skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're absolutely right, I was being an arrogant prick by saying that, and I regret it. I've gotta stop doing that. Apologies. I only offer advice, especially for young people which I mistakenly assumed, and I didn't mean it arrogantly. I highly recommend reading one book: "The Immense Journey" by Loren Eiseley.

I completely agree that the problem of the lack of respect nor understanding of science is at an extreme, and it is an immense problem. You're absolutely right.

But the way to attack it is systemically, from both sides. What we are experiencing is a societal divide, and it is not one sided, as unbalanced as it seems. It's highly complex. Science has lost the ability to appeal to humanity in such a way as to be trustworthy in and of itself. For that, I do believe science as an institution (scientists, leaders, new institutions not yet imagined) requires a deep understanding of humanity and the ability to connect with it at a core level. This will be difficult.

There are some things for which evidence will never be enough. If you don't understand that, well—there's direct evidence for the disconnect between science and the humanities. When the scientific world collectively understands that, then, I believe, we will no longer have an issue with how society relates to science. It will have become clear and obvious.

Blaming the individuals for their knowledge will never solve anything. The right question is not what people do not know; but why do they not know? And how do we make it irresistible to know and understand and pursue science? How do we integrate scientific understanding into our very core? That is the question.
Some more in depth comments about the HBP that go beyond the Chronicle article: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-main-objections-to-the-hum...
> Similarly, cold water will shut me down frighteningly fast—even with a wetsuit and lifejacket, I've been stunned into near immobility after less than a minute of swimming.

As someone who routinely goes swimming in a hole cut in ice with the water temperature typically around 1C, this sounds weird. I suppose it's a reaction you can teach your body to not have?
can you fix the title as well? (I don't think it's supposed to say "and heroku")
Well we are talking past each other.

I predict that timely delivery of life saving medications and medical devices will first happen outside of the USA, in jurisdictions favoring UAV innovation.

http://www.uasvision.com/2015/02/10/japan-tests-drone-delive...

http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0209/c98649-8847897.html

And I predict that the in the USA, the military will lead the way with regard to autonomous air vehicle technology for delivery because not the FAA, nor local equivalents, will constrain them where battles are happening.

http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense-news/blog/intercept...
By this logic it isn't anyone's duty to do anything about abusive behaviour. That's certainly a valid opinion, but I disagree.

I think that it's everyone's duty to take reasonable steps to fix these problems. It's arguable whether the specific step in question would be reasonable and productive, but dismissing it because it's "not her job" is wrong imho.
I just signed up without any problems. Did you try again?
And the wheel, that was revolutionary.
The Economist did a special report on the "third wave" of the information age/information revolution. It focuses more on the economic impacts (big surprise there!) but was very interesting and worth a read - I hope you can get the article without a subscription... incognito mode usually works well enough.

http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21621156-first-...

It's hard to see what people will actually do for work after the effects of this new revolution are fully propagated, but I mainly think that's a failure of imagination. The other revolutions were not too different in terms of taking something which a huge amount of people were doing and what society was focused on producing people to do and making it trivial (or at least to involve much fewer people). The overall impact of the industrial and agricultural revolutions were to ultimately create more jobs even if it was a wild ride while things were rapidly changing.

This revolution is different - now mechanical horsepower can be applied to tasks previously only possible through human minds which is quite different from machines or farming - but how different is it? It would take some really visionary people to figure out what the ultimate impacts of all of this are really going to be - and to try to imagine what people are going to do for a living or what society will look like on the other side.

My personal view is that AI is a pretty important component of this. I think, in principle, it's possible. But can it actually be done? That would be a pretty insane change and it's super hard to image what that will be like. But if AI just isn't possible or doesn't come around for a really long time, I don't think this revolution will be too different from others. The more "manual labor" type thinking tasks (grading essays, evaluating legal reports, collecting and searching through information, etc) will be replaced by more and more sophisticated machines. What about creative tasks? That's the final frontier as far as I'm concerned.

Well. It'll almost certainly be really interesting.

One idea I've had (I think we all have a lot of crackpot ideas) for what people who aren't suitable for highly skilled tasks are going to do revolves around social media and entertainment. What if a site like Reddit or Hacker News paid its users? I guess that's ridiculous, I'm not sure how the economics would work out - our contributions here would have to become more valuable. But if fully integrated into our minds (aided by computers) maybe they would be? I've seen people tipped in bitcoins on Reddit before so maybe it's possible. Just a crazy idea.
What can be achieved in a home set up with a DAW, a mic, and free tools? Is there any point?
Does anyone remember a website (that posted here) a while back that showed airspace classifications overlaid on google maps? I'm trying to find it so I can get an idea of the airspace around me, but I haven't had any luck so far.
Maybe not in 1 year unless you are very senior, but over 5-10 years that is attainable at a company like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.
In theory all of what you said is true, in practice a prosecutors 'absolute immunity' is a rather hard hurdle to overcome.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/01/30/7t...

