skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you believe it makes sense to even claim that other humans are conscious?

If conscious is defined as “to have subjective experiences”, then I don’t believe “other people are conscious” is coherent.

The argument I hear usually is that other bodies are constructed like my body and I’m conscious therefore they are probably conscious too.

But I think this completely misses the point. The issue is the proposition itself. How can that proposition be translated into empirical claims? If the answer is just that other bodies are like my body, then conscious is just a fancy synonym of “is a human being”.
I was there. I've done my share of programming in assembler and building hardware for embedded systems. I certainly needed to know the hardware details, but I never saw a need to rewrite the opcodes in another notation.

I definitely appreciate the point of your last paragraph.
In my experience it's the "second page" of opcodes (0f xx) where the difficulty lies; the first page has been thoroughly explored and documented by now.

Historical note: the 286 was the first to have the second page.
This especially,

I'd be very skeptical of claims that, say, some complex ongoing control system, like a self-driving car, could be "conscious". But there's an argument someone could make.

But an artifact that has no data storage seems to fail any reasonable definition immediately. Maybe it could be part of something else that you can claim is conscious if you add storage, output controls, aims or whatever. But by itself the claim just seems preposterous.
I have heard (yes, somewhat recently) some classicists argue that the move from scrolls to books, with the text segmented in pages, was also harmful with arguments along similar lines.
It is, and because a properly built graphql backend will only fetch the data requested, the benefits of this approach extend far beyond the ergonomics of API access and can significantly improve the performance of the system.

I’m a little surprised that Graphql subs aren’t more widely talked about.
You would think there would be more political will for a government to make taxation as smooth and painless as possible for its citizens. I don't hate paying income tax because I "lose" money, I hate it because the process is a massive pain in the ass, and if I make a mistake (how can you not), I risk being fined, or worse.

Turbo Tax also provides some kind of service to help you if the IRS comes after you for some errors. One of my friends paid extra for this, him made a simple calculation error in their tax return, the IRS came after him for it, and Turbo Tax didn't do shit because he made the error, not Turbo Tax. So they're giving you the opportunity to pay them extra to cover the cost of their mistakes.

I honestly think more people would be willing to pay higher taxes if the process was low-effort for most people. For example, if you work for a company that witholds taxes from your paycheck, you shouldn't have to do anything; either you get a check in the mail if you over-payed, or a bill if you under-payed, and you answer a yes/no question to adjust your W-4 for the next year.
I use syncthing to keep notes from Boostnote (as well as other things) in sync across multiple computers. I imagine the same would work well with emacs org mode.
I'm in the same ballpark: 21 2nd try, and 18 3rd try. I've sort of always known that I've had good spatial reasoning, and this is one way to confirm it. I tend to think about most problems spatially, even molding things like code and social relations into this medium, because it's my strongest skill. I also tend toward the hyperphantasia side of the spectrum. I'm curious if other highscorers also tend toward hyperphantasia.

If the site is recording telemetry on scores, but it would be fantastic to have a percentile rank at the end.
I was assuming more the latter. Also benefit is you can extend and customize in C#.
Thanks for that. I hate to nit pick, but the issues surrounding the dams in the Columbia river basin are so complex and frustrating.. I honestly don't even know who or what is right at any given moment. I've torched friendships debating culling - not even sure I was right or they were. It's just horrible. Everything about it.

The dams are hugely beneficial to society. The produce energy and expedite inland commerce, and that makes us all better off. At the same time everything comes at a cost, and the costs are easily just as catastrophic.

I've seen rivers three times the size of the Columbia that have no dams. They are like the arteries of the Earth. They wend and breathe through existence itself. Heave and fall feet in hours. To see this, to be near it is to feel everything upstream. It's like looking into the night sky, but instead of making you feel small it connects you.

The Columbia is dead. I get itchy about it because we've lost that and no one even knows anymore. We long ago muted a voice that used to sing to us, but people will only consider the loss in economic terms - salmon fisheries. We can't even talk about things like humans anymore.
>Putin is highly disturbed by this all and I think he wants to set an example to reduce problems. But I think he will just make it worse.

In the Netflix series "How to Become a Tyrant" there's literally a scene where the narrator says something like "Things not going well at home for you? start a war overseas!"
I meant more so that there are alternatives to VTI. Like if Vanguard was split into 20 different companies, and each started its own VTI equivalent.
> No. I meant that C++ should have never been born

C++ was an important stepping stone.

