skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, because consciousness does not exist. Although, I am sure an artefact can be constructed that believes itself to be conscious and capable of convincing others it is conscious. Which is, more or less, identical to having consciousness.
First images from new and improved Hubble
Most often you don't want or need to increase your transmission power. What you are looking for is a better signal to noise ratio (often written as SNR, S/N). And a directional antenna will receive less noise from directions it's not pointed at.

To stay within the valid "effective" output power of your regulatory domain, you can lower the transmission power of the transmitter. Or you can spend your excess gain by adding a little of high-quality cabling that puts your antenna at a better suited location (but more often it will be easier to just move the whole WLAN router/card/dongle).

A "pringles-like" design made out of stainless steel toilet-brush holders that includes experimental and simulation results (in German):
http://www.heise.de/netze/artikel/print/100565
It's a terrible idea. If you're not creative enough to come up with a name that costs you $8.95 on Godaddy, what're you doing in a startup?
An amazing 256 byte demoscene production: "Puls" by Rrrola
>>Does Nanosolar’s $1 per watt investment guarantee a consistent 24/7/365 source of electricity?

Good point, I guess the company will get lots of returns from customers, after they realize the sun doesn't shine at night.

(Not even nuclear gets anywhere close to 24/7/365.)

>>That's the trouble with government subsidies -- they allow people to operate outside the constraints of reality. At taxpayer expense.

That is true, of course.

But $1/Watt is the often quoted threshold where solar cells get economically viable for more solutions.

For example, it means that there will be relatively few years to get back the investment for solar cells to drive air conditioners.

(I've only read about air conditioners' energy use. I live where there are no problems with lots of sunny and warm weather, sigh.)
That brings up interesting ethical issues -- could you play a FPS game knowing the bad guys were 'conscious'?
IMO, you ought to add regular weather to your site, too - people are more likely to see your data if they're visiting your site for information regularly already.
Did you consider homeplug networking?

I have two ZyXEL home plug devices and get ~ 60-70Mbps from them (they're rated at 200Mbps for the whole network you can add them as you go). They're pretty good, but latency is higher than I'd expected - ~4ms.
Defamation by domain name
New Jersey Medicaid Lawyer
Hi! I was looking for an experienced lawyer in NJ for a recent Medicaid related issue. And I came across a site about a New Jersey Medicaid Lawyer while doing this web search. I am truly impressed with the site; nevertheless I want to know if you have a past experience with the lawyer. Thanks!
Internet Grows 37.5%, Traditional Media Declines 30%, 2006-2009
As an aside: In a rather shocking moment of self-discovery, I realised I agreed that a domain name like http://glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com/ can be defamation, but once I read a bit further and found out Glenn Beck is a conservative Fox News talking head, I decided to change my stance, internally citing 'satire' as justification.

I appall myself.
Museum Pos dan Giro in Bandung
Yes, it is possible. But a more important question would be "What are the benefits from creating an artificially conscious(A.C.) system?"
There are a myriad of uses for smarter computer systems that can problem solve with minimal guidance from humans.
But what practical use is there for A.C?

Howabout re-phrasing the original question into "Do you think it is possible to genetically enhance and selective breed apes into a race of human-level+ super-apes". Sure, it's possible, but why do it?

If you are trying to create a controllable human-like intelligence, then ethically it is the same as creating a slave race, and practically it is just overkill
for any real-world use. And if you are trying to create a human-like intelligence with free-will, then you are creating a competitor/replacement.
As far as I know "gay" is often used to mean homosexual, and that according to my dictionary means:

Sexually attracted to people of one's own sex.

Involving or characterized by sexual attraction between people of the same sex : homosexual desire.

It's just a word and words have meanings. Not a particularly big deal if you fit in to a meaning.
I wish their Chat Window on Google Spreadsheet were embeddable , too.
This design choice is significant because most of these properties, or their equivalents, will be or are already implemented in several CSS3 rendering engines: it's a great demonstration of what we will soon be able to do with cross-browser support.

