skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Yet mathematics is a language with distinct limitations. It can only describe abstract structures and relations.

I have a hard time getting this point. Mathematics began as something concrete. In fact, abstract mathematics is one huge accomplishment of the human mind.

In general, I find all the article hard to read. Maybe I lack the expertise to fully grasp what is this about. But it looks like there is no attempt to explain the ideas in clear terms.

I will suggest that if you want to know more about consciousness Daniel Dennett is a better read.
What does ‘that = this’ in JavaScript mean?
There were two points, both addressing "working on files from home"

The general point, disregarding the way in which he downloaded the files and then wiped his computer, is that Google generally has a policy where you're just not allowed to have local copies of source files to work on a remote machine.

That's something that you'd have to go through quite a bit of effort to circumvent, as the only machines that are allowed to access repos are physically wired to the network.

If you're working remotely, you're accessing a desktop computer through SSH or RDP and working that way. The files (except as caches and network traffic) never really live on your remote machine.

Of course, this only applies to source code and other such files. If you're somebody working on a powerpoint or a design document, you're allowed to download that. And maybe there's a huge exception for Google X (although I doubt that).

But working on source files at home while disconnected to a Google server is not common, encouraged, and by itself, might be a fireable offense and is definitely a violation of IT policies.
Using disabled people as a bludgeon to deprive the middle class isn't sticking up for the little guy, it's abusive. Disabled people have problems on trains, too: elevators are often broken and it's hard to move in a crowd. There are simply disadvantages to being less able, which is not the same thing as being deprived of your ability to do something by someone who holds power over you. Insisting on the equivalence of such a thing brings to mind the character O'Brien from a certain dystopian fiction.

Traveling in a personal vehicle affords drastically more freedom of movement (you are literally in control of your movement) than any form of public transport and while it's not necessarily a need that should be subsidized by the state it is nonetheless a curtailment on freedom when the state deliberately makes it less convenient than it had been.
A Baby with 3 Genetic Parents Seems Healthy, but Questions Remain
That may be true, but there are also a lot of sweeping generalizations about how the US is totally different from every other developed country when it comes to car ownership.

In fact, the percentage of households that own cars in the US is not that different from either other wealthy Western democracies, Japan, or South Korea. (China and Russia are both much lower.)

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/16/car-bike-or-...
You might want to read the rules of HN more in depth. There's a specific call-out for comments like your last sentence.
> "What is life" is now a "go look it up" question, not a mystery.

Is Earth – the planet itself – alive?

> "What is consciousness" will probably go the same way in time.

But what about free will?
You can tell that they haven't even spent any real time in Manhattan, right here in the US! No rest of the world is even necessary.

All of the "positives" of individual personal transportation quickly turn into negatives when everyone else is simultaneously trying to avail themselves of them in a dense, congested city. Then you realize that trying to have a car in the middle of a big city is more hassle than it's worth, and that walking, biking, public transit, and ubiquitous cabs actually work quite well, way better than individual cars could ever work in such conditions.

So yes, we've got suburban Americans who can't even conceptualize what life is like in our biggest city, despite it being a constant subject in pop culture.
1. Don't forget to convert the $43K figure into Canadian dollars. Doing so brings it well above the Canadian average of $53.8K. So, you're still being misleading and the point still stands.

>Cheese from Quebec vs cheese from France: Which will be cheaper and more competitive in Scotland?

The idea that "some products will be more expensive to import from mainland Canada than Europe, therefore it would be of no net economic benefit" is deeply flawed. That just doesn't make any sense. Ditto for the travel costs. Physical distances are increasingly irrelevant in modern economies.

What about Finance? Biotech? IT? What about oil and gas or renewables like wind and tidal power? Scotland is very strong in these areas and has a highly educated population (university is free). In fact, this article from 2014 claims it has the best educated workforce in Europe (though to be fair there have been significant reports of trouble in recent years): http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/s...

So far you've made reference to Scottish Whiskey, Haggis, French cheese and the time it takes to ship (or travel) between places... I can't help but think you're using some very out-dated stereotypes in your thinking.
Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons
I don't see any advance in this debate since things that Dennett and Hofstadter wrote 20+ years ago (both independently and in their co-authored book "The Mind's I[^]"). It's surprising to see academic philosophers still using arguments like the "redness problem" described in this article. How can anyone with any knowledge of visual neuroscience or artificial neural networks be confused by a generative system producing a novel state?

And perhaps more controversially, I'm always a bit taken aback by the constant blase assertion that consciousness is a mystery. Is it really surprising that we have a first person subjective experience? We know that we are incredibly complex things, constantly integrating and acting on very complicated external stimuli. Such a system should have references to its own body and its own neural states, its train of reasoning should frequently include itself, its focus will drift forward and backwards in time... this is just how a system like this would work. If the system communicates about its state then its language should have referents to these internal states, referents like "experience", and "feels like", and "I understand". Is that surprising? Wouldn't it be surprising if it wasn't like that?

