skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me rather of Roger Penrose's foray into consciousness in The Emperor's New Mind.

If you wade your way through it, you'll find the tl;dr is 'consciousness must be a quantum thing because quantum things are mysterious and so is consciousness- oh and look at those microtubules in those neurons - you might get quantum effects in there.'

Rather disappointing for such a brilliant man.
See also Clarke's First Law:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
We had those in the Centre Point tower, where I used to work. They were awful. As you swiped through the security barrier you'd be assigned a lift. However, if you missed the number or the barriers broke (which they often did) there was a good chance of getting in the wrong one.

There was a public restaurant on the top floor, so the lifts frequently contained panicky people riding up and down until they eventually got to the ground floor.

Also the lift systems occasionally crashed mid-journey. The lift would stop, the lights would go out and the LCD screen would blank and run through a boot sequence before everything came back up.

Stephen Fry once got stuck in one of them.
Salient point (TIL)...

We also check our bottles regularly and replace the corks every 25-30 years, which gives us an opportunity to monitor the quality of the wine.

----
Presumably they are checking its 'drinkability' among its other qualities!
Firefox reader mode did a stellar job on it
Thankfully, programmers are already waking up to the fact that C and Python are not the only choices. Compare the success of Rust.
Amsterdam-based SaaS startup Hotelchamp secures €1.75M in seed funding
We understand consciousness perfectly, being conscious beings an all. It's the physical world that doesn't make any sense.
> I have never understood all the XML-hate out there...

Me neither. I think it's truly irrational.
Quake3's PAK (.pk3) files were actually .zip files -- renaming them would let you extract them (in WinZip trial version, probably)
Why do you assume I didn't read it? There is currently no effective vaccine for Dengue, I don't know why they classify their work as "very successful" (well you can call it very successful to previous attempts at vaccination against Dengue but it's not the Polio vaccine, not even close) but there are currently only a few vaccine candidates.

The closest thing we have currently to a working vaccine is Dengvaxia[0] which has an efficacy (should not be confused with vaccine effectiveness, there are many more factors that could affect effectiveness in the end including mutation rates CYD-TDV has only had a few trials and it's a very new vaccine) of about 50% (slightly higher with adults) this isn't what most people in the west consider a "vaccine".

http://www.who.int/immunization/research/development/dengue_...

One should also note that while some countries have approved Dengvaxia or another vaccine for the most part all of them are still medical trials (phase 1-3).

The point I was trying to make and the article somewhat glossed over is that while vaccination attempts are good, mosquito control and safe sex are going to be still considerably more effective.
Mosquito control will be a problem in the US, NIMBY and conspiracy nutcases are just going to love man in white overalls going around spraying stuffs but that's pretty much the most effective way of dealing with Zika.

While the Mosquitos do spread they creep rather than migrate, they rarely travel more than 500 meters (unless they piggyback on something) from where they hatched so spraying, controlling exposed water sources and using biological pest control (spreading sterile mosquitoes and biological larvicide) works pretty darn well.
Zika also spreads through sperm so treating it like an STD also is pretty effective a fairly substantial number of cases was reported due to sexual transmission and condoms are pretty darn cheap and effective at stopping it and plenty of other things along the way.
Presumably your appletv doesn't say "Apple TV (100)" like mine does when I connect to it. I've got some sort of virulent strain of discoveryD and it's awful.
It's the only way to do a non-local return, otherwise you have to make sure you check every error return condition. That's part of why Rust forces the programmer to check all return values, I believe.
> Cones are a smart way ...

Cones will keep you near the parked cars, too.
This was truly enjoyable.
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> The "trap" that is the Labor Theory of Value may not be the most profitable but maybe it's the most ethical

The labour theory of value doesn't even logically hang together in any way, when you think about it.

Okay, let's suppose I spend a whole week making a giant sculpture of a dog turd out of macaroni and glitter (suppose also that I've done a terrible job even within those parameters). What is the value of that dog turd? According to the labour theory of value, it's worth quite a lot... but nobody is actually going to be willing to exchange anything else of value for it. So in what sense does it have value?
Excellent point. We have received technological advancement reliably and automatically for a long time. "Oops looks like we can have navigation software on the phone, just like that." - "Oh and VR goggles have just become viable, thanks Moore's Law".

There is plenty of stuff to do with our current hardware, but a new breakthrough would be nice.
If I was to give my unqualified, layperson opinion, I'd say "horse feathers". Consciousness probably isn't "hard" at all. It's a massively parallel brain architecture (which by its widely-spread and slow nature can't accurately self monitor) using theory-of-mind circuitry (developed to handle interpersonal social relations) to model and monitor its own operation.

