skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are right, of course. Right now I am in the early stages of a gig where I have sole responsibility for 400K lines of an orphaned enterprise package written with all correct fads (sorry frameworks). To make matters even more fun, it is about 25% of the way through a transition from struts to flex. Turning this thing around is like doing high speed maneuvers in a super tanker. Anyway apologies for my muttering, but your suggestion is welcome.
Take the walk
Twitter isn't really at fault here. They could have warned 3rd parties more, though.
Criminals Pay Top Money for Hackable Nokia Phone
You really should download and use the free trial to decide for yourself. In fact, all the slow-downers on the market have free trials.

In Capo, you have all the functionality you need, with the limitation that after 5 minutes of audio pass through for a given song, audio quality will begin to degrade.

Learn a handful of songs with Capo, a handful with the others, and let me know (use the Feedback item in the Help menu) how it went!
At what point do people realize that being a subscriber to someone with more than a few thousand followers basically just means you've put yourself on their "super short press release mailing list".

Twitter has got to be the wet dream of publicity agents and direct marketers alike...
If they simulate my brain molecule by molecule, and consciousness emerges, which one is really me? If my physical self is then killed, do I in fact still exist inside the simulation? In which case, is it OK to kill off my superfluous physical presence in order to use my organs to help others? What rights does the simulated me have?

This will be a huge can of worms one day.
I'm surprised that you thought the researchers were making understated claims:

When asked when the simulation would come up with something artistic or an invention, Professor Markram said it was simply a matter of money. "[...T]he technology is there today."

Boy does that sound like a lot of software projects I know.
The writing analogy was how I explained what I do to my girlfriend. It's a good way to describe to the general public what you do in a way that won't put them to sleep.
See my comment responding to the "premature optimization" observation.
Impressive technology, they will certainly gain a lot of speed by turning their FPGA architecture into a fixed chipset.
This is the kind of hardware/software that would be interesting to see in next generation consoles. Video games production would require the same amount of modelers/texturers/animators, but way less shader/graphic programmers as a lot of the material hacks from the current GPU generation would be obsolete.

I've explored a bit with real-time raytracing on this project : http://www.jrbedard.net/projects/C/raytracer/raytracer.htm It worked in real-time with a simple scene and basics reflective/refractive materials. But I had to rely on OpenGL speed up some of the transformations and blitting. Trying to fit raytracing on current generation GPU/APIs is a pain and feels like a hack, even with Cuda. Their product seem to resolve that problem of more easily reaching photo-realistic real-time performance.
From the comments, how software is like writing and why the typical meeting-punctuated office environment might necessarily not be the best environment for software writing:

"Here's another perfect scenario that I run into that upper management just doesn't seem to "get" that totally fits the "writer" scenario: fragmented time.

Upper management (and even middle management -- made up of the guys who never could figure out how to write a good "novel" in Java or C++ or Ruby or...) looks at your week and they go: "Okay... you had x hours of meetings, y hours of predictable admin time (timesheets, etc.), and x - y = z hours left over which was nearly 20 hours out of a 40 hour week!! HOW COME YOU'RE BEHIND THE DEADLINE!!"

What they don't "get" is that "20 hours" was 1 hour and 2 hours there over the course of a week. You can't write a book that way and you can't write a novel that way. You most definitely have "plots" in software and "subplots" and characters that need to be developed JUST like in writing. And you can't do it 1 hour here and 2 hours there. It's definitely NOT like "math" or "engineering." It's MUCH more art than science. I've been saying this for years.

