skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"When is a simulation the same as the thing being simulated?" I wrote a detailed analysis of this question in 2005 at http://thinkinghard.com/blog/WhenIsASimulation.html.

My article is a refutation of John Searle's argument that a mechanical simulation of a person who "understands" Chinese is not itself a thing that "understands" Chinese, i.e. a simulation of "understanding" Chinese is distinct from actually understanding Chinese.

Panu is repeating John Searle's argument, but replacing "understand Chinese" with "feel pain".

And the answer I found to my question is: a simulation is the same as the thing being simulated _if_ the thing being simulated is an information processing system. For example, a simulation of a washing machine is not a washing machine. But, a simulation of a calculator _is_ a calculator. A realistic simulation of a calculator would look just like one of those calculator programs you have on your computer or your mobile phone. And those programs actually _are_ calculators - because we use them to do calculations for us just like we used to use real calculators to do calculations for us.

The question of whether simulated pain is the same as actual pain is equivalent to the question of whether pain is an aspect of an information processing system (which I think it is), or whether it is something else.

An information processing system that "feels pain", will be less and less inclined to do something that is "painful". This will be part of the decision making process of that system. If the system is somehow able to "ignore" its own painful feelings, it will end up making bad decisions - just like a person who can't feel pain ends up making bad decisions. Typically people who don't feel pain suffer accumulated injuries and generally fail to look after themselves, even when they intellectually know that their insensitivity to pain puts them at risk, and as a result they become disabled and die at a younger age than those of us who suffer pain in the normal manner.
won't let me scroll down on android so I can't sign up.
I don't know if this is connected to the new information, but I seemed to remember articles about the FBI trying to set up backdoors and do something like extending the use of CALEA-type hardware to web companies. I don't know whatever became of it, but older articles on the subject can still be found.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57428067-83/fbi-we-need-wir...
After I keep reading all of these stories, I remembered reading the book: "The Watchman: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Serial Hacker Kevin Poulsen" where the book talked about the illegal wiretaps he found the FBI involved in.

http://www.nndb.com/people/453/000022387/

"As a fugitive, Poulsen needled the FBI by hacking federal computers and revealing details of wiretaps on foreign consulates, suspected mobsters, and the American Civil Liberties Union. He also hacked into the details on FBI front companies. At the highest levels of U.S. law enforcement"

I'm wondering what he knows or thinks about all the stuff coming out now. . .
The United States makes up 4.46% of the world population [1], so there might be reason to believe that 95% of communications in transit are foreign. If you look at the users of facebook, there are more who are foreign (non-US) that US citizens [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_statistics
The Death Of Privacy And The Brave New Surveillance State
Yes, found this interesting too, some P (9,0?) are missing or someone is having fun, PA like 'P Apple' ?
Please tell me there is something like this for PHP or JS?
I addressed in my post that there's not currently any multi-file upload and directory support and I consider this less of a limitation to work around but a feature request. See the Caveats section. I hope the neocities guys will change this limitation but it might be cost prohibitive at the moment.
when dealing with cpan, i think you should separate between the repository itself, which is surely more up to date than debian or ubuntu repos (because this is where debian or ubuntu pull from anyway)

and the command line interface, you have cpan, cpanp (cpan plus) and cpanm (cpan minus)

some cpan interfaces work better than others
Hey, thanks for the response. As far as frameworks, I discuss in my post that I used a stripped down version of Foundation, but I don't feel this should be a requirement for anyone (I don't use a framework on my personal site, for instance)—it just lets you deploy quickly and is good for people who don't want to worry much about responsive-ness, they just want it to work.

I agree that FTP access would not be a good move on the part of neocities, I think they should just allow multi-file upload and directory support.
"On April 5, according to this slide, there were 117,675 active surveillance targets in PRISM's counterterrorism database. The slide does not show how many other Internet users, and among them how many Americans, have their communications collected "incidentally" during surveillance of those targets."

I think something is inferred there that isn't necessarily true: there being 117,675 PRISM records does not necessarily refer to 117,675 different people being targeted. The slides imply that there would be two different records for the same person's Gmail account and their Facebook account. So the number of individual people being targeted would actually be a good amount less. Yes, still tens of thousands of people... but less that 117,675.
You are reading too much into it. The message was never "learn to code on your iPad". The message was always "make cool prototypes and ideas quickly"

Over time I have added features that I personally use into Codea. Sometimes I like to use Codea at my desk next to my desktop computer, so I added a way to do that with Air Code. I still prefer coding on the iPad directly, but I use both depending on location.

