skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the link. I just read section 4 and I don't really see how it addresses the argument. It mostly seems to argue against the opinion that computer programs cannot be sentient. My point is much weaker: that it is manifestly absurd to insist that all computer programs which can pass the Turing test must be presumed sentient.

The article acknowledges that a lookup table could pass the Turing test--the author even uses this argument for his own ends. At the same time, clearly he doesn't think we should presume the lookup table sentient. The only passage which might be interpreted as an "objective distinction" is this one:

Personally, I ﬁnd this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests
that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical signiﬁcance.
According to this response, an exponential-sized lookup table that passed the Turing Test would
not be sentient (or conscious, intelligent, self-aware, etc.), but a polynomially-bounded program
with exactly the same input/output behavior would be sentient. Furthermore, the latter program
would be sentient because it was polynomially-bounded.

And yet in the next paragraph the author says he's reluctant to stand behind such thesis.

Do you, unlike Scott Aaronson, want to adopt this amended postulate--i.e., do you believe all computer programs which can pass the Turing test should be granted personhood as long as they scale polynomially with the length of the conversation?
I'm not sure what worse about all of this.

A) The amount of a data they are getting and able to see.

B) Having to listen to annoying conspiracy theorist and/or stoner friends tell me about "the internet"
As somebody who seldom carries a mobile phone, figures out local directions with an address and paper map, etc., this editorial resonates strongly with me, and the author illustrates his point beautifully. His expression, "diminished substitutes," captures a feeling I've had for a while about the 4G lifestyle, or even one that just takes place too much on the internet.

In the past 3-4 years, when smartphones completely hit the mainstream, I have noticed a very significant change in those around me, even in some people I am close with. They seem more ... robotic! I am certain if I moved in different circles, I would've noticed a similar pattern years before among BlackBerry users, who were the butt of the "CrackBerry" joke ca. 2004.

I'm not sure how else to describe somebody completely fixated on a small device, resorting to it almost like some security blanket when an everyday problem needs solving. Portable video games like Game Boy, and traditional mobile phones, which no doubt have been similarly derided in the past, offer a poor comparison for their limited scope. The small screen provides some strange tunnel vision I don't care to encounter.
At Melissa & Doug Toy Company, Thriving on the Basics
Interesting article, but slight quibble: differential cryptography is a cryptanalysis technique, ie a method that anybody can use to try to break a cipher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis
What do you mean "freedoms they hate us for"? Can you clarify?
Good eye. I looked at that question so many times in the last couple years that I got blind to it. Thanks for pointing it out. Fixed for future editions.

The books, instead of being written by one person, are written by 50 different researchers. For every question I had, I found 3 different people to answer it. One local, one expat, one other. That way the book isn't just one person's point of view.

Then at the end, an editor combined all the different answers into one, and I went through the final-final to clean it up.

I'll write more about this soon. Good lesson learned about making a robust plan versus a fragile plan. At first I thought I'd write all 16 books myself. Next I thought I'd hire one writer per-country. But this system turned out to be a much better way to get different viewpoints.

Anyway - thanks again for pointing out the error.
A good and very comprehensive article on the subject. The only area I wish the article would also include is how society is today built on top of the assumption that privacy exist, and what happens when that assumption is found to be wrong.

To take an example, the court system assumes that judge and jury members private life is not known. When one side in a trial knows the judge or juries dreams, aspirations, deep secrets or just plain biases, that party has suddenly gained an huge unfair advantage. Since we can now start to grasp the amount of information gathered by the state, Google or Facebook, can a trail involving either one of them still be claimed to be fair and just if the other party do not has similar inside knowledge of the judges or juries lives?
Apt-get upgrading on Ubuntu Touch
Way better than having none left. Then it's game over of C player hiring D players.
Follow the link from any book's page to its page on Amazon. There you can do the "Look Inside This Book" thing on the book cover, to read a few pages.

Or just email me and offer to contribute. Then you'd get a free one. :-)
I would love to "survive" on 5 million a year.
Would be pretty hard for Nate Silver to predict all 50 states of a rigged election with public poll data...
Another thing: p2p is totally broken. You can work around it with central servers, but then [ cough skype ] you have a dependence on a big server farm that costs a bunch of money. In the long run, they won't keep you safe.

As an addendum, at least with home connections the technically inclined could badger their routers into allowing incoming connections. Given that computers (that can run long-running background services) and land lines are going to be the exclusive domain of the rich or the programmers in a few years, there is essentially no hope at all of fixing this.
Welcomed to the Bay Area
I haven't wanted to feel this awake in what seems like years. The Bay Area is the center of many signals with which I have a lot of resonance. It was nice to see such a congregation of my peers in such a nice area with all the resources necessary to create some really nice stuff. Build your city, improve your community, and connect the people around you.

