skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But there are some things which are philosophical, yet not scientific

I think you are wrong here as well.

There is an entire branch of philosophy dedicated to the study of what we (can) know, and how we know it: epistemology.

Some philosophers get things wrong, just like some people get their mathematical sums wrong, and some scientists follow incorrect hypotheses for many years. But that is not a valid excuse for neglecting to search for the Truth, or failing to arrive at Truth.

Indeed, the entire aim of all of science is to arrive at Truth.

> because there is no clear way to reach one

The laws of logic are very clear, even though most people do not follow them most of the time. You cannot even think properly without obeying the laws of logic. http://En.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_thought (And sadly, indeed, many people do not think properly.)
NSA Hacked Servers of Chinese telecom Huawei, Stole Source Codes
This was London. They still operate busses with trays almost universally and the driver gets to deal with the cash themselves. I've never actually seen that system in London - I have in Nottingham though. I don't tend to get busses now though :)
FWIW I've submitted an improvement request to the c++ faq along these lines.
Google's lightweight image format makes YouTube pages load 10 percent faster
You seem to hate the decisions they've made, and are quoting that to show how bad it is.

To me, though, that sounds like a dream marketing platform; one where you only have to pay for ads that do well, because you can push them for free to a small sample of your audience to test them.

Another possibility: if FB ever gets any good at figuring out from the content of a post who will like it, then a benevolent FB could show each post of yours to the 10% of your audience who actually wants to see it, but not spam them with the other 90%, which would make them stop following your page.
Read, and then critique, Nagle's recent book:
http://www.Amazon.com/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-...

Please come back and post your response here, or start a new Hacker-News story.
http://ledger-cli.org/ , incredibly flexible, very powerful reports. but only use it if you're willing to really drill down the documentation and discussion group
This new tech is not in general as strong as fiber woven in sheets. The claim they make is that it's "1/3 the strength of the best carbon fiber composites made today" and that to test this they measured resistance to bending "in the preferred fiber orientation" Their process lays down continuous strands along each layer but by its nature can't lay strands on the Z axis. So if you have a part that needs to be strong in every direction, this may not entirely solve your problem. It solves some of the problem, for some use cases.

(It also looks like it ought to be ridiculously slow.)

There's some answers at their FAQ ( https://markforged.com/faq/ ), but not as many as we might like.
but not tab.
I didn't see thai support . Any chance you will add that ?
> But for any task which requires semantics -- real human intelligence -- it is foolish to attempt to replace humans. It cannot be done.

Well we don't know this for sure, do we? "It's an open empirical question whether there are actual deterministic physical processes that, in the long run, elude simulation by a Turing machine; furthermore, ... it is an open empirical question whether any such processes are involved in the working of the human brain." [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis#Ph...
Is PHP unsafe? or a bad programming language?
I applaud your clever replacement of the now trite "paradigm shift" with "Kuhnian".

I haven't read the latest from Nagel so can't speak to that, but Searle's arguments work against only the most simplistic approaches to symbolic AI (which is no longer a very common framework) and his continued willful misunderstanding of how people in the field tend to think about cognition betray a lot of essentialism on the topic. Searle's attacks may stand against a naive form of functionalism but no one cares that "Watson doesn't know it won".

Added:
I think non-materialist thinking hasn't caught on in most fields of scientific endeavors because holding non-materialistic views in no way advances those occupations. It isn't the funding, it's that no one has come up with a way that having dualistic approaches lets you generate better testable hypotheses! If they did, the funding would come.

I'm not sure if you're trolling, I'm mostly responding because your comment is just on the edge of being reasonable.
> To a certain extent I think the whole STEM construction is based fundamentally on trying to hand-wave across this gap: math and physics are prestigious and perceived as hard/rigorous, while computer programming is in demand. The union (not intersection) of these two fields is STEM, which perceives itself as rigorous + hard + in-demand.

[0] was linked in the article, detailing the unemployment rates and earnings among most college majors, mentioning 7.8% unemployment among recent college CS graduates and 5.6% for experienced ones. This is used to support the claims of the article.

If CS was broken down into specialised fields, like the rest of the STEM, you would get a more accurate picture.

[0]https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/og6p8y9x1yeacejk1ci0
Here's some nice explanation on that matter: http://www.dns-sd.org/TrailingDotsInDomainNames.html.

Excerpt from the page:
"domain name that doesn't have a dot at the end is not fully-qualified and is potentially ambiguous".
Things to consider: WebP browser support is currently terrible (http://caniuse.com/webp), and it seems the solution to make WebP images display in non-supported browsers is through the help of a rather large JS file (http://webpjs.appspot.com/).
ExxonMobil brought in $469 billion in revenue last year, on which they made $44 billion in profit. It's not a big gamble for them at all if some programmer who gets $100k, $150k or whatever does not work out.

