skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The alleged inference from "zombies are possible" to "physicalism is wrong" isn't quite what you say. It goes more like this. (1) If physicalism is correct, then (e.g.) mental states are identical to physical brain states. (Or something along those lines.) (2) But if A is identical to B, then A = B in all possible worlds; that is, A is necessarily the same as B. (3) Therefore, if physicalism is correct, then in no possible world are there zombies; necessarily, there are no zombies. (4) In other words, if it is possible that there are zombies, then physicalism is wrong.

I think this argument is rubbish. Claim 2 seems like obvious bullshit, unless "identical" is given some weird technical meaning that makes claim 1 bullshit instead. Further, with the sense of "possible" that's relevant here it's very far from clear that anyone's shown that zombies are possible. (The SEP page treats this point quite well.)

I have used the following parallels before: I can imagine electric current flowing without any charged particles being present, "therefore" electric current is not the same thing as the movement of charged particles; I can imagine my computer continuing to do what it does without its circuitry and what happens therein, "therefore" the processing my computer does is not a mere activity of its circuitry. What twaddle. (See http://www.mccaughan.org.uk/g/log/2007/inconceivable.html for a longer rant on the subject, complete with a couple of quotations to show that some philosophers really do think such silly things in the case of consciousness.)
Yeah the headline also calls her a 'girl' even though she's a University graduate. When does she become a 'woman', I wonder?
Unity Indie now free
Show you read the blogs.

Show you actually read the blogs. (Comment on them, get to know the different authors, etc.)

Identify a writer (someone recently said to pick a junior writer - this is probably a good tip!) and contact them directly, rather than emailing the entire blog. If you can't grab them directly then email the blog team but 10 busy people reading a mailing list/filter with 100 messages a day means you really gotta keep it short and sweet.

Depending entirely on the blog, the blogger, and what you're pitching: Keep it short and to the point. Make it newsworthy. Make it interesting and relevant to their readers. Point out why. Give the bloggers something - exclusive preview, beta access, free trials/discount codes to give away. Make yourself available to talk further. Point to a lowdown page about your product/news item that the blogger can link to. Don't sales pitch them to death.

Bloggers are humans, they have needs (pageviews and daily quota), they have access points (Twitter, etc) and by understanding them and what they want, rather than just focusing on what you want, you can get far. Another approach is to sweeten the bloggers by going to events etc and make yourself known to them as an authority/someone to watch, maybe dropping them the odd line about stuff NOT your own; then when you launch, they'll jump on it like rabid monkeys.
In particular, anyone with a passing familiarity with the issue is likely to find the movie script at http://lesswrong.com/lw/pn/zombies_the_movie/ extremely funny.
I always like these kinds of debates, but they always strike me of being fundamentally futile.

The arguments always assume that we have qualia as a prerequisite and that a zombie doesn't. However, the very people who believe in qualia will themselves say that animals don't possess qualia as they're not conscious. Yet we as conscious thinking humans do. So how did we acquire this from a logical standpoint? Because surely a biologically identical zombie, built atom for atom the same way as a human would itself possess qualia. If the zombie doesn't posses qualia, how did we acquire it? I'm genetically related to a rat and at one point in history we were the same species, so how did I acquire qualia and it not?

It eventually just strikes me that it's an asinine argument, and only unthinking zombies would waste their time with it, thus we have proof of p-zombies in the form of the qualophiles and qualophobes, because no one else gave a big enough shit for long enough to think past an initial idea and the two camps have been left arguing as futilely as if they were arguing over the existence of god.
But just because it's possible doesn't mean that it isn't insulting.

I can understand how people found this discussion insulting, especially when it got blown out of proportion.
It wasn't tianaco's intention.

I saw the application she submitted which she is leading.
She focuses on differentiating herself from typical entrepreneurs, and a lot of that has to do with her unique experiences. She was confident this would play well with the YC team. She was fearful that it would work against her with YC alum. That's why she started this thread.

tianaco is a vocal person who says what she thinks. In some circumstances, this has hurt her. More often than not, it has opened the door to opportunities that don't exist for other people. Regardless, she has made a conscious choice to live her life speaking up. Whether this thread helped her or hurt her is unknown.
* Because the government gave the cable providers local monopolies.*

This is untrue. I'm not sure which "government" you are referring to.

In most parts of the US, an MSO negotiates with a community government to install and maintain a cable TV service. These contracts are generally NOT exclusive, or are not exclusive for a long period of time.

However, in most areas where the population density is low to moderate, there is not enough market base to support two MSO's in the same area. So while you may think there is an exclusive arrangement, there often is not. In fact, many cities want to lure in more operators to give the citizens better choices and encourage competitive pricing.

