skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get encrypted e-mail; I don't get encrypted social networks. An encrypted social network is like handing out chastity belts to women as a means of reducing unwanted pregnancies. I've said it on another encryption-related thread, but I'll say it again: practically all private information — especially on social networks — is given to corporations voluntarily because these companies manipulate their users into that. Commoditizing social network by means of accepted standards (like e-mail) is one solution; education and politics is another; but encryption? how is that supposed to help? It's like installing a bullet-proof window in your house while the door is left open and half the walls are gone, or digging a moat in your back yard while your kids are still letting strangers in through the front door.
Watch the Mega announcement [1] to get a very clear picture of this guy. He starts talking at [2].

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwlLC2PUrH8
2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwlLC2PUrH8&feature=player_d...
On CentOS 6.4 the util-linux-ng v2.17.2 package provide the /bin/dmesg command.
I don't get it. What's wrong with the name?

Are you pronouncing it as if it were the verb, "aping", like as in "poorly imitating a person's behavior in the primitive manner of an ape"?

My inclination was to spell out the letters of the acronym, as in "A-P-N-G", like: Ay, Pee, En, Gee.

I don't think they were targeting a funny name. I wonder if they're fluent in English.
Are you serious? 3.9 of them are pro-surveillance, and 1.1 of them are anti-surveillance. Some debate. I supposed the woman was supposed to be on the ACLU director's side (and even then it wouldn't have been equal), but even she was most of the time pro-surveillance, anti-Snowden.
Teenagers don't use email. They use iMessage.
That is a pretty uninformed and unhelpful opinion. Microsoft's code is the most heavily reverse engineered in the entire industry; code Microsoft ships is just about the worst possible place to sneak an NSA backdoor, since even innocuous weirdness is enough to generate a news story about it.

If the NSA wants your server stack, they're going to use the hardware to get it. But the reality is, the NSA doesn't need to backdoor your servers.
The burglar's phone's MAC address in your router's nicely timestamped log would be evidence, I would think, albeit less iron-clad than surveillance video of him taking your stuff. It would serve to bolster the prosecution's case, should the police manage to find the perp though other means. E.g., the thief might have been found fencing your Vermeer. He might claim to have acquired it innocently from someone. In that case, the jury would find your log interesting as they weigh the evidence.

An interesting question is whether the MAC address alone could be used to trace the perp. The first 24 bits of the 48-bit MAC address identify the company that manufactured the adapter. Then the question would be, did the company that put the adapter into the phone cross-reference its MAC with the phone's serial number and the serial number with the owner.

A smart thief would turn his phone off during a job. Routers logging MAC addresses are probably a much less serious problem than cell carriers keeping logs of which phones were where when.
As may I .. that's not the point.
Pretty cool idea, but I would love to see the actual back of the product I'm reading. It would be much more immersive, I think.
Nope, this is wrong - there are far greater motivators than money - passion, fame, caring about others socially, the "greater good".

We should be working to remove property in the digital world as it leads to artificial scarcity and greed.
Idiomatic code on both Rails and .NET is about equally likely to harbor SQL injection vulnerabilities.
This is the first time in my life where I have been genuinely disturbed by the location of an apostrophe.
All true.

I just want to add that even though OP may see it in HN - that doesn't mean we have a higher-than-average depression rate. Every career will have a few depressed people, our community is online a lot though, so it's a natural place to ask for help.
Can you give some evidence that Facebook actually does this?
Try a sensory deprivation chamber ;)
Idea: A label of Dr. Bronner's Soap with text generated by Markov chains from usually overblown content, e.g. spammy e-books.

A @bronner_ebooks of sorts.
> your premise is false and your conclusion depends on your premise.

Ok, so your knowledge of these terms indicates that at least you've taken an introductory course on philosophy at some point, so that's good. However the key point in my argument is "seems", because it would be silly to think that I know anything about what you're knowledgeable about.

> ...an idea that has received much support among philosophers, which indicts the entire field's critical thinking ability.

And there's where your argument falls apart. How does your conclusion follow from your premise? Greek mythology is still very much a full field of its own, but I doubt it has any active believers remaining in this day and age; that doesn't make it any less of a belief system. Similarly, I could argue that all modern music listeners are teen girls because Justin Bieber's fan base is mostly teen girls. It just doesn't follow, regardless of how you feel about one aspect of a field.

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

Yep, but they didn't always used to. Astronomy originated from Astrology, and provided it with many valid theories that Astronomy then took as its own. Astrology now is mostly classified by its silly belief system, but that's the nature of intellectual evolution. Popper's essay "On the Sources of Knowledge" that I mentioned deals explicitly with Astrology/Astronomy, and Classical Mechanics/Relativity as its prime examples. It's a good short read, you should seek it out.

