skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cool! Which lake do you sail on? All over? Do you have a website?
1) sorry, was habit/laziness. I fixed.

2) To each his own, but I think the community support for linux vastly outshines windows support because you're probably talking directly to some sort of developer on *nix forums. Also, I prefer linux from an ideological standpoint. If the machine on my desk is doing something, I want to know exactly why it's doing it. Attempts to do that in windows violate your EULA.
As I imagine many readers are in Silicon Valley, I'd point out that the San Francisco Bay is one of the best places to sail on earth. Beautiful scenery, 20+ knots of breeze every summer day (scary at first, awesome once you get used to it...), and endless possibilities from tiny dinghies to 50+ foot racing sleds. And racing sailboats is a tremendously fun, inexpensive (unless you own a boat), social, and high-adrenaline activity.

Learn the basics at one of the many Bay Area sailing clubs or schools and go out and try it. There's always demand for crew, and the most important qualities of a new crew member are being ready to take direction, in reasonable shape, and out to have fun. Expertise is a double-edged sword for new crew members, don't think you need it to get started -- you don't.

I've been racing on the SF Bay since 2000 and am totally addicted (raced today, as it happens). Forget what you think about sailing -- it's for old rich people; it's boring; I need to have grown up sailing or be some kind of expert -- and go out and try it.
I've heard an MIT grad say the same thing.
Learning to Love Insider Trading
I'm interested in both. Though I couldn't tell you the tenets of transhumanism, the little I've read leads me to believe I would agree with it. AI, on the other hand, is something I'm very interested in. As a Singularitarian, I believe AI research is the only thing we should be working on. The faster we get AI done, the faster we solve many other problems.

Your questions aren't crazy these days. I've come to realize that nothing at all is impossible. I think people don't dream big enough anymore. Crazy dreams used to be "I want to be a rockstar" or something like that. I want to live forever and travel reality, like the guy in Star Trek: TNG, s1e07
Might have to take you up on that! I sailed 420s a bit back in California, but I haven't made it happen yet here in Minneapolis. Seeing the numerous sailboats on Calhoun and Minnetonka always brings a smile to my face.

Which co-op are you a part of? Ever done any ice sailing? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_yachting )
If Linux does what you need it to do, then that's all well and good, but saying "I'm convinced that people only buy Microsoft products because they are unaware of FOSS." is just silly. There are plenty of good reasons to use Windows just like there are plenty of good reasons to use Linux. Use the right tool for the job, and don't make it a religious issue.
If anyone is in XinJiang and need Internet access, here's a way

Setup your laptop's modem and get connected to telephone wire, dial 16300 with username 16300 and password 16300.

16300 works in all parts of China.

Yes, the government forgot Internet over PSTN.
Your retinas are sensitive to light because light causes certain molecules (rhodopsin, I think) to change form and release energy. This chemical energy builds up in your photoreceptive cells and is then released as a neural signal. In other words, you would just see the light dimly, same as if the strobe were going really fast. What's interesting is if it's going a little slower than the fastest your eye can make out - the light seems to turn on and off slowly as the strobe and your eye go in and out of phase.
Why is there only one monolithic video clip which can't be scrubbed to skip ahead or go backwards? http://www.justin.tv/clip/2493eb6f993f6e24

And why is it only 2 hours long?

Is there any place to watch the entirety of the day's talks?
You learn to take the high road in this sort of thing as the easy way cruftifies your code.
This book seems to be more of an introduction that promising anyone there going to fully learn a language a week.

I think the week in the title implies more about the introduction size.
I walked around my high school in the 70s with a flexagon in my pencil case that I cut out of paper and put together.
Posting that link in reply to this submission may indicate a possible misunderstanding about the point of this book.
"So are the advances more software or hardware related?"

People don't understand that the difference between the two is irrelevant. Software is a replacement for having to create a computer chip every time you write a program. Software is virtual circuitry.

But about AGI. Dr. Itamar is correct in saying that we don't need anything else to create AI. We have BlueBrain (the supercomputer brain sim in the netherlands, i think). This, to me, is AIG. All we need to do from this point is make it so we can simulate a brain on a small enough chip, which is inevitable. Then stick that chip into an android body and let it do its thing.

