skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was working in the mobile business before the iPhone came and owned everybody (waiting then for Android) and I recall things totally differently than you.

The smartphone market was owned by Nokia and their Sxx series. That and the BlackBerries.

We were working on mostly Nokia (either native or Java), Qualcomm BREW (C++) and, granted, we had some demand for Windows Mobile but they were pretty much a nobody in that pre-iPhone world. Just as they're still nobody.

There was hardly any customer demand for Windows Mobile compared to Nokia and the others.

There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones.

It has always been an utter failure.

Now of course you may your definition of a "pre-iPhone Smartphone" which appears to be: "Certainly not a BlackBerry and certainly not anything that wasn't running Windows Mobile". So then it becomes hard to argue ; )
I'd like to see more of these as well. Not only does it put the chances of success into perspective, but there is a ton to be gained from mistakes. Failing is a fact of life, the least we can do is learn and help others learn from our failures.
I think the first and third are facts. Is the second one really established? Right now, I think it's just a claim.
Not only because it's young, also because we _do_ learn from mistakes made in other languages.

For example, I do not see PL/I's choice to make none of its keywords reserved names (IIRC, defended on the argument that one cannot expect anybody to know all the reserved words) repeated much anymore in Algol-like languages.

As another example, IDE/language pairs such as Eclipse/Java have learned us the advantages of languages that are easy to parse and where there is little ambiguity even in incomplete or incorrect programs (it makes syntax coloring easier, and allows for refactoring tools that are somewhat reliable on non conforming source code)
Ah. Well thanks to you both. :)
We've interpreted the article differently. I think it's mainly talking about negative commenter vs. commenter interactions, not commenter vs. article criticism.
Had no idea about the white label 100, I bet that's even better for derby juleps :) I will defer to the dirt farmers here. I come from a line of Texas circus performers, I don't think they knew much about cocktails because they tended to put the booze directly in the glass (not necessarily a good thing, given the number of broken homes!)
Thanks Steve, when I wrote the question there wasn't one...
Daemons Without Daemons
Why Entrepreneur Dreamers Fail to Launch
The problem with chaotic systems isn't simulating them, it's measuring the initial conditions. Arbitrarily small differences blow up exponentially fast even if your simulation has really, really small time steps.
I too believe this. Here is my argument:

1) If we have to simulate it at a low level, the human brain is far too complex for any computer in any timeframe of our current lives to have enough power to simulate properly

2) Working backwards and simulating the high level processes (AI, etc) have been a dismal failure at actually replicating human thought processes, and will continue to be. While NN or the like can theoretically simulate any algorithm, we have no idea how to effectively train them in a way that produces high level thought similar to a human brain.

Generally when discussing this with people, I say this: if you disagree, give me a date by which you think I will be shown wrong, and then we'll reevaluate at that point.

I fully expect I could be proven wrong, and that would be an awesome world to live in, but my bold and unfortunate prediction is that I won't be.
Overall, yes. I wonder, though, could the spin of the Earth have any effect on the distribution?
Well, the situation I am thinking of is a country road which the speed limit is either 35 or 50.

It's not really as much of an issue in town.
This is not a comparison of Makers Mark vs all other Bourbons, this is a comparison of Makers Mark vs literally* watered down* Makers Mark.
See this series of posts:

http://www.exratione.com/2012/07/proxying-websocket-traffic-...

http://www.exratione.com/2012/08/websockets-over-ssl-stunnel...

http://www.exratione.com/2012/12/websockets-over-ssl-haproxy...

"So let us say that you are developing a Node.js / Socket.IO application that both uses websockets and serves files the old-fashioned way, such as through Express - this is a fairly common situation. You want to have an HTTP proxy server rather than Node.js field all incoming traffic, so that you can set up load balancing, route requests for static files to some other server process, avoid having to set up SSL configuration in Node.js, and so forth.

