skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I could listen to Hofstadter forever.

Perhaps consciousness is just a byproduct of our ability to anticipate the outcomes of our decisions and reflect on the decisions we have made (that itself is a whole other ball of wax [1]).

Consciousness is a sort of neuroreflective Narcissus, we end up navel gazing at our own existence as a mind in the universe.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2008/04/mind-decision/
>No, you can't argue the world into being from these axioms. They could probably invent logic and mathematics, but nothing of the natural sciences can be discovered without the senses.

It seems contradictory to admit they could invent math and logic, but then reject that they could go one step further and rig that understanding of math into and understanding of physics. I'll admit without some corpus of data to understand the motivation for constructing physics is tenuous. But the question was about the principle of if they could and if you're granting me math I don't see any obstacle left.

>Phrasing is irrelevant. My senses are not little people talking to me about what they perceive

Sure maybe your senses aren't actually little people, but if you've already evolved a social reasoning / grunting system that only knows how to talk about people, why not convert that into a system for reasoning / grunting about everything by imagining everything as little people. It might not be literally true, but its a useful fiction. Its a fiction that lets us hack "conversational reality consciousness" into "physical reality consciousness". The difficulty in twisting the phrase differently is supportive of this hypothesis.
I live in such a house. All houses in my street have them. Some have one or two, others have 10+. When we moved here I attended a ceremony across the street when they were putting new ones. During special events throughout the year people are cleaning them, put candles and flowers to remember. It think it is an excellent way to remember and understand our past.
this is literalist, black and white thinking that is one of the foundations of fascism

if there is a social conflict (and boy are there social conflicts), not talking about those social problems is tacit support for the dominant position. pretending that one's work life can be neatly compartmentalized and has no bearing on the rest of the world is a fantasy of those who value their own comfort over the well being of others
If Facebook shuts down people would flock to an alternative.

If Facebook bans people here and there, the rest of the crowd won't give a shit.

That is the problem.
Degrading to the lowest common denominator is what an interoperable standard is supposed to accomplish. The alternative is for iMessage to entirely decline SMS usage in group chats.
You might have missed a part of the article, where author says they write single line sentences as 'code', but both Markdown and HTML automatically turn concescutive sentences into paragraphs, unless you (using a blank line or <p>) explicitly end a paragraph.

> Not publishing one sentence per line, no. Write like this for your eyes only.

(Edit: added quote from article)
Breakdown of the FDA Vrbac Meeting on Kids Vaccine for Under 5
For the Dutch speaking community, Orkut has always had a strange connotation to it, as part of the name is a swear word.
All I needed was telnet...
I know the word has a definition.

I wanted to know what tpoacher's lived experience and personal observation was to cause him to make the statement.
Optical interconnect also solves a bunch of challenges offchip at human scale: RFI, impedance, crosstalk, power surges, but we keep shoring up cheap twisted pair copper because it kinda works. The cost per foot of the media is kinda similar but the transceiver gear is still expensive and needs commoditizing.
> in the late 1800s there were heated philosophical debates about whether life required a mysterious “vital force” or if it could be produced through ordinary physical interactions. As biochemists learned more about the chemistry of life they found that it was the latter and before long everyone forgot that this was even a question that had ever been debated.

I wasn't aware that we figured out how to manufacture life? Afaik, there is no reliable experiment that can reliably construct a living organism using a combination of non-living material. Did I miss some fundamental experiment that proved otherwise?
In my view text-based is the way to go for most types of diagrams. Easy to source control and once you are used to the syntax, very efficient. Diagrams are code.
Your first sentence is not, in my opinion, a demonstrable fact. The lack of an adequate definition of consciousness tends to preclude such a demonstration.
If you just want Zürich city it is less, about $850/year
Normally I would advise against this: becoming a very good developer takes about five to ten years of experience and you would likely be taking a step back in your career without a major payoff (financially, for sure). However, in this case, a Quant who is already doing technical work, it seems more likely to be successful. The long term comp will likely end up being lower than just staying a Quant and aiming to move up, but if programming speaks to you, you are in a better position than most to switch.

One potential avenue would be to build a SAAS product for Quants with your existing domain knowledge. This would allow you to leverage your existing body of work and do the programming work you want to.

Good luck!
Why did you choose him in particular? Do you believe him to be the most capable politician today?
We Finally Understand Consciousness
Can you point out any ML project that works any simpler than this? Other than running Colab of course, which I mentioned.
It does help, but these guys know what they are doing.

