skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The definition of believing in God can get murky. If asked "do you believe in God" many people will say yes. . . but when the belief is tested the numbers become much smaller. For example if you believe that God exists and rewards those who follow his commandments, people should tithe continuously on the belief that God and not financial well-being will provide for their future. However, when you look at it, very very few people tithe out of their own volition. This is true so much so that some denominations have made tithing mandatory and started tracking it. Take away the tracking and tithing becomes miniscule. As do serious giving to the poor, charity, dong your best to stay away from masturbation and things forbidden by God that people may not find out about.

People blame modernity and science on the decline of faith, but I am relatively certain that this trend would hold true in the past. We can see this in historical events like the Catholic church accepting money for indulgences, an absolute no-no if you believe in a higher power, but perfectly acceptable if you are going about the Earthly task of building a working social institution.

People have always used religion as sort of a fashion, a show of social virtue. Very few people have actually used it to seek God. So I think when you find those who would simply say "yes" when asked if they believe in God, the number will be high. Those who attend church will also be a high number.

But when you look for people who take even the simplest, smallest and most minimal steps consistent with the belief in a higher power who wrote the bible, the numbers become smaller.

This applies across religions. For example, I was shocked when talking to Muslims about their faith and why the follow it. Their most common answer is "it provides for the social order." Which is an absolutely bizzare reason to follow a faith. If God exists and told you to do something wouldn't it make sense to do it even if it was not consistent with the Social order. This theme plays out among all religions. Most people do it to maintain the social order and appear as virtuous people.

There are a few people who are there actually seeking God. These people are few and far between and I suspect much smaller than anything anyone would have guessed.
How is that different than saying, "If you are a shareholder and you want to make as much money as possible regardless of social costs, no one can stop you. But that doesn't mean you should force the other shareholders to do the same"

If we go by your logic, then the only thing people are allowed to pool their money together for is to make the most money possible. Am I not allowed to incorporate a public company that has another purpose? A company is, and should be, controlled by the shareholders, since they are the owners. If those shareholders want to do something besides maximize their profits, they should be allowed to do that.
But what are you doing about your bubble? The bubble that colors your bias on what makes good career advice? That's what the parent was talking about and you talked straight past him. That doesn't bode well for your bot's performance!

I don't think this is the right format, but I do think computer-assisted political strategy is an interesting prospect. The problem with trusting other humans for political advice is that you can't know how much their own political ambitions play in, but the bot is really just once-removed from the people who made it, so the issue of human meddling is not entirely out of the picture. It would need to be very transparent, explicit, and clear to be trustworthy, and preferably highly tunable.

How are you ensuring that your bot is providing a valuable, localized analysis for the person asking for advice? If Boost tells me to do something that would get me promoted in California but fired in Boston, who's liable? What kind of cultural accounting is performed? Can I adjust it based on the political/cultural leanings and backgrounds of my subordinates, peers, and superiors?

Also, politics depends heavily on unpredictability. You almost need a reverse bot, telling you the worst solution, so that your political enemies don't accurately predict your moves and set traps. Does Boost have a "surprise" mode?
Lots of people don't know how to use browser extensions.

Some people don't like to use many browser extensions, like me. I've never been bothered by the ads; sometimes they are even useful.
It's hard to believe, but years ago, back when Google had what was called "stop words" (like 'the', that it ordinarily ignored) I was able to make Google perform a search that took over 30 seconds.

The reason stop words take such a long time is that millions of sites have words like "the" on them, so doing a join on all those simply takes a long time.

My method to find a long string consisting entirely of stop words, was to just download a project gutenberg of the complete works of shakespeare, and find the longest string consisting of just stop words in there, then search for it as a literal quote.

The longest one I found was: "From what it is to a".

Let me see how long Google takes to do it now :)

2.04 seconds! Nice :) - http://i.imgur.com/IhPTpr6.png

that took 30+ seconds 'back in the day'.
Oooh good catch, I missed it on my quick scan. I'd love to be able to break it down more than just Fiction/Nonfiction into listening vs hearing, various sources, etc.
nurikabe is at least as good, imo.
> are also early adopters of solar panels.

Solar panels which are paid for themselves by sending money back to the grid. If you redirect it into your vehicle, then you've just transferred the cost from the power company to your solar panel loan.
> am I right that you... support the fuel efficiency regulations passed in the 70's and 90's

No I would prefer a carbon tax charged per vehicle based on miles driven per year and the pollution emitted from the vehicle.

> If someone expert told you that similar regulation passed today would have a similar effect, would you support it?

What effect did it have? Do you think automakers would have continued to use 1960s era engines?