Of course, some bootstrapped company, or some company which had minimal angel funding or the like is taking more of a gamble, but everything is a gamble when you have no product/market fit and only 18 months or less worth of cash in the bank.
Building Micro Services (REST APIs) for your app – Design and Challenges
Venice votes to cut ties with Italy in online poll
I didn't downvote you (I am not much of a downvoter), but frankly, your comment (the first one) is exactly the sort of thing that can be legitimately downvoted as "not contributing to the discussion". You launched into a vehement philosophical critique that can't possibly be hashed out in a comment thread. Do you want people to start posting 20-page book reviews right here and now? And nothing you said is particulary earth-shatteringly new to anyone. It's just that none of us - not me, certainly - is going to solve or prove unsolvable the secret of consciousness in a HN comment.
That would be the ideal case, but the reality is a bit far off. As I said somewhere else, in the past the most upvotes I ever received were for sarcastic comments to a particular tech company (which I hate), but they arguably might not have contributed to the discussion. On the other hand, a few total negative votes were received on comments which I thought added to the discussion, but some people with high karma just didn't agree to it.

Now the problem with this new system is this: for unpopular links or articles, they'll never come to the front page, and thus very few 1000 karma people will see those. And thus, those comments might never become 'live' and visible to others, not creating any discussion at all, even further causing it to never become popular, because only conversation attracts more conversation.
Isn't this just "3.4.7 Remote Data Access (RDA)"[1] from Fielding's REST thesis[2] (where client means javascript+browser and server reads some-kind-of-wrapper-over-sql-or-nosql-so-that-quering-is-quite-simple?). I sometimes wonder if people haven't read that despite it being quite accessible, a fantastic introduction to architectural analysis and the hype of the Representional State Transfer acronym.

For those that have somehow missed it (is it really obscure?) -- the introduction alone is well worth the read, even if you don't care about the argument that leads up to REST being a good idea for an architecture for a hypertext application/system.

[1] https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/net_arch...
[2] https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
I'll take it as you don't have any evidence that human brain requires anything other than electromagnetism, then.
Of course! Don't even have the keyboard actually attached, have some guy in the gallery push the buttons too... Add those sound effects in post-production as well. No wonder there are no themes that enable your computer to beep and chirp like in the movies.
I figured as much. For a while I thought waps was going for an ironic, given the pg post that prompted this, posting. Now I think s/he is serious, but without citations there's no way to know for certain. Either way, I learned more about Copernicus and Galileo trying to figure out what waps was talking about.
Quality contribution(s) in an anonymous community? Who'd a thunk!
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

John Adams
US diplomat & politician (1735 - 1826)
Searle's whole Chinese Room argument is based on the notion that a Turing-test-passable system for processing Chinese input and responding with syntactically correct Chinese output can be engineered, but the man inside the room won't know what he's doing. This is flawed in two ways.

First, it assumes the man in the room can't learn anything about the system he's manipulating and eventually draw inferences about its grammar, which I think is bogus. Now true, you could sit in the box for a long time and not learn how to speak Chinese because you haven't learned the sounds that are associated with various Chinese characters. But eventually, after sufficient practice, you'd be able to read and write Chinese effectively, and I argue that you'd be able to derive the semantics by inference. I am arguing this on general principle, though having spent some time studying Chinese from books but not speaking much of it, I'm going to throw in 2 cents worth of empirical experience as well.

The other objection is a deeper one, made via a reductio ad absurdum; if a person can't learn Chinese this way, does an English speaker really understand English? Sure, s/he has all the appearance of comprehension and can conduct a conversation in person or via the written word, but how do we know the person isn't just mindlessly manipulating a set of rules that has been internalized since youth? Indeed, given the lack of critical thinking some people exhibit, there might even be some truth to this! but this is the heart of the problem - there's nothing about the Chinese Room argument that can't be restated as an English Room argument and used to deny the sentience of a native English speaker. And now we've come right back to Cartesian arguments about whether there is some particular seat of consciousness within the brain, some part that is more vital than others and which comprises the brain's 'driver's seat' - whether that's the pineal gland (Descartes), the corpus callosum, the anterior hippocampal gyrus (Jaynes) or what-have-you.

Putting this in the context of thermostatic beliefs, I see Searle's point about the thermostat not really believing anything...but then if I believe 'it is too hot/cold in here' am I having a real belief or is this just a convenient abstraction of my aggregate levels of cellular ATP and physical work levels to keep my body functioning, making my brain little more than the thermostat for my organs which is where 'the real action' of consciousness is taking place.

