skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Will what be simulated, is the question. When we speak about consciousness, we are referring to something internal which we intuitively know about ourselves, but cannot directly observe in others. When we have a good artificial consciousness, the external behavior will be convincing. Then we can ask: is the visible behavior just some simulation (like a mindless script being followed) or is there an internal reality which is the same as our consciousness.

Answers to the question will probably come from the convergence of two fronts: understanding better what the brain does, and correlating that with an understanding of what is going on in the machine. That is, maybe it will be shown that the kinds of states and state changes in the two are very similar (or can be mapped to each other in some way). In other words, we externalize the structures and states as much as possible and identify an equivalence. Then we can proclaim that what is going on in the machine isn't just some elaborate script; the states are actually human like: the external behavior is underpinned by apparently the same stuff that makes people tick.

We will also simply be convinced on an emotional level, due to the machines leading complex lives, demonstrating traits such as shame, regret and self-loathing, as well as joy that looks genuine. There will be depressed AI's that require therapy (possibly from humans), and ones that choose to terminate themselves. People who are not computer scientists or philosophers will be convinced that the machines are conscious, by the ways in which their lives intertwine with those of the machines and the relationships they form; only a dwindling group of skeptics will remain, even long after there is no space on the field where the goal-posts can be moved any farther.
=)

I prefer it without the target attribute, generally because I prefer navigating back than closing a window. This is especially true on phones. Power users on desktop computers usually know how to open in a tab using the third mouse button or Ctrl-clicking.
Although it's tempting, this is a game you really don't want any spoilers about (if you are ever going to play it). Vi Hart, who has been playtesting the game for months, said:

> Tips for playing The Witness: give yourself a week or two, no hints, no reviews. Sleep on it. Take breaks. It's a big game. Nothing like it.

> If you can't spend all day every day playing The Witness, give yourself months. Engage deeply with The Witness and it will stare back.

> Don't watch twitch streams or look at screenshots or read reviews. Just play it, seriously.
December/January (15/16) GNU Toolchain Update
microwave lasagne - i.e. Findus beef lasagne containing 100% horse meat (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21375594) perhaps due to cheaper horse price due to European banning horse-drawn carts on roads (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1578965/Horses-lef...)
> Clyde has better experience of actually developing programs.

Agreed. In this specific case Alice was in the right, but there are only so many problems that can be solved by installing Wordpress.
It would definitely affect user adoption with the majority of merchants.
Can they boot the bootcamp partition?
This post explained it to me, I tried it out for a month and made be a believer : http://antranik.org/intermittent-fasting/

But you're right, most of the 16 hour fast happens while you sleep.
The flipside of this is that using a framework without first understanding it is asking for trouble down the road. If you look at Rails and go "Great! Now I don't have to understand how the stack works, I can just put some templates down and have a custom blog!" you're going to be the guy who discovers that his system is slow and riddled with security vulnerabilities because you didn't take the time to understand how all of the parts of the platform interact.

This is why I always groan when I see a "solution" that involves bolting together dozens of different libraries (all out of date because updating any one would break the rest of the system) I know I'm in for a long day.

Using libraries is certainly a good thing and saves lots of time and effort in the long run, but they take more thought than most people are willing to put in. There are no shortcuts if you want to keep your company out of the newspaper as the next big data leak.

Wordpress is an excellent example. Even if you have the basic system down and have the management handled (either in house or externally), there's a dizzying array of interactions with the plugins that can shoot your foot right off. And don't think the Wordpress developers thought of all of the edge cases for you, they have their hands full on the main platform:

http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-2337/...

At the very least you need to know enough about any solution to deploy to turn off all of the features you didn't configure/don't understand/don't need. So many vulnerabilities these days happen in features you didn't even know you had.

I know the popular saying is to never write code that you don't have to, but IMHO it's less of an evil to write your own couple of hundred lines of glue than to pull in a 100MB package that depends on a dozen other packages just to get that one mandatory piece of functionality.

Most code rot comes not from the code itself going out of date, but from its interactions with external dependencies. Managing the number of dependencies makes maintenance easier in the long run. There's nothing worse than a mandatory security update for a module that breaks another external module that is no longer maintained upstream.
STMicro Exits Set-Top Boxes, Eliminates Jobs
AlphaGo: using machine learning to master the ancient game of Go
This is not correct. In the professional ranks 1p is often no weaker than 9p because often the young players start out at 1p and are very strong because selection pressure is much greater. The 9p rank in Japan also came partly out of just playing a lot for a lot of years so that accomplishment was not as great as it seems. In any case, active professional players for the most part are not dramatically stronger than one another. The range for the most part is about 2 stones, maybe 3.