The question to be asked is not whether I support it but whether a different policy might have been far better. I think a tax would have had a far less distortionary effect on the economy and potentially a more beneficial effect on the environment.
Nice! Do you still have the link to the Quora question or an example of the query?
Our ability to copy others is a sign of intelligence, not stupidity.
Yeah, I worked construction for a number of years and if you want to do physical work long term, you gotta invest in your health. Nothing crazy, but two to three hours a week in the gym can stave off major problems for a long time for most people. The real problem with that kind of work isn't the physical demands, but the monotony.
Another question I'd ask is how many semesters someone took to graduate (and number of credit hours earned).

I paid for most of college myself and graduated debt free. One of the biggest savings came from getting approval to take 21-24 credit hours worth of courses for the last two years. You pay the same price for tuition and housing for 12+ credit hours at most schools. Armed with this and the ability to handle the stress of that workload, you can halve the cost of going to college if you can do this for all four years.

I wish I had thought about doing this sooner. The reason I ended up doing it was because many of my friends were 2-3 grades above me and when I noticed that most friends had graduated I figured it would be better to get out ASAP and make new friends in the real world 2 years later.
Is it really technically correct to say that Google was performing web-wide joins on data? Isn't it all about clever indexing?
I was talking about those that get dropped by insurance (usually multiple crashes) and also - you can get injured and not report it.

But anyway, 4.6 M injuries isn't rare. "But there are also millions more who are seriously injured — an estimated 4.6 million in 2016 according to NSC" [1]

[1] http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/traffic-deadliest-year/
Whites are losing the majority is because they continue with the fiction of an "economic system" that is really an unsustainable pyramid system that essentially requires slavery and an exponetialy increasing number people to keep it going.

It's no wonder whites are becoming a minority.

But this is good because other cultures will hopefully bring new systems to replace the faulty one at play now.
Well, you don't need all that much capacity. The penguins are into text-based adventure games running at dial-up speeds and the seals are table-top RPG players. Neither population has discovered online shopping.
Triangular ones seem to be more common, but there are straight versions also https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1985737
There is a much more fundamental problem, which is that people are bad at understanding the difference between "is" and "should". No amount of information about what the world looks like tells you anything about what course of action is the most moral (and vice versa). If you are building a system that predicts recidivism rates (figuring out what "is"), then any piece of information that improves your accuracy is good. If you use that system to suggest sentences (making decisions about "should), then you are going to run in to a lot of problems.
I don't get how they get anywhere with this? If your a company that has a lot of freight you get a thousand calls a day from brokers wanting your business.
There are a lot of different designs.
When I wrote the point of contention, i was thinking how it is possible to produce stronger magnetic fields electrically than ~materially, and what that should mean to ultimate motor performance. But I can see your correction is likely sound, that in practice PM options keep a performance edge -at least until the age of high temp superconductors arrive or other magic :)
Anything that uses Blowfish since 2010 is incompetently designed (Blowfish has an 8-byte block size).

AES-Serpent is probably not less safe than AES; it's just not necessarily as much more safe as you'd expect.

A much bigger concern than which precise ciphers you're using is which block cipher mode you're operating under; Truecrypt/Veracrypt uses XTS --- like most disk encryption --- which (among other things) isn't authenticated.

The funniest thing about TC/VC's cascades is that the keys are derived from passwords anyways: a giant clunking complicated block cipher cascade resting on top of a low-entry password secret. It's just a silly design.
Unless you're going to enjoy building one, and have bearings and parts lying around, then you're probably much better off just buying one. Plastic ones are like $5, aluminium (better, don't break) are < $10. They'll probably be much better than anything most people can realistically make - better balanced, for sure (again, unless you're going to enjoy making one - not trying to shit on anyones DIY fun).
Cool idea. I like it overall.

I don't know about the idea of having "experts" talk to you. I've spent a lot of time thinking about my career and talked to a few experts and it's a real mixed bag. In some ways I see this in the same way I see most formal mentoring programs - the best way to get an amazing mentor is to arrange it yourself. There's a way to do it, but it's hard.

That said, there's a massive amount of potential to change the way that recruiting is done. Traditional job boards suck - they don't work for candidates - it's a blind stab in the dark, they don't work for hiring managers because you get the same 100 applicants who didn't read the job description every time you post up an ad.

Getting people to front-load the work before they look for jobs and making that introductions to companies would totally change the game. Recruiters aren't suited for that (I am a sales recruiter). You'd eat LinkedIn's job postings for dinner as well.

