skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just happened to be checking this right now and saw your reply.

I definitely agree with most of what you've said above, with the main exception that I consider consciousness to be somehow intrinsic or primary to the Universe, even more so than matter/energy and space/time, rather than something that emerges over time.

I do agree that what I would call the capability to express consciousness seems to exist on a continuum, and I agree with your characterization of it, but I believe that what we consider "inanimate" objects express consciousness too. At the risk of sounding completely looney, I'll admit that I've had encounters that make me think that whirlwinds ("dust devils") have or express a kind of sentience!

Although I can't really explain it, experimenting with robotics and augmentation has made me realize (or so I believe) that the interface between our bodies and our experience of our bodies is fundamentally mysterious, that there can be no possible way that any constellation of matter and energy could cause or engender the subjective sense of self. Anyone who has blinked their eyes knows that there is some connection between them and the experience of seeing, but how you see is totally mysterious. A sentient machine would be in the same perplexing situation.
I'll bite. What motivated you to do this? What was the process like? Have you considered making instructional video for Udemy or other MOOCs as another resource?
For an extreme counter: Piltdown man?

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/science-of-natural-histor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
I'm sorry for posting this; I didn't realize I was detracting from the conversation. And since it's too late to delete, I must suffer additional downvotes.
Silicon Alley’s First $10B Tech Startup Isn’t a Tech Startup
It seems videos on optimization basics come up often lately but I really like this one. The presentation is very clear and pleasant to follow.
Ask HN: Why ask for address on a job application?
I've been applying to jobs online, and a lot of businesses have their own employment portal that they make you go through. I've encountered quite a few that require I fill in my home address.

Why do they need my home address, or any address of any kind? With privacy flaws rampant in the wild, I don't know if I trust any company (even big name ones like Google) to hold my data. Are they going to sell my data and all others who have applied? What do they need it for?
Income Inequality : http://robie.us

-- launched today actually.

Going to start a PAC + Charity that helps poverty-stricken kids learn to code and play with robots while marketing the PAC and raising funds.

But the portal itself is to share/collect resources, links, movements around Basic Income and Income Inequality.
Edit: Robie = Robots (4) Income Equality
It looks like PipelineDB is implemented as a fork of PostgreSQL. I would be interested to understand what is different about the architecture of PipelineDB that it couldn't be integrated into upstream PostgreSQL.
Soli looks very interesting. There is Smarter Objects from MIT Fluid Interfaces that is similar in nature, but has a more dynamic approach. It's certainly not as simple as Soli seems because of the augmented-reality component it uses. But if Google brings back Glass and ships Soli in IoT/smart household objects, then you'd have the same result.

--EDIT--
Link to MIT Fluid Interfaces Smart Objects: http://fluid.media.mit.edu/projects/smarter-objects
A great deal of the Chamber's funding comes from Tobacco companies. In fact there are conference rooms named for them. If you haven't seen Last Week Tonight's take on the international bad behavior of the Tobacco companies I really encourage you to check it out.

It's about 18min long, but well worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UsHHOCH4q8

They've responded to a shrinking market in the US and other highly developed nations, by doubling down on their efforts to sell to everyone in the rest of the world. And woe to the country with a smaller GDP than Phillip Morris who decides to try to put restrictions on a pack of smokes.
Yes. Especially true for countries or cities reliant on Chinese money. One of which is South Korea with most of it's trade coming from China. An economic crash in China will have a big impact there. Also, we should see housing prices in west coast fall when the Chinese money exits quicker than it came. Vancouver in particular is kept afloat with Chinese money, that's going to turn out to be a bitter lesson,
But do people in Europe really feel a sense of solidarity with each other?

Yes, yes they do.

