skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's perfectly reasonable to define consciousness as "that which emerges from neural activity" if your model is able to describe that emergent behavior.[0]

This is not the same as describing what it "feels like" from the inside. From your comment, I infer that you are rejecting the explanatory powers of neuroscience because you are expecting it to speak to the "feels like" question.

[0] http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/
It occurred to me at one point - the fact that you and I even try to argue the point that consciousness exists, is evidence to outside observers that we are not philosophical zombies. (Which leads to an amusing, or perhaps disturbing, question about the people who scoff at the concept)

Also, it may not be science but it is still philosophy and extremely important. Science is based on philosophy too.
I get and agree with your last two answers, but if that's the case, why has this kind of thing started popping up on a commercial scale? They certainly would have more to answer for, legally, if privacy laws were violated.

And just because an app like that may violate privacy rights, I mean, you still see things like Firesheep, packet sniffing, network surveillance tools, all published with the caveat to just use for "testing".

It seems to me that the laws are somewhat murky, as evidenced by this article, and I would be surprised if there was any law in the US against me keeping track of MACs that came into the range of my router. With your argument I couldn't set up a surveillance camera outside my house either.
I've only read the RFCs for email protocols once, so someone correct me if I'm wrong. But the only way email is ever going to be truly secure is if extensions are added to the current protocols to add end to end encryption of the message body. Otherwise there's always going to be a third party arm for law enforcement to twist where the message is in plain text for a short time.

Also you can't trust the guy, I'd trust him to host illegal material because he wants it to stay up, but what happens when governments start offering bribes to hand over my emails?
Well, there is Gulio Tononi's Information Integration Theory (http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.long, see also Christof Koch's summary in SciAm at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-theory-of...). Personally, I don't find it particularly compelling at present, since the claims made are much stronger than the evidence to support them and I'm not entirely sure I believe the assumptions necessary to test the theory empirically. But it's out there.
I didn't say we will never understand it, although it is certainly a possibility. One might argue that Godel's incompleteness theorems suggest a reality where some things are unknowable.
Well dang, thanks for pointing out my error and providing sources to back it up.
I'll be aware even if you remove all activities and all senses from me. For some time, anyway - then my mind will likely wander.
I wrote an article [1] on the topic of considering your brain 'the significant other'. On a personal level, I think there are significant productivity advantages to be had if you consider your brain as not your 'self'.
[1] http://humbleware.com/the-runaway-brain/
We're exercising poetic license here.

Imagine a label for Poor Richard's Washing Powder and as part of the usage instructions it says "Early to bed, early to rise..." etc.
A few guesses: social isolation, physical isolation (spending all your time in the same places, e.g. living alone and only leaving your house to go to work, or working at home), burnout, unemployment, unfulfilling jobs, childhood traumas (e.g. bullying, abuse), worries about the future (fear of ageism in their fields of work, fear of losing touch with technologies or current practices)...

HN's getting more of those posts partly because you can create a throwaway account easily, and also because HNers have been warm and understanding of posters who may be depressed. In other communities there's a greater chance of trolls and griefers replying with personal attacks or suggesting suicide.
No thanks Kim. It's just going to be some shiny app with marketing fluff sprinkled on top for the every day user to create the illusion of security and privacy for people who don't know any better. Very opportunistic.
Review: Introduction to Systematic Program Design – Part 1 — Coursera
Working on a startup isn't always as easy as it seems. You have to put so much time and effort into it, which can burn out/depress people quite a bit. Then, once 'completed', if you find your idea has failed, this can add a lot of additional depression. You can also find yourself having to do all kinds of different tasks which you don't enjoy, which take up more time than you'd want.

Life can be tough, but being in a startup, which should essentially make your dreams 'come true', can be even tougher.
As a side note check out @SeinfeldToday
I'm still new to rails but I would really like to see:

- Something like spring ( https://github.com/jonleighton/spring ) built in because I use a low end machine and it still takes 5-6 seconds just to see a page refresh with live reloading enabled in my browser with nearly an empty project in terms of complexity. It would be nice to have it somehow work for tests and near instant code reloads for development.

