skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Ship of Theseus has a rather interesting application to this concept, explaining a way to do brain downloads without any risk of losing "you".

We basically know for a fact at this point that the "soul" is not stored in any one brain cell--that is, you can lose any single brain cell and you're still who you are. Thus, if we take one brain cell, digitize it into some form in which it exactly replicates the function of the original, including ability to reconnect to other cells and so forth, it will continue to function as the original cell.

So you do this one by one for every single cell in the brain. In practice, this might be possible with nanotech or something of the sort.

Since no single cell can store consciousness, and you ever have one less cell than normal in your brain, "you" must logically be fine. Yet once the process is done, not an atom of the original "you" remains. The only way I've found to poke holes in this concept is the idea that there is something "not replicable" about brain cells, which seems unlikely--for example, it's doubtful that there is a significant quantum effect on consciousness. This would of course stop one from doing this, since quantum states cannot be duplicated.

See the last paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Other_examples as well.
Google, in acceding to the Authors Guild's requests, have attained a legal near-monopoly on searching and distributing the majority of books ever published.

Incorrect grammar. Should read: "Google, in acceding to the Authors Guild's requests, has attained a legal near-monopoly on searching and distributing the majority of books ever published."

Company names should always be referred to in the singular object form, as in "it", not "they" or "them".

Mr. Doctorow, is Boing Boing hiring any editors? ;)
The best I've ever seen:

http://www.amazon.com/Cant-Teach-Ride-Bike-Seminar/dp/096717...
Advice For New YC Founders
Safari has a drop shadow, otherwise it's identical to Firefox.
That's not a bad idea... serving the mobile version to IE6, because as time goes on, and as more people are using smart phones with modern browsers, browsers that are more powerful than IE6, IE6 starts to look more and more like an ancient mobile browser anyway.
Indeed, Greg Egan's short story "Learning to be Me" is on exactly the argument (both sides!) that the article is trying to make: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/361474/learning_to_be_me.html
but good is the enemy of great.

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap-Others/dp/00...
To paraphrase Eldridge Cleaver, sex and power are one in the same. Poor folk comparatively get down more often because they cannot exert influence. The rich have less sex because they're too busy controlling others.
Best out of the set of possible practices, not out of the set of practitioners.

State of the art sounds impressive, but it merely means the best we have at the moment. Inventive people constantly improve it.

"Crossing the Chasm" talks about how most people in a given industry prefer to do what everyone else is doing. Progress comes from the technology "enthusiasts" (who simply love cool new stuff) and "visionaries" (who are excited by new application of the technology to give them a x10 advantage).

There's also the distinction between competitive advantage and hygiene factors. For the latter, it's cheaper and more reliable to just follow the crowd than to experiment with risky new ways - save that for improving your competitive advantage.
I'm more worried by the style guide. Just in the screenshot, I notice a lot of oddities and inconsistencies:

* Unnecessary parentheses abound
* A camelCase preference over snake_case
* And nocase ("myname")
* Calling methods with "::" and "."
* Curly braces instead of do..end for multiline, unchained blocks.
* Curly braces that don't even begin to line up.
* Strangely erratic whitespace (see parentheses)

Don't get me wrong, I love what you can do with Ruby, but this seems like a confusing thing to throw at your readers.
Isn't there some place where these meetings can be arranged? Italy is a bit out of my way, but I'd be quite interested in one in The Netherlands, and I suspect others would be interested in a meeting near them.
What's with all the sex stories lately? Spring is here, so hormones are flowing?
This explanation rings very true in the lives of the post-college people I know. Indeed I think this is the strongest effect in the system: the spreads between the two financial groups are about 10-20% at all points EXCEPT FOR the spread for males in the 20-30 age group where the spread looks more like 50%.

It doesn't surprise me that females aged 20-30 don't show this spread.

I'd expect to see a similar dynamic in sex versus grades for college age males. It's the stereotypical example of partying versus studying on a Thursday or Friday night, with $$$ substituted for grades!
> For the web? Passing the entire document asynchronously?

See Google Docs as an example of this.
Apology for the typo.
I thinks the its corrected now.
@wvl
Please check the post again for the proper source info
Thanks for your suggestions
@PieSquared
That post was written by my co-author and apology for any inconvenience you faced.
@windsurfer
Yeah,i used the "ubuntu studio" and pretty much satisfied with it.I'm upgrading it for few bugs in network driver binaries.

