spin

Honestly, if I'm walking down the street and I see a cop, I tend to ... behave ... better. (Not that I go around looking for trouble or anything.) If there's a cop watching, it doesn't really matter to me whether or not he's got a camera on his glasses; either way, I'm being watched.

If this cuts down on police abuse (and other wasteful crap), then I'd say the pluses outweigh the minuses.

This is useful for trying to understand other people. You should always try to figure out how/why a person came to their particular worldview.

But in a government "of the people, by the people, for the people", it is The People who have final say.

(edit: yes, I am aware that this particular incident happened in England, not the U.S....)

I wonder, though, if perhaps a lot of "power decisions" are made at the margin.

(I mean "making decisions at the margin" in the way that economists use the term. For example: I wish cheese was free. But, in real life, I have a choice between $2.49 cheese and $2.19 cheese. So I buy the cheaper cheese, not the free cheese. Because the free cheese doesn't exist.)

If the President has to make small decisions about "the lesser of two evils", then how much power does he really have?

For example: He said he would close Guantanamo Bay, but didn't. One theory is that he was full of shit. He's just a tool. Another theory is that there wasn't the political capital to accomplish such a thing. As in: there was enough push-back from his own party... he didn't want to alienate some of his friends... as in, he couldn't afford to. So he says: "Screw it. A couple hundred people in hell isn't worth my career if I can focus on other things that can benefit more people."

(I'm not trying to be an apologist for Obama here. I think Washington is pretty horribly corrupt in both parties...)

So I'm left to wonder: Sure, no smart politician is going to burn his own career for a couple hundred foreigners that the citizens hate anyway (I guess...). But why is Gitmo still open? What does it accomplish? (I keep going around in circles trying to figure out why anyone loves Gitmo...)

A president "spends power" at the margins. He spent a lot of power on Obamacare. (You call in favors, you do the horse-trading...) But he has spent no power against the "Security Industrial Complex". I guess it's not something that he cares to achieve. People are calling it "Bush's 4th term". I understand the contractors profit from "Fear of Terrorists". And I'm sure there are some military / intelligence people who are actually hard-core about it. But, outside of that.... who the fuck loves it? I just don't get it... Washington has wrapped itself into a self-sustaining engine of fear...

... oy vey. And here we're not supposed to be getting all political on HN... :-/

From the article:

"No one has willfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacies," he said. "There were no mistakes like that at all."

... then why did they lie about it to congress?

mbed + ethernet is wonderful. If you need some firmware for such a thing, may I suggest my own github:

  https://github.com/mfassler/eFirmata

The code is still a bit messy, but I'm still actively working on it. (I've got a bunch of changes that I haven't checked in yet.)

My programming consists of 99% Javascript, ie, manipulating Javascript objects. The data structures (ie objects) translate flawlessly into JSON (I just gotta remember the quotes around the keys, is all...). Switching my brain from Javascript to the-data-across-the-network (and back) requires practically no effort at all, because it's the same thing.

EDIT:

> Maybe we need jQuery for XML?

Adding more layers of complexity to deal with complexity? I am further convinced that XML is bloated and bureaucratic. I am so happy that modern browsers let met get away from jQuery. Plain, vanilla JS is better for the soul.

------- Quoting the parent:

This turns into this beautiful JSON:

    [
      "users": [
	{
	  "id": "abc",
	  "phoneNos": [
	    { "type": "home", "value": "123456789" }, 
	    { "type": "work", "value": "321654987" }
	  ]
	}
      ]
    ]

------ ... endquote.

That's a strange, contrived example. In Javascript, I would write it like this:

user = {id: "abc", homePhone: "123456789", workPhone: "321654987"};

(And the next time that object goes across the network, my libraries will be nice enough to put the quotes around the keys for me.)

I don't want to start some kind of "XML vs JSON" holy war, but I really do prefer JSON over XML because of how compact and readable it is.

I really don't see JSON as a passing trend, I see it as (almost) the most compact, succint way to express hashmaps in both human-readable and machine-readable form. (XML is big, bloated, and bureaucratic.)

(It's tragic that Crockford left in all the qoutes around the keys, though. We really don't need to type those quotes.)

For the past couple of years, I really have been wishing for an "XMPP, but built on JSON, not XML". Really. I want this.

> "I am guilty of contributing to terrorism and the purposeful killing of innocent woman and children civilians?"

How do you know this? Has he had a trial?

Citation needed.

Proud to be an American.

FWIW -- the Wikipedia article on MBTI gives several links to several studies that argue that the MBTI isn't very useful...

I agree that it shouldn't be uncritically accepted. We need to measure, statistically, just how accurate it is, and for what.

Sorry to nitpick, but:

> every attribute but introversion seems pretty meaningless

Every attribute is defined. In fact, every question on the test assigns one point to one attribute. Therefore, implicitly, every question is an example of one attribute and a rejection of the supposed opposite attribute.

But you're right -- too often it's treated like astrology. Too often, people are more concerned with assigning categories than with understanding people and what makes them tick.

"Myres Briggs was not based on science, but Jungian pseudo-science. It's since morphed from an interesting theory (which happened to be mostly incorrect) to a pop-culture superstition."

