skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is there a grid at the bottom of the real universe or not?

Wait -- we don't get to specify what criteria can be used to detect a simulation, from within the simulation. This is a classic case where Gödel's incompleteness theorems rule out any such determination.

Very briefly, Gödel's incompleteness theorems say that, for any sufficiently complex system, there are true statements that cannot be proven from within that system, i.e. using the system's methods. This has obvious applicability to the question of a simulated universe and our ability to detect this fact from within the simulated universe.

In short, this entire conversation is pointless except to say that it's pointless. Because of what Gödel proved, we cannot ever determine that we're in a simulation, from a perspective inside the simulation.
Man builds robot suit; dances ensue
How To Stop Overthinking Your Startup's New Feature
Could facebook argue that creation of an account requires parental consent? Just curious.
I can't find the article the title is referring to. I can only find one post related to Facebook on the blog, and it's unrelated to the title. Care to clarify?
Still, how is insulting G+ also an insult to his users? or you as a user?
Well that begs for another question, I would say...
Hating is good. It allows you to think of improvements. But, hating without any solution is highly annoying.

I understand the fact that you prefer speed but just speed is not the only solution to effective web design. Typefaces play a very important role in the overall UX of any site.
I'm not sure if they do ask that. Would be a good work around for them I guess.
You appear determined to find a way to paint the recent history of Australian health reform as being somehow American. But it's not - it's its own thing.

The US system is a tangle of health systems provided by every level of government and charities. It's different state by state. There's a major veterans scheme. Some states have systems a bit like Medicare. The majority of people get their care through a employment tied insurance. It doesn't serve as an example of freedom, privatisation, variations in levels of care. It's just a big complicated mess.

I think it'd be more straightforward if you just stuck with 'less socialist' rather than trying overloading America as the standard for those qualities.

Not sure that Australia has evolved that way though. There was a recent reform to introduce means-testing to medicare. And the new hospital in Adelaide - 1.7 billion dollars, 120 extra beds.
Thanks very much for the pointer!
This doesn't mean that you are suited for 40 hours a week.

It just means you have no option but to overwork yourself.
I agree with the sentiment, but the point of the post wasn't that working 60 hour weeks is wrong - it was that boasting "woe is me" having voluntarily worked long hours isn't impressive.

As you say, results are what impress people.
I mostly agree, my only digression would be that iTunes should be split from the player component with plugins, and the store component.

Then plugins like you had even back in the winamp days like milkdrop can stay in the player, where they belong, and keep the store stuff separate. But even this approach is less than perfect so I don't know really what a great solution would be.
Look at it this way. Without Cloudflare providing free DDOS mitigation, the attacks would not be happening as frequently.

Put that way, I see them as responsible for the attacks. Maybe you'd feel differently if you were the target of some of these attacks.
"Google says Plus has 540 million monthly active users, but almost half do not visit the social network."

So it sounds like the "active" user count is much smaller -- where does the 540 million "monthly actives" come from?
I'm 54. I walk 8-10 miles every morning and lift weights 2 times a week for an hour. I use to have high blood pressure and the only (I tried them all) drug that worked for me was causing abnormal gum growth. So getting off the drug was my primary motivation. I'm 6'2" and now a lean 180 pounds.
Twitch Plays Pokemon
Yeah, I am not familiar enough with account creation to know, either.
That's now obsolete. With 13.10 gnome-session-fallback is a transitional package. The new package is gnome-session-flashback, so the command is now:

apt-get install gnome-session-flashback
Two of those features:

Logical Replication

Upsert

-Would be HUGE for postgres
I'm totally in on this. This is an amazing development for the LA startup community.

As an LA native (it made the radio news here on Wednesday), I'm very curious where in the Los Angeles area this is.

Santa Monica/Venice is the startup juggernaut of this area, but media startups tend to run farther afield and I don't know if Disney even has any offices there (maybe ESPN?). I would think, given the realities of the startup world, advisors and investors in particular, not to mention LA traffic, it would have to be on the Westside, right?