You can't give me 1 hour here and 2 hours there. I need longer spans of time to do the "development" (which THERE is a more appropriate word, but in software we don't take that word the same way we do in writing.) if you want a solid plot that will not fail and supporting subplots and good characters... I NEED DEVELOPMENT TIME!! LOTS OF IT (in span of time)!!"
Surely it should be "Why Genius.com's Blocking of IE6 is Hurting Genius.com"?
Distributed transactions finally implemented for Google App Engine
Check out the Tech and Beer house too then - they had a BBQ last weekend, very nice to meet some startup people there. (The BBQ was posted on HN, I don't think the house itself has a website)
I believe that's also subsidized by the cost of the ebooks which they hope you will purchase.
Almost all of your comments could be (and have been) applied to the original Honda Insight. While it seemed radical at the time, ten years later, hybrid cars are almost commonplace.
Playing Devil's Advocate: if these simulations are truly modeled after humans, why are you so sure that they won't buy into many of the same religious ideas and reaffirm what many humans naturally think and do? Would a simulation like this even be aware that it was not just another person?

It seems like the answer to this question MUST be that the simulation cannot tell the difference between itself and a normal human. Otherwise, your argument is moot, because the religious folk will simply be able to point at this thing and say "clearly this thing is different from us -- it even knows that it's different, so obviously this is not the way our 'souls' work."
Test Data: The 2000 U.S. Census: 1 Billion RDF Triples
Who cares how much it costs Amazon to make the thing? You don't like the price, you don't buy it. What do Amazon's costs have to do with that decision?
I've converted a number of pdfs and send them to my kindle by email or usb. not hard at all.
I heard a quote once that said something like, "For the niche of highly reliable systems, programming is nearly indistinguishable from mathematics. Highly reliable systems should not be a niche."

I think that current methods make it equivalent to writing or -- as user psranga says -- more like law, such as in writing an airtight contract. But I think the future is in software construction that is away from languages and syntax towards something much more mathematical.
All the linking that you can do with the web and the multiple representations of information have to be designed into your operating system. We've also learned that tagging combined with heirarchical categorization works really really well and the filesystem should be designed around that.

Yes you can hack all that stuff on current operating systems but it isn't the same.
It is a decent database

It's approaching the same feature-set as Microsoft SQL Server had over a decade ago, but still severely lacking in optimizations and performance for anything besides basic queries.

If you were to install an OS today, would you call Windows 98 "decent" and go for that, or ditch it for something modern?
What Charles says without actually saying, and what I find most interesting, is that the new age of platform war will be waged on VMs. In that case, I don't think Charlie has anything to worry about. The JVM may not be all peaches and cream, but it's at least as good or better than the CLR, and Parrot hasn't reached critical mass yet.

LLVM is interesting, but aims a bit below all of these. What I'd really like to see is some of the other language specific VMs try branching out. Lua, Io, Erlang, heck -- even Smalltalk, could all be viable candidates.
My most memorable computer was...
Tour de Flex : Adobe's Flex framework demos
Don't be silly, there are plenty of beaches that allow camping. Just jump over the coastal range from Mountain View and you're in Half Moon Bay.
100 miles in great. But gasoline is one hell of an energy dense and convenient fuel. It will go several hundred miles and "recharges" in minutes.

Hydrogen could be as energy dense but transporting it is a pain.

That's why I've been wondering about a sealed tank with water, which would use electrolysis to split it into hydrogen and oxygen.

The gas stations could keep huge capacitors which continually recharge slowly from the gird. When a car pulls up the capacitor would dump enough juice in it to split the water in minutes. Then while you drive you "burn" the hydrogen and turn it back into water.

But the whole system is sealed and there's no need to worry about the infrastructure necessary to ship hydrogen all over the continent.
There Is But One Truly Serious Philosophical Problem
Flagged for editorializing in the headline. The article says nothing about seppuku, motive or method.
Minsky first wired a virtual neural net in the 1950's. Some science got done meanwhile ;-)

http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/page18924.html#2
Interesting article and I've been wondering how long it would take for someone to write about this.

Here is the post by Taproot ED on the real cost of Facebook Causes ($300 million in nonprofit employee time to raise $30 million): http://www.taprootfoundation.org/blog/2008/07/is-causescom-r...

I think the interesting point is that most nonprofits judge ROI over the life of the donor and use sophisticated CRMs tied in with their other online fundraising efforts to judge their efficacy.

