skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Get over yourself. Dries invented drupal, Dries named Drupal, Dries owns the trademark for Drupal and always has. Dries is also free to do with his trademark whatever he wishes.

If you chose to create a project/business named after someone else's trademark that's on you and your extremely poor judgment.

The personal attack against him and his FAMILY is more than "poor packaging"-- it's deplorable. Being 'upset' is not an excuse for insulting someone or their FAMILY. WTF is going on with this world that this is even remotely considered acceptable?
I don't get it ...
Instead shoot film and have to contentiously shell out for film, processing and scanning.
This obviously doesn't belong on HN. The site links to dildos for Christ's sake.
Five is a statistically meaningless sample. This is pointless drivel. Sorry.
I have a qualm with the following:

They even provided a ridiculous genetic explanation for how a species with a small percentage gay people might evolve

Correct me if I'm wrong, but scientific evidence suggests that a gene (or set of genes) may be responsible for homosexuality. In this case, an explanation for its existence is both warranted and interesting. The leading explanation, as I've understood it, is that the gene may make women more fertile, perpetuating the life of the gene through one gender only.

Being "gay" may be more than just a label. This is not to say that genetically we are either 1s or 0s, but that some people may be genetically definitively gay.

Furthermore, if homosexuality were a taboo, then it doesn't seem at all outlandish to presume that genetically gay famous figures would lead PC lives and have extramarital homosexual sex.

This may seem obvious but I thought you were too quick to say that science which supports the existence of homosexuality is "ridiculous." Could you at least post the evidence which demonstrates or suggests that this is not the case?

The article touched on accurate points, I just don't think that we should necessarily disacknowledge scientists who are trying to explain a very real phenomenon.
I think the definition of consciousness is implied as whatever we humans are experiencing right now. So for a computer to be truly realizing its own existence, it would have to be modeled after ourselves.
Hackintosh's are pretty old news. I'd love to see an article detailing some of the challenges in the actual hacking of it.
I've thought of it several times, but it wasn't until recently that it actually kind of scared me. It was just a surprise thought that arose as I was once again thinking about the topic.

It probably scared me this time and not others because I'm very stressed over the GRE, and grad school applications (namely: where the heck should I apply), and how me telling grad schools "Oh, I'd like to study machine consciousness" will go over. I could be wrong, but I'm concerned they wont take me seriously...so I've been trying to think of something that sounds more acceptable.
Try this thought experiment.
Imagine there was a replicator that could take an exact copy of your current atom states and replicate them somewhere else while keeping you perfectly intact. Doesn't have to be physical - could be replicated by a computer program.

Now here's the thing - you would still feel like you, looking out of your eyes. The other versions of you would be distinctly separate to you - not you.

That bit that makes you feel you are you - that's what some would call consciousness and others would call a soul.
There is one nonreligious factor that significantly differentiates humans from machines: that humans evolved, while machines were built by humans. There's an argument to be made that humans cannot understand consciousness well enough to build it, because consciousness is our only tool for doing that.

Of course, this only applies to intentional creation of consciousness. It says nothing about the distinct possibility that we could create a consciousness by accident.
Probably not on-topic for HN, but I really agree.

I never got why gay people make such a big deal about insisting they are born that way and that it wasn't a choice (I'm sure not all do, but every one I've met does, and I've had 2 gay room mates and lived in Boys Town, so I don't think my sample size is particularly small ...). I don't know (or care) if it's a choice or not - I just don't see how it is at all relevant.

I really don't care who you want to sleep with/marry/etc - it's none of my (or the government's) business.

It's a really stupid way to fight for gay rights. It's exactly the same as trying to fight for integration by saying 'Blacks are born this way - we shouldn't be punished for it' instead of 'My skin color isn't relevant to where I go to school."

Even if the first is more expedient in the short-term, I feel like it's just going to do more serious harm in the long-term. It's almost like saying 'Some people were unlucky enough to be born with attribute X. We should try to be charitable to them' The problem is that it still suggests that 'X' is bad thing and that you should 'hate the sin, not the sinner.' It would be much better to simply say 'There's nothing wrong with X.'
It sounds like you had one Java developer who was a dud. Maybe the .NET guy was just a dud too, and the next 4 .NET guys will be rock stars?
Where did you go to school? It sounds very much like you have a symbolic background. There are many approaches and people are attacking them from different angles. Here are just a couple of resources worth looking at off the top of my head:

Christof Koch at CalTech (hi, virgil)
http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/

Larry Yaeger & John Beggs
http://www.indiana.edu/~rcapub/v30n2/mindmade.shtml

Of course, Douglas Hofstadter
http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/

