skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think discussions around this are ill-served by the "upload" metaphor, as it somewhat implies that the new brain, the original brain, and the uploading process are all largely separate things. It seems much more likely to me that the new brain will take the form of an augmentation that survives the death of the original brain. The personality would be "uploaded" not by deliberately sampling parameters to feed a model, but by the new brain organically (heh) becoming a component and embodiment of the existing personality. I'm sure this isn't a new idea, but I don't know what it's called.
I disagree. The only thing that's missing is an additional section: "Is it legal?"
Ask HN: How should I develop my CMS / Back end?
I've been working on a backend in PHP for the past year, expanding and changing it every time a customer needed new things that were not previously covered by it. I was using Laravel because not only I felt comfortable with pbp but also I really liked how easy it was to implement new functionality.

Now the time has come where I have to step up a notch, change the backend design and extend it a lot further to support an incoming wave of new clients that expect something more than what I'm currently offering.

I've been digging HN a lot and reading about everything that could help me here and I opted for using GO for the backend. The idea would be to write all the functionality on GO, users, db and such and write the frontend with AngularJS connecting it through a rest-like API. I don't have right now the time to learn GO and rewrite everything I made on PHP, but I plan on doing it in the next 6 months.

Right now I'll be writing the backend again in Laravel I think, but only the functionality. My idea is to make an API and have the frontend with AngularJS connect to it using post/get to do everything. This way I can isolate the backend from the frontend and eventually rewrite the backend in go without needing to touch the frontend in Angular.

Does this make any sense? Is this, a good way to approach this although its maybe not the best one? What are your thoughts? Thank you!
Because brain is a highly nonlinear system, and these are hard to model. You cannot model every metabolic process in every neuron and astrocyte, you have to take computational shortcuts and use approximations. These approximations may have severe global effects.

To demonstrate the nonlinearity of these models there was an experiment http://www.pnas.org/content/105/9/3593.full where researchers excluded a single spike from the large scale brain simulation. The global state of simulation has diverged after 100 timesteps, compared to the version where this spike was present.
> things which definitely have nothing to do with STEM fields (sci-fi and star wars)

I respectfully disagree wholeheartedly. Many enter these industries because of their love for sci-fi. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Space X or NASA employee who wouldn't attribute at least some of their aspiration to the creations of Carl Sagan or Gene Rodenberry.
At this point, it might be weirder for a grown woman to be a hardcore fan of my little pony.
So what's actually torrented? From the blog[0] it looks like only some API data is torrented.

[0] - http://blog.aurous.me/post/130222998673/how-we-used-p2p#1302...
Elon Musk: We need to leave Earth as soon as possible
I don't care about the presence of visual advertising, nor do I think cities would be nicer if it was all replaced with reproductions of Renaissance painting. It's not that I think I'm unaffected by advertising, it's just that I don't think my quality of life is affected by it in the least.

But I do care about (actual) environmental pollution, poor economic opportunities in the inner city, overly militaristic and authoritarian policing, mass government surveillance, and the deteriorating public transit infrastructure.
Talking about "general concensus" is hard because there are a lot of different viewpoints, and depends on how much of the debate one is exposed to.

I have seen people compare systemd unfavourably to daemontools, s6, runit, Solaris' SMF, and Apple's launchd, to mention a few. I've never seen anyone so reactionary that they suggest that SysV is in any way or shape the better alternative. A lot of people are unhappy with SysV, but if they don't like systemd, they would probably consider sticking with SysV to be the lesser of two evils.

> Let's move on, acknowledge the network effects of systemd, and build something that can feasibly be the shinier, newer, better, securer systemd.

Unfortunately, I think that for those who don't like systemd, their criticisms (its design is a monolithic, intrusive, all-consuming, all-or-nothing ball of yarn contrary to Unix philosophy about small, composable programs cooperating over standard protocols) cannot be solved by improving systemd itself, at least not without a huge undertaking to redesign and break it apart, somehow.
Cinemas must 'drastically improve' or lose audiences, says Christopher Nolan
I wouldn't require any sort of thing, but given a decor of clean lines, natural colors and greenery, I'd definitely question your aesthetics.
> Sewing kits, to me, sound kinda boring.

They do to me too! However the tech industry isn't the only industry with these problems, we just talk about them more. I bought up the nurse example because it's one I'm familiar with: I dated a nurse. By the time she graduated (around 2007 I think) her academic hospital had zero, as I recall - less than 2 to be safe, male nurses. I knew some civil engineers at college, out of their whole class: 2 women.

