skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I asked about this on HN a short while ago, and most people try to address consciousness as it not really existing because it's created by your mind. I hated that psychology and neurology could explain how dopamine makes you feel happy, but beyond that, there were only chemicals, axons, dendrites, and synapses. It's like saying sodium ion channels fluctuate to carry an electrical signal, but in the big picture, it's difficult to understand how exactly that allows me to think about "reality" different from others (assuming others do).

The resounding answer I got, although unsatisfactory in my mind, was that our brain is either very complex or very simple. Neurons are vastly capable of amazing things, or we're just creating this all up as we go and we've even defined this concept of reality based on a bunch of data that was given to us and which we for the most part accept without thinking much about it.

Then again, how do I even know you exist. For all I know, my brain is making this all up, and everything that exists is nothing but a figment of my imagination (solipsism). And then I encounter another person who says the same thing (I'm telling you, I exist too, and I was wondering the same about you), and that's supposed to be where we hit an infinite loop and crash. Our operating systems seem to be a notch above the market's.
I want to say a bit of both, but I can't imagine how far away we are. The mind carries one of the most advanced file storage and retrieval systems, and on top of that, it's not like one activity happens only in one place. The mind works with several other parts in conjunction with most common tasks (blood flow increases in many parts of the brain when you look at a picture, triggering a lot of different things to happen at once). Just knowing that blood flow increases is only a measure of the energy used, it doesn't even tell us what's happening at the lowest level.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm always very interested in this sort of stuff. I've been given a few book recommendations which I hope to take time to get around to, just swamped with work and have a few books on my list already.
When looking for the talk slides, I found http://pablotron.org/software/persist-js/ too.

I haven't had a chance (or need) to use it yet.
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"At (time), I started a company to (xyz), and... (cool flashy thing)."

Usage:

"I started a company in 2006 to create software to make accounting painless for small business owners. We got rated top 10 small business software by Inc magazine!"

"A few months ago, I went in with one of my best mates to create a new kind of social network for pet owners. It's very cool, because even though it's a small niche area, we've been able to get to profitability very fast by making commissions on sales of pet training, tools, and you'd be surprised how lucrative advertising in the niche is."

"I've been working in small business since 2005 - I've taken a variety of projects and my main focus has changed a couple times, but I've always made it about making online business really appealing and aesthetic. People need gears and stuff to work well, y'know, but things sell much better if there's great presentation. It's been a joy working with designers, artists, photographers and linking them up with business owners."

And so on. I have no clue why adding timeframe makes things go over so much better, but it's really been quite big in my experience. Add a time, even if it's only a couple months ago, and it goes from being a whimsical thing to a real, legitimate tangible thing. Don't forget the cool fact - that's what people remember and talk about.
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BRB?.. but how soon is "right back"
Ah, I should add to this. The above answer stimulates discussion and gets people asking you more questions. If that's NOT your intent, then you want to be specifically ambiguous. If you get sick of having the same conversation every single time you mention what you do, or you're playing the modesty thing in a crowd that wouldn't appreciate someone whose "made it", then give an answer that seems very specific but isn't interesting.

"I work in accounting."

"My background is in management information systems."

"I work at a small company coding software."

I don't care for simply "I have a startup", because it stimulates discussion and you get the same questions all the time - what specifically do you do, what field, how long, profitable?, etc. Might as well knock half of those out right away if you want to talk about it.

And if you don't want to talk about it, you're going to need to give someone a specific answer, so when someone's wife asks "What's cperciva do?", your new friend can say, "Oh, he builds computers or something like that."
A thought not directed to anyone in particular: When clever comments and internet memes start becoming the highest rated comments on a piece, the signal:noise for information goes down a bit. As the site grows more and more, eventually we're 80% clever quotes with the hardcore practical actionable info buried in the gaps.

Is that what we want as a community? I try to delete about half my comments right after I write them. The question I ask myself is, "Would anyone's life be seriously worse if they didn't read what I have to say?" I try to kill my own comments that don't fit that criteria.
I understand what you're saying, but I'm not convinced. Think about, e.g. toilet paper. If you became a million/billionaire tomorrow, you might buy slightly more expensive, more comfortable TP, but you wouldn't spend hundreds of dollars per roll. It's a commodity, you want an ok one, but it gets used up too fast to be worth spending too much on. Walmart seeks to commiditize everything. And to some extent, it has worked.
Most people also don't care if some currently existing species were to become extinct, unless it's a species that affects human life (food, or necessary predator).

