skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that qualia are an inherently internal experience means that there can be no way to communicate them to anyone else. We are willing to accept that the other minds problem isn't a problem because we believe they are similar to us. This is why I say that machine intelligence would have to display a very high level of consciousness for us to accept it as conscious. Humans get a pass.

I discount Penrose's argument because he offers no phenomena that actually require his QM effects to explain and offers no plausible evolutionary path by which human minds could have evolved the mechanisms relying on QM. Do other primates have QM effects in their brains? What do these explain, given that the current models of the brain that we have are capable of explaining everything that we see? (Though we don't yet have the practical capability to simulate an entire complex brain and suitable io.)
I do not feel that it is fair to dismiss php as merely a "template engine". It probably outgrew such a small scope of use around 3x. On a more philosophical level: the reason programmers long to create/control/extend the platform on which they exist is because they are programmers. I think once you reach this point you should go for it but also be prepared to move onto a programmable programming language.
Actually, I notice the reverse problem:

(good) programmers are in the DRY habit, so they habitually look for the most concise way to express something -- either in programming or spoken language.

In real life, communication is lossy. You need to express things multiple ways, with examples, and then ask for confirmation to make sure what you sent is what was received.
Ask HN: Where did the name Heroku come from?
It sounds vaguely Japanese. I'm wondering if it's based on some Japanese word or how they came up with it. Anyone know?
What exactly is the argument you are making? Smoking is legal and I don't remember the last time someone forced me to inhale. The flu vaccine is legal, and last I checked you had to go to a hospital and demand it, they don't just stick you with it automatically every winter.
I'm so sick of TC whining about every freaking thing! If you want a dead simple music player for OS X then freaking write it!

Maybe it will work about better than that 'dead simple web tablet' we're still waiting for.
I have have been using Linux for about 6-8 years. At work, I have used Gentoo, XP, Solaris, HPUX, and AIX. I know several people that have hackintoshs, myself included. All of them are very familiar with Linux, Unix, and Windows. It isn't about simple. It is partly about the challenge. Do you know why we do it? You may be able to make Gnome look like OSX, but not feel like OSX.

The main reason I build the hackintosh is the price. I built a computer for just over $1000 that is equivalent to a $2800 MacPro. My wife needs to use the computer. She is a photographer and thus needs Photoshop and printing. And please don't mention Gimp or printing on Linux. It doesn't cut it for professional photographers.
Can't argue with that. Ever since freshman year of college I've just sworn off writing a paper in anything but LaTeX. Rather simple after you get used to it and a PDF is nice and portable too. Of course, I also tend to use a lot of math, especially in my theoretical computer science pieces, at which Word is just absolutely lousy. Anyway, just passing along my thoughts. :)
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Ask HN: How should I make a point-to-point wireless home system?
This is a problem I think a lot of people have, including some smart hackers I know:

Your internet connection is at location X, and you want it at location Y. Wifi router at X and receiver at Y is okay for some applications, but the signal can get week if you're passing through lots of walls or floors. Also, if you're, say, streaming to an X-Box or a desktop PC used for gaming or streaming movies, a hit in speed is really noticeable.

Using a hard wire is great, but hard. Who wants to dig into walls or have lots of wires around?

Setting up wireless routers to act like repeaters or access points seems arcane, with questionable benefits.

So I thought I'd ask the smart folks here: how should I do this? If I really just want the X to Y speed maximized, is there good specialty hardware for this? Any hacks to take off the cap on broadcast strength on an easily available router?

[edits:
- Ethernet over power is horrible in my experience. I don't even think there is a connection between the two spots

- Laying down line is untenable currently because it is a rental, and the situation is dire: separate back office (converted garage) to a living room in the house. I won't dig into concrete and most certainly won't drape wires.

- Why isn't this just a product? Two routers with directional antennae + N repeaters long the route?
]
The human eye, for example, has flaws (that are solved in other similarly evolved eyes) that an engineer laughs at

What are those flaws, if you happen to know? I'm curious.
huge under-served market of people who just need help with stuff they don't understand, and can't afford to pay Geek Squad's silly rates

I know that market very well. I sell to them and, prior to moving to Japan at least, I was frequently their on-call tech support as a result of being someone's sister's bridge partner's nephew.

