skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's way off base. You're not understanding my argument. Nobody said anything about magic.

The point is how can you ever verify that two beings react exactly the same to all stimuli? How are you determining "no measurable difference"? Setting aside the fact that silicon is measurably different from neural tissue, you still aren't any closer to answering the question "does the machine experience consciousness the same way I do as a result of its function?"
The Revolution Continues: Let Them Eat Cloud
I've been in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003.

There are a lot of issues with the way aid is distributed. The most successful parts of both places, the wireless networks and decentralized power systems, have been totally market driven, and actually hindered more by centralized efforts and regulation than helped.

Somalia, where it is too dangerous and chaotic for aid agencies or telco regulators to operate, has cheaper Internet access and mobile calling than almost anywhere else in Africa or the developing world!

Communications infrastructure (roads, signals/fiber/wireless, electrical grid) is one of the few areas where scale can be helpful. In Afghanistan there is a lot of money coming through the military to pay for a road network (with benefits to both the foreign militaries and the local economy; dual use technology at its best). Communications is basically wireless backed by satcom, with some microwave backbone and upcoming fiber, with microwave/fiber driven by military and government customers paying top dollar, then going out to connect up the cell systems. For $20/mo you can buy 3G service.

One of the biggest issues in Afghanistan is that aside from the US Military, the other US funding agencies (primary US AID) have to operate through local contractors, and a rather inefficient process which leads to overpaying for everything, and thus not accomplishing enough concentrated change to be successful. The "Provincial Reconstruction Teams" are afraid to go out except with a huge military presence, and are pretty sheltered from everything, whereas I was riding around in an old pickup truck with a 9mm and no problems.

Irrigation systems are probably the next thing to do after roads (the military has roads under control); these can be done for $5-12k each by local labor, and 20-30 systems per district, all in parallel -- or, you can pay $500k via US AID and get 1-2 systems done after 2 years. The US AID requirement to use local contractors is "trickle down economics" -- basically the hope is that paying an Afghan with political connections $500k to do work will lead to $500k staying in the local economy, paid in wages to other Afghan laborers, etc. It turns out it turns into the connected Afghan spending the same $5-10k to get the project done, and then buying $490k in real estate in Dubai or Canada.

Government and government contracting is the opposite of the startup world in every way. Very few people seem to have done both.
You're talking about qualia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

Let's just pretend that we run all the arguments for and against qualia from that article against each other and declare us all losers in advance.
PC Registry Cleaner Reviews
Registry Cleaner Reviews website is one of the largest registry cleaner review sites on the web. Rob Bentley, the owner had very bad experiences using certain unscrupulous registry cleaning softwares. Instead of fixing errors quickly and making his computer run faster, the fly by night softwares actually made things worse and installed even more spyware on his registry.
Surely this is only really valid point if Friefox saved Netscape? Is the most pressing concern of a owner/shareholder/employee that a company starts a successful open source project? No, it's food on the table! It didn't save most people's job.

Joel's point is still valid, commercially it was suicide. 3D Realm's constant rewriting of Duke Nukem Forever bottom up is another topical reminder of just how stupid it is. Another dead company.
The kernel code comes from xnu and freebsd, the UI stuff and the development tools comes stright from the NeXT that's about 20 years old.

Of course those are just the starting points, from that a lot has been reworked/improved and a lot has been added.
Yeah, If you are being bogged down by legacy code and increasingly falling behind competitors due to slow innovation, it makes sense to do a rewrite. Mozilla had nothing to lose by a rewrite and everything to gain. In the short term they suffered immensely falling behind even more but in the long term it helped them emerge stronger.

It is the same with Classic Mac -> OSX. The former was crumbling under its own weight but OSX enabled Apple to out innovate others.

The key point is that a rewrite should always produce something better and leaner. Two cases where it didn't happen are

* In case PG's viaweb -> Yahoo store. http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...

* When Sony acquired Naughty Dog. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060118.html
Oh I don't know, maybe use keep alive long polling or something? Maybe with self adjusting timeout.

Seriously. Polling the server every 3 seconds???
>> "There is no practical, scalable way for the server to update the client browser, so the client has to poll this way."

If you say so :/
Owned? Legal terms of video hosting services compared
You can run them through all manner of tests. Sense tests, logic tests, math, philosophy, reading, every experience can be compared and contrasted.

Now, assuming a large number of tests have been performed and there is a consensus they have no practical difference, why would you conclude that consciousness is not derived from brain structure?
And here I was thinking that Vimeo was pretty darn cool... Anyone have any rationalisation for:

VIMEO shall be entitled to unrestricted use of any Submission for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise, without compensation to the submitter.

?
What's with the absence of capital letters?
And the rest is from NeXT?

