skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. True.

2. If medicine were taxed so much that people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy. False. The "extra" spending in medicine drives innovations so we have better drugs & procedures etc. than we would otherwise.

3. If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people. False.

4. If your head is cryogenically frozen today, you will be alive in 2100. Maybe.

5. By 2100, the vast majority of "people" will be immortal computers running brain simulations. True.

6. There's a five percent chance I live in a "future" computer simulation as I write this. False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel.

7. By 2100, world economic growth rates will have increased
by over a factor of a hundred. Maybe - progress & growth keep happening faster and faster.

8. The growth of humanity and its descendants will stop forever within a thousand years or so. False - see _The Beginning of Infinity_ by David Deutsch.

9. Our descendants will colonize millions of star systems within ten thousand years or so. True, if we don't fuck up - again, see _The Beginning of Infinity_.

10. The nearest intelligent aliens are many millions of light-years away. True.

11. Billions of years ago, intelligent aliens had a colony near here, but left in a big hurry. False. It's a bad explanation.

12. If we allowed complete freedom of contract, law could be privatized, to our common benefit. Maybe - I don't know about "complete freedom of contract" (can you sell yourself into slavery?) but privatizing law might be a good idea, eventually.

13. If we switched to "futarchy" as a form of government, we would be richer and just as happy. Maybe - if we're going to deviate from tradition, better to do it in the direction of more freedom and less government control - which is known to make people richer.

14. If even a few of us honestly sought truth, we would not disagree with each other. True. For any issue, there is an objective truth of the matter, and if people care enough to find out the truth, they should eventually find a theory/explanation of the issue that no has an issue with, at least for a while. People will keep finding new problems with the latest theory, and they'll have to sort that out, but eventually truth-seeking should lead to plateaus of agreement.
I have some bias from having started on it like 15 years ago... the key thing to me is the toolset : eclipse and maven and code generation templates and mylyn and all this stuff just makes it so easy - now sure you can do that in other languages, but the toolset is very mature, written in java primarily and also a lot of the really cool speed tricks are tough as heck to do with a dynamically typed language
If I've got the story straight, this was the inspiration for Coffeescript. If you have the itch, but don't have forty dollars, you should check out the LLVM kaleidoscope tutorial [1] or read the LLVM manual and then check out my Ruby-LLVM project [2].

[1] http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/
[2] https://github.com/ruby-llvm/ruby-llvm
I can't shed much light, only make a couple guesses, but it supposedly will not play MPEG2. Roku players cannot play MPEG2 either, but you can purchase a license to decode MPEG2 on a Raspberry Pi.

MPEG2 decoding would let people play a locally broadcast streams from something like the Silicon Dust HDHomerun Prime which would let them get rid of up to three cable boxes in addition to watching video on the internet. Currently, people get HTPCs to play these live streams (and act as DVRs).

Instead you would still have to have something transcode the video for the Chromecast, and perhaps act as a centralized content server either relaying live TV or recorded TV. However, it also is not clear if there will be private channels which would be required to view this content from a local source. Roku players will let you watch stuff served from Plex for example.

Interestingly, though according to this[1], the Marvel chip does have the capability to process MPEG2, perhaps if it is unlocked. (It only costs about $2 to get a license to legally unlock MPEG2 decoding on the Raspberry Pi)

However, supporting hobbyists playing back conventional cable wouldn't fit into Google's strategy if it is to slowly supersede regular cable television.

[1] http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=169737&page=9
Twelve Months in Two Minutes; Curiosity's First Year on Mars
This only works between Coinbase accounts, which kind of defeats purpose of Bitcoin - because it requires both parties to be tied to a single company. Thus I don't see anything revolutionary about this - many Bitcoin services already implement that feature for transfers between their accounts.

