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.

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.

Oh goddamn I thought I'd read through that thread. Oh well, thanks!

Idea #6 is sort of already in place, if you didn't know: SWAG!!

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).

Yeah, I was pretty psyched about it that night. Awesome, I'll probably keep writing part 2 tonight!

On another note, I'll probably be on the IRC for the next couple of days/nights so maybe I'll catch you there!

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!

Awesome, I'm glad you understood. I was partly afraid that I wasn't being as clear as I wanted to but it's cool that people are understanding what I meant to transmit. I'll definitely touch on google's creepy images!

Hehe, that's pretty cool. It's a really interest topic and it's getting a lot of attention right now (thanks for making creepy pictures of dogs google!) and I felt like it would be cool to explain it.

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.

Definitely does! I'll also talk a bit about learning algorithms for these, though if part 2 gets too long I'll make it a part 3.

Thanks a lot man! I myself wondered whether mathjaxMathJax integration would benefit hubski while writing my post, but then I wasn't sure because I feel like hubski tries to keep things light. MathJax integration wouldn't weigh down a lot though, I feel, and would be pretty cool.

Oh for sure!!

Just in case, direct link is here.

Thanks! It's really slick and is so good to write with. The Pilot MR is pretty cool too! Anyway, welcome to the awesome world of fountain pens!

Holy shit there are some fountain pen afficionados up in here... Cool!

I only have one fountain pen, but it's awesome and I really really like it. It's a Cross Century II Chrome.

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.

Hehehe.

Europe is kinda far, yeah. It wasn't supposed to take two months though, stuff happened and when it came back it had a ding on the lid so it had to go back so they could replace it..

Anyway, SEND A GUY seems like a good mantra! And I've never heard about that website but it sounds very cool!

I wasn't expecting to say this when I started reading your post, but go for it.

Life is complicated and sometimes we have to do things we wouldn't normally do/don't morally condone because some situations are genuinely complicated and the alternative is worse than what you plan on doing.

So good luck, and don't get caught because that will just cause a huge mess of things.

This is so awesome! Right now I have started making my own neural network framework, and to test it and my evolutionary algorithm I made a pretty simple game with "gatherers" and "sources", but linking it to a game like Mario is a really awesome idea. My NN isn't as complex as this guy's though.

Discourse on the Method, for the 30th time.

Too many, sadly. I should really start getting those extended warranties things, 2 years just doesn't cut it for me. Also, I usually have the worst luck with warranties: my current laptop's keyboard start malfunctioning 3 days after the warranty ended :(

It's pretty cool that you got a person immediately, and that they sent a guy over (even if you had to nag them) the next day and even more so that he just fixed it on the spot and even gave you his number! I've never gotten that level of repair service awesomeness! Last time by computer broke down (the incident with the keyboard) I went almost two months without my laptop..

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.

Really, education is important for deeper understanding, but basic science literacy isn't so difficult to grasp. Often it's a strong start to just teach some basic research skills and inspire enough interest to use those skills. People can always go deeper into knowledge, but we don't all need to spend years in every subject to grasp the most relevant information for our personal lives or to get a reasonable sense for differentiating accurate information.

This is pretty much what I'm saying, tbh.

I'll have to disagree with you a bit on what you said. Scientific literacy is very very important, and I think the world would be a much better place if people where, in general, more scientifically literate (no more global-warming deniers, eh, americans?). However, I feel like one does not have to have the understanding that an undergraduate has of a field to be scientifically literate in that field, nor does a person need to have all the correct terminology.

In my opinion, all that is needed is a general change the people's spirits regarding their thinking. People, in general, lack critical and scientific thinking. What I think could help is an "addon" to education that focused on the scientific way of thinking: of accepting new ideas, and of testing them, and of seeing the results for your won eyes instead of taking other's words for it. In my mind, if people in general and a little bit more of critical thinking and of scientific reasoning the world would be a better place, and everyone would be happier. I don't need (nor want) everyone to have an amazing understanding of a ton of scientific fields, all I want is for people to have an open and critical spirit capable of changing their ideas and beliefs when confronted with new information.

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.

Some time ago my computer broke down and I was forced to spend two months without it. At first it was horrible, even more so because at the time being at the computer was pretty much all I did. What happened though, was that, at the one week mark I was completely weaned off of it and I felt good! I only had a shitty cellphone at the time, which definitely helped, and it was also summertime, which definitely also helped, but my god, it was sooo freeing. I started going outside more (much, much more) and hanging out with the people I cared about, and just enjoying life beyond a computer screen. It was actually amazing, and a summer I really enjoyed.

I'm back to being too much time in front of the computer now, but mostly due to necessity.. college, and specifically my course pretty much forces me to spend a lot of time in front of a screen. However I really enjoyed the experience of being computer free and maybe I'll try that again this summer. I can definitely go a while without a computer.