arstin

Perhaps if you already have tools, a work area, and decent skills you could do this. But speaking as a beginner who had a similar idea not long ago, I realized a workbench required a level of skill I would be unable to achieve without more practice and, well, a workbench. In fairness I do strictly hand tools, so it's it a bit harder and the bench must be much nicer.

If anyone is interested, I ended up just getting this apartment friendly bench for hand tool use. You do have to hold your foot on the leg when planing but it works great for the size/money.

http://www.leevalley.com/US/wood/page.aspx?p=66736&cat=1,416...

Agreed that it's about priorities. I'm from a poor state that went to Trump in a landslide. I personally know many people who voted for him. Most were somewhat embarrassed by it. They were ones who lied to or ignored pollsters, who wavered until the last moment. They found Trump despicable, or at least not worthy of the presidency. To understand why they would vote for him anyway, I think about how my vote for Clinton was not an endorsement of her history of warmongering, her complicity with the evils of Wall Street, her failure to advocate strong enough solutions to certain social problems until pushed by Sanders...

(what follows isn't a disagreement with the above posters, just a remark for context)

I vehemently disagree with their reasons (such as they are) for voting for Trump, but reducing the explanation of their behavior to bigotry---the easiest, most accessible, most self-affirming, and most totalizing explanation available to isolated liberals---misplaces the real problems and thus opens to misguided solutions. Yes, the Trump supporters who make the news are terrible people, and there are many of them. But they aren't over half the country. Explaining Trump's success -primarily- in this way is a failure of empathy on the part of liberals, a failure to understand the majority of the country as decent, caring human beings just like you and I who have, in fact, gotten shafted. Almost all economic recovery the past few years has gone to major cities and life for rural communities is only getting worse. We all know here that Clinton had proposals for addressing this (a 500 billion injection into infrastructure for example), but, for better or for worse---okay, for worse---Trump is who connected on this sentiment.

Everyone knows Trump is a wild card---to put it kindly---who has no concrete policies, but it's worth remembering that the main focus of his victory speech last night was promising to bring back the New Deal, for a "socialist" program of government supported work, to distribute jobs across the whole country by fiat. Whether he will make good on his word and can then force it through the Republican establishment in Congress and whether it will then work all remains to be seen.

Yep! The assertion that Turing was setting a "single target for AI research" in the way you're using the phrase was clearly not what he was doing or, I hope, what I said. My intent was the opposite: to draw attention the massive range of "targets for research" which are already implicit in the original Turing Test in order to note that saying "there's still lots more to do" is hardly "moving the goalpost".

Just to link up the way you put things with the way I chose to here, his argument for how an artificial mind is possible proposes a reasonable, minimal standard which different sides can agree to---a criterion of, "well if it can do that then sure it's a mind!". And the choice of a open and unbounded conversation as the standard was brilliant because of the massive range of subcompetencies which are required for actually executing it (including, obviously, perception). Which, of course, we gradually continue to plod through in AI research.

If you take the goalposts to have been set by Turing's 1950 "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", the only people moving them are researchers who want to trump up their own work or marketers who want to sell things.

My own taste uses the word "AI" as you do in a permissive way to include simpler tasks (which in themselves are more elemental than useful) like identifying an object in an image and presenting a few straightforward interpretations of sentences. But what Turing stipulated an actual AI would be able to do is "reach parity" with a fully human conversation, with all of our knowledge and values and desires and subtlety of motivation. When you really dig into what goes on in a real conversation---the joking, the shades of meaning, the individual quirks and tribal patterns, the lying, the compassion, ambition, insecurity---I think it's hard not to admit that we're still quite far from that. We may not even want it! But exactly the genius of the Turing test for setting a rough standard for AI is that it demands competences far beyond mere language processing.

Oh man you're right aren't you! I just might start doing that!

I personally agree with this in the big scheme of things. Computed attribute names seem overkill and I worry about adding logic to JSX. But, honestly, I could care less if they were added if such features get other people all fired up.

My personal taste though often does wish for object shorthand and dropping curlies. My sense off the top of my head is that the majority of my actual props look something like `<Widget user={user} id={id} timestamp={timestamp} />` since I mostly avoid setting up data inside JSX. Is it a big deal? Of course not. But it would be nicer to just write `<Widget user id timestamp />` or `<Widget $user $id $timestamp />` or whatever syntactic sorcery would be settled on.

A modest advantage of dropping curlies is it reduces the already tiny force of one argument for styling in CSS over JS: "prettier and less typing". I certainly don't think they should be dropped just for this reason of course, but could be a side effect worth noting.