"Human Knowledge Belongs To This World"
(we should better link to proper sources. :P)
I'll wait for your suggestions.
The sample code from that pre-PHP thing makes me cringe:

<!--sql database select * from table where user='$username'-->

Oh yeah. I can see this ultimately leading to PHP, complete with either "Bobby Tables" vulnerability, or alternatively with Magic Quotes. Bad, from the start.
Although we performed...in this tutorial OR Although we HAVE performed...in this tutorial?
Are both forms acceptable? It appears so according to Google:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22although+we+defined%22

http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22although+we+have+defined%22

English tenses are a nightmare...at least for me. Do we really need such fine-grained control over tense?
Sure: black and white exist in the world, and there are fundamental truths. There is justice in the world. But there exist people who will disagree with your view of justice, and the question is how you will interact with them. If compromise is impossible, coercion is the only answer, right?

In general I've found that zeal for justice correlates with the tendency to disregard the possibility that one's own argument is wrong. That's the danger: if you can't even admit the possibility you're wrong, you really have no options apart from agreement or conflict.
Philosopher Derek Parfit has some very interesting things to say about personal identity in such strange situations (and in general):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Parfit#Self_identity
Not in British English.
Though, he writes "Google alone has easy legal access" later.
Doctorow is Canadian, so he uses both :-)
Loved this article. Its the first such article in a long time that essentially sums-up my own thoughts on this topic. I also appreciate all of the other commenters (and HN overall) because everyone is commenting on this with respect, open-mindedness, and thought. Its way, WAY too common for people who don't really understand what's going on to say how this is all sci-fi, won't/can't happen, etc. The great thing about being one of the people that wants to upload is that eventually, all the people who don't believe I'm still alive will die off.
But you're still taking the view that your goal will be achieved eventually, unaltered, right? And if your opponent knows that your goal is unchanged, and his does not change either, compromise is worthless: you're both bargaining from a position of bad faith that assumes you will eventually win.
I had a comfy bean bag chair set up for a while, and I think it was sort of good for exercise because I would drink a lot of assorted beverages (water, iced tea, coffee), so I would have to get my ass off the near-floor quite often, and the effort was greater than if I were sitting in a normal chair.

It also made it easy to slip into a short nap if I felt like it. :)
I stand corrected while simultaneously betraying my age.

LOL, I guess.
There's official US. Gov't standards for these types of things, you know.

I use the same terminology and standards the US. Gov't does.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/threshld/thresh07.htm...

If someone insists on trying to communicate applying their own individual definition to terms of common usage that are different than those others in a region uses, they themselves are the ones that will have difficulty communicating their ideas.

If the discussion is about poverty and the poor, and the discussion is in the US, the US Gov't standard would be the reasonable standard for terminology to be derived.

So a single person with no dependents is considered poor in the US if they make less than $10,590 or roughly 10/11 K a year. I responded to Sterling's statement that said poor people love cellphone because people that make less than 10/11K a year don't have cell phone because they can't afford them.
Since the analysis is based on comfort with financial position, not absolute financial position, I would suspect this reflects the fact that women feel the need for financial security before being able to feel relaxed at a younger age than men. In other words, more or less keeping with societal norms.
A look inside the Y Combinator interview room.
Ok even if you do independent events eventually you want to upload an image or a file which is not going to fit in GET very well, the url path is limited to 2k.

POST you can pass much more information, also it is more secure in that is does not log the params and path in logs.

Or maybe you POST to a REST url that has some params such as an api_key, then you post the data structure. Or you want to post a large JSON object of all data on a page. Again limits to GET, so people choose POST then. It depends on the situation.
Am i the only idiot who can't figure out how to find an event (particularly this event) on anyvite?
I just happen to be in the area today from Canada, thought it might be interesting to stop by.
Konqueror, the "NO!" has a dropshadow.
His explanation for breaking/ignoring conventions:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/8diqr/book_of_ruby_com...
don't require comma separation use spaces like google and assume (or tell) people to quote multi-word ingredients (like "ice cream").
> Moral relativism is for the spineless.

I'd say there are plenty of things where you and I will differ about the morality. You may call those grey areas, but I'd say there's a whole lot more grey than there is black and white.
The US standard for poverty is roughly $10,500 a year. Palo Alto's median income more than 5 times the US poverty standard.

Go find me a place IN Palo Alto someone whose income is $10,500 a year can pay what the US Fed. Gov't standard for what it considers reasonable rent... 30% of one's income to live IN Palo Alto.
Not just on this site. io9.com has even opened up a "Spring Mating Season" category. Facebook and FriendFeed are covered in sex-related stories. Nothing wrong with that, really.
On casual (read: non-business) sites, I just put in some kind of fun little insult. Example: http://dkpfiles.com/pias/pics/f941GOZ66b29i2Q2Z.jpg

This is just too phishy and does instill bad habits in users who (using IE6) already don't have good habits.
I don't really know OCaml that well, but Mauricio Fernandez keeps writing articles where he gets crazy performance out of OCaml with minimal effort.

