skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Robots don't get anywhere near the effectiveness of boots on the ground, even with the most advanced robotic explorers we have today. All of the science done by the Martian rovers could have been done by a human geologist in a few hours work (except the traversal itself, so let's add a day's hike on top of a few hours lab work). And the robots are only really able to inspect the stuff that happens to be exposed on the ground around them and easily reached by limited robotic manipulators.

Sending humans to Mars for even a 30-day mission would be orders of magnitude more science return than the entire robotic exploration program to date.

And that's without considering relativity time-lag. There's serious consideration of an orbital precursor mission to Mars that would put robotic handlers in Martian orbit, or a free-return trajectory near Mars, without a lander, to do little more than remote control a couple of Curiosity-style rovers that accompany them (and maybe visit one or both low-gravity martian moons). It's anticipated that the time-lag reduction alone could vastly increase the amount of science that could be done on a robotic mission before the nuclear batteries die or servos get clogged with dust.

And of course all the robotic arguments are predicated on basic science being the only reason to go in the first place. In reality, most of the people interested in Mars and space exploration generally want people to permanently settle in space. I actually don't give a damn whether there was once life on Mars.. but there damn well better be human societies there within my lifetime.
New Kaby Lake Chromebook Under Way
Maybe this is Altman's response to being savaged over his "everyone should get a share of GDP" idea? Who knows (besides Altman)?

To be sure, there is a lot of self-censorship -- the Overton window is real, and it's not advisable to say things fully outside the Overton window. Perhaps Altman is saying that the Overton window is closing on some opinions that he thinks we should be able to discuss openly, but because they're now outside the window he feels unsafe mentioning them. That would be a fair argument, though it'd be nice to make a list of things that can and cannot be said publicly, then we could argue whether we should widen the Overton window.

I happen think the Overton window is a good thing, even if I'm not always happy as to what falls inside and what falls outside of it. And, of course, the Overton window is a natural result of human nature, so it's hard to argue that there shouldn't be an Overton window. We can affect the Overton window, and sometimes we really should try to.
Just for fun, I added every possible option to the configurator (including VESA mount and software). Nearly $14k.

Since my work (statistics) is compute heavy but data transfer only happens once, I'll be sticking with EC2 at <$5 per hour. An iMac Pro would require me to upgrade before I worked off the difference. EC2 has the upgrading factored into the price and has CUDA GPUs.

I get that not everyone is like me (video editing would be real slow if you had to transfer all the files over the web), but I find it hard to justify when I could hire a kid to build me a comparable system for much cheaper. Sure, Apple's warranty is better, but is is worth as much as the price difference says it is?
And when Google a few weeks ago decided to ban all Amazon Kindle’s from accessing their websites, by banning any browser with that User Agent string.
Divvy is good but these days I'd recommend Magnet (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12). They've had an 80% discount forever, so it's basically just the price ($0.99). It's pretty polished, and lets you assign keyboard shortcuts.
NASA Live – Latest Discovery from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope
Why? Is the idea that Sam is morally corrupt too dangerous, too heretical to be voiced? Should we not debate ideas?
No mentions of Genesis 3:16b yet: I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children.
This idea doesn't seem very useful to me, given that specific things tend to be used in a limited number of specific ways.

Sure, we can imagine a theoretical beneficial use for almost any object. However, we shouldn't be blind to the fact that certain things tend to cause more harm, even when we try to prevent it.

Note, I'm not saying how exactly we should respond to more dangerous objects, I'm just saying we should not falsely claim that they aren't dangerous.
That’s just a personal anecdote. Some babies never crawl at all and some toddlers don’t start walking until much later than 12 months. And your 2yo toddler is still nothing compared to the mobility and world-awareness of a two-month-old fawn, which has already learned to recognize and outrun predators at this age.

The fact that there’s such a spread for these otherwise extremely important life stages in humans shows a lack of maturity in their development compared to other mammals, not the inverse. Something is a little different about us.
He's the central character of the post. Literally the entire idea here is filtered through events as they happened to him and how he interprets those events.
This problem will resolve itself because there are brave people willing to weather the controversy caused by thinking in public.

Long unedited podcasts are turning out to be the best platform, with people like Sam Harris, Dan Carlin, and even Joe Rogan becoming the most important public intellectuals alive today. All three have financial and editorial independence. They reach millions of people on a weekly basis. Carlin is in Oregon, from Los Angeles, where Rogan and Harris are.

Sam Altman could obviously run a podcast where he discussed his controversial ideas. Many like minded people would rally around him. Some idiots would call him a monster. It would be great.

