skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might want to check in with some neuroscientists. If you take offense at personal attacks at Kurzweil's sanity and intelligence you might want to ... prepare yourself. Imagine if a retired doctor started doing speaking tours about the future of the internet and computing and completely disagreed with the general consensus on HN about what could plausibly happen. Imagine what the comments about him on HN would be.

They would view Allen's response as "not delusional" rather than pessimistic. I'm often surprised by how widespread singularity fans think belief in it is.

Outside the tech industry, where people have spend their entire lives in a field that has seen no increasing exponential returns (other than problems solved purely by computation, which they consider a wonderful thing but often not a fundamental advancement to their field) there is very very little belief that "the singularity is near" or that kurzweils utopian interpretation of the singularity is correct.
So many cords and things to install. I've become really lazy when it comes to games. Part of me just wants to play a game without putting in work to do so.
Minteye wants to put an end to the CAPTCHA as we know it
Lettuce?
The initial conditions in the game of life isn't normally all-off, because then every generation would be all-off.

In any case, the amount of information in the game of life is merely (initial state, number of iterations) which is certainly finite for a finite board.
(I'm the author of the article)

I don't think of myself as a victim here. Indeed, Microsoft's attacks back in 2001 drove me to work hard and learn how to run a non-profit in a time when it's constantly under political attack. This has served me very well, and I use it today when my current org (Software Freedom Conservancy) is attacked for its GPL enforcement work constantly.

Canonical, Ltd.'s attacks are more of the same. My blog post is about how Canonical really is just coming after the same group of people that Microsoft once was. I don't feel I'm a victim of either entity or any of the individuals involved. By contrast, they are my political rivals bent in doggedly pursuing their political agenda while I pursue mine. That's an overly Hegelian analysis of the situation, but hopefully that gives a flavor of what I'm thinking about in juxtaposing the two events politically.
All that the math suggests is that the escape velocity from inside the event horizon is beyond the speed of light, so it's physically impossible.

It doesn't seem impractical to be able to establish an orbit inside that radius, though, even a highly elliptical one, provided this orbit never slings you back out. It just seems if your orbit decays even slightly, you'll never be able to recover, leading to the inevitable conclusion of being pulled directly into the singularity.
Qubes 2 Beta 1 with initial Windows support released
IntelliJ + Emacs

I can't go wrong :) I have a simple keybinding bound to opening the buffer I'm working on in the IDEA to open the file in Emacs if I need to slice/dice text using my emacs-fu, but IntelliJ + its plugins are eff'ing amazing.
Sure, but the cost to solve a petaflop problem is not. We hit a point where the bottleneck is no longer flops but being able to organize systems that can use them effectively.

Doesn't matter how fast you think we will overcome this problem, it illustrates to many people that the intersection between the world that is not increasing exponentially and chip speeds starts to matter a great deal when you want to actually solve a problem by moving floating point numbers about.
I'd like to schutzhund train one. Or maybe it's schutzkatze?
They did for some things. There are several factions inside Microsoft, some more respectable than others [1]. We managed to get MSRPC/DCOM documentation out of them no problems at all. TBH there was very little internal documentation on it apparently, most of it being inside 4-5 peoples' heads.

[1] Small note to IE team: fuck you. I opened a genuine defect with steps to reproduce on Connect 19 months ago which was a regression between IE8 and IE9 and it was canned earlier today with the old bug vs feature thing. This is after 6 months of arguing with PAID UP GOLD PARTNER support over the issue as well which fucked up any IE upgrade plans for our clients for 6 months.
Disguising the grin: What makes games fun
Didn't expect to see Verilog on the front page of HN.

1 nit pick, I think wherever you use a wire assignment you need the assign keyword. e.g

wire [1:0] command = mem_out[7:6];
wire [2:0] destination_addr = mem_out[6:3];
wire [2:0] source_addr = mem_out[2:0];

should be

assign wire [1:0] command = mem_out[7:6];
assign wire [2:0] destination_addr = mem_out[6:3];
assign wire [2:0] source_addr = mem_out[2:0];

Or maybe it's wire assign. I usually first declare the wire in a single statement then use assign on a new line.
And what exactly is Cringely?
Inside an event horizon, orbiting implies traveling faster than c from your reference frame. No can do.

