skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A treatment of the question by an Oxford philosophy professor: http://www.simulation-argument.com/

The paper is very readable, even for the novice.

tl;dr:

"A technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero; (2) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero; (3) The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.
If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3).
Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation."
Right, because it's not "every feature," it's just probably the most common one after tweeting itself, and one that is probably a top-3 driver for third-party clients. Then again, I'm of the mind that they're rolling up all this functionality in order to launch something new. It's just the beginning, and there's a reason why it's going drip drip drip: building interest.
This is not science. This is fabrication, fiction, and to an observer, Bullshit.
But that's a different thing.
Soldes Maillot de foot  2012 et maillot de foot 2013
Maillot de foot - centre commercial en ligne offrant une variété de produits de vente chauds: Maillot de foot 2012, maillot de foot pas cher, maillot football, maillot foot 2013, maillots de foot pas cher, à des prix raisonnables d'expédition pour l'échelle mondiale pour Maillot foot pas cher 2013 .
I would love to see a demo day of YC companies that are still around who either quietly launched / didn't have much on demo day or who pivoted to something entirely different. Sort of like a "where are they now" demo day.
The truth is brutal: they build the right products, they practically sell themselves, and once they've reached critical mass, what else do you expect them to do? Now you bring out the sheeple argument...ah...ok...

At all the computer science conferences I go to, Macs outnumber PCs; no I mean they actually dominate PCs! Now Apple has cultivated an image that the smartest people use Macs? Or maybe these people just use macs b/c they are the best coding machines out there, and they really don't care paying more that? Or maybe we CS PhDs are just sheeple and like shiny things just like less technical users?

Really?
Videos from GeekcampSG, a all geek conference in Singapore
The blame culture is a terrible problem. If nobody is responsible for anything because it's not their fault, and somebody else is to blame, how are people going to become self-reliant?
Cheap Nike Dunks High - Nike SB Dunk High Online
Interestingly the two db's I can think of that don't support transactional DDL are both Oracle products ;-)

Oracle has something that kind of looks like transactional DDL if you stand on your head and squint, but it doesn't cover, say, changes to table schemas.... it's only side by side versioning of stored procedures.....
IOS Developer: Have your customer reviews translated and mailed to you.
Funny. I was just today thinking of something similar for finding unknown creative breakthrough talent.
Isn't there a simple solution to this problem? Bundle the unfundable ideas into a secretive spinoff. Say, call it YC BlackOps, or something. Keep it mysterious, like Google X Labs. If you do it right, it won't hurt the YC brand.
Pining for the fjords
Try a CAN SPAM lawsuit?
Why's your post blurred?
Something to keep in mind when the blogosphere lights up about how STEM is a "boy's club". It's not that there isn't merit to gender issues in STEM. It's that the dialogue is manufactured by people whose goals aren't egalitarian. If you don't educate yourself in the nuances of gender issues and postmodern powerplays you're going to be the sucker blown full of hot air.
>it's really rare to find a lifestyle technology business.

You... must live in a different world from me. I mean, I am a lifestyle "technology" business. Most of my customers are, too... a whole lot of them are so small that they still have dayjobs. For that matter, most of my suppliers are, too.

But think of all the web design firms that exist. All of the small-business IT firms. The small consulting shops of various stripes. There are huge numbers of these "too small for important people to care" companies. and so many web applications are thrown together by one person, just messing around.

Many, probably most of my suppliers and competitors are also small operations owned by one or two people. Linode, as far as I can tell, started a lot like I did; and so did most of my smaller competitors. (Slicehost is the counterexample; my understanding is that they started in a very startup-y manner.)

I mean, obviously, you get fewer firms as you raise your revenue cutoff. If you require millions of dollars a year in revenue, nearly all my customers fall off the list... but actually, probably not that many of my suppliers. I mean, I'm buying one rack from coresite, 5g from cogent, and 1.1G and 2 racks from he.net, but that's less than half my monthly outlay, and other than that, all that money goes to small private companies (and really, he.net might be considered a small private company that grew to be a not-so-small private company.)
Ad-hominems will get you nowhere.

Also you appear not to have any idea how much waste exists in Pentagon contracting. Look up the writings of Robert Higgs, Winslow Wheeler, Dina Rasor etc etc etc When DoD is throwing billions of dollars around with merry abandon of course some of it ends up used for useful projects. They use up all their money and then get their budgets bumped up automatically by the politicians.

