bluekeybox

Yeah, that New Zealand imperialism has been getting out of hand lately.

No, he's not.

while I don't think it's automatic that Kaspersky would do the Russ gov 'favors'

What's with this amazing inability of us Westerners to learn from past mistakes and endless optimism about benevolent intention of others? You'd think we would have corrected this by now, eg. after http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/russiago.... Personally FYI, I understand the optimism, but less so the inability to learn.

TL;DR Sorry, it's automatic. No such thing as ex-KGB. [/End of rant].

There is a brilliant new book (albeit somewhat advanced) that I don't see in this list: Introduction to Python for Econometrics, Statistics and Data Analysis (2014) by Kevin Sheppard. PDF available for free here: https://www.kevinsheppard.com/images/0/09/Python_introductio...

you may not want the enemy to know you're sending a fleet of fighter jets in their direction.

Nobody pointed this out yet. It would be very interesting to keep finding such perturbations that mess up learning and repeatedly add the new-found examples to the training set, retraining the model in the process. I wonder if after a finite number of iterations the resulting model would be near-optimal (impossible to perturb without losing its human recognizability) -- or, if this is impossible, if we could derive some proofs for why precisely this is impossible.

Related and a very good BBC documentary on the role (and tragedy) of engineering and planning in the USSR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3gwyHNo7MI

Amazing, thank you for this link.

You don't understand my point. If you look at human psychology, things connected to power are often fascinating, but not always in the "I'm going to get the other guy and beat the shit of him" way. Young boys are fascinated with toy helicopters, trucks, army soldiers, and yes, spaceships, but they aren't being evil/scheming about it. For them, it's just a game. There are two levels of fascination with power: a) the childish "ooh that's cool" and b) the adult "hmm, we would be a pretty powerful nation/team/individuals if we got hold of it".

But the underlying reason why something is fascinating -- because it is connected with power -- doesn't change. So it is hypocritical to claim that "I want this and that, and my intention are innocent and sincere" when the object of your desire is a helicopter gunship. Now, something flying at 7.8 km per second is potentially far more dangerous than a helicopter gunship.

In other words, wanting space exploration to be free of politics is essentially wanting power to be free of politics. Which is a bit oxymoronic. As soon as your exploration produces something interesting, be it knowledge, materials, or even location, someone else is going to want it for themselves.

Being of strategic value, space was political from day one. Nothing ever done in space was entirely apolitical. AAMOF, there would be no exploration at all without politics. So get used to it.

Umm, have you been living under a rock during the past two months?

Rogozin's twitter timeline is pretty much designed to provoke US administration (he has Russian and English feeds, both equally ridiculous). It isn't just for "internal consumption" anymore. It's Cold War 2.0, kids, at least as Kremlin sees it. And Rogozin isn't some small potatoes in Russian admin.

Not surprising, considering that, recently, Putin has implied, half-jokingly, that the Internet is a CIA plot (Yandex stock fell almost instantly as that happened).

Russian state TV is complete Volksempfänger at the moment.

I think you wouldn't be downvoted if you just wrote, "Non-optional bicycle lanes make this unavoidable".

Eich is far from the first. The mob's appetite for blood is greater than you think:

* http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/donglegate-adria-richar...

* http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/pr-executive-j...

* http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/09/10/busines...

* http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/30/paul-graham-responds-to-cri...

You are not seeing the full picture. There is no "gay mafia". I have gay friends who are wonderful people, and I support their right to marry. Some of my biggest idols in tech are gay. What scares me, however, is that the same confrontational tactics that are used to police tech sector against you-name-it people who had made a silly or insensitive joke about women or donated a couple of bucks to some non-PC campaign -- those same confrontational, entryist tactics were used in the early 20th century by Lenin and his supporters, and we all know where that led.

It's not the message, it's how it is delivered.

I didn't take it personally, was just having fun with words and certain populist stereotypes.

What you have concluded in you comment can be summed up in one word - short-sightedness.

