skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking over the responses thus far, I'm surprised no one has posted an
unequivocal "yes".

Yes, the act of programming itself makes me happy.
I've always loved building things, and programming is yet another outlet
for that energy. Additionally, I love the thrill of bending a computer
to my will, teaching it to do what I want to produce the output I need.
Shortly after finishing an extended programming project, often times I
feel a sense of loss, and a drive to seek out the next interesting thing
I'll get to tackle.

Are you asking because you feel like you should be enjoying it more than
you do? Did you used to get more enjoyment from it than you currently
do, or have you always felt this way? If you're second guessing yourself, I think mechanical_fish's suggestion
of giving it a break for a while is a great one.
Four to five years ago, I would have asked the same question and would have been superemly excited about being able to ponder over such questions.

Now, I simply don't bother.
[ I generally try and avoid frivolities, but... ]

> a bunch of sailors speculating about quantum mechanics.

Arrrr... 'tis like the waves of the ocean, but also like me musket shot - at the same time, lads!

I agree though, that outside of one or two people (robg?) , most of us aren't very knowledgeable about the subject.
This is one of those questions that bothers me. Not the question itself, just the fact that we don't know, and likely can't know.

Is there some test to prove if something has "consciousness"? Without such a test I don't think we can know what it really is. You might propose having the thing explain the feeling to you, but I could just program a computer to do the same thing (theoretically).

I have no way of knowing whether or not anyone else besides myself experiences this thing called consciousness.

You all could be perfectly designed robots that are tricking me into believing you're also humans who experience consciousness.
Ways To Make Twitter More Useful For You
I wonder how good their data are, after they got Google paid clicks spectacularly wrong early this year.
Social Median Acquired by Xing
Nice post. The section on fallout on page 15 is interesting and worth reading. Anyone know how highly leveraged the front-running hedge funds actually were? The 4:1 seems somewhat low given recent economic press coverage.
Markopolos actually tipped the SEC off in 1999. His complaint is actually quite readable and gives good insight into the split-strike conversion strategy and why it cannot possibly account for Madoff's reported gains.

I wonder if the SEC did not take the report seriously because of his somewhat sarcastic tone, e.g. mention of tooth fairy, etc.
Cool And Unique NotNeutral Designs
This site was really a great help to me in choosing modern baby bedding designs. I`ll never look anywhere else but here.
Now we seem to be entering a new era based on measurement. The reason the new model has advanced so rapidly is that it works so much better. It shows no sign of slowing.

I wish the measurement system was more accurate for science. Counting publications is not just mislead, but the root of a great evil: pollutes information sources with redundant or highly speculative information, i.e. papers published just to tell the measurement-obsessed bureaucrats that a given researcher still exists.

I wish we could just work quietly, sharing information informally with our peers over internet and at meetings, and only publish when ready, even if this means publishing every 10 years.
"The "Wear your T-shirt" craze is one of those "Why didn't I think of that?" ideas that's taking off faster than a sweatshirt in the summertime."

barf
One Laptop Per Child project reaching 600,000 children
x = 365; ((x + 1) * x) / 2 # 66795

For x > 2 and odd.
Close, but no cigar.

I'm not sure exactly what you're disagreeing with, but, OK.

If a YC service can keep people from wasting their time on bad ideas that would be incredibly valuable.

Yes, it would be priceless. But I doubt it can do anything of the sort.

The astounding thing is how hard it is for even experts (whatever that means in this context) to decide what's a good idea and what's a bad one. Larry and Sergey heard from an awful lot of smart people that yet another search engine was a bad idea. And, numerous failures heard from a lot of smart people that they were on the verge of something huge, if they'd just keep going six more months.

The founders are always too close to their own company to see if it's really viable.

That's absolutely true. But, you and I are almost certainly too far away. The only people who can really tell you are customers (even if they aren't paying you anything yet--the people you'd like to sell to), and even they're wrong a lot of the time, so you have to get a lot of them so the margin of error shrinks, and when they start giving you money voluntarily (or start telling their friends, if you have an ad-driven site, and traffic starts growing steadily), that's when you know you're on a reasonable path.