Either way, I'm not sure why you keep going off on tangents with regards to spelling or literature and such, but an important part of constructing good arguments is the avoidance of logical fallacies. A good reference of them can be found here: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ I hope from my tone that you can tell that I am merely trying to help build your understanding of the field, because your claim of lack-or-rigor in philosophy is easily disproved by even a quick glance at history. Mathematical proofs are some of the most rigorous formal 'theories' we have, and they originated with philosophy. Similarly, 'falsifiability' as a concept was invented in philosophy. It is the dismissal of this that is discerning. Otherwise, it seems we generally agree, and that you're misplacing your arguments against the wrong foe. A friendly understanding of this would be nice, but I don't gather from your tone that that is what you are after...
Amusingly, Facebook is primed to be disrupted by a college social network.

College is a high density social time in your life, and you're making a ton of new friends; those attributes among others make it ideal to escape the Facebook network effect.

No teenager really wants to hang out on the same social network as their parents.
Wow. Thanks for sitting through that for us!
There is not evidence whatsoever that consciousness emerges from neural activity.

None? Ever? Consciousness could just be a free floating quantum mechanical genie attached to my back?

Hogcock.

We are only brains. If your brain gets squished, you don't really care because you'll cease to exist in this light cone.
Or maybe you're no longer part of the culture that the Simpsons is relevant to...
For those watching from the stands, 'rwg also sent us a spreadsheet that does AES. Entirely in cell formulas. He also sent us a Postscript file that appeared to be a visualization of AES state but was in fact a pure-Postscript implementation of AES that rendered itself into the Postscript document.
That makes it sound like a straightforward classical effect. It's weirder than that. In the two-slit experiment, if you measure which slit a photon (or other small particle) passes through, then after a bunch of particles you get two spots on the wall. If you don't measure, you get an interference pattern, as if the particle were a wave that passed through both slits.

This is true even if you make the decision about whether to measure, after the particle has already passed through the slit. Check the measurement after the particle passes the slit, but before it hits the wall, and the interference pattern goes away.
Bret Victor points out a cool part:

https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/257915809131819008
I am aware of this line of reasoning, but it contains a subtle problem: there is no way to measure consciousness. We assume a correlation between consciousness and human-like intelligent behaviour. We assume that we are unconscious when in deep sleep, for example, but we have no way of knowing for sure. It could just be that we are not recording any memories for later reference. Long story short, no, there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that damage to brain will impair an entity's level of consciousness -- only of intelligent behaviour.

It turns out that it is precisely the claim that consciousness emerges from the brain -- given our present state of knowledge -- that is mysticism. The only possible scientific position here is to say "I don't know".
He wants attention first and foremost.
Once upon a time, Facebook was a quasi dating site with photos and commenting restricted to a person's sphere of influence. Today, Facebook is an advertising platform.

The end.
I don't think the High Court realises the site is a search engine... not a new Pirate Bay.
Previous HN discussion of Recursive Drawing, another very cool project by the same guy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3951255
I think it's not APNG that's the issue but the kickstarter's name, "apngasm".
No, it's not. It can be used by a single, blind person, be it a human or not.
It's probably the same tech as the kindle cloud acceleration tech. Basically the server (cloud) accelerates the page by fetching all dependent objects in parallel on th faster network, then send the result over a single compressed channel. This saves the chatty nature of http and if modified since requests and of course the startup/tear down times per origin server.
Animation and video are different things.

Here's an animated GIF used for animation: http://i.imgur.com/rwUt664.gif

Here's an animated GIF used for video: https://mediacru.sh/demo

Obviously, in the video case, a real video format wins, and if social networks let us upload videos with the same filesize cap they allowed for images, you'd start to see short videos used in place of GIFs.[1]

However, in the animation case, video-encoding wouldn't even work--videos don't have alpha-layers, after all. In this case, animated GIFs are currently the only solution--and APNGs would be a decided improvement.

---

[1] This has only just become possible for video formats, though, so some latency in implementing a policy change like this is to be expected. Until recently "video on the web" meant Flash, and Flash content didn't have any of the viral properties of images; you couldn't just right-click a Flash <embed> to save the FLV from it, then upload it somewhere else and expect it to work. We do have that now with HTML5 <video> elements, but they're still pretty rare, and as long as there isn't a place to take the tiny-little-video-files from, nobody will have them to re-upload them to anywhere else.
What's most interesting to me is how every few years (and every few decades sometime back) we're able to rationalize away certain kinds of subjective phenomena.

