skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this is great but with these devices and 'the internet of things', the most important part is not the devices but the data. And with this, instead of Google getting all the data, Spark is getting the data, and the data is where the money is. And once they get more data and learn to use it, they will become a more valuable company and eventually might get acquired.

I think for something to truly be open-source and beneficial for everyone, everything about it must be open, including the data. The data from all the connected devices globally could be stored on an open database that anyone can access and use. Its one thing to 'learn' with the limited data that one device might generate, but for a machine to 'learn to learn' it should be able to study ALL the data that might be useful.

This kind of organization could lead to a type of opensource corporation where anyone can be an 'employee'. Employment and compensation could be based off a public list of contributions to the project. To each according to his contribution.

This idea could be applied to anything that's used in public and generates data. Autonomous cars, home automation, drones, (NSA data, slightly more complicated but still could be open sourced). But as long as we're tricking ourselves into thinking we need 'money' to survive, the organization or company with the most of it wins.
True enough, but the online ad business is inextricably tied to the online publishing business.

AdBlock is a problem [1] because if you're using it then how would you even know that my banner ads are all respectful and relevant?

Like I said: I understand it isn't your problem to figure out how the sites you enjoy will stay in business. But I think it's worth thinking about.

> It's his job to find a way (hint: meaningful content) to get revenue

You mean sites should charge to read their content? How else does one turn meaningful content into revenue without ads?

([1] I actually don't think it's much of a problem at all... yet)
How kind of you to post this right before a long weekend when many people might have time to hack something together ;)
Well those are a lot of opinions stated as facts. Care to back them up?
Nevertheless, that seems to be how people understand the video. See, e.g., the person whose comment I was replying to.
> They will engage skeptics in a debate on the nature of consciousness, and Bandyopadhyay and his team will couple microtubule vibrations from active neurons to play Indian musical instruments. “Consciousness depends on anharmonic vibrations of microtubules inside neurons, similar to certain kinds of Indian music, but unlike Western music, which is harmonic,” Hameroff explains.

Did they really posit a connection between quantum and sonic vibrations (a huge and "woo-woo-y" leap) in the context of consciousness?

> “The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?” ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review.

And they're suggesting that consciousness is intrinsic to quantum systems? I think I missed some of the connections between the two.

For that matter, I'm still of a position that the very idea of "consciousness" is an artifact of the brain's anthropocentric and self-image-preserving post ergo hoc systems, as opposed to anything concrete. Compare it to software: we "see" operating systems, drivers, apps, and the like, but those are all labels of our invention. It's ultimately nothing but ones and zeros.
It suggested SublimeText. Blasphemy! I subscribe to the vim subreddit, so they must be trying to mock me.
Oh yeah, because our political system was a paragon of ethics, transparency, and trustworthiness before the bastards on the Supreme Court decided to let two dudes with an LLC sell a movie they made on a weekend that was critical of Hillary.
Penrose has for years been advocating against strong AI, instead arguing that there "magic stuff" in the brain that prevents conciousness from arising in a machine. Great mathematician, but totally off his rocker here, which is outside his field. His arguments make no sense. Someone spewing his quackery without his credentials would be laughed out of the room.
Salesforce ... a software company that focuses on doing one thing really well

One thing? They own Heroku, Desk.com, Work.com, and several other companies.
Termcoin – A Bitcoin wallet for your terminal
If you want to change the system, you have to first agree that the system is perfect and should not be changed.
I think the system at that level isn't designed to find the best leaders. It's designed to generate a small number of candidates who can galvanize their base and consolidate power and funding for their parties, and who more importantly can be controlled by the party and be trusted to maintain the status quo.
happened to me as well and eventually I had to close firefox.
oh the irony!
(but lots of nice links on the site for sure..kudos to the creator)
So you've just built a site so you can collect referral fees?
1.) Is your switching to Mac the only reason for using Dropbox?

2.) Since Dropbox has it's own directory, I imagine the others are similar. It wouldn't really be feasible because the file wouldn't be the same file across all apps.
Just b/c there is quantum activity in the microtubules doesn't mean that is the seat of consciousness. When you get down to it, the whole body is a quantum system. So I really find this off base.
And how do you pay for the content to be created?
A-B Testing 01/17/2014
This Digital Whale Will Follow Your Mouse Pointer Around
Can you name a "good" politician from the USA? Active since 1960?
The only scientific viewpoint is that we do not know whether or not strong AI is possible. Materialists think it probably is, since they can't see any reason why not. But we don't understand intelligence so we don't know if we are missing something. Meanwhile, there are plenty of reasonable reasons not to be a materialist.

