skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think attempts to rule out physicalism with arguments about qualia and such have gotten us nowhere, and I have no problem with studying game theory and experimenting with reinforcement learning, but the idea that these alone will fully explain consciousness is conjecture at this point - a conjecture that I, personally, am not ready to make.

Quite a few people on either side of the physicalism - dualism debate seem to be more keen on declaring victory and cutting off further discussion than they are in getting to the bottom of the issue.

BTW, on Searle's 'Chinese Room' argument, I have always been in the 'the system as a whole would be conscious' camp.
> The nuclear waste "killer argument" is mostly bullshit. Highly radioactive substances are spent quickly, long lived substances radiate weakly. 100000 years are quite predictable in geology.

Also the amount of nuclear waste produced is minuscule compared to much more toxic and more difficult to handle substances produced by various industrial processes. And people somehow have no issue with the latter.
if you like this, /r/theydidthemath is a great subreddit to check out in your spare time
I'm not really clear on why this got funded

"Imagine if Facebook was vending machine. There are over 7 Billion people in the world today who could potentially use a vending machine! And if we can capture just half that market and convince them to spent just a dollar a day each that's over 1 Trillion Dollars a Year! We will Disrupt the whole vending machine industry by using cutting edge Cloud Technology, Deep Learning, State Of The Art Facial Recognition and Advanced Social Graphs to make sure that each of our vending machines has a uniquely curated selection of the best Locally Produced, Organic products. And of course all of these features will be tightly integrated with our Truly Amazing App. This will be the perfect companion for the Digital Nomad Generation of the Future!"
In the next decade: Both won't happen. Building a fusion power plant would take at least a decade if we already knew how to do it. Quantum computers are still in the "We can find primefactors of numbers < 100" stage of research.
I just copied the title of the original article at themaven.net that I submitted ( https://www.themaven.net/theintellectualist/news/harvard-bus... ). I see the URL has been changed to the paper, which is probably better indeed.
I don't know, I can think of several times in the last week I would have been very happy to have a vending machine with toilet paper and coffee creamer in the lobby of my building. The only corner store nearby went out of business a few months ago.
Show HN: Essential functions in JavaScript in vanilla form (inspired by PHP)
To add to discussion: Greece GDP growth is less than 0% from 2006 to 2016. The map data is here https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/70mf7u/european_gdp...
But alcohol addiction of itself is not a crime.

Sure: being drunk in various contexts may be, and can be a serious crime (drink driving, certain commercial operators expecially). But being in possession of alcohol, drinking it in your home, sharing it with friends (provided above legal age and not driving): not a crime.

You've got the fundamental problem of addiction, for those who are addicted (many are, many are not). But you aren't layering on the additional crime of criminalisation.
HTC shares enter trading halt
"	HTC has announced its stock will stop trading from Thursday, amid local media reports that the struggling smartphone maker is to be bought by Google parent Alphabet.

The company told the Taiwan Stock Exchange on Wednesday that it was halting shares pending the release of material information, shortly after announcing that it would not comment on any market speculation about Alphabet’s rumoured acquisition."
> And what do the CAPTCHAs have to do with it?

Have you ever tried using Google's search over a VPN / Tor / public proxy? They're even worse than Cloudflare was with their CAPTCHAs).

> Why?

Probably to avoid fuckery by the local ISP and/or government.

> And how?

I'm assuming he meant OpenVPN or something, but I might be wrong.
Hasn't Catalonia already had a vote like this before?
Let me guess, they need billion dollar incentives for correct behaviour- and some gratious donations to the mba factorys?
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"Seed capital" is how this article was categorized by the economist.
I'm from Barcelona so I'm probably biased, but I still can't understand how holding a referendum can be illegal in a modern democracy. I'm asking honestly, this is not rhetorical.

Some say that Catalunya can't decide whether they want to be a country, and I don't understand that neither. This is like saying that Brexit should have been voted by all Europeans. Is there any legal technicality that I'm missing?

I guess that a country is more sovereign over their regions than the EU over their members, but still...
Bi-layered materials: graphene – no heat, no friction
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The wrong form of the verb 'seem' in that sentence betrays your incredibly dishonest attempt at selective quoting.
She's a witch, burn her!
"If I ever"upgrade" my car audio, I'm going back to an old-school style unit, with an aux plugin."

I ended up splitting the difference, going for a modern Bluetooth equipped radio with old-school physical buttons and a knob. I play music through my phone over Bluetooth and control playback with the phone's voice control. My eyes never leave the road, and my right hand never leaves the steering wheel except to change volume, which is easy with the huge knob and muscle memory.
Show HN: Underscore to Lodash Converter
> https://duck.co/help/results/sources
"We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex."