Will we eventually reach a point where we completely STOP considering pure awareness as a problem...don't know...I guess nobody knows. But this kind of thing happens every so often where a large amount of people stop taking something seriously. At this point e.g. existence of an anthropomorphic god.
The problem I have with saying "consciousness is an illusion" is sort of similar to saying "God was the first cause". It pushes the question one layer away, because then the next obvious question is "an illusion to what, exactly?" How do you produce the illusion of qualia to something that does not experience qualia?
We still have monarchies, but many of them are also democratic (hereditary monarch plus elected prime minister and legislature).
I agree we still have tyrannies too, because I think there's a cycle between them and democracies. Democracy weakens, a tyrant takes power, this lasts for a while before collapsing, then his competitors take power themselves (in some cases, democratically).
The statement "consciousness is an illusion" has always struck me as a contradiction, since the nature of illusion is that there's something perceiving it.
That wikipedia entry does him no justice. In the 90ies he ran several Mailboxes (anyone remembers those?) where people shared warez and then he went on to sell his users data to an ip lawyer who used the data to sue them. Google for "Kimble" and "Gravenreuth" to read the details. I'd rather trust the NSA with my data...
I'm not sure of the relevance of the protocol IF the service remains store-and-forward.

Silent Circle and Lavabit seem to think it's better not to use email at all. An open Skype-like system is probably pretty good. Keys are ephemeral, and transferring encrypted files in audio-video sessions makes it hard to MITM.
The odds argument for example is easy explained with the anthropic principle - namely we wouldn't be thinking about the odds of being conscious unless we were conscious.

The article mostly takes three mysterious things: time, quantum mechanics, and consciousness and gives them one hand-waving "consciousness was always there and will always be there" answer. It's tidy in a way, but that's not science and it's completely opposed to the spirit of science.

Not to mention a non-physicist drawing conclusions about unrelated fields using difficult to understand theories is new-age mysticism. It's the same pseudoscience people like Deepak Chopra have been spouting for years. A physicist would be quick to point out that observation affects the quantum realm regardless of whether there is a human being checking the output of his instruments or not (although as I'm not a physicist, I may be too rash in drawing even that conclusion.) Or in Harris's words, the moon doesn't go away when nobody's looking at it.

Consciousness is indeed a mystery, but the article adds little of substance to the discussion.
> I'm considering jumping from aspnet to a 'slower' framework like django and I'm not basing my decisions solely on the results of this collaborative benchmark

I'm not basing my decision solely on these benchmarks either, this is just the straw that broke the camel's back. Microsoft doesn't inspire me too much confidence on the future of .NET and neither does Mono. The .NET open source community has never taken off. And changing my main development language is not such a big deal, I already work with five languages on a regular basis.

I hope to see better results on future tests. I hope OWIN improves the situation for ASP.NET. And I hope future versions of Mono focus more on performance. But that's a lot to hope for and I'm not holding my breath.
If you're a US citizen, you can get insurance TODAY even if you have a pre existing condition.

https://www.pcip.gov/

I've personally done this.

Essentially, if you can show an insurance company has denied you because if a pre existing condition and/or your current employer doesn't offer insurance or your unemployed - US government will personally grant you insurance.

Best of luck.
Take it as a very good sign that you're not the only app trying to do this! That means there is a market & customer demand for the product you have under development. Move fast and make things!
I agree, there seems to be a cycle between democracy and tyranny. However, I think hereditary monarchies are on their way out (with notable exceptions).
I don't really see the US or France (or many other countries) ever becoming a hereditary monarchy again. Even the communist countries weren't led by dynasties.
I think you're looking for bitmessage which is an email replacement that hides the header and content, and is inspired by bitcoin.
> I am coding a very similar app, right this second.

In fairness, "right this second" you were actually browsing Hacker News :)
Yeah I think their point still remains though. They referred to it as "MAC" in the text of the article at least. Probably just the designer.
Startups are hard.... (Insert your Snow Clone about shopping here)

HN has a lot of Founders_

Often when you talk about founders, you're talking about people who are putting it all on the line. These are people who quit salaried day-jobs with scheduled amounts of vacation days and health care for the unknown. If they fail, not only do they go down, but their family goes down, so the stress is very high. For that reason, I try to do a hello-world type of check with founders at least once a week. Sometimes something as simple as "Hey, are you OK?" can snap people out of an otherwise spiraling-down depression. Sometimes it takes more.

Hackers in general_

It is anecdotal, but smart people in general are depressed. It is also an anecdote shared by many—even the Simpsons made fun of this so there is a common thought in society that smarter people are often more depressed. Hackers typically want to solve problems. Often hackers have a better solution to a problem, but that solution will be ignored by society. That leads to frustration and multiple instances of frustration leads to depression.
This, along with "I put it on my Facebook" and even "Do you have Facebook?" bother me every time I hear them. Unfortunately, this usage seems to be gaining momentum even outside colloquial conversation--I cringed when I first saw "Your Firefox is up to date".

