skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I only read the synopsis of the Wikipedia article and am not very versed in this particular model. However to me, the notion doesn't seem to make sense. If you're talking about philosophical zombies, you're acknowledging that consciousness is a real phenomenon, of some sort. If we're sitting here typing about it, we should also conclude that it has an effect on the physical world. So a philosophical zombie, being physically identical to a human but for not having a consciousness, would act differently than a human because it lacks consciousness, which is a real phenomenon with implications on the physical world. (which I suppose you allude to in your second paragraph)

EDIT: Ok I think I see a counterargument. Perhaps belief in consciousness is purely physical, and actual consciousness is just perception of this belief, and a perception of choice in acting on it, whereas our actions are deterministic. Seems like a strange scheme, but I suppose it's possible.
You need to understand a little history to understand why WordPress is where it is today.

The first blog software to get really popular was Movable Type (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type). MT was basically a set of Perl scripts that provided a nice GUI backend to manage content stored in a database. But the actual public-facing sites it created were all static files. When you hit "Publish," it would scan over the database and grind out a new set of static HTML files.

This made scaling a Movable Type site really easy, because even back then Apache could serve static files like a monster on practically any hardware. But it meant that when you changed something on your site, that change didn't show up there immediately; you had to wait for a rebuild operation to complete and a new set of static files to be ground out to see it. The larger your site got, the longer that rebuild operation could take. "Rebuilding" became to Movable Type what "buffering" used to be to RealPlayer (remember that?).

Then, after a few years of MT being the leading product in the then-rapidly growing blog market, the developers behind it decided to jack up the pricing structure for it (http://scott.yang.id.au/2004/05/license-changes-with-movable...). MT was not open source, it was proprietary, for-pay software, so if you wanted to use it you had to pay what they asked for it. And suddenly it looked like, instead of being twenty bucks, a valid MT license was going to cost hundreds.

As you can imagine, people freaked out and started looking at the available alternatives. There were lots, but none of them were particularly impressive at that stage. But some prominent people (see http://web.archive.org/web/20060410125402/http://diveintomar...) noticed a little project called WordPress that, while pretty feature-poor compared to MT, had two big things going for it: it was 100% GPL (so no worries about future price changes), and it used a dynamic publishing model where pages were generated live on request through database queries instead of being baked into static files.

"Hooray!" everyone yelled. "No more rebuilding!" And so the rush to WordPress began. It was pretty obvious at the time that using live, dynamic pages would be a scaling headache. But most blogs never get enough traffic for scaling to become an issue, and dynamic pages meant not having to wait for rebuilding anymore. Never underestimate the power of appealing to impatience.

The irony, of course, is that once WordPress got popular, people started noticing how inefficient dynamic pages could be, and the trend of the "static site generator" was born. SSGs are now very hot and buzzed-around, at least among programmers (they're generally too nerd-optimized to appeal to the general market). But there's nothing really new about the idea; they're just the pendulum swinging back to where Movable Type was in 2001.

Perhaps someday an SSG will dethrone WordPress. If that happens, mark your calendar; you'll want to be prepared when "instant updates!" become a selling point again, five years or so later.
That's extremely embarrassing.
> I’ve been freelancing on Wilshire Blvd, about a block away from where Tupac was shot.

Pac was shot in Vegas. Biggie was shot on Wilshire outside of the Petersen Auto Museum. Nice article nonetheless
Maybe that's your problem: you're trying to "win".
Tech IPO Pipeline: Internet Software Valuation Multiples
You should look into how the mayor of Beaverton, OR tried to annex the unincorporated land that the Nike campus sits on back in 2005.
Relevant older post from a different source:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195996
"Yet as neuroscience progresses, I think we will eventually functionalize thought, emotion, and sensation as biological processes."

That, my friend, is your little divinity. Keep the faith!
There's a commenter on HN who thinks so;

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196981

I tend to disagree, I don't think tracking my habits to more effectively manipulate and target me is an enhanced experience.
Another thing to look at is using nginx as a web server. It's a lot more lightweight than Apache. Paired with a solid SSD drive and varnish caching, and you can get some really great performance out of WordPress.
By not patenting the vaccine, not only did he save lives by providing affordable medicine, but he allowed others to immediately build off of his work.

How many people can claim to have (mostly) freed humanity from a diseases? Think about that. Think about all the pain and suffering that never was.
Also known as the infamous Death March.

http://www.amazon.com/Death-March-Edition-Edward-Yourdon/dp/...
Not really - the discussion on the thread makes it sound like the kind of thing that comes up from time to time anyway. If I had to guess, I'd expect that it happened based on the mission of making something that was good enough to replace matlab, and going from the matlab interface people were used to and working backwards, rather than starting from a concept of what a language ought to be like and working forwards. Given my understanding of their aim and the kinds of things I have read about Matlab at http://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/, I suspect that "close enough to matlab to have people jump ship" and "first-principles CompSci" language aren't really going to intersect very hard. Given the low popularity of some of the first-principles programming languages, that may be okay?

