Hacker News Reader

dsfsdfdon Does Music Help You Become More Productive?

INFJ (not sure this has useful interpretation in the practical world) here.

Like listening to music, any voices in the background completely derail my thought processes. But then I am easily over stimulated.

dsfsdfdon UW team wins AI prize for optimization approach

This looks like a big deal to me. Why such a small splash?

dsfsdfdon A faster way to compute edit distance does not exist

beat me to it

dsfsdfdon Training a Neural Net to Generate CSS

yeah, but you need to render in a headless browser. This might take 0.1 seconds per webpage which is extremely slow when trying to use in the context of reinforcement learning.

I thought about trying to do MCMC over a beam search through the rnn output, but ran out of time and patience.

dsfsdfdon What caffeine does to your brain

Me too, am naturally a night owl. I am most creative and productive 10pm - 3am. Without caffeine I'm a bit useless during the day - it lets me shift the time when I can be productive. It leaves me a bit dead in the evening though

dsfsdfdon Do we need browsers?

I would have written something similar, had I not been so lazy. Good Job, well put

dsfsdfdon NP-Complete Problems and Physical Reality (2005)

"But another reason we believe P≠NP is that otherwise mathematical creativity could be automated!"

I have a problem with this. Just because the thought is unpleasant does not make it true or false. Besides, perhaps this is the very difference between automation and intelligence, perhaps the point at which you can ask this of a computer is the point at which you should no longer consider it a computer.

dsfsdfdon Paradoxical Crystal Baffles Physicists

Perhaps it's a topological insulator, so that the bulk conducts but you'd never know it because the surface doesn't.

I'm a total noob, so if that is correct it's a miracle.

dsfsdfdon Neuroscientists Demonstrate Operation of a Network of Brains

hmm, seems a little trivial to me. Are they actually doing direct neural network to neural network communication? If this simple cooperation can be considered a network of brains so can a troop of monkeys, through communication via physical motion and cries. For that matter so can human society through the various transmission mechanisms we employ. For this to interesting to me it needs a novel and higher bandwidth communication channel. Directly wiring brains together would do it.

dsfsdfdon China’s Troubling Robot Revolution

It requires extraordinary skill for a human - but for a computer? Computers will learn to think, imo you would be a fool to believe otherwise. At that point creating more software will simply be a matter of burning more coal/collecting more photons/harnessing more wind/fusing atoms/splitting atoms/exploiting temperature gradients/etc.

So what we are arguing over is when this will happen. I think we are getting quite close - decades away. Maybe less for simpler software development processes.

Most of us are going to live through interesting times, our children are going to live through very interesting times indeed - as the old Chinese curse goes...

source: Msc mathematics and have been following the bleeding edge of ML like a hawk, looking for a problem for the solutions

dsfsdfdon China’s Troubling Robot Revolution

yup, hang on - I'm working on it

dsfsdfdon Light-based computers in development

This is what gets my juices going: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.1619

All-optical Reservoir Computing

dsfsdfdon Under Pressure

Why not just put it outside on the balcony and leave it the hell alone? Fussing about it any more is just risking getting your hands blown off. Idiot. And all this faffing around with a time bomb while you have a kid to look after, totally irresponsible. Put a duvet over it and leave it alone. It's nearly Darwin award stuff

dsfsdfdon LLILC – LLVM-Based Compiler for .NET CoreCLR

When will I be able to get my MVC websites running in node?

dsfsdfdon Ask HN: I am the dumbest person in the room. What should I do?

What. I can't even...

This is non sense. Intelligence is not speed of processing.

dsfsdfdon The knowledge argument

Except it's not a good argument - if you believe knowledge is equivalent to experience. In order to understand what ammonia smells like I need to understand how the mind as a whole interprets the presence of ammonia. Once you have understood how the mind interacts with ammonia then you know what it is like to experience the smell of ammonia. You might say well, I can imagine how it must feel to understand how the mind works and my internal model of how it must be to understand how the mind works indicates to me that this would not allow me to experience the smell of ammonia. But you would be wrong. Just as the machine in the Chinese room argument understands Chinese and understands that part of the world described within Chinese.

dsfsdfdon Creative Genius Driven by Distraction

For me it depends on how much caffeine I have had.

dsfsdfdon Creative Genius Driven by Distraction

The brain is an antenna. A poorly tuned radio connected to a large antenna picks up a lot of nonsense - but it sometimes also picks up novelty. It can sense and concentrate the signals/ideas that others miss.

