eli_awry

I think that's a different company - it's not even in Texas.

Because people help themselves to food, everyone takes like 1/2 meat and then the first six people take 1/2 veg as well. I agree, for single serving meals like sandwiches that are not easily dividable, it makes sense to only have a few vegetarian ones. But those meals are usually at least 60% not-meat for meat-eaters (bread, rice, veggies, whatever). Basically every other meal is not single serving, and the veggie entrees are seen as just another side. It's usually family style.

As a vegetarian fed by ZeroCater, it feels like a lot of the time the thinking goes something like 'we have 20 meat-eaters and 3 vegetarians - let's get 20 lamb/chicken shish kebaps and 3 vegetables ones!' It sucks to have to make a meal out of sides, and it seems like the meals are structured most of the time such that quinoa salad or mac & cheese are perceived as being sides. And I don't think the solution is to tell meat-eaters not to eat vegetables - everyone deserves them. Anyway, I have to be very aggressive about getting to the front of the line for food. Also, sometimes the vegetarian option is just lo mein or a green salad - it rarely meets what I would consider a minimal nutritional standard of ~10-20 grams of protein. I pack protein powder to supplement my lunch. To be fair though, it is tasty!

I totally would. I just got a MaKay MaKey because it's a cool thing that lets me tinker around a little and do some fun stuff, without the commitment of having to get a ton of soldering stuff etc. But I know that I now have an Arduino which I can reprogram at will.

My perspective is this: I want to make really awesome intelligent tutoring systems. I'm inspired by Enders Game, Diamond Age, and the Aristotle essay by Hillis. I want to do this because I think that the current model for distributing education privileges people who are already very advantaged, but an intelligent tutoring system could be reproduced over and over and over for free. I obviously love Khan Academy, which is being made static and delivered to places with limited/no internet connection. I think that this is radical because the vision is to use technology and the fact that things are so replicable to essentially destroy educational inequality. If you could make an educational system good enough, and distribute it widely enough, then I think that would really change the world. I want to be part of making that happen, and I'm an AI and cognitive science person, so I'm working on the tutor part.

But even this vision has so many things that other hackers are working on. Just making the net more efficient, or creating better wireless systems, or cheaper technology (or even better, technology that people can make themselves). Or empowering people to use Arduinos and to hack their own open source stuff. Or producing pedagogical content and translating it into other languages. I feel like a world in which everyone has total access to an amazing education is a world-changing proposition, and lots of hackers are working on things that really bring us closer to that.

Also I personally think that the thing that is wrong with the government is unequal application of laws and illegal hiding of government activity. I'm not convinced that there's not a place for laws, police, and taxes in a totally just society. I think that anyone who is working to destroy the (really widespread) lies and spying and unequal treatment and unjust policies and sociopathic violence of the government is doing something that, if it succeeds, will result in a truly different world. One where the laws aren't different for people depending on their class, and violence by the state is not tolerated.

I'm not claiming that working for education, diy technology, government accountability or a total overhaul of the legal system is more revolutionary than being an insurrectionist or running a totally awesome Food Not Bombs. I'm just saying that there's this idea of a better world, a fundamentally different world where things make sense and capricious cruelty is gone and everyone is essentially free to pursue the future they want and self-actualize instead of worrying about where the day's calories will come from or if it's safe to go outside. If we can have that world, I don't care if it's in an anarcho-syndicalist form, a set of independent microcountries, or just a very very reformed version of the constitutional democracies we have now. I see cheap, open source 3D printers and Food Not Bombs as having a similar mission.

I'll sum this up with a quote from an Evan Greer song "I want something that's better than this, and I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I think that we could build it if we try together."

Well, the premise of The Dispossessed is that the anarcho-syndicalist society actually becomes an oppressive monolithic power. As a result, the protagonist is unable to find an outlet for his special talents, and has to turn to other means of success.

I thought The Dispossessed did a very good job of showing the problems with centralization of planning - it's an attempt at an anarcho-syndicalist commune that self-defeats through strict social mores. I do think that syndicalism is probably the best vision I've seen for an anarchist future - but ultimately, either those syndicates would have to participate in capitalist trade, or they would have to be controlled by some governing body, or they would have to be totally self-sustaining. Just think about how difficult-to-produce drugs would be distributed between communities. There can't be a producer in each one. So are the producers of that drug going to just gift it? How can they sustain themselves if they are making something difficult to produce that they are only consuming a tiny portion of? Well maybe because they are so generous they will get many gifts. This is starting to sound a lot like something that either has to be a market or centrally planned to me.

I haven't had exposure to the hacker houses on the West Coast, so I can't really speak to that.

The motives of hackers I've known usually have to do with impacting the world and making it better for more people. I've been in punk houses with hackers, but we mostly had parties with art people, and collaborated with anarchists. I'm not talking about the Silicon Valley startup scene, which I know nothing about. I'm moving to MV in a month (to intern with an educational nonprofit), so I guess I'll find out.

I think I was probably wrong when I said 'startup folks', and I meant some other demographic - but it's a demographic of hackers that I've actually met in various places - Baltimore, Seattle, rural Washington state and Austin. And I (perhaps naively) thought that my various and scattered friends with a common ideological thread were representative of the makers of interesting things.