Codea will always be about making your ideas come to life. It attempts to reduce the friction in creating things.
I totally agree. I think the fact that her gender was brought up so much demeans her accomplishment and insults her a bit. Sadly, we as a culture are still figuring this all out.
Take note that as of a week ago BFL is shipping units that were ordered in August of 2012, that perform worse and use more power than promised.
Depends on your case but I would suggest choosing a payment processor that enables conbini shiharai (payment at convenience stores like 7-11, Lawson, etc.).

Do not underestimate the power of conbini. ;-)
If there's nothing written down just start another company without him. Tell him you're out and are taking all your IP with you.
> But in this case, setting up a mining business is trivial.

Not exactly. I'm not exactly sure on the up front cost to develop ASICs, but it's definitely well into 6 figures. BFL sold millions of dollars in pre-orders 12 months ago to fund the design and development of the devices. Everyone in the bitcoin world knew where it was going technology-wise last year, but only 2-3 companies have successfully developed ASIC miners 12 months later.

There are many people who pre-ordered devices from BFL over a year ago and still haven't received them. It seems like BFL would be guaranteed a lawsuit if they started mining on their own before fulfilling those year old orders.
If you look at the market depth (the V-shaped plot at coinlab.com and elsewhere), you can see that ~$1M is sufficient to shift the price of BTC, which has a ~$1B capitalization by ~10%. Thus, if you wanted to make more than ~$1M from BTC, it would have to happen by doing something other than selling BTC itself, lest you crash the market.

The price is supported by speculators (like me; I've bought a little to play with) who think that the value of BTC at some time in the future is at least $100. If it were priced at its utility, at least in my simpleminded picture of things, a shift of 10% in the price should come only with a sale of ~10% of its capitalization.
If this is accurate, Snowden might have to start shopping for a new country.

As an aside, I didn't know Correa was a U of I grad. His adviser was Werner Baer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Baer
So what you're saying is they're trying to knockout knockout?
There is, google for something like php lint or js lint.
Ruby 1.8.7 retired
Who expected anything different? Any country he potentially can go to will be asked not to give him asylum.
How To Receive Clickbank Payment Through Payoneer MasterCard | Onenaija Blog
Don't just say it takes resources, give a plausible mechanism. I can't think of any way for subdirectories to take more load than normal files in one directory. Am I not being creative enough?
Enthought going to Canopy as some weird hybrid of a distribution, and IDE and a package manager may have something to do with it.

I'm had many fewer issues with Anaconda, and have found that OS X behaves just as well as Scientific Linux or Mint for stuff like this.
99.999% of government officials aren't close to being touched by elections. Do you honestly believe you can change government significantly while leaving 99.999% of the government unchanged?

See my previous comment on the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5842029
Boy oh boy, I'll never be able to read everything that I want to. Ticking off one thing and 10 more are added.
For JavaScript, one option is the Closure Linter

https://developers.google.com/closure/utilities/

(disclaimer: I helped write this when I was working there)
Do you believe the safe passage papers were given without Correa's consent, as he claims? I don't.
These numbers can't possibly work for interceptions within the US telecom network. The fraction of Americans using the US telecom network approaches 100%, while the fraction of Liberians using it is probably much smaller.
Back in the early days of CHDK (custom firmware for Canon cameras) they would dump the original firmware code of new cameras by writing a tiny loader (that looked like a firmware update program to the camera), put that loader on a memory card in the camera, run the loader on the camera via the firmware upgrade menu option and that loader would just read the original firmware out of memory and blink an LED on the camera over time to send out all the bytes of the original firmware. A computer would then capture that signal with a photodiode connected via serial port or sound/mic input resulting in a binary dump of the camera's original firmware on the remote computer where it could be disassembled and reverse engineered and (eventually) extended to have all sorts of functions the camera didn't ship with.

http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Obtaining_a_firmware_dump
However, those that get the richest are in fact always the mining companies.

The top miners of bitcoins have gotten radically richer than those selling mining tools ever will. In this case the mining will run out, the bitcoins will remain and grow more valuable due to supply / demand (assuming bitcoin succeeds longer term).

There are far more $5+ billion mining companies, than there are $5+ billion mining tools companies.

Go down the list of the top 20 mining or natural resource extraction companies. The tools business is always radically smaller by comparison. eg: BHP Billiton, $156b market cap; Rio Tinto, $76b market cap; Vale $68b market cap. And of course the oil industry is far more dramatic.

