skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there really a strong argument that human cognition and/or consciousness relies on quantum effects? (That is, stronger than the vacuous argument that everything relies on some properties of a quantum mechanical system, including our computers, by virtue of being made of matter.)

I seem to recall Roger Penrose's argument to that effect a couple of decades ago being soundly criticized.
Funny but true :)
Kurzweil's Discover article says if we build a sufficiently complex machine it will be conscious as fully as humans are conscious. And he says we might do this by 2029.

This blog post says there are all sorts of low-level physical processes in the brain like detailed interactions of neurotransmitters and calcium ion channel dynamics which are super complicated and scary. And it will take hundreds of years to figure it all out and replicate it.

The answer is we don't have to replicate the human brain to create a system complex enough to exhibit consciousness. Modeling is not simulation, we can model a system after the human brain without simulating every last detail.
IOS Maintains Lead for Last Quarter of 2012 (U.S.)
Except that we're rapidly becoming better shots, and we're aiming at a target that's already been drawn.
MonoGame 3.0 Released: Target phones, desktops, consoles with one codebase
TypeScript Modules
Okay, removed the smiley
Nader calls violent video game devs "electronic child molestors"
I went to http://weekdone.com/. My screen resolution is 1440 x 900. Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/oPLMUq0.png
Except crowdfunding can never provide the sales leads, partnership leads, and M&A leads that VC firms can (or at least the best VC firms).

People call startups an insider's game for a reason. If you're not taking VC money (or are unable to), then you really need to be prepared to forge your own path, and not become "just another startup like all the others".
Comparing Germany to Alaska seems a bit unfair. If you want to live in a walkable, dense small town in the US, they do exist.

I'd personally prefer to live in a place with multi-acre lots and driving and no kids. Trees are fine, though. The great thing about the US is you actually have everything from dense SF downtown to fairly "German" Palo Alto to Atherton/Hillsborough/Portola Valley, all within the same job market metro area.
I am not saying cabal is perfect, but the situation has dramatically improved since the prevention of spurious reinstalls. It also seems that hackage uploaders are playing nicer these days, and I just generally get far less breakage.

Lots of work is being done on Haskell's package system to make it better.

I've been using Haskell for 5 years. It used to be very painful. It is only rarely painful these days.
No, there is not. The linked article is vacuous, and the quantum consciousness has not come up with a testable hypothesis yet that explains any observed data better than simpler models.
Using Social Media isn’t storytelling or is it?
Really? thats why a lot of young people move to GB right? I agree with you we (the west) are heading in the wrong direction but (thankfully) we're not a commi State (yet).
I've never used Basecamp, but... Teambox? Last version seems SaaS only, but previous ones are OSS:

http://teambox.com/
https://github.com/teambox/teambox
Actually, I didn't have a problem with the smiley. I was just suggesting that the question of how to close a parenthesis with a smiley is not solved ((yet :))|(yet :)).
I'm a programmer. Dataflow programming is of interest to me and I'm currently trying to put reactive programming into practical use.

I think in a way all those roads lead to functional programming.

Of course, in an enterprise world most people's eyes glaze over when you mention any of this.

To answer your question, I do think it influenced my thinking and made me a better programmer. Even at work, where I mainly program in C#.

I'm in general not that big a fan of visual programming and prefer text myself.
People really ought to read "On Intelligence" if they want to understand how wrong the entire academic AI field is.

It's not just the approach that is wrong. It is the entire mindset that is wrong.

At the same time, people in this field are so wrong that "machines as intelligent as human" may not be that far off because we really cannot be that smart if we have so many experts so wrong in such a field ; )
A German startup claims it is the victim of "blackhat SEO" attacks
Building a Syntax-Highlighted Input Box with JavaScript
Are you suggesting that SO - StackOverflow.com - runs on Java?
I like this idea and I think a lot of people have thought of it before. Congratulations to actually come out and post it on Hacker News though.

