skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I believe Koch is conflating two distinct concepts.

I believe Koch is conflating many distinct concepts - as most of the consciousness research field seems to.

How can you say anything useful until you define your terms?

It seems to me humans have many different layers of experience:

Visceral pain/pleasure
Instinctive drives
Emotional/limbic experiences
Locational (physical mapping)
Memory-based/learned
Abstract/intellectual/symbolic

Consciousness is another kind of experience which adds a symbol that works a bit like JavaScript's 'this', and seems to create a level of experiential indirection - so instead of sensing something directly, you experience how it affects the 'this' symbol. It seems to do this by abstracting the experience and simultaneously comparing it with an associative database of previous experiences, using all of the circuits in the list. (And probably others too - I won't pretend this is a complete model.)

You need some basic ability to abstract to have a 'this.' The better you are at it, the more bandwidth passes through the experience/memory/abstraction/future prediction/new memories system.

Simpler animals have basic input circuitry, and they learn instinctively without abstraction.

But... I'd guess surprisingly many animals of all kinds have a 'this' network. The human advantages are a 'this' network with more bandwidth, a much improved ability to learn from experiential invariants, an ability to make useful predictions, and an ability to store and communicate 'this' experiences using external technologies.

If this sketch is accurate, consciousness doesn't have to be mysterious. But it also doesn't depend on a simple connection count.

The Internet won't be conscious because it has no 'this' network. It has no pain/pleasure circuits, no emotional circuits, and no instinctive drives. But most of all it has no ability to compare memories with current experiences and to abstract learning from that. There are systems - like Google search - which have incredibly basic precursors to abstraction/learning/prediction. But they still mostly run on a batch basis with input->processing->output, and no explicit self-concept state memory.

My guess is that if you built a system from these elements and included the current state of the art - or better - machine learning, machine vision, and natural language elements, with useful analogs of instinctive drives and the other animal fundamentals, you'd potentially have something that at least acted and sounded conscious, and would likely do some unexpected things. (Which is one of the practical ways we think we recognise consciousness. Conscious entities are hard to model. In fact we're probably easier to model than we think we are, but face to face, consciousness in other people usually implies surprises.)

Whether or not it would be truly self-aware or just pretending is a question that's impossible to answer without resorting to metaphysics.
Yes!

This is great. One of the frustrations I've had with Puppet and Ansible is the lack of a clear model for data. It's quite difficult to know the scope and dependencies and origin of all the variables that one deals with.

If one could update tables and then have that representation be reified to the machines it would be awesome.
I'd rather see an OS and package manager that has a "functional" design (as in functional programming language, functional data structures). This would allow conflicting packages to be installed next to eachother in different branches of a functional filesystem.
When ever I hear people speak of god doing something for them, I immediately lose respect for the person. I always hope that perhaps one day they will grow up to the full stature of our species and use the very thing that makes us human, our reason instead of relying on now debunked lies our ancestor apes 2 chromosomes away from chimpanzee invented for themselves to appease, control and understand nature they feared.
ECG (electro- — not echo- — cardiogram) records electric potential changes between various points on the torso, of which pulse rate is really only a very averaged metric, obtained via blood flow and pressure changes.

No chance you'll detect a QT interval change with this.
In that world, funnily enough, there wouldn't be such announcements.

On this level both extremes are similar :)
We'll first have to pass from the stage were announcement like this are not that courageous (sure might annoy some BS far right minority who nobody cares about), and are actually the in vogue thing to say for kudos and hi-fives.

Which I think is were we are now.

The people who really had the guts, "came out" when it really mattered and made a difference, back in the seventies and eighties.
On one hand, we have a man who worked with the Nazis, and on the other, we have a man persecuted and chemically castrated by the British government for his sexual orientation, who many believe committed suicide as a result.
It got a reasonable amount of attention, but I think a lot of journalists (correctly, IMO) felt that speculating on someone's sexuality where they hadn't talked about it publicly was a bit inappropriate.
Compared to which country that has never persecuted anyone for being gay?
We're in a transition period, and rapidly heading towards your ideal. We're getting there, and this is a necessary step. Be happy it's happening :)
Then why not just say so? Why the runaround? I guess because they can.
I found this one very striking:
"Still, there are laws on the books in a majority of states that allow employers to fire people based solely on their sexual orientation."

Could anyone provide details? I wonder whether it is an explicit "Being gay is grounds for firing" or rather just plain lack of protection from firing for being gay?
Wouldn't it be cool if there were a library that could build relational APIs for any problem (including an optimizing SQL compiler)...
An odd thing to slip in? He is, as far as I've gathered, a deeply religious gay man. If his point is to imply those things are not at odds, then I don't think this sentence's inclusion is odd at all.
That's weird ... I though he had come out. I remember reading in Nytimes and Reuters why it was a big deal that Apple will have openly gay CEO a couple of years ago.