I'm also glad the Greeks voted No. About time this charade that is the €zone was fixed properly. And I say that as an ardent proponent of the €. The sooner a politico-fiscal framework is set up the better. Of course people _hate_ the idea because it means that sovereign states become even more closely knit. And they also hate the idea that a mechanism will be put in place whereby regions that benefit more from the integration help regions that don't benefit as much. By all means, the Greeks should get their house in order, but the stereotypes that are being bandied about the place are embarrassing.

Smart move by you guys (UK) to stay with the £ while the € experiment got under way. If people put aside their differences and fix it though the € has a chance at becoming by far and away the world's second reserve currency. We're closer than we imagine to that state of affairs I believe.

Regarding the immigrant crisis in the Med. Surely a tragedy that every EU citizen should be ashamed of. How many have died already? I don't even know. UK has responded now though (and bravo for that), as has Ireland, Germany, and others?
Founder @ PipelineDB here (hi Slava!)

Currently continuous views must read from a stream. However, in the very near future it will possible to write to streams from triggers, which would probably give you enough flexibility to model the behavior you want if you could conceptualize a table as a stream of changes.
I can't speak to whether or not it's good, but I think http://cushionapp.com/ is a really nice idea in terms of helping freelancers track and manage cash flow. Wish I'd thought of it :o)
Saving fuel with software
While I don't want to disparage all New Zealanders, I'm quite certain there are enough idiotic, overbearing, or corrupt officials that this law will be abused. And I'd like to stake money on this claim.

I am willing to bet 1 bitcoin (≈265 USD), at even odds, that within a year we will see an article on the front page of HN showing abuses of the Harmful Digital Communications Bill. Specific abuses may include: corporate censorship, overreactions to jokes, or people jailed for offhand drunk-posting. There are a myriad of possibilities.

If this happens, you pay me one bitcoin. If this does not happen, I pay you one bitcoin. If you're interested in this bet (or terms similar to it), let me know and I would be happy to discuss details.

I should warn you: The history of these sorts of laws is pretty bad. For example, Malicious Communications Act[1] has been used in all kinds of ridiculous cases. People have been arrested for posting images as pedestrian as a burning poppy.[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_Communications_Act_1...

2. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/12/kent-man-arrested-...
Do you work out a lot? In college i needed 10hrs, i would run to campus and back, swim 800m a day, 1hr weights 5 times a week. Now i just need 6hrs.
Re: Semaphore:
Not dropping the connection might mean we might starve others incoming msgs of resources (which might be a good thing) [0]. Also, releasing the semaphore back into the pool in case of failures takes on a happy complication of having to deal with errors beyond one's control.

Re: Queue:
Wouldn't the queue involve locking lest two workers end up trying to work on the same request? To be completely concurrent, I guess one could use a lock-free data structure instead (or implement one on top of something like RocksDB)?

[0] http://ferd.ca/queues-don-t-fix-overload.html

[0] http://engineering.voxer.com/2013/09/16/backpressure-in-node...
How can we, as North Americans, profit from China's demise? Is there a Chinese index that I can short? Because it sure as shit not going to go back up, not after the recent announcement of buying up bad chinese stocks.
How would you design an interview process ?
Benchling (YC S12) Is Hiring Full-Stack – Build the Future of Biotech Software
Joel on Software: Stackoverflow.com, by Joel Spolsky
I love the snark in that PEP:

> APL apparently used +.× , which by combining a multi-character token, confusing attribute-access-like . syntax, and a unicode character, ranks somewhere below U+2603 SNOWMAN on our candidate list.

and then later, one of the reasons @ is better than the alternatives:

> Whatever, we have to pick something.
[Case Study] How We Built an App Empire from Zero to $70K/mo
> One problem that immediately comes to mind with such a market is insider trading - how do you prevent that?

Why bother? The presence of HFT shows that insider trading doesn't seem to have as much of a detrimental effect as people claim.

Now you may need a couple of laws about primary insiders (corporate officers), but otherwise, let it go.

