skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "I feel that when it comes to making AI, a better definition is something along the lines of "intelligence is the ability to make good choices when faced with a decision"."

What defines a good choice? What defines a bad choice? Saying "A true machine intelligence is one that makes good decisions" is a tautology -- it doesn't define anything. Rather, it just reframes one vague question into another.

Intelligence is notoriously difficult to describe, so don't feel bad about it if you keep thinking of circular definitions. It's a tricky topic.

Also, IMO there's a big problem with rational agents: In order to be actually useful/implementable, they must be defined in a specific logical framework. You can define a rational agent in a vague sense without any specific domain, but doing so does not solve any problems -- it again just results in tautology. But the problem with choosing a logical framework is shown by Godel's famous theorem. Simply put, any such agent in a well-defined domain will be confined to that domain of reasoning. To me, a machine that excels in some area of planning but can never think outside the box, is not intelligent on the same level as humans.

Anyone advocating rational agent AI as true machine intelligence IMO will need to either find a flaw and disprove Godel's incompleteness theorem, or provide some system of logic that encapsulates all human reasoning (absurdly impossible IMO).

On the other hand, I personally think true machine intelligence will be solved much more "organically", far separated from formal logic and more related to fuzzy pattern matching than rigid formal optimization. I really like this definition of intelligence:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/vb/efficient_crossdomain_optimizatio...

Though I wouldn't claim it's the ultimate one, as it's still a bit vague. I think the key lies in what he describes as "cross domain" -- what is colloquially called "thinking outside the box", because this is the only thing humans seem extremely good at that every computer AI to date has failed at.

Humans are capable of transcending formal logical systems and finding new truths that are unprovable from the original formal system. How is this possible? Godel proved that a formal system cannot ever determine this by itself, from axioms, without being inconsistent.

IMO a true machine intelligence will also need to be capable of this formal-system-transcending property (which you can also call "cross domain thinking", or "thinking outside the box", or "creativity", or whatever).
My Dell Vostro 1500 is going strong 6 years later. I have replaced the charger once (50e in a local shop) but to be fair I spent 4 years cramming the charger into a bag so it isn't surprising it broke.
Agreed. This seems to be the general attitude of most people who were actually here.

I was about a mile south of all of this in Brighton, and I can tell you that nobody I spoke with felt particularly scared. It was more like "let's stay inside and let them find this guy".
This guy is definitely a genius... or insane. It boots the full graphical desktop in around 6 hours.
Because companies are largely still operated by humans, who make mistakes. There's a difference between "oops" and "let's systematically abuse this system for our benefit". Granted, I think there should still be a penalty for "oops" moments, just not as bad. The penalty should exponentially increase with the frequency of false positives.
This is ridiculous. It wasn't martial law security theater - it was unprecedented community-level collaboration. Security forces had absolutely no way to force/require the citizens to stay in, and probably wouldn't have been anywhere near as effective in coordinating if the citizens hadn't helped out.
"links to downloadable editions of the text of Homeland. These downloads are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs license, which lets you share it, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis. If you'd like to make a remix, please get in touch with us. "

http://craphound.com/homeland/download/

Most of his ebooks for free here:

http://manybooks.net/authors/doctorow.html
A People's History of the FPS (2012)
> Versions of Minecraft are available for iOS and Android, indicating that its developers can see beyond Java.

Wouldn't the Android version be written in Java?
I lost a lot of respect for popehat after reading that. How do you measure the cost of people's lives? The shelter in place request was just that, a request. It was to help law enforcement do their jobs. It clearly worked.

He makes reference to the DC snipers but fails to mention the cost of having those terrorists free for weeks. In Boston both men were caught in a matter of days with no more civilians hurt. I'll take Boston's solution over that of DC's. He also doesn't seem to take into account the very large number of non-fatal injuries sustained. And the potential for even more given the use of explosives. Trying to minimize the risk by discounting the injuries and only considering fatalities is pretty shallow analysis.

