skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the future that awaits millions more as automation marches forwards.
I think that dichotomy is just a construct of the Anglo sphere, isn't it? I don't think philosophers outside the US and Britain ever referred to themselves as 'continental.'

Even so Analytic Philosophy was just a reaction against British Hegelians in the later 19th century, starting with Bertrand Russell. Those distinctions get thrown around way too crudely.
Nice, how do I add mine? I'd like to keep the sources available on my wiki (mostly because that way I get a download count)
This is very cool. I recently helped a couple of visually impaired people pick a movie through a stack of DVDs they had at home, using the http://www.bemyeyes.org app.

I didn't know how they watched the movies, so they explain me that some come with some sort of aid that describes de scenes. Some kind of story telling, along the audio. I was fascinated.

However, they complain that there is not a lot of content that has this aid. I'm glad Netflix is bringing their content to this audience.
Norway Will Be the First Country to Turn Off FM Radio in 2017
Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace
Using boost converters to increase voltage
It seems like asking about randomness is not a valid question. I'm not sure how you would implement that (beyond checking for the assignment of random behavior), you can't really find out until you observe a difference in behavior over a larger sampling.
> I don't find it surprising whatsoever that United Airlines does not want him flying on their planes.

This is more a function of the airlines just being stupid though. There was a case where an Arabic family was taken off of an airplane because on of the teenagers asked how safe it was to sit in a seat next to the wing. The FBI cleared them, but the airline refused to allow them back on a plane.
That's right. If your city has visible homeless population, it also has shelters, soup kitchens, churches that help them, etc.

Donate to some of those organizations, and only ever hand out the list of all places where to get food/shelter/counseling.
I almost completely agree with CyberShadow, though the problem with fragmentation isn't only caused by forks...my rant on this http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2013/10/22/open-source-prolifer...

But fragmentation is going to happen and occasionally something really better comes along that wouldn't have from improving existing things. So I'm just as interested in making 'natural selection' work better. Now, it's extremely hard for it to operate, because it's hard to discern differences among similar projects, let alone which is better. Popularity data might help a little bit.
The primary advantage is that a 3D printer is truly able to create features in any orientation in 3D while a typical mill cannot. The price of consumables isn't really something I consider important, especially when prototyping.

The thing that a lot of people don't realize about traditional machining operations is just how long they take to set up. I didn't, myself, until I bought a CNC mill. I thought it was just a matter of sticking a big hunk of metal in it, hitting Go and then coming back when it's done.

The first problem is that for a typical 3D axis milling machine you have to find a way to mount the material you intend to cut without getting in the way of the cutter, and if your part is at all complex this can be very tricky. Different materials and thicknesses all require different methods of mounting, and learning how to mount and setup a part is an education in itself.

The second problem is that a 3 axis mill can really only cut down. That means if you want a hole in the up/down Z axis, you are fine. If you want one in the X/Y axes you are out of luck. You have to finish your Z axis operations, unmount the part, turn it, find a new way to mount it, zero the machine to the new part configuration and then do more operations. If you have a part that has, for instance, mounting holes on several sides you are looking at a LOT of manual work to complete that part. And each time you remount the part you have to be able to tell the machine exactly how the part is mounted so that everything lines up.

Industrial machine shops get around this by using 5 or more axis mills. These are insanely expensive and not really available to the home / hobby engineer, although I am quite interested in what http://www.pocketnc.com/ is doing.

3D printers, on the other hand, are truly 3D. You can have features in almost any configuration and it's no more difficult to print than a simple cube. It is literally a matter of starting it up and coming back when it's done.

I don't think 3D printing is the be all end all of machining, especially FFF, but for the home or hobby engineer it's an incredibly powerful and easy to use technology right now.
> You still need linear radio for things like emergencies.

If radio is going to be for emergencies, make sure it's guaranteed to work in emergencies:

- Mandate local control. No more networks piping music in over a network line. Network lines go dead, and then where is your radio station? More to the point, if there's no one in the booth, there's no way to get someone to tell everyone else there's an emergency. This has already happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment

- Mandate that people be in the radio booth 24/7. No more late-night autopilot, and certainly no sign-off. Have cots or similar if the weather starts to get bad, so multiple shifts can stay at the station. (Hospitals already do this.)

- Mandate that radio stations have their own generators. Multiple redundancy. No excuses.

- Create a way to get information to radio stations even if all other information transmission infrastructure is down. Because that is what we're talking about, right? Radio as an emergency last-ditch information transmission medium? Satellite communications can get jammed by bad winds blowing Earth stations around, point-to-point microwave is killed by serious snowfall, and this isn't even considering man-made emergencies.