Causes did a typical Silicon Valley move by disintermediating the nonprofits as nodes in the Causes network which robs the nonprofits of valuable data about their constituents.
Ask HN: bikechatter.com - review & suggestions
Looking for suggestions for this site I whipped up to play around with twitter some, and to unclog my main twitter page of all the cyclists I was following.
I think we're getting closer to AI, but I'm not as optimistic as the Blue Brain lead quote in the article.

They are criticized for taking a reductionistic approach, and I actually agree with the critics. Metaphorically, they are now able to build puzzle pieces, but haven't yet figured how to make them fit, let alone how to assemble the big picture.

Embryogenesis and development are very complicated processes, and, even though we also have a good idea of the macroscopic function of the cortex (primary, secondary areas for different tasks, associative areas ), some structure are still very mysterious and entangled. The brainstem is still a maze, for example, as is the so-called "mesoscopic" achitecture of the cortex.
So let's see, you set out to build a human brain and emulate consciousness, yet in the process you reaffirm to everyone that it takes a phenomenal level of supercomputing power, complexity and intelligent, purpose-guided scientists to create something that can operate on its own.

I may be mistaken, but tell me again how intelligently designing and creating an autonomous entity furthers the atheist world-view (which I am guessing you agree with, given your careful choice of phrasing ala god delusion)? If I was one of the masses -- who are evidently far less enlightened than yourself -- I would argue that this project demonstrates that an intelligent being is clearly involved in the production of a conscious entity.
Here's the clickable link:

http://www.bikechatter.com

I'm looking for ideas of fun/cool things to do with it to make it more interesting.
The Multiverse Problem
Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong
Amen. What's it worth to YOU? Market demand and available supply sets the price.
GM defaults; Chrysler headed towards liquidation
That may be true for a particular solution. If a solution doesn't make sense in ROI, then the solution should be rejected.

However, if the customers have a specific pain point, our jobs are to alleviate that pain, not sit around and say, "It's too hard."
Okay, these guys aren't anywhere near simulating an entire brain molecule by molecule. There's a big difference between this and being able to simulate the storage of a memory.

Also, the estimates of the total complexity of the brain may have all been greatly underestimated. We now have strong evidence from evolutionary Proteomics that each synapse has considerable complexity and is itself involved in computation. This makes perfect sense: the synapse must have evolved from the molecular sensing and navigation mechanisms of single celled Eukaryotes, and these are clearly capable of some computation.

(See the Brain Science Podcast episode 51)
Ask HN: Anyone else going to MakerFaire in SanFran May30
I'll be there with a desktop CNC miller and maybe a diy 3d printer.

Anyone else going? I'd love to meet up with other tech hackers while I'm in the San Francisco area.

Also, I'm currently looking for couch space, social events (I'll cook dinner if you can supply the kitchen and guests) and pickup frisbee.
The "article" is a blank page that says "click here to skip" and then does nothing.
Do vim and emacs really have all the features of eclipse? Autocomplete, integration with Javadocs, automated refactoring, integration with bug tracking systems, integration with source control, full debugging inside of the server all with the click of a button? Do you have a resource for how to setup emacs this way? I used to use emacs...
Not to mention it being completely off topic for this site.
There already is a globally unique identifier, although not necessarily a "GUID", on things you get from the web:

It's called a URL.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I drifted through high school because it was mind-numbingly boring and filled with dumb rules I couldn't understand the need for. Things only got interesting at a university.
Cost is actually determined by both the demand and the supply. This is because Amazon hypothetically takes into account their marginal revenue (which comes from demand) in relation to the cost of producing it, in figuring out a price point. Specifically, producing up to the point where MR = Cost. (Sorry for being an econ snob)
and so imho this increases your turnaround time for changes unless you are a real wizard with your tools, which is certainly possible
Indeed! Hanging is not seppuku.
Erm I'm sorry but... What is it?