I love my customers (and not-quite-customers since they never, you know, actually paid money for my services) as people. I don't think they're less intelligent or less worthwhile as human beings just because they don't understand that the little beige box over there is not a "CPU". They don't need to understand networking, automobile engines, or plumbing, just like I don't need to understand the HR policies of the local streets and sanitation department.

What they do need to understand: you can solve some problems cheaply with products that can be produced at scale. You can teach yourself to manage some problems cheaply with educational resources that can be produced at scale. If you want an IT consultant with a range of skill broad enough to encompass almost any problem you could have available to perform arbitrary tasks, it will be affordable in the sense that it will cost you far, far less than the business value generated, but it will not be inexpensive by any stretch of the imagination.
Head backwards to the source and you start to get more information. For instance:

http://internal.hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2...

Scroll down to "About this image"
This is interesting because we see Jobs' answers to the two big questions which I saw coming out of the event- Why not Camera on the iPod touch, and why no stills on the nano.

The answer comes down to price on the iPod touch- They really really wanted to get under $199, and didn't feel they could do that with a Camera. On the Nano, they couldn't fit the lens needed for the autofocus.

.

You put a camcorder on the iPod Nano. Why not on the iPod Touch?
A.

Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. Because a lot of the games were free on the store. Customers started to tell us, “You don’t know what you’ve got here — it’s a great game machine, with the multitouch screen, the accelerometer, and so on.”

We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199. We don’t need to add new stuff — we need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.
Q.

How come the Nano can now record video, but can’t take stills?
A.

The sensors for doing video are fairly thin. The sensors for doing a still camera, at much higher pixel resolution — and we’d really like to have autofocus — they are just way too thick to ever fit inside the Nano.
I'd be happy with a version doesn't randomly delete a song file (not just a library entry, but the actual file) every few months and doesn't make my X4 940 feel like a Celeron.
By Inspection
It is sad to think of all this diverse wildlife threatened by human logging. These animals that have never seen humans before don't stand a chance.
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.

It's true, we can't prove it one way or the other at the moment, but that usually just means that Occam's razor should guide our speculations and assumptions. Since the brain seems like all it's doing is performing some computations, why would we ever assume that its true function is to do something more than that?

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.

There's a good chance that the way the brain achieves its computations is indeed a bit more complex than, for instance, an artificial neural network, absolutely. But that's an implementation detail, and there's certainly no reason to assume that there's no computational model that can account for it - biologists are very close to having full working models of individual neurons already. Further, it's highly likely that the brain does its job in a biologically convenient way, not a logically convenient one, and I'd give good odds that there are a lot of logical simplifications that could be made to end up with a cleaner architecture that performs the exact same tasks.
All of their service levels, and server names, are japanese in nature so it's probably a safe bet.

http://heroku.com/pricing#blossom-1

Also the service is amazing! I had been using Slicehost for the last 2-3 years but I recently tried Heroku out and I love it, all of my latest projects are being hosted there.
i wouldn't say he "snipes" at amazon. he's just making a point that he thinks there's isn't much of a market for single-purpose book-viewing devices, and using amazon as an example.
Grad student in Cognitive Science, here. My focus is language, but consciousness is an ongoing side interest.

The answer: Yes and no, depending on what you mean by "consciousness".

If you mean something like "access to internal states" (and maybe reportability thereof), then yes. Arguably there are extant, albeit crude, versions of this form of machine consciousness.

If, on the other hand, you mean something that starts to look like qualia (i.e. "raw feels"/"what's it's like"/"the hard problem"/etc cf. the Chalmers references already made), then no.

Of course, my "no" essentially echoes Dan Dennett's, in that I don't think people are conscious in this way, either. I suspect a lot of our "feelings" are internal post-hoc stories (made possible by enabled by command of private language) that rationalize/create causal attributions for the physiological correlates of stress ("four Fs" situations).

That being said, I could be wrong, and finding a way to get at these hypotheses empirically would be a genuine advance, whether they were supported or refuted. So by all means pursue this...as someone else pointed out, it's likely the "final" answers won't be known in your lifetime, and if it brings you fulfillment in your lifetime, then giv'er.

As for where to apply, there are loads...some have already pointed out several researchers (Hofstadter, Koch, etc.), so you could always apply where they are. There's also UCSD, UArizona, Carleton University (in Canada), etc...
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".

But what if the answer to the "weirdness" question is, in fact, that it's just an ill-formed question? What if it's just an illusion, and your brain is tricked into seeing something magical about itself where there is nothing there?