I don't see how anything we talk about here can prevent bad ideas or make truly good ones bubble to the top. Certainly, if you find it valuable to bounce early stage ideas off of smart people, it's got merit. But nothing we can do here is a substitute for real users, and unless your target market is "technology entrepreneurs who think Paul Graham is fly", that aint us. And, again, my point was that talking about things on the Internet feels like doing things...but it isn't getting you any closer to your goals.
I hope to survive my time in prison(high school) with out dying of boredom. I hate this crap!
Grad school admissions is basically just done by the profs in your department. Also, these folks applied for Early Admission and get either a yes/no/deferred to normal admissions reply before the end of the year.
As far as I know, you'll get no answers here (or anywhere).

My view of things was shaped a lot by some sections of Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. If you allow that symbols (think of a bunch of object properties + some methods) can be represented in the brain and operate on each other. (There's a good description in GEB which suggests we use a javascript-like prototype object-based system. Briefly, if someone starts talking about an individual they know called Joe, who's a football player, you basically mint a fresh new symbol which carries some of it's own data (name => Joe) but also inherits from your default 'football player' symbol. As you find out more about Joe, you add more specific data on Joe's symbol, which shadows the football player one. That, to me, explains a lot about prejudice (some people's heads overly-favour the inherited attributes. But I digress...)

Your brain models the world by creating symbols which reflect the world (evolution helps for that). An important (the biggest/most complex?) symbol in your head is the one which represents yourself.

Consciousness is then that symbol operating on itself.

All this is of course happening in a physical substrate which has it's own methods of affecting things (psychoactive substances washing through your brain etc).
Strong Opinions, Well Defended

That's about it all: a person who holds to his/her opinions in an articulate, broad and open-minded way, and is ready to change them when proved wrong by him/herself or by others. That's whom I want to work with. Includes self-teaching and an interest for the world around them.
A Home Office FAQ
So I'm kind of wondering, does he plan on doing anything with this money? He quotes a bad economy as the reason for doing this, pocketing it after making such a statement would be a rather dick move.
Why Do People Prefer Replica Handbags?
It is a worldwide phenomenon that women love to buy dresses, make up items, handbags, shoes and jewelry. We spend a lot of time and money in buying these things. With the advent of the internet, we get access to a variety of products worldwide.
Largest wooden ship seeks equity partner
1. Finish high school (got about 3 more months of online-schooling)

2. Move out

3. ???

4. Profit (and/or get laid, either one)
Where to Find Rare Soul Music CDs?
No one can resist the compelling tunes of soul music. If you are one of those soul music addicts, then I am sure that you collect everything that comes your way in the name of soul music. Soul music fans spend quite a lot of money buying soul music CDs and almost all their free time listening to soul music. You will be able to get soul music CDs from all your music stores. However, there are some rare soul music tracks and albums that you cannot find in all music stores.
Isn't that interesting that the biblical limit is so close to the current outlier lifespans?
Rails CSRF vulnerability explanation
Easter Egg: Add snow to any photo on Flickr
Most beautiful girl
There are a slew of fascinating recent advances in CS and I discover more with every passing semester, but for brevity I will pick three things that have been occupying my mindspace as of late.

1. It seems that lazy functional programming languages (like Haskell) may provide a basis for a serious improvement in more robust natural language processing. A survey paper: [http://cs.uwindsor.ca/~richard/PUBLICATIONS/NLI_LFP_SURVEY_D...]

2. Semi-Human Instinctive AI, a new dynamic, nondeterministic decision-making process, seems to be the new hotness in robotics/learning algorithms. In it, a given agent is given a set of basic behaviors ("instincts") that it hones with both open and closed learning methods in a problem space. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi_Human_Instinctive_Artifici...]

