skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Searle is ignored by AI researchers because it has no relevance--it has been thoroughly debunked.

The question of whether the man in the chinese room understands chinese is the wrong question. Someone reading symbols from outside of the room is not interacting with the man, they are interacting with the symbols--the algorithm. The algorithm itself does understand chinese! This algorithm is made real, it is reified by the actions of the man in the room to create and sustain it. The algorithm exists on an entirely new layer of abstraction from the man. So while it is true that the man does not understand chinese, the algorithm itself demonstrates every possible requirement for understanding--semantics as you would put it.

A human is analogous to the algorithm and the man shuffling papers is analogous to our neurons. Of course our neurons do not "understand" what they are processing, but as a whole our neurons create an entity that itself has full understanding.

Semantics do in fact come from symbols. When I enter my password into my computer and it uses that password and allows me access to some resource as a consequence, that is semantics. The password string exists in a specific context within the computer system, from which it derives meaning. The difference between the computer system and a person is that the semantic meaning is not generic and integrated. The password exists within the semantic context of granting or revoking access to a resource. It can only exist here as there is no mechanism in standard programming languages for that semantic meaning to be integrated with other parts of the system (without explicitly programming every single case). The brain on the other hand has generic semantics that effortlessly allows integration of different kinds of semantics into a single whole. This is the only meaningful difference.
> “Generally, if you are self-made man and earn money, you are looked at with suspicion,”

> there’s a deep-rooted feeling that you don’t show that you make money

> It’s more like, if someone has something I can’t have, I’d rather deprive this person from having it than trying to work hard to get it myself

This. A lot of people still don't understand money can me made. They see succesfull men and woman and assume the money must have been stolen instead of made.
>"Neither. Try mercenaries."

"Freebooters" may be a more appropriate term
It took me two months to get used to my desk. Still, I was only able to work for 6 hours in a day when I used it. I spent a lot of time in the shop, it was where all my friends were and we would hang out there, so it wasn't uncommon to be there for 12-14 hours. I used a stool, or got away from my desk and did something else.

I agree with you about the neck for the 135 degree thing.
They're not the government, they don't need warrants, and they can't sue themselves or ask the police to investigate something they're going to file a civil case about.

They had explicit permission to do exactly what they did (you grant that permission when you sign up for the service). It may be gross that they dug through someone's email, but they didn't violate any laws or ethical guidelines. If the people involved didn't want their emails read by Microsoft, they shouldn't have granted Microsoft permission to read their emails.
Yes, I've been convicted of this. :/

If I remember correctly, the legal limit is 0.02 for underage people, to account for mouthwash etc.
I'd like to preempt the inevitable posting of the link to the Cornell article about standing desks. It's a complete, 180-degree misrepresentation of the study it claims to be based on.

Details here: http://redd.it/kfjet
That was, and still is, the case where I went to school in New Hampshire. The decision to treat the body as a container is made at the state level, I believe (as the drinking age is determined by the individual states, although effectively federally-mandated by the threat of withholding significant federal funding).
This whole thing is an early April Fools' right?

"44 Trademark exchange
I like that we build lots of IP
Problem: people think ideas are really valuable.
Solution: a marketplace to sell IP"
Please let's not have another ideas versus execution debate, thanks!
And then what? Not install the update?

The difference is, if you were running a supported version, then you could get MS to help you solve the update installation. But with the unsupported OS, all you can do is skip the update. And then you're back in the realm of an unpatched, insecure OS.
What Microsoft did here is different from the Google behavior they criticize in multiple ways:

Google's ad mechanism reads all emails sent and received by all gmail users, even in many cases people using paid Google Apps mail unless the administrator has opted out (I've encountered companies that left gmail ads enabled). This means that to a degree, the privacy and security of all your emails is compromised - though we would all hope that Google firewalls that stuff off carefully and ensures that no traces of the mails remain after they're scanned for ad keywords.

To say that Microsoft accessing one account based on evidence in order to gather more evidence for a civil suit - with explicit permission granted by the user during signup - is equivalent to Google's behavior is just blatantly wrong.

Both behaviors may be undesirable, but they are very, very different.
I think the larger point of this is that this guy found a system not intended for this at all, and it still works better than businesses set up for this purpose.
Link to previous discussion (11 days old):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7384818
This is pretty clearly a knee jerk reaction by the New York Times to Hollande's wealth tax:

>He had taken that job after his attempt to start a business in Marseille foundered under a pile of government regulations and a seemingly endless parade of taxes. The episode left him wary of starting any new projects in France. Yet he still hungered to be his own boss.
>
>“A lot of people are like, ‘Why would you ever leave France?’ ” Mr. Santacruz said. “I’ll tell you. France has a lot of problems. There’s a feeling of gloom that seems to be growing deeper. The economy is not going well, and if you want to get ahead or run your own business, the environment is not good.”

