skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My biggest problem with the war on drugs is not the frivolous spending and disgusting financial cost to the taxpayer, or the ruined lives of people in jail for nonviolent crimes. My biggest problem with the war on drugs is that it has created drug education that is propagandized, but even worse, even the nonpartisan content is still severely inadequate and abstinence focused.

It really sucks to hear of my friends from highschool are doing 'MDMA' without waiting long enough to not do brain damage to themselves. Not to mention, they're sourcing these drugs at festivals and are probably instead taking synthetic cathinones. It pains me to think that most of my friends don't reagent test their blotter, and will take 4 tabs of 'acid' without thinking that it actually is probably 2C-E and they could die from it. It bothers me that people have parents that will drug test them, so they're smoking JWH-017 and irreversibly fucking their brains up because they don't know any better.

Those in the know rely on sites like wikipedia, reddit, and erowid to get our drug information. Those that are not in the know rely on their 5th grade DARE education which they've entirely rejected after realizing weed isn't deadly, and word of mouth from other not in the know drug users that are obviously biased towards drugs not being harmful.

So in summary, yes, I 100% agree with you. I've many friends that are on heroin, a few that have escaped it, and a few that I know won't.

I have nothing to say besides that it's super fucked up and I'm glad I learned about erowid before I had the opportunity to do any drugs.
There's a vast difference between maximizing society's total productivity and maximizing the amount of time people spend working on increasing economic output. Namely, the amount of technology used.

Since most of us on Hacker News work in some form of technology, I'd say its in our economic interest not to apply terms of moral condemnation like "decadent" to forms of society that generate more demand for our skills ;-).
> But also, our society makes this lifestyle possible, and it does have its pros.

I assumed you were calling for the end of some form of social aid. The minimum wage portion of my comment could be extended to student loans or anything else. The point is that society has yet to provide decent options to every single person. Further, it's hard to work on something when you feel it's just garbage work you have to do because you're poor. The choices made by people with relatively unsavory options shouldn't determine their merit for aid.
Why Are These Weird Blue Jellyfish Washing Up on Oregon's Beaches?
Where Are the Big Ideas in Neuroscience? (Part 1)
Radio is worthless in an emergency unless there's:

- Someone in the booth. 24/7. No downtime. No autopilot. No sign-offs. No bathroom breaks without someone to cover. No excuses. If the weather gets bad, have at least two shifts in the station. Bring cots.

This has already been a problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment

- A way to get information to the radio station when every other method of communication is down. Satellite is not an option, because Earth stations can be disabled by severe wind or heavy snowfall. Point-to-point microwave is killed by heavy precipitation (rain fade, boys and girls) or widespread blackouts. Blackouts also kill Internet links. That isn't even considering man-made disasters.

- Repeated, serious testing of this stuff, before it's too late, with real consequences for people who fail. And, yes, in this context, having a good reason is failure. Having a good excuse is failure. "Lessons learned" is always, always, always don't fail.

- And, finally, a guarantee that people will hear the message when it goes out, not when their brother's friend's wife's accountant's CPA tells them, and most certainly not over social media. If SMS is more effective than FM in this role, FM has failed at the task.

That's the bare minimum to be taken seriously as an emergency alarm and disaster broadcast medium.
Hardware and software evolve fast, humans don't. This is enhanced by increasing network complexity.

Unless you think there are evidence that this will slow down somehow and we are becoming less and less depending on technology i don't see why the burde of proof is on the doomsayers (which are not the only one saying this)
Yeeeeeah... There's much more to google than just search. Also, there is much more to search engine than just seaech (seo spam countermeasures come to mind). Good luck replacing Google on its home turf.
Hawaii is a particular shit show when it comes to electricity utilities. From their own page on renewable energy, no less:

Electricity can be made from a variety of energy sources. Some are fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas. Over 90 percent of all the energy used in Hawaii for electricity, surface and air transportation comes from imported fossil fuels, mostly oil but some coal. (The synthetic natural gas used in Hawaii is refined here from crude oil.)

I think nobody here has the patience to wait for this particular dynosaur-consuming monster to catch up.

Heres their current fuel mix:

http://www.hawaiianelectric.com/heco/Clean-Energy/Latest-Cle...

Scroll down to see to see Oil listed at >60%.
I read "Superintelligence" by Nick Bostrom, essentially on the recommendation of Elon Musk (he tweeted about it). It talks about the dangers of strong AI and possible paths to it, and how humans can mitigate its effects.

The only reason I read past the beginning is because in the preface he says: "This book is likely to be seriously mistaken in a number of ways".

So at least he's intellectually honest. I believe he's building 300 pages of argument and analysis on a flawed premise.

