skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The thing Hamming understood, but which Bostrom, et al. don't is that sometimes even if something is extremely important or significant the lack of any reasonable approach to it makes it an unattractive thing to expend effort on. At least until a solution is more tractable.
Further, the idea that women dying in childbirth is some great tragedy is only true in the philosophy Bostrom and others have adopted. It is one of massive egoism and human-centrism that I think is misplaced. These same people then reject any philosophies that lessen the devastation of women dying in childbirth on the grounds that they are the fictions of lesser minds attempting to placate themselves over their impending death during childbirth. But there is no objectively true philosophy. The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with reality in a productive way.

I find your conception of philosophy unsatisfactory. Furthermore there are reasonable angles of attack we have on aging. We are making great strides in understanding metabolic pathways of aging in animal models, but we need the research funding to attract the researchers to get the work done. We will make significant progress when you can expect to have a bountiful academic career working on it. Longevity research is currently a career dead end.
The problem with dogfooding
"Some of their secondary services run on one-off slowish hardware with pretty strict rate limits."

Well everything has a cost and while OSM wants to make their website useful for mappers you shouldn't rely on data API to build a business. For example for the geocoding service there are quite a few abusers who'd run (or try) 1 million requests per day. The hardware is actually quite fast and expensive.

(I'm biased. We're running a geocoding SaaS based on open data http://geocoder.opencagedata.com/)
Scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
Forbes Now Including Advertiser-Created Content on Front Cover of Magazine
On the other hand, it could show that the owner's don't really believe in the future success of the company. If they really think the options will be worth millions of dollars, why wouldn't the owners just pay the $5000/yr more and keep the millions for themselves? That sounds like a great deal for them...unless they really don't believe that will happen.
1 7 Simple Things You Are Not Doing to Stay Healthy
How large is "sufficiently large"? Usually I write error handling code that could use goto as a state machine. This makes the code much more readable because the whole activity should have been a state machine in the first place. (Teardown and clean up is merely another state.) Needing to use goto for foo typically means foo was an afterthought.

Occasionally when I feel I need something goto-like in very small code I find it is more cleanly expressed as a `for(;;){}` loop with either break or continue as the jump points.

I'm not saying goto is never a good idea. I just want to see a single good example.
How to write cold emails that are not spam
From my perspective: aside from a mild overuse of adverbs, the words used in the piece are designed specifically to evoke a tone and a mindset. There is meaning in them when I read them. You may not catch it or not care if you do, but that doesn't mean it isn't there if you know where to look.
Not everyone's got AIS and ECDIS though. The places where I trained really pushed DSC for fishing and recreational use, by making it relevant to the little guys too: "If you'd just found a good fishing spot or a nice quiet place, why would you go blabbing to everyone about it on ch16? Call your mate up on DSC instead." They also made a point of telling people to spend that bit extra to get a radio that doesn't suck. Buying a cheap transceiver and having to input a MMSI using up/down/enter/back is really annoying and doesn't help take-up at all.

Speaking of AIS, did you see this thing from a couple of years back: http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/v... ?
> The thing Hamming understood, but which Bostrom, et al. don't is that sometimes even if something is extremely important or significant the lack of any reasonable approach to it makes it an unattractive thing to expend effort on. At least until a solution is more tractable.

Life extension has been demonstrated in other species. And medication, such as metformin, has been shown to extend human lifespan (I believe average, not maximum). Anyway, the point is that life extension for humans is perfectly tractable.

Re metformin. From a study[0]:
'Patients with type 2 diabetes initiated with metformin monotherapy had longer survival than did matched, non-diabetic controls. Those treated with sulphonylurea had markedly reduced survival compared with both matched controls and those receiving metformin monotherapy. This supports the position of metformin as first-line therapy and implies that metformin may confer benefit in non-diabetes. Sulphonylurea remains a concern.'

[0] 'Can people with type 2 diabetes live longer than those without? A comparison of mortality in people initiated with metformin or sulphonylurea monotherapy and matched, non-diabetic controls' http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dom.12354/abstrac...
Show HN: My implementation of transducers in Apple's Swift language
Isn't this the same thing as IRATEMONK that was revealed a year or so ago in the NSA ANT catalog?
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/iratemonk_nsa...
Literally everyone you know, both professional and personally.

When staring in freelancing, at least initially, you will be casting a line out into the vast pool of the people you know, and desperately hoping someone has a need for your services, bites, and ultimately gives you some money.

Some of my initial freelancing gigs came from places like stray tweets, random run-ins at non-tech-related parties, VC friends who passed my name on to their portfolio companies, ex-bosses who did the same, etc etc.

