skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First off, the title is terribly imprecise, you're not arguing that probabilistic AI can't be AI, you're arguing that animal intelligence is not probabilistic.

Second off, I personally find your theses unconvincing because the simple statements are easily refuted, and there's not enough supporting information to make them into tighter arguments.

For example, for your first bullet point, the underlying mechanism could be highly probabilistic, without our consciousness having access to the probabilities as they are executed. We do not have conscious knowledge of neuron potentials, or of any other internal state of the physical mechanisms of our consciousness, but that does not mean that they don't exist.

Further, people are bad at reasoning period, and have to be taught how to do it in school. It's only through much training that we learn reasoning from certainties, and reasoning with uncertainty will similarly require training.

Finally, I don't think that anybody is saying that our brains operate SVMs or RBMs or anything like that, they are merely computational mechanisms to replicate the behavior of complex networks of neurons; there may be direct analogs to computation in how neurons integrate chemical, electrical, and epigenetic signals, but it's not clear that they're exactly the same thing; and that doesn't mean that even if it's completely different, that a probabilistic AI can't be an Intelligence.

These are heady matters that people put a lot of careful thought into, and while there's definitely room for light discussion among friends, I'm not sure that this is the right material for HN.
Its really only common because Microsoft did so well with it compared to the rest. Its not like we "forget" other companies do it, just that they haven't done nearly as well as microsoft in their heyday.
so you think that we use probability (and are good at it) on a low level but that doesn't translate to being sufficient in probability on a higher level. Where is the border between low and high?

I am not saying any probabilistic intelligence can't work. Please define any "intelligence" or link to definition. I said I think "we" or organic intelligence doesn't with use of probability.

I am also not saying probabilistic models are useless / bad / or not worth exploring further for making better programs or anything, I just don't think human intelligence uses them as a basis.
We can't say that humans are fantastic at pattern recognition either. We may only be sure that our built-in pattern recognition is better than our ability to create pattern recognition algorithms.
But do you really believe those things are absolutely necessary? I rarely asked teachers questions and no one ever judged my facial expressions. If you are really confused a Google search usually works. Also this isn't even relevant to most online courses which have a forum or some kind of discussion. In my one experiment with online learning, many of the questions I had were already asked and discussed by many people in great detail before I even got there.
Remember back when it was all about making fun of Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers? Or even further back, The Backstreet Boys.

They all died off and were forgotten within a year.

On the other hand, it has been something like five years and people still haven't shut the fuck up about Justin Bieber.
What a coincidence, I see you use JSON config files: I wrote a tiny package to parse commented JSON files not long ago, maybe it would be a good fit for Goatee?

https://github.com/sauerbraten/jsonconf
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/
use basic number operations */ + or - without combining digits to get 24
This relies on properly configuring all relevant software to use the SSH tunnel as a proxy. That's very difficult to do in a way that you don't end up leaking information over the real connection.

OpenVPN works on a lower level and just tells the operating system to use it as a gateway (as configured here) and every software will magically start routing traffic over it. This is generally what you want for security, but can be annoying for bandwidth or latency sensitive applications.
I really want a better markup for producing books. I'm not sure that this is it.
One minor nitpick, but I read your logo as UUBook. I would drop the second U and just have Book next to the blue U.
not restful
OpenTable goes beyond reservations, opens beta for dining payments service
Have you considered preloading all of the links while the person is reading the page?
How do you face a programming task that you’ve never done before?
I agree, Source Film Maker is awesome!

I did a roundup of tools for realtime 3D content creation on the same blog a week or so ago, and talked about it there.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/01/resource...

Personally my favourite SFM film is this adaption of the "Robot Hell" song from Futurama:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLPkKZS6q9k
An estimate of the real savings for merchants from Bitcoin
Am I correct in assuming that touch interfaces can't benefit from this kind of architecture?
Well, someone cares enough to register a domain and respond to an HTTP request ...
Would you mind making a pull request? We're happy to take a look. :)
The argument itself is flawed as pointed out by others.

As for the subject of probabilistic AI there's quite a lot of evidence that natural language grammar to a large extent is probabilistic. In fact I'd say that most natural language grammar rules are just surface representations of probabilistic models such as Hidden Markov models.
i'm not really sure why this is on HN
Ask HN: Would you pay for a GTD app for Windows (like Omnifocus)?
I am thinking of building tho equivalent of Omnifocus/Things but for the windows platform as a desktop application and selling it for $75. Would you pay for that?

Any tips, suggestions or feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks.
For sure. But you get way less bang for your buck that way.
How does the sunstone work?

If you put a dot on top of the crystal and look at it from below, two dots appear, because the light is "depolarised" and fractured along different axes.