Also extremely curious how the IP access works out. Time from, say, a Disney Consumer Products artist to create new art is a big deal (and not cheap). And could DA companies put Disney characters in the iPhone app they're going to sell or is this just to make an effective demo?
I think this may be the way for attackers to force price of BTC to fall down, then buy tons of them to sell when the price goes up again.
In that frame of mind, ok, not it's backwards.

But I don't think the test provides grounds for warranting this hypothesis; it does not seem to follow from the test you could deduce the hypothesis.

I must admit I feel there is an alternate explanation for results/test.
Thousands play one game of Pokemon simutaneously
You could defeat regex by sending a different base64 string each time by including a call to void(server side random number).
Oh man, I love this idea. Disney IP access for a startup could be huge.
I would say it probably doesn't take a lot of computational mass to simulate a person. We're each doing it right now with a glob of meat the size of a grapefruit, and that's just what evolution was able to come up with.

So simulating a universe where minds are a low-level primitive, and everything else is simulated lazily and using lots of shortcuts is reasonably plausible.

But that's not the kind of world we find ourselves in. Our minds appear to be constructed of the same stuff as the rest of the world. If we're to accept the simulation argument, then our definition of "simulated reality" must imply a physics implementation that is high enough fidelity to support minds as high level structures - you have to actually be able to build compact working brains in the simulation.

Alternatively, we'd have to suppose that a brain is actually just a very convincing facade, usually sitting inert until someone observes it, at which point it reflects the inner workings of the person's mind at whatever level of detail is necessary to convince the observer that it is the mechanism behind the mind.

Both of these seem far less plausible.
> So I train, and that means I'm an 80 hours a week guy.

Doesn't follow. I consider myself to be on a similar path, perhaps with a touch less passion than yourself. I wish for my future work to be meaningful and beneficial for many, but I don't necessarily ache to "make a meaningful impact on the world." That can be done almost trivially by being kind and helpful to those around you. It doesn't have to be some epoch creating achievement.

I study. I read similar books to you. My end goal is to be really good at what I do, but I don't need to spend 80 hours a week doing it. Are you going to get there faster? I'm not so sure.

One thing that really stuck out to me about your comment:

> So I've aligned my life such that those interactions still help me reach my upper bound. My friends are smarter than I am and many are in technical fields so getting a beer with them involves talking about a hard problem we solved.

Do you never take a break? I go out with great friends that are entirely non-technical, and often never discuss a technical matter all weekend. I don't even think about how "smart" they are. I don't expect my friends to be smarter than I am. I hang out with smart people on occasion, but it's not a requirement.

[Edit: Just to be clear, what I am trying to get across in the above paragraph is my surprise that your choices targeting balance, your social interaction and hobbies, are calculated to derived benefit. Take it when you can, but what you're attempting sounds overbearing. Enjoy some downtime. Don't even think whether it is beneficial or not. What are you missing out on because it's seemingly not beneficial? I would argue: a lot.]

I spend hours reading great fiction with no technical information to be gained. My hobbies are completely divorced from what I want to get great at, and I strive to become good, not great, at them. Yet, I never feel like my true passion suffers.
You're missing the point. What makes an iPhone more real than an emulator? Is it that we consider an iPhone to be real and an emulator to be a simulator, is it that one came first? An emulator is still real. One could emulate an emulator - which of those then is real? Is the "real" iPhone not a simulator? It's all a matter if semantics.

Even if we live in a universe created by an intelligence, we are not in a simulator - we are in a universe created by an intelligence. If we are in a simulator, what are we simulating? The real universe which is like this one?
Taking a plane or get a new card? Why not just use a proxy? It's pretty common to limit fraud by going off people's IP address until you've got an established relationship with them. Using a credit card from another country is a huge fraud flag.