There's still a large class of software for which GC-ed languages are non-starters.
California and Texas had the same number of people just 80 years ago. I don’t think California has done that badly in the long run.
300B years is impressive. I wonder how they overcame the problem of our sun turning into a red giant 5 billion years from now ;-)
And what evidence is that, specifically?
California introduces bill to accept cryptocurrency as valid payment method
How to Recover from Depression (2018)
I will try to message this directly, since this thread is old now:

I solved this, figuring out the file structure and encoding from the examples. I was totally wrong about the printer idea I suggested in another reply.

MARLEY.CHT, for example, looks something like this:

╔════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ ║
║ ║
║ ║
║ ║
║ ║
╠════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ BBoobb MMaarrlleeyy && TThhee WWaaiilleerrss ║
║ BBoobb MMaarrlleeyy && TThhee WWaaiilleerrss ║
║ LLeeggeenndd ║
╠═════════════════════════════╦══════════════════════════════╣
║AA:: ║BB:: ║
║AA:: ║BB:: ║
║- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -║- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ║
║1.No woman no cry ║1.Three little birds ║
║ ║ ║
║2.One love/people get ready ║2.Buffalo soldier ║
║ ║ ║
║3.Is this love ║3.Waiting in a vain ║

etc.

You can see all the files and the code that made them here:
https://github.com/econandrew/hn_mystery_files

This was a strangely satisfying task. I hope I can help the OP recover their more important files too.
Collective human nature is horrible, but it is at least not 100% consistently horrible. In the relatively good times we must make the wise rules that get us through the bad times.
No it doesn’t. The share button opens a native share dialog, which is only possible with the web share API.
> We’re not slaves to our basest instincts.

Individually, yes, but only in a limited fashion.

But with so many paths for tribalism, with each taking so much effort to bring under our conscious control, that the average person only seems to change the direction of their tribalism rather than bringing tribalism itself under control.
> I honestly think more people would be willing to pay higher taxes if the process was low-effort for most people.

TBH I think this is why Intuit has been so successful in their lobbying efforts. A key goal of many politicians is to create tax breaks for the rich, and by making taxes as complicated as possible, they can trick the populace into agreeing to just about anything that would "simplify" the tax code.
That's just not true. See here: https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

All of these statements are about optimising the development feedback loop:

> early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.

> Welcome changing requirements, even late in

> Agile processes harness change for
the customer's competitive advantage.

> Deliver working software frequently, from a
couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a
preference to the shorter timescale.

> The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation.

> At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.
any guesses on what the retail price might be, ballpark figure speaking?

I'm going to go with rainman guess, though it will launch at maybe roughly a 50% premium for the first year to 18 months.

https://youtu.be/HtdgCFe094U?t=96
> Yes, you could literally be the only conscious being in the universe and the universe would indistinguishable from one with many consciousnesses.

No, you think that's possible but it's naive. Your existence depends on environment and self replication of information. Your structure depends on it, your cognition. Are you saying you can be separate from the tree, and everything just a fake around you?
It can’t possibly get worse for consumers
Maybe Eric S. Raymond's advice from 21 years ago is no longer true in today's internet:

> Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers don't do this; they're proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a loser.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#style
check out if your local library allows a 1 or 3-day passes of NYTimes digital, for example LAPL [1] and Berkley PL [2] allows something like this:

[1] https://www.lapl.org/new-york-times-digital

[2] https://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/explore/elibrary/new-y...
I do most of my reading (recreational) nowadays on an eReader, so much so I find reading an actual paperback a little weird. I still buy paperback textbooks though.

I like the idea of having a wall full of books ,not for bragging, but glancing at the shelf once in a while, reading a few pages of a book you read long back when you are bored is a good way to remind you of the book's theme and what you gained from it. Sort of like browsing youtube and it serves up this scene from a movie you watched long ago. Plus, it does tend to attract a visitor's attention and might start an impromptu conversation.
This was 5+ years ago so I'm a little hazy on the details. A lot of it was just plugging into our infrastructure for config, service discovery, rate limiting, logging, etc.

- Logging the exact metrics we wanted to our metrics service. (We wrote a bunch of Lua code to do this.)

- Loading the set of backend services from Zookeeper. (We had a sidecar process that would periodically sync from Zookeeper to a config file, then call `nginx reload`.)

- Routing requests to different datacenters based on where the user's data was homed. (We had Go libraries to do this, and it would have been nice to be able to just call into that. I think we ended up putting this functionality in the sidecar.)

- Changing the way we streamed a response based on an HTTP header from the application. (We ended up writing a C module for this.)

- Changing the backend selection algorithm from "least connections" to "best of 3 random choices". Nginx added support for this in 2018, apparently.

