skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Meric's Test of Consciousness of an AGI
I've investigated philosophy, spirituality and religion for a while, and came up with my way to test whether an artificial construct is conscious or not, i.e., whether it matches the definition of "strong AI".

meric's Test of Consciousness

Let the AGI be placed into an artificial simulated universe. (e.g. some kind of really advanced, Escape Velocity-like universe[1])

Assuming the AGI can fulfil its needs in the artificial simulated universe and maintain its existence - When the AGI can realise the following, and not on blind faith, it can be said to be conscious:

1. The reality the AGI experiences is not the Reality.

2. Any reality the AGI can experience is merely illusory.

3. The Reality is not like any reality the AGI can experience - i.e. it's not artificially simulated.

4. The AGI cannot with any precision describe The Reality as it actually is, besides knowing it's somehow infinitely more in some way.

I think this test is more precise than the Turing test. Basically the AGI sits in the simulation and realises what it sees isn't real and there is a world beyond.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Velocity_(video_game)
On that /s, do you know if there has been research done on what the smartest way to do funding would be? How could I find reputable resources discussing this idea?
Movie ratings from Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB or another site will always have exceptions where the rating doesn't match one's perception (after watching). But they give something to start with when deciding whether or not to check out a movie or read further about it and/or watch trailers, etc. That "initial push" is what I rely on these sites for - in other words, they help indicate whether a movie is a dud or not.

For me, the Rotten Tomatoes rule of "60%+ approval as fresh" doesn't work quite well. So I rely a bit more on IMDB ratings and the top reviews. If I had to rely only on RT, I'd have missed many movies that I personally enjoyed (sorry, don't remember the names/ratings).

As a rule, I usually avoid anything rated below 5 on IMDB, but I do like checking some movies out for the cast, even if the story, script, direction, editing, etc., are awful. In fact, looking at the cast is one of the ways I look for movies, and I sometimes binge watch one particular actor's movies to catch up with older ones that either weren't super hits or were made at a time when the actor wasn't yet well known. Those are usually so heartwarming to watch and get the breadth and depth of the actor's capabilities and also see how they have grown or changed over time.

There are also differences between how some movie critics, with a lot of knowledge and deep appreciation for certain aspects of movies and movie making, look at and rate a movie vs. how an average person (like me) would. Many people just want to be entertained when they watch a movie or show. There are fewer, in proportion, that have high standards for all aspects of movies. Even many people who claim to be "movie buffs" or write movie reviews on their personal blogs aren't as stringent. The masses need a more balanced view between what's strictly critical and what's strictly sheer entertainment value.
The problem with Starbucks is not that I can make it cheaper at home. The problem is that I wouldn't want to drink that burned garbage if they paid me.
They explicitly said in their FAQ that you could use React even in direct competition. None of this matters now, of course, because it's been relicensed. The only impact the patents license ever had on anyone was iff they initiated a patent lawsuit against Facebook.
Are you a lawyer? If not, you would be doing a disservice to anyone curious about the topic.

My own company's lawyers consider the GPLv3 toxic and not allowed at all for company use in any software we create - that's enough for me.
I can only remember the apple, cannot recall which side it is bitten.
That's quite possible. The article mentioned "_Logan's Lucky_"'s high rating and low box office results. I hadn't heard of this movie at all, but the ratings & reviews on Rotton Tomatoes convinced me to give it a shot, and I quite enjoyed it.
Ethereum, like bitcoin, is not inherently anonymous. Criminal usage in both cases require extensive mixing which is a pain.

https://blog.cyber.fund/huge-ethereum-mixer-6cf98680ee6c

Bitcoin was the crypto of choice due to the network effect, although for now it is probably better to skip ethereum and skip right into somthings like XMR and Zcash.
Very good point, and it's way easier to follow because of it.
Like buying drugs, money laundering, and hoarding. So far only one of those is legal.
Sincerely, thank you. I actually do this thing a lot, and one of these little ideas (usually artistic) can last from a day to about a week maybe. It is my own little idea that I will just appreciate and it stays good or it goes away. Maybe I start to judge it but the net yield is happiness in my own space. I like making art but have realized conceptualizing it or visualizing it gives me my own existence that I get to 'exclude others from' if I want to see it that way. I find this habit can often lead me to not make the actual art but I am in the process of realizing that is actually the beauty of it.

