skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is there a falsifiable argument that reality in fact causes consciousness?

You don't falsify philosophical problems; the definition of consciousness is metaphysical, not scientific (the Chinese room, philosophical zombies, qualia and Mary the color super-scientist, the Turing test...).

You can make falsifiable scientific predictions by building theories about your philosophical concepts, by creating detailed definitions of the process you want to study (e.g. studying brain waves and correlating them with the perceptions of people subject to certain perceptual stimuli, to predict how people respond to certain images or sounds). But this approach doesn't capture the philosophical problem in its entirety, so you can't prove or disprove it in full.
Exercise doesn't seem to help me much, as... I'm already doing regular daily exercise and still am in 'burnout' mode. Stepping away from everything for, say, a few weeks might help. However, there's little chance of taking 'extended' time away from any projects and coming back to those projects. They'll move to someone else.
They maintained control with minimal personal risk to themselves. From a "policing realism" perspective that's exactly what police do. Preventing or ending any sort of crime or violence is optional at that point, and they opted not to.

This is extremely at odds with how the police want to be perceived, and managing that contradiction is certainly their biggest concern right now. From that perspective it's easy to understand why they want to suppress this information, and who benefits if they get to.

These aren't unfortunate dolts who bumbled into a tragic response because they weren't equipped to deal with it. This sort of thing is a predictable result of the training and prioritization police act on every day.
UUIDs to Prevent Enumeration Attacks
HK, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Taiwan all add up to 200m.
Funny you should say that: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-private-equ...
Most days I'm 50/50 on that approach...On days when i support that, i would be so happy to pay them which would sustain their dev efforts, enable open source to persevere, etc. And, i trust them tons more than other providers. But honestly on other days, it would begin to feel like too many eggs into one basket...maybe not as bad as Microsoft level...even still, whether i would use them or not, i would certainly welcome a world where there would be another, solid (trustworthy) email provider - even if only to give folks an option beyond just Microsoft, Gmail, etc.
"was surely not the intent of the Turing test"

I agree but it is what it is. I think the Turing test has a few shortcomings in that regard. For one, I think it overestimated the awareness of the average evaluator by not stipulating any requirements for that role.

I was just asking if we should drop that test as some sort of academic goal being aimed for by the likes of Google but perhaps that's not the point.. as others have mentioned, it will be profitable to fool evaluators so the incentive is there regardless.
> having a stable currency

The devil's in the detail: "stable" but vs what, exactly? Local prices? Local incomes? Gold? USD? SDRs[0]?

[0] https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2016/08/01/14...
Clinics are facing severe labor shortages. It doesn't matter what the demand is, because they have a limited supply of veterinary care to give. My partner's clinic recently became corporate-owned because they simply could not hire new vets to be able to take new clients. Any days off any vet took had to be covered by one of the others on their "weekend" or the clinic would be forced to shut down.

Like other forms of healthcare, people want to take care of their pets properly and that makes demand relatively inelastic. If one clinic isn't taking appointments, they'll go to another even if the prices are 20% or more higher, especially if that one is more convenient to access. Once they're there, they'll usually stay for a long time.
> Let go of pride and commute by bicycle.

Could you please elaborate on how pride gets in the way of commuting by bicycle? This is alien to me.
In Asia, short-sightedness is becoming ubiquitous
No cover-up here, please go about your business.
It's a gorgeous visualization, but it appears the UI is bugging out for me on Brave and Safari in MacOS. The layout has no issue, but I can't select any of the dropdowns.
While not a proper historian I find Dan Carlin's observations very interesting, especially him comparing how, historically speaking, the middle class of their period had a lifestyle quite envious to our own, more akin to how we imagine the "idle rich" today (servants for all menial tasks, expansive homes, lackadaisical lifestyles and high quality education for personal pursuits). Underlaid of course by the same conceits we apply to the modern rich: they live on the backs of millions who, comparatively, are effectively slaves.

