skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a less happy story in which the attempts at ubermensch are mentally disabled. That they will remain so for quite some time, considering the moral horror potentially involved in the experiments, until the errors we make allow us to gain a fuller understanding of the system sufficient to know which changes are wise to make.

The article seems to take for granted that it is possible to make alterations to a complex system 'improve this set of genetic loci' (paraphrasing), without harming that system. But it gives us no idea what the complexity of improving them is. It may well turn out that the brain is a very fragile piece of spaghetti-coded wet-ware. That if you alter a few of genes even relatively subtly you stand to introduce errors.

Faults in only a few genes have been known to cause undesired phenomena in nature, it would be odd if by purposefully altering them without a reasonable understanding of the system we could avoid those faults.

Machines will probably be 'smarter' in 2050. They will be so next year and this trend has been the case for quite some time. Even if you're prepared to burn through the... consequences... of experimenting with genetic engineering on human cognitive ability, there is no such guarantee for humans.
I remember reading Richard Feynman saying (in maybe Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!?) that he felt bad for the researchers who went off to think in a cabin in the woods because real breakthroughs came from explaining your ideas to and working with people in other fields.
Of course not, and the fact that even black cops treat black people like they're less than human illustrates another important idea: internalized racism. When power structures in society constantly reinforce the idea that black people are worth less, everyone starts to believe it.

Pernicious, isn't it?

It isn't just about name-calling. It's about the systems that keep people disengaged politically and economically, generation after generation. The name-calling is just the surface stuff, and you know, I bet you anything that if people of color actually had a fair shot at anything in this country, the name calling wouldn't matter at all.
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I think the objection isn't that those people didn't make huge and transformative contributions to the field.

Rather, it is the tone set by the use of the worshippy word "genius", which has a murky, and totally relative definition, and the phrase "unusual cognitive ability", which implies that their abilities uniquely set these people apart from others who we don't worship in the same way.

Uncounted numbers people have fully understood, and often expanded beyond, the discoveries of Von Neumann, Shannon, Turing etc., since their times, and even more probably had the innate ability to do so, but no access.

Thousands of others have demonstrated the scrappy self-startedness of Wozniak and Torvalds, but without the societal setting and geographic luck that allowed those individuals to succeed.

Given the significant role that one's environment plays in one's success, these people as individuals aren't in themselves unusual. What's unusual is that they were people with the right characteristics, in the right circumstances, and the right support systems.

Basically, extraordinary intellect isn't as unusual or consequential as that sentence from the article implies.
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Reimplement it on Node.js to compete with Grunt and Gulp.
There's been a bit of discussion over at reddit, too: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3jhv80/pyparal....
This week in "class indicators".
The probability of developing psychosis among college students is going to be substantially increased.
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Show HN: Libsoundio – cross-platform audio input and output
This sounds fascinating. If you or anybody else can find the article please post it!
Life is a game, I pity those thinking life is a story or movie, since that's quite a passive life to live.
I enjoyed the demos - I'm not exactly sure why, but I guess it felt like I was making a lot happen when really I was just moving the mouse around.

I think that, when you step back from programming in text, and think of it as 'creating ideas' you realise that we've barely scratched the surface. Often when I solve problems in my head it's a mix of visual/verbal thoughts with past memories thrown in too. Your demos show that visualization is a powerful tool, but how do you make it useful?

Being able to see the world and visualise is like the base code for being a human, but computers are all math and text. Bringing visualization to programming is surely the next step. Already the cogs are turning to try and bring realtime REPLs to IDEs (such as light table, and visual studio code online) in order to see data as you code. I imagine from here the next step would to be able to visualise that data beyond text, and be able to edit the visualization and see the code change as a result.
This makes sense in a free market where housing is a perfectly fungible, liquid good.

In reality, housing/rent is very sticky. If my landlord had his taxes raised, he would simply raise my rent by a corresponding amount. And I would pay, because it would be too much of an issue for me to put my life on hold while I find another place to live. Nobody is paying 100% of their income as rent - there is always room to squeeze more margin out of renters.
Because the advancements in the field are interesting and wide ranging: neural networks doing vision, speech, natural language understanding, reasoning and general learning over data.
What a bizarre logical leap this early paragraph makes to try to explain why AI is beyond the capabilities of mere humans:

"AI can be thought of as a search problem over an effectively infinite, high-dimensional landscape of possible programs. Nature solved this search problem by brute force, effectively performing a huge computation involving trillions of evolving agents of varying information processing capability in a complex environment (the Earth). It took billions of years to go from the first tiny DNA replicators to Homo Sapiens. ... we have little idea of how to find the tiny subset of all possible programs running on this hardware that would exhibit intelligent behavior."

