skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would have to say that the problems in academic science go deeper than "PhD union cards", but they're certainly rooted in the same academic-familial-reproductive structure as the PhD issue.

Academia does a breadth-first heuristic search on possible research, slowly converting the search space of potential ideas into published papers. If you want to work in the research system, you get slotted into a specialty and an education largely just according to what your grad-school and postdoc supervisors already work on. Hence why I'm calling it a breadth-first search: new scientists are almost literally additional nodes in a search tree.

The problem is the heuristic that governs where the tree is expanded (and how quickly): publication numbers and grant funding (which is determined by publication numbers). From the personal perspective there's also the sheer coincidence of which research fields and which advisers you've heard of at all when you finish your BSc or MSc and apply to your postgraduate research degree -- which is governed by grant funding and publication numbers.

Thing being... not only is a tree-shaped expansion structure generating untenable job markets, but the expansion heuristic in question doesn't really correspond to what we want out of scientific research. There are three main reasons to prioritize one research proposal over another: we think it will be technologically fruitful, we think it will be cheap or easy, and we think it will advance knowledge. In short: technology, convenience, and mystery. Grant funding and publication metrics, however, almost exclusively target convenience, with technological applicability coming in second-place and the fundamental scientific issue of filling in our ignorance about Nature stuck waaaay at the back of the bus.
Fair point. It definitely looks like an emotional purchase in a tough market. They're already getting creamed for it in the stock market [1]

The way things look, this is largely a win for Oculus for finding a big backer, and a risky gamble for facebook.

I think it's good that FB's putting some faith in a great team and product all the same

--
[1] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-shares-drop-more-t...
lame. License states that one can't host it anywhere.
No point to the release. Too little , too late from the dinosaur.
We don't have the computer power to simulate a brain quark-for-quark yet; when we can it'll be interesting to see what happens. Until that happens, it's all moot anyway as it's a religious argument. For me it's clear that brains are computers, just not the ones we are using right now. This has been obvious since the first time I touched a computer 30 years ago and I didn't grasp why we still needed humans for anything at that time and that is still true kind of today. The fight is strong against weak AI and I firmly am convinced strong will happen; there aren't too many good arguments against it. Most arguments now are lack of comprehension or religion (some form of saying there is more than just this but failing to explain what/how). And this article isn't even an argument.
I think their idea tends to be to try and unify everything and provide a "toolbelt" for developing with it. At least that is the impression I get when I read their FAQ: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aC461kM855a66SzFT_TG8sHp...
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That, as the definition of computer goes now, is still a computer. 1-2-1000 doesn't matter.
China detains more than 1,500 in text spam crackdown
The fundamental difference between minds and computers, which many people don't understand, is that computers are modelling things. They are calculating outcomes from preconditions. Minds on the other hand, while they might also be doing that, are experiencing things. They feel, see and hear.
You might make the argument that we don't know whether a computer is doing that as well, because it can't tell us - but then I could just as well propose that minds are like popcorn.
Ye-Ha Hackers preparing 'wild west' zero-day assault on Windows XP
2048 hodor
I wrote with a fountain pen throughout secondary school and wouldn't mind giving them another try. Do you find that for quick note taking the ink dries fast enough?
To me the most convincing discussions of artificial or engineered minds start with:

"human minds exist"

Therefore, whatever it is that minds do is possible.
STAY THE ZUCKERBERG AWAY FROM MY OCULUS, FACEBOOK
Human brains are made of the same fundamental particles as computers or anything else in the universe, and they obey the same laws of physics. Thus I believe that it is only a matter of scale.
Statistical analysis approach can be a good educated guess at most. But if we keep observing human brain to get input/ouput dataset, we can develop a field that much like Physics, where the theory comes from experiments and even those do not must need future experimental proof to be considered valid. Yes, not all these theory based on expriments is true (that is why I say it is a good educated guess) because maybe our observed set is just a subset of all test cases we need. But using this approach like Physics we can keep pushing the limit of (AI) theory and expriements forward.

As I mentioned another half (theory first, then experimental validation) of this approach is another Einstein came along and made amazing thoeries once and for all. Then the expriments proves it is true to our best knowledge up to date. The the loop starts again.

I think the first cases may be the most prevalent because insights are not very easy to come by without seeing experimental result first. If we can make a organized way to keep working on the first half, the second half might come by some time. Just some random thoughts, primarily made to inspire some followup conversations amongst us.
"as the NSA grows in both size and power..."

