skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're absolutely right, we didn't address corruption in this piece. Will make a note for future conversations, thanks for bringing it up! As for fundraising, it's really tough -- and as expressed by some of these entrepreneurs, they've had to look abroad for funding. Some new initiatives, like the Cairo Angels, have emerged and seeded the landscape with funds -- but they're a limited number, relative to the number of startups. We'll address a bit of this investor dynamic / aversion to risk in an upcoming episode on startups in Dubai; would love your thoughts on that, too!
Configo – Control your mobile app features and configs in realtime (Beta Signup)
It's absurd that it isn't always free and open.

Why would a patent from the government need to be licensed at all? Why would there be a program that a company needs to go through to use research payed for by taxes?
I just think it is super weird to be completely, categorically opposed to remote work when a primary goal is diversity. It is a severe constraint on hiring, and you want super flexible hiring to maximize diversity.
> Ads are much less an intrinsic cultural phenomenon than you think. We think they matter to culture simply because they exist, but their absence has no important effect on it.

The thing is, though, every culture, every city, is different, and you just don't know what the effect will be until you've done it. Maybe Tokyo and other Asian cities would turn out to be the same as São Paulo, but ... maybe they wouldn't.

Because of this, and because it would be a major change, it's not something you want to do unless there's a lot of local support for it; it's something that needs to be locally driven.

Maybe in São Paulo, there was such support, and in the end things worked out, which is great.

But if nobody actually cares, it would be pretty silly to do it simply because of a "global movement."
I have thought about this. How do people who are at the heads of large corporations okays destruction and pollution of environment. Is it because they don't care about the world their kids will inhabit? Or they just don't understand the seriousness and view it that way.

If it is the former (which I really doubt), then longer lives can help. Or else, it will be just the same.

A more realistic answer might be publically funded companies are answerable to the masses (people who buy shares), and the masses only care about the quarterly reports. And again, longer lives will not help much here. Because you buy a share for you to make a profit out of it.
Even if the public is fully aware of the environmental issues, I am not sure people will take that into consideration while buying shares.

Again, longer lives won't help us there.
Most fast-takeoff AGI scenarios usually involve a singular intelligence created from an algorithm that easily scales based on how much computing power is allocated to it.

Combined with the notion of computing overhang[0], it's possible that our very first AGI could far exceed human intelligence, such that it would have capacity for rapid self-improvement right from the start.

I'm not saying this will necessarily be the case; slower takeoff scenarios are certainly a possibility, albeit an unlikely one (IMHO).

Another point to consider is that computing hardware is vastly superior to the human brain both in its capacity for raw calculation, and its sheer speed in terms of raw latency.

Keeping that in mind, assume we have created an AGI simulation that's approximately equal in complexity relative to the human brain. Not intelligence, just complexity of the simulation itself.

Now consider that AGI is not bound by biological constraints, and would not necessarily be structured in similar fashion to the human brain. This lends itself to potentially far more efficient architectures, and with that, the realization of AGI at a computational cost far below that of simulating a complete human brain.

Moreover, given a completely alien architecture, it's not hard to imagine the cognitive side of such a simulation interfacing rather directly with traditional modes of computation.

To illustrate, imagine comparing a human being to an identical human being that has a microprocessor integrated into their brain. Both humans may have nearly identical capacity for abstract intelligence, but the one with the microprocessor is going to be effectively far more intelligent, simply because their capacity for dealing with raw data and calculations is vastly superior. It's not hard to imagine a similar dynamic coming into play with AGI.

[0] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Computing_overhang
My comparison was between the C1 offering from Scaleway and the lowest DigitalOcean package. Scaleway has far larger disk and memory, but the disk is remote over the network link and the 4 ARM cores are 32bit and terribly slow. I really like Scaleways configuration and control panel but the performance just isn't there. It's likely better for a lot of things other people are doing but I needed the IO and CPu performance.
I rather think the appeal of a Moravec transfer is that a single result-mind with an upgraded substrate is preferable to two result-minds, one on the superior substrate and one still on the original substrate. Doing it that way is cruel since the original will still decay and eventually die.

(Thanks for this by the way, I've long thought about this idea but didn't know it had a name.)
Yeah I used to know the key sequences to turn off my computer.