I think that Tononi's approach is a good approximation, but it can't be a full solution because the word 'consciousness' is too anthropocentric. One criticism of IIT showed that a seemingly uninteresting complex artificial system could have a very high IIT complexity quotient. The problem is that the things we use to define the term 'consciousness' are things that can be approximated to varying degrees by chimps or dolphins or generative adversarial networks or antfarms or thermometers. But behind our use of the word 'consciousness' there is still almost always a very slightly disguised dualism that uses it as a substitute for the word 'soul'.

[^]edited
> "Present findings provide functional data supporting the hypothesis that modafinil can modulate the cortico-cerebellar connectivity of the aging brain"

I would love it if someone more knowledgeable of neuroscience explained what this meant and what the potential implications could be.
> This is why I love hacker news. I get a different perspective every day that (whether it's right or wrong) forces me to re-consider my mental models of the world.

I almost believed you there. Don't lie to yourself, we like Hacker News for its entertainment value. :P
That's just when you use custom elements in _React_.

I've definitely wired up JSX createElement implementations that handle attributes and events properly. My preference is for Polymer-style naming: `on-*` for event handlers, `$` suffix for attributes and everything else is a property. Others who've done this use special `attributes` and `events` properties.
If you're sharing this stuff optically, you'd almost certainly be better off with something like a big QR code. QR can be scanned at angles, has built-in error correction, and (depending on the font you're comparing it against) can probably pack in more bytes. OCR feels more like a hack than anything; you're using a human-readable format with an error-prone medium to communicate non-human-friendly data between two machines!
I appreciate all the hard work you guys are doing; I understand it takes time and I think most people are willing to wait.
Sure, but the first people might build the momentum, or not.
Yes, it's a subsidy to the merchants who, in turn, pay to the city property tax and sales tax.

Merchants decide where to locate in part based on traffic counts (vehicle and pedestrian). Places that are more valuable to merchants are more valuable to the city (property taxes and sales taxes are higher).

It's economically logical for the city to consider whether to offer this investment/subsidy.
Warning personal anecdote. I briefly took this drug to help with excessive sleep and sleepiness. It had a paradoxical effect where I felt more alert but was actually experiencing micro-naps. This very nearly caused me to get into a serious car accident. Please be careful if you're thinking about this drug as part of a nootropic regimen.
As much as I loved text adventures back in the day, I've found the real-life version of interactive fiction -- "immersive" fiction -- more intoxicating and memorable. I still think about "The Jejune Institute" in San Francisco frequently, and that ended years ago.
Printed text is not the best way to transmit machine-readable data on physical media. You're better off using something a QR code, rather than printing out raw characters that you then have to OCR at consumption-time.
You know I almost didn't include the two minutes bit because I figured people would fixate on that and not realize you aren't conscious for it.
People who arrive by car spend less, not more. Rather than reflecting the luxurious lifestyle of its owner cars are burdens to most people.
Second that. The whole learning process is about substituting cognitive action to behavioral action. Kids can handle it and do it very well. It is important, and I would say essential, to push their limits as much as possible. When I was a kid myself, the end of the school day (in a European country) could be heard block away: hordes of kids running out screaming!
People who arrive by car spend more than people who never arrive to that merchant.
this seems like a potential composition fallacy.
Can you expand on "Firefox completely broke security if Sync"? Do you have a specific incident in mind, or an architectural change, or..?
Dribbble Acquires Crew – (the Makers of Unsplash)
>For all we know, our brain can be just an interface to something else we don't know yet.

This is a very old, but unproven hypothesis. You might have heard of it, it's called "soul". :-)
Sorry to be a lazy HN member but that article is HUGE! Does anyone have a TLDR / are there any insights of note that are worth discussing / learning? No problem if no one can be bothered to answer!
QR codes are actually quite versatile. I've had success taking plenty of raw text, zipping it and storing the resulting bytes in a QR code.
No. That would require understanding what this means and I don't understand it because their explanation is lame.
What do you mean by 'perception'?
Plundered Hearts
In the SF Bay Area (which is mentioned in the article), they have repeatedly cut back or held capacities constant for both the freeway system and public transit.

This benefits no one except people that own houses near job centers (since it increases real estate pricing discrepancies).

Due to the local political structure, small town governments are able to sabotage the entire region's transportation network, perpetuating the problem.

The NIMBY's that support this use studies liked the linked one to justify this behavior (which is rent-seeking at best and racial/economic discrimination at worst).

