neuralk

For Windows devs: remember that some tools and libraries come with bash (and some may not even tell you explicitly).

For instance, msysgit has the vulnerability[1]:

  $ env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c "echo this is a test"
  vulnerable
  this is a test

[1] from the comments on the blog in the OP

Of course research is iterative -- you wouldn't say other fields of math or science haven't had success/breakthroughs just because they are relying on old techniques.

That said, some more recent work comes to mind.

In terms of new algos: planning algorithms, deep learning architectures (ANNs without backprop), reinforcement learning, alife and multi-agent systems.

In terms of applications (which you already hint at): Deep Blue and Watson, both of which are great examples that shouldn't be regarded so trivially. Is the only difference between the "old algorithms" from the 1960s and Watson challenging people on Jeopardy is a matter of margin? No. It's not as if we were nearly there in the 60s and only needed to crank up CPU or RAM speed/storage. Read IBM's paper on it -- it took a complex architecture spanning natural language processing, databases, search, and machine learning. As for Deep Blue, even in the early 90s people said there would never be an AI to beat the best human Chess players. Once it happened, the paradigm shifted and "of course" AI can beat humans at Chess, as if there hadn't been who denied it was possible.

Some of the coolest more recent applications are in the realm of machine learning: self-driving cars, robots that learn to navigate or perform tasks, and image recognition (which has made an immense leap in the past ~2 years).

A third and important viewpoint is academia. In that realm, you'll often hear people give the definition: "AI is search," which would encompass reasoning algorithms, knowledge bases and ontologies like the Semantic Web. Deep Blue and Watson come to mind as the best examples of AI as reasoning through search.

You linked to the wrong thread. I believe you meant this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8161586

Serious question: could they be sued by Hemingway's family for using his name on their product? I mean, if I made an app called "Tolkien" I might realistically run into trouble with his estate.

If you liked this, you may also enjoy Foursquare's visualization of checkins, which shows the pulse of the city and the change in human activities (and which areas are populated) as the day progresses:

New York City http://vimeo.com/75413842

San Francisco http://vimeo.com/75416817

Tokyo http://vimeo.com/75404940

Actually it would be the reverse, since Buddha predates stoicism.

Though it is possible Buddha was partially influenced by pre-Socratic Greek thought and, in turn, later Greek philosophers were influenced by Buddhism (to put it in perspective, Socrates was roughly contemporaneous with Buddha).

It seems the two issues are:

- people rushing to make an Idea Sunday thread/post at midnight

- people unable to find the main Idea Sunday thread

The former issue can be solved by having the whoishiring bot post Idea Sunday, and the latter can be solved by having the post "stickied" to the top of HN. I don't mean at position 1, but at an unnumbered position above that (I realize this is a may seem antithetic to some HNers, but most forums have this ability). That way it can act like an announcement thread; no one will miss it since its at the top, and no one will race to make it first since only whoishiring can post it.

An additional benefit would be that future "Who is hiring?" posts could also be posted in the same place, so everyone can find it more easily.

All told, I've really enjoyed the Idea Sunday posts, so I hope dang will rethink cancelling the experiment. As to the point that they are growing less interesting with regularity, I think a monthly or twice-monthly post may make more sense than a weekly one.

I can't believe this is (currently) the top post.

You've made an egregious false equivalency here. I don't care if the people I interact with individually or personally know that I am pregnant. I care that some company I've never heard of is deducing I am pregnant from information I'd like to be private, and then subsequently selling and doing who-knows-what with that knowledge.

>If you think it's easy for people to find out that someone is pregnant now, it was absolutely effortless in 1714.

Was it "absolutely effortless" in 1714 for an employee at a company in China to find out a woman in France was pregnant? Because THAT would be equivalent to what the author of the article is discussing. Or even to make it local: would the sellers in the town market know my personal interest if I didn't tell them? No, they would not. At least, not without espionage, which is essentially what a lot of the "big data" surrounding targeted advertising amounts to.

>In the past there was almost no privacy for anyone.

This is a massive canard. You are taking privacy to mean "not being spotted/recognized/tracked by people around you in daily life" but that is not "privacy" as the author or almost anyone defines it because the privacy issues of today are unique to today. Not only is privacy of the present fundamentally different from the past because of technology, but privacy in this context is about the privacy between individuals and corporations.

>The only thing stopping us is our own desire to participate in services and online communities designed specifically to collect and broadcast information about ourselves.

As others have pointed out, it seems like you didn't read the article. You cannot opt out without becoming Other.

This is a great idea. I would use it. In fact, I want to build it! I've been reading about sentiment analysis as part of my research, and I had this idea literally the other day: I was looking for laptop batteries and I did not have the patience to search through some N number of Amazon/eBay/other storefronts. The second issue was the fact reviews range from 1 star to 5 star on the same product BUT a crucial fact was that more recent reviews are more relevant (for instance, if everyone from the past 3 months is rating it 1 star, vs. only 5 star where all previous bad reviews were from 3+ years ago).

So how would you define sentiment? A single score on a range from "good" to "bad"? Multidimensional, like a range of emotions? A major problem I've found in sentiment analysis literature that some assumptions/models yield limited/poor results even if algorithms are good.