I thought they where re-implementing search.. Are they "just" aggregating?
Technically it's not infinite. The sun emits about 10^26 Watts of solar radiation energy produced from the nuclear fusion of about 4*10^6 tonnes of hydrogen per sec, i.e. a 100% efficient dyson sphere would capture that much energy at most.
Not saying your point is invalid but in the same context Google has access to all your stuff, including correlations to your mobile and location information and is not afraid to share it, as do others ie ISPs, possibly Microsoft.

So for browsers controlling meta data on user end has limited value without rules and laws around user data.
I'm from Crimea and I don't get this either.
Show HN: WSL-Hello-sudo, sudo by face recognition of Windows Hello on WSL
Look up what Medicare pays out.
> and doing so quickly

Most important part. The best solution which arrives too late is completely useless.
Maybe teach her how to make a Wordpress plugin? It'd slot in with what she already knows and she'd see immediate benefit as well as a real life application of her code.

Learn Python the hard way is a great idea too though, I got my friend started with the Ruby one and she really took to it. Another good one for Python is http://automatetheboringstuff.com/

Something to watch out for though is a lot of books are hopelessly out of date, code moves so fast that all the code examples in a book even just a couple of months old will be broken. Trivial for experienced people to workaround but typically if you're reading the book to learn you won't be able to figure it out.
Bitcoin Is Likely to Split Again in November, Say Major Players
They license both Yahoo and Yandex (Yandex being a massive index based in Russia).
Which implementations of Lisps are you talking about? I have been really interested in learning LISP and the only one I found that is used at production was Clojure.
> Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" is perhaps the most egregious offender.

Can you expand on this? I am reading this book at the moment, but I don't quite follow your criticism. He doesn't seem to me to be talking about phenomena related to "consciousness of consciousness", but rather about how consciousness arises as a functional process, and as a consequence of our linguistic heritage (though I haven't finished the book yet, and I find it all quite confusing, so I'm not really sure).

For reference, I found the entry for "Consciousness, defined" in the index, and the paragraph on the referenced page that most closely corresponds to a definition seems to be this:

> Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision.
You're right, I've updated my comment to reflect this. Thanks!
It's actually a pet-peeve of mine that corporatism (Rheinland model) could be easily seen as enabling certain forms of corruption. It's very clean: hardly any bribery or extortion in this model. But networking, clientilism and favoritism are widespread. Those are aspects of corruption, but more on a systemic level than on an individual level. You won't find a police officer solliciting euros, but you will find that any business leader has extensive ties, political and/or union. And these ties influence the civil society in such a way that there are less limits on unethical conduct by those in power (:: a definition of corruption).

There's a very cozy relationship between politics, business leadership and most of the union leadership in countries like Germany and the Netherlands.

The relationship is that cozy, that pretty clearly unethical acts hardly warrant official responses of the juridicary, politics or unions. One step worse for the public is that even enacted legislation is not always upheld when the three parties agree on it not being in their (local) interest. The Rheinland model transfers legitimacy from the individual to the parties representing the different interests. At that point power is concentrated, and corrupts.

Best recent example is the Volkswagen-example. But most large Rhineland corporations have such examples (Shell in Nigeria, Siemens in Spain, ...) I recently re-read a well-cited article on corporate social responsibility. Guess which firm was one of the examples... Volkswagen.
It's a skill like any other. To acquire it, the most important part is consistency. E.g. Always reserve 30 minutes, 5 to prepare the environment (close window, ensure napping place, put sleep mask, earplugs, etc), 25 for the nap itself. After alarm goes off never try to sleep more. Esp. when you do fall asleep on the last 5 minutes, it is too tempting to say "let's add another 20 minutes" but that won't do any good to get the habit and skill.

The brain must eventually realize it's nap time (preparation actions are the cues for starting), and that only has a very limited amount of time to actually nap.
> she was seen as following moral principles having not made any concessions to right wing politics

Well, Bavarians might disagree with both "moral principles" and "right wing". Especially CDU is hardly "right wing".
If you reverse some of their servers, you'll also find they're hosted mostly on AWS. So that privacy thing....
Ubuntu Adaptive Transparency for Ubuntu Dock
How Civilization Started: Was it even a good idea?
Refreshing viewpoint.

Is there a way to easily sync search repositories, like Stackoverflow, Wikipedia etc., to your local computer with an automatically built search index?
Let's imagine that due to a chain of events Oracle acquires controlling interest in FB :)
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The government of Catalonia can hold a referendum following the Law. The problem here is that the government of Catalonia is not following even their own regional laws approved by them, not to mention the Spanish Constitution.