A long time ago, we started farming. When we farmed well enough, someone had time to make pots. Pots kept grain from going bad, so we could spend less time farming and make more pots. Eventually we had more time to create and less time was spent enslaved to the wheels of survival.

Empower the people around you to work on the things that they might find important, to connect with the things that interest them, before you capitalize on the discretionary income of bored individuals who are quickly addicted to entertainment and are mere consumers of the fruits of the human experience.

Also know that there are developers, users, and consumers. A FOSS developer is one who architects and/or maintains FOSS. A user is one who implements it. A consumer is one who can only benefit from final implementations. Consumers are not evil, but recall how feedback works and know that the strongest community is the one that will propel you forward.
Greenwald has "highly detailed technical NSA materials on how they eavesdrop"
As a European, I'm pretty impressed by it and the rest of the US legal system, notwithstanding its numerous faults. The US has been through a lot worse than this efore, and emerged better as a society; the NSA processing data in bulk in nothing compared to, say, McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
If those people really exist with the motivation and means to do that, why haven't they done so? US Intelligence is clearly not perfect, as we saw in Boston.
Good food in Kailua? Where? Buzz's, sure. Where else?

(There is free WiFi at Starbucks and Morning Brew in Kailua town, but that's a 3 mile walk from the beach.)

Waimanalo: there are sections of the beach where they'll steal your computer. (Though Ewa is worse.)

No mention of 'da Big Island', or Kauai, eh?
Obviously, he allegedly has this material. I tried to put that in the title, but I hit the character limit.
At the least, I'm going to take my data away from Dropbox and switch to a self hosted alternative. And also change email and chat providers (currently gmail and gtalk).
It is a sarcastic reference to an often repeated line from a speech Bush gave shortly after 9/11/2001.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacke...

My point here being that "our freedoms" plainly is not why they hate us. The real reason is because of our involvement and interaction with them. When such involvement and interaction is kept classified for decades, then the American public has no hope of correctly evaluating statements such as Bush's.
For those who said they are using services from non-US companies, what alternatives are you using for dropbox, gmail, search, etc?
There are quasi-legal beach rentals just off Kailua beach.
Please don't be under the impression that things are any different outside the US. In fact, if anything NSA surveillance (with the help of various allies) is even more pervasive. In particular the UK, Australian, Canadian, and NZ equivalents to the NSA are very closely tied in (effectively organisationally integrated) as part of the Echelon progam revealed/described by Nicky Hager way back in 2000 http://www.nickyhager.info/echelon-a-story-about-how-informa.... Things only escalated since 2001 of course. Similar programs exist in Germany, NATO countries and generally, around the world, this being the official and legal mission of NSA (to monitor foreign communications).

When I was interviewed for a job at the GCSB (NZ equivalent of NSA) they described how each member of the alliance, being hamstrung by the legislation that did not allow them to monitor their own citizens had formed an integrated program (he didnt use the word ECHELON) where they arranged for each ally to monitor the communications of their 'foreign' allies and then to share information. He said this in a job interview so not exactly a secret! I guess after a while the NSA felt they could no longer rely on foreign services to do a good enough job. Since the funding for NSA is so incredibly massive (larger than FBI and CIA combined) what did you think they were spending all that money on?

Perhaps one of the few places your cloud services be free of NSA monitoring would be in China. But then... ;-)
Amazing weight loss tips
I would like to show you a good fat loss presentation that will give you some good weight loss tips!!!
women and children women and children women and children women and children women and children women and children women and children women and children women and children women and children why won't someone think of the women and children WOMEN AND CHILDREN women and children why aren't you crying yet
Google: Create A Native Linux Google Drive Application
A common misconception regarding how Wikipedia works. Wikipedia works by writing what reliable sources has to say about an issue.

In this case, its a newspaper article that are citing Assange, which is why the sentence beginning with "Julian Assange said". Changing it to "Julian Assange allegedly claim" would make the article worse, as the implied disbelief of using the word "allegedly" is not supported by the source.

Having to base edits around sources is hard, but I think a crucial aspect of any encyclopedia. The alternative is just so much worse, don't you agree?
Explore the field of computational legal studies, especially the research coming out U. of Michigan from Dean Katz.
Completely unrelated to the message of the story but: Did he end up talking to the girl after all or not?
> Oracle's files are based on the tzinfo files, and are just as vulnerable. If anything, more so because Oracle has a lot more money than the tzinfo maintainers.