Apart from a mystical explanation, I cannot imagine any satisfying answer to the question (i.e. one that doesn't leave you feeling uneasy like Hofstadter's answer does to most people), which usually means that there's something wrong with what we're asking, not with how we're trying to answer it.
That's a fair point. I suppose it all depends on the context of the conversation.
Yep!

Problem is, iTunes is so good at what it does (in terms of satisfaction, anyway) that it's got no real Mac competitor, so that the people like me who get pissed off at small things like not looking like a goddamn toy don't have anything to switch to. If only I could code.
An example of something that joubert is referring to is the fact that photoreceptors (rods and cones) in the human eye are actually located behind the retinal ganglial cells, nerve fibers, and capillaries. So light has to pass through a layer of tissue before being detected. One consequence of this is the blind spot.

An engineer would probably try a different ordering.
The original description is here: http://github.com/blog/466-the-2009-github-contest

"Today we’re announcing our 2009 GitHub Contest. Since the Netflix prize is now over, we figured you guys needed something to do. Here is your chance to contribute to the open source canon, make GitHub better, and possibly win some of the best prizes probably ever offered by a contest ... the problem is that we want to recommend repositories to you when you log into GitHub that you’ll love...we figured perhaps you can do this better than we can. I extracted a dataset of all the repository watches in our database – close to half a million – and withheld a sample of them. I then created a test file listing the users I held watches back from. If you can write a program to analyze our dataset and best guess the watches we held back, you win our amazing prizes."
Sure. I agree with everything you say. They have good reason to want their page rank measurement to be accurate. But they are not allowed to do whatever they want to achieve this.
a levitation chamber wont be that much fun. I think a tool which you can wear or maybe shoes which can replicate the magnetic field, will be more relevant. A chamber will be equivalent to a gravity-free chamber, which, already exists.
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In his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins comments:

Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain. He would laugh at any suggestion that the photocells might point away, from the light, with their wires departing on the side nearest the light.

Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate retinas. Each photocell is, in effect, wired in backwards, with its wire sticking out on the side nearest the light. The wire has to travel over the surface of the retina to a point where it dives through a hole in the retina (the so-called "blind spot") to join the optic nerve.

This means that the light, instead of being granted an unrestricted passage to the photocells, has to pass through a forest of connecting wires, presumably suffering at least some attenuation and distortion (actually, probably not much but, still, it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer). I don't know the exact explanation for this strange state of affairs. The relevant period of evolution is so long ago.
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I tend to agree with you, though not with so much certainty. I think the question of consciousness is fundamentally unanswerable, and I think a lot of people like to use that fact to construct arguments about how consciousness and simulation of consciousness are the same thing because they are scientifically indistinguishable. However just because a falsifiable theory can not be constructed does not mean there isn't an objective truth.

This need for all beliefs to have a scientific basis is a bit pathological in my opinion. You shouldn't feel bad for believing something "illogical" if the only reason it is illogical is Occam's Razor or scientific intractability.

My reasoning for this is that it should be obvious to everyone that our world and experiences are increasingly shaped by ideas in modern times. Even though physics can explain the mechanics of the universe in great detail, the way ideas affect our individual experiences and society as a whole has very little to do with their ability to be objectively classified as true or false. By forcing a scientific perspective you are limiting yourself from the benefits of philosophies and ideas that are beyond the realm of science.

I'm not saying that a belief about artificial consciousness is beneficial one way or the other, but just that you shouldn't be chided into dismissing your own opinion just because it does not rest on firm logical conclusions based on established scientific evidence. The other side is quite wobbly as well.
I don't even know for sure if you are experiencing qualia.

I'll go you one further and admit that I don't know for sure if I am experiencing qualia.

My brain certainly tells itself that I am, but how do I know it's not just wrong?

Perhaps qualia is, in the end, nothing more than the state of asserting to yourself that you feel qualia. In which case it's really more a question about whether your brain is properly structured to ask that question than about whether it really exists...
Install mpd & theremin (https://theremin.sigterm.eu/)

(I'm sure there's a similar windows client if that's your thing.)

edit: alternatively, picoplay (http://www.kronenberg.org/picoplay/)
One of those potential scary applications of this technology is censorship. During the protests following the contested Iranian election last June, the government worked to prevent people from being able to use the internet to communicate information (especially photographs and video) of the repression to the outside world.

