skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"When you block those ads but still read the content, you're stealing the access/time/production/value of that content without letting the publisher recoup any of their investment or make any profit."

No, you're not. Just as you're not stealing when you mute commercials on TV or go to the bathroom, or fast-forward past them, or use the 30-second skip button. If they want to try that business model, it's on them to make it work, not on users to make it work for them. They're saying, "Hey, we think our content is good enough that you'll put up with huge percentages of our pages being taken up by other irrelevant stuff." If it turns out the annoying stuff is too annoying, that's their problem to fix, and not putting up with it is in absolutely no way stealing.
Trip route should have been from Oxycontin addiction to treatment, not with a detour into illegally obtained needle drugs. The Drug War makes the path to treatment much much more difficult.
Careful... Roko's basilisk (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk)
Archaeologists Take Wrong Turn, Find World’s Oldest Stone Tools
Collection of candid images from the 1920s
This is awesome! Some of these "honest" titles are much more clear than the original, academic ones. We tend to use buzzwords/keywords to try and get noticed or even "respected", but it is all complete bullshit. Research should be informative. My submission:

"Acoustic treatment materials for aircraft engines work (sort of), but we are not sure how; airplanes still loud as f..k"

(On the modelling and characterization of acoustic liners under grazing flow.)
Not sure I understand what you mean.

If humans who don't evolve anywhere even closely at the phase of technology and humans are more and more depending on machines (coinsidence?). If machines keep improving if software keeps improving, if technology become more and more networked then why is it on the doomsayers to prove any more than the trend they are claiming can have consequences that we will have to control or guide before they happen or it will be too late.
In Haskell this goes even deeper because the lazy evaluation strategy allows the compiler to optimize the order of evaluation of the expressions within a function and create thunks without you explicitly telling it to. Haskell needs to be pure in order to be lazy, because if it were impure it would be very difficult to reason about if, when, and in what order, the side effecting operations will take place. So like you said, if a side-effectful expression evaluates to nothing, its return value is not "needed" in a further computation, therefore it may not be evaluated at all.

This doesn't really apply to Clojure because Clojure is strictly evaluated--except when you're explicitly working with a lazy stream data structure. If you were to put side-effectful expressions inside of a lazy stream, you would have a hard time controlling when they are evaluated, especially since Clojure "chunks" lazy streams by default in groups of 32 as an optimization.

Here's a SO question demonstrating what happens when you mix laziness and side-effects and don't understand the implications--you find yourself trying to restrict the optimizations you allow the compiler to do (which will hurt performance): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3407876/how-do-i-avoid-cl...
10 YouTube Hacks That You Must Know
Gordon Moore: Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits (1965) [pdf]
Perhaps the issue just hit home more effectively at Netflix once it was their own content - and particularly content involving a blind central character. Who knows.

I agree that the issue needs to stay in the public eye, but not if it's just going to be bashing Netflix all the time. Don't give the other players like Amazon and Hulu a free pass - ask them where THEIR audio described content is, and when they say there isn't any, ask them why. When they say that they don't, or they can't, ask them why not. Check the On Demand on your cable box - is there any DVS there? Ask them why not. This is a vast issue and just focusing on Netflix alone will not solve the greater problem.
I didn't realize that Rat Park was controversial. Can you point me to some scholarly articles or discussions around it, or the latest addiction research?

The wiki page indicates that there was some success in replicating the results. Searching the web is impossible, as it's mostly hype popsci articles in th vein of "you didn't know this about addiction!"
"""

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph). Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least ten years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65 000.

"""
No, of course not. But a mentor is not a trainer to go out and hire. The best strategy is to become the apprentice that your mentor would want to have.
It becomes much easier to understand the AGI threat if you consider whole brain emulations -- human minds running at superhuman speed on silicon. Hollywood has made it obvious, if it wasn't already, the serious implications of that type of development.

Whole brain emulations also make it clear that the issue has nothing at all to do with human values: a human superintelligence would be a catastrophic risk to humanity.
You could give out gift cards. Almost every grocery store sells them and there are reasonably-healthy fast food options (Subway) that have them as well. It's pretty easy to carry a bunch around in a wallet or purse. Pick whatever denomination you'd normally give in cash. It doesn't guarantee that it won't be traded for cash to buy drugs and alcohol, but it's certainly more of a hassle to do that than to spend it on food.
> they will also include the money that a household would need to take a one-week vacation.

Pretty standard (Western) Europe welfare model afaik. Here in the Netherlands it's called 'vacation money', and if you don't have a job and can show you're applying for one, you'll get a minimum wage income and vacation money is indeed included in that as a bonus once a year.

