skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But if your consciousness is separate from your physical brain, how come pumping certain chemicals affect consciousness on a very fundamental level ?

I would argue that it doesn't.

Consider the following changes to your conscious experience:

- You stub your toe. Your experience changes to include pain.

- Someone says your mother's name. Your experience changes to include thoughts of your mother.

- You take LSD. Your experience changes to include a range of thoughts, sensations, and hallucinations characteristic of a psychedelic experience.

Which of these would you say count as a change to the part of you that we have been referring to with the word 'consciousness'?

I would argue that none of these are changes to what your consciousness is; your conscious experience continues to simply be the feeling of what it's like to have your own thoughts.

As your thoughts change, your experience of having them changes, but your consciousness never ceases to be anything other than the experience of having your thoughts. On a "fundamental level" nothing about consciousness has changed. Your consciousness is still sitting in a movie theater, watching your brain play out - it's just watching a different movie.

My argument rests on the view that your consciousness is not the haver of thoughts, but is the unexplained witness to the actual haver of thoughts - the brain.

As evidence for this I'd ask you to imagine what would happen if we built up, piece by piece, a perfect computer model of your mind.

It would have the same thoughts, it would express the same ideas, and we could look at the state of the computer at each moment and explain exactly which structures in your mind led to, for example, whatever you choose to say in response to this comment.

At no point would we find some sort of mysterious glitch in the computation, a glitch that we would have to assume was the point where the magic extra-physical force of consciousness entered the picture and exerted its control.

The mind and its thoughts must work without consciousness, as such consciousness can only be the experience of watching the mind do its work, and not an integral part of its functioning.
While we're waiting for miracle drugs to become available, how about some high intensity aerobic training to reverse aging: http://www.kurzweilai.net/mayo-clinic-discovers-high-intensi...
No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter
Recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13580390
My original point was that people not wanting to make sacrifices was why we're probably doomed as a civilization.

But, they will inflict greater losses on other people by doing so. Overall, dealing with this issue is the cheaper option and cheaper = less sacrifices. So your question is equivalent to "How can you stop running up the credit card bill if that will stop us from spending money right now" and acting like I'm the irresponsible crazy person.
> Powerful* text editors built on the web stack

I've identified the problem
Wow! Time to give Lyft a try. Thanks!
Why AWS and public clouds are a great fit for digital health companies
Someone mentioned in an above comment that the uber app already supports the driver collecting GST.
Ordered a copy. Thanks for the suggestion! I've been looking to read a bit more non-fiction :)
Why are you eulogizing an existing product? Build something better or use something else.
downvoted
Fishing in Finland
This isn't about reasonable.

Theres tons of data out there, literally an entire field of work in science.

And that entire field of work is regularly debunked and debated with such old adages as - "scientists have an incentive to get grants, so they keep putting out material which the < evil illuminati types > want to hear".

And I've seen such arguments on HN.

I think there isn't any convincing left to be done, at most link people to sources and if they are motivated they'll cover it themselves.

Whats left is collective action.
This is Hacker News, we all are.
There's always something we can do. If we can't prevent the problem from happening, we can try to slow it down, mitigate its effects and eventually reverse it. Can't imagine a worse reaction now than just giving up.
Hacker News clearly knows how to DDoS websites.
Exploring helsinki in HTC VIVE
downvote get out of here reddit
Too many scripts and plugins. A typical website has hundreds of pages worth of JavaScript that must be rendered
Have you used iCloud Photo Library? Syncs between your devices and you can have it store local copies on your Mac so you have cloud and local copies (and you can backup the local copies with your usual solution). Much safer than sync IMO because the photos are synced and backed up before you can get to a computer (useful if you're on vacation and without a computer for a couple of weeks).
This may be controversial, but aren't GMOs really the way to go?
Retrieve YouTube playlist videos using YouTube API
The key aspects to consider when executing a smooth move to the cloud
An adopted girl claimed by 50 birth families
Uber doesn't meet its responsibilities as a direct employer because those responsibilities would increase their costs, like scheduling drivers for shifts. And Uber has tried in the past to prevent its drivers from working for competitors. They pick and choose, oh our drivers are independent contractors but we're also going to just take their individual tax exemptions and apply them to ourself. Come on...

Just because Uber doesn't adhere to our common social contract doesn't mean they don't have to. Unethical behavior is not justification for that same behavior.
Or on a log.
Of course - I should have added that I don't neccessarily share the sentiment behind those jokes (quite the contrary). For me they are just inevitable (social) indicators for "non-native" software (i.e. I'd say anything with significant code running through an intermediate representation or virtualization at runtime).

As such I simply found emacs an odd choice as an example.

BTW: Notepad++ uses .dlls as plugins. (Which doesn't neccessarily make it a better editor than emacs :) )
Syncing is broken on all phones, practically. MTP is a disaster.

