skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I upvoted the original article not necessarily because I thought it was particularly well-written, but because I looked forward to seeing what the HN comments about the article would say. Nevertheless, I left to go somewhere before I had a chance to peruse them.

I think in a conversation about consciousness, it's very important to define exactly what it is you're talking about. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I get the impression that within the field, "consciousness" refers to specific patterns of brain activity. (Some neuroscientist on here can correct me if I'm wrong.) These patterns can be be studied experimentally, simulated computationally, or theorized about mathematically. All fall well into the modern definition of what science encompasses. Testable predictions about reality can be made and understood.

Then the author of the first piece uses a different word a little later in the article:

> Experience - "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?"

This, in my opinion, is a whole different idea. As a scientist myself (my research is in molecular-dynamics and quantum monte carlo), "experience" is not something that can be assessed at all by the scientific method. Many people argue that "experience" doesn't even exist (see the concept of p-zombies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie). As for me personally, I'm certain that it does, for if you removed all of my faculties and senses with the exception of leaving my mind intact, I would still experience existence. The curious thing about this is that there's no way for me to tell whether other people (you all) exist in the same way that I do, not even in theory. How do I know if you actually experience existence or are simply a collection of particles following the same rules of physics that everything else does? For then if I was you, I wouldn't be me anymore. 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. It's been debated for centuries, and it will continue to be debated for centuries (along the same lines as qualia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia) but there will never be any kind of resolution to the issue.
But totally undefined and all browsers do their own thing for what's entered in the address bar — there's more consistency in URLs in content, and that doesn't do stuff like normalising '。' but does do the percent-encoded case (for unreserved characters, as the spec says).

Following what the spec says for eqivilance makes sense, at least. Anything drastic is technically treating distinct URLs as equivilant.
Exactly, its like saying teenagers don't use email. Everyone they care about is close by, you want to keep in close contact. Once you get past college many of your friends are very distant and you need slow asynchronous methods to keep in touch. Both my age friends from college and the next generation I met volunteering at a local university use Facebook for that exact reason.
How many samples? All you need to do is wait until they tell you who they are by associating that MAC addr with a hotspot.

Share "anonymous" data with vendors who provide wifi access, and suddenly Sephora knows where you live and where you work and can remind you that you're almost out of La Prairie Crème Cellulaire Platine Rare when you bin your cup of coffee outside the office.
David Chalmers is most certainly not an expert on quantum mechanics (and Chalmers doesn't seem to be someone the author is relying on in his points about QM). Neither am I, but I would make a strong bet that I have a better understanding of it than the author of this article.

For one thing, he seems (like many laymen) to fundamentally misunderstand what an "observer" is in the Copenhagen interpretation. An observer does not by any means imply consciousness. A computer program could take measurements of a quantum system and then delete that data before anyone looked at it, and it would have exactly the same effect as if a human took those measurements.

Moreover, he seems to think that the primary motivation for MWI is to solve the Schrödinger's cat paradox, and that this is its only advantage. This is, of course, completely wrong.
It's the opposite — you can only have non-paying guests. I also assume there are numerous regulations governing RV parks, which is what you'd be if you accepted payment.
But they all use the hell out of a facebook owned company...
> Its most expensive employees, tenured faculty...

Someone has not paid much attention to the past 20-30 years of developments. Faculty salaries are a falling proportion of university spending. The current cost drivers are administration (both size and salaries) and capital outlays. For example, the University of California system spends only 30% of its budget on faculty salaries (that includes non-tenured faculty). And faculty are rarely, with the exception of med schools employing star surgeons, among a university's most highly paid employees. Look at what the top administrators make in comparison.
Great, so let's talk about the NSA for a moment for the sake of "well-intentioned" attack.

So what do you think about it? How shall we (if we can at all) change anything?
>who were already smart

Getting into harvard has very little to do with smarts and has everything to do with the circumstances you were born into.
I thought COPPA allowed a guardian to approve?
Real product labels?
Culture War: Bezos and The Washington Post
Those glasses are a pragmatic solution to a moral problem, so there's not point in discussing the moral problem, and your parent is presenting a pragmatic (as depressing and curtailing to personal freedom as it is) solution in counterpoint to the glasses.

