skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh sorry silly little me for not filly my post with euphemism's, polite wording and not adhering to the political correctness cough censorship cough code. I'm sorry for calling a spade and not referring to it as tool with a sharp-edged metal blade welded onto a long handle used for cutting into the Earth's surface and soil collection.

Please be the one to correct me if you ever see me on some political news article, I may lose meself and refer to gays as gays (HOW OFFENSIVE OF ME) instead of members of the LGBTQZAKGGKDGGGFD society, I may refer to Asians as Asians and Africans as Africans (HOW RACIST!!!!) instead of POC's People of colour.

Honestly, if you're so butthurt because you have a Facebook account at least try not to make it obvious.
I find the metaphor bad.

My brain might work like a computer (computation et al), but the word computer evokes actual existing computers to a layman -- and my brain doesn't have a von neumann architecture, nor does it run something similar to our software.

A neural network does computation of course, but we wouldn't call it a "computer" in the sense we use the word when dealing with, well, computers.
I don't know what to think of that site. How has it not been shut down?

personally, I've used that site to browse through books before buying them online. In my case, it is beneficial for the publisher to have their books on that site, but I'd imagine most people don't use it that way.
Despite all their shortcomings, pedal reflectors are excellent communication: "this tiny taillight is not a car in the distance, it belongs to a bike and is much closer than a car at similar brightness would be"

They are also very close to the ground (closer than any other reflector), which greatly increases their exposure to light from a properly adjusted headlight. When i ride in the darkness, pedal reflectors are often the only thing preventing a collision with one of those otherwise invisible "ride like a pedestrian" ninjas.

That being said, pedal reflectors are only good for making recumbents more visible to helicopter crews with search lights. But i guess recumbents were not a topic when pedal reflectors became mandatory. Which reminds me, this whole discussion is in serious need of some Godwin's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Loibl_GmbH
... Then it probably got disabled two months later, when some internal bigwig complained that it was getting in the way of their old workflow...
Unpopular but not unreasonable.

- software is a new form of literacy. Perhaps at some point in the past literate people could contribute to the communi

- the fallacy of altruism. Developers working on an open source JS drop list widget are not being altruistic - their contribution to the community could as easily be say working at a soup kitchen, probably with more value to the world.

"Contributing to the community" is something we rely on Adam Smiths Invisible Hand to help us with 99% of the time. So while I use and appreciate the OSS developed to date, it has gone beyond a simple charitable model and into an Eco-system beyond any simplistic approaches. I would like nirvana, but it's dubious as a long term strategy for OSS.

- conflicts of interest always happen. When it is important enough, say Linus' salary, the community will either whither or find a way to build its own institutions to make the important conflicts managed - like Linus salary. This is part of building strong institutions we hear about so often

- getting better at begging vs better at selling seems to be the last point you make. Honestly I cannot see that as a honourable position of trade.

We don't have perfect solutions - but we are working on them
>in the sense that the entire universe is analog.

Citation needed.
I'm a dualist but for the sake of argument, one approach is to claim that however the brain functions, it should be explainable by physics, and if physics is computable, then it should in principle be simulable by a Turing Machine.
The point is that out definition of the computability of a function is too narrow, and does not take into account the real-time all connected nature of the computation the brain does.

Therefore, we lack formal way of satisfactorily compare the brain to a Turing Machine.
Programming Isn't Boring, It's Fun
> And I think it's highly likely that the brain does not work in this manner whatsoever, and that in fact, in the translation of reality into 1s and 0s, you've lost far too much to properly "compute consciousness"

You act as though the only datatype usable by computers is bool. That's ridiculous. Yes, computers are binary, but they can compute analog things just fine via floating or fixed point arithmetic to arbitrarily high precision, among many other things. To claim that the brain has a fundamental advantage over a Turing machine is to claim that there's some magical quantum (or otherwise) advantage in the brain's physical system that is un-simulate-able by a Turing machine.

You can't even argue that analog provides superior precision to digital representation of continuous values, because the analog part of the brain is represented with discrete units (accumulation of neurotransmitter molecules in various parts of the neuron)! In other words, our brain actually uses fixed point math (granted, incredibly complicated fixed point math :))
The obvious solution is complete freedom of association. (To the extent that "fit" doesn't help companies succeed, it is its own punishment.) But this would make for a short article. It would also make for simple laws, and would prevent busybodies from making other company's hiring practices their business. But we couldn't have that—not in the Land of the Free.
The question of whether physics is computable is a fascinating one I'd really like to see solved before I die.
The reason they do this is easy to understand: in science you try the simplest processes first, before you do something really complicated. If the drug companies are using this process is because there are still having successes (low hanging fruits) that can be achieved right here, right now. I agree that the best way to create effective drugs will involve more complicated processes that will take a long time to develop, but above all, to approve through regulatory agencies.
The problem here is that the so called singularity does not necessarily depend on machines having the so called qualia.
Consequences would be the solitary part.

