skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Humans are rarely aware of optical illusions unless they're extreme images they don't see in real life - crawling dots, impossible geometry - or they're explicitly labelled as optical illusions.

Some more subtle examples:

http://www.terrycolon.com/1features/optical-illusions.html

In fact human perceptual processes are only kind of reliable some of the time. Low and/or unusual light, suggestibility, and unusual contexts all have a very negative effect on reliability, but humans are often unaware of this.

Cognitive and semantic illusions are even more persistent. People literally believe all kinds of nonsense, and will carry on believing it even when offered robust evidence that they're wrong.

The point being that human perception and cognition are not some kind of gold standard. They have plenty of issues of their own. But there's a kind of assumption/requirement of perfection with machine intelligence that doesn't apply to human cognition. So bugs in our own evolutionary firmware tend to be overlooked, while equivalent-level bugs in ML are seen as terrible failures which undermine the entire premise of AI.
It's not surprising when you understand that Newfoundland was a British colony until we joined Canada in 1949 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_Colony).
My parents were born British so there's a stronger British/Irish influence here than Canadian in many ways.
> What the author calls "remarkable abilities" and "robustly understand[ing] the world" can also be seen as just reproducing our own innate and learned collective human biases.

From the article:

> “The bareheaded man needed a hat” is transcribed by my phone’s speech-recognition program as “The bear headed man needed a hat.”

If A.I. is going to work with humans, then yes, reproducing some of our "biases", such as the tendency to describe someone as "bearheaded" far more often that "bear headed", is a good goal. In an alternative universe of chimeras, a different bias would be needed.

But in any case, the A.I. needs to "understand" that one of these transcriptions is much more likely to be correct than the other. So a level of processing beyond "sounds like this word" is needed.

Take the famous absurd quote++: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." Reading the second sentence makes you, a human, double-take, and re-read the first sentence, and try reinterpreting it to see if it makes sense a different way. (The fact that it doesn't is what makes it funny.) An A.I. that has no "wait did that make sense?" step, no "is that funny?" step, is going to produce results that disappoint or confuse us humans who do.

(++Interestingly, this quote seems to originate in A.I. research: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/04/time-flies-arrow/)
How artificial intelligence is making mobile apps smarter
I wish he hadn't accumulated all this wealth at the cost of strangling computing worldwide under his semi-broken operating system.

I not a fan of royalty, autocrats, or monarchs. Just because one person is OK when given that power doesn't make it morally just. It is good he is doing nice things, but I find it troubling.
> The police have the one tactic called 'the kettle' where they form a police line around all the protesters, then letting them out, one by one, getting everyone's photo

Why don't they just ask for an ID? At least that's what police does in Russia. If you don't have an ID - they can detain you for several hours, if you have an ID - they can detain you for something else ("we need to check your documents, please go with us").
History of the computer mouse cursor [video]
Top 5 Locations – Video Production in Tokyo 2018
>They don't "welcome" gay scouts, but permit them.

They don't "welcome" heterosexual scouts, it's a children's organization... sex and sexual orientation have nothing to do with it and should never have anything to do with it given we are talking about MINORS, a good chunk of which are pre-pubescent.
Heh, I wish. It worked for a while but then I got force-logged out for a password change and now it flip flops between the modes and errors when I enable old mode.
I really think this, along with much philosophical musing about free will, is entirely missing the point. Pre-determination is essential to free will. You literally cannot have free will without it. Random choice, or even non-predetermined correlated outcomes of entangled objects don't lead to free will, they lead to uncertain decisions and those are not the same thing.

If my decisions are not a product of my prior state, then they are not my decisions. The definition of 'me' is my prior state. If my decisions are unpredictable given complete knowledge of my prior state, and the ability to extrapolate it forward, then the decisions do not come from me. If they're not mine, then I have no responsibility for them. Any discussion of my responsibility for my actions must take into account my personal contribution to the decision as a being.

Dualism does not solve this problem. It simply foists a chunk of a person's state into some non-material constituent, but if that constituent does not have a persistent (though presumably malleable) state or does not deterministically contribute to the process, again whence comes responsibility?
Does this do anything other than single word hits? For example, if I toast a message for software engineers that just says "collaborate" 10 times, I get a high score.
Why do people have to be excited? Some people work for a living and only a living. Things they find exciting may get them fired but they're perfectly good employees all the same.
GET ONE!
Your whole life will be changed
These things are awesome
I agree with much of what you said here, but 'character', and therefore indexing by character, isn't a well behaved concept in the unicode world. Normalization helps somewhat, though it's another expense at string creation time. However, even after normalization there are plenty of graphemes that don't have a precomposed characters.

