skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> its fierce fight with illusions, hallucinations and misleading spiritual experiences

Only for competitive reasons. To get a stable foothold, Christianity had to either do away with the rampant spiritualism of the largely shamanistic religions it replaced, or in some cases had to embrace and extend them. This is and was a purely strategic consideration.

> It poses a real problem to (his) atheism, and he, obviously, rejects the substance dualism, which would logically lead to a religious view on us.

One of his personal core issues is to "rescue" spiritual experiences and bring them over into a secular world. It is not necessarily a concern of atheism per se. For him, as for most atheists, there is not really a "consciousness problem" comparable to what a religious person might identify. As an atheist myself, there is nothing inherently problematic about consciousness, or intelligence, or feelings.

> However, without a conscious soul, meaning itself loses meaning. What's the ontological support for meaning to rise on?

I think most atheists, myself included, as well as many religious people would agree with you that the mind gives rise to meaning. However, I have no idea what you mean by ontological support? Are you asserting that without an overriding supernatural meaning-giver the mind cannot form a world view? Or that a mind capable of categorizing the world meaningfully cannot arise without supernatural influence?
The Age of the Internet
police can randomly stop cars for just two reasons: ... to get drunk drivers off the road.

If a driver appears to be drunk, how is that a random stop? Isn't that a 'probable cause' thing?
Pretty sure dude was joking, but you, sir, win at bitter sanctimony. Bravo.
Show HN: Android app for The Old Reader
Just released an Android app for The Old Reader (RSS reader service).

I did it to scratch an itch (no Android app for The Old Reader) and I thought that some Hacker News users would find it useful.

Right now is in beta, but quite stable and with basic reading functionality implemented.

Feedback is welcome!
Any idea how fast this is compared to java / python ?
Yeah, I'm making more a "there exists" argument rather than saying that they're representative of all drug users. However, it's common enough that the impact on society is non-negligible, IMO.

It of course invites the question of "how much of that negative impact means that some form of regulation is worthwhile?" I think that's an interesting discussion to have, the ones that admit the problem and try and quantify it. I'm not sure that many people are able to have the conversation outside of policy wonks, though.
I, too, have been using mutt for a while now.
I get emails at lots of different addresses and filter them into various folders. I use folder hooks to set my email address, depending the current folder.
You are assuming they'd have figured out how to break the laws of thermodynamics as we know it.
Compute shaders solve essentially all these issues, and more.

The graphics pipeline consists of programmable and semi-fixed components and it is quite often useful to interact with it. For that purpose compute shaders introduce compute kernels, atomic counters, atomic locks, sharable buffers and some hookups to the pipeline stages.

This is functionality gleaned from Cuda, but repackaged in a more or less portable way. Of course compute shader kernels aren't as flexible as either Cuda or OpenCL programs. However OpenCL is by now quite far behind "the state of the art".
This is what makes me so mad at our weird policy of being scared of terrorists. Given the only proper bombing here in recent memory was by the French, why the hell are we scared of jihadists when it was our supposed allied that hit us?
Yes. That applies after you have volunteered to be bound by it in the current military.

The draft register is still around but the draft itself was eliminated in 1973 (or thereabouts). So, that U.S. military force propping up NATO and facing down the U.S.S.R. during Reagan's saber-rattling in the 1980s? ALL VOLUNTEER, believe it or not.
If nobody gets your joke, the failure in communication was yours - and probably your own sense of humour.
That's true, and stealth is an interesting proposition. However, there are probably easier methods of preventing detection, such as not building a giant structure in the first place. Also, even if they manage to radiate away most of their waste heat, they'd have to assume eventual detection by an advanced civilization. Sure, with exponential effort you can always get infinitesimally closer to being virtually undetectable, but is that really feasible?

In the end, it's certainly not impossible that a civilization would go to extreme lengths in order to hide its enormous artificial structures. But the real issue is: why would all civilizations hide in this way? And if it turns out they do all have elaborate stealth tech in operation, that means there must be an incomprehensibly huge threat out there - which in itself might be the answer to why nobody is calling us up.
Right, we simply don't know the conditions to generate a advanced civilization. We're certainly not it (yet) -- at least in terms of the characteristics we're expecting space-faring extraterrestrials to have.

There might be billions of worlds full of dinosaur analogs running around happily eating and growling till their star burns out...and that might be all that you can expect out of life in the general case when it happens.

"Why didn't the Dinosaurs develop space flight?" Why don't we? Again, in absolute terms of the characteristics we're requiring of an alien civilization, we're not really any closer (in measurable absolute terms) to visiting Vega than a struggling ape is. The furthest distance a human has ever traveled off of the Earth is very slight navigational/rounding error when going to another Star.
What I learned from my daughter's wedding
Then maybe they should stop asking algorithm questions that can be answered by cramming for a week or a Google search.
Dominica citizenship goes for $100k (1).