Just because something starts from intuition, does not make it non-science. (Although, I suppose that's usually the case... there's plenty of pseudo-science to go around.) I've heard that Maxwell was motivated by "elegance" when he came up with Maxwell's equations.

The question is: does it stand the test of scientific rigor?

You said that Jung's theory "happened to be mostly incorrect". Do you have links to research on this? I am genuinely curious.

I think that the Myers-Briggs temperament sorter can and should be subjected to scientific scrutiny.

Let me propose a hypothetical personality test: "Do you prefer Pepsi or Coke?" From here, we can do simple statistical correlations. Suppose we dug a little deeper and discovered that: 62% of the people who prefer Coke prefer going to movies over sports games on Friday night. 71% of the people who prefer Pepsi prefer going to sports games over going to the movies on Saturdays. (This is a hypothetical example that I just invented in my head.)

There might be a deeper reason for this... Coke advertises at movie theaters like crazy, and Pepsi advertises at sporting events like crazy. Or whatever.

So... if you are oblivious to the underlying science of the questionnaire, and if you answer honestly, then I can use basic statistics to guess something about your personality, at above chance levels.

(BTW, these are just preferences. Just because you prefer Pepsi doesn't mean that you don't occasionally enjoy a Coke, etc.)

Likewise, there could be a study of the Myers-Briggs temperament sorter. (For those who don't know, the Myers-Briggs temperament sorter has four dimensions: Extrovert-vs-Introvert, iNtuitive-vs-Sensing, Feeling-vs-Thinking, Perceptive-vs-Judging.) We can do plain-old statistical correlations between people's answers on the test and their life choices. Are "SJ"s more likely to become police officers or school teachers? Are "NT"s more likely to become programmers or scientists? (And/or, if they don't become those things, do they wish that they did?)

It's a straight-forward question to put this onto rigorous scientific grounding. I'm curious if this has been done yet... (you said that it "happened to be mostly incorrect"... do you have links to research papers?)

I consider myself to be pretty introverted, but I find that, in purely social situations, I can get along rather well with extroverts so long they respect my quietness. When someone intelligent and funny likes to be in the spotlight, I'm usually happy to let them.

It's when people expect the conversation to be equal (we each take turns asking and answering the same boring questions about "so what do you do?" and that sort of thing) that I get exhausted.

(Actually, though... I guess either way it depends largely on the "intelligent and funny" aspect. Boring people are boring people...)

At work? Please don't interrupt me... I'm working. (or... heh, posting to HN, as the case may be... :-)

Deep neural networks are now being developed for use in Google's speech recognition tools and Microsoft's. Microsoft claims a 30% increase in accuracy by using deep neural networks (developed in cooperation with Hinton's group at U Toronto)...

You can play with a Python version of this same algorithm (cd for rbm) here: https://github.com/Wizcorp/Eruditio

(I wrote it... :-)

For the past few years, I've had this idea of creating some kind of hackerspace. The number one rule(s) would be: You must build something original. Or you must be learning how to build things. Software, hardware... whatever. If you don't make then you are not welcome.

I've never been to a hackathon, but I wonder if this is the problem when the author says "They exploit developers."

This is just one anecdote here:

I am a physics graduate of a state school. I thought my physics program was excellent. I have since studied some additional math from MIT's OpenCourseWare and some machine-learning classes from Coursera. In my opinion, the quality of the classes are roughly the same.

But what I have noticed is that a lot more of the original research comes from the big-name universities. (I suppose that professors compete to go where the most funding is, and also where they can get access to the best grad students.) If I wanted to get a PhD in machine-learning, I'd most want to go to U.Toronto or UCL (University College London). Because that's where the action is.

As a graduate student, if I'm studying the xyz algorithm, I might be learning it from the guy who invented the xyz algorithm. (As well as surrounded by grad students and post-docs who are studying the next version of the xyz algorithm.)

I suppose that, in the STEM fields, there's a trickle-down effect to the undergrads. Surely there's more energy in studying something right where it's being invented.

I have to agree. You need to look at the quality of the people who like you vs hate you.

There's plenty of haters on the Internet. As jrockway said (just a couple comments up): "If you do something, chances are someone hates you. Why? They are jealous that you are getting attention instead of them."

I heard a metaphor once: You've got a bucket full of crabs. If one crab tries to crawl up and out of the bucket, the other crabs drag him back down.

Try your best to ignore the haters.

I don't see how that's relevant to my main point: Important People can purchase immunity. The laws simply don't apply to them. The telecoms broke the law, then purchased retroactive immunity after the fact.

> unsubstantiated hand waving about how the system is "bought."

On December 16, 2005, The New York Times reported that the Bush administration was spying on American citizens without a warrant. Most of the major Telecoms were participants in this massive, warrantless eavesdropping system. So the EFF and the ACLU filed lawsuits against these telecoms. Federal courts began ruling against the telecoms (Yay! Democracy in action!).

So the telecoms "bought" some lawmakers. In July, 2008, the senate passed H.R. 6304 which provided retro-active immunity to telephone companies that participated in the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program.

ie: This is not unsubstantiated. This is not hand-waving. The system was "bought".