Every industry is experiencing it in both directions. It's more unfair to women as the higher-salary industries tend to be the male-dominated. However, if my son wanted to be a nurse I'd want him to be able to figure that out and then feel that it was completely normal.

This childhood self-discrimination is pervasive and needs to be fixed.
They should just call it copying/copies. The prospect of having your copy managing your assets could be desirable, for example.
No need for a [sic]. That is how the rest of the English-speaking world spells it.
Well, note that the article is mostly about the core systemd service management part. The article also clearly studies quality of design and implementation, accepting core goals of systemd core as they are.

One problem with «shinier, newer, better, securer systemd» is that many systemd opponents want something less shiny. And systemd is big and shiny enough that _even_ sysvinit is better.

Most arguments for sysvinit you list are, for example, arguments for s6: s6 is just a supervision suite with no other ambitions, PID 1 during the normal operation (not boot/shutdown) is s6-svscan — a 32 KiB executable, and the part that requires debugging — service launch scripts — can still be a shell script.

I am a systemd hater (at least for my patterns of desktop use — systemd can be mostly fine on some servers) and my opinion of systemd is that it is mediocre as a service management, has bad logging system bundled (is https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69934#c7 fixed? can the systemd-bundled logging system give me the last 20 lines of the log without reading all 100 MiB of the log file — it previously could not?), and breaks my workflow hard (nothing similar to startx can be implemented by design http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-Feb... for example), and systemd updates make systemd try to control more of the system which I explicitly do not want controlled automatically (I have a very handy binding for standby, and I do not want the notebook to suspend on lid close; I have multiple network configuration scripts for each of three typical locations and choose between them depending on whether I plan to move around more than transfer multiple-GiB files; killing all this autoconfig requires work).

I would probably use uselessd just to avoid bothering if NixOS shipped it instead of full systemd; it doesn't so it is more comfortable for me to use a NixPkgs-based system with init=/bin/sh and minimal hand-written init scripts than stock systemd. I was capable to use systemd almost fine until systemd has ensured that startx-like functionality is impossible to get.

Edit: a typo
OP here. This is more or less a toy project. Feel free to comment or ask.
25 Reasons Why You Should Never Visit Romania
Not entirely. What's your response to this part?

"I felt out of place among my mostly male colleagues because I hated drinking beer and didn’t like being mocked for reading novels. Not to mention that the men who controlled access to the computer made me listen to a barrage of sexist teasing if I wanted to be given that day’s code to run my program."

I'm male. I don't drink beer. I read novels. I don't get mocked for either of them. I don't get sexist teasing. I have seen coworkers do that, though (in more subtle ways)—and that just sucks.

It would be a mistake to interpret or portray this article as "afraid of Star Wars posters" as if Star Wars posters are a thing that actively attacks people who are different.
>Conversely, the loosely coupled individual components of traditional UNIX service handlers (sysvinit, inetd) promoted people learning how the actually work, and what they do, but with scattered and not entirely comprehensive documentation on how they worked.

Can you tease out this distinction a bit more? It reads like you are saying, due to their nature, people learned how to use Unix service handlers, without a good understanding of how they were designed. It could also mean that people learned how Unix service handlers worked by using them, through trial and error, because the documentation was scattered and not entirely comprehensive.
What is a "general-interest" magazine? Outside of something so vanilla as National Geographic, Time, or Newsweek, I can't think of magazines that aren't market-segment sliced-and-diced.

Computer parts and tech magazines might be inevitable detritus of any office/area focused on working with technology. Do I have to lockup my programming books and hide away the spare components I'm working with?
This article isn't talking about taking away "exclusive access to jobs" from men. It's hinting at separating geek culture from software development. Let's be honest: the two interests correlate well. You're talking about stripping many practitioners of software development from their culture. Why is that just?
Why would you fabricate DNA when you could just collect some from the target, ala Gattica?
I loved C:S up until the point when my first city had all of the available building types. After that, it got very thin. Rinse / repeat. Do the same thing you did here, but again over there.

It's a fun game but I just didn't feel as involved as the SimCity series (prior to the latest, which was a disaster).
If it's any consolation, we have the same anti-intellectual secondary school culture in the UK too.
The premise of the article is that if potential students are exposed to "nerd culture" they are less likely to pick compsci than if the person they talk to avoids this environment. Not sure how you draw a conclusion about work.
> The beliefs I have would not be immitateable by such methods, even if brain uploading is achieved.

Feel free to skip it, then, but many others want the option.

> It could not properly deal with the problem of my moral imperfection.

Morals depend on the ability to empathize, evaluate the effects of your actions on others, and act accordingly. So, you can indeed give yourself the tools to become far more moral.

