obfuscate

And it's a shame that postulating genetic group selection is so attractive, since ISTM that this is a very plausible case of group selection of memes about male and female tasks.

There's a huge difference between molecule-scale quantum chemical phenomena (as in photosynthesis) and quantum computation. Finding the former in the brain would be very cool, but it wouldn't be terribly surprising or revolutionize cognitive science the way the latter would.

It's simple semantics with confusing behavior.

The inconsistency is because, in the generator-expression case, the calls to f() are being interleaved with the iterations of the generator (so the closed-over variable has the 'correct' value when f() is called). If you change this by running the generator to completion first, the behavior is the same as the list case:

  In [1]: lambdas_listgen = list(((lambda: i) for i in range(10)))
  In [2]: [f() for f in lambdas_listgen]
  Out[2]: [9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9]

I've done this using select.

Er, RDS is (a) SQL (b) backed by EBS.

`lsof' is a nice front-end to this particular usage of /proc, and also works on other Unixes (/proc is, I think, a Linux innovation, and absent at least on OS X).

It requires neither.

> That the US's implementation of this law is heavily lopsided in favor of the patent trolls doesn't change the fact that patents incentivize innovation. (Whether they're effective or not is another debate.)

Moving the goalposts.

You can't sever a word from its connotations just by pointing out exceptions.

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http://www.quixey.com/about, http://www.quixey.com/jobs

Quixey is a small startup (private beta, immediately pre-launch) building a search engine for apps across all platforms (mobile, web, desktop, and otherwise). We're looking primarily for engineers to work on everything from front-end JS to infrastructure, as well as a QA lead and UX designer. Experience with our tools (Python 3, jQuery, MongoDB, EC2) is good, but not as important as intelligence and eagerness to learn.

Email: jobs@quixey.com

Many instance types have 2 or 4 virtual disks (presumably on different physical disks).

> calculate its Total Cost of Downtime (which probably isn't very complex for many companies)

Not complex even factoring in reputational damage?

Not sure what you had in mind by "large", but instance storage goes up to 1.7TB: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

I think which physical data center "us-east-1a" etc. corresponds to differs from user to user, to load-balance given that people will probably be more likely to use 1a than the other zones.

> Why are people's identities so tied to spinning metal vs flash storage?

In this case, probably because the original article was needlessly confrontational.

Were both in the same availability zone?

For a data set in the mere tens to hundreds of GB (in MongoDB, if anyone's curious), is there any reason I shouldn't conclude from this that I should use instance storage only (with multi-AZ replication and backups to S3, both of which I would be doing in any case)? Moderately slower recovery in the rare event of an instance failure seems better than the constant possibility of incurable killing performance degradation.

(Edit: I hadn't considered the possibility of somehow killing all my instances through human error. Ouch. That probably warrants one slave on EBS per AZ.)

Well, they can assign reported history of drug use correctly. Do they do anything similar to correct for lying, or just label their data as "self-reports of drug use"?

It seems obvious that both motivations are often present.

> But you can ignore all of that if you put them all in a big bucket called "meta-contrarianism" and write their views off.

I don't see the article doing this, though it could certainly be used that way (http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo...), but as warning about a bias you might see in the world or in yourself. I mean, look at the final paragraph:

"If meta-contrarianism is a real tendency in over-intelligent people, it doesn't mean they should immediately abandon their beliefs; that would just be meta-meta-contrarianism. It means that they need to recognize the meta-contrarian tendency within themselves and so be extra suspicious and careful about a desire to believe something contrary to the prevailing contrarian wisdom, especially if they really enjoy doing so."

Integer factorization is also in BQP due to Shor, no?

Selective (private/charter/magnet) high schools. Otherwise, yeah.

> D) This is trivially, factually incorrect. A 3GHz P4 is cheaper today (in absolute or relative terms) than it was when it was brand new. A Core 2 Duo will give you better performance/dollar than a P4 (which was better than a P3, which was better than a PII, etc).

The parent mentioned the cost of "fabricating that technology", not of processors themselves; this is vague, but AFAIK, fabs are getting more expensive quickly.

> While processing power has grown exponentially the cost of fabricating that technology has continued to increase faster than world GDP.

Note that "Singularity" doesn't always refer to exponential growth (http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools); SIAI in particular focuses on the "intelligence explosion" definition.

> There are any number of threats to our species far more urgent and reality-based than xenocide by a weakly godlike post-singularity AI.

Is this belief based on your familiarity with and assessment of the best(1) arguments(2) for and against Singularity/AI risk? If not, then what? Do you think the idea is absurd enough to confidently dismiss without engaging, and if so, why?

(1) http://lesswrong.com/lw/lw/reversed_stupidity_is_not_intelli...

(2) e.g. http://singinst.org/AIRisk.pdf, http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_...

> Humans don't follow a 24 hour feeding schedule, as it happens.

Regardless, I would think that instability of results under seemingly minor variations in conditions for rats suggests we should drastically reduce our confidence in any generalization of even the seemingly more relevant result.

"Now I have another very important point to make. Errors in base pairing, also known as mutations- are usually very very good. Why? Because 1/3 of errors are bad, 1/3 do absolutely nothing, and 1/3 are good and provide benefits. That means 2/3 of the time- mutations do nothing or help the organism."

This is the same sort of reasoning as "either I win the lottery or I don't, so there's a 50% chance". More mutations are neutral, than harmful, than beneficial.

"an inexplicably moronic hit app"

Tip: Empathy is easier if you don't describe the people you're trying to empathize with using negative-affect terms.

"I'm perfectly capable of inserting all the necessary disclaimers, but I left them out for readability."

If enough people are distracted by their annoyance at un-disclaimed overgeneralizations, you haven't actually increased readability.