but "forget to refill their pain med prescription." is something I would consider to be worse than whatever sexual harassment she received.

people in authority executing personal punishments should be thrown in jail themselves.
Spot on with the alchemy remark, I've made similar comparisons before. Coming into bioinformatics/computational biology with a strong discrete math background I found a lot of professors excited to work with me until I started telling them how their ideas and models and experiments didn't imply what they wanted them to. Just like the startup world is awash with "it's like Uber for X" the biology world is full of "let's apply X mathematical technique to $MY_NICHE" and somehow this is supposed to always generate novel positive results worthy of publication. Then you tell them that you applied such-and-such mathematical/statistical model to their pet system and that the results contradict their last 10 years of published papers . . . and they ask you to do it again.

I remember one professor studied metabolic reaction networks modeled with differential equations. The networks themselves were oversimplifications and relied on ~5N parameters (N being the number of compounds in the network). The problem was that while all the examples in publication converged on a nice steady state (yay homeostasis is a consequence of the model!) it was trivial to randomize the parameters within their bounds of experimental measurement and create chaotic systems. Did this mean the model wasn't so great? No, it just meant those couldn't be the real-life configuration of those parameters . . . sigh. And now I'm a data engineer and no one asks me to get data from an API that doesn't actually provide it and I'm much happier.
In every culture or country, the elderly will have a higher chance to live alone than the population in general, simply because they spouses have died. I thought that was pretty logical, and unavoidable.

Again, the article in question did not tell much about the very old people. 60 year old man with a heart condition? In a country where life expectancy at birth for males is 81.13 years? He wasn't old at all, he could marry and live a happy life for another about 30 years, that's what life expectancy for males at 60 in Japan is. This is not about ageism, nor about treatment of the eldery. It is simply about how people are systematically depressed and feel lost, having worked for industrial super-machine their whole life - a machine which is now gone.
Since timeup is for free I think that a good way to go into that direction is to completely expose our API and make it publicly available.

Than everybody who wants can create addons for several kind of devices and other software. Right now the API is still very tiny and in my opinion it should stay like that. Only a very small selection of additional features will come.

So far our capacity (only 2 devs) is very very limited to support all kind of other software / devices in short time. (We're still students and doing timeup as a small side project - We saw the need of that tool when trying to organize meetings for learning groups)

Any other idea how to further support your idea?
I agree, calling it a computer is the origin of a lot of confusion. Perhaps "information processing" is a better term.
I was hoping for the announcement "we are ditching the obsolete POSIX standard that specifies 1 day must consist of exactly 86400 seconds".
Ireland, Spain etc, got the same treatment from E.U. bosses. There has been a solidarity movement for Greece, and anti-EU / austerity protests in both countries actually.

E.g. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31072139

And it's especially Germany, because Germany is calling the shots in the Eurozone. France plays second fiddle, and Britain is more concerned with its Atlantic allies.
I agree with him.
> Computers are designed to interpret or translate the messy analog world where nothing is exactly 1 or 0, into a precise, deterministic digital world where everything is either 1 or 0. And I think it's highly likely that the brain does not work in this manner whatsoever

But neurons totally do work by encoding information with discrete signals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential#Process_in_a_...

Action potentials are discrete events, and just like hi or lo in a silicon computer actually correspond to a range of voltages, the exact voltage-vs-time curve of an action potential likely has considerable flexibility.
My experience is that philosophy of mind has almost nothing to offer to modern neuroscience. The questions being asked are the unhelpful ones and signify a general obsession with semantics, subjectivity and language tricks.
>I'm not sure Young actually appreciates how large sampling error is under usual significance levels or how high heterogeneity between labs is.

Rick Young is an MIT Professor, has been in biology research for 3 decades, is in the National Academies of Sciences and has published hundreds of high-impact papers across a huge number of disciplines. I know this doesn't mean he is God but to say that he doesn't understand "sampling errors" or "heterogeneity between labs" is an absurd insult.

https://biology.mit.edu/people/richard_young
I don't think that we are in the territory of having that argument at all to be honest. We don't know what the processes that the brain self evidently generates are - for example Intelligence, Consciousness. It isn't possible to discuss how these are executed (or not, depending) until we have some understanding of what they really are.

And we don't, and worse, we may not ever have access to these concepts, as Hofstadter and others have argued. It may not be possible to represent the idea of ideas in an idea.