These days I just use Syncthing on Android. What works best for me on my desktop is Rhythmbox and a bindfs mounted to the Syncthing directory, which contains a file named ".is_audio_player".

https://almost-a-technocrat.blogspot.com/2010/11/isaudioplay...

After that, multiple playlists, podcasts, transcoded or not: it can handle it all wirelessly.
Expert talk: AWS best practices for reserved instances
And they remember to shield any Raspberry Pis in the area.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/xenon-death-flash-a-free-ph...
Lord John Krebs – “Climate Change and Post-Truth Politics”
I thought Hackernews only used Fastmail?
Honest question, if it does turn out that these have a bad effect, and they can detect the bulges, can't they start draining them before they pop?
This reminds me of an effective technique for hacking an election: keeping the people who would vote against you from coming out to vote at all. For example, by threatening a law and order crackdown in the area. Busting people for minor traffic infractions, checking if they have outstanding warrants, etc. This is greatly facilitated by per-booth vote tallies, and pushing people to use a local booth.

It might be that electronic voting would allow voting from many places, and hence alleviate the problem. But I'm guessing there will still be restriction of polling booth locations to make it inconvenient for some people to vote.
Slashdot effect on the Xfce bugtracker...
Maybe working for Uber became more like driving a taxi... dun dun dun
I've accepted that if the worst predictions are true, we're doomed.

No one is willing to make these sacrifices. How much energy are we wasting having this discussion here? How much energy is wasted on computers and entertainment and machine learning and bitcoins and other popular topics here?

How much energy do celebrity environmentalists and "green" politicians waste flying around the world?

Has any Democrat proposed making serious sacrifices to stop climate change?

It seems to me that there are always two sides in this argument: one denies climate change, the other expects it and changes nothing.
Typically in Javascript, you would use npm's package.json for building, or you would use npm to install some well defined version of some build system, like you do for other packages. Like Maven builds, it works smoothly and predictably.
Ask HN: Help us select talks for a programming conference
I'm organising a tech conference about programming languages in Paris this summer [1]. We just started « community voting », a process which aims to give a voice to potential attendees so they can help us decide what should be featured at the conference. It's a way to bridge the communication gap with the audience and to provide the content that in a better way matches the audience interests.

Would you be willing to help us select the best presentations ? The list of talks is here:
https://eventil.com/events/polyconf-17/voting

[1]: https://polyconf.com/
To clarify: I'm not arguing that blockchain technology is useless for enterprises. I'm requesting concrete examples of blockchain technology solving a specific B2B-issue better than existing technology. All I've heard so far are vague, theoretical examples, while no one seem able to point to a concrete B2B-issue, and explain how and why blockchain technology solves this issue more efficiently.
I have a friend who works for Exxon material science division. His goal in life is to find "the next oil", obviously Exxon is willing to hedge its bets and fund some alternative energy research so they can position themselves if a new breakthrough is discovered.

Here is the problem: Oil is currently the most energy packed material that humans easily have access to. And its not even really close, wind / solar / etc are not just 40% less efficient, more like orders of magnitude.

I think the demonization of oil may be causing more total CO2 than just burning it. A craze starts which convinces everyone to buy electric cars - except those rare earth materials for the batteries are really hard to find. They require millions of tons of mining to gather enough a usable quantity for one electric vehicle.

How does all that mining get accomplished? Certainly not in a CO2 friendly manner. Where does the electricity come from to charge those batteries?

Many reasonable people in the energy industry are eager to find a "better oil" but realize that rushing off into hysterical tulip manias is probably doing more harm to the enviroment than just using the 'cheap / easy' oil that we have.
My experience working through Toptal has been mostly positive (although I haven't done a contract through them in quite a while).

I failed my initial application due to my inability to solve a couple of algorithm specific tests as other commenters have mentioned. I reappllied a couple of months later, did a couple of codility tests to ensure I'd pass this time, and flew through the rest of the process.

Yes, their signup process will potentially disquallify a couple of good devs, but it will also weed out a lot of bad devs that can't take the time to learn the solutions to common algorithm problems.

Once in, they have a variety of jobs available, some good, some bad. Overall I don't mind working for them. I've been happy with the Upwork dev's I've hired so far, so can't comment on if I'll hire through Toptal.
Except this actually ensure that no client will be pissed off because he confirmed his purchase only to discover that price dropped 1 min after...

By interrupting current carts and letting customers wait a few moments it help easing out this kind of bad surprise. And by the time store get back up frustrated customer already had time to figure out that he just have to make a phone call to modify order and that's not so harsh all in all.
"Big if true."
Case in point:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13944757

:)
The deeper problem is monoculture versus multiculture (if that is the correct word).

Our farming is currently focused on monoculture: only one kind of crop on a large field. Mainly because its efficient in maintenance and picking because it makes all kinds of mechanization possible.

