skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dry itchy scalp remedies
Yes it can be extremely annoying and embarrassing having a scalp condition like dandruff, eczema, scalp infections or a nasty itchy red rash on your scalp. If you are suffering from: is your scalp flaky itchy or do you have dry scalp with…
Here's another question. What does Ken Rockwell have to fear from digital photography? Seriously, why else would he expend so much effort debunking this "conspiracy" (his words "(digital) raw is actually a conspiracy to addict you to having to buy software the rest of your life")?
I've never heard a good reason why it wouldn't be possible. But even supposing that it isn't, AI research is not wasted. It is clear that products related to AI (natural language processing, computer vision, game opponents, etc) can be exceedingly useful even though they're not sufficient to produce a conscious AI. So don't worry!

My personal belief is that the reason progress in AI has been so slow is that AI optimists vastly underestimated the computing power needed to produce good AI, and when our computers are finally fast enough (20-30 years perhaps, and the most important metric is probably not FLOPS but memory bandwidth) AI will actually not be that hard to achieve.
I used to be a bigger Google fan than I am now, and it's all because of this pagerank/link business.

It's fine to have an algorithm to prioritize sites. And it's fine for sites to manipulate that algorithm to their own ends. Both of these things are completely natural.

Trying to keep this list of who's cool or not -- secretly updated by god knows who -- and forcing the rest of the world to do as you say or suffer economic punishment by de-listing from your engine? Not fine, although Google is certainly in their rights to do so.

A better strategy is for Google to adapt, not dictate. As it is, they've created this entire system where everybody games the system but nobody talks about it, and that's counterproductive for the net as a whole.
Which, as a bonus, gives you significantly better per-node performance on modern hardware

Could you expand on that last bit? i.e. what is it about modern hardware (and about Cassandra) that makes this true?
No one knows what human consciousness really is or if it even applies to other animals.

Having said that, consciousness is not a requirement for intelligence. It would interesting, and plausible enough for self-improving AI as smart as a human to be developed without addressing the question of consciousness.

For extra credit: No there is not enough evidence.

Here is my opinion on this matter: It is possible to simulate the universe, but it is not possible to be the universe.

Simulation is different from being, just as predicting the weather is different from manipulating the weather. And simulating consciousness on a computer is different from being conscious.
Can you explain what the major advantage (and disadvantage) of the data model of Cassandra over a flat key-value store is?
Goodbye BlackBerry
In the Hunt - Finding the Path to Success by Changing Directions
Which of Automattic's services (WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, IntenseDebate, and Polldaddy) do you consider famously insecure?
I am dead certain that it would NOT be possible to achieve consciousness in a computer program.

On the other hand, I know if I ever had to debate this question with Daniel Dennett or Eliezer Yudkowsky or any other capable person who believes there's nothing special about "consciousness" I would lose the debate.

Attributing a special meaning to consciousness, on the surface, is just as illogical as believing in religion- Neither seems to have a valid defense, as far as I can tell. Therefore, I find it disquieting that I DON'T believe in religion but DO feel so certain that computers can't be conscious.

Once you figure out the reason for this apparent inconsistency in my belief system, please let me know :)
If we assume that humans are conscious, then yes, it is possible for a machine to be conscious. The only arguments categorically differentiating humans from electronic machines are religious in nature.

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.

Whether it is achieved will depend on economic forces. I don't see much economic value in making conscious computers, or things which seem to be down that line. So I expect consciousness will come out of pure research (perhaps within a corporation, like IBM), well after computers have exceeded the raw processing power needed.

Because they will be so different from humans, it will have to demonstrate a significantly higher degree of consciousness than a human needs to in order for most people to be comfortable with the term.
On The Merits of Running One's Own Blogging Software
which "new lead" in computation do you think will allow it?

I don't know if hardware is holding back progress in AI, especially with distributed computing; it is more likely a question of software and programming. I think in order for a computer to exhibit a reasonable facsimile of human intelligence, it will have to do more than just run programs written by humans. It would have to have the ability to write and rewrite its own code.
> You left off an odd but plausible option:

You missed my second bullet.

> though it's awful for implementing the average FF extension

I find that most Firefox extensions are more about modifying the user interface, and less about modifying the content of the page. (i.e. Pearl Crescent Saver, Tab Mix Plus, Download Them All!, Tiny Menu, etc) The big names cover most things you could want to do to the page outside of a Greasemonkey script (Ad Block Plus, NoScript, etc)
I would argue that it is orders of magnitudes more complex.

Spam passess a single toll gate on the way to each user. You have an address book with contacts and previous conversations and a whole pile of data about previous 'known good' emails in the inbox.