As a meta-comment, I find the condescension in your comment unnecessary. Why is he "spewing" and why is it "quackery"? Did he not publish a testable, falsifiable theory? Isn't that what science is?
"AdBlock is a problem [1] because if you're using it then how would you even know that my banner ads are all respectful and relevant?"

That is the nice part about ABP's whitelist -- respectful ads are shown, and bad actors are punished. Better still, if you disagree with ABP's judgements, you can (a) disable the whitelist or (b) use a different ad blocker. It is a great idea for what amounts to an industry-wide problem.
A preponderance of it. There;'s no blanket answer to a question like that, it depends on the circumstances of the individual case.
Even BlackBerry Thinks Windows Phone Is Too Small
Crap, I'm an idiot - there's a manual at https://microcorruption.com/manual.pdf that talks all about it.
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/ is a good one for SaaS startups.
Scheme and/or Common LISP seem to be the common recommendation to embark on SICP journey, just for reference.
You're onto me ;) Hopefully it gets enough votes to get noticed. Then come Monday we will see the following headline: "I Built a HN Leaderboard for Sources over the Long Weekend."
The more simple patterns seem to be overlooked - that banal change in ones breathing patterns - breathe not "deeper" but "more often" - a habit body could learn in two-three days. All the animals, dogs, yaks, etc are doing it.

The key issue is to relax oneself psychologically from the stress of unusual feelings and discomfort (it is almost the same as hangover) and let the body breathe and sleep. Extensive water consumption to boost circulation also helps.

I train groups of tourists a mt. Kailash trek and four days of acclimatization is enough for almost everyone.

I am myself capable of walking the same distances with rates comparable to Tibetans - what kind of genetic mutation I have undergo?)
All you've done is moved the problem up the value chain. Now instead of publishers losing revenue to AdBlock, it's advertisers. That's not a good solution. Advertisers will very quickly see that their conversion rates are falling and will adjust how much they pay for an impression accordingly. (Not to mention that many ads are sold per click and not per impression.)

Changing the channel during an ad is already priced in to the cost of the TV ad. The TV people do studies on how many people change the channel or hit mute. But mostly they don't care because they can see that the TV ads work by how many people call the 800 number or how in-store sales jump after an ad runs in a region.

This is especially true of online ads. If you have an online store, you probably don't really care how many impressions your ads have or even how many people click -- your main metric is how much did it cost to get you a paying customer. Ad Block drives that number up whether it loads the ad or not.
yes. And yet here, for the first time, is evidence he might have been right. This is where we all look at our shoes and mutter something about burdens of proof.

Note that it is still possible to describe consciousness as a computer -- it just has to be a quantum one. I find a lot of us techies relax around strong materialist positions (Penrose, Churchland, Searle) once you have coerced your interlocutor into admitting that there is no way of proving that there isn't an abstract(able) substrate. We can probably all agree that my Core i7 is not a mind. The disagreement amounts to whether or not a computing substrate of which all the relevant components have tidy classical explanations can be a mind, and after reading this, my fence-sitting on that issue is done. Without a single example of a functioning classical-mechanical mind, and strong evidence that quantum effects are nurtured within the brain, it would appear the magical-thinking quantum-worshipping nonsense-spouting materialist weirdos have it this time. Dammit.
Way to conflate the qualitative into the quantitative, the mark of materialism.
What exactly is the point you're trying to make here? That this is all legal? They have at least violated the SPIRIT of the law.

Also, you are ignoring all other reports that the NSA is storing CONTENT of every means of communication.

Just this week, it was revealed that they store hundreds of millions of text messages:

* http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/16/nsa-collects-mi...

They also store every single phone call made in the US:

* http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec1...

* http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-spying-fla...

Oh, and thinking about using Skype? Also tapped:

* http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/nsa-taps-skype-ch...
"Until no politician/President can guarantee himself a second term will they ever feel accountable to the public."

No, until they learn that they can't get in at all without being accountable to the public, no politician will feel accountable to the public.

I don't know how to look at a politician pre-election and know that they'll be honest and keep citizens' rights foremost. Certainly not by listening to them, because I've noticed whenever they make sounds their lips are moving, and when their lips are moving they lie.

So it would have to depend in part on their not being able to hide anything. Which would mean something like absolutely fucking open books, on everything, almost up to having a camera in the president's bathroom. Citizens would have to be able to inspect just about anything at all at a moment's notice. 'cause Congress won't.

And if not the absolutes of the previous paragraph, then as close as we can get, and closer all the time.

They lie, they have money and weapons, they have to be watched 24/7. Just like us.
>quantum
>vibrations
>consciousness

Reverend Bayes says 99% probability of quackery.
So every month if I update I will be required to fix my application to work with the new versions of the library. Perhaps say 25% of my time will be _only_ on maintenance? And from what I recall things are not deprecated for a while, but very rapidly changed with little to no warning. This was a major headache.
What a great idea! I'm going to try it.

