electrograv

Absolutely, unquestionably, YES! (Certainly for some people). Those sufficiently uncomfortable would migrate to climates better suited to their physiology, if their physiology didn’t adapt to the environment; for example, my ancestors were from extreme cold environments, and I am without a doubt FAR more comfortable in 50 degree F weather in a T shirt than I am in 70 degree weather. And to me with the right clothing, everything down to and even below freezing is quite pleasant.

Prior to much modern technology, just surviving and staying alive as a human was a miserable, painful experience.

We have it so, so good today, compared to our ancestors just a hundred years ago, let alone thousands. Virtually every measure of human suffering (extreme poverty, starvation, sickness, death, etc) is dramatically lowering with each generation.

It is a wonderful thing that modern advancements allows us to be comfortable, which then further frees our minds to pursue even greater and more wonderful endeavors.

People who complain about having to put on a sweater have no idea how miserable it is for those of us who have to sit for 8+ hours in an environment sweating profusely when it gets too hot.

This is why office AC is the way it is. You can put on a sweater. I cannot take off my skin.

Those of us who suffer from this would LOVE to trade places with the people who complain of the terrible effort of “putting on a sweater in the summer time” when it’s a bit too cool inside.

Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of peeling off our skin when we are sweating uncontrollably in a 78F room, that some say is “not too hot”.

It’s important to recognize that humans are very diverse creatures, and office environments have to deal with the complex task of accommodating a wide range of physiologies.

> Perfectionism is a personality trait rather than a mental health condition. There is no World Health Organization diagnosis code for perfectionism and it is not listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It can fly under the radar and masquerade as the pursuit of high standards, yet it overlaps with a plethora of disorders from eating to obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, body dysmorphia, depression and suicide.

Note how it simultaneously says “perfectionism is not a mental health condition”, then proceeds to immediately insuinate it is effectively a mental disorder. This continues throughout the rest of the article.

The domain of neurodiversity as a whole is far more complex than reducing the whole of a phenomenon to such simplistic and IMO damagingly derogatory terms as “interolerable rise of perfectionism”.

Despite the author’s attempt to interleave a few studies with personal stories, it conveniently neglects to tell the stories of “happy perfectionism”: There are many like myself, for whom pursuing this internal motivation for perfectionism turns out to be immensely intrinsically rewarding. In fact, I believe this intrinsic pleasure some (small percentage of the population) take from striving for perfection to have played (and continues to play) a pivotal role in humanity’s rise in technological advancement.

It is not the destination, but the journey (to asymptotically approach a vision of perfection), that healthy perfectionists find so rewarding. Certainly, pathological corruptions of perfectionism exist (for example, any such case where you experience distress or suffering for not achieving infinite perfection, despite it being obviously unattainable) — but this is true for all personality traits.

If “capitalism has failed”, as you claim, don’t you think it’s rather ironic that ALL the world’s most advanced technology comes from capitalist societies then? Shouldn’t there be at least ONE modern computer system that was built entirely without capitalism?

Open source counts as capitalist technology as well, since the vast majority of its contributors live within mostly capitalistic societies as a whole (and I’m not really aware of Soviet open source software).

Chinese technology, perhaps the greatest upcoming contender to the USA’s technological dominance, is also deeply capitalist throughout its inception (though elements of state control are deeply interwoven, the Chinese government wisely realized the benefits of capitalism and managed to use it to great success).

Capitalism is certainly deeply flawed, but regulated capitalism still seems to be the best system we have so far. Constantly saying “Capitalism has failed!” is utterly useless if you cannot propose a new system in its place that does better. (Hint: Most systems that people popularly propose have been tried time and time again.)

There’s really no other way — even if we had a hypothetical omniscient AI — because you can already construct weapons from a number of harmless existing parts with nonviolent uses, there’s no way of banning ALL possible weapon parts from being printed without also banning everything.

And this isn’t even getting into inevitable circumvention of any such limitations placed on 3D printers.

The only way to entirely prevent the construction of weapons is to build everything around us out of jello or styrofoam, and box everyone inside this soft padded universe permanently. But then I bet you even then someone will figure out how to terrorize others with the tools at hand; even if all they can do is hold you down and smother you in jello, someone, somewhere will do it, and copycats will appear everywhere thereafter.

I turn all the telemetry and tracking features off when I install Windows 10, and it takes a good 30 minutes to an hour to turn them ALL off. And that’s just the OS — any apps within by Microsoft will all report back what you’re doing constantly, and some won’t let you turn this off at all.