> the poor are human beings and should not be demonized for having the niceties

Absolutely, but you mentioned the UK. I visited the Emmaus centre in Cambridge a few years ago, all the lads there (ex homeless often for more than a decade) told me to never give money because buying alcohol isn't just 'nice', it's a disease that destroys people and there are alternative solutions. They all lived that life.

I'm not going to say 'don't give', but if you somehow know for certain it's spent on alcohol, I definitely would say don't give. At least, taking it from ex homeless guys who still struggle with alcoholism and the life they live now at Emmaus.

Perhaps it's different in various shitholes in the world where there is nothing to rely on, I can imagine alcohol being a sensible temporary relief, but in cities with capacity for homelessness issues, it's not a good choice. And if you look at Europe for example, you'll find that e.g. the Council of Europe has ruled various times now that not just citizens, but also refugees, all of them, without fail, are to be provided a minimum of shelter, food and clothes.

Not saying it's a perfect situation, far from it, and sadly professional homelessness relief still relies way too heavily on charity and voluntarism, but in many cities giving money for alcohol is simple not the best thing to do at best, and harmful at worst.
In order to replace Google, just implement their patents and then wait until they expire.

At least, that is how it should work.
There appears to be some sort of activity happening on the mountain in the background during certain shots ... I couldn't decide whether it was mining or timbering.
United Airlines is THE worst.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/business/passenger-vs-airl...

In my case they almost apologized for having had Federal Air Marshals detain me.
It would help to cite articulate, reasonable philosophers who discuss science. Like: Carlo Rovelli, Imre Lakatos, Noam Chomsky...
Virtually all of these discussions of AI come from the very peculiar way in which we view our own intelligence. It's only the notion of a "conscious will" or whatever unifying feature we find in reflective self-awareness that prevents us viewing intelligence as nothing more than large chains of deterministic complexity. It is a hypothesis that there is something to even human behavior which is more than this deterministic complexity. In other words, there may be no qualitative leap from the AI we currently have to some sort of "real AI" or singularity or whatnot. It may be that you just build up more complex cases over time.

That way of thinking is hurtful to our egos (we would be simply complex deterministic automatons) but there is really nothing other than our pride to suggest that this is not, or could not, be the case. It would also put to rest concerns about machine AI, as it would be an extension of what currently exists, simply on a larger scale.
Hi.

As far as I know. Norway has not been transmitting public radio on the AM bands for as long as I've been alive.(I'm in my 20s)
From the github Readme: "Since version 0.5.0.0 Spock is no longer built on top of scotty. The design and interface is still influenced by scotty, but the internal implementation differs from scotty's." :-)
Functional Star Wars BB-8 Ball Droid Made from Hacked Sphero
This is a worthwhile point. People have a misconception about what philosophy is because pop 'philosophy' like Zizek is more about generating controversy than useful inquiry.

It's like someone who has only ever seen click bait dismissing journalism as pointless.
This may be the case in the US. However in the UK, doctors are scared to prescribe pain killers. As someone who suffers from chronic pain (accident early 2012), it took two years to get even close to adequate pain medication (from a pain specialist in the end).

I work hard and if there was a better option than pain killers, I'd happily pursue it. Being tarred with the same brush as addicts is quite offensive. Also, I have a BMI in the mid 20's so further exercise isn't going to help.
The problem with that is that having proof and getting overpowered by a superhuman AI might fall within a very short timeframe.

The risk (impact*probability) is simply too high to be ignored. We don't know the probability very well, but considering the impact, it doesn't matter that much. I think if the risk is high enough, the burden of proof gets shifted.

To just swat it away with a sentence like "Sounds reasonable to you? Me either." is a bit insulting and reckless.

Personally I want to see AI get developed as fast as possible, but I think it's not too much to ask to care a little about the trajectory of that development in a phase where we still know we're in control. All this article told me is that yes, we're in control for now.
I'm normally the sort to find things like philosophy useless, but I think philosophy might be an exception to my general trend.

I think that if philosophy education works (a big if), then it will be very valuable in that it teaches people to recognize legitimate questions and encouraging them to think rationally about them.

Very often on HN, a story will drive a lot of comments pushing a moral point. But the supposedly moral point is usually just a popularity contest and posturing - "I hate the person doing this SOO MUCH!!!" or "I'm so empathetic for supporting this position". And any attempt to get past that to actual moral philosophy nearly always results in nothing more than ad-hominems being thrown and completely emotional (and inconsistent) arguments being made.