We can't create a AGI program that is smart from the get-go. We know neural nets can learn. We just have to find the right way to teach them. If you want human-like intelligence, you have to convince the ANN that it actually is human. This means giving it all the inputs that humans enjoy - sight, sound, touch, etc. It is then that we will have robots with the capabilities of being smarter than we are. But once that happens, in the words of Sam L, "Hold onto your butts"
The cheapest Dell with Windows 7 is 300 dollars. Everything other than Windows 7 is a ripoff.
Wow. Talk about dumbing down to the point of incoherence "The White House has relaunched its Web site with programming code written by the public. The White House says it's overhauled the technical aspects of the site and now there's computer code written in public view, available for public use and able for the public to edit."
Not really. Remember there are lots of people out there who are completely ignorant of anything outside of Windows. Their entire computing world revolves around it. Over the years they've learned a few tricks, they might know how to setup a printer or share a network drive, maybe they can even reinstall an OS by themselves. These people are basically paying Microsoft a premium for a familiar Windows experience. The value of this experience is their own choice to make. There is also a large industry of MSCE/MSCP/etc types who have built their careers on Microsoft products. For those people a new version of Windows that isn't immediately repulsive to consumers is money in the bank. In both cases the actual quality of the OS isn't relevant. It's all about predictability, familiarity, comfort, backwards compatibility, etc. Windows 7 is closer to what people actually want than Vista was.
http://feedhub.com
http://maps.google.com/?q=new+mexico

What do you mean by NM?
super big deposit?
Well, actually, that isn't true. Streaming content makes Netflix much cheaper than renting movies (if the content serves your entertainment needs, anyhow).

I agree that convenience is worth something, but so is stable technology that already works. If Hulu was anywhere near the cost of cable, I think most people will stick with cable. They already own the DVRs and they already know how to use it. If Hulu is much cheaper, it has a chance.
I'm guessing New Mogul.
Good point, I'll check.

It kinda sucks though to have your cash tied up right when you need it most.
Ok, you've certainly proven your wisdom to me, but I still don't agree. When it comes to most normal computers users - old people like my parents, kids that aren't computer geeks - they want internet and email and word processing. Windows does this. Linux does this. Mac does this. Windows - buy my OS. Mac - buy my shiny computer, we'll give you an OS for cheap. Linux - buy a cheap computer, install this free OS. ... Why on earth would you pay more for something? Any logical person would not. As a web dev, I find that MS does things their own way, regardless of what people want. IE writes their own standards, which is unacceptable. MS doesn't bother fixing things in a timely fashion because their friends at the AV companies like that MS is exploitable (could be FUD, but sounds right to me).

I'm just saying that, all things equal, people will choose the cheapest one, and they aren't doing this because they don't know any alternatives.

... Though I am pretty irritated that Adobe STILL won't make a good flash plugin for linux. sick of choppy video. Windows has me there.
Can we leave this kind of mindless 'content' off of HN? It's a valid point (I haven't purchased W7 yet for my Windows boxes because of the cost) but really just flamebait.
Hulu To Actually Add Premium Pay Content While Keeping Current Content Free
It kinda sucks though to have your cash tied up right when you need it most.

If you think you need cash now, just wait until you've spent a few months working on your startup. :-)
It's operated by nickb, so this could explain it:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775507
Well I suppose you are technically correct. But Bill did go to a rich and fancy private school which is somewhat like an Ivy.
Probably harsh, but nevertheless my point of view.

Your view seems to be informed by ignorance. For instance, your claim that they've only given back where they couldn't "rip off" BSD/MIT-licensed code is pretty specious when Apple's largest contributions are to BSD-licensed projects that they use. Who exactly is getting ripped off?

it's a _huge_ company with lots of money.

What differences does that make? Your prior criticism was that they took much from open source and gave back little.
When you bring money into it, you're making it sound like their contributions should be based on what they have, not what they have taken. That doesn't seem very fair given how many of their employees and how much of their revenue has very little at all to do with things taken from open source.

A more reasonable perspective is that they should give back in proportion to what they took, rather than that they should give back in proportion to how much money they have. The former is fairness, the latter is entitlement.

webkit came from khtml

That was seven years ago. Longer than KHTML even existed before Apple's fork. A lot has changed in that time. Today, much of the development on KTHML is backported from WebKit, which is itself a vastly more active and widespread open source project than KHTML ever was. Half a dozen projects and millions of users have benefited from Apple's development efforts. I don't see how this can be interpreted as anything less than an open source success story.

(hello quicktime, hello itunes)

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Both of those products use standard non-proprietary formats by default.

I could nearly bet that MS does more open source then apple.
If it's not already the case, apple is heading in that direction.

Could you cite examples of Microsoft's open source contributions for comparison? Or explain how Apple is "heading in that direction"?
This question has come up time and time again see many previous threads.

For example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775507
If this research is right about the brain's time processing, it would help explain déjà vu.
I can't help with SF, but I've been looking in the Boston-North area for a while, and in my experience apartment companies require a years worth of proof so that you can prove you can pay off the lease. I dropped the apartment market a while back and have been strictly looking at condos - which do require a more stringent investigation into your finances.

