skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Modeling is not simulation, we can model a system after the human brain without simulating every last detail.

Maybe so, but I think the author is arguing that those details are part of the emergent whole; in other words, without them, you might get an intelligence, but a very alien one.
Valve is getting Steam for Linux ready for the day when you may have to choose between keeping your Steam library on your existing PC or throwing it away to use some Windows 8 descendent. They are hoping you'll be able to switch to Linux instead of just losing everything (or never upgrading your computer).
Interesting that so many people are discussing the price. If you've followed 37signals' blog posts about business, it's pretty clear that they prefer to have paying users, rather than offer support (i.e. waste money) to people only using free plans.

Indeed, the high profile of their brand is what (now) allows them to do this with a new product: their users will be familiar with the other products 37signals offers, and buy based on that familiarity/constancy.
I think the question you need to ask is whether the outcome would still be the same if the "decision maker" did not exist.

It's fair to say that Steve Jobs was a decision maker. Did he not take the "initiative"? Would Apple exist as it is today without him? Certainly not.

Also, President Bill Clinton ordered Selective Availability for GPS. Basically allowing for more precise GPS coordinates for civilian use. Do you think this decision did not help foster the use GPS system in cars?

My point is that decision makers cannot claim FULL credit for the development of a technology but they can claim credit nonetheless.
For an interesting look at the impact of the last time a whole load of expensive and rare materials were brought home from a new world, see here[1]. It's also worth looking into the price revolution[2], a 150 year period of time where the import of unheard of masses of gold and silver into European markets had a startlingly unstable effect on the Spanish economy.

[1] - http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/611/what-happened-t...

[2] - http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/socst/ghgonline/units/4/docume...
I bought an out of print copy second hand. But you can buy a new one here: http://www.barbaraminto.com/textbook.html
Couldn't they have done this design without ripping off the water droplet background from Apple? http://www.geeksphone.com/#slider-peak
I floss all the time because it feels amazing
Thanks! Yeah, the gdata API and demo is pretty nice (and VERY fast). It's been a joy to work with.
Basing your idea on where the cutting edge will be in a decade on the current state of consumer products will be misleading. A roomba is a $300 piece of hardware with an embedded computer, IBM's Watson was a $3,000,000 system. Both Apple's Siri & Google's voice recognition blow the average call-center system away.

I'm not sure we'll have sentience in 16 years, if ever, but we're a lot further ahead than you give us credit for.
Cherrypicked? He's describing how consciousness currently manifests itself. Which cherries did he forget to pick?

Also considering much of Kurweil's "evidence" is best-fit graphs of cherry-picked data points, it's kind of ironic to lob that the other way.

> if this article wasn't citing all this quantum consciousness pseudoscience

Yeah, I guess if by "all this pseudoscience" you mean a two mentions of two very minimalistic claims. It's not like he's fabricating Deepak-Chopra-esque word salad.
The developer preview is an actual phone, not a webpage.
Nothing has been announced, but fwiw, I've been running benchmarks comparing the SSD block storage at Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/blockstorage/pricing/), as well as the all-SSD VMs from Digital Ocean (http://www.digitalocean.com/), and frankly, the CPU & I/O blow away EC2 so far. Compared to Google Compute Engine (https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine), CPU is on par, but obviously SSD is going to best even zippy local instance spindle storage.

For example, calculating 8th order Fermat prime factors (single thread/core intensive, so ymmv), EC2 XLs are getting smoked by 20-50% vs. Digital Ocean's 2 core 2GB RAM/40GB SSD. Replicated in multiple data centers/zones a dozen times. Not bad for $20/month!

Also, for the low end, remember "core" on EC2 is throttled at 50%-75% for the small & medium instances, translating to lots of stolen cpu time.

Still working out the details on the Rackspace SSD EBS-equivalents, but will post update soon.

