skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are right, and I don't disagree, and I've even had a couple of clients tell me that I should be charging more -- the usual number they offer is twice my usual rate ($35/hr for students; $39/hr for home/home office; $45/hr for businesses).

However, I started doing this in part because I was extremely frustrated with the various expensive I.T. support companies and draconian vendor support contracts, and because there's a huge under-served market of people who just need help with stuff they don't understand, and can't afford to pay Geek Squad's silly rates.

I wanted to be part of the solution, instead of adding to the problem.

For the most part, we have a pretty good relationship with all of our clients. There are occasional frustrations, but most of that is due to our own growing pains. We just "fired" a client recently after a large project went sideways and we ended up getting a bit soaked on it; we won't hesitate to do that in most cases, and I think it helps keep our business relationships healthier.
Last Days of Big American Physics: One More Triumph, or Just Another Heartbreak?
Construction implies design.

Evolved entities (read: complex entities) are not designed.
This is exactly why I run Rockbox on my iPod. I can now use simple folder-organization to sort my music and have it show up exactly the same way on my iPod! I hated having one organizational structure on the disk and an entirely different one when I opened iTunes. Who knows if the ID3 tags in all my various mp3s are correct, standardized, or contain the information I would need to find them? In iTunes, I'd often have to go back to my folders to find a file, figure out how that file was tagged, then go back to iTunes and find it again!

When I find mp3s online or get them from friends, I never bother to edit their ID3 tags, but I often sort them using a simple tree-structure that's built into almost every device called a file system. I'm used to storing documents, photos, and source code this way. Why should I learn a new way just for one app? If my files' ID3 tags were entered correctly or can be downloaded automatically, I'm happy of course, but when I make my own mp3's or find ones with empty tags I hardly ever bother to fix them. What's the use?
In the case of cryonically freezing someone, the professional believes that they are giving the person a chance to be revived, not killing them.

Even if the point is valid in the broader arena, in the case of cryonics it doesn't hold.
The symlink is only checked when malloc is first called.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I also really enjoyed your early postings on Lisp and functional programming; at the time, they helped me stay the course towards learning Lisp.
I'm not sure I agree. For several reasons:

a) The phenomena of qualia remains unexplained. This has no bearing on making something that can mimic consciousness, but does become significant if one wants the real thing.
The last argument on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766462

b) QM may be intrinsically linked to consciousness. (see Roger Penrose, _The Emperor's New Mind_) Of course, this a mute point given the QM computing seems to be around the corner.
You may perhaps be confusing "definition" with "understanding".

My dictionary defines consciousness thus:

consciousness |ˈkän ch əsnəs|
noun
the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings : she failed to regain consciousness and died two days later.
• the awareness or perception of something by a person : her acute consciousness of Mike's presence.
• the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world : consciousness emerges from the operations of the brain.

====

We may not know HOW consciousness comes about, but we do have a definition of what consciousness is.
I am most of the time disappointed by x86s, but i5/i7 looks more promising: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/09/intel-launches-...
Intel launches all-new PC architecture with Core i5/i7 CPUs
I didn't know there was such a thing. Maybe I'll bring my Nano out of retirement. I've owned more mp3 players than I can count, and the only iPod I'v ever liked was the Nano but I gave up on it because iTunes was just so unusable.
From what perspective?
VLC?

I've never liked iTunes.
We don't know for sure that machines are not currently capable of experiencing qualia. We don't know that machines cannot ever be capable of experiencing qualia. We don't even know if animals experience qualia, and if so, which ones. I don't even know for sure if you are experiencing qualia.
Seems a bit like foursquare but without close ties to existing locations or the game aspects... and of course you charge users to create the very content which makes it valuable to them.

I think there needs to be more incentive for users than cutting down on spam and geolocation to really make it worth the price of participation.

With that said, best of luck.
BEAUTY AT ITS BEST
Nope - it will copy them to an iTunes music folder and play them from there. Then it will continue playing in alphabetical order from that song on.
That's far less convenient than a searchable bank of music that plays consecutively.
Social Systems: Can we Do More Than Just Poke Friends?
Searle is an atheistic (I think - at least he's nonreligious) philosopher who agrees with you. He argued against "functionalism" - which is pretty much the stance that most here are taking - that consciousness is a complex adaptive process, nothing "magical".

However, he's just playing with your intuition, the same way you are, and his logic (though not his certainty, either, from the bit I've read) is flawed. You should read up on his "Chinese room" thought experiment yo learn why.
i had the same problem.

checking the READMEs of the entrants, it seems to be a GitHub Project Recommendation contest. for example, check out
http://github.com/jeremybarnes/github_contest/tree/master
The iTouch is supposed to have all the features of the nano plus more

Says who?
Does Songbird still stop playing music when you X out of it? Because that was disgraceful.
""It actually kicked around and started to spin, and without friction, it could spin faster and faster, and we think that made it even more disoriented," said researcher Yuanming Liu, a physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. They decided to mildly sedate the next mouse they levitated, which seemed content with floating. "

That mouse got high in more ways than one.
Ok, but how is a constructed object and a ... (randomly? naturally? what ever word you want to use) evolved object quantitatively different?