Oracle's got enough cheddar to take it to court or settle out-of-court like their business depends on it.
any number (> 0) of children killed is terrifying.
I'd recommend the Discrete Mathematics course from the NPTEL.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlUFkMKSB3Y&list=PL0862D1A947...

Also check out their other CS videos.

http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/courses.php?disciplineId=106

Finally, put Youtube in HTML5 mode so you can increase the play speed if needed.
So far we have nontechnical reporters attempting to interpret a PowerPoint slide vs the heads of every big tech company and the NSA flatly contradicting without ambiguity the conclusions they are coming to. I think your poll is making a lot of assumptions about what is actually happening.
Thank you for the detailed reply.

> Anything you do that changes the distribution of events (like moving the cursor in or out of a window changes the input focus, manipulating the window hierarchy changes the mapping from event position to window target, etc) needs to have its handler executed BEFORE any other events are distributed.

Yes, this is definitely a shortcoming of X. I have been thinking about this for some months; I believe that a solution which maintains the client-server model is to replace server grabs with transactions, which may be initiated by either the client or the server. Obviously this is not backward-compatible as it requires client support as well as server support.
FWIW, this is also the way O'Reilly's JS Pocket Reference explains it.
What was the point of linking that article, it is misleading- he didn't provide solutions.
I don't buy it either. There is every single possibility that the person who leaked the document has a financial stake in CNET and the Guardian and made the whole thing up for pageviews. 


I'm not sure what you mean by "every single possibility." Do you just mean "it's possible"?
I've run for public office before (Libertarian candidate for NC Lieutenant Governor in 2008), so I have a little bit of insight on this. It's probably a bit much to write up here and now though. If I can find time I'll try to write up a blog post on my experiences, and mix in some of what I've learned since then.

I'll just say this though, as a TL/DR: Running a political campaign is basically marketing. You're just marketing a person instead of a product or service. The basic principles are the same. So anything you can read on how to market online in an inexpensive manner, can probably be applied to a campaign. "Guerrilla Marketing" applies to political campaigns as much as it does to products.

If you're a techie (probably a semi reasonable assumption if you're here) I'd say: use a cheap VPS, F/OSS software, and do the technical stuff yourself. Maybe pay a real designer to do your website design if you don't have any design ability. Utilize the heck out of social media. Probably most importantly, and maybe the biggest thing I didn't do: follow the "permission marketing" approach and start building your audience well in advance of the election. If you're thinking of running in 2016, start planning the campaign and start building your mailing list(s), twitter followers, Facebook page, etc. NOW.

And don't be afraid to ask your supporters for money. If people really believe in what you are saying, they'll contribute. And while you can run a campaign "on the cheap", the more $$$ you have, the better in many ways. If nothing else, because the mainstream media use "amount raised" as a proxy for how viable your campaign is, and in deciding whether or not to report on your campaign.

Also, what I'd do if I were going to run again (I don't currently plan to, but never say never) would be to really study the craft of storytelling. I'd read books on how to tell a good story, and understand the art and craft of putting together a compelling narrative, and then try to cast as much of my campaign as I could into the form of a narrative. Human beings seem to be somewhat hard wired to find narrative form appealing, and I believe that good marketing in the future will largely hinge on the ability to tell a good story.

Anyway... I'm hardly an expert (I didn't get elected after all), but there's a few random thoughts for ya. I'll try to revisit this and write up some more ideas and blog them later.
He didn't.

The phone didn’t make me avoid the human connection, but it did make ignoring her easier in that moment, and more likely, by comfortably encouraging me to forget my choice to do so.
Hypothesizing about the lookup table is an irrelevant question, because no such thing can exist in the real universe. Not even in theory. Moreover, your lookup table contains some amount of information in it; either it was generated by a relatively small polynomial process, in which case for as large as the lookup table appears to be, it actually isn't, and is indistinguishable from simply using the program that was used to generate it, or it does indeed contain exponentially large amounts of information, in which case hypothesizing an exponentially large source of information for the mere purpose of passing a Turing test is a bizarre philosophical step to take. Where is this exponentially large source of information?

Recall that in information theory, being a bit sloppy but essentially accurate with the terms, the amount of information something has can be expressed as the smallest possible encoding of something. The entire Mandelbrot set, as gloriously complicated as it may look, actually contains virtually no information, a mere handful of bits, because it's all the result of a very simple equation. No matter how gloriously complicated your enormous hash table may look, if it was generated with some humanly-feasible program and nigh-infinite amounts of time, the information content of the entire table, no matter how large, is nothing more than the size of the program and perhaps a specification of how long you let it run.