Selling tools like the bitcoin mining boxes is foolish, unless you're selling lemon tools that won't recoup their investment (people will stop buying them quickly), or unless you're betting bitcoin won't thrive long term. If you think bitcoin will thrive, it's far better to mine each coin yourself and own it long term, and ride that extreme appreciation. The return would be far beyond any margin you could earn on boxes.
You are assuming a representative distribution of users of whichever service they select. That may not be true.
I can't understand the historical perspective that trashes the founders because of slavery. After fighting a long guerrilla rebellion and forming a new nation with a novel form of government, were they supposed to immediately turn on southern slave owners in another bloody war? If so, the American republic would have lasted maybe 10 years.
Yeah, I definitely don't think all long names are justified. I'm a huge fan of simplicity, and prefer short, simple, and direct code. With regards to Spring, especially, I do tend to agree that some of the very long class names are that way just due to incidental complexity, rather than complexity innate to the problem space itself.
Apple joined in Oct 2012. It could be that other companies have agreed to join and were allocated those codes, but are not yet up and running as of the date the slides were made. Just speculation. I recall that there was a slide saying "dropbox coming soon", so they are probably working on onboarding other companies.
Well, 90% of the time I just hit "Back" when a canopy like that is thrown in my face. Sometimes I want to read the content, though, and would prefer to do so a bit subversively rather than giving in and signing up.
> I don't see anything about government equipment on private company property in the slides.

Given the interface already laid out in what we knew about PRISM before, that's mostly an implementation detail. Maybe the company didn't want to have to send the data over the open Internet on their own (even encrypted) and wanted to pawn off that responsibility to the NSA?

I don't know where the info came from but I remember it being talked about when the news first leaked so it may have been sent by Snowden with the initial leak of slides.

I suppose the question is really how embedded into the company's subnet is the government equipment?

> The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court does not review any individual collection request

Basically this part from the article introduction: "The program is court-approved but does not require individual warrants. Instead, it operates under a broader authorization from federal judges who oversee the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)".

Keep in mind this is where the US/non-US inequality is at its most severe. Almost the only reason the FISC really cares about this at all is to prevent monitoring of American citizens in a way that violates the 4th Amendment. The program as constituted is less worried about ensuring the right person has their data collected as it is about ensuring that a U.S. citizen does not have their data collected.

So from that perspective such a warrant might appear rational on the part of the court.

That's admittedly a pretty large inequity between US and non-US persons but that's how the existing case law seems to approach it.
When is a Simulation the Same as the Thing being Simulated?
For everyone wondering how much you'd need to mine to pay for the equipment, here is a handy calculator: http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

The BFL Jalapeño (5GH/s) is $274 and where I live electricity costs $0.19/kWh. From the article, the device "pulled 50 watts of power when actively hashing". So, this will pay off in 3 days, and will generate 9321.64 USD over 3 months (given 0.61 profitability decline per year).
Architecturally, it sounds remarkably similar to commercial social media monitoring platforms - not too surprising, since both are essentially about watching and searching the behavior of people around certain topics/groups/keywords.

Queries ('selectors') go in one end, are presumably translated into appropriate queries at each of the external 'data sources' (best-effort translation of the original selectors into whatever the source supports query-wise) and then the results are either alerted on in real-time (surveillance) or kept longer-term (stored comms).

Content returned varies on what the provider can support.

Finally there is a search interface on top (although it looks very basic in this case - simple boolean AND/OR) to provide historic search over the data collected.
Oh, I'm pretty sure there are.

And though I'm dying to know just how deep the rabbit hole is, I'm thankful that the slides are being steadily released. In today's world I guess that's the only way to grab attention and gain momentum.
Well... Java is an interesting choice, but it's far from the strangest.

I still have this (https://www.librarything.com/work/3032548) book somewhere. Working through it as a kid was an interesting experience (amplified by the fact my computer was an Apple II+ at the time).
i hope engaging in this clearly off topic, wont offend others

linux and foss rely on volunteer effort, therefore efficiency matters a lot, inefficient system will loose volunteers and momentum, i think its surprising the system lasted for so long , but then i believe the number of surviving distros is in decline and even less so the number of package management system

anyway, maybe my usage of the word centralized and decentralized term is wrong

cpan can be viewed as centralized, it is a single storage space for all modules

i just believe that is too much waste, in having to repackage each application to different systems, there must be a better way, where the effort will be more efficient and require less resources

maybe the opposite of what i said is true, maybe we need to centralize over one package system to reduce the effort, or in other, maybe we need we centralized over a single system and repo, to be able to decentralize the effort
They also posted a great diagram breaking down the process in simpler language:

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/inner-working...
How how much would I have given to be a fly on the wall for that conversation and in the meetings leading up to that call.
Interesting. Some insight, some contradiction and confusion especially when compared to earlier reportings on the first slides:

- The "direct access" claim is replaced with "FBI interception unit" which is "government equipment on private company property to retrieve matching information from a participating company" that detail isn't mentioned in slides but provided in annotations.

