skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Yes but simulating the brain will never be the same as the actual "wetware" in operation. To my understanding, the simplistic reason that hard AI has failed and always will - while it uses digital computation as a platform - is that its a HARDWARE deficiency.

Are you saying that hardware deficiencies are never resolved over time?

>I'm generalizing but AI people all seem to be algorithm gurus who feel that the next algorithmic breakthrough will be "the one" to create an AI.

I study AI at Stanford and I've never met anyone who thinks that.

>I think what they miss is that the physical manifestation of brain and body are in fact required to be conscious. Disembodied consciousness cannot exist since conscious beings (animals) have complex biological systems known as bodies that enable what we view as intelligence.

You need to justify that. The reasonable argument closest to what you are saying is that sensory stimuli are required for intelligence. This isn't hard for a computer to simulate.

>Yes, computers are infinitely better at rule-based computation than animals. No, they cannot pass simple tests of consciousness that a mouse can,

Like what?

>and theres really no prospect of it happening because a better algorithm is created; fact is, animals and even insects don't think based on algorithms.

This needs justification. If they aren't computing, then what are they doing? You're looking down into the dualism abyss...

>Algorithms are models of the real world, not the real thing.

No, algorithms are neither. Algorithms are sequences (trees, if you prefer) of instructions.

>Being conscious means using ones eyes/ears/mouth/nose/skin to feel, hear, smell, speak to interact with the world around you.

So are blind people less conscious? What about those with no sense of smell?

>It means having agency and not just checking a set of pre-written rules in order to decide what to do next.

What makes those two things mutually exclusive? When I make a decision I consult my values and my goals and attempt to make the decision that gets me closest to my goals without compromising my values. Where do my values come from? Some of them are based on instinct (i.e. genes, i.e. hard coded) and some come from parents/society. My goals? I'd say most of them are just milestones on the path to other goals, and then that there are a few fundamental goals that come from biology (e.g. I fundamentally want to reproduce, this means that I need to attract a mate and earn enough to support a family, this is made much easier by an good education, etc.).

>Its a biological system that enables that.

Why? And what makes you think we couldn't build a biological computer (other than by the traditional method ;-) )?
I'm here by the big screen.
CONNECT BY PRIOR on the other hand can be a life saver.

There are projects where I really love using Oracle (and to a lesser degree SQL Server). It has everything to do with features that solve problems.

I loathe DB2 though. Also, there are some weird smaller commercial databases like Pervasive that seem to add nothing but difficult interfaces.
Umm, since when does Michael Arrington care about his reputation - or yours?
Not to be wooden, but if you reply to someone's comment, I don't think there's a need to state @[username].
This is interesting, because in my course nobody that felt the way you did lasted the entire ten days :) You must have been totally miserable.

To me the course was mostly a secular study in mind hacking.

Yes, you are just quiet and meditating. But most people find that... in that total silence that stretches to days, during the extended meditation sessions using the techniques, profound and terrifying things you have long suppressed come bubbling up. Its really intense and emotional. Women often burst out crying during the sessions.

The idea is that while you are cultivating detachment, these things bubble up, and you are not reacting, only observing... you condition yourself to deal with them. By doing this for ten days at length, you wash yourself of your demons.

I found that this happened for me. I stopped worrying about the things that had bothered me daily after that course. I was in India when I took the course, and consider myself a half-assed buddhist, so I didn't have a problem with the relgious aspect, but you're right, it is not totally free of dogma.

The key thing to remember though is that they don't claim that a single ten day course will dramatically improve your life permanently. They just claim that you can learn the technique in that length of time. You still have to practice daily, several hours a day according to them. I admit that... I don't, really. I did for several months and then stopped.

But what I have taken away from the course is a deeper understanding of myself, and I make daily use of anapana when I experience distress. It works, helps return me to equanimity, and I think it actually makes me smarter.

I can say that for me, the experience was... deeply spiritual. Only I don't believe in spirits, I'm an athiest. The things that happened to me during that ten days were profound, and were pretty on par with the claims the hippies coming out of the courses before me were saying.

The course was the hardest thing I've ever done, by far. I'm really glad I did it. But as your experience points out, mileage will vary.

The key to the whole thing for me was that... verbal thinking is not thought, its just a reflection of underlying mental processes... and if you just shut the fuck up inside your head, you find that you have a lot more room for productive work, and thought, and you become smarter. Before that, I confused thought with productive mental work, and so the chatter in my head never ended. Now I can clear my thoughts, and have an empty mind and this is so important for using my limited brain power productively.

The REALLY interesting thing is that at the beginning of the course, nobody can NOT THINK for more than a few seconds. By the end of it, you can go for minutes at a time. And it feels GREAT :)
Remove the word "arguably".