Spam filtering has gotten pretty good. A lot better than google at filtering out 'bad' search results.
I wouldn't bet on machine consciousness happening in your lifetime. But consciousness is a cool enough thing that solving 0.001% of the problem is useful too. Machine vision, collaborative filtering, machine learning, all of these are attacking a tiny subpart of the consciousness problem, but they're still useful.

Don't worry that AI will turn out like phlogiston. The journey will yield its own rewards, and plenty of partial success will also be extremely valuable.
Why Do You Participate in Open Source?
Yes, they do send people traffic. Many sites rely on Google for most of their traffic. However, paid links does not a spam site make.

If they are flagging sites with a legitimate purpose and with original content, simply on the basis that their evermore dated method for determining authority is not working so well anymore, Google (as an authority themselves) should not be flagging them with such a label. I think it is unreasonable, not for denying them traffic, but for labeling them as spam. It's not impossible to find out who's in the supplemental index all of a sudden.
Since I wrote that query back in 2005, and it was actually somewhat more complex (had to deal with users banned after they dug the same story as you for starters) I assume Ian (whom I've never met) is simplifying for pedagogical reasons. And we had something similar to what you describe in no. 2 in 2006.
Everyone one of this article's "rules" looks like this:

1. In the words of Evan Williams...
2. According to Jason Cohen...
3. This advice from Michael Arrington of Techcrunch...
4. According to Jason Calacanis...
5. Those are the words of Mark Cuban...

A true list of N things ...
A definition that errs on the side of marking spam sites as authorities is defining a spam site as one that exists solely for the purpose of selling links to other sites.

I would expect that these true spam sites exist as a link network somewhat seperate from the rest of the web. You could start manually defining filters based on what sites are actively selling links on the digital point forums.

We may have actually had this conversation in the real world, come to think of it.
> CouchDB is a document database that supports two-way replication so you can re-sync after taking part of the data offline, but it's still designed around the concept of a single master that holds all the data

To clarify, CouchDB's replication features are peer-based and ad-hoc, there is no "master" replica. And you can take part or all of the data offline, or spread it geographically.

I think by single master, you mean CouchDB doesn't have support for partitioning a single logical database across machines, which is true (though there are projects for large scale partitioning with CouchDB, but it's not in the core yet).
Let's address the easy part:

Do you think the Church-Turing thesis (anything that is computable is computable by a Turing machine) indicates that machine consciousness is possible?

Only if you assume that consciousness is a computation, which is assuming everything.

I normally try to resist this topic, but what you're saying here tugs at my heart-strings:

I'm now a little concerned that it may all be a waste. I'd prefer not to waste my life on something that turns out like the phlogiston theory.

Consider the total failure of algorithmic approaches to even begin, even pathetically, to replicate anything recognizable as consciousness. Were the people working on it dumber than you?

Try to find some way to control for the geek fantasy factor, in yourself and others, before deciding what to do.

(By the way, now I'm curious: what was it that led you to "the scary idea that machine consciousness may not be possible"?)
Exactly.

Google should become better at what they are doing, work harder on identifying spam sites. Crawl more frequently to get a better grip on provenance.

Maybe set up an 'announce' service where you can dump a url before linking it to establish provenance for your original content.

Dictation is not a solution to anything it is a show of weakness.
Or... what if your credit is refunded if enough people like the post?
The problem does not lie only in the capturing medium, but also in the display medium. I mean like, with film when you want to show a picture to someone, you craft a print from it, which usually is quite high quality in terms of resolution and color. But with digital, you create a lowres web-version of the image, and send it via email or put it into a webpage, and then its viewed from some cheapo, poorly configured, low-res display.

I mean, where is my HDR 64bpp 300 PPI display? I remember hearing about HDR displays some 5 years ago, current bit depth is from 90's and almost 10 year old CRT can pull more pixels per inch than todays "highdef" screens.

edit: throw in factory calibrated too into my "requirements"

If our displays were better, it probably would expose the limitations of current digital capturing, and therefore push capturing tech forward, so that remaining gaps between film and digital could be closed.
When you have things of value that can be sold or exchanged you will allways have a market. If some authority tries to ban the exchange then it will be a 'black' market. The harder Google tries to enforce their policies the more it will drive the selling or exchange of links underground. Maybe this would be a good thing but there is certainly no way they can stamp it out.

I personally think that the problem lies in the rules of Google's system. A more robust system should be able to account for and adjust for the market realities created by it's own rules. Maybe it is technically impossible but I doubt it. I'm sure the clever people at google have thought of this as well but perhaps they are starting to face 'legacy' system issues themselves.
Steve Jobs Snipes at Amazon, Praises Ice Cream
It is unreasonable inasmuch as it is bullying site owners in to compliance, forcing them to disclose information. I think that this is the case. The central effect of flagging a site as spam is not a quality assurance issue. It is influencing these sites' behaviour. The use the fear of Google taking away their traffic as a way of forcing compliance. That is what I have a problem with.

