skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The number one reason to believe that America is lost is quite simply that it has lost the ability to change. Moneyed interests (with more to come thanks to the recent SCOTUS ruling), hyper-partisanship and a complacent, immature behaviour all around means that no matter which way the world heads in the coming decades, America will be left living in the past.

It'd be nice if I were wrong, so someone try and give me a realistic scenario under which the US will take responsible, long-term decisions including:

- raising taxes to cut the deficit.

- reforming healthcare to contain costs

- raising the SS age and/or cutting payments.
What would they be improving? Their marketing, sales, operational efficiency, quality of education, or teaching the test?

The first 2 are irrelevant, efficiency is good, better education is great, and teaching the test can be quite bad.

There are plenty of educational reforms that could improve things without the need to privatize everything:

* Funding for open source text books, lesson materials, etc.

* Make teachers observe each-others' classes occasionally.

* Tutoring vouchers - more flexible than school vouchers.

* Abolish homework (that's contentious though).

* Publish school budgets and make the principle defend them to parents, to expose waste.
Indeed, the diseases of aging kill in the range of 100-200k people every single day, while making life miserable for hundreds of millions and negatively impacting the people around these senescent individuals (who here enjoys seeing family and friends get sick and die?). It represents a huge loss of human capital (what if Paul Erdos was still around?), and it costs a huge amount in palliative care that we know ain't going to cure people.

When that is taken into account, the fight against the diseases of aging (actually reversing aging, not just making people live a couple of years more in a senescent state) is incredibly under-funded compared to all kinds of other things.

Vaccines are important, but they're already getting attention. What about saving that kid's life when he's 80 years old? Your dollars make a bigger difference when used doing research in fields that are currently overlooked because aging isn't considered a disease by most (yet).

SENS.org is where I donate most of my charity money.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39

and

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8554766938711591377&...

and

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0312367066

for background info.

Please at least read/see those before making the same "it won't work/wouldn't be a good thing" arguments that everybody has made a thousand times when first introduced to this. Thank you.
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Find someone whose hair is on fire and sell them water. Make sure you have scarcity power over the water.
i did try the libsvm implementation in weka.. but it wasn't available for all datasets (my guess being it works only for binary classification), ended up using the SMO algorithm which gave pretty good results too...
> Just an intuitive understanding that if we decrease infant mortality we will net the human race many more years of life than anti-aging research.

If we accept that there's no reason why we couldn't defeat aging (mostly with periodical repair of the molecular damage that accumulates as a by-product of metabolism -- not need to understand how everything work, just keep damage under a certain threshold) and that we will some day do it, we should do everything to bring that day closer;

100-200k deaths per day. All those that die won't come back. Lifes saved by curing aging are actually saved for real, we don't just delay their death by a few years/decades.

This would be one of the most important things that humanity ever did, and once we do, we'll look back at our current lack of enthusiasm in curing aging as a great sin of omission (we could have did it sooner, but just took our time).

I'm all for vaccines, but right now it's not anti-aging research that is taking money away from vaccines. There are a billion other places to cut first.

If you're looking for a very important field that is dramatically under-funded, it's hard to get more marginal utility than in curing human senescence.
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Why do you think that is? Do you realize how much pressure a textbook writer or school district would face for teaching, in so many words, that the Pilgrims tried setting up a theocracy, and the problems inherent in that led the Founding Fathers to build a secular government? How dare the schools suggest such a thing! Next they'll try and teach kids that evolution is true.
What part of Just because _why couldn't handle it (AS YOU SAY) didn't you understand? I wasn't accusing _why of not being able to handle it, I was referring to what I thought the parent meant.

Honestly, I never cared for the drama of the whole concept of _why and I still don't, and I wasn't trying to dig on him since I really don't care about it at all.
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I for one find it encouraging when people that age are achieving something great by anyone's standards, not just the lax standards that society applies to the senescent.

At the very least it makes old age less terrifying.
It is clear to me that restoring choice to the education market will allow competition to occur, which will likely result in increased quality.

Except in this area, the quality of the student seems to matter quite a bit more than the quality of the school. When Chicago Public Schools used a lottery-based system for granting spots in the top-performing schools, it turned out that students who won the lottery didn't turn out significantly better than those who lost.