I would be all over this, but right now I'm lost on ideas. I'd do it in a heart beat though.
Show HN: rapid development for mobile education sites
I think it's possible to change the speed at the server, after you generate the file/s[1].

[1]http://superuser.com/questions/519649/tool-to-bulk-speed-up-...
Here in Germany it's also pretty normal that even in a densely populated residential neighbourhood there are not too many people on the street, unless there's a larger store nearby or something like that. Otherwise, if you do see many people on the street, that would be a sign of high unemployment...
I'm surprised you have never encountered such a page.

It's not that I've never encountered such a page; it's that you did a rather poor job of explaining what you were doing in the first place. If you'd said, "Here's what I want to do" and then explained what that was in even minor detail, people would've been able to follow you. Instead, you said I made a custom one the other day that briefly describes the product, collects emails, and does a little A/B testing. That's it - that's your only explanation of what you were doing. You then further said All I was "offering" by the way was 'free updates'. It made no sense then, and it still doesn't make sense when I read it an hour or so later.

No need to write an insulting reply to me when I've basically asked you for clarity in an attempt to help you solve your problem. That's a jerk reply and it implies that I'm an idiot for not "reading between the lines" of your text. Screw that - I don't need to help when people act like that to others who try to help.
Does anyone have a copy of a Googlegeist survey or two that they'd be willing to share?
Not entirely. QM is puzzling, but not as bad as most popularizations lead you to believe. That's why I added the second link.

Here's a paper that the second link is based on in case you don't want to sit through the video:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf
Not quite what I had in mind, but definitely interesting.
Amen. Pet peeve of mine as well.
Some time ago (mid 2011), I was trying to use an AWS 64 GB machine for some largish work and discovered that I couldn't actually allocate anywhere near all of the 64 GB of RAM I was supposed to have access to. As I recall, writing a simple C program to do binary search to pinpoint exactly what the max amount of memory I could malloc was, it failed somewhere around 34 GB – so just over half of the memory I was supposed to have access to. Makes me wonder how much of this 244 GiB you can actually use when you spin up one of these machines.
Citation needed. My entire family has Macs, and I have never seen this. As far as I know it is impossible to add toolbars to Safari: there is no API for doing so.

I call shenanigans.
This is spot on, and something I have thought for a long time without the time or ability to elucidate it so clearly.

The complexity of the human brain is not just difficult, not just complicated or hard to understand, it is several orders of magnitude beyond our ability to comprehend. IMHO we will need a fundamental leap in our own intelligence before we have the means to comprehend even how the brain works, and one more leap to understand how we might reproduce its behavior.

It's a long way off. People who believe otherwise are doing just that—believing.
Boston, Philadelphia, and DC all have substantial car-free populations.

They are small in proportion to the overall populations of the respective cities' urban areas, but that's almost entirely because public transportation has lagged the construction of suburbs and sprawl. Boston's T, or Philly's SEPTA were mostly constructed in the early 20th century so it's only those older areas that are feasible for car-free living. (The DC Metro is an interesting exception in that it's a much newer system, but it too fell out of step with development.)

In fact, I'd say that there's a sort of "car free radius" that's basically the edge of residential areas just before World War II. The suburbs that got built after that are hugely car-centric, ones built before typically aren't.
Also, pressing shift 5 times is an easy way to enable sticky keys in Windows.
The project I've been working on, http://kona.com, has had the idea of personal/work projects baked in from the beginning, and it's free. Worth checking out.
It's because the design is driven by development companies with profit-motives.
Trello is absolutely incredible (and they have a really receptive development team). I've used them for development, marketing, HR, etc and have yet to be disappointed. Mobile version is also kickass.
Again, I do not care "why", just that it happens. Crapware is more of a Windows thing. This is one of (many) reasons I avoid it.
I for one feel that YouTube is far better off without comments.
I've taken money from Mark and can say quite honestly that he's provided a ridiculous amount of value to our company since coming on board. He's an operator and a realist who really is "founder friendly"
MAImagePickerController for iOS - Cocoa Controls
Charging a one-off fee, per project, is a great idea.