That of which we cannot speak that thereof we must remain silent, or something.
Dark energy is such a stupid term. You can tell it's a term designed to court funding, and garner intrigue.

If they used the term "unknown energy" instead, review boards would look at the grant proposal and just shake their heads. Maybe "unexplained/anticipated energy" would stand a better chance as a term. For added excitement, the three letter acronym UAE could be used to foster an impression of technical expertise and mystery.
But this is effectively begging the question. If you assume that reality can be completely described by functions that compute on natural numbers, then obviously anything within reality, including consciousness, can be simulated by a Turing machine.

Unless I've missed something, it's not actually been shown that the universe itself is Turing-computable, therefore there's no reason to assume everything within the universe could be equivalently simulated on a Turing machine.

It could also be that in theory, consciousness is Turing computable, but not in practice. For example just computing a protein fold for 1 millisecond takes hundreds of ASICs days of compute time. This might give some clue that complex physical wetware processes are not able to be efficiently simulated in real time on any realistic Turing machine.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the idea of a hierarchy-free organization. I get the appeal of thinking we are going to live in a world without bosses, but how utopian is this idea? Misguided, maybe.

I believe the current examples show that even relatively flat orgs must revert back to a command and control structure once they get to any size, for instance Github, and Google retricting freedom (the 20% worktime perk being taken away). Orgs are based on a division of labor and that means roles and that means you play your position and that is less individual freedom.

Also, hierarchies don't exist just to 'tell people what to do' or divide people by status - bosses have authority to resolve conflicts among peers, and a final decider - as anyone who has witnessed the pitfalls of 'design by committee'.
Physics is most probably computable, since people created it; the real question is whether the world is (Turing) computable, and from my point of view it is clearly not. I find it remarkable that most people believe it is or that it might be.
The "good asynchronous" code in Golang is straight-line code that would be called "synchronous" in Node.

Part of the problem is that even as an attempt at a "non-synchronous" interface, this seems clumsy. It demand-creates new channels for requests. That doesn't seem right.
> To claim that the brain has a fundamental advantage over a Turing machine is to claim that there's some magical quantum (or otherwise) advantage in the brain's physical system that is un-simulate-able by a Turing machine.

Again, please point to any research you know of indicating that the universe itself is fully Turing-computable.
The source for Bitbucket is no more available than that for GitHub.

http://atlassian.bitbucket.org/
It seems like building around uwsgi, for example, might be easier than interfacing over zmq; and the approach of of using electron to interface with a standalone Python web server is difficult to distinguish from simply opening a browser.
> It's unrealistic to think contract labs or university core facilities can get the same results as a highly specialized team of academic researchers, they say. Often a graduate student has spent years perfecting a technique using novel protocols, Young says.

Then they need to spend the time documenting those protocols.

My dad worked in biological research, and his attitude has always been: if you don't write it down, you might as well not have done the work at all. ESPECIALLY in research.
"The only mature and real-world solution is QT"
That seems a little disingenuous. What about GTK with pygobject?
I don't see why. Your computer reacts to keyboard and mouse in the real time, also for network packets going in and out. And it's plain turing machine. It does so by regarding every input as they become available, one by one.

Information comes to brain via neurons, and those have finite speed, it's not as they had quantum-like properties. Signal in; signal out, with delay and altered magnitude.
A new video of big sean
I think it'd be better to just use unity or unreal, or anything else really that provides you more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS2nlGyu4fk

As someone has already done some.

Also visual studio 2005? How old is this thing?
You don't need specialized equipment. I used to make skyr at our local dairy back when I was a kid (in Neskaupstaður, East Iceland), the equipment we used for our method of production was:

1) A large metal vat for the milk to ferment in.

2) Burlap bags that the fermented milk was drained into.

3) A large open top metal tub with wire racks on top, stored in a cooler.

The burlap bags were placed on the wire rack and the whey (mysa) allowed to drain from the bags for a couple of days. When the curds were almost free of whey, the Skyr was scooped from the bags and sold. Not exactly a high tech process.
There are at least two distinct concepts here. 1) Exactly (as much as possible, given apparent environmental constraints) reproducing the procedure and results claimed and 2) attacking the procedure or results as ineffective or misleading (to what is actually being claimed).

I'm not sure either is quite analogous to QA testing in the way you claimed though. Yes, QA testing should be reproducible and yes, QA testing should search for novel tests, but the scientific process is still a bit different and there are multiple distinct and important phases and concepts at play.
My closest belief is near similar as mentioned in article, that brain, at some level has some "computational primitive", which resembles transistor functionality.

But that is only one level. There can be additional layers of function, which can be influenced by sub-atomic entities, like elementary particles. We still don't know how deep this goes. This is, what most likely, provides depth of our consciousness.