As an internal policy or part of their algorithm, do whatever you want. But that is not what they are doing. 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. It is the effects of the intimidation not the effects of the flagging which are substantial. I think it is also safe to say that they are the purpose of the policy.
We have no definition of consciousness, so it's impossible to say whether machine consciousness is possible, or whether we have it already.
I think it is possible that some area's are going about the problem wrong way. With current hardware attempting to simulate the brain as it works I don't think is the viable option.

I seem to have the problem also that we are using the thing we are trying to simulate to work out how to simulate it. From our perspective the problem could be almost impossible.
He might have been. He was definitely - if it was him - a teenager. Also, according to the newspaper article that cost him the $ from the US Army, his age was such that he would have been 15 in 1981.

The thing I remember the most was he had long spider-like fingers and could touch type.

I was at a company called Rainbow Software in Calgary.
T-Pain Video Proof of Jay-Z Diss | Hip Hop MVP
Facebook Still Risks Having To Reveal Its Entire Source Code
I look at consciousness fairly oddly:

I believe consciousness is an emergent property of a complex system; it is simply the nature of the universe that complex systems exhibit consciousness. I'm defining "complex system" as any system whose outputs/results affect the inputs/possible states. If I think something, the possibility space for my next thought is dependent upon my previous thought, and so on.

I think artificial consciousness research will progress, through computer simulation, to the point where a "real" consciousness emerges from a sufficiently complex simulation. The hard part will be mapping its inputs/outputs into human-compatible form; success will probably occur by accident at first. But when we can do this we'll be able to talk to a totally simulated consciousness through the prism of it being another "person".

At this point more research/thought will be put into the nature of consciousness itself, and how to connect with other-than-human consciousnesses. We'll use the experience of bridging communication with artificial consciousness to successfully communicate with naturally-occuring consciousnesses associated with other complex systems (the earth, a tree, the galaxy, etc). It sounds a little insane, but I totally think this is within the realm of possible in our lifetimes.

Of course, that's all based on the notion that consciousness is an emergent property of a complex system, and not something entirely unique or bestowed by higher powers or whatever.
Summarized here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813894
In this tough economy, fastest growing e-commerce sector is … luxury apparel?
Maybe explore "BASE" vs "ACID" (coined elsewhere)
Well that was another theory. When they first released it I saw these theories:

* It's there to help encourage developers from Windows to write iPhone web apps.

* It's there to help encourage web developers that use Windows to make their pages Safari/WebKit-compatible (because they don't have to own a Mac to test their pages against it).

* It's there to foster 'switchers' by showing people that there are viable applications on the Mac (and that it's not a 'broken' platform). (e.g. the guy that sat behind me when I went to see 'White Noise' that kept complaining to his girlfriend that Michael Keaton was using a Mac and how much faster the audio processing that he -- Michael Keaton's character -- was doing would be going if he was on a PC with Windows)

* It's the vanguard of Apple moving software to Windows to ditch OS X.

* It's the the vanguard of Apple porting their core libraries to Windows to make running Windows apps under OS X native and seamless. (i.e. Apple + WINE or something like that)

* It's their to drive up the number of Safari users to force better web standards.

* Apple has no clue what they are doing.

* Apple was using it as a way to make people excited and not bummed over the announcement that there would be no native API for developers on the iPhone. (Yes. It was released at that Keynote).

Obviously some of these have proven false. As for the rest, it's a toss-up.
IPhone OS 3.1 adds new features and functionality
You can update at the column granularity, so having a row of 100k columns is fine since you don't have to rewrite the whole thing to update a small part. (Cassandra rows have a sparse list of columns, so you can treat a row as a sorted set, not just a fixed-size vector. The model Digg describes in another article uses this: http://blog.digg.com/?p=966)

Columns are also indexed so you can retrieve from large rows efficiently too.

Finally Cassandra also adds the concept of a SuperColumn, which is a column that contains other columns.
Are humans at a place where we can write and rewrite our own DNA?
At This Point, I’d Prefer Java Developers Over .NET
Stunning pictures!
http://internal.hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2...

I found a better page for viewing the images, not quite as painful as the Wired method (Next... Next...).
Also I find it fascinating that the table is "Diggs" (it was originally "digs" and I suspect it still is). Gotta get the branding right, even in sql queries.
I keep waiting to see the picture of the fanged frog.

Fanged frog FTW...?
Wouldn't you agree that it feels awfully "weird" to be a living, breathing human? Doesn't it seem to be beyond what can be expressed by mere computer algorithms?