You're marketing. Not the time for balanced language.
I know it's fashionable to bash Arrington on HN, but I'm willing to take the karma beating and say this: couldn't the MYB CEO have requested the FunAdvice CEO submit to a confidentiality agreement for this specific reason?

Here's another, potentially more-provoking one: Isn't this what "good business" is all about? Manipulation of your opponent? Using what you can to generate PR buzz? "I'm not being a jerk, I'm just doing good business."

Please do not treat this post as a testimony of my own values.
Cyberspace: doomed to become a "vaster wasteland"?
Experienced programmers have many skills aside from "the latest language".

The approach of jettisoning older, more skilled programmers because they cost more and don't know languages with the latest bells and whistles is similar to the general approach of selling poor quality or defective products of all sorts which happen to have the latest marketing bells and whistles.

It is rational for companies to do if they can get away with it. It is rational for us to punish companies harshly for doing if we can.
Also recently there was a very interesting article in Communications of the ACM about STM vs HTM and the problems with both in a general sense.

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1410000/1400228/p40-cascaval...

Edit: Prettier version
http://mags.acm.org/communications/200811/?folio=40&CFID...
IPv6 - the Australian isps that support IPV6...
So far http://ipv6.internode.on.net/ is the one I can find that supports ipv6.

Any other Australian ISPs support IPv6?

I need to start preparing software for IPv6... so getting a net connection with IPv6 will be a good start.
I would love to chat with one or both of you about my opinions on the JVM if you're interested. Please email me and we can meet up on IRC or something.
IT and most departments have a budget, the more you spend the more budget you get next year. Nobody tries to reduce budget by saving here and there. Au contraire, you have to come up with ways to increase headcounts and needed resources so you get more budget next year.

Unfortunately that's how the corporate world works.
In Feb, I took Part 1 course of Art of Living (AoL). http://artofliving.org

In AoL, they teach you what they call 'Sudarshan Kriya'. It's a breathing technique which helps you in variety of ways. I originally took the course because I was very stressed and my friends recommended the course so that I can learn how to deal with stress. I can definitely say that the particular breathing technique helped me a lot and I can say without reservation that my stress has reduced drastically. What I like about Sudarshan Kriya is that it is a very practical technique. It's very easy to follow and as you do Sudarshan Kriya regularly, your breathing capacity and your ability to focus on breathing will increase. Sudarshan Kriya helps you slip in to meditation much more easily. I highly recommend taking the Art of Living course.
By the end of the course, I could scan my beating heart within my chest. It freaked me out. I wanted to tell my classmates all about it, but couldn't for a couple more days.

I had severe back pain, have lower back issues, and it took days to get them to allow me to meditate sitting against the wall. When my concentration would break every few minutes, I would gasp in pain, my lower back muscles cramping and spasming the whole time, because it was overwhelming. I thought, and I still think, that requiring me to go through that was ridiculous, and it was only when I told the lead teacher I was leaving if he didn't allow it that he permitted me to sit against the wall. It still hurt like hell, and that was fine, but I could hold myself physically upright at least.

I don't think the courses in the US are so uptight, though.
Coal's the one with the bad record there too. An average of 1000 coal miners die each year from accidents in China alone.
The algorithm requires a fence too. I found remarks at one point by Cliff about why he couldn't do it in c++, if I find them again I will post them here.

edit: on iPhone so I can't post the link, but the comments section of cliff's blog has a discussion about java vs. C for this data structure. summary: maybe you could do it but it would be tricky and extremely non-portable, I.e. almost definitely not worth it. hope I didn't overstate, wasn't trying to dismissive (need to watch my language online).
Comments like this should not be condoned on HN...
I recently looked up mathematica, after reading up on wolfram; I then went to the site to find it cost $2,495 for a license :( Can anyone explain to me please what it exactly does and its worth in a few sentences? Thanks..
The difference is that seasteading makes the current system unsustainable; it doesn't storm Alcatraz and spread stories about Michelle Obama saying "Let them eat Arugula!" If the French revolutionaries had simply left, and created a French-speaking country that ran itself more effectively than Monarchist France, it would be comparable.

But seasteading also (theoretically) uses new technology, which makes starting a country radically cheaper the way Moore's law and open-source software make starting a company so much cheaper.
Ask HN: Zillow is trying to acquire my app + domain for "a couple hundred bucks", advice?
So, I might get razzed for this - but I figured I'd come to a place where I would receive useful insight on my situation.

Dilemna

Zillow wants to buy the domain that a website (optimized for iPhone which uses their API) I've created resides on for literally "a couple hundred bucks".

This seems like an easy way to take advantage of the work I've put in to building the domain/ranking.

Additionally, they've threatened to cut of API access if I do not comply with their wishes.

Data

It's located at http://izillow.net

Since launch the site has received ~50,000 visitors + links from techcrunch, apple, google (appengine) and numerous blogs + recognition in the New York Times.