All too often I dither around for an extended time when starting. Then, when finally started, everything just flows.

Maybe this will help reduce dither time.
Finally something to replace the awful bitcoin-qt. Get the best of both worlds with a "gui" that is in the terminal.
Lest people think this is useless negativity, the point is that you need to scroll down and look at the other pages to see the really interesting ones. :)
Well wait a minute. They predicted "there is quantum activity in the microtubules". Almost everyone said "you are crazy, that's impossible". If it turns out indeed that there is, then this was a successful scientific prediction, in the style of predicting the structure of DNA or the existence of the neutrino.

You are right, it doesn't mean that this is the seat of consciousness, but it doesn't mean it isn't, either. Further investigation would be required. But saying it's "off base" just because you don't like the thesis is exactly the opposite of what science is supposed to be. It is scientism, not science.
But if you're using AdBlock, won't you likely be blocking my malware-free, privacy-protecting ads too? You wouldn't even know they exist...

I agree with your larger point though. For all the (legitimate) hand-wringing about ad networks tracking people and building profiles... they still suck at targeting ads. A lot. I think we're still in the Stone Age of ad matching algorithms.
There was a primary each time. It could have been another Democrat. Or you could have voted third party. As long as you vote for either major, you're voting for the same thing.

C'mon. Doesn't everything Obama has said on surveillance sound exactly like what Bush would have said? They're the same, they just use different dog whistles.
And their focus over the next few years is to be the cloud computing company for businesses. Had a salesforce VP tell me recently that SF wants to dominate non-CRM software (e.g., electronic medical records in the cloud) while Oracle and SAP are still working on figuring out this whole "cloud" thing.

Large businesses are still just entering the cloud with a lot of their software. Salesforce is the company they think of when thinking cloud. There's a lot of power in that.
Are there many accounts like that on HN?
More details, please.
Penrose's Gödelian argument
If you come up with an Ad Blocker that blocks all those things, but lets "good" ads through, I'd pay for a license! :)
that's nonsene, you can use "classical" computation to simulate quantum effects to arbitrary precision (it's how we can do things like simulate NMR spectra with the born-oppenheimer approximation).

The descriptor "quantum" to describe a computer is also actually kind of nonsense, because fundamentally a transistor works because of "quantum effects".

However: While I disagree that penrose's overarching idea that "brains are magic" is nonsense, his specific mechanism invoking microtubules may be correct (and I personally lean towards that mechanism and have for a while)... But I also don't think that has any bearing on "the computability of strong AI". It does however, have a bearing on "trying to develop strong AI by biomimicry", e.g. neural nets, deep learning nets, etc.
I thought of it using a quantum comp too.

Quantum origin of conscience might actually make teleporting not a horrible deal. Perhaps if you make a perfect duplicate of someone consciousness it gets entangled (or other technobable) and causes the person to briefly enter a coma like state until one of the duplicates is destroyed. In that case teleporting a la Star Trek wouldn't be as horrible as it is depicted - i.e. clone someone and then kill one original.
The subtitle for that book could be "Just because you can doesn't mean you should".

Why would anyone write non-web code in PHP? It's completely out of its element.

If your selling point is "not having to learn" you're not being very fair to developers that use PHP. If you can't learn, you've got a problem. New technology comes up all the time, and if you can't adapt, you'll get left behind.

Would you recommend a PHP to JavaScript converter so you can do PHP in the browser and avoid all that painful "learning"?

What about "bash beyond the shell"? It's possible. Would you want to write an application in bash? Please, do not.

Everything that made PHP popular and versatile is now a massive liability. Perl went through the same cycle from saviour to relic and that community has been struggling to try and reinvent itself (Perl 6) in a manner that's in keeping with today's concerns.

The level of change you'd have to introduce in PHP to make it current is so staggering you may as well write a whole new language. Even the relatively modest changes made to modernize Python have caused an enormous rift.
The underlying terminal parser is friggin' hawt: https://github.com/chjj/blessed
Scientists Confirm Explosives Used to Demolish Towers on 9/11
I was given a bunch of DG gear around Y2K. Kept a couple of Aviion boards to hang on the office wall after having to purge the system collection before moving.

As much as I love old gear, my interests are currently more modern. Still I'd like to put an OS on a smaller system, either ARM or MIPS. ST has a nice new Discovery kit that as a 2.4" QVGA TFT LCD and would serve has a radio controller prototype.
Actually, the example I was referring to (see my comment elsewhere in the thread) is copied directly from the Go documentation here: http://golang.org/pkg/sort/

Composition is great. It does not solve the same problem as generics. The reason people can't seem to "get" the idea of statically typed languages without generics is because static typing without parametric polymorphism is a painful experience.

