skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Coherence of self is demonstrably an illusion, because we have seen experiments of people with severed brain stems.

In that situation the brain halves still insist on there being a self, and insist on knowing the motivations for actions taken by the other brain half, despite not having any direct connection, and often being provably wrong (e.g. researchers have manipulated data, presented them to one brain half as decided by the other, and gotten the brain half to explain its motivations for making choices that were actually made by the researchers).

Similarly, you can sever the connection between the brain and the gut (which also contains a mass of neurons) and the gut will continue to operate independently, yet the gut can affect your emotional state and other parts of what we tend to consider as "self".

We are government by a range of independently operating systems that combine to create "self" in some form.

Note that this does not mean that consciousness have to be an illusion, but the illusion single, coherent unified self is created by and actively perpetrated by our brains, papering over all kinds of holes.
Why is it a library? An executable script would be enough.
Elixir/OTP. :)
Totally. Maybe the hiss is what they mean about the technology still making noise? :)

I still have a tape player in my car. (My car is 15 years old, with a proprietary stereo moulded into the fascia, so as long as I have this car I'm probably stuck with it.) I have one of those tape adapter things so I can listen to music played through my phone. Quality is OK, but every now and again the wheels get stuck, the stereo switches sides, and the music goes off. It's 2015, and cassette tape technology is still causing me problems. I can hardly believe it.

Cassette tapes were bullshit, and I can't believe people can't see it.

We've already had people wanting CRTs back. I dread to think what's next. A floppy disk revival? Long play VHS? Black and white TV?
Distribution, maintenance and pushing updates will be lot simpler.

also, as a rockstar programmer, I do things right way ;)
If you're unhappy with unclear definitions in philosophy you might appreciate Wittgenstein's Tractatus: http://philosurfical.open.ac.uk/tractatus/tabs.html, in which he uses formal logic to present a proof that all moral philosophy is nonsense. It's considered by some to be the greatest work of philosophy of the 20th century.

"The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -- and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one."
Not everyone considers SF to be a top US city. To each his own.
>I guess I look at it from a truly business standpoint and any business wants to acquire an "asset" at the lowest possible cost.

That's not the "truly business standpoint" - that's Stockholm Syndrome.

The "truly business standpoint" would be to understand that you are not operating as a charity and it's your responsibility to maximise your benefits.

As an individual and not a corporation - assuming you're not a contractor - you can choose to trade off salary vs intangible benefits (culture, etc) vs equity vs free time/side projects.

But if you're not valuing yourself realistically, you're giving away value to the employer for no rational economic reason.

Landlords and other businesses certainly won't operate as charities, so why should you?
NixOS!
My First Mini Summer Haul: Bath and Body Works
Does Comic-Con have a piracy problem?
Some ivory tower nut proved in the 70s that semaphore-and-thread was logically equivalent to queue-and-message, i.e. the same results could be obtained by each.

But queue-and-message is superior in very many ways. Done carefully, you have only the queue as a shared structure. If message processors are non-blocking then the entire system is non-blocking. Deadlock can be statically determined by examination of the message vectors.

And last but certainly not least, in the debugger, all important state is in the message or local variables in a message processor. No enormous stacks to dive through, trying to find who did what to whom. Simple single-threaded message processors have straightforward logic. And a message-aware operating system can make the work queues transparent.
Amazon could be delivering groceries in the UK very soon
How to secure your web applications with NGINX
>easy to record, share

This was actually one thing leading to minidisc's demise. The DRM doesn't allow you to extract your recordings digitally. They fixed this eventually, but it was too late and flash memory had already taken over.
There's a short documentary on the Martini Beriev VVA-14 on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZgWjxYTJS8

At least here we can see the wings, which aren't shown in the wikipedia article!
> Our sensations cannot give us the notion of space. That notion is built up by the mind from elements which pre-exist in it,
and external experience is simply the occasion for its exercising
this power, or at most a means of determining the best mode of
exercising it.

Can somebody explain what is meant here?
How Prison Reform Became a Presidential Priority
His argument doesn't need a definition of conscience. He argues that if A arises from certain traits of B, then you must accept that A also arises from C, since it contains the same traits.

Secondly he clearly refers to a definition of conscience called phenemonology. And one must assume that "materialist" is a term in philosophy that people familiar with the field knows what entails and people not familiar with it doesn't. this paper is not an introduction to either of those terms.

Your complaint is that you don't know the what these words are and that is what is apparently wrong with philosophy.
I read it a few times and liked it. However, once I read what Philip Greenspun had to say about it in writing about Copeland's Generation X [1], I rethought it, and came to agree with him. I've been unable to re-read Kidder's book since, though I've tried.