3. Anatoly Shalyto's Automata-based programming, using finite state machines to describe program behavior, seems to have a lot of potential. It attempts to view programs from the context of engineering control theory, which opens the door to the use of powerful techniques from dynamical systems in mathematics.
I doubt you're going to get any answers here. I've seen GEB mentioned already and if you're a reader I highly recommend Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Fascinating theory, but the consensus seems to be that it's probably not correct. I picked it up after encountering references to it in a diverse set of sources.
Techcrunch is getting really lazy. This story, in particular, is confusing and inaccurate.

I do like me some Backtype, though.
The Resolver One (Python) Challenge - $25,000
That's how Truphone (iPhone VOIP in/out app) works - it's a free download, and when you have used up the initial credit you have to top up with a credit card.
Is this "acquired" in the pownce sense of the word?

Seems like a similar sort of deal. Are these going to be common in the downturn?

Congrats anyway.
This question is better suited for a philosopher rather than a biologist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind
I major in cognitive neuroscience, which is exactly what you're asking: how does conscious thought arise from unconscious parts?

I think one book you may benefit from reading is http://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valent.... It's a wonderful and short book with some subtle humor and amazing powers of explanation. After reading it you may very well have a better understanding of how it's possible (and how many different ways it might be possible) for what we see as complex behaviors to emerge.

I've had dozens of friends read this short book, and they've all thanked me for the recommendation and ended up buying a copy for themselves.
I was in the T-mobile store yesterday and the salesman advised me not to buy a G1 until (list of problems) were resolved with a new version of the software. Right now there's the G1 on T-mobile, Storm on Vodafone and iPhone on O2. iPhone is the clear leader and I can't see that changing anytime soon.
I suppose this is for gamers. You might want to make that more clear. Is there anything unusual that you plan to add that might make it more appealing? Maybe photo galleries and contests for game screenshots.

What programming language did you use?

Oh, and you might want to take Pownce off the profile editor.
>>> (sum(xrange(1,366)))
66795
Google Shutters Its Science Data Service
IPhone adoption in Small and Mid Businesses to hit 10% in 2009
Featured Algorithm: The TBB Pipeline Class
Java/Android certainly does not have the benefit of Xcode's slick Interface Builder, definitely a lot less inspiring when it comes to creating an app with a beautiful UI
Coded Preview makes showing mockups easy
A buddy of mine was showing me new designs he was pumping out for his new projects using Coded Preview and I thought the idea was really cool, considering I always seem to waste 3-4 minutes setting up demo preview pages for my JPG layout designs.
Obama Rumored to Pick Climate-Change Wonk as Science Adviser
A buddy of mine was showing me new designs he was pumping out for his new projects using Coded Preview and I thought the idea was really cool, considering I always seem to waste 3-4 minutes setting up demo preview pages for my JPG layout designs.
RIAA Abandoning Mass Lawsuits In Favor Of Backroom 3 Strikes Policy
The Curse of Information Addiction
I don't think it's that great... Most importantly, keyboards require a flat surface to be really good. When on the move, keyboards really suck. There's plenty of room for improvement in portable input devices. Even something with a lot less expressiveness, but that, for instance, can be used with your hand in your pocket (perhaps while wearing a HUD of some sort) would be a huge improvement.
> I also program because I have ideas for programs that don't exist, and it's the only way to make them exist. I program because I want my computer to do something that it doesn't already know how to do.