Cost of living in Dominica (2) is between 40-60% cheaper than in Honolulu. Working as a telecommuting freelancer I think he would be fine.

1: http://www.isla-offshore.com/services/citizenship-dominica/

2: http://www.numbeo.com/
What about Steve Jobs's similar statement that taking LSD was "one of the two or three most important things [he did] in [his] life."

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/09/dr-lsd-to-steve-jobs-...
I'm not catching the point your making, but am worried that you're saying France hasn't had secret prisons and state sponsored torture. If you are saying this, please read up on Algeria. Be prepared to feel sickened.
You seem to be making the case that taking drugs is in some sense "cheating" your way to a psychological experience, and therefore somewhat immoral or superficial. That's a valid perspective, but consider this: do you consider drinking coffee to be cheating? Do you consider the ingestion of caffeine to reduce fatigue and aid in cognitive performance as a bad thing?

There's certainly a difference between being more alert and having a psychedelic experience, but they're both a manipulation of the mind via psychoactive substances.
There is no transparency except for carefully crafted releases that make the administration look good.
Based on my limited time in Ireland, I'm guessing you can also get most of your daily needs serviced by very local businesses.
http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=qc7chnfvvrqkkkcin6bx...
Dominica goes for $100k (1)

1: http://www.isla-offshore.com/services/citizenship-dominica/
At least the hotel in the Dubai airport has awesome massage chairs in the rooms and lets you come and go as you please (unless you're traveling on an Israeli passport, in which case, fly the other way). On the other hand, there are no outdoor facing windows in the rooms and you get the same amused "of course not" when you ask for one.
Recruiting standards have been too high since 2007 actually. You're actually more likely to get in the military as a descendant of a middle-class family than from a poor family. And if you exclude the Army, that has been true since 2001 or so.

And post-2009 when active operations in Iraq were ending and the economy really went to shit it's gotten even harder to join. You essentially can't even get into the various Officer Candidate Schools without being either in peak physical shape (Army/Marines) and having good grades, or having a GPA of 3.4+ with good physical scores (Navy/Air Force).
I remember when google came out I didn't quite understand what was different, and hated the fact that I couldn't use operators such as +-(). The feeling lucky button further reinforced the feeling that google was a dumbed down interface for the masses that wasn't for professionals. Took me a bit to realize that the results where better then AltaVista regardless of the reduced sculptability.

EDIT: haha now it's been so long I've even forgotten the operators. They where the boolean operators AND, OR, NOT etc. spelled out, and other very useful sculpting tools.

http://www.netstrider.com/search/altavista.html
Do they have to be laying on a surface?
Dominica "sells" citizenship for $100k, and St. Kitts & Nevis wants a $250k donation, or a $400k real estate investment. A similar program with the same amounts exist for Antigua & Barbuda.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/28/business/world-overlooked-...
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo can't tell you about NSA abuses
> Maybe, just maybe, this might get the US government to stop, or at least drastically limit its spying operations.

And the irony would be that the US needed foreign gov'ts to accomplish what its own citizens could not do.
Is that what http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/BDR_Project is about? They aim to "implement main BDR features into core Postgres" in versions 9.4. Looking at past history, that could be the third quarter of 2014 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL#Major_releases), but of course, that is just a guess.
I've no idea what the appropriate amount of regulation is.

One of the interesting things that David Nutt said in his book was that perhaps, if we didn't have the puritan attitude, we could research substances that gave people the effects they want without as much harm. What if we had an alcohol alternative that was non addictive and could be switched off at the end of the night with an antidote? Or a recreational stimulant that didn't cause heart strain?

If we approached the question of drugs from a libertine but harm-reducing viewpoint, I wonder what we could achieve.

Also of course, who would get hooked on meth if they had a choice of cheaper, safer, legal alternatives? Some still would but I bet it would be less.
Take back control II
So decide, tech peoples: Should this technology build in audit trails or not? Should this technology record what interface a government employee was using to extract this data, or not?

It shouldn't be.
So, first you build a Dyson sphere, then you build a system to cool the outer surface of your Dyson sphere to near 3 Kelvin (except some narrow directions in space, where you radiate your excess heat).

Now the interesting question is, is the energy you capture from the star sufficient for running this cooling system of yours. I have no clue.
Interesting idea, although I find the motivation a little unconvincing. In particular, the quotation

"... natural language abounds with directly or indirectly self-referential yet apparently harmless expressions—all of which are excluded from the Tarskian framework"

used in this article to motivate the concept of inconsistency-tolerant logic is actually much better support for non-well-founded set theories [1] allowing hypersets (i.e. sets which contain themselves), e.g. by assuming Aczel's anti-foundation axiom [2]. Since these set theories are compatible with standard the set theory, extending it, rather than replacing it, they don't throw out the notion of consistency, but have no problem dealing with self-referential sets and such. "Vicious Circles" [3] is a great exposition of the subject of hypersets and their applications to computer science and logic, among other things and is quote accessible for such a theoretical subject.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-well-founded_set_theory

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aczel%27s_anti-foundation_axiom

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Vicious-Circles-Center-Language-Inform...
>> Of course, it's hard to come up with campaign slogans or appeal to emotions by making cogent, nuanced arguments.