He essentially said that Kidder spent a year in the presence of engineers, and at no point came close to understanding what makes them tick, and in contrast Copland seems to have spent a week with some and instantly grasped their essence.

[1] (NOTE: NSFW photo at top of page) http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/reading

Edit: Fixed a grammar problem.
I saw an article about Google about six months ago that said that people in the same position could be paid wildly different amounts based on the company's assessment of their contribution and the cost to replace them.

The first thing I thought was that this is a good way to compensate people. Second thought was that it would cause much gnashing of teeth to anyone who decides to look at equal pay for equal work based on job title and seniority.

Does anyone have that article?
It's an artificial chemistry which is inspired, but can do other things as well, from untyped lambda beta calculus.
There are two projects related to it, one in meatspace, other in virtual space. Project 1 says that if this chemlambda can be done by real chemistry then it may help to build or understand biochemistry. The article is http://chorasimilarity.github.io/chemlambda-gui/dynamic/mole... Molecular computers (2015). Project 2 is about decentralized computing, without any higher layer of control.
Pretty, short animations with some explanations in the https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/UjgbX chemlambda collection. More meaty stuff in the http://chorasimilarity.github.io/chemlambda-gui/index.html . But you have to follow links to articles and read them :) Real stuff in the github repo, see https://github.com/chorasimilarity/chemlambda-gui/blob/gh-pa... .
I'm a mathematician, not a programer, there has been no release yet, every possibility is left open. Play with it folks!
I have not figured out why firefox is so lousy with some of these d3.js animations, but you can make your own and fiddle with them. True is that some of them have tens of thousands of nodes which appear/dissapear (several hundreds at a time). Safari works well, chromium decently.
I similarly once used Git to evidence cheating [1] at a corporate hackaton. It was none other than the CEO team who committed half the files before the kick off.

[1] I didn't phrase it like that at the time, because it could be accepted that desgin work isn't hacking. Most of the wiring with the real APIs happened during the night of the hackaton. Besides, ultra-preparing plans/assets for a corporate hackaton in advance is just showing high motivation. And commits at 6am from a CEO still hold me in respect 4 years later.
Alan C. Kay: The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)
How Goldman Sachs Profited from the Greek Debt Crisis
Drones Delay Efforts to Fight North Fire in Southern California
Yes, certainly. But not American companies; not companies that purport to have American values. The principle of free speech was incorporated into our constitution, not because the idea started and ended there, but to push an American ideal into Government unequivocally. The ideal exists outside the constitution.

A private company can suppress free speech; it can perform searches and seizures on its grounds; it can profile and discriminate and have pay inequality. But it cannot claim any moral high ground. To say "at least we don't violate the letter of the constitution" is a shamefully low bar.
North Korea in 4th place:
https://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2015
California freeway fire sends drivers fleeing
Thank you! I had the app on my phone. I searched for a web version of it but I clearly wasn't thorough enough. Thanks!
I've seen this argument. Reddit banned salary negotiations because of it.

When I saw that I wondered whether employers could use such reasoning to hire men over women in positions like sales and acquisitions that require negotiation.

I don't think people appreciate what a two-edged sword that research is. Either we admit sex-differences can factor into performance, or we don't.
I have a set of scripts that I've compacted into a one-click binary that spin up new AWS instances as a VPN. Would people buy this? (I'm planning on a Show HN: in a week or two, once I get the final debugging and product artwork done.) Even then, I'm really not sure if there is an advantage in having you're own home-grown VPN or using a service like StrongVPN (or any of the other "google: private vpn service" VPN service providers)?

I'd like to think that people would want to "run" their own, but I'm wondering if most even would care.
Can you point out where Colin indicated (clearly too subtly for me) that his repeated comments on this subject were a joke and should not be taken seriously.

Once you do that, I'll try and explain (mansplain if necessary) how a play of 2 lines and 1 act is probably not a very serious response.
"How, despite being careful and having Windows Defender, it's almost inevitable to end up with some spyware/adware which is very hard to get rid of." What the heck are you doing with your computer? I never get spyware/adware, and I don't even have any realtime protection, just regularly drop to safe mode and scan.
You can see another here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L58NPPQ5eI - this one is less of a documentary but better illustrates the contrast in behavior between the wild dark foxes versus the artificially selected tamer silver foxes. They're cool, I wouldn't mind having a fox as a pet.
Could you point out which laws you think might make it a crime? I'm genuinely curious.

If I tell a peer some sensitive information, and they share it...isn't that on me for choosing the wrong person to trust with that information?
USDCHF – Remains on Bullish Offensive
There is also Google Chrome Extension for Google Keep. It works well on ubuntu, like a native apps.
True, you may want to adjust for say, years of experience. Although if that was transparent.

For instance, Dev level 2 makes 100k with 10k additional per every 3 years professional experience - you have differences amongst the staff but less room for people to complain about the variances.