For many, freelancing, at first, can be getting on by the seat of your pants and simply hoping the cosmos divines you with a new gig (often from somewhere or someone you never saw coming) before your savings account dwindles to zero.
Not right. If the US was peaceful, there wouldn't be much of an argument for developing nuclear weapons, but the US is the most aggressive nation in the world, and nuclear weapons are the only thing that give them pause. The actions of the US since the end of World War II - invading other nations at will, interfering in their internal affairs, starting secret wars - give legitimacy to nations who want to develop nuclear weapons for their own defense. Nuclear weapons bring safety from you.
I really enjoyed this article, it touches on so many different areas of math and computer science and connects them in interesting ways.
This is fantastic news! And they decided to include the Chromium HSTS Preload list too. I've submitted something like ~30 domains to the list, and having them covered in newer versions of IE automatically is a very nice thing.
> Maybe one can see religion as simply a rational response to the absurdity of life

The problem is that religion doesn't answer anything(or gives absurd answers,backed by nothing but faith and fishy philosophy),isn't rational because it is not fasifiable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

What is clearly absurd is religion.
Did it work? Does he get rescued? Is bash better than a life jacket?
Genetic evidence shows loss of three basic tastes in penguins
>now people suspect that it's a smokescreen to hide BS behind.

In fact, this is usually a good heuristic to tell whether someone is trying to get off the hook with saying nothing at all. Politicians love this. It's all about filling up the listener/reader's short term memory buffer and get them to lose track of what you were saying. Once you've done that you can basically loop for a pretty long time. Many are embarrassed enough of their mental limitations that they'll just pretend something important was said rather than confront the speaker or admit to themselves that they can't keep up.

That said, that kind of writing is gold when you're writing fiction with, say, Gaimanesque magic in it, because it allows you to be really woolly and create a sense of non-understanding and mystique.
This was also part of the Survival Swimming course that used to be mandatory at Georgia Tech back in the olden days. At some point in the class, we had to jump off the high dive, use our pants as described, and remain floating in the deep end of the pool for some length of time (30 minutes I think?)

Fun class, but I shouldn't have taken it in a poorly insulated gym at 8 am Winter Quarter. Brrr.
> Longevity research is currently a career dead end.

David Sinclair[0] is wealthy and well known for his work in longevity. He Sold his company to GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million.

D Sinclair's earlier work was on resveratrol, and there's some more products coming. Well, actually one has arrived—in the US at least: http://www.elysiumhealth.com/

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sinclair_%28biologist%29
I agree that empathy would be a problem, but the exact nature of the simulation matters. If it were an exact copy of a human being, right now that's not technically feasible (or if it is, not outside of a highly visible major project).

In any case, the current proposal is mostly a funding grab, you won't see an actual brain simulation come out of it. Even a nematode worm is ambitious right now. See http://www.openworm.org/

I accept that's a consequentialist argument though. If we did manage to create cheap, easy to run brain simulations, I think we're starting to run into the question of the nature of personhood and the nature of consciousness (something I hope to contribute to some day). Do AIs deserve to be free from slavery if they are not experiencing anything consciously but still have desires and creativity and can convincingly pretend that they do experience something (which a good simulation would do)? I have a feeling that regardless of the "correct" answer to that question, whatever it is, human beings' emotions are very hackable and we'll grant them rights based on emotional appeals if they get to that point. ;)

That would open an interesting technical issue though. If a human simulation was cheap and easy to run, and we wanted to legislate the conditions under which it was run (e.g. must be given reasonable sensory inputs and have hunger, sexual desire, and other wants set to near 0), we'll run into the DRM / TPM debate again, but this time with serious "life or death" consequences.
This wasn't a case of needing to reach up, but to slog through.

To give a case of an author I've discovered recently who manages just the opposite: William Ophuls. He writes on a difficult, complex, and diverse topic (political systems response to a world of limits), but does so with an economy of words, a superfluity of information, an elegance, and all while maintaining interest and engagement. I'm still mulling over what he's written at a month or two's remove, and want to re-enter it again. I picked up a great deal reading his works, Plato's Revenge and Immoderate Greatness.

That is mastery of language.

Mark's writing isn't.
Penguins Have Bad Taste
Getting into the physical meat of it is tough, since most of the tools we use (measurement microphones, high-quality AD/DAs, software, etc.) are expensive. The theory can be a bit more accessible – though like most things, it often doesn't click for people until they get a chance to do it themselves.

The industry standard textbook, were something like that to exist, would be Bob McCarthy's "Sound Systems: Design and Optimization: Modern Techniques and Tools for Sound System Design and Alignment." [1] It's dense, but a great read, and should be accessible for people with a decent knowledge of the concepts behind FFT and basic signal analysis.