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/CullenJacobLev...
Perhaps because, on average, people are dead before they turn 88? Or, because people retire at 65 (or 55 in Canada?)? Or, because she's been mayor for over 30 years, which isn't exactly something you can accomplish at a young age? Or because she's in incredibly good shape for a woman of her age?

There exist inappropriate times to comment on someone's age, or to make decisions based on it. This wasn't one of them. The story was much more about her than the debt free nature of the city. I'd also mention that she does not in any way seem offended by such comments, she seems to enjoy playing it up and joking about it.
Eliezer, to you, how does the fight against aging compare with the fight against poverty or the fight against war? Is it just a matter of scale? These concerns of yours, while pressing to us lucky few, seem to sidestep the urgent problems faced by the rest of the world: insecure access to food, shelter, healthcare, and education.
You may try Programming Collective Intelligence if you haven't already (it's actually a O'Reilly book ;).
I like to see articles that emphasize that smart people are old. Ageism is far too prevalent, imo; old people are worthwhile and should be revered, not mocked or denigrated. Oldness is experience, and oldness is an advantage in most cases.
Also, nothing personal meant by my comment.
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Our society has agreed that after 60 years or so, you have earned the right to put your feet up, move to Florida, and retire. I admire that she has an easy out and yet chooses to continue serving the city she loves, and with excellence to boot. Well done, ma'am, I would like to shake your hand.
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Oh I didn't take it personally at all. I honestly appreciated the reminder to check myself when I reference someone like this.
"I'd also mention that she does not in any way seem offended by such comments."

Yeah, I wonder how I'll feel about this when I'm older. Maybe I won't mind. It just sounds weird to me when people mention the age of someone and it's not relevant to the story, kind of like when someone is telling you a story about someone and they mention that they are black and it's completely irrelevant.
are you sure your buddy's friend is making enough to support himself? have you met him? or is your friend just yanking your chain?
I don't think all that much of the app, but the presentation was fantastic.
Ugh, I had to reply. :-p

First, that's an incorrect (or at least not complete) definition of a private good. A private good is rivalrous OR excludable. Education is non-excludable because raising the education level of economic actors benefits society, which benefits even the uneducated. Two reasons education is (largely) nonrival: (1) we can have more than one student in a classroom and/or host classes online and (2) there are not a finite number of diplomas a highschool can issue, they cannot be permanently consumed. Therefore, education is a public good.

You'll be tempted to nitpick about the nonrival part. After all, diplomas can't be consumed but seats in a classroom can. However given enough seats and enough qualified teachers, education truly is nonrival. This would be a meaningless statement (after all, who cares about situations with unlimited resources) except that making education nonrival is actually fairly cheap compared to the benefit received by society.

And because education is a public good it should be provided by the government, just like national defense. Private education disgusts me almost as much as the idea of private militias. But that's neither here nor there in the context of our current discussion.

I don't understand how you can think you're doing poor people a favor by forcing them to attend their crappy neighborhood schools instead of giving them choices.

They wont have choice. They are contained by geography in a public system. They are constrained by money in a private system. If they go to a poor school they go to an ineffective school, regardless of whether it is public/private. I fail to see why you think schools on average will have more money in a private system. I've already pointed out that free market forces are operating on the public system.
Part of article 26, section 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory...

I simply disagree with this. It is not a right that everyone have a free education anymore than it is a right that everyone have a free pair of underwear, but people get confused because one seems noble and the other silly. Why do they use the word "free" here when obviously it isn't?

Also is this really a guarantee, as you state? If so, I am sure the UN (which gets 20-25% of its funds from the U.S.) is failing to back this guarantee, as I am sure there are millions around the world not receiving their compulsory elementary education. Perhaps the U.S. should focus on making their education system work and be well funded before signing declarations that "guarantee" every human, no matter how matter how exponential their procreation, receive a "free" elementary education?
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Note: I don't really know what to believe when it comes to religion, I'm still on the lookout for something (religion or otherwise) that makes sense to me.

I understand what you are saying, but I have to say that I disagree. For some people, its all well and good to treat religion as another tool for answering a particular set of questions. However, for a lot of people, religion is a belief in a set of truths on which the universe is based.

If you believe this, then it doesn't make sense to say that religion can't answer certain questions. In fact, the logical conclusion of this line of thought would be that science is in fact the study of rules which god encoded into the universe, i.e. it is one of many ways to gain an understanding of god. But, if you believe this, you can't separate religion from science.

