skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great news! I think distributed access, control, and contribution to the best AI's will help create 'safe' AI's much faster than any AI created in secret. One thing this does not address, and is something that Jerry Kaplan has an excellent suggestion his recent book "Humans need not apply", is the distributed ownership of AI where tax incentives to public companies that have larger numbers of shareholders, encourages wider distribution of the massive gains AI will bring to these companies.

I really hope that the training data, as well as code and research, will be opened up as well, since the public could really benefit from the self-driving car training data Tesla may contribute[1]. By opening up the development of this extremely important application to public contribution and the quality benefits that it brings, we could get safer, quicker realization of this amazingly transformative tech. As of now the best dataset for self-driving cars, KITTI, is extremely small and dated. [plug]I am working on a project to train self-driving car vision via GTAV to help workaround this (please contact me if you're interested), but obviously real-world data will be better in so many ways.

[1] https://medium.com/backchannel/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinato...
Could you explain the difference?
I'm curious to find out if my expectations of QA are unrealistic.

I'd _expect_:

* Devs write automated unit tests galore, plus a smattering of integration tests

* QAs write some acceptance tests

* QAs maintain a higher level of broad understanding of where the org is going, trying to anticipate when a change in Team A will impact Team B _before_ it happens. They also do manual testing of obscure/unrepeated scenarios, basically using their broader knowledge to look for pain before it is felt.

The above hasn't happened anywhere I've been (though each point HAS happened somewhere, just not all together).

One thing in particular I've noticed is that a good QA is a mindset that a dev doesn't share. Devs can learn to be BETTER at QA than they are, but I honestly think it's not helpful for a Qa to be a Dev or a Dev to be a QA - they are different skill sets, and while someone can have both, it's hard to excel at both.
FWIW most hiking boot soles don't hold up well on pavement.
So, not the CTO, but some shared higher-level manager. The point is that the QA lead cannot report into Development, and Development cannot report into QA. Both of those arrangements can lead to a bad actor stopping the other group from doing the right thing. (Eg: if QA reports to Dev, then Dev manager can force bad code to ship, and if Dev reports to QA than QA manager can prevent shipping and force Dev to waste time on excessive/pointless test code development that's not cost-justified.)
Actually, in Haskell the usual coding style is to explicitly declare the type of all top-level things, which kind of contradicts his first example of 8. The idea is that every time you change a type, all uses of it that use the previous type are then highlighted as compile-time errors, which is definitely useful for refactoring. I'm not sure about the example that he gives, but if used this way type inference is actually quite useful for refactoring. Plus, all intermediate non-top-level types are adjusted automatically whenever possible, which saves work — I think this is really what he's saying.
Worklife (YC W15) Is Hiring a Director of Engineering
I Am Not a Cyberterrorist
So what is the difference with, say, very fine sand/dust? Density? E.g. do the same critters ingest fine sand - and if so, why plastic is more harmful? Also, if these microbeads are chemically inert, what is the harm from them entering the foodchain - as opposed, again, to e.g. dust?
I believe in the precautionary principle which says the exact opposite.

"The precautionary principle ... states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
That's the thing. It's not necessarily about an evolution. If I "accidentally" make a break though right now. The AI could evolve into a super intelligence before dinner time.

Simply stated, an AI that writes AI.(Forget the halting problem for a moment) How many iterations can it create in 3 hours?
> There's just no good mechanism to stop massive harm to common resources

In economics, this is called "internalizing the externalities". There is a good mechanism that works very well, it's taxation. Instead of taxing productive things people do, tax the polluting things.

Also, the most polluted countries in the world tend to be the ones with centrally planned economies. There's nothing inherently environmentally conscious about central planning.
It doesn't have to be the CTO; as I mentioned in another reply my intent was that QA and Dev need to be equals in the reporting chain, rather than one reporting to the other. That can work at any scale; even on an agile team with one QA and one Dev, they both report to the same boss who's responsible for both sides.
Comments, that's 95% of why I'm here.

I could find the same stories elsewhere with no (or worse) discussion.
You don't see the difference between an overt act and a natural occurrence?
As the last paragraph states, we saw the writing on the wall with the open sourcing of ASP.NET MVC which is why we were comfortable with sticking with .NET.