Essentially, I'm abstracting Doug Hofstadter's elaborate refutation of Searle on Godel Escher Bach; I'm with Hofstadter and Dennett in being a materialist proponent of strong AI, and think Searle's argument is isomorphic to the 'god of the gaps' argument made by intelligent design proponents.

I haven't read Nagel's new book yet, and I'll give it a whirl, but since these arguments are essentially philosophical rather than empirical I don't anticipate any sudden conversions. In turn, I think you ought to try Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Brakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
If you accept materialism as true, then by the Church-Turing hypothesis it is a necessary and foregone conclusion that computers will achieve full human intelligence, and even more, because they do not get tired and are not distracted.

But the hypothesis of materialism is what is in question here, both by my citation of the difference between syntax and semantics, and the obvious (to anybody who understands what a computer is and does) conclusion that computers do only syntax, while humans clearly do semantics also, and also by Searle's and Nagle's work.

I think that the evidence (which most people want to deny) is very clear that materialism is false. Most people deal with this evidence by ignoring it, or by denying it exists in the first place. They never address it.

You can prove me wrong. You can prove that materialism is correct. Just produce a real AI which is every bit as intelligent and capable as a human. Produce an AI which can really do semantics. Produce an AI which clearly convinces everybody that it is really intelligent in the way humans are, without any parlor tricks (like modelling an idiot savant).

It is much harder to prove that materialism is false, but that is what Nagle has done in his recent book. Have you read it? If he has not convinced you, please critique his arguments.
On the thermostat, I get the impression McCarthy was being a bit obtuse just to goad Searle a little. What he was illustrating is that simple systems can exhibit apparent intentionality while remaining simple. A steam governor or a thermostat are great examples. Living creatures, like the Aplysia californica snail studied by Eric Kandel, make use of analogously pretty damn simple mechanisms for reasonably sophisticated behaviour. Following this line of research, we've created remarkably effective systems like the 'syntax-only' Google Translate system, and IBM's Watson.

The questions posed by Nagel and Searle are interesting ones. Qualia is really difficult to account for - it makes sense for a materialistic system to have 'distinct placeholders' for different experiences, but why should they 'feel like' anything? Precisely because they propose a non-materialistic solution, they're difficult ones to explore - and so it's not really surprising that their own attempt to illustrate their perspective haven't been that convincing to materialists. The Chinese Room thought experiment is only convincing if you start out assuming the only thing that can 'think' is the person doing the card shuffling, which begs the question. See Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas for a good exploration of the argument.

If you're interested in sophisticated explanations of conscious experience and semantics from a materialist's perspective, Hofstadter and Sander's 'Surfaces and Essences' and Minsky's 'Society of Mind' and 'Emotion Machine' are great. Dennett's 'Intentional Stance' is also relevant - discussing how we can sensibly talk about material systems as having intention. Bear in mind that dualism is the more 'natural thought' in historical terms, and even hardcore materialists lapse into dualist terms easily. Researchers are rightly suspicious of unexamined assumptions. When it comes to science of the mind we have a history of novel, unnatural thoughts that are also very flawed (like Behaviourism), but critically, materialism (and Behaviourism) have both been productive.

One thing you can comfortably say about the progress of science is that at any point we're going to be partly wrong. Materialists are actively investigating and testing ideas, which meets my definition of 'real science'. Even if researchers are wrong on an important point, it doesn't make their work worthless, so you should probably hold back on the character assassination. Brain injury's effect on subjective experience and behaviour suggests to me that pure mechanism is important to experience, which is why materialism is my 'default hypothesis'.

If you want to ask hard questions, then go back and look at your assertions. What does 'really doing' semantics entail? How can the 'void' between semantic and syntactic systems be accounted for? Or, if we can't currently explain it, what can we do to investigate it?
I don't buy the hard to measure argument. CEOs at large companies make a tonne of money. This is usually justified by saying that they are more skilled than the average CEO but this kind of skill is also hard to quantify. Why does this argument work for CEO pay but not programmer pay?

If there was really a shortage you'd see salaries for programmers going up. Instead there are documented cases of companies colluding to keep pay down. Based on the high salaries you could argue that America has a CEO shortage and needs to increase visas for foreign CEOs.
This is an important point. The direction of the fibers makes a big difference. The basic method of strengthening carbon fiber weave (which is weaved at 90degree angles) is to alternate the layers so that they are 45 degrees apart, if laying up a normal flat part. When I created a longboard (similar to Boosted Boards in length) it was still very flexible, even with this method. The small part shown in the video is hard to bend, but so would a wooden part that small.
Eh, it was rude but nonetheless relevant IMO, even though I disagree with the GP.
Au contraire.

Since electromagnetism cannot cause intentions, or goals, and since the human obviously has both intentions and goals (teleology), it is clear that the human brain does encompass something in addition to electromagnetism. (The same statement applies to all of the chemical processes involved in the human brain.)