I believe things are better where you live; I'm just trying to explain why your comments are controversial with the HN crowd.

Personally, I'd like more roads, parking, public transit, and bike lanes. It would alleviate some of the housing pressure in Silicon Valley, lowering real estate costs, which would improve the quality of service industries, increase the efficiency with which VC money is spent, and generally enable more startups.
It's a retreat. It could have happened. The ground was ceded when closed source drivers were allowed to be willy-nilly linked into the kernel with impunity, a clear GPL violation.

The Free Software initiative requires bravery and confidence. The idea is that if you establish a large enough base of viral software, people will eventually have no choice but to become a part, or be put at great disadvantage. And it worked. Linux is everywhere. The only places it didn't work, are the places we were too cowardly to press the advantage.

Stallman was right. You cannot compromise. Once you start paying the Dane-geld, you'll never get rid of the Dane.
I don't know what is your basis for that claim. Looking at actual figures for different places where I live (Finland, which has many places with very good public transport options) shows that people who come by car spend substantially more money when they come shopping.
I can't understand how to use the query language. It all seems so magical!

I tried building something with Cayley once but couldn't fetch all the data I wanted in a single query, or didn't know how to, then got frustrated and deleted everything.
It fits some kind of apps. I've built one React Native app where the "lowest-common-denominator" was more than good enough (no special code for different platforms) and would have worked just as well as a web app but wasn't possible due to the nature of React/React Native. If I would have used ReactXP I could have published it on the web as well and used just one React code base so this is good news for me.

I don't understand what you're trying to argue about. If you don't like it, don't use it.
Is xamarin free?
Introducing Get Schwifty – write, evaluate and run Swift on the iPhone
I'm a woman and fairly aggressive and experienced negotiator. When I negotiate for myself, I find the gap is about 10%. When I used to work as an agent and I was negotiating on the behalf of others, it was the exact opposite. I was able to get my clients about 10% more with less work even though I was less skilled at negotiation than other agents. If I was better, I'm curious if I could've gotten 15% or 20%.

In tech though, I end up making more money than my male co-workers because engineers in general are such terrible negotiators.

It's very hard to find female engineers at all, but many years ago (before Glassdoor) I did manage to interview at one company (~200 employees) with 25% female engineers. Their offer was 40-60% of market value and their benefits were awful. My guess is that the men at that company were making 60%, and women 50%.

I interviewed at another company where there were 100 women employees. The only men were the 3 founders, all 10 warehouse workers, and all 4 on the tech team. Interviewed with the founder and I got an offer. It was low but I could not get him to budge a dime so I turned him down. He called over 6 times after that trying to get me to take the job. He seemed genuinely confused about why I wouldn't take it. I'm pretty sure he was a very nice and reasonable boss with the one exception of pay. He was just delusional in that department.

I interviewed at a ton of these companies almost none of them are thinking "Haha! We can get away with paying our workers 70% of market value," instead they are truly deluded. I think women are more likely to just accept the low pay and not negotiate at all.

When interviewing, I used to just get this intuitive feeling like "I don't think this place pays well," and it took me many years to realize what I was just seeing was too many female employees.
Other externalities: more traffic, hence more noise, more pollution, more traffic accidents.
There are no better docs than Postgres docs.
> Also, as the article points out, there can be considerable latency on arrival, as time may be required to find a place to store the vehicle. With public transport, no time is required on arrival to find parking.

And indeed, cities are starting to acknowledge that, with major public events offering off-site parking, and then public transit for the last several miles. The hybrid solution works great in larger states, although I'm not sure if the same strategy would work in, say, manhattan.
It's "The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul" by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

"The Mind's Eye" is by Oliver Sacks (who has almost definitely read Hofstadter/Dennett)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2081.The_Mind_s_I
Well, if you think there's a difference then we never agree :)
Titlegore. I'm having trouble parsing all those negatives in the headline.
This compiles poorly and has a performance cost, it turns out.
Doing:

constructor(props) {
super(props);
this.func = this.func.bind(this);
}

Is better if you care about performance.
It appears that we might have jumped on the transistor metaphor too quick and to intensely. I believe not everything is binary in the brain, even if the resulting executive action is. Patterns, for example, might not be.
Do the Wikileaks docs explain how exactly they place the malware on the victim's computer? That would be more interesting than the details listed in the article - CIA's malware doesn't seem fundamentally different from other tools of this kind.
Looks Like Walmart Paid $9M for Shoes.com and IP
This is really great to see. Kudos to the Wire messenger team for taking this step.
Any recommendations for scaling Postgresql's best practices? Really appreciate it.
Pretty sure the first lesson is "Fear is the mind-killer".
It is huge, but so is Electron.

