Just take comfort in knowing that female attractiveness usually drops off a cliff far earlier than male attractiveness does. The same girl writing that essay will one day be 40+ and begging for any of those "genetic superiors" to give her five seconds, while the same male "uggo" with a stable income and decent hygiene will be able to take his pick of a bunch of nicer women who didn't view the whole of humanity through the lens of the beautiful people master race.
Actually, you can't comment like this here. It's one thing to post inflammatory rants about flamewar topics (like a bunch of others have done in this thread); significantly worse to conjure up nasty things on others and gloat; but adding a personal attack element into the mix crosses into bannable offense. Please don't post like this to HN again.
> Unconscious behavior like this made me lose much of the respect I had for women.
I agree. What really gets me is that you're told to open up and talk about your emotions. They paint to bottle up as a negative trait, but women usually lose all respect for men – friends and partners – who share their own fears and worries. One time is enough to ruin your image and dismiss the good times. Empathy is replaced by disgust, since they don't want to be seen around with a weakling.
I still believe everyone is worthy of respect and dignity. But I'm not going to put my trust on women. Sensitive men are creepy.
Wow, you are hateful people. I've been a woman walking around with unshaven legs -- men recoil with disgust, tell me I am a "hairy beast", etc. It's been this way since middle school.
Men are not the only ones to put up with disgust from the opposite sex. Dealing with this universal human experience should not make you "lose respect" for 50% of the population because we are not a homogenous lump, we are individuals and we are all different.
I'm sorry you had to endure such insults. My post wasn't written out of hatred and I apologize if it came off that way. Sometimes I let past issues get the best of me. But I really appreciate the way you describe it – "Dealing with this universal human experience".
I hope my manners didn't turn you off HN. It's a great community to be part of. You learn something new every day from developers of all walks of life! Please stick around, it's worth it.
ah yes, ever show a weakness, pain or suffering, and you're a goner in their eyes, pitiful worthless bag of meat. no more of that alpha which bleeds with a smile on his face and takes every hit in his life without stumbling.
I mean, if you expect perfection, provide perfection, nothing less.
my theory is that they feel weak (this goes beyond obvious physical weakness compared to men), hence the strong urge to have alphas 'guarding' and providing for them.
> I wonder, for instance, how much sooner we'd have discovered the Juniper backdoor --- possibly the most catastrophic backdoor in the history of the Internet --- if a larger collection of experts was somehow allowed to review the cache.
So you're claiming that he should be prosecuted and convicted for the leaks, but simultaneously that he should have allowed more people to have access to the leaks? This position doesn't seem very consistent.
I was a bit shocked, though I probably shouldn't have been, to notice recently that police in the local airport all carry assault rifles now. Assault rifles. I'm not that knowledgeable about guns, so I'm not sure what kind exactly - maybe M-16s?
A few years ago there was something about military personnel being stationed with unloaded rifles in airports as part of the War on Terror(TM). I now imagine that was to desensitize us to this future - everyday cops carrying loaded assault rifles in public all the time.
The reason the military personnel carried unloaded weapons is that commanding officers live in fear of an negligent discharge ending their career, this was true for most base sentries before and after 9/11, you can pretty much only count on those guarding nuclear weapons to have rounds in their weapons. "Nothing personal".
As for police carrying rifles/carbines in our airports today, well, they're much better weapons than pistols, more accurate and more likely to hit the target and not an innocent, much harder hitting if they have the right ammo in them, all police should have a "patrol carbine" instead of a shotgun in their trunk or secured in the passenger space of their vehicles.
The only question here, is the threat level at the airport high enough that routinely carrying rifles is warranted? That I can't say, but as noted by others, it's routine in more "civilized" Europe.
In Europe, it depends on the cop: Traffic cops are often unarmed schlubs. Federal police are armed and well-trained. China also seems to have multiple tiers of cops and relatively few are carrying guns in public.
This is partly because of the North Hollywood bank robbery, with the two men dressed head-to-toe in home-made body armor, where the 9 mm pistols and shotguns the police had were ineffective in stopping them. Some of the cops went to local gunshops to borrow some AR-15s that were able to penetrate the armor.
Afterwards, a lot of police departments started issuing Patrol Rifles (M-16s) to their officers (usually carried in the trunk of their cars) either purchased from firearm dealers/wholesalers, but also via the Department of Defense's 1033 program.
Seeing heavily armed police (with actual assault rifles not AR-15's) and paramilitary members (the Carabinieri and Gendarmerie etc) is much more common in Europe than the US and been the case for decades.