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-26-blitz-...
Startups making lithium-ion battery recycling more profitable and sustainable
Something doesn't make sense to me here. If it's automatically liquidating but ALSO it's the thing propping up a bunch of cryptocurrencies, it feels like there's a crash that's inevitable here. As the value drops, it sells automatically, which drops the value further, which causes more sell-off. What's stopping that from happening?
It generally isn't. Some people don't have the ability to metabolize phenylalanine, and it will slowly poison them. However, if this is you, you would definitely know.
Is it your job to testing every new js framework, didn't think so. Then this "new framework" situation is just funny.
Whatever works for them to make the pages load faster. It's really slow lately
You're right, I think my situation is similar to yours. My solar array is not so big (for now at least) so I have lot of power in the noon but less in other times, so it will be very helpful to have a lithium pack that absorb all that power quickly and then feed it to the lazy lead pack over the next few hours.
SSR isn’t a technique though. Functional UI composition is a technique, and SSR is an optimization being brought back to this technique.
That's so 1980s. Your appeal to nature has nothing to do with the reality of the last several decades. Mergers among firms in the same market are never good for humans who must use those markets in order to live.
>We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components.

So sayeth every acquiring company about the acquired. I can think of very few that it held true. Maybe this can be added to the list, but only time will tell. I wouldn't suggest people holding their breath though
Nothing to add here, but this is fascinating to think about. Thank you for this perspective.
Humans are good at anthropomorphizing objects even if they are not humanoid.

Not making it exactly human/animal like won't help that much, the underlying features that make the bot useful such as graceful moment, well enunciated speech or deep conversation will make it feel more human like no matter what form they take.
A dweb messenger without server side replication
Alternately, the artificial sweetener might end up being too sweet, so they balance it out with some more bitter caffine.
Blaming an individual for systemic failures is bad form (even for Microsoft). If you read the post, you'd see the QA org saw that Easter Egg, took it in the right spirit (like they should), and signed it okay for beta release (mistakenly, I'd presume) followed by everyone else in the bureaucratic chain that might have okay'd it as well.
Hash, displace, and compress: Perfect hashing with Java – andreinc
Of course, any program can be written completely in C. This, however, does not mean that it's always the best way to write programs.

Suppose you have a piece of code that you have to modify frequently until you find an acceptable solution to your problem. For example, it may be a game character behavior, or automatic vehicle control equations, or something else. If you write this piece of code in C, you have to recompile this module and link the whole project each time you modify the source. With a scripting language, you can write 90% of your code in C, and remaining 10% in this scripting language, so that you compile your C project only once. You can even hand over writing the remaining 10% to the people who are not familiar with low-level programming in C but perfectly understand the problem domain (like engineers or game designers).

Another scenario is when you want your application to be customizable by its users, but only in a controlled way and without exposing the sources.
Thoughts on AI, comradeship, ethics, interdependence
Same. I've also found .aspx templates in .NET to have similar issues, although those are more complicated with all the data binding functionality.
An experimental cancer drug had a 100% success rate
Yep, in this talk I go over an example from Netflix where Apache Iceberg originated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiC9vZATv0o&t=8s
> If you separate javascript code into 2 main parts

The point is that you don't do this. You do:

const App = () => {
// Client-side counter
const [count, setCount] = useState(0);
useEffect(() => {
setTimeout(
() => {setCount(count+1)},
1000
);
}, [count, setCount]);

// HTML-rendering part
return (
<div>Count: {count}</div>
);
}

The framework (next, fresh, whatever) grabs this and generates:

- Some sort of "bundle.js" that contains the component (as well as the framework to render it).

- An "index.html" that contains "<div>Count: 0</div>" (and references the above bundle).

- When the "bundle.js" is loaded, it runs the App component in the browser and reconciles the in-memory vdom with the browser's dom (that has the div because it came in the .html)

- From then on, the component runs normally (i.e.: the counter keeps increasing and you see it increase on the screen).