The fact that IE or browser x can't browse the iTunes store is less important than some other tactics on Apple's part such as lack of non Apple device support...
While this advice is mostly true you can't split it up in days. You have to do most of this at once from the start.
>Can they threaten to remove sites from their index if you don't write "I love Google" on the top of every webpage?

Sure they can. They wouldn't survive very long. That's why they don't.
I generally like PHP but am not a very advanced user, so I'm interested: what shortcomings do you see?
Framework for Data Visualization
(check the video) http://bit.ly/rC61O / InfiView.com
God knows how much that cost them though... Dropbox is in a similar situation and is going to have to pay millions (in equity?) for their domain. To the submitter -- I don't think it's an inherently bad idea because domains certainly have value. Mint.com anyone? However, the legal issues here are basically insurmountable on your budget, you don't want some random non-accredited investor holding shares in your startup.
Pubsubhubbub
Any care to let me in, on whether if I set up pubsubhubbub as standalone rather than MT, WP and the likes on my server, either py or php ( if available )
Thats easy: turn off the hovering!
Thanks for the tip - I'll check VLC out.
"Data source: manufacturer"

Also the models seem pretty old. I'm from Europe so I guess some of them are US only but not all.
If you say it's an average, than either every month you had the exact same amount of visits, or (more likely) you didn't have the same amount of visits each month, and hopefully you had some growth. I don't see any lying in there.
Infographics Showing Why You Should Go Green
It's images! Is that really better?

It's not text layed (laid?) out in a cool way with HTML.

It's a png image of each page of the pdf. It's quick sure, but images? Not text? It just seems wrong - why even make pdf's, if all you want is an image of the text?
All science aside, I actually laughed out loud at this one.

If there's anything funnier than a small floating mouse spinning out of control, I can't think of it.
It won't replace view as HTML because it's images of the text, not the text itself.
A really helpful, valid and well thought out response.
This sort of advice takes a pitch that might just work in the Burj Dubai elevator (818 m/2,684 ft - worlds tallest skyscraper) and that almost gets the point across if you're pitching to an investor who's looking for people with a background in cool CMS....into a deal maker.

@patio11 - I'm tempted to send you our elevator for analysis. Anyone interested in 'HN Elevator: Rate my pitch' ?
I'm curious what HTML5 features are being used? Are they using <audio> or <video> tags? That seems like the most likely. Or <canvas>.

I've noticed "HTML5" is getting thrown around a lot lately. It's the new "AJAX".
I think it is important that every business have a good impression of what they do, and what they do not do.

Weather.com is for knowing whether you should carry an umbrella when you go to the office tomorrow. Stormpulse is for knowing whether you will still have an office to go to. When serious professionals need to make critical decisions to protect lives and property, they trust us to give them the data they need in a form they can use.

Stormpulse: We Don't Even Have An Icon For "Partly Cloudy"
Playful audio-based animation with Concave Scream on Datavisualization.ch
More helpful would be to look up the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle, aka the physical Turing thesis or strong Turing thesis. It is more intent in proposing that everything in the universe, including the universe itself, is computable. If you hold to this principle, then machine consciousness is obviously feasible.
--------
Another way of asking your question is: why wouldn't machine consciousness be possible? Why would there be some special sauce in the brain that is off limits to being understood and/or modeled?
--------
And lastly, to address you're worry of wasting your life, there are many, many applications of AI/Cog.Sci. that would improve the human condition immensely without needing fully 'conscious' artificial machines. Also, the main reason why I in particular am dedicated to AI/Cog.Sci (and really the best reason for devoting yourself to anything) is because it is the most damned interesting thing I've ever been exposed to, IMHO.
First of all, we've seen that low-level physical models of our universe don't gain explanatory power by trying to take "consciousness" as an ontological primitive. It's clear that consciousness is a high-level property of patterns of tinier things.

So the algorithm you use to decide that a clump of neurons satisfies the "consciousness" predicate will almost certainly work by observing high-level properties of the neuron configuration. Since the consciousness predicate abstracts away low-level details, it's hard to see why neurons should be better than other computational substrates at forming predicate-satisfying configurations.

