skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
western science is barbaric, primitive, stubborn, and totally ignorant about this ... and so arrogant about their model, which says consciousness comes from meat ... yogis have nailed this so well over a few thousand years of investigation of the nature of the self and its relationship to consciousness ... you will have to learn some new vocabulary, and do some meditation ... worth every moment spent .... just as an example of the subtlety of the east, there are five words in sanskrit for aspecets of the mind, while we have only the one ..

your question is great, the motivation is wonderful, and may your search be fruitful .. it is the reason for birth, to come to understand this ...

enjoy
To summarize, their new strategy is to make allegations of copyright infringement, in response to which, ISPs will voluntarily cut off people's internet access, without the music industry having to prove any copyright infringement in court. Presumably if there were a free market in ISPs, this wouldn't work; the alleged copyright infringers would simply switch to ISPs that didn't have agreements in place with the music industry. So the strategy depends on either suing the ISPs (in violation of the DMCA safe harbor clause? There's no mention of a counter-notice provision) or internet service monopolies who can be bribed.

If effective, this would grant a music industry association the power to unilaterally exclude people from participating in the public sphere: no access to Google, no access to Wikipedia, no emailing your lawyer, no blogging about how the music industry is corrupt. Given their remarkable lack of precision in filing lawsuits in the past, let alone their decades-long history of criminal conspiracies and abusive business practices, it seems irresponsible to allow this to happen.

I hope you folks in the US can do something about it.
My hunch is that stuff like SOX is not whats going to stop this, rather, properly funding the SEC so that they can actually investigate cases like this would. Of course, SOX doesn't require a tax increase, whereas funding the SEC would.
I'm no expert in hindi but doesn't Sammaan mean stuff/belongings not dignity ?
To read this document, I would either need to install Flash or sign up for a Scribd account to download the PDF. Is there another place where the document can be found? Is it possible to redirect the original article link to a place with an open-access version of the document?
At birth, when does the first neuron fire, and how does it sustain itself?

The brain starts well before birth. Humans don't have a single on switch so much as a long bootstrap process that starts when the first few neurons start to link up and ends at death. Although most positive changes happen by ~25 years old.

What we think of as consciousness is basically the neuron's that stop focusing on what is going on and start considering options that we don't directly carry out. AKA when you actually catch a ball you don't really think about it but when you consider how you might do a better job in the future well that's consciousness. The brain is not a fixed entity but a constantly adapting system and consciousness is really best thought of as part of that adaptive process.
"Also, having programmers who believe that their employers actually give a damn about them is probably a good business strategy for companies that actually want to be around five or ten years from now."

This is probably the most overlooked reason to get at least semi-good hardware. Part of the reason I quit my last job was because of management's stubborn refusal to get us tools that would make us be more productive.
Behind the scenese at College Humor's new MTV show
Somehow this query still works: http://www.scribd.com/search?l=0&page=1&per_page=100...
What I find amusing is the phrase "nothing more than electrical signals". As if electrical signals were somehow trivial to understand. As if one individual neuron didn't embody so much chemistry and physics and history (it's got your entire genome stored inside!) and complex behaviors (it's a tiny little creature!) that we can't even understand it in isolation.

I'm not sure whether to recommend Dennett's Consciousness Explained or to compel the questioner to work through The Molecular Biology of the Cell, followed by (e.g.) Hölldobler and Wilson's Journey to the Ants -- and then keep going -- before trying to dismiss the complexity of a network of neurons with the wave of one hand.
If only they'd abandon the Suits running the labels.
Lord Palmerston on Programming
There's a pretty good write-up of installing a Debian userland on the G1, but the link seems dead today. Maybe this will work later: http://www.saurik.com/id/10

In the meantime, here's the Google Cache version:
http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:qTYLZQyrPnQJ:www.saurik....
One Laptop Per Child ready for version 2.0
If not meat, where? I don't mean to offend, but I am curious as to how one can separate pseudo-science, already disproven ideas (All matter is made from 5 elements) and some eastern tradition from posed hypothesis, repeatable experiments and conclusions that are up for being argued.
How VM Sprawl Will Drive the Urgency of the Network Evolution
saamaan is stuff

sammaan is dignity.

Note the lengthy `a` in the first syllable and light `m` in the second syllable of the first word

and the short `a` and stressed `m` in the second.
Compromising electromagnetic emanations of wired keyboards
Actually the SEC with increased enforcement, could probably fund itself through fines levied against those they were investigating.
I find that some people (hooray weasel words) are so driven to find that something special that can put humans in a completely different realm from other things and animals that they won't accept that the same processes that run us also run most other living things, just more progressed.

I don't know why people need a clear, binary difference of what makes one "human" to appreciate how beautiful life and the mind is.

