skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you are right in that other inputs are needed to decipher meaning. Humans for example tend to have quite a lot of different sources of input -- as when we are children and learning new words we have the spelling (visual), how it sounds (auditory), and possibly another image that shows what the thing means ("cat"). Or maybe we have the auditory ("mommy") and the visual (the child's mother). If you were trained strictly on text, then the meaning of concepts is harder to decipher. It might be why abstract concepts like higher level math are hard for a lot of people to grasp -- their only exposure to the concepts is usually just in the form of text.

As an exercise, when I think of the word "circle", images of circles and spheres show up in my head. Also the equation of a circle. My quick definition of it would be "a perfectly round object" which leads to questions of what "round" and "perfect" mean. The more I think about it, all my knowledge seems quite circular in that there are no axiomatic concepts, everything is relative and it just builds on itself. I wonder if that's the key to decipher meaning, increase the connections of the web -- with strong enough references you can pinpoint which of the nodes in the web something refers to.
For those not overly familiar with either, can you define how the comparison is on dissimilar things?
You should learn Rails. Why? The Hartl tutorial[1]. It's the best tutorial I have ever read, far surpassing anything else.

Not only does it cover the various features of Rails, in it you build a real life app: a simple Twitter clone. Once you've finished the Hartl tutorial, you'll know how to build an app in Rails, how to write tests, how to use version control and how to deploy it to Heroku. It covers everything to build a web app with nothing missing. All in all, if you don't know much about software development (as opposed to programming, which I know you're experienced at) then I can't put enough emphasis on how great this tutorial is.

Others have suggested Django (a great framework that I've used too and love) as you know Python. That does make sense. If you're really confident in Python, perhaps you should pick Django. But Ruby won't take long to pick up either and I can assure you - the tutorial is worth it.

Finally, there are lots of other new frameworks, including client-side frameworks, that might be helpful too. I'd wait though for a bit. For the moment, you just can't go wrong with Rails. Years later, there's still just as much a demand as ever for Rails developers and it's a solid base that, once learnt, should serve you well for many years, whether you're building small projects for fun or large projects professionally.

[1] https://www.railstutorial.org/book
> I'm just having difficulties deciding whether going to school for two years outweighs teaching myself and eventually taking a bootcamp.

I've read mixed things on bootcamps, but have definitely heard some have fairly high hire rates - it was something I considered but my personality usually favors a potentially harder/longer path with a higher chance of success rather than the quick/easy route. If you feel comfortable/confident in a bootcamp go for it.
Karpathy usually talks about machine learning topics from multiple viewpoints, and usually (in my experience with his writings) prefers more loose, non-traditional interpretations (that ultimately lead to better understanding of the underlying mechanics of the approach).

In this case, his point was that one way RNNs differ from FFNNs is their ability to accept arbitrarily sized inputs and generated arbitrarily sized outputs. That's pretty important, which is likely why he emphasizes it.

But the rest of the article shows the salient point; RNNs are NNs that hold a state vector.

Saying that RNNs are NNs that allow connections back to previous layers is true, but that's only one way of looking at it. Holding state is another, since it implies backwards connections. Feedback is another term. And because they have backwards connections, state, feedback, etc, they also posses the capacity to handle non-fixed sized inputs and outputs.

In summary; it's different viewpoints of the same mathematical object. Karpathy focuses on the ability of RNNs to handle arbitrarily long inputs and outputs, because that's something FFNNs cannot do.
In the first place, ask yourself - why do you need devs to sit next to you in the office? A lot of people just don't think about this and assume 1800s style offices are the norm...
The corresponding HN discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627246
Al Jazeera Journalist Responds to U.S. Labeling Him Al Qaeda
Our life is dominated by systems we don't understand. I have some understanding of how my cell phone works at the software level, but when it comes to details at the hardware level I just trust the electrical engineers knew what they're doing. I have virtually no understanding of how the engine in the bus operates beyond what I learned in thermodynamics 101. Sure, you might say - someone understands these things. But for some systems, it's hard to pinpoint these people. And for some other complex systems, like the stock market, nobody really understands them or (completely) controls them. But we still use them every day. I think once AI becomes useful enough, people will gladly hand control over.
Good to know. I am going to look at the book Flash Boys. Thank you.
Good comment. My addendum to follow is not directed to you, but to non-scientific readership.

Yea, it's boring for professor on the thesis committee to read, but this sort of stuff is very valuable for students and postdocs, who often struggle to reproduce poorly-documented results from other labs.