Have you started working on this? I'd be happy to discuss it or your ideas some more.

>farm to plate automation

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you referring to a specific technology (like Soylent) or just automating the process of growing, harvesting, and distributing food?

>My children are doing GCHQ sponsored mathematics work (cryptography challenges) at the age of 10 probably in the vain hope that they will eventually see this as normal and be recruited before they have a chance to question the ethics of it all.

What? Care to elaborate? (I'm American if that explains why I have no idea what you are referring to)

In some sense, he is right.

With writing, people did not develop memories as powerful as they did when traditions were oral -- there was no need. How many people can recite epic poems or plays from memory, let alone the Odyssey? Extremely few could these days, relatively few could 1000 years ago, and many more could 2000+ years ago. And you can bet that those who developed powerful memories in the time of Socrates would be among the most wise and cultured, so his complaint is not an unreasonable one to make. Besides, Socrates was perennially the devil's advocate and its not impossible if you had caught him on a different day he would've argued the opposite case.

Taking it further, his quote applies equally to the advent of the internet, especially search engines. Many people outsource their memory to Google -- they will even look up things on their phone in the middle of a conversation because they've forgotten its name.

Has there been any political action in the UK yet? I'm American and hadn't heard of any British politicians speaking out against GCHQ.

> By contrast, the parallels to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and living in a turnkey fascist state are most unpersuasive.

Why? The possibility of a turnkey fascist state is very real. You need only look to history to see how many leaders, once elected, completely ignored all laws and constitutions and legislating bodies to declare martial law and institute a tyranny. How can you say that you aren't worried about that, and the power of a surveillance apparatus in the hands of such a leader?

As the person whose comment was singled out, can you explain how was my comment "defending spying that is clearly out of control"? I wasn't intentionally. As pointed out below, I assumed the GP knew of a story that I didn't, so I wanted to learn about it.

I just thought he was referencing something I was not familiar with, not paraphrasing something I was.

> are you playing some kind of semantic game ... because if so, i'm thinking you might be keith alexander?

You are reading too much into my question. Sometimes a question is just a question and there's no need to pitch a battle over it.

Funny, that doesn't answer my question. I was already aware of the letter released by Senator Grassley[1] and none of the stories in that letter match those referenced by the GP.

So, again, can I get a link to that story?

[1] http://www.grassley.senate.gov/judiciary/upload/NSA-Surveill...

>Hence the guy who spied on his ex for years without being caught.

Can I get a link to that story?

I'm not sure how much you can really blame Facebook or Google here. My understanding is that a corporation is legally compelled to comply with a National Security Letter if it receives one, which is far from voluntary collusion.

Maybe I am missing something, but I don't see where your dissatisfaction is coming from.

>Churchill was distinctly batshit

That's simply balderdash. Churchill was not only a brilliant politician, but an extremely witty and accomplished writer, thinker, and artist. He even received the Nobel prize ... for literature[1].

If you'd like to explain why you think he is "batshit" I'd love to hear it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill

Brilliant, hilarious, and either scarily accurate or perfect satire:

  Ask HN: I might be a spook

  Show HN: I'm tired of seeing

  Mark Cuban: If you want to get rich, stop being a fucking joker

  Google+ is now available as an alpha release (1991)

  Apple announces Mac OS X mouse annoyances

They have also increasingly had more of a Green agenda, which (although I am sympathetic with) is troubling because it jeopardizes their credibility. Specifically, I have seen them rate worse quality products higher than others merely for being green.

Data science sure sounds sexier...ish.

The irony of people who use the "damned lies and statistics" quote snidely is that the "statistics" part is not referring to the field Statistics but the plural version of the noun statistics, which of course are easily abused. The field of Statistics is all about NOT abusing statistics.

With respect to that Twain/Disraeli quote, my friend who is a professor of statistics tells me that he cannot go to a party and say what he does for a living without someone repeating it smirkingly.

When you say "playable by humans," what do you mean?

If you mean "physically capable of being played by a human" then I'd say that a large majority of popular music right now is unplayable by humans, simply due to the sheer amount of digital production that goes into them. Many genres of electronic music fit in this category, but while being "unplayable," all clearly have an author (the composer/producer) and an intent (no matter how shallow or profound).

But if you meant "playable by humans" on a subtler level, I then ask:

Is music coming from a radio playable by humans? Is music written on a sheet playable by humans? Both lack an immediate human operator that is "playing" them, yet despite this difference of media, both are valid forms of music that clearly communicate the intent of a human soul (the former through the radio device, the latter through symbols).

I'd argue that using the computer/algorithm used to generate the black MIDI is an instrument like any other. Maybe you were asking something more along the lines of: how valuable is music that is generated arbitrarily or randomly by a computer algorithm, and does it contain "soul" like music produced explicitly by humans? That is a philosophical question about the nature of art and computational creativity, perhaps without an answer.

No, the police are doing the policing, and the private companies are supplying the technology.

There is nothing in the article for you to believe otherwise (that the tech companies are doing the policing or any other scenario).

The "right" decision depends on more information. For example, hitting on 20 is the right decision if you are betting no money or money that isn't your own.

True, but I believe the argument still stands for other ML algorithms, such as support vector machines. There is no way to query directly why the SVM maps an instance to a label.