skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Erlang team is working on a JIT for the language, and the first release should be out soon. That should help with the "faster" part. "Nicer" is rather subjective. I happen to enjoy how Erlang looks and works, though it took me a couple of tries before I really liked it. I'm not sure why people don't jump on the idea of a bulletproof VM.
SIMP – System Integrity Management Platform
I've written a lot of multi-threaded code, but I don't think I've written ANY multi-threaded code that doesn't involve queues passing objects (hopefully safely) between threads. As in, no locks, no semaphores, no accessing shared state between threads (OK apart from an global flag structure that just set various error conditions encountered and was only interacted with by atomic get/set operations and where order of access was never important). Adding a lock to a program is like a huge red flag - stop everything and really think about what you are doing.
"Is my dog conscious?"

I would say absolutely. But maybe we have a different definition of consciousness.
We already have the Do Not Track header which most big and legally compliant data management platforms adhere to. The Content Security Policy header can be improved to add extensions for data handling.

Follow this up with certification by a main industry body and legal foundation for how companies in the sector should operate with data and we can finally make progress. This is no different than how finance companies or health companies go through audits and such with both process and data handling.

While digital advertising doesn't need to be as onerous and involved as that, the same workflow would help along with clear rules for collecting, analyzing, acting on, purging and securing data as part of consumer wishes and best practices. The next step would be to make sure transacting with a non-certified company carries risks and perhaps fines so that media buyers actually work with good vendors based on merit instead of inside deals.

There should also be technical certifications so that companies can actually prove they know what they're doing and dont just cram megabytes of crap on a page to serve a single ad. It's just too easy to whip up some crappy ad server software these days which ends up bloating sites and ruining trust and user experience.

Unfortunately there are issues with regional laws applying to a global business and the large amount of shady networks headquartered internationally but it's a good first step.
A few months ago, I wrote a simple Android app and put it on the Play Store. Now every two weeks I receive unsolicited spammy emails about ad campaigns and increasing user awareness. Funny how those get through the filter.
The new answer to this old question: "How can I merge two Python dictionaries in a single expression?" - http://stackoverflow.com/q/38987/541136
I just want to comment that I only clicked on the article after reading your comment about the original title, and I feel that the edited title less accurately reflects the material.

You added your opinion to the title, rather than leaving it alone.

Ed:

In fact, your title less accurately reflects the material of the paper, which specifically deals with:

> Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort. If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings.

Your title completely omits the key focus of the paper, and its examination, which the original title included.

You did this because you disagreed with the paper, and used the pretense of the nebulous notion of "clickbait" to edit in your disagreement.

The original title was more accurate as to the article contents.
Based on experience is there a common bug or scenario that you see overlooked often? Like say what happens during the transition between leaders, or handling multiple failures (multiple netsplits..)?
I think people focus too much on Uber replacing consumer transportation. I think they're going to branch out into transport of goods and eat into the trucking industry in a major way, in addition to whatever they do with consumer transportation. A lot of the commoditization concerns that you'd have with transportation don't apply as much to transport.
It's also an animal on Old McDonald's farm.

But aside from that: in the present era, it's pretty much impossible to have a product name that's pronounceable and not conflicting with another project of moderate to high "known-ness". The best you can usually hope for when naming a project is that you're not in conflict with a name of something else that solves the same problem you're solving.

If you have a solution to the name-conflict dilemma, I have some cache invalidation questions I'm looking to get answered
sort of doubly ironic that many other Google service emails that you actually want to receive get filtered...
Interesting. A few days ago I stopped receiving pull request emails as well. Granted I routinely delete these after I process them - but I was alarmed when I checked my spam and saw them there.
You're most welcome. Happy to help. If you need more insight, feel free to send me an email (in my HN profile). Would love to hear what's to come of it.
Inventing Chromebook (2012)
Centuries-Old Shipwreck Discovered Off the North Carolina Coast
How is that helpful?
This happens to me all the time as well. I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and apparently a lot of other people seem to think they do as well.
Or at least, they have firstname.lastname1@gmail.com and people easily forget to add the number.

I wish there was a better way to deal with this type of situation other than constantly sending "please fix your address book" emails. Email is a broken system.
I came here to comment on that; almost as bad as "X Watts of Power, which is enough to run an average household for Y hours"
You're comparing wind loads to seismic shaking, which stresses the structure differently. Phyllis explained to me that the problem with tilt-ups is lack of bracing strength - they're just not designed to be shaken back and forth for a long time. Compounding the problem is that the joints are very hard to inspect after the structure is built.
They are no different functionally and perhaps morally (though on could argue that killing people remotely from your desk in Missouri is troubling).