Even though Fan Hui is not an active professional in the traditional sense this is an absolutely huge accomplishment and leap in playing ability by computers. BTW, Michael Redmond is not particularly strong by professional standards.

(Edit: The correlation between strength and rank now as noted below is due to promotions more often coming from acheivements: If you win at X you get promoted to 7p immediately, if you win at Y you get promoted to 9p. You cannot win a big tournament and keep your low rank. Here is an example of someone who went from 3p to 9p in one match: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_Tingyu. But professionals cannot give each other 6 stone handicaps when one is 9p and the other is 3p)
The difference this time is that real AI will be able to automate all human jobs because it will be able to endlessly create better tools via robots. When the tractor was invented, it wasn't able to drive itself, the combine, the trains, and the grain processing facilities.
Ostensibly it's the job of the state to balance the civil/privacy rights of its citizens with surveillance. It's the job of these companies to balance the monetary value of the data they collect with the backlash and loss of business they will get by collecting it, which is a very clear and explicit conflict of interest -- they benefit greatly by minimizing that backlash by, say, sponsoring conferences about protecting privacy while simultaneously eviscerating it.
More women need to create items that require placeholder images, some of which will choose to use pictures of sexy men.

In that regard, it's uneven representation moreso than sexism.
Sadly, the article doesn't mention what language the software is written is.
If only it were open source and its users had both the knowledge required, the time AND cared enough to check.
>>> the point of near-human levels of learning

Argh, these days, AI is like NoSQL a few years ago. The magical buzzword taken to an extreme level.

When do you think it will happen, the point at which AI will overtake most of the jobs done by humans? By the time it happens, the society will change significantly. Significantly enough so that it's probably pointless to guess. Will the society adapt to the change? Well, it has adapted more or less successfully to the changes so far.

Even when it happens, there will always be human factor. Humans are social, they need interaction with other humans.

We should probably slow down with all the 'AI will take everything away!' drama (which makes nice headlines which contributed significantly to this buzz, thanks a lot). We should remind ourselves, that we don't even have self-driving cars in mainstream (or, in software terms, 'production').

We are talking about a massive leap here, required in both society to accept the change and the technology to make it feasible beyond cool demos. By the time this happens, who knows. Maybe half of the humanity will go extinct because of WW3?

I get the hacker mentality, that we should try to change the world and everything. But sometimes, it's good to stop for a moment and do a reality check.
Currently, the electricity you get at home has been stepped down in voltage several times. The power station delivers it on the order of 100,000V, which gets stepped down at a sub-station to something like 20,000V, and then stepped down by a distribution transformer to 120/240V.

If the grid were DC, what would do all of that stepping down? Is he proposing replacing all of those transformers with an army of industrial strength DC-DC converters? Wouldn't that eat into the efficiency gains he is proposing (I would also imagine that that gigantic active switching solutions are more expensive and less reliable than gigantic transformers).

My first thought at a suggested alternative was "why not try increasing the frequency of the distribution AC?". This redditor explains why that's not ideal: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1u45rz/why_dont...
Making Appium Enterprise Grade
Is there any expectation that a public address (even if it's buried in a huge IPv6 address space) is in any way secret? Once a packet leaves your network, you have to assume that the world knows your IP address. If you want to keep it secret, don't let it leave your network.
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Stephen Hawkins plays chess
For the system that allocates just once at startup, I can't think of any noticeable change of performance even if allocator is 20 times slower. But, it should be memory-efficient, since RAM is really expensive on those devices, isn't it?

Standard allocators that I'm familiar with use minimum 8 bytes overhead per allocation. Umm_malloc uses 4 bytes overhead: twice less. If we have 200 allocations, it's 800 wasted bytes already.

Plus, it uses "best-fit" algorithm, so that the resulting fragmentation is far less than with the "first-fit", which is used in standard allocators. (if one really wants to, she can use "first-fit" on umm_malloc, too)
Indeed, it's perhaps one of the most fundamental questions in life, at least in my view. I only wish I could somehow peer into the distant future to see how things pan out.