There's both absolute and relative poor documentation. The brevity of most scientific publishing (coupled with the lack of any sort of external incentive for clarity, as you point out) means that even papers that are good, by the standard of scientific papers, can be a real bear to turn into working examples. I personally feel that a lot of what makes various labs good is knowledge of the things that aren't going into the papers. A dissertation, with (potentially) a lot more room to go into details, can serve both as a source of this information for external readers, as well as a convenient internal reference for people in the lab who need to dig up some details of their prehistory.

edit: to clarify, my perspective on this is coming from physics. In other fields, there's more of an emphasis on explicit protocols and "methods sections" that presumably help with this sort of thing.
The code is nonsense. Their method is good for fuzzy logic like recognition, but this approach with code will never work for anything other than an art project.
> feed forward networks do not have immediate state. Not in any relevant sense.

Feed-forward networks do have state, but all the useful parts all obtained through explicit training (ye olde backprop, ye older hebbian). The typical scenario is "train model (write mode), deploy model (read-only mode)," which as you point out, has no "thought" since at runtime, no changes or introspections are happening.

> So therefore they can never have thought.

The key idea here would be: generative models. Most current AI fads are driven by discriminative models (image recognition, speech recognition, etc) which provide very narrow "faster than human" output, but, as you point out, have no thought or will or motives of their own.

But, once you have a sufficiently connected network, you can start to ask it open-ended questions ("draw a cat for me") in the form of sampling from the network (gibbs sampling, MCMC, ...) and it fills in the blanks.

The extra oomph of providing actual agency and intent and desire to the model is an exercise left to the reader.

> (which should be a slower, longer term process).

Sleep is a requirement of all things with neural network based brains as far as we know.
I often wonder if the gap is that we're so caught up on training our networks on vision and text that we're ignoring the fact that living beings have a sense of time and reward as part of their input.

A child knows that if it says "Mama food," it is likely to get attention, and if it gets attention, it is likely to minimize its hunger. Right now, a neural network can be trained to know that "Mama" occurs often in human dialogue, what words occur around it, even its dictionary definition and images of mothers. But it's not making the deeper connection to a strategy that minimizes hunger.

When I think about this, I wonder if insights from the world of gaming "AI" would be useful in developing the training datasets for real AI. Because you can't be a mother to a billion virtual babies, but you might be able to program a set of heuristics to be a mother to a billion virtual babies. Then you have some system that trains on their life experiences...? All speculation, but very interesting stuff.
this. I broke my ankle a few years back and needed surgery, the staff in the recovery room were surprised that I discharged myself the same day rather than stay overnight, and didn't look especially happy when the reason I gave was that I didn't want to get sick.
Why Do Humans Have Chins?
And if you're more comfortable with Python, I strongly recommend the CS231n assignments / labs: http://cs231n.github.io/

Assignments 1 and 2 alone give a solid intro to implementing these algorithms, and the lab-oriented iPython-based format gives you a very high probability of writing a correct implementation even if you're clueless at the start.
This change does make SQL simpler for PostgreSQL.
Sounds about right for the fpb in sa. They make a lot of talk about protecting against pornography specifically child pornography. Given south Africa's current trend of sexual violence against minors it's understandable but they are pretty much unable to enforce anything.

The sa government has a very mediocre understanding overall of how the technology that makes up the Internet works and likes to propose rather broad and technically unfeasable laws that inevitably are either ignored or eventually abandoned.

It wasn't that long ago that they expected any isp to be keeping packet logs of any traffic through thier network for a period of five years on the off chance that the police might need it. It took a fair bit of back and forth to get them to realize how absurd such an approach was.

I would expect that if this does come to pass and youtube is blocked etc, that even the most naïve user will suddenly discover what a vpn is and life will continue. ( never underestimate the technological capability of someone , including your grandmother, to find a way to watch thier cat videos on the Internet )
No, just add complicated-looking figures and you're fine.
The only time it would be a disability is if it really is a dis-ability.

I do not consider sociopathy to be debilitating all the time. The same can be said for claustrophobia. A mild form of it produces discomfort the person can control. Severe cases would qualify for more drastic treatments.

So, it may be true there are more sociopaths in business. I would not refute that. But whether the sociopathy is debilitating is to be examined. And that, I would assume require assessing the individual if they are happy with their life.
I dug an old Osborne portable out of the trash when my school threw a bunch of them away back in the late '80s. It was actually pretty usable! Remember, back then small, low-res displays were the norm, not the exception. Even the first Mac, which was revolutionary for its focus on graphics, only had a 9" black-and-white display.
Pity the poor schmuck he does hire. You dodged a bullet.
Have you checked out Crate.IO? https://crate.io/overview as an "SQL for Elasticsearch" option.
6 Frameworks Creation of Efficient RESTful Services in Java
The article is full of incorrect statements and biased opinions, I stopped reading at some point, because even though I think Quasar is really interesting, this article has been a turn off. Some things that bothered me ...