What I want to see (and I will try to develop in my upcoming service) is a protocol that lets you transfer Bitcoins between different services instantly. Right now it takes 6 confirmations in most services to receive a payment, but with a mutual trust between them the confirmation time could be essentially cut to zero. Mt.Gox tried to do something like that with their "Green addresses", but it didn't catch on.
Most lenses such as this are rented for a number of reasons. For example, there's little need for ownership before and after a film is shot, so it's just an expense.

The other is that a lens such as this will be awkward to use on a day-to-day basis. It's specialized and you wouldn't use it for anything except staged and planned photography. You'd have to stop way down (which you would have the flexibility to do) to get a manageable depth of field, but then you'd struggle with artifacts from the iris unless it had a costly number of leaves/blades.

There are 'inexpensive' (~$1k) lenses that come close. I think Voigtländer and Zeiss have a couple options for f/0.95 or /1.0 in 50mm. I don't have personal experience with them (I've only rented the Leica f/0.95 50mm noctilux) but they're amazing when you want to take photos in a dark place.

I'm not sure about SLR and PL-mount lenses, though. The Canon EF mount is very popular in digital filmmaking, so you might find a really wide aperture there. Zeiss Master Series has a T-stop of 1.3, but I don't know the apertures for calculating DOF. (I'm going to guess f/0.95 or f/1.1.)

If you're just after better low light performance, sensors are getting better all the time and are a much less expensive variable to tweak. I'd probably grab a decent f/1.4 or even f/1.8 and then look for the best low-noise sensor I could afford. $2k of sensor would buy you $10k of lens.
Even then the limit is unlikely to come from non-volatile storage itself. The current effective flash R/W speeds are pretty much limited by the controllers.

I remember an article stating that embedded flash controllers typically have a 20MB/s speed limit. This in turn meant that wireless speeds beyond 200Mb/s were mostly worthless, because the devices simply could not utilise any more. If someone can find the article again, I would be delighted.

However: if the reality with RRAM is even half as good as the claims go, then it would certainly encourage the hardware vendors to invest in somewhat better controllers. After all, what good is a new, hyperspeed storage medium if you can't access it any faster than the old one?
Extracting all info out of the brains would be impractical. A lot of the things humans do we do because we are humans. Our emotions only make sense because they are mechanisms of survival and passing our genes. They would be quite impractical in a singularity (although, some other emotions, specific to the digital world, may be employed). So in a sense, I can only see one force in a post-singularity utopia, driving post-humans: knowledge and understanding the beauty of it.
So your recommendation is to... go forth and create a new programming language?
It's called Polycentric Law[1] and people who actually think it's a good idea seem to exist in larger than zero quantities.

See this entertaining thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5009244

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycentric_law
Great post. I am surprised this sub did not do better. It seems that the front page has been occupied by a huge number of posts about the NSA, which were not very on point with HN Guidelines.
TIOBE Programming Community Index for August 2013
McDonald’s Burgers “Unfit for Human consumption”
Here's an even crazier version: we develop a quantum computer the size of Jupiter with seemingly infinite computational capacity, and "scan" and simulate the earth. Similar to how a sufficiently advanced AI application today could probably take an overview picture of a pool table at any point in a game, and deduce the past shots that had to be taken in order for it to result in it's current state, you might be able to develop a virtual time machine.
I had the exact same feeling. Couldn't put my finger on it at first. The book itself interests me, but something about the copy made it seem "too good to be true" and as you said a bit scamy and off-putting.
Effective ML (2011)
If you have the stomach for it, find a used copy of the "dragon book" [1]. I have the red one.