I realize it is not a defensible argument to say that the human experience is just to "weird" to be computable- I wish I had a better argument for defending my position...

Nonetheless, I find it hard to understand people, such as yourself, that are probably exposed to this same "weirdness" in their heads as I am and yet are so confident it is merely an illusion created by a sufficiently complicated computation.
It's not all or nothing: even if true AI would not be achieved in your lifetime, there would still be loads of useful things with the stuff you learn.

As for the question, I am sure that it is possible (except I take issue with the word "consciousness" - what is it supposed to mean?).
> Apple didn't make it. I did. The machine I'm using is known as a "Hackintosh" -- actually a 9-inch Dell netbook that I've hacked to run Apple's Macintosh operating system.

> In the end, I had a crude version of the Mac tablet computer that the rumor mill always says is just around the corner.

When did Dell come out with a 9" TabletPC?

> Turning a netbook into a Mac certainly isn't a task for technical naïfs [...]

Oh... that 'Tablet' PC.
I'm curious: how easily does "easily scaled" mean? How much advance planning needs to be done about the eventual size of a cassandra cluster?

I think I can see how you can add machines when you need more capacity, but what about when you don't need all that capacity anymore? How do you go about removing machines from the cluster, and how does all of the nicely scaled out content get rebalanced when you do?
You're right. The way to tell is how much difficulty you are having in explaining how the whole line-up/hierarchy works.

I think it goes against one of the Apple-y things that I quite like. Make something people like enough to pay for. Don't build a product based on cross subsidies, non-transparent pricing, customer lock-in (not sure about this one), etc. That concept (I think) keeps Apple grounded. If they can make something that users are willing to pay enough for to make Apple a profit, they make money. If they can't they don't.
In short: yes.

I think it's painfully clear that sometime in the coming years humanity will reach the pinnacle of its scientific achievement with the advent of an artificially intelligent machine: one that is able to think and reason and is self-aware. Technology is moving at such a rapid pace and in the right direction that this is just the next logical step.

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.
SHCOKING: What Djangoers don't want you to know [pic]
Up and coming Django developer lets fame go to his head. It's poeple like this that ruin communities! Wtf??? So glad I chose RAILS!
Consciousness isn't a unique body in our universe, it's a state. (so far as we can guess)
A point of clarification should be made here... Are you speaking of machine consciousness behaving similar to our own?

Human's consciousness is but one form, in my opinion. We are a complicated biological machine seeking the fulfillment of our existence; how is that any different than a machine seeking the fulfillment of its existence?

I believe the money is in self-evolving circuits and programming; allowing the machine to mold what defines its existence based on external parameters - and overtime, based on internal parameters (will to change).
OK here's an argument for why you could be right.

Whatever it is that distinguishes consciousness for what computers can possible do is also the thing that makes you realise that computers can't be conscious. If you could logically write the reason down to 'prove it' then it would also be something that you could implement in a computer. So the reason, whatever it is, has lie somewhat outside of specifiable logic.

Just in case this is somehow original. I'm designating this 'thing' as a 'dejb' and calling the whole thing "dejb's theory/proposition/whatever". Although it actually probably just a restatement of Godel's incompleteness theorem. Also I actually believe that computers can be concsious.
Hubble's Prying Eyes : Astronomers Discuss Their Favorite Images
I don't understand why people let such a small amount of fame go to their head.
> Realize that in a confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins-- not through strength, but rather through perseverance.

So an almost infinite series of water molecules ^H^H^H startups can each spend themselves against a hard problem...and, eventually, the hard problem falls...and the last startup in line gets to claim credit?
The computer equivalent of human DNA would have more to do with hardware than code. When I talk about computers rewriting code, I'm talking more about rewriting patterns of thought processing. While humans can't rewrite DNA on the fly, we can definitely teach ourselves new ways of approaching problems.
Dropping out: Those who found success without a college degree
I'm not understanding at all why Aaron's sexual behaviour is Hacker news, or even interesting.

I'm sure he'd agree.
Biz Stone outlines Twitter's revenue plans
HP on Why Giant Corporations Shouldn’t Do VC
The spartan text-based install is also remarkably fast. Once you've done the installation a few times, it's possible to get the whole system up and running in five minutes.
I just checked the paid links on Google's search page. They do not use nofollow. This fact, combined with your arguments, is consistent with gojomo's hypothesis about Google wanting to monopolize paid links.
So what is it, nature or nurture that causes sexual attraction?
Once a startup has revenues, its valuation may be tied to a multiple of revenues. Without revenues, a popular startup such as Twitter may be in a stronger position to name its price.

Why does that seem so backwards to me?