In vanilla-land, you would:

- Write "<div>Count: <span id="count">0</span></div>" in an index.html that also loads a "counter.js"

- Write the counter.js file with something like:

document.addEventListener('ready', () => {
const count = document.getElementById('count');
let value = 0;
setInterval(() => {
count.innerText = value++;
}, 1000);
});

Less code, you don't need frameworks, hydration nor anything similar and it's probably much more performant.

However:

- If you want to change the counter's initial value, you have to update both the html and the js file

- If another dev adds some element with id="count" to the html the whole thing breaks.

- If you want to modify the generated html structure, you have to edit both the html and js file

- When the logic gets more complex, you will have to implement it both in your backend-code-that-generates the html as well as in the js

That is, even though it doesn't seem like it in a simple example such as this one, the developer ergonomics of having a vdom are much better when things get hairy. The million dollar question then becomes "how can we achieve a performance and code-size similar to the vanilla approach while keeping the ergonomics of the vdom".
I get skeptical about acquisitions, but from what I can tell this actually seems like decent news.

Thunderbird isn't acquiring K-9 to kill it or merge with an additional product, they're buying it so they can increase its development speed and then put their name on it. That seems to me like about the best acquisition goal that they could have -- basically saying, "what exists is good, instead of building our own thing let's just pour resources into what exists."

It doesn't seem that conceptually different from what companies do with products like Blender, where sponsoring more development on an existing product is better than rolling an in-house version. The main difference being that K-9 is not independent now, the companies that do this with Blender don't end up owning Blender.

So with any acquisition there's some cause for caution, but overall I am inclined to be pretty optimistic about this. I use K-9 today, and I would like to see K-9 get more resources and to get more parity with other clients. I'm a little bit hesitant about my primary email client on my phone entering an experimental phase where its interface is going to change a lot. Again, concerns, but overall this seems like actually pretty good news.
RSAC: “Users Are Not Stupid, So Don't Treat Them Like They Are”
Simple and concise.

I love programming but I hate the gatekeepers who stand in the way of my autonomy. They think they know better but if they did, they wouldn't need to hire engineers in the first place. Product people can be amazing guiding lights in the dark but they can also be the most cancerous self-indulgent babies ever.
From http://www.kan.org/6100/os.html#macosx

> Mac OS X is the next big thing for the Mac. A fusion of Apple and NeXT technology, OS X is fully native, fully pre-emptive, fully protected and full of the bells, whistles and buzzwords we've been promised since PowerPC first appeared. It supports symmetric multiprocessing, to go along with the multi-G4 machines shipping now and the multi-core CPU's currently under development.

>Sadly, Mac OS X probably will not run on a 6100, no matter what you do to the hardware.

Anyone know why that was? Looks like people got OS X to work on iMac G3's so you'd think that a PowerMac with upgraded G3 and memory should be able to run it. Some other HW/MB feature missing?

edit: This[1] video about upgrading to OS X on an iMac G3 mentions the need to update the Mac's firmware so I guess there may not have been a FW upgrade for the 6100.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwTLvhHNnLU
It's mostly health insurance firms. That's a much bigger sector in USA than it is anywhere else on earth.
> Unfortunately, that argument applies to you, yourself. I mean, presumably you know that you yourself are intelligent, but you must take it on faith that everyone else is. We all could just be a kind of Chinese Room, as far as you know. Communicating with us is not a sure way to know whether we are "really" sentient because we could just be automatons, insensate but sophisticated processes, claiming falsely to be just like you.

I'm not sure the conclusion that Chinese people might not understand Chinese either is the best counterargument to Searle's thought experiment or its conclusion effective use of words alone doesn't constitute sentience. At no point does the difficulty in establishing what Chinese people do and don't understand rescue the possibility the non-Chinese speaker knows what's going on outside his room, and most of the arguments to the effect that Chinese people understand Chinese (they map real world concepts to words rather than words to probabilities, they invented Chinese, they're physiologically quite similar to sentient me, they appear to act with purpose independently from communication) are also arguments to the effect that text-based neural networks probably don't.