That's what it boils down to for me.
In this case the solution is also the algorithm in a technical sense, because algorithms solve classes of problems and we can just define the class to consinst of this sole instance. Then 66795 is the algorithm that works for the whole (singleton) class of instances.
A tangent. I wanted to copy and paste a paragraph that I thought was interesting, but the ability to select text is broken in the Scribd document viewer. I then tried to find a link to download the document in PDF form, but almost couldn't. After a bit of searching, I found the PDF download link hidden behind the "download" dropdown menu. When I clicked on it, Scribd dutifully notified me that I was required to sign in before I was allowed to do that. At that point, I gave up and took a screenshot of the paragraph: http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/Markopolos... ... specifically, it's interesting that Markopolous feared for his personal safety because of this report.
Congratulations guys, get those black t-shirts on!
Thanks for the kind comments guys. We're really excited about the outcome, SynthaSite's a great company and doing some very cool things.
why Lisp doesn't really provide the startup advantage any more that Paul Graham might think it does

Out of curiousity, what was the reason?
Thanks for the kind comments guys. We're really excited about the outcome, SynthaSite's a great company and doing some very cool things. Thanks to both the YC network and all the readers of Hacker News for your support
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6349
congrats again peter :)
Consciousness doesn't really exists, it is just an illusion.

It is both scary and amusing to me that there are entire (expensive) conferences dedicated to something the participants can't even give a definition for.
It wasn't completely ignored; they investigated a little in 2006, but seem to have trusted incomplete/forged records of funds under management. See:

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB122956182184616625-lMy...
Ask HN: How do you manage your knowledge base?
We are currently using Microsoft SharePoint sevices 2003 at my group to manage our knowledge base, you know, all our internal documents about formal and less formal procedures and tasks, but it is very suboptimal and difficult to search. How do you handle that kind of information to be easy to produce and, above all, easy to find?

Thanks for all your responses.
Thank you. +1 for the thought. Chrome is my primary browser, though.
This looks like something I could use on my OSX desktop but unfortunately this is a Windows-only product. Here are the full requirements:

What are the system requirements for running Resolver One?

''Software'': Resolver One requires Windows XP or later, with .NET 2.0 installed.
If you don't have .NET 2.0, you can download it from Microsoft (it's free).

''Hardware'': The minimum specification for running Resolver One is a Pentium 4 at 2GHz
with 512Mb RAM. We recommend a Pentium 4 at 3GHz with 1Gb if you're running Windows XP or
2Gb if you're running Windows Vista.

Does Resolver One work under MacOS or Linux?

Not right now, but it is something we're looking at. In particular, we have been able to get
the Resolver One Web Server running on Linux using Mono internally; we will post instructions
on how to do this soon.
Scribd raises $9M in Series B, hires Bebo COO, and new marketing VP
The funny thing about your thought experiment, as well as the infamous "chinese room", is that you could actually turn it on it's head. The conclusion is that consciousness doesn't matter.
How I'm going to learn Erlang
You may be amused or appalled to hear that we mock up an Android UI (plus some initial functionality) in Visual Studio and VB.NET before running the result through a translator to get the equivalent Android Java code in an automatically initialised project. A great way to jump-start an application.
Thanks very much guys for the kind words
Thanks for the tip. I'll take a vacation.
What's the commercial thinking behind the giveaway?

How do these guys make money?
How to Access MySpace from School | TechJaws
One way in which this can occur is if you raise a seed round in convertible debt which converts into preferred stock at a following Series A.
The Atlassion products (Confluence and Jira) were awesome at my last startup. I'm using TikiWiki right now for something similar because it fits my budget ($0).
Paul Buchheit coded SUP examples on AppJet
He needs to read with a purpose, as in pick out a goal with some sort of metric (eg learn rails) and work towards it. Time will pass anyway, you might as well have something to show for it.
RIAA gives up on lawsuit strategy, asks ISPs for help
http://www.boundless.org/features/a0000901.html
The Need for a Reliable Free Hosting Service
These days every business, whether it is a billion dollar company or a small home based business, everyone has a website of their own. All of us understand the importance of having a website to promote our business because more and more people are turning to the internet to look for the services and products that they need. It might be alright for billion dollar companies and other medium sized companies to have expensive hosting and a dedicated server.
Hm, the scary thing is, I think if my true passion was picking up road kill, I would probably never find out. It would never have occured to me to try that profession. So I am doomed :-(
Frittr is the example usage, and http://sup.appjet.net is the raw implementation.