And, if YC starts acting like DoD, who exactly is going to provide follow-on financing? None of the money men, not Sand Hill Road, not Wall Street, are willing to put money in the same way and with the same scale that DoD is.

What's even worse is academic research. The professors don't care about product development, they care about publish or perish. And the output from PhDs is predictably a lot of useless greek squiggles and not very much product actually usable by Grandma.

There is no fabulous opportunity because the incentives are out of whack, and your exhortations won't change that.
Warby Parker Sees Its Way To $40M Series B, Led By General Catalyst
If we're living in a simulation it would only mean that somehow, on a lower level, we're represented differently than we think we are (ie, bits instead of atoms/particles/quantum waves/...). This is not a very large leap. Information theory has been linked to physics in various ways.

It wouldn't make us, or our experiences, any less real. The environment we evolved in would always be exceptionally realistic to us, by definition (we don't know any different!). Even if some higher entity sees us living on some game-of-life grid. Though that's a philosophical matter, I guess.

Edit: To be clear, I believe it is possible that we live in a matter-level simulation. I do not believe that we live in a human-level simulation. That would be a much too anthropocentric view for me.
Couldn't disagree more with what? The part where I say that Facebook have decided that a native app is good business sense and I trust that they're right?

At no time do I say it makes zero sense to develop a native app, ever. Just that sometimes it doesn't, that it's business, not a whim or a slight, and that over time those apps that can run in a browser, will.

Lots of room for debate over what constitutes an app that "can run in a browser," of course. But despite the title, I don't think what I wrote suggests that native apps are some kind of evil.
Re: The cipher for encryption of the message data:

One time pad. Inefficient, but guaranteed secure by mathematical proof if the key is secure. Google it.

QKD is far from ready for last-mile networks, but in principle it should be able to use existing fiber and have similar network topologies to what we currently have in classical networks. (e.g. It is possible to distribute entanglement through untrusted repeaters.) Your arguments against it are the same that were once applied to transistors or lasers.

As for ECDH, please reread what I posted earlier. If your information will not be sensitive after a decade or two it is perfectly fine. If the information will remain sensitive, it is unsuitable.
They do something similar with equity trades. They get professionals and public entrants to select stocks and include a 'dartboard'. From my limited reading experience the dartboard rarely wins implying people do add value, but it would be interesting if someone could find a history (I didn't with a quick Google). In Australia one news paper includes an Astrologer which I find amusing.

With start-ups I think it would be too expensive an experiment to fund.
And I am confused as to why you wouldn't use varchar or char to record, you know, inscribed writings. I mean if it says 1890-03-300 I assume you'd want the extra zero recorded, right?
When I receive update mails from a company I've bought from, and there was no explicit opt-in checkbox, I usually just mark them as spam and send future mails from that entity to the trash. My box is full enough.
HTML5: Why Developers Need it.
i just click the spam button. i never subscribe, so any email i get is automatically unsolicited. some smart lawyer should form a class action suit.
I love it,it looks so cool.And thx for sharing the src.
Slicehost is the counterexample; my understanding is that they started in a very startup-y manner.

Maxed out their credit cards, tried to find angel funding in St. Louis, and got told the going terms were "We'll get 50% of the company to cosign a loan for you" so they continued to bootstrap, managed to successfully structure a pricing model such that customers pre-paid for services (allowing them to service most of demand), rode on to acquisition by Rackspace... if I recall correctly. (Pours one out for Slicehost.)
"A predicts B" means "A precedes B, and knowing A will substantially improve your guess about B." Obviously, puddles do not predict rain - they happen after. As someone else said, though, the weather man predicts rain, but rain doesn't follow from the weatherman's statements - the causal relationship there is substantially indirect; measurements of various phenomena are fed into models, themselves developed from past observation, which causes various information to be printed on a screen which causes the weatherman to say certain things that, yes, correlate strongly but not perfectly with the weather tomorrow. This is not hugely different, in terms of information flow, than us predicting a lower longevity for Steve based on observation of his lesser creativity, both caused perhaps by the same gene (leading to the correlation we are exploiting to make the prediction).
The Kindle integration brings up an interesting issue, which is that Amazon doesn't seem to really be investing in the Kindle SDK. Last I used it anyway, it's not very powerful, doesn't give you any integration with books, access to the web browser, etc. And that's if you do get access to the SDK, I know devs who've had a hell of a time getting in, even with genuinely interesting ideas.

