metaxy2

What's always surprised me is how much of the cartoony image is real. There really were pirates with peg legs, hooks for hands and eye patches, pirates that talked with lower-class English accents and kept parrots as pets. There were swashbuckling captains feared all over the seas that held their crews of convicts and scalawags to surprisingly strict codes of honor. As the author says here, a lot of these things only happened in certain places and times, but the fact that these people did really exist is pretty fun and amazing.

This seems worth dividing into a couple of concerns. One is: Can it provide an accurate enough simulation for the baby? I think we would definitely get there with advanced enough AI, since the level of sophistication needed for cuddling and interacting with babies is lower than, say, having an intelligent conversation.

The other concern is that even if the simulation is good enough, there's still an ick factor to "tricking" a baby into forming an emotional connection with a machine that doesn't have real human feelings.

If we build caretaker robots with software that closely models the internal function of human brains, to the point that we're satisfied that their outward behavior is accompanied by complex and human-like feelings of caring, that problem goes away too. Whether that's even possible is more of a philosophy of mind question; depends on whether you think internal experience depends on the exact nature of the physical substrate.

(Of course if it is possible, there's yet another layer there with the ethical issues of designing a slave race of beings with real feelings, see e.g. Robin Hanson's ideas about "ems.")

Really top-notch American barbecue really doesn't get enough credit. The best BBQ places deliver a head-trip, pleasure-overload, "this is so good I'm going to die" experience that matches any haute cuisine you can find.

There's a large contingent of dark meat eaters here in North America as well, and we also find it a mystery.

Modern, sophisticated dualists tend to think that consciousness just sits "on top" of brain activity, experiences are generated based on what's going on the brain. Many are "epiphenomenalists," who say that the content is determined only by brain activity, so the information flow is one way: brain -> conscious experience.

This has loads of problems (if consciousness has some influence over behavior, then what's the physical mechanism? And if there's none, then why are we able to even talk about it?). But dualists argue that materialism is even worse because it leaves you with outright paradoxes.

So, on this account, a weakly conscious system is just a system that's physically organized in a way that generates only weak experiences.

Dualists tend to have the intuition that it's an absolute quality--or at least, something with a special status beyond a higher-order description of patterns in physical activity. Your turbulence example is perfect: I can't imagine a fishtank that is atom-for-atom identical to a system that's experiencing turbulence, but somehow isn't "really" turbulent. I can easily imagine a system that is in the exact same state as my brain, but isn't having any internal experiences.

In Philosophy of Mind, this is discussed in terms of different types of "supervenience" and whether the mind supervenes on the physical world in the same way as something like turbulence or digestion, or in a more limited sense where the physical world determines the content of experience but there's still more going on; and I think some say it doesn't supervene in any sense at all (but that probably just comes down to a disagreement about terminology).

Physicalists say consciousness supervenes on physical processes in the exact same way as higher-order physical properties like turbulence, digestion, being alive, etc. Dualists feel that still leaves something out.

There's a lot of talk in here about whether consciousness is binary, whether it can turn on and off like a lightswitch, as if that's a good proxy for dualism vs. materialism.

I would argue that this is a totally separate question. In terms of my core intuitions, I'm a hardcore dualist. Chalmers is my favorite philosopher. But the idea of something being "weakly conscious" makes plenty of sense to me. In fact, I have been weakly conscious--waking up from being knocked out for one reason or another. During the process of coming out if it, I remember being in a hazy state, where experiences didn't have the vividness or clarity that they normally do. Of course, it's possible that it's just my memories that are weak, but at any rate the idea that these experiences didn't have the full character of normal conscious experience doesn't strike me as any kind of evidence for materialism.

In my father's last months, I saw him medicated on morphine to the point of being near unconscious, and it's easy to imagine that he was having the same sort of weak experiences as I've had. None of this rattles my dualist intuitions at all.

What most dualists say is that it's incredibly mysterious that anything has any level of consciousness above zero. Saying consciousness doesn't need a special explanation because it's possible to be weakly conscious is like saying gravity doesn't need to be explained because it's possible for objects to have small amounts of gravitation. It's an unrelated issue.

