skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Consciousness is correlated strongly and solely with the brain.

One thing to consider with that is that only the brain is able to give answers about consciousness—i.e. it's producer of verbal content and thought,' so there could be no communication of it if something like consciousness were going on at other loci in the body. To get a better feel for how something like that might happen, I'd highly recommend checking out some research on split brain patients who's corpus callosums (callosi?) have been severed (this connects the two brain hemispheres). One of my favorite examples: split brain patient shown an instruction to go out through the front door only to one eye (each eye is connected to the opposite brain hemisphere)—specifically it's shown to the eye which connects it to the hemisphere not used for speaking. The split brain patient will get up and follow the instruction, walking toward the door. Then the researcher asks the patient, "what are you doing?" and cognitive dissonance resolves itself into some plausible but essentially bullshit answer like, "I was, umm, going home to get a Coke..." If you'd like to hear more, check out [0]

Also, to be clear here—since this conflation derails just about every discussion of consciousness—the article is talking about the 'hard problem' of consciousness. So, the issue at hand is immediate subjective experience, not a self-reflective mechanism (simple versions of that could readily be coded up).

> If consciousness exists in this universe then it must be explained by the laws and constants of this universe.

If our universe is likened to a board game with some finite set of rules, e.g. Monopoly, the 'physics' of this universe is fully determined by the rules of the game (even if there are non-deterministic aspects where you have to e.g. roll dice). The non-hard problem of consciousness is a question in this realm, like "can I sell one of my properties to another player?"; the hard problem is necessarily outside the scope of the rules; it's a question more like, "what is the molecular composition of a 'Chance' card?". The rules of Monopoly do not cover this. In a similar manner I believe the 'hard problem' of consciousness is getting at what it means to be a part of the fabric of the universe, and the laws of physics are expressed through that medium, but no specific laws create it.

[0] Social Brain, Michael S. Gazzaniga

edit: I wrote 'not used for language' previously and changed it to 'not used for speaking,' which is an important distinction.
> Your explanation of Syria is similarly without rational basis. ISIS was not created by the Arab Spring. It was directly created by catastrophically stupid military actions taken by USA next door in Iraq.

Your rationale is as ignorant as the person you are replying to. The Arab Spring, which resulted in the rise of Syrian & Libyan revolutionaries, was absolutely a major factor in the rise of ISIS.

To suggest that it was exclusively one or the other is ridiculous.
Why not just use Cygwin?
"... caught colleagues having sex with supervisors..." which is also a problem. It seems like overall the culture was toxic.
The primary reason I support it, and I don't think I'm alone among founders in this, is that I think that society is not going to work very well in the long term unless we strengthen our social safety nets. I want to live in a society that functions well, because I'm happier when surrounded by happier people.

I also think that it would enable more people to take the risk of trying something new if they knew that failing didn't mean destitution, and I think that we'd see significant upside from that in terms of economic competitiveness. I think I should be paying more taxes than I am to fund that, especially on unearned income.
I'd be interested in seeing some of your analysis on government agencies. Especially considering most government agencies are bureaucratic nightmares filled with unions more concerned with head counts than efficiency.

More likely than not, an honest analysis would see the 80/20 rule show up, dozens of needless and redundant positions will be exposed, and when presented with the data the agency is most likely to scoff at the idea of cutting headcount and spending through efficiency as that means a smaller budget for next year. A fun example of this is Detroit Water and Sewer's egregious spending on asinine positions such as a farrier, despite having no horses.

https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/17404
The problem here is that there's a distinct balance of power that a CEO can take advantage of. People may feel extra pressure to maintain their position in companies as a result.
Because the language of physics and neuroscience is mathematics aka information processing.
More flops that are optimized for the linear algebra that usually powers most machine learning. The matrix transforms and vector multiplication that are so beneficial to rasterizing mesh geometries work really well to compute neural networks.
> The fact that you have 100 classes implementing this is a good sign you should turn the design on its head. Why not just have a single tree structure built using generics?

Does anyone know why gui toolkits never do this? Every one seems to follow an OO model where each widget owns it's own children. Even in GTK they hacked in an OO system to do it instead of having a separate tree.
Or it might be the result of said account being an impostor...
Linux still sucks shit on the Desktop. I try it every year, and every year it sucks very slightly less. It goes beyond drivers and application compatibility, Linux distros are ugly and the people making them have no taste.

The Desktop/Laptop market is not nearly as important as it used to be, but within that space, Microsoft's dominance is about as strong as ever. Apple might have been able to take a dent out of it if they were committed, but they decided the obscene margins on iPhones were more important (and I can't entirely blame them).