> Also, a computer would have only finitely many states, so it would only delay death, not prevent it, as having the same exact mental state an infinite number of times would, I think, be indistinguishable from having it only once.

There's a huge amount of theory on how fun and novelty work with enhanced cognitive ability, with many potential solutions to that problem.

Beyond that, long before we deal with the finite number of interesting mental states, we'll have to deal with the heat death of the universe. Given a few billion years to work on both problems, I think we'll manage a solution. I'm far more concerned about whether we can solve mortality before the next existential threat to humanity than about whether we can solve problems like the heat death of the universe in billions of years.
Am I the only one here that finds more issue with the open secret embedded throughout this article? The article is written from an assumption that we're powerless to overcome the desire to brand ourselves by the outward facing image of our chosen interests.

I should be careful not to state I'm not taking the position covered by the well-worn pre-rebuttal in the article. I'm not scoffing at this phenomenon. It's real and I'm wondering: why aren't we trying to make kids immune to it?

Instead all I see is people that want to exploit it and steer people into selecting careers such that the superficial representation found on a spreadsheet makes the commentariat happy.

e: It just comes across as working to makes your metrics look good, without reaching the underlying goals the metrics are less-than-perfect at measuring. If there really are societal issues keeping people that would have otherwise entered a "tech field" out, shouldn't fixing it be about helping everyone overcome the obstacles in achieving that step of self-actualization? Instead I just see social engineering designed to balance the gender ratio.
If someone can pay for these computing resources, why shouldn't he do it?
Also there is no physical law that forbids cheap brain-scale computing. 1 exaflops could easily fit in less than 1 cm^3, given sufficiently advanced logic technology.
Do persecuted non-nerds have the right to (in any way) cordon off computer science as a refuge free from nerdiness? Because that's what articles like these seem to be suggesting we'd need to do, by saying that nerd social cues like Star Wars and geeky T-shirts are excluding women.
What war are you referring to? and where has it sort of started?
Dang, shouldn't this be pointed towards the original source?

http://recode.net/2015/09/29/the-oh-shit-moment-when-growth-...

Edit. It is interesting that market saturation is not raised as a possible cause.
I think people probably do tend to type queries into search providers like Google in whatever their native language is. A web text box might not be the best example for people trying to do discrete tasks though, but at a higher level the queries are probably part of some goal like "get times for new Ridley Scott movie" or "check availability of X" . I'm not sure I can see people typing that into a launch menu, but I'm guessing that's roughly what Microsoft wanted to see happen with Cortana.

Stricly using commands, discoverability probably is still an issue. Text doesn't necessarily need to be command based though. For example, if there are 10 (100, 1000, etc...) options on a screen I suspect it's probably easier to select using text. In some ways it could be similar to a touchscreen.
Pretty scary if this is considered difficult. I actually had to redo my math's exam in high-school, so I'm trying to be nuanced here, but really, this question should be doable, at least in the Netherlands, when you're 14-15y old, way.. way before the exams. Though I might have a distorted view, since in the Netherlands you are put together with same-leveled candidates at the age of 12.
> You're talking about stripping many practitioners of software development from their culture.

Where did you get that from? I was merely attempting a theory (not excusing) on why these people act they do toward equality.
On the other hand, sewing is pretty useful. I have had many pairs of trousers whose lives were greatly extended by my making repairs to them.

Although at some point, i discovered that superglue was much easier than sewing.
I will do away with the installer and just make it a tarball for now until we can build a dmg
If you want a hard science-fiction novel about digital humans you could read Greg Egan's Permutation City, it's a masterpiece.
It's hardly sophistry. My point is the web as it stands has certain features. One of those features is that servers can't control how clients render content. I think it's pure hubris for content providers to move onto the web and then suddenly demand that things work the way they want ("you must render our ads or you're stealing") ignoring the way things actually work.

> Besides, your argument is essentially “If you want me to pay, use DRM”. I would suggest that this is not a direction we need to try going down again.