It's cool to see a big name for once.
I could never learn something like that, I learn by actually doing. For example, when I wanted to learn Perl (this was a while ago...) I started to write POPFile in it. The only way I could get sufficiently motivated was by writing some code that others would see and use. Nothing like peer pressure!
Robot wars: The rise of artificial intelligence
I can try to answer this according to my theory. So one big "IMHO" on all the following text.

Saying that chemical activity "causes" us to feel certain emotions is not correct. A little thinking could show you how absurd this is. "Causing" would mean that there is some sort of cause and effect here, some event X that causes event Y. Like when you turn on the kettle and the water boils. So this would mean that when a chemical event X is happenning in a brain, it will cause the person to feel an emotional event Y.
This is an absurd hypothesis. Where is event Y? It's actually hard for me to explain why I find that hypothesis so absurd. Maybe someone here can help.

Anyway, my opinion is that THERE IS a correspondece between chemical events and emotional events, but it's not causality. I can't lay down all of my theory here, but I would say that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the "inside" world and the "outside" world. (Like a 1-1 correspondence between sets.) And those X and Y are paired together in that correspondence.

I remember when I was in elementary school I wanted to make a conscious computer program. I was programming in Basic at the time. I thought, "Okay, the program should be able to feel pain. So I should make a variable PAIN, and when certain events happen it will cause PAIN to be equal to 1 or 0 or -1 or whatever." But I kind of got stuck there, because what do you do after you set a value to the PAIN variable? The best you can do is to have the PAIN variable determine the behavior of the creature, for example to make it scream "ouch". I believe that when it comes to emotions of creatures other than ourselves, behavior is all there is to their emotions. When it comes to our own emotions, it's more complicated and independent of our brains.
a) Every new sale gets them $200, much more for the bells-and-whistles financial version. It won't take many sales to make back the prize money.

b) It's being used largely inside organizations, which need a push to share what they're doing with resolver. [I'm in this situation: I've done some cool things with resolver, but been asked not to talk about them. I may use the prospect of prize money to nudge my client into loosening up on the secrecy]

c) It's a very good piece of software. People trying out the app are likely to come away loving it.

d) Potential customers may be worried about buying something with a small user-base. A competition like this makes the number of existing users more visible, and maybe draws in new ones.
You can run a windows instance on EC2 or similar for $.12 per hour, and connect to it with rdesktop.
Personally, I find this better than trying to run things under Mono, etc: I can use resource-intensive applications from my laptop without roasting my thighs.
If I couldn't work on things that I love every day I would hate it. I don't know how there are so many todo lists, chat apps, crm and accounting packages out there, I couldn't stand it!
It all comes down to the fact that for Google the browser is an advertisement delivery tool. Hence every browser improvement has the potential to increase revenues for them.
To brk, thanks for the link, TikiWiki looks promissing. I think I'll give it a try.
No, all we have (perceive) is a model of the outside world. The brain is sitting in a black box (the skull) with some signal connectors to the outside. It only gets a stream of signals, and from that creates a model of the world. That it chooses to react emotionally to some of these signals is just a way of the brain to modify it's own behaviour (maybe trick itself for the good of the species, like the desire to mate and have children).

I think part of the success of the movie "The Matrix" was that we all knew that it is true, in a way. The only difference to the Matrix is that we carry the super computer that simulates our world around with us. We are not sleeping in tanks connected to the central computer - or so we think, there is no way to ever be sure...

I think you should have followed through with your "pain variable" approach.

A good read is "Braitenberg Vehicles", it shows how even very simple rules can evoke complex behaviour and the appearance of emotions.
Show Document co-browsing on any document.
I would like to draw your attention to http://www.showdocument.com that we recently launched.
It allows instant co-browsing on any document.
You upload your document and invite your friends to view it with you
VirtualBox in seamless mode is your friend. That's how I've my IronPython and F# set up on OSX.