But it feels more sparkly and special to treat it as a mystery.
What religious stuff?
In my experience all those "consciousness is otherworldly magic" people are at least heavily influenced (1) by the religious interpretation of the "magical uniqueness" of the humans compared to the all other living beings. Wishful thinking. Then comes the "free will" and other also "magical" thinking. Especially easy to sell in the US (2)

And we aren't made of anything other than what all the animals are made of, and the underlying processes in our brains aren't physically unique. And there's no "spirit" or "soul" needed to explain anything.

The word spirit comes from Latin spiritus "breath." Ditto for the term for soul "psyche" which comes from the ancient Greek psykhe with the original meaning "breath." That's all that "leaves us" when we die (as we "have our last breath") and from where all the magical thinking came.

The consciousness is just a product of evolution, and "a kind of self awareness" exists by animals too. Not much different from what we observe by ourselves, and actually of direct evolutionary advantage.

More about all that:

http://www.vice.com/read/sorry-religions-human-consciousness...

http://www.livescience.com/26338-crabs-feel-pain.html

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/01/free-will-is-dead-l...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

---

1) if themselves not explicitly declared believers or at least philosophers, the latter having all the incentives to mystify the topic and stay away from the hard sciences

2) 4 of 10 in the US believe "that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago: http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-h...
I just had a chuckle: the Chrome tab I have open now (for this HN story) reads "The Internet of Poo" with the rest of the sentence faded out & cropped. How fitting
> will certainly affect how fast certain jobs can be automated, but that automation does and will happen is undeniable.

But that's a relevant point. The main question in the automation debate is not whether it happens, the question is whether job destruction due to automation happens fast enough to outpace the usual job creation mechanisms (appearance of new market segments etc.).
Frames! The article missed them.

Oh boy, did I love frames.

That, and fixed backgrounds
If you're blocking an emergency vehicle in the UK by bad parking they have the right to smash your vehicle to get past - and it's your fault.
Relevant: Profitable Until Deemed Illegal (2008)

https://blog.codinghorror.com/profitable-until-deemed-illega...
arj ... daaamn. That brings back some sweet memories to the soundtrack of a modem handshake whistle. Good thing we still have Norton Commander in a form of Far Manager to show some of the past glory to youngsters :)
>I would be willing to code in a not-so-beautiful language for a summer

Career advice: don't be a primadonna.

Even actual literal primadonnas don't start out as primadonnas.
Could get traction on Kickstarter with a good video.
I would venture a guess that this is a case of “better safe than sorry”, although admittedly I don't know what the exact verbiage on an UK egg carton is.

Some supermarkets may decide to refrigerate the eggs, even if it is unnecessary. The shell of a cold egg will get wet when it warms up (condensation), and bacteria on the shell will thrive. This could lead to dangerous levels of contamination on the shell, and some of it might make it's way in your body.
And a journalists' views on string theory :-/

"Just because Witten is a genius does not mean he is infallible. He is wrong, I believe, that string theory will eventually be validated,..."
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> Of course the real explanation of consciousness will be both profound and mundane

The expectation of something does not guarantee its existence. Words are created to define the expectation of something unexplained, only to be discarded when the expectation is unmet.

Take the word "miasma". At some point in history, a belief was born that all diseases came from gaseous poisons emitted by rot. Then the miasma theory got definitely discarded when we got the ability to view germs, which are simply distant cousins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory

Take the word "aether". Since waves on the sea were carried by water and sound waves by air, it was assumed that interplanetary space was filled with a substance that light (assumed to be just a wave back then) was carried through. It was called aether. It turns out the real explanation of aether is not profound nor mundane: there is nothing, and that nothing expands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories

I don't really understand why it is hard to accept that there is no after-life, that all our activities are the sole result of chemical transmission of signals in our brains... that there is no point of view, just local chemical storage of information.

But it was hard for our ancestors to fathom that humans were part of a phylogenetic tree encompassing all Earth life forms, that we as a species were not special. It was hard for them to fathom that space is relative, that there is no center. I suppose it is always hard to accept that there is no reference point in the universe.
Are you a neuroscientist?
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It may be a mystery for some time, but I suspect we'll figure it out eventually. Given the rapid pace medical science understanding has gone through in the last several hundred years, it seems likely.
> The amount of photons in the scintillator is proportional to the energy deposited.

Exactly: it is proportional to the energy deposited in the scintillator! Which, for a cosmic ray, can be a tiny fraction of the total energy. In order to measure the kinetic energy of a particle, you need to stop it. In that case, your detector is called a calorimeter.
Regarding the mentioned Moore's law, do we really have 1000 times more computational power on consumer devices than we had in 1996?
> The basis of that opinion is my belief that the use of downvotes to express disagreement often has a more positive net effect on Hacker News than a comment expressing disagreement.