That's not to say that you couldn't come up with an interface for controlling a computer blindly with a mouse.
This is an incredibly complex topic. Believe me, most of my Egyptian friends and family will wax poetic of the same difficulties and desire to leave/ have already left. There's no way to do a response justice in a post, but we are working as we speak on episode about brain drain from Egypt in attempt to make sense of the complexities. Would love you input, if you'd like to be involved: hebah [at] kerningcultures.com
The primary problem with the phenomenology approachieve to AGI is that we have so little understanding about the mechanism of general intelligence. Some aspects of intelligence, we understand, but as is analogous to flight it's nowhere close.

Whereas with flight the Wright brothers and before them Richard pearce understood it well enough to make an approximation and thus working implementations, we don't have anything close to that kind of understanding.
I'm not sure they are comparable. I have a bunch of servers with both Scacleway and DO and, despite the slow disk access on Scacleway's, you get 2GB of memory per server which works well for some microservices.

A DO instance with the same amount of memory costs $20, compared to €2 for an IP-less server on Scacleway.
Docker on Synology
Via front and back entrance at the same time
Well again it's a completely different story, this isn't unique to the NSA, and not unique to the USA.

And heck universities getting patents for research funded by public funds, conducted by students which are supported by public grants isn't any different, one might say is actually worse.
And you also forget that many companies will use public grants, as well as tax credit for R&D, governments have quite a big reason to provide incentives for private companies using public funds because the more you spend on R&D usually the better your economy and society will be in the long run.

There is nothing in the law that prevents the US government from filing patents, there's nothing in the law of most countries to prevent government agencies / government owned organizations for filing patents (before the royal postal service was "privatized" it was the largest patent holder in the UK while being a government agency they sold off most of their patents when they were privatized, same goes for British Rail, and British Telecom).

If you want something worse then well most medical patents today are more or less publicly funded, drug companies are often paid by the government to find drugs which then they can later patent, heck if they are doing it "right" then they it's also likely that they'll use a public university to do the research for them while maintaining the filing rights for any patents for true double dipping into your pocket.
Current ARM server chips are much worse than Intel chips on the performance/watt metric [1]. The datacenter play would necessarily have to target consumers with low performance needs and offer them a better price. That would be tough because you have to compete against the already-cheap $5/server/mo Intel market.

AMD's SeaMicro was arguably the best shot at offering an alternate ARM-server commoditization model. AMD shut down SeaMicro in April [2].

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/8357/exploring-the-low-end-and...
[2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/16/amd_q1_2015_earnings...
I think a lot of it is a network effect problem. As (hopefully) more nerdy girls start finding each other and providing alternatives to ostracization at a young age, they'll be able to increase their numbers.

That said, as controversial as there is, I think there is a bit of a genetic component here. Not that girls are genetically less capable of being good engineers or even of being nerds, but rather, that men may be genetically more likely to have obsessive and solitary interests, including things that seem to be borderline on the autistic spectrum.

Men are 8x more likely to be diagnosed with high-functioning autism than women are.

If there is a genetic component to this [1], then the numbers of female nerds are probably always going to be lower than female nerds. But awareness and support of female nerds is certainly important.

[1] http://www.autism.org.uk/about-autism/introduction/gender-an... (See section about chromosomal differences)
I've always quite disliked advertising. I really think that it's a rather insidious force in western culture, and it has always bothered me that it's so aggressively forced into people's day to day lives. It nearly always preys on people's insecurities, is intentionally designed to distract you and is often just an eye sore.

I know it's a little goofy and "edgy", but this article reminded me of a quote by Banksy (a well known graffiti artists):

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. FUCK THAT. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe then any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs."
Banksy

It's overly angsty, but I like the idea that some cities are taking it upon themselves to rid themselves of ads, rather than street artists destroying personal property to accomplish it.
Totally didn't convince me: beta signup without nothing, no demo, no screenshots.
I assume you mean 0.004 euros, 0.004 euro cents * 24 * 30 would be 2.88 euro cents per month.
Doubtful. I was a student during that time and I can't recall any math or CS (or STEM) classes that cancelled a class session because of the strike. The most that happened was some teaching assistants cancelled their section for one day.
I suppose I mean "necessary" more as "necessary to the way life works right now." Existence with immortality or very-long life expectancy could be completely different in ways we can't fathom, so I'm opposed to the idea of automatically accepting it as more desirable than what we have now. (Yes, this is a conservative and somewhat closed-minded position. If nothing else I hope people will come up with a detailed vision of what conquering mortality would look like, rather than just assuming it will be better.)