They are VERY VERY different politically and therefore in reality, however. It's been demonstrated that for whatever reason the public at large isn't nearly so concerned about military actions carried out by drones. Maybe it's the low cost, or the fact that we don't risk American lives doing it, I'm not sure. If you looked at all the drone strikes over the last 10 years and replaced them with operations that involved american boots on the ground/f-16s/CIA wetwork etc it's very hard to imagine a scenario where that would have been acceptable to the American public.

Drones also have loitering capabilities that would be much more expensive to maintain with jets. Basically, I'm of the mind that drone strikes are seen as 'easy' and low risk politically so we end up killing more people than we would if we had to weigh the risks of more traditional means before we carried out the operation.
The last time the NASA budget was this low as a percentage of the federal budget was 1961. It's really bad that this isn't well understood on a site like HN. If we can't justify it here...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:N...
Being stuck on 2.7 is becoming a little more unbearable every day.
Oh, I understand that; I have no illusions otherwise. But I thought this thread was precisely about how strange the laws are?
Interesting things spread incredibly quickly through Google. I know of some petitions that had 1000+ signatures within a few hours after being posted. Everybody is on email constantly, and there are numerous other backchannels that can reach the whole company within a day.
Twice in one thread? This started because I objected to that analogy as toxic.

You can't possible think that sending an HTTP packet to an HTTP server is morally tantamount to walking into a stranger's house?!
I agree it's possible to do better than forward path tracing, but a big part of why nearly everyone switched to it was that it significantly reduces artist time, is a lot less painful and requires fewer hacks than the methods used before it.

The state of the art keeps improving but I've never heard any call the switch to forward path tracing a painful disaster, quite the opposite.
"Clearly not, he's asleep right now."
Facebook Builds a Rough Road Back for Those Booted by Its “Real Name” Policy
Sometimes I don't want to deal with the people any more.

This may be an anxiety issue on my part. Fair enough. I will generally continue to do it.
Soo, lots of designers submit their work but only one gets paid? Yeah, that's not exploitive...
After reading this, I went through my spam folder and it's looking overall quite okay EXCEPT that all the comments on Google+ in response to things I posted these past few weeks are marked as spam. All of them.

Yup: Gmail is marking comments originating from Google+ and written by legitimate users as spam.
I've never been a fan of anthropomorphism nor of overloading terms (with additional definitions). Everything descends into a primordial soup when this starts happening. And it is very hard to predicatively and rationally operate in a bowl of primordial soup where one thing is not distinct from another. Clear and crisp definitions and detailed distinctions are what makes higher order modeling possible. So no... societies are no in any way "conscious", even though they may at times act in ways similar to conscious entities.
This is an old idea. Google keyword: "global brain".
That is why I don't need to able to send from my server to Google. Accepting tyranny is just not worth it.
The problem is that, at least for the moment, AI doesn't have a discernable (or even arguably cognizable) mens rea.

So how do we craft laws for a world where very nearly all the network traffic consists of machines talking to each other, learning, and talking again?

You keep pointing me to "how the law works," but I've said in four different messages now that I understand that - I'm pointing out that the law, as written, doesn't work.

I don't think there is a place for government as we know it - much less the completely shamed criminal justice system - on the internet. These institutions can go peacefully and with dignity or they can be stubborn and destructive, to the detriment of humans everywhere.

The more people try to justify their behavior and normalize their insanity, the more likely the latter scenario becomes.
Usenet died for a reason. (that reason: spam)
Sometimes it does, for me.
They're done over USB. The system will look for specially named firmware files (*.up) and auto-apply.

This forum: http://mazda3revolution.com/forums/2014-mazda-3-skyactiv-aud... has some excellent info, and someone usually posts the new FW files. I've done an upgrade and the hacks myself.
> We may not be able to individually predict how AI will develop, but we can make some educated guesses based on comparisons to emergent systems we've already seen in nature - and I think "ants vs. humans" is just poor pattern matching. :)

Oh, I think I see. I didn't mean to imply anything about how higher intelligence might develop, and I agree that the ants and humans analogy doesn't say much about how intelligence might come about. It was just supposed to illustrate what can happen (from the ant perspective) when comparatively super intelligent goal-seeking things are present in a shared environment (regardless of how they arrived).

I have little idea if/how/when highly intelligent AI could arrive. Can we entirely rule out the possibility of AI researchers making advancements over time, and then eventually some research lab building one that's super intelligent compared to us? Why? [normally things as unlikely-sounding as this wouldn't merit discussion in my book, but in this case there might be high stakes!]
Do you have an example of this working? I thought that browser venders we're having the :visited selector lie to you when you call getComputedStyle on them? Also, how would you workaround the need for JS? I understand that you can do something similiar with tracking pixels, but I'm under the impression that Ghostery blocks them.
The reputation requirements here are a very low bar; as far as I can tell it's effectively "don't be a botnet".
Interesting that you brought up natural selection, since arguably countries do have some sort of natural selection, but it's fairly limited since they are restricted to some geographic area limiting the competition to neighbouring countries (at least until recently).

