skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to continue learning English after coming to America?
Hi, i am Chinese student in San Francisco, though I have learned English for more than ten years in China and relative good score on TOEFL, I still have great difficulty in listening and speak here, I find the way people speak is different from what I learned. People here speak much more quickly, not clearly, and with various accent and phrases I never heard before. I find I still need to learn much more, So I wonder do you know any methods or tools to deal with this problem? Any ways promote continued learning?
Graceful Resignation
There's no consensus that Minsky, Pinker, Dennett have succeeded. Plenty of philosophers and scientists have disagreed with their arguments. Dennett's attempt rests on the controversial claim that we're actually p-zombies, and consciousness can be understood in only functional terms. This is prima facie absurd to many people.
I don't object to you calling it that, but it is literally the thing people are talking about when they refer to "exploding offers" from venture capitalists, which is the irony here.
Wow, I've used Lorem ipsum before and people seem really confused by it and think I put it in purposely and that it was part of the final design.
First Foray into C++ with SFML
Are there any best practices and/or tools for 'nohup' monitoring?
Houston immigrant doctors given 24 hours to leave the U.S., then a reprieve
Only skin deep though. Canada select who they want to come into their country. Europe doesn't have that luxury.

It's not about being perfect but about being honest.

So while you might say Canada is great its not as rosy as your charismatic minister might want to paint it.
higher risk-adjusted expected?
> as consumers we get to win for a little longer.

Quality will be reduced to be sustainable with the pricing pressures being applied.

All this does is maintain Walmart and Amazon's sales volume, it doesn't bring consumers consumer excess by getting better products cheaper.
I check Google finance each day at work. huge opportunity for improvement
ISPs like Sonic.net value consumers privacy
DropBox has the same Big Brother clauses in their terms of use.

https://www.dropbox.com/terms#acceptable_use

* you must not even try to ... sell the Services unless specifically authorized to do so; publish or share materials that are unlawfully pornographic or indecent, or that contain extreme acts of violence;
advocate bigotry or hatred against any person or group of people based on their ... *

https://www.dropbox.com/terms#privacy

we store, process, and transmit Your Stuff—like files, messages, comments, and photos
I understand what you're saying but it's not like the user couldn't physically change the device and create similar dangers. This is why uploading custom firmware on most devices voids the warranty, but I don't think you can make it impossible for someone to "break" their device if they really want to.
I agree with you. I couldn't tell you when I was eating a fresh hamburger vs one that was previously frozen.

There are potential public health benefits to freezing, but they're not as large as I had thought. For example, the sushi industry has been freezing raw fish for a while in order to get rid of parasitic worms[1]. So I assumed that also worked for bacteria. But the article says that Salmonella survives the freezing/thawing. Live and learn.

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/02/436691493/why...
My comment is not intended to portray the sponsors as bad people. I am sure they want to help the refugees succeed in their new life. My intention is to demonstrate that this is not as simple as Canadian collectivism vs. American individualism. A strong dimension of this story is empty-nesters essentially adopting a new family, which is great, but then proceeding to treat them - although with the best intentions - in a somewhat condescending, parochial way, as if the adults of the family aren't grown people who've already survived a thousand times more hardship than the sponsors have ever known in their lives.

I think the sponsors are good people. But I disagree that they're good in some kind of uniquely Canadian way. These are empty-nesters searching for a new family just like these ones right across the border in Buffalo or Bellingham or Burlington. Just look at overseas adoptions in the United States.
Well, that's precisely intrinsic to the problem of being subjective. You cannot objectively describe subjective experience, because otherwise it would cease to be subjective and become objective. It is reasonably probable that subjective experience will be outside of science for ever — unless we obtain so great a knowledge of the human brain that we can actually see some kind of physical change happening without a physical cause.
An interesting development for anyone who wants to take Nagel seriously is Mary and the colorblind room. Short version, a girl grows up in a black and white room (which is impossible in a lot of ways but just imagine) and that she is fed a database that lets her learn everything there is to know about the physical world of color (which is impossible but follow along) and then one day she exits the room and she sees a red rose. Nagel argued there's something about Mary's experience of color that she had in that moment, that she did not learn in the room.

Dennett is another strong opponent here. He says Mary would retort, aha but you have a limited imagination. I know everything about color, so nothing about that experience was new to me in any non trivial way whatsoever. Because Mary knows EVERYTHING about color. It's may be impossible for us to imagine someone being omniscient about color, and that spoils the whole argument.

Similarly, what if we knew every physical fact about bats. Dennett only needs to say, we have small imaginations. We have trouble imagining that what it is like to be a bat would be the sum of all physical facts about a bat. But we can't be sure of that. There is no logical certainty. Hence Nagel proved nothing.