LLVM is a modern "compiler infrastructure" project. It's textual intermediate language is relatively easy to write. If you can write a program that accepts user input, and generates LLVM IR, then you've got a compiler of sorts.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Book
Java program to convert location in Lat Long
"These team members wanted whatever Zynga was willing to sell, even if that didn’t include the more valuable Draw Something assets or user data. Even more employees offered to work on OMGPOP.com for free. However, Zynga said this would all take too much legal work and wouldn’t agree to sell anything."
ORMs vs SQL: The JPA Story
Our startup is an automatic summarization API (http://www.textteaser.com/). I once wrote an article in Medium (https://medium.com/medium-ideas/59b1747c1d36) to showcase how our technology will perform with Medium articles. It received good feedback. Frontpage in Hacker News plus top post in Medium for last month. We then create a bot in Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/user/tldrrr?sort=top) to summarize submitted articles. Mostly good feedback but some subreddits banned the bot eventually.

So my tip is, don't just show the world your product. Show the world what your product can do.

It is best if you can show your product to where people are familiar with. In my case I used Medium, and Reddit. I'm planning to do it to some popular web applications next time.
How is this not a thing? This should be a thing.
A Year of Open Source
Seems very scamy..the price is not even listed on the home age, just the buy button. Neither the author has justified his credibility in the matter.
Just added Leica and Mamiya (I actually had two disparate lists, so you helped my correct a bug!). Canon/Nikon have been the gear of the most interest so far (and high end for both). The headers for "Rent Canon" and "Rent Nikon" are there for the bulk of visitors coming to the site.

I haven't reached out to many photographer communities, as I didn't feel the site was end-to-end enough to bother them. I think it's to a good state though, and will start pursuing this.

I actually bought a 5D Mark II after launching the site that I've rented out more than a few times :) Luckily enough, I'm also a photographer. It's been a pretty good incentive to also be able to earn money as a user of the site.
The scientific institution has stopped really paying that much attention to space (or computation, in relative terms), and has started paying attention to biotech and materials science instead. Not a one of those science-fiction authors thought to suggest "get your DNA sequenced for $100" in their wildest flights of fancy.

Also,

> search is still keywords in a textbox

what else would you suggest? The "hard problem" part of search now doesn't seem to be anything to do with indexing information usefully, but rather getting people to be able to clearly communicate (and before even that, clearly decide) what they're looking for.
Google co-founder bankrolls world's first lab-grown burger
There have been some half-serious discussions about this elsewhere. The idea is to start flooding the web with encrypted traffic, which is supposedly enough of a red flag in and of itself for the NSA to consider it worth storing. The back-of-the-napkin math predicts that if you do enough of this, they'll be unable to store all of it.

Or they'll just open a new datacenter.
You're also downplaying the creation of a global communications infrastructure that is nearly ubiquitous and unprecedented in its capacity.

Other than that, no progress at all. /s
Funny enough, I just cut my "Get Notified when X" module because it didn't get much use. I think a better way might be able to save search criteria and get notified when new gear that matches your criteria is posted. What do you think? Or how do you see this module working?
the scariest part of us living in a simulated environment is what happens when the players get bored and decide to turn us off (that thought might have been controlled by one of the players)
snitko actually approves, I guess.
Did Matz, creator of the Ruby language actually read the book or just voice interest in reading it :-)
Cashing in the chips (we can't simply run a spy agency on trust)
Please, be civil. There are better ways to ask a question.
Estonia's technology cluster: Not only Skype
> False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel.

I see you've never searched youtube for "The Sims".
All of the things humans do, we do because we are humans. There is no "natural set of universal goals for sentient beings"; we simply like what evolution has made us like. Changing (and especially removing) our terminal goals is the same as creating a new species with no relation to us. Why would we want to do that?
U.S. adults spend two-plus hours a day thumbing on mobile devices
This wasn't funny, please stop.
The real is answer is learn Java. Perhaps Android or Java EE
I'm a customer of yours. I'm in your target market (guessing: technical person who wants a proper backup solution).

However, I would never have found or bought your product if I hadn't seen your link on a thread on HN about git-annex a few days ago. If I hadn't followed that link specifically from talking about a project I'm really enthusiastic about I doubt I would have bought.

> It is because I don't want to serve the people that it would be effective on.