The secessionists have even forbidden the opposition to participate in the debates in the Parliament of Catalonia.

Edit to add: it is not the same a country willing to participate in an union and then deciding to leave it, than a movement in a nation (Spain) where some people in there decide they want to transform a part of Spain in an independent nation.

Remember also that Catalonia has never been a nation.
Banks don't create money. People treat IOU's after depositing money in banks as money, but they are IOU's not money.

The difference may seem meaningless most of the time, but occasionally it becomes extremely important.
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Note the important distinction: no one, anywhere, has ever created a real-time video simulation indistinguishable from the output of a real camcorder. Real-time video is significantly different than still-frames. It's why video compression uses completely different algorithms than jpeg compression, for example.

Our visual systems are tuned to notice problems with real-time outputs, whereas a still frame is ambiguous. There are all kinds of transformations you can do to a perfect still frame where it still seems perfect afterwards: You can tweak the contrast, brightness, hue, throw a softpass filter on it, etc, and a human observer still won't notice a big difference. In other words, there are many ways to "cheat"! Even though we're doing operations that don't correspond to how nature behaves, a human observer is still fooled by them.

Yet the moment that you string a bunch of still frames
together into a video, that human observer will pounce on you immediately and call it out as fake. I'm not sure why motion makes such a massive difference, but it does.

To put it another way, if it were possible to make a real-time video whose ground truth was identical to a camcorder, we'd see it in hollywood. But no one has been able to; Avatar was the best we could do.

I think it should be possible to train a neural net to paint the scene, similar to a human painter. DaVinci didn't make diffuse/ambient/specular textures; he simply painted the scene according to how it would look in real life.

And in real life, color changes are gradual. It's crucial that the colors change in exactly the right way, but the changes themselves are rarely discontinuous. That means a neural net might be able to catch on pretty quickly.

Bots are already doing similar work:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/505zzr/colour_run/d71g...

Before: https://i.imgur.com/EqMLNFo.jpg

After: https://i.imgur.com/omYmn7Q.jpg

If it's possible to clean a puppy, it might be possible to extrapolate how light should behave in the general case.
> Our visual systems have been tuned for a billion years to notice that.

I think it's actually quite nuanced. Some things we are highly attuned to noticing and need to be exactly correct. Other things are surprisingly easy to fool the eye over.

And of course many things lie somewhere in between these two extremes.

CGI is an ongoing process of discovery about the limits of and the requirements for realism. And the artistry comes from knowing how to work around current limitations.
> FWIW I think nuclear is good in principle, but neither states nor companies have proven responsible enough to handle it.

So the currently operating nuclear plants that have gone without incident are dismissed? Why so?
> Or, if you let me, they have life SO good, they have run out of good things to complain about.

This is my perception of things. Or, as I sometimes put it in person, "people haven't experienced a war in a long time so they're going batshit with priorities now".

Also: it's not that we run out of issues to solve, it's that most of the actually important ones - like energy security, climate change, stabilizing agriculture and healthcare, developing - are hard and don't lend themselves into us-vs-them thinking. Even figuring out how one can contribute to that is difficult, and it's easier to find some proxy irrelevant non-issue to bitch about instead. And media only amplifies that.

EDIT:

Also, and this is probably a very controversial opinion: I think that the ongoing talk about a lot of those proxy-issues is strongly, actively harmful. The number one focus of the world right now should be stabilizing what we have. The technological civilization is very fragile, and at the point in which if it collapses, it won't rebuild itself for millennias, because all the easily obtainable high-density energy sources have been used up. And with the death of technological civilization, all the dreams of freedom, equality, long and healthy life, will die too.
I mean, a probably more relevant summary of what DDG offers would be: Bing/Yahoo/Yandex mashup stripped out of personalized results + bangs + [until recently] community maintained instant answers.

Edit: Worth pointing out: as far as I am aware, they're using all the other search engines with an agreement with those companies, which makes it completely okay in my book to credit them as the one.

I credit my operating system to Canonical, even though the heavy lifting and behaving nicely on hardware is done by people contributing to Linux. Linux out of the box doesn't mean a thing to me. Bing out of the box doesn't mean a thing to me. DDG and Ubuntu do mean a lot to me.
As posted elsewhere in this discussion, a request for professional courtesy similar to the more common "NSFW" tag. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15292325)

> fnord123: That post has text of the patents in question. Please warn if you're linking to text of patents so people don't expose themselves to triple damages
First and foremost, the state indicators are very confusing.