However the same restriction don't apply to corporations, and indeed those are heavily competing over their means of existence (money). Which gives an interesting perspective to the current tendency of large corporations to improve their own chances of survival by dodging taxes, influencing politics etc. In some sense it does seem like corporations have become 'intelligent' and are attempting to change their environment to suit them. I'm not too sure what the end result will be, but I fear it's unlikely to be beneficial to humans.

To stop this we may have to, as you say, kill "God".
Show HN: Standard ES6 JavaScript with coffeescript-like syntax
I appreciate the note, but at the risk of being offensive you took something that was quite reflective of the style and content of the article and made it sound dry and academic -- almost research-y. It may have outright reduced the clicks to the article; at the very least, it probably changed the sort of person who read it.
Finally!

I've long wanted to do

for server in (server1, server2, *other_servers):

Instead of

for server in [server1, server2] + other_servers
It's not at all clear they had a solid support and sales setup. The company folded for a reason - why would you buy a company and run it the same way it was run before, if it was about to fold under those same processes?
agree. But let's say each of these processes bound to a core need to log important information. Well, that logging should probably be done on a separate thread. So, it is really just a matter of using multi threading where appropriate and not using it just to use it
It's cute when programmers pretend to also be scientists.
N.S.A. Summer Camp: More Hacking Than Hiking
In practice, carriers and manufacturers do not tend to release updates for Android phones other than Nexus once the shinier model has come out a few months later.

One of the major selling points of the iPhone is that it will continue to receive full OS updates for 2+ years.

Continuing software upgrades are pretty Apple-specific in the smartphone market, but it's also just as true of Windows and Linux in the desktop space.
Seems like common sense to me. Consciousness is the time between when you are born and you die while your brain is in proper/typical working order (e.g. when you can remember and relate and learn from memories).
Consciousness in the metaphysical sense isn't really turned off when you sleep; otherwise you couldn't have dreams.
I'm very shocked by this too.

Is there no money being returned to the investors via a sell? 40M is a lot of dough... GV can write it off with the acqui-hiring, but what about the others, specially First Round?

I feel like the story behind Homejoy would make a great series of blogposts
> It's fun to catch liars lying!

Not as much fun to watch them continue to do so unimpeded. The number of "pants on fire" rulings by Politifact that keep making the rounds for years afterwards is pretty depressing.
The Coontown Breakdown[Part 1]: A Brief Analysis of the Habits of Coontown Users
I don't have access unless I use work contacts to push and I won't do that.
Sure, above was not serious commentary, but a joke interpreting consciousness in the other sense.
It was more like a McGuffin.
I believe I checked PNGs as well, and I went through all my archives up to that point (it wasn't just Evolution which had forgotten for a while to strip image metadata). Possibly my grep was also better at checking variant field names? Dunno.
Why does it need access to:
Photos/media/Files
WiFi connection info
Device ID and call information
?
There would be many more than that if markets didn't (usually) strip metadata by default.
Interesting article. Well, not really, come to think of it.

It lacks one critical element: An operational definition of consciousness, that is, consciousness defined in a measurable, observable way.

Without said definition, this is angels-on-the-head-of-pin loosey-goosey nice sounding but fundamentally empty mental masturbation.
Aaron Swartz' last GitHub commit. Never forget
Maybe consciousness fades out as the size of the group gets larger and larger and there's some limit where it can't get conscious anymore (probably related to the speed of sound).

But consider this: you are aware of yourself, but how do you know that you are the only thing occupying your brain? I mean, what if your brain spawns 5 different conscious processes, each of them completely separate and independent from the others? And what you feel as yourself is just one of these 5 processes.

How could you ever know if that's true or not?
Unprecedented Gigapixel Multicolor Microscope: New Tool to Advance Drug Research
You're probably right. Mailing lists (of the discussion group variety, not marketing mail) often have problems with spam filter false positives, most commonly due to DMARC policies.

There's not really a great solution to that at the moment - either you technically violate RFCs by having your your discussion group software modify some headers, or you deal with other kinds of breakage.

Doing header rewrites is effective for reducing FPs due to DMARC, but adoption is far from universal - off the top of my head I'm not even sure if Mailman supports that at the moment.
What watchdog do you mean? I've ssh'd into my Mazda3 and was planning on doing it again soon, but I don't know what you mean by that.
The author makes the point that, as compilers get more efficient, they'll optimize thing you don't realize, so optimization before profiling is pointless. And I think they're right, but they could probably go further—as compilers get more efficient, even if we know the bottleneck, it might be impossible to know how to optimize a bit of code, since you can't understand what the compiler will do with the code you give it.