It's likely that eventually the boundaries between humans and AI will blur. I guess at some point there will be cognitive augmentation, but imagine the debate that will generate. Look how we view physical enhancement by drugs today in sport.
This article just made me feel like i am 70. Thanks.
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
Why wear a prosthetic when you could become a superhero instead?
For more click on: http://www.medihealthscience.com/2016/01/27/481/
Firing people is risky for the person potentially being fired, not for the owners of the firm. Growing and shrinking over time is part and parcel of running a consultancy. That's why you see it all the time, and I'll bet if you look closer at the ownership during layoffs you'll find that they very rarely miss a paycheck and usually escape unharmed.

The fact that it's an unpleasant reality doesn't make it any more risky than e.g. having to pay taxes.
Does anybody know how is his running challenge going?
Thank you for posting our blog gitdude!

- Seamgen
"You just beautifully summarized the "Lump of Work fallacy""

The fallacy claims that the number of jobs is a zero-sum game. I'm not saying this at all. While more jobs will be created, because automation is happening at such an exponential rate, there won't be enough jobs replaced.

I have feeling when we do have AI, many of these economic principals will need to be re-written.

More from this article:

"Whereas some argue that immigrants displace domestic workers, others believe this to be a fallacy, arguing that such a view relies on a belief that the number of jobs in the economy is fixed, whereas in reality immigration increases the size of the economy, thus creating more jobs"

Immigration may increase the size of the economy, but if they are hired at let's say 30% of an American working at the same rate, it essentially dilutes the market. Americans now have to compete with someone making much less than them, which will mean a huge pay cut.

With AI, it will mean competing with algorithms/hardware that can probably be purchased for even less than the cost of a worker.

The end game for this will be a class of people owning all of this AI hardware, the poor, and a much smaller middle class of people in-between that have the skills to work on the AI hardware.

What happens to all of the people that aren't educated or don't have the skills in this new economy when all of the jobs they could do to make money have been replaced by AI?
Snowden was looking into Qubes more than Tails as a more secure alternative. But don't let the truth stop a good sensationalist name-dropping headline.
A problem here is that the project is rarely described as "customer needs a CMS". If that really truly is all that's needed, and presented as such, yes... use an off the shelf thing that has other benefits.

Usually there are a lot more gotchas that need to be addressed. Maybe WP is a valid solution, with some customization, or maybe it's not, based on a bunch of other factors the client presents (existing integration needs, skills/experience of other staff, etc).

Understanding/parsing/coaxing requirements, and setting and managing expectations... both of those are much larger factors in someone's success than lines of code, of speed of coding.

When the client reasonably comes back and says "oh, and we need XYZ to happen and tied in with the CMS". Well... you're now on a 'hosted wordpress' platform and don't have control of anything, so the tie-ins the client needs are basically impossible (or... require 10x the amount of work compared to Bob's solution). These scenarios happen. We can't always predict them, but with enough experience you should be able to predict many/most of the potential use cases (at least out a few years in the future).
So we want unsupervised learning, huh. I think this line is rather important:

> But there are lots of limitations of this approach. For one, to teach a person something new, you typically don't need to tell them about it thousands of times. So the state of the art in AI is still much slower than how we learn.

Unsupervised learning is not necessarily the answer. The computer would have to be given plenty of spare time to learn random patterns from the universe and have enough inteligence to apply these to a problem. What would be better is if we could tell the AI once and have it figure things out. When you start a new job that's what happens, someone tells you the instructions. (They may or may not show you as well, and may or may not stick around to correct your mistakes.) This requires interpreting the instructions into rules and then attempting to apply them, learning from mistakes, and then evolving that into rules that work, then after enough examples of success, evolving into patterns recognition that makes it more automatic.

Human expertise can be broken into three levels, the first is strategic planning and takes a lot of mental effort, then there are rules-based responses which are faster, then there is the muscle-memory-like automatic responses. Right now it seems we either manually program in all the rules or else we use 1000s of examples to build up the automatic level, but we don't have the strategic level for the AI to build its own rules or the level of using its rules to learn from examples over time. (Though I am not well enough versed in AI to know for sure that we don't have pieces of those solutions.)

It would also be nice for the AI to be able to take patterns it has learned and articulate them as rules which someone else could learn.
I think making that distinction would be similar to saying that a computer is not running software because it was built inside minecraft.