For example, when you create a new macro, the macro editor shows a button to the right of the name that is either a check or an X. If you click the check (which would mean what, anyway?), it switches to an X. Did you just complete some action by "checking" it? Apparently, clicking the Check button _disables_ the macro. Clicking the X enables the macro. To me that seems backwards, but either way it's a very poor state indicator+driver.

Then you have inconsistent behaviors of the + buttons. In the Groups and Macros columns, their + buttons add a new element. But in the macro editor, the + button causes an action panel to slide up over the Groups and Macros sections. So + doesn't add a macro step, it just shows you the things you can select from (and drag) to build the macro.

Now, the - (minus) button on the macro panel... it doesn't remove the panel that the + just popped up; it deletes the current macro action. To remove the panel, you have to click the grayed out + button.

And when you're done adding a macro action, should you click the check button on the bottom? Apparently not; that toggles the last action on or off.

Ok, so you've got an action. Want to add another action? If the panel with all the available actions is open, can you drag one down below your last action (repeating the same behavior you followed to add the first action? Nope. You have to click that grayed out + button to remove the actions panel. Then a new button appears below the last aciton - "+ New Action". Click that, and the action selection panel slides up again. Drag another action down to the macro panel and ... oops! That doesn't work!? But that's how we got the first action there, and we just clicked "+ New Action" (and it showed us the action choices). Ahh, this time you must double click the action you want - not drag it. Now it appears in the macro actions window.

The UI is a wreck. The app is great, but the UI seems like another entry here: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/6/9/15768800/reddit-worst...
I think the point is high CO_2 exhaustion rate of the gasoline cars, so that entire industry (and customers) switched towards the diesel engines, actively promoting them to be superior and eco-friendly variant of gasoline engines. Turns out they were wrong (just the other type of the pollution - Feinstaub) and to make things worse, they kept silent until the entire thing broke viral.
It is incredibly telling to me that the article doesn't even mention the nuclear issue because, i assume, the author is afraid of that reality. Coal is going to have to be a backbone because nuclear got killed. Pick your poison please, but be honest that that was the choice made.
The largest mining pools were based on China.
Ask HN: Do you use D language in web programming?
I'm examining a language D language. and I liked the features it offers. I want to get the comments of people who actively use it. I would be glad if you write your reasons for using it. Thank you.
7 soft skills every millennial should have
No offense, but I have yet to find a infotainment system that I liked. They reflect the brand identity of the vehicle, yes, but badly. The majority of in-car-entertainment systems are clunky, slow, and look outdated. The hardware is already at release a few years behind, and you can't easily replace it. (This also applied to smart TVs, and to some extent to in-flight-entertainment).

What I would love is a simple standard for aftermarket radios, like you used to have. One connector, and it wires up to the speakers, a display (that you can replace), and all the hardware buttons e.g. in the steering wheel. You'd have a one-way connection from the car to the device for information like speed.

When I buy a car, I don't want an integrated entertainment system. I want to buy a system from a stereo manufacturer that integrates with the card.

And I want the option to buy an "in-car-ITX" barebone from NewEgg, pop in an SD card with a LibreICE distribution or whatever, and roll my own entertainment system if I like.

I want things like changeable themes, Spotify support, information about the currently playing radio song (even if not supported by the station), and so on. I want fluid animations and no latency, readable text, and idiot-proof usage. That really shouldn't be so hard.
> no one has ever made any program that outputs a string of images indistinguishable from a real camcorder

We know how to simulate light essentially perfectly. Path tracers are capable of producing results indistinguishable from camera images in many cases, including the colored wall case you mention, and for video as well. The main problem is it can't be done in real time. Also, doing the modeling required to get perfect images is extremely labor intensive. But simulation of light and its interaction with common materials is mostly solved.
> I mean, really, come on -- that's not realistic in any reality.

Huh? Most projects use a single framework in a project, sometimes two if they are migrating. If I had multiple frameworks in my project, sharing components between them would be the least of my problems.

> standardizing "custom DOM" will eventually get us to a standard slightly above raw HTML

I understand this sentiment, but DOM is irrelevant to front-end work right now. DOM is just a render target for frameworks, making DOM smarter changes nothing.
Very true, but this tends to be an issue mostly in California. That's why it's quite surprising that states like Arizona, Nevada, Utah, NM and Texas haven't started getting into this in a big way. I think it's just a matter of time. Especially since they can sell their power to California for a big profit.
> Even if the pregnancy was unplanned, the two people chose to have sex for a complex set of factors

Or just alcohol?