So, unless you do that, you're just playing at being an emergency service. That represents the bare minimum to be taken seriously.
No, his argument is "nothing we have built so far (i.e. special purpose AI) leads us to believe that we will build general purpose AI".

There is nothing inherently contradictory about a future with ONLY special purpose AI. Technologically speaking, it doesn't really follow that one leads to the other. He is using his credibility as an AI practitioner to state this, although he doesn't go into details.

He's saying the burden of proof is on the doomsayers, which is reasonable. I still don't see the argument either.
This is the link of the project:

http://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog/MEMEX.html
Looking at the screen dumps of the iOS app, I am not convinced that this app evaluates any Swift code at all.

Also, as far as I know, Swift on iOS doesn't have anything eval()-like [On the Mac, there is a REPL (https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=20)]

I would think the easiest way to evaluate Swift code 'on' a iOS device would be to send it to a Mac, but as said, I don't think this app evaluates Swift code.
Frequently when philosophers solve a particular problem, it moves out of the realm of pure philosophy and into more "practical" fields, such as mathematics, the natural sciences, justice, or politics.
Jeff Dean's talk at GTC
It seems inevitable that continued advances in PV will either destroy the power utilities or force them to reinvent their business as electricity brokers (focusing on distribution and/or storage).

Regulatory capture can slow this trend. But as the article indicates, it's only temporary. Advances in energy storage and moderated consumption allows customers to disengage from the grid entirely.
Nice Job. How do you accept new entries?

Do you have/plan to build an installer app like the f-droid project? That app itself could use a modern design like you have done :-)
Most of these comments are trying to determine why people are homeless, citing some anecdote of some person the poster met once. It bothers me that we are trying to determine why people are homeless so that next time we see a homeless person we can know why. That's simply not possible.

I was (voluntarily) homeless in San Francisco for a while (http://austenallred.com/voluntarily-homeless-in-silicon-vall...), only because I wanted to work on my company instead of get a job, and I had read enough Thoreau that I didn't care to give up the majority of my time in exchange for crap I don't need. So I could have gotten a job, but I deemed it not worth giving up my freedom for. Of course, that came with other sacrifices, but I considered it worth it at the time.

In doing so, I ended up hanging out with a wide, wide variety of homeless people. Some were punk kids who wanted to reject society/capitalism, many of whom were from broken homes. Some were mentally handicapped. Some had done enough of some sort of drug that they were completely fried. A few seemed very intelligent - one lost his job as a physics professor when he had sex with one of his students, and his family was so ashamed they wouldn't take him in.

Saying things like "homelessness is a choice" is true for some subset of people, but completely untrue for others. Most of the homeless I hung out with were very affluent and had iPhones and MacBooks (you don't find many forced homeless pitching VCs in Palo Alto), but when I was in the city it was a different story. More mental handicaps, more felons, and more people who had simply fallen upon difficult times.

The amount of willingness they had in the matter is a spectrum., as was the tech they used, the reason they were homeless, and their ages But they're all people, and most of them that I met were good people, with wants and dreams and desires mostly just like everybody else. Please don't try to say, "All homeless people are x."
Sounds like they're the American equivalent to Hikikomori.
This new mesh captures oil, but lets water filter through
The Easiest Guide to Making Reddit Your #1 Traffic Source
Why wouldn't. It was created very recently.
They do, they usually jam on several subchannels so the quality is nothing special. Plus, if the signal drops a bit you get stuttering/drop outs/desyncs, not graceful degredation.
Envato have just announced that they've paid out $250M to community
> But in reality, the richest countries are the ones that have strong research curriculums, with people studying things that are not immediately beneficial or even useful.

Is this because studying those creates a rich country, or because people of rich countries have a tendency to study these things?
My problem with philosophy is that it appears to have few standards for what constitutes a correct answer to a question, or for what constitutes a well-formulated question.

So, take, for example, theories of truth. Last I've heard, "correspondence theories" (a sentence is "true" when it corresponds to certain states of the external world, called "facts") are actually considered very problematic, precisely because they leave little way of characterizing "truth" in such "a priori" fields of knowledge as mathematics and philosophy. Instead, what's currently popular are minimal or deflationary theories of truth (a sentence "X is true" means just X). Problem is, this theory appears to say nothing at all about truth; as Wittgenstein lambasted, it only says something about words.

So yes, if I say that "X is true" and "X" are equivalent sentences, I've said something about sentences, but I haven't said a damned thing about the contents of the statement X itself!