Although, it's possible that creating something that does what humans do requires the same materials humans are made of (but seems unlikely, or at least I think other materials will allow a close approximation).
Automated Social Media Lead Generation
You are not the only one, I'm building mobile chat applications for a living (6 years now) and to this day I don't "get" the Snapchat UI.

I believe the UI has been tweaked for users that are more impulsive. I know it sounds strange, but you open the app the first time and you are immediately asked to make a picture of something and then send it to someone. (even though you haven't seen your available contacts yet)
The chinese room thought experiment is simply annoying because it doesn't even get the questions right. It basically asks if the hardware becomes conscious/understanding when running software - instead of asking the real question - if the software can gain the understanding/consciousness. The man in the room is just a hardware component replacing a computer processor. But the only place to look for intelligence in this experiment should be in the rule-system, not in the processor executing those rules. As those rule systems decide if the communication makes sense or not. To make a real conversion the rule-system needs flexibility to handle dynamic input and thereby creating a dynamic flow between the inside and outside of the room, but that flow is about symbol manipulation, not about the symbol manipulator. I think no one in AI ever even argued that the hardware part of a computer would gain understanding.

The only good part about this thought experiment is that it makes the hard question of consciousness - how can it arise from physical phenomena - somewhat more obvious. But it's still the same question as for normal human minds and neither an argument for software systems becoming conscious nor against it.
You can surely make people fat, or lead-poisoned, or stuffed full of sugar and diabetic, or more full of meat, etc. through government decisions.

While the libertarians might have a point that most such decisions turn out to be deleterious, it's certainly not the case that policy can't make you fat, and so can presumably avoid making you fatter.
Sorry to say I agree. At the very least, a requirements.txt would be nice.
Flash Crashes also have no effect on the wider market. When you look at end of day prices for various stocks and indices, there is only a single symbol where you can actually see the effect of any flash crash:

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/flash_crash_flash_in...

Also, HFT lowers the price for people who do have information to trade with it. In this way, while HFT adds little information of it's own, it does enable better information transmission.
I'd be interested also to know what people think about taking notes on a tablet with a stylus. I've never done this, and I think it could provide some of the benefits of taking notes on paper, but not all. For example, turning physical pages and visualizing data in concrete locations would still be more helpful for me, since I'm a spatial learner.
It's worth clarifying your use of the "p" rating scale alongside the "dan" rating scale. Essentially, there's an "amateur dan" scale which is what's measured on public servers like KGS. Under this scale essentially all professional Go players rank at the maximum rank, 9 dan.

In parallel there's the professional ranking system which also uses the title "dan" but is bestowed by the professional Go associations of every country. These rankings are symbolic instead of quantified, although generally higher professional dan ranks cannot be anything but corresponding to higher skill.

So, a "European 2d" is a professional rank which may or may not have a good translation into a quantitative scale like ELO or "KGS dan" (I actually don't know). Generally, my understanding is that European professional rankings lag behind Asian ones as well by some amount.
Why Are Doctors’ Offices So Badly Run?
Higher voltages and frequencies is how you get less loses as resistance is coupled to current. The lower the current, the less the resistance affects transmission. However you can only increase ac voltage and/or frequency so much before you have another issue, the impedence of the air itself starts to create loses Also, because AC doesn't fully penetrate the wire, you have to run much larger wire sizes to achieve the same affect. At a certain point, you simply can not push more power using AC without resulting to things like superconductors.

DC OTOH, does not have the skin effect issue and so because more desirable in certain cases. In fact, high voltage DC is how they electricity directly to LA all the way from Oregon/Washington state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
Most of these yachts are rented out by their owners. I don't see anything in the article stating he was even on the ship. I'm not sure how you can hold him responsible if he wasn't even on the ship at the time this occurred.
FWIW, if you have to look to the Soviets to find favorable counterexamples, that's not a good sign, is it?
Best Practices in Software Development
Useful _to the user_.

With a smaller set of emoji, you can analyze what text often is coupled with what emoji to help infer the meaning of text automatically. Great if you want to serve ads based on private messages, less of a concern if you just want to deliver a useful product.
Actually, today has been a good news for AI. Looks like agent beats the human player at go.

http://www.wired.com/2016/01/in-a-huge-breakthrough-googles-...