The moral problem is some people rape people who are intoxicated or who they got drunk with the intent to rape. The ideal, moral solution is people stop raping. The number of people of who rape (EDIT: and the number of rape episodes) should absolutely be reduced, but ending rape altogether isn't going to happen in our lifetimes.

So, to reduce the number of rapes we can use things like the cups (which could avoid intoxication by date rape drugs) but also try not to drink too much, especially if you don't have someone to watch out for you.
it would be simpler and more effective to integrate this technology into drink straws and other paraphernalia. Bars will be hesitant to replace their entire glassware supply.
I worked on improving the aspnet (on Windows) results and I committed aspnet-stripped (based on @pdonald's aspnet tests) and HttpListener.

As that committer, I have to ask: Why would you change your career path due to supposed 'abysmal performance' reported on a website?

Keep in mind that the 'abysmal performance' of many of the frameworks can still handle millions of requests per day. Plus, many of the 'slower' frameworks have other development benefits like ease of development, community ecosystem, static type checking, etc.

The reason I replied is because 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 where I don't even know if experts have tuned the results, and where I don't know why the results are 'poor'.
I personally don't spend a large amount of time thinking about consciousness because I question the practicality. The subject matter is so dense, and like other(s) have stated, philosophers have dedicated their entire lives to pondering the issue.

Frankly it sometimes upsets me when I do put an extensive amount of time into it and don't end up coming up with anything conclusive; it is depressing. There is (obviously) a incredible amount of ambiguity surrounding the subject, and there is something about this particular issue that is unnerving.

On the other hand if you can stomach the subject matter it is very stimulating, unfortunately it does not lead to concrete conclusions.
My guess that hacker depression some combination of social isolation and lack of self-esteem.

For an intelligent, logical person, there are few places to turn to. And they can post here anonymously.
Excellent, simple and funny.

Please can we not have any narky comments about this one, appreciate the joke move on with your life. It's typography is not important?
The only reason to use one-time pads is an extraordinary level of paranoia. If you are paranoid enough to need a one-time pad then it makes little sense for you as a private citizen to trust that hardware you take into public places hasn't been compromised. Manual creation and transmission of the encrypted message is the only approach that makes sense.

If lots of people adopted one-time pads it might hinder NSA et al but this would be akin to trying to convince people to wear masks whenever they are in public to hinder monitoring with CCTV.
Ask HN: How do you stylize jQuery Mobile? 
Recently got a job as a front end developer at a big bank. I'm in charge of the UI. We're using jQuery Mobile. I'm a bit in over my head as I have to make this work on over 17 different phones flawlessly. I'm FUCKED.

I need a page that has all the assets of jQuery mobile so when I'm skinning, all I have to do is look at this one page.

Does anyone know where to find one?

What is the proper process when skinning jQuery Mobile?

It never feels right and it feels very hacky skinning it. What I do is create a new stylesheet, view whatever I want to change in Chrome/inspector, then override those classes in that new style sheet. A lot of things tend to break and I have to use a lot of special classes to fix them up.

What is your process?
Advice for Market Outsiders
Contrived, sure, but you could use these exploits to upload all files added to the card somewhere, assuming it can find a wireless network to connect to. Maybe even just keep a hidden copy on the part of the FS invisible to the host system if there is enough free space.

"Oh sure I've got an SD card you can borrow..."
IIRC they are also planning to make drinking straws that incorporate the testing technology.
> Except during filming a real rat really was submerged in oxygenated fluid.

Yes, and even though I thought they might have gotten actor Ed Harris to also breathe the liquid, this account -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss -- says he didn't.

Interestingly, the mouse scene had to be edited out for the version shown in Great Britain, on the ground that it constituted animal cruelty, something the British ... umm ... feel rather strongly about ... wait, let me try again ... about which the British feel rather strongly? Anyway, the mouse scene was something ... wait for it ... up with which the British refused to put. :)
"the world is not at all about money"...Seriously?!

Do you really think that Google, MSFT, FB etc. went "against" the government in the public because they are "not at all about money"? I like the wishful thinking, but unfortunately, if I were running one of those companies I would do the same thing so that I get to keep my customer and user base, because their confidence in my company and product is the driving force of my continued revenue. How much money is / can the government going to give me anyway? They are not MSFT or GOOG or FB's customer!
Neuroscience hasn't been able to produce a single theory on the origin of consciousness, unless one accepts "it emerges from neural activity" as an explanation.