Do you consider this to be a foregone conclusion? Is this not something to be resisted or reversed?
Quoting Candace Pert, author of 'Molecules of Emotions':

"For decades, most people thought of the brain and its extension the central nervous system as an electrical communication system . . . resembling a telephone system with trillions of miles of intricately crisscrossing wires." But new research techniques for studying peptides and receptors show that only 2 percent of neuronal communications are electrical, across a synapse. In fact, she writes, "the brain is a bag of hormones." And those hormones affect not only the brain, but every aspect of body and mind; many memories are stored throughout the body, as changes in the structure of receptors at the cellular level. "The body," Pert concludes, "is the unconscious mind!"

From: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/review-of-molecules-of...

Emotions seem to occur outside the brain.
Windows used to have a "Czech (Programmers)" keyboard layout. As I remember, it was one of the few layouts that _just worked_. First thing I would do on new installs is make it the only available layout.
"Quick app switching"

For me, it's candy app switching but definitely not quick. Having to look at animated transitions is extremely distracting and definitely hurts productivity.
Well, we have been put on blacklists that the operator wanted money to "expedite" removal from. I'm assuming that blacklist was pretty much random IPs... And it did impact deliverability.
It seems like a worthwhile gamble either way.

If my consciousness dies, then the last function of my life would be giving my family and friends someone who would still love them and take care of them, and, in a way, it would be giving birth to a new life. It's something I'd want them to have even if I weren't there.

And if my consciousness lives, so much the better.
Do you measure to see how well this works?
One of the biggest ironies of the Huawei hacking case is that now every time someone detects an attack from a Huawei device or the company itself, they can never be sure if it's China or the US that's behind it.
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It is amazing to me to see computer science fundamentals hand-waved away as 'crap' and 'BS'.
About 3 years ago...
it reduces the chance of deliberate theft by the service.

One problem with bit coin, is that an exchange service can suddenly find itself with millions of dollars worth of bitcoin, dwarfing the possible income available via fees and start thinking really, really hard about where the most money is to be made.

and then the service might go out of business, and the customers lose their property.

Not to mention the target the service might represent for hackers etc.

Having a dual key system ensures that, for all parties, the best possible outcome of attempted theft is nothing at all for anyone.

Not a great outcome for any specific customer, but an outcome that aligns the motivations of the service provider and the customer.
Is brain a machine? If you don't believe in souls and that kind of thing - then the brain is material and thus a machine for me.

Can you replicate the way brain works in another machine? If it is a machine than most probably yes.

Can you replicate the way brain works in a digital computer? It is possible that there are physical processes going on in the brain that cannot be feasibly approximated by digital algorithms (i.e. it is possible that there are analog machines that are for some problems faster than any digital computer can be). There used to be analogue computers and it is entirely possible that some day they again will be useful.

Can you build a brain without knowing how it works? Well we know how to build a brain without knowing how it works - you need a woman and a man and ...

What is the definition of artificial then?

Can you control AI if you don't know how exactly it works? Probably not - just like we cannot really control humans, but we have pretty good ways of influencing them.
i don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but the argument is that a computer is a different thing to a mind. So, even if a really powerful computer could convincingly mimic a mind or otherwise achieve a similar result it would still be a different thing.

For me a good way of thinking about this is the discovery of genetic heredity. Heredity was known for a long time before DNA was known. Eventually evolution became understood too. But, before DNA was discovered we didn't know what a trait "looked like" in much the same way as we don't know what a thought or memory "looks like."

Without that knowledge it's hard to know if a computer is mimicking a mind or being a mind.
The problem is that we have cultures which perpetuate the myths being used to sell them expensive drugs, precisely because these cultures are using these drugs - and like using them. So, in spite of the lies, the Pharmaceutical industry continues to rake in record profits; because it has created a product that people want.

Never mind that a pharmaceutical subscription is a chain in the contemporary slavery link.
It said statistics on the blogpost linked above.
It's just the Church-Turing Thesis all over again, with a dash of metaphysical nondeterminism.

So far, everything in reality seems to be "made of" either determinism or randomness. There might be a third option (and options beyond that), but we haven't seen one or thought of one yet.

So far, computation can model determinism perfectly well (after all, computation is just very orderly, bottled-up determinism harnessed to a predictable human purpose!), and model randomness as well by drawing random bits from an entropy source. When you get deep enough, mathematics is in fact reducible to computation (paging Robert Harper). Given this, the Church-Turing Thesis says that our mechanical computers ought to be able to model anything reality is made of: either reality is theoretically Turing-recognizable given enough compute-power, or reality contains super-Turing phenomena that we could exploit to build super-Turing computers.

Thus, if we accept a couple of assertions that have held up decently so far, it looks as if all parts of our prosaic, everyday reality ought to be amenable to computational modeling, provided we find the right model and throw enough flops at it.

They are assertions, but they've also held up for a damn long time, and we would need some extraordinary evidence to accept the extraordinary claim that those assertions don't hold.
Basically:

floating point is hard. Programmers get it wrong, compilers get it right.

