skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think I am the only one who think humans will never manage to build something that complex.

The universe is impossibly large, but it's not fundamentally complex. All complexity is emergent, not built in. The universe may very well run on a few very simple rules of data transformation, like a collection of cellular automata.

I don't think any physicist would argue in favor of the universe's complexity in connection with the simulation idea. In my opinion a better implausibility argument could instead be constructed from the enormous size and the apparent wastefulness of calculating every single simulation tick (which may well be equal to Planck time).
The reason you're the only one who thinks we can't is because you're limiting the possibility of building something like that with todays technology.

1. I'm not sure this is the case anymore but it certainly makes things easier. Regardless, why do you think 3d motion can't improve?

2. We have some but nothing that is a true AI. Many AI experts think a true AI, most likely modeled after the human brain once better understood, is going to happen in the next 50-100 years [from last I read, I am certainly no expert]. Why do you think this can't happen when most seem to think it eventually will?

3. Every year science makes progress to test, image and discover things that are very small. Right now string theory is a possibility that strings may be smaller than atoms. Why do you think this cannot or will not be either proven or disproven, ever?
>> We've mapped the nutrients required by our cells down to a molecular level. We've even got a thorough understanding of the interaction between the food we eat and how the microbial ecosystem in our digestive system breaks down our food as we digest it.

This belief, in a nutshell, is the problem with nutrition. We have done no such thing, but we've convinced ourselves that we have. I have no doubt that we aren't even capable of understanding half the shit that goes on to turn food into energy.

At one point, society killed people who dared claim that the Earth revolved around the sun. We should never think, even for a second, that we have all the answers, and we should be immediately suspicious of any claim that we do.
Generally that's the case. Specifics vary by state: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/single-member-llcs.ht...

(not a lawyer)
It's not that eigenvalues per se are useless--they're plainly not--but that no one finds eigenvalues in practice by computing the characteristic polynomial and solving for its roots. Unfortunately, that computation is often found in HW and exams in US undergraduate linear algebra courses.
Two different unrelated adjectives: it's an advanced language, and a purely functional language
There always are non-technical cofounders looking for a gullible programmer to implement their stupid idea for equity-only. Take a couple of those and then work your way up into paying jobs.

You also could try getting an internship at an established company.
> I also know that Amazon can get away without enabling this since they have in-house fraud team.

Their fraud team isn't that great, but that's a whole different subject.

It's not like there's a magic switch that enables 3DS. Still, 3DS isn't bulletproof. There was a time (it might still be true) where all you'd need is the card holders last name, their billing zip, and the last four of the card number, to create the 3DS password if it wasn't already created.

Albeit, this wasn't the case for the larger banks, where you'd need their SSN most of the time. However, in most shops, you can search by BIN, so again, defeated...

If you were carding (verb: to use someone else's credit/debit card to fraudulently conduct a transaction), depending on the dump, you'd already have this information. Of course, there's no way for the processor to check verify the name of the cardholder*, so the info on the card might be incomplete in that sense, but it's still easy to get.

3DS isn't meant to be a catch-all for fraud. Depending on how a card is acquired, the 3DS code can come with it (keylogger).
The sad part is it's even easier than that, if your goal is hosting like two packages. Stick a bunch of debs in a directory, make sure your default GPG key is reasonable, then run `apt-ftparchive packages . > Packages`, `apt-ftparchive release . > Release`, and `gpg -ab < Release > Release.gpg`. Then toss the whole thing on a web server that supports plain HTTP. Honestly I bet GitHub Pages is good enough.

The syntax for sources.list is then "deb http://path/to/your/directory ./". Users can pick up your key by piping it into "sudo apt-key add -", or they can "sudo apt-key adv --keyserver... --recv-key..." with the usual GPG options (and check the fingerprint the same way).

The problem is that most serious users will quickly want tooling to do things like keep track of which versions of which packages are in the archive, not have two versions of the same package, support multiple distros/releases, support separate "test" and "production" areas, etc. And that's where the complexity shows up. (Also why you never see "./" sources.list lines in real life.)

But for "Hey, I built these three packages", it's kind of perfect.
A nice little pep talk motivating study of linear algebra and why it's useful (e.g. pagerank):

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06sc-linear-algebr...
Founder here. I find it crazy that over 50% of transactions in Treasuries and 70-90% in other asset classes are still traded over the phone. Lots of room for new entrants to make an impact in the space.
I used Dokku, and tried real hard to get it to work, but it just didn't work out. Getting started was easy, but once you start configuring things, and keep adding plugins for everything that you are doing, it keeps getting crazier.