Random question on queues:
Will they be just as good (easy to use / efficient) as resque?
French and Spanish speakers put articles in front of everything, and none of them seem too bothered by it.
Perhaps under the radar from politicians who would otherwise demand political donations as protection against onerous government actions? It says the local town council was even unaware of how major an employer the company was.
> It seems that is the only branch of philosophy you are familiar with, because what you are doing is generalizing your misinformed notions of one school of thought and applying it to an entire field.

You really need to learn how to shape an argument -- your premise is false and your conclusion depends on your premise. Deconstructive postmodernism is an idea that has received much support among philosophers, which indicts the entire field's critical thinking ability. Now read carefully:

Scientists reject astrology out of hand, which supports science's respect for critical thinking.

If even a few scientists accepted astrology in a formal sense, it would indict science training.

Because more than a few philosophers detect no contradiction in deconstructive postmodernism, this indicts philosophical training and its respect for critical thinking. Which was my point.

> So again, if you actually are interested in understanding why what you are saying is misinformed ...

You skipped the part where you offered any evidence to support this conclusion. On the other hand, you're a philosopher, so my expectations aren't dashed.

> Philosophy wasn't just some fanciful step-cousin of literature, it's [sic] entire purpose was to formalize thought with the aims of eliminating the illogical.

First, you want "its" here, not "it's".

Second, that presumably explains why lit-crit is a laughingstock. Read more at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

In the above now-famous episode in contemporary philosophy, a scientist wrote a deliberate hoax philosophy article which was eagerly accepted and published. The author then revealed what he did and why.

The overarching problem is a lack of reality-testing in philosophical fields, and a less than rigorous respect for logical argument, defects not shared by science.
a desktop software, open source and with IMAP

Which will still see your data unencrypted. And there are open-source browsers too.

In any case, as I said several posts ago, a number of Lavabit customers were complaining about having lost their stored emails; if they were using a desktop email client with IMAP, that wouldn't be the case.
Ya, kids really aren't up on technology.

But seriously, the internet is not something you just dump things on, it's not a big truck.
I disagree, it is only possible at the moment to define _intelligence_ as "that which emerges from neural activity". There is not evidence whatsoever that consciousness emerges from neural activity. This is just a type of religious dogma in disguise. Think about it. Thanks for the link.
Seems like the no names on the trucks thing could also be about efficiency. How much does it cost to get a truck painted with the company logo?
Yes, exactly, for a number of reasons including the problem of large arguments and results.
My critiques (as a film professional).

1. The first 3 shots are very warm, then the 4th shot, a wide in the same location is cool, followed by another warm shot. Not a huge mistake, but annoying for me as it's jarring.

2. The storytelling is a bit lacking. She seems annoyed at having no laundry, but I don't get the feeling that she's too busy for it. I'd rather see her rushing around in the morning trying to find something clean to wear. Also, once the laundry is picked up, show how busy her day is. She gets home, the laundry is delivered, then she can collapse on the couch in front of the tv or with a good book, or conversely she pulls out the little black dress from newly delivered laundry for a night out on the town. Considering the most likely customer they are either a very busy professional or someone who doesn't have to work. The latter would typically not be attracted to a representation that shows them to bored to do laundry, they imagine themselves as busy (and if children are involved often are).

And I agree that the cookie should be a surprise, don't give it away in the video.

All in all for probably very little money, you have a nice video. Nothing that's going to win awards or go viral, but it gets the point across.
De vuelta.
Yeah, but it adds a bunch of requirements on the operators that most don't want to have to abide by; it's easier to just ban <13 year olds.
The OS already provides a library for securely generating random numbers. On Unix, that library is called "the random driver". Its interface is file-descriptor based.

You'd rather not be in a position to care about cryptographic randomness regardless. So, by all means, use high-level crypto libraries. But those libraries should also be using the random driver, instead of trying to bolt their own CSPRNG on top of it (or, god forbid, trying to avoid the random driver altogether).
I can plz has resume? A how-to guide to writing awful recruiting emails
thanks pro. ;)
I wouldn't trust him. He seems like such a shady guy[1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Early_criminal_inves...
I agree that some of his comments muddy the waters; I can't say that I know exactly what he intends to do. But take this first comment for example which I think would be made by many people who had recently started working in IB or management consulting:

> I didn't know how to check my work. I didn't think about order of magnitude.

