opaqe

pure python is legit! excellent documentation

Why not ML? Our programming languages course had a unit in ML and the transfer to Haskell after that was not trivial but still a smooth learning curve -- I could read not just getting-start or for-beginner guides.

Would the Amazon turk population, which ive been told is dominated by non-native english speaking users, skew results in an interesting way?

Also, in my experience, my most intense visual images are far more overwhelming than what I would point to as my most powerful verbal thoughts (comparing them just now on an absolute feels weird for some reason). Could the result that visual images tended to be weaker than verbal thoughts be due to the fact that, under lab settings, people don't tend to have their most vivid images? Perhaps there's more variance levels of intensity with visual images as opposed to verbal thoughts. The latter intuitively operates at an on or off basis without so much a gradient, but the results do show some variance.

Mining canonical papers/text to generate standardized tests (SAT/GRE) might be a further step. My guess is that both tests and commercial prep-material are produced by committee.

Any proofs, reference papers, visuals showing the experimental runs? I've dug around the databases department at my uni and I've heard this exact application of ML to query optimization floating around, but never anything substantial, so I'm curious.

Agreed. You could pick a historical thinker at random and spin the same article making leaps into the future. Being self-identified as religious and influenced by God was the norm even well into Enlightenment. This sort of retrospective coronation is the positive version of "judging people without regard for their historical context." You could also pick any historical figure and say how their pro-slavery and anti-feminist thinking "helped unlocked the secrets of ____." But no one would praise or click that article on the face of it.

This was my immediate idea for a comment as well. His "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" book also has an extended discussion on the "Library of Mendel" which I forgot if he included in intuition pumps. But from a programming languages perspective I think the discussion of navigating "design space" in a generalized way is a very powerful abstraction.

I thought this was about videos on YouTube. Maybe this isn't new but my suggestion box gets flooded by videos that are segments of longer content (Louis ck shows/appearances, Zizek lectures). Maybe this is hand-curated stuff by a bunch of independent channels but I'd be curious if this is done algorithmically. At least the video segmentation part.

I noticed the establishment v. non-est. behavior as well. How much of this network property is really a predictive signal more than an explanation for "shock" at the results? What are the conditions for it being one or the other?

Is there a more detailed paper describing the algorithm? The description is very vague in the article. When they pick the two points, is there an evaluation on how much "diversity" increases w/r/t each of the three possible operations, and that's how they choose?

edit: thanks @q_revert for linking the paper

I don't necessarily sympathize with postmodern studies as much as you, but threads like this really don't contribute much to HN and should be more tiresome for people across the board. We should recognize it for the flame-war that it really is, just one that doesn't have a proper representative on one side, i.e. a "community bubble" symptom.

If there's no technical discussion of the algorithm or an interesting bipartisan viewpoint to be had here, then all that's left is bashing that's been done before in past stories.

>In other words people are mostly fine with any entitlements to the poor & disadvantaged as long as it doesn't threaten their way of life or become a competitive element to the comforts & privileges they are accustomed to.

Threats to people's "way of life" is the central idea to your post, which I think is a great springboard for specifically cultural issues that surround UBI. At the very least, cultural inertia is a real barrier to this kind of policy, even if we grant it status of being strictly better economics. The article also fixates on the "people will become lazy"-thinking as a culturally entrenched barrier, but I think your post has other real barriers that are harder to bring to discussion.

>people don't want a handout-receiver...suddenly being able to afford the same niceties of life that they see themselves slaving at their 9-to-5s for.

The "basic income" part of UBI suggests that "niceties of life" are not paid for. How austere that definition - whether it includes your examples of daycare, economy flights, and popular restaurants - is up in the air.

>universal extra $10,000 bump to _absolutely everyone_ regardless of income class ( if that is what they even _mean_ when they say UBI; I doubt it is )

I'm also deeply suspicious of how "universal" we really mean; just consider how the article's "experiment" really samples only from the "best case" of entrepreneurial, well-educated professionals (w/ families).

As for your post, an assumption is that universality w/r/t income is the only meaningful way of looking at it. For example, single and family households have very different "basic needs." Following from the "per-need" basis, reasonably, shouldn't UBI handouts be larger with more dependents? This seems to get to part of your worries, given the examples of daycare, etc. Being young and single, my assumption is that UBI is relative to single living expenses, but the article makes a point about people raising families. I doubt it's economically feasible to pay up-to family household needs for everyone - taxes and social benefits make that distinction. Are there still cultural worries w/r/t UBI that scales on dependents? What does that do to incentives and cultural perception on raising families? Maybe UBI will eliminate income-class related cultural issues that plague us this century, but it'll shift those cultural lines over other lifestyle-related boundaries (i.e. single v. married v. family)?

>People who are unlucky to be earning just enough to be excluded in one way or the other, from these UBI handouts ( which already happen in disguised means and forms, but more on that later [1] ) but not enough - from their wages & other sources of income - to be living a comfortable life will...

This is awkwardly phrased and hard to parse to me. Being excluded from UBI after some amount of income contradicts your later ideas. Also, "work" that pays that low is assumed to be at the margin where either automation eliminates it, or it's so undesirable (flipping patties) you're free to fall back on UBI living to find other undesirable work you like. That's also assuming you really don't have skills, which leads me to ask: do we consider some level of skill-acquisition a basic need and thereby include "education" costs in UBI?

>e) their friends cannot afford to socialize as frequently as they once did ( or worse, have moved to a different part of the country simply because it is no longer affordable to remain ) due to the same wage pressures

I don't know what friends you have, but society as it feels like to me already poses career-advancement choices against staying close to friends, especially those that don't work in the same field. Once you reach some level of career success, the need to maintain it naturally constrains your mobility w/r/t friendship (diversity) in some ways. Having a UBI-line only makes the "some level of career success" explicit when you make more than that line and like the lifestyle. On the other hand, wouldn't UBI let friends be patient about finding work that keeps them together? You and I may argue about the value of our friends, but certainly there are very meaningful friendships out there on the status of "threats to lifestyle" that you insist. But now we've come to a turn: originally, the article claims UBI will incentivize working over "patiently waiting," but w/r/t friendship we have a different case to consider.

I used this to teach myself to code for the first time. It felt very natural just exploring and getting immediate visual feedback with the images I generated. I still use it to generate my desktop background images.

I'm 17 and started teaching myself Python last year when they told me the course at my school was cancelled since only 5 people enrolled. I was incredibly disappointed. I wanted to learn programming because I love computers (of course), but also because I had very few things I attempted to master of my own volition. I felt that much of what I did was fragmented, satisfying an external pressures to succeed in all my academic subjects, nothing I could call a passion. It was a smack in the face when my school wouldn't support my desire to connect with something meaningful.

Fortunately, I picked a hobby that really accommodates self-learning and did as much coding as I could on top of school. Now I'm picking up web programming, looking into using Django and building my own site. What programming really brought to me was a new sense of mastery that originated with personal interest and drive. I think this feeling is what the latter part of the blog started to get at. It overrides any insecurity against geniuses or whatever because you'll be too proud of putting in your own work and too proud of your progress to worry.