Koch, Churchland, etc. speak on consciousness:
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/342
Weird compared to what? I have no experience being anything other than a living, breathing human. Thomas Nagle wrote up the classic "qualia" argument you're making as "What is it like to be a Bat?" (here: http://www.clarku.edu/students/philosophyclub/docs/nagel.pdf..., it seems persuasive: that there is a certain subjective quality to consciousness & conscious experience— it must feel like something to be a bat, or a person, or whatever? Hofstadter's and Dennett's book, The Mind's I (http://www.amazon.com/Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self-Soul/...) is an interesting introduction to this kind of stuff, the authors have a lot of fun @ qualia's expense.
It's the Kodak conspiracyyyyyyyyy!
The strange thing about monotonous corporate programmer jobs is that the only things you can get passionate about are your tools. They speak of things like IoC, DI, and TDD as though they were at the core of what they are accomplishing at their job. It's nice to know what those things are and when they're appropriate, but I just get this image of an assembly line worker preaching to me about his amazing screwdriver.
You are assuming that there is no innate quality of human organic compounds and processes that differentiates us from electrical components.

It may very well be the case that this is either true or false. We simply don't have enough evidence.

And given the fact that we are discovering new properties of matter and organic reactions all the time, there is a bias towards this being false.
A/B tests don't cover everything that entales the user experience design profession. It's about a strategic user-centered process from the beginning of the design. To build a product and then revise without first considering the users throughtfully is a waste of resources and time.
I am at NC State (graduating in May), and my research adviser does have a symbolic background (I'm pretty sure)...very good read on your part!

Thanks very much for the links. I am stressing over where to apply, hopefully these will help some.
I completely agree that having or nor having college degree does not necessarily indicate chances for success. As article indicated we have many successful drop outs but how many drop outs are actually become successful, probably less than 0.0001%. I believe in power of dedication and desire. If you are motivated and know what you want you will learn and pick up knowledge much faster and in more efficient way then any college can teach you and will succeed. As the meter of the fact, most successful drop outs quit school because it was not build for them and held them from growing quick. They are fast paced and proved it. However, for average person who does not have extraordinary ambitions, college might be a good place to learn how to learn, to learn how to organize thought, to figure out what they need and meet good people. Nevertheless, completely support college degree but it should not be an indicator of success when preceded by public, by employer by business, however you have to have some way to measure you potential success if all you have is resume consisted of one page and few facts.
Hey guys, maybe human consciousness is nothing else but an "illusion" provided by the matching of information between what we perceive through our senses and what we have stored in our brains? Of course, that "matching" process is the big problem to crack. Could we hypothesize that when babies are born they aren't aware because they don't have a 'minimum threshold' of information in their brains that is required to enable the 'match' being produced by their input senses? Or from the other spectrum, say, advanced patients with Alzheimer disease lose their self-awareness because their memories are destroyed and the 'match' needed to trigger the 'illusion' of consciousness is disrupted ?
As a meta-comment, notice that threads like these usually result in many people posting lengthy first-level comments, and not doing much replying and discussing. (Compared to other HN threads, of course.)
Maybe this guy has a point, but he start of talking about absolute trash. Yes, I can and do play VHS vidoes today. Yes, camera cards do die out after 20 or 30 years, but what has this to do with the fact I can make backups, or just keep copying them around forever, try doing that with film. And the wizard of Oz looks so good because of digital remastering, and they didn't have any choice but to use film. When you start of your argument with this bullshit, I stop reading.
Google's search results page blocks all crawlers (including Google) using robots.txt, so it's a moot point. Nofollow's only relevant when a page might appear in a search engine.
> The central effect of flagging a site as spam is not a quality assurance issue.

Sure it is, spam makes search less useful for users, keeping it out is most definitely a quality assurance issue.

> it is to intimidate sites into stopping a practice which hurts Google

Which hurts Google's users as well, spam hurts us all, spam sucks. Google is correct here in removing sites which partake in such practices.
Another fellow awesome user on HN :)

I used xmonad for a while actually before switching to awesome. I found the latter easier to configure and better out of the box (especially with multiple displays), plus I wanted to learn Lua over Haskell at the time. I found my productivity increased dramatically using either.
There's an inaccuracy in the article, Microsoft didn't think they were dealing with AST, they were dealing with AST. From the press release he links to:

"The patents were recently purchased by Allied Security Trust (AST) from Microsoft to ensure the patents did not fall into the hands of non-practicing entities (more information on non-practicing entities is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll, among other sites) that could seek to assert the patents against Linux products."
Just wanted to second it, the presentation was really good.
It's not conscious until it gets stupid around the hot new server down the hall: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6132718/Men-los...
Slightly misleading / sensational headline from TechCrunch. A better one might be: "Plaintiff in patent lawsuit may get to inspect Facebook's code."

