skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
China is also planning a massive investment in nuclear energy. And hydro. And even coal. There really is no one solution.
the program fails repeatedly and then loads a previous state to try a different move, what you see is the result of multiple trials. it can't reliably get it right on the first try.
The funny thing about wealth (even gold) is that it has value only in so far as other people let it have value. And there are certainly many extreme examples from history where massive amounts of wealth can go away quite quickly. Both through economic change and through political upheaval. Indeed, it can be surprising how fast such processes can work, and how quickly large concentrations of wealth can shrink, even when it's merely through economic and industrial change.

As it turns out, a lot of the "wealth" that is owned by that small percentage you describe is actually just paper wealth, the sort of wealth that goes away the easiest. It's also worth remembering that the world's economy is doubling about every 15 years or so. So the wealth of the elite can easily become a much smaller portion of the whole if they don't keep up.
Unless you convince the seller to transfer the bitcoin and then file a dispute with eBay/Paypal. Then it becomes the most efficient means possible.
The ending is very poetic in a way.
"Fragmentation" is a horrible name, and sometimes people use it to refer to problems that don't actually exist, but there is a very serious problem with Android updates: While iPhone users can expect prompt updates directly from Apple, Android OEMs and the carriers they do business with effectively make phones you buy at the carriers' shops nearly impossible to update. That's horrible, and the Nexus branding and technology program hasn't fixed it. Way too few Nexus devices, way too many OEMs.

All that said, targeting Android 4.x+ is rational. Facebook Home is going to push some capacity boundaries. No reason to buy trouble by targeting earlier revisions.

However, neither my TF300 nor my Nexus 4 are listed as compatible. So Facebook has somehow taken a crummy situation and made it even worse. It apperently isn't compatible with all 4.x devices.
Yeah, it was insanely tough. Countless all nighters, and impossible problems. What I'm really thankful for is how much pursuing the degree taught me about grit and perseverance to study and overcome problems.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias" -- Stephen Colbert
I'm always impressed by the technical write-ups that come from Airbnb. I'm also always astounded by the complexity of what's happening on the back-end for what appears, on-the-front-end, to be a relatively straight-forward CRUD-type system.
"Rules of Attraction" was far more entertaining than this drivel.
I think the difference is that the computer can try the input and record the result and then try again. The baseball player can't have a redo of that pitch if they miss or if it's a foul.

I don't really see how it's time travel but that's what he called it.
That sounds like what Tim Ferriss said in 4 hour workweek
Yes, it's incredibly different! A huge problem in AI is internally modelling the outside world. This completely sidesteps that.
"Good thing it's not a zero sum game."

Unfortunately, costs for creating content of high graphical fidelity and for reworking it and whatnot very much mean that it is not a zero sum game.

You cannot take story and mechanical risks if you spend millions and millions on the engine licensing, art talent, and man hours required to perfectly render every shade of grass.

This is, incidentally, what is driving the AAA bubble and the slow implosion of studios we see today.
I don't know if anyone here is a fan of MMA aka Mixed Martial Arts (as I am), but I think the parallels between the startup/hacker world and MMA are fascinating.

Not unlike startups, success in MMA requires proficiency in several very different disciplines including wrestling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, boxing, Thai boxing (Muay Thai), karate, etc.

In the early days of MMA, fighters were very one-dimensional and the dominant champions tended to be wrestlers, reason being that while a wrestler could reasonably defend against a (kick)boxer's strikes, (kick)boxers were generally powerless to do anything once a wrestler took them down, which they inevitably did in the course of a fight.

I believe this is the case with hackers vs. business guys as well. Hackers can generally become very proficient in business in 3~5 years on the job, but a business guy would need 10+ years of focused practice in order to become equally proficient in hacking, and until they learn will be absolutely clueless when working with hackers.

And in the early wrestler-dominated days of MMA, people envisioned a future where every MMA athlete would be equally well-rounded in all of the disciplines and such distinctions would become unnecessary. But as is often the case, the reality has turned out a bit differently.

A strong wrestling base is still a huge plus and a strong indicator of success - There are 8 weight classes in the UFC and 5 of them are wrestlers. But in general, what has happened is that in order to be a champion or championship contender, one needs to be minimally (i.e. above average) well-rounded in every discipline, but every champion is exceptional in at least one discipline. For example, non-wrestler champions like Anderson Silva (185 lbs) and Jose Aldo (145 lbs) are outstanding kickboxers who are competent enough in wrestling to be able to avoid being taken down. The days of only-specialists are gone and the days of only-generalists never came; the reality has turned out to be a combination of the two.

