maxander

When corporate grants are bringing research groups into existence more or less from scratch, it's fair to call it more than "ties." At the very least, this is far beyond the norm in fields I keep track of- for instance, pharmaceutical companies helping fund academic biomedical research happens, certainly, but only in limited cases and generally it's considered a significant asterisk next to whatever the study finds. When those same companies are carrying out their own research (say, clinical trials for a new drug) they typically do so under external supervision, with rigorous reporting standards.

For that matter, the choice isn't between oil-industry experts and complete novices. Carbon capture is chemistry; there are plenty of chemical engineers with independently-funded academic positions, or involved in non-oil-industry funded companies. If some of them published a review of the plausibility of carbon capture, I'd listen to it.

No. The anti-fossil-fuel movement, in general, doesn’t have tens of billions of dollars at their disposal. Deeply held beliefs may certainly influence scientific research, and that should be guarded against, but by itself it doesn’t let you buy scientists wholesale.

Remember that, a priori, you should be far more skeptical of studies with this sort of result than, say, studies showing that neocortinoids don't harm bees or that the latest blockbuster pharmaceutical has no side effects. The sheer mass of money in position to lobby for the "fossil fuel use is fine!" position dwarfs that of all other financially-fraught research questions put together.

To wit; the company behind the paper in question, Carbon Engineering, is noted by Wikipedia as having "oil sands financier N. Murray Edwards" as one of it's principal backers. And the article's "outside expert's opinion" quote comes from Stephen Pacal, co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton- which has an "extended partnership with BP" worth a great deal of money [1]. The financial conflicts behind this research are staggering.

[1] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/11/18/carbon-mitigation-...

Contrary to the other answers to this question, I suspect the real reason is that the prototype is expensive, and way easier to recover from a lab animal’s poo than the researcher’s.

If particles are “just” particles, how would you solve the problem of two objects without spatial extent (point masses) being infinitely unlikely to ever collide? Among other things. In treatments I’ve seen, this is always explained in terms of particles “actually” being fields.

This sort of RF signature could allow an "ecowarrior" to go around finding and sabotaging mining outfits. (Or, y'know, for a boring old burglar to go around stealing GPUs.)

They're attempting something fantastically difficult to do effectively (arguably beyond human capability) and arguing that their slightly-better-than-chance results indicate that their approach is promising. More likely, the system is picking up on some "low hanging-fruit" indicators in the data (perhaps that corporate filings with certain buzzwords are likely to fail, or that reference projects beyond a certain age, or similar) which would already be easily picked up on by human analysts, and that anything much beyond that would be impossible with anything remotely resembling the present method.

I want to posit a general hypothesis (perhaps it's already been said); better-than-chance performance by a classifier on some dataset is not evidence that a similar (or any) classifier can perform better on the same data.

Have you ever tried to fly a quadcopter drone manually? It's really hard; I could barely get one to hover, after hours of practice. Yet AI quadcopters that can fly in ornate formations and execute complex maneuvers are well known [1]. Don't discount what AI can or can't do just because it's hard for humans.

Other advantages in ferries' favor; unlike most streets, the docks for autonomous ferries could be designed around the AI's capabilities. Also, ferries don't travel at 70 MPH. :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4 (6-year-old video!)

The cost and market cap estimates are probably both not good measures of how things would work out in practice on that scale, but even so- it looks like someone with a couple million dollars to invest could plausibly extract several billion from BTC via a 51% attack. It would cost substantially more than the estimate on here (since even non-NiceHash cloud GPU services probably wouldn't fully cover the required hashpower), and require substantial technical expertise, and decently-connected people would probably see it coming at least days in advance due to the movements of GPUs and GPU-power involved, and be pretty definitely illegal, and BTC's market value would be crumbling underneath you as you tried to sell out... but, the sheer profitability of such a scheme should seriously worry people with a stake (finanical or emotional) in BTC. A dollar bill sitting on the sidewalk doesn't stay there long.

The article is making a simpler point than that. If I show you the table:

  A	B	C
  1	4	3
  20	45	15
  8	15	7

And so on for some arbitrary number of rows, you can look at the table all you want but you will not perceive "A+C=B". It's just not written there. To get A+C=B you have to generate something else in addition to the table, namely a hypothesis- but this is a creative act, not an empirical one.

Because trillion. If that’s true, that’s not just some extra secret projects to break all encryption and build a secret moonbase- it would mean that the US government was secretly printing a quantity of cash roughly equal to its own GDP, indicating that the dollar would be worth a fraction of its apparent value (if anything) and making a total economic collapse of Western civilization a virtual necessity. It merits a bit of surprise.

However, looking into the .gov report where they’re getting this from, it looks like the “21 trillion” figure is the total of all adjustments both up and down, to any part of the budget sheet- sloppy accounting is being done, but the net “adjustment” (the amount of money being unilaterally summoned from unclear sources due to Pentagon malarkey) is merely (!) in the hundred-millions or billions.

> Turner said cell carriers can't completely secure our phones because they have to allow for law enforcement access.

The key sentence in the article. The reason there isn’t a fix is that our (U.S.) government prefers spying on its citizens over being protected from other powers’ spying.

What tiny sounds have we all been making every day of our lives, but have never been in a quiet enough space to hear?

No. Read the text- it’s companies that are refusing to provide samples of their own drugs to generic manufacturers, thus blocking the development of said generic versions.

Doesn’t need to be legal enforcement. The FDA could simply start taking its time when issuing new drug approvals, study registration, etc, for bad actors. A substantial quantity of a pharmacy company’s budget and product development cycle is devoted to dealing with the FDA as it is, making it any worse would be a big deal.

