skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People always saw the universe based on their current knowledge, in the digital era we believe it's a computer simulation some time ago we thought there were turtles all the way down.

We are still at the philosophical stage, science is too young for these kind of answers so the question is when we will reach the necessary knowledge level to comprehend it and if this is possible because we are also part of it.
Agreed. Sure, as I have been around when mp3s became a thing and the TranceAddict or MercuryServer forums where the go-to place for electronic music enthusiasts, I'm of course familiar with your sources. In fact I produce and to a lesser extent DJ myself.

Of course since then my taste became much wider and genres are really irrelevant to me today. Which renders the usual recommendations engines hardly useful to me - it seems everyone's coming up with the same suggestions (or they all use EchoNest). In any case it's not a replacement for a real human curator that knows his stuff. Also labels play a pretty big role in this. Despite the evil reputation of the major ones, their smaller siblings are very valuable when it comes to curation and selection. Being featured on kranky, warp, Secretly Canadian, Editions Mego,... well, you name it, is a very strong indicator for quality. Particularly in electronic music this is hardly news.

Speaking of digging up hidden gems and rare classics: Do you know the Numero Group? An utterly fantastic re-issue label that made it their mission to find the most well hidden and unreleased material to give it a proper modern release. The background story is a fascinating read too: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jun/13/numero-group-cr...

If you want to learn more about them, start here: http://m.mixcloud.com/NTSRadio/numero-six-hour-takeover/
These ideas may be fun to think about, but ultimately they're meaningless. It's certainly not a new idea that some being on another plane of existence brought our universe into being on a whim, and can modify the parameters of its existence at will.

If that's so, it's highly unlikely we'll be able to poke any holes in it. Nor is there any reason to believe our memories or any of history is real. Maybe scientists have poked holes in the simulation a million times, and each time, the supreme Code Monkey suspends the simulation, fixes the bug, and rolls back the state to before the hole was poked.

For that matter, it's silly to believe that our puny existence has even been noticed by whoever spun up the entire Universe.

Most of the questions that this premise supposedly solves are mostly based on fallacious reasoning. Why is the universe fine-tuned for us? What are the chances of this specific universe? How likely is it that intelligent life exists on our planet? You may as well ask what are the chances of your particular DNA sequence. Just because your specific genetic code is extremely unlikely doesn't mean it's impossible that you exist.

Ultimately, such an idea only raises more questions. So, say we are in a simulation. Now, how does the "real" world work? Where did it come from? How do we know it isn't a simulation?

If these are the answers that make the most sense to you, you've stumbled down the wrong path, and it's time to take a fresh look at the world.
The issue he's talking about can be pretty easily illustrated with "turtles all the way down". A simulation must be, by definition, simulated by something that is external to the simulation itself.

If this isn't infinitely recursive somehow, then there must be an instance that is not a simulation. This is the uber-reality he speaks of.
This is one of the strangest things I've seen from google.
Predatory Glow Worm Discovered in Peruvian Rainforest
Except the "demand" is not a demand directed at anyone, but just the world in general -- since it's after the fact. They would dig up dirt on those who have already written negative articles. No demands are made of them. And no demands are made of any nameable individuals. If you ask "who are they blackmailing", the answer is "a hypothetical."
Its really nice!
Any way to view SHOW or ASK posts?
The world with CSS3 transforms
> Why assume the author of this system is even aware of us at all?

Think about why we simulate systems. There are two reasons that I can think of to do so. First, to exist inside of it, like a flight simulator or Minecraft. Second, to observe the emergent effects, like Conway's Game of Life. Assuming we're in a simulation, we'd have to assume that we're in the second kind of simulation. (Now that I think about it, what we term as deities could simply be alien 'players' of our universe game. Other examples of the first I can think of are ridiculously over-powered humans like Steve Jobs or John D. Rockefeller or Genghis Kahn.)

Assuming we're living in a simulation of the second type, it's the emergent properties of these that make them interesting. Emergence means you can't make a predictive mathematical model of what's going to happen. If what you're after is something you can predict mathematically, then you'd just do that with an algorithm rather than run a much more complicated simulation. We do do things like make computers in Minecraft, but the size and complexity and overall 'seriousness' of our universe sort of implies that that would have been a design goal for our world, rather than some cosmic two-year old's science project.

It would seem to me that if you have the power to simulate the universe then you could probably model quantum effects mathematically. I mean, we already do with the classical laws of physics, though obviously not to that level. I would think that life itself would eventually top the list of research priorities for our supernatural creators. I'm not saying they'd be interested exclusively in human-like intelligence, but they already had billions of years to study cosmic physics. Why keep the thing running once life starts evolving if that's all you're after? Ethical issues aside, it would have to seriously impact the performance of your simulation algorithm, the same way that sort of thing makes our own games more complex.
> A midlife crisis is simply when all your 'someday' bills are due.

