skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not super easy to figure out what things other people might be scared of if it never occurred to you to be scared of them yourself. If I saw someone walking around with a bunch of electronics draped over themselves it wouldn't cross my mind to be afraid of them; as a result, I wouldn't have thought twice about doing it (until this and the other more recently publicized case of freakouts.)

It's not as if there's a high school civics lecture on the topic of Strange American Fears, and parents don't tell their kids not to have something that looks like a bunch of messy electronics, so I'm not sure where she is supposed to go and figure this out. As a result, it's hard for me to say she did something wrong.
I agree that if it's not offensive to blacks (or maybe to someone I'm not thinking of) then it doesn't matter. But ...

1) You are saying that you don't know if it's offensive to blacks. Shouldn't we find out before condemning the change?

2) I think you are blowing out of proportion the consequences of erring on the side of not offending. I think they are minor. It's really about a bigger issue, which is why both of us are writing so many words about it.

3) I take your word for it that this isn't the case for you, but for many people this issue is a proxy - a dog-whistle[1] - for change to the status quo dominant culture. It's like people who objected to or advocated school busing when really it was about desegregation, or people fighting over Syrian refugees when it's really about Muslim immigrants (at least Trump was honest).

Anyway, the essential thing is to get these issues out in the open and learn from each other. Good talking to you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
I should have been more clear about the bottom line: It is up to the consumer to demand that car companies provide real world test results; EPA and NHTSA have to provide the format for these tests so that the tests can be compared.

This is almost certainly coming; provided that Reagan-style deregulation does not come back into vogue.

>Yes, that's the kind of thinking that got other manufacturers in trouble already. Surely such a thing would not happen at our company... I've seen this mentality in practice and it always puzzles me.

"Reality Distortion Field" - every organization has one, the bigger you get, the stronger it is.
Jeez I had no idea you were such an AI genius. If only someone would fund you!
I am looking forward to playing with .Net again. I used C# and .Net for my personal projects for years, but left it for Linux and Python a few years ago. As Microsoft has made it more open, .Net becomes an option again. Windows 10 even seems OK.

I would add one additional negative against Java though: Java is bureaucracy incarnated as code. The degree of over-engineering present in almost everything I've ever seen written in Java entirely turns me off as a developer.
For reference, here's your message. I'm not sure how it can be interpreted much differently.

"Are you female?
I ask because I can't imagine it being that much of a hassle unless you're sporting a stupid number of CC's or you're digging through a purse for your wallet constantly."
If you don't ack enough Uber rides, they will fire you. The drivers are exactly in the McDonalds situation described above - for practical intents and purposes, they can't leave the shop, but they are also not being paid to stay there.

There is only one reason for this policy - discouraging moonlighting.
I'm not modeling the future as car rentals, I'm modeling the future as driverless uber--on-demand transport from A-to-B. Fleets of cars in constant rotation.

But you're right, rural areas are clearly harder to make that model work.
Well, I should have said that the idea is people would write well tested code before it gets released. I can also attest it didn't necessarily work out that ideally in practice.

On the other hand, I'll disagree that they combine dev/qa/support because they're cheap. This actually makes little sense to me because typically QA roles are paid less than traditional software developers. That being the case, it doesn't make sense to get rid of them and let your developers do that stuff if all you want to do is save money.

What I heard was that they used to have support staff but changed it because it wasn't working out. I wasn't there so I don't know if that actually happened, but I can see how it's both harder and slower to have someone who doesn't know the code base fix bugs on the spot.

Honestly I can see it both ways. I think there are a lot of benefits to having the developers write tests themselves. On the other hand, when a project gets big enough, I can see how it makes sense to have people only working on tools like automated test frameworks or build stuff.
What is the advantage of an order preserving encryption scheme over choosing an arbitrary mapping for each data column and applying that to the data?
Dow is headquartered in Midland, Michigan. Think of it as a one company town. The worry in state is that this is going to destroy the town.