That said, I'm encouraged to see so many people interested in it and contributing to it. My perspective, though, is that of a C/Fortran HPC person who is cheering for things that will help people move to a more scalable coding environment. I was looking at Julia to see if it was an alternative to Octave for university users; the impression I got was that it was still too subject to change to recommend at this point.
I don't understand this viewpoint. It seems to me like advertisers are more likely to use extra data to be more manipulative, the same way they do it by targeting ads on the internet. What kind of improved experience are are imagining?
It is up to you to be so pessimistic, but why would you try to convince others? I see everyday some proofs that the world is not all about money: I just need to hang out with friends to be convinced.
Yep, low cognitive overhead. There is a reason an ATM is on every corner.
Isn't maintainability going to be significantly added by so much being statically checked? Even if people are writing functions that are internally ugly, wouldn't haskell largely enforce that those functions can't really hurt the outside world?

It seems to me like "off the rails" in a pure language is going to be much nicer than off the rails in a language where mutable state is the norm.
"She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree because of her sex; Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948."

How much talent has been wasted down the centuries due to nonsense like this?
It would be interesting to make a list of other "open source scientists".

I contribute with one: Cesar Milstein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Milstein for more information read specifically "A missed opportunity?
The patent saga" http://www.whatisbiotechnology.org/exhibitions/milstein/pate...
Grammar Annoyer: chrome extension to annoy grammar sticklers
is it purposely avoiding major cities? (and all the neighborhoods in or near them?)

I can't find any coverage in SF. And I checked for LA, Boston, Austin, NY (each borough)...
If single-cell organism is conscious, and each cell of our body is a "single cell", it immediately follows from here that "our" consciousness is in fact consciousness of a certain, very specialized, cell which resides somewhere in our body. Maybe it lives in the brain, maybe elsewhere, but it's a single cell nonetheless.
Well, that's an interesting question. Much like music, uptake is strongly dependant on price and it's a fallacy to infer that the quantity consumed would be equal if the cost changed.

If there was a higher price due to patents I wouldn't expect so much of the third world to be immunised, as a lot of those countries depended on aid to distribute the vaccine. I'd also expect first world countries without socialised healthcare to have more non-immunised people.

Also many. It's many dollars. </pedant>
Heightmap software terrain rendering on canvas
Hi Sean, it surprised me enough that I ran the test multiple times and came up with the same result over and over. I connected with Ben over the weekend and would love to talk with you guys some more!
Since the are so many suitable alternatives, what all the kids are doing varies from school to school. So this is just an isolated anecdote.
The patent saga of Cesar Milstein
That bouncy logo is incredibly annoying, just FYI.
Fair - I don't have a great grasp on what higher education costs Stateside, as I'm Canadian - the publicly funded schools tend to manage ~$6000/yr tuition, and the private schools aren't much more.
Strongest possible disagree.

Ok, we disagree. It wouldn't be the first time. ;-)

the Debian OpenSSL bug was an entirely unforced error stemming from applications that chose to use Debian OpenSSL's terrible CSPRNG on top of the OS's CSPRNG

I think the biggest problem was that OpenSSL used OpenSSL's CSPRNG after Debian broke it. Having applications all open+read+close /dev/random is not going to prevent that.

a far more likely concrete flaw is, for instance, a SecureRandom implementation that allows developers to specify insecure seed values.

A SecureRandom implementation should not allow the application to provide seed values except as additional input. It should always seed itself from the operating system entropy source, with no option to disable that.

Aside from the issue of performance (which can be severe) and the timing information leakage to local spies, there's a very practical reason to avoid developers read from /dev/random:

int fd;

fd = open("/dev/random", O_RDONLY);
read(fd, buf, buflen);
close(fd);

I've seen this on a number of occasions, and it works perfectly fine... until your server gets busy, the kernel entropy pool runs down, and /dev/random returns a short read. At that point, all hell breaks loose. To me, this scenario alone is enough to tell developers to use a library's automatically seeded CSPRNG instead of reading from the kernel.
I don't consent to you blocking expenditures on things I need to do my life. So now were fucked. I guess sometimes you just cant get it all your way. Perhaps you should keep up the childish whining about "I don't wanna"... I'm sure that is rational and will fix all sorts of things.
If you're looking to minimize your taxes, Rhode Island is a poor choice. Property tax in Providence is $33.75 per $1000 ($19.25 for owner-occupied property) levied on 100% of the assessed value. On top of this, the state has a huge unfunded pension liability and municipal benefits liability (~$2.3bn). State employees and teachers benefits add up to another $7bn.