Yes you end up saying "we're all robots/zombies/unconscious animals" this way, and there's actually nothing special about being human it's just a myth we tell ourselves. But aside from some people not finding that conclusion tasteful, there's nothing wrong with it.
> Whites are currently being replaced with Latinos and other non-Whites in the US

"Replacing" and "adding" are different things.

> Soon people of majority White European descent will become a minority

Okay. As a person of majority White European descent, I'm not clear why I should be specifically concerned about this.
Sure that sounds reasonable (although IANAL and don't know if it's enough legally), as long as you don't need special secret keys.
I also remember the short lived VR craze of the mid 1990s.
As a kid back then, I remember trying some kind of 3d tennis game in an arcade, which was like $3 to play. What turned me off from it was a weird realization that I much prefer playing sports in real life with the bonus of not feeling nauseated and seeing cross-eyed after wards.
Thus, I would love to see this modern incarnation of VR applied to something more than just games...
>All of today's science is logically compatible with the absence of subjective experience, because science cannot even define what subjective experience is.

That just means science is incomplete and we are ignorant, not that subjective experience is metaphysically different from all other observed phenomena.
One of the first programs I ever wrote was a Mandelbrot renderer in GW-BASIC, on an 8086 PC with a CGA card running DOS 3.3. This wasn't in the '80s when this would have made sense, rather this was circa 1994 because this was literally the only computer that was available to me. Nonetheless it was mind-blowing to me.

CGA had a 320x200 4-color mode. My program had a hardcoded bounding box that it would evaluate, and generate a 320x200 rendering of. I had to leave it running overnight for it to run to completion. I would set up the bounding box in the source file, start running the program, then wait until the next day for it to complete. It was awesome. Modern hardware could probably do the same thing in a few milliseconds. I'm sure it being written in GW-BASIC didn't help. :) Still, good times. That was the first thing I ever did that sort of resembled graphics programming.
> It was a bit of a disappointing read as I was expecting some more analysis than one-line descriptions.

Fair criticism. This was by design.

I'd originally set out to follow the table with a commentary section on each license. But judging by the first few sections drafted, that was shaping up to be a very long read. The pain-and-confusion bit is terse and cartoonish to begin with. Blocks of additional text weren't going to change that. So I erred on the side of brevity.
Try NARS2000. It's APL with sensible extensions written by someone who knows APL very well.

http://www.nars2000.org/
If self-sufficiency per person is negligible, worse off can still mean blissful. Alternatively, in the deep future, there might be the annihilation of comparative advantage, somehow.
Uber's lawyers are being idiots, asking for things that they know they won't get, and he's slapping them down. To claim he's biased and unprofessional you have to show that he wouldn't do the same thing to anybody else acting the same way.

If Uber wants to protect their reputation in the news, they need to win the case.
Without entirely ruling out the opinion, you can take any advice that such logic must take place in a reverse proxy in front of the app with a grain of salt. It's one thing to place certain anti-DOS/DDOS logic in front of the app, but basic rate limiting that depends on inspection of each request (including cache/database lookups for per-user limit increases) is certainly something that is very commonly found at the application middleware layer (after user authentication and route parsing, but before the controller).

Rate limiting is not meant to be a hard defence against denial of service attacks - that is an entirely separate engineering problem, where even a reverse proxy is not enough protection when you're facing a network-level flood. The primary purpose of rate limiting isn't to prevent hitting the application at all - it's to prevent hitting the heavy logic that starts when the controller is invoked. As long as your application's bootstrapping layer is lightweight, there is no problem with leaving rate limiting as part of the application.
Is progress inevitable?
He claims that consciousness is an illusion, ergo: He is unconscious.
Snark is not a virtue limited to tech journalists. My significant other is a journalist (outside of tech), so we have lots of journalist friends. They are hands down the snarkiest people I know.

It kind of comes with the territory.
Doesn't materialism fall into "any ontology" that you're ranting against? That's fine, skeptics about the nature of external reality have been around since the ancient Greeks.

But then to circle back around and privilege materialism as being somehow distinct from all the other ontologies humans have argued for? Are you skeptic or are you dogmatic materialist?

Pick your side. Just so you know, equating every other ontology as the equivalent of "God having a plan for my life" is piss poor philosophy, and just ignorant.
> I can not think of any good reason why the stones on the beach - together with someone or something moving them around to perform the computation - should be any less conscious than the human brain they are simulating. And this seems of course absurd.

It will take around 3,000,000,000,000 years and enormous beach to simulate one second of brain activity. It is literally unimaginable. What do you imagine when you talk about absurdity? Is it some small scale model, which is laid bare before your mind's eye in all its simplicity, leaving no place for consciousness to hide?
A better solution would be relatively new socket option:

IP_BIND_ADDRESS_NO_PORT

https://www.mail-archive.com/netdev@vger.kernel.org/msg66879...
Gizmodo found what looks to be FBI Director James Comey’s Twitter account
Facebook has created a system that encourages fake content. Change that system and you get rid of the content.
Anthony Levandowski isn't just a schlub caught up in a big lawsuit. He's the guy who's self-funded startup got bought for $680M. He's facing a lawsuit from Google.