If you were able to get a userbase of high-quality candidates, who you worked with to improve their careers and then put them into additional jobs you'd be able to charge thousands for each successful hire. There's a market for helping move the smart, overworked, underpaid millennials who are grinding it out at professional services firms from their first jobs at $50k to jobs paying $120k a year (which will more or less happen naturally for a lot of them as they move through their 20s). These people are likely to pay for it, plus their employers would pay on the other end.

The hardest bit is making it a habit for young professionals to check into your platform. Right now it's a weird concept, but hey, the idea of dating online amongst 22 year olds was weird until Tinder changed the entire game.

If you could turn Boost into a career coach firstly and then into a reliable pipeline of candidates for professional firms, I'm convinced you could make this massive.

Damn, I want to work on this now haha.
I love these rationality links. :)
And I came here thinking this was about a C++ class library..
> Why not charge a tax that increases for every year a car gets older, so that the person driving the smoke-emitting clunker has an incentive to upgrade into something that is cleaner and safer.

Seems like this tax burden would fall disproportionately on the poor who couldn't afford to upgrade their old clunker in the first place.
Step 1: Build a fidget spinner
Not without scheduled jobs (crons or the equivalent) or always-live processes, no. If you're leaning on a runtime the server owns and your own code is never invoked, you are (or your account is) not using any CPU time.
That's why I said the title is clickbait.

Also, it's a misleading title. It has a false statement in it. The false statement is intended to get you to click something.

The quality of the article isn't relevant to my point. My point is just that people will click this link expecting a defense of ESP.
Enable the POSReady registry hack for getting the updates: http://www.zdnet.com/article/registry-hack-enables-continued...
Well, yeah, but there is no solution to the infinite regression problem, right? Adding God to the mix doesn't really change anything.
Do you have a link to that? I'd be interested in reading it his response and I can't see it by searching Quora.
I happened to be playing with one when this article popped up in my RSS feed. It's my sons but it's on my desk because I tried repairing the cracked frame with super glue, for about the 5th time. It still works with the cracked frame and the repair didn't take this time because I mindlessly starting playing with it while the glue was still drying. We've had 3 around our house for about 2 weeks and everyone that lives or visits, in age groups from 60's down to 10 months have fidgeted with them almost every time they come across one.
Your argument is very similar to the "i think it should be" argument that I mentioned before. Are there any studies or some other justification that might substantiate that your theory is indeed true?

Does all tertiary education should be "free" for everyone? English history, art, etc? How does the price setting works: government just pays whatever educational institution asks for? Does it forces institution to accept the amount of money being provided?

Also, what does "better payoff for the economy" mean?
Does it mean that the median wage rises, amount of taxes collected increases, productivity increases, something else... ?
Interestingly, I wonder if it cached your query.

My same query as you took 0.3s, but if I stripped out one word ("From what it is to") it took 2.2 seconds.
There's nothing to index. How could it have found my Shakespeare quote via an index? It consisted entirely of words 'from what it is to a' but produced only the Shakespeare quote. I don't see how it could have indexed anything.... it must have done a join. (Which makes sense given the 30+ seconds I had to sit and wait before it returned its answer, while also reporting the time it took to produce it. What else could it have been doing?)

By the way I believe I wanted to know whether it would return the Shakespeare quote at all.

If you mean that it might have cached the results of the query, I doubt anyone else queried that exact phrase, other than me.
There may be technical reasons, as well. I remember that, after the Berlin Wall came down, large swaths of former East Germany got fibre lines (for telephony, mostly).

Then, a decade or so later, DSL became the new standard. Which, as it happens, didn't work over fibre. I'm assuming they spent more on research into making copper faster because it was much wider deployed). For a long time, your best option for your fibre line was 128kbit/s analog-modem over digital-line.

Eastern Europe's infrastructure may date from around the same time, which may make it easier to improve now. It's a second-mover advantage. Compare NTSC vs. PAL, or (maybe, not completely sure) 230V vs 110V mains.

Also, in terms of "Government regulation" there really isn't anything stopping Deutsche Telekom from improving its network. They operate on a system where they just send a notice, and it's considered to be approved if not replied to within two weeks. I'd say it's mostly a curse of not enough competition (cable isn't much faster), and a network that's currently good enough for most people.
Google Home is coming to Canada this summer
>> We really have no idea how this stuff actually works. For all we know, your consciousness was in my body until a second ago.

Sorry but that doesn't make sense. By the same token you can start believing in supernatural creators- because, after all "we don't know how [physics] really works".

And yes, we do know some things. For instance, if something goes wrong with your brain, your conscious mind is also messed up. That's pretty solid knowledge there.