A feeling that something just isn't quite right about the place, and it's better in London? Gee I wonder if they mean this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2161151/With-Holland...

>Some wealthy businesspeople have also been packing their bags. While entrepreneurs fret about the difficulties of getting a business off the ground, those who have succeeded in doing so say that society stigmatizes financial success.

Yep. This article isn't about poor, plucky upstart rags-to-riches entrepreneurs at all. It's about manufacturing consent for slashing taxes on the ultrawealthy. The rich are pissed about Hollande's 75% tax and they want you to do something about it for them.
Jumping rope regularly has helped me avoid shin splints. 10 minutes once a week seems to do the trick for me (now that I can jump for 10 minutes straight -- took a bit to get there).
5 Awesome CIA And Secret Service Movies You Should Watch Again – Top 5 Awesome
Assuming that not everybody in that situation [1] a) is American b) is fat c) has enough 'cheap crap' to sell to make up the difference, a much more achievable solution is "park/get off public transport half a mile earlier than you normally do and walk the difference". If you can't afford the extra 10 minutes out of bed, or the parking bit is impractical, take 15 minutes out of your lunch break and walk around. Bonus in each case is you get to discover more about the local area in which you work.

[1] speaking as a Londoner, living in a modest suburban flat about an hour's journey from where I work, your suggestion is financially impractical, even if I sold all my possessions. Even if it were practical, I'm sure you recognise that not everyone could do this simultaneously.
Microsoft was wrong, and is tacitly admitting it even as they ostensibly claim the opposite.

That said, their stated justifications probably suffice to get this categorized as a "forgivable error".
i don't think the language is what matters most when talking about technology. The platform is the important thing. When coding on iOS or Android, learning Objective-C or Java isn't the longest thing to learn. Learning the framework objects and patterns is really what matters.
Same goes for HTML5, node, Ruby on Rails, etc... A computer language is very rarely using more than 50 language constructs (operators + keywords), which could easily be learned in less than a few days.

Haxe doesn't solve this issue i think (and nothing can).
No one's dropped the ball - everyone's ignored it as someone else's problem as it's a maintenance issue, not one for direct profit. Same as for the y2k and and IPv4 problems. Outside of IT, it's probably the same for global warming. There's probably a special/psychological term for this.
Show HN: Vanilla JS Dropdowns for Bootstrap
In college, when I worked as a cook at Waffle House, I'd frequently do double-shifts, 16-hour days standing. But it's a lot of movement, you're constantly moving from the food stock to the griddle.

My father is on his feet all day. He delivers bread to grocery stores. He is constantly speed-walking. He usually has about a 10 minute drive between stores, where he of course sits in his truck, and spends about 45 minutes in each store.

Now that I work from home, sometimes I take a shower to think. That's only tangentially related.
I am not getting what does this mean? Does that mean I could switch to any Network Carrier within Holland and not having to switch sim card?

So basically a Software Defined Sim Card?

I thought Apple tried this but failed. May be they could try again?
Ok, let me put it this way: if there happens to exist some territory matched by your randomly-generated map, you still have the problem that a randomly-generated map was not in any way caused by the territory. Of course, that's just unpacking the word "match".
Why does the absolute filesize of SVG matter? Nearly all web servers will compress it before putting it on the wire.
Ah, yes. The TV Cop. They're never wrong, never excessively violent, never need permission to "do their job", work happily with any TLA, have affairs with coworkers, glamorize the dirty cop, ...

I don't think I've ever seen a routine traffic stop on TV. Maybe it's not TV-worthy. But if a five-year-old asks me, "What do cops do?", which version do I give them?
8 biggest “enemies of the Internet”
I would describe that as simply "being professionals". No magic n-time programmers, just mature pros.

What you're describing as a great programmer is the equivalent of a chef in the kitchen, what you're describing as good programmer is a talented amateur cook, and your medium programmers are ordinary people that can cook an edible meal.

We have a shortage of professional developers, and a huge number of people who wouldn't get hired if they had the same skill level in a profession where there wasn't a shortage.

We've put lots of meat in seats to compensate for the shortage of mature, professional developers. Meat that can get away with incredibly immature, irresponsible and unprofessional behavior because, hey, who else are they going to get?

Fuck me, the ones that manage to build only slightly more shit than they break already get labelled "decent" programmers.

And it's self perpetuating, because if you combine the amateur playgrounds of most software departments with the systematic wage suppression you create a career perspective anybody with any sense would steer clear of.