Also making light of the police and donuts does not improve my opinion of his stance.
Namecoin and the system Assange is suggesting is unnecessary and highly complex, if it could be achieved and adopted to any meaningful level at all.

The obvious hammer for this nail is just a radically transparent information system with accountability for public information an individual contributes to the public record.

Search algorithms are, largely, a commodity code now. Before you argue otherwise, the complexity and proprietary nature only arises when you try to show preference to less desirable content before other content information consumers desire. Ie - advertising

Even with advertising in the mix, it is trivial for a search company to append a query score with its query results. With a transparent query score and a transparent algorithm, the community has a trustworthy third-party between the content producer and consumer.

Transparency and that includes the information source!!!
That's much too sanguine.

Have been running Arch and Ubuntu on Thinkpads for over 4 years now, which are known for being Linux friendly. And, to be fair, it works, but it doesn't just work. Power management issues abound: out of the box, Ubuntu on my Carbon X1 was regularly using over 10W, and it was only with substantial tweaking that I could get it to 5.5W-6W consistently. Anytime I need to restart, I need to go through the Powertop suggestions again. Certainly could write a script for that, but it doesn't just work. Suspend doesn't work all the time: I've had days where I've charged the computer overnight, thrown it in my bag, and by the end of the day it was entirely dead, complete with some minor but obnoxious filesystem corruption. Using the hardware mute button fucks up PulseAudio.

I'll point out that the Carbon X1 is hardly some "random, low-priced consumer laptop." Probably a bit less Linux friendly than more traditional ThinkPad offerings, but if you go any more higher end with Sony or whatever, I would be very pessimistic about it working, just or otherwise.

Now, for my purposes, other alternatives just don't work. I don't know an easy way to have a Windows or OSX system to throw up a private virtual cloud over LXC on your notebook so you can work from a networkless Koh Rong beach. Linux (and Ubuntu in particular) makes this trivial. Everyone else has shitty window managers, while dwm is heaven.

In that respect, Linux works. And nothing else mainstream does. But universal mediocrity isn't an excuse for mediocrity.
If you consider speed too, then maybe. For example, if I see a 100 page document, and I'm told word wrapping was done manually cause the test editor was incapable, it is a bad text editor.
I still believe that resources would be better spent on fixing stuff rather than "sending a message" that it isn't broken.

And BTW, I'm a big fan of printing output of init scripts to console, provided that it's nice and concise (as it used to be in most distros few years ago) because it greatly aids debugging when (not if) stuff breaks. It's one of the reasons I left Windows, actually.
Much better: http://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/bph-publications/AmS...
Interesting, so apparently the Spanish inquisition too started using waterboarding to avoid having to permanently harm their victims.
This may be a long shot, but are there a lot of HNers here Mumbai? A meet up would be nice.
The dependency thing is a big deal. So much wasted time tracking down dependencies for my Ruby projects...

I recently discovered RVM autolibs. Wow - what a great idea.

Is there a way to make 'autolibs' work with bundler, or rbenv?
I think that may be a distinction without a difference.

All public transit was shut down. In Watertown specifically businesses were not allowed to open and anyone in a car was subject to being swarmed by heavily armed police and taken into questioning.

Edit: clarified the parts that were specifically about Watertown vs. Boston as a whole.
"If it has legs, it has legs!"

Whether or not you find this science rigorous, it is the kind of thing that leads to a "wow! my mind is blown" a-la so many smokey college dorm room nights.

Similar to the anthropic principle, these concepts are cool but hard to use.

Nevertheless I do like the way this one gives us a new way at justifying the value of 'interesting' stuff that we might be otherwise interested in discarding.

