skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
blah blah Obama just talking, trying to keep us on the edge, give the dogs a bone.

These government people move way to slowly, how long does it take with todays technology to communicate and figure out what needs to change? The longer we just keep 'talking', the longer they can continue with their scraping of data and secrets.

Someone or something is going to have the data; there's nothing that can be done about that. Marketers have been doing for a long time, the NSA just got CAUGHT. Marketers use it to make money by making sure you see the best ad for you, the NSA uses it to make money by 'stopping terrorists'. But what if all the data was free and the programs turing it into useful information were open-sourced? That would change the market entirely. Anyone could see the most important scraped news of the day, whether its a terrorist threat or just thrending news. It could be like a social network that everybody has already joined. Privacy would be interesting. Maybe you could only see from others what you choose to share yourself. But thats too long to get into here...

Clearly what needs to be done is this: the data that the NSA collects should only be accessible by the program. It needs to be fully autonomous. The biggest concern with the vast collection of data and secrets is the human element. So we should simply take the human element out of it. Make an open-sourced program and algorithm that reads the data when it needs to and automatically gets the results to those who need to see it. The code could be posted on github and master pulls can be voted on by the whole world, but we can start with just America maybe at first.

All of America shuts down for simple things such as football and the superbowl, dead peoples birthdays, religious holidays. I think we could dedicate a day or two to a simultaneous conversion about important things happening in our country moderated by artificial intelligence and by the end of the day take action on what we agreed upon. Gallup releases 'polls' so quickly, how come nothing comes from those?

But if we don't trust an artificial intelligence then WHO can we trust? Obama? Clapper? The Pope?

We could physically implement this system ourselves if we needed to, after we figure out what we as a nation/world want. There's a data center in Utah. We could literally go there and take control. but how many people would a 'protest' like that require? and if we come to the conclusion that thats the only other option, we should hurry before the military and Google finalize the perfect humanoid robot. Or else all hope might be lost. The people vs armies of drones and robots. Elysium here we come.
Tackling the Sefnit botnet Tor hazard
Anytime you hear the word "consciousness" in the field of neuroscience, expect a barrage of pseudo-scientific sloppy reasoning to follow.

Even if there are quantum effects involved in the operation of the brain, or any other organ of the body, the idea that they are responsible for this thing called "consciousness" anymore than action potentials or chemical messengers is a gigantic, unsupported assumption.

More likely the words "quantum" and "microtubule vibrations" sounds sufficiently mysterious to appeal to the casual reader's dualist bias. A proper scientific study into "X", whether X be consciousness or anything else, would begin by defining it concretely.
(a) makes sense because it is assumed that if you have the job enabled, you want it to be started. If you do not care about those services, just disable them.

(b) is indeed a PITA.
it'd be fine if the libs were actually libs, with a documented api (you know, in man, it's nice).

that's not the case tho, and that's why its a blog post and not something everyone and their dog uses.
Why not just stop at the point that a Pair is just two pointers and a List is a bunch of nested Pairs, without any classes, deftypes or monads?)

Btw, the classic trick from SICP lectures, where a Pair was implemented as a closure (a procedure) that accepts messages (to illustrate code-is-data principle) is much more interesting abstraction than this overengineered OO stuff.)
Nintendo 'studying' mobile devices in wake of bleak hardware sales forecast
Also, I'm probably hellbanned.

No, you are not. If you think you should be, but for some reason that automatic system has missed you, you can send an email to PG asking him to ban your account manually.
A new mini-version of jQuery UI after 9 months
Search Engine Grader: See our ranking criteria
But to write 100,000 of framework-less JS today on a green field project seems ridiculous.

Why? I've worked on non-web software projects 1-2 orders of magnitude bigger that didn't need anyone's magical framework to develop and maintain a sound architecture. How come we can't just use good design that fits the project if the software we're writing happens to be the front end for a web app?

It's about picking the right tool for the job, the same as always. For some projects and some development teams, I'm sure these modern JS frameworks and tools have proved valuable and will continue to do so. On the other hand, we're currently planning another web app that is expected to grow at least as big as the one I described earlier, and no-one on the team is seriously considering using any of the current crop of front-end frameworks. That's not because we don't know what they do or how they work. It's simply because none of us thinks it's a smart idea to build such a large and hopefully long-running project with a fundamental dependency on the kind of technology that typically measures its time at the top in months.
> Almost everyone said "you are crazy, that's impossible"

according to the article's narrative, at least...

> 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

True. But it could also of course be His Noodly Appendage at work in each of those microtubules. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence, etc.