With all those clowns calling themselves programmers, and the rest of us being tarred with the same brush, who the fuck wants to be a programmer when they grow up?
What sucks about digital calendars. What does the perfect cal app look like?
Calling all digital calendars users: We've built Foogi to instantly find common free times from anybody on any calendar. But we don't want to stop there. What are the things about digital calendars that anger or frustrate you right now?<p>What are some things that you would love digital calendars to do? And what services would you like digital calendar to work with?
Yes this is certainly a problem with HN where its active timezone is US centric. Which means news not submitted during those time are likely to never shown up.
Let’s End The Search For Mobile TV
I'm genuinely astounded that there is not more of a movement towards open source style text books, that accept contributions (e.g. chapters) from reputable academics from around the world.

I understand that there is a huge amount of money involved, but surely the only stakeholders who benefit are:

1) The publishers, for obvious reasons

2) The authors, as they may get a healthy sum of money for writing a given text book.

3) (possibly) the teachers, if they get bribed into using a particular book in their curriculum.

Lets forget about the publishers, because they are for-profit businesses who do not have the students best interest at heart. We'll also forget about the teachers, because this type of bribing is not common in my experience (teachers I know tend to go for what they already know, rather than the new shiny book which came to them in the mail). Also, we can presume that teachers are not in the business of squeezing every last dollar out of their students.

As for the authors, I don't have an issue with people making money by writing text books. I know a few academics and industry people who are able to pursue more interesting goals because they have money coming in from books they've written. BUT THIS IS THE TINY MINORITY. Of all of the academics who would be capable of writing a chapter for, e.g. an introductory programming book, I would randomly estimate that only 0.1% of them have written a text book that is used in universities. If another 5% of them got together and contributed to an open source text book on the topic, that was liberally licensed and free for students to obtain and distribute, then why should we not embrace that?

I understand that "getting your name out there" is not motivation enough for doing such things [0]. However, surely just doing it for the good of education and teaching is motive enough?

Every now and again I see books come up on hacker news which seem like quite good resources (recently it was a cryptography book, another time it was a link to a github repo for a specific field of mathematics). It would be great if these projects could take off, and become the bibles for their relevant areas. And if a particular academic institution disagrees with the teaching of the book, don't go out and prescribe expensive text books to your students. Rather, fork the (e.g. CC-licensed) book that they are not happy with, and change it. Or better yet, submit a pull request, discuss the issues with the maintainers, and hopefully resolve the issue amicably.

It just astounds me that this is not a thing.

[0] - This occurs a lot in discussions about how companies such as Google try to get artwork from people at zero cost, citing that the artist will get "exposure".
Butterfly Wings
I can share my experience as a wechat user: yes it is a platform, yes people want and need much more than sms. In fact it is very easy to imagine a wechat phone that will fulfill the needs of users. And it is extremely dangerous: this platform is a prison! This can kill internet.
You might find it more instructive to ask this question the other way around: Why do tech employees sign contracts that reach beyond the boundaries of legislated human rights? Is there any better indicator of employee exploitation?

On reflection, I think the answer to your version of the question is that experienced teachers are expected to bring their teaching resources with them to new employment. Other people's resources are generally just not as useful. Having an employer hold exclusive right to the IP would be counter-productive to industry best practice on this point.

But, things are indeed changing in the direction that the grandparent commenter indicates.
It is convenient for Facebook that it is in the best interests of the users. Facebook in part become as big as it is today via the free advertising it receives on the vast majority of business advertising which includes a Facebook page link or even just an icon. Businesses have been incentivized to build this audience.

But arguably now Facebook is so intrenched that it can remove some of this incentive and even profit of giving some of it back for a price.
"Freedom score"? Really? Some number, representing "freedom", calculated from the US point of view - it's, how should I put it... Less than impartial. Not to mention method of calculating freedom.
> Taxes, Frustration, More Taxes

Uh, that's how I could describe my current situation in Germany. We were a little too successful last year and now the tax advance payments are endangering our liquidity.

It feels as if this year I had spent more time reading about taxes and regulations than working on the business.

Something is wrong when taxes become such a prominent part of your daily business life ...
These tech companies have to grow up. They are consumer companies now. Just because you can do something does not mean you do it. The CEO should have made the call that some tech secrets are not worth the press and upset users.
I understand that it's not that simple, but having this guy shut up was not worth it.
And I want companies to value their customers more than some piece of code.
Eh this guy is patio11, he's a practically celebrity around these parts!