In my case, I gave up when I couldn't get dokku to start a (critical) container on its own after a reboot. Ultimately, I think dokku is a good thing (in general) but to get it to succeed, it needs to get decoupled with docker a bit, so that people like me can use it easily without having to deal with docker.
depending on the constraints and circumstances of the simulation and it's parent, maybe the absence of chia pets would trigger some sort of undesirable self-awareness.

like a switch in your dreams that doesn't turn the lights on or off.
Author here: to run a house for a week, one of Tesla's battery would not be enough; you would need a few. I guess I wasn't much clear on the post.
People also don't only solve for eigenvalues computationally. Knowing about all the perspectives of eigenvalues helps. I agree the computations are dumb, but if you propose an intro linear algebra class with no computations to soak up test scores you will get far more protests.
I love it. Please keep it running.
That doesn't prove or disprove anything. The author assumes the simulation would have to simulate the entire known universe at the level of detail we observe. That is absurd. A simulation wouldn't need to simulate the entire universe, just what I am observing at that exact moment.

Think of it is lazy evaluation. The rules are all known, but they are not evaluated until needed. If we have one single person, how hard would it be to simulate every single input to that one person? You wouldn't need to simulate an entire universe to do that.

Going back to what the author had to say, you wouldn't have to simulate the state of every atom at every time. You only need to simulate when it is measured. Interestingly, this syncs up with what we know about the quantum world where measurement causes the state of the wave function to collapse.

Additionally, the author seems to assume the universe exists outside of himself. He seems to trust the measurements and insights of scientific facts I doubt that he has confirmed via his own observation. Even if he did confirm all of them, this still doesn't prove the universe exists outside of what he directly observes with his own senses.

By analogy, imagine you are a character in a video game. The video game doesn't render the entire universe of the game. Only the portion of the game the character is in at that moment. From the character's point of view, the laws are consistent. The character could even try to postulate some universal laws. Try to determine the size of their universe.

I am not saying the philosophers are right or wrong. I'm just saying there is a lot more to the philosophy than the article covers.
The EFF Cooperative Computing Award rules, by the way, specifically say that you can't just claim (say) A^(3^16) or A^(3^17) without knowing how to find their decimal expansion.

So the possibility that someone would try to use this to claim the awards with no calculate occurred to someone (maybe Landon Noll) back around 1999.
Voting both forks is the "nothing at stake" problem, which is discussed extensively on the ethereum blog, with a variety of proposed solutions. It's not entirely a solved problem yet, which is why I said people are "working on it," but it's starting to look pretty solvable.
Mantra-lang – Tiny and Visible
There are lots of programs which generate a semi-plausible city map, perhaps filled with generic buildings. But so far nobody seem to be able to generate something that looks even vaguely convincing from street level.

It would be fun, and even useful, to have a procedural storefront generator. One that constructs storefront styles, signage styles, door styles, and window displays. Use images from a street view program to train a machine learning algorithm as to what various parts of cities look like. Don't just use existing storefront images; build them up in 3D from door, window, sign, and display components.
I watched Gilbert Strang's video lectures on linear algebra (the MIT freshman course) for preparation for my PhD qualifier exam, and as a third year grad student, I could appreciate the relevance of almost every single topic in the class. That is, seven years after freshman linear algebra and with countless applications programmed, papers read and implemented, and theoretical/applied classes taken, it "all made sense" (don't ask me what a freshman is supposed to make of that material, other than to acquire it at a very abstract superficial level).

The early classes are the prerequisites for every and anything you might wind up doing with math. Including becoming a math prof, or a web dev, or dropping out. Nobody tells you, for every section of every textbook you have to read, what its myriad applications might be, and you can't get a customized build of just the topics you want.

But we're all startup people here right? Can this shortcoming be fixed? Can we make a detailed dependency graph of topics in applied mathematics, which could potentially be used to generate custom learning builds?
The founding of Australia's web newspaper
This cargo cult stuff, from which this term derives, get's pretty surreal pretty quickly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_Movement
Would someone care to explain -why- you're downvoting the parent, instead of just downvoting? The idea that there could be more universes than there are universes creating simulations makes sense.

I'm genuinely curious and we must have some silent geniuses downvoting that comment. Instead of downvoting him, please, do go on.
Although I disagree with the condescending style, I found your article very interesting and a good argument against this hypothesis. I'm likely out of my depth, so I apologize if my question seems very naive. You said, 'it is overwhelmingly likely that whatever the “most elementary” controllable aspect of reality is, be it strings or something else, it will be able to encode at most a single bit per thing.' What if more variables were considered when deriving meaning from an electron? For example, Up means 1, Down means 0, and the position of that 1/0 relative to other 1s and 0s provides further info, or the time between transitions between 0 and 1 provides further info. Could a single electron then store information about more than 1 elementary particle?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_safety

Aggressive type coercion is not type safety. It does not prevent type errors. It just sweeps them under the rug.