For example: the impulse on HN to discard this research... whether or not it's valid, it is certainly an interesting example of the point of the research itself. If this stuff has legs, it'll have legs. Mind blown? Bleh maybe for a second right?
I hear your pain. I'm trying to roll my pet project with C only (it suits me better, since I'm not a full time programmer). I'm using clang on OSX and gcc on linux and mingw on Windows (all x64, of course). There is something that bothers me though. I feel like I have made a grave mistake. Everything I look up that I need for my project there exists a suitable library for C++, but not for C. This surprised me. Maybe I don't know my way around libraries for C, but it seems like I have to reinvent wheel (badly so) if I want to stay with C. So now I'm thinking if I should just let go of C and do C with classes, which bothers me tremendously.
Bootstrapping virtualenv
I'm not really sure why it is big news that content copyright holders have automated DMCA scripts running.

Sure, there should be some compensation for false DMCA take downs, but this story is just surfing on some artificial wave of rage against Fox & Murdoch.
I wasn't frightened. I considered it the best, most effective way of helping Law enforcement to do their jobs. Which, BTW worked. One day of lockdown and the crisis was over. Compare that to the DC snipers referenced in the article.
Become A Programmer, Motherfucker
You should make a benchmarking script to track speed over time. I've written probably 10 different Verlet engines in JavaScript, and the overhead of JavaScript's dynamic nature can be very palpable in the simulations.

For my most recent attempt at something speedy, here's some source code making use of typed arrays and doing away with objects completely. The speed improvement is good, but maybe the maintainability suffers a little (press space to create blob):
https://c9.io/blixt/blob/workspace/index.html

Note that the particle-line collision is currently inefficient, so it slows down the simulation a lot more than it should.
I think public safety was part of it. It pretty much eliminated the easy targets. There weren't any crowded places to plant a bomb.
Your script is a great step in the right direction, but unfortunately,
having a file specifically named "LICENSE" is not universal. It's almost
as common to see a file named "COPYING" and plenty of other alternatives
are used.

More importantly, any license stated in the actual source files supersedes
the additional "LICENSE" file. There is also the headaches of binary files
like images and similar where verifying the license is just painful.

I wish it was as easy as running a script. It would be a good idea if
github enforced some convention to make sure the free repo's they provide
for open source really are licensed under an OSI approved license.
Will you be willing to help law enforcement again by staying in your home each time an armed suspect is on the run?
Exactly. Very expertly handled by all involved. Including apprehending the suspect without killing him. This guy killed an 8 year old and two young women and a fellow officer yet he is still alive. Remarkable restraint in my opinion.
After the Madrid bombings they didn't shut the city down, and they weren't suicide bombers. They didn't shut London down during the IRA bombing attacks during the 80s either.

And that's two examples I've lived through. TBH I find it hard to think of a single example of a terrorist bombing leading to a city shutdown, apart from this one. It makes clear sense to shut down a local neighbourhood, a couple of streets... but a whole city??? WTF???
That one doesn't work in Germany, but here's Mona Lisa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3anYbEtl9E
That comment is only being upvoted because it implies that America isn't a first world country which some insecure souls need to believe contrary to all evidence.
His comparison to the Beltway sniper is apropos.

I happen to be someone who's connected to both, one of my stomping grounds was Building 20 where I founded a student run computing center with the Logo Lab's surplus PDP-11/45, serial number 413 (so 313th made), the Stata Center replaced it.

And the woman killed in Virginia at the Home Depot ... well, that was "my" Home Depot, as well as the location of a favorite Chinese restaurant, it was even pretty easy to figure out where the sniper likely fired from.

Were we "scared" in the D.C. region? You better believe it, I certainly didn't go outside without wearing my body armor and carrying my handgun, but we didn't shut down the region. Then again, look at the above, Virginia is shall issue and well armed, Maryland is seldom issue but still well armed, Massachusetts has done just about everything it can to disarm its population....
While the RuneScape news is interesting, the author of the piece clearly doesn't understand the subject matter. Perhaps it would have been better to link to the RuneScape news directly?
It's only the old public information structure that is broken. A purpose-built public information system is already well into development and early-adopters are seeing the future. I'm lean and committed, so feel free to engage in rational argument.

