. I knew Israel is tech-savvy (lots of startups, etc.), but I didn't expect this statistic to be so high.

Are there any Israelis here that could shed light on this?
Mocklinkr - design mockup review service
Neat little application! And Hecl is a great up-and-coming programming language.
Why do people find the "illusion" response helpful?

"How do Newtonian physics, quantum physics, and relativity work together? Don't worry about it, the physical world is just an illusion, and illusions aren't rational."
Which looks good on film, but in reality I rather suspect that a cyborg with a USB interface would be more efficient.
This argument works only for enterprise/server development, where hardware is under your control.

When developing for the consumer market, hardware is not "expensive", hardware is simply not available: users control their hardware, and even the argument of "ever increasing gigabytes and gigahertz" doesn't work anymore, as more and more prefer to trade speed for increased portability or (surprise!) smaller price.
yiiiiiiiiiiiikes
The iPhone is also locked to one carrier in the following countries: UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Japan, Venezuela and many more. Unlocked iPhones are offered in relatively few countries.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1937
As Andrew Gregory already noticed, we're the first browser ever to release with a two-digit version number.

First browser with over 1% market share, but not first ever.

W3C's Amaya - http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ - is at version 11.

Avant - http://www.avantbrowser.com/ - is at 11.7.
The .github.com cookie is old and useless. You can't use it to do anything - it's a relic of our old authentication system. We should have made sure they were deleted before switching to the new cookie as it's caused some confusion.

What mojombo said is accurate. (He's a GitHub co-founder and I'm the person who wrote the redirect code.)
Please see my other comment. You cannot get user login information from Pages.
Also against the switch view;
It well migth be a replica of the evolution process; a little being w only a couple of neurons that handle simple proceses, and by iteration grows to a more complex being.
That would also correspond w the natural pattern of growth.
I assume 2000 years ago some people would live about that long. It's going to be a smaller percentage of a smaller population but the are reasonably healthy 105 year old people in the world today so I assume there were a few back then.
"not be aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent (512(c)(1)(A)(2))."

"not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity (512(c)(1)(B))."
I dont view reincarnation as "me" waking up in some other body in some other time;
IMHO it has to be on a gene level, "me" is just a bunch of genes wich have learned and contribute to the general pool.
Or something like that.
Ah, enough people say programming languages should be terse that I thought that's exactly what you meant.

Concise is clear and short, terse is less characters but unreadable.
Android? PS3? I thought the conventional wisdom was that these are doing poorly.
Well, then anything adaptive is "reincarnation." You might as well just call it "adaptation," then, instead of redefining another word.
The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur:

MLstate - currently in stealth mode - is an IT company, whose functional programming approach to SaaS and cloud computing has been recently recognized by the French Ministry of Research Innovation Award and support from leading investors.

We are research-oriented, we value technical excellence and innovation and we believe our technology has a potential to dramatically change the way web applications are being built.

MLstate opens several new permanent positions to meet this challenge:

* Senior Developers: Outstanding PhDs with at least 3 years of research experience in functional languages and/or formal verification and the ability to manage a small technical team.
* Developers: PhDs with strong FP skills. Applications from PhD students defending their thesis soon are also welcome.
Conceptually, its an illusion in the sense that theres "something" doin interpretation between the "real" things and our brain; in the zen koan of the tree that fells, it migth not be doing any sound because theres no brain processing the wave and telling someone that a tree falled.
I have to agree with monk.e.boy's assessment that they're probably just checking for cloaking. That's not exactly an exotic technique.
This is a concern for a customer. If you don't see how the company is making money, how can you be confident they will be around long? Especially for a product like a website you don't want to bother moving elsewhere if the company goes belly up.
<canvas> is already here and supported by all major browsers. Except IE, of course.
Id recommend reading Godel Escher Bach.

It talks about how complex things can be built from simple building blocks.