The insider trading laws only punish the little people, the big fish are all doing insider trading anyway (see US Congressional returns on their stock market investments).
Count me out. 7 billion minus 1. First I do not like watches, I have not used one for more than 15 years. Second I do not like single companies to try to steal more and more of our private information. So I do not like single company to monitor my health, my credit card nor my garage door. Pop.
I taught myself how to code about 5 years ago and while I eventually figured it out (and launched weddinglovely.com), I was really annoyed at the process and how every tutorial seemed like it assumed I came from a comp. sci. background. I decided I wanted to write a learn-to-code book aimed at people who have previous experience with front-end development and how websites work, but no programming experience.

The process was long... took me about a year. It could have been much shorter if some personal and startup events didn't interfere with the process, especially since it's such a small book (~140 pages). Another book that size would probably take me about three months. I ended up doing all of the design myself as well, which slowed me down, but it was enjoyable as I was able to use some of my design background and editorial design knowledge – a nice break from writing and programming.

I have thought about making instructional videos, since the ones that I sell in the "complete" package have been doing well. The biggest issue is time, since I'm still running my startup solo. Second biggest is potential revenue, since my salary for WeddingLovely is currently at $0 (long story) so I'm supporting myself completely on what Hello Web App is bringing in.

Thanks for the fun questions!
Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
Take a look at the Wikipedia entry if you would like an overview of the scale/scope of the project and its history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_%28operating_system%29
Depends on how you spin it. I know many people who would characterize ethanol as an "addictive, harmful drug". Large food companies spend lots of money trying to make their products more appealing, and by some evidence addicting.

The difference is that people can get drunk and blow out their liver or get fat and blow out their pancreas (usually) without direct effects to those around them. Since 90% of tobacco users have to use it in a way that blows every bystander's lungs out while they are blowing their own out, it gets much more vitriol.
The shadow banking sector in the mainland worries me more than anything else in this emerging situ. It is an information problem, but magnified by the potential for political distortion or simple opacity. In freer societies, the issue is merely a gap between expectations and emerging reality, and we know how extreme even that can get.

A lot of firms may be severely impacted by this share price collapse, both financial and non. More alarmingly, "shadow" bank failures may occur unseen, or structural problems that would normally be covered or speculated about by the media suddenly rear their head. We may only find that large sources of financing vanish long after the fact.

Many expect the CCP to swoop in and save the day, but perhaps it chooses to not do so, or do something more extreme than changing some rules or commanding the buying of shares in the big indexes.
> This would be true if people always behaved like Econs, not Humans

And your solution is having an elite class of Humans (again, not Econs) solve this problem by deciding what other Humans can and cannot do?
Wealth Secrets of the One Percent: How the super-rich became super rich
> > You asked why people are talking about taxpayers having to bail Greece out, and why we don't try and punish the banks.

>Now you're just claiming I said stuff I never said.

Oh really?

> More often than not, you'll hear stuff like: [...] "Why should taxpayers bail Greece out?"...
All the while, there is absolute ZERO condemnation for banking entities making risky loans. There is not even a tacit nod towards acknowledging that if banks make loans that fail, it is their loss to eat.

Please.
Many thanks for the replies. Much appreciated.
This is the blog post on which Joel Spolsky announced stackoverflow.com, in which he made the case for its need in the market of online resources for programmers. I think he was right, and since then, he's stayed right. Maybe it could be improved if the right someone were to tweak it in just the right way - but I'd be wary of attempts to do so.
Excellent -- thanks!
The profit motive is that it's rarely smart to fight a battle that you know you're going to lose. When lions fight, they stop as soon as they know who's going to win -- the losing lion would rather walk away with his life than force the winner to kill him.