(also ~90k pageviews)

It's in compliance with Zillow's TOS & they've threatened to cut of API access if I do not comply with their wishes.

History

Last year in May I created an iPhone interface for Zillow's "zestimator" - it was all fun and games, got a little bit of blog coverage/mentions & an overall good response. Zillow seemed to be all for it.

Then the New York Times included it in one of it's articles - and Zillow asked me to very simply put the words "unofficial version" and a link at the bottom of the app.

No problem. Done.

Now

Zillow has launched their own iPhone app (which rocks) - but wants me to take down mine and hand over the domain for "a couple hundred bucks".

I dont feel this is fair and they're trying to stiff me with a measely $250. What would you do? What do you suggest? What are your thoughts?
If he really wished all startup founders would do this, he wouldn't publicize it.
East village even better ;)
I think the move to B'CC Techrunch and the move to send a blind acquisition offer off of "inferences" are equally stupid and one action might deserve the other.
Well yes he could, but business is basically about trust. When Warren Buffett asks you to send confidential information you'll do so because you trust him not to abuse it - his reputation is built up over many years, but can be shattered with just one major breach of it. Both parties know this.

If you lose your credibility you lose your ability to do business. Credibility is to business as intelligence is to hackers.
I recently started working with a Fortune 1000 that has a support agreement with RedHat for, among other things, JBoss. The developers and admins rave about the support provided but disparage other vendors to whom much more was paid.
I definitely intend to give Erlang another try soon, if for no other reason than because I really want to hack on RabbitMQ. Last time I tried I failed though.
Funny moment during my course: it was during the Indian monsoon in Dharamsala, and it was raining outside. There were a limited number of umbrellas. We were not allowed to talk. As I went to leave the meditation building, someone came inside with an umbrella. He wanted to hand it to me. We couldn't look at one another or speak.

I made him wait like 10 seconds, just standing there at the door. I couldn't ask for the umbrella, he couldn't offer the umbrella. It was profoundly funny to both of us. We laughed about it 6 days later.

I still laugh out loud whenever I think about it. A joke in total silence.
A new alternative to git submodules: git subtree
Way to commit the fallacy of composition.
Good business is treating your colleagues with respect (even if you secretly want to crush them). You can be sure that Geoff Cook will never, ever, ever do business with Jeremy Goodrich after this display of unprofessionalism.
I don't have experience with this, but I would say that if the site is successful enough, hold out until they serve you with something real--either a lawsuit or a more serious offer.
It isn't. If they e-mailed you that they didn't have a problem with it and their API is still accessible there's nothing they can do about it.

It's obvious that since they now have their own iphone app they want yours down, or merged into theirs. You're basically a competitor. And they're trying to buy you out. And their tactic seems fairly obvious: "let's see if we can get the guy to hand ot over for a couple of hundred bucks, if it works fine if it doesn't we'll have to get into real negotiations"

Now you've got to play the negotiation game...

Note: This is just my opinion, and it could of course easily be wrong.
There is a philosophical issue here about gradual progress vs revolutionary/utopian change. Do you have any thoughts on this issue?

The French Revolutionaries, Edmund Burke, Karl Popper, and others had thoughts on this issue which are relevant.

Whether you want sea steading to have philosophical relevance or not, it does. Which side of this particular debate do you think it is on and why? Do you see that as a problem or a merit?
I agree with mixmax about trust in business. I'd just like to add that if you compare and contrast the writing styles of Cook and Goodrich, it is pretty clear who is the pro and who is the wannabe. There was nothing shrewd or savvy about what Goodrich did. OTOH, Arrington did squash a source in public. That just seems odd.
Ghrist has one nice overview article, another one comes from Gunnar Carlsson and his group at Stanford, http://comptop.stanford.edu/preprints/topologyAndData.pdf (and a toy: http://www.stanford.edu/~gurjeet/mapper.html), but you surely know that already.

Sorry for I won't attempt to survey literature as this area is new for me too, and I don't want to confuse you, or embarass myself =) I was sure you will find these anyway. I just began dusting off my Morse theory and handful of other mathematics and I am not yet paying much attention to what present developments are directed at. One unfortnate aspect of strictly applied part of this field is that most of results and a leading conference are funded by DARPA, which leads to publications I would consider mostly recruiting material than a scientific communication. My background and goals are anyways disparate to most of the approaches so I took only cursory look.
High-Tech Card Tricks
They're about as drastically different as major free Unices can be.

The BSDs are the reference standard for add-on package management. In the RedHat 5 days (a decade before RHEL 5, mind you) the BSDs had a huge third party software library available using either the ports tree to compile from source or using "pkg" files precompiled from the same source base and available for download from the distribution FTP sites.