"it does not help for fast prototyping or small apps imo"

I can understand this sentiment---React really is meant for serious apps. There is a decent learning curve. There is small overhead. And though it now only requires just a tiny bit of setup thanks to create-react-app, it might easily require a very significant change to workflow habits. (And the fact that CSS is still held by some as an ideal way of maintaining UIs rather than a temporary requirement given what browsers can consume in 2016 is a testament to how how hard habits can be to change. But I digress!) If you're not already knee-deep in it, React is almost certainly overkill for a marketing page or a mostly static form-y interface for some rails backend.

But just to give an alternative opinion: I think React is great for prototyping. The big reason is that React allows you to easily build and use custom abstractions. When you get down to it, that's sorta the whole point of the library.

If you need to do something---maps, a text editor, a flipping clock---there's a decent chance a catalog like js.coach will already have a React component for it. And at just a single line import away, unlike old jQuery "imports" which typically required more setup which then was more fragile once you wanted to make a change somewhere else (like, you know, renaming an id).

And over the years, like many others I'm sure, I've evolved my own toolkit which happens to be perfect for prototyping. I can vertically align <Rows /> and <Columns /> just by passing "center". I can add a modal simply by typing <Modal isOpen={isProfileVisible}><Profile /></Modal> right next to the button which opens it. I can add data persistence and real-time updating mostly just by typing <FirebaseWrapper /> and tweaking some config for the new app. I could go on and on. And these are just little personal things which make life a little easier. There's also projects like react-flip-move which smoothly animates transitions in a line of code, react-sortable-hoc which gives, in a line of code, a sortable with pretty good touch support and essentially infinite lists......

Obviously in principle you can get these benefits in other frameworks. But React is one place where lots and lots of people are actually contributing to the ecosystem.

I'm a product designer so work at a pretty high level and have no use at all for knowing how to implement different sorting algorithms or data structures. Nor am I sure how acquiring this skill would help me at all in the development I do beyond knowing the basic properties of maps, lists, immutable seqs, or whatever else I'd make use of. And sure, if you're a JS dev you need to have a rough understanding of prototypal inheritance (though classes make this less necessary now), hoisting (though deprecating var makes this less necessary), this (though arrow functions probably let this understanding be postponed a bit now), etc, but that's just basic requirements for doing your job... not so much the art or craft of it.

I can see a case being made for studying basic architecture patterns on the other hand...

Wikipedia entries on philosophy are uniformly bad. Unfortunately I've never read a phil sci introduction that I liked, but if you're interested here is a sampling of notable phil sci books that occurred to me now. Note that many people who write phil sci might have professorships in other departments than philosophy and typically have an advanced degree in the science they specialize in. They just have more of an interest in speculative issues that build off already existing results or second-order questions or broadly integrative work than most practicioners, as well as at least enough background in the broader philosophical tradition to avoid basic gaffes or self-inflation resulting from narrow vision.

Judea Pearl - Causality

John Earman - World Enough and Space-Time: Absolute vs. Relational Theories of Space and Time

James Woodward - Making Things Happen

Jeff Bub - Interpreting the Quantum World

Peter Godfrey-Smith - Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection

Jesse Prinz - The Conscious Brain

Kim Sterelny - Thought in a Hostile World

And some historically important works:

Carnap - The Logical Structure of the World (in a loose sense, the first attempt at an AI program)

Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery (the philosophy of science practicing scientists now inherit and unquestionably assume)

Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (a ubiquitous work on scientific practice)

Readers of HN might also dig up Scott Aaronson's paper on how complexity theory might be applied to certain philosophical questions.

Paglia considers herself "a transgender being" and supports the right for everyone "to modify their body at will" (http://bit.ly/1rFwGRx). She also claims to have struggled with gender identity her whole life.

I wanted to understand your perspective, which so brashly denies Paglia her own experience, so I watched the Youtube clip. Unfortunately the easy to find one cut off mid-word, right before she was apparently about to explain her provocation. She wasn't eloquent, and I guess I can imagine how the 30 seconds might be mildly upsetting. But transphobic? A bigot? As just one expression of an inner darkness so vile that all she might ever say is poisoned?

I think a more charitable interpretation of what she was trying to get at is that we should be careful that media attention doesn't encourage some troubled people---who are troubled for whatever reasons---to make a huge commitment which, for whatever reasons, they later regret. And that in some cases maybe other "solutions" would be preferable. Or perhaps her opinion might be contingent on the current state of technology? Or perhaps---IDK---she's even wanting to challenge the framing of the condition as a problem in need of a solution. The point is just it's not really obvious to me why we should rush in with the pitchforks and righteous anger just yet.