Because some people might not know: Wobbly=member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a union opposed to capitalism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World . They're over a century old, and are still active.

So part of the problem is their alternatives to capitalism. Which are mostly primitivist (as in, destroy infrastructure) communist (in the central planning, grey way depicted in i.e. The Dispossessed) or just kinda goofy. As a lifestyle choice, living off the refuse of a bloated and exorbitant society is actually quite sustainable until you need serious healthcare. As something for everybody to do, a new way of governing, it fails because there will be no society from which to absorb the waste. I think efforts to establish autonomous, non-hierarchal, consensus-based organizations or communities within capitalism is awesome. But ultimately, seven billion people are never going to form some totally sweet Zapatista-style worldwide commune. At that scale, the markets are going to be at work. Capitalism is inevitable.

My perspective is that appropriate solutions to this problem involve taxing externalities (pollution, murderous working conditions that cost society), and reducing the cronyism and corruption that breaks capitalism. Also deciding as a society that we are better off if people are not involuntarily homeless or hungry or dying and agreeing on a social contract to provide welfare.

I want to make the world a better place, so I choose to work on making more, better, cheaper, smarter education available to everyone everywhere. And from society's perspective, this is actually a good investment because it increases human capital and also reduces future costs (as educated folks have fewer kids).

I love communist farms and kibbutzim and I can absolutely imagine living on one and participating in one of those societies. And if you hate capitalism, that's a good way to protect yourself from it. But the farms and kibbutzim themselves are still participants in a larger capitalist system.

The communities of kids like that that I know make circuses and free schools and are extraordinarily well-read.

I agree - I think it's somewhat cultural. That community has a lot of good ideas, but few fleshed-out solutions, which are harder and require more technical/modeling skills. It's hardly unique to them - education researchers (for instance, as I've been noticing recently) and many administrators are equally quantitatively lacking. Part of it may also be that doing novel critical analysis requires few resources, but doing most novel science is a high-capital endeavor.

It was totally sexy. I think the answer is free copies of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon in every soup kitchen ;)

There's something in between wasting talent and becoming a worker bee. I was part of a similar community and found it disenchanting because I wanted to make new things. So I left, and now I make a lot of awesome things, and I'm much happier. I can make contributions and put them on the internet to impact people far and wide. These kids create strong, loving communities and that's as much or more than most people contribute to the world, but I personally felt like I was wasting my particular talents. So I left, But it wasn't to become a worker bee. It was to achieve self-actualization on my own terms, which is the same thing these kids are doing for themselves.

The perception that embarking on a career that you think will make the world a better place is selling out or becoming a drone is really harmful. Being a professional member of a hippy/punk community or an avowed member of the CrimethInc Ex-Worker's Collective or a Slingshot producer or a freegan is a valid choice, but it is hardly more pure than anything else.

I'm a 23 year old with purple hair, but I'm also a PhD student at a top 10 university for computer science. I've hung out in tons of squats and punk houses, and briefly been a street kid, but I got a 2380 on my SATs. I lived in a non-residential warehouse for months - months when I was taking Physics, Linear Algebra, Computer Science and Sociology 321 - Class and Inequality. I've dug through dozens of dumpsters, and I've hiked hundreds and hundreds of miles on the Appalachian Trail. I've been in jail and won the prize for Best Undergraduate Research at my university.

I fell out of touch with the anarchopunkier half of my friends when I got serious about artificial intelligence and computer science - I love these things and they're very important to me, and in the coffeeshops we always talked about how to get rid of tyrants and inequality. I have always believed in technology. OLPC, Ubuntu, Khan Academy, Coursera, solar panels, cell networks - the list goes on.

Startup folks and street punks have a lot of similar ideas about what we want, but really different aesthetics. The punks I've known are much more well-read and just as bright as the grad students I spend time with now. On the other hand, they're in denial about capitalism. Both groups have a lot to learn from each other, if only they can look over the other's smarminess/smelliness.

He doesn't actually say what the positive correlation is, which I find disingenuous and suspicious. Because his scatterplot is so non-detailed, it's about as useful as the following scatterplot of SAT scores:

X|X

---

X|X

Where the axes are scores above and below 600 in math on the first and the second time taking the test. There are some individuals who do better or worse - but just because we can draw a detail-obfuscating graph of data doesn't mean there is no detail in the data, or no correlation, or that SAT scores won't help us predict future SAT scores. It just means we can draw a detail-obfuscating graph, and that there's not a perfect correlation.

One point the author does have is that these scores are not perfectly predictive, so bad performance one year shouldn't mean that the teacher gets i.e. fired. OK. He seems to be protesting using information to draw any conclusions at all. Perhaps it would be more effective to show what fallacious or irrational conclusions are being falsely drawn from this data and used to fire teachers, and then object to those specific instances of irrational actions. This value-added measure has not been shown to be intrinsically unreliable or wrongheaded but maybe some applications of it are.