Mathematical statements, at least analytically speaking, are mostly actually hypotheticals conditioned on an enumerable set of axioms and a formal logic; with those, we can use a coherence theory of truth, in which a statement is true iff it does not contain an internal contradiction. But then you've thrown out most forms of mathematical Platonism, which is, and I do loathe this, the most popular philosophical interpretation of mathematics.

(I loathe it because mathematical Platonism is so often used as a starting example to support a fully general philosophical Platonism, in which statements about theories of truth or morality or knowledge are made in reference to Philosophical Abstract Objects. These have no extension inside space-time and also are not any kind of mental or computational manipulations or constructions (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/), and are taken as necessarily constituting the only correct answers to philosophical questions, thus neatly yielding a kind of unique epistemological authority for the philosophical process of arguing and analyzing sentences, which is utterly absurd from a naturalistic perspective.)
Google Moving Toward Encrypted Ad Services
I think the only JVM named HotSpot is the one distributed by Oracle.
It's hardly well known, but I implemented an SMTP greylisting proxy called Spey which used a coroutine for each connection with a cooperative scheduler which switched between them as data arrived. (Cooperative scheduling has huge conceptual advantages, because now you don't have to think about synchronisation and concurrency issues.)

It worked really well --- on my machine.

Unfortunately on other machines there were weird bugs and instability, and really-hard-to-diagnose crashes; because it all worked fine on my machine, debugging was painful. Eventually I figured out that pthreads, which was being linked in by a library I depended on, when combined with a particular glibc and a particular Linux kernel, would store the TLS pointer at the top of the C stack --- it used alignment tricks to be able to figure out where the TLS pointer was from the current stack frame. (I assume this was to work around a kernel with no native TLS support.) Of course, my coroutine implementation was allocate its own stack with mmap(). This was causing pthreads to pick up either a garbage TLS pointer or, even worse, the wrong TLS pointer.

That was when I gave up on manual coroutines in C. Lovely idea, works really well on paper, so much simpler than threading (if you can live without multicore support), doesn't actually work in practice.

They're still worth checking out in languages like Lua, though. I'm still bitter that ES6 doesn't have proper coroutines, opting for the much less useful generator concept instead. Apparently they were too complicated to implement...
This seems pretty similar to the Haskell Maybe Monad.

"Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!" has an example[0]:

routine =
case Just (0,0) of
Nothing -> Nothing
Just start -> case landLeft 2 start of
Nothing -> Nothing
Just first -> case landRight 2 first of
Nothing -> Nothing
Just second -> landLeft 1 second

becomes (using some 'do' syntactic sugar):

routine = do
start <- return (0,0)
first <- landLeft 2
second <- landRight 2 first
landLeft 1 second

Checking for Nothing is taken care of 'automatically' and if any of start, first, second or (landLeft 1 second) are equal to Nothing routine is equal to Nothing too.

[0] http://learnyouahaskell.com/a-fistful-of-monads#walk-the-lin...
A Black Triangle Moment[0] for Mantle programming?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20050306071700/http://www.rampan...
Sale of U.S. Arms Fuels the Wars of Arab States
CTO at Aerospike here.

Aerospike is battle-tested in large deployments --- ad-tech, marketing-tech, a few new ones in telecom and fin-serv. Pushing huge load with very, very little downtime. That's what we're the most proud of --- and I'm proud that we're able to offer this killer codebase as open source, after being closed source for the first few years of the company.

Most applications have a huge core of key-value --- twitter, for example --- and need a fast and scalable key-value component. You can start with a single server (on your laptop with Vagrant) and scale up later.

We're adding more types, more cool operations, more indexes this year.

The fact that Aerospike has a basic query system, type safety, flash optimization (Amazon has switched over to being very SSD/Flash centric) support for every language under the sun (three contributed Scala layers --- and we see a lot of Go use as well as the usual Java / Node / Python / PHP / HHVM), Hadoop integration....
"Could have if they wanted to" is the core signature of ADHD.

Imagine knowing that there are lots of things you could, theoretically do with the resources you have at your disposal—but having none of the "willpower" thing that lets people do things that are even slightly boring or unpleasant in the short term.

Imagine wanting to learn skills that require practice, but being unable to invoke whatever mysterious forces cause this "practice" to happen.

Imagine being amazing at stupid skills that you got because their training mechanisms involve short reward loops (for example, video games) and knowing your own potential, and hearing over and over everyone around you tell you about that potential and encouraging you to use it, but just feeling a stab of "ugh" whenever you even consider starting that is utterly insurmountable.