If you have FU money and you're complaining about PC culture, you're being unnecessarily cowardly. Start a podcast and help change things.
In my understanding, bitcoin and its supporting technology is a monetary system. So, in my opinion, comparing bitcoins with tulips will be similar to comparing Fractional Reserve Banking with tulips.
Hah, I don't know a single person who has ever told me about using an imessage app. The lifestyle thing feels real to me.
That's a bad fix. There are lots of people I like interacting with, on a normal, non-political basis, that I can't get along with politically. In normal social situations, we get along fine, because it's not normal to constantly talk about divisive political issues. But on Facebook, it's become (for many people) a norm to post endless political memes.

If I didn't want to hear anything about these people's lives, I wouldn't have friended them in the first place. I don't want to have to block all of their posts just so that I don't have to deal with their obnoxiously-expressed views.

Ultimately, I think the norm of people posting political things on Facebook will go away--or at least, the only people being obnoxiously political on Facebook will be the same people who are obnoxiously political in real life. In the mean time, it's pretty annoying.
The article seems deliberately deceptive, entirely ignoring the second half of what it claims net neutrality means except to criticize Google for not treating all the bits it sends the same, and then encouraging us to think net neutrality creates a "bevy of regulations" for Google's competitors. What new regulations apply to non ISPs? How does net neutrality change that other companies have to make deals with service providers?

There's no argument here, just a complaint that Google is huge which, while probably valid, seems irrelevant.
unfortunately that usually isnt the case. there are very few diseases where one mutation or molecule is truly causative. in many areas, weve approached the limits of how much we can treat disease by just targeting one molecule or mutation. this is an area where $50-70B of pharma R&D spend goes each year for the last few decades, and the yield of that research in terms of approved drugs is declining exponentially
> ...you holding the giraffe while I fill the bathtub with brightly painted power tools.

I'm down for that.
I completely agree. The exchange seems to go like this:

A: "I think black people are genetically inferior."
B: "I think that's a bigoted thing to say that has historically caused a lot of harm to a lot of people."
A: "Why can't we have a free exchange of ideas?"

Person B is engaging with that idea, it's just that they think it's completely indefensible. I have a hard time understanding how Person A thinks this conversation is supposed to go -- like are we supposed to entertain everything as if it were serious? If I go up to a physics professor and say "I think physics is completely inferior and wrong" what is she supposed to say?
Thanks for linking to this, looking forward to checking it out.
> It will cost $200 billion to get to Mars by 2040?

That's not a lower bound. That's an upper bound on what hopeful NASA contractors think they can milk the government for in doing it The NASA Way.
That's one way to delay the vote...
If you believe that investors don't look at non-revenue metrics like MAU you are sorely mistaken. In fact, it's almost all they care about in this category. Twitter's stock is in the toilet because their user growth has tapered, whereas Facebook continues to grow at a healthy clip.
Ask HN: As of 2017 – best PDF/academic paper reader?
I guess its a sad state of affairs that the landscape has changed so much over past few years, but wondering what people were using to read/organize academic papers, i.e. from PubMed or ArXiv?

Mendeley - still developed, owned by Elsevier
ReadCube?
Papers (acquired by ReadCube...in limbo)
DevonThink?
iBooks?
Zotero?
flat files?
Appears Sente is sunsetted..
"The worst you'll get is a tongue-lashing?" Not even close. It is quite ordinary for SV employees to be fired or "resign" after being caught participating in wrongthink. Eich is the most famous example, but Apple's former chief of diversity is a more recent one.

No, this is not quite as severe as being arrested and imprisoned for thinking the wrong things. But career-wise, at least, it can be almost as disastrous.
They're delightfully interesting machines, in that they really didn't get the chance to shine back in the day .. but now we have emulators and disk drives, and all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff.

The guys at Defence Force are making a dual-Oric: two Orics' chained together to combine graphics and audio capabilities .. if you get the druthers, follow the progress here:

http://forum.defence-force.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1771

(tl;dr, two Orics are wired up, they're gonna work in sync to build a hi-res image .. yay!)
> What if the ideas are unethical?

Then argue the case for that position and tease out the ethical ramifications with your interlocutor. Bring a lot of evidence to back up that argument. Argue against the strongest form of the opposing idea(s), don't just create straw men to knock down or attack simple weak spots for easy points.

Unless the person advancing an unethical idea is intentionally trolling, take them seriously and seek to engage & explain your point. But it also requires truly understanding the other side (hence why you should be able to both articulate and argue against the strongest form of their argument).

Humanity has had some pretty awful ideas over its brief history. We have a mixed record when it comes to eradicating them by dialogue vs fighting. Usually we try dialogue for as long as we can. Too often, we wind up fighting when dialogue fails. Changing hearts/minds isn't an easy task. But the more we vilify, insult, ostracize, and otherwise verbally (or physically) attack those whose ideas we deplore, the more they frequently dig in on their position because they've tied their own identities to their beliefs. It's a funny condition with people that they often hold their identity as a believer in thing X far more strongly than they actually hold thing X.