And if I was you, I would much rather make enough money to pay the bills, than play the freemium lottery.

And Taskmessenger is all about adding value to a project - something that you should be proud to charge for.
Ah good point, can't believe I missed that. It's there now. Thanks!
What does convergence exactly mean in Machine Learning?
A couple of points:

The sites themselves are pure HTML, JavaScript, and JSON. No active processing on the backend is needed to deliver the site content (creation and editing does require active processing).

The sites are being delivered out of Amazon S3, and the back-end processing is done in Heroku.

This is free right now, but will probably have a monthly charge if it becomes successful (I don't want to make it advertising supported).

I've got 5 dynos spun up at the moment. Will add more if the site becomes sluggish. :-)
I don't like the interviewer or the interviewee. "I took out my card and asked if I could pay 200 euros," Newman said. "In return, I would write a great review on TripAdvisor. The woman at the hotel immediately said yes. It was a win-win for both of us." This contradicts his own statement later: "If the hotel is close to the train station or has a comfy bed, that's why it's getting a good review."

That said, threatening to write a bad review is hardly extortion. And anyone can do it, so it's not like the preferential treatment is limited to only a few people who can write reviews online.
> Tooling: Visual Studio.

It's a decent tool but I think the alternatives for other platforms are either equal or better. imo MS is typically playing catchup in this area now.

> Libraries: If it's _really_ popular in the Java world, you'll find a port (think nhibernate, log4net) or something equivalent.

This is what truly makes .NET a no go for me. There's just too few non-paid and open library equivalents compared to almost any other platform. Not mention the libraries in other platforms tend to have more features. The .NET open source community is still pretty small and weak, and I just don't see that changing (even with CodePlex it hasn't really had any drastic changes).
I'm not sure which debugger you use to debug Java code but I can do local _and_ remote java debugging via Eclipse.

IntelliJ supports JavaScript and JSP debugging as well.

Client-server development using EJB 3.x is way much better, cleaner, and simpler than .NET, sorry, this is something that I don't think you can argue elegantly.

.NET culture when it comes to open source is sub-par while Java is very rich. Spring, Tomcat, Jetty, Hadoop, HBase, Eclipse, NetBeans, Maven, Ant, the list goes on. These are mature and high profiled open source projects wherein .NET I have never seen an open source project reached that level of acceptance.

While Java has this sub-culture of factories that made of factories. .NET has this culture of fighting with the latest and grandest libraries that Microsoft launched once every 6 - 12 months.

Enterprise .NET is not at the level of Java yet (compare Message Queue, remoting, security, and other capabilities .NET are still lagging).

.NET has its cancer in its own way.

I honestly believe that you have not used Java that deep professionally.
San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Seattle to name a few.

http://www.walkscore.com/rankings/

From my experience I would say only the top 7 on the above list are fit for life without a car. Can't imagine not having a car living in Miami or Minneapolis.
"Who's Your Best Friend?" Is Not Security
I don't see how Motorola/Freescale and IBM having shifted focus from competitive consumer PowerPC chips to embedded applications reflects so badly on Apple. That platform remained competitive with Intel until the G5, which never hit its stride.

Apple learned from their mistake. They made a dramatic transition to Intel inside of a single year. The impact to consumers was nearly zero.

Compare this with Microsoft's recent efforts to switch to ARM.
"Deep Space Industries will also focus on extracting asteroid water, which can be split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen — the chief components of rocket fuel."

To do this, you need a lot of energy, it is essentially charging a battery. If this was really feasible wouldn't we be using solar panels to separate water into hydrogen on Earth? Do solar panels in space have the potential for far greater energy output due to less atmospheric constraints?
Don't forget the OpenOffice.org clusterfuck.
So in addition to serifs being worthless now Kurzweil is completely wrong! This guy is going to debunk all the truths we hold dear.
Podio.com is great too!
You just need to configure it properly and it can become quite powerful! and best of all it's even free!
I started working in 1994 and Oracle was already the database provider that did not want to comply with standards (Sql92). They were already greedy.
Crowdfunding can potentially be a deal-breaker for startups trying to raise a later stage of funding -- at least as it stands right now.