The state censorship policy in Iran is mainly implemented with transparent web proxies that identify prohibited URLs and redirect to a warning page. Internet users in Iran have become quite adept at bypassing the filters by either using specific circumvention tools or by tunneling their traffic out over VPNs or protocols such as SSL or SSH.

During the protests, the Iranian authorities began to restrict access to specific protocols by throttling them down to a trickle of bytes so that business users could still access some SSL services or foreign VPNs with enough patience, but the channels were no longer usable for mass tunneling to restricted websites.

The traffic throttling is implemented with the same techniques that ISPs use to restrict P2P file trading traffic. It's the exact same DPI vendor hardware.
dd-wrt lets you change the broadcast strength on some routers. check out their documentation for details - http://www.dd-wrt.com/

otherwise, unless you invested in commercial solutions (microwave transceivers), i believe you are stuck chaining together repeaters or running a cable.
No. When I want a playlist, it's often not easy or not possible to find a search term that includes just the album I want, so I have to drag the album into a new playlist, which creates clutter. Playlist searching is great for finding a song but terrible for building a playlist.
Are you using the free version or a paid option? Because I find the non-free options to be vastly more expensive than hosting options elsewhere. They provide a valuable service in terms of taking administration issues out of the picture and letting you just focus on developing your app. But my feeling is this is not targeted at hackers who are surviving on rice and beans but rather those who are more likely to have well-paying day jobs. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it's a good business model - but since I'm in the rice and beans category at the moment, I'm not in their league I'm afraid.
Hey, I know the feeling, it's weird to adjust to but I still haven't filled my 5 Terabytes of space yet so I'm happy. Soon I'm going to offload all my files to a file-server I'm building with an exorbitant amount of HDD space.
I don't mind spending a bit for a low end commercial solution, as long as I'll spend less than, say, $800, and won't get cancer from sitting next to one for a long period of time :)

Got any links or brands?
That has nothing to do with the argument he's making.

He's saying that the mental health effects on practitioners in the field should be considered.
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Ah, yes, we have arrived at the problem of being fundamentally unable to be sure of the nature of reality. We don't know if our sensors are reporting to us the "true" nature of the world and we don't know if our brains are reporting to us the "true" nature of our internal states.

I guess, like you, I am okay with accepting that experiencing qualia and my brain telling me that I am experiencing qualia are functionally indistinguishable if not equivalent states.
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I like your ethos -- But be careful not to confuse expensive and value for money.

If you're doing a job that is many times better than your competitors, then double the rate is a drop in the ocean.

Even stingy clients will understand this. In fact, stingy clients often understand this best of all -- they know how to see value. "Bad" clients are the ones that don't get it at all.

My general rule is to set a solid price and then cut deals.
There is the Ethernet-over-Power option (they seem to work a lot lower than their rated speeds, but over longer distances / walls might be better in some cases compared to wireless). (Linksys PLK300, or D-Link DHP-301, etc).

Before shelling out that much, I would try getting a second router to act in client mode and have high gain or directional antenna on both routers.
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If you're willing to pay $800, why not just pay someone to run a wire?
Know of any good off-the-shelf directional antennae? Not sure I want to mess with pringles cans. Also, any guides on setting a direction through a few walls? Or do you just use it like a dowsing rod with some power sensor to point it in the right direction?

Also, I've tried a network-over-power system, and it totally sucked when it worked at all.
I would be more interested to get in the Hoverboard business with this kind of technology.
I doubt there's a YC-type startup that can employ a full time UX designer, or needs to, really.

IIRC I once read that Amazon employs one UI dedicated person. It makes sense, since UX (no offense to UX experts) tends to be less work intensive than code or design - you don't spend hours pixel pushing or debugging. And if you're not the NY Times or Amazon, you can do fine by hiring a consultant when needed. Or you just take the Zappos/Craigslist route, and listen to no one but your users.

BTW, a title like "Fire Your x" is lame. Firing someone should be a last resort, not something you do after reading a couple of blog posts.
People getting killed ANYWHERE is distressing, surely.
The "Facebook Integration" is literally nothing but a URL to Facebook's share page that's not unlike those copy/paste "Share on Facebook!" you see on practically every blog. And it's only for the App Store. It's nothing special really.
I have a different complaint: I think it makes sense to have a template system for PHP because PHP is such a poor template system. :)