skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure. To start off, I'd like to point out that Schrödinger's cat really isn't a problem for the Copenhagen interpretation. The hypothetical device is "observing" the system during the entire experiment, so the cat is never in a superposition between dead and alive.

At least, I can tell you some of its other advantages.

First of all, wavefunction collapse is non-local. That is, if you take the wavefunction as being physically real in some sense, then collapse is an event which propagates faster than the speed of light. Because this cannot be used to actually send information faster than light, it doesn't violate causality. But it still has a smell to it. MWI does not have this problem.

Another advantage of MWI is that it is deterministic. Once again, there's no rule that says that physics has to be deterministic. But when you're going along, finding one deterministic law after another, and then all of a sudden it seems that things are non-deterministic after all, it should give you pause.

There are other problems MWI solves which I don't understand as well, most dealing with problems with wavefunction collapse. In short, collapse has a lot of properties which are highly suspicious because you just don't see them elsewhere in physics.

It's also arguably a simpler interpretation, in which case Occam's razor applies. Unfortunately, we don't yet have good ways of estimating the algorithmic complexity of arbitrary hypotheses, so whether this is actually the case is a matter of debate.
You could also bounce all email that you receive which isn't encrypted with your public key. If you think requiring all your contacts to set up GPG is too hard - what makes you think they'll adopt bitmessage?

(I know bitmessage has some different security properties than gpg+email -- but I think we'll all agree that if everyone and everything switched to email+gpg we'd be in a much better place from a security/privacy standpoint than we are now).
Race to the Top District Education Innovation RFP announced
Sounds bad. But almost certainly was not simply a spur of the moment decision, but rather that Lenz was on the list of people to be fired later in the day and had done things that Armstrong knew about (like leaking Patch information). Still bad to do it like that on a call where people are getting fired for real, but this gives some context.

http://www.businessinsider.com/aol-ceo-tim-armstrong-appeare...

A few minutes later, Armstrong complained about leaks to
the media. He said the leaks were making Patch seem like
"loser-ville" in the press. He said, "That's why Abel was
fired." "We can't have people that are in the locker room
giving the game plan away."
The effect of your actions on the physical world is no different than an advanced Turing machine.

But the internals of your mind might contain some sort of consciousness that isn't understood yet scientifically.
In this case, the person can't use a computer because people like the author condescend a bit, fix the problem in ten seconds, and don't set them up to be just a bit wiser for next time.

When I try to teach people how to fix their own problems, 90% of the time they don't care and "just want it fixed". 9% of the time they write down the instructions on a piece of paper that promptly gets lost, and the process of teaching them is considerably long than the quick fix. Perhaps 1% of the time they actually pay attention, get that spark in their eyes that shows they've learnt something new and interesting, and can demonstrate it back to me a week later. I con honestly commiserate with real teachers and lecturers now - if the ratios are anything like these it must be the most soul crushing job on the planet.

Ultimately, I've learnt that 99% of the time I'm better off fixing things quickly and moving on. I'm hoping I can instil (heh - I typed "install" first time around) curiosity in my children such that they can learn to help themselves, but my wife, parents, parents-in-law, brothers, and most of my friends are a lost cause by this point in their lives.
Well then...first I learned something about DSA, and now I'm 1/3 of the way through re-reading The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. Jesus Christ I am a nerd. Iä! Iä!
What an awkward time to take photos.

My company was interviewing a candidate once. He was spectacular during the interview, but then he stared taking pictures of our office and our employees, which made us all uncomfortable, and that's the only reason we did not offer him a job.

What may seem like normal behavior to one person may be offensive or intrusive to someone else.
No, social Darwinism is the misapplication of Darwinism to societies. But in not talking about interactions in the state of nature. And you're right, killing isn't always the most efficient way to go, buy when it is we don't call it murder, we call it advantageous behavior. And as humans, we project respect onto apex predators, who have adopted an evolutionary route of expensive killing, not honeybees.
On Locked Bathrooms and the Right to Poop.
Since we're throwing fruit onto the stand..

I'd love to see Perl Mason on here (the benchmarks)

Make the DB something CPAN like tie::Storable and load it in RAM. Lets see how that stands up XD
Read this on De-anonymizing alt.anonymous.messages. The linked to PDF discusses many of the attacks that can be performed on a secure messaging system. It's very thorough.

http://ritter.vg/blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
I think what you're saying is quite stupid.

I often find HN discussions... not sure how to describe it... I guess I just don't like many of the commenters for some unconscious reason. It could be: passive-agressiveness, people who are not emotionally mature (pg), overall negativity, stupid people who try to sound smart. Or something else.

The atmosphere on other online communities is more positive, which is a good thing. You can disagree without being negative.