I've heard from many Series A / B VCs that they will not invest in startups that have gone the equity-based crowdfunding route (that is, not the Kickstarter approach, but the new kind where equity is provided as per the new JOBS act), because they don't want to deal with hundreds of tiny investors. It's a nightmare for them.

The only way to deal with these sorts of equity-based crowdfunding platforms if you plan to go for a later stage equity investment from a VC or other investment professional is to bundle all the unaccredited / crowdfunding investors into a single LLC or other entity and have that entity invest in the startup with terms that allow future investors to treat them all as a single class in much the same way they deal with accredited angel investors now.
That would be philosophical questions.

In addition to that, human minds may possess some qualities above our current understanding of physical reality.

And wouldn't the experiment "proving" that we understand it all, precisely, be the creation of an AI equaling or surpassing the human mind?
Although you are taking heat for saying they are less secure, this is mostly true. Specifically, it is the JVM that has major security problems, not the apps themselves. This is not so much a fault in Java but in Oracle's implementation and their longstanding failure with security.

Fun fact, several Windows versions have included a security mitigation technology called ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) that breaks a large majority of exploits and raises the bar significantly. Exploit developers and penetration testers love Java, because any machine that has it installed (most of them) breaks ASLR, re-enabling all of those exploits that Microsoft had otherwise mitigated.
I’ve evaluated PHP frameworks, and the answer is Laravel
What Makes Spark Exciting
<rant>

I want Highrise Personal. There are so many CRMs for every different size of business, but I want a contact list where I can fill in information about people as I go (ie. start with "big guy with red hair at Mark's Dec. 17 party, discussed quantum tunnelling" and then add in his name and contact info if/when I learn it) and add arbitrary notes about everyone. I know I could just use a regular CRM but those always get hung up on leads/accounts/etc. I know I could use something like Evernote (or Workflowy, which I love and sort of use for this currently) but that's not really the right tool for the job.

Every time I mention this someone tells me it already exists; every time the thing they point me to is full of useless social integrations and other shit. Does anyone know of a "personal CRM" that doesn't suck?

</rant>
shrug. That's my usage pattern. I find it hard to imagine having the screen on for more than that on an average day, even if the phone is in active use more than that (e.g. when listening to podcasts, or taking a GPS trace during a workout). And of course there's the passive use of just having it constantly syncing. With previous Nexus devices just the passive background noise of Android was often enough to use up the battery in a day.
Yeah, my screen is very different: http://i.imgur.com/4qEJZOF.png

Must be something javascript then as NoScript has blocked something.

That said, your screenshot doesn't really change much for me. If OP is expecting visitors who don't want to click the "Register free" button to visually scroll, scroll with their eyes until they finally locate the Walkthrough link in the footer, I think he'll find that they don't.
I feel like it's the copy equivalent of that old story about the new "developer" deleting a bunch of braces at the end of the file because he didn't like the way they looked.
Why you need more margin in your life
$25 is too much for something you can get for free with asana or trello. I guess you pay for the brand more than anything else, like the apple tax.
How to Find a Co-Founder Success Story: Mobiplug, TechStars 2012 grad
Microsoft in talks to invest up to $3 bln in Dell buyout
Of course it is an important signal, but they don't say "I'll switch when all my games work, to the very last (even the ones I have no intention of ever playing again), and not a moment earlier". That's just an unreasonable position, which I'm sure not even venomsnake really believes.

Now that I typed that, it's obvious that we're feeding the troll.
So - the base model is priced at $899 to which you will want to add a "Type Cover" - another $100 or so - and you get a $1,000 tablet with 64GB of storage.

Oh - and it comes with a stylus - what - just like the Windows CE devices in the year 2000? Very similar.