Of course, I guess it could just be that the SSC is Mauricio in that case.
Why Google Is The New Pirate Bay
The Internet as a source of Regulatory Arbitrage (1996)
why do they assume satisfaction with financial situation equals financial situation? there are plenty of people making 6 figures that want more, and there are plenty of people making 40k that are happy with their lives.
Nokia 5800 Xpress Music in Black Silver
What's up with all the "getting laid" threads on the front page the last couple of days?

Spring is in the air?
Not really a British thing.

The University of Nottingham (which is most certainly British) has this in its style guide: "similarly, use the company is rather than the company are" [1]

The Economist (a publication of a British company) has a style guide that has this gem: "A government, a party, a company (whether Tesco or Marks and Spencer) and a partnership (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) are all it and take a singular verb. So does a country, even if its name looks plural." [2]

[1] http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/public-affairs/uon-style-book/si...

[2] http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=...
A Sign Of The Times: fbFund Shifts To Incubator Model
Curse of the Social
I've always been shy and had troubles with relations with other people. I've met my wife by chance, and it was miracle that she didn't put me down when I've told her repeatedly "I'm so boring, really, let's speak about you" on our first "date" :).

I was expecting women will appreciate that I'm so humble etc. It turns out they just thought I'm really boring, if I say so myself. So this is lesson number one - don't assume women will appreciate that you are humble.

Still - my wife somewhat endured my "I'm so humble and nice etc" talk, and we're married now, so there is a chance to everybody :)

So - lesson number 2 is - when you meet right kind of person at right moment in life, it is really difficult to screw things up. So be yourself and don't worry - your time will come.

Just remember to be open to new people and new experiences.

PS when you are shy it helps a lot when you think about everything you do in terms of "what would be the worst outcome of this if I screw up?" It is often the case that the worst outcome is exactly the same that if you don't do anything. So expected value is higher than 0 :). For me it helped a lot.
Libpaxos: open source Paxos library
I call bullshit. I'm broke and still not getting any.
Here is the link to the invitation:

http://anyvite.com/lld60cypag
There's no dropshadow in Safari.
POST easier to protect from XSS attacks when using the Django middleware.
For some reason I can't get "Barney Stinson! Barney Stinson!" out of my head.

I feel like if I tried to pull some of that stuff with a potential employer, I would be dismissed as a pretentious blowhard.

http://barneysvideoresume.com/
Seconding the reCAPTCHA recommendation - I can't think of a way to make it any simpler than this. It even works if you're developing from localhost.

I put off implementing our captcha for a long time, believing that it would take a day of research, implmentation, testing, debugging; with reCAPTCHA and ambethia's Rails plugin (http://github.com/ambethia/recaptcha/tree/master), it took less than half an hour.
I've been trying out mu-commander. Not bad, better than Finder for actual file/directory browsing.

Wish it had auto-complete of paths, though.
Are you a native English speaker??

Both are correct. They are different forms of past tense, with different meanings.

"we defined ..."
The "simple past" is used for recounting past events, as when telling a story.

"we have defined ..."
The "present perfect" is used when describing a past action that has effects on present events.

You might have learned this from your English grammar teacher, or from Google: "wiki past tense".

-- David Jones
SQLite Optimization FAQ
Stress OutSourced:  A Haptic Social Network via Crowdsourcing
Hey, you smart Americans, left our smart women to us :)
English is my third language. Anyway, it's not clear to me which is the better choice for the tutorial sentence.

Simple past is used when there is a specific time involved. But isn't going through the tutorial considered a specific time?
Measuring the value-add of hedge funds
Solid advice for recent grads. Most of the list pertains to software engineers, too.

To add to #4 - "You must be able to handle irrelevant criticism": when I was working as a junior developer, my mentors would intentionally throw in a hideous design element if they were going to present a prototype to product management or design.

This would give certain product management types something obvious to point out and fix, and offend designers so much they'd work to get us prettier assets ASAP. The better PMs were able to see through the trick and focus on the real problems.

I thought this was stupid until I saw how well it worked.
Congress certainly has the authority to change the Act if they did so in the first place in 1950. I do not think that they did have the authority to give up their responsibilty if it was un-constitutional in the first place.

One of posters on this thread, 'jhancock' said that quote "creating money isn't spending."

Well, hey buddy! What do you call what the Fed has been doing since 2008? So far they have lent 3 Trillion US dollars and provided some 5.7 Trillion bucks in guarantees on PRIVATE investments.

Definitely illegal according to the Constitution. It is outside of their mandate. How it will play out if we, the tax-payer, tell them to take a flying leap...Beats me!

I support H.R. 1207 that would require the GAO to audit the Fed. It is a start. After that I am sure most Americans will want to get rid of it and control our own money.
Isn't it impressive that languages evolve?!
Ask YC:  Would HN readers be interested in a HN events site?
So, I run the hackers and founders meetup here in Silicon Valley every couple of weeks. People really seem to like getting together and having a beer with fellow HN readers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=566583

I've noticed that it can be really hard to get something like that launched, unless you can get your announcement on the front page of HN.