But, agreed, given across-the-board I/O benefits of SSD, surprised Amazon isn't offering something in the non-cluster category. And at $2,500+ /mo, the new instances are definitely targeting a very niche use case for burst-heavy batching.
Linux's Not Unix
How to build an old-school racing game
Haskel/Scala has Learn You a Haskell/Scala for Great Good! and Lisp has The Land of Lisp.

Are there any _why-esque guides to Clojure and FP in general like these other languages have? I'm unaware of any and consider it surprising given the Clojure communities passion.
FWIW, I think AngelList is already planning to do that bundling via SecondMarket with their crowd-funding offering:
https://angel.co/help/invest#invest-3

Q: Do startups have to deal with a million new investors?

No. The overhead is the same as adding a single large investor to the round.

All of the investors are pooled into a single fund which, in turn, invests in the startup. Only the fund is listed on the company's cap table—the individual investors are not. The fund also signs the investment documents, the individual investors do not.
Ya I'm living in Hollywood right now w/o a car by choice. It's totally functional for me since I live next to a subway stop and my work is also off a major stop. And the neighborhood is incredibly walkable--everything I need or want. Taxis readliy available should I need one.

Although being a single guy here, I think women see it as a red flag (at least from what I see on okcupid). Interested in moving to NYC unless I find somewhere cheaper and still interesting.
Great article!

My forever project is: the syntactically simplest high-level programming language. This had been kicking around in my brain for a long time, re-emerging every time I learned or read about a new programming language whose syntax seemed unnecessarily complex or conventional. As overwhelming as new language development is, I decided to set a goal for the end of 2012: a sufficiently complete proof-of-concept implementation, with documentation, to demonstrate the basic concepts. The result: http://om-language.org

Although the language itself isn't useful for anything yet, the side benefits of developing it have been many:

- Developing my C++, Doxygen, and Unicode knowledge/skills to a high-advanced level, which I have applied in my professional software career.

- Filling in lots of gaps in my knowledge of concatenative (and other) language theory.

- Discovering that using prefix notation in a concatenative language works better than postfix: no stack underflows, no data stack needed, and a program effectively becomes a partially-applied function awaiting more data (i.e. the rest of the program), elegantly allowing for data pipelining and events. As far as I know, using prefix notation in a concatenative language is a first.

- Discovering "panmorphic types": that when every piece of data can be expressed completely and equivalently in a uniform way (in this case, as a quoted program), data types become an implementation detail.

- Rethinking how to best define "number" with respect to a computation, which has led me to arbitrary-precision arithmetic implementations, Riemann spheres, APL, and down all kinds of other interesting rabbit holes -- resulting in some new number theory ideas which I am fleshing out for incorporation into the language.

- Learning all the glue technologies to actually release it (CMake, GitHub, etc.).

- Writing documentation that describes it to others. This has clarified my thinking on it more than anything.

Most importantly: I've invented a real language! It feels good.

Although I'll be adding to this project forever, none of these benefits would have happened if I didn't set some goals for getting it out of my brain and starting to flesh it out. I encourage anyone with a forever project to do the same.
What do you mean by "comprehend"? What do you say to the idea that we might -- rather than build an AI piece by piece and thought by thought, a project I agree is several orders of magnitude beyond our ability to comprehend -- instead "grow" an AI by putting together evolutionary computation and enough processing power to eventually converge on something we would understand as "intelligence"? The extent of such an intelligence wouldn't be fully understood by us, or itself for that matter, but what of it? Our intelligence evolved without anyone understanding it.
MIT website hacked by Lulzsec
ISS Night Glider Mode
Anchorage could be any random middle american town and it exhibits the same suburban sprawl issues. What problems do you see with the extrapolation?
> can someone drain your account if they get your IBAN?

No. They are often printed on invoices and the websites of organisations you might want to send money.
That is damn wicked fast on my crap PC. Now I wish YouTube allowed us to use skins. I'd use that!
The Awesomeness of Google Plus
It's not quite as stable yet. First time I played it ran flawlessly (and at the same speed as it does under Windows). Since then I've had a few issues like excessive screen tearing and missing audio, but they're not too bad for what is still considered a beta.