Other issues which often have a fundamentally philosophical element that are relevant here include many issues of measurement (e.g., job interviews and hiring).
From the article... "You’ve just got a lot of young people raising $1 and $2 million seed rounds for dumb products. How are they going to make money off another photo or text messaging app? It’s like, c’mon guys, let’s challenge ourselves and do something better."

Also, from the article... "Sherbert — a Twitter-like app for four-minute instructional videos"
I think they were responding to your hyperbole. You did say something very specific about the membership fee being covered by what you save on toilet paper in a year.

I realize that people have different communication preferences, but I understand where they are (apparently) coming from, I too find hyperbolic emphasis tiresome.
were statistics and controlled studies discovered in the domain of philosophy? Or were those discovered by mathemeticians, which simply replaced philosophy.
Probabilistic programming is the natural extension of this line of development. It's an active area of research. Two such languages implemented in Scala are Figaro and Factorie. Not sure about Haskell.

(Also, weird reading a comment I made on that blog 8 years ago!)
Yeah, I hate it when the slaves escape too.
Make Your City Better
"Homeless" means just that: without a home. Any additional meaning is just part of the mental model you've constructed over time, which isn't necessarily a full representation of reality.

You could add a qualifier to it. "Unwilling homeless" for example.
An inch-long universal text encoder
LA’s Proposed Parking Signs Are Brilliantly Simple
Meditation at Lagunitas

by Robert Hass

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177014
Except you'll be 20 years behind their current version.
> But if we make machines that are smarter than us and have desires

It is a hypothesis that human desires - the conscious processes involved in thinking "I want such-and-such" - influence human behavior. Consciousness is not whatsoever a solved problem, and it may be that we are just complex, deterministic automatons whose consciousness and desires are caused by our behavior (like the steam produced by an engine), rather than causing it.

I'm not necessarily in this camp, but I bring this up to point out that there is an awful lot of common prejudice bundled up in what we consider our own intelligence/consciousness to be, and we project these biases onto what we imagine AI will be. We almost certainly misunderstand our own consciousness profoundly in this way, and at any rate there is no definitive scientific (or philosophical) answer to "what is self awareness" or "what role do desires play in human behavior" (again, the desire could be the steam from the engine).
The article by an American reflects a less respectful attitude towards Philosophy in the U.S. compared to other English-speaking countries such as the U.K. Remember how the book and movie "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" were retitled "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone" for the U.S. markets, perhaps catering to an American preference for instant gratification (sorcery) over abstract thought (philosophy).
I'm not saying that philosophy professors don't increase economic output. I'm saying they don't contribute anything at all.

In general---I think there are some good ones. And I think a lot of the contribute positively through their teaching, just not their research and publications. But note that the primary focus and goal of professors at top-tier universities is research.

Also, I disagree with your dichotomy between "economic output" and "society's total productivity," but that's a separate issue.

Also, I'm not going to be dishonest for the sake of narrow economic interest, which is what you are asking me to do.
Just to play Devil's Advocate, not because I believe this:

We can, and do, create machines that are faster than humans, and it is reasonable to assume that eventually computers can be created that have capacity and connectivity larger than humans.

But that doesn't prove that the result will be as intelligent as humans, let alone more intelligent, because intelligence is clearly more than just speed and capacity.

Edit: for instance, faster and bigger does not change the O(n) complexity analysis of algorithms, thus faster and bigger does relatively little to improve the ability to solve exponential problems.

Exactly what intelligence is, is still not known, and it is quite possible that we will need an algorithmic breakthrough to create something equivalent to human minds.

And even if that happens, making that thing faster and bigger than human minds may turn out not to result in superintelligence -- that would just be another similar assumption as the first.

So it might need yet another algorithmic breakthrough to create superintelligence, and it is possible that neither humans nor human-equivalent AIs will be able to make that breakthrough.

Again, I don't believe the above, but I think it is purely a matter of optimism versus pessimism, not about things that are proven.
Man that hits home, only I'm still 24 with a complete lack of motivation.

I keep telling myself that I'm using it as an excuse and that it's really laziness, but if I'm intellectually honest with myself I don't really believe that. It's like I miss some hormone that motivates me, similar to perhaps a gay person missing the sexual attraction to the opposite sex and not having any way to change that, in a world where nobody is gay and nobody gets why you don't have that genuine, inherent attraction.

Feel free to elaborate a bit on how you eventually got out of this if you'd like, I'd love to hear more. Perhaps it'll help me, too.

