ThisIBereave

the closest computational equivalent to writing that sentence we have today involves executing a model with 1.5 billion parameters. (and I couldn't find an estimate of the energy cost of that)

Nor should we accept false equivalencies.

Interesting implementation detail

while "pigs" != "fly":

Citation needed.

Agreed. I was definitely expecting a reference, and I was confused that the table of contents listed the authors & their positions before mentioning the title of the chapter.

I lived in China for 6 months and saw plenty of cops with guns and saw undercover cops roughly throw around a street vendor who had gotten too close to the forbidden city for their liking. Your view here seems to be willfully obscured.

Having your opinion formed by the media is a necessity of living in a world where you can't get first hand information for everything, i.e. a constraint imposed by reality. the difference is that in the west you can choose what media you want to pay attention to, and the media itself is free to report what it wants.

Previous discussion of this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8901357

Maybe this works for people in finance, but I can't see it being useful otherwise. The concept you're using as an analogy just isn't widely known.

It should be noted that public github repos are _not_ public domain and not even necessarily open source unless the author specifies a license.

Nice! Now I just need someone to make an emacs mode that does this.

I like the look of your mountain ranges. Is that done using a published method or something of your own devising?

As the poster above mentioned, Methane has a greater immediate impact, but it only stays in the atmosphere "for 11-12 years"[1], making it a relatively short term problem. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for "approximately 100 years"[2].

1: http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/evidence/methane.shtml 2: http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/evidence/carbon_dioxide.shtml

From Wikipedia[1], "In the past 540 million years there have been five major events when over 50% of animal species died." So if your measure for bio-diversity is the number of unique animal species, it dropped by half at each mass extinction event. The events only reflect a drop in the diversity of animal species as this is an "easily observed, biologically complex component of the biosphere", so the overall change in bio-diversity could be lesser or greater.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

If anyone else was curious about Scott's usage of "God" in this lecture, he talks about it here[1]. TLDR: they are "tongue-in-cheek references to an Einsteinian God."

1: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=189

>Right now Liberia has about the population and land area of Virginia, which means it's already overpopulated.

First, that assumes Virginia is 'optimally populated'.

Second, according to Google, the population of Liberia is 4.294 million (2013) and the population of Virginia is 8.186 million (2012), so using your Virginia-baseline, Liberia can about double its population before being considered over-populated. The Indian state of Kerala, meanwhile, has 34.8 million (2012) people in a smaller area (~38k mi^2 vs ~43k mi^2).

Do you mean PARC circa 1970s?

The drivers have to pay for their own insurance, so it's not that. Hard to see how a background check requires 20% of all revenue.

There certainly does seem to be a lot of political posturing going on, but I don't think it is coming from the scientists.

It can be very difficult here to get by without knowing chinese unless you live in a foreigner-friendly area (i.e. a tourist area or near a university).

I'd suggest using a tour company if you want to travel more widely. Having a translator at least would be very valuable.

"He had no idea who was behind it until last August, when he provided malware samples to a security firm at the request of a Bloomberg reporter. A forensic analysis of the malware by Joe Stewart, a threat expert at Atlanta-based Dell SecureWorks, identified the intruders who rifled Solid Oak’s networks as a team of Shanghai- based hackers involved in a string of sensitive national security-related breaches going back years."

The HN reaction to this story is pretty sad, I have to say.

Yes, journalists are poor at providing technical coverage. That's not really their job.

Yes, this guy could have created a more secure network system, but if a government hacking group comes after you, you will likely not do any better.

One of these, at least, is supported by a pretty weird edit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&diff=51...

"stealing other's content" that was completely user generated...

Yes, but what you're providing is _not_ the Google Knowledge graph. You should not claim that you are.

You really have to be a member of the clueless aristocrat club to write for Forbes.

"Two million bucks is the great dividing line between middle-class comfort and worry in America right now. That $2 million is $100,000 in income, if you base it on an aftertax 5%."

Obviously everyone in the middle class is sitting on $2 million in wealth.

Hah, don't mind my snarky comment. Just get these kids off my lawn.

How I Advertised All My Websites To YCombinator

Google Closure is what I'm talking about too. However, it's important to know _which_ Google Closure, as there are a number of components. It seems that the component most used in ClojureScript is the JavaScript optimizer, which is most likely just run as a post-processing step.

Of course, ClojureScript could also be using the Closure Library within the code, which would integrate Closure deeper into the system.

I presume Closure is only being used as a post-processing step to optimize the javascript that's produced.