But monoculture is not good for the soil and bad for health of the crop. Therefore pesticides and fertilizers are needed.

An alternative could be multiculture. Like for example http://jinjaritual.com/syntropic-farming/

A very divers pallet of fruits and crops in the same area. The soil will only get better and the plants protect each other. Just as in the 'real nature' ;-)

The downside is losing the efficiency: getting all the different fruits and crops from the field is more labour intense. But the general maintenance will be much cheaper (no pesticides and fertilizers). And the yield will be healthier and probably more nutritious.

The other downside is more commercial: the big companies that sell mechanized stuff, pesticides and fertilizers will always educate farmers into monoculture.

But especially for more poor countries (or poor farmers !) a multiculture would be much more beneficial...
April 1st early this year?
> Or it might kill you from some weird reaction.

Given that the alternative is definitely dying, I'd take my chances with the pill after trials have shown it to be sensibly safe.
For people who haven't read this article -

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36228/ballad-of-the-sa...

Climate scientists are depressed because of the results they are seeing.
Did the title get modded to remove the reference to music? It's a terribly unclear title as it stands.
As if JavaScript would be the only option.
But if you make the old people younger, you won't need young people to care for them - they can just re-enter the market.
> But can it? To say something is an illusion is to say that is really an experience of something else.

Your definition for "illusion" begs the question by simply assuming a subject is needed, ie. an "I" must experience an illusion. Rather, an illusion is simply describing the relation between perception and truth. If a perception, taken at face value, entails a false conclusion, then it's an illusion.

Even the basic dictionary definitions of illusion make no reference to a subject. They're all of the form of "a false idea or belief", or "a deceptive appearance or impression". Beliefs and appearances are attributes we can ascribe to mechanistic systems too, like computers, which can have sensors plugged into Bayesian inference engines that can infer false "beliefs".

So requiring a subject is a property that you have imposed on the meaning of illusion, it's not intrinsic to it.
They have WAY too many employees. They need to cut half, and become profitable.
Do you know how much one could expect to earn as a Toptal developer?
Blizzard is getting rid of the Battle.net name
Unless I've missed something, WALTR doesn't solve the author's smart playlist / generate a "new playlist of the day" problem.
It's kind of a crazy concept, especially if you are old enough to remember the days where RAM was counted in kilobytes and you would optimize assembler code to save clockcycles.

On the other hand, this is 2017, and people apparently don't care much about the footprint of their software, as long as it's convenient and it solves their problem. And ultimately that's what counts I guess.
“Peak Framework” and the runtime barrier: why libraries/frameworks are exhausted
In theory, yes. But that depends on how many healthy cells or stem cells that change to replace them there are. It's a big complex problem really that I think people understate. It's part of why we heal so well up to a certain point in our lives (the ability to remove and kill off faulty or old cells). This wouldn't be a fountain of youth but more like a fountain of "not needing a nurse to wipe your ass when you're 95."
Except it's not going to be back for almost two hours...
And reddit. It was a top post recently https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60rzjn/my_cat_was_fo...
This internet-connected box is 275 x MORE efficient than a tree
iTunes is the single worst piece of software I'm still forced to use. I would pay $100 for a better piece of software but Apple has their walled "garden". And they have billions but can't hire PMs and engineers that can build a better piece of software. So fuck them.

Anyone foolish enough to build a music listening system on top of them unfortunately deserves whatever they get. I don't have much sympathy.
Fable F#-to-JavaScript Tool Integrates with Microsoft .Net Core SDK
Having no personal life is the new uber-cool, says Harvard study
Netflix serves over HTTPS and uses HSTS. Under most circumstances, you aren't going to be able to MITM them and "grab their info" even if you've compromised their WiFi.

You keep coming up with these claims about how easy this is, yet you also keep missing basic technical points about the system actually works. As I've said before, if there is actual evidence that someone's account was compromised then they can produce that as part of their defence in court. However, if content that is watermarked to a specific account turns up all over the Internet, that is evidence suggesting that the person in question has infringed copyright, and that does need a real defence if the rightsholder chooses to take legal action accordingly.
It means both :) . It can take on either meaning based on the context.
Interesting idea. As someone who's never found Twitter interesting, I'd love to witness such mayhem. I've always felt Twitter is too focused on who is saying what, instead of what was being said by who.

Of course even if the content was more interesting, the platform would probably still hinder my curiosity. It's like I'm walking into the middle of someone else's conversation, with little-to-no context.
Discourse uses Ember. It's pretty successful. http://www.discourse.org/
This also sadly seems like why little will be done in time. :(
I didn't claim it does. Reducing the size of government decreases the amount of money the government needs to operate without incurring additional debt. If the government were less expensive to run, officials wouldn't need to invent new ways of taking money from the people.
Could you give a concrete example of how blockchain technology can reduce costs associated with accounting, auditing and settlement? Just a single, concrete example is all I'm looking for.
Regardless of any real or tin-foil-hatted dangers regarding pesticides, GMO, etc, I believe that biodiversity in and decentralization of our food supply are two vectors of robustness & anti-fragility that we should embrace, as opposed to optimizing outputs for monoculture monopoly farming.
No problem, I made the jump to intrinsic value [of labour] myself.
> Angular 2 is a different framework, plain and simple.