Full automatic fire isn't really that interesting of a distinction. 30-40 shots spread over a few minutes is probably going to do more damage than 30-40 shots in a minute.
And if you consider how a police officer acting in the public interest is going to use it, there isn't really any difference at all between automatic and semiautomatic fire.
"I was a bit shocked, though I probably shouldn't have been, to notice recently that police in the local airport all carry assault rifles now. Assault rifles. I'm not that knowledgeable about guns, so I'm not sure what kind exactly - maybe M-16s?"
Airport police in every European airport I have ever traveled in, since well before 9/11, have always carried fully automatic submachineguns.
The US may or may not be a police state, but that's not a good metric upon which to gauge it.
> everyday cops carrying loaded assault rifles in public all the time.
It's to protect you against these evil terrorists who hate your Freedom! I'm joking, but that's basically what politicians in the US say the whole time to justify such measures. 9/11 has been a Godsend for all the ones who wanted to push for militarization of police forces.
My office is in the same building as a police substation. Every day when I leave it's the officers' shift change, so I'm walking while a bunch of officers are milling about, holding M4s in the parking lot. I own and shoot firearms, but it's a bit fucking insane.
Eh, if you're just auditing the class, maybe. When I was in college they made me retake ridiculous prereqs for the most trivial of reasons every time I transferred, allowed no exceptions to these, and personal requests to professors to get out of them were completely ignored. The prereqs were enforced by the computerized registration system - good luck getting past them without a waiver.
As one anecdote, they once told me I needed to retake intro physics. On the pretest given on the first day of class, I came within one problem of a perfect score. Didn't make a lick of difference - their syllabus differed from the last university in the most minor of ways, and despite the fact that the class never actually covered even 50% of the stuff it claimed to on the syllabus, I was made to retake the entire sequence anyway.
I'll counter your anecdote with mine: in my undergrad years, I started out as a computer science major, and discovered that I wanted to do computational astrophysics 3 years into my college career, meaning that I lacked significant physics background. The Astronomy department was adamant on me "needing" to have done the basic physics classes (mechanics, E&M) before letting me into an introductory quantum physics class, even though I already possessed a working knowledge of the basics. I emailed the professor of the quantum physics class, explaining my situation, and simply ended up taking the quantum class alongside the basic physics classes.
Although I think your situation was pretty special as well, transferring universities is usually incredibly annoying and filled with road bumps. I've found there's a lot more leniency given to students who remain within the same university.
If you are taking a degree program, it is the institutions responsibility to ensure that you have met all the requirements. If they don't have enough information on equivalence of a different institutions course, the easiest thing for them is to require you retake the sequence.
The way to get around this isn't by taking pretests (which don't mean much) it's by writing the final exams. In some institutions you will be able to do this without (full?) course fees if you are attempting to demonstrate equivalence.
That's kind of my point - they could have tested me easily by giving me some problems from a previous final, or anything else, or even talking to me for five minutes, but instead they chose the path of petty legalism by assuming since the syllabus didn't agree with their's 100%, the only way to guarantee I knew the material was to make to pay to retake the entire sequence.
I failed to mention I'd also already spent three years as a physics major and had already taken classical mechanics, electrodynamics, and quantum mechanics - so being told to retake the intro physics sequence was quite silly indeed.
It's not exactly petty legalism, they can lose their ability to grant degrees over stuff like this. This is one of the reasons that if you are transferring institutions, as a student it is your responsibility to check transfer credits. After all, it certainly isn't true that all undergraduate curriculum are equivalent.
It's a bit of a pain, but the point wasn't that they should give you some questions from the old exam but that you should actually sit the new one, under exam conditions. That resolves the problem for everyone without you having to spend the time repeating lectures etc. In the best case you don't pay full rate either.
Having taken Algorithms at both undergrad and graduate levels and read through many books to prep Google/Facebook/etc interviews, I would flip out if anyone ever makes take an Algorithms class again.
My personal experience, from having been an e-book aficionado who eventually went back to almost entirely paper (cheap used hardcover when I can find it):
Ebook advantages:
- Cheap, no commitment, try before you buy
- Easy to transport, take 30+ books on vacation with no increase in weight
Dead-tree advantages:
- Higher retention of material (various cues for memory related to the physicality and layout of the book versus an indistinguisable smorgasbord of ebook pages)
- Greater tendency to actually read, since they sit around your house/living room taunting you, rather than being forgotten in some obscure folder of your device
Ebooks also have the killer feature that you can increase the font size. Maybe to people in their 20s and 30s that doesn't seem like a big deal, but trust me, as you get older that's a big deal.