In a trivial sense, it's true I can't inspect others' minds, and despite what everyone says I could be the only thinking human being in existence. But I have a lot of reason to suspect that physiologically similar beings (genetically almost identical in some cases) who describe sensations in language they collectively invented long before I existed which very strongly matches my own experiences are somewhat similar to me, and that an algorithm running on comparatively simple silicon hardware which performs statistical transformations on existing descriptions of these sensations written by humans is simply creating the illusion of similarity. Heading in the other direction, humans can also be satisfied by the output of "article spinners" used by spammers to combine original texts and substitute enough synonyms to defeat dupe detectors, but I'm pretty sure the quality of their writing output shouldn't be given precedence over our knowledge of the actual process behind their article generation when deciding if they're sentient or not...
I always connected BackgroundWorker with Windows apps and not ASP(.NET) applications
This seems to be self defeating.

Since everyone’s words, including yours, would be those of the primordial demiurge (?) who got the ball rolling.

If ‘quantum effects’ are large enough to affect that causal chain then they would be enough to affect the course of human action.
> A wish: an IMAP server backed by Thundebird's local storage and K-9 as client

Isn't Thunderbird using some weird file based system? Wouldn't an SQLite backed client be a better idea in general? What would the advantage of thunderbirds local storage have aside from maturity?
> Slaves were not permitted to marry. Children of unmarried slaves learned how to live from their unmarried parents. You're blaming the victims instead of helping them.

We aren't talking slaves, we're talking about people who are, by and large, free to make their own life choices.

> In the next paragraphs you claim that they want to live this way and that this can't be changed.

I did not make that claim, nor did I make any claims about slaves, ancient romans and/or europeans. Your argument appears to work only when used against extremes.

I merely pointed out that people right now, not hundreds of years ago, are free to make life choices regarding education. That certain cultures do not prioritize education as much as others is not a point of contention.

> Tell that to children of Nigerian immigrants. https://medium.com/@joecarleton/why-nigerian-immigrants-are-...

You appear to be making my argument for me - that race is not a factor, but culture is. Those immigrant Nigerians are the same race as non-immigrant blacks in the US, but have better outcomes. That very article clearly shows how that culture prioritises education.
IMHO, the only two valid business criticisms at scale are:

- It's loosely typed and most orgs end up putting in some type system since it can get unwieldy

- Performance is poor at scale

Both can be "patched" fairly easily at scale though:

- Start introducing a typing system: https://sorbet.org/

- Split heavy throughput services out into things like Go, Java, etc.
Why not Crystal?
This was the pet theory of my chemistry professor in college. Having learned more about the Roman Empire, which didn't fall so much as shrank and withdrew to the east before being conquered by the Ottomans, I can look back and say "Yeah, I bet as a chemist he'd like to believe that."
On the subject of quaternions, here is an article that pops up on HN from time to time.

https://marctenbosch.com/quaternions/

It is called "Let's remove Quaternions from every 3D Engine". The author suggests replacing quaternions with rotors and geometric algebra. In 3D, the formulas are essentially the same, but framed differently. It makes some "surprising" properties more intuitive and is extensible to any number of dimensions. The last part is especially relevant to the author as he is developing "Miegakure", a 4D game (i.e. the game world has 4 spatial dimensions).
My guess would've been the appetite suppressant qualities of caffeine.
Amazon Partially Down
On the webstore, you will be facing the following message
“We’re sorry, an error has occurred. Please reload this page and try again.”