[edit: wording & a little extra explication]
Could this not simply be a reflection of cultural differences in the expression of disagreement? I have no personal experience with life in China, but a common observation others have made is that, similar to other societies in the region, and in contrast to cultures in many European and American countries, avoidance of shame, respect for authority and maintenance of social harmony are of significantly higher importance to people.
Media properties are natural monopolies thanks to copyright anyway so, sans quality, it really doesn't matter who owns them.

On the other hand it's definitely possible to have a monopoly on distribution but good luck arguing that it's possible to have a monopoly on art.
Maybe in hindsight due to a certain perceived technological superiority, but that's far from clear and from the perspective of the 80s the Warsaw Pact was far superior in conventional force by numbers in Europe. See e.g. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_138256.htm?s...
It's a bit off. The context is complex. It's true that things are tense these days. But not only SF, everywhere: USA, Europe ..

There are social tectonics at play and the stress causes people to overreact negatively on anything that doesn't solve the current issues.

ps: augmenting intelligence is still weird to me, at least above a certain point, I'm all about balance these days; fix me but I don't need augmented abilities.
I think the lies on the internet thing will have to defeat itself. I remember being led astray by internet “wisdom” back in the first dot com bubble. Then I went and tried to apply that knowledge IRL. I don’t remember any single particular example, but I remember feeling downright embarrassed for believing something off the internet. I then learned to always take anything from the internet with hefty doses of salt rocks.
The article made the distinction between criticism of an idea and criticism of the person behind the idea. "Of course we can and should say that ideas are mistaken, but we can’t just call the person a heretic. We need to debate the actual idea." It says right there that criticism of an idea is welcome.
Throttle the FCC and Fight for Net Neutrality
I'm ready for the ignorance of Americans on the internet to get a wake up call. It will be painful and difficult but a decision to revoke NN will force people to become familiar with meshnets/decentralization/encryption if they want any sort of freedom.

However, most will just accept the cattle feed and roam the fenced pasture.
I'm extremely aware of this as someone who is socially conservative in terms of abortion, gay marriage, trans issues, etc (seriously not trying to start a flame war).

It's weird knowing that a large portion of the country has similar values to me, but in a major city I can never mention these things or I'll immediately become unemployable. It doesn't matter that these things have zero impact on my behavior at work; you just can't say that you believe certain things are right/wrong if it goes against norms.
Indra’s Net connects us all, especially in meme-space.

We grow or diminish memes based on the fuel we give them.

BitCoin is not an investment. It is speculative baseball card trading and its harder to keep safe from theft than baseball cards. This is the truth as I see it.
My wife works on this project! This is so cool to see real-life stories of this. Awesome.
I've always found it interesting that part of the issue gets ignored. Those people who are running around online downloading and uploading? They're beating the copyright holders at their job. The primary purpose for existence of publishers for centuries was to master the problem of distribution. Now, any clever 12 year old can run circles around these huge organizations in their spare time for fun. It's like if tomorrow kids became able to slap together Lambourghinis in their backyard. Except if 90% of our economy was based on producing Lambourghinis. Because distribution was the problem that drove the global economy. It was the reason why factories won out over village craftsmen. It's the reason we live in cities. It's the reason we educate our kids the way we do, why we structure companies the way we do, etc. Solving the problem of distribution was basically what our economy existed for for a century. And now... it's literally child's play.

This is quite a bit larger than copyright, but obviously media is the first place where it became very obvious that distribution is no longer a worthwhile problem to solve as it has been commoditized by computers and the Internet.
Well, sometimes it's meant that way. If you want your economy to keep growing at 2% per year, that really is exponential growth.
See this list and go to the most recent years: https://www.thefire.org/resources/disinvitation-database/

When the list started it was fairly evenly distributed between right and left leaning speakers being disinvited. Now it's much more commonly right leaning speakers.
I'm not a lawyer, but I highly doubt that they could. It's also not what happened here.
It's fine to criticise the ethics of the work. Beneficial, in fact. The problem arises when you can't separate the ethics of the work from the ethics of the person doing the work.

When "this is a bad idea, maybe you should stop" becomes "you are a bad person".
Why not discuss Parzival instead? The interactions between Jeschute, Parzival and Orilus provide plenty of material for discussion, and it isn't straightforward.
In my case, direct experience with the driving conditions of all three countries, over a decade. ;P
This isn't happening in only SF, or only in tech. It's happening all over, and across the spectrum of ideas.

Is the argument that social media is tearing apart our society correct? I think it goes deeper than that, and that it's tech in general. We've grown impatient with right-swipe, immediate communication (whether through texting or calling on a cell phone; remember when you had to find a phone, or wait until you got to home/work?), immediate gratification. No time or desire to think things through, just react.