My Office365 account is listed as being in "Colombia" (CO) and insists on a Colombian address if I want to update my billing info -- despite my current billing address being Colorado (CO) and me never having been to Colombia. Tech support says there no way to change this, that my account will permanently be set as Colombia, despite it being obvious that the current billing address is Colorado (and Wells Fargo doesn't even have banks in Colombia, AFAIK).

Seems like companies just really suck when it comes to multi-country handling. Xbox lets me buy games, proceeds to download them completely, then does a geo-IP check and says "Corrupted". Xbox support insisted my hardware was bad (despite many other games downloading just fine), until I mentioned I wasn't in the US. Only at that point did they figure out there was a geo-IP check going on after the download that leads to the "Corrupted" error. They were actually going to completely replace my Xbox unit, determining the motherboard or something was selectively corrupting data for specific games. The remedy: "Oh move back to the US". No refunds or anything. (Real remedy: PPTP.)

Google takes it a step further, and disables updates for apps if they aren't available in whatever it determines to be your current region. I installed the Wells Fargo app, then went travelling. During that time, WF app releases a critical security update and ceases functioning until updated. Android points out "update available". But if I tap it to update, it says that app is not found.

Google Play also takes your physical location to customize part of the UI[1] language, inconsistently.

Netflix does the same[2]. They do even worse though, disallowing the audio language for subtitles, depending on region. In the US and watching with someone that's not fluent English? Too bad, only English subtitles. In Central America and want English subtitles? Nope, just Spanish or Portuguese (?! Portuguese isn't even in the top 5 languages spoken around here).

1: http://imgur.com/F1QlQ9U
2: http://imgur.com/yy7emGI
Seems like backward reasoning. It's fair to say "Hey, if the universe is a resource constrained simulation, that would explain why wave-particle duality!", but I don't see any logical requirement that "Because wave-particle duality, it must be a resource constrained simulation (if it's a simulation)".
On mobile, it's the worst! I have to stare at a completely blank screen for several seconds while the fonts download.
Let's not kid ourselves. Web fonts are 80% about branding and 20% about usability - on a good day.
The 'main thrust' of Paleo is simply eating whole foods in a state of freshness and from quality sources. (that being arguably more common before industrialization and the marketing of 'prepared' foods that come pre-seasoned and individually wrapped, etc.)

As an aside, pre-seasoned processed food can give us a false sense of variety because even though most packaged foods have corn syrup or wheat or corn or one of those popular foods, by adding different spices or making different 'foods' out of it such as pizzas or other recipe transformations, it makes the same basic ingredients taste and seem different. But if you focus on eating whole foods with somewhat minimal processing or transformation into recipes, you can readily realize how much true variety you're obtaining.
> He defined Communsim as any positive interaction between people, and implicitly any negative interaction as capitlist subversion.

No, he didn't.

> Communism is a socio-political theory.

No, it isn't. It's an economic system where the means of production is commonly owned. This has socio-political consequences, and socio-political requirements, but is not itself a socio-political system. Democracy is a socio-political system. Capitalism is not. Monarchy is a socio-political system. Communism is not. Meritocracy is a socio-political system. Distributism is not.

> As a counter-example, every example he gave, is perfectly allowable in a Capitalist society.

He never said otherwise. That was his entire point.

> Except that OSS exists comfortably in a Capitalist society, because Capitalism has no problem with people freely donating their time and skills towards any type of endeavour they choose.

Or you could acknowledge his actual point, which is that communism and capitalism are able to, and do, coexist.
I've been using this pattern for years and never once ran into a problem. Does anyone here have any compelling reason not to?
Totally true. I'd add though that there definitely is a level of initial respect you get as a YC company. It doesn't help close the deal, but it will generally keep you out of associate land.
This is what it comes down to. If you follow uninteresting people, you'll have an uninteresting front page. If you follow no people, you'll have an empty front page. If you put a tiny bit of effort in, you'll have a decent front page.
That's probably an oversimplification. The Saudi government's gobsmacking flagrant corruption was a powerful motivator for bin Laden, and religion is a vector for opposition to the Saudi state. And there's no question that the US helps keep the Saudi government in power.