I think what the GP was objecting to was that there's no more reason to jump to the article's conclusion than an infinite number of other conclusions based on the evidence at hand, and it's sloppy science to imply otherwise.
I don't necessarily agree with Penrose's views on consciousness, but I'd personally wait on laughing him out of the room until I had a conscious machine that could laugh along with me.
Stanford work on Deep Learning for NLP
I don't get it. Strong AI is just a model of the mind that is indistinguishable or better than the original model.

Think of it this way. If you were to do a double scale, full 3D model of earth, with all pieces intact wouldn't it just be a bigger earth on which you could live and do stuff?
Even without becoming perpetually dominant, many of them exercised a huge amount of control over a large area for a long time. IBM from the 1930s through the 1990s, Microsoft from the 1980s through the 2010s, AT&T from the 1910s through the 1980s, etc.

There are cases to be made for these reigns being useful: AT&T spawned Unix and (in part) TCP/IP and the Internet, IBM spawned much IC development, Microsoft proliferated cheap and standardized x86 CPUs. But each also quashed competition in the form of both other firms and competing technologies: AT&T, despite the role UNIX came to play in packet-switched networks, explicitly rejected them for its own network recognizing that this would undermine its own dedicated-circuit switching. Microsoft's treatment of competitors is legion, but it's IBM we have to thank for the term "FUD".
Really can recognize objects without any human help?
office snacks.

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We released the blog post: http://blog.algolia.com/search-grader-engine-performing
actually, no, I'm asian, I'm a scientist, I'm currently unemployed (but not taking assistance, I'm ineligible, and anyways I saved up knowing this would happen), and I run a non-profit that is attempting to cure cancer. (check my profile if you don't believe me)
Although I generally agree with the sentiment of the article, I strongly disagree that we need specifically "affordable" housing. State-subsidized "below market rate" housing that enables people with low salaries to occupy highly-demanded space is incredibly inefficient and also likely doesn't serve the interests of the people it is supposed to help.

I don't see why the ability to live in San Francisco is any different than the ability to afford a BMW or a Tesla. Should the government subsidize "below market rate" luxury cars too? What would be the incentive to get an education or work hard? Personally I feel somewhat offended when there are dozens of below market rate units available and I'm actually excluded from attempting to buy them because I earn too much money. Meanwhile there are hardly any homes available for people who can afford the houses without subsidies and we bid up the houses to obscene prices due to lack of supply.

Also, if the people who work in SF or other high income areas cannot afford to live there at current wages, there should be pressure on them to leave and work elsewhere. This would increase demand for their labor and drive prices up, all else being equal. (I know, there are other factors here, but those should be dealt with separately, not by adding more layers of complexity to the problem.)

Further, if those workers cannot afford to rent or buy, lowering the cost of renting or buying also reduces the pressure on employers to raise their wages.
This is, of course, why we will use a Heisenburg compensator when transporting.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Heisenberg_compensator
Become active in developer communities, create and contribute to open-source projects on GitHub, and people will contact you.

Companies like Toptal (http://www.toptal.com) mine GitHub and online developer communities looking for talent.
I am aware of Krysta Svore's work at MSR [1][2] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhW3Sen9TVY) that might be what you are describing, but those "classical" methods certainly do not work on all systems and with arbitrary accuracy. And the iterative approximations do not converge for more complex systems in the lifetime of the universe, nor do we have enough computing power to do so. She is predicting ground state structure, certainly not say excited states where geometry and Berry phase effects and non-adiabaticity come into play.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=177...
[2] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=177...
Extendible hashing is amazing in space utilization while retaining the performance of hashing.
You know PHP? I'm hiring part time. Can be 100% remote if in the US. I know other people looking for P/T devs all the time for mostly one-off client projects.
The open web is a miracle, it's amazing that it exists. Back when the open nets were forming corporations like AOL and Compuserve tried to bottle it up but failed. That's why the web doesn't work in the way that publishers would like for their business models. If the web had worked the way they want it to it would have never become the success that it has.

But, we have to be vigilant. From now until the end of time they will be working to lock it down for their gain and society's loss. The sad part is that they will probably win because there will be teams at many corporations working full-time on locking things down and lobbying, they won't give up. The main hope now is that so many people have tasted freedom that they will fight to keep things open.
The precedent would only be alarming to authoritarian cowards. Which, if we're also accepting the "law is morality" viewpoint, are people who should be in prison or worse.
Great job, this looks really neat.
Why am I not surprised that this involves microtubules? Kurzweil meets Penrose meets Indian mysticism -- it's hard to imagine a denser nexus of consciousness-related quackery.
"there is quantum activity in the microtubules"

For the record: Almost nobody would have disagreed with this statement. What people may have argued about is if quantum activity in the microtubules correlates to anything to do with the function of the brain, esp. memory, or cognition.

