skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I discussed this problem decades ago when I developed MORSE (http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/morse/MORSE.html).

People like certain things for no obvious reason, and are unlikely to change. It does them no favours to recommend them music they don't like, or anything else which depends on taste. But if there's music similar to the music they're known to like, which they haven't heard - perhaps because the band is obscure, from a different decade or part of the world, or new, for example - they might want to hear it. Also, there might be one or two songs they'd like by artists they don't normally listen to. Collaborative filtering is good for this.

Your point is valid about ideas, news, and a number of other things which have nothing to do with taste. People would benefit from sometimes being exposed to viewpoints different from their own.
I find that scary. A huge collection of specialists makes for a pretty fragile species.
I would love to do this at some point. May I ask how you managed to get a 15 h/w job?
Weight-loss technologies train the brain to resist temptation
It's kinda sad to see our elections to be used as reference for falsification detection research...

This isn't exactly new, such analysis was done as early as 2011, i.e. http://lleo.me/dnevnik/2011/12/07_gauss.html

Although, they were more focused on the peculiar distribution, than on integer spikes.
You can argue that that's true of all large enough or complex enough organisations. The emergent behaviour deviates from any one individual.

Reminds of my favourite law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
An important thing about intelligence is that it doesn't have to be like the one we have. An intelligence that "wake up" won't say "hello" to us. Assuming we survive its birth, we may just recognize it as things slipping more and more out of anyone's control, ignoring our inputs and doing whatever.

One could wonder if it didn't already happen with the economy.

In a way, talking about these kinds of "meta-intelligences" is kind of a point-of-view thing. It depends on the abstraction level you use. You can look at an ant and think about it as an individual insect, or realize that it's just a tiny, specialized cog in an intricate machinery of a colony - a colony that kind of behaves like an individual animal. Similarly, at what point our day-to-day interactions with other people, aggregated over the entire population of the planet, start to resemble a planet-sized organism doing weird self-regulation stuff? What's the difference between saying that "the market decided" and saying that a low-level decision was made in a part of the planet's brain?

Abstractions are weird this way.
Specializing enabled huge advances, everyone having to do everything is actually quite fragile because it can only support a small population.
How Do Board Games Go Viral?
I love Eno. Such an influential composer and yet he doesn't consider himself a musician in the least. He's used his own ignorance of music to spectacular effect. This a piece the Telegraph did on him a while ago. It's worth reading:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/how-brian-eno-creat...
Hah! Got anything for the XBox One? :P
Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again, though as least Ars seems to be self-aware about it.
It so happens that the 14th annual European Tcl/Tk users conference just took place [1]. Quick perusal of the event site shows the breadth of uses Tcl is still being put to (enthusiastically, by programmers who choose to use it):

* nuclear power plant operations

* high-performance visualization and analysis of microscopic images.

* design analysis of high-resolution camera light sensors.

* embedded programming of Cortex-M3 ARM v7-Microcontroller.

* satellite control systems.

* multi-platform/compiler automated C++ library compilation.

* customization of the Fossil VCS.

* scripting and visual programming on Android.

* communicating sequential process programming.

* Linux D-Bus scripting.

Slag Tcl all you want, but it's still being used every day by brilliant programmers to ship real products, in environments where reliability is crucial. How does Guile stack up to that? Or any other unfashionable programming language for that matter?

Maybe more effort should be put into understanding what these programmers see in Tcl that the critics can't.

[1] http://www.eurotcl.tcl3d.org/index.html
> This is a road to madness

How so?

> If every time you wouldn't understand something you would just plunge into the material and get familiarized you would do nothing else for the rest of your life

That's how I've been spending a significant part of my out-of-work time, for most of my adult life. Is there anything wrong with being a curiosity-driven person?
You're right; there are many unknowns. But that doesn't mean you pull a number out of thin air. M&A teams use all kinds of models to make financial projections and calculate ranges for valuation. Even for the LinkedIn acquisition, other bidders backed away because per their calculations, the deal was getting too pricey.

The rounding thing I think is only a signal. When you get a rounded offer, you feel that the buyer has room to go up. When you get a precise offer, the signal is the buyer has an exact notion of how much this is worth to them, so they might not be willing to go much higher than their initial offer. It's a psychological thing which will probably have a smaller effect in a bidding war.
I worked with different versions of Delphi for 7 years. I miss it sometimes. The language was quite good, but people would always judge it because of the IDE that made it "too easy"
It can be demonstrated quite readily in humans, through media (literature, movies, TV). It happens all the time! If you've ever heard or uttered the phrase "I know exactly what the character is going through!" then you've witnessed it.

It can't be proven in the sense of mathematical proofs, but then, nothing in reality can.
Democratic primary results can be predicted by counting High School Graduates
Coming in from the harsh fronts of YouTube, Reddit and 4Chan, this is an awfully tame flame war.