I also do this through art history, too. This has am interesting angle to it. I habitually look for unconventional interpretations of art history but any will do. I often find little pieces of art history that I relate to a lot, or have personal theories of. Maybe others would think similarly but I don't know that and it doesn't matter. These relations are between me and a bunch of dead people and the lineage of the human mind.
One possible cause is the pricing: Kindle strongly encourages you to price books at most 9.99 and a publisher might want to price their eBook higher (so as not to undercut the print version).

Another reason is that it's not trivial to produce a good looking eBook, and some publishers might not have the technical know how.

Question for you: do you get all your books through Kindle store or do you also get PDFs and other .mobi downloaded from the net? Also, what's so bad about printed books?
Heroin and meth addicts regularly commit violent crimes in order to procure more heroin/meth. The only reason they need to is because prohibition makes those drugs orders of magnitude more expensive than they would otherwise be. The only reason the drug cartels engage in ruthless violence is because they operate outside of the law and thus outside of the government's monopoly on force. Criminalization is the root cause of the crime.
There are sooo many alternatives, not just two.

For instance you could partner with another company, showing them the open contracts and make deals with them to share the price when a project is successful.

You could try to put your knowledge into low-thinking-step-by-step guides and raise a team of student workers to support you.

You could buy another small, struggling company, taking a bank credit for the buy. (a bank is much more willing in such a case than when you just want to grow)

And this is just what I come up with laying in my bed at 7 in the morning. There are dozens more options. As entrepreneur it is your job to find a solution without being limited by common ideas.

PS: A profitable, vertical, enterprise solution provider is not a company you raise money from investors with. You don't have the growth factor an investor needs. Grow with increasing profit. Grow with taking on more than you can handle and then keeping your customers continue with you despite you not being able to deliver on time. That's how this business works.
The Real Jimmy Kimmel Test
> promises not to sue unless you sue them first

Isn't that exactly the same as Facebook's license grant?
https://imgur.com/a/eO2cp

Cool website lol!
one thing that boggles me about the firefox dev team is their continuing refusal to add a "disable ctrl-Q" setting. it's right next to ctrl-W and in my firefox using days i accidentally hit it a ton of times.
Please update your HN profile with some kind of contact or website information. Currently it has nothing. It'd be easier for people to check here than search online and try to find out more.
This was a concern for most professionals. If you were a physician, lawyer, dentist, etc you did this because you didn't want patients/clients looking you up at home. My father, who is a physician, did this and refuses to open an FB account for the same reason.
The Nazi Mass Hysteria of 2017
NYU Offers New MS Program on Computing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation
another long-time vimmer here, and i'm perfectly happy to reach up and hit esc. caps lock is a lot more useful as ctrl.
Show HN: (Websnake) Asynchronous http/https requests in python (for humans)
I've only used VSTS, not TFS on premises, but my experience is that all the "cool" VSTS features(complex work items, custom queries, kanban boards, etc) I just don't find much of a use for. These features are focused on heavy management requirements for very large teams. I can get most of what I want from work items via github/gitlab label tagging, the custom queries are only useful if you actually use the complex features of the work items, and so on.

Meanwhile, the critical feature for me is a easy-to-write and easy-to-read history of discussion on a work item. This is nascent in VSTS. The description and discussion blocks don't even support markdown; The description box has its own WYSIWYG editor, the discussion block barely supports linking to work items(but http links aren't recognized, which makes it awkward to link to e.g. the code or the wiki). File attachments go in a separate tab, so it's difficult to contextualize what part of the discussion they are for.