PS: Absolute immunity protects from both criminal prosecution and lawsuits, so in general they can at worst be fired possibly disbarred. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_immunity
> distribute the proceeds to the poor via a "basic income" scheme

Basic income goes to both the poor and the rich. It's universal. The net affect may be redistributive, but there's no preference given to the recipient's income level.

Most rich people would just take the basic income as a small tax break, but they're still getting it.

I know you know this, but it's important to frame this issue properly if you want to support it. There can be no question in basic income of "undeserving" groups getting it, because everybody gets it. This also has the worthy effect of eliminating all the bureaucracy that current benefits programs carry.
Hackers steal £650M in world's biggest bank raid
We're getting pretty close cost wise:

http://www.genome.gov/images/content/cost_genome.jpg

It's around 5k for whole genome sequencing atm and some googling showed that you can do exome sequencing for a lot cheaper (it's a very small fraction of human DNA).

This guy seems to think that the flattening of the tail on that graph is due to Illumina not having enough competition rather than being due to technical limitations at the moment.

http://www.synthesis.cc/2014/02/time-for-new-cost-curves-201...

Full Disclosure: I hold shares in Illumina.
And most of those will have problems with high torque motors.
> I don't necessarily really agree with your statement that a majority of society was opposed to gay marriage in 2008.

I actually thought this was the least controversial part of my comment. This isn't just my anecdotal opinion, it's pretty well supported by polls if I'm not mistaken. Do you mind if I ask on what basis you think the opposite is true?

> when asked about this issue and same-sex marriage, Eich pretty much sidestepped the question and refused to answer it, citing how he has never discriminating against anyone. And to a lot of people that wasn't good enough of a response coming from a CEO of a company that prides itself on its diversity, especially when they also have gay employees.

This is a more compelling point actually. On the other hand, it's easy for me to imagine that he just (like me) failed to comprehend the level of lunacy he was facing and figured the best way to handle a manufactured controversy was to not give it more attention than necessary. On top of that, I feel like I'd also be much more morally inclined to emphasize that political views are irrelevant, rather than pander by saying "oh I've completely changed forever" and implicitly approving of the intolerance implied by political litmus tests (regardless of your location on the political spectrum).

> I also doubt Eich got called a whore, bitch, slut, etc much. And to say Eich was "bullied" in the way Sacco was bullied is laughable

As you said, it wasn't me who compared them. That being said, I don't think using the term "bullied" for either person is particularly unwarranted though.
The marketing and salesmanship of the Human Brain Project may have been a little too successful for its own good. On one hand, the idea that simply building a giant brain simulation would be possible or scientifically useful is not currently realistic.

However, I don't think they (Markram et al.) are that naive. In reality, the project is composed of a lot of different subprojects, in simulation, neuromorphic computing, mapping/characterizing mouse and human brains and doing actual neuroscience, theory, applications to human disease, even philosophy and ethics, etc.
see: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/discover/the-project/sub-pr... and their list of publications so far
https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/science/publications

It's a huge umbrella for neuroscience funding that they marketed to the EU under the grand vision of simulating the brain. Whether or not this kind of marketing/funding mechanism is an optimal way to do the best science is a very legitimate issue to debate. But the implication (which the HBP brought upon themselves..) that a bunch of crackpots have been given a billion dollars to buy supercomputers and run nonsensical simulations is an oversimplification.
Especially when you can probably bring the same or similar person in 6-8 months after funding the company for only 2-3% equity!
Seriously? Who cares?
Are your friends very experienced? I went to Cal and afterwards went to one of the major tech companies. None of my recently graduated peers anywhere (including Facebook, Dropbox, etc) got anything close to $500k in stock. If you got lucky and timed valuation before a stock boom, you might get $250-300k. In general, the offers were around $60-150k in stock over 4 years. With more normal growth, it could reach $200k. For many people, especially in later years or if you had bad timing, it could be signifanctly less than that.

All that being said, money is terrible motivation for working at startup, unless you are the founder and CEO. I left said company after 6 months because the team was dissolving and terribly mismanaged. I had several offers, but the one I went with gave the lowest salary. The draw was that everyone I interviewed with extremely sharp and friendly and that the CEO would allow me to work remotely while I sailed around the world after a year and a half.
That's the ultimate form of selection bias though. As long as it doesn't happen we can continue to discuss this and if it does happen it's moot and we likely won't be discussing it at al.

