Come on folks, how is all this half-information bashing better than trial by media?
We don't know exactly what happened. There are various incentives for both parties to say things that may / may not have happened. AirBnB needs to be careful to make sure they are not the target of a lawsuit. The conversation that they had with EJ can be misrepresented. Or they may even be worse than what this shows.
Who knows? Why are we, a bunch who would normally need citations to believe that humans need water to survive, engaging in such ludicrous trial-by-media with hardly any validated information?
Until recently, I thought that the patents issue was a PITA, but not that big of a deal, and something that would eventually pass after a lot of damage is done.
Now, I really believe that unless things change, the US is going to have a lot of trouble attracting new businesses to start at home, or foreign companies providing services in the US. Spotify will run their own cost benefit analysis of fighting the lawsuit versus attracting future revenue. Many small services that cannot afford an upfront lawsuit in the hope of future American revenue will just not open shop or services for the US.
It hurts me to see how the patent system is screwing with every damn thing. As they say for startups, competition from other countries won't hurt America, but inefficiencies and bad decisions within would. And IMHO the risk is not hypothetical anymore.
Agreed. Usually when these threads pop up there's some speculation on getting rid of software patents, but I'm afraid that's no longer in the relam of possiblitity.
Way too much money has been poured into buying massive patent portfolios by the big boys, from Apple & Co. to Paul Allen. If some upstart Congressman suddenly tried to pass a law to invalidate them, you can bet multi-millions would be spent to prevent that and get him/her unelected.
A compromise that protects startups in some way may be the best we can hope for at this point, I'm afraid.
You raise a great point. Definitely agree on the fact that legal / ethical frameworks are required.
However, it might be very hard to do without knowing what the emulated "being" looks like. Its hard to imagine placing legalities and ethics on something whose powers (and possibly, limitations) are absolutely unknown. Consequently, the law might be misplaced, restrictive, or downright abusive depending on what it turns out to be.
Having said that, I agree with your broad point - having that advanced technology without the social aspects to deal with it might be a nightmare!
In terms of learning new things, the vote count helps tremendously! You can tell that a security-related suggestion earning 50 up votes is sound (of course considering context), technology-wise. I've learned a lot about passwords, plaintext, server-side hashing, salting and related best-practices solely from HN comments.
Displaying scores might make the other aspects troubling (since group-think is supported unnecessarily, often disregarding novel thoughts or disagreements). But I've learned to ignore such things, especially since most of the conflicts are "opinions" anyway, so the value addition is somewhat limited.
In terms of actual facts and expertise though, nothing can beat the vote count!
Having said that, I am still not sure which one I prefer given that there is inherently a tradeoff between the two aspects.
> In terms of learning new things, the vote count helps tremendously! You can tell that a security-related suggestion earning 50 up votes is sound (of course considering context), technology-wise.
No, absolutely not! You can only tell that other non-experts agree in some path-dependent fashion.
I'll occasionally see highly-upvoted nonsense in an area that I'm expert in. This is very bad.
This is some kind of cognitive bias.
EDIT> I should clarify that it's entirely possible for experts to disagree. So this isn't the you disagree with me so you dumb argument.
But that's a great opportunity for the expert to step in and say something valuable in reply. The high upvote count of the "wrong" response will lead to your response getting more readers.
The fact is we're already half way bought in to this "social bias". Otherwise just get rid of the voting altogether. Get rid of karma. In fact, get rid of associating usernames with comments. But I think everyone realizes, even if they don't like to admit it, that social context provides some value, even if not perfect.
No the don't, they provide a social signaling function that can be just as powerful as a vote count. When a "popular" name is attached to a post it gets read more closely and frequently voted up. If HN users were truly interested in letting the "quality" of the content stand on its own then comments would not have names attached to them and the content would truly stand on its own.
> when evaluating someone's comment it would be good to see other comments they've made that might provide insight into their biases.
In other words, let the popularity of a username influence the visibility of the content. If you are suggesting that people (including yourself) actually go back and check out user comment histories with any frequency I think you are mistaken.
Karma is not just popularity, it is also a measure of perceived authority and insight that a comment provides to a discussion. The consequence of losing this signaling function may not have decreased the quality of the comments, but it has certainly decreased the utility of the comment sections at HN.
One very surprising example of someone playing with single eye vision. Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansoor_Ali_Khan_Pataudi) played in the Indian cricket team as a batter for many years. He lost one eye at the age of 20, but surprisingly still managed to bat.
This is particularly striking since batting involves judging the ball that comes at you with some speed. His previous judgement and muscle memory might be useful of course. But I'd love to read about any research on this, if anyone is aware...
Apparently one of the guys involved in early Air Force space suit research had lost an eye in an accident (no, not Yeager, can't remember the name right off). It created a bit of a stir when they tested him post-accident and discovered that his depth perception had actually /improved/ now that he only had one eye.
Unfortunately, despite this, they weren't willing to let him go back to flying fighter planes, which is why he got into space suit research...
Uninformed guess: the speed of a top-level cricket delivery (~100mph) is such that stereoscopic vision doesn't really play a role. It's all in the timing.
I'm a PhD student working in machine learning, and I very highly recommend this library. I've used it for all sorts of problems within and outside my research, and it just works great. I've used it in C++, Python, as well as Matlab.
Their papers are excellent too if anyone is interested in reading about large-scale optimization problems for SVM.
We’re in the most ridiculous industry on earth. You can whip something up in a few hours and before you know it, people around the world will be using it.
In today's context, most work in AI is statistics-based. So if you are talking about conventional AI (logic-based for example), yep it would be relatively harder to find.
Lets not forget though that machine learning and data mining and their applications: natural language processing, a lot of computer vision, recommender systems, financial predictions, fraud monitoring, some types of games, and innumerable others are huge advancements made towards the same goal that AI was after, albeit with different means (statistics) than originally attacked with.
Statistical machine learning is AI. And it is bigger than ever before.
We don't know exactly what happened. There are various incentives for both parties to say things that may / may not have happened. AirBnB needs to be careful to make sure they are not the target of a lawsuit. The conversation that they had with EJ can be misrepresented. Or they may even be worse than what this shows.
Who knows? Why are we, a bunch who would normally need citations to believe that humans need water to survive, engaging in such ludicrous trial-by-media with hardly any validated information?