The recipe:

1) Geospatial information system
2) Transparency
3) Exclusively peer-generated content

http://nwzpaper.com/socialContract
Of course not. It depends completely on the situation. No one here complained about the shelter in place request that I've heard of. People seem happy this was resolved so quickly.
Adding your HackerNews comments to your website
This isnt censorship. Studio is just trying to prevent copyright violation on its property. Given the book shares the name and the author it was affected as well which is unfortunate but not malicious.
Yeah. People were still walking their dogs. My wife & I went out for a calzone at 12:30 and the place was packed. I don't think a single person I talked to online or off was "afraid". We were just staying out of the way, and with the T shut down there wasn't much to go out & do anyway.
Everything that mentions the number of deaths seems to forget the fact that this guy didn't 'just' kill 4 people, he also injured over 150 people (a lot of missing legs on those injuries too...)

There's a huge difference with the other examples. Namely in how indiscriminate it all is.
I felt that locking down Watertown, Newton, and Cambridge was unobjectionable, but my only quibble would be that I'm not sure it made sense to shut down so much of Boston itself.
Yes I agree with that. But profit sharing with employees is per se taken from revenue left over after operating costs and such, profits are what you distribute to share holders.

I agree with what you're saying, I'm mainly quibbling with the language of the structure of the proposed investment instrument. It would be very easy to do some Hollywood style accounting so that the business owner and employees all get a fraction of gross revenue after costs, but any investor would get zilch for all time.

I know little of accounting, but I know that much :-)

(This is of course orthogonal to the ethical / moral dimensions)
The other cost is that is a sort of reward for the terrorists to overreact like this.
Errr, did you/are you ignoring that the lockdown was a complete and total failure? That only until it was over did a subject (see my other comments, can't call Massachusetts residents citizens by the traditional meaning) exit his house and notice something amiss on his property (evidently outside the search parameter), resulting in him calling the police?
Further, I live in Boston and they didn't say you couldn't go outside, they just advised you not to. I walked across the Boston Common where people were playing with their dogs and grabbed a coffee from the coffee shop.

People from outside of Boston probably didn't realize it, but it was really just 1 neighborhood locked down with the mass transit everywhere else not working.

Weird day? Yes! Martial law? No.
Apparently the holy scripture, aka the constitution, isn't worth the paper it was written on. Soldiers in cities? That shit would not fly here. You get a congressional inquiry for letting AWACS control the air.
Just an observation: My understanding is that SF used to be affordable. That was part of its attraction. Than SV happened and that was the end of that.
Curiously enough, once booted, the system is somewhat usable. You can type a command and get a reply within a minute.
BS. Do you have anything to support that ridiculous claim?
My team and I are starting up a legal social network. We have since changed names and pivoted slightly to address several different markets but here is a video I made which describes a small part of what we are about - http://youtu.be/3m194rui52Q . I see you went after funding from places like Sunlight Foundation and Google Ventures. I'd like to know more about that process if you wouldn't mind sharing...
Agreed. I think the article could be written in a different way, I mean it kind of reminds me of those cheap government conspiracy speculation articles.
By this logic attempting to look for Sunil Tripathi also "worked".

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc
Indeed, also possible.
That article was in very poor taste. I'm typically a libertarian, anti big government, with a slight conspiracy theorist side to me, but I was thrilled to see the well-coordinated and well-executed manhunt that captured the suspect alive. It was a rare moment, I was in full "'MURICA" mode yesterday. To complain about the process is just contrarian nonsense.
... What, do you consider "being so annoyed by unethical people that you get committed to a mental institution" normal and OK?
Totally agreed.