5 - 'foo'

That's a type error. It's not a convenient shortcut for `NaN`.
But is this 'legal' even if the employee didn't sign anything to change the previously agreed upon arrangement (options)??
This is especially tragic because matrix factorization algorithms are so deep and interesting, theory and programming-wise! LU, Cholesky, QR, eigendecomposition, SVD, mmmm. Round-off error tolerance, convergence criteria, stability, yum.

Characteristic qualities and root finding: bleh.
I wonder what the terminal velocity is for a drone that's lost power. It seems like anything that's able to climb to and hover at 500 feet probably won't drop quite like a brick unless things go wrong in a very particular way.
Care to explain? This sounds like wishful thinking. When love is merely a chemical reaction and all of your emotions are, why can't this be simulated in some way?
I don't understand what is "membership" in sites like Google/Twitter/Facebook. I thought that it could be when you have an account in there vs you don't; but how then can you be a "non-member" at Facebook, for instance.

Can someone please clarify this for me?
You don't need to run the house for a week for a battery to be useful.

The standard idea for this is for the houseowner to charge the battery during off-peak night hours and deplete it during peak hours thus helping the electric company to decrease the variation between peak and average load. This also has the effect of decreasing the amount of copper in a cable required to connect a house to the grid.

If enough people have batteries, it also helps grid reliability. Most grid failures are single point of failure so having a distributed source allows power to keep flowing while repair is being carried out.

There are a lot of advantages to having a big battery which could power a household for even a day.
Unfortunately I don't think cities will deal with this well if there all of a sudden is a mass migration - they still will likely have costs/debt to pay off and divide that cost among everyone in cities. I'm not sure many cities are planning for this transition.
60 Frames per Second and the Web
Average household consumption is around 30-ish kWh / day, so an 85 kWh Tesla battery would give you almost 3 days. The question I have is why you would need to store more than a day's energy for your home, assuming you charge it with solar?

I suspect you need much less than this, and a 10-20 kWh home battery would be just fine to do the job.
Cellphone Startups Use Wi-Fi First to Handle Calls and Take on Rivals
Well, there is a tree in Athens, Georgia (USA) which legally owns itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself
Aptly is a dream to use compared to the others, generally makes sense, and is well documented. Big thumbs up for aptly from me.

I started out with a reprepro archive, which is an abandoned project (or at least, had been for a couple of years early last year (edit: looks like I am in error, there are commits dating to last august... I must have been looking at the wrong repo)). The biggest problem with reprepro is that you can have only one package version per package - so no rollbacks.

But yeah, though you need software to calculate the index files, once they're done, an apt archive is just a static website, easily pushable to s3. Of course, if you want a private repo, it gets a bit more difficult...
Well, I probably don't have to tell people to never run copper between buildings. Always run fiber. The longer the runs, the higher the common mode voltage between grounds and the higher the stress on the isolation circuitry. Plus lightning strikes don't have to hit the cable directly, they can pull up the ground for the whole building and suddenly instead of having 200V of common mode you have 4000V for a few milliseconds.

Anyone who has ever wired up a T1 in the basement of a highrise knows what I mean.

-Matt
There's a big opportunity to put people's bid/ask on a single platform, but it's always tough to build a two-sided market. Are you concentrating on building supply or demand first? What's in it for the incumbents to use this platform? Doesn't the status quo benefit them? (I'm guessing less price transparency and less liquidity in the market translates to higher fees and margins)
Let's say that electricity was FREE during the night. What exactly is your electric bill today? $300 per month if you're a big user? If that battery costs $50,000 and reduces your eclectic bill to zero, then it pays for itself in a mere 12 years.

In other words: no.
I don't mean to offend you, but I guess offense well taken. If you are asking this question, it's really important you hire someone with really good system knowledge and security knowledge before you launch your SaaS production, besides having someone doing a proper security testing. If you are running on AWS then make sure you have a proper IAM policy and proper security group settings. If you are running applications then containers are probably a nice addition. Basic WAF is essential. Even enable fail2ban even if your servers are in private subnet. No password-based SSH. UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE. These will get you enough before someone finds a remote shell exploit take over your server or someone leaks secret key in github repo or before you get XSS pwned.
That was Jason's assumption, not mine. :)
The definition of "meaningful" might be a bit soft here. When figuring out what changed in a release, I don't really care that you "converted tabs to spaces" or "refactored method name based on intent" or any such structural change. The git log is generally too noisy to be used for describing a release.
I started out with Dokku and ran into a number of issues. After moving to dokku-alt I've found it to be very useful for running small services.
This analysis misses out on the importance of growth in establishing valuations.