Am I in the minority that has no problems with being categorizes as a mammal, just more progressed, not different altogether?
I have very similar feelings toward "web 2.0" conferences.
Will the video tag work with any video format across browsers? be limited?
Those seem like entirely different results though. Seems all books with "wrox" in the title are deleted.

If you want another example, you can try "harry potter" or "sitepoint".
You won't get it until you actually use it for a while.

(That was my experience.)
... until biology catches up.
I applied to a job in the spring of 2006 and when they were showing me around the development area I noticed that everyone had single smallish CRTs and what seemed like older computers. I asked about it and they told me that most people had P3-500's! Unsurprisingly their salary offer was low also and I did not take the job.
Also, I'd add that designing an app to scale out effectively is one of the harder challenges that most developers face in the world of web apps. He seems to imply that you just by another few boxes and magic happens, which is not the case from what I've seen.

To be fair, the article is a little more balanced than the headline.
If your overpaid programmers are writing O(n^2) algorithms then that cheap hardware is going to get expensive real quick.

Well, that depends on the value of n, right? Not every piece of software is Google or Twitter: They don't all have a userbase that grows virally to encompass every breathing human in existence, plus animals and robots. Especially if you charge the users money.
This argument is applicable only to code that runs on only a small number of machines. Using roughly his numbers, you can afford to pay somebody US$100 000 to work for a whole year to make your code 10% faster if that code uses 100% of a million dollars' worth of hardware, which is only 200 high-end US$5000 servers or gaming machines, or 2000 low-end servers.

But that's assuming that the benefit of the speed improvement is merely improved throughput resulting in data-center savings. If the issue is that your non-AJAX UI is frustratingly and inconsistently slow and so your ex-customers have switched to your competitors' AJAX app because it has consistent 200ms response times when they click on buttons, it may not matter if their app actually uses more CPU cycles than yours (because half of it is written in JavaScript and your ex-customers aren't running Chrome yet.) If your game gets 20 frames per second and your competitor's game gets 35 frames per second with nicer-looking graphics, you're going to lose sales, even if the customers run the game for only 10 hours each.

And that's why gamer games and desktop apps are still written largely in C, C++, or Java with some Lua, and Google's large-scale apps are mostly written in C++ and Java, while small-scale server-based applications and the stuff developed by the in-house IT guys are written in all kinds of higher-productivity, lower-performance languages.
Amazing. Congrats Jason. After getting fed up of the incumbants, I started using two news site searlier this year (SM and NewsCred). Both have made remarkable achievements in short time periods. Now one is acquired already. What recession?
I quit a job a couple of years ago where (I kid you not) I had no desk, no allocated seating, and no PC. I was expected to bring in my own laptop. Whenever there was a director's meeting, we all had to surrender our communal office and hide in the server room. Duration of job: less than six months. It would have been shorter if I'd know what assholes they were (I had some idea they might sort out the problems if I waited a while). Worst. Company. Ever.
Ask YC: HeclBuilder.com
ATTENTION: Java plugin required. Sorry, but it wouldn't be possible to build this otherwise.

I have hacked up http://www.heclbuilder.com recently. It's not complete, but I thought I'd ask for comments and opinions about what people would like to see in it.

I know the design is quite simple - I am just not very good at that so I kept it simple. Very specific advice appreciated, "I don't like the design" is a bit useless, unless you want to volunteer to fix it:-)
Ok, but then it's not "absolutely free" - it's "absolutely free - for now". So either their main selling point is a lie ("100% FREE - No Hidden Fees" != "We'll charge you once we figure out our business model"), or we're back to square one on this question: How will they make money?
Unfortunately, the steps involved in that process seem an exercise in insanity. I'm thinking more along the lines of: the developer phone has an unlocked bootloader, therefore I would like to be able to flash an Android image that already has a userland set up and working. :P
The problem with a per month fee is that it creates no incentives to produce good music. In the old systems artists who produced music people wanted to hear were rewarded with record sales and crappy artists didn't get paid.

With an all-you-can-eat model of music, especially for p2p distributed, how does the record label know whose music is worth more based on downloads. There will be little incentive to sign on new or indie groups and pay them while the consumers will likely download their music anyway, assuming it is covered by the all-you-can-eat license. New artist would be shut out of the system unless the had some sort of connection(corruption, manufactured pop group) to the record label.

And the record labels wouldn't even have to pay current artists in proportion their success if that success can't be measured. Even if they measure success by torrent activity, there would be still little incentive to sign new groups. As always the little guy gets screwed.

Maybe this could be arranged to work and even be better than the current system. But, I don't want to pay a monthly fee that goes to 90% of music that I don't like just to get the 10% I do like.
The problem with a per month fee is that it creates no incentives to produce good music.