There's plenty of room to disagree with her here and lots of needed expansion, but surely she gives a reasonable enough start to a conversation? Maybe you personally don't want to have it. That's fine. Me neither. Everyone who participates comes off as a dick or an ass or just can't be heard over the yelling.

Well, I really don't feel like working at the moment so I'll bite!

The article, of course, doesn't just give an opinion. It tells an historical story---partly from her own experience as a social justice activist---and makes an argument that a wrong turn was taken. You could well disagree with her conclusion, some premises, or think she left out key facts, but I think her grounds are a bit less flimsy than whatever biases she happened to inherit.

FWIW, I didn't know who this person was, but I googled out of curiosity and she appears to identify as trans herself? (but, sure, this doesn't matter inside this dialectic since she could still have "cis privilege").

One of her recent criticisms seemed to be parents subjecting their children to sex reassignment surgery before they are old enough to give informed consent. And that the explanation for this---obviously, right?---involves the prominence of gender and sexuality in our cultural zeitgeist and as technologies for self-identification. She also points out that sex change is now being misleadingly presented as a solution to deeper problems that would really remain unaddressed.

A Twitter-inflaming interview had some interesting remarks on a connection between sexuality and cultural decadence---which she has apparently written a book on the history of---but she seems to be actually well read and was working with a much more complex structure than bloggers picked up on ("decadence" is used as a technical term, the link isn't causal, a richer concept of self-identity is assumed, the objectification of bodies is placed in a more complex network, etc).

But again, this is just my impression from procrastinating for a bit!

One point in defense of books is that by having you focus your attention for an extended period of time, they can unfold an interesting and coherent perspective on their topic. Of course this only holds for good books and most books---like most anything---aren't that good.

Also, not all topics are necessarily well suited to books. I agree it's probably better to browse varied sources online to learn how to use async/await. But I can't imagine even approximating the experience of reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs through random-ish web browsing. Though both involve reading, these examples are really different sorts of activities, each well supported by different features of the product design of the book and the web.

Thanks for this series! I already got one based on an earlier list (a collection of Knuth's papers).

I love reading recommended books lists from interesting, informed people. Especially when, like this one, they include a number of eccentric or offbeat selections which reflect the personality of the author. There's so much junk out there that's meh or even hazardous to consume. A good list---the more idiosyncratic and personal the better---can bring a subtle and unique structure missing from Amazon generated recs or canon-by-committee lists.

Yea that's a good point about just how much better (and...different) Kripkes work is than that which has been produced by the publish or perish academic system in philosophy. As far as I can tell it's been utterly counter-productive.

In Kripkes favor I would also add that he was a great stylist, with warmth and humor and...flexibility of presentation. And that partly because of this NN and WRPL are perfect introductory philosophy texts for "generally educated" people. If I taught philosophy instead of working in tech, I'd probably help keep Kripkes legacy alive for that reason alone!

I enjoy reading Kripke and agree he's done solid work. But I must admit I don't get the "Great Philosopher" thing. He did great work in mathematics as a teenager then basically just applied that model root and branch to the philosophical problems his teachers fed him. Which was a perfectly legitimate, even clarifying contribution for the time. But it's not clear to me how the result was a huge advance outside the local Carnapian tradition he was entirely inside of. (And as received a nice documentation in Soames's history of analytic philosophy which uses Kripke as the hero.) Then again I read "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" as almost provincial!

FWIW, I personally find Putnam, Quine, and even Rorty far more interesting to read both now and from a historical perspective.

Some readers here might be interested in the nice blog he kept last year.

http://putnamphil.blogspot.com/?m=1

Sort of a tangent from the thread: I get the point about "good enough" at the moment, but I wonder if car AI really does need to perform much safer than any human driver before truly autonomous vehicles should be allowed to see widespread adoption. I'm thinking about the difficult problems re: legal and moral responsibility for human written/guided/trained programs like car AI. As well as the fact that, unlike in Go, real people's very lives are at stake in the program's successful performance. We already seem to have met the requirements for a research project---which is still unbelievable to me!---and I wonder how long the last leg will take.

I also recommend Headspace! Certainly do the free content, and I think it's worth paying for a while longer. You don't pay to learn facts or techniques...get those from books...you pay to be given structure in real-time---the whisper in your ear to get back on track, now try this, now try that. For the effect of "now I'm going to meditate" when you hear that guy's voice. When you're just starting out, this sort of help is probably the most important thing.

I only tried Parse for one prototype two years back, but I take it I'm the target audience.

