idm

I'm quite comfortable saying that master/slave is an unsavory metaphor to use in your distributed architecture.

Software engineering was life changing for me. I studied cognitive and computer sciences (CMU '03) - and when I graduated I realized I didn't know much about writing software.

Luckily, I found a software engineering course (Berkeley, 2005) after graduating and they let me attend without being enrolled. That professor (Kurt Keutzer) had wisdom! Literally life changing.

These engineering skills are totally different from what you learn in a computer science curriculum. I highly recommend a course like the one OP links.

It's a fact that wealthy donors support specific research that interests them.

On the one hand, hasn't research always been funded like this? Wealthy patrons have always supported work that somehow gratified them. And history is replete with despicable personalities who have nevertheless financed good science.

On the other hand, when the patron's interests turn out to be questionable, the research supported by those interests can be examined. It's okay to give it a second thought in light of new information about the patron.

I happen to think this article raises valid questions. For example, I have questions about the idea of buying a visiting fellowship. I have questions about the mechanisms by which faculty become oddly encumbered by donations.

This is basically what I do.

I then use Gthnk (http://gthnk.com) to navigate all my markdown files. I sync with dropbox or seafile, but it's the same basic idea.

Gthnk renders to PDF for printing. In fact, a medium-term goal is full import/export via hardcopy, which requires paper-oriented output.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of Gthnk.

It would appear the rat poison they are referring to is strychnine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strychnine

Gthnk is journaling software. I use it as my technical "work journal" and I find the practice to be valuable.

I've been working on this software for years by this point and I occasionally post updates about it to HN.

The current update is a pretty big one and, with all the discussion about personal knowledge bases and whatnot, I've decided to share the progress.

You've convinced me to try it out.

My personal knowledge management project, Gthnk (gthnk.com), would appear to plug in easily as a Source - without any special plugin necessary. I really like what you've made!

I recommend the Multi-Account Containers extension by Mozilla, which has a "sort tabs" button that accomplishes what you want.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

I am not sure why this functionality is a separate extension - this is a bit confusing - but it's working for me.

I've heard the typical ICU/hospitalization course involves bilateral pneumonia, apparently requiring intubation and ventilation.

It appears to be survivable as long as equipment and personnel are available. And that's the problem: availability.

When health systems are overwhelmed, even people who could survive pneumonia with mechanical ventilation will die - because the equipment supply is exceeded and there are no ventilators left.

So yes, there are treatments for pneumonia, but they are limited in availability.

In the psychological sciences, it seems like you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

When a phenomenon with a large effect size is demonstrated with tens or hundreds of participants, everybody crows about how the sample size should have been larger.

On the other hand, when a small effect size requires millions of observations to detect, now the criticism is that the effect is too small to matter.

At any rate, this effect is small - but it is reliable. The only crappy part about this study is the ethical boundaries it crossed. In most other ways, this study was kindof amazing...

Hi Paul - looks interesting!

What is the license? My presumption is that you intentionally did not embed a license within either of the documents.

I made a separate account for the Chromebook. I don't associate any personal info with this account. Of course, most people will reuse their existing accounts, but it's not strictly required to provide personal details in order to use a Chromebook.

Happy Chromebook user here. I use the Asus c213 as my daily driver now. I do the heavy lifting on a Linux server.

Crostini made it all click for the mobile development environment. VS Code was the last piece of the workflow that I was missing.

Now, I've got a rugged laptop with rubberized edges and some water resistance. I take this thing into environments I would never have taken any other laptop. I don't worry about this laptop and I love that.

It's called the "file drawer problem" in which research is conducted but not published because it wasn't significant.

You're referring to "Type I error" in which a statistically significant result is obtained by chance, not because the effect is real.

This article does not appear to be an example of the hypothetical scenario you proposed. The trend line is not a "horrid-fit," as attested to by the statistical analysis published in the article - which is open access and may be read for free.