The point is, salaries are not arbitrary, which is the basis of the anger when staff compares against their peers.
You're right -- the big 4 was stolen from the audit world.

Depending where you look it's the Big 5 or Big 4 and will be some of Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft.
The only place I hear "big 4" in regards to tech is Reddit's cscareerquestions. It really doesn't mean anything more than "top companies that are famous"—any combination of Google, Facebook. Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple will do.

IMO they should just call it "top companies".
When I started out my degree in logic & metaphysics, I came to the conclusion that philosophy needed to be much more precise.

Precise philosophy already has a name: it's called physics.

(In the end I transferred and finished off my degree doing mathematics and computer science.)
> I've seen this happen on more than one occasion.

OTOH, just because it happens doesn't necessarily mean someone meant it to.

That is, for most companies it's hard to imagine creating a project just to fire someone. But it's very, very easy to picture a natural progression like: "new project starts and needs internal transfers -> several managers see an opportunity to get rid of bad/disruptive team members -> project fails because half its team was bad/disruptive".

Never attribute to, etc.
What Happens When Your Side-Project Suddenly Needs to Sustain You
Or maybe Jeff is highly productive but not good at marketing himself. Perhaps he doesn't want the spotlight and is happy to quietly provide value for his employer who rewards him in turn. Perhaps Jeff is black and everyone besides management (the only people who have a financial incentive not to be) is racist. Perhaps Jeff is doing an important but unpopular task; e.g., he's the asshole rejecting pull requests because the schema changes break normal form, or running A/B tests and finding that all the other employee's cool features don't increase revenue.

There are lots of legitimate reasons why Jeff might be effective and well paid, and why it might not be useful to publicize this fact widely. A popularity contest is NOT the right way to allocate pay - among other things, the participants in the popularity contest have no incentive whatsoever to properly evaluate Jeff's value.
Right - there's also no efficient algorithm for encoding chess positions into the electrical and chemical states of a couple of pounds of active neurons, and yet living humans seem to be able to play chess.
What's "longer term", specifically? Are we talking in years or just more than a few weeks?
People have even used it to create pixel art :)

https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
API-Tech and Product
Using types to encode additional invariants is of course very useful, though
those pointers does not enforce non-nullability. For example you can transfer
ownership out of them more than once:

void f(nn_unique_ptr<std::string> a, nn_unique_ptr<std::string> b) {
// Null pointer dereference in one of following lines:
std::cout << *a << std::endl;
std::cout << *b << std::endl;
}

int main() {
std::bind(f, _1, _1)(nn_make_unique<std::string>("Hello!"));
}
API or Platform
Just to clarify why calling it RGB isn't that wrong, for people who don't understand the LMS thing[1].

LMS stands for Long/Medium/Short (wavelength) cones, and I assume most of us know RGB is Red/Green/Blue.

Long cones are responsible for seeing long wavelengths ("λ") of the visible electromagnetic spectre ("EMS") are going towards Red and peak there before fading into infra-red.

Medium cones are responsible for seeing the medium λEMS peak at green, where the Short cones kick in for short λEMS, and they peak at blue.

Some colours are seen when two (or maybe even all three?) cones are simulated: Orange, Yellow, Cyan, Purple, etc.

---
[1]: I'm not an expert on the subject, bit I did some research into it because a friend of mine is partially colour blind.
Some context. Marius Buliga isn't a native English speaker (he's Romanian), so parts of these pages may sound a little confusing. His academic papers are (I find) more clearly written.

The 'lambda' being referenced is the 'graphical lambda calculus' which is Marius's own invention of a family of graphs and graph rewrite rules that can act as a notation for the untyped lambda calculus. Chemlambda is a chemically themed specialisation of his graphical lambda calculus used as an artificial chemistry.

Artificial chemistries, in turn, are used to understand properties of chemical systems in the abstract, without the fiendish difficulties and complexities of actual chemical soups. Much as artificial evolution can be used to understand the dynamics of evolution without the long-time scales and messiness of actual organisms. Stuart Kauffman used the same technique in the 70s, shuffling punch card programs to show the presence of attractors in networks of chemical interactions. This sheds light on behavior such as 'autocatalytic sets': sets of chemicals that can catalyse their own production, which is a necessary condition of life.

For artificial chemistries, it isn't always essential to say what each element 'corresponds to' in real world chemistry. Hence some of the ambiguity between whether the nodes in the graph represent atoms, molecules, or in some cases bonds.

Marius's artificial chemistry is turing complete in an interesting way: it stores information in topology as well as linear sequences of discrete elements (though it isn't the only 'graph computation' approach). This makes it a good analog for biochemistry, which is also structural as well as linear. He is using this system to look at models of decentralised chemical computation.