(normally).
It filters out the people whose ego won't let them take the test.
The premise is also plain wrong. I will gladly put on my goggles for gaming.
things_which_did_not_happen.txt
>I'm totally the opposite, and blame you entirely for provoking what follows! SQL at this point is passed expiry.

Actually it's the very opposite.

SQL is a higher level abstraction for all this ad-hoc junk, based on actual mathematical principles (relational algebra), and it's also declarative, instead of imperative.

Furthermore, all this NoSQL query systems now emerging are nothing new. They were tried in the 70s and early 80s, and people found out that they sucked. Before SQL what we had was, well, NoSQL.

Wanting a flexible schema-less db or one that's denormalised for certain needs (like Google's or Facebook's) makes sense.

Replacing SQL and RBDMS for the common tasks they are used (company logistics and accounting, etc) with NoSQL is a regression to the primitive past. I guess people not knowning (computing) history are doomed to repeat it.
The person experiencing (using the brain) is always outside the realm of matter.
Stupid article. AR and VR are completely orthogonal.
Because, of course, floating point addition and multiplication is not associative. This turns out surprisingly easy to demonstrate:

0.1 + (0.2 + 0.3) = 0.6
0.1 + 0.2 + 0.3 = 0.6000000000000001

and the same for multiplication:

0.1 * 0.2 * 0.3 = 6.000000000000001e-3
0.1 * (0.2 * 0.3) = 6.0e-3

It actually isn't "surprising" if you understand how the format works. It essentially uses scientific notation but in binary, with a set number of bits for both the mantissa and the exponent as well as a few changes thrown in for better behavior at its limits (like denormalization). This means that it can't directly express numbers which are very easy to write in decimal form, like 0.1, just like we can't express 1/3 as a finite decimal. It's designed to manage this as well as possible with the small number of bits at its disposal, but we still inevitably run into these issues.

Of course, most programmers only have a vague idea of how floating point numbers work. (I'm certainly among them!) It's very easy to run into problems. And even with a better understanding of the format, it's still very difficult to predict exactly what will happen in more complex expressions.

A really cool aside is that there are some relatively new toys we can use to model floating point numbers in interesting ways. In particular, several SMT solvers including Z3[1] now support a "theory of floating point" which lets us exhaustively verify and analyze programs that use floating point numbers. I haven't seen any applications taking advantage of this directly, but I personally find it very exciting and will probably try using it for debugging the next time I have to work with numeric code.

A little while back, there was an article about how you can test floating point functions by enumerating every single 32-bit float. This is a great way of thinking! However, people were right to point out that this does not really scale when you have more than one float input or if you want to talk about doubles. This is why SMT solvers supporting floating point numbers is so exciting: it makes this sort of approach practical even for programs that use lots of doubles. So you can test every single double or every single pair of doubles or more, just by being clever about how you do it.

I haven't tried using the floating point theories, so I have no idea how they scale. However, I suspect they are not significantly worse than normal bitvectors (ie signed/unsigned integers). And those scale really well to larger sizes or multiple variables. Assuming the FP support scales even a fraction as well, this should be enough to practically verify pretty non-trivial functions!

[1]: http://z3.codeplex.com/
This sort of thing is significant. It puts remote support for systems in a very different light. At Efficito, we have plans to release on-premise appliances as well as our cloud hosting options. This sort of story makes me think about how to avoid this sort of problem.

Here are rules I am suggesting.

1. The on-premise appliance should not be directly accessed from the network unless folks at the local environment enable contact.

2. Everything else, regarding services, should be loosely coupled and designed not to give significant access to either party over the other.

This sort of thing strikes me as an area where the industry is going to have to evolve. The danger of "we can connect to your systems" is becoming clearer to a larger section of the market.
The Pathway To The Future [audio]
I would work on research projects for free, if the projects were interesting and/or I got some reputation out of it.
3º Fórum da Plataforma Tecnológica Portuguesa da Construção no LNEC
Ask HN: Who enjoyed the 10 Print book?
I'm really enjoying the 10 PRINT book from a previous post.

http://10print.org/

I thought about implementing it in the languages I use currently and it's much more verbose. I mainly use Python, Java and PL/SQL. I'm sure some people here can do better!

Python:
import random,sys
while 1 : sys.stdout.write( "/" if int(random.random()+0.5) else "\\")

PL/SQL - not really one line but possible - first time I've used PUT rather than PUT_LINE:
declare i number; begin for i in 1..10000 loop if round(dbms_random.value)=0 then dbms_output.put('/'); else dbms_output.put('\'); end if; end loop; dbms_output.new_line; end;

Haven't done java yet!
Lets see some variations in the languages you usually use.
Any Universal Turing Machine can emulate any other Turing machine. That's not interesting. What would be interesting would be if human minds could solve the Halting Problem.
>All I'm saying is that oDesk typically connect a westerner with a developer in somewhere like India who thinks that being paid $3/hour is fantastic, and who's other options for a job are basically hard manual labour.