Is it just a live search of twitter for some term?
I really doubt digital computation will ever be a platform for intelligence as we understand it. Biological systems really are different than digital ones.
It might and your approach may be optimal already. I guess it's a question of how much the environments differ? When I am moving to a new project I try to get myself setup so I can make changes and test them as quickly as possible and it's always a judgment call about how much time to spend doing that setup. Also, there is a cultural element like one poster said if everyone is using vim them that becomes a clear choice...
I think what Allocator2008 is getting at is that creating artificial life would show that there is nothing mystical or non-physical about consciousness. This would partly poke a hole in the argument for existence of God that the creation of life and/or consciousness has never been witnessed.

To have the artificial brain not be aware it is not a regular person, or to have the brain buy into religious ideas, would actually make the point (that the artificial brain is just like a human's, and thus consciousness is not mystical or non-physical) stronger.

Edit: khafra, ericb, and alexandros made the point I was trying to make better and in less words in replies to this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=574258
Whaaaat? That place is known as the Tech and Beer house? Haha :) It was a solid event, at any rate.
Hoithue.com - Tư vấn thuế, hỏi đáp thuế, tin tức thuế
i'm not sure what more you can do, but a good start would be to clean it up. the layout is broken for me.
Is any of your peering with Tier 1s?
How do you detect for codec support though? Or does the browser take care of that for you?

Of everything coming out of the HTML 5 standard this is the least exciting imo, there is alot more involved in building a video player on the web than linking to a progressive download asset and hoping it works.
http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/
wow...

People like to romanticize suicide, but I think it's pretty much the complete malfunction of a human to try to kill itself.
Customer Development, Class 5: IMVU
History of Python Visualization
Sounds like you are right:

"At the push of a button, the model could reconstruct biologically accurate neurons based on detailed experimental data, and automatically connect them in a biological manner, a task that involves positioning around 30 million synapses in precise 3D locations." [1]

It doesn't necessarily mean they aren't modeling molecules, but the wording hints that they aren't.

[1] http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/
I do part 1 only and it works pretty well. Occasionally I have to add a site to my filter list.
Ask HN: Any HNers in Beijing?
Anybody up for drinks, talk, and general mayhem next week in Beijing? I'm going to be spending next week there, partially as a tourist, partially to see some good friends, and partially for work (on my startup, nonetheless).

During the week I'm guessing that I'll have a shocking amount of free time, and since I'm traveling on my own, figured I'd look for new and interesting people to meet up with.

Failing that, pointers to an excellent low-cost tailor, as well as peoples' favorite restaurants, would be most appreciated.

Email address is in the profile if you'd care to drop me a line.
It might not go over well in a paid gig. Corporate tech managers do tend to freak out about Lisps and low-market-share languages in general.

One strategy that might help is to be brutally honest about how long it might take in Java, and how much cheaper it would be in a JVM-hosted dynamic language. But obviously if you don't already have enough experience with an alternative language to make a confident estimate, it would be a crazy gamble.
2d OpenGL Java engine
It's always seemed to me that people found the right analogy ages ago: programming is like wizardry.
I find this post highly questionable. What is so hairy about C++ for an IDE exactly? It's strongly typed and yes, if you do too much C style stuff it may be a bit harder to navigate but if you stay in a clean OO world it should be very, very similar to Java. Microsoft put out a competent C++ IDE well over a decade ago and Borland has done so as well... It's my personal opinion that IDEs are in general superior to text editors because this integration reduces the cognitive load of solving particular programming problems. People that say eclipse doesn't have a good text editor are being a bit ridiculous - out of the box it is not that great, but there are many 3rd party editor plugins, you could configure shortcut keys however you want and of course extend eclipse... now I am somewhat biased in that I work daily on an eclipse RCP project, so I am already spun up on extending eclipse. This all has me curious though, I'll spin up eclipse C++ development against my thesis code the next (likely imaginary) opportunity I have time to kill...
A glib bloviator: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
A how-to for creating DIY inexpensive wall art
Stifflog - Stiff asks, great programmers answer
have a look here:

http://www.bme.cornell.edu/bme/cms/people/grad/upload/Lewis-...