Speaking of the wiki, it was just introduced and it's pretty basic. For some reason you can only place attachments in a single special directory, which makes editing it through the repo annoying - I want to colocate my pages and their images/attached files, like you would do normally...

I also have some minor quibbles like the stupid iteration workflow(add iteration to project, go to team, select project iterations for team...talk about optimizing for the edge case).

I think VSTS should really replicate the github/gitlab/etc issue description and discussion page. Past that, they seem to be pretty good at keeping feature parity(the pull requests are nice, the CI is okay).
This. I don't even want to know how many patents we're all infringing on in everything we ship. We all just sort of sweep this under the rug. No one ever does a technical/patent analysis. Is patent check part of your deployment pipeline? I highly doubt it. There's probably tens of thousands of broadly worded software patents out in the wild. The only thing that keeps the industry safe is how difficult it actually is to do that analysis because of the inherent complexity in both software and patent law.
Si is also incredibly useful but requires industrial processing to turn into something useful from an industrial standpoint.

Au is indeed useful, but not so much as nearly indicated by its current pricing. There's a _long_ history of human predilection for gold-as-a-magical-substance versus gold-as-an-industrially-useful-element.
Just get a cleaning lady.
No, they said your license didn't terminate if you had a counterclaim against them. The only event that license terminated was if YOU attacked Facebook.
Not at all. GP is implying that there's some shitty journalism going on.

Your comment bothers me more than it should. Why do people who feel strongly about stuff allow, or even encourage, shitty reporting and intellectual dishonesty as long as it suits the narrative they support?

I mean, you're calling out a commenter for being 100% right, putting words in their mouth and then calling those words ridiculous. What's the point?
We are moving to Apache 2.0 in a few days. Early draft at https://github.com/Yangqing/caffe2/tree/apache pending double check to make sure we are honoring all existing contributors.
Facebook messenger chats are not available that way.
"and the more you think about patents the more you wish you were a plumber and not a dev so all you'd have to deal with is toilets blocked with shit, and not software patents, which are much worse."

This.
Yes, an excellent film!

It’s all just voltage, but obviously with video oscillating at much higher rates.

You use most ‘audio’ modules with video modules and vice versa. All the typical logic works like divide, mult, add, etc.

It’s a really fascinating format!
To be pedantic, it's more that there isn't enough data to even say that there's any correlation to begin with, and also that our understanding of the origin of the two quakes refutes a shared cause.

A usage note: the phrase "correlation does not equal causation" is usually reserved for the case where two variables A and B have a correlation in the data that isn't just due to sampling accident, and hence are causally connected, but just not in the naive sense of A causing B. It may be that B causes A or that a third variable C causes both. But a true correlation in the underlying process always has some causal explanation.
$14MM isn't really as much as some folks seem to think. As you point out, there are expenses associated with having that much money. There are constraints to what you can spend while still having enough money to work for you, so that you don't have to.

Buying a jet, with just that much money for assets, is probably a bad choice.

You're going to want a house, perhaps more than one. You're going to want someone to manage your assets. You're going to want vehicles. You're going to want to do something to increase your security. You're going to want to keep at least one lawyer on retainer. Things like that...

What that money is enough to do is make more money. Once you have a goodly amount of capital, it becomes much easier to make more money.

So, instead of them buying a jet, they should hire a good finance manager and lots of insurance. I'd also recommend living frugally while using the bulk of their newfound wealth to increase their wealth.

$14MM is good money but it's not really 'fuck you' money. If they insist on buying a plane, I'd recommend a used Piper Cub. That's about all they can realistically afford, at least at first.
Oh fuck off with this. Jesus, the hyperbole is through the roof.
I think there's a broader picture here than our personal preferences about our ideal situations.