Are there any wild biological species that humans absolutely rely upon?
"General Manager" gives you a lot of flexibility to be what you need to be to different people. If you're CEO, COO, etc, it's harder to say during a negotiation "I've got to check with so-and-so and I'll get back to you" to cool things down. Lower titles obviously convey lower authority for people who want to speak to someone higher up.

Source: A mentor of mine who runs one of the most profitable architecture firms in the Middle East.
Apple will fall on its face because nobody will want luxurious computergadgets in '09.
I agree. I didn't get that from your original post
Carmack is a hacking demigod, but to me the 'throwaway line' about environmentalism was the most interesting thing in the whole post. It struck me that someone I did idolize had a completely different value system. Obviously that which drives him forward is entirely different than what drives me. And being in touch with what drives us forward is I think something that many of us come here for.
Twitter Used jQuery plugin:username Availability check and update Screen name.
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With it having "1" in the title bar, I was expecting a second page. Instead, it just sort of... ended abruptly. I was hoping for more.
Wow that was a lot of interesting stuff. One thing that stuck in my mind is: "a study that showed that a drug works even when you know it is a placebo"
I'm aerospace turned hacker myself. Just curious, are there any others about in the same boat?
I don't think anywhere much accepts cheques in the UK any more. Perhaps some shops, but it's unusual. Worst offenders are probably students paying for drinks by cheque.
Check Your Spelling in Any Application | TechJaws
"Anyone's welcome who has interesting things to say."

This is why HN is the best news site for tech news anywhere. I'm like Furqan (the author), a bit of a mutt, and have enjoyed reading and participating here.
I've been surprised at just how business-saavy the "tech guys" on this site are!
I'm probably about as "un-HN" as you can get.

I live in a small industrial northern English city, about 10,000 miles from the buzz of Silicon Valley both physically and metaphorically.

I don't know how to code except a bit of really basic stuff, I don't have an education from a top university, I don't own a laptop or an iPhone or even my own home PC.

I don't work at a company that makes mashups out of widgets using the Google and Twitter APIs then turns them into Facebook apps.

But I still work in a startup, even though it's not in the web field. We're a new regional digital radio station on a platform called DAB. I love the startup atmosphere; it's so much more rewarding to come in every day and get stuck into building this thing up. It's not a web app, but it is a blank canvas for ideas and development-- we really want to do things differently to any radio station that's gone before and put to death the adage that "there are no new ideas in radio".

Personally, I take an interest in the way in which radio's using new web technologies like Twitter to have a two-way conversation with listeners and turn them into participants. I'm interested in the social news model and how it could be adapted for our medium. I want to give new life to a medium that's condemned as dying on a regular basis. We're really not "big bad old media", you know.

Some of the technical stuff on here goes way over my head, but the quality of submissions and discourse is far better than other social-news sites I could mention. I'd rather have a site that's a bit above my technical level than one that's full of conjecture about Apple laptops or pictures of cats.
Does anyone know how much the developer G1s work out to for us Europeans? http://code.google.com/intl/de-AT/android/dev-devices.html only mentions the $399 US price - I suspect if they ship them from the US, I'd have to pay customs and more for shipping, etc.

$25 to sign up as a developer just to obtain this information seems a little harsh.
Ask HN: news.yc without refreshing?
I'm tired of refreshing news.ycombinator.com =] Can someone please build a reverse ajax script that just updates new stories, point changes, and number of comments in real-time? Perhaps a nice little graphic displayed (such as in XCode when you add a closing curly brace "}" in a method) to indicate the information has updated.
Total nonsense. I'm no relational-junkie, but I know a bad argument when I see one.

Firstly, the author can't decide whether relations are an abstraction or not. At points he seems to be preferring graphs to relations because graphs are abstract and relations aren't ("the anti-abstraction argument rears its head in the RDBMS vs graph database debate"). At other points, he admits that relations are also abstractions, but argues that graphs are more suited to the data we actually use. Seeing as relations are just as abstract as graphs, we can ignore all the stuff about abstractions being a good idea. Yes, we know; that's why we use relations.