We actually don't "want to roll with Microsoft's solutions so we did" which is why we use MySQL not MS SQL, AWS not Azure, git not TFS, RabbitMQ not MSMQ.
Maybe Yahoo should focus on either user count acquisitions (see whatsapp, youtube) or product acquisition (youtube, instagram)
The brain doesn't "solve" tasks. That's cart before horse thinking. Our whole concept of "vision" only exists because eyes and visual cortices exist. I know it seems like a philosophical nitpick, but saying that the visual cortex is good at vision is like saying that water is good at being wet or being surprised that your soup is perfectly fitting the shape of your bowl.

Now, the human brain is definitely a complicated thing to study and understand (by whom? by itself!), but framing it as if the brain was a computer that received a task that it then solved, is the wrong way of thinking about this.
I think self driving cars and carts will also kill almost all middlemen. Why go shopping for food if you can get everything shipped to your fridge for 20-30% less, direct from the producer. Google will probably also offer to drive you for free to a medical specialist and start doing tests after you entered the car. So we probably need a lot less physicians too.
The article seems to suggest that a lot of the families planned on having big families anyways. It wasn't like the decision was between "no kids" and "maximum kids". More like "stop at 6 kids" and "maximum kids".
- It's too expensive. There is no way my ad impressions add up to $10 a month.

They do though. Online advertising is a ~$60 billion a year (domestic US) business undergoing very rapid ~50%/year growth rates (estimates vary wildly).

Over around 120 million households, that's about $42 per month per household.

Over 20 million households with at least an upper-middle-class income, it's even higher.
because governments spend other people's money, so the choice to opt out of the market due to loss of value in participating is distorted.
Iceland does this fairly effectively (use market based solutions).
Is it possible to own stock in a start-up and work on it without getting paid while on an F1 visa?

Thanks!
Our approach - in a much smaller company - is that all stories should have automated tests before they head off to QA. QA's job is to make sure that the story in question works correctly, it's not to find regression bugs. If QA finds a bug in the story, we write a test to catch that before we resubmit it. Over time, we have enough tests at all levels of the system that QA doesn't generally need to worry about regressions: just making sure that the latest story works as advertised.

This approach allows us to stay agile, with small, regular releases, while also making good use of what QA folks are actually good at.
#1 I see drivers use other nav apps all the time. Uber just provides integrated navigation, but I'm pretty sure it's not required. The uber app didn't have navigation for quite a while actually.

#6 is calfornia regulation, not an uber/lyft/whoever requirement. I don't know how it's like elsewhere.

#9 I would compare uber to current taxi independent contractors, which have been standard operating procedure for decades. The taxi driver rents a taxi car with it's attached taxi medallion for a few hundred dollars a day. Anything they make after that is their money. But since the fee is usually very high, they have to work 12 hours day to make something approaching a living. I'm fairly certain the card terminals and the taxi company phone dispatch services come with that rental.
Markdown based task management with Electron
This definitely makes reading the comments more interesting. There also seems to be less of a hive mind here.
Very interesting. I'm going to give Werkzeug a try.

Have you tried out Falcon, btw? If so, how does it compare to Werkzeug?
Thanks, those are good points. I enjoyed the article.
Reminder, someone at the Fed thought negative rates in 2015 and 2016 were appropriate:

https://marketrealist.imgix.net/uploads/2015/09/Sep-dot-plot...

I'm not saying it was Yellen... But it was Yellen. If they were looking to shock-and-awe this market, talking hike and then going negative would do it.

I have no idea what is going to happen.
>Of course, if the browser is insecure, all bets are off wrt web security.

I guess this is a no go for now, then?

>There are three more they are working on.
Technically, even the extinction of humanity is a finite downside.