If you remove the set of all people it will be effective on from the set of all humans then you will get ∅.
At 1G acceleration, you can accelerate to a large fraction of the speed of light in about a year. A suitable rocket engine does not yet exist, but g-forces and human lifespans don't prevent travel to nearby stars.
Los celulares implicados en el cáncer
I think that the point about "no politics" meaning fairness is particularly accurate.
This looks really cool and I actually need something like this. I would target busy people who don't have time to read full articles, and I would use a mobile platform to distribute this (iPhone/Android apps). Try also students that needs to summarise long text for school, this should help them. And blog writters should put a preview/summary of the article on top of it so send it to them as well, with an example of their article summarised in your emails.
Apple is not really the best when it comes to online services. iCloud still suffers from a lot of issues, MobileMe flopped and many of their sites still run on very, VERY ancient code.
That sounds enticing, but I think you could never rewind the state of the Earth without considering the variables external to it. If you couldn't also simulate anything that could alter the course of events, such as exposure to the Sun, I think you'd end up accumulating enough lossy transitions that the simulation would be rendered (ha) worthless in a deterministic sense.

If we consider that only simulating the atoms contained within the Earth is enough to have a perfect understanding of it's state across time, by logical conclusion simulating a house would be enough to rewind the history of it's structure.
Accounting and Finance Jobs in Denver Colorado
Hacking the ultimatum game
I think that happened: http://web.mit.edu/remy/
How could 4 be maybe and 5 be true?
This idea of money as simply electronically stored value was actually pushed hard by Dee Hock back in the 70s. He even talked about the ability of someone with a secure network or transactional platform to create new currencies. Hard to do it though :)

(Dee Hock was the "founder"/driving force behind Visa btw).
No, that would be too BASIC. It should be well designed first.
IBM Gets Allies to Chip Away at Intel
"I just want to say two words to you. Just two words."

"Yes, sir."

"Are you listening?"

"Yes, I am."

"Financial derivatives."
I didn't realize the Sims were sentient.
The strongest argument against private law is that that is how law used to operate, and our ancestors deemed it so unworkable that they invented the system of open public law we know today.
But once you have Draw Something and hundreds of millions of users, it's easier to launch the next hit.

Having that leverage is a big advantage in the iOS marketplace where discovery is a major challenge for newcomers.
Maybe important parts of our personality are in the nerves of our spines and guts. Also, maybe important information in the brain is lost during freezing. Otherwise, yes, #4 is true.
He played that asset a long time ago: Berkshire bought about 20% in 1973, and was on the board until 2011. But yes, he absolutely knew about this.

He paid $11 million and is getting about $44 million after 40 years of holding it. That's kind of lousy rate of return, and the newspaper business has some question marks. So I can see why he might not be interested in buying it. And if Bezos is buying the paper for civic-minded reasons, I could see Buffet encouraging him.
Interesting to see that Samsung started mass production of their 3D NAND memory yesterday.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/08/05/samsung-ships-first-3d-ve...
It's just a bad argument in general...saying that because people spend 30% more when stuff is free (without improved results) means they have twice as much as they need. It doesn't follow, at all.
Print Instagram Photos
The world market is big enough for everyone :-)
Just got an Amber Alert on my Phone
Me: San Francisco, Sprint, HTC Evo

Amber Alert
Boulevard, CA AMBER Alert UPDATE:
LIC/6WCU986 (CA) Blue Nissan Versa 4 door

The phone was a pretty jarring ring w/ a red symbol/icon.

Granted I'm in much better shape then the victim, but I'd be interested in seeing how these Amber Alerts turn out.
Having a hard time feeling sorry for the Winklevoss twins. The market paid them more than what they were worth.
I thinks a better question would be is not how to, but should you. See - Bjarne Stroustrup: Why I Created C++ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBjjnqG0BP8)
Except in this case, they laid everyone off. Also, Zynga doesn't seem all that interested in acquiring IP. I imagine this was just a fuck up on their part.
Ideally, thats why you tune on a system that you can "break", in an environment that is replicating the bottleneck/issue you are trying to improve/fix.