You then rotate the crystal until the two points have exactly the same intensity or darkness.

I like stories about rediscovered ancient technologies but in this case, a youtube video, an image or even an animation of the device would have been helpful.
There is one, actually, later in the process. This is intended to help you through the process in real-time, I suppose.
You are. Preloading on touchstart is something that I plan to work on soon though.
That's a bizarre and rather rude comment.
I've noticed the same on DO. Lots of weird proxying attempts trying to use the webserver too.
// run in firebug and click & enter input...
$('#answer').click(function(e){
var value = eval($('#question').text().replace('=', '').replace('÷', '/').replace('x', '*').replace(/\s/g, ''));
console.log($('#question').text() + value);
this.value = value;
})
Amazon have done this to improve the performance of dropdown menu. http://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-...
True, I presume to tell employers that they are responsible for following the law.

I think you're exaggerating the complexity of the legal system to attempt to support a point that doesn't warrant support. In the article, Horowitz took the proposal to his company's legal counsel, and quite quickly, counsel came back with, "this proposal is illegal". It's not impossible to determine that -- it was actually determined correctly in the real world.

On the wage agreement issue, here's a quote from the recent Pando Daily article (http://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valley...) regarding Eric Schmidt:

"Later that year, Schmidt instructed his Sr VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact a secret and only share information “verbally, since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?"

This isn't a case of a company honestly trying to follow the law and being victimized. Schmidt knew that he was opening Google up to legal action, and he did it anyway because it saved him huge amounts of money.

If these companies think the laws are bad, it's not like large corporations have no political power. They're free to buy as many votes as they always do and get them changed. Until that happens, they can suck it up and abide by the anti-trust laws in force in the country they've chosen to incorporate in.
I'm not sure it's that simple anymore. I don't think I would pay for any GTD/productivity app unless it also had a mobile counterpart. Not only does this mean you'd need to create a compelling app for Windows, you'd also do the same on mobile and figure out how to sync everything together.

I don't have any data on this, but I suspect the Windows community is more split between iOS, Android, and Windows Phone than the Apple community.
you are right about the title, sorry.

is there a consensus/definition on what is AI without relying on what animal/human intell. looks like/functions?
Yes, I'm happy to offload as much as possible to the compiler as long as it doesn't involve hundreds of lines of unnecessary classes and interfaces. That's just wrong.
Wait. A feed is an API now?
So write your own open source reverse engineered drivers or find a manufacturer that gives you docs for their sensors. It's what the Linux crowd has done for a decade now. That's what hacking and tinkering are all about. They are doing free and open Adreno drivers for example. Also Tegra. Saying Android is not open source because it doesn't come with open drivers for all current and future hardware is just plain impractical. It just means you want everything in your plate. It doesn't mean Android isn't open.

Edit: Noticed people might be taking offense to my strong wording.
I went all the way, simulated keydowns and all. (Thanks, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4158847/is-there-a-way-to...)

var element = document.getElementById('answer');var y = document.getElementById('question');var dispatchKeyboardEvent = function(target, initKeyboradEvent_args) {var e = document.createEvent("KeyboardEvents");e.initKeyboardEvent.apply(e, Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, 1));target.dispatchEvent(e);};var dispatchTextEvent = function(target, initTextEvent_args) {var e = document.createEvent("TextEvent");e.initTextEvent.apply(e, Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, 1));target.dispatchEvent(e);};var dispatchSimpleEvent = function(target, type, canBubble, cancelable) {var e = document.createEvent("Event");e.initEvent.apply(e, Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, 1));target.dispatchEvent(e);};var send_key = function (key) {var canceled = !dispatchKeyboardEvent(element,'keydown', true, true, null, key, 0, '');dispatchKeyboardEvent(element, 'keypress', true, true, null, key, 0, '');if (!canceled) {if (dispatchTextEvent(element, 'textInput', true, true, null, key, 0)) {element.value += key;dispatchSimpleEvent(element, 'input', false, false);dispatchSimpleEvent(element, 'change', false, false);}}dispatchKeyboardEvent(element, 'keyup', true, true, null, key, 0, '');}; y.addEventListener('DOMNodeInserted', function(e){var z = eval(y.innerHTML.replace(/[=\s]/g,'').replace(/x/ig, '*').replace(/÷/g, '/')).toString(); for(var i in z){send_key(z[i]); element.value+=z[i];}});
Hannah Montana is Miley Cyrus' character. Miley's an increasingly big deal.
The site was riddled with so many issues and "simple pickups", like 404 pages, that I had no confidence in that management team to finish the project within a couple of months. However, a new management team quickly showed that the problems were fixable by a competent team. I believe the timeline was reasonable for a well managed team.
It's Official: China Is Becoming a New Innovation Powerhouse
C​r​o​t​c​h​b​o​o​b​s
This thread is full of purely self-inflicted problems.