Creating an intelligent thing is like creating a garden, all that is required is to prepare the soil and remove those plants/ideas which do not serve the purpose of the garden.

Perhaps the idea that is contained in this message will find a home in the garden of another mind - give it a chance to grow, it needs a particular kind of soil. But once you get it started it's a corker.

Perhaps someone with a different set of skills to mine can make this idea manifest. I strongly believe that formalising this notion will lead to strong AI.

dsfsdfdon Game Theory Calls Cooperation into Question

I think you may be missing an aspect of this. The original result in game theory, implied that systems can be globally cooperative with selfish individuals. This has been used to justify Capitalism, much like the concept of evolution within social darwinism. If systems can be globally cooperative with selfish individuals, then we as individuals are doing our duty by being selfish. This is why a highly technical result within mathematics is so widely celebrated. This counter result undermines the first result - granted the first has been taken wholly out of context, but hopefully so will the second. But I'm not holding my breath...

dsfsdfdon The Sierpinski triangle page to end most Sierpinski triangle pages

yup. If only I had the time :)

dsfsdfdon One-electron universe

Thanks for this, was not aware of the name :)

dsfsdfdon One-electron universe

yup - now write that in formal mathy terms and collect your Nobel prize.

dsfsdfdon One-electron universe

I like the idea - why should everything be a different thing? I think that perhaps all things are actually different aspects one thing. It makes the universe much simpler.

dsfsdfdon The Code We Can't Control

There is a distinction to be made here between brute utility and morality. If a person commits a crime and serves the time for it and lives beyond the point where that crime has to be reported when applying for a job - should that previous conviction alter their likelihood of getting hired? Society as a whole may decide that it should not, yet the processes which determine the chances of hiring will not reflect the decision made by society as a whole. There will be a very large number of conflicts of this type, on the one hand businesses want to maximise profits and on the other society as a whole wants to impose certain moral and economic values upon those businesses. This is part of a more general tension between different structures within a society. The difference here is that before the conflict was less obvious because the agents involved could hide their motivation, when we are using machine agents for decision making we can easily query them and observe their bias objectively. So rather than creating discord between the various motives of society, it is really only making them more visible. Which I would say is a good thing.

dsfsdfdon Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180

do tell? I can see a few game changers, new generation fusion reactors, a renaissance in nuclear, but none of these are just around the corner...

dsfsdfdon What Happened to Old School NLP?

I think it's more likely that we will do machine learning to learn the syntactic structure, rather than hand craft these pieces of machinery. For a long time we have tried to create intelligent machines by designing to solve a problem, now at last we are designing machines to solve problems and finding success. I see no reason to imagine that going back to the old school methods, with a layer of the new magic on top is going to be effective as we move to the medium term - in the short term, possibly, but briefly.

dsfsdfdon An Algorithm That Unscrambles Fractured Images

It has occurred to me a number of times that it might be possible to reverse this process and create a light field display.

dsfsdfdon Foldit – A game that contributes to protein folding research

Why is machine learning not good for this?

dsfsdfdon In his garage lab, Omahan aims to bend fabric of space

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927952.900-scorn-ove...

http://news.techworld.com/personal-tech/3256631/dna-molecule...

I guess this guy should never have got his doctorate, let alone a Nobel prize?

dsfsdfdon In his garage lab, Omahan aims to bend fabric of space

Also, personally I think it is entirely possible that we have been visited by aliens. Why is it so difficult to believe, you think we are the only life in the universe? Of course the idea is mixed up in a whole lot of mythology, it's a magnet for crackpots. But underneath all that, the central position that we may have been visited by aliens and we may have observed them, is not really crazy, when you think about it coolly and logically. I haven't seen any evidence in my life that can convince me either way and I am comfortable with that ambiguity.