I wonder if, strategically, it would have been a better idea to give it a new name rather than a subsequent version number?
Scientifically, it's not controversial. The consensus about GMO's being good is stronger than in the climate change case.
LocalStack: A fully functional local AWS cloud stack
What's been your experience with browser-side debugging? The one thing that scares me about typescript is you end up debugging something you didn't write.
They have something called underground water banks.

This billionaire named Resnick owns a large percentage of Kern water bank. He also owns a huge almond farm. Almond take something like a gallon of water to grow 1 almond.

He uses huge amounts of water. Other entities pay him for water. The federal government pays him for water--I don't know why.

It's all rather confusing, but private individuals shouldn't be hording/profiting off underground aquifers? The laws around these water banks are confusing.

This billionaire has taken so much water for his Fiji Bottled Water; the islanders are supposedly having to buy water? It just doesn't seem right. He ran the wells dry by serving us fancy overpriced water?

There always been a big push-pull between farmers, and Northern California. The movie Chinatown, with Nickolsan, and Dunnaway made a fictional movie about the corruption in water rights.

This Resnick is not doing anything illegil.

I just don't know how a private citizen can have so much power over a natural resource.

As to the fill rate of the aquifers; I don't have a clue. They seem to want to keep it quiet. It's seems like it would be easy to measure? I all for water conservation. I'm not for rich guys doing what they want with all of our water.

http://articles.latimes.com/2003/dec/19/local/me-kern19
> He spends inordinate amounts of time heavily suggesting that consciousness is an ephemeral nothing that we're not just ignorant about, but mistaken about.

That's right, it's an illusion, in the sense that we perceive ourselves to have some irreducible subjectivity, but we actually don't.

> But when pressed enough, then he retreats to a just barely reasonable stance that's closer to Chalmers than the stances he spends most of his time communicating.

I'd like to see a citation for that, because as far as I've seen, Dennett hasn't changed his stance on this subject in over 20 years, and he's been very straightforward about his position in every interview I've watched or read.

And what he thinks is quite clear: he's a straight up materialist. Qualia don't actually exist as some irreducible phenomenon and consciousness is an illusion. He's published multiple books on the subject arguing for this position quite forcefully.
Much less environmental-friendly than the Odeillo solar furnace[1]...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odeillo_solar_furnace
Wait, I'm confused. Say I'm the author of a library. Some of my dependencies had breaking changes, but they didn't affect the users of my library, as it's handled in some method.

Should that be a new major version of the library?
On a slight tangent, does flash photography damage paintings?

I see always people using flash in museums. I assume it's because they don't know how to turn it off.
Agreed, but why then are the opinion papers such as Guardian then concentrating on denouncing GMO or pesticides, and not monocultures?
I use the SoundCloud app on my iPhone and its perfect. No buffering issues whatsoever, even when the internet is spotty.
We do nothing about it because it's a natural cycle.
US scientists launch world's biggest solar geoengineering study
bold hypothesis: The bell was used as alarm for attacks of warriors, next to a bell for tsunami, storm, etc ... and a tsunami took the bells to the ocean. Very unlikely though that Arabic name would be used when the temple or whatever tried to resist the cultural invasion.

I wonder, what means Bak? Big?
No way, you had to master CDs, you needed a dedicated 700MB SCSI disk to write it too, then it took forever to burn (1x burners people, 1x). And you might have made a coaster.

In contrast, ZIP disks were fast, scratch proof, reusable.
It seems to me that the problem with this answer is that we have already paid the up-front cost of these offline systems over generations and so you are supposing that the switching cost is less than the ongoing maintenance of what already exists. There may be efficiency gains to be realised somewhere, but unless there are incremental and quantifiable advantages at each intermediate step from here to there I can't see this existing outside very small (albeit potentially lucrative) niches.
Preach brother. I've been saying the same thing for years now after a similar experience moving from an Angular SPA to a Django + Pjax app. I noticed an order of magnitude increase in productivity.I can't imagine going back now.
Great question. This is a cause for concern for me as well.
As far as I know the system I described is manual only on iPhone. That is, if the database file gets updated on another device/computer, you have to manually re-import it from Dropbox to MiniKeePass to see the update there.

On desktops/laptops, if you're pointing KeePass at a database file in a Dropbox-synced folder, then it's automatic.
It is because they don't know how to turn it off, but also it does not damage paintings.