My dad had a benefit fund through his union and because his dentist knew how to milk the program, he ended up with a lot of unpleasant and unnecessary dental work. You see it a lot with telephone company employees, fire fighters, etc.
The tool is neat, it just lacks arrows and shapes (like diamonds for decisions etc.).
For what it's worth - a friend of mine is a dentist and he mentioned once that white fillings (the ones that are set with an UV light) start to shrink after 5 years. On the other hand, silver filling will do the same after 10-15 years and at a slower rate. Whether this shrinkage will lead to problems is a separate question.
> Why did the API endpoint change? ...

This stuff all feels better suited for a commit message. Conversely if I found all this in code I'd delete it.

I'm an almost never comment person (I use them when things are weird or inconsistent, but otherwise view them as noise) but I've been persuaded by John Ousterhout that code cannot adequately describe abstractions, and you need comments to fill in the gap.

Similarly with variable names, if you don't know i is index, please don't try working on this code. I get some code is a soup of inscrutable variable names and flow control to the degree it looks decompiled, but that's a higher level composition problem, not a "use more nouns" problem.
> but most websites never will

only because it's harder to do that right now than just describing a document via html.

But there will come a time when it's trivially easy to write a full app in the browser via wasm, and the outcome will be that the user can either accept or reject the entire app, rather than selectively choose the part of the app to view or use.
> Not that git is great for prose, but it kinda does the job and I don't need to have a new tool.

Is there really something better? Git is pretty great in general, and prose doesn't seem like there'd be much room for improvement in tooling. I'm not a writer really though, so maybe I'm missing something?
Given your experience, I'd target at first something in the big data / data mining / machine learning field rather than pure software engineer:

- Much of what you have acquired as a Quant is potentially going to be re-usable

- Becoming an actual SWE will potentially require you to learn a lots of new stuff (code review process, unit testing, large scale software architecture, code refactoring, OO, algorithms, code productionization, source control, debugging, etc... the list is very long) , and more importantly, you may have un-learn a lot of reflexes you might have acquired as a quant (of the "code, run once and throw away" persuasion)
All three of you seem to have the same general problem, just the company name is different. No single account should gate access to _everything_ in your digital life. If getting banned from one company's platform would be a major problem for you, that probably means you should take steps to correct that now, no matter what the company is.

If Facebook or Twitter banned me, it would have zero effect, because I don't ever use any of the services. If Apple banned me, it would be annoying, but I'm not heavily dependent on iCloud, so could switch to an Android phone pretty quickly. I certainly don't keep anything critical on iCloud or locked behind Apple services. If Google banned me, I'd lose an old gmail account I no longer use and I guess Google Voice, which I do use. Honestly losing Voice would probably be the most painful. I don't use any other Google service that requires a login so it wouldn't be a huge deal.

We keep seeing these "XYZ banned me and I lost access to all my digital life" posts on HN, and they should be wake-up calls, yet people still think It Won't Happen To Me, and then we get another "ABC banned me..." article next week.
This sort of undermines the necessity of modern dentistry, though. Didn't it?

You can even take it further back. How many of those fillings were truly necessary at the time?
Tangentially related:

"Omit needless words."

-William Strunk, The Elements of Style

Highly recommended book for anyone who wants to be a more effective writer.
This made me think:

"Unlike many other German cities, the city council of Munich in 2004 rejected the installation of Stolpersteine on public property, following objections raised by Munich's Jewish community... She objected to the idea that the names of murdered Jews be inserted in the pavement, where people might accidentally step on them.

In other cities, permission for the project was preceded by long, sometimes emotional discussions. In Krefeld, the vice-chairman of the Jewish community, Michael Gilad, said that Demnig's memorials reminded him of how the Nazis had used Jewish gravestones as slabs for sidewalks.

Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) has expressed reservations towards to project, noting that the form of the memorial, particularly its location on regular sidewalks, which are regularly stomped over by passersby, is not respectful. Another criticism from IPN has concerned inadequate level of detail provided on Stolpersteine, such as lack of context clarifying that most of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were Germans, and not Poles. IPN officials have repeatedly suggested that instead of Stolpersteine, the more respectful, informative and traditional form of remembrance that the IPN is willing to support."
what is 'alternative data'

Is it like listening to nirvana when eveyone else is listening to michael jackson?
This argument is a pretty egregious example of strawmanning. A sketch of the author's reasoning:

1. Consciousness is observer-independent, so if one person observes consciousness, then everyone must acknowledge it.

2. If there are infinite observers of a given computation, each with a distinct interpretation scheme (e.g. observer i flips every i-th bit), at least one will interpret that computation as conscious.

3. (1) and (2) imply all computations are conscious.