Secondly, despite this being a post about abstraction, he doesn't distinguish between a physical implementation and a logical representation. Yes, a SQL database can store graphs inefficiently, but that's a problem of how the relations are physically stored, not a problem with relations themselves. You can store a self-joining relation just like a graph, and optimise it for graph-like queries. That's the beauty of abstraction!

Thirdly, he claims that graphs are better when the structure of your system will change frequently. There's no argument for this, it's just a non sequitur he drops in at the end. It's true that most RDBMSs are very static in nature, but that's because they have been designed reap the rewards of static typing. They don't have the be that way, and I can't see that graphs give you any benefit here.

Fourtly, he claims that 'you want an abstraction that reflects how you really think about the data and not some jury-rigged representational model continuously intruding itself into your thought process.' True, but graphs are just as much a jury-rigged representational model as relations. Almost every system needs to store data about users, but users are not graphs (nor are they relations. Don't confuse your data model with reality!)

A database is something we build abstractions on top of. These could be graph abstractions, or object-oriented abstractions (ORMs) or whatever. A database does not dictate the abstractions you use, it simply provides an abstraction for data storage. Such an abstraction should be chosen because it can store all the different kinds of data you need, and provide constraints that prevent the data from becoming incoherent. These are the important considerations, and they aren't even mentioned.
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If you read through the Apple SDK documentation for the iPhone it's stated that the dimensions you are working with are NOT pixels. On the iPhone and iPod, the dimensions you are working with scale 1:1 to pixels, but that you should keep in mind the scale will be different with future devices.

So all apps will scale automatically to bigger screens. And it seems that they planned from the start that bigger screens would come along.
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Huh?

Your math is off by a few orders of magniture. 100x10mg = 1g, so 1 kg should be 1000x$215.17 = $215,170.00, for an ingredient cost of 1000x$.71 = $710.

Also, I can buy 100 x 10mg Clarityn for $65, but I won't, because I can get 100 x 10mg Mildin (exact same active ingredient) for $35.

Edit: Oops, forgot to add a point.

Your point holds true, your calculations are just for 100 kg instead. Thing is, medicine isn't invented, manufactured sold or bought in a free market. Another difference between Clarityn and coke is that there is a very elaborate framework in place to make sure your pills are good - if your dealer dilutes your coke with flour or ratpoison, you're screwed and nobody cares. If there was no demand/requirement for that protection, I'm sure we could get our pills for around $1.
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one kilo of cocaine ... $4,500 ... On the streets ... between $200,000 and $600,000. ... Claritin ... $215.17 Cost of general active ingredients: $0.71

Your analogy does not work, because it compares two regulated items (cocaine and Claritin), instead of one regulated item vs. one unregulated item.
What is an objectivist? (I read wikipedia but I am not sure what this refers to).
The trap techies fall into
heh it's unfair for me to ask this of the community when i myself don't even have time to do it. let's just say it's a feature request that i think would be neat, not nagging anyone or anything.

if i find some time before the winter break is up, i'll throw this together. i've always wanted to play around with reverse ajax anyway. does anyone else like the idea or am i just being picky?
UniversalComet: Make any web page a Comet end point
Also, your stateside cocaine kilo prices are off by more than 10 times, even factoring in the recent price jump. Here are the latest news stories mentioning stateside prices:
http://news.google.com/news?q=kilo+of+cocaine+costs

You used to be able get about $18000 for a key (kilogram, or 2.2 pounds) of cocaine. New you’re seeing prices of $27000, $28000 per key. That’s a big jump. ...
OK - it's flagged
So this has little to do with recreational drugs and perception.

I disagree with that. I suggest you take some psychadelics and try to explain your experience to someone who's never taken them. Words fail to convey this properly. It's as hard as explaining the colour red, I think.
Maybe their super data mining computer will eventually tell them to avoid running out of croissants every single day before 9 AM at my local Tesco...
Are all the MS Zunes dying?
Objectivism is the philosophy of writer Ayn Rand. Objectivists are followers of that philosophy.

