skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The theory is not being dismissed because it is offensive; it's being dismissed because it has all the signs of a crackpot theory and none of the signs of a legitimate one. It is trivial to tear it apart. But if someone tore it apart, using the trivial arguments, you would not believe them - you would say "oh, you're just rejecting him like everyone else", "you're part of the brainwashed mainstream".

There are thousands of arguments like this online. People who somehow got to PhDs from weird unheard of schools, went off the deep end, and publish their 'theories', which aren't developed enough to even argue against, but are written in half-intelligible, imprecise language, claim to be "ignored by the establishment", claim to solve this-and-that problem with a method that the establishment wrote off prematurely, etc, whatever. They're all the same.

This particular 'theory' (though that's not a fair word for it) scores easily over 100 on this list: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html, and so isn't even worth a person's time to look at.

A simple line of reasoning to support this:

If it was a legitimate theory, it would start with concrete statements about how it proposes the world works. Not vague, hand-waving stuff. It would start with math - lots of it. It would start with a precise explanation of how the experiments that prove an ether to be impossible missed the truth for 100 years. It would discuss examples where mainstream physics fails to predict the right result of experiment, and then show, with calculations an informed reader could follow, how it makes better ones.

The guy is telling you he's right, and you're believing him, or at least taking him seriously -- like a sucker. He's telling you "no one else is believing me, but it's because I'm being ignored unjustly", but you've skipped the more likely explanation: "no one else is believing me because what I'm saying makes no sense".

But I, who knows enough physics to parse this stuff am waiting for him to show me he's right, and he's not doing that at all. Nor is he showing anyone else, which is why he's being ignored.

It's not all your fault, though. It's way easier to spot these crackpot theories when you've a) studied legitimate ones and b) seen so many other crackpot theories that say all the same stuff.
See also : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/22/ancient-roman-hair-...
I'm not a down-voter, but I have to ask: which major company would you trust to develop this uncharted, potentially lethal software? All of the options seem pretty frightening, simply because they don't have a track record yet. I've got my money on Uber winning out in the long term, but only time will tell.
This was a really nice breakdown, thanks.

You mentioned that that Deep learning was a method of choice for AI researched because Deep it has unlocked a lot of new application.

I have a question - is it also a "method of choice" for researchers because its not well understood yet why Deep Learning actually works?
The pay for working for a "real" company... salary, normalized expectations around work/life balance, 401k, benefits, name recognition on your resume for future projects... it's almost always significantly better at "real companies" vs smaller agencies or start-ups.

That said... we wouldn't have Microsoft, Apple, Dell, etc. if everyone followed that advice.

Which boss do you like more?
Also - must remember that AI is a programmer on the sidelines letting data do the logic. It required a fairly different frame of mind than traditional programming
In a day, it's not unusual I work on issues for 2 different projects and have to troubleshoot a Tier 2 issue for a couple of other projects.

Your second paragraph seems accurate. My friends are ex co-workers that moved on to much larger companies.
[ JavaScript ] Killer of Sequential Promises
32 vs 64-bit app support is quite separate from 32 vs 64-bit kernel-space drivers. 32-bit operating systems need 32-bit drivers and 64-bit operating systems need 64-bit drivers. 64-bit operating systems can run 64-bit apps and 32-bit apps.

Crucially, however, 32-bit Mac OS X 10.5 could run 64-bit apps just fine. That, combined with OS X's universal binary support, made it easy to start deploying 64-bit application code far earlier than most Windows apps began transitioning.

Most of Apple's computer models were only available with 32-bit x86 for less than a year, so the installed base that needed their applications to still be 32-bit was minuscule compared to the installed base of 32-bit Windows editions that couldn't run 64-bit apps even if the CPU was 64-bit capable. Most Windows application developers faced bigger challenges in deploying 64-bit code than Mac app developers, and the Windows devs' work would benefit a much smaller fraction of their userbase. Windows app developers don't switch to 64-bit unless they absolutely have to. (e.g. this year's 64-bit re-release of Skyrim, to accommodate the address space requirements of heavy modding. Skyrim was originally released in late 2011 as a 32-bit only game despite listing CPU requirements that couldn't be satisfied by any 32-bit CPU.)
Bitcoin entrepreneur Charlie Shrem gives first interview out of prison
Have used Vue with Django before. Tried React first, but opted for Vue. It's a breathe of fresh air :)
Used to be true, but now, ads for any CarPlay-enabled vehicle seem to almost exclusively feature the stereo as the key selling point.

A notable holdout: Toyota, who has arguably the garbagest entertainment system.
Well, considering the text itself (and leaving apart one's feelings about the person speaking it): it does contain some valid points and interesting ideas -- about leveraging the "Yalta system" and the "anti-Hitler coalition"; and about the need to get beyond "bloc thinking" -- and raises valid criticism about American-led efforts to support various insurgencies in the region (and the damage caused by going outside, rather than through the international system).