Our fundamental ideas about how a string should work and what kinds of things we might want to do with one are deeply influenced by the languages spoken by the pioneers of the computer age. Short of someone from a very different language tradition not being exposed to these implicit assumptions in their formative programming years I don't think we are ever going to know what a different path would look like.
No, skill certificates in general aren't worth the investment, both in terms of time and money.

Even worse, because of their proliferation in the past in more enterprisey industries and companies they can literally signal that a candidate looks good on paper but probably doesn't have a whole lot of real world experience. Therefore, skill certificates might achieve the exact opposite of what they're claimed to do.

So, it's likely best to avoid them.
But for all those who "stay in the game", only a proportion get to survive, and some of those who do not give up meaningful quality of life for 2-3 months more time.

Situations are complex and outcomes are highly varied. One size does not fit all.
We have a few roundabouts in my town in SoCal, small ones, and they all have stop signs.
> It asserts, roughly, that if
indeed we humans have free will, then elementary
particles already have their own small share of
this valuable commodity. More precisely, if the
experimenter can freely choose the directions
in which to orient his apparatus in a certain
measurement, then the particle’s response (to
be pedantic—the universe’s response near the
particle) is not determined by the entire previous
history of the universe.

That about sums it up. I think (and I could be very wrong) that the last sentence refers to a particle's lack of dependence on previous state; that for a measurement, only the present state will inform the measure.

That seems to infer something about the idea of 'free will', that is, 'free will' in this context seems to refer to an independence from prior states. Loosely, we can choose to step out of the path of our past's falling dominoes and change the course of our lives. Or something like that.
There's a recruiter on LinkedIn I saw has taken to put the following into every job post "Only looking for the best of the best. No time wasters please." Reminds me of a dating site.
Dynamically adjustable HoppingAmplitudes using callback functions in TBTK
>I was in Scouts for a couple of years. Religion was not really a focus at all.

Same. Aside from having a Jehova's Witness as a scoutmaster (that never once brought up religion, in fact my family and that family were the only non-holiday church-going families in my dens and packs), there was absolutely nothing religious about my time from tiger cubs up to my father dying just shy of my 13th birthday and me leaving scouts.
>In the 1830s a German naturalist named Renous was arrested in San Fernando, Chile for heresy. His claim? He could turn caterpillars into butterflies.

If that was his actual claim it would indeed be heretical (or at least academically fraudulent) even today.
If you live long enough you will eventually get some kind of cancer. This is inevitable as DNA damage accumulates. Chances are something else will kill you first, but detailed autopsies of older people frequently turn up small, slow-growing cancer tumors.
You were right. I did enjoy this essay.

I disagree with it. And even if I didn't, there are other reasons it wouldn't change my ethical outlook on the situation. But it is interesting nontheless.
equal opportunities? freedom of choice? How can you control for these really abstract concepts that involve thousands of variables. What constitutes freedom of choice when you have the internet and articles that say males should do x and women y? How can you say that something is inherited or environmental? Even with biology, most of the disease imply both factors.

I've seen some of the articles about the Nordic countries and was not conviced at all. They were saying that in Nordic countries women have more choice and they have a lower participation in CS studies. And bang, they thought they proved something...
While pre-moderns lacked anonymity, they had a very real distinction between private and public. For example, John Owen, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell and one of the most influential Oxford academics of his day, lost 11 children some of whom were in adulthood. Yet despite his voluminous writings, there is absolutely no mention of these personal events.

And while one individual isn't enough to prove a point, it is illustrative of the pre-modern distinction between private and public life. One may even suggest our lack of privacy is the result of our general willingness to erode the boundaries of public and private.
GitAtomic – New Native Git Client for Windows
I noticed you said "Collaborate", as a software engineer, I am intrigued to learn more. May I have a link to your newsletter.
> Is it okay for doctors to lie about placebo treatments if it actually helps?

I mean, their oath is to help people, not to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
(And Latin-1 is a strict subset of Unicode, which means all the direct code point lookups are superfast, literally just a zero extension.)
This is the closest I could get from 1973, "The Sting"

https://youtu.be/M78dkPzChPw?t=4733
The beauty of placebo effects is that like weight loss or quitting smoking, the health benefits are pleitropic, suggesting that we are impinging on fundamental health-promoting biological pathways.
That had to be the most annoyingly contrived article I've read in a while. Apple's policies have been problematic for a long time, from usability to openness.
In a perfect world, requiring reclamation would help. In the real world it just pushes this off to gray market recycler. They will come by and pick up your broken fridge for free for the recycle value but most will just vent the refrigerant no mater what. They just claim it was zero pressure when they found it. Hooking up a reclamation machine and paying for the refrigerant disposal would take all the profit out of this service.

