skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Human consciousness isn't human, in fact it isn't even brain consciousness (since we aren't conscious of everything that goes on in our brains) but rather the property of some (comparatively) small number of neurons. Ultimately, this is just a system of coupled biochemical reactions. There isn't really a meaningful difference between a single cell and a small network of neurons in terms of specific biochemical reactions. The only difference is the magnitude of the system's complexity.

This leaves you with two options:

1.) You can posit some blessed configuration of a biochemical system that magically produces awareness, a property separate from matter. Note that since our neurons are arranged quite differently, this blessed configuration must be quite general.

2.) You can assume that awareness is inherent in matter, and any difference between a group of neurons with coupled biochemistry and a cell with coupled biochemistry exists on a continuum. Thus, any difference in awareness between a neural network and a cell is likely to be one of resolution.

If you think for a minute hopefully you'll realize that option #2 actually involves fewer assumptions.
Well ya, nothing to do with helping out Cloudflare, but however it got there random creds are being served to the world from their product. No specific criticism on their efforts to fix it, just that they bear some responsibility to make it inaccessible from their servers as fast as possible, even if its still cached in a million other spots. Shitty task but it comes with the territory.
> This is the type of magical thinking that the parent OP is referencing, vastly exaggerating ourselves or aspects of ourselves to make us exceptional.

On the contrary, this is very sobering thinking that you and the OP have tried to turn into magical thinking by adding all kinds of value judgments to it like "exceptionalism" and "supremacy". I'm not objecting to the political view, although I find it bleak, nihilistic, and shallow. I'm objecting to your nonsensical justifications of it. I was also trying to continue your talk on consciousness because I find it interesting.

> Our solar system is not a freak. Some 15% of star systems in the Milky Way are similar to ours with gas giants for away. It's not a majority, but not rare either. Oh yeah, multiply that by 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe

This is simply wrong. The sun is a single, middle-aged, population I, G-type star with a configuration of planets that is unlike any other configuration of planets we've found so far. There's more that makes our system, and Earth in particular, unique, they're all fractions, and they all get multiplied together; and we're not as ignorant about those fractions as you'd like to argue.

> (btw, the unobservable universe is 10^30 the size of our own.

This is both theoretical and irrelevant. We can never interact with it, so even if it is teeming with life, we could still be alone.

> Once again, you're employing exceptionalism and assuming that life has to resemble us and communicates in ways that we understand.

No, I'm not. I'm describing ways that make us unique. You're saying it's not that we are unique, it's just that there's nothing else like us out there so we don't know how to look for it...

> A relatively simple one is that (let's assume other lifeforms are territorial) Earth is part of some alien empire and is off limits. Another simple one is that we have been contacted but humanity isn't ready. Considering what the current response to globalization (retrenchment and reinforcement of national identity), an intelligent alien civilization could come to the conclusion that introducing themselves would make matters worse.

This argument is tangential to the discussion. But you understand that both these scenarios have been considered and some scientists have looked for evidence of them, right? Dyson spheres are relatively easy to spot and haven't been found. Evidence of engineering on a galactic scale is easy to find if it exists. And before you say, "What if it looks like natural processes because it's so ubiquitous?" scientists have looked for evidence of that too, specifically with older elliptical galaxies to my knowledge, but probably in other places.

And yes, there are other possibilities (civilizations scale down, rather than up, for instance) and we're continuing to look, but let's see evidence first. So far, the evidence says that we're probably rare. While you seem to think it is a bad thing to think or a justification for all kinds of bad thoughts, I think it means we have an obligation to both preserve the Earth and to get ourselves off of it to preserve ourselves.
>I'd suggest what keeps man from eating man

Not really the point I was making with the lion/zebra thing, but regardless:

>is a general belief in a authority higher than man.

For some, certainly. I'd venture that it's only one route available. I certainly don't believe in any higher authority whatsoever nor do I even believe that good & evil are particularly sound concepts (Moral Relativism), yet most people that know me will probably judge me a good person.
It's fun to listen to what people say, but you really need to watch what they do.
It was an accidental pun. I noticed it before posting the comment and almost rewrote it. I'm not one of those people who say "no pun intended", so I just let the pun go free for others to discover.
What about the legacy database I inherited, that the company paid several thousand dollars for, where the SQL queries were linked to the UI as GET variables?
I don't understand what you mean by We are a strange species, we can go to the moon, but, struggle to see/admit such an obvious mistake.