- The case format notation points to "real-time notification" when a target logs in or sends emails/IM/VOIP etc:

"Depending on the provider, the NSA may receive live notifications when a target logs on or sends an e-mail, or may monitor a voice, text or voice chat as it happens (noted on the first slide as "Surveillance").

The "Depending on the provider" bit is interesting as it suggests that there are potentially different levels of "participation".

- "On April 5, according to this slide, there were 117,675 active surveillance targets in PRISM's counterterrorism database." can a FISA order cover a target across service providers or each provider requires its own order? the number of targets could dramatically be revises downwards depending on that.
> If anything, it bolsters my intuition which is: the fact that anarchist societies historically haven't stood up well to the depredations of authoritarian and warlike organizations is probably the reason we think they can't work.

Sure, but my intuition is that you cannot simultaneously stamp out all authoritarian/warlike organizations. And even if you could, you'd eventually get one more, which would screw the whole world up again.

The idea is one of those "would be nice in theory/won't work in the real world" types of things. I wish it weren't, I really do. But life is about dealing with the hand you're given, not the hand you'd wished you'd have been dealt.
Only if you have no prior information. However, since the target has to be a specific person, and you have to have some reason to want to monitor them, you would have to have a good deal of prior information. At the very least, you know the networks on which they can be monitored, which already introduces a much more informative prior than "is-a human". The ratio of Americans to other people in your belief network would tend to be dominated by that other prior information.
Obviously you can change the URL to get parts 1-4..

http://projectmona.com/bits-of-brilliance-session-one/

http://projectmona.com/bits-of-brilliance-session-two/

http://projectmona.com/bits-of-brilliance-session-three/

http://projectmona.com/bits-of-brilliance-session-four/
If you wish to have

1) a cool room at temperature T

2) enough light, L, to see by

3) a happy human at temperature H

Assuming that T,H, and L are fixed, you're going to use more energy with a less-efficient process. So, you'll 'spend' more energy to get there.

If you're trying to run the process at fixed energy, you're going to wind up accepting a slightly higher T. If that's the case, you'd be able to use even less energy by powering the LED directly and moving the setpoint for T up to that same temperature.
The Congress can implement their obligation to declare states of war however they see fit. The concept of the AUMF dates back essentially to 1798 so I can't see why we'd declare it illegitimate only now.
It could easily be a typo in the slides, for all we know. Problem is, we do not know just how accurate the information presented in the slides is.
Hindsight is 20/20: It also could have happened that bitcoin prices are down to $1 right now and then BFL and other shovel sellers would vastly outperform dedicated miners.
> I don't know where the info came from but I remember it being talked about when the news first leaked so it may have been sent by Snowden with the initial leak of slides.

I first saw this in followup articles from the NYT and Washington Post quoting unnamed government sources.
Its nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with winning lucrative contracts for US companies or protecting the interests of an entire industry.
The US Govt has a name for this list of domestic interests to protect, it was revealed in the large cable release from Wikileaks a few years ago.
Once again, don't confuse predictability with ability to understand a system. We actually have a fairly good understanding of weather dynamics and turbulence - and I can give you the formula for both of these - the Navier-Stokes equation! Not the simplest equation, but something understandable (yes, I know there's a Millenium Prize problem to see if we always get a smooth solution). We do understand how turbulence arises from this. And we understand the weather very well.

However, we can't predict the weather, nor can we predict the earthquakes. And as you correctly point out, the reason for this is chaos. The reason is not that we don't understand the underlying processes that govern these dynamics. Rather, the uncertainties in our initial conditions increase exponentially with time (due to chaos) and make long-term predictions unreliable.
Perhaps P9 was allocated to a company that is no longer part of the program.
An awful lot of Ruby ... does every programmer really need to know Ruby? I seem to be getting by.
I have no idea if this is at all related to the topic (and I realize this reads like typical HN smarter/hipper-than-thou criticism, so I apologize in advance) but while I find Aziz Ansari to be hilarious in roles (Parks & Rec, his small role in Flight of the Conchords, etc), I've seen a few of his standup shows and didn't find his own material to be particularly funny at all.
It wouldn't really surprise me too much. It's not like President Obama would approve each and every asylum request centrally from the White House, so the London consul may have assumed a safe pass would be acceptable and then Quito had to negate it because they weren't ready to go that route.

After all Snowden managed to leave the Hong Kong airport somehow, presumably the HK authorities (not to mention the airline) would have wanted to see some documentation of permission to travel?

Edit: On the other hand, maybe you're right. This ABC News article seems to say that Univision has confirmed that the safe pass had been generated under the direction of Pres. Correa. http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/ecuador-issues-denials-s... and only after Univision got wind of it was it disavowed.

Still a mystery is why they bothered to disavow the safe pass at all. Perhaps the problems with Assange?