Just for rough specs; both my Windows 7 64-bit & Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit installs have their own SSD (Samsung 830), on an i5 2500k/8GB RAM/nVidia 560TI machine. TF2 is installed on both the SSDs.
Thank your making an informed statement about this. I don't think parent knew what he was talking about, his figures about tax rates in Sweden were far from accurate or knowledgeable.
Having no idea what the software stack is, and only basing a guess on having read plenty of Joel's musings, I'm guessing a Microsoft technology. I'm sure someone has the goods, or Google could probably answer.
I'm pretty sure someone can only put money into your account.

In general you go into your bank or banking website, give them the IBAN number you want to transfer to and then do the transfer.

For personal accounts + transfers under about £10k it's in about an hour in the UK.
> I was very excited about Tent.io, and wrote a small app for it, but after a few months began to see serious problems with its design.

Can you be more specific? I've been thinking about using the Tent protocol as a foundation for my forever project, so I'd be interested in hearing what problems you've had with it.
Interesting choice of framework, given that the PS3's YouTube application is built in AngularJS as well: http://blog.angularjs.org/2012/08/your-excuse-to-buy-playsta...

Did you find any advantages to using AngularJS, or was it just coincidence/familiarity?
Complexity science, Python programming, and the philosophy of science
I wish this were done with voice bunny, but I realize it would get expensive.
Heh, if I told you my biggest problem with cars was the lack of a mini-fridge, and you offered me one with a mini-fridge, yes I'd like one thanks.
It was not attempted trolling. The problem comes from the fact that even if there cannot be "some" games working under linux. And i will try to argument myself. My steam and gog library is about 200 games. For the majority of them - i will never touch them again. But there are maybe 20 games that I play regularly. The problem comes from the fact that they are scattered trough time and technology.

Giving up on the most of the games will be easy, not so much on vampire the masquerade, deus ex, painkiller, icewind dale, jedi outcast,skyrim, psychonauts or heroes 3. These are games I tend to play a lot.

But you don't have much chance with compatibility - if you make any of these games work, there is strong chance you will be able to make most of the games of this generation also playable. And then comes the thing that everyone has some games that are dearly loved but they are different for each person.

So yeah - all is not what I meant. So if Gabe wants the linux users to play from now on - that is amazing. If they want to get people to switch the comparability is important. And for old games too - because for some they are beloved classics that have stood the test of time.
While the current consensus among American dentists is that flossing helps prevent cavities, this (like what seems to be a frightening amount of what dentists believe about dentistry) is not actually founded on or backed up by scientific evidence. There is slightly stronger evidence that flossing helps against gingivitis (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22161438).

As for dentists handing you a bill that would pay for a used car? There's an easy fix for that: ignore most of what they tell you, and get things fixed if/when they hurt. When the dentist has you sign a consent form that says "dentistry is not an exact science", take heed.
I think we're seeing the unfolding of 37signals. I know that's the cliche thing to say here on HN, so note I say this bearing that overarching fact in mind.

I think Basecamp Next was the beginning. I can't put it into words, but users stopped praising 37signals after Basecamp Next. Changes were probably necessary, but it just doesn't garner the same respect as the original Basecamp. I feel like they deliberately removed private messages to get me on board with their CRM and it doesn't really seem like the average person knows what to expect when they add a user to a project (Can they see everything? Are they able to create projects?). Sure, I know, but the average person is reasonably unsettled by the current way this is handled - a problem that didn't exist in original Basecamp.

This Basecamp Personal feels like they are reaching, not innovating.

I'd love to hear what other people think, or why I am wrong and jumping to conclusions.

EDIT: Great comments. I am pretty dependant on Basecamp, so I don't relish the idea of 37signal's demise, but I have to be honest when I say I think they're concentrating on different ideals. I like most of Basecamp Next, but the things I don't like are glaring and 37signals is generally good at addressing glaring faults.
I can't speak for everyone, but personally I distrust schemes like this for one simple reason: creativity loss due to undetectable exhaustion.