While on the surface it's just a peculiarity, I think there's also an aspect of this sort of usage that masks the very notion of how things work. It subtly leads one to feel more that these are personalized, bespoke services rather than massive projects.

I generally try to take a descriptivist approach to language usage, but this one makes me cringe a little every time.
I'm not sure why you're saying that accountancy is for people with "no imagination" and, more worryingly, implying that it's some sort of "lesser" profession.
I have always hated the tendency toward creating retarded adverbs, ever since people took to registering domains in the Libya country code TLD.

Now, we'r stuck with all these trendy sounding SaaS projects that have adopted some of the most irritating names imaginable.

I wish people would stop dreaming up stupid website domains like:

dork.ly

fart.ly

retard.ly (note that in most cases, it would take a small leap of imagination to choose "retarded" over "retard" in case like this, but that opportunity is often squandered)

adverb.ly

grammar.ly

and-so-on.ly

...even worse is when someone truly brainless comes along, and adheres to the trend, but registers under a .com TLD, and still botches the grammar of the word. as in:

botchedly.com

I have always hated these sorts of names.
"Looking further ahead, the GTK version of LXDE will be dropped and all efforts will be focused on the Qt port."

http://blog.lxde.org/?p=1046
So no-one in the 13-18 age bracket owns anything other than iOS devices?
Modern crypto offers 100% privacy if you do it right. How would you enforce a court order to tap a conversation that's encrypted and the keys are discarded after use? It's tantamount to a court order to defy gravity. Sure, you can write such a document, and it might be constitutional to write such a document and you might even throw someone in jail for contempt for disobeying such an order. But... so what?
Did you just suggest that reporting on a billion dollar business was an invasion of privacy, or was that just a joke too dry for me to pick up on?
Kafka wrote something about that ;)
I think the mirror test, and consciousness, are separate issues.

1. As someone else here pointed out, a computer can be programmed to pass the mirror test, indeed a sophisticated robot must be able to do this, to be able to successfully navigate a complex environment. But that robot need not be conscious to do so.

2. A conscious creature (a creature that shows classic signs of being conscious) isn't necessarily able to pass the mirror test. In this article --

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

-- we read that "Primates, other than the great apes, have so far universally failed the mirror test." I think many primates would meet various criteria for consciousness, but can't pass the mirror test.

Interestingly, in the linked article, birds of the family Corvidae (crows, ravens, European magpies, gray jays (aka "camp robbers"), and others) pass the mirror test, possibly the only bird type that can. Corvids are very smart birds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae
Afaik yes and no.
> There is something very fundamental about it that we don't understand at all. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, especially the type of people that would like to turn Science into a religion.

I could be wrong, but as an European my understanding is that there are people in the States who actually believe in non-science things like Adam and Eve and all that, so that when you begin to say that maybe Science doesn't or can't have all the answers (for example just the other day I was thinking "hey, has anyone proved that mathematical induction is really intellectually honest? or was Hume actually right and it's all make-believe?") you're immediately tagged as "a lunatic guy who believes the Earth is 6,000 years old" by Science-loving American redditors (HN is a little bit more forgiving), doesn't matter that I may be an agnostic and that I'm amazed that things like "God" are brought into a discussion which tries to make sense of the things around us.

It would also help if people would have a little more knowledge of the history of Science itself, this way they'd know about guys like La Mettrie or the French positivists who lived in the 19th century, meaning this discussion has happened many times before.
Well this was obvious. When Facebook started, your parents, and grandparents had no idea what it was. And therefore it was interesting. Now, it's like a perfunctory listing of every human you know, including family members. It's like a phonebook. Employers look at it. Your Mom sees it. Is that fun? No, it's just mundane. Teenagers today see their parents using it all the time and think, well, what can I do on there that's fun? Ya.. Tell my grandma I did well in math class. Whupeee.

When we 30 somethings were young, our rents knew nothing of what we did online. And isn't that what we liked about it, at least in part?
I think ultimately this will be resolved by experiment.

If progress continues far enough, then eventually people will want to upload their minds to computers, probably using Moravec's method of gradually replacing neurons with hardware.

The prudent way to do this would be to ask the person how it's going as you progress, and try it in various different sequences.

So if, say, you replace the visual cortex, and the person reports that their perception of color and depth has disappeared, but they still know where things are, then you know that the new hardware is correctly reporting information, but for some reason isn't supporting conscious perception of that information.

And then you can try to debug it. Maybe your algorithms are wrong, or maybe consciousness requires some physical effect.
Although I was rather fond of Seinfeld when it first aired, I can understand why it's particular sense of humour wasn't for everyone.

These days, of course, there's also http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny to contend with.