I work in an ultrasound imaging research lab (at wash u, but at the med school, not engineering). Hit me up jordan52 at gmail if you get serious. I've wanted to do this for a while, too.
What's amazing about this interview is that it takes awhile to realize that it's from 1999. Are we really that far behind?
This is not about ID vs. evolution. It is about whether the brain can be reduced to a purely physical system or if there is something nun-physical about it, i.e. a 'soul'. Clearly, building a functioning artificial brain by copying the physical characteristics of a human brain should settle this one. I'm not saying we are there now, but there is certainly progress.
"Which other projects/gems/plugins have you seen?"

Ah, well there's the catch. I've seen interest and enthusiasm, but so far little code to implement things.

Basically, people who would love to see Ruby have more Lisp-like powers, but not inclined to go hacking on it and making it happen.
It's the text editor used by Joy, Thompson and Ritchie.
Yes, totally forgot about this. Thanks!
Probably won't change many minds, but it does prove there's no "magic" in the recipe, and proves that god(s) are not necessary for the creation of life. It challenges the assumption that some magic chunk of soul-cloth is required to make consciousness work.

That said, surely there will be those that argue that conscious machines have no rights because they are missing their chunk of soul-cloth.
Have you considered doing something similar for business cards?
You don't have to be a wizard, just competent.
Philosophical dualism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind)) is a mistake at the core of most religions. Making a human brain would contribute much to destroying the concept of the mind as something separate from the brain, rather than the mind as something the brain does.
If true syntactic abstraction is CL-style macros, then almost no language has true syntactic abstraction. It seems odd for you to single out Perl in that category -- as you should look at Devel::Declare, which is an improvement over the core module Filter::Simple, both of which provide syntactic abstraction for Perl 5. (In particular, MooseX::Declare seems like a very good candidate to address your criticisms both of Perl's syntactic abstraction and its rather simplistic default OO model using something other than merely subroutine prototypes.)

If you're capable of backing up your complaints, please feel free to link to previous discussions, rather than making everyone go look for them on their own. A few moments of research on your part would save the rest of the Internet countless time.

... and no, no matter how much you'd like to invalidate my comments by arguing that I wrote the post in question, I'm not and have never been Matt S. Trout.
The gas station could also directly split the water which is easy to transport. The only advantage to on bard electrolysis is home charging. Anyway, the real problem is storing enough H2 to drive a useful distance.
A Design for a Distributed Transaction Layer for Google App Engine
"The 2e doesn't place form over function, form is function."

Replace 2e with anything that you admire and you will most likely find that statement to be true. I think that is incredibly important and the answer to the false dichotomy that is "form or function?". When you do it right you end up with both.
Hobo 1.0 Nears
The layout is broken for me as well (Safari 4).
This has been implemented in Java in userland:

http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=31...
URL to the project: http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/vcl/asap/ [last updated a year ago, does not address this latest silicon]

Hotchips presentation: http://www.hotchips.org/archives/hc18/2_Mon/HC18.S5/HC18.S5T... [also of the previous 36 processor silicon]

Looks like 64 words of instruction and 128 of data for each processor. You will want to think "dataflow of simple DSPs" rather than "cluster of linux".

The power use is amazing. 84mW while 100% active on their 36 processor 475MHz unit.
it doesn't involve working around constraints in a pre-existing system

You need to read some books or sites on screenwriting.
I can't paste a link (iPhone) but try googling "elliott rossio wordplayer".

Also: the writing of serials, such as sequels. Google "stross martin the art of being late" for Charlie Stross's explanation of the pain involved.

You want to see constraints? Those folks have constraints!
Microsoft's Windows 7 Starter is a gift to Google
This could be an useful tool for snapshots.