Besides you'll need to jump through some serious hoops before you can explain how my consciousness could be in your body without me knowing anything about it. Not that I'd put that beyond her, the little hussy!
At the risk of sounding like a fiddly-toy-elitist, I have to say that I prefer practice butterfly knives. There's a wide variety of tricks to learn and it takes some hand-eye coordination. Of course, they're also louder, and tend to freak people out until I point out that it's not sharp (and probably a while afterwards too).
> Part of the problem is that the network disk that EC2 provides as EBS is 100x slower than local disk, so keeping all the indexes and data in memory is the only way to replicate physical hardware performance.

> If anyone knows of a better EC2 setup for PostgreSQL, I'm all ears.

Have a proper replication & archiving setup, and use instance storage. If you have configured streaming replication to 1-2 other servers, and archive your WAL to s3 (using wal-e or such), you're already above EBS's guarantees (99.9% durability IIRC?).
I've made a few for kids at my school on our 3D printer. There are models on Thingiverse.
Perhaps, but if new cars were cheaper then there would be more (and newer) used cars on the road. No matter who is driving it, an old clunker that creates 20x the emissions of a new car is harming all of us every mile it is driven.
Ah, HN, where's there's always a comment that roughly reads "It's good, but [X] is better."

Snark aside, I wasn't aware of either of these before today, and I'm delighted that I now have hours and hours exploring them ahead of me. So thank you for the link to Google's project.

Oddly, despite the greater range of HQ works with Google, I'm finding their system significantly more frustrating to browse. One of my favourite things about art galleries is accidental discoveries - walking in for one thing, and wandering around for a while before accidentally finding something else amazing, that I'd never have thought to look for.

As one would expect from Google, their system is proving very helpful if I want to find a particular artist or a particular style - it's great for finding things when I know what I want. If I want to see just impressionists, great. If I want to see just Monet, great.

However, I'm actually finding I prefer just browsing through page after page of the Met's collection, precisely because it's not categorised and sorted to the nth degree.

Interestingly, I think it's representative of a broader problem that's creeping into society. Chance is an important element of discovery, and one that for some bizarre reason (or I suppose, for predictability of advertising), the Googles, Facebooks, etc of the world seem to be trying to eliminate. The focus on giving people what you (or an algorithm) think they want is what leads to things like echo chambers, through reduced exposure to different points of view.
Someone once did an analysis on HN posts and their ranking relative to the time they were posted and votes. And they found posts with certain keywords were heavily penalized and sort of soft banned from the site. IIRC it included stuff like "NSA" and "HN" and posts from certain sites like reddit and youtube (but I could be remembering.)

Having the full list of banned keywords, or even acknowledging there is a list, could cause drama. And it's easily evaded if people know about it, like when reddit banned "Tesla" posts got through by misspelling it "Telsa".

There's also other stuff like a controversy filter, that detects articles with more comments than votes and penalizes them. I try to avoid commenting in articles that are getting close to the limit to avoid triggering it.
>My moral code is based around the Golden Rule, but not because someone or something said I should - it's because it's logical and purest form of fairness.

No it's not logical, it's completely irrational. If someone has something you want, and there is no way to get it, the rational thing to do is kill them and take it. If we wish to kill him while still being in a society where we won't get killed ourselves the solution is to kill them in secret in a method that makes it as likely as possible that you won't get caught while publicly supporting laws forbidding murder.

Saying that morality is rational is a cop-out answer.
If morality were rational we would live in a world where people rarely do anything immoral because they realize it would be irrational to do so. The reason morality is even an issue is because immoral actions are rational where we can derive a benefit from them and not face consequences (either because we are very unlikely to get caught or there is no consequence for getting caught.)

The golden rule is nice and all but it is most certainly not a rational principle - as evidenced by the fact that neither Jesus nor any of its other proponents have every tried to offer up rational justifications for it. Instead it was justified with "I'm God, do as I say," and that was the only justification ever offered for it.

Even just now, you claimed it was rational but didn't even even attempt to give logical arguments in support of it. You merely asserted it was "the purest form of fairness" without either explaining why. Most definitions of fairness would find "eye for an eye" to be fair, fairness requires good for good and evil for evil. The Golden rule is not fair.

Also fairness, while something that many people value, is not a logical principle, we do not derive the value of fairness from logical reasoning but human feelings. . . The universe and the world is rarely fair and the desire for fairness is often contrary to sound reason.
The MPG chart is of median MPG among production vehicles, not mean, and not mean weighted by person-miles driven.
of course it cached my query. :) try it again in a few weeks.
Well written? I stopped reading at "mansplaining guinea pigs."

Anyone who resorts to such tropes can't be taken seriously.