Did anyone have any sort of impression that he was going to cooperate out of the gate? There's a better chance that he drops his pants and asks for a spanking.

Yes, the 5th Ammendment can be used as negative inference in a civil suit. Whatever. This isn't testimony. This is discovery. It's years before this gets in front of a jury and it won't matter one iota when all is said and done.

This is a marathon of a fight. Levandowski just signaled that he's not an idiot.
>All of these "definitions" require an audience that has SE and is able to recognize it. A scientific definition would not.

Not entirely true. Science is made up of language (syntax, meaning etc) and is also observer-relative.
If Google, Facebook and other major tech giants did lobby recently, then I consider the passing of this bill a major failure for those companies on lobbying effort. Would it be okay for Mark Zuckerberg to donate a huge private money to the Republican Party and overturn the ISP's influence?
Tesla doesn't need to compete with either of them. They just want to sell more cars. Any of a number of ways to do that.
Why do Republicans really seem terrible?

The party of hypocrisy - eg had only one 9/11 commission but ten Benghazi commissions, or eg cared about deficits only when Democratic president is in power

Gerrymandering (REDMAP)

Threatened US default over debt ceiling

Wanted to gut ethics committee as soon as they could

Refused to hold a vote on a supreme court justice indefinitely as long as a Democrat president nominated him/her

Told CBO not to calculate cost of repealing Obamacare

Want to roll back civil rights of gays

Want to roll back environmental protections

Want to make coal and fossil fuels win over clean energy, are angry about investment in green energy

Want to roll back privacy and net neutrality

Want to use taxpayer money to expand the army already past ridiculous levels

Are angry about universal healthcare even though rest of the developed world has it and has cheaper better outcomes

What is the explanation for why they seem to be against everything that a person would normally consider good?

I realize they say they want personal freedom and smaller government. But then they want to expand the army, keep increasing fossil fuel subsidies, etc.

And when someone is incompetent, they seem applaud it... they seem to be against college education, teaching evolution, skeptical of global warming to the end, etc. and (with some exceptions) are ok with Donald Trump's blundering and appointments of people to agencies who have explicitly said in the past they want those agencies eliminated.

Why? Am I really being partisan and Democrats break just as many rules? I just don't see it. Both parties have their problems but Democrats seem to at least care about competence and fairness while Republicans honestly seem to find new rules to break all the time, on top of everything I mentioned above. And then when the Democrats follow suit they get upset.
Startup quietly packing tenants into SF's empty luxury apartments
This is exactly the point - no one needs to be taught how to use an iPad. It's some MBA trying to push "educational strategy". No one who invented any part of an iPad grew up with one.

The further into my tech career I go, the more I like a bog standard whiteboard and a notebook and pen. They let me focus on thinking about hard stuff, instead of thinking about how to use some oversold software.
Overcast for macOS – A free desktop podcast client
Be specific. What system? Society is full of chatters. Now we virtualize social interaction, the chatter is only getting more widespread at the speed of light.
How is funding a pro-Trump non-profit intolerant?

I voted for Bernie in the primary and Hillary in the general, but the hypocrisy of Zuckerberg publishing his travels to rural America like he's a politician while Palmer is pushed out of his company is too much.
AirBnB is a company I want to IPO more than any other just so I can see their finances. The idea is so simple, so universal, and (theoretically) so profitable that I was surprised that they only just became profitable. I assumed the company had been printing money for years, back before they had to deal with lawsuits, regularly avoided taxes, and when everybody still loved them.

It doesn't surprise me that they're profitable at this stage, but the fact that it took them so long to get there on a completely unlevel playing field (competitors pay taxes, have better customer service, own physical property, etc) makes me seriously concerned about the future prospects of this business.

I obviously don't have the data, but it seems people are growing to like them less and less. Whenever founders have a sense of entitlement (I've met Brian and Joe - they came across as arrogant) it doesn't end well when they suddenly have to play by the same rules as everyone else. AirBnB is way too big that they can shirk the law anymore, and as the public grows to dislike them more their lobbying efforts will become increasingly futile (just look at what happened in New York).
Think about explaining general relativity, quantum chromodynamics, or just the way a second level cache works to a random human from the early stone age. Probably not an easy task. I am not sure if this is actually a fair analogy, describing what seeing red is like is in some sense very different from explaining the theory of general relativity. But on the other hand the situations are also somewhat similar, the stone age guy just does not posses the required language, probably to a large extend math, and knowledge and is unable to look back on several thousand years of human history and innovation that shaped us. Sure, it looks like a stretch to us that we will ever be able to meaningfully convey the experience of seeing a red object, but I am not convinced that this is a given. Intuitively I certainly agree with you, not going to happen, but maybe that is just a lack of imagination.
Totally agree. I think there's is a huge need to teach children logic, but not code.
> Company Vice President and Treasurer Douglas Patterson thought it would be a clever idea to use the actual SSN of his secretary, Mrs. Hilda Schrader Whitcher.