While thier might be some anecdotal evidence where this is true it's mostly just you being prejudice.
I am living in Indonesia right now. I would say at first I agreed with you. However what I see as time goes on is that the rule of law in the US is largely an elaborate illusion.

The point of rule of law is supposed to be that the government is bound by the laws. Calling this "robust" with regard to the NSA is the equivalent of putting ones head in the sand....
The argument in this paper comes down to "computers can't think because I don't label what they do as 'thinking'".

Now if you make the argument that we're very unlikely to build a conscious machine without knowing what consciousness is, and simply assuming that it's an emergent property of complexity is probably foolish. OK. Maybe. Who knows?
Since Red means both 'Cancel' and 'Delete', use something else: Black. Black, like: 'an empty black hole is where your data will go.'
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The unique lessons of Oculus
PS shame it is so hard to poke to memory these days without using C/assembly.
I know of two ways currently being tried to address this.

The first is to have scientists break their problems down into chunks that can be performed by volunteers but which aren't completely beyond the ability of the scientist to manage the resultant code. This is doable for much of physics and computational biology, less so where a scientist isn't a programmer themselves. We're taking this approach with http://solvers.io.

The second is to have the scientists mentored by programmers to help them become better at it. This is the approach being taken by http://interdisciplinaryprogramming.com.

In both cases, any particular volunteer dropping out is probably not a massive blow. If a project is going to rely on a particular programmer long-term, they probably need to find the funding to pay them.
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I don't think this is actually known.
Yeah, but there's little evidence to support that. Corporations will form cartels and monopolies if they get the chance. Unless they consider enabling corporations also a form of regulation (which is kinda true). I do agree that we'd have a more free market without corporations.

Of course, with sufficient lack of regulation, it also becomes possible to just shoot people who monopolize stuff.
BTW, the district in Indonesia which has the best government is a monarchy (the Sultanate of Jogjakarta). It is a Constitutional Monarchy and the Sultan does not have legislative power (only executive power).

I will admit though that as an American it seems weird to have a Sultan of a small district in a larger parliamentary democracy. It would be like having a King of New Hampshire....
It's interesting how all of the focus of this discussion is Google, Amazon, and Heroku. Why hasn't RedHat's OpenShift gained more mindshare? It's not a bad platform, although I've found their support leaves something to be desired. It's also priced very competitively for small apps (you get 3 nodes free).
Here's a one line patch to make OpenSSH log passwords:

http://16s.us/docs/sshlog/sshlog.patch

I log passwords (just as a hobby) to see what type of passwords the brute-force bots are currently using.

Here's the top 10:

PASS COUNT
123456 3785
password 2531
1234 2053
admin 2005
12345 1390
root 1281
123 1246
1qaz2wsx 1207
root123 1150
passw0rd 1120

Here's the top 10 complex:

PASS COUNT
P@ssw0rd 1027
1qaz@WSX 466
!QAZ2wsx 357
Admin@123 310
P@$$w0rd 299
P@ssw0rd1 177
Admin123!@# 172
P@ssw0rd123 166
1qaz@WSX3edc 153
1qazXSW@ 150

Don't use any of those passwords on your systems.

Edit: Formatting.
I've had this issue too with some of my old, Open Source jQuery plugins and even keeping the scripts separated (into the document head and at the end of the body) and commented didn't seem to work. Developers looking for the cheap and easy copy and paste I guess don't recognize the difference. Fortunately GA supports simple filtering to mitigate it.
Vim is multi-platform, and there are GUIs for Vim, particularly GVim and Macvim, where you can use the mouse, and copy/paste, etc, just have to do it the Vim way. You gave up too early, Nano isn't even close; it's like comparing Notepad to Notepad++. Give both Haskell and Vim another chance.
Completely relevant podcast discussion http://edgecasesshow.com/083-floating-point-numbers-are-a-le...
+1

I would also add some personal opinion and say that all you need is a paring knife and chef's knife. Maybe a sharpening block. And Zwilling is my choice too.
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$200M for ~150M Users. Bad deal if you compare it with for example, whatsapp... But hey, at least they landed a exit.
See the parent comment I replied to for the link, a language comparison of Github projects.
This comment says what the Oculus Rift never did.
I've never had a problem, even when writing a 5-page composition in an A3 notebooks. But it's possible that the nibs and inks at my local stationery shop, here in Japan, are a little different to the ones where you are.
So then it has the power of (at least) a universal turing machine.
Seriously? An app that does what it says isn't stealing from you. An app that runs up your electricity bill and damages your phone without disclosing its behavior is clearly a different matter.