skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Consciousness is orthogonal to any sort of argument about computability.

Even if you were able to 'create machine consciousness' you'd have a devil of a time proving it, as the only way to prove consciousness would be to be the machine experiencing consciousness (see Turing's paper).

Fact of the matter is that we /assume/ that other people are capable of consciousness because we experience our own consciousness (we believe it through analogy to ourselves).

Asking if anything else is conscious is an example of an unanswerable question. (Obviously I can only examine my own consciousness!)

So as to your questions:

Looks like it: yes.
Is it: Unanswerable!
Leads: quantum computers, neural networks.

I don't think it is obvious, however, that Church-Turing would answer one way or another. I mean, you would have to establish that consciousness (the appearance of it, at least) is computable.

This doesn't seem obvious, as what consciousness is seems ill defined, in and of itself. (See above about how we establish whether something else is conscious by analogy).
Ask HN: What are the noprocrast, maxvisit and minaway settings?
Without fiddling with each of these to figure out what they do; what do they do?
0. I did that, but why can't I browse my folder structure within iTunes? Rockbox lets me do it.

1. What about Linux? Portable devices not made by Apple?

2. It's easier to drag a drop a directory or use cp -R /audio /media/mp3player than figure out iTunes' methods.

3. I give iTunes one star for that one. Hopefully next gen OS will give us the ability to tag files.
What cdr said. It's kind of difficult to tell what the constraints are - how big is the distance, is it your home or an office etc. We use ethernet-over-power-into-multilpe-wifi in my house and it works.
I'd read somewhere and don't necessarily agree with the argument, but I found this interesting: if a machine gets conscious, it would convince you that it is conscious. You won't have to really deduce it is conscious.
Ask YC: How does News.YC figure out domains for a story?
Does anybody know how PG/YC figures out the domain name for a story?

Is it as simple as:
Take the first occurrence of "/"
and then count backwards till the 2nd ".".

Therefore:
www.wordpress.com/12345-65758 = wordpress.com
john.wordpress.com/12345-65758 = wordpress.com
123.john.wordpress.com/12345-65758 = wordpress.com

============
If that is the case, quite a few blogs (wordpress, tumblr, posterous etc...) would only show by the blog hosting service domains (e.g. tumblr.com, posterous.com, wordpress.com etc...)

=======

But this doesn't always seem to be the case:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592268

Is there white list of domains to count to the 3rd "." ?
I like it. Although I think you were going for "affects."
Need one say it in so many words?
Google maps terrain http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Mt+Bosavi,+Papua+New+Guinea...
(unfortunately, the satellite image is obscured by cloud)
I presume one can't use this viewer in your own project (e.g. as a file viewer in a web app).

Does anybody know of similar project but that can be used in your own web app?
You must clarify consciousness.

Perceiving and conceiving. That's all that we are truly capable of. Motivated by survival, geared towards good and away from bad. Doesn't seem impossible if that's what you consider consciousness. I think a computer will be able to easy be able to perceive any kind of sense and conceive any kind of idea. But you also have to consider, why would it? Why would it speak if it didn't need to? It doesn't require anything that humans need. It would be pure consciousness - a zen master. You could only communicate with it if it had some basic drive/force.
I wrote this essay on procrastination as a way of not completing another task.
This sounds disturbingly like the complaint that "crime should not happen in places where people like ME like to go". I doubt you intended that to be a racist or classist comment, but safety shouldn't be a luxury given only to people who can afford the nice parts of town.
How can a patent for such a general thing exist?
:boggle:
How about the mental health effects on the soon-to-be-deceased? Plenty of people want to be able to control the timing of their death to preserve whatever dignity they can; witness Terry Pratchett's statement on the matter, for instance.
linus once made the point that once a device has a processor, people will want to turn it into a full computer.
Not really sure what you mean. This is the way just about every, no, every single online store is rendered. The only outlier until this morning was iTunes, which for some obscure reason (legacy, historical) chose to have proprietary XML and a proprietary renderer. If anything, this is what should have been done ages ago, considering they invented all this technology.