I'm with you on this. I need reading glasses for paper books but not for ebooks. Large-print paper editions are rarely available for the books I want to read, but every ebook is large-print and exactly the degree of largeness I want. With a paper book, larger print requires a larger book. With an ebook, a thousand large-print books fit in the space of a single, regular-print trade paperback.
That's not to say that I don't still love books on paper. I'm not going to drop my iPad Pro in the sand beside my beach chair to go play in the surf. Nobody will steal my paperback, the sand won't hurt it, I can see it clearly in bright sunlight, and I can run it however long I feel like reading it without ever thinking about the battery charge. I also like traveling with a lightweight paperback. For the cost of remembering my reading glasses, I can forget any worries about saving battery, toting a charger everywhere, finding places to plug in, theft, fragility, accidentally leaving it or the charger somewhere.... Nice.
I just wish more of the books I wanted to read were available as lightweight paperbacks with comfortable-sized print....
True. I've had reading glasses for the past couple of years now and, aside from ingredients/cooking directions on food packets, I can manage just fine without them.
Your first dead tree advantage is fascinating. What might help - in part, definitely not totally - would be a compromise between the naff skeuomorphism of yesterday and the minimalist 'flat' design of today. You need a visual (obviously, not as good as visual and tactile) representation of your location within the book that doesn't get in your way: challenging.
Off topic: I understand your arguments, but every time I read something like "mostly cheap used hardcover", as an author myself I have to ask: You are aware that the creative behind the work you read does not get a dime from you?
I'll argue they do, although indirectly. Because the first sale, at whatever price it was, confers not only the right of the purchaser to read it, but also to resell it later (or lend it, or gift it).
I wondered at that statement too, but for a different reason. For me, a book is an investment for life, so I don't mind spending some money on it if it's worthing buying. (If I only want to read it once, I can usually get it through some library.) I would only consider second-hand books for something like a really expensive text book that I'm going to need repeatedly, but only for a limited period of time (e.g. for a thesis).
When I said "cheap," I meant in price. I'm averse to low-quality books, and would rather pay a few dollars more or hold out longer for a copy with clean pages and little wear. Especially highlighting is usually an immediate deal-breaker. Finding a fairly nice copy typically isn't a problem, though - low-price hardcover is often a more difficult request to meet.
Do you also think that Ford and GM should get more money when someone sells a used car, or that builders should get more money every time a house gets sold?
The difference is that with a house and a car, you pay for the physical object. With a book, you pay for the ideas contained therein - a subtle but (IMO) important difference.
Which isn't to say used-book sales should be illegal, but that if you can afford it, why not support the person behind the ideas you're profiting from?
"With a book, you pay for the ideas contained therein - a subtle but (IMO) important difference."
Not according to the law, you aren't.
Also, there are plenty of ideas involved in building cars and houses. They're not just random piles of wood, metal, and plastic, any more than a book is just ink smeared on paper.
I read a lot and don't have a ton of money. It's a tradeoff I'm willing to accept, and if I'm concerned about the author, I'd honestly rather donate to them directly than see it siphoned off by whatever deal they may have had with the publisher.
They do get a dime. When I buy a new hardcover book I remember that the book will have a resale value and account for that in what I am prepared to pay.
This is already the first election in which millenials and gen-Xers (terrible name, btw) outnumber them as far as eligible voters. The problem is eligibility isn't enough - old people vote far, far more reliably than young people, so the (often idiotic) preferences of their demographic still win out.
Automatic national voter registration when turning 18 would be a step in the right direction, but I'm not sure it would convince people to actually go to the polls. In certain states just registering to vote in the first place can be a real hassle, and having to do it every time you move punishes the more mobile generations.
Green Party is also an option if you want to protest vote. A problem, for some, with supporting libertarian candidates is that they (voters) may not be as fond of the low-hanging fruit policies most likely to get implemented (e.g. defunding many agencies, removing environmental protections) as the moonshot policies they also promote (e.g. ending the war on drugs and reducing the military-industrial-natsec complex). Even though neither 3rd party will ever win, the votes do send a message about which way policy adjustments should be made, so it's still worth some thought about what message you really want to send.
Most people live in uncontested states (for the presidential election). Voting for a major party only makes sense if you actually like the candidate, or you live in a swing state.
The Libertarian party is much bigger than the Green party, and there are many people who sympathize with libertarians on a lot of issues even if they don't call themselves libertarian.
Johnson/Weld are real candidates -- both two-term governors from moderate states! I'm surprised they don't have more support considering how bad the major candidates are.