I'm not sure how I feel about that.
For all those who have not liked my post: I rebuilt my first carb about 40 years ago, sitting on my fathers lap (age 5). He was a mechanic, I was a mechanic until I was 20. After that I spent the next 10 years selling tools and diagnostic equipment, as well as fixing a lot of cars - especially problem cars.

I have worked on thousands of carburetors. I can re-jet the 2 carbs in my race bike in about 5 minutes (main jets only). Carburetors are indeed in use on millions of engines. I understand Bernoulli's principle, and I also understand that a carburetor is lousy at part throttle metering. What does that mean to you?

Part throttle is anything that is not full throttle. Some people have a hard time believing that a fuel injected engine offers no full throttle advantage in total horsepower - it is the barely open part that matters. Fuel injection is massively more efficient and clean than carbs at part throttle. The part throttle issues cause all the emissions problems, cause all the pollution, cause all the smell when following behind a carb'd car.

The electronic carbs of the 80's were a real nightmare. Take a mechanical device, put some dozen vacuum lines on it, each controlled by a solenoid, give it a dumb computer that you can't talk to, and no tech information anywhere. Not even at the dealer. Caveman tech, dressed up with bunch of patches and cruft. It was done to save a buck, not because the better way wasn't known. And the systems are horrible and should be sent to the crusher. It is fuel metering in the worst way; adding miles and wear just makes all the problems even worse,

The EEC-IV systems used by Ford from 87-95 only had a 60 pin connector on them, the same number of pins that a Beagle Bone Black has. I have be thinking about how to use that as a basis to replace existing systems with an open source system that would be better and cheaper.

But carburetors need to die. They are not great new, and get worse with age.
I agree that supercookies and header enrichment should be prevented whenever and however possible (e.g. header enrichment will be solved by requiring encryption à la Let's Encrypt), but fingerprinting is a lost battle that we should all give up on.

We will never be able to solve fingerprinting without upheaving the entire web platform as we know it. So many web APIs are simply not possible without exposing some UA capability and configuration variance. For example, it is impossible to support WebGL without exposing additional UA variance for fingerprinting.

Computers will always have varying capabilities and configurations, and developers will always need to consider some of them. A world without fingerprinting is a world without the modern web.

It only takes ~30 bits of entropy to uniquely fingerprint all ~3 billion internet users. We already expose this much variance entropy, and it is only going to increase as the web gets new features.

I implore you all to simply give up on fighting fingerprinting. Try to stop worrying about it, as there's almost nothing we can do short of the nuclear option of removing every API that exposes UA variance (which will make the web less useful).

We have already lost, and every new feature makes the hole a little deeper. The hole is already too steep to escape, so accept that you will be tracked by colluding websites whenever you browse the web.

---

The W3C page comes to roughly the same conclusion, but recommends a very drastic and dangerous solution: legislation. I fear that legislating this issue will legitimize only select pre-approved uses of UA variance entropy, and will hinder developer innovation in the long run. I'd rather be fingerprinted than be held back by legislation as to what browser data I'm allowed to read, and in what manner I can act on that data.

Please do not lobby for legislation in order to fix this problem. W3C's proposed solution will most likely only cause more harm than good. I would be deeply upset if "intent to fingerprint" became an actual crime.

One example of something useful that such legislation may make illegal is my navigator.hardwareConcurrency polyfill[1] that runs a timing attack on your CPU (not unlike "The Spy in the Sandbox" linked to in the W3C page) to figure out how many cores you have. This information is actually useful for optimizing heavy multi-threaded webapps, but it is also directly useful for fingerprinting. Future legislation could make it so that using my polyfill, even for benign purposes, counts as "intent to fingerprint".

People do not deserve jail time or fines based on if a tech illiterate jury judges you to harbor "intent to fingerprint". The future will be a very scary place for developers if you actually have to worry about this.

[1]: http://wg.oftn.org/projects/core-estimator/demo/
Cassette Revolution: 1980s Tape Tech Is Still Making Noise in Our Digital World
Drone Temporarily Halts Firefighting Efforts as Wildfire Burns Freeway
This article[1] was posted to Reddit, and included a 1/4 mile time of 10.9s and peak acceleration of 1.1g

1: http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/17/8994519/tesla-ludicrous-sp...
Engineer says Google denied bonuses when she tried to expose salary inequality
Let's be mainstream – User focused design in Elm [video]
It's all relative. Compared to Dresden, small guided missiles are positively humane. Heck, the hammer that was dropped on Fallujah makes a drone look meek. War is by design very ugly.