This is a scientific article - and unless you're a scientist, it may be difficult to understand the entire article.

This is an open access article and the statistics are published. See p.41 for a per-country analysis of the effect on literacy.

I would be ashamed to publish criticism about an open access scientific article without having any understanding of statistics.

Captain Disillusion has been way ahead of his time for so many years.

I think his time has finally come.

Thank you for highlighting this! I wasn't aware of Patrick's software until you mentioned it, but there's a lot of great stuff there:

- KnockKnock: perform system scan to list everything you have installed, like kexts, browser components, startup scripts, etc.

- BlockBlock: continuously monitor system for changes to startup scripts

- TaskExplorer: tool to examine a running processes

- Oversight: continuously monitor microphone and webcam activity

Nice UX too.

Wow. I can hardly believe what I'm looking at. We're so used to seeing one "bullet train" at a time, and even that is held as a lofty aspiration. Some day, maybe, my country might have one too.

That Chinese train yard picture is so serious. Once upon a time, the Dow Jones industrial average was a composite metric designed to roughly characterize the rail industry, including steel production, machining and manufacture, real estate, and use. The health of that industry was found to be predictive of the health of the entire country, and although the DJIA shifted from rail, it is still predictive of nationwide economic health.

China, in my eyes, just proved how far ahead they are - and my jaw is on the floor. Those trains represent so much. It's not merely that they exist - and all of the economic activity inherent in making them exist - but now that they exist, they are an engine of productivity. All the people who can move now...

Thanks! Yes, I plan for agents to support death. In fact, I plan to backfill the entire human species into the database, most of whom are dead. I estimate this will grow the database by 80-110 billion agents.

Thanks for providing a definition for the word "virtual."

I think part of the problem here is that I've invented something we don't have precise language for, yet. I call the agent population synthetic and I call the database virtual, and that's just the nomenclature I'm using.

I'm absolutely shocked at the number of people who feel deceived that this isn't an actual database of the entire human population.

This is a serious problem, though. My work exists at the intersection of social psychology and artificial intelligence, and these fields do not share enough vocabulary. There are major barriers to communication between "intellectual silos," and I think all of the confusion in this comment thread about the word "virtual" illustrates this point very nicely.

Geographically, yes the precision is at the country level. Within each country, there is another breakdown by age and sex, another by religion, another for language, and so on. So, there are a few ways - beyond geography - that you can slice the results and they are going to be proportional to reality.

Of course, the devil is in the details, so when you zoom in on any individual you can see the "uncanny valley" of how the simulated agents aren't quite right.

Naturally. :) I wonder why id 1 isn't working ...

Thanks for the report!

That's a really clever idea!

The public API is rate limited. However, if you want to purchase a dump, we can work something out.

Absolutely. This is an active project and I have a plugin system for synthesizing additional data sources. In the research literature, I have seen several impressive US census-derived synthetic population projects, so finer-grained data are a future direction.

They are not real people, but it is not a "unitary statistical representation" either. At the country level, crossed by the age/sex level, pplapi agents track pretty closely to real humans. Other dimensions (e.g. income) have more noise in them, so they are less reliable.

It's a synthetic world population derived from public population data; these are not real people (i.e. human subjects) and the source raw data were not identifiable or even individual-level data.

I nevertheless think there are a number of issues raised by the possibility of a human population database, but to be clear: pplapi does not have actual people in it. I am currently writing about some of these issues.

This is part of my research and I'm happy to answer any questions.

I gave a preliminary poster about this a few months ago:

http://imiller.utsc.utoronto.ca/media/ci-2016/2016-06-03_a-s...

This project is under active development as I wrap up my PhD.

> experiment with the techniques for social media propaganda developed by DARPA's SMISC program.

Interesting. I hadn't heard of SMISC - thanks!

I replied elsewhere, but I'm pasting it here too just so our threads connect.

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf p. 4:

> Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign.

> some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015