Consider software development teams. It's probably optimal for the team to be all co-located so they can communicate in person. But the internet today enables dispersed teams (that otherwise wouldn't be able to work together, e.g. for financial reasons) to pretty effectively collaborate on software.

The internet is providing additional options, that provides additional benefit. VR could provide collaborative benefits along these lines.
People should take responsibility for their own actions. A lot of ICOs are fluff and high risk. People should be aware of that before they invest. If they don't do their research, they shouldn't blame lack of regulation for their laziness. How would regulation fix this?

Who would enforce regulations? You would necessarily have to centralize things and hand over power to an authority. This would defeat the purpose of a dencentralized blockchain.
HHS to take healthcare.gov offline for 12 hours every Sunday
I'm about 3 years into my career. Should I focus on developing my technical or interpersonal skills?
>"People underestimate the amount of resources required to articulate monetary policy by a central bank. Bitcoin can already do that much better than maybe 70% of the worlds central banks."

Bitcoin only has totally clear monetary policy because it's increase of the money supply is entirely predetermined: It is created at an ever decreasing rate approaching a limit.

The result of this certainty in monetary policy is a currency that is naturally deflationary (literally by definition). This makes Bitcoin perfect as digital gold but shit as a functional unit of currency. You don't want to spend an asset that will naturally appreciate in value, discouraging using it.

You could have a cryptocurrency that generally trends at the same inflation rate as regular currencies: 2-3% annual and use that to pay the miners (or just give everyone a wealth endowment through giving any current owners a 1% increase in their current wallets and use the other 1-3% for the miners) and you would have a currency that could stay price stable with out Fiat currencies instead of always increasing in price like BTC has (at least over a sufficient moving average to reduce the volatility from speculation).
Reminds me of this chestnut http://www.businessinsider.com/liberals-can-win-if-they-stop...
Post a boarding pass on Facebook, get your account stolen
Everything old is new again: one of the original pre-1.0 proposals for CSS was to have global lights that would affect the colouring of bevelled borders.
I am one of such owners who did not disclose mining activities on my website and I am encouraged yet concerned at the opinions of the developers over what one does with coin-hive. It is always good to have an opinionated, and impassioned developer.

But if it leads to coin-hive dictating the way a website chooses to operate, it becomes not much different from the way Adsense dictates the way you have to display its ads.

This is the quote in question: "we have to be respectful to our end users". I am your end user. My visitors are my end user. Please do not jump the gun.

That said, the topic of whether disclosure is respectful, or legal, or legal until the law has caught up with it is a slippery slope with many valid yet conflicting parts.

- When a visitor visits a website, is there an implicit agreement to expend resources to load all of the website?

- If so, is ad block breaking the implicit agreement?

- Why do people often use cookies as an example of why it should be disclosed, when the issue is a matter of privacy not the use of computer resources?

- If it is computer resources, doesn't it fall under the first point above?

Yet, there are many types of tracking tools besides cookies that are even more invasive and take up CPU, bandwidth and electricity like tracking cursor movements (session replay) that never gets disclosed either out in the wild.

It may seem like the whole world is against undisclosed mining, but to a fish, an aquarium could be the whole world.
UnitTest: A Mocking Framework for InterSystems Objectscript Classes
I don't think that it's necessarily the wealthiest users. There could be a fork with lots of interest, no particularly wealthy users, and no non-user miners. One could probably impose the "no non-user miners" rule in code.

But even then, I prefer it, because with enough interest, it can always be forked. And that's much easier than changing governmental monitary policy. That is clearly dominated by the wealthy.
Step 1: purchase, borrow, or steal enough hash power to reach 51% for a short while

Step 2: use this power to force enough transactions to make yourself rich enough to keep 51% power indefinitely

Step 3: profit
And they didn't even ICO
Ok but generally it is possible to debug by omitting the decorator.
I'm curious what's the insurance / clinic you go to. I'm assuming it's not a usual bulk-billing one, but one related to instance?
The other ones are pump and dump ponzi schemes, but definitely not mine.
That's false, unless you assert the lack of free will.
Not in my experience, the cab is always "just round the corner" when it's 10 minutes late and I ring to chase it up. Another 15 minutes and maybe it arrives, or maybe I ring again and "oh we had to cancel it".