Outside of admins and linux developers, Linux has no chance on PCs. Every year that passes convinces me more of this. We are going on the 20th "Year of Linux on the Desktop". If they were going to do it, they'd have done it by now.
> Imagine a Linux setup where you can launch PowerPoint without a VM

Wine?
Isn't Web Audio based off of MacOS'x Audio API?

I think the whole point is that Javascript used to be slow, and using the CPU as a DSP to process samples prevents acceleration. Seems to me what is needed is like "audio shaders" equivalent to compute/pixel shaders, that you farm off to OpenAL-like API which can be compiled to run on native HW.

Even if you grant emscripten produces reasonable code, it's still bloated, and less efficient on mobile devices than leveraging OS level DSP capability.
Is it just me or does the new logo look a lot like Winamp's logo?
If they are private, yes.
It is, because if there can be a world that's physically identical, but lacks consciousness, then consciousness is not physical. Law of identity plus the necessity of physicalism demonstrate this.

The p-zombie argument isn't circular, but it can be attacked on other grounds.
You're making music. It's not that difficult.

http://kruhft.bandcamp.com/

Here's a synth using the technique:

http://busfactor1.ca/kruhft
i've been trying to come up with a license that captures enough of the freedoms of open source to protect the user while allowing for a non-zero cost. my license is below - it's not open source, but if you're willing to consider licenses that are liberal but not OS, i'd love to hear your comments

http://db4j.org/pupl/PUPL
Ummm, no. The poverty rate continued to decline until the mid-70s. There was in fact a rapid decline with the beginning of the War on Poverty.

https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...
I originally thought the same. However, manual transfers of custom tones to devices is still available. I have 12.7 and confirmed this. It is done the same way (see bottom part of article HT207955 from Apple https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207955).

The part that was removed is the ringtone store, not manual ringtone management.

A lot of tech headlines are getting this wrong, however.

Though, removing app backup might have a huge impact on backup/restore speed for even local iOS device backups which is very annoying. Especially if it doesn't remember the set of apps you had in the backup.

If I get a new device and have to manually download every single app again, to me that is a ridiculous change.
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How healthy is the desktop market outside of the corporate environment? Consumers seem largely content with phones and tablets.
Good list. There's a fourth major factor that might even be bigger than those three combined: How receptive the viewer is to ideas that don't mesh with their current world view.

Any discussion about fundamental preparedness has to be had with someone who's not already on board with the idea, otherwise it's just preaching to the choir. This means that the conversation will inevitably challenge their world view, often fundamentally. This is not a comfortable exercise for the recipient.

Many folks are deeply uncomfortable entertaining new ideas, and doubly so if the implications of those ideas would be unpleasant to them and theirs. For many people, if someone suggests to them that they might find themselves in a life threatening situation, is taken as if the person proposing that scenario is directly threatening their life.

Fundamentally it's an unfortunate human instinct to want to shoot the messenger, as an emotional reaction to the message.
This is clearly a license enforcement measure.

They're going to search for commercial sites sending this header and then hit them up for money.

This is DRM.
I have been following a lot of his social media activities for a while, it's sad to see this happen. He is known for making jokes/tolling people. Also, part of his expertise is in pricing things and his net worth is supposedly in 100s of millions - if he was serious, the price would have reflected that. My guess is that everyone involved in the legal process knew very well that this was a joke - his bail is being revoked to teach him a lesson for insulting the legal process + infamy from his misunderstood price hike.

Washington post says: "He will be sent to a maximum-security prison until his sentencing hearing in January." That sounds a little too extreme for a joke while on bail for white collar crime. I don't understand, how, this otherwise very smart person couldn't be smart with the legal system - maybe it's the anxiety medication he takes or just miscalculations - who knows.
Pretty much, even as a developer, I feel the desktop paradigm is less and less important each year since I mostly only use a web browser and a terminal.
Trump blocks sale of US tech firm to Chinese company
The Community Edition
Why should all of our leaders be charismatic lawyers? How are they more qualified? Or in some cases, famous actors. The current president's main qualification was inheriting a ton of money and being good at getting in the news.

The bar is not terribly high and I think successful tech leaders are probably more qualified than anyone else that shows up.

I think the idea of having representatives and leaders is a bit old fashioned to begin with. But if we are going to have them, they should be the most competent intelligent people we can find from outside of politics.
See my comment elsewhere about a "split" approach to this for a Ruby implementation. I get that there's a semantic difference to change from __dict__ to the way __slots__ currently works, but it might be feasible to change the way __dict__ works to inline instance variables in the instance by default in cases where they're readily statically inferred and get much of the same effect without changing the semantics of __dict__.
I'm curious what you mean by that, because I've never heard anyone seriously argue against that assertion. Our top marginal corporate tax rate is one of the highest, according to Wikipedia [1], though companies are generally pretty good at not being too profitable and therefore not paying a very high tax rate, if that's what you mean.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St...