Anyway good for him.
Yet we see that StackOverflow is fast and scaling really well with demand while Reddit still has load issues after seven years.
244 pages? Modern car user manulas are often thicker.
Wow, that is very eye opening, thanks!
Algol variants, PL variants, Extended Pascal, Modula-2, Mesa, Cedar, ...
From people most likely younger than me.
I read it as saying that the benefits of not basing your business on a proprietary platform are lower than the benefits of going with a stack that you already have some expertise at. You may read differently.
Time-series data in Cassandra and DynamoDB
He's a religious man. It wasn't "slipped in". Read the following sentences. Brilliant.
Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? (1977) [pdf]
In theory the Amiigo does what you want. In practice... well the device and software is pretty rough at the moment. I'd send you mine but I lost the shoe clip part already and I'm not sure if it works w/o it (it complained every time I loaded the app about it being missing).
Surely if they are colliding then they are no longer parallel.
> the same god who hates gays

Well, that would be a matter of opinion; Reform Judaism doesn't think so, for instance, and nor do a lot of liberal Protestant Christian churches, particularly in Europe. Even the Catholic Church is backing away from the idea now.

(Of course, it could also just be a turn of phrase; plenty of people use phrases like "thank God" without literally believing in one...)
I understand that point. The impact of something such as this on your shaping is incommensurable; I can only imagine how much being part of a minority (particularly, one which is prejudiced, mocked and even attacked) shaped his way of understanding and appreciating difference.

However, I can't agree with putting it in "that" way ("among the greatest gifts God has given me"). Even taking into account how much such a thing will shape a person, it seems exaggerated (to me). It sounds like he is who (and where) he is because of his sexual orientation. He was, however, born in a developed (and rich country); he had food, parents and housing; he also education (and a good one, in great schools) and the privilege of working at IBM and Apple.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_law...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_law...
Biblical literalism is not as common as you seem to think it is...
This is what North America would look like on Jupiter
The fact that Fitbit charges you $50/yr to export your own data is also probably also counts as an advantage to Microsoft as well...
Entrepreneurship Takes Center Stage for MassChallenge Awards Ceremony
Apart from it is very obvious when an attack is made when looking at logs.

We saw the attacks start hours after the announcement.
Postgres would probably be even easier, since it already has the framework to do this (foreign data wrappers) and a nice API to write said wrappers in python[1] - 200 lines to use your SQL client as an email reader[2], I imagine that wrapping /proc would be considerably less :)

[1] http://multicorn.org/foreign-data-wrappers/
[2] https://github.com/Kozea/Multicorn/blob/master/python/multic...
Yea, I can tell I am getting old by how few people I recognize on the covers of the magazines in the grocery store checkout line.

(I think that is a not-so-funny version of a joke a comedian told, but I can't for the life of me remember which one...)
To me it came across as purely figurative. IMHO the usual phrases like "thank God it's not raining" are pretty much detached from the religious context.

Is it different in US?
I'm no expert, but I suspect this is just referring to work "at will" states, where you can be fired without being given a reason. Thus, it could actually be for anything: Your orientation, your work performance, that ugly shirt you wore yesterday. Doesn't matter.
Agreed that this reduces the effort, but I'll believe it's easy when I see it :) In any case, I think OpenSSH randomart is likely to be more effective than the emoji approach.
Ed-Tech startup intends to help humans learn anything
#ABOUT
Chalk Talk Solutions is an Ed-Tech startup that is intends to help humans learn anything. Chalk Talk creates complex visual representations of the learning diagrams in the student's brains at a given point in time, records the student's learning objective (e.g. getting a high score on the GRE), and generates a clear path for that student to achieve that goal. Our web application currently focuses on helping students achieve higher grades on English-based standardized exams, starting with the SAT. We aim to expand our content offerings significantly in 2015.

#WHYUS
Armed with $600,000 in angel investment a couple of months ago, we just released out first version in October 2014 and we already have several paying users in countries like Jordan, India, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Switzerland. Our management and investment team possesses a strong network and has successfully started and operated many businesses, including international education franchises. Our technical team enjoys solving difficult problems and building end-to-end software solutions. Our US engineering office is located in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. We're still a very small team so when you join us you're not just joining a great company, but you’re also helping create one.

#TECHNOLOGY
Django, Python, Javascript, HTML5/CSS, AngularJS, Postgres.
Knowledge in any of these items is a plus: Data Science, Data Visualization, and Machine Learning.

#DESCRIPTION
Looking for: Software Engineer – Full Time, Part Time, Intern.
Needs to show examples of past work. Work on web applications (both frontend & backend) and UX is encouraged.

Competitive Compensation: Salary + Equity.