Consciousness appears to be the ultimate mystery. 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. We just don't know, and it's intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise.
>Because this is automatic, and doesn't require that inebriated people maintain their own quality controls.

Is not automatic...it requires every single bar or club to change their ENTIRE line of glassware and you to trust that they did!. Plus, a rapist could easily buy a glass that looks exactly the same as the ones of their favorite bar and exchange it.

>With a strip, ignoring the fact that it's a socially awkward thing to do, when are you going to test your drink? Before you take every single drink?

You carry the strip with you ALL THE TIME and toss it into the glass every time that you're holding it. I mean, it doesn't have to be a nasty looking tiny strip...you could have ice cubes or even go design crazy with tropical umbrellas that scream "RAPIST IN THE CLUB" when activated....
I've asked on the numpy mailing list. The "import * " was a design decision, now irrevocable without breaking existing code.

For examples, from http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2008-July/0... :

Robert Kern: Your use case isn't so typical and so suffers on the import time end of the balance

Stéfan van der Walt: I.e. most people don't start up NumPy all the time -- they import NumPy, and then do some calculations, which typically take longer than the import time. ... You need fast startup time, but most of our users
need quick access to whichever functions they want (and often use from an interactive terminal).

I went back to the topic last year. Currently 25% of the import time is spent building some functions which are then exec'ed. At every single import. I contributed a patch, which has been hanging around for a year. I came back to it last week. I'll be working on an updated patch.

There's also about 7% of the startup time because numpy.testing imports unittest in order to get TestCase, so people can refer to numpy.testing.TestCase. Even though numpy does nothing to TestCase and some of numpy's own unit tests use unittest.TestCase instead. sigh. And there's nothing to be done to improve that case.

Regarding the age - yes, you're right. BTW, parts of PIL started in 1995, making it the oldest widely used package, I think. Do you know of anything older?
should we cut down on the tags?
In a future update ;)
I read that, but nobody drinks whiskey, beer, etc with straws.
> "What discourages me here is that the overall tone of the HN commenters is: Get with the program. Instead of acknowledging that it is an open question and saying something like, “Interesting hypothesis, my own thoughts are that X, Y, Z, but have you read A, B, or C, which indicate Q…”, the response is: (chuckle) Consciousness? We solved that, didn’t you get the memo?"

Amen. We need to stop letting the comments devolve into such a miasma and use each story as a jumping off point for intelligent conversation -- why can't we be friends?

Continuing on the meta-topic at hand... A flaw that seems to occur in many intelligent people's minds is that as soon as we're able to form an opinion on a particular subject, we assume everyone else has too. Let's take a moment to appreciate that we don't all have state-of-the-art knowledge on every single topic. Our aim should be to help each other move further along, not shoot down attempts to learn.
Honestly, I doubt she wrote that. Why would she? This sounds like the work of a hoverparent.

> Facebook used to be all I could talk about when I was younger. “Mom, I want a Facebook!” and other whining only a mother could put up with.

Sounds to me like the mother wrote that. Bet you anything her mom's a journalist.
Extremely likely, in this case. It looks like the way it was discovered is that various people have set up bots to take Bitcoins from transactions with repeated r values, and they took coins from Android Bitcoin clients that on paper were doing everything right.
I know several people who had this happen to them

It's far, far, more likely that you've had friends who drank too much and then assumed, in the absence of an actual toxicology report or other corroborating evidence, that they were drugged.

Ref: http://www.britac.ac.uk/funding/case-studies/burgess-spiking...
I wondered how much productivity has been lost since the invention of the iPhone to extended bathroom breaks...
Ooooh, nice addition! Also, surprise glass swap-out!
That's why I assumed people that actually care about privacy use a desktop software, open source and with IMAP, so there wouldn't be no huge loss.
I think most of the "argument" comes from the conflation of the "what is it like" with "where does it live" questions.[0]

Most of the "dumb" arguments about "where does it live" are actually "what is it like" questions, most of which are thoroughly disposed of in Dennett's Quining Qualia.[1]

[0] http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_insid...

[1] http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/quinqual.htm
What are you talking about ? The OP WAS talking about privacy and posting. To which you have completely ignored and replied with your own Facebook personal story.
Consciousness is a mystery only to those that cannot define what it is.