I'm sure that's an important component of it. But it is not the whole story.

For example, incidence of clinical depression peaks in the late 40s. This page has a graph:

http://www.medicographia.com/2010/10/the-timing-of-depressio...

(I've seen more detailed graphs, but I can't find any right now.)

Also, I read about a study that showed that predictions of husbands having extramarital affairs could be made more accurately based on the age of the wife than on the age of the husband. The authors hypothesized that husbands looking elsewhere for sex, was, in part, a natural response to the wife going through menopause. (I can't find the study now.)
> I don't think that's true at all.

Forgive me for saying, but this whole response seems like a confrontational HN-esque way of saying "What about intrusion detection?"

To which I'd say, "Great point! And you're right, that comes more easily for physical locks. Although I think we could do some interesting things with incrementing nonce's for successful and failed attempts to transact with a smart lock design."
Yes, this is an excellent point, although it doesn't contradict anything I said. In fact, it might help explain the demographic trends: older generations might be more likely to see food innovations as benevolent, because these innovations formerly played a legitimate role in increasing the supply of food that wouldn't make you sick.

Schoen's comment below makes an excellent, related point: older generations might have a lower, or at least different standard of what constitutes "dangerous" food. It used to be that dangerous food would immediately give you an infectious disease; whereas today, dangerous food very slowly gives you a chronic non-communicable diease.
I vaguely hinted at supporting GamerGate, and this was enough for you to slander me as "trying to justify some pretty terrible actions". At no point did I attempt to justify any violent threats; quite the opposite, I simply pointed out more violent threats and suggested they should be given equal reporting.

The article in question could have addressed the real issue of doxing and online threats without taking a side in this political GamerGate fiasco.
Does anyone know why this is even possible? Is it due to airport fees? I was surprised to that the UK imposes such a high duty on incoming international airplanes [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passenger_Duty
Leaking confidential information is clearly not okay, and good on Goldman for firing everyone involved.

That being said, look at how the government and regulators approach the tech industry: Words like "open," "distributed," "inter-operable," which have not just technical but philosophical meanings in the tech industry have no meaning to lawmakers or regulators. That's precisely because there's no revolving door bringing people with these perspectives from the industry into the government, where they can shape policy.

There's no particularly good solution to regulation, and I'm not convinced our status quo is worse than the alternatives. Most people do not believe you can achieve societal goals in a free-market without regulation. So you have some sort of regulation, and the question becomes: who are the regulators? A professional class of bureaucrats well-insulated from industries, or a class of practitioner-bureaucrats that move fluidly from industry to government and back? There's good and bad that comes with both options.
I just made my first list. Composed mainly of asdf asdf :P
You mean other than Google Glass - right?
If you accidentally published sensitive info in that package you may want to contain the damage.
No particular reason you couldn't side-channel the universe.
same with git rebase on master branches and yet people do that sometimes. there'll always be use cases for deleting a package from anywhere no matter what repo we're talking about.
They mention adsense, and this is an early version. I bet it'll be rolled out more broadly over time.
How close to full-spectrum are those new "daylight" LED bulbs?
IIRC, no. You need to get/see UV in order for your pineal gland to stop producing melatonin (what makes you sleepy). That is why most light therapy boxes say that they're "full spectrum" - they emit UV in addition to visible light.
I think the parent commenter more closely means meta-reality. There is sort of an ongoing debate in science/philosophy over whether our not our Universe actually computes at some level; it looks like it might, but there is no reason a priori for us to believe it does compute and doesn't just seem that way.

To claim that the Universe is a simulation means that it would be the result of some computation. Depending on your interpretation, this could mean one of two things: that the Universe does ITSELF compute, or that there is some "computer" which carries out a computation resulting in the Universe. The second is what I think the parent commenter is thinking about. In that case, where does this "computer" exist? It's certainly not in our reality. This would imply that there is some meta-reality that contains the "computer" which computes, and thus creates/contains, our reality.
homepage, too
It seems to me that a consequence of the second principle of thermodynamics is that your simulations are always going to be (much) smaller than your resources (I'm using the word loosely).

So you can't go very far down the road of simulations in simulations in simulations before the "deepest" simulation is to small to have conscientious beings. So the argument that we are in all probability in a simulation seems to break down.
Here's the link, because that website is gross:

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
Encrypt Everything: The Tech Based Free Market Solution to Net Neutrality
Life imitating art?
The problem with the 2nd approach is password restrictions (some of which, stupidly, reduce the key space rather than increase it - all uppercase required on some banks? yes it happens).