I expect to see the same dynamic in the startup world. Hackers are becoming more business-minded and business guys are (maybe less so) starting to realize the "power" and importance of hackers, but I don't expect the two worlds to ever completely converge. It will be important to be world-class in at least one discipline (hacking or marketing or whatever), but everyone will need to be at least above-average in all disciplines to expect to compete at all.
It makes perfect sense when, say, that's the only cable you have on hand and when "mostly working for cheap" beats "not working, but technically correct and optimal." And then there are those to whom "lossy but non-DRM analog" (VGA) typically beats "lossless digital with DRM capability that will sneak up on you when you least want it" (HDMI).
This is definitely something I won't forget about the next time I'm trying to figure out what a binary is exactly doing. Also, I really need something like this for OSX right now.
How many times must I point out that Max Gunther is the pioneer of this thinking?

These are required reading for everyone:

How to Get Lucky
http://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Lucky-discovering-ebook/dp/B00...

The Luck Factor
http://www.amazon.com/The-Luck-Factor-Luckier-ebook/dp/B0037...

This thinking was original only when Gunther put it in books. Stop re-inventing the wheel and just read the damn wheel.
The AI and physics in Far Cry (the first one) were actually pretty legit.
Neither can a baseball player. He's been practicing since age 3 to hit that ball.

Is a decade or two of baseball practice really all that different from a computer playing and re-playing the game over and over looking for optimal strategy?
The paper is worth a full read as well. One of my favorite bits... "The FCEUX emulator is about a jillion lines of C++-ish code, was intended as an interactive GUI application, contains support for multiple di erent platforms, and the code is, on a scale from a pile of horse shit to not horse shit, approximately a 2"
>I've never been invited anywhere, hung out with anyone, celebrated someones birthday, had a meal with someone except my roommate, or just done something fun with another person

Take initiative. Find events happening that sound cool (school calendar, city calendars, local bar calendars), and invite other people out. Ask people if they'd like to grab lunch, or if you can join them at their table in the dining hall. Acquaintances become friends mainly through repeated exposure and one-on-one interaction.

>for the past three months, every Friday and Saturday night, I've walked aimlessly around campus for hours, hoping to find a friend

This is much less likely to succeed than by attending something that's meant for people to make social connections. Join clubs (activity groups, meetups, etc.). The more people you regularly interact with, the more likely it is you'll make a connection.

Your school wants you to succeed at this, and you should take advantage of the resources they provide to do so. Ask your RA if he knows of anything fun happening this weekend. Tell them you're looking to make new friends and could use some recommendations of events you should check out. Tell your professors you're really interested in connecting with people who'd like to collaborate on UX projects, and ask him if he knows any other students who are taking the class because of more than just credit. Ask people in the Student Life committee which events are most likely to have people attending who want to make new friends, rather than people attending with existing friends.

And if you're feeling depressed or having difficulty connecting with people you'd like to be friends with, talk to counselors in the student health center. Like you said, many young engineering students face problems like these -- they will have advice both specific to you and from helping hundreds of students like you.
Maybe, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the "time travel" question.
Challenge #1 - Create a service that helps people find upcoming online/remote coding challenges, especially ones with monetary incentives.
Cinematography is lighting and, to an extent, camera work! IMO movie comparison would be with production design. After all, it's the script that must work - everything else is a bonus. Same goes with games, if mechanics is there...
The "you can't fire me, I quit" approach. I like it.
But we then look at the fact that, for something that can take a single day to come up with, do we really think a limited monopoly of five or ten years is worth granting?

I think not. In fact, I think that the culture of hacking which has done so much good for this world pretty much demands immediate and unfettered access to the opportunity to play with these ideas.
Yep, ran into the programmer's-autoresponder for the first time from the dev of the AlarmDroid app for Android. It's pretty effective.
"Layering the file system translation on top of the flash translation is inefficient and impedes performance."

"For many years SSDs were almost exclusively built to seamlessly replace hard drives; they not only supported the same block-device interface"

The point of storage is to be able to put anything you want on it. That contract is the block interface, and includes the ability to change the filesystem. A file with internal structures is also a filesystem. The interfaces are fine. Change for change's sake should be avoided. (Providing a bypass, SSD-optimized interface is fine, but, ahem: "put down the crack pipes"... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5541063 )
One of the reasons I switched to Ubuntu was the fact that they streamlined third party packages in a way that integrated them into the update stream through the PPA system.

The fact that I can get an up-to-date version of Wine, for example, and be notified when there's a new version, is fantastic and easily beats chasing down installers from vendors themselves, or having each of them run their own updater.
But, man, don't you get it--without patents and the free market we can't have research, God.

Why do you hate America?
> ... we actually discovered something pretty fundamental that never been discovered about glasses, period

This is how companies get patents on obvious things. They didn't discover this.