"Unfortunately at this point in time it isn't completely straightforward to proxy both websocket traffic and ordinary web requests for Node.js through a single port - which would be the ideal situation. It becomes even less straightforward if you want to use SSL. The following is a brief overview of present options as of early Q3 2012."

"The up-front summary: if you are reading this after Nginx adds support for proxying websocket traffic to Node.js (supposedly coming up in version 1.3), then everything is rainbows and unicorns - just use Nginx. If you are reading this prior to Nginx support for proxying of websocket traffic, then you will likely have to do more work and investigation in order to create a good proxy setup for your servers."
Yeah... what I've found from my work is that higher-order modeling tends to leave out important effects. Which is okay when you're specifically trying to understand one particular property of a system (diffusivity, charge distribution, etc.), but when you want ALL properties to be accurate? That's difficult.

Edit: I'll elaborate a little bit more. We currently simulate large proteins using force fields like CHARMM or AMBER. The problem we're trying to solve is what structure these proteins will fold into, and these force-fields work pretty well for that.

But consider this: these potentials are basically a handful of equations that describe stretching, bending, torsional, van der Waals, and electrostatic interactions. The parameters for these equations come from measurements of simple compounds that have similar structure, and these are used to extrapolate what will happen in a different substance. Good enough for folding, but if you want accurate energy levels? No way.
Europe Is Warmer Than Canada Because of the Gulf Stream, Right? Not So Fast
Well, if it's a 50 mph zone and I'm a car going 15, that's illegal.

Don't see why that isn't true for bikes.
This quote also stumped me

>“You can’t predict whether the stock market will go up or down because you can’t compute it,”

If you had an accurate model of the agents, you could easily compute the stock market.
I think the quotes on this title should have been around the word "innovations".
This is pretty cool. It's obvious it's not a 1:1 port of the original, but still fun and entertaining.
pg has an essay where he says the smartest people he knows are always willing to take blame or admit they don't know the answer to a question.
Assuming the brain is an instrument or computer machine as many seem to be doing in the comments. Who is the operator of the machine?
Does this support sticky sessions?

Normally I think it's best for HTTP backends to be stateless, but WebSockets open up interesting possibilities for RPC solutions like NowJS (https://github.com/Flotype/now), dnode (https://github.com/substack/dnode), and others (https://github.com/kriskowal/q-connection) that benefit from keeping state in memory in the app servers.

I'd be interested to hear about other load balancing techniques for WebSockets.
But does a model of a human neuron require that the initial conditions are perfectly captured? I can't see why it would.
The rumored PS4 specs are total overkill for Gaikai. I could imagine Sony using Gaikai for game demos and PS2/3 backwards compatibility, but not "mainstream" gaming.
I agree completely with this. As you point out the act is standard - but the outrage is evident in the usage of the phrase "watered down". (And it's been used repeatedly in different places across my news feeds). This means - to me at least - that they've totally lost this PR battle.
But it's the cloud! /s
Well...I'm a believer in strong AI, and I think a brain in silicon (or whatever substrate you prefer) is definitely possible. Downloads of human brains to silicon, maybe not so much because you'd have to accurately record the state and topology of ~10^11 neurons, which is rather difficult. So I'm not that optimistic about my brain being freely copyable the way people's brains are in Iain Banks' SF novels (although I'd like to be wrong about this).
It's not that bad. If you go behind a building, it becomes transparent. Pretty close to Diablo. Of course it's a demo not meant to be a full blown game.
I know, but leaving rogue debuggers after you're done using them is not good practice.
What I've found common among publicly available dictionaries is the lack of space characters and I've seen a couple of write-ups where people actively strip space characters when creating dictionaries.
Because of this most all my passwords contain a space character, and so far it's yet to cause me any problems.
Microsoft had been going downhill since steve ballmer took the Gate's position. They're loosing their empire that Bill built.