If you think just selecting “no thanks” to Cortana on install disables all of Windows 10’s telemetry and tracking features, you’re sadly mistaken thanks to the UI dark patterns.

Windows 10 was a huge step backwards for privacy. Fortunately, Microsoft is moving to be fully GDPR compliant companywide, so I think things will get much better soon. But even there, I’m not sure if GDPR covers telemetry the company claims is “anonymous” (it’s not anonymous if it comes from my IP address, as far as I’m concerned).

What Windows 10 really needs is a “don’t EVER automatically phone home in the background, unless I am explicitly prompted and approve this in each instance”.

It boggles my mind anyone designing Kialo would have thought that to be a good idea, or that they wouldn’t foresee it being abused regularly to nudge the tide of an argument in the preferred direction by the moderators.

I’ve seen it all the time: Depending on the agenda of the moderators, one side of the argument mysteriously receives an overwhelmingly large amount of “moderation” for minor technicalities or even outright nonsensical reasons.

I’ve even seen Kialo’s own confusing design you mention here used as a way to subtly suppress one side of an argument: Take any argument beyond the top level, and it’s very easy to simply claim it is a duplicate of a top level argument. For example, if I write a con of a con, moderators can remove it saying it resembled an argument they saw in a top level pro. Or if I write a pro or a pro, they can remove it by saying it’s a duplicate of its own parent!

And this technique applies any number of levels deep in the tree. When this “moderation” gets applies overwhelmingly on one side of an argument, you can shift the entire balance of a Kialo argument quite easily without revealing overt corruption on the surface of your actions.

Those kind of fines are simply not compatible with low quality advise like “Just add an opt-in checkbox, and you’re good to go for GDPR! What’s the big deal?”.

Overall, I like GDPR a lot (though as a disclaimer, I should say I haven’t read all ~80 pages yet).

Still, I am not as confident as many here that GDPR will have no serious unintended side effects.

Imagine for example if Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. all get hit with huge fines despite genuine best attempts by them to be compliant, after which they decide to cut their losses and exit the EU market entirely. Stock markets could crash globally, a new recession would occur, etc.

I very much doubt anything like that would happen, of course. But until things settle post-GDPR, I don’t think anyone can say for certain how this will economically affect the EU, and the world.

Oops, seems you’ve forgotten about the “right to be forgotten”, and several other requirements. Better prepare yourself for those >$20 million fines — how dare you negligently handle personal data, college software engineering student!

I’m all for strengthening privacy protections and punishing bad actors in this domain, but designing strong regulations that don’t have seriously bad unintended consequences, is a really really difficult task. I’m not necessarily saying it shouldn’t be done; just that I don’t envy the jobs of those trying their best to do good for the world via regulations without accidentally destroying some really good things.

It may turn out that GDPR has few unintended negative consequences, or it may turn out the harmful side effects are far more severe than anyone predicted. Only time will tell, I suppose.

Personally, I wish there were a technical solution to privacy concerns — something akin to DRM, but applied to each individual’s personal data to prevent it from being used in unauthorized ways. That’s about the only kind of DRM I think I could really get excited about :)

I’m not sure I’d say all the abstractions break down. If you and your team can agree on a subset of C++ features and patterns that work really well, you really can have some nice, clean code that yields both effective abstractions and good system-level results.

The problem with C++ is that it’s effectively a giant pile of tools, that keeps getting new tools dumped on the pile every few years —- some of which meant to “replace” older tools, yet rarely remove any tools (for fear of breaking backwards compatibility). So the pile keeps getting bigger and bigger, until it some day collapses under its own weight of complexity (maybe).

Skilled craftspeople can still use these tools to great effect, but there is at least an organizational overhead and danger from how cluttered and huge the set of tools is: every person or team may use a different subset of tools due to differing preference, not knowing about all the tools, not using some tools “properly”, using the “bad” tools, etc. etc.

This isn’t the only possible way to do it, but I believe it’s the most common and effective approach.

So it’s not at all unlikely that when running the identifier, they simply don’t match against people who say no to this. They’d never be recognized at all, and the system would just identify their face as an “unknown” identity.

I cannot say for sure whether or not this is how they implemented it, but it seems likely.

I am sympathetic with worries about how automation will affect the job market, and I love philosophy -- but I saw no explanation in this article for why Mark Cuban believes philosophy in particular will be more valuable.

http://www.businessinsider.com/ridiculous-regulations-big-go...