Excerpt: In 2014 the United States had the third highest general top marginal corporate income tax rate in the world at 39.1 percent (consisting of the 35% federal rate plus a combined state rate), exceeded only by Chad and the United Arab Emirates However, the average corporate tax rate in 2011 dipped to 12.1%, its lowest level since before World War I, largely due to the great recession and a bonus depreciation tax break.
It said that the capital to do this was $200,000 -- what was the inventory of robots required to accomplish this.

What will it take to have a small fleet of robots to manage small farms - but many small farms.

What if a community of gardens and farms were dispersed around a neighborhood/small town - and the town shared the use of the autonomous robots wherever possible.

Which robots are common to all farms and which robots are specific to a given crop?

Also, the downplay the robot-management tasks (refueling, recharging, interceding in really bad weather to tell the robots "that'll do robot, no farming today" sort of stuff)

An open library of farm robots, the tasks they can do, their cost options, how much crop area /number of farms/acres they can manage, if they can multi-task between activities specific to tomatoes in one farm and corn in another etc...

That would be interesting data.

Then couple that with the open source civilization plans - and update those to make those items more intelligent for efficiencies in their designed tasks.

In 100 years, if we can get an atmosphere on mars, we just send a fully automated pre-colonizing farm fleet to prep our invasion.
> Color certainly can exist outside of people seeing it; we can have machines detect it.

Machines detect wavelengths of light. That's not what a color experience is. Photons aren't literally colored red or green. That's just how we see objects when the cones in our eyes are excited, sending electrical signals to our visual cortex.

This is more obvious with smell and taste, since that greatly depends on an animal's sensory apparatus. Nothing has an objective smell or taste.

> You claim that there's some other invisible force at work when this happens,

But I made no such claim. I'm only pointing out how the problem is hard. I have no idea what the answer is.
There's no photo (of her) on her academic homepage or her own Web articles either. The obvious inference is that she doesn't supply photos to journalists.
> Linux still sucks shit on the Desktop

Shrug I've been using it on my main machine (a laptop) for 8+ years now. Works well for me.

> Outside of admins and linux developers, Linux has no chance on PCs

While I'm ever so slightly afraid you might be a little right, I'm super thankful that Canonical keeps putting out excellent new releases.
Got any better suggestions? Genuinely interested, not sarcasm. (Mostly.)
I mostly agree. I have used cygwin for years when forced to use windows and have had mostly a great experience. In the article she mentions launching windows programs from the shell as if it's a great new thing... you could always do that from cygwin.... The only thing this gets you (i think) is not having to recompile programs.
Location: Orange County, CA

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My previous experience was very broad in software development (dealing with firmware, desktop software, and web development). But I'm looking primarily for a Front-end or Back-end or Full-stack position. I'm willing to learn any framework.

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Check out https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/

I think the linux desktop user experience has improved exponentially over the last few years, you should give it another shot.
How to choose between Public, Private, Community, and Hybrid cloud solutions
Cygwin cannot run Linux executables. Cygwin .exe's are specifically compiled for Windows.
That might be so. It's intriguing. But that still doesn't close the gap on explaining consciousness.
actively resists any data collection

What an overly dramatic way to restate that these orgs are anonymous.

collective refusal to take the problem of addiction seriously

Incorrect. The church, particularly Jesus, does take it seriously. Addictive and destructive behavior patterns are called sin, but because this "progressive" society continues to water down right vs. wrong and tread down a path of moral relativism (that's just like your opinion, man!), it has reaped exactly what it has sown - a lukewarm and ineffectual stance towards active repentance from sin, including the desire to help others in that process.

What have you personally been doing to take things more seriously?
She was/is a traitor. Keeping secrets was part of her job also!
If it's not neurons, it may be that the foundation for understanding consciousness is wrong. Which would be assuming that some objective, abstracted view of the world can explain our subjective experiences.

I'm not saying it's impossible. Who knows. But it remains a hard problem for now, at least.
Your sarcasm is noted (and pretty funny), but you should know that there are military theorists who are taken seriously despite being superficially silly.

For example, an Army field manual [1]: "Any use of force generates a series of reactions."

Like, duh, right? But if you read on, the manual makes a highly cogent, precise point (one that's especially relevant to a military that all-too-recently used "body count" as a success metric).

"There will be times when an overwhelming effort is necessary to destroy or intimidate an opponent and reassure the populace. However, counterinsurgency forces should calculate carefully the type and amount of force to be applied and who wields it for any operation."

If you fail to generalize from tanks, rifles, missiles, etc. to "force", it's a lot harder to think about how to apply force to get the outcome that you want.