There really are no answers other than it is impossible to exclude such complexity from a system.
Aside from the usual self enrichment activities. I would set up a foundation that does many small unique services to a community.
Examples:
Go around to different communities to offer free construction to link up sidewalks to make it more pedestrian friendly.
Consulting and financing to small shoppes so they can stay unique and viable against large competitors.
Setup free clinics that solely cater to helping people sleep more restfully.
Gojomo...You didn't upload your logo or name of your search. Just click on each item (background, search bar, etc) and a color box will pop up.
Um, no. I'm a "formerly autistic" (the irony should freak you) researcher in (classical) information theory and linguistics. You will hopefully get your answer at linguistics.name, when I get around to it. There is no charge to just learn the material. I do claim to own the theory itself, So you can't teach it without a license from me. Life is hard y'know?
We (western people) own that to the rationalist notion that anything thats spiritual, mistic, esoteric, has to be the complete opposite of rational.
Theres no one or the other, both notions has to be part ot the Truth, if some theory dispises one or the other, it cannot lead to the Truth.
I was supporting your point. What made it sarcastic, the use of "Right?"
It depends on who you ask, but there are two general camps: the bottom-up approach and the top-down approach (neuroscience and psychology, respectfully).

I believe it to be a side product of response to stimulus (neurons firing off). If I'm right, we're going to have a lot of fun with interfaces in the next 20 or so years. I'm a big believer in emergent neuropsychology (the functional programming version of brain science).

I'm not going to delve into the top-down approach because you get a lot of other really cool theories, but a lot of it has to to with perception ("Is this red the same color to me as it is to you (other than just naming this color red)?").

In response to your edit, I'm pretty sure that neurons start firing before birth but neurons are interconnected in a multi-dimensional graph, so it's pretty much a chain reaction that gets influenced depending on external (or internal) stimulus.

I believe that when we take both the bottom-up and the top-down approach and meet in the middle, we will have a true AI... but I'm guessing it'll be based on a non-vonNeumann architecture.
"I've been thinking about the first time I castrated a lamb with my teeth."

Suddenly, my job satisfaction sitting here programming just went up a notch.
IBM's BlueGene/L
Statistics :( Just add another variable - officer or soldier - and the conclusion can be reversed. Clearly no causation here: higher percentage of officers died, and officers were smarter.
In a short story of JL Borges (and in a lot of other places, im sure):
"the road is the goal"
(veeery loosely translated from spanish)
It depends on what you're trying to do. Most phones I've used can be operated with one hand, blindly, to do common tasks (raise/lower vol. silence call).

The biggest problem, though, is that modern portable devices /need/ the expressiveness of a keyboard. Which is why devices like the Blackberry, the sidekick, etc. took off.

The touchscreen changes some of that, but, from what I hear, it doesn't quite work as well.
I've never been to 'Canda' so I can't speak to the issue.
O(N^2) forgets that in most cases it's really more like K * O(N^2) + I and reducing the size of K can have dramatic impact because it tends to be more than 10,000 cycles. For a wide range of inputs a low latency N^2 can be faster than a high latency n * Log n because thrashing you cache is really bad.

The basic question you need to ask is how much are you spending on hardware / bandwidth vs coders and which is better to focus on.
What I mean by "consciousness is an illusion" is that consciousness does not exist. It is a non issue. Again in this thread as in any other discussion on consciousness, nobody has given a definition of consciousness. There is nothing meaningful to talk about.

On the other hand, the physical world exists, or at least out perception of it exists. You might say that you also perceive consciousness, but honestly, what is it you perceive? I don't think it is the same as perceptions of physical things.
I don't think the world is an illusion - but rather our perception of the world is.

We only see a very limited spectrum of light, but we don't realize the massive gaps we cannot see. All of our senses are a tiny pinhole into the world, and we base our reality on them. Our sense of smell is a fraction of other mammals, we really don't notice that a dog could be smelling 20 things in a room that we don't notice.