As for many scientists who create a formalism, he is also evangelising it as a useful tool for others to work with in looking at chemical computation in the abstract. Take up is small so far, with only one other cited researcher to date.

The animations are very stylised, they illustrate simple underlying processes with a lots of visual action. The actual 'moves' are very discrete: they happen at regular intervals and rewrite parts of the graph in one go. When nodes in the graph are removed by a move, they float around in the animation for a while then disappear. Similarly when new nodes are about to be rewritten into the graph they appear and float around in the animation a little before they'll be incorporated. When a move takes place the graph is simply connected to new nodes, wherever they are on the canvas, and D3 is used to then relax the graph. Hence the violent pulsing of the simulation as moves take place.

Hope that helps. It's not my area of research interest (though I worked with Prof S. Kauffman in the late 90s), so feel free to correct my understanding if I'm off.
I'm sorry, why am I looking at renderings of the corporate headquarters instead of at least additional rendering of the vehicle exterior and interior?
def L(*vargs):
return vargs

tada.

>>> stuff = ['c','d','e']

>>> L('a','b', *stuff)
('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e')

Just like that.
Once you start down the lonely path of a C++ developer, it just makes sense to buy the 55 gallon tub of personal lubricant.
How to print stack trace anywhere in JavaScript (2011)
Video only dictates the intensity of the 3 components (RGB), the spectral distribution of the components is dictated by the color filters in the TFT and its lightsource.

I.e. on the software side you don't have much influence over the spectrum that reaches the eye.
You need two eyes for depth perception. Neither individually can tell you location, your mind figures that out by combining inputs. If you move your arms and feel something near you, you still don't know where it is until your mind relates it to other things your mind knows are near (or other parts of your body). The sensation itself only provides information on existence, the mind pieces together location. On the other side of experience, external actions are entirely an effect of internal processes. Essentially, the mind is a black box puppet master and the body is the puppet.

(I haven't read the passage, but that is my interpretation of your quote. I always enjoy Poincaire's musings on the mind, they resonate strongly with my own.)
I particularly like that he faked the tweet from Life at Google (tried to find it, couldn't), that gave me a good chuckle. I enjoyed the Readme overall, thought that it had a good tone to it. Not too sarcastic but not too serious. Just enough to make me get it's just a silly fun thing he did in some free time.
Sounds a whole lot like Kant's synthetic a priori judgements.
Great idea. Hire a bunch of law and regulation flouting failures? I get the whole "you will fail far more than not" but it's not like they were doing something new, they couldn't even manage to take over something as simple as dispatching of cleaning services, let alone set up a cleaning service that didn't abuse its "independent contractors" aka employees.

It's kind of annoying, but hell, Google failed at "Home Services" at least once before, why not hire a couple people who failed at exactly that just a few days ago. It sounds like a winning only-makes-sense-to-google kind of strategy.
$15,000 Good Deed – Inspirational Video
Variation in self-reporting?
Well I never!
RadioLab had an episode on this:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91696-new-nice/
Wittgenstein himself went on to criticize parts of the Tractatus later in life.

It's a bad idea to treat philosophy as a menu from which one can choose the most appealing items and be left with a satisfactory understanding of the problems at hand.
Nameless Parameters in RubyMotion
Installing Java without unticking a checkbox is an example. Or installing a Chrome extension that at a later time is bought by someone who silently updates it to do harm. Or installing Hola VPN. Etc.
Finally, Microsoft Office Apps for Andoird Users
I love that observation. Here is the reference for fun: http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland...
And of course, there is a brain drain of the very best that come to the USA from any place that doesn't fairly compensate. I'm all for these unfair compensation schemes because I want the best and brightest to come to the USA.
What Happens When an Internet-Connected Brain Has a Stroke?
Research showing that men on average are better at negotiation may mean that making skill at that a factor in hiring or pay has a disparate impact unrelated to business function for jobs where that is not part of the duties, but it doesn't mean that substituting sex discrimination for more direct skill assessment for jobs where that skill is required is either appropriate, efficient, or legal.

Skills not being perfectly evenly distributed by race or sex doesn't justify race or sex discrimination in place of assessment of individual skill. There's second edge you try to portray does not exist.
> you can't receive more than one peer bonus for a single thing that you do.

So how do you explain the coworker getting multiple peer bonuses? Was that manager breaking the rule?

It's not clear to me whether a first PB was even awarded (not counting the vaguely worded one that came later).
Perl lends itself to craziness because of the notorious TMTOWTDI principle taken to the extreme - Intercal can indeed appear more sane than many Perl programs I have had the misfortune to use and (shudder) update.
I agree with the sentiment, but unfortunately, on one instance I was actually told by the project director why the new project was created (I was on the other project).