Vi Hart, who produces these videos, now works at Khan Academy. She's also one of the people to make tau (as an alternative to pi) go viral. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7vhMMXagQ

Another interesting thing would be to let the plea-bargain cases go to trial, with a moot outcome and see how many come up not guilty. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to motivate lawyers to argue their hardest.

For the help of other people: BDFL = Benevolent Dictator for Life. Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_for_Life ) doesnt list him as an example, but that doesn't stop him from being pretty close.

I've spent the last 1.5 years as a machine learning PhD student slowly discovering many of these resources and topics, and I wish I had had this list at the beginning - it contains most of the gems I've found. I'd add that PGM course on Coursera clearly explains fundamental topics in probabilistic graphical models.

It's important to understand individual algorithms, but in many ways it's more important to have a broad overview of the field and its more modern methods, so that given a problem it's possible to think about the best way to solve it, and to share a common language with others who may have ideas. Beyond this list and various online courses, I've found that talking to people about their work and explain the high-level concepts of every black-box classifier or similarity metric or whatever it is they use has been quite educational

I looked at about 60,000 distinct users. But you're right about my overall strategy. I chose all of the subreddits with over some number of subscribers (I forget what the number was now.)I ended up with 433 subs. I filtered out the current default subreddits from this visualization.

One thing I was wondering in terms of reddit research - have you looked into this at all - is that they have users check a specific box if they are ok with their voting data being used for research - even if it's already public. My question then is this - is it somehow wrong to use (already-public) data for research? Anyway, I talk about my original aims for the project in some other comments.

Thanks for the link to stattit. My strategy for getting enough threads for my other project was just to keep a slow scraper running for a month and then go back to it - stattit will be incredibly helpful.

I combatted this in two ways - first, I only looked at the top 433 reddits.

There are always going to be the same people cross-subscribed between A and B as between B and A. This graph is not of the number of people cross-subscribed between two reddits - it's of the sum (number of people cross-subscribed)/(users in A) + (number of people cross-subscribed)/(users in B). So if a lot of people in a tiny subreddit are cross-subscribed, they get a big boost from the first term, but almost no boost if they make up a tiny sliver of subscribers to reddit B.

Some of these issues seem like they could be addressed by in-house people at Reddit better than people on the outside - and I'm pretty sure they're already doing some stuff. One could identify clusters of users who 1) usually only vote for one another's stuff, 2) Vote up things most users vote down, and 3) Link mostly to 'bad' domains and rarely comment. These users could then be screened by hand, and hellbanned. This is the sort of thing that I would start with aberrant voting data though - and that is probably not public for the malicious bots.

That's a cool idea.

In the original title, 'Hidden' was 'Latent' - communities that de-facto exist even though they are not explicit. 'Latent' would have been a more precise word, but 'hidden' is more accessible.

I didn't look very far into that, but I think that the issue was that subreddit data wasn't included in the vote dump they did. I actually only heard that secondhand - I could be mistaken.

I just used post and comment histories, which suited my purposes fairly well because the larger project was looking into how memes spread.

Here's a copy of the post with just text and screenshots: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~elie/noscriptnetworks.html .

I developed this on Chrome on a Mac and Chromium on Ubuntu, and it worked on both of those. Sorry it's giving you problems.

Those subs weren't really active enough for me to get significant data in the time I was scraping (Reddit doesn't let you go back very far.) Great idea for a future post though.

Indeed. I took out all of the default subreddits because they added too much noise - everyone starts out subscribed to all of them.

This is great, and adorable. When I was a kid, I hated that I was a girl because boys had all the adventures in books. Fiction by authors that featured tough girls - Tamora Pierce being a notable example - helped turn that around. Girls want to go on wild chases in strange lands too!

Assigning a moral value to Google's algorithms here, or to personalized search in general, doesn't make sense. I like personalized search - when I change main operating systems, as I do every few months, my information for debugging is always for the right os. If I look up hashmaps, it usually gives me results for the programming language I'm using that day. In the middle of a study session for linear algebra, I can just search for inverse and get a useful wikipedia page. If I want results that are not personalized like this for some reason - more balanced coverage, I actually want to know about pythons, whatever - then hopefully I have the discipline and ability to go to incognito or another search engine. Maybe I don't know about them, in which case if I'm politically engaged I will find out from a fearmonger. But the reality is that there are two products, each ideal for different people and use cases, and neither of them is evil. It has always been difficult to get 'unbiased' information, whatever that is. With Google, I have a chance to see beyond my local papers and the people I know in one way, and with DDG it's another.

I feel like many of these posts present a false dichotomy. I hiked over 600 miles of the appalachian trail this summer, and I did use social media - a little. I posted about one photo to instagram a day - a faun a few days old, a chimney in the middle of the trail, a view of two side by side mountains, one drenched in sun and the other in a thunderstorm. This helped my notice the most beautiful moments of my day each day, and now I can look back at a gloriously curated story - ~35 pictures from 30 days. I put those photos up for my friends and family, and now I am so happy to have them. And they were happy to take a moment while flipping through their instagram feeds to see them. I guess I don't understand the fear, hatred, and jealousy people feel when confronted with moments from other people's lives.