The original stated objection of AlQ was indeed to remove US presence from Muslim holy sites, but Lawrence Wright's book on what happened (for example) makes it pretty clear that the religious stuff was more emblematic of the real problem than it was the real problem itself.
Ultracoin Song Contest
- Make a list of successful companies using lang X. Bonus if competitors. They're a success because of lang X.

- Will using lang X over Y reduce total lines of code? That's less work, less time, less money.

- Are # jobs for lang X rising? Show some pretty graphs. We can't fall behind the market.

All of this is bullshit to an engineer, but precisely how you need to sell it.
You're overlooking something basic and uncontroversial that may prevent such an analysis from being deterministic. Gödel's incompleteness theorems say that, for a sufficiently complex system, there are true statements that cannot be proven from within that system, using the system's methods. This means that, from a perspective within the universe, we may be constrained by the incompleteness theorems from making any kind of conclusive determination as to its true nature.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems have a wide reach. They prevent a solution to the Turing Halting problem, and they placed a firm limit on projects such as Russell and Whitehead's tendentiously named "Principia Marthematica" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica), a very ambitious project that was fatally undermined by Gödel's work.

The incompleteness theorems need to be considered in the present question -- we're inside the "system" we're trying to analyze, consequently there are questions we can't meaningfully resolve. I think the question about the universe being a simulation meets this classic criterion for indeterminacy.
When was the last time you used Mercurial? Git being 10 times faster seems dated. Especially if you're using Facebook's fabulous Mercurial extensions, which actually make Mercurial faster than Git.

https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...
I think you've nailed it. I'd be really shocked to find someone working 9am-9pm straight, no lunch or dinner break 5 days a week. I used to do shift work (IT) 7am-7pm 3 days a week, which, to me, was burn out level. I used to feel over worked even though every weekend was a 4 day weekend. Can't imagine adding 2 more days.
My young daughters (5 and 7) have figured out the Windows 8 swipe commands by themselves, without the tutorial. They're surprisingly fast and adept at it. Even tiling the windows (to share files, or to run Skype on one side and desktop Chrome on the other) apparently comes "naturally" to them.
Why use a digital stadiometer?
What's Happening in Ukraine
Running is a "low-impact exercise" if done right.
Planned Departure Now Allows Users to Will Their Digital Assets to Charities
Actually, it is almost universally admired when a person pushes him or herself. One way to do that happens to be to work harder than other people. Now, it can get to the point where you become so inefficient that it's stupid. No, we don't typically admire stupidity. But let's not kid ourselves -- hard work is respectable.

As an extreme example, I'd wager that most people instinctively admire those who can make it all the way through Navy SEAL bootcamp, and one of the reasons is that participants are literally working NONSTOP during that period, at a level of physical exertion that most people nowadays could not sustain for a few hours, let alone days on end.
30 seconds followed by nothing at all is not an uncommon experience. For a freakin' blog entry. (As often as not I have to read using View->Source.) If you figure load times rivalling, say, launching Photoshop and frequent failed loads is reasonable for a text page, then maybe the web isn't where you want to be after all.
This article reaks of helicopter parenting, with all the usual over-blown statements that make talking about targeted advertising so hard to explain:

> Facebook can’t buy our children, and it can’t sell them either.

Yes, slavery, because that’s exactly what’s at stake…

> But 10-year-olds still need supervision.

Not sure I need to point out that they have nothing to do on Facebook in the first place, or that humanising young corporation in a way to disparage the ability of their (very mature) executives to make decisions is lame. You are not Mark Zuckerberg’s, or Sheryl Sandberg’s mother — stop thinking that because you are someone’s mother, you are always right on all matters; otherwise, I'll have to point you to how the authors’ of Freakonomics have truckloads (litterally) of hatemail proving that being a parent… doesn’t exactly make you reasonable in general.

