I'm willing to bet that free access to this research has saved lives. It has certainly improved mine.

This article reads like the first step in a character assassination attempt. I don't like it.

>What is it about life that makes us want to value it?

That's an excellent question. All the questions about consciousness are probably an attempt to better understand (and avoid?) death.

However I still have a hard time imagining a scenario where we can scientifically understand consciousness. Eventually we will understand all about how the mind works. All the various processes and how they lead to higher functions like thinking consciously in natural language etc. We'll be able to manipulate and alter our conscious experience. But even if there was a neural switch to turn consciousness on and off, we would still fail to convince ourselves of the physical nature of it, as we could never experience a state without consciousness.

My personal belief is that although we are painfully physical, we will never explain why we're actually here, experiencing those calculations, or in fact being them. Being calculations of a meat sack. Why would this happen?

Yeah, I agree with the sense of mystery you talk about. To me the two great, and linked, mysteries are why matter, space, time, etc. exists at all, and why some part of it experiences it in a self-aware way. They're both meta-questions to me, that probably can't be answered from within the universe by observing it, just like how one of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems says arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency from within. I know that's playing fast and loose with math metaphors, but it's an analogy not a rigorous proof.

There wasn't a "lack of rigor"

He just never finished. He collected data and then didn't follow up with graphs and conclusions and such.

There's nothing wrong with a blog post that tells you about 2/3 of a N=1 study on yourself, it's interesting. It doesn't owe you completion, it just is not complete.

There is a distinct lack of rigor, and there's a lot wrong with a blog post that doesn't accurately describe the environment the experiment is taking place in or any other pertinent details that would allow for a reproduction.

Completion is actually the least of the problems here.

it's also funny how people assume blog posters owe them anything. get off their lawn!

No one owes me anything, but it's posted on HN and there's a comments section in HN so I am entitled to point out the (substantial) flaws in the submission.

I feel like most of these experiments don't control for air temperature. I feel like cold air has a much more rejuvenating effect than just lowering CO2 levels. Not that they don't matter, but it's not like you'll instantly feel better.

Why won't you "instantly" feel better? Instant meaning a few breaths of outside air, anyway, likely well within the claimed 5 minutes.

I recently tried to book over AirBnB just for the convenience of it. They requested government id and a new photo of me for verification. They also (indirectly and insidiously) asked for my permissions so sell all my personal data listed in the ID (biometrics, height, skin colour, ID number etc). Of course you'd have to read the privacy policy to know this, and many people don't. Also their facebook login asked for a list of all my friends as well as all my likes. What the hell does that have anything to do with them?

I just booked off their platform. It was easier and cheaper, and definitely more private. I also wouldn't recommend anyone to get vendor-locked so hard as to have their livelihood depended on this company's policies.

HN is right-biased and quite nationalist.I'm always amused to realize that some people actually believe that Facebook's "moderation efforts" are a good think, while WeChat's or VK's are not.

I mean, I get why an exec or a politician would have to say this in public, but come on, who actually buys this? Facebook is no less of a propaganda tool for an authoritarian elite than it's Chinese or Russian counterparts. And even if you're a nationalist American, don't forget that Facebook isn't really protecting your own interests.

What kind of tyro thinks GB/s instead of ops/s is the right measure here?

That wasn't the point at all. You were sneering at others because you had converted the numbers into GB/s and those numbers looked small, but the only foolishness was doing the conversion in the first place and the only person doing it was you. A billion messages of any size is nothing to sneeze at. Have you ever worked on a system that handled that many messages in its entire lifetime, let alone a single day?

P.S. There's no such thing as a 1985 GSM network. That phrase just makes your comment look even sillier.

NVidia's demo video is staggering.

Looking back at this after the Huawei scandal, it seems very likely it was a preliminary step to create a negative impression regarding Chinese manufacturing. Bloomberg could have been lied to, or been chosen to deliver false stories for propaganda. Of course it could be irrelevant (there were tensions regardless) but given how everything looks weird, it probably wasn't.

Because no matter what the audits say, this article caused a widespread feeling of mistrust towards Chinese-manufactured electronics.

To be fair SaaS destroyed the previous financial model of the software industry, which was much better for the end user imo. Back then, software companies tried to make good, comprehensive products that respected user privacy, were meant to run locally, provide a complete solution to the problem, and were supposed to be a permanent solution. Better software meant more sales and more money. Unfortunately excessive piracy broke this model.

Sure, today's software capabilities are much more advanced, but you no longer get a physical disk that you can load on you computer and be confident it'll just keep working for years on end without any external dependencies etc.

Looking at the best software, the sass world has created, Google - it's orders of magnitude more valuable than any PC based software.

So maybe it isn't fair to say the user for a bad deal.

Google is a jumbled mess of multiple pieces of software, and you get access to none of them, only a search service, and it is loosely defined. Also Google isn't particularly good at anything nowdays, except maybe NLP. Their ability to deliver good results is only a result of massive spying. Many researchers would be able to provide software 10x as useful as that of Google given access to the same data.

Imagine a pre-SaaS Google: You get a few of LTO tapes delivered to your doorstep. They include an index of every website in existence, it's owner/creator, a short description of what it is, and a number of semantic flags.

Moreover, you'd probably get a list of all identified businesses there are in every country, region and industry with their contact information and website addresses.

Imagine what you could do with that...

>> Many researchers would be able to provide software 10x as useful as that of Google given access to the same data.

That's interesting. Can you share more about this ?

As for your pre-sass search engine idea:it's great. Very useful indeed.

But how do I get from that , to finding the bunch of separate webpages that describe how to solve my personal, niche problem( in a really good way ? Most problems are like that. Context is always different.

And yes Google is far from ideal. And SEO sucks.

But still, that problem solving capability is now available to many.

Google search is an exception in that it really needs to be a SaaS because there is no way you can run it locally. Your typical SaaS doesn't need to be one.