4. This is absurd.

5. Therefore, computation cannot equate to consciousness.

No one would claim that pi (the constant) is conscious because some sub-sequence will parse as Shakespeare, nor would they argue that an excerpt of Proust is conscious because it required intelligence to produce. Let's agree on some sensible preconditions for consciousness (entity recognition and some notion of memory, among others) before we start trying to argue by reductio.
Technically that's accurate, but that does nothing for the social stigma of being that one guy who makes the chat suck for everyone else just by being present
>your manager is wrong, but the way you handled it is very immature. There are "shit" managers everywhere, if you get one, suck it up and start planning your escape.

They don't even sound that shitty to me. Managers like everyone else in the world have to work within the constraints of the system in place. Like Scrum vs Kanban. Maybe the manager couldn't care less but their director is the biggest Scrum cheerleader ever. And maybe they're getting hounded for the estimate and just need a number. And maybe skipping the internship program looks bad for the manager. And so on.

Even if it's all the Manager's fault there's far worse sins in the world than dictating a methodology or asking for an estimate.
Bitcoin protects against debasement of fiat, not inflation.
It's a hedge for the collapse of all fiat currencies.
Data Oriented Programming in Java
I had copied this Emacs macro just for doing that.

;; one sentence per line
(defun wrap-at-sentences ()
"Fills the current paragraph, but starts each sentence on a new line."
(interactive)
(save-excursion
;; Select the entire paragraph.
(mark-paragraph)
;; Move to the start of the paragraph.
(goto-char (region-beginning))
;; Record the location of the end of the paragraph.
(setq end-of-paragraph (region-end))
;; Wrap lines with 'hard' newlines (i.e., real line breaks).
(let ((use-hard-newlines 't))
;; Loop over each sentence in the paragraph.
(while (< (point) end-of-paragraph)
;; Determine the region spanned by the sentence.
(setq start-of-sentence (point))
(forward-sentence)
;; Wrap the sentence with hard newlines.
(fill-region start-of-sentence (point))
;; Delete the whitespace following the period, if any.
(while (char-equal (char-syntax (preceding-char)) ?\s)
(delete-char -1))
;; Insert a newline before the next sentence.
(insert "\n")))))

(global-set-key (kbd "M-j") 'wrap-at-sentences)
I don't know by exactly which route I'm going to reach delivery of X project, but I know that I know how to navigate.
Look for:

1.Can you sell? Do you have enough knowledge of the market? You’d be surprised how many “founders” I’ve talked with that haven’t made a simple google search of the competition and why/how their product is different

2. Runway length. As a technical co-founder I don’t want to be worrying about investor relationship, 4 months of money in the bank or some other items that belong on the CEOs concern.

3. How much work is needed before users can start using it. This is a personal preference but I gravitate towards a project/MVP that can be completed in 3-4 months and after that I’d expect the CEO to start bringing in users. The test for any startup is it’s ability to onboard people and if after that time users are not coming I start considering moving on.

Things to avoid:
1. Jerks. The relationship between co-founders is based on a lot of trust and a good chemistry/communication. If I’m unable to connect with the cofounder I’d very likely be very unproductive.

2. Lack of funds. Usually tech cofounder role come at a pay cut and the initial test of the founder in my book is her ability to raise funds

3. No mvp, pitch deck, prototype in excel or whatever. I’m hoping to see that the founder has tried to test in any way possible his idea, let it be by making a mock in figma, no code, a spaghetti of zappier actions, and the results of those tests. When I don’t see this it usually tells me that the founder sees his value as the owner of an idea and expects the technical cofounder to “make it work”. That is a huge red flag for me and will get me running for the hills in no time.

Hopefully it doesn’t sound too harsh… I’ve been burned before as a tech cofounder :)
Orkut was nothing like current social networks. It didn't have any kind of feed. You had to manually visit user pages if you were looking for something. Also, user pages had no "blog space" for posts, just main description, "testimonials" (for friends describing you) and scrapbook (like a public email inbox, later turned optionally private). Oh, and a photo gallery.

Another thing that was massive in orkut - but still niche as most users didn't use this feature - was community forums. It was great to be able to read and talk about any topic using the same account, in the same website and the same layout. Worldwide, what filled this gap was obviously Reddit, but it's still English-only for most subjects. Also the format is different, Reddit is not a typical flat internet forum.
> if a body could run itself more efficiently then it would by default

TIL that underclocking is apparently not a real thing, and also that the results that the scientists are seeing in the linked study are impossible.
It becomes less clear when you consider theories like the “user interface” theory of reality by Donald Hoffman. The tl;dr is under that model the chemical and physical alterations we undertake are perceptual models far removed from the nature of underlying reality, and so causality is less obvious with regards to how much those chemicals being administered are determined upstream. “The case against reality” is a book with the longer form of this.
> Talking about computation and consciousness is a sideshow, this is anti-materialism by the back door. Nothing more.