On the disease comparison, admittedly I was only thinking of viral and bacterial disease. Death is much like a genetic disorder we all have. On the other hand, isn't "health" usually defined as how a "normal" person's body works? If death is normal, then it can't be a disease. OK, enough semantic games. ;) I still see a qualitative difference between keeping a body healthy enough that it doesn't die until that universal process wears it down vs. something earlier.

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that society accepts death and rejects accidents. Is the grief of accidental death really universally distinguishable from that of old age or illness? On both sides, you'll have anger/sadness it happened so soon, or reluctant acknowledgement that it was going to happen some day and we can't predict it or prepare.

(The following is somewhat OT in the context of "uploading the brain":) On grievous injury, I don't know if commenters have been including vastly improved ability to recover from those in "immortality." I wonder though, if fatal injury were the only way to die, would it cause people to lock themselves away in a bubble to live forever, rather than risk dying? Maybe in the first stages of the science, the body will still get frailer as the years pass, so that sudden accidental death becomes more likely the longer you live. Would such an eternal sheltered existence, lived in constant fear of losing it one day, be worth having? If not, why do you want it? If so, why is it really that different than what you already have? After 1,000 years are you going to say "I've accomplished enough, experienced enough, that I am now more comfortable with possibly dying than I was when I was 25."?

Presumably the likelihood and number of possible accident scenarios will decrease over time, so maybe most people won't worry too much. Murder could still be a big fear/threat though.
Mmm, yeah... could you guys try to not be so nerdy? That would be great. And no jokes about PC load letter.
>are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well

How can your teaching quality be proficient if you can't speak English well? Sure there are teachers who get unfair evaluations because they have a bit of an accent, but if you actually can't speak English well, how are you effectively teaching in English?
I think server-class ARM is interesting, but it's always struck me as much more interesting for on-premises stuff... like, you want a cheap on-site NAS that doesn't use much power, or a generic machine you can use as a switch, or maybe even an intranet host or something. Anything in the category of stuff that is always on but not very resource-intensive.

In cloud deployments, though, sharing a bigger box amongst lots of virtual machines just seems way more economical.
I'd say this article is more along the lines "Is money corrupting politics?", especially as the outcomes of research in this context is usually are aimed at policy (or rather, justifying policy to the masses).

If you want to tackle the shame that is using science as a populist tool for denialism, that you are allowed to conjure up an expert witness for any contrarian point of view or agenda, then you must tackle this problem head on. Front and center of this is the congressional ban on gun research.

Probably the first step would be to change the way we present data and facts to policy-makers in a more sophisticated way, e.g. shorter review periods, or being able to democratically control those who sit on these committees. Or better, have more knowledgeable people there in the first place. Something something, series of tubes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes).
Simple yes is not enough - it is much more complex than the article explains. Private funding is just the tip of the iceberg - private companies want their own opinions written in scientific manner, with facts taken and hidden to support that opinion. Is it good or bad? It actually does not matter - it is that way. But this applies only for paid papers.

There is a whole another category - paid research/engineering projects. Scientists doing the work expect to publish something. Yet the meat of the research has to remain hidden for the company investing to hold market advantage. Result? Technical babble in papers. And it is quite often hard as hell to find which pieces of the paper are not honest.

Government funding application forms usually include a field labeled something like "Expected result/outcome". So you cannot just get funding without certainty of success in one form or another. Which basically results in funding directed to projects with some preliminary results. And those preliminary results are funded from another projects and so the cycle goes. This is very well illustrated in PhD Comics [1].

One of the core reasons behind all of this mess are funding gatekeepers: private companies know what they want and will pay for that particular output. Public funding is usually behind some Government Agency where the same set of people review funding applications and... "known to be well behaving" (delivering promised results) researchers are much more likely to get funded, see [1]. Either way, it is next to impossible to do what in my book is actual research - come up with a new idea and get funding to test whether it has any grounds at all.

[1]: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd050611s.gif

Edit: fixed link
What if you kept all the original neurons and re-assembled them into your original brain? Who would be the real "you"?
You May Never Want to Bring Your Children to the Dentist After Seeing This?
Or the hospitals kicks out patients who are still sick, so they either become someone else's problem, or they make money when they're readmitted.

Aligning incentives is hard.
> ...go see stories about people trying to build a SFH on a empty lot and being block by neighborhood bullshit...

True. AIUI, it has been incredibly difficult to get anything new built in the city for a wide variety of reasons for a very long time.