Your point is probably valid if you identify as a backend web dev, but different people have different priorities. I'm personally a product designer first and a developer second. Sure, I can set up and deploy a simple backend, but I don't enjoy it and I have no interest in learning the complexities of scaling it. Any time that I have to spend dealing with data persistence or managing a server is time spent outside of where my attention naturally rests.

Compare to a developer spending days tweaking the shadows and padding and colors and fonts of a UI component. It's "easy" to do, and it's important enough that (given the choice) many people wouldn't use an app which paid no attention to that level of detail, but it's likely time spent away from what they really want to be working on and to which they can best contribute. So just drop in Bootstrap and maybe later get a visual designer to help swap it out.

That's how I feel about backend services. Use a backend service until the app outgrows it, then---if that point is reached---it might be established enough to have someone focused on that problem swap the BaaS out for a custom backend. You have to be careful to keep your code sensibly decoupled and organized...but that's a good practice anyway (and is also the defense against your very relevant worry about the service shutting down). In fact, the app I'm working on now is at a point where, after a year, we are replacing the firebase backend with our own solution.

Basically, BaaS's can be a good crutch for some people---especially small, product design focused teams---because they remove complexity. Just like Bootstrap or Material UI can be a good crutch for small, data management focused teams. It removes complexity. Even if the complexity in each case doesn't seem to be high, every little thing to worry about adds up, and it's good to have the option of making tradeoffs.

I would add Ruth Millikan's work. "Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories" is her masterpiece, but way out of depth for a beginner ("out of depth" in philosophy meaning most people are likely to be bored, confused, or dismissive yet with the right background the book is amazingly exciting, insightful, and valuable). "On Clear and Confused Ideas" is more approachable and has been made available for free online now. http://web2.uconn.edu/philosophy/department/millikan/clearct...

Starting in philosophy is hard because it takes a lot of immersion to begin getting a sense for what people are even talking about. Most fields are like that, but philosophy is notable since it often uses normal words in (many different) technical ways. It can also be hard to stick with it long enough to feel even what the motivations for the problems are.

The motivation for the "Humean problem of induction" along with a description of how it has evolved needs to be set up somewhat carefully. Marc Lange provides a nice intro if anyone is interested. http://www.stephanhartmann.org/HHL10_Lange.pdf

But once you've got the basics from a "mere" phil of science perspective, you can go a lot further. For example, you can look at how "knowledge" is linked with human values and what it is to live a good life. Or at how the experience of art is connected to learning or human development. How does the "Humean problem of induction" bear on these themes? These far reaching connections---which typically involve an empirical or "scientific" component---are where philosophy really gets fun!

You might check out stuff from John Haugeland, who coined "GOFAI" back in the 80s. Here's a nice essay I quickly found online (that's sort of indirectly about AI) for example: http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/haugeland/Mind+...

It's not an exact comparison, but this is in the ballpark.

https://github.com/FormidableLabs/react-shuffle

This is a great essay. And obviously pertinent!

If Thrun is right about AI "outsmarting people in every dimension", how in the world could more entertaining job training videos organized into "nanodegrees" help us at all? I know this article was just a free ad for Udacity so he had to say self-serving things, but do you think the dude really believes this???

As others have pointed out, the real problem before us this century is to somehow decouple having a basic standard of living from performing work---more specifically from "contributing to productivity". My amateur guess is that even with our current state of food and energy production, the biggest barrier isn't the massively difficult economic and organizational problem, but advancing as a culture beyond our entrenched moral assumption that the means for basic living is something to be earned rather than a human right.

More or less IMO. React+Redux is a solid default choice for any UI. That said, I can't speak about Angular 2, but Ember has been integrating a lot of the good ideas from React with a focus on longer-term support and everything-just-works cohesion. Ember could be a great choice if you are, say, an enterprise which values such things. But a neat thing about React is it's becoming increasingly transparent---just a powerful structure for plain javascript and an optional HTML-like component rendering syntax. Also, Ember is strictly a web framework, where React is increasingly cross-platform.

Thanks for the effort :), but these points are simply unsound. Far from being a patch, React offers -one- standard model for writing UIs on any platform. Thus React at its core has nothing to do with the DOM (see React-Hardware, React-Blessed, React-Native, React-Canvas...React-DOM is just another rendering target). Also, in a real-world app React drastically simplifies actual code with the tiny tradeoff of adding a small amount of complexity onto "the web stack". If you actually care and weren't just trolling, you---or a reader who shares your uninformed intuition---might enjoy this wonderful high-level overview of what React is actually about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1vW1w8k7J0