This article shows no direct in vivo evidence of such a thing, just a simulation that shows exactly what "quantum activity" is possible, and a tenuous, hypothetical connection to how that may deal with cognition.

FWIW, I have long believed in penrose's microtubule hypothesis (wrt to cognition, but not necessarily consciousness), and I find this finding to be encouraging to my belief, but in the article there is some obfuscation of just how much (or how little?) has been found here.
Avoiding exceptions is a worst practice. The guide even admits they're only doing it because they're so far beyond a critical mass of exception-unsafe code that they've lost hope of solving the problem.

If the profession ever wants to produce anything reliable in C++, one of the first things that needs to happen is to start treating all unsafe legacy code like toxic waste, marking it clearly, handling it carefully in isolation, and disposing of it with prejudice as soon as possible. I don't ever expect to see this, which is partly why I switched to languages that try to handle failures and mistakes gracefully.
http://www.academia.edu/882409/The_Reign_of_Quantity_and_Sig...
I agree, it would be nice to see something more specific here... but petitions don't only function by applying direct political pressure, they are a time-tested way of building a list of interested supporters. As such, the inflammatory language may be deliberate: it may be a tactic to recruit highly motivated, partisan supporters with the eventual goal of mobilizing them to reach out to others in their own broader networks, or to donate to the broader outreach campaign. And I think outrage travels through the Twitters faster than policy specifics.
Vilifying "politicians" is a convenient way to let We The People off the hook for tolerating broken democratic and electoral processes.
Original Metroid Source Code
> His arguments make no sense.

Do you think that quantum physics make any sense? :)

Also, I'm not sure if this is about strong AI; maybe I am wrong, but I don't think that consciousness and AI belong to the same field...
This person or group has created lots of accounts, but there are no others like them that we know of.
"Person-hours".
The irony is that in Clojure the classic, naive non-tail-recursive factorial procedure from SICP will first result in an Overflow Exception and then in Stack Overflow, while any other Schemes or Lisps could do (fact 1024) easily.

Don't tell me that I should use some bigint type, the whole big idea behind the numeric tower is to do not bother with types.
> Should the government subsidize "below market rate" luxury cars too?

People have families and lives built around geographic locations, not cars. I'm not saying we should or shouldn't subsidize housing (I lean libertarian personally), but it's disingenuous to suggest this is like the car market. What's at stake for many people is a foundational part of their lives.
Untrue, because the reason the microtubule coherence was posited in the first place, at all, was as an origin of consciousness. There wasn't another reason to presuppose it. So the fact that the activity exists does have information content with respect to the central thesis. It certainly doesn't prove it, but it moves the needle.

Analogy: Suppose the Earth is covered with clouds and we have never seen the sky, we have not invented space ships yet, etc. Nobody knows why tides happen. Someday someone predicts there is a GIANT rock orbiting the Earth not too far away, and everyone says that is crazy. But eventually you send a rocket up with a camera, and you see this giant rock there! Whoa. Since the tides caused you to look for the rock, and you found the rock, you have reason to suspect the rock does cause the tides. Maybe it doesn't -- further verification is required. But the big rock is evidence, it moves the needle. That is what science is, is making testable predictions and then testing them and then letting the results of those tests help you understand what is going on in the world.

Invoking the FSM or discounting evidence, because it doesn't match preconceived notions, is in fact the kind of thing that is the bane of science and always looks embarrassing / shameful in retrospect. I would hope that people at HN understand science well enough to see this pattern and not participate.

P.S. Re the "according to the article's narrative" snipe, uhh, some of us have been following this issue since the 90s when the idea was proposed. "You guys are crazy" is an accurate description of the majority consensus.
"... and unusable for any kind of modern desktop usage unless all you do is write code in a terminal."

Sounds good to me. Many times (actually most times) I have no need for a "desktop" metaphor on my screen in order to get things done. I actually get more done big jobs done faster without the desktop metaphor in the way.

"... the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think."

That's what makes them so special.

Perhaps in the long run the most "powerful" and sought after computers will not be the ones with the latest chips, but the ones that the user has the most knowledge of and control over.

Can you imagine the old-timer reminiscing: "Remember when computers didn't have backdoors built-in?" or "Remember when you did not have to pay for a license to write programs for hardware you bought?"
> I wonder if Amazon hasn't cut Dropbox a huge discount to keep them around.