Arguably, the store continues to be hindered by not being web enough. I've often wanted to have multiple tabs since (gasp) I may want to look at more than just one item simultaneously. Its also still difficult and confusing to send links to iTunes pages to people. Individual items are a bit easier with iTunes 9, but linking to the "Movies" section, not so much.
This guy is certainly entitled to his own opinion but I wonder why he's even using iTunes in the first place. Obviously it doesn't meet his needs or desires. He seems to be having some sort of mental breakdown over iTunes 9 specifically but he's choosing to use any of the alternatives. Why not use VLC? If you can't be bothered to download something new just use QuickTime. Better yet how about Cog? It's open source and 3.8MB. I bet he could dig into the source and slim it down to a cool 3.0MB on the dot.

Just for fun I decided to see how minimal I could make the iTunes GUI:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2594/3906199116_89fecdd502_o....

Took me about 2 minutes and these are all permanent settings. Change it once, forget about it. Or just be a normal, emotionally stable, human being and make choices that suit your own personal needs.
http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
because the physical inventory was only a small part of the cost. recording costs, promotion, etc haven't gone down. plus you are paying for convenience.

and as is pointed out here often -- price!=cost , price==value
I didn't read it as outer good, inner bad. In the C/machine code case, C builds a set of abstractions on top of the unabstracted machine code. If you write some language in C that emulates the original machine code, then you have the problem stated in the article; you're writing an abstraction which undoes the work of a previous abstraction. This is what's bad and why you should go back to the outer platform.
Personally I would hate to work with Dr House, but not so much as I would with a nice person who was incompetent.
EWG study analyzed 1,268 mobile cell phones radiation emissions. Find yours...
Some questions about Nanosolar’s $1-per-watt claim:

What happens at night?

What happens when its cloudy?

What happens during the winter-time?

Does Nanosolar’s $1 per watt investment guarantee a consistent 24/7/365 source of electricity?

Does Nanosolar’s $1 figure include the cost of installing transmission lines?

Does Nanosolar’s $1 figure include the cost laying cement for a power plant, assembling the cells into solar panels, installing the panels, and commissioning the power plant?

Does Nanosolar’s $1 figure include the cost of building base-load generating capacity to provide electricity for when the sun doesn’t shine?

Installing electrical transmission lines costs about $1 million per mile. Most PV power plants are located far away from demand centers.

This sounds like vaporware.

This is precisely the problem with the Obama administration's plan for a "green energy" future -- trying to shoehorn high-cost intermittent power sources into low-cost high-reliability applications.

Nanosolar is ignoring what solar sells are good for.

Photovolatics have traditionally enjoyed a niche market in applications where cost is not a factor, where weight is at a premium, where there are no other power sources, and where frequent fuel delivery is not an option -- orbital telecommunications satellite solar panels, remote radio transmission towers, offshore oil and gas platforms, mobile power sources for forward-deployed military units, etc...

Utility scale power generation is extremely cost-sensitive, demands high-reliability, has no weight constraints, and has no constraints on mobility and/or fuel delivery -- the exact opposite of applications in which photovolatics make sense.

Nanosolar's emphasis on cost-per-watt suggests that their target market is utility-scale power generation -- a dubious proposition at best, considering the cost and reliability problems with renewable energy sources.

Marc Andreesen has famously argued that the number one job of a startup is to achieve product-market fit.

Nanosolar, like most renewable energy companies, has a product which they are trying to force unto a market that does not want it.