I've been wearing glasses for nearly 30 years and have known for most of that that you can press down behind your ears and the weight seems to all disappear. Your ears don't notice it much, but your nose does.
Top Worst GMO Food List
How would it figure out what it means to be "winning"? It might be possible, but would require using OCR to read the 'score' (and guessing as what is meant by the score) and would also need some way to determine if the goal is to "go to the right", etc. (also possible). Doing this would be interesting and more practical in that it could work with games where you do not have access to the memory, but seems like it would require more work in interpreting how the game's state has changed and wouldn't allow going back in time.

A Quake bot is easier to develop because it is written for a specific game.

I accept that bet for training a pigeon to play SMB :), although the scenario you described isn't comparable (it is only one game and you would be giving the pigeon extra feedback about how to play it. It still seems hard and I think it would be notable if you achieved it.)
Startup Standup Startup
You can't effectively do things like instrumenting every write instruction in a program using ptrace. Also, the techniques Pin uses sound hairy, but they're the same things software virtualization does.
Why is this strange?
The early clients did mining by default in the background, and per-block difficulty was very slow.
It does not take very many people playing with it for a few weeks and throwing away wallets to get to 1 million lost bitcoins
Well, someone is certainly free to do that even if no one has yet. But the fact that I can buy a machine from a major vendor now that, without even advertising that fact, can run linux perfectly out of the box is a clear step-up over 2007.
> All employees are founders so there is less team risk

I'm really interested in seeing how that plays out. I've always thought that a more equitable ownership distribution across the first 10-15 members of the team (incl. 'founders') would result in better outcomes more consistently (defined to mean sale or IPO).
'Big brother is not the State, Big Brother lies in Big Data.'
I believe people are working on a port of DynamoRIO to OSX.
It's true. If you're doing research you're probably working with compounds nobody's ever made before so you can't be sure what their biological properties are. You can often make an educated guess by looking at the structure but you can never be sure.
Yes, indeed, the average cage is getting bigger and shinier.
Why not join clubs at uni doing what you like to do? I found friends at uni playing chess, taking swimming lessons and working on tough team assignments.
https://github.com/mozilla/towtruck/issues/5
> Of course graphics should not obscure the game's goals.

Indeed, you might say in that case the graphics are of high quality! Low quality graphics can easily detract from gameplay.

I think there are two definitions for "graphics quality" commonly used.

- Realism, as used in this article.

- Aesthetics, an example of which would be Team Fortress 2. By any definition it is not a very realistic game, but it still has very well-made/high quality graphics (before hats, anyway.)
I use xubuntu, and get all the benefits of its progress as a platform without any of the unity shell nonsense. It's nice.
I read on bitcointalk.org (so take with a grain of salt) that a new wallet was used for the initial blocks, so there are 50 coins in each of ~40k wallets.

It's entirely possible that early on they used throw away wallets while testing and the alleged $100m in "early coins" are all inaccessible.
Was Instagram.com redirected to pinterest.com also for you?
For a couple of seconds instagram webpage was redirected to pinterest webpage. Have you experienced it too?
Of course it does. Models are useful because they have predictive power. If you have time travel, you don't need to predict anything.
It would probably be sold more as a massive improvement in backup technology over time machine (which is already pretty nice).
I don't think anybody is arguing you can't have research without patents. People are saying that you can't have research without tons of cash. Whether that cash is a license from the government to get money from users of an invention, or a straight up check is a public policy issue. If the government funds some research, everyone pays for it whether or not they use it. If the government grants some legal protection that makes it easier to monetize that research from users, then only users pay for it. Which of those is more appropriate is context-specific.
Fair point. So you think Bayh-Dole is worth repealing or modifying? A quick read through the Wikipedia article certainly makes it sound like a reasonable policy (for example, licensing is mandatory) and demonstrably preferable to the previous regime.
Important context: Walter Kirn was born in 1962, and entered Princeton in 1979.
I can't help but state my observation that you sound like a total bigot.
I hope I'm not the only one seeing the irony of this post.
It is if it can't learn from those mistakes.
Sorry, but law firms operate for-profit. Partners are the owners of those firms and don't give away their profits to charities at the end of every fiscal year. This is quite a ludicrous assertion. Several partners at top law firms pocket several million a year outside of their client fees. For many lawyers from top schools, making partner is the ultimate goal because of the potential windfall.

http://www.law.com/jsp/ca/PubArticleCA.jsp?id=1202588541180&...
*Fed(eral Reserve {System,Banks}), as opposed to E(uropean) C(entral) B(ank)
That is potentially where I'm heading with this, but I legitimately am looking for an answer to this question too. :)
It's that IF that's the problem... We can solve a lot of the world's problems, not just this one, if we can find an energy source with the kind of lifetime EROEI (energy return on energy investment) characteristics of petroleum based fuels. The non-trivial problem being we have yet to discover anything close to that. NPK inputs are energy intensive (check out Phosphorous mining).