That's... a bizarre argument. You might as well argue that since heavier-than-air-flight is a search problem over an effectively infinite, high-dimensional landscape of possible machines - and that since it took evolution billions of years to produce birds, we have little chance of stumbling upon a working design for a wing.

Of course evolution's 'brute force' breadth-first hillclimb takes billions of years to find solutions to problems. It's undirected and unintelligent. Engineers don't have to perform undirected unintelligent searches across the infinite space of possible solutions to problems, they can think and plan and learn. I see no reason to see AI as a particularly different class of scientific endeavor, more complex than rocket science or nuclear engineering or biochemistry, such that ordinary, unenhanced human brains can't hope to comprehend it sufficiently to design machines that are capable of intelligence. This sounds a little like an 'if man were meant to fly, god would've given us wings' argument.
I think I address some of your points in the article. I specify that overall peak power consumption for the chip is 30W - this is for an octa-core configuration. This means one CPU roughly consumes 3.5W (if you take out the coherency manager and fabric). Then I also referenced the SPEC CPU2000 performance number at 1GHz. From that you can easily calculate performance per W. If you want more technical details about the architecture, they do have an user manual here
http://www.loongson.cn/uploadfile/cpumanual/Loongson3B1500_p...

I also state that a new processor will be released next year and it will run at above 2GHz which should solve the difference in frequency.
Ask HN: Importance of a good .com domain?
Hey all, I'd love some marketing / growth people to comment on this:

I can't seem to get any one of the .com domain that I want, mostly because of squatters. The .co domains seem to be available. How much of a disadvantage is it to not own the .com domain?
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> Who will work 15 hours a day next to me.

Science proved many times that working this much does not yield any result and is actually harmful both for your health and productivity.

Great post otherwise :)
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You could probably name 1,000 people that made significant contributions to the computer field, but that 1,000 had less impact than everyone else put together especially when you ignore fashion. AKA If we lost Linux, but kept BSD then not much would have changed.
The frustrating thing about this is that the entire concept of salary negotiations is one of the prime causes of unequal pay between genders.

The entire culture of a company trying to offer you less than you're worth so that they can save a few pennies is disgusting.

There shouldn't be salary negotiations - people who do the same job should be paid the same salary. If you want to negotiate for extra vacation days or a signing bonus or whatever, fine, but not salary. Just pay people a fair salary and pay them the same.

The current salary negotiation setup is extremely detrimental to people and should be eliminated, not encouraged.
GitHub Enterprise has had the ability to deny force-push to master for a little over a year now. I think it might have had the ability to totally deny force-pushes before then, too. They seem to be steadily improving the granularity of the controls.
I think a lot of people forget that 64-bit MIPS has been around for more than two decades - much longer than Intel, AMD or ARM.

For example, the Nintendo N64 game console had a MIPS64 CPU.
That's a great comment, thank you. Let me check how all the prices relate once again and come back to you.
"Each one of these predictions, like a uniformly expanding Universe whose expansion rate was faster in the past..."

I thought that the universe's expansion was accelerating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe
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So I'm a small biz owner. my website is getting way too many hits from Samara Oblast. I realize there is nothing good with those hits, so how can I change that? I have been learning a lot from these boards.. So if anyone can offer Insight on this.. I would love it. Jenny:-)
Innovation Impacts on the C-Suite
>>Isn't this article just taking a roundabout way of commenting that landowners in highly productive areas are choking growth and more productivity by siphoning too much money off of the non-landowners for use of the land?

Ehhhh... yes, but it's contending that the reason landowners are able to do that is the land use regulation that makes the land valuable. So it would be more accurate to say that regulation is choking growth, by handing landowners a bunch of economic rent (unearned profits).
Full extract oils (essentially the entire planet is dissolved in ethanol, then evaporated to leave a concentrated resin) claim to contain over 400 compounds (not all are cannabinoids). You can buy them in high THC, high CBD, or high TCH and CBD (in addition to the others) formulations.

Recent studies have shown that reported genetics aren't very reliable (ie. what is claimed to be a pure indica or indica dominate hybrid have actually tested as ~75% sativas).