There were ton of things we solved with Lua, which wasn't ideal. Since that's the only Lua in our codebase, everyone who touches it has to make a mental switch to remember all the weird edge cases (as you do with any language), plus 1-based array indexes, plus no static types.

Plus, any Lua or C you write has be contorted to fit Nginx's multi-stage request/response architecture. If you're writing a plugin that is meant to play nice with other plugins, then the contortions may be worth it. But for us, a proxy library would have given us the freedom to write code that was simpler and easier to understand.

The team moved to Envoy after I left: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/how-we-migrated-dropbox-...
Does anyone actually use technical analysis?
Well, you're completely OT, but I started hating frontend development exactly when redux + sagas started becoming popular.

Don't get me wrong, Elm has a very similar architecture but it's pleasant to use. The idea is cool, the implementation of redux and sagas is a terrible boilerplate mess.

More recently, with react hooks + async you can model something similar without having to use redux or sagas.

Redux hook syntax is also a step forward, albeit not very useful now that we have context and reducers.
I would disagree with "Use Docker Content Trust for Docker Hub".

Docker hasn't been signing official images for the last several years, so turning this on means you'll get the last correctly signed images, which happen to be years out of date.
We already know that Google is scanning all of the files in your account looking for kiddie porn, and has been for the past decade.

>a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect's Gmail account

https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le...
"Conscious" is a word that has no objective scientific definition.

It follows that "slightly conscious" is not well defined.

In practice "conscious" just means "anything that thinks and makes decisions like I do".

Also, nobody actually understands how their own brain works when they are thinking and deciding, which makes it very difficult for anyone to determine if some particular AI software thinks and decides the same way that their brain does those things.
I don't think the FBI would be that dumb to arrest you before they have solid proof.
I don't know if you're right or wrong, but I do appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts!
> Don't buy domain names I'm not sure I understand this one - anyone have an explanation?

When you buy a domain name, you are supposed to supply accurate ownership information. If you do not, the registry can yank your domain when they discover that. Most registrars obfuscate/hide the information in their whois service, but they still need to have it to comply with the rules of the registry. That information can be subpoenaed.

The purchase/renewal transaction(s) also leave a trail that can be followed.
If only.

GIF is still the only format that supports animated frames, and is supported in most applications that support images. I sometimes create some animated WEBP to post somewhere, but the outcome is always the same, I have to go back and convert it to GIF or it won’t display.
Napster was designed explicitly to enable copyright infringement.

Cloud storage is not.

A more valid comparison would have to involve the Supreme Court's ruling on VCRs, which could possibly be used for copyright infringement, but had substantial uses that were perfectly legal.

>The Court's 5–4 ruling to reverse the Ninth Circuit in favor of Sony hinged on the possibility that the technology in question had significant non-infringing uses, and that the plaintiffs were unable to prove otherwise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive...
Sven Guckes Has Died
Definitely going to test it!
And you could dynamically and efficiently add/remove web apps and endpoints assuming your entire codebase is in C#.
Yes. As I grow older I'm more drawn to Nintendo ecosystem than any other due to games that are so much packed with fun and pretty immediate in their delivery.
> Brains have dedicated "word-processing units" and those are much faster than number-processing units.

*In most people.
Another nit, the "abandoned" part is the one that was open sourced a loooong time ago. Since then, it underwent a ton of changes but yeah, it's within Facebook. So, not abandoned at all, but not available outside.

The main issue (as usual in big companies) is the large amount of inter-dependencies with internal systems. Scribe as-is today doesn't make much sense outside Facebook. And yeah, it could be cleaned up, mock the internal services and OSS it. But that's a lot of work, both doing it and maintaining it. And having all those mocks, etc "wouldn't be Scribe as-is either"in terms of how e.g. it scales and so on.

In any case, the storage (LogDevice, https://github.com/facebookarchive/LogDevice) which is a large part of the system was open sourced a while back and... sadly it went again into "not-maintained OSS".

Finally, you can get a similar-ish system working with OSS tools (e.g. fluentd + Kafka) that will also scale quite well and which IMHO can also made to scale to Facebook-size levels. So, the incentive is there, but there are OSS alternatives already available :)
If it an OOP language I use a tool to reverse the code into UML class diagrams. There are a few of these tools, I use Enterprise Architect. I play with the resulting rat’s nest and I find that tactile exercise necessary to gain an understanding of the relationships between classes. It also serves as a road map for the future
Yep, which leads to things like the following not creating out.txt (in cmd.exe)

prog.exe "abc \" def" > out.txt
Geodatadownloader[1][2] solves the problem of "how do I download data from this ArcGIS rest endpoint?" It operates completely in the browser, besides the CDN for the javascript, as well as the ArcGIS online map used to visualize the data you're about to download.