Please read Nagle's work. Read Searle's work. Read all of the philosophical literature on "intention".
I am sure there are a lot of (under)graduate research programs that could use that money better, than some eminent professor at the end of his days. Not that the recognition and praise is undeserved, just the money could of been better utilized imho.
> I think you ought to try Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Brakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Thanks. I'll buy it and read it.
They say that the previous FAQs will be replaced by links:

> Both Marshall and Bjarne will be updating their FAQs to either forward or link to the new FAQ on a per-FAQ level.
I actually found it optimistic, in the "destroy a village to save it"[1] sense. HN, as it currently stands, will cease to exist. I suspect the volume of submissions pointing directly to old wikipedia articles will dry up. I consider this a good thing.

I suspect the volume of submissions that are reposts piling onto something already on the front page (Erlang, Erlang, Erlang, Erlang, Haskell, Haskell, Haskell, Go, Go, Go, Snowden, Snowden, NSA, Erlang, Lisp, Lisp, Lisp, Lisp-flavored Erlang, NSA, Erlang, Erlang, Bacon and Spam, Javascript, Framework, Framework, NSA, Erlang, Haskell, Haskell, Erlang, Lisp, 2048, will dry up. I consider this a good thing.

I suspect I will spend less time on the site, either because conversations will become static expressions of views or because I won't have to filter through as much content, even though much of which marginalia I find quite engrossing. I consider this a good thing.

What comes next is open to conjecture. It could be a more mature salon full of reasoned discussions or it could become a ghost town with lots of great, old, discussions.

[1] I know, apocryphal at best.
Dutch counterfeiting ring's £30m swindle behind decision to replace £1 coin
if i understand you correctly, you seem to believe that qualia definitely affects physical reality. we don't know whether that's true or whether qualia is just a byproduct of physical reality, and given the probabilistic nature of what we can observe physically, we may never know.
There are another aspects that SMS is bad at:

- Crossing a border with SMS is rather expensive. Only recently that T-mobile finally dropping 35 cents charge for international SMSes, not sure about others...

- UTF-8 implementation sucked until recently. I think it is still unpredictable if it cross carrier.

- Group SMS is non-existant, although MMS can handles it. (and if you have someone uses sonething like Google Voice, forget group messaging... although it is probably Google Voice who would deserve some blames.) But there is no way to get receipients' capabilities.
My favourite was that http was blocked, but https wasn't at my school. Easy peasy :)
Maybe I've been talking to the wrong people, but all I hear about marketing through Facebook pages is that it delivers little to no results, and most companies that have a Facebook page aren't actively maintaining it anymore.

And growth in advertising doesn't tell me anything. Most of the advertising market consists of a bubble in which all parties tell each other it's worth the money with very little evidence to show for it. But maybe that's just because I live in a bubble where advertising is mostly invisible.
This will improve with time, every new technology starts like this and if it's better than the current technology, it sticks.
If anyone is interested, the discussion on implementing WebP support in Firefox has recently moved from Bugzilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=856375) to mozilla.dev.media (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.media/qM...).
I agree with you both, at the same time not everything using a session/token auth/authz combination needs to be "kereberos". While one might argue if it's good or bad, we've long let the web server be the authentication/authorization boundary -- and there's not really anything wrong with formalizing the architecture into a auth.example.com and a service[1-through-n].example.com.

Let sessionN.example.com check for a valid sessionN cookie, if it's missing, let SessioN.x.c set a temp cookie, pushing a token also to auth.example.com, then -- the client that's missing a valid session for serivceN, is redirected to auth.example.com with a ?token=<encrypted>. Auth does the authentication, and bounce back to serviceN.

[edit: Hm, I'm completely missing the SSO bit here, actually -- at the minimum there's a redirect bounce for every new service N+1 the client access after obtaining a valid session for auth.x.c. That would probably be a problem for AJAX? Maybe it's possible to wrap with javascript in a sane way]

Client has a session (flagged not authenticated, not authorized) for ServiceN. ServiceN asks auth for the status of the session-token, gets a valid (optionally along with authorization data -- depends what "authenticated" means) -- assuming a valid reply, ServiceN sets up a "proper" session (eg: php session id, whatever framework ServiceN uses).

Basically Single-sing-in -- without single-sign-out (unless ServiceN can/does sign client out via auth.x.c on sign-out from ServiceN).

Yes, this is basically CAS/Shibboleth/etc -- but for medium sized architectures it might actually be simpler.

All interaction(s) assume trusted communication paths (ssl for client-server/service -- vpn/ssl/internal for service-service).

The other way (less web centric?) is to simply have Service1-N lookup via LDAP/AD/RADIUS towards some central internal user database).