Interested candidates should contact us at info@chalktalkinternational.com or send us a message at http://chalktalk.academy/
Ampy Is a Wearable Spare Battery That Charges as You Move
Startup Lendoor Aims to Use Crowdfunding for Small-Business Loans
I don't really see why ToroDB can't be implemented on top of Oracle :) There could be some demand for it there.

I needed this for a side project at work a while back, but didn't get the time to implement it.

Oracle's cumbersome enough already; I for one have no desire to drag XSDs into it to use XMLDB.
Thanks. It seems it is the latter. In some states the list of things forbidden to discriminate on misses sexual orientation. The wording used in the article was closer to the former.
Beats me. This is a third-party tool. The release XML was updated immediately after release, which is the normal procedure.
Any word on an open API/raw data export or is that a policy, not a eng decision?
Tim Cook: “I’m Proud to Be Gay,” and Helping Others Is Worth Trading Privacy
That is pretty much MS's strategy for all these years. Someone else does the innovation and then they follow.
Wow. That doesn't sound like an accident - you don't say someone "is fairly open about being gay" unless you're damn sure they are. What an unpleasant person.
These are the memoirs of Max Gergel, a chemical engineer who graduated in 1940. If you enjoy the "Things I Will Not Work With" series you will probably like this. All in all it was light and enlightening reading. Some of the topics covered:

How to acquire chemicals as a poor high school student.

How to get the most out of college.

Starting up a company, finding your first customers and expanding your markets.

Being a supplier to the Manhattan Project.

What chemical engineering was like before the EPA and OSHA.

What went on to create a future Superfund site.

The tricks and techniques of traveling salesmen in the '50s.

A note to linux users: Poppler has a lot of trouble with the PDF. Mupdf will drop the occasional half page. Xpdf was the only engine that could render the whole thing flawlessly.
You're really just interpreting bytes as characters in a different character set. "Visualizing hex bytes" suggests something slightly different, like using an emoji for each of the digits 0-9 and A-F (not much unlike the other proposals for writing hex digits, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bruce_Martin_hexadecimal_n... .)
That's a pretty offensive accusation.

Like Cook points out, the US is still country in which gay people are subject to life-altering discrimination all the time. Most other countries are even worse.

I suspect you're overestimating how accepted homosexuality is outside of your bubble.
>As for me confusing HN and YC, I'm quite aware of the difference between the two and as far as I know I didn't confuse them in the least. Lots of start-up people frequent HN

Felix said he's the MS person for YC. You misrepresented it as HN a couple of times. Please read your post again.

>Every third or so link you posted has 'microsoft' in it.

But we do have you to counterbalance me.

>Hosting is almost never the biggest cost for a start-up, but it can be the biggest cost for a larger company, which is what most start-up aim to become.

What? What is the biggest cost for a startup in the initial phase when founders are not taking salaries? Rent for sleeping? Ramen noodles?
Which large company has the biggest cost as hosting? Even 50k/yr is like 1/3rd of a Silicon level salary. It's like you got it completely backwards.

Anyway, all this unrelated to the topic at hand and does not belong here. There were numerous HN threads with this discussion and please write your thoughts as a blog post and you'll have my upvote.

Again, got any thoughts on the Microsoft Band? If not, /thread, I am out.
Out of the 2k doctors in SF (?), only 200 or so seem to take Cigna (my current insurer); 1500 would take Blue Cross/Blue Shield (previous).

If your doctor doesn't take your insurance, it's considered "out of network", and you end up paying ~50% of the cost, vs. 0-10%.
I don't share Eich's views, but he's 58 - the cultural concepts that made it difficult for Tim Cook to be public about his sexuality may be the same thing that makes Eich against gay marriage.

Edit: I can't comment due to rate limits, but a poster below hasn't read what I wrote above and is suggesting I am saying the men grew up in different times. I am suggesting the exact opposite: they grew up in the SAME period/culture.
Frustration-free Responsive Images
French entrepreneurs launch test to detect pork in food
4 Things Every Indie Game Developer Needs to Know About Copyright and IP
>I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.

Americans are so weird.
Have any companies explored fixed, or movable mirrors as a simple way to maximize the light on the panels? Since mirrors are much lower cost than the panels I am surprised that no one faces the PV system away from the sun, and then points 3 mirrors at each panel. In places that aren't space constrained this seems like a much more efficient approach.

We have a heliostat for a piece of artwork [1] that keeps the sun hitting the same spot with only slight variations in angle over the year, and it only requires a single motor and gear train.

I am aware that the solar furnace type systems all use mirrors, but I haven't seen any PV systems that use this approach.

[1] http://www.janetsaadcook.com/BU/BU-1.htm#BUarc
"since all the data is stored inside the DOM as field values or HTML data attributes."