Tell that to the countless Indie bands that produce music 10X BETTER than mainstream music. They don't have near the same amount of money as top 40's pop artists, but they don't care. They make the music cause it's what they love to do, I'll be damned if their stuff isn't sometimes better.
Call for ideas on living in a warming world
I'm philosophically a Buddhist, so I put consciousness ("mind") first and wonder more about where the physical world comes from. Experientially, the world is not much different from a dream (except the sex is more awkward) but it has certain properties of persistence, regularity, and sharedness among ~10^11-14 sapient organisms that make a convincing case for a world of cold, hard matter that exists independently of us. But that's an illusion.

The physical universe doesn't actually exist, any more than a dream world does. There are probably trillions of universes in existence-- maybe infinitely many. They can't be counted, and they don't much matter because they're physically inaccessible to us. We're lucky, though, to be in an exceedingly successful universe whose laws are set ("fine tuned") to allow for complex life. The universes that don't support complex life to observe them might be "out there", but they effectively don't exist.

Mind is eternal, but the processes it can support depend on the physical system (body/brain) to which it binds, and of course that physical system evolves and, sadly, collapses. We're extremely lucky to have our minds bound to such beautiful, powerful creatures as humans. We could've just as easily been bound to cockroaches or tapeworms (and it can happen after death in a negative rebirth, but karma's another subject entirely).

The transmigration of consciousness is taken as self-evident by Eastern religions, and there's actually a fair bit of evidence for reincarnation (refer to the work of Ian Stevenson). What's controversial is whether or not a mind-- or, at least, an unenlightened mind-- can exist independent of a physical body at all. The Theravadan perspective tends to be that it cannot, whereas Tibetan Buddhists believe in an intermediate experiential state called the bardo.

Am I butterfly dreaming I'm a man? Or a bowling ball dreaming I'm a plate of sashimi? Never assume what you see and feel is real! -- Doreen, Chrono Trigger.
This is a great question, and one that will never be answered by scientific naturalism. The current worldview assumed by scientists is that the "natural" and "material" is all we have and all that can be used to explain everything.

Unfortunately, while this does form a powerful basis for truth in the empirically observable, it completely shatters and is horribly faulted when one tries to explain the unempirical and unobservable with only what you have. It is an extremely powerful assumption (based on faith in a worldview) that the domain of the metaphysical is purely explained by the physical (the laws of physics and the material)... In your case, where does this concept of mind, self, and consciousness come from? It's clearly powered by a physical entity (the brain), but the "self" is also clearly not a physical entity.

There is absolutely no proof that the system of material thinking holds water in other domains such as the metaphysical, so most of what scientists think about the mind and self come out of some seriously convincing bullshitting. They really have no clue how it arises, and it will never be explained unless we manage to re-create a conscious entity ourselves.

With that in mind (pun not intended), take anything you read about how the "self" comes about with a serious dose of common sense. This is where it's up to you to make a decision, because the scientists (while sounding smart), really have no more clue than you do =)
Confusing activity with action
It's not just about users because there are no users; there's just data. Any data, the same thing applies.
I'm a part of the XMT project @ UMD http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~vishkin/XMT/index.shtml

Admittedly, the concepts involved are dated since PRAM theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Random_Access_Machine) dates to the 70's. However, this project marks the first successful commitment of PRAM theory to silicon
Although, when it comes to custom intranet apps, N is usually tiny.
Yeah, at that point you can pretty much conclude that the company is doing something incredibly wrong, and it's only a matter of time before it bites them.

If you have crappy pay and perks, then you won't attract good talent, and whatever good talent you had will eventually leave. Without good talent, it is highly unlikely you'll have a good app. If your app sucks, you will slowly bleed off customers, and revenue.

Of course, that's not a scientific fact. For exceptions start with: Contracts, Government.
You said: Presumably if there were a free market in ISPs, this wouldn't work.

You might have wanted to say "competitive market" or "perfectly competitive market", not "free market". A free market is one in which laissez-faire is the only rule, and monopolists and oligopolists are not a priori bad.
Whole Earth Video
Something tells me this will lead to an increase in stealing open wireless connections, and more advance pirates using aircrack on their neighbors WEP encrypted wireless. They will either do this preemptively or after losing their own connections. Expect to hear sob stories about how a grandmother can't look at pictures of her grandkids because a pirate used her open WiFi to download gangsta rap and the ISP shut her off.
If it's an illusion, who is it illusioning?
no incentives to produce good music

Less financial incentives to produce good recorded music to be played back by private individuals.

Live music will continue as before. Commissioned music (i.e. movie, TV, and commercial soundtracks) will continue much as before. Every musician whose record sales don't support them financially -- which is a very large percentage of musicians; go read some essays by recording artists on the subject of record contracts -- will continue as before.