I also noticed that for some strange unconsciouss reason, I really dislike people who use cliché phrases like: "Just to play devil's advocate." or "X and Y are orthogonal".

(This comment is intentionally quite negative because you sound like an adult capable of taking criticism.)
Are you sure. I've read several studies that shows marijuana has a habit of revealing or causing schizophrenia in youth, with almost no incidence in adults.

I wouldn't let my kids smoke marijuana the same as any substance that might cause maldevelopment.
If it were still that way today, most of the startups that this site revolves around wouldn't exist.
Experience: I was a bartender in Antarctica
It does not matter what the circumstances, to fire someone in any sort of public setting is a since of profound ineptitude and immaturity. I was surprised that AoL even still exists, I do not know who this person is, but if he is in charge of AOL then it is only a matter of time before it is no longer in existence.
I haven't used a Mac since a bit after the introduction of quadro or whatever it was, so I don't have a dog in most of the discussion above. I also don't own a mobile device. Those facts probably date me as a Linux user.

Here's a suggestion for designers: the age of the Linux user base is aging at a rate of one year per year. That doesn't mean there are no young ones, only that we are going where no Linux user has gone before (I joined various Linux projects back in 1992.)

Every human on earth, after there mid 40s, experiences changes in the geometric optics of their vision system. As my eye doctor says, the denial rate is 100% and the participation rate is 100% -- if you are lucky enough to reach that age.

Please design an accessible operating system we can still use in our 80s. This is a very big opportunity. How old will you be in 2038 is maybe a good design target. ;)

Accessible on a mobile device, a desktop, and able to function smoothly with presbyteropia is the basic design spec.

Get your team an old geek geezer or two to tell what works and what doesn't. When I forget my reading glasses at work, I have to use the Magnify app on Win7. Go ahead and try this, and see what the experience is like and if it's so perfect it can't be improved on you are done. Otherwise, work on that aspect of your design.

Even if you are young and not 'there' yet, try out the Magnify app, and try whatever Linux has to offer on your distro of choice for the same thing. It completely changes how you size windows and operated effectively. It will give you insight into important principles of design such as navigating windows, scrolling, keyboard usage, etc.

There is no need to make the very best of what exists today -- make the very best that will be needed tomorrow.

You will appreciate this advice one day.
- The tone of "Arrogance" is striking.

- Ahh "Humility" is such a wise trait.
Literally sweating for my startup
Etcd v0.1.0 release
I guess that's Dirac for you. Unbelievably brilliant.
well, gravity is actually distortions, curves in spacetime, not something carrying energy, as far as I know.
Request for Proposals: PRISM Break Up
It doesn't have to be voluntary. If I have a list of all the MAC addresses/timestamps and can cross reference that against a different known list of people times (ex: credit card transactions, rewards card, even face recognition) then you can associate them. With enough data it can be very exact.
"We spent 100s of millions of dollars the board is committed, I am committed"

Choo-choo, everyone jump on the fail train. No really, this is what is wrong with big companies. They pick a failed direction and they can't stop. It is a giant rusty ship heading to its grave, the captain waving his big dick around "Doesn't matter what everyone says, this will be successful!"

I think most people there know it is failure that is why the explicit warning not to joke about it (there is probably enough of that to warrant that comment). Critics who don't believe in the failed cause are pushed out as non-team players. It leaves the desperate and the brainwashed. ... Yes, patch will be the next Facebook if you just work an extra night no matter if your daughter fell of the stairs and broke her leg.
From the recording in the article (@ 1:15)

"I also want to clear up the fact that leaking information or anything around Patch isn't going to bother me. Doesn't bother me. I'm not changing direction."

So what you're saying is, Armstrong also gives inconsistent directions to his employees?
Yes of course, everyone reads while on the toitey, that is a given. But I read the NY Times on my kindle, and occasionally, OK, you got me often, HackerNews (just a second while I flush) ok, where was I... ah yes, what is needed, in my view, is a nice little stand or holder for your tablet, ultrabook, kindle, etc., my arm gets tired, the old time newspaper was much lighter. LOL. I am sure someone has already patented something like that!
FP is the future of software engineering, and always will be.
AOL staffs around 5500 employees, posts incomes of around $2.5 billion, and owns -- amongst other things -- TechCrunch and HuffPo.

If you don't think they're an important company, I suggest you talk to more people who are outside of the tech industry.
> I've also had the "get on board or leave" speech thrown at me.

Yes the old "we only want true believers here", people you can abuse endlessly and treat like animals.
The phrasing "Switch on" is terrible: are you telling me that the switch is currently "on" or that clicking it will turn it on?
The Smartphone is Dead
> there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that damage to brain will impair an entity's level of consciousness

There is loads of evidence from studying states that alter the brain.