So the fine mostly just stops the fridge from being worked on by qualified professionals. Perfectly fixable items are going in the trash because nobody wants to buy dedicated equipment for every refrigerant used. R134A is common enough to make the equipment worthwhile to own but not so much for propane and other less common refrigerants.
Gates is in the shitter . . .
Sorry, I'm not communicating clearly. What I am saying is there is an undecidable infinite set of correct answers, and then another infinite set of arbitrary answers. In the second set, there are an infinite number of right and wrong answers. The first set cannot be replicated by a TM and the second set can. Combining the sets into one and we get a set that a TM cannot replicate, yet it still has an infinite number of arbitrary wrong answers. This seems possible to me. Am I missing something?
I'm not a big fan of GraphQL. Its main benefit is for serverless which I am also not a fan of. It shifts all the control to the client and makes the server generic which actually takes away flexibility overall.
Many of the DNA mutations which cause cancer are essentially random and impossible to prevent. The human body is not a simple deterministic computer system.
What about a self-driving Tesla ?
Cul-de-sacs decrease criminality too. If you go down a cul-de-sacs to do recon, you look out of place.
Google Open Sources BERT to Train NLP Models Without Breaking the Bank
>they can't really talk about their role in a big success - they didn't have much of a role, usually.

I would wager that at least half of candidates are just good humble team players. Your approach optimises for egotistical braggarts at the expense of normal people.
The number of them's fine, it's probably even desirable not to limit it too much and find the suggestions stuck in a local minima. It's the relevance; listing adjectives as alternatives to a noun.
Nope, it's accurate.

One booming industry is kidnapping [1]. I worked on a technology that would have helped with that problem in one of those African states. We made the sale, delivered our equipment, and prepared to install and activate the first phase. The equipment vanished and the negotiations stalled on the next phase. It seems half the government was interested in preventing kidnappings, while the other half was perpetrating them. Furthermore, the budgeting process involved some kind of internal process where someone gets approval to spend some money, the money is issued, but it gets "taxed" on its way to the vendor until nothing is left. Total loss for us.

1. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mapping-kidnappings-in-...

ps - Our teams visiting in country needed armed escorts, for obvious reasons.
Increase your sales productivity with this simple hack
I thought testing against placebo was a standard procedure in medicine and without such testing treatments wouldn't even be approved.
Not true. (It is often possible to understand the cause by just looking at the damn code.)
I had a really hard time with medical anxiety after my dad almost died from pancreatitis suddenly. Stomach pains, heart palpitations, numbness in various places. I was convinced I had 10 different fatal diseases. I wasn’t making up symptoms. I had real pain, a chronic cough, and real pvcs that showed up on ekgs. It took a lot of doctors and a lot of tests to convince me that I was okay. And then i started to understand that all of my symptoms matched a single disease— “anxiety”. And I started focusing on letting things go and not thinking about it and avoiding triggers like caffeine and all of my symptoms just ... stopped. A miraculous cure of like 10 different things I was utterly convinced I was dying from. Even the pvcs and my non-stop post nasal drip stopped almost entirely.

The body is fucking weird.
Ah yes, I forgot about that. (It is mentioned in the documentation though.)
I still have the certificate from back when I was Screeched-In in the early '00s; after a couple of months in St John's working with a software company there that was lead contractor on a project I was architecting...

I was on a boat at the time...
The 'placebo effect' seems to be wholly the effect of the sum of biases and psychological effects on reported outcomes in the placebo (non-treatment) arm of medical trials. It doesn't mean there is an 'actual' effect, it is just that reported benefits by patients is affected by the situation. 'The nice doctor gave you pills, and trying to be helpful you might respond more positively when asked if you are any better.' Or 'patients with a temporary flare up in their condition were invited onto a trial, and - lo - they got better even without the active treatment.'

Placebo just refers to the bundled biases and other uncontrolled-for influences. It is not a real thing that can be used to make anyone actually better. Whenever there is a physical measurement that can be made about some affected body function, the placebo effect mysteriously disappears.
From what I have understood, the Placebo effect is the most thoroughly studied medicine, with millions of real test cases.
Try this on Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
> The definition of 'me' is my prior state.

I don't think this is true. We know that thought and memory are constrained (accessed) at a physical level - at least to some extent. That is, damage to your physical brain can result in diminished or eliminated access to those things.

Indeed, thought as we know it seems to be a physically mediated process (perhaps not completely defined by our physical bodies, but at least influenced to some extent).

As well, emotion is a physically mediated phenomena. Even our experience of this existence is physically mediated. Without a functioning body we lack the ability to experience.

So what does that leave you to be? You are, at your basest existence, the ability to choose. A choice engine with a physical layer; a physical memory, physical emotion, the ability to think. But at your foundation, you choose.

You remember, but unless you choose, you are nothing but memory.
> It also has some really interesting ethical problems, is it okay for doctors to lie about placebo treatments if it actually helps?