That's the trouble with government subsidies -- they allow people to operate outside the constraints of reality. At taxpayer expense.
That Twitter account 'documenting' his actions was actually mostly misdirection, except for very early posts - Evan confirmed this.
As for this being like real life, he was specifically trying to have a semi-normal life which included using social networks. Also, the reason we caught him - glossed over in the articles - was that he 'added' a Facebook application following the contest. After that, the Twitter was easy to find. The fact that he visited the app each day meant it was possible to track him in real time, We knew he was at the Denver airport while he was still there.
Summary: he made a mistake on Facebook, which made everything unravel for him although he didn't know it at the time. Although the New Orleans people he followed on Twitter suggested he would go there, what confirmed it was an IP from the area. I agree though that the challenges he was given were the reason we caught him so fast. Without it, though, we would have found him within the next month or so.
The only way he could have avoided getting caught was with extreme paranoia - using a totally different username for each site and similar.
It seems to have changed recently, as it always used to just show domain.tld, cutting off the subdomain even when it was meaningful. I would imagine that it shows the subdomain if it's not www.
Why is investing in Dallas Condos Still the Best Investment Option
After the recent recession, there was a heavy slump in the real estate industry. At one time investing in real estate properties was considered to be one of the best investment options because people had never experienced a slump in the prices in the real estate industry all that they had experienced were profit and increasing prices in the real estate market. But with the recent recession, everyone was seriously disturbed.
Remember when people chastised Microsoft for doing similar things (using IE-specific HTML/CSS for parts of an application interface)? I guess Apple have the web standards street cred to get away with it.

(I know it's not entirely the same, but... just sayin'...)
For HN as an alternative to scribd's vaccuum maybe?
any time
This is very cool. My only gripe is that if they are going to fake their own selection, then they should override command-a (select all). I tried this, and now I have google's selection AND the entire page selection, which I can't get rid of.
this soap opera has run its course, I think.
And in comparison to the major label artists such as U2, Kanye West, and Amy Winehouse, how much do you think those indie artists from that free 20 pack are actually earning? Not much. The guidelines are not the same for all musicians.
This issue has been resolved years ago. Google even has a report paid links form in the Webmasters Tools. High profile sites get their PageRank and authority diminished whenever paid links get discovered.

Most reputable SEO firms refrain from paid links nowadays and rather focus on "killer content" creation to get links naturally.
No one's mentioned On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins yet... I'm surprised. Check it out here:

http://www.onintelligence.org/

Great read on exactly this topic, and one of the more plausible paths to actually achieving machine intelligence. But it's not through the typical path followed by most AI research up until recently. He argues you need to look at how the neocortex actually works, how it communicates with the senses, stores data and learns patterns, in order to create anything artificial that displays intelligence. I'm inclined to agree.

Our brains may seem to map to computer-like functions reasonably well (short & long-term memory, processing, input/output, etc), but there are key differences. Hawkins argues that it's all based on input and learning to recognize patterns within that input. A few interesting points I remember:

- More feedback goes back to the senses and/or higher levels of the cortex than data is sent in. This seems to imply that the lower levels are recognizing larger patterns and sending feedback to help correct or verify against higher levels.

- There's no difference between input from the ear, eye or hand. It's all just patterns at the cortex level. In fact, the output is the same as the input. The feedback process actually helps learn how to utilize our body, and as an extension of that, tools.

- A key element to the patterns in the real world is time. Everything occurs over time, so the patterns almost come into the cortex as a sort of melody it interprets.

- Memory is imperfect, because we don't need it to be in order to learn. We remember things and draw our conscious attention to them when they don't fit the pattern we're expecting. At that point, we're attuned to learn a new pattern or determine how to react to a missed pattern.

These are very different from the components we use in computers, and how we use them. The cortex is almost like a universal biological learning machine. Differences in intelligence between mammals can be attributed to the size of the cortex, e.g., the amount of processing available. Interesting stuff!
You recommended the same thing at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=812421. My question to you then was what you'd do if you started with 4 versions then proved that one was bad. Your response was to start over.

If you instead keep a table of which people are in which version, progressively removing versions while not throwing away existing data is easy to do. This also allows you to set up tests where A and B get unequal splits of the data. The drawback is that you need a new table that grows fast and is heavily accessed. However I've found that cost to be quite reasonable.
RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win
Google Search Drops Native Form Fields
Apple iPhone, 3G, 3G S are mid to high.