(I kid, I kid.)
The eee PC and Aspire One, which I believe are two of the best-selling netbooks, both have horrible distros. I gather netbooks were targeted for doing internet and office, so the disros are optimised for doing that and nothing else. If it turns out most people want to do more with their netbook (which the hardware is certainly capable of), it's no surprise that they would avoid linux when linux makes it difficult for them to do what they want.

Does any netbook ship with a non-crippled linux distro? I'd like to see sales figures for that, especially compared to a windows version on the same hardware.
I think the moral is "RELEASE DAMNIT", not "don't rewrite".

If you can rewrite and still release, rewrite away.
Linux won't "win" the Desktop until there is a generational leap over other OSes. Linux can't win because everyone else can see what Linux programmers are programming and can copy all the ideas, if not the code outright.

I love Linux, don't get me wrong, but it's always going to be a second banana for the consumer.
Yes I have read the article and as other people have pointed out I too am missing the threat. This is like saying I will pull out the identity of the person who browsed through my blog and left a comment. It is definitely possibly to do it over a period of repeated visits. And assuming I spend all that time to dig out information.

So, instead I am positively noting that you cannot assume it is anonymous and think of ways I would benefit from it whether identified at an aggregate level or an approximation or even uniquely.

The author listed few examples which he words as 'exploits' the non-anonymity and I mentioned few more but rather positively. It might be a very fascinating view of the web if we can start browsing it from a world map, don't you think so ?
> I’d even say the reason tabbed browsing is so popular nowadays is actually because back and forward are broken!

Oh, come on now. The reason tabbed browsing is so popular, is because you can work on several apps and websites at the same time.

Please make your points without making stuff up. It's annoying.
Accent reduction
Because it's spelled "maths" :)
That's just good business.
1) Set your system's language to Japanese (or Swahili, or another language which is totally foreign to your experience)

2) Go through a week of normal use, including both routine open-the-Internet-and-send-email use and change-the-desktop-image level non-routine use.

You now know about one hundredth of the amount of pain a non-technical user has when switching OSes. (P.S. She hates brown, cannot change the desktop image, and her nephew who is good with computers doesn't know how to either because none of the files he's describing are on the window and this is so frustrating to her.)
When U [said](http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html), need to "weigh the votes" I thought you said considering votes from people with more than a certain points as more, rather than what now seems to be "older peoples votes only"
Given the state of the code when it was released, I can't really say I blame the developers for thinking 'screw this'.

Check out the comments they had to delete before releasing the code : http://www.jwz.org/doc/censorzilla.html .
An interesting, if somewhat pessimistic, speech. One quibble: he states the size of "an atom" as being around 1nm. I thought it was more like 0.4nm, if he's talking about silicon anyway. Not a game-changing difference, but still.

And he also seems to dismiss rather perfunctorily the promise of upcoming technology and techniques - the most egregious example being the scorn he pours on the potential of 3D computers, which he seems to think is merely stacking a few photolithographed dies on top of each other. I think this is somewhat misguided; most of what I've read on the subject talks about building, via nanotechnological (or even biological) assembly, true three-dimensional structures, with the massive increase in connectivity this allows. I'm by no means an expert on the topic but if you want a hint of evidence that this technique might be useful, I'd ask you to consider that treasure trove of as-yet unattainable computing technology: the human brain.

Good talk though, thought-provoking, although what it really provokes me to do is argue with the author ...

(edit: oops, I was thinking of the radius of Si. Now I have even less of a point; oh well)
Funny he implies the bundling of IE in every copy of Windows and the threats against OEMs who thought about bundling any other browser had nothing to do with the failure of Netscape.

It's true Netscape 4 lasted very long and was tough to improve, but I think that blaming Netscape for not having resources comparable to Microsoft is not entirely fair.

A rewrite is a risky proposition and should not be taken lightly. If Netscape did something wrong it was not to do it right after 4's launch.
This is Webkit + V8 + minimalism + usability (and other really good ideas like comics promotions), so, only V8 is what was written from scratch.

This is very good example of really smart approach. Another one is the reuse of Java/Eclipse ecosystem for Android development, same as Google App Engine Java. In both cases they rewrote VMs.
Media Temple. Best customer service, best karma.
Honestly, I didn't understand the reason of re-posting that old stuff.

This man got his niche as a popular blogger and he is really good in that sort of blah-blah-blah re-telling-the-obvious-things posts.

But why here?
See which twitter users dont follow you back in 9 lines of python code
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)
There are a number of practical, scalable (albeit tricky to set up) ways of pushing events from the server to the browser, gathered under the umbrella term Comet. Google have been using Comet for chat within Gmail since around 2005.
Gandi.net should probably be on the list, with their recently-out-of-beta hosting offering. I hear good things, though I can't claim to have tried it myself.
Yes, it matters. Most smaller companies tend to be service companies, because they don't have huge economies of scale. Most product companies tend to be larger -- it's easy to moonlight as a designer who figures out what box you should sell a lightbulb in, but you can't moonlight as the guy building the lightbulbs, because you need tens of millions of dollars to manufacture them profitably.