Is living in SF a must - how are the burbs or just outside of SF comparable? You may be able to find something for less a month and also easier on the financial investigation.

Best of luck.
Hmm, this make anyone else thing of Tom Swift?
Might be obvious but find a roommate that is renting out a room, then you don't have to deal with any of those issues.

Just find a quiet one or one that is out a lot so that you being home all the time does not bother either of you.

You may even catch a break with one that has a dog and you offer to walk it in the afternoons during a coding break. Most people who have pets would love someone to walk them during an afternoon.
Now, I'm not a cheerleader for modern-day psychopharmaceuticals; I often liken antidepressants to kicking a television and hoping that the picture clears up. They often don't work, or mysteriously work for some time, then stop, and there doesn't seem to be a ton of rhyme or reason to it.

That all having been said, from what I've read, for most people with chronic depression, the most effective treatment is a combination of antidepressant drugs and behavioral therapy. For a lot of people, one or the other alone doesn't work very well, and I certainly hope that no one would be unwilling to get help because people would think them weak or lazy for relying on antidepressants.

Put simply, if you have chronic depression, you can use all the help you can get. Sometimes drugs don't work, many have awful side effects, or may just not work for any given person, but it's often worth the trouble in order to fight clinical depression. If people can effectively manage it with behavioral therapy, then great, but for all the people out there who've tried and for whom that's not enough, I hope you reconsider the idea that for the most part, antidepressants are for the lazy.
What do you mean by self-employed if you don't have an income? If you are a contractor (such as myself) you should be fine with whatever tax-related paperwork you have, such as a 1099. If you're trying to start up, I'd second the suggestions of looking for a roommate, if you can bear the thought of it. If you're like me and can't imagine having a roommate, look for a place that's for rent by owner or another similar situation where you would have the opportunity to sit down face to face with someone not bound by corporate policy and try to reach an arrangement.
Perhaps I have become too cynical over the past several years, but to call this naive seems almost too charitable. As a physicist might say, this is not even wrong.
How High Will Real-Time Search Fly?
I think most of us living in SF have income and/or 250k in net worth.
"Let me ask a simple question, if everyone had a DVR that could record any and every series they liked, enabling them to watch the shows they missed immediately, why would they go to Hulu ever again ? Lunchtime at work you say ? I respond simply with “slingbox enabled DVR”. Let them stream the shows from their homes."

Hulu offers a wide selection of content no longer broadcast on cable or satellite TV. Next problem is extremely limited upload speeds on most US ISPs. This would result in sub-SD quality streams. Hulu is about ~2Mbit/sec streaming. Average residential broadband is sub ~1Mbit upload. So half the quality on average under best conditions (hope no one is home using the Internet or get used to circa 1996 animated GIF quality video)

"Traditional media should be blasting the cable/telco/sat companies for not adding DVR features and dropping pricing fast enough."

They should be kicking themselves for raising prices of programming to the point where cable/telco/satellite providers need to overcharge for equipment to help offset the higher costs of programming which are so large over the last ~3 years that the providers were actually unable to pass all of it onto the consumer. They were terrified of $10-$20/month price increases. People accept <$5 increases on a yearly basis but it's not enough to keep up anymore.
That's probably the one most useful thing you (re)learn when doing a startup: how to save money.

It's so easy to get caught up in big spending when you get out and start working. Most of your yuppie brethren are inclined as such, after all. I have a feeling that learning how to be frugal will pay off in later years, seeing how most older folks seem to value it... xP
My problems are compounded by having a big dog, and planning to spend more than $1500/mo on a place (I'm looking for a townhouse or a duplex on the outskirts of SF in the $2.1k range). So, I've been looking for quite some time, but not finding much that fits my needs (I'm in Mountain View, currently).

I've talked to my current landlord about how pervasive this problem is in this area in the past, and it's partially a side effect of how hard it is to evict someone in California. It costs a fortune and takes several months from the time you actually stop paying rent for your landlord to kick you out of your home in CA. So, property owners do everything they can to make sure the cost of you declaring bankruptcy or other tactics to avoid paying your rent while still living there are higher for you than for them. It's one of those unintended consequences of regulations intended to help poor people; it actually hurts the poor the most, since people with high net worth don't have any problems jumping through these hoops, but poor folks get stuck living in the absolute worst locations and paying exorbitant prices because no one else will deal with them.

If you deal with folks who have decision making powers within the company, showing historic tax records indicating you can make the payments, or showing a history of paying similar rents on time and for a long period of time, may be enough. When I moved out here, I had to show I had been making mortgage payments on a house in Austin for several years. My tax records weren't very impressive since I had shut down my prior company two years prior and hadn't started making much money with Virtualmin yet. Landlord also wanted an email confirmation from YC that we actually had some kind of funding, and had some expectation of making money.