For example, damage to certain parts of the brain produces hemispatial neglect. The person loses awareness of not just one half of the universe but the concept of that half. This is not consistent with an incorporeal soul, which would continue to make judgements about the full universe albeit with hemispatial blindness.

Then there are dissociative states, as with some migraine auras, where some aspect of self-awareness is lost, leaving the person with the sense that they are watching their own actions in the third person, but with otherwise intact behavior.

There are the dissociative anesthetics like nitrous oxide and ketamine, which create a solipsistic disconnection from the outside world without abolishing self awareness.

The memory function can become disconnected while consciousnes remains, as with some sleep disorders and drugs.

There are delirious states, seen in illness and with some drugs, where the person is conscious but experiencing imagination on the same footing as reality.

The corpus callosum connecting the two halves of the cerebrum can be severed, leaving each side with an independent partially-disconnected consciousness.
> This isn't a TV show.

rdtsc's law of failing large companies: "a large enough failing company, with a power crazy CEO is indistinguishable from a TV show"
Last I heard, there were still some "security oriented" OSes using RC4 for their /dev/random.
MAC addresses aren't unique but just nearly unique.
Contracts are a broken system
This is the best comment I've seen in this thread. It illustrates the key point IMO, which is that pretending like you have all of the relevant information precludes you from understanding the real cause of the phenomenon you're observing. Having a closed mind should never be celebrated as a rational thing to do even if it means not accepting the dogma du jour.
This game is chilling.
noonespecial nailed this one. But allow me to suggest that others who would consider the route of patenting such a necessary invention that they should probably pick a reasonable licensing fee for their work. Why not license your invention for pennies on the copy/individual use? Competitors can compete on price, people can still afford it, and you can still obtain the benefits of your cunning.
Reasonable, but just a theory nonetheless.
What the fuck is dogma du jour?
I have to say that's beautiful. You've definitely caught my interest with this project (Spire?)

I loved Dustforce too. Keep up the good work.
I'm curious.

For those of you who have lead and managed teams of 100 or more, would you ever resort to firing someone spontaneously in front of their peers?
Seems like another reason to never start talking in the first place. Thanks!
Except that in the call, he specifically says that he doesn't care about leaks. Which is it?
I think anyone that survived the dotcom boom and crash has stories like this. Pud's F-ed Company was full of them.

We had the meeting where only half the company was invited and the half that wasn't invited was let go. We had the VP that found out he was let go when his card key stopped working in the middle of the day. We had the employee lock himself in the office and refuse to leave. We had the contractor that was "let go" that laughed and just kept showing up for work. My boss that "let him go" was fired 3 weeks later. We had the guys that were let go but slipped through the cracks and nobody told them until HR sent them a packet. I saw the CEO fly into town just to fire my boss but she panicked and left before he got to the office and refused to answer her phones. Most of us kept all of our stuff packed in cardboard boxes, ready to walk out the door or change offices whenever people left. One friend kept a wall of ex-employee nameplates in his cube. The day I quit, I handed him my nameplate on my way to meet with my boss to resign, so everyone else knew by the time I walked out of his office.

The winners were two I didn't get to see. In some customer crisis, we hired a new guy with some special expertise on a platform and put him on a plane somewhere with a VP / Director of Development. They start talking on the plane and by the end of the flight, the VP realized he was so full of crap that he fired him, told him to not even leave the airport and go rebook his return flight back home.

The same VP hired another new guy but on his first day he went to lunch with other developers and somewhat joked about how he realized that it isn't what you do but what they think you do that gets you ahead in this business. He was fired 30 minutes after lunch.
Comments like these hurt the effort to fight back against the very real violations committed by the NSA.

It's not a joke, and your comment is not funny.
Never, not even in front of a team of 10, or 5..

If you have to let someone go, you do it in private.
I just did an internal communication for my client about of two particular platforms, which is more secure.

To start with, security isn't really a scalar measurement; a vector maybe closer. But all it takes is one tiny vulnerability in a remote corner of the application to open up the door to complete compromise.

Rather than vulnerabilities in underlying platforms such as .net/asp.net ruby/rails, more vulnerabilities are the result of erroneous application programming or mis-configuration.

And the age of the articles that you mention won't be much help in your search, as vulnerabilities are noticed in very old platforms, such as the recent issue with the old version of rails.

You are more likely to introduce a vulnerability in your application than being exposed to risks by either of these two platforms.
EBay Retail launches in-store sales analytics
For this particular article I didn't record any uptime. It's definitely a metric worth measuring, but I wanted to get super specific with this test. Lots more testing to come :)
I wonder if this was a publicity stunt to get people to go check out patch.com?

I'm only half-kidding.. I had never heard of it before, and I went to look at it after reading the article. Anyone else?