The blackhawk helicopters flying over Boston were a clear breach of Posse Comitatus and the warrantless searches (or self-warranted, any type not warranted by a judge) was a clear breach of the 4th amendment.
Police. Not soldiers. Unless you mean the soldiers that ran the marathon with full packs and then helped the first responders after the blasts.
Correct me if I'm wrong, an infringing title would be a trademark violation, not a copyright violation. The DMCA applies only to copyright violations.
According to Wikipedia, it's actually written in C++. However, I suspect that the author is merely right by coincidence, as he goes on to claim "Java and Flash don't work on Android".
Right, this is with regards to the DeathAdder only. :)
I'm not amazed, No doubt the BPD put in a lot of overtime this week already, and I'm sure having a place close by for coffee and sweets must have felt great. Plus, DD is as Boston as you can get. Maybe a little reminder of what they were out there for.
JQuery 2.0 released
Hot on the heels of jQuery Mobile 1.3 comes jQuery 2.0, a brand new, full release version of the popular JavaScript library. The big news — that we’ve known for a while — is that jQuery 2.0 has dropped the library’s support for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8. These so-called legacy browsers are slowly creeping towards extinction and it’s certainly true that very few people still use IE6. However, there are still substantial numbers of clients requesting IE 7+ support.
Expect further irrational responses like the Boston Lockdown, while factors that kill several orders of magnitude more people continue to be ignored.

What is worse is that the conditions for this aren't top-down driven. In aggregate, Americans seem to me to be addicted to fear, are hopelessly unable to think about risk, and want security theatre. Security theatre needn't be implemented rationally, because its purpose is to be theatre, not to be effective.

The thing that people should fear is the secondary effects of security theatre. To implement security theatre, you need most of the apparatus of a police state (i.e. large numbers of police that can be mobilized at a moments notice for flimsy reasons). The mindset supporting such theatre also allows politicians to engage in military adventurism in the name of 'safety' or 'freedom'.

It's obvious at this time that clear statistics and rational, measured approaches to risk don't sway people. I suspect about the only thing that might at this point is satire. The whole security theatre effect is driven by emotion, and people dislike being the butt of jokes more than they like the rush they get from fear.

Perhaps we can invent some perjorative like 'wingnut' or 'moonbat', but for fear junkies, then make jokes about them.
The city was not shut down after the bombing. It was not until the events that happened days later that it was. So you cannot just compare the bombing itself without being facetious.
Funny. Not long ago I read about a couple big game makers giving up on HTML 5 because it was too hard and too costly.
When you're studying the philosophy of science, it's more accurate to say that our theories and equations describe reality rather than to say that they govern reality.

That's not necessarily arguing that a more fundamental theory might exists that could overturn socially unpopular theories higher up the chain. Sure, that happens in certain kind of debates rather often, but I'm not sure that's what's happening here.
IIRC they put a 'ring of steel' around the financial distict of London ('the city') in the early 90s as a way of protecting it from IRA attacks. Also the IRA gave warnings so that despite truck size bombs the loss of life was relatively small (1 in the Bishopsgate bomb in '93)

Saying you 'lived through' that is a bit dramatic. A lot of us did and it meant nothing more than reading about it in the paper same as everyone else.
<blockquote> Well after consulting with people behind some of tech behind OWS, I doubt something like this would be effective.</blockquote>

You could try doing it without calling for a war to kill everybody who disagrees with you, without turning to violence as your first resort, without trying to change the names of public parks that were named after civil rights activists, without raping the women who make the mistake of joining your movement alone and before becoming members of the protected in-crowd, without the antisemitism, without seizing or destroying public property, without trying to divide society against itself, without shitting on police cars, without demanding that other people pay for the costs of your expenses that you create, etc, etc.

TL/DR: Don't be a bunch of fascist yobs or else society might treat you like you're a bunch of fascist yobs.
I don't think it's apropos at all. The snipers were killing individuals, not maiming hundreds at a time. And I don't see how the level of gun ownership matters (in either case). How was carrying your handgun going to help you if the sniper shot at you? How would it have helped MA residents?