Akka follows the Erlang actor model pretty faithfully and what you do in the actor model is that you model state machines. In Scala you can also work with scala-async [1], which is basically what Quasar does, but that is not enough because calling a function and getting back some future result is only a really simple use-case, whereas in practice you get streams of messages and the communication is a bidirectional ping-pong.

So you work a lot with context become/unbecome [2], which is very much like what you'd do in Erlang for evolving state. This is because modeling a communication protocol requires multiple stages and a constant dialog with the other side. Even in a simple producer/consumers relationship you need back-pressure. Pretending that the communication is somehow synchronous is not going to fix the non-deterministic nature of this process and the logic will end up looking mostly the same. This is because it's not the asynchronicity that bites you ;-)

Quasar cannot make blocking I/O to not block threads, although it's clearly stated in the article, but that's just wrong. You can indeed patch connections to work with Quasar's fibers, working much like how you patch sockets in Python with gevent, so you can create your own JDBC data-source that plays nice, but that's not the same thing.

This really means that your pieces of I/O logic are still separated into blocking and non-blocking (red versus blue) and I'd rather see which is which by seeing `Future[T]` or `Observable[T]` in my function signatures. Therefore I disagree that Quasar code is more readable, but at least I'm willing to admit that YMMV.

Also, that Quasar actor given as an example has nothing to do with the actor model. This is because in the actor model the actors are untyped. If you type your actors, then you're not talking about the actor model anymore and you'd be better off with another computational model. At the moment it is completely futile to try to type state machines that work in a non-deterministic highly concurrent environment. And if you go through the effort of typing those actors, then you have to at least recognize that actors can communicate with multiple other actors at the same time and thus expose multiple interfaces. And then you can say that at the very least your typing says something more useful than Object or String.

I could write more, but I got tired.

[1] https://github.com/scala/async

[2] http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/snapshot/scala/actors.html#beco...
The fact that I seized a domain ten years ago doesn't mean I'm not who I say I am today.

Also, seizure and hijacking aren't equivalent.
I don't see how the company's actions would affect the employees. If they directly participated in the seizure? Sure. But a random software developer at Microsoft, or a random CSR at the registrar shouldn't be affected by that clause.
seems like an article that was done specifically just to try and save face about all the broken promises with SpaceBase, followed by Broken Age, missing deadlines, mis-managing funds, and then making jokes about your customer base. Sure there's a healthy bit of backstory and a story that tries to basically say 'He just totally deserves a top hit.' I don't think he really deserves one, maybe he should earn it?

But even then, Tim seems like he's been successful. He has a legitimately good design legacy... I'm not sure why he needs a 'super huge great selling game.'

He makes comments like this: "That’s something we’d love to do," he says. "But we don’t want to compromise our approach to games. It would just be wrong if we tried to make a game that was imitating some other successful game."

Except that from the outside it looks like they are very willing to compromise when they could have had success by just following through on their promises...
So far scientists haven't found anything special about the human brain that can't be mimicked by a machine. Given enough neural connections, and a large enough data set, and a long enough training period there is no reason to think that a machine can't do everything a human brain can do.

Put another way there is nothing magical about a child learning about the world. A child's brain is just a large neural network being fed patterned data over the course of many years by a variety of extremely high resolution analog sensors. Eventually the child begins to respond to the patterns.
I wish they would open source the rest of the charts. When I worked there we had some amazing visualizations that weren't included in the open source portion.
Adding Rosalind Franklin to the author list would have made it too long.
A script to open/mount an encrypted external hard drive, an rsnapshot script to do the deed, a third script to close/unmount the external drive. Run every three days our so. There's a fourth script to mirror to a second external drive, run every two weeks. Overall, it's three one-word aliases, one password input and a cron job.
I Bleed Aqua
Do you mean:

http://sml-family.org/sml97-defn.pdf
It seems like this is a good argument for not going public. You have to pay a 5% tax to bankers and sell shares to institutional investors at what often appears to be a 50% discount
> Do you object to taxes in general?

Strictly speaking, I voluntarily choose to be taxed, because I vote for representatives that make laws that impose those taxes. So I can't say I object to taxes as robbery (though there are extreme libertarians who do view taxation that way).
We Can All Change the World
I'm sorry that my understanding of set and computation theory is lacking. Please excuse my ignorance while I study up on the topic further.

But, I do believe the original commenter misunderstood my question. Why is it that we humans, when armed with how a computer works, can identify halting problems? Why do we not get stuck in a loop when studying a potential halting problem?