Long term, I'd love to add support for download of multiple file formats. I believe I'll be able to use an emscripten port of GDAL (specifically ogr2ogr) to do this.

[1] https://geodatadownloader.com
[2] https://github.com/mchaynes/geodatadownloader
>How

They have lobbyists [0][1], and you don't. But don't worry, "experts" and oligarchs tell us that corruption here is among the lowest in the World.

>Using lobbying, the revolving door and “dark pattern” customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy, and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise.

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

>The biggest obstacle, the New America experts warn, is the lobbying power of Intuit and its allies.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-21/california...
Lua in nginx can you get very far in my experience.
Easily. It was advice for another time.
Some of the anonymous advice here is pretty poor and recommends centralized services that require some level of identification.

If you actually need to be anonymous the daunting but doable tactics on https://anonymousplanet.org/ are a much better bet.
> regulations that are likely to pass would prevent Apple and Google from removing apps arbitrarily?

Any proposals?
I use TurboTax.

The reason I use it is that I've used it in the past and I know it works for my somewhat weird tax situation. It sucks. Intuit is a terrible company. But there is no way to know that I'll be able to actually navigate the wizard for some other product before I dive in. And all of the free options definitely don't support my situation. If I wanted free I'd be stuck with the raw forms and I'm not confident I'd do it all right.

I'm a weirdo and I actually like the precision of doing taxes, but the consequences of botching it are very high. So I go with the thing I'm familiar with and I get mad that TurboTax is taking $110 of my dollars every year for crap that should be done much more simply.
The article even mentions that the CEO, Sam Altman, says that it’s not conscious in any way that you would use the word “conscious”. It’s like porn that way. You know it when you see it. And a computer is not conscious in anyway you would recognise.

And that’s why science communication matters. Having some super excited researcher talking publicly without an editor or someone to ground them just gives wrong ideas. Imagine the number of enthusiasts who did not read any rebuttals and now think AI are becoming conscious.
Lua is a nicer than JS (but not by much) so I can see why would someone want to do to this.

At the same time, a compiler Lua -> JS wouldn't have the download size issue and would probably have faster performance.
Well known by many in the German chaos-sphere. Sven was always out for helping others. Was behind vim.org and you will find more on Sven on http://www.guckes.net/sven/
On this tired topic of origins of consciousness, I've heard an interesting statement that consciousness arises from life interacting with matter. Life by itself, an abstract life, wouldn't be able to do much or interact with anything. Matter by itself would be an amorphous substance sliding down to the lowest energy state possible. But when life interacts with matter, it sees itself in the mirror and consciousness arises.
>If conscious is defined as “to have subjective experiences”, then I don’t believe “other people are conscious” is coherent.

Coherent but about as likely as Last Thusdayism. You have to factor the probability and potential mechanisms of what might give rise to consciousness and if you do you should have a very low probability on other humans not having it, just as you have a low probability on a random human you meet physically not having a brain without having to confirm by looking inside their head.
The solution to catch the errors for each function would be to catch errors from each promise individually (possibly within their functions, or within wrapper functions). This solution would also clearly state the intent. Performing concurrent tasks and only catching the errors at a higher level is a tricky thing to define behavior against; .Net/C# does it with the `AggregateException`, but even that comes with its own difficulties (which error comes from which promise? which came first? did one cause the other?).
This is a much bigger thing than people might realise. This is like a vertical cliff in in the graph of progress, a true phase-change marking a "before" and "after" in the timeline of the history of computer graphics.

In 2012 I saw that scene in Prometheus where the scientists throw some drones up in the air. They zip away down the corridors of the alien temple, mapping it in 3D in real time. That scene resonated with me, because I realised that this wasn't some "distant future tech", but probably already doable. The hardware of the day was nearly capable of it, what we were missing was the algorithm.

For the first time I feel in computer history, we've reached the point where the hardware has massively outstripped our mathematics. Our algorithms used to be decades or centuries ahead! George Boole died 100 years before widespread use of Boolean logic. Gauss died 200 years before computers started using his maths heavily. Etc..

Today we have teraflops available to us on our desktops, but the mathematics is yet to catch up. This paper is a huge "catching up". It's the first high-performance, general-purpose, robust, and incremental reverse renderer. That's a very generic thing with many applications, not just in computer graphics.

Imagine what this technology will be able to do with just a few years of refinement. On a future RTX 4080, it may be possible to build 3D models in real time from a video feed! Super resolution extracted from multiple frames! Drones mapping 3D spaces as they fly through them! The "enhance!" capability from CSI might not be fantasy any more!

We live in exciting times...