"The West" has seen it as an obvious mistake for decades. It's the weird power structure in North Korea that wants to perpetuate itself that is the problem (along with China preferring to have a 3rd party buffer there). I'm sure even China isn't especially happy with the situation, they just lack a clear path towards improving it.
> I'd go even further: our current presidential administration spends a lot of energy telling us that America sucks because the people in it suck

Wtf are you talking about? This has never happened.
Seriously? So when I see someone on HN who I think is clearly wrong, I can't say that? I agree that my tone could be improved, but I only said it that way in response to the parent's tone.

Also, how was our argument a "flame war"? It only lasted for 3-4 replies, and was quite civil in my opinion.

I tend to always agree with your decisions, but this one is a bit too extreme.
Wait, your CTO cried at the all hands? Like publicly burst into tears in front of the entire meeting? I'm just curious, what did someone say to them that had that effect?
Or maybe they want a candidate who asks: what are the functional and non-functional requirements for this task?

If the interviewee guesses whether or not security, speed, memory use, portability, maintainability or anything else are important, maybe they will do the same in production code.
The world is a messy place. "Critique code instead of people – be kind to the coder, not the code."
Interesting note on the North Korean suspect, Ri Jong Chol, that's in custody:

"He said Ri has a degree in software engineering from the Kim Cheak University of Technology in North Korea and that Ri had wanted to open his own IT business in Malaysia"

So...one of our own.

source: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/kim-jong-nam...
Because you are required to sign up with a company email. It's anonymous for the users, not for blind.
In evacuations, generally luggage beyond whatever people are carrying in their hands is not accommodated. So that lack of luggage gives a margin of error on weight.

The PIA stunt was especially dangerous due to it being a normal flight
The term was used in the 1880s in painting circles; it probably varies by field
Looking at the archive there does not appear to be a clear editorial opinion about what security news is. Some articles are useless in terms of security practice, e.g. the Ashley Madison settlement which is legal news and titillation but there are no lessons or reasons to change security practice.

Good luck.
> One of the things Nietzsche hated most were life denying philosophies. If your philosophy of life made you weaker, then it was evil.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. I think that Nietzsche observed philosophies and decided some that thought they were life affirming were life denying, but I don't necessarily think built into that is hatred. Indeed, I think you can take out of Genealogy that he rather admired the slaves. Their life denying philosophy served their ends, after all.

I actually think Nietzsche probably has more in common with the Stoics than not. They both seek to overcome a world that might deny them. One through acceptance, one through self-overcoming.
No bias - I consider myself one of them.

Wasn't really meant as a negative judgement - the cold is merely there to emphasise that I meant people that generally don't factor in emotions.

Didn't mean to offend anyone. I can see how it could be interpreted negatively though. :(
Weight is not the problem here.

While the plane in question is certainly larger and more powerful than the majority of the links I provided

At least an order of magnitude more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliners_by_maximum_t...

The smallest 777 can take off weighing over 200t. An extra 0.7t is basically nothing, considering even the smallest variant holds nearly 100t of fuel and consumes over 6t/h of it. In other words, 0.7t is the weight of the fuel consumed in less than 7 minutes of flight.

https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-a-Boeing-747-or-777...
But aren't you still doing that today? I believe that somewhere in your country, someone wants a big pipe on some land, but the people living there don't want it, yet they force it anyway.
I use (and like) Project Fi as well. Porting a number and/or taking the unlocked phone to an AT&T or T-Mobile store was also why I went with it. Do I honestly expect Project Fi to be around in 2 years? No.
What Buffet left out. The massive windfall from OPIC, a U.S. Government insurance program not audited by the GAO, in the buy of Mid American. https://www.opic.gov/sites/default/files/docs/claim_mid_amer...
Organized crime, war, politics and corruption?
Fair enough. It was meant to convey reasoning devoid of emotion...wasn't aimed at a negative judgement.

I consider myself one of those people so def didn't intend to offend.
Google is involved in plenty of projects that don't directly make money. They could leave it up for ad targeting if not just as a good will gesture to their community.
People who currently work at Google must see these posts here on HN every time they shut something down. The comments area always the same. Google must be aware this behavior is hurting them in a substantial way. Has anyone seen a public comment from someone at Google?

Do they really not get it or do they just not care? Or am I wrong, is this not hurting them at all?
> we never had a typing error in production

Python (currently) doesn't actually check actual types are per their annotations. Do you mean that you rely on, say, your IDE to do static analysis to ensure everything's lined up, or that just by virtue of having annotations, your team can reason about things more easily?