So what does this say about when scientific results contradict religious texts/beliefs? I would say it means one of two things:

1) They are speaking in a different language that both happen to use the same English (or whatever) words and therefore can't be compared directly.

2) Someone got something wrong. Either the scientists are wrong (e.g. need more data and better models) or the texts got it wrong (e.g. a problem in transcription and/or translation from the word of god to something we humans can understand).
It is a good idea - if you're actually funny.

I don't know what your product is. I've scoured your website and I still don't know what your product is. No sale.
Please at least read/see those before making the same "it won't work/wouldn't be a good thing" arguments that everybody has made a thousand times when first introduced to this. Thank you.

I will do that. Thanks for your informed post.
<sarcasm> Embrace constraints. Basecamp was built in 10hrs/week. You can do something great in ~60-80 years</sarcasm>
Exactly. Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580721.
The reason is the same as in math, physics, chemistry, English. It's more important to cover a larger amount of material than it is to actually have students learn useful knowledge in a subject. There are lots of high school students who could tell you the dates of Napoleon's reign, the dates of Otto von Bismark's reign, the dates of WWI, WWII, and the cold war, but only a tiny fraction of those students could explain with clarity and insight how those disparate events are related and linked. Yet it's that knowledge, more than X significant event happened during year Y at location Z, which makes knowledge of history valuable.
100-200k deaths per day. All those that die won't come back. Lifes saved by curing aging are actually saved for real, we don't just delay their death by a few years/decades.

So you're talking about immortality? I'm not sure we're capable of devising a governmental system capable of surviving such an invention.

When I read anti-aging, I assume the extension of lifespan, not immortality.

I really like your posts on this issue though, I'm going to check out the links you provided.
Experience is an advantage as long as it is not squandered by adopting extreme traditionalism. If you can keep learning when others have stopped, you can achieve anything.
> - Make Creative Commons text books. Hire a group of editors and staff that over see super star teachers who write the books. Release them under the CC licence.

The problem being that no one will use them. There was an article a while back about how all the textbooks' content is basically controlled by some Christian 'watchdog' group in Texas.
How do we kick our synchronous addiction?
Actually Chomsky and Rand share a similar view of Crony Capitalism and a corrupt regulatory state.
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Yeah, you just instantiate an ExecutionEngine and feed it your LLVM bytecode, and it'll give you back C function pointers that you can call. The ExecutionEngine is either a JIT (which'll compile your bytecode into native code and give you that back) or it's an interpreter (where the function pointer you get back is an entry point into the interpreter).
The Apple marketing is that the iPhone is for everyone, not just people who want someone else to vet what they do with the iPhone.

And there's nothing stopping Apple from making a device that truly is for everyone, with one mode that can be locked down completely so you can have someone else limit what you can do to do keep you safe, and another mode for people who don't need to be handheld and are adults and can make their own decisions without needing to effectively violate the DMCA or loose hardware support from Apple to do it. However, Apple is welcome to create whatever device they want if they think they can sell it.
Experience for youth is not a fair trade. Experience is usually domain specific and prone to being rendered worthless as times change. Additionally, experience can render you resistant to further learning. Youth brings energy and the ability to learn faster than others.

Lets remember that the article emphasises the mayor's age precisely because 88 year olds achieving great things is so very rare.

I hope that I'm wrong and you're right, but I'd rather have youth than experience any day of the week.
The diamond engagement ring was invented by a PR company hired by De Beers: http://blogs.static.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/21211.htm...

Personally, I got suckered into buying an engagement ring one time, but the engagement didn't take. After lots of searching, I was eventually able to sell the ring for half what I paid for it.

I used the money for gas and moved to California :)
For a quick introduction to SVMs (and a wide range of machine learning algorithms) then I highly suggest Andrew Moore's tutorials. They're extremely concise and well described, taking the format of a university lecture. Only the PDF slides are available however.
http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/svm.html

If you want a good introduction which actually derives the math and logic behind SVMs then I'd suggest looking at Stanford's AI/ML video lectures available for free here -
http://see.stanford.edu/see/lecturelist.aspx?coll=348ca38a-3...
It begins with the first few lectures which covers introductory knowledge and some other machine learning algorithms but lectures 6-8 cover the theory and principles behind SVM.

The great thing about this is that relatively little knowledge is assumed on the student's part and he provides a great deal of notes and handouts on any areas the students may be fuzzy.