When uber is available it's a glorious system - know exactly where the cab is, which one it is (when it's busy and there are many outside), no "I don't go south of the river" type drivers, takes credit card (no "the machine is broken" at the end of the trip, or try to flag down a black cab that does take card), always get a receipt, not a scrap of paper you have to fill yourself, etc etc.

The only problem is it's not available in the town I live in. The local mini cab firms usually refuse to take bookings for short trips (2 miles), and usually refuse them even when you want one asap

Phoning for a cab is 1980s technology. I've used uber in a dozen countries on 4 continents, the same experience every time, far better than any mini cab or taxi (in NYC taxis force adverts down your throat!)
Scholar is by far the most powerful search site for academic literature. They not only find new publications weeks before other platforms do, but also find far more literature from all sources.

Nevertheless, I feel like this is one of these half-hearted Google projects and doesn't fully live up to its potential. This relatively subtle UI change is a good example that they don't seem to care too much about taking it further. I just pray Google doesn't shut it down one day.
Moreover, most cash transactions at small shops aren't even tracked individually. The merchant will just report the sum of sales for a given period if he's honest, or a completely unrelated value pulled from thin air if he's not.
What exactly doesn’t make sense? What in the theoretical scenario do you not understand?

Here is the scenario without the … emotional baggage:

——

Company X has patent P.

Company X releases open source O which provides implementation of patent P.

There is no patent grant in the license of open source O.

Company Y uses open source O.

——

Can company X sue company Y for infringement of patent P? I think the answer to this is “yes”.
Vue: MIT
Angular: MIT
Preact: MIT
Knockout: MIT
JQuery: MIT
Backbone: MIT
Ember: MIT
Aurelia: MIT

...

React switches to MIT...People still FUD. WTF.
Don't you have to take them to a ticket office?
In my use, zero or one tabs is producing sound at any one time, so the distinction doesn't really matter to me.
Can you actually spend Bitcoin in physical stores outside of the Bay Area? Bitcoin just seems like an investment vehicle/security rather than a currency. How many people actually use Bitcoin for buying toilet paper?
Well, we're about to find out if the Bitcoin exchanges in China have all the assets they should. The PBOC told them to stop trading, turn over copies of their records to the PBOC, and refund the balances of their customers. We should know within days which exchanges were stealing customer assets.

The exchange executives were told not to try to leave China.

(Remember Big Vern? Paul Vernon, CEO of Cryptsy. Took the money and fled to Liaoning, China. Started a Bitcoin exchange in China. Wanted in the US. Might be a good time to push through diplomatic channels for the government of China to find and return him. The PBOC investigators may have found him by now.)
Maybe in 2 years. I don't know about soon.
> Game of Thrones occupies the kind of cultural space that something like Star Wars did during the original trilogy.

I don't know, I don't think the magnitudes match up here.

Game of Thrones is a cool show that people enjoy watching, which happens to be emblematic of the current trend of long-form, character-driven drama with a bug budget.

Star Wars was a more of a complete revolution.
Well React was originally released as Apache. So React has run the gamut at this point.
That's like saying the decreasing price of hard disk space discourages people from purchasing it.
There's a huge difference between $300k/year and $300k/year with 7 figures in the bank. The latter means you can afford a down payment on decent property anywhere, which means you are actually making an investment instead of pissing everything away on rent.

If you don't feel rich at that point you need to get your head straight. Obviously there is always someone richer, but you are deep deep into the 1% of the richest country in the world and you need to be thinking about your greater life's purpose.
Also, if it is split multiple ways then the decision probably isn't entirely up to the OP.