Not saying I agree with all of the points in that article, but these strike me as a few harmful regulations:

> A U.S. District Court judge slapped a $500 fine on Massachusetts fisherman Robert J. Eldridge for untangling a giant whale from his nets and setting it free. So what was his crime? Well, according to the court, Eldridge was supposed to call state authorities and wait for them do it.

> The state of Texas now requires every new computer repair technician to obtain a private investigator's license. In order to receive a private investigator's license, an individual must either have a degree in criminal justice or must complete a three year apprenticeship with a licensed private investigator. If you are a computer repair technician that violates this law, or if you are a regular citizen that has a computer repaired by someone not in compliance with the law, you can be fined up to $4,000 and you can be put in jail for a year.

> The city of Philadelphia now requires all bloggers to purchase a $300 business privilege license. The city even went after one poor woman who had earned only $11 from her blog over the past two years.

This seems like a really good one :)

It really does involve a lot of “staring at a screen” (or paper/whiteboard brainstorming) though, and just talking about it excites me, still — it’s the intellectual/mathematical beauty and creative potential of what is being sketched on those “authoring mediums” that is so very stimulating.

When I first started coding, I was 8 years old, and I didn’t even know the first thing about whether this field would pay well, whether it would be socially engaging, etc. In fact to some extent I was actively doscourage from it, rather than joining the family gardening business (manual labor care of plants — just not for me).

None of the circumstantial reasons for or against programming mattered to me. It was the coding, the very process of staring at a screen with complex patterns and ideas as they’re authored, that excited me. It still does; creating beautiful code that does intricately complex things, that all work correctly every single time to produce the designed results, feels almost like being a modern day wizard creating magic.

Because the work itself is intrinsically motivating, it never gets old, and no amount of social pressures could sway me away from doing this.

There are many unpleasant aspects of being human that we tolerate, because we have no other choice. Through time, technology is created that helps us deal with more and more of these things. That's only natural, and good.

That’s the most foolish thing I’ve read in a long time.

When I was growing up, I was a bit stubborn regarding use of soap and deodorant: I pretty much refused to use anything but water to shower, and never used deodorant (or any other topical substance, for that matter).

That approach worked just great, until I hit puberty... Trust me, if you think nobody needs deodorant just as long as you don’t use soap (or some other such nonsense), I am the living proof of just how extremely far from the truth you are.

Of course, many people out there will never need deodorant (genetics play a large part here, according to some studies I’ve read). There may even be some microbiological technology we can find to cure body odor in alternate ways. But to assume that deodorant is a universally needless product (in favor of not using soap) is incredibly naive, or nearsighted.

I’ll save responding to your random derision of capitalism for another debate.

That’s one possible solution, but it only works to the extent that your simulator accurately reflects reality. Any hard coded simulation is therefore doomed to fail badly, and any adaptable “simulation” isn’t really a simulation at all — just more neural architecture.

> So we need simulation both outside and inside agents.

We don’t even need a simulation outside of agents, if you just use physical robot bodies :) Humans do just fine learning without extra simulation environments — the real world is enough.

Of course, simulated environments are incredibly useful, but not in the ways you’re claiming. Mostly it’s because reinforcement learning is still so slow to learn that without a simulated environment it would take forever to test anything. Also, they allow repeatable, testable results that allow learning effectiveness to be measured scientifically, etc.

Also I know you can formulate RL such that you use a simulator as part of the learning algorithm, but IMO that is cheating at worse, and a misguided rewsearch path at best.

> Neural nets by themselves are not even the complete answer.

Only to the extent that human brains are also not the complete answer to intelligence (i.e. maybe there’s a possible brain architecutre much better than ours), but I don’t think that’s what you’re saying.

If you meant the current wave of artificial neurons are not the complete answer, then of course I agree. But I don’t think that’s what you’re saying either.

Show me the part of our brain that you think contains a perfect simulation of reality and I’ll concede. Now certainly, our brain can do a kind of “neural simulations” to understand and reason about consequences of actions, but that “simulation” (if we can even call it such) is learned.

Assuming you were trying to make a juxtaposition though experiment — what you should be asking is “Would China’s people care if a Chinese chip maker notified the US government first of vulnerabilities in their hardware?”

> that's a claim without any evidence to back it [u]p.

You are correct. The irony is rich here.

I always welcome a good argument (whether in dispute or affirmation of an issue), but just saying "I think <XYZ>" doesn't make it so. Reading through this thread, all I see is the common HN Default Skepticism / Negativity -- but more so; skepticism with less scientific rigor than the work being criticized.