As far as I can tell, the entire discussion rests on what he calls "instrumental goals" vs. "final goals". (This article I found on Google has similar content: http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf )

His example is the "paper clip maximizer": http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

In this situation, the final goal is: Produce the maximum number of paper clips.

The instrumental goal is: Acquire all resources in the world so that you can direct them toward paper clip production, which involve destroying all humans, etc.

Personally, I don't believe this threat is worth thinking about this point. The supposed path to implementing such a technology isn't credible, and it seems orders of magnitude less likely than, say, us having to evacuate the entire planet.

In other words, I believe that we will be able to build very useful special purpose AIs that accomplish our goals. I can see a future full of benign "plant-like" intelligences, existing indefinitely. They are machines that take in incredible amounts of information, and spit out ingenious answers that no human could have come up with.

From that, it doesn't follow there there is any motivation to take over the world.

We should think about the many, many challenges ahead with special purpose AI instead, and our increasing dependence on computing.

All these special purpose AIs will collecting everybody's personal data, shape their behavior, etc. For example, you can easily imagine a company like Facebook or Google deciding to sway an election.

There are a lot more important problems to be thinking about now.
Thanks for the comment jcos. I'm not sure how to market to research labs, but I'll look into it:) As far as the cost, you can use it for free for 30 days so you can see how you like it, and if do, since you're a student, I'd be happy to set you up with a freebee license for a year. Just drop me a line via the contacts form on the website and we'll take it from there.
I wanted something easy to use to quickly get an idea of how much explicit content could we be dealing with. The main challenge was dealing with a multi-lingual database. I didn't even find a naive classifier.

Though I don't have time/RoI to improve this, but potential ideas are to use labeled data to cluster porny words and get a probablistic metric of porni-ness of a sentence.
Do you have some examples of "solved" philosophical problems moving into natural sciences or mathematics? That sounds quite interesting.
I'm surprised no one has yet cited pg's "How to do Philosophy" (http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html). I like his implicit explanation: the healthier parts of what used to be philosophy have been turned into the sciences (and some social, experimental sciences) while the less healthy parts have remained (disconnected questions about what reality is, which feels like a variant of "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?).

Most of the comments on this thread so far feel like defenses of science, rather than philosophy (e.g. "Philosophy is valuable when it is directed to the inquiry of truth for the sake of discovering truth").
I don't follow. See my top level comment about the "paper clip maximizer". The argument does hinge on strong AI, as far as I can tell.
In Soviet Russia, the earth moves you!
That's an excellent way to ensure nobody checks your signatures, though. Making it hard means they will be ignored.
Does the fact that they may not "deserve it" mean that they don't get satisfaction from it?

Something my wife and I have been mulling lately is the concept of "grace." She has concluded that means being able to be generous to people who don't necessarily deserve it. I'm not quite there yet but I'm trying to get there.
https://github.com/cms07/general-manager

It's all there.
Project Moneyball: How Yahoo Built a Native Ad Platform in 43 Days
Chrome wouldn't open your link. I've corrected it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf_BR1StMxQ
Alcoholism doesn't make life more joyful. That's the level of drinking many homeless people do.
IBM ThinkPad 720C.

When it was too weak to handle modern operating systems, it was turned into a VNC terminal (for Linux on the server).

It was finally retired in 2004 or so. The keyboard is still the best laptop keyboard I've ever had.

(my everyday desktop needs are still served by a 2008 iMac with 6GB RAM, by the way)
It's tricky. I've both personally visited homeless shelters where ex-homeless people lived and worked under guidance and coaching, and the general story from them was 'don't give money'. Maybe of them used drugs in the past and said the cliche is completely true.

In that case, if someone asks, best politely say no, direct them to places where they can get help (most advanced economies have some capacity in every city), and take the money and donate it to said places or another cause when you get home, pool it in a jar for a once a month or whatever donation if you want.

On the other hand, someone close to me in my own family was homeless for quite some time after a wrongful prison conviction. Despite him having enjoyed a great life, big social circle, never addicted, enjoyed higher education and a nice career etc, typical upper-middle class stuff, he struggled on the streets. His prison time carried stigma that he didn't deserve, but couldn't be proven innocent. He stayed on the streets partly because he was afraid to ask for help, to be seen. And partly because he was convicted on a holiday, outside of the country he knew well with a limited network.

Someone else in my family took him in, from the streets, gave him some money, a roof to stay under etc. And that's why this person is part of my family now. And I've spoken to numerous ex-homeless who had no addiction, and just didn't have any food or a roof to stay under. Or recently when we partially funded the first month rent for an illegal immigrant. He now has a painting job etc. It's an uncertain existence for him, but he's got an alright life and contributes his share to society and is financially independent. The issue is that cases like this require time to evaluate that you tend not to have passing someone by.