I've been personally involved in this sitting on the telecommunications board in previous city ~8 years ago. We had an agreement with Charter, and wanted to get another cable company into the city, but couldn't make it worth their while in any realistic manner.
Money without support is less likely to succeed. Perhaps with established, expanding businesses it would work.
Exactly. Lots of them are "awkward" or not "socially adept". Get used to it :)
If it is modular, reimplement one module in parallel and test. If there are no tests, add those first. If it is not modular, make it so, first.

If a single module can be ported to sane code successfully, you have a chance to fix the rest. If not, start reimplementing the whole thing in parallel. If you have no parallel test environment, create one first (so you can "deploy" your copy as if it were real).

It's all about the order in which you tinker with it. :)
Garmin don't make any products I want to buy anymore. I had a GPSMAP276C which though getting old was the best GPS device for me, with way more features than a phone GPS provides.

Then it got stolen, and when I went to see if there was a new/updated model, there wasn't: garmin have spent the last 5+ years making mass-produced cheaper models for in-car nav.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_birds_and_the_bees
That's what you call getting paid by the word.
I'm guessing, when she gets married? Until then it's all messing around with 21st-century algorithmically designed materials, you know, 'girl' stuff.
Agreed. Locale flips the concept of a cell-phone upside down.
At the high school level you don't really know what you'll be doing 15 years later? You should have a complete grounding, so that you can make those decisions and not have to play catch up later on. I am not saying probability and stats are less important (probability is as important and increasingly stats), but you need calculus as well, at least a good basic grounding.
A bicycle is dirty, greasy and has pointy bits. No more welcome in a building that other, um, dirty, greasy things.
Bah, waiting's for losers. Just steal a small RTG and rig a wireless charger to yourself, you'll never need to charge an appliance again, plus you can power your hybrid on the go . . . just stay away from any FBI agents, just in case.
When I hear about "awarenesss" I want to get out my gun. Kidding, but real functional bike parking would be much more to the point. Imagine artsy car parking spaces - I would just think "oh cut it out".
I agree with you that "engineer cum quants" do hard math work, but you're not really comparing similar groups anymore (your original claim was that a "typical financial job is more technical than the typical engineering job"). My impression was that quants almost always have an academic background in math or physics, but I don't think this level of math is typical for most of the folks in finance, including many who make gobs and gobs of money.
The point DA was trying to make is that new mediums have these kinds of problems & we are pretty good at fixing them. For the internet it was a combination of people/skills developing (eg domain names, brands) & technology (eg Google) that eventually (pretty quickly when you consider that article is just a decade old) fixed this.

That doesn't mean real time search will get fixed in the same way or prove to be useful in the same way. It just means that when any such new medium (twitter, web, cup of tea) arises, we should expect to find comments like yours.
I think it's probably the work of a translator.
As long as you don't have to send/receive MS Office files to/from other people, it should be fine. In my experience there are still some horrible incompatibility issues (specially in formatting).
I don't expect points for being female, but it is something that sets me apart in this scenario.

I don't think you, a YC alum, would necessarily dock me for being a woman. I do think that you might not find some of my accomplishments as interesting as you would someone more like you. Is that unfair? Only if I knew YC alums were reading my application after I submitted it. Because I would have tailored it to you in the first place, the YC alum. It would take too long to re-tailor it at this point!

That's ALL I meant with this thread.

I apologize for any misunderstanding or offense taken.

With all due respect, you don't know how you would deal with being a minority until you've been one.
I'd say let them have laptops, but install software on the laptops that will alert or lock the laptop when ever any issue (something is wrong, or the destination is approaching).. I'd say in most cases the plane would know when something is up.
I'm late to the Facebook dev game. Just started experimenting with app building this month. My initial impression wasn't great. Their documentation is hard to follow, and very few of the examples actually worked.

Many of the API features have been removed or changed, but the documentation hasn't been updated to reflect this. Looks like it's only going to get worse.

Compared to developing apps with Amazon's APIs, it's really a mess.
'ch' : Cheat Sheet Utility for Bash
Well that's it then. It's just because you're a non-coder (presuming these negative experiences have been when speaking to coders rather than men in general). You're in the same boat as me! Try coming to a YC BBQ - that was a pretty tech-intense experience for me!

You'll find a lot of the coders that you feel uncomfortable with, would feel quite uncomfortable at the type of events you revel in.
Flowdock Combines Yammer And Google Wave
My argument is not that Silicon Valley was inevitable but that it takes a long time to grow an entrepreneurial region.

It's not misleading in raising the bar to areas/regions that want to be the next Silicon Valley and don't have an entrepreneurial substrate and appropriate ancillary services (e.g. attorneys, accountants, banks, that understand startups and entrepreneurs) to form a viable ecosystem.

I don't think the 100 years is misleading, if it had happened somewhere else (e.g. Boston) I think it would still have involved the same antecedents: major universities, risk capital, electronics firms...It may also have been important that it was primarily agricultural land that was pushed aside, if there had been other active industries they may have preferentially competed for the same talent.