However, I bring up the limits of rent stabilization because I often see people saying:

"More people would build in San Francisco if it wasn't for that damned Rent Control in the city."

or

"Rent Control is why noone builds in San Francisco."

It turns out that -not infrequently-, many of these folks don't understand that rent stabilization doesn't cover new construction. [0]

I hope that once one discovers that rent stabilization doesn't prevent a developer from building a new building full of 1000sf (or smaller!) units that -currently- rent for ~3k/month, and can be adjusted to "market rate" at any time the lease between the landlord and tenant permits, one starts digging around to discover more about the especially fucked up process of getting new construction approved in this town.

[0] Except when specially negotiated, as mentioned in my previous comment.
I was a grad student and teaching assistant in Berkeley maths 1998-99. I observed that the department intentionally admitted many more grad students than it could possibly put through the full PhD, and had a well-tuned system for weeding them out after a year or two - chiefly a "preliminary exam" that was notoriously tough and (in my view and that of many others) unfair. A charitable view would be that the department wanted to give many students a chance to shine and graduate, so had a liberal admissions policy; a cynic might observe that those who failed the prelim conveniently taught calculus as TAs for a couple of years for a ridiculously low cost, hence provided cheap labour (much cheaper than Dr. Coward for sure). After two years of experiencing the kind of environment Dr. Coward describes, I definitely adopted the cynical view. I left the university, and mathematics, and have been much happier as a result. I wish Dr. Coward every success in changing what I found to be a very unpleasant system in the department.
These are factors, but what's discussed in the article is not regulation due to safety, but regulation due to existing homeowners in the neighborhood not wanting their property values to go down as a result of the increased supply. That's just brazen market manipulation via control of the city government. Cities should have a role in making sure construction is safe. They shouldn't, in my opinion, have one in protecting the financial assets of incumbent homeowners.
I agree that you should get some psychiatric help (I can sympathize with your condition), but the 'battery draining while off' gives me pause. How bad was the battery drain, and was the device 'off' or 'sleeping'?
I'm going to ignore your baseless (and incorrect) assertion about "an inferior version" of UPSERT (MySQL's doesn't work properly except for the primary key). Your problem is that you are not doing an index only scan. The reason you are not doing an index only scan is, most likely, that the visibility bit is not set on the table. This is usually as a result of excessive writing to the table, but sometimes it is due to incorrectly tuned planner settings. Try setting your cpu_tuple_cost higher and/or cpu_index_tuple_cost lower. I have had to do this in the past to get index only scans to work. BTW, a quick way to force the issue is to SET enable_seq_scan TO off in psql.

I would add, you should really upgrade to 9.4, as there were some performance improvements to aggregates.
I'll just be over here waiting on the other side of the story...
Why Myers Briggs Personality Tests Are Useless
The situation with English is similar to the situation with Korean being written with hanja, although not as severe. We're using the Latin alphabet, which was designed for a language with many fewer phonemes, and we're using it in a quasi-ideographic way in which spellings reflect etymology as much as they do pronunciation. So even though we have between thirteen and twenty vowels, depending on how you count, we attempt to represent them all with only six graphemes — and irregularly at that.
Norway's neighbors are Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, whose welfare systems are generally not characterized as "inadequate".
Survival of the Fittest Can Evolving Workplace a Good Fit?
Yeah, he made one of those, too[0]

[0] http://www.damienhirst.com/the-dream
For reference, I did not mean unregulated graffiti but, as I mentioned, more along the regulated nature of Five Points NYC which looked like this before it was pointed over a few months ago. [0]

[0] - http://inhabitat.com/nyc/wp-content/blogs.dir/2/files/2012/0...
Meh, EMC has been a part of the walking dead for years. There were rumors a few months ago that VMware—a spinoff from EMC—was going to acquire EMC.

Dell doesn't care. They've been private for a couple years. No one's going to pummel their stock tomorrow morning.

Anyway, HP has much more to fear from HP than they do from the synergistic effects (lol) of Dell+EMC. HP is a total disaster, and is far more likely to kill itself off than die from consolidation around it.
Precision medicine ideas for VCs and angel investors
The equivalent way to preserve the newline semantics in Perl these days is this:

perl -lnE 'say if length()<1024'
>Also, they arbitrarily told Instagram to fuck off by only banning their image embeds, which pissed off even more users.

This makes no sense. The opposite happened: Instagram blocked Twitter.