That's one thing I don't really like about type annotations in Py3.5+, unless you run it through a static analyser or have an IDE that understands them, they're effectively just noise. As such, I have mypy running through Syntastic, in Vim, and while not perfect it's a vast improvement over non-annotated Python.
Yep, I totally agree. Before I read this thread, I actually tweeted to 1Password to ask if they would be willing to produce some way for me to quickly cross reference the Cloudbleed sites against my 1Password vault.

I think Watchtower alerts should be based on any publicly known breach, not based on what the companies themselves say.

At this point, I consider any account using an affected Cloudflare service as potentially compromised.

This is a missed opportunity for 1Password to say that not only is your vault safe, but we will also help protect you from any potentially sites that had their data exposed.
Yeah sorry I can't edit it again now. I editted because the reason I used "evil / unreal" was because those are typically the traits given to a God to illustrate contradiction. And as religion is intrinsically overflowing with contradictions they aren't a particularly compelling way to argue against it.
Tell the victim what? "A stranger offered me money to play this prank on you." The shill knows nothing beyond that. Meanwhile your trained agents need to be a rare combination of loyal, controllable at home (via families etc held hostage), and yet still worldly enough to function as assassins!

That person knows things, and that is the person you want as little exposed (or tempted to defect) as possible.
Careful not to over-micro-dose, then it's just a really weird day at work. Heard from a friend.
There are atom (the older silvermont core, not goldmont yet I think) laptops in the market already. They run casual desktop stuff just fine.
How can that be necessary? Not a rhetorical question.
I work at Uber. I was on the wifi yesterday. I was successfully using blind. If business insider would like video evidence, I'm happy to work with their reporters 1:1.

There's a lot of problems at the company and it's been a difficult week for many of us here. Not having access to blind is not one of them.
Qualcomm will have a 48-core competitor later this year, and at 10nm to boot:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10918/qualcomm-demos-48core-ce...
I love Crystal language and am seriously looking forward to the 1.0 release later this year. I think adding Windows support will vastly increase the user base and interest in the language.
I've never heard of that, unless by "wash off" you mean "wash off and take a huge dose of atropine and some other drugs, while on the way to the hospital."

Then you definitely have a chance, but you'll have some interesting symptoms for the rest of your foreshortened life.
I've been on several overseas flights, including on US based airlines, where people were stuffed in the aisle. It seems to me to be a dangerous practice, but flight safety standards tend to be more lackadaisical outside the US.
Also they don't seem to realize how many people have caches.

Crawling the web is something that a lot of people do these days for everything from SEO (Seomoz and every other major SEO tool probably has a crawl) to web data companies (Email Hunter, SimilarWeb, etc.) to national security agencies.

I'd be surprised if there weren't thousands of cached crawls out there that managed to grab some of this data.
One of the big conservatories in the infosec world are people who sell 0-day exploits to "security companies." Some go for the tens of thousands of dollars. Ranty Ben talked about how some people live off this type of income, when it came up in a panel discussion at Ruxcon 2012.
> Eventually, somebody has to do the actual work to implement the abstract algorithms

Sure, and that's, as I said, also an essential part of programming, which is a strict superset of writing code.
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=fallibility+of+eyewitne...

It would be funny if everyone told the same story about something far more trivial than this. After all, no witness would have known what they were seeing until later, by which time they'd be relying on distant recollections of the event.

Witnesses suck.
The scope of this is unreal on so many levels.

20 hours since this post and these entries are still up ...
>a lot of overlap

Definitely. Though from what I've seen stoicism emphasises rationalising through problems more in my experience.

i.e. Here is a logical argument as to why you should not worry about this thing. Buddhist has some of that too, but the approach tends to be a bit more "spiritual" if that makes sense?
It's not that it wasn't significant at that time. It's just that in the long-term, it looks small compared to making the value of the labor of the entire population 100x more valuable.
Undergraduate Research Would Benefit from Better Comparative Data, Says Panel
I'll take a stab.

It is a very accessible work, still today. The writing is clear and simple.

It's always been a popular work across the centuries, but the form seems to work well for contemporary audiences. You can engage with at different levels, it doesn't require a deep commitment. You can read a few passages before bed time, leave it for years and pick it up again, leaf through it and skip back&forth. As you grow older, the depth of the work reveals itself.

Specifically, given the easy to digest form, Meditations is somewhat of a board room coffee table book, like Machiavelli or Sun Tzu. There is a lot in there about what it takes to be a good leader.