The BSD package management platform doesn't really address OS upgrades, which has been a weakness for me when considering it for business use. The preferred method of upgrading for a long time was to check the code base out and recompile it periodically. FWIW this doesn't have the Gentoo stigma -- it's not done for the optimizations, it was simply the most pragmatic way to distribute updates to large systems over the small network links of the time (you can easily maintain an up to date system over a dialup modem if you've installed it some other way).

NetBSD specifically has a focus on running on as many architectures as possible. This isn't a big win for you perhaps, but it makes the OS suitable for installation on embedded devices. The NetBSD distribution tends to be fairly small, which also plays well into running on modest devices.

Why would I want to use one or the other?

I would suggest selecting one and giving it an honest assessment for six or so months, trying to use it daily for the same things you use Linux for. Linux has overwhelming developer and industrial inertia behind it, so you may well find that you prefer CentOS, but it will broaden your horizons, particularly around the edges -- firewalls, RAID, kernels, package management, and so on.

You might also do the same thing for Solaris 10 (particularly not OpenSolaris first). It's a really interesting mix of some legacy stuff (a miserable default shell) and some advanced new features (dtrace, zfs, smf).
If they have an open documented API and you are using it, then I would stand your ground. What are those 90k pageviews worth to them? What are they worth to you? I imagine they're worth more than a few hundred bucks to you.

How many hours have you put in?
Negotiate a better price. If you can't agree on a price and Zillow cuts you off spread the word about that fact.
Here's what was going through Schonfeld's mind as he was typing that entry up:
"writing...article...about...mobile...must...mention...iphone...somehow..."
Way to shoehorn it in at the end with that non sequitur.
So you are using their API for your app. I assume their TOS allows them the ability to turn off service for you at their discretion.

If that is the case you don't have any legal recourse regarding the API. I would certainly not give up the domain for chump change, and would look at a different source for your data.

I would also look into any copyright issues, but selling for a small amount is absolutely not worth it to you. I would hold onto it just out of principle at this point.
In the old times, young faculty members who collaborated rather than did original work didn't get tenure and so left "in failure". Graduate students can't collaborate as that's not the purpose of the exercise (as others here have written). Post-docs CAN collaborate, but they're trying to make a name for themselves which is somewhat anti-collaboration.

This leaves the tenured profs, but they're off chasing money to fund their groups. Not a great system, which is why I left it.
The papers I've seen that have more than a dozen or so authors often work like this: The first and second authors were the project drivers, and did the writeup; the names in the middle were involved in data collection, number-cruching or sub-projects, and are often distributed across different organizations; and the last author (or two) will be a very well-known name, someone who has basically blessed the project by granting their name to it as an established researcher in the area, but who most likely only advised the main researchers.

In general it only counts on your CV if you're the first, second, or maybe third author. But a project with 20 people on it would probably collapse under the organizational weight before completion if it wasn't a pretty big deal. For example, the papers on the Human Genome Project and shotgun sequencing had a lot of authors, with the breakdown as described above.
You're in negotiations (They offered, didn't demand).
Counter with an offer of $X0,000. Divide and conquer from
there.
You can set the Dock to hide, in which case you can use the full display.
Hugh Jackman buy's breakfast for camped out fans
Well posting here is a good step and even better if high profile blogs/sites picks this up. Such may force their hand and offer you a better deal.

Though looking at it from another perspective and the site's current rankings on the web and you using their name in your app might not be much you can do. You might want to consult with a IP lawyer!
I think flickr is probably the worst way to navigate through all of these. Is there any way to put each section into a slideshow or something? There's got to be a better way
"[A]wfully embarrassing to me as a man, and as a computer programmer" is quite different from "felt uncomfortable/embarrassed when the presenter or speaker started making a fool of himself".

I can feel basic empathy for someone's situation without it being "embarrassing to me as a man."

And thanks for the gratuitous vulgarity, it really added to the discussion.
$250 is certainly a lowball but their registered trademark for Zillow gives them almost infinite leverage. They can just take your domain if they want to. The sweet spot price is just below what it will cost to sue you for trademark infringement. I'd hope for $5k.

Also, www.izillow.net goes to a different site than izillow.net.
IPhone App Developers Threaten To Sue Apple Over Late Payments
Should Google Be Paranoid About Losing The Android Name?
The domain itself may be worth a couple hundred bucks, but your app and the time you put into it is worth much more, so you're on solid footing negotiating a better deal.

It would be a PR nightmare for them to just pull the plug on you.
INSIDE WASHINGTON: Taxpayers to get rude surprise
Tell them you want a job at Zillow for $150k/year. You win, and they don't give in to your negotiations.
Others may be interested in buying the domain as well, now that it's known that Zillow has their eyes on it.

Keep spreading that info around. Maybe the best offer will come from elsewhere.