Another annoying but logical constraint is the one where sites query your pwd for references to the site itself and tell you not to include that - another strike against that appending approach.

The requirements vary, are conflicting and change over time. I tried your approach, but then gave up after repeatedly forgetting what restrictions applied for which site - altering my specific password and making it non-memorable. Enter 1Password.
I'm sorry if this is an unpopular opinion on here, but the CC companies are equally as culpable for this as any dark market.
That would lead to shorter passwords. Normally domain names are pretty long, and just containing a common string like .com doesn't make inverting hashes any easier.
Ask HN: What are tips on running a successful adwords campaign?
I was chiding your comment for being rude, not salacious.

The first meaning of "scabrous" in my dictionary is "having a rough surface", and that's how I meant it. There's a long tradition of using that word to describe rough-and-tumble discourse, and it seemed fitting. You didn't just smack another user, you smacked them with a pointy implement (a link to an insulting image). That's not ok on HN. Neither is smacking people without a pointy implement. And telling another user "You're a liar and a coward, and you know it" is right out—a bannable offense, although we didn't ban you for it.

I'm insisting on this more than usual, because we don't want the pugilistic approach that is popular in some related (by subject matter, at least) online communities to take root here. When commenting on HN, please eliminate incivility from what you post.
How much of this is more easily explained in that Betty is conservative and her granddaughter Jennifer is liberal?

Jonathan Haidt's TED talk on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives touches on sex and food (see time index 7:09):
http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind

If there is a shift in the decades in common cultural attitudes, it might be explained by a general pendulum swing back and forth between conservative attitudes versus liberal attitudes holding more common sway in any particular decade.
Pie Noon
What you are saying makes sense, but you are taking on the entire copyright argument with this logic.
Sorry for the delay—

ECT has been construed poorly in the media, typically as abusive towards patients (or as a threat). However, it's a legitimate technique that's been proven in clinical trials repeatedly. In popular lit, you can read about the experience of going through (and receiving help from) ECT in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar; I've personally experienced a thorough ECT treatment, and her depiction of the relief (the titular bell jar imprisoning her/suffocating her is lifted to sweet relief).

Medically, it's introducing small (but seizure-inducing) voltages to the brain. The patient is typically given a muscle relaxant and/or a sedative for the duration of the administration. They are tied down—not to stop the patient from resisting, but to stop them from hurting themselves during the administration through involuntary muscle movements. This is repeated, multiple times in a week, for several weeks until being able to discern either a positive effect or lack thereof.

When I last researched, it was not entirely understood why this treatment provides such a fundamental relief. One theory (I tend to hold this one, as it just makes sense) is that some peoples' depression emerges from an overconnected brain, seeing patterns and associations that others do not (as easily). Under this model, the ECT severs some portion these connections and brings "quiet" to the depressed person's brain; again, this is similar to what I have personally observed in myself.

I should note, the ECT is a serious treatment with long-term neurological effects. Short-term memory loss is common, with other complications being much more rare. It should not be taken lightly as it can cause perceptible, permanent changes to the person's emotions, memory, personality, and cognitive ability, with by far the largest symptom being impairment of short-term memory.
Same for me : my dev pc has a 6 y.o. AthlonX64 with 4GB RAM, which force me to have a second pc to only run Lotus on it ! Six months ago, my manager ask to upgrade my workstation for the standard build provided by the IT dept, with some modifications in order to lessen the cost (the standard conf cost like 2k, while his was 700$). And he was replied : "your conf costs too much, here is a 400$ conf with an i3 core". He said then : "Fuck it, we'll take the 2000$ standard dev build then".

In reply to the top post, I would add the following task delayer :
- supplier unreliability

We order a server from a major manufactoring company, which had a faulty PCI bus (well hardware defaults happen). They took 6 months and 5 differents motherboards to ship us the same exact configuration we initially payed for !
Is car technology creating stupid drivers?
Some good tips, published on a site that moves all the fucking content out of the way every time you click the mouse and makes it impossible to easily figure out who wrote something. Love the message, hate hate hate the Medium.
Fun thought experiment. Take all ad-supported services you are using now. If you were asked to pay for them, how much would you pay?