CVS has basically decided that smoking is on its way out the door, and they've decided to forgo the remaining profits in selling a smaller number of cigarettes each year for the next few years. They've decided that they'll be better off getting ahead of this trend, shifting to more health-oriented branding, and opposing smoking publicly and vocally.
Logged in just to upvote
(y)
How many tens of millions of dollars has Microsoft sunk in Surface, tablets and other touch technologies, only to have Apple eat their lunch? How many billions sunk in MSR every year yielding no commercial products? Microsoft has always needed to get their product vision from somewhere else, and for all of the hoopla about Nadella and open sourcing everything, that core fact about Microsoft hasn't changed. It's really sad because Microsoft has everything stacked in its favour to succeed. I mean it's not like like don't succeed on those products that they copy from others, starting from Windows all the way down to the Xbox and Bing, but when it comes to commercial innovation, that's not who they are.
Yes, thanks for the concise summary.

The only thing I didn't understand is the part about garbage collection. What does garbage collection mean and what is the benefit in this implementation?
>Since 90% of tobacco users have to use it in a way that blows every bystander's lungs out while they are blowing their own out, it gets much more vitriol.

What's funny about this is that it's not necessarily true. The whole "secondhand smoke" thing appears to be one of those convenient lies aimed at a greater good. It certainly isn't blowing out anyone's lungs. Still, the falloff in smoking is something I'm totally into, just because it stinks.

There is no science at all supporting the notion that the harm from ethanol approaches that of tobacco, so I'm not too worried about the people you know. In particular, the addiction rates are vastly different.

Basically, your opening sentence says it all: your point relies on spin to be sharp.
This is awesome, thanks for making it open source!

Would it be possible to set triggers or something on the continuous views? Lets say I want to take action (immediately) when a value calculated over sliding window goes above a limit.

It's a bit late here but I'll definitely play with PipelineDB tomorrow.
Sounds like all the criminals I've known.
Fisheries - looking at Norway coast i think we'll be able to scale fish farming to feed even 50B Earth population.

Forests - well, too bad for them (and for us)

Water - once it priced more correctly, like with oil/gas (we still have many socialized externalities even there of course), market machinery will start to pickup bringing up more efficient use as well as various projects to efficiently produce and geographically redistribute water (like moving the record snow from Boston to the record drought striken CA :)
Um, why is the chamber campaigning against anti-smoking laws? How strange.

Edit: Oh, because they're funded by tobacco companies. Welp.
Subreddit for Google’s DeepDream AI Code
My favourite papers from ICML today
There are a handful of Chinese index ETFs out there - FXI is the biggest one - but there are others you can probably short like the MCHI or the GXC.

If you really like to gamble you can buy puts on some of the bigger ones.
Programming language with automatic memory management. Look up "garbage collection" for all the details in the world.

The reason I brought it up is because it's a common trope that you can't do low-level programming with GC, and systems like Oberon are direct evidence to the contrary.
It's not so much as how different it is from an architectural standpoint as it is about the sheer magnitude of such a feature. All open-source communities have processes which help maintain high quality, but also add a bit of red tape. I don't think we'd be able to operate at the pace we want if we were pushing every change upstream.

However, we love Postgres and plan on actively merging upstream releases!
Windows XP? Stick a fork in it. It's dead
That's the new skin on developers.google.com, glad you like it! I think you'll find the whole thing is pretty snappy, it's rendered 99% on the server side besides a few presentational JS pieces.
Yeah, that's what I did. I don't see why they need it. It would be nice if someone who built such a portal could answer why.
Warren Buffett's Best Kept Secret: Reading, Retaining and Remembering More Books
Reference to hn thread discussing the original article A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844686
Seriously, thank you for posting that! I enjoyed his site immensely and will definitely revisit it in the future.
I'm keeping my name for SEO reasons – Tech Comics
another thing to consider is f2py, which allows calls to Fortran subroutines from Python. in my experience, it was faster than numpy, but you have to suffer from writing Fortran.
Cost vs. profit.

Tobacco takes up valuable real-estate in your retail area (right at counter--right at checkout). Tobacco sales continue to fall so your gross sales are falling. Tobacco prices tend to be regulated heavily (minimum price that you can't sell under), so profit is probably fixed. Underage tobacco purchases are heavily penalized--so your cost due some store selling to a minor is minimized.