That doesn't seem like a very good idea. Seems like the opposite of what we've been doing for the last few years.
Then why would you complain about getting alerts if they can be disabled? Or are you complaining about the idea of other people being able to get alerts because you don't approve of the concept?
According to recent comments from the Pope - he is something of a authority in the religious world I have heard, seems that God has no deep hatred for gays, was involved in the Big Bang and watched observantly life evolved.

You don't really need a superficial reason to hate other humans, if your heart so desire.
honestly I could care less. I really just don't care who is gay or not. I really don't give one whit to those who think its some special event when they do.

your personal life, keep it personal, its no one's business and it certainly is not something to exploit for personal gain or to guilt another with
.NET & Windows are used in the enterprise space, a lot. If mainframes are still around in enterprises, as a decent market (still worth billions of dollars), I imagine that .NET & Windows will still be around and probably still worth tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars, 20-30-40 years from now.

There's no foreseeable threat to Microsoft in the enterprise, that market is roughly split in 3 between (mostly) cross platform C++, (mostly) cross platform Java and Windows-only .NET (I don't think any enterprise really uses Mono in production). And both C++ and Java predate .NET, so enterprises seem to love .NET to have moved over to it.
Yeah, I'll have to look into it. I assumed you could take the course, but I didn't know if you'd need to be sponsored by a company or anything like that.

I don't know that I'd see it as a waste of money. I just like using my vacation time and money to experience something completely different and new, while learning new skills. Even if I'm not out doing something more interesting and engaged, I'd just end up hiking around finding a place to hang a hammock and read a book on coding or a technical paper.

My wife says my vacations aren't vacations because I never look like I'm relaxing in the classic sense. I'm not kicking back on a beach with a pulpy novel, usually (not that there's anything wrong with that). For me, a vacation is a time to psychologically recharge, and I get that by engaging myself, but on my own terms. Along with that, depending on how long the certification lasts, it's not that bad to have a backup skill/cert in the wings.

I've also found that it's really valuable to get insight into what other people do to make the world go round. Gives me a better respect and understanding of things in general.
This isnt a bigotery contest hey? I was talking from the point of view of someone who has the greatest respect for what Turing has done.I mean that's a shame that everything he has done for his country mattered very little when he was judged for being gay.
It should also be noted that (as of now) there are no immediate citations for these claims.
Not surprised to see Krane's take on crowdsourcing getting mentioned in NYT. She's found a niche that most crowdsourcing websites ignore: Good old fashioned loans.

Seems to me everybody focuses on donations or equity financing.
They are certainly converging ever closer to the truth. They should just come out and say Jesus never existed as well, and they are not sure there is a god and apologize for being the biggest trolls in the history of humanity. Then they would gain some respect.

This is the organization that to this day stays opposed to reason, advancement of science that meddles into research and politics and tells other people what they must think and do because of what they believe without evidence and that has done the biggest damage to progress of civilization and horrible destruction of ancient civilizations and their achievements, now comes to us with an ingratiating smile, because it had to give up so much power, and says how it stands for progress. But we should not forget how it behaved when it really did think it had god on its side.
>> Sorry if I came off somewhat arrogant in my earlier post.

I only trust arrogant & unapproachable doctors. This parody couldn't be truer: http://www.theonion.com/articles/doctor-has-troubling-amount...

>> Was she acting as a nurse or NP when she was taking care of you?

Don't know which one, I was focused on myself :). And definitely don't know other things you talked about (other than MI).

Well before I was scanned, she said suspected dissection based on pulses and some other monitors. Then the scan confirmed it. My 2 cardiologists (personal and fd ones) both say I'm lucky she was there.
You Can Fit All of the Planets Between Earth and the Moon
That's a mistake but it should be a career limiting mistake nonetheless.
That's like saying "your program is more elegant if it has no monads". It's an incorrect statement. The monadic version is perfectly elegant. Even better: it's the right one.
Larvel – The little Emoji framework
As a fellow atheist I would very much appreciate it if you educated yourself a bit further before hurting your self-proclaimed cause.
This is purely anecdotal, but one of my favorites is "Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations."

http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract
Ambulance drone can deliver defibrillator faster than an ambulance
I'm pretty sure the reporter said that Tim Cook was open about being guy, which led to everyone reminding him that he isn't, in fact, open about it.
Tim Cook is a Christian. This is a message to the Church.
*fate (at least I hope you mean that)
I don't think we can equate complexity of a tropical thunderstorm to the complexity as described in the article. The discussed complexity arises from local connections (be it persistent bonds or repeated interactions) between entities. While interactions in the thunderstorm might seem "complex" to our mind, they are not "complex" from the point of view of "complex systems", they are rather "complicated".

Moreover thunderstorm network (if we consider the interactions of particles in the thunderstorm) is very transient. No feedback loops emerge in the system (to my understanding of thunderstorm). Also the system does not adapt to the surrounding environment through it's reconfiguration of internal connections. Thunderstorm lacks many properties of the complex systems discussed in the article.