What is the origin of awareness itself? It is the very activities one is aware of. The activities produce energy which we call consciousness. The dimension that the consciousness can see is determined by the quality of the very activities.

Consciousness is thus not solely generated by neurological activities.

Before denying this because of your first impression, please confirm if what I'm saying is true or not, and whether it is confirmed by all evidence or if there is in fact any evidence which contradicts it. What I've said here doesn't come from my thoughts or ideas.
The interesting thing is that the scientific method is fundamentally based on humans agreeing about their experiences, usually ones involving their sense of sight.
Is it possible to stream data to these cards?
Maybe a series of aphorims would be better, say quotes from Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack, etc.

Neat idea, though!
A few hours of filming and a few hours of edits. Our amazing ninjas graced us with their acting skills. David, the cameraman loaned us his house, camera and his mad skillz. Nicky Blitz is also a friend and was nice enough to let us use the track. All in all, there were some costs, but very minimal. Concept to youtube in one week.
Tratar la diabetes
Tratamiento natural para revertir la diabetes
Has anyone pulled this thing apart? I am curious how they can claim 5x speed improvement for JavaScript compared to Safari.

AFAIK third party apps still cannot use a JIT because they cannot execute dynamically generated code. Wonder what is behind those claims.
So my friends working at Google said that Google decided to go out of China because of Tibet, i.e. Google supports Tibet's independence from China as separate country, and that the whole thing about content censorship was something that Google was able to put up with and wasn't the reason for its leaving.

Not sure if this were actually the case, but my friends were pretty firm about this. If it were actually true, lol, the whole world is fooled. Let's go figure out how to make Tibet free so that Google can go back to China. =P
Everybody keeps getting the Schrödinger's cat experiment 100% backwards. It was created by Schrödinger to highlight how absurd the interpretation of quantum mechanics was at that time.

Since then, even the Copenhagen interpretation basically says that the "observation" happens already at the Geiger counter:
"Analysis of an actual experiment found that measurement alone (for example by a Geiger counter) is sufficient to collapse a quantum wave function before there is any conscious observation of the measurement"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat#Copenh...

Consciousness might be worth thinking about. If it exists independently of the brain, it still must have effects on the brain, to have effects on human actions. These effects on the brain could be measurable. "This voltage here went up for an unknown reason".

Further, it pushes the question to another unobservable "magical" world. So, the consciousness exists in another world which is not directly measurable. Can we measure it indirectly? What is the structure of consciousness in the astral plane or however you are going to call it? If the whole goal of arguing that the consciousness exists in the astral plane is that "we can't study it", then that sounds a bit non-serious.
Some fodder may perhaps be found here:

http://www.dsld.nlm.nih.gov/dsld/index.jsp
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on the other end, i think it's also weird to say that we will never understand consciousness.

frankly i think our science just isn't very advanced at the moment. particularly lacking is our understanding of anything that isn't linear
Wow, such vitriol. Let me guess, you're a big Ubuntu fan, and my assertion about privacy offended you and your clan. Now you're trying to peg me as some sort of moral absolutist. Well, I'm not, I just do what I can do when it comes to getting people to use software that respect their privacy.

Obviously, people make their own decisions. Sometimes they ask recommendations, and I respond with my honest opinion. So when it comes to Ubuntu, I tell them that I would not recommend it, for the reason I explained above.
http://www.mnn.ch/hyph/hyphenation2.html
"A Facebook", "An Instagram", "We all had Instagrams", am I the only person who finds this incredibly annoying?

"Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet"
Your detergents have quotes from Benjamin Franklin on their back labels? Coooool! :D
It blows my mind that this is his first foray into functional languages. Makes my imagination wonder what the current state of the gaming and programming industries would be like, had he built Wolf 3D in a functional language and inspired everyone else from there.
I tend to agree with the general tone of what you're saying, but have a problem with "The activities produce energy which we call consciousness". Either you are using the word "energy" in the regular sense or as a metaphor for something else. If it's the former, we're missing some physics. if it's the latter, you're still sweeping the problem under the rug.
Whenever the question is 'how do i ...' followed by insane amount of something, the right answer is usually; 'Don't'

Are you sure you want to have that many things in the same view, coz human attention is limited as well as his perception of movement and reading speed...