The more burned out you are, the less likely it is you're going to come up with something creative that fits the problem you're trying to solve.

Now of course, committing to push a lot harder on all fronts for a set amount of time could help you - just don't assume that there is no price to pay. You have to make that subjective calculation. Exhaustion manifests itself in many ways, and the most insidious types of exhaustion are hard to detect and can sabotage your efforts to make something unique. (Assuming that is what you're trying to do - if it isn't, fair enough.)

I'd much rather fail to do everything on a todo list and get just one good, non-obvious idea dreamed up and prototyped that day, rather than consistently and mechanically trudging through every damn repetitive task on a set list day after day.

(Note: This is just my take on it - kudos to the OP for trying it and telling us about it. Experimentation with stuff like this is always worth it. =) )
Are antibiotics helpful in curing cough?
I purchased a Dell XPS-13 through the Sputnik program ( http://dell.com/sputnik ) and Ubuntu was pre-loaded, it worked fine. I did not like the mouse much, but I don't like any of the touchpads - I bought it specifically for the Sputnik program, not the hardware - but I found it overall to be very nice and useable. I am generally a ThinkPad fan.

It was fast, could run development environments in VirtualBox well, had a long battery life, etc. Even the speakers and microphone where better than I was used to for Skype and etc.

Unfortunately it was stolen before I ever had the chance to get involved the Sputnik stuff. It was kind of expensive as laptops of that size go, and I have to decide if I should get another one or not.
Expecting an AI to replicate/model every detail of a brain is like expecting a house to replicate/model every detail of a cave.
In the original article he details that the Ask updater waits patiently for 10 minutes after the Java installation completes (probably successfully or unsuccessfully) before launching as a background process.
Too bad Google missed out on buying Sun.
Same thoughts here, I immediately thought of "Connected play" pattern when reading this article. Growing up in communist Warsaw had its downsides but at least my walkable play area was huge so there was always someone to play with (that's more or less the spirit of this pattern.)

link: http://www.jacana.plus.com/pattern/P68.htm
I think you underestimate how difficult it is to drive versus walking up stairs or walking a mile.

Just as an example: blind people can't drive at all, but they can walk miles pretty easily and safely. And visual impairments of various sorts are, IIRC, the number one disability among the elderly.

Slower reaction times are similar: they destroy the ability to drive, but they're not a huge deal for walking up a flight of stairs.
I lived without a car in Chicago for three years with absolutely no problems.

Also, there is a spectrum from being totally car-dependent to not owning a car. My parents live in the D.C. suburbs and they have more cars in their garage than people who live there. Because you can't even go to the drug store without driving several miles (and this isn't a far-flung exurb, they're only 17 miles from downtown) my brother and I each got a car as soon as we could drive. Meanwhile, I now live in Westchester (a suburb of NYC), and while I own a car I only drive it a couple of times a month (Costco trips mostly). The same is true for Chicago. Unlike in Manhattan, most people do own cars, but a large number of people don't use them that heavily because the suburbs are easily accessible by train.
Maybe if more people floss their teeth, cleanings would go faster, allowing him to see more patients, partially making up for the scarcity of expensive dental procedures?
Thanks for the feedback. We're really focused on facilitating teamwork. It's normally something intangible and we're trying to make it visible which will hopefully in turn make it contagious.

I will take a look into how a one-off fee model would work.
He's a professional. He genuinely cares about your dental health. Most medical doctors enter the profession because they genuinely want to help people, not exploit them for bucks. And prevention is very often the best method of help.

Compare him to the programmer who creates an extensible open framework, as opposed to the guy who throws together a dense hack that only he understands. The latter could be said to be acting more in his own interest, but the former is more dedicated to his profession and the greater good.
I'm really interested who this yacht guy is :)
A car with a mini-fridge would probably do quite well for anyone who takes roadtrips or frequently goes grocery shopping.
I'll see your anecdote and raise you one ;-).