I'll pass the “my child is so smart” because… well, with a mother like you, I can only hope that she is, and focus on a simple thing: someone as opinionated as a hippie teenager can be probably never ‘Liked’ big corporate brand on Facebook, yet, they are apparently listed as such.

That is a purely technical problem, that has nothing to do with parental consent and kids’ agency, about how much control Facebook users have over their listed ‘Likes’. I wouldn’t sue Facebook, because, well, they have good lawyers and your narrow-minded hysterionics and over-helicoptering seems to have ruined the patience of every judge available. I’d go with the announcers, telling them that they are advertising to the wrong crowds because of technical glitches. But that's just me.
Sports are fun, man.

No, winning is fun.
Maybe the law isn't the most important thing here. I think that Facebook has to act like a grown up and think in an ethical way about this. It's just immoral to use children their images in adds. And I don't think that this fits Zuckerbergs original intentions when he started Facebook.
Bill Gates Bullish on Deep Learning (and so is Placemeter) | Placemeter
Yes, I'm on board. The point is that as far as we understand currently there's no "good reason" for spacetime to be discretized, save for it being run in someone else's computer.

That by no means indicates that it is in a computer. Indeed, as far as we know, spacetime is not a grid! So if the hypothesis is: computer we are alleged to live in is any way like computers we ourselves build (eg. finite memory, finite processing speed, discrete, etc.), this paper is a step towards falsifying that hypothesis, not confirming it!
How does TM affect the price?
Today is Niklaus Wirth's 80th Birthday
It is fallacious to say 'just because our ancestors lived that way, it is good'.

Well, sure, if you're claiming it's some sort of lemma in a proof. Stuff our ancestors used to do is likely to be neutral or good for you, due to the way evolution works. The key is likely. I'd agree with you that it's a fallacy to hold "ancestors used to do it" as some kind of oracle.

You can appeal to 'our ancestors' lifestyle' as reliably as you can appeal to say, the benefits of 'biblical diet'. Both are identically fallacious.

There should be a name for the meta-fallacy of treating what should be a hazy rule of thumb as a mathematical identity.
Mozilla localForage
"the global supply chain that exploits workers" can we please stop perpetuating that ridiculous myth, in the countries in which sweat shops exist, they are generally far better options for laborers than the alternatives.
Not remotely true. For example, even if you did then the "Share what's new" and "You may know" panels cover around 40% of the actual content area available once you've already got rid of the giant bar at the top and empty spaces at the sides. This is on top of their OCD defying love of spamming notifications. And if you have the misfortune to use it to access some of their developer channels, well the noise level in them is mind boggling.

Compare and contrast with FB, which is almost information overload, but it's got the immediate hooks of who's online, what the latest changes are and a few items from the feed all there on the page at the beginning. It also loads a lot faster, while G+ is noticeably slow even on decent machines.
I agree. 80hours ~ 12 hours 7 days a week w/ 30 min break for lunch. I work all day all the time, but it often equates to 8 hours a day, not 12. Even if you work 7-8s that is less than 60 hours.
Passwords leaked on live TV as UK responds to flood emergency
Showing nothing for 3 seconds beats just using the fallback and switching when the download finishes?

It's great you collected data, but I think the working hypothesis is flawed.
it is funny, all those sites that talk about user centric design, and the user experience, then go on to release a dogshit site that pulls in gigabytes of crap from the four corners, for what is basically a blog. Or a cms.

The web tards would be the first up against my wall.
Mobile support is on the way ;)
Maybe he is from Scotland, how would you know?
>30 seconds followed by nothing at all is not an uncommon experience

really? because i spend a lot of time on the web and i've never seen that. You might want to check for problems at your end.
I'm curious: where does this 10x speed increase come from? are you implying that git is inherently faster than mercurial? I've not actually used mercurial myself so I wouldn't know...