Your view is a bit US centric, there are lots of nuclear installations outside of the US. The US is probably the least of the problem in this particular respect.
One thing I often see repeated is that every new industrial technology initially destroyed some jobs but eventually created a lot of new ones: the cotton gin, the steam engine, the car, etc. That's because these things only did one thing, and by doing that one thing really well they opened a lot of side-niches. It took a lot of time to invent and scale out new machines, so for long periods of time these side-niches would be available to people.

I completely agree with Sam here. I think the fallacy in the above argument is that there is a qualitative difference between Turing-complete machines and special-purpose machines. Turing-complete mechanization is broad and endlessly adaptable.

Programmable machines aren't machines. They're machine-machines, and can be adapted to new tasks in short linear time by small numbers of people with little capital. That makes it "different this time."

I also think that malicious AI is already kind of here, but in a hybrid "cyborg" form. It's the corporation. Corporations that destroy human livelihoods and abuse human beings in general to maximize per-quarter shareholder returns are a bit like "paperclip maximizers."

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

The danger is not in some Terminator-like AI apocalypse, but that incremental advances in AI will make these things progressively less and less human and more and more machine. I can imagine a future almost-entirely-silicon financial corporation that uses its speed and superior analytical intellect (at least in the financial domain) to lay waste to entire national economies in order to maximize shareholder value... i.e. paperclips. Since this would likely be found in the hedge fund world, nearly all of this siphoned-off wealth would be captured by a small number of already very rich people.

Nightmare AI wouldn't be much like Skynet -- a new being pursuing its own self-interest. It would be more like a very, very smart dog helping its elite owners "hunt" the rest of us in the financial sphere. This could fuel even more massive consolidation of financial wealth. We are already seeing the beginning of this with algorithmic quant finance.

In a thread on Twitter I also heard someone bring up "AI assisted demagoguery," a notion I found to be total nightmare fuel. Imagine a Hitler wannabe with a massive text-comprehending propaganda-churning apparatus able to leverage the massive data sets available via things like the Twitter and Facebook feeds to engage in high-resolution persuasion of millions and millions of people. The thing that makes this scary is that populist demagoguery gets more appealing when you have things like massive wealth inequality.

You can make counter-arguments here, but I also agree with Sam that it is foolish to just hand-wave these kinds of possibilities away. We should be thinking about them, and about how -- as he puts it -- we can find ways to channel this trend in more positive directions.
Uh. Do you mean that, because a project is open source it has to limit itself to the lowest common denominator (not targeting git specifically here) rather than aspire to a better/more suited toolchain that its community believe in?

And by the community, I do not count those not having made any contribution but complaining about what is there in the first place.

This case is about the toolchain, but the same could be set about the code. Does it has to stick to an imperative form, as it is the most common widespread and understood paradigm, or can it be functional because it fits best the original design?

As long as the API is clean and the documentation is clear, I'm fine making the little extra effort to enter the world of the author rather than him/her lowering his/her expectation about what the project, as a whole, should be.
As with every legal question the answer is "sometimes." But typically, yes it is legal. See the comment below that basically allows the "extinguishing" of options under certain restructuring.
A government is a collection of people that, like almost everyone else, are almost exclusively motivated by the goal of "having a job tomorrow". Governments, inasmuch as they can be anthropomorphised, are not especially interested in solving problems beyond the continuance of the apparatus.
> I have no idea other than I'm just going to keep getting my shot because the years I don't, I get really sick and its not worth the long term gain.

What makes you think it's not worth the longterm gain? It obviously depends on your utility function, but for most people presumably being sick for a week now is less bad than being so sick that you die 10 years from now. I'm not saying that's necessarily what it comes down to, because the evidence isn't at all clear to me. But I do think that the pro-vaxxers have completely 100% failed to make their case here, so I don't understand why we constantly have these articles with them browbeating others and calling them ignorant when they themselves apparently have no idea about the safety/efficacy of the vaccines that they're calling others stupid and irresponsible for not getting.
Maybe this?