the things that pass for clever
This makes perfect sense: digitise (as we say now) admin and busywork, to let teachers shine at teaching.
What problem would that cause? Wouldn't it only be a problem if you attempted to index into it, which you wouldn't do (on purpose) if you didn't think it was indexable? And if you did try to index into it thinking that it wasn't indexable, it would be a bug, which is the same as when it's indexable...
Reddit is not real life. If you could gain the communication, leadership, and political skills necessary for an executive position at a company like Facebook by posting on Reddit, then their meeting rooms would smell a whole lot worse.
That's a bit disingenuous. There are people are trying to engineer solutions to those problems, both with and without technology. They've also been around longer than rocket scientists. For every 1 SpaceX engineer, say there's 10 other humans working solving violence, addiction, homelessness using data and science. What if they just don't show up in TechCrunch.
I think this argument is a bit specious. While taking steps to reduce the cost of energy may have an indirect effect on manufacturing in energy intensive industries, the main goal of this policy is to improve the bottom line of energy companies to the tune of billions of dollars. Companies which also happen to be huge campaign contributors.

This would be like claiming that loosening the banking regulations was part of the Administration's plan to boost consumer spending, while ignoring the fact that it also helps those companies make billions of dollars more than they otherwise would have.
i thought that "peehole" is a bellybutton, but yeah, maybe it's okay to be interpreted by the viewer :P
I cleaned it myself.. it took like 10 minutes. It was pretty annoying. We are good friends.
>For panpsychism to be wrong, there has to be two different kinds of matter (conscious and unconscious)

I think you have it mixed up. Panpsychism is the dualist belief, although it differs than supernatural dualism it's still dualism. It says that matter is singular but had two properties the mental and the physical.

Whereas materialism is monist all the way through. You raise good questions and science and philosophy are still working on it but it doesn't require any extra properties or matter and agrees with scientific evidence therefore simpler.
Get Domain – Best Domain Name – EASY
Yeah, right. I know a ton of people who talk like this and exactly 2 who have moved to low-tax jurisdictions. Neither of them are any great loss.

Generally the tone is a bunch of libertarian piffle where they soak up education, get raised up and absorb experience in a nice stable high-tax jurisdiction. Then at some point they stamp their pretty little foot and say that it's quitsies time for their big-state upbringing and that they are now "even" with the societies that conferred all those advantages on them... and off they go (typically to run businesses whose business entirely depends, weirdly enough, on economic activity in the high-tax type jurisdictions that they left).

I have some sympathy for the idea that taxes should be lower and governments should be leaner, but the messianic nonsense (collapse of the West predicted, film at 11) that people like you and the guy I originally responded to is just irritating. In the fantasy world you live in, no democratic government even undergoes a course correction due to unsustainable spending. No-one ever gets irritated and votes in a party that promises to lower their taxes and does so, ever.... You are manufacturing a crisis to make your moderately interesting ideas seem the The Only Answer To Everything.

Incidentally, the answer is treat citizens like citizens, not like 'customers' (or assets, for that matter) - unless you want to torture the idea of being a "customer" to the point where you can turn benefiting from a public good into somehow being a "customer" of that good. Generally this isn't a analogy that particularly helps understanding anything at all. What would we learn about defense, public order, or the notion of public education as a public service - not a "customer good" provided to the person themselves or their parents, etc. by rephrasing it as a "customer" relationship?
I was expecting the source to be open given a github.com URL in the link...just a readme. Any plans to put the source code on Github?
Lots of cognitive science literature models human beings as reinforcement learners, with plenty of good evidence for the hypothesis. The interesting question is: what kind of reinforcement learning?
Amid L.A.'s Housing Crisis, There's a Fight Over Expanding Rent Control
> it's mostly a fancy way of playing games

You're saying that dismissively, but video gaming is a trillion-dollar industry.

Yes, VR is expensive right now. Every new technology is. If you think issues like motion sickness and running into walls are insurmountable, then I think you haven't been paying attention to the state of the art--there's been a lot of progress made on both of those. Also they're more or less mutually exclusive; motion sickness is mainly an issue with seated VR, not room-scale.
Respectfully, I think that's an unrealistically high standard to set. Having a job that is stable and engaging with long term potential is an exceedingly rare find for any generation. And entry-level jobs are how you make your career - you work your way up.