Of course there are privacy concerns, but it's the same problem that Android and iOS and solved well enough. Maybe they're worried about poorly written apps draining the battery? I think they're missing out on a huge opportunity. But another explanation would be that the current Kindle SDK isn't planned to last - maybe future eInk Kindles will run a watered-down version of Android?
Just because something is achieved contractually does not mean it doesn't undermine market mechanisms. Cartels are contractual but that still undermines the market.

There is a proposition in the law of property that restraints on the alienation of land are to be avoided whenever possible. restrictions on alienation reduce the fungibility of property and increase transaction costs, reducing efficiency. In some states, e.g. NY, there are limits on what sorts of restrictions on alienation courts will enforce when written into deeds.
I really liked BSD style rc.d and now Arch and other distros are moving to systemd but Ubuntu won't ship it in 12.10.
My takeaways from Sydstart 2012
Pick what&rsquo;s right for you
I'd say that the main thrust of my argument could be summarized as "frameworks are good, you should use them to write apps." My observation is that often when people say they don't want to use a framework, they end up trying to write code that does similar things the framework would do, but because they're not experts in designing frameworks, they do a bad job of it. An example would be rather than using an ORM, people write some one-off database service, and then copy-and-paste and find-replace to write another one. This leads to a great deal of code duplication, and makes it difficult to fix bugs and fix performance issues (e.g., to implement a read-through cache, you'd have to go through each copy-pasted variant and implement the cache, rather than implementing it once in a base class.)

It's not that these people are writing a better framework that adapts more to their needs, it's that they read on the internet "don't use frameworks" and decided they were smarter than all those other startups that use Rails. The result is generally a pile of half-complete, poorly-conceived ideas centered around decisions that no longer make a lot of sense.

I say all this having used, seen and maintained many a homegrown framework in my time as a contract developer. I'm sure they're out there, but I've never seen a codebase that doesn't use a pre-existing framework that's better than one that does. I think if you work on a small team, it is very difficult to take the time to write a well-designed and well-tested framework in addition to your main responsibility, which is presumably to make features that users are dying to give you money to use.

You are definitely right that you can paint yourself into a corner with frameworks. I suppose my theory is that as long as you're using an open-source framework, you will always be able to code your way out of whatever situation you end up in. I also believe (but obviously cannot prove) that in nearly all of these situations, the net effect of using a framework will be a positive in terms of both your code quality and your productivity. It goes without saying that if you choose to use a crappy framework, then you're going to have problems.
How can it be deterministic if there are elements of randomness in our universe? I mean true randomness such as electron movement and nuclear decay.
Assuming we are a simulation, I don't see any reason to assume that the "base universe" has remotely similar beings or even physics as ours. It's obviously (if anything is obvious) possible to simulate different physics from our layer. Why not the outer layer? We might not be "bits" in a recognizable sense, or even qubits. We can't really keep any of our most basic assumptions when speculating here.

Luckily, in Real Life I'm a dualist.
How to better start learning programming: imperative or declarative?
Ask HN: Does Android need a system to revoke notifications on other devices?
1) Many people use multiple Android devices. 2) Many people download several of the same apps on all their devices, which creates duplicate notifications. 3) Notifications are one of the essential interactions that users have with the operating system. 4) Actions done to notifications aren't reflected across devices or to the web.

If I dismiss a notification, should it not also be dismissed on my other Android devices, and also to the web interface of that app?

If I tap a notification, should it not also be revoked on the other devices and interfaces associated with that app?

Notifications have become so crucial to the Android experience to me. Automation through services like IFTTT/Pushover make life so much easier, and then there are all the email and social networking apps that ping with updates of all kinds. It's become very strange to me that I need to dismiss notifications on my second device which I have already read or acted on.
BTW, If you want to stop the pain in the eye that Twitter for Mac causes on a Retina Display, just enable "Open in Low Resolution" under "Get Info" of the app. Better than default behavior.

I've tried to hack it and enable hi-resolution but I couldn't. I know it's based on TWUI, but for some weird reason I wasn't able to override the classes it uses at runtime.

g.
Food and beer are the least important attractions. Those things are portable. (And SF is hardly a runaway leader in either category, even when the competition is confined to the USA.)

The main non-portable attraction is VCs and their money. People go where the money is.

The fact that SF is crowded is a feature. Your startup's recruitment pool and tech meetups and potential partners are all within a few dozen miles. If you change jobs, your commute doesn't change.