In short, I'm similarly conflicted and usually do give. When I have time I tend to have a chat and ask what they need. They'll say 'some change' or whatever and I'll just cheerfully say huh, why? And they'll say for some food or w/e, and I'll just hang out with them for 20min and buy them some food and eat with them. Best case he actually wanted money for food and had some social contact, worst case I fed someone who didn't starve and had a nice chat.
Superhuman Machine Intelligence does not have to be the inherently evil sci-fi version to kill us all. A more probable scenario is that it simply doesn’t care about us much either way, but in an effort to accomplish some other goal (most goals, if you think about them long enough, could make use of resources currently being used by humans) wipes us out. - Sam Altman

http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1

Oates seems to have missed the concept of an Intelligence Explosion, which is why it is difficult to compare current AI limitations to the behavior and capabilities of a superhuman machine intelligence.

I would strongly recommend reading Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence for a full treatment of the source of worry for many brilliant minds.
Thanks for posting - this is amazing... I was actually working on a far from finished article "How a Search Engine Startup company could compete with Google" http://bitexperts.com/Question/Detail/42/how-a-search-engine...

and then this announcement came across. Will be looking at what kind of crawlers they would release. Hopefully some modern ones based on a WebKit / Chromium core, that exposes DOM model and suitable for navigating all these AJAX script fueled modern web interfaces.

Also very interested to see what kind of Machine Learning / classifiers they are using. When working on our search engine, we were using purely statistical classifiers like all variations of Bayes, SVM (Support Vector Machines) and decision trees C4.5 glued together with some custom algos. We did not use neural nets at all. Nowadays, neural nets have a new name - "deep learning" and seem to be everywhere.

Really really interesting in terms of what people would build with an Open Source Search Engine. Watch out Google :)
what if elon musk said he could power a car to haul 5 tons 500 miles with a tablespoon of spit?
Instead of going through each of the points made, let me link to some pages that already dealt with many of them. It sounds like all this guy heard was "AI might be dangerous" and decided to rebut that, without looking at the arguments put forward by so-called "doomsayers". Protip: before demolishing any argument, try to find one (or a couple if you have more time) person who makes the argument seriously, instead of taking your understanding of the argument from news articles.

https://intelligence.org/2015/01/08/brooks-searle-agi-voliti...

http://lesswrong.com/lw/k4h/request_for_concrete_ai_takeover...

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-n...

https://intelligence.org/files/AIPosNegFactor.pdf

http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter (this is just to counter the implied claim that nobody who actually deals in AI disagrees with him and it's only uninformed people like Bill Gates(!) that worry.)
Thanks, i will fix it :)
That's a lot of code. I'm pretty sure I can use SDL to open a window and paint a triangle with a C-coded rasterizer in few than 500 line.
pretty sure that "earth moves you" is not a localized phenomenon
I agree; that is part of his argument. Obviously though it is a completely flawed argument. Up until the creation of the personal computer most machines were specialists. They were large computers designed for specific computation tasks or machines made specifically for manufacturing certain kinds of goods. Generalist computers didn't have much precedent. That's kind of the point of new technology. It's not necessarily predicated by something that came before. It is orders of magnitude better.

To me this argument has historically less validity than creative people dreaming about singular, binary acts of creation. Historically those people have won.
The article was interesting, and the title does say it's talking about hobo culture. As I watch the HN discussion unfold, though, I want to point out that 41% of the homeless in the US are families. These folks aren't usually hobos -- hard to get the 4-year-old to run fast enough to catch a freight train. It's a very different lifestyle since families aren't generally throwing off the strictures of society to live in freedom, but instead desperately trying to rejoin.

http://www.endhomelessness.org/pages/snapshot_of_homelessnes...
Agreed that starting with their own content makes sense. As for the difficulty of adding existing AD assets, I'm unclear as to why this is any more difficult than adding more language tracks, something Netflix has been doing for years. As for procedural and contractual issues, advocates in the past have gone so far as to get the owners of the assets to agree to license to Netflix free of charge, to no avail.

It's sad that in the UK, VOD services are even further behind on accessibility. I do hope that Netflix is actively seeking out AD, but given their track record so far, I'll believe it when I see it.

Most of all though, I wanted to respond to one particular thing you said: "And for all the stick they get, Netflix actually leads the way in accessible content"

The lesson I've taken from this is that they don't get nearly enough, or perhaps the right kind of, stick. Advocates (and legislators in some countries) have been after Netflix on this issue for years, but what finally seems to have gotten Netflix to take action was when the mainstream media started picking up on the story. That action was swift and completely addressed the story that the media told. I therefore think it important to keep the story going in an attempt to ensure that Netflix keeps working on this problem.
Personally, My main motivation for learning about artificial intelligence has been to break thE barrier of being able to communicate with dolphins . At this point I only understand the principles of machine learning and pattern recognition and this challenge should be overcome soon . I think there could be more advances in communications with other creatures.
Lenovo Y450 bought in 2009. It is still running strong now.
What would happen if tens of millions of vehicles started feeding power grids while sitting in parking lots. I think that could happen someday soon.