Basically, the whole "big lookup table" has to have some sort of characteristic to it. Either it was created by a program, in which case the program itself could pass the Turing test, or it is somehow irreducible to a program's output, in which case in your zealous effort to swat a fly you vaporized the entire Earth; you can't agree to the possibility a machine might pass the test (or be sentient or whatever) but you can agree to the existence of an exponentially complicated source of information? That's only a gnat's whisker away from asking "Well, what if I use magic to create a philosophical zombie," (I'm referencing the specific concept of a philosophical zombie here, you can look it up if you like) "that looks like it's passing the test but it really isn't, what then?" Well, I don't know, when you're willing to invoke magic in your defense I'll concede I haven't got much of a response, but you probably shouldn't call that a victory.

The lookup table argument only makes sense nonconstructively, if you merely assert its existence but then don't allow anyone to ask any question about where it came from, or what properties it has.
You must not be familiar with 'palantir'. A seeing stone used for spying, communication, and manipulation by Sauron and Saruman in LOTR.
Rand Paul Bill Would Curb NSA on Phone Records
I'm not changing anything because I already assumed all of my data was being monitored anyway.
I'm in the same case. I never assumed that any US company would side with me against the US government, so I already worked under the assumption that the US government (in a very broad sense) could access my Google/Facebook/AWS data if they wanted to, even without a strong justification for it.
Am I the only person that saw woodegg.com as "Woo Degg"?
Text of the proposed law:

"The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution shall not be construed to allow any agency of the United States Government to search the phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause."

http://www.paul.senate.gov/files/documents/EAS13699.pdf

("Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013")
Great! Thanks. It looks like his name may in fact be Daniel Katz. Is that the same guy?
Is it really that hard for people here to talk about their thoughts and experiences without trying to life coach you or go Harvard Business Review on your ass? Christ.
By far the most surprising thing about this stuff is that everyone is surprised by it.
Just skimming through the linked post, it seemed like you would be writing all 16 of the books (admittedly, this could be my own reading failing), which seemed like a really ambitious goal.

Are you planning on writing about the entire process after you've completed your journey?
We the people are now we the unimportant nimrods. When the rule of law no longer matters, we no longer matter.
Derek Sivers is one of our industry's truly interesting people. I like to think that if I had f-u money, my life would be like his. I'm almost certainly too lazy for that, though. Keep being interesting, Derek. Hope this project does well.
I've always used PGP and OTR for messaging, and client-side encryption for cloud storage. I don't think I'll be changing much.
Sometimes I wonder if we're in a transitionary phase of mobile technology where we are still at the point of directing our attention at the actual technology rather than using it as a compliment to our "real-world" experience. Glass seems like a step forward in theory, but in practicality I believe it's just moving the screen from your pocket to the side of your head.
3 Rules for Creating a Beautiful Online Portfolio
Agreed. Sadly, many Americans continue, as you describe, to believe that the country is hated because of its freedoms, when the reason is its actions overseas. The core reason that people believe glib lies such as Bush's is that many people in the USA have no idea that people in other countries are not that dissimilar from themselves, in their interests and in their ambitions and concerns.

We can't get everyone to travel, but we should be able to do better with modern internet technology and ubiquitous cell phones. For example, perhaps a website facilitating the creation of email / text message friendships between people in America and people in Afghanistan (or Gaza or Yemen etc). That would have the advantage of potentially severely reducing the signal-to-noise ratio in the government's mass surveillance of its own citizens. Initially of course it would be the more enlightened westerners that would participate, but it would be a start. Incentives for both sides could include language skills / other educational objectives.
if they had a feature to upload saved snapchats online, I would do it and share it through facebook and twitter, in fact I already do http://olaji.de/snapchat a lot of my friends find it hilarious and I have almost double the amount of snaps saved on my phone right now, than on the site... I plan to upload more and more while snapchat value goes up and up, I am a 20 year old college student, a lot of you older guys have trouble understanding...
Yeah. I'll be writing about it very soon.

Made a lot of mistakes. Learned some good share-able lessons from the process. You know I always try to describe those, afterwards, in case it can apply to something you're doing.
I agree with your message, however was the IRS really being partisan or is it that tea party groups in particular(and those that seek to fund them) are more actively exploiting the "social welfare organization" loophole?
I agree that the law should be more clear, but I also think a lot of people are overreacting to this case and not applying a consistant standard of privacy outrage.

Google constantly reads my email to display ads in GMail. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make for free email service. There are many Google advertisers that I trust less than the NSA, and yet I continue to use GMail.

The big difference is that I didn't have a chance to evaluate the security/privacy tradeoff in the case of PRISM, but if I had, I think I would still choose to use the services of the companies involved with the program.