I suspect the reason that it’s done indoors is that, most places with a high enough density of humans for this practice to be available, the outside is a dangerous place for a tripping patient. Someone driving by blasting a rap album out their window could send a trip in some bad directions.

The candidate is probably now happily working under a manager who doesn’t complain “why are you using your skills? Just [do the simplest thing that occurs to me], you idiot.”

HNers interested in this topic are liable to be interested in SlateStarCodex's treatment of it: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/05/marijuana-much-more-tha... .

tl;dr; according to the author's "Irresponsible Utilitarian Analysis," the statistically dominant factor in whether widely-legalized marijuana would be a net benefit or harm to society is its impact on driving. Since cars are, for most of us, the most dangerous thing in our lives, this probably makes a decent amount of sense.

Googling “Instinctive Driening Response” turns up a paper “Observations on the Drowning of Nonswimmers” by Frank Pia, as pribably the original source... or rather, it turns up the citation of such, but not the paper itself.

Hate to be that guy, but I’d imagine this is closer to the original meaning if the term. Mechanical parts required to perform under pressure are much older than servers. :)

That would be awfully nice if it were true. In reality, the opposition to this kind of tech just makes lots and lots of cheap missiles, while your interceptors cost millions each, and drive you bankrupt.

A good way of looking at the “hidden cost” of buying your home- when you get a mortgage to buy a house, you’ve simply shifted from renting your home to renting the money used to buy your home.

Since your house and that cash are (sorta definitionally) worth the same amount, which you do makes less of a difference than you would think. (And no, it doesn’t matter that the mortgage money is “rent to own”- as the article points out, a home-renter could have just as easily been putting that extra cost into stocks the whole time.)

I have to say, I find it remarkably ironic that a researcher developing surveillance technologies has this much concern over being surveiled. I'm also inclined to note that the argument "these technologies with obvious, profound antisocial uses have some feasible prosocial uses also" doesn't justify the work.

Having gotten that off my chest; you're probably worrying about nothing, at least in terms of impact on your day-to-day activities- if the U.S. or aligned nation started curtailing the travel of computer scientists, it would be all over HN for weeks. Maybe if you want to go work for your country's intelligence agency someday (an obvious move, with your interests) they might look over your file before an interview. But perhaps in that case, contacts with Chinese researchers would be seen as an asset- the CIA and similar organizations have been known to try to recruit cooperative foreign-employed scientists in interesting fields, for various purposes, and to use their own experts in those fields to make contact.

It might matter if you're a "real academic," i.e., affiliated with a university and conducting your research in "conventional" settings. For an academic to not be talking to out-of-country colleagues would look pretty odd, in most fields. But if you're just some dude in your basement chatting with Chinese espionage experts, that might raise some red flags. :)

Well, no, of course not- when a neuron dies, the information encoded in it's connections is lost. [1]

But replicating the original connections isn't necessary, and certainly not necessary for the neuron to "compete." For example, say an old corporation dies, e.g. Microsoft [2]. Could a new corporation replicate the 1000s of precise products, services, and contracts of the original? Not at all. But replacement corporation could find new things to offer, potentially taking advantage of the economic shortfalls and new demands precipitated by the demise of Microsoft. Eventually the economy returns to full efficiency, though in a slightly different form than before. And just so with neurons- the information passed through the neuron that died will now be in demand by neurons downstream, and this demand can be fulfilled by new connections by the new neuron (or new connections from old neurons, or simply not.) But the information may come from different places, or have slightly different semantic value, or other differences. [3] Brains, like economies, change, and are good at changing gracefully.

[1] At least, as far as we know- with glial cell participation and functional viral capsids and whatever else is going on, anything is possible, I guess.

[2] Example chosen without malice. Honest!

[3] All assuming the competition model of neural organization. Which is a plausible model last I checked, but see [1].

Aside from the other answers; because "being on-call 24/7 and having the ability to safely drive through town at high speed" is a capability just as important as paramedical training, for that role, and who else has it?

Given how often things like this have been happening, it’s no longer “initial,” it’s iterative.

If he’s going to make a run for politics he’s got to cultivate some sort of nickname. Else he’ll wind up being The Zucker in every newspaper appearance.

Whether adult human neurogenesis happens doesn't indicate whether exercise (or growth mindset, or diet, or whatever else) isn't effective; there are plenty of other modes of neuroplasticity that could be modulated by such things. Similar to how the article noted that, despite claims that antidepressants worked via promoting neurogenesis, they still work even in the face of evidence against neurogenesis happening at all.

Even if human neurogenesis turns out to be a complete fable, the implications for actual humans trying to boost their intelligence is minimal. IQ correlates with brain size only modestly, and typical variations in brain size are (I haven't done the math, but I feel fairly confident) an order of magnitude greater than what anyone has claimed adult neurogenesis could produce; simply adding more neurons wasn't going to get you where you wanted to go, regardless. But that's not the only game in town- there are many ways the brain changes itself.

(As it happens, thousands of hopeful nootropic-poppers and brain-trainers haven't been terribly successful at boosting their IQ yet. But it remains a possibility.)

My goodness- built in the sixties, stores several GWh, and has 70% efficiency. Enough of those would solve the curtailment problem altogether.

Not sure how a technology that relies on the availability of titanic quantities of fresh water is going to play out in California, though. :(

Look at the x-axis of that chart- the peak nighttime load is happening at something like 8:30pm. Even at times of the year the sun is still up by then, it's not going to get you much no matter how you swivel.