In any case, a lot of good points are raised by both sides. As an Emacs user, I appreciate Stallman's points, but he does make a fatal mistake, in that he doesn't include popular extensions like itcl in his evaluation. That's like evaluating lisp without considering popular macros, or the potential of macros. While that doesn't alleviate the problems Stallman has with tcl's lack of datastructures, those are not insurmountable with a couple of well-written C-extensions, assuming that tcl's C interop is any good at all.

Also, tcl is a pretty terrible lisp, as although they have a lot on common, the differences are substantial enough for fans of one to have some degree of distaste for the other.

The most entertaining part is that Stallman criticises tcl for lacking common datastructures, being slow, and having bizarre syntax that appeals to hackers alone. ESR (and, I believe, Stallman, although I am unsure), goes on to note the common use of dynamic scope, confusing quoting mechanism, and the horrors of upvar and upvalue.

Gee. DOES THAT. SOUND. FAMILIAR?

If it does, it's because most of those problems also appeared in MacLisp, the direct predecessor to Common Lisp. Many of them also appear in other lisps:

Linked lists, an unusual datastructure, are one of the few well supported by Lisp. Lisp used to be quite slow, and many implementations still are. Dynamic scope is still the default in elisp, and macros just barely hold the system together when you're writing lots of code, a cicumstance that Stallman claims elisp is actually better in than tcl. As for confusing quoting, `(there ,(is 'quite) ,@(a lot) of that in lisp). And upvar and upvalue are in some ways less dangerous than macros.

Actually, lisp used to have its own version of upvar and upvalue, coupled with a mechanism called the fexpr that let you get rid of a lot of the quotes. These were not implemented in most later lisps, due to the fact that they are nearly impossible to optimize well.

At the end of the day, whether you love or hate tcl and lisp, there are people out there that are stuck using far worse extension languages. Like these poor sods: https://gitlab.com/xonotic/xonotic/wikis/QuakeC/Introduction....
On the other hand, at this point, anyone under 30 in Quebec is fluent in English, because they had to be to pass school. I've only had trouble making myself intelligible to people 40-60+, and even then, that tends to be when I am way, way north-east towards Baie Comeau.
Facebook's Filter Bubble Is Getting Worse
The paper did mention (IIRC) that the ballot counts themselves didn't appear to have any tendency to align with "round" numbers (1250, 1300, etc) which they likely would have if someone was lazily counting the ballots. It was only the calculated percentages (#votes for winner over #votes overall) that had the trend.
>you really don't know what actual cultural diversity is //

So a young nomadic Mongolian girl and I (UK, middle-age, male, working in craft/retail) don't represent different cultures because we can both speak English?

Go on, explain, clearly I don't understand.

Didn't you already explain that there were vastly different subcultures within the population of English language speakers? Don't you think there's more to culture than mutual unintelligibility?
I read something similar positing a positive role for aberrant behavior due to mental illness - if everyone eats the strange mushroom, the entire village might die, but if it's just Crazy Darrell then the rest of us can benefit by seeing what happens to him.
> Google is teaching their car how to navigate city streets, deal with human drivers and pedestrians, navigate intersections, handle construction zones, deal with emergency vehicles and cops directing traffic, etc. All with a much better sensor package than in a Tesla Model S.

The interesting thing is that no matter how much one anticipates situations a priori and builds them into the AI/model, there will likely exist situations not anticipated by the engineers.

For example, it is not clear to me how exactly a situation like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_direction#Sweden will be handled. Will this be "patchable" (never mind the logistics and security issues of providing updates to a nation's fleet), or will it require a full retraining of the AI? Or more generally, how robust/modular will the designed AI be to these kinds of situations?

The reason I like this example is because it is a classic instance where humans have inertia and thus have difficulty in consistently applying the "switch driving side" rule - I have seen international travellers requiring at least a few minutes at the wheel to reorient themselves.

In principle one would hope that a modular software solution can handle things more consistently.
Sorry for the mistake.
> The difference with AI is that it will have all of the knowledge within a system

If you asked me to come up with 5 different definitions of AI, the concept of "all of the knowledge" wouldn't really be there. I agree on the "incredible connections" part, though.
Clinton is bought and sold worse than anybody since US Grant, perhaps, although she doesn't have the excuse of being a huge alcoholic.
"Around the same time, I read an essay in Wired magazine by Paul Saffo, who is a director of the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Menlo Park, which argued that the information highway is going to cause a flowering of personal expression not seen in our society since the sixties, and that when this happens (maybe in five years) people whom we now think of as computer nerds will have the same hipness that in retrospect we now assign to beatniks."

Neat, he predicted the emergence of the hipster.
In a few of the threads, the mention of SROs and need for housing come up. Gentrification, affordable housing, etc.