I beg to differ. I have the impression that there are many large topics that the HN community as a whole has pretty homogeneous opinions on, and that this "community opinion" is self-reinforced by (amongst others) down-voting comments that do not conform to it. IMO, that is an open door for confirmation bias. And I don't think that that is something we want to be associated with...

Having said that, I fully agree with downvoting comments that are obviously only trying to start an argument. However, I would not do so because I disagree with the opinion, but on the basis that such arguments for the sake of argument are "a net negative to the discussion", as Udo put it.
I've read a critique of this approach, which critiques the basis of this assumption - "laws of physics". It goes like, that living systems does not follow laws of physics completely, but rather, as time progresses, establish new laws. And we have the word Emergence now. New laws emerge from within the interactions of the system, they are not posed apriori.

Would be happy if someone more knowledgeable could elaborate.
I don't think I mistook you. The Popular Mechanics piece gives an example of quoting body language from Audrey Hepburn in the 1953 movie 'Roman Holiday'.

I don't know how I'm supposed to interpret that loop, or how it fits into any context. I can think of multiple interpretations, and have no way to figure out which one is meant, or if that mixture of interpretations is the point.

It's "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" for me, but without even the search ability that the text phrase has to figure out how it's used in context.

Do you have an example of how quoting is used in a good way?

> "quotations of body-language "acting" depicted in a TV show"

Similar problems exist in TV shows when actors require the watcher to know the allusion (or "quote") in order to understand what's going on. I remember as a kid watching the old Loonie Tunes and recognizing there was a gag, but not understanding it. My mom would explain that it depending on knowing that they were referencing some piece of 1950s American pop culture.

When done well, the quotes fit in smoothly. You don't need to know it's from an external source, though knowing that it does provides extra depth and texture. For example, see "References to 70-80’s movies in Stranger Things" at https://vimeo.com/175929311 .

But in mixed media of text and video, it's very hard to make a smooth transition. That's why I wrote that the clips seem to stand out in large font, exclamation points, etc., as a "look at me!" attention grabber giving the quote far more attention as a quote than as a supplement to the conversation.
You assume a specific implementation. In the movie, we only see the display moving from one screen to the other. That is a problem solved since the 80s with X-Window.

More recently, all enterprise application UI are actually web UI. So that's just moving a browser window from one screen to another, so just a refined Apple "Handover".

On a more hardcore fashion, we can move a whole VM almost seamlessly. At some point that could be the case with containers too and that may not be that far fetched to move single process after all.
It could be replaced with != 0. But an implicit conversion from integer to boolean like in C is not possible.
Okay, fine, but why am I in here experiencing it?
I'd totally forgotten about the Book of Mozilla easter egg ('about:mozilla' in Firefox's url bar). Just re-checked, and yup it's still there, albeit a different text.
What makes you think they'd do a good job?
To answer my own question, it's in ES6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9813277
A very good book about what we currently (minus 3 years, perhaps) know:
https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Codes...
thank you, thank you , thank youuuuuuuuu!!!!!
I've got a Theta S and it's a wonderful, simple piece of kit. Obviously one of the drawbacks of most handheld 360 devices in this context is you'll be in the shot, unless you mount it out of view and use the app to take the picture - which is a bit of a faff to ensure on the fly.
There are a lot of really annoying quirks about Haskell. It is a beautiful language but after using it professionally for a while, some things come to mind that really make me pull my hair out of frustration (although I understand why they exist).

My biggest gripe is record handling. There are a few libraries that help dealing with the pain of records, but if you're using 'vanilla' Haskell, they really can be frustrating.

For instance, any field name in a record pollutes the global namespace for that module.

data MyRecord = MyRecord1 { name :: String } | MyRecord2 { name :: NameType } <-- This is an error because the "name" field can't be both a String and a NameType (a made up type, just for the example). You need to use something like rName or r2Name to differentiate the two constructors...

...Which leads me to the other problem of different record constructors of the same data type having different fields, which can lead to some very ugly runtime exceptions (so much for a strong type system!):

=> data MyData = MyData1 { name :: String } | MyData2 { value :: Int }
=> let x = MyData1 { name = "hello" }
=> x { value = 0 } -- <-- this causes an exception because 'value' field does not exist for the constructor MyData1, but does for MyData2 so it matches the type system and there is no compile-time warning to catch it.

Another big issue I've recently had with my code was dealing with multiple constructors into pattern matches/pattern guard conditionals. For example, I have a record type like this: data

MyData = A { ... } | B { ... } | C { ... }

and I want a case to match either A or B, otherwise do C. Let's say I have a function f1 that I want to run on A and B, and a function f2 that I want to run on C. I'm forced to do something like

case myData of
A{} -> f1
B{} -> f1
C{} -> f2

Whereas I'd love to be able to do

case myData of
A{} or B{} -> f1
C{} -> f2

This becomes a big problem when I have a lot of cases to take care of, and repetition makes it harder to spot bugs and easier to mess up.
I thought they were dead myself, they really missed the boat in creating the original reddit type site
There is one big white box across the screen that forces me to login to that web service when I want to read the text, so I actually can not read it.