Tuning can be fun. Almost as fun as fixing obscure problems with modem AT strings. ;)
Harsh In Hard Times? A Gene May Influence Mom's Behavior
Because why would I care if I change species if it keeps my consciousness alive?
Huge images, terrible comment features and obnoxious scrolling should be reason enough to ban that site.
Electronic Carjacking
Well, then maybe we could argue the same about religion: atheism and then pantheism didn't really work, so we invented organized religions with one major god. Relying on the wisdom of ancestors is a sure way to avoid growth and to not acquire knowledge, and it is precisely this trait in people through which they are usually manipulated.
Or type slightly less:

$ git init --bare project_name.git

It will make the directory for you.
This is not a problem in e.g. PHP, out of the box it can embed json in script tags, with default settings you never get the sequence `</script>` (you get `<\/script>` instead) and it even escapes U+2028` and U+2029 which are syntax errors in Javascript string literals but not in JSON.
> why isn't there something like that for flaws/bad incentive structures/tax exploits in government?

The problem with this would be that you would get many people trying to change laws that they don't like, and even groups of people "fighting" over trying to make a loosen/tighten restrictions in a law. For example, just imagine the tug-of-war between pro-gay marriage and anti-gay marriage groups over the statutes governing marriage.

You would probably have to pursue a Wikipedia-like solution and 'lock' sections of law to this kind of input, which at least on its face, would start to make this approach more useless (because you would only be plugging holes in laws that few people cared about).
What about Google Pressure Cookers and Backpacks, Get a Visit from the Feds (4 days ago)? It's very much a political article, even if it include a technical side. We all know what would be discussed.
The very existence of the term 'hit machine' implies that some people are able to do so reliably. This is certainly true in music.
Could you perhaps recommend some of these alternatives to The Elements of Style? I'm rather curious to read them and see how they compare.
Just because you brain is frozen doesn't necessarily mean that it will stay that way for long enough, or that it will remain in a readable state.
maybe a more tech oriented article would have been preferable: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/05/crossbar_uncloaks_fa...

(venturebeat sounds like a investor magazine to me)
Too bad it's written in Java.
Your analogy is backward; early civilizations were far more dominated by religious beliefs than we are today.
Those aren't "books in a similar vein", those are the things that this book is (as far as I can tell) aimed to disrupt.

It's like this thing is selling an ATM, and the parent comment is asking "well, I live in Nicaragua, is there an ATM there?" and your answer is "there is an ATM in Nicaragua, it is called a bank."

The Dragon Book is the reason more people don't write compilers. It's old and thorough and formal and really feels like you were handed an "Installing Your Model HJ-3660PF Nuclear Hydraulic Reactor" manual, more than an approachable guide. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, if you're forced through it for a class--you'll learn more, and what you learn will have a more stable foundation--but it's a shame for people who are just curious, and would learn something from a friendlier presentation where the more formal approach would lose them.

Writing a compiler is pretty fundamental to being able to form an understanding of platform semantics as separate from language syntax. It's something everyone can do--but it's treated so formally that it feels like one of those weird advanced-level things only to be attempted after you've learned everything else, like creating your own magic spells in D&D. If it felt more like some "Create Potion"-level magic, maybe more people would have tried it, and figured out that there's really no magic going on at all. :)
I once followed this line of reasoning.

"So we expand the computer to simulate everything. Hell, if we were to correctly determine the state of the universe at the big bang and simulate every atom since then we could answer everything about the past, have a perfect image of the present (intelligence dream!), predict the future... We could simply write an algorithm to know where or if intelligent life exists outside of Earth..."

Then, after some consideration I realized that the smallest possible computer capable of simulating every particle in real time... was probably reality itself.