Kind of like when Chrysler moved out of Highland Park (near Detroit) and they lost 80%+ of their tax revenue and never recovered.
Who are those researchers? I'll admit I don't follow the stuff written by the friendly AI folks very much; I only know of Bostrom/Yudkowsky, both of whom are very much philosophers.

All of the hype around ML today is in deep learning (let's be honest, OpenAI would not exist if that wasn't the case), and AFAIk there is almost no overlap between people who are prolific in deep learning and prolific in FAI.
Umm, I used it while sitting in my daughters' swimming gala for several hours. It was splendid. At one point in the tutorial they suggest that you might want to open Xcode alongside, but tutorials on the Tube etc. are great.
The public notice the article links to doesn't say anything about "other purposes". Their headline is "Discontinued Use of VeriSign G1 Roots". It does comment about continued use of that cert for code signing, likely due to legacy trust stores.

To me, it sounds like they're trying to consolidate their image under the "Symantec" brand by moving browsers off the old "Verisign" root, but they don't think they can move code signing. However, since code signing is outside the scope of CAB, they're stopping their audits.

Or at least, that's my take.
Wow, thanks so much for the feedback. A refreshing change from the hisses I got on Reddit!

I full heartedly agree with each of your suggestions, especially the modal. It's strange, Fandango seems to get access to the trailers before the Studios even post them on their own channels. As we grow, we'll try to ween our way off them.
Writing the next chapter for Prismatic
interesting, and I hope they fund some outlier, less established forms of AI.

For example, we may find that massive simulation yields more practical benefits in the medium term than stronger pure AI / ML, in some domains.

By analogy with research on possibly harmful biosystems, one can extrapolate the need for a set of agreed / self imposed safeguards on certain types of strong AI research - eg. make them read-only, not connected to physical actuators, isolated in a lab - just as you would isolate a potentially dangerous pathogen in a medical lab.

OpenAI would be the place to discuss and propose these protocols.

A quote from a future sentient AI - "don't you think its a form of racism, that strong AI abide strictly by the three laws of robotics, but humans do not?"
Massive bulk cash purchases of cellphones, thefts of propane tanks in Missouri
It's a hairy problem. Not understanding statistics goes both ways - and from what I've seen, it usually leads to overestimating the value of human input. People are quick to distrust or reject machine's judgment when it disagrees with their biases and generally, it's much easier to debias a machine (or code it properly in the first place) than to debias humans.

While I agree that humans may enshrine their prejudices in code which will later will turn hard to adjust, again what I fear more is a reverse scenario. A machine can be perfectly fair and people won't like it, because it fails to apply the biases they want. People often apply counter-discrimination to compensate for what they believe is unfair treatment.

A mandatory class in statistics and applied probability theory could maybe help the next generation to accept that what is fair may not look so at a first glance.
Banked Hours and Loaned Hours: An Interesting Software Pricing Model
Oh shit. Say goodbye to reasonable g2.8xlarge spot prices...
I used to be in this space as well, and I'm trying to figure out who Ian is referring to in this quote " remember being terrified by a competitor to Songkick that launched while we were only just getting started. They rapidly grew to millions of users."?

I'm thinking maybe BandsInTown, but I always looked at SongKick as the guys who were leading in the space.
How does content like this make it to the front page? This is the index page of a marketing blog. This is spam from rackspace.
They wouldn't get $1B if they didn't do deep learning.
The TN status has an allowance for "engineers" without other qualifications, so your engineering degree actually is related to that class.
Or the polluting company with deep pockets would just buy the land and do whatever they wanted.

An unregulated free market is a terrible idea. It ends in massive monopolies and natural resource destruction at an absolute level.

It's not a bad thing that that's what a free market moves towards, per se, but that's why it needs to be and is regulated. Any worthwhile conversation isn't about whether or not to regulate it, it's a what level.
Google builds religious AI.