NYT might have great revenue (it does), but it also doesn't have as much growth potential as Buzzfeed. They have fewer new markets to reach and less segments to expand into. Probably the only big financial upside they have is in cutting legacy print costs.

Of course, this same growth-based analysis also applies to Facebook/Twitter vs Google. They're both much younger businesses than Google and presumably have lots of growth available in both users and advertising effectiveness. Google, on the other hand, has been selling ads since before Facebook even existed. Thus, it's easy to make a case for Google having reached it's peak while Facebook has room left to grow.

Also, any analysis which conflates newsroom uniques with service users is basically useless. The average content "unique user" reads a few articles a month (if you're lucky), but the average user of a service like Facebook logs in multiple times a week. This is one of the key reasons that VCs prefer technology companies to media: users have much more of a regular relationship with their users. If the NYT shut down tomorrow, the majority of their 57 million visitors wouldn't even notice. But if Facebook shut down tomorrow, it'd be on TV: hundreds of millions of people would notice.

That being said, I do agree with the premise that the NYT is undervalued. They've made tremendous strides at improving their digital operations over the past few years (especially in 2014) and have also realized that serious investment in technology is critical to remaining positive. If nytimes.com were exactly the same as it is today, with the same team & investments, but had been founded as a startup a few years ago I bet they'd have a $10b valuation at least.
exactly :) memory is cheap -this is an exercise in that imo.
Without knowing the methodology used in the OP, I occasionally visit Facebook (eg, most of the cafes in my area are easier to find on FB than their own site, so I can check opening hours; some businesses post articles or information publicly on FB that's relevant to me) but I don't have an account anymore.
I disagree, unless your SaaS is storing highly sensitive data.
Many people regularly use Google without signing in.

Twitter is admittedly more membership based, but they still have millions of people viewing tweets (especially embeds) without an account.

Facebook is indeed primarily a logged-in experience, but if you look at the numbers you'll see that uniques are less than members. So it's essentially a measure of how many members actually visited that month.
The Hotel Problem
Report: John Lennon was a cheating and drug-abusing husband
The site has only been open for 3 months and looking around at some forum posts it seems to not have ramped up yet to a huge amount of users. I have no idea but I'm gonna guess low 5 figures.
android phones still have a lot of room to grow though, so its not quite a pessimistic outlook for google.
Most billion dollar companies can be traded without much difficulty. I've done 3 txns.
Neat! Of course the first thing I tried to do was see whether you could drive though buildings. You can.
The problem is that the market has been skewed by banks, which set-up the existing electronic platforms in the 1990's. The electronic trading protocols were designed to be exactly like a telephone conversation between the bank and its customer. By restricting who can 'listen' to the conversation, banks create a private information loop, where the largest banks with the most customers can capture more of the information in the market than other participants. Effectively, this advantage over the market means that investors have been subsidizing billions of dollars a year in bank profits for years.
The biggest change since the financial crisis is that the buy-side (mutual funds, hedge funds, pensions) is now in the driving seat for determining what the future of markets look like. We're seeing that with innovative new exchanges like IEX in the equities space.

We've built demand on the buy-side and are now reaching out to sell-side partners who are interested in moving the market forward. The parts of the sell-side that haven't invested in technology and are holding onto their old ways aren't very excited. The parts that have are a lot more open and we are looking forward to having them onboard on day one.
Let me just remind everyone that wiki.debian.org is, well, a wiki. I'm on a mobile right now, so I trying to consolidate the apt/repo-pages, trimming the obviously (too) old information - and adding a more visible "this is how simple this stuff can be, even with proper gpg-signing, and http support" -- is a little too cumbersome. But I've for a while now been intending to help out a bit -- the wiki is somewhat neglected (compared to, say the excellent arch linux wiki). Mostly I think the Debian wiki is in need of some pretty mundane wiki clean-up: consolidation, simplification and modernization (consentrate on documenting current stable and testing).

But more impirtant than me actually doing that, is convincing all of you to update the wiki whenever you encounter errors or missing information! :-)

(No affilation with the Debian project other than being a long time user of Debian)
Apple will NOT buy Tesla for $75B in 18 months - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055177
From what I read almost none of the dynamics mentioned require self-ownership... Except for the self ownership part. Most of the dynamics at play could still be in play with a corporate owner. And after laying out the R&D funds, what incentive would a corporation have to layer in the extra self-ownership code instead of just skimming profits and playing a more centralized coordination role?
Right. And that's why their P/E is 27.08, which is still higher than average. For example, Microsoft's is 17.70—showing that the market estimates it has significantly less growth potential than Google (which I agree with).