The same is true of programming. For small programs, you don't need abstractions or patterns. But if you want to build large, resilient, performant systems, you'll need formal definitions for those terms, and formal definitions of components you can use to build them, and so on.

Re-reading, it sounds like you're saying that the concept of a monoid isn't useful by itself, and I guess that's fair. But I didn't know anything about them before, and now that I read this article I do. I've got a long way to go!

[1] https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf
The usage of of an accent as syntax in markup and programming languages annoys me to no end. And it will still be used, to this day, the latest example are template string in Javascript.

• It is semantically idiotic because it's an accent, not a character.

• It is visually annoying because you almost can't see the thing.

• It is bad for usability, because on non-US keyboards the accents are implemented as dead keys. Yes, accent + space gives you the character but that's really unintuitive for people who grew up expecting accents only over letters.
It will take way longer than 100 years to gey an atmosphere ready to grow earth crops on Mars, if at all possible.
In principle, no set of third party objective facts can capture first person subjective facts. This is part of the hard problem.

The question is whether human subjectivity actually is true first person, irreducible subjectivity, or just an illusion of it.

Consider the analogy to sight: seeing is believing right? And yet, at some point you'll see an optical illusion whose logical properties are simply inconsistent with other properties you've seen. Like how water appears to break pencils [1]. So how do you reconcile this? Clearly seeing can't always entail believing.

Enter science. As I linked elsewhere in this thread, science can explain fake subjectivity quite well. So your choice would seem to be throwing away our best tool for objective knowledge just to preserve some special property of human minds that ultimately makes no real difference.

[1] http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/optics/bp.cfm
"Pointing out" is what you did, "rude" was how you did it.

For example:

"It's almost as if you don't understand that rudeness is about the tone instead of the content".

Or:

"It looks like you're trying to move the goalposts; would you like some help with that?"

Or:

"> 'It's not patronizing - it's pointing out a basic statistical fact' Interesting how you think the two are mutually exclusive."

Etc.
>3. "Jehoavh's witnesses 'mentality' has nothing to do with 'prepping'. They think (IIRC) that only a certain number of people will be 'saved'

That's a little unfair. While one aspect of LDS preparedness might be their take on the rapture and how that'll play out, their teachings on preparedness are not solely aimed at that one scenario to the exclusion of other more likely/immediate scenarios. They also don't guard their preparedness teachings and learnings for exclusive use within the church, it's all quite openly shared to all without any reciprocation expectations. That's admirable, IMO.

Also, as a concept the LDS take on rapture as a reason to prepare, is very similar to how 'zombie apocalypse' is used as an engaging concept to drive home very practical preparedness thinking, while at the same time being in itself patently absurd.

Myths and legends of old served much the same purpose. All these things are fantastic tools if applied appropriately, and don't require being taken seriously/literally to be useful.
You don't think you're being a little melodramatic here? We're talking about a change to a Server header. Nginx doesn't let you remove their server header either, and their business model is to restrict access to important functionality on nginx now. Do you think that's a morally better approach?
> It's hard to put my finger on what exactly unsettled me about

I blame ...

Take a long hard look at many things you take for granted and realise just how barmey they really are, unless you consider how economics works. Planned obsolescence (washing machine falls apart within legislated years + 1 day) is an obvious consequence of wanting sales to be repeated and profit maximisation. Some firms will aim for a different solution to the formula - eg Miele in that space - by pricing high and generally lasting longer but they really dance to the same tune.

To take perceived value to one ridiculous extreme, a Bugatti Vayron costs in the region of £1M and a modern Ford Fiesta costs say £10K. Is a Veyron really "worth" 100 Fiestas? Reduce them to raw materials and compare value or look at the amount of research time that went into each (my money is on comparable or more on the Fiesta). Both can transport near enough the same number of people but the Fiesta (I think) has a bit more room. The Fiesta almost certainly has more boot (trunk) space.

This seeming nonsense with spinners isn't really incomprehensible and we are all complicit. It is the way of the world and always has been, it's just a bit more complicated these days.

... marketing (and lack of incredulity - I'm guilty too)
> There’s still dirt, early mornings, dirt, more dirt

I have always wondered who are these farmers in the dirt in the early morning? Where I farm the environment is rarely suitable for 'being in the dirt' in the morning. Typically the field work starts in the mid-afternoon after the sun has had a chance to dry up the morning's dew or previous days rain. There are definitely some late nights though.
Much ado about nothing: ancient Indian text contains earliest zero symbol
I bought a business in 2014 and needed to migrate customers from the previous owner's stripe account into ours. At the time, stripe didn't have an easy way of doing it and I wrote a python script to handle that.

https://gist.github.com/codegeek1001/69d0419b332ea1e206b4