But I have to give it to Bill, he knows how to control and take over. Letting others pirate your software just to let your empire grow is astounishing to me.
Calling a sub with & has a special meaning, it exposes the current argument list @_ to the called sub. That's why you don't see it in most code.
San Francisco has 39% more jobs than unemployed
I'm also both a driver and a cyclist, and I couldn't agree more.

When you get behind the wheel, everyone and everything becomes a potential source of rage because everyone and everything becomes just another obstacle.
I have no idea :-) But I'm guessing the guy in the article thinks so, since he talks about non-linear effects. Linear systems cannot be chaotic.
Thanks for working this out of course. But, if the old code produced nice-looking plots, what can be said of the new, except you like the way it reads better?
Following http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3438066/check-constraint-..., and assuming that ID's get doled out in increasing order:

create table post (
id int primary_key,
parent_id int references post(id),
CONSTRAINT foo CHECK (id > parent_id)
);
I'm somewhere in between. I think it might be possible to create a machine that does what the brain does, or even to "upload," though I don't see the latter anytime in the foreseeable future.

But if so, I don't think it'll be with a standard von Neumann machine. Not that such a computer couldn't perform the required computations... it's Turing complete. But I think it would be a very poor fit for the problem domain. You'd want some kind of radically different incredibly highly parallel architecture. You also might want it to be analog or analog-like. There's been some interesting renewed interest in analog computers for a little while, and in probabilistic processors that can run incredibly fast by discarding the requirement of perfection.
Funny thing is: she could make more money by telling people she gets support from the links. She just needs to spin it correctly.People want to buy these books, knowing it is helping her would only make them want to buy them more.

I worked at a non-profit tech company that did a campaign where we got people to use our affiliate code to make purchases on Amazon. People liked doing it, it made them feel good. It also gave them excuse to feel good about going on a buying spree on Amazon.

I bet she could significantly increase revenue buy having a button under each book she links to that said, "Help keep this site going, buy this book".

And it would also sidestep this whole controversy.
I got some, can you dupe me a GPOW? TPTPTPTP~~~^_^
It's possible to point that out without being a total jerk.
I cant really argue with to much of what you say, but in my defense as i said in my original post i dont really consider BB to be smartphones, i would also extend this to Symbian. Though this is entirely my opinion, most of which i would probably say is as much my bias to WM as anything :).

But at the same time if you look at the statistics here on market percentage [1], you see my main point to that windows has lost nearly all of its previous market share.

[1]
You didn't understand what I said. I was implying that this site is a money-maker for pg, not that it costs him money.
You click around to run around. You click on enemies. You click on dropped loot. Looks like Diablo to me. ;)
tl;dr: guy says the brain is not computable.

I say: Is too! Dialogue complete.
The differences in initial conditions do cause the trajectories to diverge, but in certain systems they don't just diverge, they also get pulled into the orbit of an attractor, such as the Lorenz attractor. So, the behavior overall, despite being seemingly chaotic, is actually predictable and ordered.
How are you conflating randomness with unpredictability?
Ah. No worries. :)
list comprehensions of course!
Laptops are the Stenotypes of Software Engineers
Frozen ice cream sandwich coughs up crypto keys
By the gods... :)
It's easy to suggest that developers shun "profit"-based targets like ad-optimization, but those thoughts only seem to come to those who have already secured themselves financially (although I don't know the exact financial position of Jeff Hammerbacher or Alex Payne or Jason Cavnar, they certainly aren't strapped for cash) and these articles come off as people talking out of both sides of their mouths.

I'd like to see concrete examples with high-profile companies of where conscience was favored over profit.
Linux, Windows, and security FUD
Funny list of unethical websites that fabricate content...
Interesting, i 've never been able to find e.g. spike recordings from a published study. ADNI seems to be only about alzheimers
Stripe hiring UK Engineers- it's coming
Oh come on. I'm not going to make a prediction one way or the other, but there's one thing I do know: simulating the brain and simulating the current stock market to predict the outcome of a stochastic process (which is unknowable because you don't even know the inputs) are two vastly different things. So that's a really weak argument for his position. Not an argument for it at all, actually.
That's not actually true, unless you're on a controlled access highway. In which case there will usually be signs mentioning that non-motorized vehicles are not allowed on that road posted at all the entry points.
Enraged? Really, maybe you could reexamine your life. Something about enjoying the journey?