I can't imagine why they would. Dropbox dedupes all their data before hitting S3, but Amazon can still leverage their bulk hardware discounts that Dropbox likely isn't big enough to score. Amazon would have the upper hand in such a deal, and I don't see why it would be friendly.

> http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibration.... looks like an interesting solution to storage.

AFAIK those boxes are and have usually been tuned for lukewarm or maybe even lukecold storage to cut costs. Dozens of 5400 rpm drives loaded on bare minimal support planes have a genuine rating of Shit for reliable seek times. It's great for backup, when you only expect a small fraction of users to actually make a query and be thankful enough they're pulling down a recovery. For the kind of direction Dropbox wants to take, this is absolutely out of the question.
For comparison, Chicago, a city that isn't growing like SF, added 1,150 housing units in 2012 and had 3,050 units under construction for delivery in 2013-2014 as of September 2012: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-09-13/classified/ct-....
While interesting, I think the headline is a bit hyperbolic.

The Chromium project doesn't build on many platforms, and the build system they use for it is minimally documented.

While individual bits of code might be reusable on other platforms, I'd be hesitant to base any project I create on Google's codebase given the lack of portability and their reliance on arcane buildsystems.
You're the reason PHP has a bad reputation. You have no idea what you're doing, and you use your mouth not only to breathe, but to spill hate on it too!

80% of your points can be answered by wrappers/helpers. How often do PHP developers have to walk through a user-generated string of multibyte cacarcters? Ok, didn't think so. And when you do you have all the required tools. 99% of string handling is simple copy, and the byte apporach is great at that.

A few points that stand out, and give an amusing idea of how you implement stuff:

"Unless you use a wrapper"
"What's the difference? I don't know, and I really can't be bothered to read"
"Try typing that three times in a row, I dare you"
"Oh yeah, and there are no less than three API"
"a real database where field lengths are defined in characters"
"makes autocompletion tricky" on native function...

PS:

- natsort() is intended for numbers

- ENT_QUOTES isn't required unless you use single quotes to encapsulate your outputs

- ugly code = using different function names.. ok

- PHP isn't helping Microsoft.. ok

- utf8_decode is a shortcut for iconv() using the 2 most common encodings, just FYI

Edit: formatting
I'm generally very skeptical of authors or papers that make claims about "quantum processes" and consciousness because they are generally written by people who know very little about neurology and even less about quantum physics. Ask them about quantum entanglement, and you'll generally get a misguided interpretation based on a decades old mistake in reasoning that has long since been corrected [1][2]. However, I decided to give this paper a try not because I expected there to be any actual content, but just to see why otherwise intelligent people would be drawn to what I consider to be obvious pseudoscience.

I didn't read the whole thing, but from what I know of quantum mechanics and QFT (standard undergraduate course load) I didn't see anything wildly misguided. This tells me that one of two things are true.

1. This paper describes a legitimate link between a non-classical process occurring in the brain that may "cause" consciousness. I do not know enough about the brain to rigorously evaluate the claims.

2 (more likely). Quantum physics is hard, even for scientists. Neither of the paper's author's are physicists, and neither have done any _recent_ meaningful work in any subfield of physics. I would expect that groundbreaking work in physics would require ideas beyond an undergraduate level, but I did not see any physics in the paper I didn't understand. It looks like at the very least, there is room for a false positive. What I mean by "false positive" is that sometimes not about A will cause you to reason that Q->C even when the truth is A->Q and A->C (correlation does not imply causation...). For example, it could be that the electrical signals of the brain that cause consciousnes + quantum effect, but if the same signals were running through a semiconductor we would instead see a different quantum effect (depletion zones, electron holes...). If our brains were made of 5nm CMOS transistors, a non-physicist might see quantum tunneling and conclude that it somehow caused consciousness.

I think the most important thing for non-physicists like me to remember about papers like this is that although sometimes scientists make important discoveries outside their fields we should allow specialists in the area to evaluate the non-physicists claims before believing them ourselves.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism
[2] http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/76036/how-does-qf...

EDIT

Penrose did important work on the nature of black holes ~40 years ago. At one point in time he was a real physicist.
> it already has mutable state, assignment, loops, (pseudo-)OOP and 5 layers of historic brain damage

You mean like Scheme, right? It's got all that, plus an extra couple of layers now that there's R7RS.
In order for the claim or idea that consciousness depends on quantum information processing( processing not accessible from classical computation) you would need a rigorous definition of consciousness. Or one that at least required quantum information processing and explanation for the requirement.

I do not see either kind of definition put forward so the claim or idea that quantum information processing is necessary for consciousness does not seem very productive.
I love how on their "Channels unblocked page" it claims to support "all the major streaming services."

What's not on the list? Youtube.