A subsidy to small businesses that didn't exclude service businesses would have the effect of making more people want to work for service companies. Which is fine, except that they produce negligible exports. If you're selling lightbulbs, you make money in India by selling them there; if you're a lawyer, the way you make money in India is by hiring an Indian lawyer in India, and somehow convincing this lawyer to give you a fraction of his billings (so most of the money stays behind).

Given the potential trade deficit problems, I suspect Obama wants to focus on subsidizing businesses that can export.
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100 Awesome Business Blogs that are Better than an MBA
Ask HN: Recommendation for FL/OSS software to bootstrap a project
I'm looking for a recommendation on FL/OSS software I can use to quickly put together a web site that will support the following functionality:

1. User registration and login/logout
2. Photo upload for each user with tagging
3. Discussion forums
4. Ability to post reviews on pages on the site
5. A general news feed where I can post stories

Anything packaged that I can grab to get started? Don't care much about the language.
AlphaLab Demo Day Companies Launch
Ultimate BetReferral Code| Ultimate Bet
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Facebook also uses it, with an Erlang backend, for Facebook Chat.
They're obsolete, allegedly. http://jmtame.posterous.com/capitalization-is-obsolete I disagree as I have to slow right down to read writing that's all in the same case (as otherwise it 'reads' as a monotone run-on sentence) and little is worth the effort, but he makes some interesting points.
There is a great description of a true first-class continuation on Wikipedia:

Say you're in the kitchen in front of the refrigerator, thinking about a sandwich. You take a continuation right there and stick it in your pocket. Then you get some turkey and bread out of the refrigerator and make yourself a sandwich, which is now sitting on the counter. You invoke the continuation in your pocket, and you find yourself standing in front of the refrigerator again, thinking about a sandwich. But fortunately, there's a sandwich on the counter, and all the materials used to make it are gone. So you eat it. :-)
Erlang FizzBuzz Showdown (Part 2): Transferring PHP/Ruby/Python to Erlang
Following on from yesterday's guide to transferring skills from PHP/Ruby/Python over to Erlang
Ask HN: Which of those services would you pay $5/mo to use?
I want to measure how much of a bubble there is around social media services and similar. "Everyone" is talking about it, but some statistics show that it's not very pervasive (e.g., 60% of Twitter users stay for less than a month.)

So I'm trying to have people put their pretend money where their virtual mouths are. If the following services charged $5/month each, which ones would you pay for?

As a baseline, 84% of the US population pays for a cell phone.
GMail (or any other webmail client)
Posterous (or WordPress.com, or other blogging service)
Google Reader (or other hosted RSS reader)
TheSixtyOne (or Pandora, Last.fm, or other online music service)
Real time search services
None (I would abstain or look for free/self-hosted alternatives)
Why does it matter? This always struck me as a rather useless popularity contest. I'm on ubuntu & except for games*, there isn't a single thing I'd boot vista for. There's one or two long tail apps I'd like to have, but they wouldn't help the linux community much.

[^] And seeing how they treat Macs, I don't think game publishers will put up with developing for 3 platforms.
I would pay $5/month for reliable, fast, secure off-site backup. Actually, I already do... I use JungleDisk with my own key.
There is no browser wars.

All browsers share a common goal of respecting standards while adding features to keep users happy, making the web an enjoyable experience.

Well, except one...
I don't see any impact from "commercial" software to Linux. As all the commercial software turns to online service, you have to pay monthly fee in order to use the service. Linux will dominate the network market as it was done in embedded system market because it can easily be customized. Any software value on the customized distro (browser, email or IM) is included in the hardware sales (like decades ago when we sold these "huge" computers).
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I would have to say I wouldn't pay $5/month for any of these... In fact I already stopped listening to Last.fm rather than pay $3/month (I can listen to Norwegian stations online for free, and I never cared for Last.fm's selection algorithm - Pandora's was much better, but I can't be bothered to use a VPN or proxy to use it).
And, BTW, "this is the kind of thing you solve in five minutes with a macro in Emacs" looks almost like Joel Spolsky knew the HN crowd would eventually come...
Yeah, but the API doesn't give you access to those users' gender (since Twitter doesn't ask/store that info), which means you have no way to tell the classifier "Here are 500 males' tweets, here are 500 females' tweets."

I suppose you could manually find males and females and train based on their body of works, but it won't be great; you'll likely run into a selection bias.

But if you seeded with that approach, and then used a SpamAssassin-style auto-learner...maybe you'd have a chance?