A friend of mine was able to get a place, despite having low net worth, no credit history to speak of, and no historic tax records to speak of, and no history of paying similar rents, by just showing pay stubs from her current job which pays enough to cover her rent. But, I would guess that would be dependent on having a job, and dealing with someone that could make a judgment call and has the power to accept a lease from someone without all that other stuff.
Squareone: Make money posting to Slashdot
Now that makes more sense then the nonsensical plan everybody was assuming they would go with.
If you look at that topo map, it looks like San Diego is bounded by mountains, just like SF and LA. Flat land in CA tends to be where you can't easily get to it.
Get into politics, and try to convince the people of SF that rent control is stupid and needs to be done away with, use yourself as an example. Well that's a good long term plan, in the short term, I'm afraid you might be screwed.
How do I get Wolfram Alpha to plot these things

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Curves/Newtons.h...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%7Ba+y%5E2+%3D+x+%28x%5...
Google supports false advertising?
Search Netflix in Google right now and hit on the first sponsored link. It will take you to BuddhaShopper.com and then redirect to Netflix sometimes!? See the included url to Google search result. Am I confused or is this not suppost to happen?

http://www.google.com/search?q=netflix&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Question - I've got more of a business background than a technical background. I can do basic html and I've played around in Linux a tiny little bit, but that's pretty much it.

Anyone have any recommendations for getting more familiar with programming in a fun, laid back way? Nothing specific I want to do with it, just think it'd be a neat thing to spend some hours in. All recommendations appreciated greatly.
The effects of the next Drupal security hole should be entertaining.
San Diego's downtown airport is comically tiny, so this has been an issue for awhile. The ideas proposed, in order, were:

1. Convert the Marine base at Miramar into an airport -- nixed by the wealthy residents of nearby La Jolla

2. Partner with Tijuana and build a binational airport straddling TJ and San Ysidro on some conveniently undeveloped land there. This stalled for a number of reasons, and then some housing developments sprang up on the mesa where this would have worked, so the idea died.

3. Build a mega-airport in the desert, out towards El Centro, and a superfast bullet train between there and downtown San Diego. Kind of... inconvenient, and reeks of compromise.

4. A floating metropolis off the coast of Point Loma! Well, Singapore's doing something similar.

Notably, most of the flights from San Diego's downtown airport go to LAX or other nearby hubs, and LAX to San Francisco is the most-travelled air route in the country. These are not long distances; a decent bullet train system connecting California's metro areas would substantially ease the congestion at SAN, SNA, LAX, etc. and probably be more environmentally friendly, too. The CA high-speed rail project was proposed about a decade ago, and is progressing excruciatingly slowly -- deets here:

http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/

Last I heard, it was expected to begin construction in 2012, and start carrying passengers around 2020.
Seems like an interesting concept. I just hope that the author does not treat each of the seven languages as its own entity. That is, I want a comparative description over the different languages.
Unfortunately, one cannot learn how to program in a "fun, laid back way." Yes, it's fun and a joy, but it will often be frustrating.

With that said, The Little Schemer is a good one to start on.
I always thought insider trading with full disclosure as to why and a time lapse should be okay. I think the following would both be fair and good for the world:

1. Let a member of the company announce their intention to buy in one week while disclosing their full reasoning. So make any information they're trading on public, and wait a week for the market to act on the information.

2. Allow a member of a company to leave a public, standing order of, "I intend to X shares of our company's stock if the price drops below $Y per share."

Those seem like they'd be good for the markets rather than bad.
Don't know about SF, but here's what I've found elsewhere:

- Commercial landlords have policies, and you're dealing with people who don't have the incentive or power to change them. With private landlords, you can talk to them and make a case you'll be a good tenant, they'll take you on.

- Use references. Past landlords are great, but investors can be impressive too. Line up some letters on official stationery.

- If you've got a blog, or public site, or coverage, you can use those to woo landlords too.

Landlords want someone who will pay the rent, not trash the place, not bother them, and stay a long time. Keep those in mind, and figure out how to sell yourself as a good tenant, and hopefully the formalities shouldn't be an obstacle.
I agree that AI is going to push us forward to places we've never even considered before (being a strong supporter of the Singularity myself), but I think focusing on AI is wrong. I think that, like most big things, strong AI will come by accident. Someone will be working on something orthogonal and they'll stumble upon the key to strong AI. Hopefully that'll happen sooner rather than later, as it's very important, I just don't think that sort of thing can be focused on in and of itself and succeed.