(Note: this applies to an electrically neutral non-rotating black hole.)
This was a great post. Just a little nitpick. I think this line near the bottom:

var something = maybe(doesntCheckForSomething(value));

Should actually be:

var something = maybe(doesntCheckForSomething)(value);

If I'm wrong then I likely missed something so please let me know. Thanks.
Hi Andrew, great overview looking at the foundations of programmable logic. I recognize the look of the schematics from CircuitLab! Noticed that you went out of your way to take screenshots -- is there something we can do to make it easier to use our image export, or alternatively some sort of embeddable widget like you use for the Verilog gists?
Ah, no problem. It's helpful to know that the readme gives that impression.
Burning Ship Fractal Deep Zoom Animation
That's very weird: my laptops stay plugged and on 24/7 for months at a time, and the batteries still last around 2.5 hours. These are 4 year old Li-Ion batteries I'm talking about (they used to last 3 hours when they were new).
Wow, nice job cramming several "I'm a crackpot" indicators in there, instead of just sharing your ideas.
If you use a Kolmogorov measure of complexity, the complexity of a function and/or its output is defined to be the description of that function using some universal language. So a function cannot, by definition, generate data that is more complex than the function itself.

Pi can be described by a relatively small formula/function. It can generate very long sequences of seemingly random digits. The complexity in all of those infinity digits is still just that of the simplest formula that generates Pi.
I am very intrigued by your approach, could you please share more of it or maybe point some books that go deeper on this?
While scrolling down the tabled, framed, left side "menu", I had a visceral feeling of reminiscence and nostalgia of roughly 1998, when I started playing with HTML.

Amazing.
>maybe it's for folk who enjoy reading spam?

middle-brow dismissal much?
MediaWiki uses a fairly typical mostly-normalized relational design. You couldn't easily port it to a document store.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/MediaWiki...

Also, most MediaWiki installs use plugins, and those plugins often create their own database tables. So RDBMS is pretty much baked into the MediaWiki culture.

However, MediaWiki is fairly well abstracted from any particular RDBMS implementation. Everything from creating tables to making a join is done through an API.
Evidence against extra-terrestrial origin for crop-circles, for the doubters.
The best thing that religion did is show modern man the dangers of choosing faith over evidence. People don't call the singularity a religion because they want the world to be better or want to live forever or know more. Everyone wants that. They call it a religion because people believe this will happen in their lifetimes because they really want it to. They have faith and have shown no evidence. It's not about the belief in improvement, it's about the belief in prediction of a specific kind of improvement and a prediction of a timeline.
If the site where the form was filled out sets the users' collected info as rather obviously-named Javascript cookies or PHP session vars (i.e. $_SESSION[email]=$_POST[email]), that's one method, no?

Was anything mentioned about the browser used? Maybe when "auto-fill" browser options are enabled for a user there's a way to access that data.
He's a true hacker and a craftsman.

He seems to have a lot of practice and hours to line things up for each one. They don't look perfect. Maybe he just does it by eye? GPS?
To be honest, MSRPC and DCOM was based on DCE RPC and MS donated DCOM to the Open Group.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeDCE
Could this be dependent on the Verilog version? At the very least, the wire assignments without the 'assign' keyword seem to work in the iverilog simulator as well as Altera's Quartus suite synthesis tools. I have seen both conventions (wire declaration and assignment separately or together), but I believe the assign keyword is only required for the former.
The page is unfortunately not responding.
Google has it cached (Altho it's slow to load as well): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YAoaA6A...
Tidal forces would be a problem though (if not at the event horizon, then at least increasingly so as you approach the singularity). Basically, whatever part of you is closest to the singularity experiences more gravity than the parts that are farther away.
It could be argued that such things happen in academics too.

But this is not the same, famed people established themselves at Microsoft and AT&T. There wasn't this sort of hiring of celebrity. Someone of Kurzweil's stature could be doing his own research and simply hired on as a board member.

There are plenty of widely known people at Google, but seemingly in spite of Google rather than because of. Maybe that's a consequence of 20% time too. But if people's reputations are staked in things other than the company, the company seems to borrow more reputation than it makes.
SAVETHESCIFI | EULA? What EULA?
The Facebook SDK is Ridiculously Heavy
I think given where Apple is going I'd rather they focus on improving Siri. If you're attached to your iPhone it's much easier to say "Siri play me some other Led Zeppelin songs" than to sort through a laundry list on your desktop.
So About That ‘Glowing’ Cigarette…
I am aware that there are already some programs that are capable of "learning", and you could certainly say that they are selecting the correct paths based on trial-and-error, and "remembering" in order to build faster and more accurate responses. I don't pretend to understand how human brains are wired, but I don't really view DNA as "spaghetti". It is code. Wonderfully designed TERNARY code integrated into a system complete with an interpreter and built-in code cloning, error-checking and correction. We humans have yet to design something that works so efficiently. We still suffer from errors in the code, though - mutations that cause such things as CF, Downs, Sickle-Cell, etc.

I suppose it is really the brain one would seek to emulate if they were trying to create some form of true AI.
Why is this shit on Hacker News? This is not reddit. This is not even new.

Flagged.
The post you linked actually does look like crackpottery, and your endorsement of it looks like crackpottery too. Highlighting how your point of view is suppressed by mainstream science just makes it seem more like crackpottery.