CVS took a bit of hit, but I suspect that they have numbers on the profit they gain by repurposing that space. I'm sure somebody crunched the numbers.
I have been using Windows Tablet PC since 2003 (HP, Toshiba , and now Fujitsu).

The (typically) Wacom stylus works very well and with OneNote, allowed me to take extensive class notes across two masters programs.

OneNote also interprets the handwriting so it was quite the pleasant surprise to find that my scribblings were somewhat searchable.
Just sell some aussie dollar or for the brave, buy USDZAR. Much more liquid than the stocks, and exposed to all the second order factors which are already priced into stocks but not yet into the the implications for currencies: lower commoditiy prices, structurally lower demand for Australia's output, less Asian capital investing in the country.

The ZAR angle gives you exposure to a possible slowdown in the huge Chinese investment in Africa, plus the dire politics in SA. The downside is people are already short the unit.
This course looks amazing. Thanks for sharing it
I'm the cofounder of a health tech startup. This is my opinion.

The cynical spin was healthcare pre-2008. Today, our healthcare industry is finally making meaningful changes to its model, moving from fee-for-service toward value-based care and risk sharing. [1]

This means payers, providers, and everyone in between is now incentivized to get IN FRONT of problems (like smoking) before it creates an even bigger, high-cost/high-risk patient population (heart disease, cancer, etc). Those who don't will get phased out / merged.

The reality is ~75% of the $2.2 trillion we spend on healthcare per year goes toward fighting said chronic conditions. From a distribution perspective, 20% of the population is responsible for ~80% of costs... 5% of population, ~50% of costs. Moving the needle a small amount matters a lot.

[1] This is one example of a brand changing due to industry consolidation. Prices are being commoditized across the board for care, for drugs, etc. As others have said, CVS & Walgreens are no longer just pharmacies selling drugs. They are diversifying and growing into providers just like payers.
It’s Time to Kill the Monthly Fee for Small Accounts
Wireless turf war pits mobile industry against Wi-Fi
I'd love an A4 sized one of these and a screen, monochrome would be fine, I spent so much of my life drawing out code/approaches on squared pads only to leave the pad at the office.

All I would want is some way of indexing them and one press to send as an email.

I'd drop 200 quid on that right now.
What's ironic about the Chinese stock market is that it's incompatible with Beijing's controlled economy. Knowing this, we can see just how desperate the central leadership is getting with appearing to have control.

The stock crash is particularly dangerous for Chinese leadership at a time when people are becoming fed up with the wealth gap. Wiping out the wealth of its citizens will have catastrophic results for the communist party. Attempts to distract the public with territorial disputes will continue and eventually lead to military conflict should the leadership feel threatened by social unrest.

The mounting debt in China, corruption, social issues, stock crash is a perfect brewing for a pivotal change. Historically, such conditions have led to a military conflict, or invented threat to drum up nationalism. But none of this works if the people feel like they got robbed, which in this case, Chinese government has actively encouraged people to put their life savings into stock market and at high leverages where an enormous chunk of the population will become homeless overnight should the market crash.
Not right now, but it's definitely a feature we're thinking about.

Awesome--let us know what you think about it!
It was a satirical picture: http://www.doxdesk.com/img/updates/20091116-so-large.gif (source: http://www.doxdesk.com/updates/2009.html)
Your first part is why I always find these talks silly. Encryption (at least the kind they are talking about) is just math - all the laws in the world aren't going to change the math. You can't legislate away the knowledge of that math; even if you force Apple or Google to insert your backdoor into THEIR implementation of the crypto, that doesn't mean that a 'terrorist' couldn't just use their own implementation of the readily available and widely known algorithms. That cat is out of the bag; you can't legislate it back in.
I love the Lilith mouse that's used in the first photo.
First Greece, then China, coming up soon is Puerto Rico, is the US next?
When Patton Rolled Tanks Over Veterans in Washington D.C