It's as native as it gets, it imitates native widgets perfectly and allows the designer to easily recreate every element of a particular OS' HIGs with the use of stylesheets and native code.

In before "doesn't look native in my macOS": Because the people writing in cross-plat tools usually don't care about getting every detail right, they just want their app to run well everywhere. But Qt does allow the
developer to nail those details without too much effort if he actually cares.

The only problem with Qt is C++.
> Nothing about our understanding of intelligence or self-awareness explains why we're not philosophical zombies.

perhaps we really are zombies.

> why there's perception at all

why do atoms interact at all? why do fields interact at all?

perhaps "there's perception" because fields and matter can interact.
By the way, the author of this blog post, Leonie Watson, is herself blind. She's well known in the accessibility field for her conference talks on accessibility (there are many on YouTube). A few years ago she wrote a personal piece on her blog describing how she lost her sight and how she came to accept such a change in her life. It's well worth a read:

http://tink.uk/losing-sight/
I didn't know that, but will look.
Is Spotify's resource-intensiveness due to things it's actively doing in Javascript (i.e. a lot of procedural code running all the time), or is it due to things it sets up the DOM to do (i.e. a really complicated page that the renderer chokes on)?
Italy court bans Uber across the country over unfair competition for taxis
I have read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy fiction. A lot. Very few stories surprise me regarding the broad strokes or philosophical system / theme as it relates to magic and world building. I always enjoy when an author teases a new perspective on a known theme or system. Sanderson is great at taking a "known" system and bounding it tightly and thus making it a great story telling device.

I always enjoy an author with a deep understanding of a subject like game theory and they weave it into the magic and story giving a view into something new. So "everything is derivative". And nothing is :)
You are implying you need an ORM for the simple key-value (jsonb) data access. I don't think you would benefit much.
That there's any subjective experience, that there are things I perceive or experience.

The question is how do I explain having a subjective experience at all, and do toasters have one?
Then sublime is just perfect for you looking at their release schedule...
Well, if we did that in tandem with eliminating public roads we could see what happens. Public transportation does exist outside of the government-subsidized model; see the jitneys in New York for an example.
Exactly. I think this would end up like the restaurants that tried out a no-tipping policy. All of their best servers left and turnover went from low to incredibly high. The best engineers would negotiate on title, or ask for creation of a new title, or just go somewhere that would allow that.
Two things I'm seeing reading the comments:

Anyone referencing European public transportation should realize that over half the countries in Europe are smaller than the state of Iowa, and none of them save Russia & Turkey are larger than Texas. You're comparing apples to oranges.

Second, not one of the comments below mentioned the Auto lobby. If your beef is with the number of personal vehicles on the road vs. public transportation, you should probably look there first. Tell your billionaire friends to start outspending the $61 million spent in 2016 by Automotive[1] industry lobbyists (compared to the $1.4 million for Misc Transport[2]) and maybe you'll start seeing a difference.

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=M02&yea...

[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00004700...
If that's true in Finland which I don't doubt I suggest that is a reflection of the very different built environment of that country compared to the USA. In the USA there have been several studies on the question and all have determined that arrival by car is associated with lower spending. Here is one:

http://kellyjclifton.com/Research/EconImpactsofBicycling/OTR...

Here is a roundup of numerous case studies. http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/03/the-complete-busine...
Can the below code be sold to raise money?

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "http://www.python.org"
response = requests.get(url)

page = str(BeautifulSoup(response.content))

def getURL(page):
"""

:param page: html of web page (here: Python home page)
:return: urls in that page
"""
start_link = page.find("a href")
if start_link == -1:
return None, 0
start_quote = page.find('"', start_link)
end_quote = page.find('"', start_quote + 1)
url = page[start_quote + 1: end_quote]
return url, end_quote

while True:
url, n = getURL(page)
page = page[n:]
if url:
print(url)
else:
break
This isn't completely fair to the founders.

Empire was not what all of them wanted, and Jefferson is an example of a founder who spoke against slavery in his early career and then accepted it because essentially the time to fight that battle hadn't yet occurred (his statement against it in the Declaration of Independence was overruled in light of national unity). He did keep slaves until his death, but he also freed his descendants and was involved in drafting the Rights of Man which says a lot about his more egalitarian views. That is remarkable for a gentleman planter from Virginia. Of course some of the founders in the north despised slavery anyway.

Jefferson was a bit of an outlier but make no mistake what they did was radical for the time. We can't romanticize history nor try and analyze it in light of today's values.
Not according to the article:
I frequently tell the apocryphal story
Fuel for Mexico's Diabetes Epidemic
Well, that would agree with the article and disagree with the person I was replying to.

So I think you're responding to the wrong person.