I'm not an American so I'm not in the target market, but a lot of these kinds of sites live and die by early adopters and tech influencers who start using them and advocate to their networks.
tl,dr: Nothing released in the last year utterly revolutionized the smartphone market, therefore nothing innovative will ever happen in the future and smartphones are basically a mature, market-saturated, boring technology.
You can still describe Ubuntu and GNOME as "we care about design, and we don't swamp the user with choices."
Donate idle computer time to charity
I believe kunai but agree that use of encryption in messaging is very atypical, regardless of age.
Yep. These are all great points. This is the first set of many many tests to come but it was good to get a baseline. If you check the timestamps of the full tests, you'll see that all of them were run back to back to back within the course of about 2 hours total time, so there shouldn't be much variation. That said, locking down ALL of the potential variables is definitely something I'm striving for long term.
U.S. Companies Thrive as Workers Fall Behind
> Not being able to handle criticism is a debilitating personality trait for someone who wants to achieve a high level of success in any sort of intellectual pursuit; and that is the reason why I strongly disagree with the desire on the part of some to change this aspect of the community.

There's a difference between intelligent criticism and nit-picking for nit-picking's sake. There's basically a guarantee that no matter how widely accepted a comment or post is, there will be a group of pedants ready to rip it apart in the comments section.

I'm not saying that changing the attitude of the community is necessary, or even possible, but it does get in the way of what otherwise might be stimulating discussion to have all the weeds of "oh you said Z comes after Y, but actually the alphabet has no concept of space, and you're a god damned idiot who should feel ashamed for even suggesting such a thing."
Well, this is the first I've heard of Patch, so I went and had a look at http://www.patch.com/

...

Er, is this supposed to be a news site? There's not a lot of actual news, but I can go and see what's happening at "Propwash Junction". Which isn't actually a real place but a Disney ad. Real news is at least two clicks deep.

Doomed!
To be clear, I'm not necessarily arguing that it's advantageous. I'm arguing that his experience does not qualify as a liberal arts education, and he shouldn't criticize it at such. You seem to place his experience into a second category:

>as opposed to receiving a generalized American-style "liberal arts education" (referring to the uniquely American method of having a core curriculum and general education requirements)

Neither a core curriculum nor general education requirements qualify an education as "liberal." At least, they shouldn't. The liberal arts are subjects, first and foremost. The humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences. Their power lies in their great history of consideration throughout civilization, their prevailing and constant influence on the affairs of the world, and the nuanced questions that lie at their center.

The liberal arts are inherently inter-disciplinary, and thus invite exposure to more than one. Moreover, the "teaching" of the liberal arts is far different than "research" in the liberal arts, a point often missed in larger university settings. If they are not taught well, you're not receiving an education of any sort.

I'm not criticizing Nelson's education, or at least, don't mean to. But what he's criticizing is not what he thinks. It may be that pre-professional economics degrees normally do impart critical thinking skills. Nelson seems to think they don't. I don't really care; what I know is that these requirements don't meet the demands of the liberal arts: http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/undergrad/academic-excellence/f...
"I strongly disagree with the desire on the part of some to change this aspect of the community."

The community wasn't the way it is right now even a year or two ago. Nothing wrong with trying to change it back to civilized discussion away from a malaise more fitting in /r/programming.

As you say, this is HN.
For anyone interested in quantum mechanics and consciousness, I recommend Scott Aaronson's book Quantum Computing Since Democritus; the chapters on Penrose are worth the price of admission. His blog, Shtetl-Optimized[1], is also a good read (and I think the book appeared there first).

On a different subject, recently there were a spasm of interest in fMRI studies that showed that "free" choices could be predicted based on neural activity well before a "conscious choice" was made.[2][3][4]

The general consensus seemed to be "Hah! Take that, free will!"

My take on the results were that they were hardly a surprise, if consciousness is an activity of the brain. You should no more expect to make a conscious decision prior to displaying brain activity relating to the decision than you should expect to perceive a flash of light before the light bulb is lit. It would not necessarily have any negative implications for the existence of free will; those experiments are simply exploring the mechanism of free will.

On the other hand, I believe they do kind of imply that consciousness is a product of the jello in your noggin. Either that or there are some funky delays involved.

Now, as for the third buttock: if consciousness doesn’t come from the brain, how does it work, exactly? I'd like some mechanism with my philosophy, thanks. Presumably, if I'm waving my arms around, you can trace the motor neuron activity from my appendages, up my spinal cord, and into my brain. But "and then a miracle occurs" is a pretty uninteresting way to connect that with the universe deciding that jazz hands are necessary.

[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/

[2] http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_d...

[3] http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html

[4] http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/09/03/free-choic...
In this case, the guy had just rambled on for some time about how he didn't care if anything "leaked." If I were inclined to take photos, his earlier words in the recording might well have sounded like permission.