I smile when I see cyclists, think about what a nice day for a ride. I slow down, look for an opportunity, and pass them. But hey I'm not a 20-something self-absorbed ego machine.
I'm not complaining about asm.js, it's more that I feel like the hole we (and I don't mean I personally) are digging is getting deeper and deeper and switching is only getting less and less likely.

When you say that I could not explain how would it be different, maybe I just did not notice your response which is why I did not respond (and the last response is where you asked how is having JS as bytecode that different from any other bytecode).

How would it be different? I mean it's not that I insist on the bytecode for the sake of having bytecode (I kind of hint at that several times in the last thread, but I guess I could have been more explicit). It's more that I feel that some sort of fundamental change in the way that web applications are built is necessary. Why? I don't think that JS & DOM scripting can be pushed that much further, like I'm having a hard time imagining that say 5-10 years down the line JS applications will be able to compete with native, somewhat computationally heavy applications (which is what I assumed was the direction in which this whole web thing was going). Today, when I open some site which is written as a SPA (e.g. HootSuite) in Chrome, within a couple of minutes, the CPU goes to 100% (on i7). And that is an application that is not really doing anything that computationally expensive. And it's not just HootSuite.

So yeah, I don't really care that much about bytecode, and I realize that some change would not happen overnight. Do I have concrete steps how to achieve this? Can't say that I do.
> I too believe this.

You don't. The article argues that there is a theoretical barrier that prevents a brain emulation in principle, you argue that technology isn't ready yet and won't be in our lifetimes.

Opponents of your viewpoint argue that you simply can't imagine the state of technology in 50 years.
You run into the same problem you had with Posterous. Having your own domain does nothing to prevent Tumblr from running out of cash and shutting down your blog. Luckily Twitter/Posterous are doing the right thing by providing a way to retain control of your data. Imagine if they didn't provide those tools, you're at the mercy of the platform.

I'm not on Posterous, but I am on Tumblr and I do worry the company won't always be around once the cash runs dry or they get acquihired.

I like the WordPress strategy of strong data portability features within a hosted environment and an open source, self-hosted option. This way even if WordPress.com (Automattic) gets acquired, WordPress.org will always be an option without having to get comfortable with an entirely new platform. Of coarse, if you're a developer you could always just use an open source static site generator like Jekyll or Middleman.
Maybe they hope they will improve open source Webkit on their own free time, which they will have much more than before being laid off from Opera.
Not a commentary on this project per se, but I can't help but think when I see "X in javascript" voted up that the implicit frame is: "isn't it impressive what you can do in javascript now?"

But if you flip that statement on its head, the equivalent is "The web has finally caught up with what we could do on a 1997 desktop!"
Pretty cool. The full source code's on Github as well:

https://github.com/mitallast/diablo-js

The code's not commented very heavily, but it's pretty readable nonetheless.
How about horses? Tractors? Get real. Bikes can't do much over 15, most cyclists anyway. That's why they can go slower: they have to.
You've gat to love the comment on TFA saying something like: "It doesn't matter that it can be broken by experienced crackers, it's just to keep the honest man honest".

That is so wrong: all it takes is that each one of the warez group builds one like this and then they can rip anything "big media" produces and then put it on torrent or underground movie-sharing networks.

(oh the memories taking my bycicle when I was 12 to meet people in parking lots to trade 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy disks ; )
Boyle's Law is statistical, but pretty damn accurate, even though it's nowhere near a simulation of the dynamics of the myriad molecules whose dynamics it aggregates.
But the thing is most neuroscientists don't just sit at a computer all day. 95% of the tasks they do are not computer-bound.