Reductionists can't be neuro-chauvinists.
No MySQL, no Java in oracle developing plans ?
Plasma TV Installers Los Angeles
Searching for Plasma TV Installers Los Angeles, HD Pros is there for you. For further details, visit our website.
An option to ignore submissions for certain domain names.

(Personally, I'd be happy if I never have to see another Techcrunch link again.)
Am continuing to learn about both digital and film. Bought a Canon Elan 20? years ago. To point out what I picked up in reading, chasing the links... Zeiss.com: "35mm ZM lenses achieved 400 lp/mm on film; ZF ~300 lp/mm, medium format lenses up to 280." Looked up average grain size, resolving power, sampling theorem... For me, it remains: choose the tool for the task; consumer DSC JPEG did that in recent years.
Build samba server in Fedora/Centos
Hasn't this been beaten to death? The human visual system evolved to see things of a human scale, and the visible part of the spectrum is correspondingly very narrow. If you want any kind of visual representation of space or of atomic structures, you pretty much have to assign colors more-or-less arbitrarily. I don't think the term false-color is applicable here, because that assumes that a true color exists.
Agreed. But, if one is willing to lie to both sides, then it would be very easy to get everybody enthusiastic (until everyone realizes they're being lied to).
Hubris and GHC 6.12 + dynamic linking
Life insurance leads
Life insurance leads custom filtered by you using dozens of options. Get your life insurance leads now with no obligation or contract.
As amazing as the find is, I can't help but feel anxious that in many ways it would be better if this was never reported ... I hope thet are left alone.
Yeah, the eye can't do a super long exposure either. This is why we have tools, to enhance what we are capable of.
It's a bit of a hack, but if you upload something to google app engine, isn't that kind of a CDN?
http://www.google.com/search?q=php+shortcomings
Should be very difficult. (The sex, and getting enough resources to generate a human-hovering magnet field.)
World's Leading Driver Update Software 
Driver Update Software compatible with all versions of Windows XP and Vista, including Vista's 64 bit edition. Driver Robot is guaranteed to be 100% free of spyware, viruses and other malware.Driver Robot Exporter enables you to run and save a driver scan on a computer that does not have an Internet connection and use this analysis to download all required driver updates on an Internet enabled computer. The fast scan option in this software scans the system and identifies the exact driver for your system and allows you to download the same.
Speed? Doing db calls over the net doesn't seem too efficient.
All New Honda Civic Launched by Honda Cars India
Hulu Needs Mix of ‘Pay And Free’ Web Video Content
Jaypee Greens Kosmos Noida, Wish Town Kosmos Noida, Kosmos Jaypee Noida
Jaypee Greens Now Launches a New Township on Expressway “KOSMOS” in Sec-134 Noida. It offers best of facilities & services at affordable price. Wish Town is an integrated development spread over 1162 acres.
Generating an image from the PDF server-side is the only way to faithfully perserve the layout of the PDF.

For some PDFs, Google will give you the option to view it as HTML (it seems to just be the PDFs returned in search results?). It's usable for mostly-text documents, but that's about it.
Ignoring you're question; AI isn't as much about machine consciousness and human-like intelligence as people like to think. Theres a lot of very good AI used every day: classifiers, pattern recognition, googles pagerank, recommendation systems, optimization algorithms and so on.

On to your question: Do I think something that looks like consciousness is possible? Yes. How soon depends on how conscious it looks and how much this is faked and real.