Unless you're going to be merely using a prebuilt machine learning library I feel that understanding the math and logic behind the algorithms is vital.
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Love is certainly the most wonderful of all things in life. Every heart is in continuous search for the glowing depth,
I guess I can bolster this with the usage scenarios that are probably happening:

People get their phone and try to use the mobile browser, but the experience sucks so they give up (or only use it whne they really need to get some info from the web).

Developers look at the usage statistics, see that no one is using the other browsers and proudly declare that the people whole own phones with those other browsers don't want to access the information that they are presenting to the world, so therefore there is no point in targeting them as an audience.

The problem is that this is the wrong conclusion to make. Just because people aren't accessing your content in a certain way does not mean that they don't want to.
You know, AMA stands for "Ask Me Anything", which generally implies that any question is fair game (with obvious caveats for off-topic privacy-invasive questions).

People who don't want to answer any question should probably write "AMAA" ("Ask Me Almost Anything").
The clip of Lessig is actually from his appearance on the Colbert Report, where Lessig gives viewers explicit permission to remix, despite Colbert threatening to get "very angry and possibly litigious".

The voice might actually be Lessig purposely recording for this creation.
I just think it is an interesting idea to tie tax levels to the city budget (which is what I assume they mean by "charging what they need"). This would provide incentive for the city to balance the budget, as the cost of any spending programs would be felt by the citizens immediately and not delayed to the future.
Good, if beauty is not important, tell your partner you don't find him/her beautiful anymore.

I think his/her reaction will disabuse you of that notion.
I recall, at the ripe old age of 34, being put off by a new engineer who said "People of your generation look at technology different than us younger people, but it's cool that you are so familiar with the internet."

Now, I recognize that 34 is _little_ out of place at some startups, but I hadn't realized I'd moved into a new generation.

It didn't really bother me, so much as cause me to be aware that time is certainly passing by...
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It seems like a lot of people who aren't in tech see all websites, even if they're useful, as somehow frivolous. As though working at Google (or Facebook or...) must be nice, but it's not helping the world in a serious way. The importance of Google's Superbowl ad, for me, is that it made the case to a mass audience that all this web stuff can be good. Like, morally good; it makes the world better. I think this is something that a lot of us who work on websites believe, but I've had trouble talking about it with, for example, friends who work at nonprofits. They would see what I was saying, but somehow remain skeptical, and I think the ad made a more convincing case than I ever did. So for all of us who are web developers, it's like the ad publicly legitimized our work to some degree. Not that we needed it, but it's nice, and I think it's an important effect of the ad. So thanks, Google.
The Rhode Island School of Design has a library of Dazzle ship designs.

It's pretty neat

http://www.risd.edu/dazzle/
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yup, that's nice too!
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What does being 88 years old have to do with anything?

It means she grew up during the worldwide Great Depression, but was still old enough to have known its stark contrast to the prosperity of the 1920s. This could have influenced her towards extreme frugality.

She was also an adult before the worldwide adoption of Keynesian fiscal policy, so the idea of even temporarily running an unbalanced budget might be particularly odious to her.
By that logic, pizza is a public good. When I eat pizza, I become a much more pleasant person in my interactions with others, which benefits society. Most things that are good for an individual benefit society as a whole. It's a matter of degree. Education benefits individuals far more than it benefits society, which leads me to place it in the excludable column. Your justification for non-rivalrous is circular. Since education is valuable to society, we should be willing to pay enough for it to be non-rivalrous. I don't think that's a valid argument. It's irrelevant to my point anyway.

The whole point of vouchers is to reduce the constraint of money on one's educational choices. Poor people will still have limited choices, but they'll have more than one, which is a significant improvement.

I don't think a privatized school system would necessarily have more money in it. (It likely would at the higher end, but not at the lower end.) The benefit doesn't come from money; it comes from competition for that money. Money gets wasted on ineffective programs and teachers in public schools because there's little incentive to improve effectiveness. We're talking about an industry in which merit pay is a controversial topic! When there is a fairly direct relationship between the quality of education imparted and the monetary rewards received by teachers and principals, it seems pretty likely that performance will improve.

Good discussion.
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Honestly, I think this kind of thing is interesting, but it's totally for the benefit of the ego of the poster. And I think it's fine to speculate about his identity too. That's part of the ego stroking.
Some people get it, some people don't