One could almost imagine some peaceful, alternate universe with the leader of genuinely democratic and non-aggressive (but still not necessarily western-oriented) Russia saying such things to the General Assembly, in so many words. But this is Vladimir Putin we're dealing with, after all, and the current historical context matters greatly.

And it all unravels pretty quickly, for example on line 3:

But I remind you that the key decisions on the principles guiding the cooperation among states, as well as on the establishment of the United Nations, were made in our country, in Yalta, at the meeting of the anti-Hitler coalition leaders.

Right there, he's basically "gaslighting"† us -- blatantly attempting to fuck with our minds by asking us to accept that Yalta is a part of his nation's territory, completely side-stepping the issue of its forceful annexation less than 2 years previously, and the rather profound insult to the international system and the concept of rule of law that action caused -- while attempting to lecture on the importance of respecting established precedent and working through the international system.

So like, right there -- a huge, steaming pile of WTF, right there on the Assembly floor. But rather than stop there, he keeps piling it higher and deeper:

Whatever actions any state might take bypassing [UN] procedure are illegitimate.

Like for example own pet insurgency movement in a certain neighboring country whose name starts with the letter U, the existence of which he also continues to attempt to deny most of the time (except when he obliquely praises it). With all the completely unnecessary and avoidable bloodshed and other human suffering that has gone with it.

(to be continued)

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
Dummitt and Foote suggested above is a great text on the subject and probably the best when it comes to a complete treatment of the theory.

The only complaint one could make is that it's written for mathematicians.

A more appropriate book for "lower level" students (in terms of mathematical maturity) would be John B. Fraleigh's "A First Course In Abstract Algebra".
What do you mean "assuming" it's the right model - a known-good model is the model in human brains, which is definitely a series of neurons, no? what else would it be?
> We can do this, I am an enormous optimist for my species, but it will require the elites, from London to Harvard, from Cambridge to Hollywood, to learn the lessons of the past month. To learn above all a measure of humility.

We're doomed.
Events, laws of nature, and invariance principles – Wigner (1963) [pdf]
Tesla and Google. Tesla has tons of data and already have proof of concept ready, and Google knows how to write software that makes fast decisions in an ambiguous reality to achieve good enough results.
> Dollars were useless in 1968,

Hmmm. Go on....

> but you could exchange them for a useful commodity.

That sounds useful though. That sounds like dollars have (or represent or store) utility.

Really, it sounds like you're making the point that Bitcoin isn't a commodity and is therefore valueless, which I have a tough time agreeing with (the marketplace also currently disagrees with the idea). Neither real-estate nor services are a commodity and they both have economic value.

If that's not your point it seems that there is a misunderstanding of what "useless" and "has no value" mean in the context of describing Bitcoin (and dollars?), and that we've not come to terms on what those phrases exactly mean so that we ensure we're examining the same set of thoughts built with the same set of words.
>Rust is primarily aimed toward real-time applications that can't tolerate garbage collection latency.

Why can't Firefox tolerate garbage collection latency?
Naw, at least with me I seem to be able to by treating the tab ordering as a conceptual discovery ordering. That is, I remember what things I learned / researched prior to and following each tab. It's lossy, but because each has a unique relationship with its surrounding concepts there's plenty of opportunities for parity-like behaviour; redundancy.

When researching a thing I'll open up some high level page about it, then do breadth-first searches of tab contents, opening up new tabs whenever I see something that looks interesting, has wider implications, or possibly has some weaker relationship to a thing with one or both of those properties and I think I might be able to traverse the concept graph this way to find it / them.

So I end up with a sort of flat tree where it corresponds almost directly to my earlier thought graph which produced them. I can work with maybe 200 this way... But not more. Unless I open them in different windows - sometimes different browsers, actually, to help further differentiate/compartmentalise them (eg. I'll use this strategy for largely disparate topics). Then, well, I'm not sure where I top out, all I can say is I once crashed my box from out of memory (not running swap), and it's a 32GB box soooo... I dunno.

There are likely many others that work this way. Perhaps it's not common, but I also feel that it's very unlikely unique!
Just define consciousness, and then maybe we can start to have a scientific discussion about it. ;)
Is this advocating removing dashboards? What do you replace it with then?
Disclaimer, I haven't looked at their work to closely.

I think the process they use to select the hyperparameters overfits on the labels in the validation set. The true size of the labelled data includes the 100 from the training set and all labels in the validation set.
I would not and I am an up-voter. It's been three years of flawed OS releases from Apple. The worst was installing Mavericks. I read the release notes and it's just Apple's e-book store. Then the random crashes and inability to reboot begin...