Stop. Patronizing. The. Dinosaurs.
We've had three meltdowns in 40 years, about one per 13 years so far.

This is not a fair comparison. The shuttle was a bad design, with a high failure rate, and it doesn't make any sense to lump it in with tried-and-true rockets, which have a far lower failure rate. Similarly, it doesn't make sense to lump the dangerous RBMK reactor design used at Chernobyl with the far safer reactors designed in the West.

How many people died in flight during the Apollo missions? The answer is the same number that died as a result of the events at Three-Mile Island and Fukushima: zero. Design matters, and if you're trying to be objective on this topic, you have to distinguish between good designs and bad ones.

Also, not all meltdowns are created equal, as your post suggests. If you look at Three Mile Island on Google Maps today, you'll see all sorts of arable cropland in active use all around the site.

EDIT: Why the downvote? Is there anything I've said that isn't factual?

EDIT 2: here's a link that explains the differences between the Soviet RBMK and the Western LWR designs: http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/RBMKvsLWR.html
The argument is fundamentally and fatally flawed by a lack of understanding of how the "mind" works.

The basic flaw in the argument is that there is only one "mind" and that all its workings are available to us.

But as much recent research shows, especially that of Tversky and Kahneman, we have at least two "minds", the so-called "fast" and "slow" systems, and the "fast" system is not directly accessible to "us" - and "us", what we recognize as "us", is the working of "slow", the deliberate, conscious, effortful problem solver, often called upon to cook up a "good enough story" to explain an exception "fast" couldn't make sense of.

"Fast" might be terrifically good at probability, with some survival heuristics favouring particular conclusions - better to always conclude that those weird pattens in the bush are a tiger than to be wrong once.

Since "fast" is not really accessible to "slow", it matters not how good "fast" is at probability - and "fast" could be 100% probabilistic AI and we'd never know it...

...not without detailed neurophychological study, at least. It certainly wouldn't "just be evident".
then people would be naturally great at probability

Where do you get that conclusion? Think of a baseball player with exceptional hand-eye coordination, who also knows absolutely nothing about any of the math or calculus behind it. There is a vast chasm between conscious and subconscious thought (where the latter might be viewed as the underlying "intelligence model"). I don't agree that a (partially) probabilistic model would necessarily imply a proficiency at the conscious, communicable level.

we wouldn't benefit from learning about and consciously using probability to solve problems, as our brain would already do it on a lower level.

Don't understand this one either. Back to the baseball player - there is a lot of value we gain from our brains "naturally" solving e.g. inverse kinematics problems on the fly. But, there is also a lot we gain from understanding these mathematical concepts at the conscious level. Totally different realms, both useful.

Statistical methods generally need a big learning set to learn anything.

Ok, that's a limitation of the current AI models. They're not smart enough to infer the essential characteristics of an elephant from a small set (it's also a very narrow approach...you don't start a child off by showing them pictures of elephants, first they have to spend a long time acquiring basic fundamentals of knowledge and perception). I don't see how that implies a more deterministic nature of organic intelligence.

Even the child might think something is an elephant and be wrong. But (IMO) it's the same process of using the bits of knowledge you have to make a guess (and an estimated degree of certainty). "It could be this thing or it could be that thing, and my model says it has the greatest probability of being this one, so that's what I'm going with."
They could have made google now a plugin.

Calendar and email in AOSP suck.
Does it support /#!/ (hashbangs) or just pushState ?
This appears way more complex than Pandoc, which can produce multiple output formats (yes, including ebooks) while using well know markdown syntax. Even the extensions to the syntax are a) from popular libraries (github, mmd) b) easy on the eye.
For the most part it's either epub or mobi at this point in the ebook game, with the rare occasional pdf. Epub and mobi are essentially interchangeable thanks to Calibre, and if you need PDF then you probably need more complex formatting than a Markdownesque language can provide.

Converting from Word is a problem, but that's for different reasons: 1) authors (understandably) have no idea how to typeset, so each author has their own special bizarre style that's almost always wrong, 2) the HTML produced by Word is a hideous wreck no matter how you slice it, and 3) each different version of Word produces wildly different, but equally monstrous, HTML.

Sadly the word processing game has been won by Word. 99% of non-techie authors will use Word (or maybe Scrivener) to write their novel and it's tough to convince them to learn a formatting language when they can just press 'bold' on the toolbar.

In either case we already have a format to be invisibly used by writing software: HTML/CSS. It's the underlying language for epub and mobi, it's well understood and easily learned, it was specifically designed for book-like documents (and not web apps funnily enough), and programs already export in that format. The problem is that some programs (like Sigil) do a better job of exporting than others (like Word).