While that works for larger metro areas, like SV or the recent HN gathering in NYC, smaller areas like Padova, Italy it can be a bit challenging to get a HN meetup off the ground: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=566583

I own the domain www.hackersandfounders.com. Currently it just points to the Hackers and founders Meetup page, but I've been toying with the idea of building a Craigs list style community meetup listing. Would the HN community be interested in something like that?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.
This is also known as Cross Site Request Forgery or CSRF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery
The best you'll ever get is human to human contact.

But that doesn't scale cheaply.
I'm thinking about setting up an HN events site to help HN readers organize something like this. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=568903
I am sorry, I attributed the comment to the wrong poster! I agree with the first comment of jhancock now that I more closely read it. Again apologies! Hope to hear more comments on this thread!
Hm. When I saw that the link was to something on ycombinator.com, it looked like it might have been endorsed by YC. Perhaps this should be changed, to prevent abuse -- links to something on news.yc could be treated like 'ask YC' comments.
This is really interesting. Perhaps the success of the hedge funds was precisely because of the new money entering the industry. New money enters, that money pushes up the prices of the assets the hedge fund already owns, making their returns look really good. But when new money stops entering, the asset prices collapses back down.
A few years back (probably in 2006 or 2007) I talked to a bunch of researches who were working on image recongition and they told me they searched high and low for any proof of this and didn't find it. So I have had a cached opinion since then until about 5 minutes ago. :-)
The article deals with the economic advantages of home ownership and I agree with most of it’s points. I’ve never bought the idea that "owning your own home" is a great investment. Because the reality is all it takes to virtually destroy that investment is a drug dealer moving next door to you (or any of the other million things that bring down house values)

But there is a technology wrinkle here that I think might help home ownership. It is within reason that technology will eliminate utility companies within my life time. Mini-Reactors are already a reality (http://www.planetizen.com/node/35982), it’s just an issue of bringing down the cost. Endless electricity eliminates the need for gas (natural and petrol) and could also power a decent water filtration system (meaning you could get your water from the clouds). If you have a green thumb you could even grow your own food.

But all that’s only possible if you own your own home.
Webkit already does this - http://webkit.org/blog/126/webkit-does-html5-client-side-dat...
Well spotted. Linking this to small identity is a part of an extremely important consciousness-raising that I hope is happening. Hopefully this will curb what you are describing about the anti-Bush movement.

I was recently talking about something similar relating to framing the international development arm of an NGO in the context of 'social justice.' That piece of semantic propaganda can cause a lot of trouble later on. The understanding of 'justice' that we nurture in our normal, functional societies is one that relies on one party having absolute power: A just ruler.

A Judge (or the legal system) has all the power. The defendant, only those powers given to him in the name of justice. In the context of this kind of society, unwavering commitment to 'justice' is extremely useful. People fall into line. It is harder to game the system by increasing barriers to justice. This all oils essential machinery like contracts, security & a fixed set of rules.

It is harmful taking this to a different context.

Once you leave that context, justice doesn't work so well. If you need the recipient of the sharper end of justice to agree to it, that's a problem. Who expected Omar Al-Bashir to show up voluntarily for his arrest? The reasoning was that asserting the International Court's in this context authority would be a step towards subjecting criminal rulers to the same justice as criminal citizens. But the power balance is all wrong.

Like the article rightly points out, making claims of ustice is no good if you are appealing to the party directly, via negotiations.

so why is everything framed as justice?

Partly it's habit. There are parallels between stealing cattle from a farm & stealing from the national treasury. But also, the proponents of 'justice' are often appealing to 'the public' as the judge. For example, the Israelis & Palestinians appeal to 'world opinion.' While perhaps strengthening their hands individually, that kind of appeal hurts their joint ability to negotiate with each other. IE, it gets them better terms in a less likely agreement.
Using POST doesn't necessarily make it simpler to defend against CSRF. You still need to use some kind of exclusive token shared between the client and server (e.g. a session id stored in a cookie). Imagine a poorly implemented site that doesn't prevent users from uploading js script blocks into the comments. A user could upload a script that creates a form and submits it via POST to your POST restricted endpoint, thus circumventing POST only protection. I'm assuming I've misread your comment as you use POST only and you're also doing proper CSRF protection right?
Ace any interview? You certainly wouldn't be off to a good start with me if you tried to use a powerpoint presentation.

For a programming job at least (and probably most technical positions) it seems that all those suggestions would actually work against you.
There are a few "artistic" iphone shots of ycombinator environs on my tumblelog: http://rdouble.tumblr.com