But, one question I fail to see answered well is, why should a city that isn't affordable be required to find and provide housing for individuals in said city? I can't afford to live in Carmel, Los Altos, etc, but I live where I can afford.

California has places like Modesto, Stockton, etc. that have available housing that is not expensive. I'm sure there are places in rural washington as well. Why not have the city partner with neighboring (affordable) municipalities and establish housing, maybe jobs and recovery programs, etc. at a fraction of the cost of trying to wedge the same into places like Seattle or Washington?

A UC Santa Cruz / Civinomics study for homeless in Santa Cruz found roughly 2/3 of the individuals arrived here either on the edge or already homeless.

At what point do municipalities say "enough" and put their own first? I have friends locally going back generations that can't afford to live here and move, yet I am told that someone living in their RV has every right to camp on the street and demand local services, yet arrived here recently.
Absolutely. Just as we are (in my opinion) a result of emergent systems (evolution) - the systems we build should be expected to have emergent properties. And there are other systems we are beholden to (and impact) such as the biosphere and the climate.

Criticism of capitalism is often misunderstood, or misconstrued as "conspiracy theory" - while what it often is, is just pointing out the most likely and apparent emergent properties of capitalism - and likely follow-on effects of that. Examples are concentration of capital and power, ignoring "external costs" like environmental damage etc.
And more generally, I would say it just depends on the quality of the AI. There is no fundamental reason why such a system would have to recommend only similar music. It could try contrasting music, and build a picture of what aspects of the music you like. It could draw conclusions to recommend seemingly different genres which nonetheless share some commonality that might make them appeal to you. It could also occasionally try out completely different things, to broaden your horizons (and give you more of that if you react favourably). And that's just scratching the surface. You could do all that without AI. An AI could potentially do all that, plus other interesting things that we wouldn't even think to try.
> I don't understand what it is you like about Australia and NZ if it's not the high standard of living and society created by laws.

Well these are the things I like about your country and your neighboring country.

- In NZ and Australia you get on average more sun coverage per year. This is good for energy costs as I like to use solar.
- The people there speak English, so it is an easy place to move.
- Land is cheap in NZ
- The currency conversion is in my favor
- Not many people live outside of Auckland (in Australia) and NZ has only a few densely populated areas. I'd not live there so people won't have easy access to bother me.

Those are my reasons for considering to move there. I don't see how they "don't make sense".

The laws are the only thing from stopping me from moving there.

> What is it about Australia you like over the US if not the society?

To answer that specifically, it's the ability to easily live outside of your or any society while not living in a place that is completely "lawless"
How Amazon’s team of old-school book reviewers influences what we read
A pair of friends just moved to Paris to do just this. They had to travel to a French Embassy (Houston was closest) and prove they had a States-based job, and that they were financially secure. They're allowed to stay for one year, and then have the opportunity to re-up for one more.

I don't know of a master list, unfortunately.
Sure, it's a fair consideration. But before asking that question you should have just quickly googled some other student opinions.

http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=246554
I used this for my masters thesis a few years back. It was fairly intuitive, you still need to be comfortable coding to dig into what's going on under the hood, but the visuals of all the pieces hooked up really helps abstract away some of the complexity and lets the user focus on how the data flows through the algorithm.
He is a Linus Torvald, a John Carmack, or a Chris Sawyer. He has the skills, the experience, and the name to demand that.
Playing Lisp Again (2004)
I agree that the naming is poor - that doesn't make them liable for human error though, the driver has to opt in and is made well aware of the operation modes.

Incidentally I'm carrying that exact book in my backpack right now. I think the problem here is much deeper, and even opposite to what Norman discusses in the book. An autopilot is the epitome of "don't make me think" - I want to go from A to B, no need to worry about the driving. The problem at hand is that the technology is not mature enough to fully take over from humans, and we are not good at staying alert in this half-focused state - I don't own a Tesla but it must be incredibly boring. It's an interesting conflict of tech vs human nature.
"Invisible Hand" turns out to be just another word for a feedback loop. Something we've learned quite a lot about in the past century. Feedback control is not magic. It does some things right, and it dumbly fails in some other cases. It's more resilient and tamper-proof - it's close to impossible for a single individual to control this system. That's why people like it. But it's also much less efficient than central-planned economies could be. In a way, running economy by self-cancelling feedback loops is outsourcing computation to the physical world. Instead of figuring out - using brains or computers - how much widgets a factory should make, you just let people buy and sell and get rich and go bankrupt, until the system spits out a stable state. Very resilient, but very wasteful.