Not that we really have any other option, but I am just trying to explain the 'illusion' of it.
is there an easier way of finding the relevant bits of overcoming bias?
is there someplace that links to the beginning of serial posts?
Profit from the next two weeks of intense polishing and releasing my product week 1 of January 09!
The new Napster is $15 a month. I can listen my music on any computer and on my portable mp3 player. The artists and labels get paid based on which music I listen to.

The DRM really isn't a big deal, because I can listen from anywhere with internet without even installing software. It's "Music As A Service" and it seems very fair and reasonable to me.

To be honest, my only complaint with Napster is that Apple refuses to let their hardware be interoperable.
Number 3 seems interesting...

If it catches on, architecture classes might get higher precedence in curricula. Moreover, it might unify (to some extent) the theoretical background around hardware and software.
a common thread seems to be working outside and/or working with animals. I'm convinced that there are qualities to these jobs that resonate more with our innate (evolved) abilities than a desk / programming job. I'm thinking of taking 3-4 months off to volunteer in a national park (or something like that) between my current job and my next
I believe they mean Canadia.
So take biology out of the discussion, and consider consciousness in a computer system. If a program is self-aware, is it conscious? Or is there more to consciousness than that? Why don't conscious computer programs exist if we already understand how consciousness works? Would it be ethical to reboot that program, if it existed?

Biology can explain how neurons in the brain (computer) works. It can also potentially explain how thought and logic play out (program logic). But how do you explain consciousness in this metaphor? this.isRunning? Or does it make more sense to say that even if we understood all of biology, there are still things that we won't fully understand?
But at least for Web 2.0 it is possible to give a definition of what it is supposed to be. I have yet to see such a thing for consciousness.
The choices aren't based on sales but other factors such as innovation, features, ease of use etc. How much they have changed the game as it were.
More about this guy Markopolos - http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ihAaFD-AY7...
Actually I can't stand to read documents on Scribd. I would much rather just gave the PDF to view instead on an in-browser type of thing. In fact I am looking into removing it from all my searches because it's gotten to the point of me just closing the tab when u realize it's a Scribd page. :/
The list is from 2006. It would be interesting to see the current numbers for Brazil and Russia given their supposed ascendancy. Plus, half the world's population live in China and India, neither of which is on the list.
I posted a few responses on my blog http://leveragingideas.com
You need to register, then they provide you with the option of downloading the PDF.
Thank you.

I was about to make the same comment and also point out that even int the most un-brainy situations brains help.

I recall a study that showed higher IQ toddlers are less likely to die in an accident. Even in our super child safe words, even with toddlers, brains go a long way.

But then again higher IQ might correlate with higher family income which correlates with more parental attention... that's statistics for you.
bah.. i was thinking something more along the lines of "dumb" nodes that have very simple reactions to incoming signals. It would be really interesting to apply this research:

Synchronization from Disordered Driving Forces in Arrays of Coupled Oscillators

http://www.physics.wustl.edu/Fac/WesselPublications/2006Bran...

to more of a neurological model.
There's nothing wrong with your advice. The problem is that too many people think they must find their passion in their work and that's a tall order to fill. Far easier to work to pay the bills and indulge your passions after that's done.
JavaME is dozens of devices across almost all networks, and that never meant success for the platform (if compared to the 1 device 1 network that apple introduced)...
bonus point! cred. your wow score. dollars indicated by an abstract number in a computer. What's the diff? I notice that universities seem to have become profit centers to scam parents wealth and create student debt. I would rather go to a free university to learn and only to learn. That I might get a piece of paper some day means as much to me as the share price for a startup.

this has not been a test
"What does surprise me is the fact that everybody I've met on this gig--with the possible exception of the lamb--seems to be having a ball."