That is to say, this seems largely like a non-issue / non-story.
Wow, this is really stupid.
The Problem with Design and Implementation
Weird to read an article that stresses making money but is anti-marketing.

I understand most marketing is bloated. But even the best products need GOOD marketing to bring in the dough. The solution is not to be anti-marketing. Rather, be pro revenue focused marketing.

Unimpressed.
What's new in Total Commander 7.5
"In order for this to occur, however, significant advances must be made in fields outside of technology; e.g. quantum computing will probably be a huge stepping stone, and for that to come to fruition we must first fully prove quantum mechanics."

I recently heard about the term "yak shaving". This seems to be a good example.
what about when the brain is powered by machines? Does that count as a computer being self-aware?
Sounds like you should be going to the Singularity Summit to talk to other people who devote their lives to this issue.

Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument details the most obvious probabilistic implications of substrate independence in consciousness: http://www.simulation-argument.com/

The most blatantly obvious indicator that consciousness is substrate-independent: We are DNA-based life forms. DNA stores information. It's program code stored in molecules. You are the product of the code of your parents. If for some bizarre reason we find out that we HAVE to use DNA to create other conscious systems, we will still have the ability to do exactly that. Not "machine" in the sense of being composed of metal, but certainly "machine" in the sense of not being the immediate product of natural selection.

David Chalmers' work should be particularly relevant to you, and you will find him at the Singularity Summit this year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers

Even if you don't live to see machine consciousness as a reality, the only other pursuits that might compare are anti-aging and intelligence enhancement research. If you're not going to create something that can figure out how to give you an indefinite self-contiguous narrative, you have to support its creation or face certain death.

I'm guessing you already have your CS undergrad or will have it soon, and you're interested in AI, so that seems the natural choice. I'd say you're overdecided if that's what you want to study.
I very definitely write code as part of my design process. Code is free. It's not like building a shed where nailing some boards together to see how a truss should work costs money. Banging on some keys to see how sockets should interplay is free (disregarding time, but we're already engaged in "design", and I presume we are interested in "the right answer, sometime" instead of "the wrong answer, today"). So I code as part of my design process. I might throw that code away. I might keep a function or five. Who knows? But there is no way to know what the design is going to look like until you know all of the limitations, and the only way to know all of the limitations is to actually take a peek.
Facebook’s Experimental Desktop Notifications App For Mac
The "weirdness" (or whatever you want to call the enormous explanatory gap between our mental lives and inanimate matter) deserves an answer. It's not something to sweep under the rug as "subjective" or "unscientific" or "poorly defined".

I agree, though, Hofstadter and Dennett have done an extraordinary job of devising such an answer. There is lots more work to be done, of course.
MonoDevelop goes cross platform
> what about when you don't need all that capacity anymore

It's not really an interesting use case... For the same reason that in every language I can think of, hashtables grow as you insert items but they don't shrink as you remove them, because if it got to size X once, it will probably do so again in the near future.

That said, decommissioning nodes will fall out naturally from our work on automatic load balancing for the 0.5 release.
* The point of the policy, the point of this publicly declared part of their secret sauce is not to recognise and flag spam sites, it is to intimidate sites into stopping a practice which hurts Google.*

The practice hurts Google because it hurts Google's users, so of course they want to stop it. As a frequent Google search user I want them to stop it as well. Buying your way to the top of Google results should be made as difficult as possible.
it makes a perverse sense.

It almost becomes a bluffing game - obviously Twitter can generate some revenues. Deals are done on the basis of future revenue. If current revenue is unknown - then everything is just based on projections..

"It is better to stay silent and be thought a fool rather than speak and remove all doubt"

Once you're generating revenue - a buyer has to show how they could do it better. (Or buy you at Nx revenue - a loss for you)
this is very well done for a v .5.

I post articles like this for another reason:

Someone please build this for "everything". I currently have a fb, twitter, and gmail notifier app. I'd love instant RSS updates, along with stocks. Push it to me. Also make it an open api that any company can push to. There's adobe wave, but that's missing the mark somehow. I'd pay for this, without a doubt.

If there's some lone hacker out there with a half filled out YC W10 app and/or some code going on in textmate, please please please make this. I'd love to give you my money.
NoSQL is a buzzword, originally to describe "distributed open source databases" but it's catchy enough that pretty much every nonrelational db uses it.

So saying "NoSQL gives you [or doesn't give you] X" is meaningless.

And for the record, SQL is great, but trying to keep using it once your data set has outgrown a single machine is like "trying to build a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes." (Gotta love jwz.)
Consciousness is a feature of our external world/ Universe. We should formulate theories and test it experimentally. We should describe it in terms of basic components. Unfortunately, this is not how AI has been treating consciousness. AI treats consciousness as an art/engineering problem rather than rigorous science. But, there is hope : Journal of Experimental and Theoretical AI http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/tf/0952813X.html

Current theories say consciousness is caused by a specific mode of representation/ computation. Like good scientists and rational thinkers we should submit everything to rigorous testing/ proof. Let us not please take things at face value.