The happiest time in the past 25 years was the first half of 2016, when I swore off almost all tech for 7 months, road tripped, and visited with people--strangers--and learned what made them tick. Guess what--not technology. And I was relaxed, happy, free.

Technology isn't the cause of a toxic society, but it definitely is a/the catalyst.
Why E?
Current reports are that Netflix's contract rights to the Marvel original shows is set to expire in 2019, just in time for Disney's still unnamed service to launch. (…and possibly one of the reasons it isn't launching until 2019.)
> Yes, it famously was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot

Of course it was. Hence me using it in my 'straw-man' argument. Maybe I was too subtle.

You still haven't convinced me why I should move everything to TLS. Also, I do doubt you have other stuff to do, seeing as you answered my post, point by point...

Yes there are 'bad actors' but lets not get too paranoid here. We can't wrap everything up in TLS cottonwool.... where does it stop? Are we all too afraid to leave our houses without 'security' ? Do we now talk in code in public just. in. case. someone is overhearing what we say?
Guidelines....that is what put people off..
Dubsmash's road to 200M users with 3 engineers
LinkedIN: 75% of 25-33 Year Olds Experience a Quarter-Life Crisis
> This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics.

What about all the novel things about physics that we won't ever hear from the gay people who are forced out of physics because of a life-threatening climate of hate and bigotry?
Results of this debate disagree with you

https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/free-speech-th...
McLuhan's point of view was that the means for media delivery have a much more significant global impact than the content contained within the media itself.

He did not contend that the content was meaningless, or lacked a message. He did, however, quip throughout his life that focusing on the content is putting the cart before the horse.
Can Artificial Intelligence induce empathy?
>without any benefit in return ?

Isn't the implied benefit that it might allow for an easier birth?
Talk about a shitty god.
Uh oh, Sam has been "red pilled".

Without providing more examples/specifics, it just reads as a tirade against the boogeyman of "political correctness".

Is he upset that the SF crowd rejected Peter Thiel for endorsing Trump? Or is he upset that Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla? Who knows? He's being so coy.
You can definitely stop science. There's a reason we don't secretly infect populations with various diseases just to see what happens anymore.
https://www.spectacleapp.com/
FCC net neutrality vote halted due to security concerns
To head off the usual comments, Spanner (as quoted in the source) is a CP system and this is a rather disingenuous and unfortunate marketing spin by Eric Brewer that conflates availability of the network infrastructure with availability of a distributed quorum in a network partition.

How reliable your network is has nothing to do with what happens when it inevitably does have a failure.
> We need to accept that some of these ideas (probably not all - it's always difficult to get on the right side of the line) are inherently dangerous.

ostracizing hypothetical talks is the problem here, not pursuing the unethical goal; just talking about what part of the goal makes it unethical is being shut down (according to the article)
Good point!

I think Sam is right and the quote (from 1999) also points to the issues. However, many comentors are pointing out that this is some 'culture war' thing that has infected SF. I think it's just a natural progression of maturing companies. They become managerial, not entrepreneurial. As such, stability is valued more than innovation, and you get a stifling environment. In essence, the Gervais principle[0] comes into effect as the 'graphite control rods' that are middle managers are lowered into place to help control the nuclear reaction that is capitalism.

Aside: It seems that HR departments (as an idea) have not been doing a good enough job a 'graphite control rod' (to help control the capitalistic reaction) in reference towards the #MeToo movement. Some better invention than an HR department is needed to prevent/control these harassments. Perhaps better surveillance/monitoring at work will help?

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
Nope

https://petapixel.com/2017/10/14/photos-eiffel-tower-night-i...
Predicted by Matt Groening

https://goo.gl/images/pPPy6o
I don’t see how this follows at all. Can’t a rich person value their reputation and good name?
My mid-2010 Mac Pro tower is still my favorite machine, probably favorite I've ever owned. The form and function are basically perfect. It's built like a workman's tool and that's what it is.

Update that with current year components and shut up and take my money.
May I ask what measures you take to stay safe?

I am new to the US, got Netflix and Amazon Video but soon realized they hardly have what I am interested in. So I got myself a Vpn (BlackVPN, if that matters) and started using Popcorn Time. I am still a bit wary to download torrents, something I used to do a lot back home.

So, any suggestions on what more I can do before starting torrenting?
I guess... if $449 is "$600+"...

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682014...
I remember being in argentina a couple of years back and seeing the "Political correctness" pro-trump slogan and thinking how dumb that sounded.

Moved back to SF, and there is a HUGE difference of what it was for me 5 years ago. The people I know are way more cautious and the people I don't are even more afraid.

The Damore essay is still one of the unspeakables. I know I fear getting fired if i publicly said i agreed with it, even though i never read it or did anything of the sort. That to me is a ridiculous state of things.