I feel like having ads on hubski would severely undermine the experience the hubski team wants us to have -- ads would make hubski look more like a conventional social aggregator, i.e. reddit, i.e. easily digestible content that panders to the lowest common denominator, instead of the awesome website with quality posts and discussions that go on in hubski. Not to say that it wouldn't work, it's just that I've noticed that the interface is very much so designed in order to encourage thoughtfullness and I feel like it ads would detract a lot from it. That said, hubski needs money. I commend you for giving a lot of alternative funding models, but I'm interested in hearing your thoughs on the model currently being tested. Edit: In my mind the NPR model would be the best alternative (listed here) to hubski's the model that's being tested now. A close second would be the value added model, which is pretty much the NPR model with benefits for people who donate (thus encouraging more donations).
Heh, facebook ads are very very aggressive. At a certain point there was a way to target one person. Anyway, I actually don't find hubski hideous. It definitely takes some getting used to, but so does reddit (and look at it's popularity!). After that I started finding it quite lean and streamlined. These are opinions though. Curating ads is a pretty cool idea, but I can't say I support it when there are alternatives like NPR's model. Besides, most people use adblock/ublock and I doubt that many would go through the trouble of disabling it for hubski.
It's amazing to me that this is the first time that we're going to actually get good pictures of Pluto. The best "picture", i.e. what we think Pluto looks like we've ever had before this flyby are like this: And now we're receiving awesome high quality pictures of a planet (almost!) whose orbit is so eccentric and long that one run around the sun takes about 248 years!
Definitely, and this is one of the most important things I want to discuss after I finish writing a reasonably comprehensive rundown of the rest of the inner working of artificial neuron networks. There are soooooo many possible applications for neural networks due to their intrinsic ability to adapt to problem, as long as you give it a reasonable input and output.
Finals in four days, Shouldn't have missed class, Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Idea #6 is sort of already in place, if you didn't know: SWAG!!
Oh goddamn I thought I'd read through that thread. Oh well, thanks!
This is a really good read! I still love the act of just sitting down, hopefully with a beer or two by my side and reading for a good couple of hours, and I think I'll never want to give that up.
I found it amazing, and very very interesting. It makes sense that, after such a long time in the woods, one would lose a lot of social/communication skills, but this case is even more interesting because he seems like an inteligent person and, while he didn't have any human contact, he read a lot of books. That's a really interesting combination, I think, because reading books is great exercise for the mind, and usually lead to some sort of self-analysis which I think made him very self aware. While I've never been more that a couple weeks out camping, I really like and somewhat relate to this line With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.
I'm working on making my own sound synthesis and manipulation library for a microcontroller chip! Currently implementing a fast fourier transformation so as to have some data do display.
Just in case, direct link is here.
I love that a lot of machine learning stuff is coming up in hubski. I myself study and work with machine learning algorithms (at school and on my own) and I find them fascinating, and it's awesome that more people are being exposed to this amazing subject with so many possible possible applications.
I love Camus. What you're saying resonates a lot with me. I myself can't remember a time when I actually believed in religion, in general. It helped that my parents, while religious, never forced their views on me. Anyway, due to that I've always had to face that, without this afterlife that religion provides, it's stupid to do anything. Why does anything matter if it's impossible to alter the outcome. Everybody you know will die, regardless of what you do. And so will you. And eventually, the whole universe is either going to collapse or stop expanding or expand so that life isn't possible, and enthropy will make sure that life will eventually end. So what's the point? Well, the point is to have fun. As Camus and you said, there is no grand scheme of the universe. The universe is a chaotic combination of particles that have no idea what's happening and/or what's going to happen. The only grand scheme is in our head. And that's where we should derive meaning from as well. Whether the universe collapses in how many billion years from now and even spacetime becomes a point of infinite density where time has no meaning or not, what you do today does matter -- it matters to you, and it matters to the people you do it to. As for what keeps me going, thinking does. I find that it's amazing that for a strange and seemingly chaotic arrangement of particles I can be here, be aware of myself, be able to think on what happened before and predict what is going to happen next. Just the fact that I can be here and ponder what the meaning of life is is, to me, amazing. In general, thinking about the human experience, and how amazing it is.
I'm on arch right now so I'm going to download and edit in a minute! Edit: Installing it as a hassle -- sooooooooo many dependencies, and a lot of them from git so it took a while to download the big ones (and I'm on a pretty decent connection). That said, it's pretty barebones, for now. When you open it there's just a page with an address bar in the middle, and typing into there takes you where you want to go. It'll either do a search for what you type or go to the address. There's no address bar at the top of the page you're viewing, but in any page you can press TAB and get a little HUD with the aforementioned tree history view and an address bar. Overall, it's pretty, but not that functional as of yet. Certainly not revolutionizing, but it's pretty and I'll probably check on it every once in a while. Edit2: crashed when I tried to view a .swf file on it. Edit3: Ok it crashes quite a lot, at least on my machine.