The combination of compounds is probably the biggest driver in a person's experience and the percentage of indica vs. sativa only has some influence over that combination.
These two classes of rich that you are describing probably intersect a lot. Once you make money in business, you need to invest it somewhere that will make you a return. Land is a popular choice.
> Seeing different ways to look at something is always refreshing ... how do YOU think about NNs?

A year or two ago, when I was really doing the wandering researcher thing, I made a point of asking lots of people at different groups how they saw deep learning. I think these three narratives capture most of what I heard, although a people blended them in different ways.

Certain views are more common in particular groups. For example, people at the Montreal group seem more inclined to think about things from the representations narrative than other groups. (Although, I think I have just about everyone else beat in my extreme version of seeing everything from the manifold perspective. :P )

I feel like there's some pretty interesting quasi-sociological work to be done on deep learning. Because the community has grown so fast, and there's a lot of variety in how people think.

>> ... chain of composed functions is optimized..
> This is certainly true for the majority of models in use today, but I wonder if this will remain true for future architectures.

I suspect there's something very fundamental about chains of composed functions. I can't formalize my feeling into a strong argument though.

> In the case of a network that is supposed to update it's own weights during normal operation (i.e. topic discovery), the functional narrative is less clear to me.

I don't think matters too much. The functional graph becomes more complicated, but it's just a matter of the output of one function going to multiple places.
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Yeah, I think people tend to discount or forget the eccentricity and maladaptivity of ultra-high intellect people. I think it's also possible to be paralyzed by high intelligence as a result of existential angst-- a problem that intellect is poor at solving.
I heard a fella once say that's rather a play, with all of us playing our parts in turn... Bill something or other...
I love the stuff, but for me it was incredibly dangerous because of precisely how much I loved it. Once I start up smoking, I can't stop. I'd go through a quarter every two days. I would smoke as soon as I got up, as soon as I got home from work, all through the night, waking up every hour or so to smoke. I would stop seeing my friends (none of whom smoke), I would stop going out. I had no patience to read or code, and so all I would do was lie on the couch and watch TV or lie in bed listening to music. I stopped working out because moving took too much energy. I stopped self-improvement. I lost any intellectual curiosity. Sure, I would write down my moments of "great high inspiration" which were usually meaningless strings of words in childlike handwriting (because my fine motor skills are pretty terrible on the weed) that sober me was embarrassed of.

Some people can function perfectly fine on the stuff, but my addictive brain absolutely cannot handle it, and I'm much, much better without it.

But I love it.

I love it.

And every day it's really, really hard not to just give up and call my guy and smoke the night away.
Nice

http://lea.verou.me/css3patterns/#marrakesh
It seems like the author has realised that there are a few common functional programming patterns (folds, maps) that are also common ways of combining information and operating on data structures, and seen the parallel to some operations that we frequently want to do within neural networks. A 'function' is simply a thing that takes another thing and produces a third thing. This doesn't seem that revolutionary or insightful - do these ideas give us any extra knowledge about neural networks or is this just a nice parallel?
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IANAPS (I Am Not a Political Scientist), but I consider regulatory capture (outside of anarchy) to be the single most important unsolved problem in policy.

I think, in general, regulation works best as a threat (clean up your act, or we will). But for a threat to be credible, you need to follow-through on it from time-to-time.

The recent issue with the FCC and Comcast et. al. is an example of this. 20 years from now, we are going to regret that the FCC has increased authority over ISPs, but the actions of the cable oligopolies left little choice.
That's why they tell you things like "if they extend you an offer be prepared to accept it" and if you tell them your salary they'll pressure you into accepting an offer you would normally refuse.
It is a github page, it's hosted on github.io. The branch is https://github.com/pakastin/deck-of-cards/tree/gh-pages
There's a node server required too, to coordinate the multiple connected clients.
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I bet a modern common space would be filled by people looking at their cellphones.

Perhaps it would have worked before smartphones, but I don't think it will any longer.
JetBrains to switch from an ownership model to a rental model for their IDE's
Trying to draw by writing HTML text is like pounding a screw. It's the wrong tool for the job. If you want to draw Zenefit's hummingbird, use an SVG draw program. Inkscape is free and can do that job.

As a way to get past HR idiots, it may be useful.
Had the same idea but I also have a hundred others to distract me, so thanks for the heads up. I'll keep an eye on it.
For classification, I think of it simply as a nonlinear transformation + multivariable logistic regression where parameters are learned jointly. In particular the nonlinear transformation is assumed to be of the form of some number of affine transformations, each followed by a nonlinear component-wise mapping. I tend to intentionally avoid brain comparisons because: 1) there's more than enough of that already 2) I don't know enough of the neurophysiology to speculate. I'd like to see some mathematical analysis on what classes of function are more efficiently represented (and/or learned) by networks with increasing numbers of layers.
I don't think making cats bark would be very relevant to an Internet technology company, but it would probably be a good sign in a relevant industry (say, a company that trains animals).