There seem to be really extreme regional differences with this. Wherever I am, when I take an Uber I usually tip a small amount ($1-$2) and as small talk I ask the driver what ratio of people leave a tip. Here in Western Mass I've gotten answers in the 30-50% area, if I'm right. New Hampshire seems to be similar. But in New York, they tell me it's maybe 1 out of 10.

I suppose I did mean more common within our circles--the corner of the culture that reads Hacker News. I'm from Western Mass, which has way more small software businesses than startups, so I'm not sheltered from the idea.

I think you're right there's a certain groupthink that goes into it.

On some level I'm surprised this approach isn't more common. With diminishing marginal utility of wealth, a small chance of making millions has a much higher expected value than an almost zero chance of making billions. Plus, even if the billions were worth proportionally more, we actually tend to underweight high risk/high reward scenarios compared to a perfect expected value maximizer. E.g. you wouldn't pay much to get a 1/10,000 shot at unimaginable bliss, even if the expected value math works out.

I'm guessing part of it is that at some point, say under a 5% chance, we stop calculating altogether and it just becomes "so you're saying there's a chance!" If you have a 1% chance of making something as big as Basecamp and a 0.001% chance of starting Facebook, they both feel about the same, so might as well shoot for the moon.

I think at least at first, Google's success was definitely because of the algorithm. Existing search engines were terrible. They primarily relied on text analysis and human edited web directories. You could search for something as basic as "pet food" and get a few relevant results and then a bunch of random garbage. When Google came out using PageRank, it was a whole new world. Every tech savvy person I know switched right away, and not because of the interface.

But no doubt the simple and elegant interface helped too, and has helped them stay ahead as the other search engines have caught up with their algorithm.

There are certainly players who could make a much better move given five hours in a highly complex position (not every move--you'd be hitting sleep deprivation by move 3!). It's not unheard of for grandmasters to spend an hour of clock time on one move, and I bet you money that same player would sometimes go to 2 or 3 hours if they weren't on the clock.

As to visualization without pen and paper, the best blindfold players can keep track of a whole board in their mind, and explore variations deeply without losing track of the current state of the board or forgetting about the key variations they found along the way.

It sounds like you're into chess more than me, so I'm sure you know most of this stuff, I'm just noting it for other people in the thread.

Moreover, this is a classic side effect of stimulants, at least anecdotally (not sure what the literature says). You can get hyper-focused on one task or sub-task and lose track of your overall priorities. Although I imagine regular stimulant users learn to compensate for this.

In the US we do teach about the scientific method as an abstract idea, especially in grade school and high school, but working scientists mostly learn by osmosis here as well. I'd say it serves a role similar to the way finance guys use math models, or musicians use advanced music theory: an idealized description of the way things are done on the ground that you study in school, but rarely use day to day.

Maybe you got wires crossed between the Nick Cave cover of Avalanche amouat mentioned, and the John Cale Hallelujah? Cale kind of sounds similar.

Stevie is amazing, but for "greatest creative run in popular music history," I feel like we still have to give that to The Beatles, no? In 5 years they released Help, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Magical Mystery Tour, Sgt. Pepper's, The White Album, Abbey Road and Let it Be.

The key of C is arbitrary (you could rename any of the other keys to C and rotate the whole system, and everything would work the same). But there's a case to be made that the diatonic major scale (Ionian mode) has a certain primacy in modern Western music, certainly more than say, Phrygian or Locrian. Both listeners and composers tend to hear the major scale as the most default, vanilla, un-surprising scale there is. It's one of the things that gives certain tunes like "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and "Happy Birthday" an almost annoyingly predictable quality. Even something pretty tame like Mixolydian sounds a little surprising compared to the major scale.

So it's legitimate to ask, if we're going to letter our notes based on the notes of one key, why not pick the key that sounds the most basic and fundamental? (The answer is that at one time folks heard music in a different way and Ionian didn't have the priority that it does now; see my other comment [1]). It also probably doesn't hurt that Aeolian (natural minor) is arguably the second most natural and "default" sounding mode, so it's not nearly as weird as if we decided to letter the notes off of Locrian or something.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12529437

Like a lot of the seemingly random and arbitrary stuff in music, there's a good historical explanation. Western church music used a variety of rotations of the scale (a.k.a. modes, though that word also has a broader meaning) and it took a long time for C to become the "main" mode; for a long time it didn't even exist. See this StackExchange answer for more: http://music.stackexchange.com/a/895

Mindfulness meditation is not unlike that, but the thing you get engrossed in is your entire mental experience: sounds, smells, the feeling of the air on your skin, even your thoughts (though you're supposed to let them go as soon as you notice them). It's a very different feeling than being engrossed in some single thing to the point where you lose track of everything else. It's more like being engrossed in _everything_ to the point that you lose track of all of the noise that's usually going on in your head, and on a good day, even your sense of self.