Regarding size, the official memberships from 2014 were ~411,000 (Libs) vs ~248,000 (Greens). You could look at that as either the Libertarians being 66% larger, or them being practically the same as far as order of magnitude and portion of the total electorate. Johnson/Weld are more experienced candidates than Stein, but on the other hand, Ron and Rand Paul never came as close to winning a nomination as Sanders did, either (him being about 98% in line with Stein's positions - I remember his local campaign staff even defecting to her around the time of the DNC endorsement).
Regarding policies, Greens and Libertarians are also 99% in alignment on this particular issue (war on drugs), as well as some others. I know people have their preferences, just pointing out that there are multiple similarly-sized third parties of yet complete opposite ideological natures that would still be optionable for those wanting to vote on this kind of thing. It's even easier to not support this kind of behavior by the DEA.
Party membership numbers are wholly irrelevant -- the number that matters is electoral support, of which Johnson/Weld has 4x that of Stein and drawn in substantial numbers from both major parties.
If what matters to you is actual electoral support, there's no reason to be voting third party anyway. Both Stein and Johnson got less than 1% of the vote in 2012, and even combined only about 1.2%. The most successful third-party/independent Presidential candidate in decades was Ross Perot in 1992, and even winning just under 19% of the popular vote he failed to win any of the electoral college. It's a self-serving double standard to tell people to pass up the major party candidates but then vote based on electoral support for the third parties, ignoring how well their ideological and policy positions actually align with your own.
There's something to be said for simply polling high enough to get into the debates. Debates where a candidate could, for example, offer an alternative view on drug policy.
If a third party gets 15%, they get a third podium on that stage, which I think would be worthwhile and healthy for American democracy especially in the face of the two most hated candidates in history.
I don't particularly care if it's Johnson or Stein but I'd like it to be someone. Ideally we'd have both. Johnson is pretty close to breaking 15% in a lot of polls.
Of course this line of reasoning simply suggests that pre-debates, if anyone asks you should /claim/ to be voting Johnson (or Stein), not anything about where you should actually vote.
It does matter that it's Johnson over Stein. Johnson and his running mate were both two-term governors. If they make it to the debate stage, they are real candidates and nobody can dismiss them.
You (along with the immediate parent) actually do have a good point here. If any pollsters ask, I'd probably say I support Johnson for this reason, though overall I'd personally prefer Green policies over Libertarian ones. There's something to be said for Greens/Libs banding together just to help wedge third parties into the process at all. This kind of strategizing is still pretty unfortunate though, and only makes sense for the polling/debate process, not necessarily the electoral one.
Not to mention the CPD would almost certainly change the debate qualifiers immediately to still keep Johnson out, same as the DNC did with Lawrence Lessig.
In general, it allows a better approximation of the solution function for far less hidden neurons. Sure, you could get arbitrarily close using a single hidden layer, but that hidden layer might need to be unfathomably large. Same idea for network topology in multilayer nets - a network could eventually learn to set a lot of the weights to zero, but training is a lot faster and more effective if you know a good problem-specific topology to start with. Deep nets make problems more tractable. Recurrence is the real game-changer, since then you've moved from non-linear function approximators up to Turing completeness (at least over the set of all possible RNNs).
It's not a bad book, but imo it starts off very strong and then quickly goes downhill throughout. This was the general (and unsolicited) criticism from most everyone I've shared it with. The stuff from prehistory, up to the agricultural revolution, seems to cover a lot of recent discoveries and is both fascinating and informative. The rest is, as the parent comment states, a very simplified summary of the author's favorite topics, a few paragraphs spent on each one, and clearly showing certain cultural biases (it honestly felt optimized for appeal to a TED audience). A good assigned read for early high schoolers, less useful to many beyond that point.
By the time you're at part four, on the current era and emerging technologies, it literally reads like a bunch of newspaper clippings from the Science section of the NYT. While I'm hoping his new book will fix those (perceived) problems, it seems unlikely to contain better or more profound commentary regarding trends in changing humanity and emerging technology than books like Superintelligence, Age of Em, etc. At best perhaps a "lite" version of the same concepts sanitized for a broader audience. Of course I look forward to, upon publication, hopefully having been mistaken about it.
>(it honestly felt optimized for appeal to a TED audience)
Funny that you should say that because TED is extremely popular here in Israel (the book was originally published in Hebrew a couple of years before the English translation).
>While I'm hoping his new book will fix those (perceived) problems...
Don't get your hope up. It's basically:
- the singularity is near and that's not necessarily a good thing