When the other shoe drops, the money is going to come from somewhere or the state will go bankrupt.
The guy who wrote Papers, Please, Lucas Pope, has been doing some very creative games-as-political-statements stuff for some time now. He may be the most creative person working along those lines today.

For another example, check out his earlier game, The Republia Times:

http://dukope.com/play.php?g=trt

(It's free and plays in the browser, no download required)

The storyline there: you're the editor of a newspaper in a totalitarian state. Each day you see the unfiltered newswire, and you have to pick and choose which stories to feature and where to feature them on the paper's front page in order to maximize public support for the regime. It's a delicate dance; completely ignore events that make the regime look bad and you'll lose credibility and readers, but give them too much prominence and you'll drive public support down rather than up.

Oh, and just to make sure your incentives are aligned properly, the regime is holding your family hostage. Fail to get people in line quickly enough and they will all be shot.

Like Papers, Please, it's really a brilliant way to take some pretty simple game mechanics and use them to make a point that sticks in the player's memory.
Calling them Public Domain Scientists would be more accurate...
I only use Facebook to message other people and nothing else. Didn't look at all the other stuff (games and all that crap) for years. Also my usage of FB has declined rapidly lately. Mostly I and my buddies use better services for just messaging.

but: for me IRC is still around and never gets old. None of these fancy new social whatever stuff will beat it.
Another interesting thing about DSA is that the signatures allow for public key recovery i.e. given a signed message, you can (usually within 1 or 2 possibilities) determine the public key of the signer. It's a bit like a handwritten signature where everybody can read your name amongst the scrawl.

Most of the time this property is useless, because you want to verify the signature against a known-good key, but it does also mean you're probably not going to want to use DSA to pass signed covert messages.

Schnorr signatures actually have a simpler, and I think more intuitive, construction and don't have this property. They also don't require collision resistant hashes.
Those afraid of jumping into $10 might want to try the beta/demo on the game creator's website: http://dukope.com/
The Age of Algorithms
The top paid public employee in most states is the football coach at one of the state schools. At most of the others it's the basketball coach.
So you'd rather pay some company the hourly to locate you car because they throw a tow in for "free"?
I agree that "emerges" is no explanation at all.

But we can agree that the images on the TV screen are caused by the configuration of physical matter making up the TV, just like our consciousness is caused by the physical matter making up our brain.

Granted, people have subjective (i.e. feel-happy) reasons to throw out Occam's razor and suppose we have e.g. an eternal soul, but the search for the soul-receiver in the brain will just give you fits (not so bold prediction: they'll never find it, because it doesn't exist).
"It's not that we can only discover things via science. It's just that we shouldn't trust discoveries made via flashes of insight, clairvoyance, intuition, guesswork, divine inspiration, etc."

If we can't trust discoveries through non-scientific means, than it seems to me you are saying we can only discover things via science. So if I have continuing experience of something so far yet to be confined within an ordered model of falsifiable hypotheses, what am I to do?
Anything that has energy (and so far, this seems to be everything that exists), creates a gravitational field. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress%E2%80%93energy_tensor
Son, I hope you never have the displeasure of working in an enterprise environment.

First of all, as others mentioned, your personal machine runs on Windows so right off the bat there goes your instant virtualenv, pip install.

Even on the Unix app server, you're probably behind a firewall that's tight as a duck's ass so chances are you're downloading the tar ball and making the package yourself.

Third, wtf are you doing littering the app server with all these binaries? And what is Python? I'm sorry, no, rewrite this in Java, please.

If you do manage to convince your manager and the rest of your team that Python is not black magic, the first time numpy breaks or some small issue crops up or you have to migrate to a new server and reinstall numpy but now there's a new version and... GTFO of here with that black magic.

I agree with you, developing websites on your MacBook Pro there's no excuse not being able to install numpy. In the real world though, having basic necessities in stdlib does absolute wonders.
Yeah I think this is covered in the very first episode of The Office: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSibGV5Y_WA
it is a beautiful romantic vision, but while some good people give all their things for free, companies like google or facebook are making billions using the free content donated to the "greater good".. its doing a greater good to them..

and while a like this vision in reality this will lead to some sort o neo feudalism... because in the end we will become more and more dependent of those big tech titans that use anonymously and freely shared, without anybody to reclaim for that..

and what if you do share in good will, what will prevent others to use it do do warm? how can we the owners of whatever it is can control it against a bad use?!

if some militia organization use your information created for the "greater good" to create profit to buy guns to oppress kill people?!

only by every human being signing digital stuff, and attach licenses to them.. even if its free.. it would be your choise to give it freely if you will.. but for all those reasons i stand in favor of the signing of all the digital goods..
Amazing. Please start a blog and post more stuff like this.
Ah, I should have used tangible property, as that is also used in nexus determination, and more relevant to the tech space.
And ... ?