Given all that, I still don't think it's worth it, but obviously a lot of others disagree.
> "Unless you believe there’s something magical about consciousness"

Well, yes, I do actually. See philosophical zombie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie). Although I don't doubt that the physics of our universe could be simulated.

By the way, there's actually something called the Bekenstein bound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound) which puts a finite information limit on a volume of spacetime. Incredibly enough, the information content is not proportional to the volume of the region, but to the volume's surface area. This is known as the holographic principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle).

I did a calculation the other day for fun with the Bekenstein bound. All of the information in 1 kg of water can be entirely described with roughly ~20,000 earth masses of 1 TB hard drives (assuming each hard drive weighs one pound).

And if someone wants to see something extra freaky, calculate the maximal information content of a Planck volume ;)
I'm constantly fearing that Voyager might trigger an "out of bounds" exception
How is running as user less safe than as root?

In OSX, /usr/local is really user-space. It comes empty on an install, and the system never touches it (that means no mess with /opt). The FHS also doesn't mandate /usr/local/bin to be owned by root. Don't root-owned utilities go in /usr/sbin?
Were you inspired by mixest.com that appeared here last week?
> People who want to live in a community have their say in getting to pick the community in which they live.

They don't have any power in the zoning boards. 100 people could want to buy and build high-density housing in Palo Alto, but 10 people who already own property there could defeat their intentions via the zoning board. There is no reason why the desires of the few should outweigh the demands of the market.

If you don't want to live around high rises, buy up the land around your house. You shouldn't get to achieve the same effect by preventing other land owners from developing their property as they see fit. The zoning laws that allow this sort of behavior just favor existing property owners over future property owners, and lead to globally non-sensical development choices.
One inefficiency could be related to this point Paul makes:

We can afford to take at least 10x as much risk as Demo Day investors. And since risk is usually proportionate to reward, if you can afford to take more risk you should. What would it mean to take 10x more risk than Demo Day investors? We'd have to be willing to fund 10x more startups than they would. Which means that even if we're generous to ourselves and assume that YC can on average triple a startup's expected value, we'd be taking the right amount of risk if only 30% of the startups were able to raise significant funding after Demo Day.

So- if a VC can triple a startups expected value that's great, but you'd need to do a bunch of them. I think this is essentially what Dave McClure is doing- making lots of smaller bets to "hit singles" as he says.

Reminds me of my college days playing online poker. The best players would have a 20% ROI at the $55 10 person tournament tables, and each game would take an hour. If you just play one at a time, you'd make about $10/hr. That's why everyone played 10 tables at a time- we made 10 times as much.
I'm not a big fan of Cringely's but I do enjoy this particular insight. It is unclear to me that Microsoft is even in the same game here because of their lack of content.

Specifically Amazon innovated in the book space, its in their roots and they have leveraged the crap out of it. Apple if you recall innovated in the music space. The similarities are stunning, take something people continually consume, is fashion driven, and reduce the friction of that consumption, golden. The 'chunkyness' (in terms of price per transaction) is bigger in books than in music but the mechanisms are similar. All we need now is NetFlix to introduce a dedicated 'video' device, then move up to phones and tablets.
Magical Number 7 - Limits on our Capacity to Process Information
I can't wait until unlocked bootloaders are the norm and the drivers are open source. The level of artificial stagnation on phones is disgusting and a joke to our profession.
You're making a different point now than what I took you to mean before. Not only that, but the OP would really be doing something noble if they were making open source, contributing in some other way if they aren't a coder, than with some holier-than-thou complaint about other peoples choices (i.e. OSX).
It's a downvoted post. (There are a few shades of gray.)

Note that you can't downvote until you have enough karma, which I believe is 500 right now. The threshold goes up as the site grows and karma becomes easier to acquire.
Evidence of a correlation is all that's necessary to do that, scientist or not. What a correlation tells me is that if I observe A, I am likely to observe B. In the case of rain and puddles, there is a temporal component that seems to be confusing you. Rain now is correlated with puddles for a while in the future. Puddles now may not be correlated with rain now or in the future[1]. Observing puddles now, I can't tell you anything about rain in the future because there is no correlation, not because there is no causation.

[1] If the weather in the area tends to be the same day to day, then I can absolutely predict rain tomorrow based on puddles today, to occasionally be frustrated by weather change or sprinklers.
Relevant: http://tjholowaychuk.com/post/27984551477/components