One could follow all the steps involved in getting a human from his evolutionary ancestor to his current state by using a pair of magic tweezers to make each mutation in the genome happen at the right time and in the right way. Could you tell the difference based on the result?
Apple just put up their usual web stream at http://apple.com/quicktime/qtv/specialevent0909/ ... it's a bit faster than the podcast download, currently.
this is awesome. i recently tried to use GitHub for finding fun hacks, but i just couldn't find stuff very well. i'd like to find a community of hackers and startupy folks actually working on open source code, and i think this will help. more community connections would help, too.
It would be just as much of an academic service for you to help find a out that AI can't work is it would be if you found out it can. The problem is inherently interesting and worthwhile pursuing, regardless. Phlogiston theory brought on Oxygen and the rest of chemistry after a while.
Fitness fanatic or couch potato? Blame your DNA
What I Learned from the Wordpress Worm
About Infinia Stirling Engine Technology (Solar Power)
"Hyperbole may sell, but we don’t want to sell it."

Bravo. This is a great response, and as tptacek noted a great case study in security relations.

Of course, what ultimately matters is 37signals's behavior going forward. But this is certainly a step in the right direction.
The Why of Y
Google Micropayments Coming: Can It Save Newspapers?
You are right. They will have to reveal the source code to a couple of experts that are under confidentiality agreement. Oh and the experts will only be allowed to look at the code in a closed room with no Internet connections. No big deal.
There are some good points in this comment. Still, have you watched over the shoulder of a non-techie trying to use a recent version of iTunes? Accomplishing many goals, like configuring what content ends up on your iPod, is remarkably confusing for several people I've observed (and then helped).

I'd just suggest that the number of installs of iTunes doesn't necessarily correlate to user satisfaction. If you own an iPod or iPhone, you have essentially no choice but to use iTunes, particularly if you're not technically inclined enough to investigate alternatives. Apple has a captive audience for iTunes.
Developers: It’s not about being exact. It’s about being concise.
The Innovators Dilemma Renaissance Style
There are no images that mimic the color response of the human eye, though you could approximate such an image by combining many images in filters covering the visible colors.

But they would still not be "unaltered". Astronomical objects have an extremely large dynamic range in terms of brightness. If you've ever looked at a galaxy through a telescope, you'll see what I mean. You just see a blob that's the bright central bulge. The brightness distribution in a galaxy falls off exponentially with radius. If you amplify the signal to see the faint outer parts, the central part would hurt your eyes (or, practically speaking, saturate).

We made a movie of a simulated galaxy merger for a competition last year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agqLEbOFT2A In this rendering, the colors are approximately realistic, but the brightness is not. For my own education, I made an alternative rendering with just a fixed linear stretch that should more realistically (barring monitor gamma) mimic what the eye would see. In that movie (I've been meaning to upload it), you basically only see the centers of the two galaxies, nothing else.

So the bottom line is, to see any detail you must "manipulate" these images. It's reminiscent of High-Dynamic Range photography [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging], where you compress the range of brightnesses to be able to convey a scene in one image.
says apple's usual product lineup aesthetic.

one of the problems apple had about the time jobs came back was a confusing product line. nobody had the discipline to say "no," so there were a bunch of nearly identical competing products. novices had trouble picking one.

this current situation isn't nearly as bad as that one was, but it's definitely headed in that direction.
I'd certainly pay for the privilege! Go DannoHung, startup awaiting :)
what's refreshing is that each OpenBSD release has its own theme, song and artworks

it seems they really are having fun !!!
I guess I was counting since the first hole in 2002. Have there been any in common linux distros since then? OpenBSD got caught once.

But even so: Ubuntu has had zero remote holes in the default install in 5 years. I'm getting hung up on a divide by zero bug somewhere, but I think that works out better if you want to be pedantic about this stuff, no? :)

Seriously: it's a dumb marketing slogan, and it means next to nothing. In point of fact over the last 6-7 years OpenBSD doesn't have a particularly distinguished security record according to their own metric. It's better than Microsoft.
I like what Banshee is heading, pretty cool!, no mac love yet though (yes there is a experimental version, I don't care I use Ubuntu anyways).

In other words you don't need another iTunes you need iTunes mini-mode.
My advice, if you are considering a PhD, is to pick your school based on your potential research advisor more than the department or the school in general. Contact him or her before you apply and tell them your plans of study and research interests and then go from there.
its time for my current selected item to scroll into view when I re-sort by a different column. or maybe I'm just being unreasonable, asking for too much?
There have been lots of security bugs. But no "remote holes in the default install", which is OpenBSD's marketing slogan. That's the point that I was making. It's a dumb metric.
Yes, you can easily tell the difference between entities that have evolved by natural selection, and constructed entities.