I love Mike Rowe's sense of humor. Even if I did scream in revulsion when I read the first paragraph.
I bet there will be a study that shows how smarter people lost more during current crisis.
your 'very non-geeky' brother managed to hack a smartphone and uses a dev version of Android?
Ask him to send in his resume... we're hiring truck-driving hackers in here!
But if they do their job well they'll end up decreasing their own funding as businesses become more legitimate.
Study some ethology.
The Recording Industry Decides To Stop Suing Its Customers
It was basically introduced in the book mentioned in the above post. You can read more about bicameralism here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

(I'm pretty sure it's been disproved since, but he put forward a very interesting theory)

edit: err use the entire link, the parens didn't get included.
There are two methods for investigating consciousness; One subjective, the other objective. The first is philosophical, the second is a physical. And they should lead to the same answer.

Both sides will claim their method to be the right one. And from time to time one will seem better than the other. But ultimately, some questions will be left unanswered. And both methods will break down. And you will want to fill in the gaps.

But you'll realize that one may complement the other. And you may decide the course ... but you'll never be sure.
Ask YN: Review my new side project, Netbook Tracker
Netbooks are my new favorite gadget. I bought one a few months back, but it was a pain to compare all the models and decide (I ended up with the Acer Aspire One A110 and highly recommend it). So to make it easier I created a database that makes it a whole lot easier.

http://www.netbooktracker.com

Basically a niche buyers guide. The code's abstracted, so it can easily be used to power different verticals. People seem to be enjoying it so far, the average visitor goes through 7 pages in a visit. It's still a bit confusing to use at the moment, so I'm hoping for some good advice here.

Browse through the site and when you see a model you're interested in, hit compare. It creates what amounts to a shopping cart of models you're interested in. When you have more than two selected, the comparison page does its magic. This is still a bit confusion, so if anyone has ideas I'm all ears.
sample size: 490 people

iq difference between living and dead: 3 iq points

statistically significant?
Cool. Maybe it's just my flu-addled brain, but it would be handy to have a way to search that's a bit more point-and-click.

Where'd you get the data?
I disagree with that. I enjoy what I'm doing, I'm passionate about it, and having done it the other way as well, I wouldn't change back. It's great to wake up in the morning and think "Yes! I'm going to spend all day working!" without a trace of sarcasm.

Some people may be able to do a job that they hate, but it saps my soul.
Does Google count?
Firefox and Opera are both backed Ogg Theora [1] [2]. WebKit (Safari and, I guess?, Chrome) looks like it has QuickTime formats with more being supported down the road [3]. (These are all pretty old articles I remember from the top of my head. I'd predict that the body of video formats will probably stabilize soon with Theora winning.)

[1]: http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/05/support-for-html-video-...

[2]: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/a-call-for-video-on-the-w...

[3]: http://webkit.org/blog/140/html5-media-support/
But they are adding text support to <canvas>, and for that I celebrate. I look forward to not drawing my graph labels with the Hershey vector fonts.
Officers and non-commissioned officers made up for about 7% and 20% of war deaths respectively.

So officers made up 27% of deaths there, not a higher percentage.
Another way to put it: if you ask "how can we build a bridge", I am not going to respond by saying "the physical world is an illusion, so building bridges is useless". On the other hand, if you ask "how can we build a conscious entity", I will say the question is meaningless. If you ask instead "how can we build an entity that can have a discussion on Hacker News", we have something to talk about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network

Is that what you mean?
I didn't know that. I guess I got the impression from some peoples' comments on the web that they did... Thanks for the clarification :)
No more lawsuits: ISPs to work with RIAA, cut off P2P users
There is something to that. I live on a farm and while I bitch about going outside in subzero temperatures to care for the animals, there is a satisfaction in doing the basic, hard physical work that I don't get from sitting at a desk programming.

We are definitely hardwired to be outside and it's sad that we spend so much of our time indoors. Surrounded by the white silence of snow, admiring the beauty of sundogs on a -10F morning is an amazing way to begin a workday.

And starting out your day sliding around in mud & chickenshit certainly gives you perspective when listening to some drone in a meeting :-)
Do the maths? There are established algorithms for calculating statistic significance.
We use a MediaWiki install for a lot of general knowledge, and for project-specific stuff we throw it in our Basecamp.