https://www.mapbox.com/drone/no-fly/#5/38.651/-96.504
I know that HN titles are the post's title. But seriously? I'm not clicking that. This isn't some magazine aimed at young girls.
People are already carrying their personal mobile surveillance devices everywhere they go.
Ask HN: As a young developer, how can I launch a successful freelancing career?
I started learning web development at an early age, and a few years back i started freelancing using the freelancer.com platform. But it's no secret that freelancer.com has bad business values and is basically ripping off all developers, not to mention it's low prices and bad clients. So i'm wandering how can i launch a successful freelancing business while being a college student, without being tide to a platform, since i don't have any experience in doing so, and don't know where to get the clients.
I'm one of "those men" and to be honest, I really don't care about making your wife uncomfortable for 30 seconds while I hit on her. If I wouldn't do stuff like that occasionally, I would still be a virgin at 30 and most likely spend the rest of my life alone, since women never initiate contact unless the guy is handsome, rich or popular. I'm sure the positives of being attractive and basically having men line up to have sex with her outweigh the negatives for your wife (and you, too, or would you prefer an ugly hag?).
Is this trolling? I honestly can't tell.
I'd say it's one of the rare ideas that almost no one supports. The right obviously objects to redistribution. The left prefers inefficient redistribution. It's hard to say there's much tangible opposition on the far left or that opposition causes consideration or that most politicians are taking a serious look. I think you might have just gone 0 for 5.
I think adults routinely navigate this situation without melting down, and so am very wary about attributing the author's experience in any way to alcohol. If you choose to consume alcohol in a business setting, you remain entirely responsible for your behavior.
I've always wondered: if I implement Common Lisp in C or Fortran, what does that say about Common Lisp?
I think Sam is incorrect when he writes "The great technological revolutions have affected what most people do every day and how society is structured. The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it. But this is not the normal course of technology"

Jobs were not created in the sense that people were previously doing nothing. Jobs were transferred from low skilled occupations such as tending to farms, to higher skilled occupations which more closely resembled the salaried jobs of today.

The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers. The industrial revolution gets a really bad rap, but compared to the work and life expectancy that preceded it, the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century.

The tendency in all technological revolutions is to reduce the amount of exertion performed by workers and increase the wealth available for consumption (and correspondingly reduce its price). So today "work" often means sitting at a desk, while occasionally checking facebook. Whereas to our forebears just 5-6 generations ago, this would have seemed extremely leisurable, if not entirely magical. Not to mention the average worker can now quite easily afford to keep a device in her pocket which lets her access all the world's information and connect with almost anyone else on earth for less than a day's salary.
Nitpicking: Designing new viruses or bacteria for a neo-plauge is less likely than a 'bad-actor' getting their hands on enough uranium for a dirty bomb. Nukes are relatively easy to understand and make, get enough U238 together and it pretty much goes boom. Little Boy just shot 1 half at the other sub critical half. Blammo. Viruses are not that easy, as the cell is complicated beyond all measure. It's as if we dug up a 4 billion year old self replicating and evolving machine out of the lunar dust in '69 and brought it back for study; we have basics, nothing more at this point, not even a theory beyond Darwinian evolution really (yes, it has advanced a lot recently, but still, it's primitive). Nature is INCREDIBLY better at viruses, so much better than anything we have. If we could engineer viruses like nature could, and exploit the vectors in the way that nature does, a lot more diseases and human frailties would be solved by now. Stem cells are just the beginning here. We have a LOT more to learn about viruses before anyone, even state backed groups, can make a plague in their basement. Heck, we have smallpox saved away precisely because it is so virulent and we haven't been able to make anything so potent since. It took the entire world decades to get rid of it. The methods it uses are of great interest to us for therapeutic purposes maybe. Who knows if there even are any. In the end, viral vectors of human suffering are doing just great on their own now, us trying to make a more terrible one is very far off.
1. Inheritance taxes are one part of the solution. Capital gains taxes are another.

2. Make the right to conduct financial transactions contingent on one being part of a global financial network which abides by a specific set of taxation rules. This can take many forms. The U.S. in particular is well-placed to initiate and control such a system. However, considering that Wall Street has captured Congress, I doubt the U.S. will come anywhere close to this in the first place.
By implementing basic income, you no longer need welfare, public healthcare, etc. You get a smaller government body as a result.
Apple is a fascinating phenomenon. It rightly interests everyone; investors, economists, managers, consumers, and from the look of this thread, even those who it doesn't interest. :)
There is no special call stack manipulation in the CL condition system. It's built on top of dynamic scoping and normal catch/throw unwinds; see http://www.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/MetaCircular.html for block/return-from on top of catch/throw.
Real name policies are a bad idea, but fixing the problems with using real names is not, though it sometimes can be difficult.
Rails Developers - automatically disable dangerous Rake tasks in production
I am surprised you ever lost your virginity with that attitude. If it was in my power to make this comment known to every woman in the world just to ensure you never have sex again, I would. Go to hell.

Edit: judging by your comment history, you are a real misogynistic troll (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=contergan&next=66288...). So yea, go to hell twice.
If nukes are so easy, how come Iran, with all its oil wealth, is still not there? It remains a difficult state actor play.