I get the impression that philosophers of mind are slowly coming around to the conclusion that the existence of qualia alone refutes materialism (by which I mean the view that consciousness is produced by physical processes) . This post does assume that qualia exist so if you are taking the former position then you would be correct that it is anti-materialist (though the author does not recognize that position).

While it's clear to me that the existence of qualia (ie. the existence of subjective experience) refutes that consciousness is computational it is not currently entirely clear to me how to make the additional step that it refutes materialism entirely.

Nonetheless if this does hold then the only way to save materialism is to deny that subjective experience exists, which I think is a hard pill for anyone to swallow.
I appreciate this short post for being a reminder that few things in life are "all good" or "all bad".

I see this is your third post on the blog. I hope you keep it up!
Climate VC World Fund Adds PwC as Anchor LP to $365M Fund
> Again, the buttons have no real meaning.

HN sorts downvoted comments lower in the page, colors them gray, and hides them from users by default. The only reason your comment is near the top of the page is because it's attached to the most upvoted top-level comment. It can't go any lower without breaking the comment thread.

Downvotes also take away karma and HN shadowbans people with negative karma.

None of this is just "analytics data" or how you'd want to treat someone writing informative comments. Your assertion the buttons are meaningless is directly at odds with how the site works.
Existence of this problem is often used as a defeatist argument to do nothing about software security.

1. I don't want to run any software I don't trust, and I don't want to trust anyone.

2. But it's impossible to verify anything, because even my CPU could be lying to me.

The result is that any improvement in security gets shot down, because nothing short of digging sand for silicon with your bare hands is safe from Ken Thompson.
He makes any number of unsupported leaps.

E.g "consciousness is observer independent". It seems likely, but it's not at all clear it needs to be the case. E.g. let's say the universe is a simulation for your benefit which optimises away everything that does not directly impact your experience. Maybe my consciousness is just a side effect of currently having an impact on your experience. I have no way of telling whether I blink out of existence the moment I'm not conjured up in order to write this to generate the page you're now reading. It may sound far fetched, but the point is that there is an infinite number of possible observer-dependent universes. As such just ruling it out by default is a gap in his argument.

With respect to his definition of computers, he's glossing over just how little it takes to end up with something which computes. The simplest possible turing machine is ridiculously simple, requiring only 6 rules T(2,3) [1]. While I agree with his argument that such things arising out of nothing by chance is unlikely, it's not at all clear that it's unlikely enough to rule out an infinite number of such devices running mostly "junk" programs that'll crash.

But we also know that it doesn't need to be entirely random - such computation can provide mechanisms for the propagation of life. While cells themselves are not universal turing machines (they have limited "tape"), any number of living things are conceptually universal turing machines (humans being the obvious example), in that they/we can process "tape" without any inherent limitations on length (though practical limitations, certainly).

He then goes on to use his claim that consciousness must be observer independent to claim that even if we have such a computational process, we can't just pick encoding to make a claim of consciousness. But this stretches the claim of observer independence further, and rather than strengthen it, to me it weakens it. Since we don't know what consciousness is, it's not clear that consciousness could not arise from a subjective observation of a process. It's not even clear that this isn't the very core of consciousness. That hypothesis is as supported (in other words: it's not) as the argument he's making. It may be a very weak possibility, but he's not even considered it and given any justification for ruling it out.

I stopped reading there. This is typical of a whole lot of philosophy that makes a whole lot of embedded assumptions that are glossed over because the writer see them as so obvious that they fail to consider that they are assumptions at all. Most of it descends into sophistry without even realising it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram%27s_2-state_3-symbol_T...
Competent Elites:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-...
Just in time for C++23’s long awaited std::print

https://github.com/cplusplus/papers/issues/884
Thankfully this one has some archives. But indeed, not everything does.

Even with some backup, the Internet has not always proven itself to be a reliable means of archiving things. Companies (and their websites) vanish, and not always with a working archive somewhere. YouTube channels routinely vanish, along with their content, and in many cases it's on you to back something up (using third-party libraries).
>tell your obviously unstable manager to go read a book on managing

Haha. Isn’t them reading a book how we all got into this mess in the first place.

Rarely see this sort of thing from managers who worked up from individual contributors.
Browser isolation for email links to stop modern phishing threats