Also, most forms of meditation are very soothing and tend to get you into a hyper-relaxed state that you don't get from most hobbies, though I'm sure it can happen with some hobbies, like gardening.

The best work happening in this area is by a Princeton professor named Dmitri Tymoczko [1]. He's discovered some pretty fundamental results that tie together a lot of the previous theories of harmony based on geometry. He was the first music theorist ever published in Science [2] and he wrote an amazing book called A Geometry of Music [3] (technical but readable, a must for anyone trying to really understand why music sounds good).

He also teaches a 2-semester intro level music class at Princeton that is infused with his ideas, and makes the lecture notes available online [4]. Those notes are so good they're better than any intro music textbook I know of, especially for us geeks who like to hear the scientific explanation for everything.

[1] http://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/bio.html

[2] http://dmitri.tymoczko.com/sciencearticle.html

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Geometry-Music-Counterpoint- Extended-Practice/dp/0195336674

[4] http://dmitri.tymoczko.com/teaching.html

Seems to me there's two ways of doing this:

1. Totally clear your mind of the previous letter and make each letter a separate decision. That way you only have to avoid being biased toward using one letter or the other too much. This is probably pretty hard.

2. Allow yourself to be aware of your previous answers, but thwart your own biases by including patterns that cancel them out.

I went with the second option and consistently got between .45 and .55. I know our main bias around randomness is not realizing how many runs and patterns exist in truly random data. So I occasionally included runs like "fff" and "dddd" and, rarely, patterns like "dfdf" and "fdfd."

There's actually a whole class of keyboards like this [1], the most popular being the Jankó keyboard [2]. Here's [3] a cool demo by a Jankó virtuoso.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphic_keyboard

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK4REjqGc9w

I think I may have gotten the best one, on my second try:

"Zynga Shuts Down LucasArts"

I think that really happened with Riven. It's easy to forget, but some of those stills were as beautiful and realistic as anything being done in realtime 3D games today. [1] [2]

[1] http://www.mysterium.ch/riven/pictures/riven_05.jpg

[2] http://www.grandecaverna.com/myst2/myst2_eramoiety.jpg

I actually switched to NewsBlur the second I first saw it, a few months before they announced they were killing Reader. I just find the interface much nicer to look at and less distracting.

Some good arguments, but isn't .NET still the best platform for making truly native looking Windows desktop apps with a simple, high level language? Qt and wxWidgets are decent, but it's a lot trickier to get a native look and feel with those. There's a reason so many apps maintain separate versions for Windows and Mac rather than try to get by with a cross platform GUI toolkit.

The "ask a professional" feature is really cool. A couple of years ago some MIT students came out with a plugin for Word called Soylent [1]. It's the same basic idea, except it's backed by Mechanical Turk instead of a team of professional editors. Turkers suggest small changes and the changes are voted in or out of the final draft by other turkers. Pretty cool stuff.

[1] http://projects.csail.mit.edu/soylent/

Inspired by this, I translated the whole solution into JS. I renamed your "query" object to "output_state," which seems like a more accurate name.

    var output_state = {};
    function print(x) {
        console.log(x);
        if (typeof x === "number") {
            output_state = {last_num: x, time_since: 1};
        } else {
            output_state.time_since += 1;
        }
    }

    function fizzbuzz() {
        switch(output_state.last_num) {
            case undefined:
                print(1);
                break;
            default:
                var a = output_state.last_num;
                var b = output_state.time_since;
                var number = a + b;

                if (number % 5 !== 0) {
                    if (number % 3 === 0) {
                        print("Fizz");
                    } else {
                        print(number);
                    }
                } else {
                    if (number % 3 === 0) {
                        print("FizzBuzz");
                    } else {
                        print("Buzz");
                    }
                }
        }

        fizzbuzz();
        // Or, correctly: if (number < 100) { fizzbuzz(); }
    }