Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48185192

Points: 5

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42798287

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19128200

Points: 1

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It should be easy enough to survey people from different cultures and countries, and feed those surveys into the model, to get a more accurate representation. You could even take that, and have a global model, as well as different models based on cultures, to get things like "This is how you will be perceived by most people in the southern united states".

Harper's Magazine, September 1996:

> From an interview with Kurt Vonnegut in the November 1995 issue of Inc. Technology. Vonnegut was asked to discuss his feelings about living in an increasingly computerized world.

>> I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I'd never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterward I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, “Are you still doing typing?” Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, “Okay, I'll send you the pages.” Then I go down the steps and my wife calls, “Where are you going?” “Well,” I say, “I'm going to buy an envelope.” And she says, “You're not a poor man. Why don't you buy a thousand envelopes? They'll deliver them, and you can put them in the closet.” And I say, “Hush.” So I go to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it's my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Second Avenue, where I'm secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I've had a hell of a good time. I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.

A bit of a reminder that we don't have to be overly efficient about everything we do. Instead we can simply stay mindful and just enjoy whatever it is we are doing, even if it is waiting in line to buy an envelope, or waiting for the coffee to brew.

Scientists had already determined the usefulness of LSD and other psychedelics in Psychotherapy of this sort back in 1950 (http://www.psymon.com/psychedelia/articles/busch.htm), but since the controlled substance act in 1970, it hasn't been possible to do any real science in this area. Good to see this finally starting to change.

I gave up on the one where you had to squeeze through a bunch of narrow red pathways, it's not so easy on a trackpad.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8356097

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

An easy (although not necessarily correct) way to define intelligence could just be the ability to learn, although even this can be hard to define. Some animals can learn fast, while others have a larger space in their memory. As was pointed out, dogs are able to learn significantly more words and more complex phrasing than other animals, but at the same time they have been conditioned for a very very long time to understand human voices, dolphins much less so.

Dolphins are in a completely different environment, which results in completely different conditioning. Perhaps the reason they seem similar to us is because they are in a similar place in their environment. They're fairly independent species, not relying too heavily on other species, or being heavily preyed on by other animals. This could allow their brains to evolve in a similar way to ours, which aligns with our definition of intelligence.

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Temporarily, but needs to be remote longterm.

Technologies: Ruby. Rails, mostly backend, a bit of frontend. JS. Python. Git, vim + the usual Unix dev environment.

Resume: http://neyer.io/resume.pdf

Email: aaron@neyer.io

I'm a student at Case Western currently finishing up my last year. I've done Rails development at MIM Software and causes.com, and was an SRE at Google, developing mainly in Python and Java, with a bit of Ruby as well. At Case, I've helped to run ACM and Hacker Society, putting on conferences and hackathons to get more students actively developing on their own personal projects.

After graduation, I'm planning to travel the world, and am looking for a job with flexibility in where I can work so that I can accomplish that. I'd be especially interested in somewhere where I would get to work with data (Crawling, mining, processing, etc...) or with Quantified Self, which is my current passion (Currently developing a personal website to centralize a lot of my data to better quantify my life).