I think central planning is much too fragile for today's world. But who knows, it may be ok for tomorrow's. I believe that prerequisites for successful central planning are having a benevolent planner backed up by huge computing power, so that the planner can respond to changes everywhere promptly enough. A friendly AI, if you like.
Did they have to show they had X amount of savings in the bank?
You didn't correctly read what I wrote.
This is highly dependent on your nationality. For example, if you're an EU citizen, you can work from wherever in the EU due to free movement of people laws.
cube level?
Did they? It seems like people are only interested in the surface of tech, the sexy acquisitions, the new Steve Jobs movie, the new iPhone. And then I try to bring up why password requirements are security theatre and people's eyes gloss over. I've taken to telling people my job description of "works at tech company" and leave it at that.
I’m not defending Lenovo, I think they broke the law here and should fix their UEFI firmware.

However, when you throw away your OEM windows, you’re essentially throwing away money.

There’re good laptops that come with Linux or FreeDos preinstalled.

They mostly targeted towards enterprise market (who get their Windows through volume licensing). But I find it’s a good thing: besides OS choice I usually get upgradability, reliability, and reasonable prices (IMO companies are better at tracking their expenses). For example, take a look at HP ProBook series: they are good, include wide range of specs, and if you want to, you can get one without Windows.
I've actually found this tool to be very convenient for explaining the data mining process visually to laymen.

Does anyone have any experience using Orange? How would you rate it compared to SAS EG or other alternatives?
Yes, kinda - you can compile to an escript, and mix makes that super easy. But it needs an Erlang environment - you can't easily compile to an executable that will work anywhere, so it can be limiting. If you're happy with that limitation, yes and yes to the latter two questions. Otherwise, I'd stick with what you're using.
I'm intrigued now. Who is this 1888franklin?
This wasn't a rear-end. This was a side hit after being cut off by a semitrailer entering a four-lane but non-limited-access road from a side road.
> Single language = single universal culture = same shit all over the world, no diversity.

Like Morocco, Saudi, Turkey, and Indonesia all have the same culture, because Standard Arabic is common due to Islam?

Or England, Kenya, and India are so culturally identical because English is a standard language across them?

Or how it's difficult to tell a Spaniard apart from a Mexican, because they both speak Spanish and hence are culturally identical?
> They some how manage to be more restrictive then where I currently live (New Jersey).

Considering NJ is a part of USA, that sounds a bit like saying that New Zealand manages to have higher mountains than Limburg, Netherlands (which is apparently the highest part of Netherlands with a whopping 322.7 m hill).

BTW, your link literally starts with: "About 230,000 licensed firearms owners own and use New Zealand's estimated 1.1 million firearms." That's supposed to be "nonsensical"?
It's all about the visa, and a lot of folks don't understand that working under the tourist variety is usually verboten.

Perhaps begin with countries in which you're interested in living and working, and see what sort they offer...
Ok, I'm sorry for snapping at you! I do try to avoid that around here.
Oh, come on. He's asking for a list of places that have a program for this sort of thing. He's hardly asking for "specific legal advice".
It's ridiculous to frame it like that. I'm sure most surgeons also want to make sure their patients benefit from a surgery, but I'm sure they don't get taken advantage of.
> Personally I think that the OSv/Java unikernel stuff is probably in the sweet spot of industrial demand

We're currently using unikernels with our Java micro-services for supply chain/logistics tracking and analytics, and loving it.
"Ms. DeOliveira-Longinetti, who co-signed on the loans, was shocked and confused." Be careful when co-signing any loan.
You are so right. Which exactly points at the problem:

Multiple OS package managers (choose one), and for each language/framework/... that you use, one extra. Which includes headaches for how to handle overlaps between the two. One ought to take into consideration how others are handling these issues, just to ensure you're not alone.

I do not have concrete answers, but I firmly believe that it is possible to reduce the mental and practical efforts required for package and dependency management by somehow abstracting and disciplining the current solutions.

In this context, Guile and NIX are often named. Their stated goals, however, are generally about reproducibility of builds. Could anyone point me to discussions/documentation that specifically addresses the wildfire of dependency- and package management?
Pointing to expertise is not argument from authority.
One potential solution I've been pondering:

Send like 4000 homeless people to a small abandoned town (like old dead mining towns and such), with gear and supplies, such that they can help each other create themselves a society, simultaneously they might revive the abandoned town. If they then choose to leave, they leave. If they choose to stay they stay.

Not everyone needs to be assimilated, and us building services to help them "be successful", is the literal meaning of assimilation. Kinda like a commune or an Amish village, potentially even burning man, allow them to build themselves the society such that they are successfully able to live in.

P.S. I don't have particularly good ideas about how you keep them safe, or even if you should. It should be their society and maybe that means, allow them to make their own laws.

P.P.S. I know I'm crazy.
Honestly, I have no idea. However, that is the kind of person he would need to be to get a 3 hour a day programming job. Or he is full of shit and talking out of his ass but that would be uncivil so I better not say that.