The basic mistake in this whole argument is that there is no such thing as an inertial frame or near-inertial frame that crosses an event horizon. An inertial frame outside the event horizon will appear to be fully outside it from within the frame, even if extended.

Event horizons can exist in GR even without black holes, for example, an accelerating observer sees an apparent horizon or Rindler horizon, where signals beyond it will never reach him.

But there is no near-inertial frame that, from within the frame itself, appears to cross the Rindler horizon.
It is not possible, and to see why it is likely easiest to take the perspective of an observer at a fixed distance from the black hole. ( The guy who holds on one end of the wire.) From his perspective, he sees that the wire is lowered towards the event horizon, but the tip of the wire is redshifted and moves slower and slower the closer it comes to the event horizon. This is because the light reflected by the tip of the wire needs more and more time to reach the observer. And in the end, the observer will never see the wire actually reaching the event horizon. And since signals in the wire can not move faster than the speed of light, the origin of any signal through the wire is further away from the event horizon than the perceived position of the tip of the wire.

About your other questions ( and being a bit sloppy with my definitions): Inside the black hole the radial coordinate becomes timelike, that means the singularity is in the future of every particle which has fallen into the black hole. And you can not orbit around the singularity any more than you can orbit around next Thursday.
The history of science shows your conception is a bit too stringent. It sounds a bit like Popper's extreme views on falsification in philosophy of science, whereby a theory must either pass every empirical test that is thrown at it, or be flatly rejected. The history of science (Kuhn, etc) shows that this is just not how it works. In general, when a theory fails a test it is tweaked and revised to accord better with the data, and sometimes (usually after the theory gets much more complex) a new, usually simpler, revolutionary theory replaces it. Now, since we can't go toss stuff into black holes, theoretical physics at this level is more like pure math, where the "observations" are the calculations of the theorists. When the calculations don't add up and a contradiction is found it doesn't mean that they've lost touch with reality. On the contrary, they are bringing their theories into closer congruence with reality.
As someone who was born more than a decade after this was written, I can't say I understand the context in which this was written. Would anyone care to elaborate for me?

Specifically, I'd like to know what opinions about Fortran, Basic, Cobol, PL/I and APL were common at the time.

Also, how was this received?
> But no one other than PHP programmers seems to have anything good to say about PHP.

The people least familiar with the language have the most negative to say about it. Making fun of PHP is pretty much a fad -- this particular topic, about htmlspecialchars(), I heard originally 5 years ago and it just cycles around and around. Even the most famously quoted articles about PHP's shortcomings are typically at least 50% flat-out wrong and 25% opinion.

That being said, PHP has a fair share of warts -- it's a language with a long history and rapid change with little overall direction.
I had the opportunity a few years back to work with Jeremy McGrath (many time motocross/supercross world champion) on a commercial shoot he did at our local motocross track. He was modest and pleasant to talk to. He treated me as just another rider, despite the obvious difference in our skill levels.

I also later had a chance to meet Jean Sebastien Roy, a slightly less famous but still top level rider, when he came to do a promotion for KTM. You'd never know from either of them how good they were until you actually saw them ride.

This contrasts heavily with some of the "experts" I ride with every weekend during the summer. I once had a competitor refuse to shake my hand and scoff at my attempts to introduce myself. It is a huge difference in attitude.

By the way, hello HN crowd. I've been a daily reader for several months but never found a topic where I felt I had something useful to post. I hope this has been relevant and useful.

P.S. I ended up beating the guy who wouldn't shake my hand, which gave me a petty feeling of satisfaction. Childish, perhaps, but I'm not perfect.
Julian Assange plans to run for Senate seat in Australia
Fear not, weary HackerNewser, for I've got you covered throughout your treacherous quest for deeper knowledge. What I've been able to do is apply my in-depth experience at link clicking and text selection - both tasks which I've only needed to apply one time only, in this particular instance, in order to provide you with everything you're looking for:

"Riemann aggregates events from your servers and applications with a powerful stream processing language. Send an email for every exception raised by your code. Track the latency distribution of your web app. See the top processes on any host, by memory and CPU. Combine statistics from every Riak node in your cluster and forward to Graphite. Send alerts when a key process fails to check in. Know how many users signed up right this second."
Hey Mike! Cool to see circuitlab developer(s?) on HN! It's an awesome tool.

When writing these blog posts, I usually create a single circuit with a bunch of disparate parts - I don't need the circuit to be functional for any simulation purposes, I just need the diagrams and rendering. Part of the reason that I only use a single circuit is that I need to copy and paste different parts, and I'm not sure if copying/pasting between different circuits is possible. Also, copy/paste rather often dies on me, especially when selecting multiple components, which makes workflow a bit more complicated. (This happens to me rather often and is really annoying, because the only way to fix it is to close the tab and restart. Symptoms after breakage include inability to copy/paste or move any circuit elements around. If there's any way to submit debug logs for when this happens, feel free to let me know and I'll be sure to try next time it happens. You have my email.)