It currently has package signing, right? What's the problem? I'm confused at how a historical problem that has been fixed even matters when discussing why or why not to use it. It's like saying you wouldn't use OS X because 10.1 didn't support Intel processors.
When link titles were for the early adopters
Maybe some RSS reader should adopt the name 'Strained Rectum'.
I have on occasion used Patch (I live about 30 miles outside a metro area on the border of suburb vs farming land). I don't read the site, but instead read a twitter feed of the local corespondent. She happens to be fairly good at filtering good community news. I'll be keeping her in my twitter stream (assuming she isn't let go) but I will think about that recording every time I start to click a link to patch.com from her feed or anywhere. I will probably just query the main terms from her tweets in a Google news search from here on out if I want to know more. Somethings should be handled privately even when the opportunity may be presented publicly. There is no value to any point that was presented by firing someone in that manner.
How come it's not available for Linux? Oh well, back to chess.
Yup, looks like most of their revenue is still from subscription:

http://ir.aol.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=147895&p=quarterlyearnings
You don't need consciousness to perceive something. It's just electrons interacting with atoms.
I'd have preferred all the hosting times use the same scale on the left hand side to more easily relate response times. It would also have been cool to see all of the graphs stacked on top of each other in one graph or visually grouped the separate graphs together in a single page's height.

I guess as a marketing piece it gets some interest, but it lacked in actual utility for me.
How to convert PS Vita compatible videos on Mac
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It doesn't follow - the type of consciousness we experience could be different. Though if you were saying that it's absurd to call single cell 'conscious' in the sense that human brains are, then I agree.
Especially given that where it made the most difference was in third world countries. If cost had become an issue, this would not have been the case.
Good point, that was a poor example I chose. This tax will hit service-delivered-as-an-appliance plays out there, if I am reading it right. Unless they give away the appliance server.
What about inline elements inside divs? Even the semantic correctness crusaders freely resort to abuse of <b> and <i>.

HTML lacks extensibility. If you want to move beyond classical typography you have to make heinous compromises, and there is no reason <table> should be specially exempt.
Patch is basically hyper local news. I've followed the one for my town in the past (Kensington, MD) and there's a lot of overlap and shared stories with neighboring ones. (Silver Spring, Bethesda, other areas in Montgomery County) The ones around here are fairly decent and get good coverage of community-related news like school stuff. I haven't seen any ads masquerading as stories on the ones here, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened elsewhere.
Check what kind of traffic you are seeing on /xmlrpc.php.

What tends to happen is that spammers hit that file up and ask it to perform slow operations (the Wordpress team recently greatly expanded its capabilities). A PHP instance gets tied up for the duration. I've had instances lock up until killed by timeouts of 2 minutes.

When a bunch of traffic arrives at once, it only takes a handful of badly behaved instances of xmlrpc.php to render the server essentially inoperable.

I just went through this a few months ago. My bloggers don't use it and it can't be deactivated from within Wordpress any more, so I just 404 it in nginx.
I played this game in the free beta when I saw the Yogscast playing it... fantastic and unique game. Highly recommend giving it a go!
"Won't bother me", meaning "won't stop me".
It still hurts the team/the project and is considered an offence.
I think a good counter question would be, how many lives have been lost from companies patenting vital medicines thereby reducing the potential availability of such things?

Parents are all well and good unless people die solely because of them.
"Some prominent people noticed" isn't quite accurate. Matt Mullenweg actively marketed WP to major bloggers.

I have said elsewhere that the solution to having to choose between static and dynamic is to make site updates POST-based with queuing logic. The term of research is Staged, Event-Driven Architecture (SEDA).
It rather seems to me talking about "qualia" is pushing the question one step away, or creating a circular argument.

If I attach a light sensor to my Arduino and then upload code to the arduino that says "if sensor active, flash light", I'd say the arduino has a "qualia" of light. Perceiving light flips some bit in the arduino. That's all there is to it.
AOL is still a thing?
The other aspect to consider is that his discovery for the vaccine was only possible due to the HeLa gene lines, which were taken without permission and used in a variety of 20th century discoveries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

Like many fortunes, one made on the back of a Polio vaccine would have been made with a crime, originally...

I think Salk was too interested in simply eradicating polio to think of personal enrichment though.