Thanks for sharing in any case :)
In a data mining / machine learning class I took in university a key point my teacher made was that of the 'No free lunch' theorem. In that class the theorem was offered on its face and I haven't yet read the original paper (just summaries and recounts) (http://web.archive.org/web/20140111060917/http://engr.case.e...), but the point of the theorem feels very related to the point the author makes. The thesis boils down to: 'not having seen the data, there is no universally superior algorithm'. The author's point of view seems to comport with this theorem. I haven't gone through the paper myself, so I can't argue for or against it. However, in my experience as a professional statistician that has used Random Forests, SVMs, Neural Networks, etc --- finding the right algorithm takes 'feature engineering' (http://blog.kaggle.com/2014/08/01/learning-from-the-best/) and close inspection of the data and basis function. Are the data fit well by rectangles? Then you'll want to use decision trees / random forests. Curvy? Give SVM a try. Do the data take intricate patterns? Look into boosting (fitting on residuals recursively). Feature engineering boils down to the old statistical phrase, 'live with the data.' That is, you actually need use your own mind and beliefs to organize inputs prior to feeding them into an algorithm. So in my experience, what seems to be true in Kaggle competitions, and the perspective of this author, it's true --- algorithms are either tightly constrained and perform really well at a specific task, or they perform poorly (but quickly) in a broad sense.
Whenever this question comes up about _anything_, it seems like people forget that if the people who do it enjoy it, that is a big public value.
The issue here is the mandate that when you create electricity with solar that the electric company must buy that electricity from you as you feed it back into the grid, regardless if they currently need it or not based on demand. These power companies dont want to become energy storage companies, its too expensive. They prefer to simply make as much electricity at the moment as is needed.

I agree with the electric companies on this point. If they dont need the electricity, why should they be forced to buy it? That will increase costs for non-solar customers as they end up footing the bill for the battery storage needed by solar customers. I think the proper way to do these installs is to have customers always have on site batteries which store the energy for their own homes use. Yes, its nice to sell back electricity to the grid, but that feels like a very hackish way to use 'solar'. It makes sense also. If you want to save money on your electricity, you need to make your own, so you draw less from the grid- Not make it for someone else when nobody wants it.

Does anyone know if the power company is required to buy all forms of electricity currently? Could you just setup thousands of solar panels in a field you own and demand money from the grid? Seems like a easy return on investment, depending on the cost of panels/equipment.
But how do you view Philosophy of Science, which discusses how one should acquire scientific knowledge and what does it mean? It is still a relevant discussion, as witnessed in the endless debates about String Theory.
Xeno's paradox is a simple one. It's solved by the physics law x(t)=vt (assuming no acceleration) and the application of a geometric series.

Statistical decision theory also supercedes many philosophical problems.

A number of lesswrong articles, typically addressing the nature of categories and how to reason based on them, also move into this territory and browsing lesswrong is probably worthwhile if you are interested.
Well for one, whenever a power-line goes dead... the Solar panels need to shut off so that the workers can safely replace the powerline.

There's nothing quite like "Oh, some home in this neighborhood is still powering this powerline, despite the fact that we've shut off all the other power sources". That's quite the real "shocker" to the poor worker.
> Nobody is afraid of today's AI algorithms.

I'm more afraid of who will have control over this new form of infrastructural capital, and how they will drive the rest of humanity into poverty.

Everybody can stand on the shoulders of giants, but there's only a few who can monetize it.
This is a common argument but the numbers don't back it. Radio station listenership had tanked and market penetration of pop music with respect to total sales volume is going down. The most popular song rarely constitutes over 0.5% of sales for a given week. The only growth segments I read about are for NPR and non commercial stations.

The real idea is that they want the most cheap to produce, easiest to sell commercial on format. I don't believe that they care much about who listens to it.
The laws are usually based on "net metering", so they probably only apply to the amount of electricity you can pass through a residential meter.
Don't know how it is in English-speaking countries, but Netflix's laughable subtitle translations are as common a conversation topic as the weather and sports where I live. I have no idea why they don't bother stepping it up.

As someone who is only very slight of hearing - no problem talking with people in person - it is also immensely frustrating that I usually can't get English subtitles on Netflix instead of a translation. And when I can finally get it in English, it's closed captions, which kind of ruins my experience by captioning every sound effect in a movie or TV show.

I have no idea why this isn't a bigger focus at Netflix given there must be a whole iPod generation with some minor hearing problems.
Buzzfeed is journalism in the same way that semi-scripted "reality" shows are documentaries.