Tim Cook: I don't have a very positive experience so far during his tenure.
Ask HN: How did you make your first million dollars?
Thanks for the study - Figure 1 is impressively self-explanatory. It's interesting to note that the article's author Robin Hanson[1] worked in AI & ML industry roles starting at the peak of the last AI boom in '84 and witnessed the AI winter through to '93.
In your example, the LAMBDA form is preceded by a sharpquote. So #'FORM is syntactic sugar for (FUNCTION FORM). This is a way to reference a value in the function namespace instead of the variable namespace (Common Lisp is a "Lisp-2"... actually more than that, but that's the common terminology.) Usually this sharpquote would precede names of functions when they are passed as a value. (Interestingly, they are optional on the LAMBDA form.)

Generally, preceding single quotes in Common Lisp e.g. 'FORM are syntactic sugar for (QUOTE FORM) which has the meaning of reading in the form without evaluating it. You'll see lots of single quotes used for that purpose as well.
But physics is not about believing, it's about describing reality. And when we look at our universe, we are not seeing new matter being created. If the theory actually says that new matter is created while the the universe expands and the amount is not so small that it may have escaped detection, then the theory is wrong. And not because somebody believes or says something but because the theory does not match reality.
So when Google's car runs you over, the only way they'll pay medical expenses is if you post on HN and an employee happens to see it?

Obviously kidding on the specifics because your insurance company should go after them, but let's not give Google a free pass on their systems all having "good enough" results.
Drupal 8 pretty much killed my love for drupal, I'm now switching to wordpress, though I miss drupal's book module in particular.
I completely agree that one should expect a very different approach to developing this sort of software, but that also leads to a key question that should be asked about any company approaching this sort of thing: is there a good reason to believe they're capable of this different approach?

And if other facets of the company are showing signs of fundamental problems, do they deserve trust that "this will be different"?

None of this to say they're not capable of this, but I think there are good reasons to doubt that a hardware company with a spotty track record when it comes to software has the ability to put forth the software engineering effort required to build something of this caliber.

$0.02, just my opinion, etc.
Or how about I just cut Apple out of the picture, which is what is actually happening.
J-drilla
and google has a pretty large fleet driving around the bay area. every time im in mountain view I see at least 3-4 a day when I'm just driving around
As to the other main thrust of what he's saying (supporting Assad as the lesser of evils... like you know, back in the good old days of the anti-Hitler coalition): let's just say things are "a bit more complicated" than the way he presents it. And that he's side-stepping some very important things -- the atrocious human rights record of the regime he'd like us all to throw our weight behind [1]; (this is time-traveling a bit, but) the conduct of own armed forces[2] in that country since that speech (for example, their use of cluster munitions, against those some UN conventions he claims to hold so sacrosanct); and this little bit of unpleasantness [3] (NSFW).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_during... -- especially the part about "According to various human rights organizations and the United Nations, human rights violations have been committed by both the government and the rebels, with the "vast majority of the abuses having been committed by the Syrian government".

[2] "Russian airstrikes have killed around 3800 civilians, about a quarter of them children" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_intervention_...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouta_chemical_attack [NSFW]
The immense availability of financial instruments and VC makes investment in any mildly promising technology overshoot. There's nothing really mysterious about this, especially after the dot com bubble. Is the web useless? no, but there's a limit to the number of players doing the same things the same way successfully - because that's what hype does, make people focus in not just a technology but a particular way.

3d-printing, mobile apps, tablet devices, VR, cryptocurrency, 3D TV, Neural Networks (in the 70s, then again in the mid 80s, then in the late 90s, and now), you name it.

These are perfectly applicable technologies that may or may not warrant the swings in investment they attract, but they are valid and defensible nonetheless. They may also be monetisable - not always useful stuff brings proportional profit in the market. And of course, there's also timing. The exact same idea may work years later in a different environment. But the only way to find out is to try, and maybe try too much at some point.
There's no accounting for taste...
Skihlz fundraiser Android app: buy shoes for teen athletes, app by 501(c)(3) org
This may just be Apple's lobbying operation running on because nobody officially told them to stop.

There were previous rumors last summer of Apple testing at GoMentum Station, which is part of the old Concord Naval Weapons Station north of Oakland. But nothing much has been reported about that. It's not that secret; BART tracks go over it, you can see most of it from nearby roads, and a high school faces it. Honda has been testing there, using an Acura with the inevitable spinning Velodyne on top. Apple doesn't have a California autonomous vehicle testing license, although 19 other companies do.[1]

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testi...
skihlz fundraiser iPhone app: buy shoes for teen athletes, app by 501(c)(3) org
> Now I'm really interested in the SpiderMonkey/V8 thing.

I think SpiderMonkey is 60x faster than V8 there because of an optimization we have to avoid quadratic behavior while flattening ropes, it's described here: http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/0f92c398ce929a3f3d9...