I suppose this is a case where you don't want "Perfect" to get in the way of "Good enough", especially since it will never be perfect...
Drupal is a CMS written PHP that has plugins for the features you describe.
For me, just about the only online social service which is useful enough to justify paying for it is e-mail. And that's definitely one area where the free services (yeah, GMail) are lightyears ahead of any paid service. So apart from 'infrastructure' stuff (like hosting, domain names, etc.) my online existence is completely free. And I honestly don't see that changing, ever.
FUD patrol is always protecting netizens from BS like this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift

Also, I'm a big fan of a revenue neutral tax shift from payroll to energy/carbon.
I've been following this for a while and was under the impression that the POP3 access was a paid feature. Got a link to the free-ness?

nevermind:

http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2009/03/13/pop3-technol...
Drupal also has lots of tutorials and documentation, and a fantastic (and well-organized) user community. It's in PHP (which makes me recoil in horror every time I look under the hood) but the code is pretty solid and they have fairly high standards. Far and away one of the best open-source projects I've encountered!

Note: I haven't done anything with Drupal in ~18 months now, so not sure how things like Drupal 7 etc. have turned out...
XMPP, Jabber, AMQP, Rabbitmq are a few keywords that are getting a lot of hype lately.
I'd pay for webmail on the assumption that they have the scale to filter spam better than I could manage on my own.

I don't think I'd be willing to pay explicitly for anything else (maybe if they were bundled, but not at $5/month each).

$5/month seems steep. For comparison, LiveJournal charges $3/month or $20/year.
I watched all of that and the guy didn't end up revealing which browser usually won. I'd really like to know! I'm assuming it's Chrome, seeing as it has the best Javascript performance (I think that's still true?).
100 Geeks You Should Be Following On Twitter
In addition to all the scp comments here, if I'm doing a constant <edit files locally, update remote copy of directory, test on remote> cycle; I'll usually use rsync instead of scp.
Users like what is familiar, as far as the OS goes. They aren't using computers to learn new things about computers. They just want to surf the net, email, etc. Every new Linux-specific thing they have to learn is a waste of time. Every familiar app they can't run is a loss.
> Whether it fits HN or not, thanks for this.

Of course it does: he hacked the Gibson.
Aishwarya Rai at 62nd Cannes International Film Festival 2009
Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, really need to find other kinds of monetisation than subscription fees, if only because they become exponentially more useful the more people use them. Restricting the number of users by charging them wouldn't help them.
Online backup!
What exactly do you call pessimistic? The assumption that Moore's law will hit a hard wall and soon we won't be able to ride it's back any longer? I, for one, would be glad if the days of "extensive agriculture" in computing, and games in particular, will be over; maybe game designers will then have time to seek the better form of the game, instead of producing cliche-ridden sequels beefed with the current technology. But the article doesn't seem to promise anything like that: if anything, advances in mobile devices, bandwith, changes of national and age demographics promise us even more of a wild ride we experienced previously!

Or, do you call pessimistic (conservative, I would call it) the assumption that by 2030, kids won't be growing their "pocket-sized dragons" or the Singularity won't happen?

So, what exactly do you call pessimistic?
What Wolfram Alpha could do for the Enterprise
The Next Twitter or Facebook is the Open Web
I would definitely pay to use twitter although I do not think that would be a good idea for them
Digital Licensing: Do It Yourself
Share a file, lose your laptop
Did Google Change SEO Yesterday?
You say that, but when the userbase dropped by, oh, ~99%, would it still be so useful to you?
I was curious about
"Nimrod produces small executables without dependencies for easy redistribution."
does this mean that it packages any third party libs in the executable? wouldnt there be licensing issues?
When dealing with high concurrency, Erlang will beat C.
Search Power of Collaborative Design
BBC News: Pirated pop keeps stars popular
Don't forget BOSH.
7 eBay Tools That Save You Money
I'd pay $5/month for on demand access to highest quality DRM free copies of all recorded media (film, music). In fact, I'd pay more, maybe up to $20.

I don't like bittorrenting everything you know. But at the same time, I'm not paying $30k+ to fill my iPod. A reasonable monthly fee is a good compromise and I'd happily pay it.
My take is that it is only a matter of time before all entertainment content is legally freely distributable. And the music and movie industry know it they are trying to make as much money as possible the traditional way + DRM style technology while they still can.
While it is true that the OLPC is using Linux, many of the features of Bitfrost http://radian.org/~krstic/bitfrost_2007.pdf are not present in mainstream Linux distributions (e.g. applications being isolated against each other (yay); theft detection using a central activation server (yay?))

The Bitfrost architecture follows strong requirements regarding the ease of use of security mechanisms (e.g. no user passwords, no reading required). Perhaps Apple just tries to get someone smart for the necessary security improvements who aims for a slightly more pleasant user experience than UAC.