Our biological hardware is built out of finite atoms. Consciousness unfolds out of "electrochemical circuits". Electricity == consciousness.

We have what is called "human energy" - emotions are one example of expressions out of it.

For AI, to be human like, it has to simulate physical behaviour of human energy.

I see, that out of this energy behaviour simulations can emerge what I call "computational psychology". That is, computer could analyze and decode human behaviour and "understand" like psychologist does this.

Thing is, that many people don't see these subtle patterns - they are learned over lifetime with different success rates. Once they are aware of these patterns, they can function more efficiently as a human. Such "psychologist as app in your pocket" potentially can raise overall quality of society.
On all hardware components, some seconds are already longer than others. Computer clocks are not accurate. They need to synchronize and the clock skew and the following synchronization cause seconds to have varying duration.
You should know that there are a million of tiny ways for an experiment to "fail", requiring one do repeat it. Reagents could be bad, a machine could have broken mid-cycle, a positive (or negative) control could have been wrong... Basically meaning, "it didn't work". In this case, any "data" that would have gotten would be incredibly suspect and you'd need to repeat the experiment.

In the vast majority of labs, this is nothing nefarious, it's the way science is done. If something fails, you try to figure out why it failed, try to fix the issue, and then repeat the experiment. Only once everything works correctly can you get valid data to then try and interpret. And if you get an interesting result, you still need to repeat the experiment 2-3 times to be sure.

Repeating failed experiments isn't an issue - and has nothing to do with alchemy. It's just basic troubleshooting.
I'll never forget hearing Jerry Lettvin [0] pronounce, in his slow, measured, way: "The brain is not a computer. The brain is a gland."

I think he said it partly to tweak his MIT AI Lab audience (this must have been about 1982). But he had a point: a lot goes on in the brain that is not digital.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Lettvin
I've thought this[0] was interesting but haven't found time to play with it yet.

[0] https://www.cronofy.com/
> getting better at begging vs better at selling seems to be the last point you make. Honestly I cannot see that as a honourable position of trade.

Asking for donations is most certainly not begging, and I personally find that a somewhat offensive way to present it.

Donations are a voluntary contribution in return for some kind of work that was done; begging, by definition, isn't in return for anything. They are two fundamentally different concepts, just as different as 'accepting donations' versus 'selling'.
It definitely does take a considerable amount of work to get proficient to that level and even more to develop the intuition of where to look. It must be stated, however, that the authors of these blog posts are not attackers. They are proactively finding and demonstrating where software already in common use could be exploited by attackers.

Just like how research into cryptanalysis strengthens cryptography for everybody, research into software vulnerabilities and exploitation strengthens software security for everybody.
Although it isn't on-campus (6 blocks away), the Internet Archive folks purchased a house in order to rent to employees at cost:

https://blog.archive.org/2015/03/17/open-source-housing-for-...
I thought everyone is aware of that. Life of a Slavic man is sadly, similar to a life of an American black man [1], for the same reasons - poverty, low educational level, lack of opportunities, which causes crime and self-destructing behavior. Which results in that by the age of marriage, there is a shortage of men at least as bad as a shortage of black men in U.S. - except black women have a slim chance of getting into an interracial marriage - getting a European or other foreign guy for a Russian girl is more difficult.

Coupled with sexism meaning that women typically earn very little if anything, and their only chance to escape abject poverty is to get married, and because there are so many women for so few men and with nothing else to make the guy interested, pregnancy becomes the only option. To keep the guy married (especially given that divorce laws are very weak and not in general working in post-Soviet countries, and men lose little if they divorce), an extreme psychological pressure is required, which usually takes efforts of the whole girl's family. Except the very cynical guys, only chance to escape this is to keep as far from marriage as possible. This is probably why post-soviet population declines so fast.

Of course, the higher classes of society (e.g. coders) are exempt.

(the other side of this is domestic violence which is very common, and sometimes not even viewed as a problem, which is an even more sad side of the story)

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing...
A friend of mine was a pretty active day trader during the dot com days, he used to call it "the only gambling legal in all 50 states" and talked about earnings in units of "Boxters" [1]. Unlike the person in the article he had not invested in real estate or other holdings and so his net worth changed dramatically during the 2000 recession. I always felt it was like a teen who drives recklessly until they almost die in an accident and then can't bring themselves to drive above the speed limit after that.

I always felt that being single and without dependents gave him an edge. I was never comfortable not having a really really safe hedge as a stop loss. Of course it could be I was just too chicken to "go big" :-)

[1] The Boxter from Porche was going for about $50,000 each at the time.