I suspect in these cases he learned some useful trick or mode of thinking in a matter of minutes by having someone point it out to him. Not so much "basic" as "simple".

And irrespective of whatever Minerva claims to do I think it is clear that many "elite" graduates feel there are simple, useful things not being taught in schools which ought to be.
awesome. little things like this differentiate companies a lot. this can be the difference on whether they remember your brand or not! good job over all.
Getting started with Sass
Modulo the fact that Debian shouldn't be mucking with the inner workings of packages in the first place, sure; stubbing out OpenSSL's CSPRNG with calls to the OS CSPRNG seems like a reasonable plan. It is, by the way, part of the NaCL design too.
That is actually the fun part here in Norway. It isnt really unthinkable.
SSHBeam: A simple android app that sends files to a remote server via SSH
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.fxthomas.sshbeam for the app.
> One prerequisite for something being scientific is that it must be testable, and this sort of thing is not. So it's not science and I don't waste time conflating it with what actually is science. It's an interesting philosophical question.

As a dualist, I agree that the question of whether experience exists (and whether there is a soul of some type powering it) is not answerable by science. But many of the people I discuss this with take the attitude that because it can't be answered by science, it's not even worth discussing as a possibility. It feels like a physicist approaching a mathematician with a theory based on experimental results, and being rebuffed for not having a proof.

I haven't even read the original article, much less the HN comments, but based on what I've read here (and on my past experience discussing similar subjects on HN), a similar attitude is likely to be at play.
> but a consulting firm who makes a tiny tweak and sells the software under "consulting services" because they "install a solution" for the client, doesn't charge sales tax.

Then the consulting firm would pay the sales tax when they buy the software (before tweaking it).
I imagine that it'll be something involving browser-JS-baked PGP and an optional client-side driven indexing service (like a Sphinx search agent running in the task bar.) It'll weave in some sort of "Hey, you're emailing a service provider that doesn't support PGP enforcement - supply recipients public key, send unsecured message, or ask them to switch to MegaMail?"
I'm a season behind on Breaking Bad; I don't like watching half-seasons and would rather just watch the whole thing once it's all on Netflix. So: not too excited.

63 people have finished the crypto challenges; about 9000 people have started them.
Well, her mother is Marcelle Karp, a "feminist writer, editor, and television director and producer". But it seems Ruby herself writes (and performs live) quite a lot, so I don't see why we should assume she hasn't written this.
Actually I had a similar idea but I think we need a totally different site here, besides the labels.
Perhaps you should have a seat over there.
Re: moving divs: this is probably not what you want to do. Re: performance, check out the Chrome developer tools for info on the redraws / re-paints; this is where your performance hit likely is. Pre-rendering to an off-screen canvas may help here, but I'm definitely no UI / UX expert.

Check these out too:
Chrome dev tools primer: https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/

Getting dirty with chrome dev tools: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/chrome-dev-...

Forcing a redraw/re-paint with some other good info: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3485365/how-can-i-force-w...

Canvas performance: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/canvas/performance/

More on SVG: http://www.mysparebrain.com/svgjs2#(1)

General JS optimization: http://www.mellowmorning.com/2008/05/18/javascript-optimizat...

Usually, I find that by asking about what you want to accomplish vs. how to do it, the results are better. Could you please give us some more context on what you're using this for? That will probably lead you to a better and more complete solution (unless you're just really curious about how to do specifically this, in which case, I bet others would be interested in that as well).

Also, with all the best intentions, and coming from someone who only knows one language, check out this humorous post about "alot" vs "a lot" (unless that was intentional, in which case, lol). http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better...

Good luck! :)
[edited for formatting]
As I understand it, Android doesn't use Harmony's CSPRNG. But maybe it did in an earlier version? Maybe that's the problem?
You're quite right, BI headlines are often "sleazy".

Still, I love spending time there. I love clicking on the misleading headlines.