That's the point. This person did a neat little project that uses skills which are directly relevant to the job being applied for. The project probably isn't actually useful on its own, but it shows interest and ability.
That whole page is gorgeous, but GoL in the background is the icing on the cake
My brain's probably just not working correctly today, but:

> Also, past a certain venue size, it's better to mike guitar amplifiers rather than make them louder or add more of them...

By "guitar amplifiers" do you mean "loudspeakers being fed the signal from a guitar and amp"? Also, I assume that miking the amps would let you feed that signal into your master sound system where you could mix it and distribute it across the venue's loudspeakers as required? (Whereas adding more amps would just mean more speakers on stage?)
Agreed! I found the article and thought it as an interesting approach to look for a tech cofounder.

What other way would you suggest? https://angel.co ?
I like the approach of a small, fun task as "extra credit". But how do you smoothly bring that up in the interview? I guess if you're being asked about CSS technical details, you can mention you built this last night and ask if they'd like to see it. But I'm pretty sure due to nerves, I would make that really awkward. Like I'd answer the phone and shout "LOOK AT WHAT I MADE!"
“Show Me a Hero” and the Limits of Life, the Movie
>>People like sprawled-out, low-density development.

Some people like those things. Other people actively dislike and avoid those things. Certainly there are enough of the latter that the Bay Area could be much more dense than it is, and still contain mostly people that like that density.
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I understand deep depression intimately, yet disagree that it's grounds to infantilize another human.

So what about other mental illnesses? Dementia? Schizophrenia? Is it your position that, regardless of the mental state of the individual, their personal decisions should be paramount, no matter the cost, including their own life?

If so, then we'll have to agree to disagree. There are many many contexts in which we, as a society, determine that someone is mentally unfit to make decisions, and then treat them differently, whether that be a schizophrenic who is given a different sentence in a trial, a person delirious on pain medication unable to sign a legal contract, or a minor who is denied the right to vote. If you disagree with that basic principle, you disagree with one of the fundamental tenants of the society in which you live.

Of course, you're free to feel that way, but don't be surprised if others don't share your views.
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How should developers monetize OSS? [survey]
I'm in the same boat man. We just need a little tamper-proof dispenser that only allows us a certain amount for a given period of time.

Like you, I'm better off without it. But I do miss it.
To make life into a story is to project onto it meaning. If you don't view life as narrative, what do your actions matter?

The "happy endings, fairness, justice, heroes, villains, turnabouts, karma" JoshTriplett lists are the narrative projections which make life feel valuable in spite of life's trending towards wavering extremes of boredom and suffering.

The OP's argument coincides with the Buddhist and Taoist positions, who prescribe a lack of attachment to all mental constructs -- be that family, culture, love, hate, beauty, honor, good, evil, progress, and so on.

I get the logic behind it, it's an attempt to reduce life to the unassailably true. However, I think that sort of detached reductionism invariably leads to the view of the universe as a meaningless expanse of material, with an ordered procession of predestined material actions and reactions.

Is the meaningless material universe the true universe? Perhaps, but life feels like much more than that.

I prefer the ancient Hindu philosophical counterpart. They also believed, as the Buddhists and Taoists do, that at the most fundamental level it's all meaningless, but that by some miracle the meaningful emerges from the meaningless by way of our experience of it. The mind gives reality to the unreal, and that's a good thing.

Sure, the narrative we project onto the world may be fiction, but without it the material universe is a blank book. If life be fiction, give me fiction.
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That is a problem of robotic hardware, not AI. It's really easy to hook up a microcontroller to get mic input and query a voice recognition server (backed by some sort of AI software) and then do commands based on interpretation of the result (more AI software). The hard part is actually being able to do the commands. There's a reason the service industry hasn't been totally destroyed by robotics yet, and it's simply because it's hard to get robots to interact with the physical world with any sort of generality. Though lawns are simple and standard enough there have been lawn-Roombas for a long time.
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Not necessarily; especially when watching lesser productions, where it is more difficult to maintain the illusion. The strange juxtaposition of the fantasy attempting to be created vs. the reality that it's just a bunch of people dressed up, trying to create the illusion of another reality can be particularly disconcerting.
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