Basically JS engines do string concatenation lazily: they create a rope, and then the rope is flattened when needed [0]. When appending/concatenating one character at a time and flattening after each concatenation, we avoid quadratic behavior (copying the same chars over and over again while flattening) by overallocating so we can simply append while flattening. The source code comment has the full details.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure)
What a loss!
I wonder if Apple would launch a self-driving Uber competitor, and I wonder if they'd make it iphone-only and deeply integrated, like their other services.

Will Apple cars have access to more information about iphone users than Google/Uber cars? Enough to be anti-competive? It's really interesting to see their hardware-advantage-driven approach to services come to bear on different industries.
I'm a fan of the graphics as well. Does anyone know what they were made with? I see the org-mode reference at the bottom of the page, but I assume that doesn't include the images.
North Korea's sanctioned operating system can be hacked remotely
> Is it just my imagination, or could this be Tao? And could he really have been on the verge of leaving math before 2012

That's a huge stretch.
When I was traveling across Africa, I was told that thieves love the steal passports from US and UK Citizens since it was possible to be black and a citizen of those countries once the passport is doctored with a new photo. Much harder to pull off a photo of a black person with a German passport and German name. These passports were sold via operations like the one mentioned in the article.

The saddest part of the article is the local officials were bribed for a decade. Ten years.
Uber intrigues me, but they also scare me given their complete willingness to act in less than ethical ways. Combine this with something as critical as a self-driving car and I worry.

I tend to agree with the sibling comment: Google and Tesla. It's easy to say Google since they've clearly been doing this for awhile, but they've always been on the leading edge of some remarkable software, and seem to fit the criteria of a company well-positioned to take this on.

And considering Tesla's SpaceX connection (some serious triumphs in hardware AND software), I think they're uniquely positioned to take this on.
Why does 2016 seem so much shittier than previous years?
How to start a business by Christmas
So did loads of institutional investors - herd mentality. "He invested, must be good" and the other way round
Modules are a gargantuan step forward. While we'll likely never get the effortless compilation speeds achieved by Pascal, hopefully the three day build on top-of-the-line hardware is a thing of the past.
I have a question. I often see titles of blog posts or books such as "Learn Modern C++" or "Learn Modern Java" but how possible or practical is this for a newcomer when the languages have been around this long?

For instance what happens if you opt for the strictly "modern" just Java 8 or C++17 type approach to learning these. And then you end up as the case in the real world needing to maintain legacy code? Or you collaborate with people who have been using the language for a long time but don't use these modern approaches?
I'm a lot more concerned with whether it has passed a rigorous permitting/licensing and driven a few million miles than I am with the branding.
Think the argument is that most products don't need a dashboard and so you will not need to replace anything
As C++ features started to creep back into C you'd see a lot more of this. The // comment identifier is perhaps the most famous of these.
Performant Parallaxing
The brain has more than one multitasking mode
That's great news. I haven't been car shopping for awhile.

A friend has a 2016 Honda Pilot. The enerertaintment system on this thing is a pure shitshow... I think it's 3 clicks on some awful touchscreen to turn the radio on.
Rendering webpages is a very intense task. Many of the improvements Servo is working on are basically "how can we transpose AAA video game technologies and techniques into web page rendering." The problems are more similar than you'd imagine.
I would trust companies that have a culture of making fool-proof software such as major airplane and car manufacturers. I was talking to an engineer that worked on the software for the main computer of a fighter jet and he said writing code is a small part of it, writing the specs and tests for it is what takes time. I don't think any of the Silicon Valley companies are willing to match that, it's not in their culture.
You can't use a hypothetical to disprove a theory. Your entire comment is completely baseless: "These people don't follow my school of thought, so they must be wrong!"

No offense, but using your ego to make an argument is pathetic. I'm aware the theory sounds crazy; I'm not an idiot. But I'm also not going to let my hubris dictate what I can or can't research. That's just stupid.
Thank You, Jon Gnagy: An Appreciation of a Predecessor to Bob Ross
Apple sells several of the most popular consumer electronics devices in the whole world, and contrary to the opinion of the techo-chamber, those devices pretty much just work. We have an interesting cognitive bias when it comes to these kinds of products: we can obsess about how awful iTunes is, for instance, without appreciating the tens of millions of lines of code that pretty reliably do their job day-in and day-out for hundreds of millions of users.

This, by the way, is true of pretty much every major tech company. It's hard to think of any of them --- even Adobe --- where the weight of all the stuff they've gotten right doesn't confer pretty much automatic credibility to any kind of new software project.

Like any company, Apple might not succeed at an ambitious new product. But you'd be nuts to bet on some random startup over Apple (or Google or Microsoft or even Adobe), at least for a "big" product.
It has different semantics. Your code is equivalent to a `forEach` call, not `map`. Calling `map` returns a new array containing the results of the callback, while a for loop or a `forEach` don't.