If you're doing animal-based research (the majority of real neuroscience currently), then its time spent with behavior testing, surgeries, waiting for the drug to be in an animal for 72 (or however many) hours, processing slides, pipetting, etc.

The time spent at a computer is mostly data analysis, reading papers, ordering supplies and grantwriting. A huge amount of time seems to be spent jumping through hoops, ordering things, working with vendors of equipment that doesn't frequently work as advertised, and dealing with broken stuff overall. The data-analysis they are doing again, isn't bound by the computer's speed. It generally is working with a few dozen (or hundred) samples of relatively computationally easy data.

There's not much for a computer to speed up.
Click!
Live Coding in CoffeeScript
The Humanities, Unraveled
I can't wait for Far Cry 3 in Javascript.
I simply can't understand why people feel the need to proclaim that something plausible will never ever happen some time in the (possibly very distant) future. It's both stupid, unproductive and often embarrassing (when they are proven wrong).

>"But Nicolelis is in a camp that thinks that human consciousness (and if you believe in it, the soul) simply can’t be replicated in silicon.

I'm guessing/hoping that the silicon reference was made by the author of the article and not Miguel Nicolelis, considering that silicon is extremely likely to be replaced by graphite or something else in the next decade or two, at least with almost full certainty by the next century. If it actually was Nicolelis who spoke about silicon, it automatically discredits him from having anything to say about the distant future of computing.

>That’s because its most important features are the result of unpredictable, non-linear interactions amongst billions of cells, Nicolelis says."

Even if that was true, which I doubt, so what? There has to be some kind of a system behind those "unpredictable, non-linear interactions" in order for the brain to have any functionality at all, and every system can be figured out and simulated. It might be incredibly complex and take centuries for us to gain the required knowledge and processing power, but even that doesn't make it impossible.
Having worked there for 11 years I also got the impression that company management is inadvertently trying to stay culturally isolated.

For example, when the iPhone came out, the management called AT&T and asked them to exclude the iPhone from the previously negotiated Microsoft Employee Discount program. MS phone is Ok, Blackberry is Ok, iPhone not Ok. The effect was, obviously, even less awareness of the best products out there, especially among the most loyal, and thus most influencing managers. One high-ranked manager told me he can't use an iPhone because he couldn't give money to the company trying to kill MS. Assuming the unlikely that Apple indeed was out to kill MS (rather than the more plausible - to make a good product and a few bucks), that would be a very good reason to get half a dozen iPhones, so that you know well what's going to hit you over the head real soon.

Culture is the least identifiable, least amendable, and yet most influential component of any organization...
"We humans excel at understanding and replicating what nature did - then at improving it."

Do we?
Yeah, a lot of prominent bloggers are violating that rule then. Marco Arment (http://www.marco.org/2013/01/06/baby-stuff-review), Jeff Atwood (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-st...), not to mention The Wirecutter blog. (http://thewirecutter.com)
On the other hand, I believe we did see exponential growth in our ability to both automatically drive cars, to automatically translate text, and in voice recognition.

If we consider 1958 to be a good starting point for self-driving cars (http://technologizer.com/2010/10/09/google-self-driving-cars...), might we say that Google's car is orders of magnitude more powerful than those of 1986?

If we consider 1954 a starting point for machine translation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_machine_translation), again might we find that Google Translate is similarly in a different league than SYSTRAN of the 1980s?

I do not really have the knowledge and sources to back those claims up, so I have to frame them as opinions for now. Could someone with experiences or deeper knowledge about these areas weigh in?
Ask HN: How was the Burger King Twitter account hacked?
I often see in the news that X twitter account was hacked; how exactly does that happen?
Anyone who pours perfectly good cask-strength bourbon into a cocktail deserves whatever they get. :)
A svn post commit hook to comment on Jira
s/anime/anima - as in soul, vitality

(Not so much Jung's inner woman)

I think the sentence does read better if it is complaining there are not enough cyberpunk Japanese comics on my site though :-)