Just say "it depends".
Given that "Palantir Intelligence integrates disparate data from disconnected data silos at massive scale for low-friction interaction with intelligence officers." I think it's very likely that government analysts are using Palantir to analyze data gathered with PRISM. But whether they use Palantir or a corkboard, I don't see how that makes much difference about the legality of PRISM itself.
I think the NSA can read a byline all on their own.
Without getting too deep into this issue of relativity, let me point that that the Milky Way is per Wikipedia "100,000–120,000 light-years in diameter".

Rather than go down to Planck level granularity, if reaching space flight, or better, serious engineering works in space that are visible from afar is a low probability thing, with time scales say in the millions of years, then "first" will I think do for our purposes.
That would have killed his security clearance.
> They probably look like Newman of Seinfeld fame.

So it is not possible to be fat and bald and still be willing to sacrifice for your country?
Is this legal? My understanding is that most states have strict regulations concerning any kind of light being projected from / on your windows.
As far as a self-hosted Dropbox replacement, how about SparkleShare? http://sparkleshare.org/
So back to OCR paper forms then? No more web forms to fill out my tax data each year? Should I have to go visit the Social Security office in person each year too?
China's 'Shadow Banking' And How It Threatens The Economy
People that get caught doing something they are inclined to do but shouldn't tend to become better at getting away with it next time.
I did not like it using Git under the hood -- as the SparkleShare site mentions, it's not particularly good for storing "large" files (photos, etc.)
Ah right. I typically use send hooks for that, based on the To: address but folder hooks would help me out too. I'll have to look into that.
Maybe interstellar travel is just really hard even with technology far beyond our own.
Are you honestly arguing against doing something because intellectuals that inspire you advocate it? That's a fantastic reason to seek out a new experience.
It deeply saddens me that a tiny tiny percentage of the population can really fuck up the lives of everyone - financially, socially, politically, religiously.

The real problem is in how we set up the governments. We give to much power to a few people.

What we really need to do is let people vote on individual issues. Want to go to war that will affect everyone and will cost trillions? Let's have a vote.
SO the airlines will not sell him a ticket, couldn't a wealthy individual fly him out on a private jet in theory?
Within 20 years 3d printing and Open Ecology will have given _you_ the means to pretty much never need to buy anything from the man again. Real communities that live off the grid can happen within our life times (and it not be the most tiresome back breaking work in the world) and maybe we can find a bit of happiness in the joy of being human rather than the endless procession of churning out ever more so that the rich above us can steal it from us.
Technological Disobedience via Cuban Innovation
I've never seen Youtube links on HN, so I'll make a text post and leave the link here. In times of mass spying and the economic crisis, I find the idea of technological disobedience to be quite attractive. See the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-XS4aueDUg

"Ernesto Oroza has spent much of his time studying the technological innovations that popped up during “The Special Period in the Time of Peace,” the Cuban government’s euphemism for the 90s collapse of the country’s economy that’d been set up for thirty years of isolation. He found scores of homebrew, DIY machines that citizens made to get by when no other options existed. In 2010, Motherboard visited Oroza in Miami to talk about his discoveries and the mass of brilliant creations made by Cuba’s DIY inventors.

Cuba’s inventor culture has its roots in the 70s, when a group of revolutionary-minded scientists and mechanics formed the National Association of Innovators and Rationalizers (ANIR). Building on the ethos of Che Guevara, ANIR untied hacker-minded folk with the needs of an isolated economy and the call of a socialist revolution. Oroza showed us his meticulous collection of machines from this era, which he has contextualized as art pieces in a movement he calls “Technological Disobedience.”

short article source: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/mbtv-the-technological-disobedience-of-ernesto-oroza
I'm sorry but you're wrong. Look up what sslstrip does (that I mentioned in the post you replied to).
And what about git-annex? I thought it is designed to overcome these shortcomings?
Sasha Grey stars in spoof NSA Recruitment Ad [video]
That's how social networks used to work. I remember thinking how crazy it felt to use your real name on Facebook.
This seems like a very cool project, but I don't see how it provides real anonymity. What concerns me isn't even "a well-financed adversary", but "someone who is curious about who you are, and has spare time to think about it".

Changing your identity regularly doesn't seem terribly useful either, if you then re-form the same relationships with the same people.