I'm not opposed to the idea of finding some balance between static and dynamic typing -- Clojure type annotations seem interesting -- it's just that I don't like the way Go does it.
I'm not sure there is no key exchange... Last I looked into Skype's security, not only was the traffic encrypted, the binary itself was also heavily obfuscated, so nobody knew what was going on. This was half a decade ago, though, and lots of things have changed since then.
No. Only for one-dimensional systems can classical systems approximate quantum ones to arbitrary accuracy. The resulting technique is known as DMRG. (Although there is some crazy 12-dimensional corner case with adiabatic quantum computation I recall hearing about [1], it's totally irrelevant to most simulation in general and especially the sort you are talking about, unless you know of a classical way to find the ground state of all 1-D spin glasses, in which case there are a lot of people at UCSB who would be very excited to talk to you.)

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.4077
"Strong AI" is completely meaningless. Strong AI = whatever isn't human basically. The actual argument that "Strong AI" is meant to support is this: You can't create a Strong AI because Strong AIs can only exist in intelligent beings and computers aren't intelligent, therefore computer scientists are wasting their time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
It's the "better solutions" that make me wonder why people go down this road for any reason other than academic curiosity.

Given an arbitrary back-end written in Python, Ruby, Go, Perl, Java, Scala or PHP I would expect, nine times out of ten, the bad apple to be PHP.

Anyone who knows how to program PHP properly, and by that I mean using all of the modern conventions, would be far more productive in something like Java or Python where they didn't have twenty years of appallingly bad design decisions influenced by its role as a web scripting language weighing down their code.
Are you sure you're not confusing "exact solutions" for iterative approximation?
> Europe unite.

"old Europe die hard" http://i.imgur.com/srtDWIX.jpg

Seen nearly 10 years ago in Cologne, sadly I don't know the name of the artist (it was in a museum, he filled huge walls with such drawings). I know HN frowns on images, but I don't have the eloquence to express what this picture is saying anyway, so I'd rather post that instead of nothing. At least it's not a meme - not yet, anyway. Here's hoping :P
They could all just lie. Congress isn't going to ask them anything, and they aren't going to tell.
That's definitely an interesting solution: an independent authority who judges ads worthy.

I question how independent ABP is, though, when their (only?) revenue comes from the fees sites pay to get on their whitelist. It gives the appearance of a shakedown.

With the default set to block, it's kinda rough on the little guy, too.
Having Tomasz attached is the only thing that makes me believe that the project isn't total BS (as in they are showing what is easy to give nice results). Tomasz did his thesis on exemplar-SVMs, which is probably the base (or maybe even a more advanced version) of the technology. The biggest turn off is that most CV results are based on many specific conditions, often finding methods turning to the bias of the dataset. Offering a single technology for a wide variety of results is easy to promise (oh it works well on this test set, should work on others), but hard to really deliver. Also many kickstarters won't know the difficulty of PASCAL VOC, and even though PASCAL only asks for a bounding box, they should have made their results more visually appealing.
+1

I think I was on the $20/month plan. My overall impression of Dropbox was that it was always there when I didn't need it / never really there when I wanted it.

1. Most of the stuff I need to share with myself or others lives in Github.

2. When I want something to sync with my laptop (usually when I'm running out of the house) it's often behind of bunch of other files and means it will have to sync over a mobile connection if I'm going to get it. This usually means using a thumb drive rather than deal with syncing.

3. And this is entirely my fault: I had a handful of older projects in my Dropbox folder that weren't mirrored on Github or anywhere else. When it came time to actually dig one out it turned out that Dropbox had had some manner of sync issue and had renamed dozens of files in my .git folder. It was unusable.

I dropped down to the free plan and uninstalled Dropbox from my laptop. Haven't missed it at all.
But it doesn't have to be the same two.
DEF CON 21 videos now available for direct download and torrent
The solution is simple: websites just need to start detecting adblock and refusing let someone use the site with it enabled. If you don't like it...go pay for an ad free service. Nobody deserves to get something for nothing.

Edit: Additionally, using someones server resources that they pay for without contributing anything to their revenue, if ads are in fact an important source of their revenue, is effectively stealing. Just because the ads annoy you doesn't justify screwing the people who pay to run the site you're using.
that really is sexy...quite possibly the best UI I have ever seen. brooding dark background and no nonsense colors.
Author of the article here. I don't think many people enjoy doing their laundry or cleaning their apartment. I also think most people enjoy free food, as it saves them money. The dog walking perk I can understand, but beyond that, are you legitimately stating that you wouldn't want any of these perks free of charge?