That sort of is my point, but not quite. Because once DRM is in the picture then I (and everyone else) won't partake of the content, which is what they want of me anyway. Until that time, I feel morally, ethically, and legally free to render their content as I see fit.
Agreed. Especially given our limited (read: virtually nonexistent) understanding of how, exactly, consciousness is created, it seems to me that this gradual transition through an organically integrated component is the most likely scenario by which a digital consciousness could be created.
The two aren't mutually exclusive if both are allowed. See Berlin.
I always wondered how Plumbises were made.
Discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10369053 (includes links to other discussions)
The distinctions drawn by him (and you) seem entirely arbitrary to me. Why is an atomic bomb more than just a big bomb, and voice transmission more than just an extension of signal transmission (telegrams), but somehow real-time transmission of video is nothing new? How do the first two somehow transcend "refinement" but the latter doesn't?
The basic dogma of the modern activist is that reality follows language and culture, which implies that if activists can only adequately police language and fiction, real life will eventually match their desires. The world doesn't work that way, and activists efforts in this area are doomed to produce only frustration and an inevitable backlash, the beginnings of which we're now seeing.
What line of thinking are you thinking of?
The most egregious recent example I have seen is Dark Matter.

The women are all hyper-capable, responsible and determined. The men are all petty, flawed, impulsive and frequently fighting with each other. It's absurd if you realize what is happening.
It's not that simple. Good communication is not about treating everyone the same.

"What do you think?"

Nine times out of ten, on non-trivial issues, I think that we shouldn't be making this decision here and now. The fact that you're prepared to just take an opinion (generally I have several things I can think of, none of which are held particularly strongly yet) without weighing up the pros and cons is somewhat terrifying to me.

I think: 'You're asking for my opinion of something important. And this is just not the way that one communicates on important issues - it's not professional. I will write you something, backed by appropriate research that will let me take a better guess at what's going on, so that we can make a good decision rather than us just pulling the decision out of our arse here and now.'

Sure, I'll meet you half way. Trivial issues, sure - simple question, simple answer. Complex issues? Brief me on what the meeting's going to be about beforehand and I'll put in some background reading first, we can hopefully have a decent discussion once everyone's done their homework. But... it's not a matter of just asking the question. There's significant investment in working well together there on both sides - in getting to know me, me getting to know you... us having that good working relationship that makes the question relevant and likely to be answered well.

These sorts of articles are a bit like an iceberg; a little bit above the water, lots beneath. Or the old, 'Elephant in a room surrounded by blind men.'

If you want to know what someone thinks, yeah ask them. But... you can't just ask someone the question and expect appropriate or desired output to magically appear. It relies on good relationships, correct incentives, certain power distributions, the people involved communicating in the right style, and so on...

If you know your teams, then getting input is not particularly difficult. You note how different people like to be treated and what seems to bring out the best in them. You've talked to them a lot, you've helped them develop their skills and careers. If you don't, then you end up with this sort of generalised response to something that worked for you.

The question asked to someone else, and the manner it was asked in, may very well be entirely different. That's what gifted communicators do - not just pop magical questions but alter the way they're communicating to get the best out of people who are very different in the ways they think.
> As a corollary however, is it really a good thing to push a gender towards a particular field?

I don't think the suggestion is being made to push genders toward a particular field. I believe the case being made is that the status quo is that genders are pushed towards certain careers due to cultural biases and antagonistic or hostile group behavior that goes unchecked by the larger communities in certain groups.

The question being asked is how we, as a society, can stop pushing genders into certain roles. In particular, regarding the field of computer science and engineering.
Reasons to upgrade to Internet Explorer 11
I wonder what impact self driving cars will have on billboards in the future...
One of my favorite meta-analyses in this vein is the inverted funnel of Doucouliagos and Stanley [1] which investigates elasticity in the employment market. In particular, fractional change in employment / fractional change in minimum wage. The idea is that so many studies have been conducted on this topic that if you construct a scatterplot by putting N (study size) on the y axis and elasticity (outcome) on the x axis, then you get a funnel (wide at low-N, narrow at high-N) that can (arguably) reveal selection bias since selection bias will disproportionately affect the wide, low-N side of the funnel.

Of course, this technique can only be performed if you have not only large studies, but a large number of studies -- so large that you can resolve an empirical distribution of outcomes at several different N bands. It's therefore limited to a small number of topics. Still, it's neat to get quantitative insight into an effect that is usually unobservable.

[1] pdf page # 33 of http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.398...
Honestly if it wasn't for the fact I use chromium, it be a 25mb app, Spotify has me beat by 400mb though.
By itself, yes, but

>>> all([[[]]]) == True
True
>>> all([[]]) == True
False
>>> all([]) == True
True

is pretty counter-intuitive at first glance.
Act as your own certificate authority (CA) using OpenSSL
Economics — just like psychology — is an unscientific load of nonsense which like astrology uses math to look serious when it is merely convenient metaphysical rhetoric to legitimize the status quo.
Ha, the first SFBARF meeting was actually held in my apartment, when Sonja was still not sure if it was something people were interested in. Crazy to see how much it grew.