The words Objectivism and Objectivist are usually capitalized.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
When in hacker news do as hackers do I guess.
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This is an important point that the author of the article seems to have not noticed. His whole argument is based on the idea that rent control leads to a decrease in supply, with a resulting hike in price due to unmet demand. But I wonder just how many apartments can really be built in Manhattan? Or in intra-muros Paris, or in the City in London...
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I'm trying to decide between a CS MS with a machine learning specialty or a bioinformatics specialty. Would you say machine learning is more employable? Bioinformatics probably interests me more.
More here - http://gizmodo.com/5121311/reports-30gb-zunes-failing-everyw... not good news for Microsoft and even worse news for those that have 30GB Zunes
Demand is constrained completely by a venue's capacity

This is an example of the "We Have No Competition" fallacy. It is a fallacy because substitutes for the demand are possible. In the present case, substitutes could take the form of events on other nights at the same venue, other existing venues, new venues, venue expansion, virtual venue axpansion via remote-viewing technologies, recording for later viewing, etc.
"The argument that rent control prevents owners from maintaining their buildings is pure bullshit. There's not a rent-control law in existence that doesn't allow annual increases sufficient for maintenance. Buildings aren't maintained because the owner sees the opportunity for dramatically increased profits if the current tenant leaves and lets the building fall to shit in an effort to drive them out."

Read that paragraph slowly and see if you can find the causal relationship between rent control and buildings not being maintained. It's easier to find than Waldo...

While true that it doesn't prevent them by force of law from maintaining the buildings, the natural profit-seeking motivations will cause a sharp increase in deferred or eliminated maintenance and improvements, as the landlord wins either way: either they save 1-2% in current expenses or they get to reset the rent to market rents if the tenant gets too sick of their shithole. Seems pretty far from "pure bullshit" to me...
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The process the author describes is almost identical to the one I've experienced, despite the fact my area of research is different than his (machine learning), but his analysis of the results drastically differs from mine

Its true, 90% of the stuff doesn't work/isn't applicable and I have spent more money on buying papers than on rent in the past year, and I spend many days working on stuff that often has little or no positive effect. But its still the most cost effective research you can do, after you factor in the value of your time.

Every new idea I develop on my own takes far longer to develop and test, and trying to get better results than everyone else is a lot easier when you're basing your progress on the cutting edge instead of something that is a decade old.
As the son of a former small-time landord (teachers by day, landlords of 1 single family and 1 duplex house), I can assure you that those landlords will have PLENTY of tenants to rent to down there!
Yea thats what I do but I have an efficiency function which judges my iterations so I know if an iteration is actually good or not.
Coding Horror: The Problem of the Unfinished Game
Illinois has a bad entrepreneurial scene too. Everyone pushes you to get employment, it's nauseating after a while.
For journal access, consider some part-time lecturing / mentoring at your nearest university. I mentor a group of business students once a week, and aside from the extra money and overall enjoyment, get a university email and athens account - as I'm undertaking market research for a new startup, this is saving me A LOT of money.
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You do realize that this whole thing came crashing down because of the very lightly (if any) regulated CDO's right?
How smart are you really when it comes to tech?
Predictions 3.0: The biggest headlines of 2009
Steve Jobs health rumor resurfaces
Ask HN: How many of you are 2nd gen Entrepreneurs?
When I was a young kid my dad had a corporate job as VP of Sales for an HVAC company. He used to travel the world making deals and taking care of clients, and then he was let go. He tried to get similar jobs with other companies but they never played out, and so he took to being an entrepreneur.

His cousin in the Carolinas had just gotten into the computer business, building and selling personal PCs. So my dad, with no experience, dove into this field here in Florida, they would spend hours on the phone every night as my cousin trained dad and talked him through stuff over the phone.

Dad never really financially excelled. Money was perennially tight and mom would work jobs to get extra income and benefits, but we made it and I was infused with the entrepreneurial spirit.

So I'm a 2nd generation entrepreneur. Is anyone else here with a similar story?
I think you missed a dollar sign somewhere in that title.
I would be interested in hearing how many people are 3rd generation entrepreneurs. A number of entrepreneurial friends of mine are following in the footsteps of their grandparents, whereas the financially tight lifestyle that can come when a parent is the entrepreneur, can often push the child toward a more secure, salaried lifestyle.
I'm the opposite. My dad is a fairly senior executive at a Fortune 500, but he is the supportive one of my entrepreneurial endeavors. My mom on the other hand isn't so much.