I think we're still a bit of a way away, but it will happen. Do I think the machine will be actually conscious like humans? No, I don't. Appearance and actually being are different things. A machine can be programmed to appear conscious by following decision making patterns similar to humans, by incorporating emotion (perhaps as a weighting system to deal with certain scenarios, or maybe not include emotion at all and go for pure practical efficiency..), self preservation, priorities and so on. But, this won't make them conscious like a human. I think theres more than a biological computer in us humans. Religious people like to call it a soul; I prefer to use that term to refer to some overall control system which is outside of the biological control systems: if the brain and nervous system is our hardware and our thought processes our software, then the soul is our firmware. I don't think we will ever completely understand what makes us conscious, for this reason, and therefore cannot ever make truely conscious machines BUT I believe we will, eventually, get very close to it.
Robot to be controlled by human brain cells
But we do all those things and we are machines. Biological machines, yes, but still machines.
I play Multiplayer FPS even though I know my opponents are conscious. Doesn't prevent me from shooting them because I know I only kill their avatar and not themselves. Same with AI - I shoot at an avatar I won't destroy it's code.

The ethical issues will rather be the moment when AI's are clever enough that they can be teached. What will humans teach them? Personally I believe the best protection from abuse will be to get that learning process in the public (as compared to AI's learning from companies or military for specific purposes). So my own long term target are distributed virtual worlds in which AI's improve by getting passed around. A single computer user might still teach them bad stuff, but I hope some sort of selection based on many people watching and exchanging bots will get the best possible results even though completely preventing abuse won't be possible.
An FPGA of sorts?
Until you said that, I didn't even realize it wasn't flash. This rocks!
This is the type of thing you don't need goto for, if you have first class continuations, or properly optimized tail recursion. Continuations would allow you to write your own control structures in much the same way.
Too often have I see "result-oriented supervision" translating to a make it happen mentality.
Can anyone confirm if this works in Internet Explorer?
Check your unread Gmail from the command line
Don't know why you're downmodded.

I use http://www.ajaxdocumentviewer.com/ on my own personal site. It works the same way as Google (but has ads), and handles .doc files.

I'd much rather use the Google app if it could handle .docs :(
Job description written in Ruby
JsMath: Including Mathematics in Web Pages
It's interesting what data structures would be optimal for the SSDs from the near future. If random writes are only a controller problem, it may be the good old btree again.
Text copy wont work.

I really dont see anything new here. This is exactly the same stuff they have at Google books. Except now its in an iframe .

Flash implementations are obviously superior as of now.Also, try building a decent browser game in javascript and html5.
Any public figure should have a skin thick enough to deal with stuff like this.

Fox News, CNN or the BBC it shouldn't make any difference.

The fact that the guy is a conservative talk show host is entirely his problem, if you want to live a quiet life then you shouldn't have your head on TV all the time.

Don't feed the trolls. And he should read up on the 'streisand' effect, I'm pretty sure that this whole thing will attract 10x the viewers it would have otherwise.

But then again, both parties benefit from that so I guess this will continue for a while.
Here is a bookmarklet I just wrote to look at all the links on a page and open any ending in ".pdf" in google's viewer. (if you have firefox set to open tabs for windows, it will open them in new tabs) Feel free to share and improve.

- - - (select entire text and make into a link)
- - -

javascript:(function(){dl=document.links;for(i=0;i<dl.length;++i){if(dl[i].href.substr(-4)==".pdf"){window.open("http://docs.google.com/gview?embedded=true&url="+dl[i].href);}}})()

- - -
Very smooth, but why does it lack a search box?
Take a look at http://blog.higher-order.net/2009/02/01/understanding-clojur... for details of Clojure's persistent vector implementation.
Wow! All the dynamic features of Haskell and the type safety of Ruby? Where do I sign up?

(Yes, I'm being sarcastic. It's actually a neat accomplishment)
The illusion of two-stroke apparent motion
That would already be very useful though, for things like online papers and datasheets, which as a rule sit on the same server as the page you're looking at.
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2
The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2 2.8-inch QVGA display may be compact, but it shows off the latest version of TouchFLO well; it’s when you look at it next to the HTC Hero, as you can see in the gallery below, that the similarities become clear, good, with a loud speaker, while the 3.5mm headphone jack is a nice addition from a firm that used to demand an adapter dongle be used.
First paragraph seemed good, I'll read the rest later.
The point is if you actually went and looked at the area, it won't look to you like hubble shows it.