(BTW, mutation is random, but evolution is not a random process).

Two example quantitative differences (although, I'm not sure why the specific exclusion of qualitative differences):

1) The human eye, for example, has flaws (that are solved in other similarly evolved eyes) that an engineer laughs at - if you were building a human eye, you wouldn't make the same "mistakes". The deviation from the "better" version is measurable.

2) Evolved entities exist because of procreation. And their only reason for existence is to assist genetic material to replicate. Constructed objects reproduce exactly 0 times and have 0 genetic (or other replicator material).
The 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge
My MacBook Air went belly up two days ago. For that kind of money, I'd expect better than 14 months of life and I've treated it like a museum piece. Our little $200 lenovo netbook is durable, we caught my son jumping on it on the bed yesterday. We scolded him but he did no damage to the laptop. My 6 year old ThinkPad churns away and has been used and abused.

I am seriously considering putting together a hackintosh before shelling out more to get my Air fixed.
The YC companies do outstanding elevator pitches in 5 or 6 minutes. The best I have seen anywhere. Pitches to VCs are typically 30 minutes plus time for questions...but their minds are usually made up after about 5 minutes.

In New Hampshire they have an interesting twist on the elevator pitch. They call it Peak Pitch. It is done in the winter at a ski area. The organizer pairs startups with investors and they get to pitch on the ski lift to the top of the mountain. Pretty cool.
Aren't you also (perhaps only almost) defining complex systems as those that have consciousness? I.e. your argument for the one is dependent on the other and vice versa?
I think it is interesting that slide 15 of the presentation suggests buying a domain with equity as a possible option. The comments at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813774 (rightly, I think) suggest that this is a bad idea.
I agree that iTunes needs reworking, but I don't believe a Lite version is the answer.

I'd rather see Apple rethink the entire iTunes interface and try to rebuild it while making it simpler - think iMovie '09 or the iPhone. Asking for a Lite version sounds similar to Henry Ford's customers wanting a faster horse - it doesn't fix the underlying problems.
You can sync your iPod, unless it is iPod touch or an iPhone, using Winamp (http://blog.winamp.com/2009/03/11/how-to-manage-music-in-ipo...)
Apple has been forcefeeding music lovers for years, but have never been able to give any true nourishment to the unsigned independent musician. Its like eating candy, fried foods, bacon, and soda for the rest of your life. Sounds fun on the surface, and might be a good idea and exciting for a while But if you keep it up, you will die. Or at least end up with a heart attack or other serious illness. Try some vegetables, fish, and water for a change. Or at least another, more nourishing music service. By offering what of what musicians and music lovers want, you actually offer them more "meat" in your service. Makes for more satisfied consumers, and greater brand loyalty.
Ah, but, see, after the initial effort, at least on the mini9, it does Just Work. The initial effort is also pretty modest, beyond the fact that it doesn't come pre-installed.

Even "Software Update" works.

It's also only $350 ($300 for the smaller SSD which would require greater install effort by removing enough to have enough free space).

For other hardware, however, I agree: it's not worth the bother.
A comment in the techcrunch post tipped me off to http://ecouteapp.com/ Liking it so far.
Uhh, close it? You'll never see it again.
I have a mac but don't use ITunes because the playlist management is so poor. I use the mac port of Amarok instead. It's playlist management is way better for my needs.

I don't use the ITunes store, don't have an IPhone, and want to play my music in formats that ITunes doesn't support. So for me when it comes to playing Music the Mac most emphatically doesnt do what I want out of the box. Granted I'm not the average user but still there's nothing wrong with wanting a music player that is just a music player.

For people like me ITunes is just wasted Disk space since it has so few features I want and doesn't support many of the ones I do like.
I'll bite. There is nothing in the design of relational databases that specifies that a record must be fixed length. Most good dbs don't do this at all, simply using something akin to:

Each row in your db has:

row size: row data

for each column:

cell size, cell data

In multi-value databases, which the cassandra supercolumn seems to be mimicing somewhat, your cell data can contain more cells again, and can support huge hierarchies. I like the design of these systems that keeps the relational model, but stores all related data in two places, which dramatically increases speed as you are reading related data off the same disk block. Typically this means huge performance gains as you read in large blocks (kb) off disk as it is.

In my opinion, having written a few multi dimensional indexing systems and db's from scratch (including a multi value db), there is little preventing a relational database becoming the best of both worlds. What do you think about the relational model makes it so "impossible" to scale?

I tend to think it's simply legacy code. Has anyone created a relational database with the goal of horizontal scalability from the outset?
I think you're right. Apple is daisy-chaining each one of its products to get more and more users. The iPod/iPhone requires iTunes, which requires Quicktime and Webkit, and which (on one occasion) was bundled with Safari.