Since then, congress doesn't even bother with immunity any more. Both Cheney and Bush have admitted on national television that they authorized torture. (Torture is still illegal in the U.S.: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2340 -- that's a specific law passed by a democratic system.) And yet no one was ever investigated or arrested or anything. Ho hum.

Obama now has a "kill list" that he personally signs. He can declare someone to die, without a court or a trial. That sounds like "monarchy" to me, not "democracy". ("Off with his head!")

Based on these and other events, as far as I can tell, at a federal level, we don't really have a democracy anymore. There's no democracy to uphold or respect. If you're a Washington insider, protecting Washington power, then anything goes -- spying on American citizens, torture, invading countries, killing people.

But if you threaten Washington power, then you will be hounded by prosecutors in the name of "justice". It's too bad Aaaron Swartz couldn't buy himself some retroactive immunity.

But when HSBC helps Iranians launder money, that gets a free pass?

You said "I'm not saying he deserves life in prison or anything..." that's exactly my point. Important People get a free pass. Low-level geeks get crushed under the full weight of the law.

"...that one of these prosecutors would also take their life?"

An eye for an eye. Being passive doesn't seem to bring any justice.

If you invade Iraq based on flimsy (at best) evidence, there are no consequences. If you sit in an office in Washington DC and order the torture of prisoners (which is still illegal in the US) there are no consequences. If you wreck the economy, there are no consequences. (This just in: HSBC gets a free pass for money-laundering.)

But if you're a low-level geek (Bradley Manning, John Kiriakou, Aaron Swartz) then you will be crushed under the full weight of the law.

Important People don't go to prison. Low-level geeks with a conscience go to prison. Or have their lives completely ruined.

They have no empathy or respect for us? I have no empathy or respect for them. Harass her until she commits suicide. Washington is full of sick-and-twisted freaks. We should stand as a perfect mirror to their moral crimes.

I totally agree with this.

Children play without self-consciousness. ie, they don't think about what other people think or what they're trying to accomplish.

Children play for fun. This is where creativity starts.

From the article, some of his money comes from Youtube ads, which I don't think would exist if it weren't for traditional copyright laws. (ie, Youtube wouldn't be giving him a cut of the ad revenue if it weren't for copyright.)

Still... Kudos to him for not using draconian enforcement, yet still making lots of money.

By your rhetorical question ("Do they also control the media?") I assume that you're trying to paint sk5t as some kind of conspiracy nut.

sk5t's comment was: "My perception is that Zionists are a very powerful special interest group." Which strikes me as a calm, rational opinion. (Whether or not you or I agree with it is another matter...)

I have to agree with this. There's time and there's money. After graduating from college, I've taken a lot of time to re-learn math slowly. I've also studied a lot of neuroscience and machine learning on my own time. I also quit computers and taught English for two years and moved to a foreign country and spent some time working on my people skills. (Sadly, I'm back to computers now, with a "normal" job...)

For me, I'm happy that I invested my time into myself, rather than investing money into some mutual funds or something. Very happy.

YMMV.

This is a neat idea. I just rented an apartment in Tokyo. My Japanese is not that great, so when going through the lease, the realtor and I sat down with Google Translate* to go through all the legalese. We had the exact same sort of "wtf?" moments that the author describes -- I can deal with regular conversation, but legal terms oftentimes have odd meanings compared to how regular people talk...

(*actually, it was something else, I don't remember the brand, but exactly the same concept as Google Translate)

What you say makes me think about Nigeria, as well. Historically, most of their wealth has come from oil, and up until 1999, they were ruled over by a corrupt military. Consequently, it seems to me that Nigeria's "entrepreneurial" culture is all about "getting money from rich people", rather than creating new things that people value.

I think that there are different types of learning, which I think are correlated with different brain areas.

For example, learning to ride a bike likely involves the cerebellum (the chunk way in the back, bottom). The cerebellum is involved in balance and coordination. (People who have damage to their cerebellum still have normal consciousness, but they become very un-coordinated and clumsy.) It's likely that you cannot just read a book and "download" that knowledge into the cerebellum. So skills requiring balance and coordination (riding a bicycle, swimming, sky-diving) must be learned by doing.

Compare that to knowledge that exists in our conscious minds. This knowledge likely exists in the neocortex. If we are conscious of the knowledge, then we likely can read a book and incorporate that knowledge into our own thoughts.

I suppose there are some professions that require a mix of skills. maeon3 brought up brain surgery. Surgeons read a lot of books, but they also practice their cutting skills on cadavers.

But overall, I agree with the concept behind studentrnd.org. "Doing things for yourself" is often a better way to learn. Plus, one of the points they make in this article: the first person to do something (invent the lightbulb, etc) didn't have anyone to learn from; they had to figure things out for themselves.

(Plus, I have my own personal biases: I'm sick of all the hand-holding that goes on in the modern world. Everyone has to take a class for anything, and time is always scheduled... whatever happened to just living your own life and trying things out for yourself? Build your own desk even though you could just buy one from the store... simply because it's fun to just do things for yourself... many people enjoy cooking their own food, etc...)