Certainly that must be illegal under the ADA, or something similar?

It’s not feasible for a human to define such a metric formally upon ‘environmental variables’ (such as education stats, graduation rates, etc.) — quite obviously, as you say — yet trivial to define it as an “outcome measure”, where we directly measure the quantity in question (no matter how difficult or expensive to sample this variable).

To the “quality of living index” example: One could design a polling methodology to fairly reliably gauge people’s overall happiness and satisfaction in a country. This polling would be expensive, so we couldn’t do it super broadly or super frequently — and that’s why we use the subsequent steps described in my parent post (on forming statistical models to separate out connected variables that we can easily and cheaply measure to approximately model the “ground truth” happiness metric).

You can then use this “model fit” to predict this extremely expensive “ground truth” notion of individual happiness in this case, on a much more frequent and granular basis than would ordinarily have been feasible using a ground truth gathering method like a polling process.

Even the notion "hard science" vs "soft science" is a very slippery slope, IMO. We should not seek to speak of "hard" vs "soft" science; instead, we should focus on distinguishing good from bad science. Even science performed on incredibly difficult and complex topics (with immensely numerous confounding variables, near impossibility of controlled trials/experiments, etc.) can still be done correctly! One simply needs to adhere to statistical rigor and qualify conclusions from data with appropriate levels of uncertainty, withhold conclusions with no predictive power or statistical significance, and publish meaningful negative results just as frequently as positive results.

This movement of lax scientific rigor within fields that call themselves "sciences" is incredibly dangerous and threatens to erode the credibility of all results/fields that call themselves "scientific" in the eyes of the general public -- the vast majority of whom do not have the time, energy, or ability to review each field and/or publication to understand how rigorous and honest it actually is.

When you read about problems of anti-intellectualism and public distrust in science, the first thing we should do is look to the "sciences" (and bad journalism) that justify this distrust.

1) Formally define what is meant by "innovation" in terms of clearly measurable outcomes.

2) Measure this clearly-defined quality among all countries and many sample points through time.

3) Try to separate out explanatory variables for the quality being measured. Build these data driven statistical models to model this formally defined "innovation" quantity -- not using hand-tuned weights of various measures, as these "rankings" or "indexes" often do.

4) Try to predict a probability distribution of the "innovation" quality, using models developed in step 3.

Step 1 should be qualified with explanation that this human-designed definition is an imperfect, and that all results should be understood in the context of this formal definition.

Step 2 should be qualified with notes of any possible limitations in the sampling methodology (availability of data, etc.) and how this factors into error margins.

Step 3 should be qualified with sufficient explanation that it's a model of reality derived from data, and therefore risks overfitting/underfitting/etc. errors.

Step 4 should be qualified with an explanation that this is a prediction based on the above model fit, and therefore is subject to potential errors compounded by any of the previous steps.

That would be the scientifically/statistically responsible and rigorous thing to do. But I suppose I'm crazy to expect Bloomberg to aim for any level of rigor in these "indexes".

In reality (as you describe), these are completely arbitrary human-designed heuristic scores with most likely no statistical significance.

I really wish we could qualify these "rankings" with a more honest term , like:

"statistically useless, arbitrarily rated average of multiple human designed score scales, meant to loosely relate to some quality we want to measure, but in reality is more a game of politics and adversarial score optimization."

But that doesn't have the same 'ring' to it as "top country rankings in innovation".

Mask-RCNN (more recent) takes it a step further and also generates a per-object pixel segmentation mask, which is even better than a bounding box obviously. For that reason, Mask-RCNN is much more exciting to me, and incredibly impressive if you see examples showing what it can do.

That said, “under the hood” of Mask-RCNN are still axis aligned 2D bounding boxes for every object (and this occasionally creates artifacts when a box is erroneously too small and crops off part of an object). IMO we need to somehow get away from these AABBs, but right now methods that use them simply work the best.

This inversion from intellectuals welcoming disagreement to shunning it is a terrifying movement to those who value science and truth-seeking, because in a worst case scenario it could very realistically lower us into a new dark age. Just the necessity of an "intellectual dark web" is itself an extremely concerning reflection of today's intellectual climate, which is becoming hostile to tenets of rationality and civilized discourse.

When we subtract dialogue and reason from the picture, all we are left with is emotional conflict -- and rarely do two extremely conflicting emotional views of a topic resolve automatically without the intervention or guidance of rationality.