[Or we can take the easy route and live in a bubble :) ]
"I was talking to some people today who are struggling to get mysql to do ~100 insert/update operations per second."

I apologize for being flippant, but.. Were they running MySQL on an EeePC ?

They are probably Doing Something Wrong if they are struggling to do >100 insert/updates a second on even modest hardware.
Does it matter? The value of Facebook is in its users; not code.
I wonder how many of the Hackintosh people have tried Linux. I would say it is much simpler to setup a nice Linux distro and make it look like a Mac... That is if you are into that sort of thing.

All you would need is Gnome, an OS X theme and AWN. It is free and legal.

I ran a Macbook pro for a few years in college and I cant bring myself to switch back from Linux. The only thing that might put me on Mac is developing an iPhone/Touch app. I feel Linux is on par or somewhere not too far behind. Am I wrong here?
I've hardly been using Facebook at all lately, but I bet it that combining an application like this with deleting 90% of my "friends" would make it very useful. I think maybe the killer feature that Facebook is missing is marking someone as your actual friend.
Somebody Has To Say It: It’s Time For iTunes Lite
Of course it's possible, everything you can imagine is possible, given enough time and resources. But is it probable?

But I think the question you should be asking yourself, if you're wondering how to spend your life, isn't if machine consciousness is probable, possible, whatever. You should be asking, what do I want to do with MY consciousness? If you want to work on these problems, then do it. Doesn't matter if it happens in your lifetime or not. If you enjoy it then give it a try. Worst case is you spend your time doing what you enjoy. Best case is... well, machine consciousness I suppose.

Besides, you should always be thinking big. The person I admire the most has a small metal plaque that sits on her desk. It says "what would you attempt if you knew you couldn't fail". I happen to think this is the most powerful sentiment I've ever encountered.
But we know how to get the effects of evolution... on steroids: unsupervised, feedback/effect based learning (generic algorithms, NNs, etc.)

We can already generate big enough NNs that we can understand them in general (some areas get "specialised" in some way and more active in some conditions), and we know that the result is what we expect - but there's no way someone will take a look at the weights / resulting model and tell you what it does. I think we can create consciousness intentionally, but not understanding the process completely.
What? Conscious machines already exists. Now its only a matter of coping them into different material. And maybe learning about consciousness in process.

I mean, we know almost all about the low level - neurons. They are relatively easy. Signal goes in, signal goes out. So now, even if we don't understand this whole high level emergent process we can still copy it. Its like if we had a assembler code of some big and highly complicated algorithm - even if we don't understand it we can still rewrite it to different machine and it will work.

There are about 100 billion neurons and about 500 trillion connections in brain of an adult, so you can take Moors law and estimate, not if, but when it will be possible to brute-force brain. I say 2025.
Some philosopher said this sometime back regarding Penrose's theory: (I can't find the original so might be a bit different)
"Quantum Computation in microtubules is as explanatory as magical pixie dust in the brain"

We can substitute pretty much anything for the first noun phrase:
" X is as explanatory as magical pixie dust in the brain "
I'm often wary of those complaining about Google's policies because they're based on the idea that being listed on Google is a right and not a privilege. This, to me, is faulty logic. Unless they're deliberately taking part in anticompetitive behaviour by blocking competition, I think it's perfectly within their rights to delist or demote you for pretty much any reason they can think of.

I think Google have made it pretty clear that as far as they're concerned they don't want people selling links to other sites in a way designed to manipulate search-engine rankings, and if you do so you may be delisted or have a lowered ranking on their site in the future. I think that's specific enough, personally, and think that anyone wanting a more specific policy either wants to work around them to violate the intended spirit and complain if and when Google punishes them for doing so.
>I define consciousness as having an internal model of the world that includes yourself, as well as your own though processes (at a lower degree of fidelity). This says how you compute things, not what you are computing, so it is orthogonal to Church-Turing.

Do you have any proof or any testing that can be done to validate that?
I'd love to subscribe, but given scarcity of attention, I really do not want to hook myself up to that firehose.
Today's Apple keynote video has been posted to Apple's podcast feed.
I'm not sure this belongs here, but I found a better link with a slide show while looking for the fanged frog. The YouTube blurb has a little info on it too.

http://www.backpacker.com/researchers_new_species_papua_new_...
When A Start-Up’s Valuation Is Unveiled - Venture Capital Dispatch - WSJ
"On communicating better" --- 37signals revises security pages.