I never used to floss, and would regularly have cavities to deal with (pretty much every visit to the dentist). When I started flossing religiously that ceased. I've had one filling (and that for a tooth cracked when I accidentally bit down on something hard) in the last decade.

For me, there's a pretty clear benefit to flossing. I imagine there's a lot of variation in its usefulness, depending on things like diet, mouth shape & size, what kinds of bacteria you host, etc.
Chicago or Philadelphia come pretty close.
That presumption, that strong AI is inevitable, is precisely the point in contention. The fact that it has been a decade away for nearly a half century argues against its inevitability, not for it.
You may think it's dumb, I know a ton of people that love living in the suburbs. To each his own.
I'll check back in a couple of weeks to see where you're at...
Towns are an interesting case where the free market system breaks. The reason is that developers work in units that are too small. If they built whole towns, people would pay more to live in the ones that were walkable and human. But currently developers mostly just build a few hundred houses on the edge of some existing town. Which means they compete with one another at the level of houses rather than towns. Which produces grim expanses of McMansions.

I'm not saying developers should switch to building whole towns. It would be a harder problem. The kind of people who currently build houses might not be capable of solving it.
I work for a large software company with about 11,000 employees.
This is the right approach, I believe. However, it has not yet been tested in the courts if an investor in the pool sues when he/she feel wronged when a future investor tries to cram down all these investors in a down round. It's inevitable to happen at some point, and it will probably be an issue given that most investors in the crowdfunding approach will be unaccredited investors.

Right now as it stands, Second Market is only available to accredited investors (https://angel.co/help/invest#secondmarket) and so the JOBS act crowdfunding rules don't apply here in the same way.
For the Start screen - it opens on the monitor you last did something in "metro" on. For example, if you opened the Charms bar (Win+C or hot corner), and open "Settings," Start will now open on that monitor. You can always force the Start screen to open on your monitor of choice by opening the Charms bar on that monitor and clicking on "Start" or by using the lower left hot corner. However, there's no way (to my knowledge) of doing this with the Windows key alone.

For the taskbar issue, you can change that. Right-click on the taskbar, choose "Properties." Under "Show taskbar buttons on:" select another option. I personally prefer "Main taskbar and taskbar where window is open." But to each his own.

Good luck!

Full disclosure: I am a Microsoft employee.
I feel you. I ended up going with Salesforce's $5/mo contact manager edition and just stripping all the tabs and modules on the contact pages so it's super-simplified.

Now all my personal contacts are managed in Salesforce which is super robust and powerful. I love sorting them by "Last Activity" to see who I haven't spoken with in a while and working my way through the list that way.

(I was able to negotiate a discounted rate of $2/mo when I talked to one of their account execs too. I bet that's still an option...)
Blatant sensationalism; its on their About page and appears to users of all OS's, not just Windows. Just had a look on a Mac and Linux and the page is static.
14-YR-OLD PRODIGY PROGRAMMER DREAMS IN CODE
A self-professed computer nerd, Santiago is fluent in a dozen different programming languages and thousands of people have downloaded his apps for the Mac, iPhone and iPad.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DBXZWB_dNsw
We're talking about a guy who believes he will be able to literally resurrect dead people by feeding primitive personality data into an AI which in turn would emulate the deceased. So, yes, he's been wrong for a long time. He has always been simplifying issues to the point where they become absurd parodies. This is not new.

Having said that, I'm glad he's around though. AI and transhumanism are need of a skilled public advocate, which he is.
It's certainly best in class in touch parallax and mediocre usability.
Actual moral is probably that some people have better teeth than others.
Wow, what a find! These are well worth sitting through, but if you don't want to invest four hours, the content of these videos is in Feynman's book "QED". But if you're ever going to spend four hours watching QM lectures, make it these.
The site that usually shows which MIT services are down/unavailable has evidently been hacked, too:

http://3down.mit.edu/
Not anymore, they don't. (Source: http://bit.ly/947yQJ)