Exporting via the export tool produces a single PNG file for the entire circuit, where I often need just a bit of the entire diagram. Screenshots let me select a small portion of the circuit.

I'm not entirely sure how this could be fixed. If there were gist-like embeddable widgets, I think the convenience of those would outweigh the disadvantages of a slightly different workflow. Circuit "gists" would be awesome. Another thing that would be great is if I could select a bunch of elements on a circuit, click on some button, and have a new circuit created with only those elements in it. (Note that I'm just brainstorming what would help me specifically, so I don't know how all this might fit into your product.)

Anyway, CircuitLab is awesome! Thanks for making it.
Controlling a motor using wifi connection and a gamepad
Seems to be powered by crackstation. Main difference is that it tweets your twitter handle and password if it finds them.
It's on Hacker News because I find it interesting and it was new to me. Up voted.
I see your point, but if I did this on the subway to work, I'd get some pretty weird looks.
That would be horrendously easy to write a bypass for. As with most of these "lets end CAPTCHA" solutions.
Declare the Flickr API a National Historic Landmark
And here I thought the Singularity referred to Apple's stock price.
Real Business Problems with Social Media: Are You Experienced?
I don't think that that much analysis is needed. JavaScript is simply a horribly-designed language.

Furthermore, it is inherently impossible to improve it. The only way to improve JavaScript is to throw out everything that's there. At that point, you aren't dealing with JavaScript any longer.

The obvious solution is just to offer Python and/or Lua embedded within the major browsers (even if that doesn't include IE right away). They are both sensibly-designed scripting languages that are essentially free from the problems and stupidity that we see in JavaScript. We might as well use them, and at least leverage some of the code that already exists for them.
I wasn't trying to imply it doesn't happen, only that it doesn't happen _frequently_.
We're also using OpenStack Swift for media storage these days.
As a former bicycle mechanic and salesman, and someone who is still very tuned into the industry, I'd give this a zero percent chance of actually being successful.

There are three big issues with this design. First of all, you're going to be looking at a seriously increased Q factor trying to fit three different speeds into that gearbox (as opposed to Truvativ's two). The Q factor is the amount of distance between your feet. If you lie down on your back and make a pedaling motion, the natural positioning of your feet is one banana apart. Bikes, to have sufficient stiffness in the bottom bracket region, space your feet two banana's apart or more. Graeme Obree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Obree) figured that out, and when he designed Old Faithful he added a very narrow Q factor, which was a big piece of his success. A huge benefit of carbon fiber is its ability to add stiffness in the BB area by overbuilding without increasing Q factor (or weight all that much), hence the BB30 standard. Truvativ's two-speed front crank is already very widely spaced, and trying to fit more in is going to cause problems. Remember, to balance out the pedal stroke, you have to compensate on the left pedal (I see this is designed to work with existing tech, but it'll feel strange unless you get a longer left pedal spindle), so every increase in distance on the right side is doubled.

Secondly, no part on the bike gets worn out quite like bottom brackets (not including "wear" parts like chains, cassettes/freewheels, tires, etc.). Powerful riders (and not necessarily racers, I know plenty of everyday commuters who fit this bill) tear BB's to shreds. I am a racer, but I'm also a lightly built climber, and I tear through them pretty regularly. Putting a gear box in the BB shell is going to subject it to a hell of a lot of torque, and it'll be difficult for it to stay dialed in and functional with the power output of many riders. The extra mass could also make it uncomfortable to stand up and power out of the saddle. Trek, Pinarello, and a few other companies already reinforce the non-drive side of some of their bikes to even out the extra weight from the chainrings and front derailleur. All the extra mass from a gear box will expound this.

And lastly, internally geared systems are a bitch to maintain, and it's one of the reasons why you will be hard pressed to find a shop which will overhaul your vintage three-speed hub. The newer internally geared systems (like Shimano Alfine and Nexus) are a lot easier to work on, but Shimano spent decades perfecting that stuff. This system is not going to be easy to work on to start, and good shop owners don't sell products their mechanics can't fix easily. It's just not a good proposition.

All in all, a cool idea, but to me far too many issues for it to ever be accepted. As that bikeradar article puts it, no need to reinvent the wheel. Internal hubs and derailleurs (the latter especially) get the job done quite well.
I wonder what computing would look like if every motherboard had an FPGA on it (especially one that could be rapidly re-programmed).

The only ideas that immediately come to mind would be games offloading some of their logic to a custom FPGA-based co-processor, or being able to have a hardware decoder of all the latest audio/video codecs. But maybe with the speed of current hardware, all of that might be moot anyway.

At the worst, there'd probably be a lot more people out there that can speak Verilog.