Given that it can still be effective even when you tell your patients you are giving them a placebo, I don't think this needs to be an issue (it's a worthwhile thought-experiment nonetheless, of course).
> “If my decisions are unpredictable given complete knowledge of my prior state, and the ability to extrapolate it forward, then the decisions do not come from me.”

I don’t see how that conclusion follows from that premise. In fact, the whole free will debate is uninteresting to me exactly because it seems like a dissolvable semantics question regarding what does “me” mean. Is it a totality of some prior physical state? Is it supernatural? Depending on what somebody arbitrarily chooses for that, it seems to more or less force a conclusion about free will. E.g. a supernaturalist might believe my decisions are fully determined by “me” but that “me” is a concept that partially exists outside of the applicability of physical laws.
Has anyone studied whether there is an opposite anti-placebo effect? Like if a patient lacks confidence in their doctor and doesn't believe that a real medicine will actually work, is it less likely to be effective?
Correct. The incentives are only truly there, generally, as an organization, for intelligence agencies to do what retains them capabilities, and their budget.

And when every department is granularly information insulated, it's easy for an individual to get caught in a task that serves the above while not even realizing.
You can argue it's not worth paying the price to catch more murderers, to protect more children from pedophiles, to stop more rapes. But that's a subjective value judgement and society doesn't have to agree with you.

Be disappointed all you want, but try actually taking their position seriously first.
Whoever thought the placebo effect was a ‘trick’?

It’s well established that the mind controls the brain which controls the body. (And the other way around, too). A physiological problem in the mind can cause a chemical problem in the brain which can cause a ‘physical’ problem in the body. Or heal a problem in the body.

Quotes around physical because mind and body are both physical. If doctors are surprised by this it must be because they are still clinging to some form Cartesian dualism.
Often the alternative to trying a treatment that you don't fully understand is death.
so you guys in the States started to #consume less and less ... to match the footprint of the rest of the universe ?
Could just be interstellar dust coating the sail.
> The recommendation from the installer is that it is pumped and inspected every 3-4 years.

That sounds about right if the goal is to keep a system that's not properly functioning (not enough microbes to break down solids) from filling up to the point of causing problems. You won't go wrong if you follow that advice but depending on what goes into your septic (do you have a garbage disposal, do you do laundry with bleach, number of people in household, etc) you may be able to go an order of magnitude longer. Recommending a system be pumped every 3-4yr is like a 3k oil change, it's excessive in the overwhelming majority of use cases but it will make more money for whoever does the work and not cause a system to fail in a way that comes back to bite whoever installed it.
This describes me. Started using Photoshop around 4, knew it inside and out. Then, over the years, Photoshop far outgrew me (and my needs). This is a wonderful alternative that probably does 95% of what I need in Photoshop.
> But the D-Link camera also lets you bypass the D-Link corporate servers and access the video directly through a web browser on a laptop or other device. If you do this, the web server on the camera doesn't encrypt the video.

This is exactly how I accessed the camera feed, because the DLink online app was a huge honking piece of shit. I'd just go to http://192.168.1.XX/video.mjpeg and leave it open in my browser.
>there's so much trademark confusion, for a long time I'd always assumed they were two branches of the same org, and trademarks aren't supposed to allow for this kind of confusion.

Confusion goes way, way back in the U.S. as far as scouting as there have been multiple organizations doing similar things, just between 1896 and the 1940's you had:

- Woodcraft Indians

- Sons of Daniel Boone

- Boy Scouts of the United States

- Peace Scouts of California, New England Boy Scouts, Rhode Island Boy Scouts, Michigan Forest Scouts

- Life Saving Scouts of the World

- American Boy Scouts

- YMMIA Scouts

- Colonel Cody’s Boy Scouts

- Lone Scouts of America

- Columbian Squires

- Boy's Works

- DeMolay International

And probably many other smaller ones.
> Whenever there is a physical measurement that can be made about some affected body function, the placebo effect mysteriously disappears.

What matters is not that subjective feelings do improve?
Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Sony, Nintendo, Canon, Suzuki, Yamaha, Panasonic, Toshiba, etc. are household names. I'd say that the Japanese have plenty of internationally-savvy brands, I wouldn't pity them :p
In what sense an image of a rabbit perturbed by adversarial noise can be _correctly_ recognized as a duck?

There can be a general consensus that the image looks like a duck at most. And if humans see a rabbit and AIs see a duck there just won't be consensus.
With the exception of pain
Optics.
For the record, I'm not threatening anyone...
Zero Day for VirtualBox allows guest-to-host code execution
Why not just ye old triangulation?
No, it cant be just that. We know for example that lack of social support causes increase in pro inflammatory cytokines, among other real effects. It would be highly implausible for the placebo effect to not be rral.
Why you should become a deep generalist, not a specialist