For me, it comes to $100+ per month but that seems like a steep price to pay.
Maybe I am ignorant but trying to distinguish between simulation and reality seems to me a lost case right from the beginning. You have to look for a difference but we know neither the rules of the simulation nor of reality. If we look at the universe and find a difference between what general relativity predicts and what the universe does, maybe it even looks exactly like floating point rounding errors - this tells us nothing. It might be an imprecise simulation but it may as well be that general relativity is just an approximation and the real behavior of the universe is floating point general relativity.
Can you then please summarize in just a few sentences what you think the message of the article is? I'm interested in what you personally found in it. It looked to me that the article starts from the wrong premises and then slowly develops... what actually? I don't know. To me, what I've read just doesn't have sense. So I'm genuinely curious:

What is the thesis posited in the article?
> Except is that information public?

I don't think it needs to be easily accessible to the public to be problematic. Many people, including businesses and government, can have access. The electricity vendor has little incentive to protect it, to scrutinize government requests, etc. Recent NY Times articles describe the US Postal Service accepting almost all law enforcement requests for information on their customers.

Also, data has a way of leaking ...

> That information actually has an extremely legitimate use, which is to better manage peak grid usage and how to optimize that.

I do see a benefit to it, but 1) It should be anonymized and minimized. For example, how about aggregating data about usage on my block and storing that? Cleaning it of anything that violates privacy, such as high-resolution individual signals? 2) My privacy is a higher priority than their technical benefits; there's an assumption (maybe not by you) that whenever there's a tradeoff, privacy doesn't amount to much -- this is money we're talking about, after all.
I used a fake email address.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll consider that in the future. It's probably naive to think drive-by-criticism can be constructive in this setting.
Holy PsyOps Batman.
I find this whole article rather suspect. For example, people have always had premarital sex. (http://books.google.com/books?id=knN9HzkY1pEC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA...)

And the author simply asserts, without any proof, that children from divorced families do worse. Really?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-divorce-bad-for...

I stopped reading halfway through on the assumption that the author was a Republican, and lo and behold, she's with the Hoover Institute. Thought-provoking article, but given the assumptions made and how they clash with the facts as I know them, I don't buy any of it.
If you randomly sampled a set of 93 dice floating in space from a set of 200,000, what are the odds that 20 of them are closely aligned along the same axes?

Is this a fair analogous question?
What is immoral is all the regulation around it that forbids new credit card companies from entering the playing field.

That's why now, instead of the existing companies fixing the mechanisms that allow for fraud to take place, they can afford to ignore that market signal (that their product has a bug) by forcing their customers to pay for it (the retailers, who in turn force their customers, us, to pay for it).

This is how, in very real terms, the lack of competition literally hurts everyone, by making everyone pay for thieves, instead of making just incompetent private companies (trying to compete in this market) pay for it.
Invention by Design; How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing by Henry Petroski:

http://www.amazon.com/Invention-Design-Engineers-Thought-Thi...

Previously, I've read his book Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering:

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Paradigms-Histories-Judgment-En...

I can't speak on the former yet, but the latter is excellent, and provides a framework for analyzing failures in engineering judgment (regardless of whether you're talking about bridges or software). I've also been working through The Little Schemer.
There is also an alternative to GTD, it is Zen to Done (http://zenhabits.net/zen-to-done-ztd-the-ultimate-simple-pro...).
It basically tries to be a simplification of GTD. Also the idea is to focus on 10 simple habits to improve productivity.
"I opt out at airports, I donate to the EFF, I don't use Uber or any other app that targets people's privacy and actively threatens the freedom of the press"

Freedom of the press cannot exist under capitalism, who controls the hiring and firing and owns the organization controls the information.
So, we will see startups spring up that will compare whether it is profitable for you to use ads or solicit contributions from users.

Also, this ties in with Google's efforts in payment space.
There are almost all kinds of jobs on odesk. From debugging a c/c++ code to writing algos and doing web developent etc. PHP is in high demand on odesk.
:O

How do you compute that number?
some people are not old enough to remember the regular famines in India and Pakistan - obviated by engineered strains of rice
I think the parent can be read as an honest request for more details. It doesn't need to be met with snark.

(Don't take this too harshly - the content in your post is good.)
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+contributor#!/story/forever...
>I stopped reading halfway through on the assumption that the author was a Republican

I am impressed by the open-mindedness you display.
They're starting incredibly small with 10 publishers. Users have a bigger incentive to signup when ads will be removed from a large number of sites they visit. For example, if I just use Imgur, why don't I just upgrade to Imgur Pro for the same price, get the ads removed, and the extra Imgur perks? Now, if Google ads would be removed from a dozen of the most popular sites I visit, then yes, I'd consider it. I'm hoping this doesn't fail due to lack of publishers. Google has a tendency to lock everyone out for too long, so I'm worried it'll be another invite only flop.