You, the people, have to understand that you must not use that freedom destroying web service when you want to keep your freedoms.

It has gone much too far and we have to take consequences, this is a serious question about your real life freedoms, not a game or a simulation.
A Web Audio experiment – detecting piano notes
I would agree that London is a fast flowing city when it comes to cycling but it is also a pretty dangerous one. I've personally seen another cyclist killed while out on my bike and I know we have a bit of a problem with just how dangerous the roads can be while on a bike.
But in terms of particulate emissions it is very significant. Upwards of 60% of total sulphur emissions and accounts for over 60,000 deaths per year. At room temperature you can walk across the surface of the fuel. It is nasty stuff and the scale is quite large.
When phones were wired you didn't 'upgrade' your phone for years if not decades.

All the end of Moore's law indicates is the end of the free lunch: free performance increase for software without any work on that software.

So instead of 'doom and gloom' I predict a very healthy re-surgence in reduction of bloat and efficiency, something that as far as I'm concerned can't happen fast enough.

FWIW my cell phone is 6 years old and as long as it works I'll happily use it. If a phone is a status symbol or a fashion accessory then there are plenty of ways to get people to upgrade even if the underlying tech doesn't change so I'm quite sure that manufacturers will find a way to re-package the same tech in ways that allows them to sell into the elective replacement market.
> perhaps each of us has multiple consciousnesses within

You're not far from the truth. Every piece of your brain still alive works roughly as the whole, even when cut off from the rest. Every part of it can make complex decisions (although past a certain size, it's not going to be very smart).

See experiments on a patient with a severed corpus callosum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx53Zj7EKQE
Hard numbers from Amazon? I'm sure an unlabeled graph has been released at some point showing some kind of hockey stick growth.
This is actually very similar to a question I was asked when interviewing to read Maths at Oxford. In the Oxford version, your brother and you are also playing a game. You have a 2-dimensional block of chocolate with a poison piece somewhere in the block. The poison piece is bright green to the eye. You each take it in turn to break off some chocolate (you have to follow the rows and columns of the chocolate, and the break must be a single break). To win you must avoid eating the poison piece and end the game by handing it to your brother. You have the choice of going first or second? When should you choose either?
Yes, and there is quite a big difference between highways and city driving. In the city you are just racing to the next stop, even if it took a whole 10 seconds until it was safe to pass the cyclist. How long is one red light?
Yeah, I assumed you meant that.

That's not something that's intended for consumer hardware, it's a special purpose CPU used in high-end networking hardware. It's been around for a while, the only real news in that was the upstreaming of the LLVM backend code. It did cause some unwarranted rumors, though.

A quick peek at the actual code reveals that it's not a general purpose CPU. A few web searches will tell that it's a custom CPU used in Myricom's LANAI networking products. There's a much older GCC backend and other compiler tools for it available too.
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Valid but introduces undefined as the first item of the array
Re-frame 0.8 released
What's the argument that this is gambling? Or rather, that this is gambling while eBay is not?

I understand on a rational level that this is less fair to bidders and a bad model if you want to just buy things, but I don't see where this is a game of chance instead of a consequence of who is participating.
It's you.

Your last question is loaded; it assumes maximizing profit is bad. In practice high profit margins are often a reward for being first to market. Maybe those high margins are a recompense for R&D costs. Plenty of answers to rebuke your suggestion that maximizing profits is unethical. It's also a situational topic made more nuanced by the specific product, company and many other circumstances.
Yes, C++ is a particularly easy language to get that wrong, where float * can be a pointer to scalar, vector or 2d array. Other more strongly typed languages, like Python, will make those errors easy to spot with any sort of test case.

Beyond strong typing, do you get the sense that static typing significantly improve prototyping ability for matrix analysis code?
I agree that not having realistic VR due to a lack of hardware performance would be sad, but my arguments mostly concerned the global economic collapse (or rather, a lack thereof) mentioned in the parent comment.
You mostly don't self-experience. Mostly you experience what's going on around you, and what you're doing and physically feeling. Mostly, you don't act consciously. But when you direct attention at your own experiencing, or at your own actions in a deliberate way, a subsystem dedicated to that task wakes up and provides you with a homunculus self-model. That would be the 'I'.
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But before you can create the universe you need to create at least two membranes.
Could be anything, as long as it is insulating.

Advantages would be: reduced noise coupling between devices, and it would open the possibility to make multiple layers of transistors.