Or, who knows, maybe it will all break. It's not as if the future is easily avoided, and it's not as if the current system is all that great. My favorite musicians make almost no money from recordings.
Consciousness is just the firing of pleasure centers when external actions fit into pre-defined purposes. It's like the very highest abstraction of a functional event-triggered programming language.
While that book is fascinating and totally came out of left field when it was published, I don't think I would recommend it as an introduction to consciousness. The idea that people very similar to modern humans weren't self-aware as recent as the pharaohs is fascinating though!
That's an excellent idea. Why don't you start writing them? I'll be your first customer.
Practically speaking, I wonder how long custom tags will remain as flexible as they appear in the spec. It won't take long for search engines to decide their preferred tags, how they're weighted and how they relate. Then our tag schema will pretty much have to follow suit to rank well. It'll be like the rel naming conventions, only on a larger scale.
Solar Flare Surprise: Pure Hydrogen Shot at Earth
I picked up roadkill for two summers in a row while working for the DPW, but we never called it roadkill, we denoted the dearly departed as 'buddies'. It was sorta funny since you may wonder, "Where do all them buddies go after you get done pickin em all up?" They all went in this 12ft hole known as the buddy pit.
May I kindly ask you to correct the link to the german translation on the main article page? It currently links to http://www.heiniger-net.ch/archives/167/langswitch_lang/de, but that link doesn't work anymore. Please link to http://www.heiniger-net.ch/archives/167 as indicated in my original post. I changed the way my blog handles multiple languages.

Thank you very much.
Interview with Polaris CEO: positioning software for your mobile, no GPS required [video]
My point is that the indie bands would be cut out of the record labels deal. They won't get paid by the record label from the all-you-can-eat deal, but people will still pirate their music assuming it's covered by the deal. They may make good music but they won't get paid as much as they should for it.
I checked this page at work, and IS still only supports IE 6. The page that returned said this:

Hey there! I see you're running Internet Explorer 6.

That's neat. This reminds me of my grandpa. He had this old car that he kept having to fix. He spent so much money on it that he didn't want to get rid of it (even when it stopped running).

You guys should hang out.

Here's a free sports car from Snipt.

I understand where they're coming from, but I usually find out that insulting your customers is a bad idea.
Twitter Venn Examples
They also describe zopa as "a human-centred way to loan money to people in the developing world."

Zopa is a great service and I would happily recommend it but the UK, USA, Italy and Japan are not developing nations.
Casual Friday was so successful that it has expanded to last the whole week.
My point is that the indie bands would be cut out of the record labels deal.

Obviously sol, it goes along with the entire virtue of being an "INDIE BAND", but the beauty in this is that they all have their own distribution methods, their own labels, and their own little microcosm within the industry. And it's thriving, very well.

* They may make good music but they won't get paid as much as they should for it.*

How much "should" they get paid? They distribute their own music however they deem fit, so if there was a memo that got passed around that says "a musician should be making billions of dollars because we're a society that simply thrives on entertainment", then my entire post here is moot.

The Indie subculture is doing VERY well on it's own, and they are by far more sympathetic to file sharing because they want the exposure.
Mike Rowe is a great guy, and this was a great article. This is why I come to hacker news.
This is indeed a set of specific and credible allegations that the SEC should have investigated thoroughly. The level of detail is far above that of the usual letter indicating suspicions about an organization, and the author shows knowledge of the relevant law.
The guy claims to be running about 50 VMs. I can understand how they might pile up, too. Testing across multiple platforms and browsers is probably a lot easier with a massive farm of VMs. But you need a lot of CPU for that.

Two laptops isn't hard to explain: You have the ultralight laptop to carry to the coffee shop and the somewhat-heavier laptop to take with you when you need to get real work done on the road over several days.
The problem that started illegal filesharing still exists: bits can be copied

-fixed
For those wondering what SUP is: http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/What_s_SUP_:_FriendFeed_s_Mode...
Gates Foundation to help libraries be better free 'net cafes
I love working in the library. It makes for a nice change of venue where I don't feel compelled to buy stuff.
He is really writing this from the perspective of web applications. If you app is humming along nicely on a single EC2 instance, it isn't even worth an HOUR of your time to DOUBLE the capacity of your app.

The last big app I was in charge of ran 1M pageviews a day on $500/month. At my standard rate, it isn't even worth a day of my time to double the capacity of my app on the same hardware.

He certainly isn't saying don't optimize. He's simply saying that scaling web apps STARTS with throwing hardware at the problem. Where and when you cut over to developer optimization depends on your -actual- costs, size, and growth.
At birth, when does the first neuron fire, and how does it sustain itself?

Body activity doesn't start from birth, even the zygote has already processes inside it that are life processes.
CTO's View on Clickpass Acquisition
Bernie vs Benford's Law: Madoff Wasn't That Dumb
No mention yet of what's next for Immad...
people?