If you're just looking to play around a bit, you could try downloading a demo of SMAART 7 [2] from Rational Acoustics. It's basically a soft dual-channel FFT analyzer. We use it to compare a generated signal (usually in the form of pink noise [3]) with a returned signal (a copy of that signal sent to a speaker and returned to the analyzer through a reference microphone.) By comparing these two signals, we learn basically all we need to about how sound is acting in a given space: we know it's latency; it's frequency response due to signal processing, the physical nature of the speaker cabinet, and air loss; and it's phase response due to the same. The difficult part of the process is interpreting that data and using it to make informed decisions about how and where to modify signals and speaker positions.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Sound-Systems-Optimization-Techniques-...

[2] http://www.rationalacoustics.com/store/smaart.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise
In a universe without an observer there would be no-one to note how absurd that is.
Eh, I don't think that follows. Top firms in many sectors try to hire elite programmers. Do they succeed? Further, how much of the industry is made up of hires of top firms?

I have no particular position on the elite status of those working in HFT. Certainly there are some smart people there, but I don't know how to generalize. I don't have anything like a representative sample of either HFT or programming more broadly to compare, despite having worked in HFT and out of it.
Ignorance about names doesn't support an accusation of any kind of prejudice, much less racial (not cultural) prejudice. I am glad EFF knows better than to misuse a word that would have people stop taking them seriously due to gratuitous KKK/Nazi undertones.
Does anyone happen to know whether philosophers have tried to come up with optimal ethics assuming P(universe exists for no reason) is close to 1 and P(god exists) is close to 0? The best we can do is probably to maximize the life span of our species to continually improve these estimates and the best way to achieve that is possibly to minimize suffering. Is it that easy?
Penguins can’t taste ice cream, so says science
Show HN: I wrote a book about getting started pentesting (50% off for HN'ers)
That sort of thing only works on men who think they can trade something for sex. If you buy a woman a drink (or bring a deer to her cave) with the expectation that she now "owes" you, be prepared to be disppointed.

Suppose someone of the same sex bought you a drink, would you feel obligated to have sex with them? How about if they implied that they would love to invest in your company?
Other comments are reasonable, but fantastic work alfredxing, played around with it just now and loved how simple and intuitive it was. The only feature I really miss here is being able to use the previous answer -- is this there and I just didn't find it? Thinking of an 'ans' constant that holds the previous answer
Hi all. I wrote a book introducing the fundamentals of web application penetration testing, expressed in language I hope is friendly to coding hobbyists and beginners. I've written a few walkthroughs for basic vulnerabilities and plan to build it out with more vulnerabilities, tools, and extra resources (scripts, payload lists, etc).

I'd also like to offer all HNers half off. If you're curious and would like to get a taste of some of the content, visit http://bughunting.guide

Thanks HN!
Stand With Greece
All public intellectuals that propose or push their body of work should be forced to offer warranty or insurance on said work so if the results do not turn out there can be consequences.

Just like every one else.

http://www.propertarianism.com/2014/10/25/speaking-honestly-...

Promise to truthful speech as opposed to free speech.
How to Get Published on the Huffington Post
People love stripped-down versions: Instapaper, Pocket, Flipboard et al are all testament to that (as is AdBlock, to an extent)

I think it was almost entirely because the "follow/unfollow" experience was so clunky, especially compared to Twitter and FB. Even today, adding and removing feeds from my readers is unnecessary pain.

The hurdle is far too high for the casual audience.
Here's a philosophical question that's been bothering me for a while. For large enough n, we can construct an n-state Turing machine that attempts to prove a contradiction in our current most powerful axiomatic system (let's say ZFC). We must assume that this machine loops forever, but Gödel's incompleteness theorem implies that we can't prove that.

What does this construction imply about BB(n)? In what sense is the BB sequence even well-defined if we can prove that it can't be determined?

(Edited for clarity.)
I trust that you would do the right thing. My concern is if your software gets out there on the web (even if in 50 years, I'm not saying it's an issue now) and some jackass from 4chan has a different agenda. Or maybe if "brain uploading" becomes a thing (which I have problems with on a philosophical level, but that's another discussion), maybe North Korea could use it to up the ante on their "3 generations of punishment".
I will never forget a lottery winner statement. She won a huge amount of money in the lotttery. She went out to dinner
with her family to celebrate. The next morning her husband
woke up in complete liver failure. Both were MD's and her
final statement at the end of the interview was "Life is truly random." I think about that quote too often.
Sounds like every company, ever.
I can understand feeling morally opposed to it, but a realist might tell you that it's important to spy on the German government simply because it's a powerful actor, even if it's an ally of the United States.
1. The NSA uses all of these offensive information security technologies in mass surveillance as well as targeted attacks. See Belgacom.

2. The more concerning thing is their appropriation of civilian infrastructure and targeting of civilians using offensive attacks.