Because Apple has a captive audience, their usual aesthetic of hiding everything complex and letter the power user discover things has given over to the profit motive. Apple has an incentive to showcase features like the Genius Sidebar right off the bat, because Genius links into the iTunes Music Store.

I read an interesting article on Steve Jobs and the original design of the iDVD application: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/28/idvd_hung_out_...

The key bit for me was in this quote:

Evangelist and a group of Astarte developers described pitching the simplified app concept to Steve Jobs. "Jobs never glanced at their presentation," the article noted. "Instead, he walked up to a whiteboard and drew a square. This is the program, he said. Users will drag their movies here to create DVD menus. Then they'll click 'burn.' That's it. 'I don't want to hear anything about drawers or pop-out' windows, he said."

Seems like Steve needs to take his own hypercritical hatchet to iTunes. (http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2009/05/hypercritical.a...). It would be just in time for iTunes X (pron. iTunes ten).
Isn't the whole premise of the iTunes approach that you shouldn't have to bother with folder structures? I mean, really, what's the advantage of doing that?

Isn't it better that you can literally just type in a keyword and the system shows you the matching music?
Uhm, right after installing iTunes 9, I got a free 20-pack indy music collection. That's kinda nice.
One2crowd | Magento, Silvertripe and PHP developers
Agreed. Even if not ran at the same time, it still seems dangerous to split by modulo. Why? Suppose some test is set up with the end result that group A visits the site 5% less in the future, and B is unchanged. After this result is discovered, the next test is run, which is to test whether the background should be white (A) or puke green (B).

Now even if in actuality people don't care one way or the other about the color, it may well be discovered that group A does worse, because there are still people among this group that were exposed to the previous test and are now coming back less (or have stopped coming at all).
> And now I have a dedicated device (iPhone) to play music. I only use iTunes to sync.

Same here, but I consider that a failing of iTunes, because I'd prefer to play music on my iPhone rather than deal with iTunes shitty interface.
i.e. iTunes.
Searle is an atheistic (I think - at least he's nonreligious) philosopher who agrees with you. He argued against "functionalism" - which is pretty much the stance that most here are taking - that consciousness is a complex adaptive process, nothing "magical".

Now that someone brought up the S-word, I can't help but paste in one of my favorite Searle quotes (http://sss.stanford.edu/others/johnsearle/), which to me very clearly indicates how much of a mental and logical struggle it is (and how much flubbery is required!) to attempt to justify his position:

'Could a machine think?' My own view is that only a machine could think, and indeed only very special kinds of machines, namely brains and machines that had the same causal powers as brains. And that is the main reason strong AI has had little to tell us about thinking, since it has nothing to tell us about machines. By its own definition, it is about programs, and programs are not machines. Whatever else intentionality is, it is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation, photosynthesis, or any other biological phenomena. No one would suppose that we could produce milk and sugar by running a computer simulation of the formal sequences in lactation and photosynthesis, but where the mind is concerned many people are willing to believe in such a miracle because of a deep and abiding dualism: the mind they suppose is a matter of formal processes and is independent of quite specific material causes in the way that milk and sugar are not.

Even if the guy's a freaking idiot (which he is), you've gotta appreciate the way he tries to turn the "dualist" label against the people that are most opposed to dualism, while that's almost exactly what he's arguing for. He would have made a great politician; unfortunately, he's made his career arguing about something that he doesn't really understand, which is a damn shame, I hate to see so much mental energy spent fighting a lost battle...
I tried it recently and [it looks like you need an add on.] But I didn't like that it didn't recognize the group by artist flag iTunes uses. And I couldn't set up album-by-artist. And it seemed to use more ram. But, it looks a lot nicer to me.

[edit]
Slightly off topic, but I'd like to know how Apple managed to remove physical media whilst keeping the same pricing.

I'm no economist, but shouldnt the massive iTunes media surplus supply reduce the prices significantly?
There's no way to prove we're unique in the universe. At most you could say the known universe, but even then you're going to have a hard time convincing people of that.
I'm not sure if I have been downmoded because I have been misunderstood, so I will try again.

I think that the policy of enforcing Google's nofollow guideline by removing sites from their index is not directly about keeping their index free of spammers. It is about enforcing a standard for disclosure specifically designed for their purposes. It's not about disclosure to users, it is about disclosure to search engines.

I don't want anyone purposely deceiving the search engines. I have a problem with the way Google is enforcing this. I think this hints at the issues with having such a powerful Google.
If you're digging into Hofstadter (and if you aren't, you should be, whether or not you agree with him, almost every word he's ever written is worth reading, including the seemingly irrelevant stuff about translations), I Am A Strange Loop (http://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/...) is a good read, as well.