That's really cool! Can I ask what you're using as / whether you're using a framework for your neural networks? When I started my current project I started playing around with a few different frameworks so I could simplify most of my work, but I ended up starting to write my code from scratch (efficiency was a major concern). Machine learning is a really interesting topic (with soooo much stuff to talk about) and I'll definitely talk about it. Anyway, it seems like you've got a very cool idea and I want to know more about it!
That is true. Thinking about it, you see a lot of people who have very good critical thinking in their area of knowledge but fail in areas they don't know much about. If we generalize and take that to mean that critical thinking arises from knowledge, we can't force everyone to have knowledge about everything so they can think critically about it. But a scientific mindset, and specifically the scientific method and philosophy of the science doesn't require you to have any concrete knowledge about a subject, or any subject, to be able to apply it. I feel (note the use of feel, which implies intuition and not a research backed opinion) that just knowledge about how science in general works, and of the scientific method and how it is used to learn about the world would help a lot of people have a much more open mind to new ideas, and more importantly to give importance to research, instead of dismissing it.
Discourse on the Method, for the 30th time.
I had no idea man, that sucks. Shit. All I meant from that comment is that lithium, in very small doses (naturally ocurring scales) seem to have a good effect on mood and stability. I had no idea it had such bad side-effects, that really sucks. Might I ask why you were on lithium, and how you were able to stop being on it?
This is such a great article. It hits some really interesting points, specifically, the fact that who we are is very dependent on what chemicals we are on. How can we have a good notion of "self" without including our physical constitution if an alteration of a few grams of lithium to our physical constitution can fundamentally change who we are, how we feel and how we behave? The mind is not seperate from the body, and it's stupid to think it is. We change everytime we eat, and everyday when we wake up we are a different person than we were when we laid down to sleep.Maybe we should all take a little bit of lithium.
Porting my dynamic waveform generation code to an embedded chip while minding size and performance restraints. If I can get it to work twice as fast as it is right now I'll be soooooo happy. I should be studying calc II though.
None. People who commit crimes (under most circumstances) need help, not punishment.
It feels awesome to know that a lot of people have gone through what I have. Yeah, that is one of the big realizations I had going through this. And it was strange. And more, at first I was actually mad! I was so upset that before I could walk through life without having to acknowledge that sometimes other people's problems are more complicated than they seem. While before everything seemed to have an easy solution, now every problem seemed much more complicated, now I had to factor in people's personalities and anxieties, their motives and their point of view. Of course, I eventually understood that, while maybe simpler, what I saw before wasn't the truth. It was a gross oversimplification of other's life's and that it was arrogant of me to think I could find easy solutions to everybody's problems. Of course, it was just the shock at first, but I learned to deal with it. And hopefully I'm wiser for it. Seriously, the best thing I got from this is that these states of mind pass. Maybe today you're feeling a bit down, but the certainty that they'll pass really helps. In the begining it was hard to convince myself that it would pass because I'd never been through it before and didn't want to search for help, and that's the only thing that really scared me -- that I would feel like that forever. It did pass though, and now I have a much easier time dealing with those states of mind. Hell, during my last two panic attacks one of the things that helped me through them was thinking that if I was having one today I (hopefully) wouldn't have another for a good month or so.
Hey, that's awesome! I've never been to the states, sadly. Unfortunately, I live in a country where, although the beer culture is big, the diversity is not. We have two biiig national brands (Sagres and Super-Bock) and that's all we pretty much drink in terms of beer. I'm not complaining, they're actually quite good but I do miss the diversity.. I spent a month travelling around Europe and I got to try soooo many different beers!
Hehehe, jeeebus lord nooooooooo. There was a whole mess on reddit about that guy. Long story short, he doesn't reddit much anymore..
Hehe, his posts were actually pretty cool -- informative and fun. Shame he had alt accounts and vote brigaded.
Well said. I have no problems eating meat as well. I enjoy eating meat, and so I'll only stop eating meat if 1) I stop enjoying eating meat or 2) I start having ethical concerns about eating meat. Since I still love me some burgers and still don't have any ethical concerns about eating meat, I'll keep enjoying my burgers 'till I'm as fat as a cow (hehe). I think they mean natural as in it happens all the time in nature, and normal as the sociological norm, as in, everybody does it. There is the question, however, of whether there would be more vegetarians if more people were aware/in contact with where their meat comes from. I think that everybody should, at some point, be confronted with the reality of where meat comes from.
HOLY SHIT. This is amazing. Gorillaz is the goddamn best pseudo-band ever. Demon Days were amazing and there were more than one times in my life in which I listened to Plastic Beach every day. All of their work really, is amazing, in my eyes. I'm sooo excited for what this album is going to be. Every album is usually a different sound form the last, so I hope this one is going to be something new and awesome!
I didn't know that facebook's targeted ads weren't blocked by adblock. I don't use facebook much though, I only log in every now and then to check for messages and stuff, though, so I wouldn't be able to tell. I don't see what would make an extension like adblock unable to patch those out though, unless facebook was actively using some random placements and/or serving them from a lot of different servers.