3. The vast offensive capabilities of the US government undermine their ability to be trusted in the development of improved defensive capabilities. Defensive research and product development funded by the US govt will produce systems that undermine offensive capabilities that are a key form of US hegemony.
Loved this article, I'm really interested by the BB numbers in particular and how they relate to the halting problem.

And I though I could win this silly game with my Knuth's Up Arrow notation and vague knowledge of Ackermann's sequence!
How long until that list of yours is just *.gov?
I think it's more engineers who know something about everything, and everything about something.
Not sure why this is posted now, as it's untouched since 2010. Text after first example explains the <|> operator which isn't in the example? Final paragraph refers to next post, with no link.

Confused,
Rusty.
Germany definitely has high quality nutritious bread, that much I'm certain of.

(Disclaimer: not German, but Dutch. Our "normal" bread is weak and soft and spongy compared to German bread, even the whole wheat variety, which I eat almost exclusively because it's still more nutritious)
That's an interesting question. We already have that problem though, ever heard of humans? ;)

Typically we deal with it by having a waiting period of 18 years from birth (balanced by death) or a green card to citizenship process that takes a while and is limited in number.

On the other hand, would simulated humans even need much of a vote? I think their primary needs would be satisfied by simulated satisfaction. The only thing they they would need-need in the physical world would be for us humans to not pull the plug on them and to service their hardware when it fails. Much easier to deal with than real live humans. Just a few real humans might be needed to maintain entire cities of these people.

It sounds like a great sci-fi story to grant a real-world franchise to a few elected officials in the sim-city and keep the truth hidden from the sim-citizens.
> For large enough n, we can construct a Turing machine that attempts to prove a contradiction in our current most powerful axiomatic system (let's say ZFC).

What is n in this construction?
Also Samsung Smart TVs.. or have we already forgot about that? it has been a whole week.

I know it's not Germany.. just wanted to provide another example, so we know Germany isn't special.
SpiderOak's client is closed-source though, so you only have their word that they don't have your private key.
Life is meaningless if you live a finite life because no matter what you do it will be washed out in time. Life is meaningless if you live an infinite life because any finite portion of time in your life approaches 0% of your total life time and by definition has no value. And yet, meaning can only be defined by life, because there is no such thing as inherent meaning.

If I created life I would almost certainly make it finite but endow it with a sense of hope that life goes beyond a single life span.
Right. Which is why we wrote our own storage and API and the router on top of it.
There is also an nascent energy transition towards renewables now.
What is your background?

Have you found bugs for large companies? How many?

:)
I would contend that in the successful cases where you are optimizing from the beginning, you are actually doing a two stage process, one design stage where you figure out what you need, and another where you figure out how to do that efficiently and fast. To some degree, it's semantics (when is optimization not design related?), but my point was that optimization before nailing down the requirements for that component is what leads to problems. I think that's the premature in premature optimization, when you spend time optimizing something you aren't sure will even survive a later point in the design stage.
This is framework fatigue. Ruby on Rails for example made, and still makes, front and back end web development tenable for people who don't necessarily know what happens behind the scenes. The same goes for Angular in the front end.

When you're starting out your programming career by programming against a framework, you'll get very very good at doing things within that framework. However, in the absence of exposure to lower levels of abstraction, this knowledge will be your glass ceiling. There comes a time when you need to level up as a developer - this usually means getting a deeper understanding of what it is you actually do.

Of course, we're all web framework developers in a sense, even people who tend to roll their own HTML/JS/CSS - and even these require you to look deeper into how browsers perform tasks - but higher level frameworks tend to obscure things quite a bit more. Also, higher level frameworks tend to have high rates of internal change and external churn. To make matters worse, a lack of more fundamental knowledge will always mean you're at a severe disadvantage when judging the benefits and drawbacks of new frameworks as they come out.

A fad-based choice of programming tools is not a good recipe for keeping your sanity, because you're perpetually reacting to any whim happening on the cutting edge, especially if you follow the exaggerated bi-annual trends slavishly ("and now, EVERYTHING has to be done in React!") - on the other hand having an ear on the ground will help you. Fads do serve a purpose, because they expose you to new ideas. But they kill you just as quickly if you pivot your entire professional life to accommodate them.
Restaurants improved their hygiene scores when told they're displayed in Yelp
Would this really be considered a hardware backdoor?
Emergency care is what you are describing. Urgent care, while urgent, doesn't have the same immediacy. This replaces what gets done in an urgent care facility.
I think you missed my point. In room X you only have so many things you can do with the reverb. Period. With an active sound system like the one in the article you would have new options that would be physically impossible otherwise.

There's no reflective/absorptive setup that will make a room with a 10ft ceiling sound like it has a 20ft ceiling. With enough microphones, speakers and computing power you could do exactly that - you could effectively change the sonic shape of the room. If it works...