Three good books I rely on for this analysis are

"Understanding Silicon Valley" by Kenney http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Silicon-Valley-Entrepren...

"The Silicon Valley Edge" by Lee, Miller, Hancock, and Rowen http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Valley-Edge-Innovation-Entrepr...

"Regional Advantage" Saxenian http://www.amazon.com/Regional-Advantage-Culture-Competition...
Not only is everything automated and nothing interesting happens, but when they actually do anything, it's all listed out step-by-step in the manual.

I fly small airplanes and I have no desire at all to fly commercial jets. I used to say they were just glorified bus drivers, but bus drivers have a more fulfilling job than most pilots.
Free e-book: Windows 7 troubleshooting tips
It's certainly better than some other cities I've lived in - but I live and work downtown, and navigating downtown streets on a bicycle to/from work is an intimidating proposition. Not many of us who work here do it - and I commend the brave souls who do :)
Exactly what I was thinking. I don't believe many girls graduate university before entering the nomenclature of womanhood.
Google Music Search Powered by Myspace & Lala Launches
Parking is not the gating factor for bicycle commuting in any city. Finding roads and paths to ride on without raising your chance of getting killed significantly is the difficult bit.
Reminds me of the old joke about the cockpit crew of the future: a dog and a pilot. The pilot is there to feed the dog, and the dog there to bite the pilot if he tries to touch anything.
Door Hanger A Smart Way of Marketing
ShoutEm speaks Chinese
Google’s Response To FCC: We Now Restrict Calls To Less Than 100 Phone Numbers
It hasn't ocurred to me. That's enough. Of course they've got this idea, and a thousand others. I was just making a comment to see if the idea was silly or not
I believe that both Federal Radio (1909) and Hewlett Packard (1939) benefited from talented entrepreneurial engineers, risk capital, academic expertise, and a deep understanding of how to foster innovation not just manage invention.
IPhone UI for web app
The big innovation I've wanted to see for the longest time is missed call connecting. When AT&T drops my calls (which happens all the time), I call the person back and they call me back. We get each other's voicemails. Just connect the damn calls if we're calling each other.
It was more the video and the fact that the email for the woman's corporate email account and gmail account was called "Motorola", it made little sense.

I dunno, it just really did not look like someone who does not read hacker news could pick it up and understand it.
IUI vs iwebkit
provides full screen, hiding menu etc.
That is very interesting, it probably works well for communities where minimal investment is needed (your 2000 US) but in many more rural towns it just falls under.

Such as for the house I am at right now, a well was dug for water a septic tank was dug for sewage power lines and phone lines were extended (most likely from nearby overhead lines) when the house was built. The problem is that fiber is not extended through overhead lines but dug in, and in a place where satellite is the only option I bet would be extremely expensive depending on how far apart houses are spread apart.

I lucked out that low quality dsl was available I don't think I could handle a sat connection.
It would be anyway because of time value of money.
The entire article is explaining why this isn't the case. Would you drive to work if you knew that you wouldn't be able to park your car anywhere? Of course not. This is what is faced by cyclists. Sure you can leave your bike on the street (if it's not raining) but as the article states the rate of theft is so exceptionally high that it's idiotic to do so.
Curiously? Does anyone know why IE8 is left out of comparisons like this? I'd love to know how it ranks for JS performance against the "other" browsers
Safari Books converts to flash. Users complain.
And it's a lot lighter too! Except I heard about this over three years ago already.
Important to view these results in context:

http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/v3/run.html
Google and the Deadly Power of Data
It usually cannot complete benchmarks that bring out the differences between the good engines.
I've got no stake in any of this at all - never applied to YC, doubt I ever will - but something which'd bother me a little: what if a company applied a while back and hasn't seen this HN thread? You can guarantee that at least one set of founders is going to be on holiday.

The problem, though, is that I imagine that'd it be really hard, what with the number of applications there'll be, to individually reach out to applicants before making their applications available to anyone other than the partners...
I did this for three years as a consultant. I worked from the home office (US) 3-4 weeks, and then travel to Europe for a one-week co-lo...rinse, repeat. We grew from 7 people up to 3-4 teams with about 30-40 people. In the end we had a well-oiled machine. What made it effective: good engineers, good build, continuous integration, and co-lo whiteboard design sessions (can't say enough about that last one).