No. My conclusion was predicated on a belief that it is better that we have our Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle in the next 100-200 years rather than in the next 1000-2000. If you have budget of several tens of billions and you want to be judicious where you invest, it is unrealistic to expect to create magic in Africa over 100-200 years. In that situation the best you could hope to achieve for that continent is to invest in medicine aka what Bill Gates is doing, and hope that it will help turn the continent from 3rd world to something like Mexico (which is still far from great). And then what hope do you have that once all the work is done that people there won't elect someone like Chavez and start beating up students at local universities with baseball bats?

you whitewash over the fact that we ARE in fact much much better-off than most people who have ever lived

Perhaps yes, but not if you listen to egalitarian vanguard. Just talk to OWS participants if you don't believe me. Though if we are indeed better off, how much of that is a function of technology rather than egalitarianism?

you are looking for profit

What do you mean by "looking for profit"? As I said, my (hypothetical) motives are purely altruistic. I have fifty billion dollars and I am willing to spend them all to the last penny. All I want in return is the next Plato/Aristotle/Socrates within the next 100-200 years. Is that too much to ask? How do you interpret this motivation as "profit"? Who profits?

There is no immediate pressure on us to produce Aristotles et. al. because they are not going to bring immediate benefit

First of all, it could be argued that someone like Plato has made a huge contribution to Greek and Roman civilizations. Aristotle was the personal tutor of Alexander the Great for God's sake. These individuals contributed tremendously, both within their lifetimes and in the millennia after. Second, even if you discount the influence these people had in the Ancient world, and assume that the majority of it is felt 1000 years after their death, then still it is better to have them sooner rather than later. For that means waiting 1000 years for the next step in our civilization rather than 2000 years.

Darwinism requires diversity. Hence it is simply better to invest in disadvantaged

Why not invest in diverse but advantaged then? How is it that you jump from one proposition to the other (i.e. that diversity equals disadvantaged)?

the truth is that you are coming from a position of an individual with significant wealth who is looking for next Aristotle to increase his personal wealth by taking his

No. We both agree that the next Aristotle probably wouldn't be the next billionaire. He will probably not be a poor man, but it is highly unlikely that he will turn my fifty billion into fifty trillion.

All the arguments are simply dressings to make that short-sightedness and greed look good.

There! Just add that I'm a Zionist homosexual free-masonic Illuminati overlord. Perhaps you are that OWS supporter I mentioned above? In which case, I don't even have to invoke one as a literary device!

Thank you for your response. You bring up some good points, but I would like to contest others.

First, I agree that humans should probably not "devolve" into flowers (although "devolve" is a funny word -- technically, evolution, like entropy, is a one-way process, where even parasites can be said to evolve in their own way).

Second, I agree that exceptional individuals like the Greek scholars you mentioned contributed enormously to the human progress in the past two thousand years.

Third, I agree that average human condition in Africa is currently deplorable compared to average human condition on all other Earth's continents.

Where we seem to disagree is in the way we frame our questions and our solutions. Assuming I am an individual of significant wealth with altruistic motives, I would like to produce as many Aristotles, Platos, and Socrates in as short of a time frame as possible. Africa seems like a terrible, terrible place to invest my money with that goal in mind. First, as an individual investor, I can only invest during a timeframe of no more than approximately 20-30 years. Second, even if I open a foundation in my name that would continue doing my work after my death for centuries, Africa still looks bad (the worst in fact) because what happens if, for example, the country I invest in is taken over by a dictator or a warlord some fifty years from now (of which there is an extremely high risk throughout the entire continent of Africa) who brings the country back to the Middle Age or worse, while taking advantage of the invested results. Dictators have a common tendency of "cutting the tall poppies" when they come to power, which means that the African Aristotle I invested into will most likely be imprisoned or dead before he even becomes anything close to Aristotle.

I (as well as my foundation) would get a much better return on investment in a country like Romania that is "almost there" in terms of development and whose political situation is kept secure by a strong supranational organization like EU or NATO.

Finally, let me explain what I mean by the difference between individual and supra-individual. If you look at humanity's history over the past 3000 years, you will see that our attitude to things concerning politics was very different throughout. We had had pluralistic societies like Ancient Greece which simultaneously condoned slavery. Aristotle, for example, believed that certain individuals are superior "by natural right", and that others were better off serving their superiors, i.e. he was anti-egalitarian. I consider myself more egalitarian than Aristotle was, however I do not believe that our current fashion of rather extreme egalitarianism represents some final development; to me it appears as more of a "moral fashion" that always occurs at a certain phase of an outward wave of what I call "literatization" (as opposed to "civilization").