95% of the world'a food supply is dependent on petrochemical based inputs of which we are starting to see a decline in availability.

If you can show me ANY process to turn trees into pesticides as you suggest in any kind of energy efficient manner I'm open to revising my opinion, and would probably change careers to focus on that industry as I think it'd be a world changer. However I think you are very wide of the mark on the science in making such a suggestion.
30 year old movie spoiler alert!!!!

War Games: Very, very basically, from deep, deep memory...

A computer about to launch a global nuclear war is played at tic-tac-toe to learn it cant win. It deduces that the only way to win a nuclear war is not to start the thing in the first place. Any other strategy is a lose, or what we call mutually assured destruction.

Its obviously more complicated than that. Even though its 30 odd years old, it worth a watch.
I wrote a simulator to help me understand Differential Sync. The nice part about DS unlike OT is that you can still work offline and sync later. Here is the simulator:

http://dougmart.in/dssimulation/
Great resource, thanks! Worth noting, it looks like this only covers things like in-person Hackathons as opposed to online contests too (e.g.: Rails Rumble).
"waste" yes, but no wealth is being destroyed.
Depends on what sort of parties you like.
Interesting. I remember some parts of my dreams. They're not really stories I can tell or write down but they're more like places with a specific feeling or emotion.
Says a newspaper.
Phosphorous mining is incredibly energy intensive. It's relative proportion in the Earth's crust is not pertinent - what matters is its availability in extractable forms. Google phosphorous mining and you'll see the parent's claim that Phoshoprous production rates have peaked is well supported.
Thanks for the link! I was looking for something like that; the article did seem to make a lot of unfounded assertions.

Here's a reply by the article's author to that rebuttal - http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/kaspersky-indy/
Scientific advertising, different century same rules
Any suggestions for a good neutral concise must-know news source?
Maybe I'm missing something but I was interested in a more detailed explanation of the emergence of private enterprise in 'Communist China' where 'private enterprise was a crime and marketing wasn't a profession.' Seeing the section heading "Startups, Venture Capital and the Communist Party: how did this happen in China," and talk about how private business was a crime in the 'old China,' I was expecting more of an explanation of the transition rather than just some points on why, but not exactly how (other than talking about specific government agencies that invest in high tech R&D / science).

I tried to follow this link[1], but it's all in Chinese and returning an connection reset error.

[1] http://www.chinaconsulatechicago.org/eng/kj/t31882.htm
Proverbial Wallets
IMO, this question is part-test, part-research by PG who would not be opposed to being involved with a future, digital currency. Equally for reasons of curiosity as for anything to do with profit or changing the world?

Which was the sole-founder startup working on something a bit like this? Got rejected but with promising feedback on their first foray. Was it a currency or something else they were working on?

An addition for the next Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas list?
See also "I Hate the News" by Aaron Swartz http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
Very true. The end was hilarious.
that's what a top poster on the article's comments said
..or just use "their"
Many people forget that using inch marks in place of quotation marks (which don't have neating issues) is an ASCII-only phenomenon.
Rent seeking can't and won't last. You don't need to go very far - just read http://reason.com/archives/2013/04/14/the-end-of-power on the frontpage today (the comments suck however - they basically try to deny the fact that for humanity as a species, the last century has been the best ever)

The basic idea stands - too many people have more comfort, want too many things, and are harder to control - and now more than ever.

The solution to rent seeking is basic capitalism, as in the use of reason.

Ayn Rand style capitalists do worry about the letter and the spirit of the laws and of a contract, because they know it is in their best interest. They are not into rent seeking because they know the end results.

She said that beautifully : "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."

Ayn Rand theory and work can be seen as one implementation of John Rawl theory of justice. He added a 2nd part about equality, but he also deconstructed the opposition between freedom and equality.

Basically, you only need a good premise, then you can work on it. The premise here is reason.

The only real "competition" could be from a belief not based on reason, such as racism or a kind of religious fondamentalism - but not any kind as explained by John Rawls, just the kind incompatible with democracy. I'll put islamism in that bag (the basic idea of stoning to death women who had sexual relation outside of marriage in this day and age is not very palatable to me).

Anyway, the remedy is the same for both diseases - science (and the occasional readings of libertarian books)

If you have ideological problems with Ayn Rand, read at least about John Rawls veil of ignorance on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice
Could someone clarify what the author means by "Women in developed affluent countries tend to have 2-3 children (or 0-1 children)"?

Does he mean that in some countries the range is 2-3 and in others 0-1? Or is it that there are two peaks in the histogram?
news.ycombinator.com

Could, not, resist.