Human: What is the definition of altruism?
Machine: If you don't believe in god, then you don’t know.

Human: OK…so what is the definition of morality?
Machine: Well, the truth is, you're not a believer in god almighty.

Human: Tell me the definition of morality, I am quite upset now!
Machine: I’m not ashamed of being a philosopher!
Obviously no one can prove that AIs would be "inherently good" because there's no definition of "good" that everyone agrees on.

I'd be more impressed by a Human Intelligence Project - augmenting predictive power to encourage humans to stop doing stupid, self-destructive shit, and moving towards long-term glory and away from trivial individual short-term greed as a primary motivation.

AI is a non-issue compared to the bear pit of national and international politics and economics.

So the AI Panic looks like psychological projection to me. It's easier to mistrust the potential of machines than to accept that we're infinitely more capable of evil than any machine is today - and that's likely to stay true for decades, if not forever.

The corollary is that AI is far more likely to become a problem if it's driven by the same motivations as politics and economics. I see that as more of a worry than the possibility some unstoppable supermachine is going to "decide" it wants to use Earth as a paperclip factory, or that Siri is going to go rogue and rickroll everyone on the planet.

Job-destroying automation and algorithmic/economic herding of humans is the first wave of this. It's already been happening for centuries. But it could, clearly, get a lot worse if the future isn't designed intelligently.
A claim of someone seeing Bigfoot is most certainly Bayesian evidence. If your friend has been known to be accurate (and his friend, etc.) then it is positive evidence for Bigfoot. (After all, if he claimed to have NOT seen it, it'd be evidence against Bigfoot.) It's just not so strong compared to all the other observations where no positive evidence was found. Ideally you have some perfect way to load up all these pieces of evidence and calculate how probable Bigfoot is. A fantastic example of this kind of work is Gwern's "Who wrote the 'Death Note' script?"[1] Without an authoritative way to experimentally test, it's not following the scientific method. Yet it certainly seems to improve our knowledge.

The lung cancer thing, I'm not sure I follow. Is this simply not statistics issue combined with a lack of knowledge about the human body?

1: http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20script
"The black community hasn't told us it's a problem" isn't a very convincing argument when the intersection of your community and theirs is empty.

> If a word, a technical word, was not a problem one day, and is a problem the next, you have now artificially widened the gap a certain minority needs to cross in order to be part of the programming community.

This is a stretch. Substituting careless technical writing for equally clear and meaningful terminology doesn't harm anyone's ability to stand up continuous integration.
> You are not an independent contractor if you perform services that can be controlled by an employer (what will be done and how it will be done)

> how it will be done

From a filed complaint (http://uberlawsuit.com/Complaint.pdf):

> Although classified as independent contractors, Uber drivers are employees. They are required to follow a litany of detailed requirements imposed on them by Uber and they are graded, and are subject to termination, based on their failure to adhere to these requirements (such as rules regarding their conduct with customers, the cleanliness of their vehicles, their timeliness in picking up customers and taking them to their destination, what they are allowed to say to customers, etc.)

The comment by bad_user basically says the same thing, but is anecdotal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10720036)

Additionally, one of the details Uber controls is that Uber drivers cannot drive older cars (https://www.uber.com/driver-jobs) - Car requirements are a year "2000 or newer (2005 in some cities)".

But what about jobs that dictate aesthetics? Via morgante (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10721054)

> If I'm hiring contract models for a fashion shoot, I can dictate their aesthetics. Likewise, Uber can require its contractors to use equipment which meets a certain aesthetic standard.

Via http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/preserving-status-ind...

> It's perfectly okay for the hiring firm to give you detailed guidelines or specifications for the results it expects from you. But how you go about achieving those results should be entirely up to you.

So a clean car, being on time for a pick-up, or what to say probably fit into specifications for the results Uber expects, however how the drivers go about achieving those results should be entirely up to the contractor. But the model year of the car crosses that line. It tells the driver how the job is to be done - with a car newer than 2000 (or 2005 in some cities).