The article does not cover things like GPS and other sensors. The selling feature seems to be that it might run standard desktop programs.

So who is going to buy them?
Here are a few more versions of the story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090807 (venturebeat.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092088 (telegraph.co.uk)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092123 (bloomberg.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092327 (guardian.co.uk)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092447 (latimes.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092764 (lohud.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092889 (bbc.co.uk)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093489 (cnn.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094517 (ft.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094529 (wsj.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5097396 (reuters.com)

There are more ...
Apparently, flossing also helps to prevent heart disease. Perhaps that's just some unfounded pseudo-science being pushed by the floss-manufacturers but in any case I imagine it can't be bad for you. Twice a day might be a little overkill, though.
Demo Day Pitch = Seed Pitch. Lessons from 500 startups
Does this mean that Ubuntu supports GPU Hardware acceleration drivers?

I am not an expert on the matter, but it seems that most Linux distributions used to lack this, unless you had a specific Card that had drivers for it under yer distro ..

Please feel free to correct me. This is one of the issues which prevents me from 'jumping' completely onto Ubuntu.

Thanks
GitHub seems to be doing just fine without managers .. http://gigaom.com/2012/03/26/tales-from-the-trenches-github/ .. from an end user's perspective.
Eclipse has rich plugins that even Visual Studio can't touch.

(Maven) m2clipse alone is a very good reason to learn Eclipse.

You can't download 3rd-party library with Documentation _and_ Source Code _and_ Navigate to the code without having to setup anything _and_ included in your build like you would have in.NET.

It's a big plus for incorporating and debugging code when you need to do so.

I've done C# and now fully Java (and JavaScript) and I wouldn't go back to a more locked and dumbed-down ecosystem.

C# the language may well be better than Java but that alone is not enough of productivity boost.

Eclipse, Maven, FindBugs, CheckStyle, Jenkins, Tomcat, Jetty, rich 3rd-party ecosystems are the key of my productivity boost.

VS.NET, NuGET and having to write either MSBuild or NAnt plus IIS (express or not) aren't cut it. Not enough to be agile.
If you click on, "What is Soundgecko", there's a forever looping background movie that looks really cool. It looks like it's downloading 2.8mb of the movie every time the previous 2.8mb finishes downloading, how does this work? Is it something like Node.js file streaming?
[Link here](http://soundgecko.com/)
This looks like a rebirth of Backpack to me, which is great because I sorely miss Backpack.
>It's sad that all new great products stop as web-apps and never go further.

There are other apps for personal use or collaboration such as Wunderlist, Omnifocus (Mac, not PC) and Any.Do (only available natively for iPhone and Android.)
(playing devil's advocate) The emperor's new clothes.
Indeed, although to outsiders who lack the context of the usage of the phrase, it comes off as a bit crass. In the TC article it sounds like they were pulled, which was probably a good idea for all involved.
I highly recommend Jan Gehl's "Life Between Buildings", which even though was written at the beginning of the '70s is still very relevant today. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Gehl#Influence)

> Gehl's book Public Spaces, Public Life describes how such incremental improvements have transformed Copenhagen from a car-dominated city to a pedestrian-oriented city over 40 years. Copenhagen's Strøget carfree zone, the longest pedestrian shopping area in Europe,[2] is primarily the result of Gehl's work. In fact, Gehl often uses the phrase "copenhagenize" to describe his vision of how urban centres can embrace bicycle culture and urban cycling.
For what it's worth, our neighborhood isn't walkable enough to allow you to function without a car, but it does have plenty of space for kids to roam including elementary and middle schools about four blocks away and lots of businesses with a mile and at most one major street crossing. Plus our 1978 house is good-sized and our lot is nice with lots of trees. It was not wildly expensive or congested.

Edited to add: Just occurred to me it might sound like I was disagreeing, when actually I was agreeing and then some. It's just not that hard to find whatever sort of neighborhood you'd like to in the US, if you're willing to pay the price. (Which might be money, or having a smaller house, or living somewhere that isn't trendy.)