Things like TOCs can be handled by using an open, easily-editable format like epub as a base format, then using Calibre to invisibly compile to different formats. Calibre does a flawless job 99% of the time.

Edit: My creds are that I run one of the largest writing communities online, briefly ran an online ebook conversion service, and have composed and published ebooks myself.
>Have you actually built and installed AOSP on a device?

Yes. I work with embedded Android at the driver and framework integration level. This is my every day.

I'm not really concerned that someone can't load AOSP on some cheap AT&T subsidised phone. Does that make the framework less free? No, that means they have non-free hardware.
Android is already forked[1].

Gingerbread: 20%
Ice Cream Sandwich: 16%
Jelly Bean: 60%
KitKat: 2%

1: http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html
How to audit your phone's application traffic yourself
> That's in Shenzen. Might as well be Mars for most people.

Ah, yes, if only some smart people could invent some kind of global network for people to buy things remotely, and created some site where you could order these things. They could call it, for example, Ali Baba.
It's unbelievable. Even in the tech world, I haven't seen such good quality of reports so far. Why is it not that popular? Maybe because it's a paid service.

Thank you so much. Please introduce more to us later.
Even better, Microsoft already license the Exchange protocols to Google and Apple, and then they get to pay Microsoft and do the work of integrating their mail and calendaring software with Exchange.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/IP...
eh i think in sufficiently complex projects its difficult to alter no matter what language it's done in.... its not like if we had RoR versions of every software we would be living in a utopia.

In my experience, readability doesn't really play into this stuff as much as how interconnected the code is, i.e. if there are some dangerous anti-patterns functionality that should be orthogonal becomes interdependent.

There are tons of RoR libs that are written in this filthy way. :D

flame on!!
Pandoc provides Markdown converters for many formats, including LaTeX. Under the hood, its PDF output is via LaTeX.
Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5342104
> The author mentions "you can have control or compatibility, but not both".

Or you can be like Apple, controlling everything while still taking the liberty of shitting down developer's throats (who are delighted to be at the receiving end, for some reason).
Renovation Appartement Nice
Just pushState.
umm like 40% of traffic is already touch, seems too late
but the baseball player with exceptional h-e coordination would catch the ball without learning about math or calculus behind it. We suck at probabilities naturally / don't catch the ball naturally.

Otherwise I agree with what you said (and am limited in time, sorry)
Having tried to setup a few local git repositories myself, I do appreciate the easy install part. This is a really handy tool for a small company that is not much into figuring out all the details of gitorious or gitlab.

Keep up the good work guys!
Bitbucket under maintenance
Is Homakov busy again?
Preloading on touchstart is planned.

Also note that percentages like that don’t tell the whole picture; non-touch traffic hasn’t decreased by “like 40%”.
You'd be surprised by what really motivates users
Seconded, where is IT going and why is that fortunate?
I believe I read somewhere that Amazon does this for their menus. Clever idea to utilize this kind of analysis though.

edit: @devgutt else already mentioned this. I had this page open for a while before posting.
These kind of jokes are a time honored coping mechanism. I can remember that it wasn't long after the shuttle disaster in 1986 that I first heard the "Head & Shoulders" joke.
This isn't thought through: if someone has started writing his book in Markdown he can't use this markup without converting the expressions; instead of extending the original in a useful way, this project is breaking compatibility.
"...a bad design, with a high failure rate"

Once we have inherently safe reactors powered by safer fuels, we'll be dope-slapping ourselves about those pressurized water uranium reactors while saying those same words.
The entire article is all about how it's not really an obvious solution at all. Amazon is forking Android, and they have rewritten many of the GMS APIs, and yet, many of the apps do not run on Kindle Fire like they do on Android.
Good point, but does this actually solve the "shortage of apps" problem if you don't have access to GMS and Google Play?

All this came up because of a couple of articles that said Microsoft should dump Windows Phone and do Android phones instead. So, would Microsoft have more problems getting developers to write for Windows Phone (and Windows 8 Metro) or for a forked version of Android?

Also, technically, you don't need an Android phone or tablet (or Linux) to run Andoid apps, since Bluestacks does this... though you might run into the same problem with GMS.
What side projects did you start in 2014?
> I am disappointed by the development of unnecessary peripheral functionality such as this.

users expect their browser preferences, history, bookmarks, and passwords to be synced across devices. for a significant chunk of ff users, this is in no sense "unnecessary peripheral functionality"
VPS is much more expensive because you have to do all the work to provision (either manually or automatically) the software stack you are working with, configure every new instance either, configure your deployment and testing pipeline using a CI server and using git hooks, and keep the whole edifice up and running. The time overhead is very large, and it ends up taking over as the major cost driver.