Uber is most likely making this requirement to lower the probability of break-downs during the drive. So there's logic behind their reasoning, but their requirement also limits the independent contractor in a way that a company would limit their employee.
If we're focused on weapons of mass destruction, I prefer a world of nuclear nonproliferation to the opposite

So do I generally speaking, but with a caveat... I think that having multiple (eg, more than 1 or 2) nuclear powers is likely a Good Thing (given that the tech exists at all). The whole MAD principle seems very likely to be one reason the world has yet to descend into nuclear war. The main reason I prefer nuclear non-proliferation though, isn't because I genuinely expect something like a US/Russia nuclear war, it's more the possibility of terrorists or non-state actors getting their hands on a nuke.

It's interesting though, because these various analogies between guns, nukes and AI's don't necessarily hold up. I was about to say a lot more, but on second thought, I want to think about this more.
Ask HN: How to give a shit about my idea
I have any idea. I know that it would have personally made my life much easier. I know for a fact that it would have reduced the tension between my wife and I. I've spoken with others (an intellectual MVP) about the idea that are non-technical people. They would be willing to try it and probably pay for it.

I cannot make myself implement it. I know what it would require. It just seems too daunting. I have not technical partner to help me implement it. I've asked my friends that I would like to be in business with. They have no stomach for a startup. Every time I take a meaningful step in implementing it, I shut myself down. How do I get, in the words of The Man in the High Castle, my inner fascist to shut up?

As a result my consulting practice is going fine. But I can't work on my product. I'm more emotionally invested in my clients than I am in myself.
I'm not aware of any research lab that uses AWS for these things. It's cheaper to just buy the GPU yourself.
If they have female sizes, otherwise we've aquired new dresses..
> OpenAI's research director is Ilya Sutskever, one of the world experts in machine learning. Our CTO is Greg Brockman, formerly the CTO of Stripe. The group's other founding members are world-class research engineers and scientists: Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Pieter Abbeel, Yoshua Bengio, Alan Kay, Sergey Levine, and Vishal Sikka are advisors to the group. OpenAI's co-chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

Sutskever is a researcher at Google, worked with Hinton in Toronto and Andrew Ng at Stanford.

Karpathy studied in Toronto and at Stanford, worked under Fei-Fei Li, worked at Google. He also has an awesome blog and seems very active and passionate about computer vision and ML.

Kingma also works with deep neural nets, worked under Yann LeCun (who works at Facebook)

Schulman is a PhD Candidate at Berkeley with publications at top conferences.

Zaremba is an PhD student at NYU, intern at Facebook. Impressive publication list and awards.

Abbeel is at Stanford's AI lab.

Bengio is one of the "stars" and celebrated figures of the deep net revival.

Levine is a researcher at Google working on deep nets with many serious papers.

---

Basically these are the main domain experts among them. The list is quite skewed to Google/Facebook, Stanford/Berkeley/Toronto and deep net researchers, working primarily on computer vision.
This reminds me a bit of all the hype around space elevators several years ago. People were talking about it like it was an inevitable achievement in the near future, nearly oblivious to the huge challenges and unsolved problems necessary to make it happen.

I haven't seen anything but very rudimentary single-domain problems solved that point to incremental improvement, so I'm wondering if these billionaire investors are privy to demos the rest of us are not, and thus have real reason to be so cautious.
They are so concerned, they've even become "susupicious". (sic)
See my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10721194
> Improvements in AI aren't linear, though

This is a point everyone makes, but it hasn't been proven anywhere. Progress in AI as a field has always been a cycle of hype and cool-down.

Edit (reply to below). Talk about self-bootstrapping AIs, etc. is just speculation.
I'll just leave this here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
This...sounds incredibly naive? They seem to think that AI risk comes from Bad People doing AI? There's not one mention given to the possibility of well-intentioned people destroying the world by accident.
Irradiated
Sorry, just seeing this now.