I'm pretty sure davidw knows that and said it tongue-in-cheek. davidw has been on HN a long time and is, himself, high up on the highest karma list of people.
That is a straw man jobs in technology are not like professional sports or acting - having said that player unions and SAG/Equity do negotiate minimums so that not all the cash goes to the lucky few.
TIL that businesses should own their own name on the internet, and point their customers at that instead of into some walled garden.
This has been my experience too. I stick to my personal profile though. People who endure liberal propaganda, bad jokes, and half-developed ideas are a very small and focused niche.
That wasn't a negotiation, that was a demand. Dan'l did the negotiation. "People are not often as clear as Steve was" - he wasn't clear at all. He put on a performance for the developers, and Dan'l was the person who had to clarify what Steve wanted.
Your example is telling: of course Bill Gates would be against patents, he stole the very basis for his entire empire from Xerox!

I don't have studies to cite, and that is certainly a fair argument against patents. However, there is a principle at play here that is very relevant. Is society better off where one can reap benefits for their efforts? Most would say yes. At least in some cases, patents increase order and fairness in society by creating a mechanism for one to benefit from efforts that would otherwise go unrewarded by the market. If society deems these efforts worthwhile, then society legislates a mechanism for compensation. There's nothing irrational about this.
I think it is more akin to building a 18k email marketing list and then having to pay a fee for each subsequent email you sent to them.
And you thought that people who had specifically asked to read you should be able to read you! Foolish human.

A musician friend on FB friend notes that posts containing the words "song" or "music" or that link to Soundcloud appear to get badly downvoted by the algorithm in casual tests he's done. Possible workaround: put your s*ngs on Youtube.
Indian banks may switch to Linux rather than extending XP support
Another route is to go to your local developer meetups – even if the topic isn’t directly related to you – and ask around.
A musician friend on FB friend notes that posts containing the words "song" or "music" or that link to Soundcloud appear to get badly downvoted by the algorithm in casual tests he's done. So anecdote, but not completely untested anecdote.

Possible workaround: put your s*ngs on Youtube.
You missed my point. Technology is not the reason WebP is probably going nowhere.

Apple, Microsoft and Firefox for whatever reason (politics/principle) either won't support defacto standards or have to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing so (see SPDY). And without those three you are never going to get above 45%.
The Eight Stages of Successful Social Movements (1987)
I think every time the issue of Steve's maniacal side comes up I
feel obliged to bring this up:

Wozniak on Jobs:

I was inspired by Stanford intellectuals like
Jim Warren talking this way at the club. Lee
Felsenstein wanted computers to help in things
like the antiwar marches he'd orchestrated in
Oakland and I was inspired by the fact that
these machines could help stop wars. Others in
the club had working models of this computer
before Jobs knew it existed. He came down one
week and I took him to show him the club, not
the reverse. He saw it as a businessman. It as
I who told Jobs the good things these machines
could do for humanity, not the reverse. I
begged Steve that we donate the first Apple I
to a woman who took computers into elementary
schools but he made me buy it and donate it
myself. [1]

The contrast in the personalities of Jobs and Wozniak could not be more clearer.

However I agree with first part of what toddmorey has said below:

3. Most importantly, being an asshole may help
great ideas get powered through, but it's not
the only way.

The latter part, I'm unsure and circumspect about:

The people I most admire have found
success while still being amazing human beings
to work beside.

In the valley and elsewhere, I think this is increasingly not the case.

I think we should stop telling kids that life rewards the passionate and the
skilled. By rewards I certainly do not mean some inner calm or contentment
coming from indulging in what you love.

I mean the conventional rewards of recognition, admiration and remuneration.

Life is rigged in favor of the opportunists.

The schemers, hustlers and the witty-talkers.

But certainly not the plainspoken and the adept.

This is what many kids who have grown up on the stories of Steve Jobs and the valley lore surrounding many other iconic founders, will take away as their
guiding principles.

They will grow up thinking, "Life rewards the unabashedly ravenous, merciless and ruthless blokes among us. Life does not spare the dignified, the pleasant or the mild-mannered."

There is nothing to suggest otherwise.

No matter how you dice it, your conscience tells you that this is more
than a bit disenchanting if not unfair.

[1]

http://i.imgur.com/a1I9DTs.jpg

https://plus.google.com/+CarmsPerez/posts/GnVTvQNgvpf
What?!

In Europe we have pre-paid packages with flat rate SMS.
Flash is animation software. That people write games in it is a function of its past ubiquity and a symptom of the dangers of Turing completeness. Actually coding in Flash is unbelievably horrible. This is like an announcement of a well-supported cross-platform Brainfuck kit.
The 75% wealth tax point was only a minor point in an article that expressed many many other points and anecdotes, and whose greater argument was that the entrepreneurial climate in France was poor. The fact that your argument focuses on this minor point in order to dismiss the whole point is rather telling about what consent is being manufactured here...