So to an individual mind in the early 21st century some truths (such as that societies have to be structured in one way and not another) may seem to be self-evident, but that's because an individual is always anchored to his or her historical epoch. Moreover, the desire to structure the society in a particular way seems to follow one's biological idiosyncrasies. For example, the primary driver of intellectual activities of a tall person may be an internalized wish to arrange the society in such a way that tall people are not discriminated against. Similarly, the primary driver of intellectual activities of a department of economics of a country X might be a motivation that the elite of that country stays in power.

For that reason, I tend not to trust neither egalitarians nor anti-egalitarians when it comes to evaluating whether a particular society is good or bad. Unfortunately, the only truly useful measure of a society's success (its ability to spread itself while maximizing the number of potential paths of realization of its individuals) is somewhat beyond of what can be measured over one's lifetime. So I tend to prefer to stay close to natural laws, and assume that if a particular gamete is "lucky", it is perhaps lucky for some reason that is unknowable to me.

Philosophical question (don't take offense, please):

Why should we be rewarding "unlucky" gametes?

Please note that I don't consider the likely answer "because they have something useful to contribute to society" as a good one because it assumes that one individual mind (with all its hopes and biases) can comprehend what is really good for society in the long run (think thousands or tens of thousands of years).

Now Mark Jason Dominus is often wrong when it comes to his political opinions, but he's rarely wrong about programming, and your tone is just way too negative for seemingly no reason. Of course he's missing selection bias. That kind of goes with being MJD. So?

Because most people would rather support their allies and people who like them, rather than playing the hand of people who hate them. This is actually a tragic situation. I don't want to comment further.

Absolutely shameful that this is the top comment. People on HN have no idea about geopolitics and what danger Russia represents to countries like Poland and the Baltics. The West should now be speaking in unified voice and pressuring Russia to give up Kaliningrad. No patience anymore for objectivity.

Oh and it's fucking rich to complain about supposedly fascistic tendencies of Putin's opposition when it is Putin himself who says things like, "Russia doesn't need minorities. Minorities need Russia." Fucking hypocrites.

The US involvement in in the Ukrainian protests is completely overstated. While I do not deny that some American NGOs might have provided help, it does not change the fact that the movement is mostly indigenous and self-organized and is an expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo that's been brewing for decades.

The actual situation is like this: as protesters become more educated about events around the world, they learn from each other. From the opposite side, however, it appears that there is some organized action "behind the scenes" guiding them. Yet it may be completely not the case. It's just a matter of people growing smarter. Yes, you can blame technology on this, but then (to be consistent) you would have to go centuries back and also blame Gutenberg, the quill, stone tablets, and so on.

Usually, when I say something like this, I get a reply from someone "but but the Wikileaks showed American so-and-so discussing with so-and-so". That's completely irrelevant. The influence of the State Department is not that great (in particular when it comes to countries that are not Iraq or are otherwise vital to US interests). Whatever help US actors have provided dwindles in comparison to the kind of money that is being thrown around by kleptocratic oligarchs to maintain status quo.

Any examples of (2) -- or links to something that discusses this phenomenon? Thanks.

Yea, better burn that oppressive cis-heteronormative literature before it triggers a micro-aggression. Also don't forget to send the authors to a Gulag.

immediately start the see,-social-differences-are-the-result-of-vast-differences-between-the-binary-sexes wheel rolling again

That's not the wheel I'm interested in rolling. I'm rather interested in critiquing the current humanist-sociological status quo mantra that biological differences are irrelevant or can be abstracted away. A rather large difference between the two goals.

The narrative of oppression is a very important one, and like all grand narratives (thanks critical theorists, for once at least) not always correct. It's starting to become an example of "rule by victimhood" (c.f. "rule by decree"). Whole terminology has been devised by feminist and other similar movements so as to make the oppression narrative appear untouchably true. For example, the word "sexism" (as well as a few other similar "-isms") has been defined as something one-directional, something that only men can afflict on women and not the other way around. This is considered to be valid because there supposedly exists an "institutionalized oppression" that makes sexism possible, and that therefore sexism in the opposite direction is impossible. In other words, the very definition of a word contains an a priori assumption, with the net effect being that repetitive use of aforementioned word in ideologically correct context engenders constantly consuming this assumption at face value.

I could go on for hundreds of pages, but I will stop here.

A little wrong to look that way though since (a) it was under USSR that the country got its current borders and shape on the map, and (b) the actual issue over which the conflict is going on is due to USSR-like foreign policy doctrine of Putin's Russia.