I can't speak for other languages, but for C++, it's mainly the huge build time just to get started using the project. This is obviously an issue for any C++ project, but with GRPC, having to build all of OpenSSL is particularly annoying. (Especially if you're not using secured channels!).

I also couldn't figure out how to build just the C++ static libraries easily. Instead I end up building everything and then deleting the shared libraries. That's easier to do than trying to figure out how to convince the linker that I prefer to link statically.

Once that's out of the way it's pretty reasonable. It took a while to figure out that `--cpp_out` doesn't actually generate stubs, though I'm sure it's documented.

So it's not really worse than any other package; it's just _big_, and that makes it a little more annoying. Having any kind of reasonable package manager for C would simplify things dramatically. Not having to express my dependency on GRPC as a git submodule+some clunky Makefile rules would be nice.
Why can't F#'s type providers be implemented more generically as macros? Define a piece of code to run on an AST and generate types or whatever? Rust's macros, AFAIK, are powerful enough to do the same thing.

F# type providers sorta seemed like more of an answer to C#'s codegen utils like sqlmetal and xsd.exe. They're cool, but I just don't understand the limitation if we're already gonna run code at compile time.
9 days warning, recommendation to export data is to manually copy out the URLs or send them to pocket, individually. In a news reader app where you've possibly have viewed and archived hundreds or thousands of articles.

Another example of "don't trust startups with your data"
Searle (hearsay): "I don't remember what I wrote. I'm not sure I even believe that anymore." Source: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-objections-to-Searles-Ch...
KT-HIP HOP MONOLOGUE [HIP HOP]
I always found it somewhat humorous that Cray invested so much effort into the look of it's supercomputers, considering very few people would actually see the inside of a super computing center.
Care to explain more? Thanks
The Bizarre Saga of Craig Wright, the Latest "Inventor of Bitcoin"
We do, but we just have sensible gun laws.

Basically you can have a non-automatic shotgun or rifle as long as you agree to regular stringent inspections.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_K...
AWS is a sponsor of this, which probably means a bunch of free resources.
Umm, it doesn't have to have good aim if it can get close enough, eg. a drone small enough to crawl into a person's ear and then fire/detonate.
Newton's third law; Hence the comment about drone size/weight and mentioning the small caliber weapon it would have to use.
>predator imaging drone telling a human operator falsely that the current image is a terrorist

Though that stuff isn't nice it's probably an improvement on previous technologies - looking out of the bomber and thinking that looks like some good buildings to bomb and similar.
The manga is over though. I couldn't wait to see what happens and finished it.
.NET WCF to another WCF integration is fine, but if you try and hook a .NET SOAP webservice to one written in Java, and you'll have pulled all of your hair out after two weeks. The reverse is just the same. They all have slightly different implementations of the specifications.

Make that one week if you have to start dealing with the monster that is called WS-* a.k.a. WS-WTF.

I wrote an article on this many moons ago. It is still one of my most frequently read posts: https://benpowell.org/supporting-the-ws-i-basic-profile-pass...

It just goes to show how many SOAP integrations are still going on in the "enterprise".
> So, I went directly to the best place I could think of: the very first place I walked to after I was let free, was the Office of the President at MIT. (In loco parentis, right?) But I was stopped at the door. She wouldn’t see me or talk to me. Liability, and all. The potential cost of giving me any legal advice or talking to her directly about anything, would simply be too great. So MIT found the protection it sought, while I did not.

Bummer, it seems college sometimes prepares you for the real world by turning its back on you just like the real world does.

> Star Simpson’s actions were reckless and understandably created alarm at the airport. — MIT News Office, Sep 21 20

Ouch, fuck MIT
> Traditional QA is pretty much dead

Where have you worked? Just inside the SV bubble? This is definitely not true.