People don't fully realize the colors mean different atoms, and are not the actual colors you will see.

He's not trying to say we shouldn't do this. Just, like the title says, "Space doesn't look like that".

It only matters when they pick colors for aesthetic purposes. The photo of uranus is very obviously false color, but the colors of the first photo were chosen to look pretty, rather than convey information.
MonetDB August '09 release
I really like the effect of crowd-sourcing influence. This appears to be a fall out of the large number of comments to the recent post on HN regarding the slack on part of 37signals:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803899
thx! I was looking for something like that. I don't like to open iTunes everytime I want to listen to 3 songs.
I see no difference... it's two sides of the same coin.

Are they intentionally screwing developers' access to APIs to prevent competition to their own apps? or are they limiting the APIs to ensure revenue streams for telcos, to ensure the platform lives on.

Both are business decisions (and therefore always justifiable), but neither are interesting to a hackers or a consumer. The latter two want the ability to do magical things, and can't.
Phone Sex Girls
Choose your horny girl for phone sex at livesexcalls.co.uk. You can also call at 01489 866 617"
The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
- Edsger Dijkstra
Didn't know "Tex Fonts". With those installed, this is the best solution for mathematics on the web.

Great concept.
Wasn't there a YC startup which offered this?

EDIT: Yes - http://fathomdb.com/about/home
Updating iPod Touch To Latest iPod OS 3.1 Without Paying
Apple iPod Firmware 3.1 is out now and available for download, the major update to the core operating-system features some pretty exciting improvements like ability to manage your iPod Touch applications icons and screens via iTunes 9, the update is free for all iPhone and iPod Touch users except iPod Touch users currently having any firmware version older then 3.0 - they are required to pay an upgrade fee of $4.95 to get this latest OS upgrade and will get prompted by this screen when accessing iTunes.
Then why parsing a human-readable file that could, conceivably, activate a much richer debugging option-set is such a huge overhead as to make the symlink way a better option? Is the setting system-wide or process-wide?

Sorry, but I just can't see why it would be a better option.
This is certainly a good point. At least I somewhen crossed the line when I just started to see things as input-output-devices with more or less complicated algorithms in the middle.

The human has a hideous complicated algorithm in there, involving a live-long history, internal feedback and reflection and arbitrary side constraints.

A spider for example is much simpler. 'If the net shakes, walk where it shakes and eat.' (Certainly, + a batch of regulations to be able to walk and sense, but the point stands).

However, imo at a certain point, a computer program passes the complexity of, say, a spider. Just consider modern compilers. These things are of baffling complexity and do things inside no human can imagine in details :) Or, imagine data mining software, or even just very complicated, security aware network guards. All of these softwares are very, very complicated in their input-output-behaviour, and even though they are not as complicated as a human, they certainly can compete with a spider, at least for me.

And exactly this view is what caused some pretty nasty discussions for me, since some people are just not crossing the line of 'everything is an input-output device of different forms' and they stand hard on the ground that machines and animals are different, because they are machines and animals (and some go ridiculous ways, 'god made animals, humans made machines', and whatsoever, not even some 'but the spider might be more complicated than FOO, because, which whould be a nice discussion :) ).

So, overall, I, as a person who is working hard on being a tolerant, non-racist person (which is really hard), don't see a reason to exclude the possibility of machines and robots being conscious, just because 'they are electrical and not organic' (which has a ring of "he is black, he CANNOT do science" to me. Sorry if I just offended a lot of people).
I think the way parallelisism changes the established trade-offs in code "optimization" is summarised by his lines:

Don’t split a problem into “the first” and “the rest.”
Instead, split a problem into roughly equal pieces;
recursively solve subproblems, then combine subsolutions.

A tree can be processed breadth-first (parallel) or depth-first (sequential), or both.
If there are no phones with Android, it's not very useful, is it, no matter how open the API is? Of course I have no knowledge of what their internal discussions are like, but I think that's the compromise.
eru, your answer is too generic - I could have googled that myself. I'm interested specifically in the shortcomings of PHP as a templating system.