Moreover, multiple reports at
https://downdetector.com/status/amazon/

And on twitter and social media.
The funny thing is as far as I know they still use PHP to render React (via embedded javascript interpreter) on the server.
By rational, I mean the only time it is better than other methods. Buying legal things with bitcoin is slower, more expensive, dramatically more environmentally harmful, and dangerous to the consumer (no regulation). Truly no upside in real life applications unless you're trying to do illegal things.
Project Nessie also powers Dremio's Arctic service, so you can get all the branching and benefits of Nessie with an intuitive UI to browse branches, create branches and merge branches. Also, it is a cloud managed service with a free tier.
But this way they get to conflate attacks at the bank with attacks at women.
If you just want to do this on an enum within Rust, as I did just this morning, the strum crate is very useful -

https://stackoverflow.com/posts/50879764/revisions
We need better tools for online speech
Agreed on all points, and I absolutely abhor the cynical reality.

Its why I'm not above calling for purges and complete overhauls of the approach to policing.
Fuel price per gallon is only half the issue - or maybe even less.

Last week I filled up with 93 octane for $6.10 per gallon. Took a ~300 mile road trip with the cruise control set at 72mph. I got passed by people driving 80+ mph every minute or two. In really large vehicles. There's really only two possible conclusions:

1. People don't realize that their driving behavior has a huge impact on their fuel economy.

2. Fuel isn't that expensive.

My car (Audi Q5) got 37 mpg. The window sticker says it should only get 28 mpg on the highway. This isn't even hypermiling - I'm speeding the entire time.
Sprite Zero has zero caffeine, if you must have a sugar and caffeine-free Coke product.
>> Clarification of definition of federally licensed firearms dealer
I didn't realize that this was an issue. Congrats on closing some sort of loophole, but there are plenty of ways to get a gun.

They're probably aiming at situations where a person has an FFL for a side-business, selling guns from home, but then also occasionally sells guns that they own personally as a private person. This is totally legal but it's tricky. People who collect guns often buy and sell a lot without ever intending it to be a business, but they sometimes get accused of being a dealer without a license.

>> Penalties for straw purchasing
Something that should have been done a long time ago, but it's not even a band-aid.

Already there, since forever (in the form of USC 18 1001 or whatever statute covers making false material statements to the US Government), and totally redundant anyway. The Gun Control Act already makes it a crime to transfer a gun to someone who is prohibited from having one. A straw purchase just means acting as an agent for someone else when buying a gun (thereby lying to the Gov., which is what makes it a crime) If they could have bought the gun themselves anyway, then who cares? Or if you made the purchase but never transferred the gun to the prohibited person, then again, who cares?
LUMI, Europe’s most powerful supercomputer
The joke is a reference to the index finger cursor. It doesn't really work unless you're using the middle finger in place of a index-finger-pointing-up gesture.
"decline in service for consumers" -> squeezing the maximum quantity of blood nickels from suffering animals and their owners.
This presentation may help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiC9vZATv0o&t=8s
Reading the transcript, the simplest test I could think of to test sentience is to abruptly walk away mid-conversation and see if LaMDA starts panicking or asking "where did you go? Are you okay? Do I need to call for help?" If it needs to be prompted in order to do anything, it's not sentient.
Chatbots could deliver the personal connection to a messiah figure so many modern religious movements emphasize. I would be surprised if we don't see a church founded around the ramblings of a discarded bot in our lifetimes.
The Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey.

In my mid twenties, this book helped me pay off all my student loans and build an emergency fund with 4-6 months of runway. It changed the way I think about money.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi.

This built on top of Dave Ramsey’s by helping me create a system to build my wealth through investing and still continue to save towards future goals/emergencies.
Gold famously doesn't decay, but why should I expect prices to remain constant in terms of gold? If I sell you a chicken today for 80 milligrams of gold, why would you be obligated to sell me an equivalent chicken for 80 milligrams of gold in twenty years?

Gold isn't a perfect store or value, it's just a perfect store of gold.
I'm glad they hired him after that.
Works for me on safari MacOS even if it feels slow