Like it or not, BI is the future of journalism on the Internet.
The bugs you make may not be related to types because your definition of what a "type" is refers to the very weak guarantees given by C, Java et al.

Have you ever had a bug due to something being null/nil when you didn't expect it? How about a string or list being unexpectedly empty? Perhaps you've discovered an XSS or SQL-injection vulnerability? What about an exception that you didn't anticipate, or really know what to do with?

In a more robust type system, these could all be type errors caught at compile time rather than run time. A concrete example of the null/nil thing; in Scala, null is not idiomatic (although you can technically still use it due to Java interop, which is understandable but kind of sucks). To indicate that a computation may fail, you use the Option type. This means that the caller of a flaky method HAS to deal with it, enforced by the compiler.

My "come to Jesus" moment with the Option type was when writing Java and using a Spring API that was supposed to return a HashMap of data. I had a simple for-loop iterating over the result of that method call, and everything seemed fine. Upon running it, however, I got a null-pointer exception; if there was no sensible mapped data to return, the method returned null rather than an empty map (which is hideously stupid, but that's another conversation). This information was unavailable from the type signature, and it wasn't mentioned in the documentation. The only way I had of knowing this would happen was either inspecting the source code, or running it; for a supposedly "statically-typed" language, that is pretty poor compile-time safety.

This particular example of a stronger null type would be doable in the "weaker" languages, but it isn't done for several reasons - culture and convenience are the two most prominent in my opinion. In this sense, "convenience" means having an interface that does not introduce significant boilerplate; any monadic type essentially requires lean lambdas to be at all palatable. "Culture" refers to users of the language tolerating the overhead of a more invasive type system, which admittedly does introduce more mental overhead.
I appreciate your point, but I think invoking Gödel's incompletness theorems in this context is taking them far out of their scope.
So my comment got quoted. Neat. I'd like to respond to:

> My response: who said anything about metaphysical?

Well, the original author did. The entire article is, at its core, an argument for dualism. Dualism is a metaphysical theory.

As for the accusation that I intended to imply that consciousness was a solved problem, all I can say is "What?" Seriously, how did you get that from what I said?

The problem with the article, and the reason that people responded negatively (although, I think, for the most part thoughtfully), is not that everybody thinks the problem of consciousness is easy, or that it has been solved. It's that the arguments presented were weak and not particularly interesting or novel.

I agree that discussion on HN should be thoughtful and polite. But I don't think that means we should be constantly patting each other on the back and blowing up each other's egos.

I also don't really think the quote mining here was helpful. Here's the comment that was quoted simply as "Not a useful concept": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195854

Huh, it actually looks like that comment went on to bring up the concept of zombies, and linked to further reading. I guess quoting that part of the comment wouldn't have supported your indignant outrage though.

Finally, the position that consciousness is not a useful concept is an important part of this discussion. How can we even have a meaningful conversation about consciousness without first addressing whether what we're talking about is real?
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Did you listen to the end? He wonders aloud what might have been if QuakeC had been QuakeScheme.

It's not his first foray into functional languages though. It's his first attempt to write production scale code in a pure functional language.
Seems to me that animated WebP would be better for short video sequences (3-6 seconds) than APNG anyway. People are dumping animated GIFs all over social networks now, and a lot of them weigh in at anywhere from 300k to 2MB, which is somewhat ridiculous, especially on mobile.

However, Google (Blink) themselves rejected WebP animation (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57594084-93/blink-leaders-r...) due to performance concerns.

Which brings up an interesting dilemma, which is balancing network performance with CPU or rendering performance.

We need a format that's optimal for mobile network transport, optimal for decoding speed, and optimal for rendering and memory. ;-)
My brother is a secondary school teacher, and at one point would fairly often get friend requests from his pupils.

I thought this a little odd. So did he. But in the end he figured out which box to tick so that they could be his friend, without actually letting them see anything, and this seemed to keep everybody happy.

(The subject hasn't come up recently so I don't know whether this is still the case, or whether his pupils have moved on to some other system, probably one that I've never heard of.)
And just like that, 8 new startups are born.