What allows us to make the intuitive leap past that? And to follow up, what are the implications about "brains are 10^10 200Hz computers in parallel" hypothesis?
Let's not forget about SOPA/PIPA/OTHER_PA which godaddy famously support.
> Also! How much did your degree help you to be where you are now?

The degree is useful for getting past HR - most of the people that actually matter in a hiring decision (engineers/managers) don't care. Which isn't to suggest a degree is worthless - you [hopefully] learn what you'll need to know to make a positive impression on the people that matter...but it's entirely possible to do that without a degree (it'll probably just be a little harder to score interviews).

In my first search (as I approached graduation) interviewers barely asked about anything directly related to what I did in school (they were far more interested in side projects I did in my own time and the stuff I created that I mentioned above) - in my second/most-recent search it never came up at all, it was all about what I did at my then-current job and [more recent] side projects.
German workers trying to save lose. German capitalists making their money on exports and investing it by loaning it out win.
LXD is a container service that creates Linux-only isolated spaces running under the the same (shared) kernel.

KVM is full OS-level virtualization.
How is publication specified? Is it a single word, a character, a millisecond of sound or video? I wonder how that scales. Could be the first real DoS of a ministry. Bring it on....
How to minimize data wrangling and maximize data intelligence
"So yes, an OS should allow you to call its API without triggering internal bugs. But that's kind of a straw man."

That's not a straw man. That's the exact topic under discussion in this thread.

"Let's ignore the bug described by the article for a moment and look into this."

And that my friend is the definition of a straw man :-)
How long before an DNS fork?
I agree with everything you said. But this isn't what's happening in this thread. In this thread, a random, semi-anonymous person saw that someone was offering their work for free and asking for donations, and planted their feet firmly in the ground and let everyone know that they refuse to donate unless the code is licensed in exactly the way they like.
What Could the Mars Colonization Transport (MCT) SpaceX Project Look Like?
GM: That Car You Bought? We’re Really the Ones Who Own It
It was to stop information that didn't go anywhere...I'm not saying it was the best idea ever, it stopped the really stupid stuff like made up emails. Since before this contact information wasn't verified they could literally make up gibberish emails.
Id imagine no Linux support and not being open source would put many people off from donating, myself included.
Embattled Max Planck neuroscientist quits primate research
> saying this for decades?

A handful of years ago I put together a computer fully loaded that gave me 1 teraflop of commuting power.

Today I can put together a computer the same size that will give me 32 to 50 teraflops of programmable computing power.

Many of the "AI" advances since 2007 are just running old 1970s-1990s AI algorithms on faster and faster and more parallel hardware. If you have to train a model for a few hundred trillion instructions, but your CPU only does 20 operations per second (and you have to share it with 1,000 other people), you can't iterate your science fast enough to make progress. Now we can iterate our science almost too quickly.

> how the brain "thinks" at a neural level,

Planes don't fly like birds. Birds don't fly like bees. True AI doesn't have to replicate mammalian (or avian or reptilian) neural topology.
I work in this youth glorified startup world. It's awfully critical to imply that those of us who enjoy the atmosphere are "seeking blatant disregard to their personal dignity and craft."

There's not as much drinking done as you would think and really it's either an after work hours thing or someone is coming in checking the place out and has a beer. It's really not a big deal. It's actually just more convenient because alcohol can loosen you up and means you don't have to go across the street to an expensive bar.

I believe you're taking an overly hard-lined approach to this. I work very hard, and so do many others. There's some who just dick around, but that's going to be in any office. I would ask you though, what's more conducive to meeting new people around the office? A light-hearted 5:00 / 6:00 drink at the bar right outside the work area where there's already other people drinking OR organizing everyone to go to a bar across the street and hope people show up OR just going to the bar?

WeWork is a great place because of the community it builds and you might very well argue it does that on the back of its kegs with taps labeled WeWork. Is this really so bad? Think about your typical startup who's struggling to get along. Isn't it better that they have others to talk to especially others who are going through the exact thing they are?

I genuinely think you can't understand all the psychodynamics at play because you're stubbornly holding onto your perception of a workplace should be. Hey to each their own, but I see a lot of positives in WeWork's approach.
The Path to Creativity: How entrepreneurs find new breakthroughs
Just yesterday I watched this episode[1] about the Dead Sea. The same thing is happening - everyone is pulling water out of the Jordan River upstream and there's barely any left once it reaches the Dead Sea... There it's complicated by the fact that multiple countries are involved.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/22/travel/dead-sea-bill-weir-twl/...
> the people in charge will not give control

Eliezer Yudkowsky would likely disagree with you: http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox

EDIT: Also - http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1450:_AI-Box_Exper...
You're right, it's changed a lot in the last year.