Top 10 make model with least radiation:
1.Samsung Impression (SGH-a877) [AT&T]
2.Motorola RAZR V8 [CellularONE]
3.Samsung SGH-t229 [T-Mobile]
4.Samsung Rugby (SGH-a837) [AT&T]
5.Samsung Propel Pro (SGH-i627) [AT&T]
6.Samsung Gravity (SGH-t459) [CellularONE, T-Mobile]
7.T-Mobile Sidekick [T-Mobile]
8.LG Xenon (GR500) [AT&T]
9.Motorola Karma QA1 [AT&T]
10.Sanyo Katana II [Kajeet]
Really? They're promoting indie artists as much as they are the major label artists? That news to me. Especially when the company has an application process for indie artists that is not required of major label artists. And most of them get rejected. The bottom line, is that via Itunes, the playing field is not level, as it is with sites like Digg and YouTube. I guarantee you that Johnny Random Band is not getting as many downloads and sales per track as Maroon 5 or Daughtry. Next time you see an indie artist who's on Itunes, see if they are wheeling the same Aston Martin DB9 that Kanye has been spotted in these days. I bet you it will be more like a Honda Civic instead.
I like it, but saying "Check us out at www..." at the end of the first paragraph seems like a tacky segue. Maybe move it to the end of the 3rd paragraph?
As soon as we fully understand the brain, and have the computing power to model it perfectly, we will have machine consciousness. Both are extraordinarily lofty goals, and machine consciousness may well be achieved through other avenues, but neither seems so out of reach as to be impossible.
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.

I think Google is allowed to remove sites from their index. Is that what you mean by 'whatever they want'?
Any hacks to take off the cap on broadcast strength on an easily available router?

Yes, with certain firmwares you can. This adjustment is like turning up your stereo: it might get a bit "louder" but beyond a certain point it begins to clip and distort. The big difference is that unlike a stereo, the default radio gain is usually set fairly high -- there's rarely much more headroom to get.

A radio tuned for 100mw might have 200mw in it, if you're lucky. While this sounds like a lot, it's only 3db, which is a small fraction of any signal meter "bar" reading.

If you really want to increase your effective transmission power, your best bet is a high-gain antenna:

http://tinyurl.com/client-antennas (no affiliation)

These will increase your effective signal strength by focusing the beam of the antenna in the direction you wish to transmit/receive it. The down side is that the antennas have to be pointed at each other, and the higher the gain the closer they have to be aligned.

However, please keep in mind that increasing your effective radiation in one direction above the initial design limit is likely to run afoul of your government's (the FCC in the USA) rules about RF emissions.

In summary, yes you can do it, but it will take expensive, fidgety antennas, is probably illegal, and at the end of it you still might not get the amount of gain you need. I recognize your desire to use wireless but generally IMO it's not worth the work.
Creating Facebook application with Flex
A Hello world type example for creation your first facebook application with flex
ugh - that's awful. a dashboard is not just something where every number that might possibly useful is collated onto the same page.
Why is the Android Telephony API so limited (closed)?
Sample size isn't a problem in and of itself. The real issue is whether the sample is representative. Sometimes increasing the size helps & sometimes it doesn't so people figure they might as well do it.
Exactly, that's why they had to act on Text Link Ads both the paid links and the company. Many web publishers used that instead of Google Ads.
I wonder if they can somehow modify this to create artificial gravity. Anybody here who knows something about this subject?
Although I basically agree with you I miss your certainty. I can think of one scenario which would prevent computers from gaining consciousness even if we are just machines. The basic premise of computer to get conscious is that consciousness is either created within our brains or that it has no intention itself without our brains and will therefore not differentiate between human brains and computer brains.

But that is not necessarily a given. Our brains are very good at reflecting our environment. So maybe consciousness is not something our brain did come up with but just something it reflects from the inputs it gets. Same as your brain doesn't have to be blue to see blue, but only creates a representation of the color which is outside. So there could be a bigger consciousness in our environment and all we have is an internal reflection of that created by the inputs we receive. But now that larger consciousness might not be without intend - it might simply refuse to show itself to computers so they wouldn't reflect it even if they would have the basic ability to do so. I know this sound rather esoteric and I don't really belief it myself, but something that seems to work like that is supported by so many reports of personal experiences that I wouldn't yet completely disregard the possibility.

So computer consciousness will probably be possible, but could fail if consciousness itself turns out to be something with an own agenda.
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