It is a primary work. As a reader, you will take a trip back in time, when people were, for lack of better word, different. The deep religiosity on display can come across as somewhat alien, especially since it is one that focuses on the importance of the observance of rites rather than on establishing a personal spiritual connection. It is very un-american, un-christian, and that journey is valuable in itself.

The breadth is wide. Stoicism is easily dismissed as being somewhat of a dour, pessimistic philosophy. There is undoubtedly a melancholy undercurrent in Meditations, but it is also full with love, joy, kindness, happiness. The opening sets the tone. A thoughtful thank you note to all the people who Marcus feels affectionate to. Near the end, after being reminded a great deal about your mortality, those bright colors will have lost their luster somewhat, but Meditationes leaves you with more confidence in humanity and love towards your fellow man than with less.

Marcus Aurelius was by all accounts an admirable man and an important historical figure. There is somewhat of a voyeuristic kick you get by reading something he never intended to publish. Especially when writing about his wife, his insecurities, his unpleasant views on sex, all are more personal passages than philosophical. It's been 2000 years, I'm sure we're forgiven.
Where he reports a null result. It's wasting your money, take a full dose or not at all.
>
We may in time experience a decline in float. If so, the decline will be very gradual – at the outside no more than 3% in any year. The nature of our insurance contracts is such that we can never be subject to immediate or near-term demands for sums that are of significance to our cash resources. This structure is by design and is a key component in the unequaled financial strength of our insurance companies. It will never be compromised.

Is he basically saying that the insurance business is structured in such a way to never payout catastrophic amounts? Is this a harmful thing for the insurance claimants?
Good thing they were a minor vender of nas.
Here's how I see it...

A positive decision is one that removes regulation or protects us from the government.

A negative decision is one that adds regulation or protects incumbents in the industry.

We can disagree on that, but we probably agree on the bigger issue: keeping a free and open internet. I want that as much as you probably do, I just don't believe government should play the role of guardian of the internet.

I see this specific decision as positive because it removes one more (albeit small) hurdle from competitors entering the market. Believe it or not, but all of this regulation protects the AT&Ts and Comcasts because they already have the infrastructure to comply. But a small, scrappy startup? It's hard enough building a quality service, but even harder when you have to devote a large chunk of time and money to even qualifying to play.
I think it would be healthy that Google would stop pushing out crap without long-term commitment.

"Fail fast" mantra is no excuse to not do proper product management for a company of that size. I think they just aren't very good at it.
The Photoacoustic Effect
Maybe it is just me (and I am not mother tongue English speaker) but this:

>"I thought: 'How can human beings treat other vulnerable human beings in this fashion, in public, in full view of everybody?'

Somehow makes me think that the same things if done privately and not in public could even be admissible?
It would be so weird if journalists still had this thing called integrity where they raced to verify, not release, speculation about a breaking story.

I guess we're well past that now though
Asking people with hardware background - How hard would it to build a router with NAS, API to talk to Nest etc, smoke alarm, security cam? And what would be the cost of such a device?
>I have not seen any definitive statements as to how the chemical was applied except in hacker news comments

I already quoted the text passage in the video from this BBC story, but here it is again: "The footage shows the woman in white lunging and wiping a man's face with a cloth." I assume the BBC aren't generally in your "less cautious" category.

It's fairly easy to google around and find other news outlets saying "spray bottle", and the other terms I mentioned.

Yes, I understand wild speculation. But I expect less of it from journalists.
OMG, that's very funny. I use neither Google Search nor GMail. But I do use the 8.8.8.8 DNS server. When I need to check if my internet connection is down, I ping 8.8.8.8. Very useful.
My original take on the statement was that corporate revenue wasn't going to either wages or capital investment. The other options are

1. The corporation's treasury, which is not economically useful past a certain point, or

2. Shareholders. In this case, since I don't see much evidence of major dividends, that would mean stock buy backs, which are not a great way of paying shareholders.

Returning money to shareholders is a great idea, if there is nothing better the corporation can do with it. If.

The paper is not making much sense to me, though.
The idea that we are "privileged" is what breaks this. Assume that we are not special matter, and all matter shares the property of free will. Then the leprousy is just matter (in this case, a bacterium) exerting its free will for in its own interests, ignorant of the ramifications that it has on other matter (us). Given that this happens all the time with people, I don't think it is far fetched.

Of course, I don't think the universe exists to love god, so much as the universe is "god" playing with itself for entertainment.
Can you please also fix the "escape key closes chat without any warning" feature too?
Usually, that's me a week later looking at my own code.

Sometimes, it's me looking at someone else's godawful mess, but then I try to use tact.