Imagine, even, having skills that could get you a great, well-paying job (e.g. programming—something, as it turns out, that has a short-reward-loop method of learning) but then just not being able to work up the desire to apply for a job; to go to the interviews you applied for; to come to work on time each day; to do anything other than surf the Internet once you're there.

This isn't abstract to me—

I failed out of university. I was homeless on-and-off for a year and a half. I went back to live with my parents for a year. Then (at the age of 24) I got diagnosed with ADHD and put on a medication for it.

Now, two years later, I'm making $250K/yr working as a CTO for a financial startup.

Many people I met while homeless, looking back, also had all the signs of having had ADHD—or, if not that, then major depression, or a social anxiety disorder. None of them thought of themselves as having a condition; they just "didn't want to work." They didn't realize that what they "wanted" was in large part a function of what they would or would not flinch away from because of pain; and that their pain response to attempting certain things was not a matter of "character", not and not something they had failed to learn or needed to "work through", but a treatable handicap, like nearsightedness.

I wish I could take every one of them to the same psychiatrist I went to, but it took me eight months on a waiting list to talk to them. There are far, far too few practicing psychiatrists to help all the people that need help. Something about this needs to change.
Sorry, no offense intended, if anyone took it. In my use-case, the words such as 'gay' and 'lesbian' were in almost all cases, used for explicit documents.

This is a very naive implementation to quickly get a handle of amount of porny documents. I intend to do some more work around clustering of porny words. I think understanding sentiment would be hard and involves a lot of labeled data, but that is a potentially very useful project.
One of the linked posts is this 2013 article about an
automated lie detector being tested at U.S. borders:
http://www.wired.com/2013/01/ff-lie-detector/

I have mixed feelings about it.
XM is pretty awful, mostly as an artifact of the number of channels they chose to cram into the system.

I was once privy to a document that showed how the 1.5Mbit stream was divided up into the channels. Some of the "better" channels got less than 32kbit/sec.
The argument is that you don't need strong AI for it to be dangerous to humans.
He is saying that bad allocation of taxes is stealing.
Would be interesting to know how long the effect lasts, e.g. will 1h, 12h or 24h between the physical exercise and the test make a difference.

If it's say ~8 hours, then scheduling gym classes in the beginning of school days may help these children. If it's 1h it won't matter much, as long as gym isn't at the end of a school day.
Would your opinion change if you were told that article was written by an AI?
Deception Is Futile When Big Brother’s Lie Detector Turns Its Eyes on You (2013)
Yay monads?
HFT algorithms aren't even AI but are capable of doing large amounts of damage when they become synchronized - the resulting flash crashes can wipe out large amounts of capital.

And it's most likely that these things will emerge from industries that have no effective regulatory oversight (e.g. HFT/SEC), so effective controls against damage will most likely just not exist.

There won't be a shotgun welded to the main processing core of the Wintermute AI that decides, for whatever reason, to bankrupt your company, halt food shipments to your grocery store, or shutdown the systems that clean the water supply.

What scares me about AI is the ineffective controls that will exist on these things, and given the state of most software development practices I don't think that's a huge stretch.
Thanks. This quick idea worked for my cases, because there were few potential false positives. But your idea around using a regex style matcher should be good.
Can anyone comment on the claim that private solar power generation affects the stability of the grid? What kinds of infrastructure changes would be needed to properly support power generation in private homes?
> People with severe handicaps can't compete in major league sports, and society makes no serious effort to "fix" this.

Given that 99%+ of the population can not participate in major league sports, it's harder to see this as an imbalance.

A better example would be the physically handicapped. Is it OK to exclude someone in a wheelchair from a software development job when they are equal to other applicants in every other way? How about someone who is blind?
That is a great analogy. The distinction between "giving up" and "making the best of what is around you" is easier to draw when it isn't wrapped up in the rhetoric of rugged individualism.
Lots of minimum wage jobs offer hours dramatically under 40 a week.
Faith vs. Facts
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hakaru might be worth looking at
It seems most people who take a position against the feasibility of machine superintelligence are basically making an argument-from-lack-of-imagination: "I can't think up a plausible way that bad things could happen, therefore bad things won't happen." This is then backed up by an argument-from-authority: "And I've been in this field for X decades, so you should trust my ability to imagine this kind of thing."

We have seen arguments like this throughout history. Often, what motivates them is the writer's own failures and consequent life narrative: "I couldn't do Y, so Y isn't possible right now."