Edit: Bob Bruninga has written a bit about solar power in cars. Great content. http://www.aprs.org/APRS-SPHEV.html
Large-scale electricity storage is what is needed. One vanadium battery per block.
Show HN: Food Finder – a place for foodies to find and share amazing restaurants
We used to feed the homeless for as long as we could afford to do so, we were our own non-profit, so feeding the homeless came out of pocket. In any regard, we would go out at night when they would be sleeping on the concrete in downtown Orlando (Florida), and downtown Kissimmee, some choose to be homeless, some don't even want to be homeless, they'll tell you their story with tears on their eyes. You can't just decide to judge whether a homeless man is there because they chose to be without actually talking to them. You really can't. We helped some of them find homes, others find their way back home. The homeless people are like your family, they need to be taken care of too, but not everyone is willing to put their heart out for someone else.

Everywhere I go, if I see a homeless person asking for money I offer them any food I have in my car. You don't have to give them money, food is valuable as well. If they don't want it, it's their loss.
Workers seeking productivity in a pill are abusing A.D.H.D drugs
Am I the only one who finds it difficult to mentally concentrate on a task after physical exercise? I feel like all my energy has been spent and there's not much (glucose?) left for my brain to function at higher levels of abstractions.
Why do you feel we will not build "Strong" AI? We know AI as smart as humans can theoretically exist, because humans exist, so intelligence is possible. Is there a reason to think that humans are near the upper limit of what's possible? If not, why can't we build something significantly smarter than us?
Lenovo ThinkPad R61, 2 GB RAM, 1.7 duo-core, 80 GB HDD Windows 7 Laptop. It is still my second machine(or third, after my desktop/phone) and it is perfect for everything, including some python programming and writing/surfing. The keyboard quality of the machine is just insanely great, combined with the trackpoint.

I got it for 1300 BGN, which right now would be 650EUR and I bought it 8 years ago :) The only thing I have changed is the hinges once(cost me 20EUR). It has been the best investment for me and hopefully my desktop will be surpass it someday :)
OS : Linux Mint 17

Hardware : Dell inspiron

Tools : Java, Scala, IntelliJ, Git
Does X lead to Y?

Statistics today can answer the question of causality in many cases, especially the controlled studies, and that use to be the domain of philosophy.
Here are some things you will probably notice. Start with a really small database, maybe 10,000 facts. How long does a query take? Half a second? One second? I am just guessing here. It will take less than a millisecond on a usual SQL database.

Now increase the size of the database to say 100,000 facts. This will make essentially no difference for a normal database because they will likely be able to answer the query using an index in time logarithmic in the number of facts but it will take NebulaDB ten times longer to answer a query because GCC has to compile a ten times larger file.

If there is some quadratic code somewhere in the system it may actually take a hundred times longer. Every query requires processing all the data while a usual database will only touch the data relevant to answer the query.

Another thing are updates and deletions. I did not read the code in enough detail but can you support that? If yes it sounds a bit like a nightmare to me to find and remove or update the relevant lines in the C source code file. And it will be very likely a slow process because if the length of a fact changes you will have to move all the later facts.
I'm not sure I would pick Nietzsche for the gold standard of philosophy. I've always had it that Plato, Kant, and Hegel were the big 3 (in terms of systematic ontologies).

Also, Dan Brown sells like crazy and is easy to read. Zizek, no one can read, and no one actually buys his books AFAIK. But at the level of 'sensationalism' perhaps I could see that.
That's not an argument why special purpose AI leads to general purpose AI with motivation take over the world, and I still haven't seen one.
Related: Your DNA may carry a ‘memory’ of your living conditions in childhood.

http://scienceblog.com/48584/your-dna-may-carry-a-‘memory’-o...
There are other reasons to avoid Walmart, and not that is not meant to imply that Costco is perfect, just less imperfect.
HA != backup

you can have whatever redundancy you want, and maybe even lagged copies, but if you need to restore something months older, you still need backups..
I can't find any direct references anywhere, but from the name I can't help but compare this framework with Scotty[https://github.com/scotty-web/scotty]
http://bud.urbas.si/Licence

Free for personal/noncom/oss, contact for commercial. So probably not.

IMO, this will have to offer super tremendous advantages over MSBuild to have any chance at gaining traction. The latter is free, open source, easy to extend, already fits with ci/cd and is the native build tool for the platform.