Any detail a "friend" provides is a clue, and these clues can be used to re-describe the network.

I'm not trying to be a wet blanket here, I'm just concerned that Nightweb is something it's not.
The Crick anecdote is not to encourage people to try LSD so they can gain a connection to Francis Crick. Instead, it prompts a sense of dissonance between popular mentalities towards the substance and a luminary's position on it. Nutt's over-arching point is that society should pivot away from prohibition to harm reduction, which rests on people being informed about the realistic risks surrounding various substances.
What's wrong with any of those things? None of those things are harmful.
Haven't we always? When one gets a lot of downvotes, the software often responds with an (hell)ban. How is that not the community deciding that some people are not worthy of being on HN?
It works on Mac OS X. Not pretty, but… Open in chrome.
The #Hustle - My Startup has 30 Days to Live
A simple way to build smarter apps
Anonymous doesn't work the way you think they work. They hit easy targets, and lack the sophistication to hit anything else. BAH is, I assure you, not an easy target for any hacktivist group.
Even if it's true it really doesn't mean anything.

DMT was the most intense psychedelic experience I've ever had, but came away with zero insights or spiritual change (unlike as from the usual suspects).
US to access Europeans' bank data in new deal

The fact that the US was secretly accessing Swift bank data did not come to light until 2006.

The deal gives the US access to bulk data from Swift, a firm that handles millions of bank transactions daily.

A German Liberal MEP, Alexander Alvaro, said the deal "will ensure that terrorist financing can be traced back to its sources, but it will not affect day-to-day bank transfers of EU citizens".

And the leader of the UK Conservative MEPs, Timothy Kirkhope, said it "sends the right signals about our resolve in fighting terrorism and our commitment to remaining a strong partner of the United States".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10552630
I wonder if they will also grant Snowden asylum. I don't see how they could argue against doing so while kicking up a stink over the spying.
Your comparisons are all extremely unfair in the same way: they involve unjust disregard for the well-being of others. There are victims in each of your analogies.

There are no victims if I safely use a mind-altering drug like LSD. Responsible drug use has more in common with using a neat programming trick to accomplish a personal goal than it does with hacking.

Still, I come across this comparison often: like people think it's "cheating" to use drugs. Nonsense. If there's a tool I can use to safely accomplish a worthwhile goal, why not use it? It might be "unnatural" or "cheating" to use a sharp stick to fight off a predator, but I doubt you have qualms with such physical tools.

Is it cheating to put a roof over your head to avoid the elements? You live in unnatural conditions surrounded by synthetic solutions to accomplish your goals. You're using some sort of electronic device now. I fail to see the distinction between synthetic physical tools and synthetic chemical tools, but I do see your argument is full of holes.
Is that integrated into SparkleShare?
This was posted as part of a larger collection not too long ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5962933
I sincerely hope EU officials hold the US to account for this
I'm sure there are some jurisdictions in which this would be illegal.

In some places, certain "traffic aides" are outlawed E.G. Radar detectors. While it could be argued that this doesn't help you evade police, the fact that it's an extraneous (potentially distracting) "thing" attached to the windshield could be a legal hiccup.
Depends what you want to use it for. Anyway, you can have multiple bitcoin addresses for different purposes.

On top of that, while I wouldn't rely on this cryptographically, the relationship is one-way. Gravatar links email addresses to gravatar images, but it's not intended to link in the other direction, so the same is true for any information stored in the gravatar.

You can use my system to reply with encrypted text to a comment on a blog post without knowing the email address of the person you're replying to, only their gravatar image.
In the early times of Google I switched back and forth to Altavista because the NEAR operator was the way to adjust the precision of my terms.
This statement implies that you know better than Crick and Watson what contributed to their discovery. That's absurd.
Show HN: Weekend Project - Hacking the Square Reader
Perhaps, or they just don't do it again. Not all people in jail go back. Generalising things like you have here is not helping anyones understanding on the issue
> "the interview process is this largely protocol driven song and dance where you're supposed to scratch your head and be wowed by the technical question and then slowly and painfully make incremental progress on a solution while the interviewer can feel smug about knowing it all along and maybe they can help you along the way. If you blurt out a good approximation in the first thirty seconds, that ruins the whole courtship."

Your friend is exactly right, and there's plenty of competitive companies out there not demanding you physically take up a whiteboard marker to cock-swing out some algorithm in a political kowtow ritual. Asking for an answer or illustration of deductive process to a non-trivial question is a good litmus test of both talent AND enthusiasm/presence and provides entry points for deeper technical discussion but relying on a '2 line perl implementation of log(log^n-dimension) reimann curvature' as a source of truth rather than understanding the person you're humiliating and how they can augment your team if the Ruby Beard of Magic approves is absolutely absurd. Unless you don't care about the people or culture you're creating and just want the work done of course, because money money or whatever :D