I wish there was a job board that highlighted companies that use distributed teams and are looking to draw talent without requiring re-location.
Jefferson's research doesn't show that the seasonal flu vaccine has no efficacy, just data showing that it has less efficacy for people over 60. He's mostly criticized for dismissing the convergence of independent evidence of efficacy for the vaccine. He has a higher burden to bear if he's to get a review board to approve of a flu vaccine RCT. Oh, and the article comes out just in time for a flu pandemic, promoting fear.
I've noticed a pattern, that I'm calling the iPhone Asymptote Theorem. Basically, phone manufacturers are copying the iPhone experience best they can, and they're getting closer and closer to the iPhone, but they're never quite duplicating it or beating it. The second video showed the Droid loading a endgadget.com slightly slower than the iPhone. The interface, aesthetics, all seem slightly or somewhat worse than the iPhone (representative example: compare the back of the Droid to the back of the iPhone). The scrolling on the Droid seemed a bit less polished than the iPhone, and you could tell the first woman was fumbling a bit with the interface.

To put it mathematically, lim t -> inf (non_iphone_quality) = iphone
it's obvious that laptops are going to get more awesome because of this

I remember reading that standard laptop batteries use cylindrical batteries in a block closure, meaning that the added cost of manufacturing them as blocks isn't worth the value users would get from an extra 50% battery life. I think cheaper manufacturing is what's key for laptops.
John Resig has a performance rundown that is about one year old that included IE (http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/). IE is woefully slow compared to the other browsers in the roundup and is not included in some of the results as it would continually crash during testing. It would be nice to see some more up to date benchmarking with IE, but the link I referenced can give you some insight as to its speed relative to the other browsers.
Mouse 2.0: Multi-touch Meets the Mouse (Best paper at UIST)
Sometimes I get the feeling that if I got a needle and was hit by a car two weeks later, I could convince people it was a side-effect.

I had my ribcage sawn open by the medical system so they could cut out a piece of my heart and replace it with a chunk of a pig's. I'm still around and doing just dandy. My suspicion is that the people who can do that sort of thing probably have a better notion of what this vaccine will do than I do.

Not that any of this invalidates any of your arguments, of course; I'm just talking.

Edit: Perhaps another way of looking at it would be: I don't really want a doctor who has never written a line of code in his life to tell me how to write a program. I suspect that modern medicine is not quackery and does involve actual expertise, and (equally significantly) that the medical system has a greater amount of medical expertise than I do.
According to all the benchmarks I've seen, IE8 is about an order of magnitude (10x) slower than any of the Webkit browsers. They're so far behind that you'd have to significantly rescale the graphs to include them.

Here's an example of a recent Sunspider benchmark:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138459/IE8_runs_10_t...
I've used it extensively when compatibility with a bunch of MS Office users was not a concern. Never had any trouble opening other peoples' MS Office files, but I wouldn't trust it if I had to send lots of files to people.

For home use it's superb - even my computer-illiterate parents are using it exclusively.
Hope this is helpful: your front page doesn't tell me why I shouldn't just use my desktop text editor. (Or 'Stickies' on the Mac.) Why is SJ a better choice?
Faster Maintenance with Augmented Reality
From the ads I see on Craig's, the parade of "requirements" they're looking for vis-a-vis the money they're paying, I'd say yes. It looks like too many of the troops have sold themselves cheap ... (and that too many potential employers want a lot for almost nothing).
I have a barely functioning immune system

That is why you should ask your doctor if you should get the vaccine. Immunosuppressed are on the high risk list and are encouraged to get the vaccine.
That's so obvious, yet I never would have thought of doing that in a million years! Thanks.
Agreed, but that is not the question. I would love to see everyone holding a diploma walking out with some knowledge of both calculus and statistics.

The question is given limited time in school, which is more important and useful for the average person? I think the answer is statistics and probability. People confront probability and statistics in the news all the time and make practical decisions based on what they think is more likely. Most people can apply probabilities in their daily life, few people in nontechnical fields will use calculus.

I brought up my own experiences to point out that as a former military analyst and current DBA and programmer I have used basic statistical knowledge on a regular basis. I have used knowledge of Calculus so little in my daily life and job that I had to give myself a very thorough refresher when I returned to an academic study of mathematics.
Of course, once they start making laptops with these, the TSA will ban them.
Has anyone else had a problem with Chrome where you hard-drive starts seeking (audible noise of it working) and never stops?

I thought turning off the anti-phishing feature would fix it, but I recently got it again. I've seen it happen on both Macs and Windows PCs.
In my experience the best way to end these types of design arguments is just to start coding. If you're good you'll have a decent prototype to show off before the rest of the team has reached a decision.
True, but must be viewed in context (a small IPO in the mid-1980s, for example, might raise $2M - it was a different world altogether back then).
But even if you adjust it for inflation, it's still under $50M for a VC fund...
Actually, these numbers are quite significant to anybody doing mobile web development. Android, iPhone, and WebOS all use Webkit-based browsers.

Javascript performance is particularly relevant for Palm, since all of their applications are JS based.

There's also certain audiences (like HN), where IE is a fractional minority. IE is still keeping us back in the overall market, but there are certain emerging niches where these benchmarks really matter.