You would have to posit a sort of hell simulation into which all human consciousnesses are downloaded to be maintained in torment until the heat-death of the universe for it to be an equivalent downside.
The far more significant cause of the Great Recession was outright fraud. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClfBxWPkBKU and other videos featuring William Black (a former bank regulator from the S&L crisis days).
Wait, it was said those are super-small - so small, filters can't filter them out. So how can it then be that animals are choking on them? Are they congealing somehow? The article you quoted shows some pretty large beads. I see how they could harm a small creature, but for beads this large it should be pretty easy to filter them out. Are those the same beads or different beads?
SOAP and WCF is a very scary thing. We're in the financial industry and many of the systems we integrate with use .NET and SOAP/WCF.

Although Visual Studio does all the heavy lifting for us via 'Add Service Reference', the sheer amount of boilerplate code generated when integrating a SOAP service is terrifying and bloated. We hope to migrate to ASP.NET 5 but we're not sure how well connectivity with SOAP services will be supported. One of our partners actually requires us to host our own SOAP service based on a spec they provide.

However, for our own APIs we use ASP.NET Web API and build REST/JSON APIs as highlighted in the stack page (http://engineering.gopangea.com/stack).
The article seems to omit something fairly important: Where in Nevada? Which city?

Am I missing that somewhere?
A fluid labor market means just means that contracts and labor have a much easier time finding each other.

But why is that preferable for labor, compared to having a reliable job? People have bills, mortgages, etc - a "fluid labor market" is not in their favor.
That's very cool! Thanks for the explanation.
Fishing quotas, seasons and permits have been well established in the developed world for a long time.
My intention was not to "hijack" the top comment, but to post where it was relevant i.e. the thread talking about the event rather than among the questions themselves. I don't think pointing out room for improvement is irrelevant. I didn't expect my questions to be answered, especially since he had already left the thread, but used them as an example how the outcome wasn't optimal.

Edit: I, as you, removed a bunch of my comment. Not sure why I should bother.
Jobs are being lost to automation--does that mean we can theorize that increasing total automation will result in decreasing total employment?

Probably not, because at large scales there is a positive correlation between automation and employment. That is, the nations with the most automation are also the nations that have developed the best employment. The U.S., for example, has much better employment than it did 100 years ago, and better than China today. China would love to have the economy of the U.S., automation and all.
If we adopted really strict adherence to that rule as the bar to research, there would be no scientific progress at all. I'm not convinced that would be a desirable thing.
Is there a description of this somewhere? (Such as in public filings.)

Is the advertising so coarse as to ignore the content of what people say? Are they only propagating information about purchasing and browsing history through the metadata offered by the social network information in order to drive advertising?

All the questions should suggest that I'm genuinely curious and looking to understand, so if you read this and get riled up, instead of downvoting please take twenty seconds to guide me to the truth...
This is very helpful, thank you!
More on the importance of translation for multilingual SEO (MSEO)
I've used some of the products containing microbeads and was flabbergasted when I learned that they were plastic. It was my dentist who asked a pointed question during a routine cleaning:

"Do you use Crest toothpaste?"

I answered yes and was informed that some of the plastic beads from the tooth paste had gotten stuck in my gums. The dentist went on to explain that she'd sent in many complaints to the company but they still didn't drop that ingredient.

What weighs on my mind now is why a toothpaste company continued to use microbeads after learning of the externality. Did they have too much inventory to sell. Were they afraid that discontinuing that exact product would upset customers? Did they think that owning up to the mistake and correcting it would draw too much attention to the mistake?

Personally, my respect lies with any entity that can own up to and correct its mistakes before it is forced to do so.
But the entire point is that they've invented a novel mechanism for counterbalancing vibrations that are unique to the three cylinder. When you do that, you reduce vibration. This reduces fatigue.

It's worth noting as well that there's no such thing as "inherently balanced" when you're talking about ICEs (except perhaps the inline 6). Four-cylinders are inherently balanced in one mode (first harmonic), imbalanced in another (secondary imbalance), and exhibit torsional effects that may as well be imbalance.
I'm a downvoter: I find arguments like this one to be ideological rants and not valuable.

For every person and in every culture, offending people is considered wrong. To suggest that it doesn't matter is not a serious argument.

Apparently 'slave' doesn't offend you. It doesn't offend me either (I remember being a little uncomfortable with it long ago, when I first encountered it, but I don't notice it now). But for me to say that therefore it is not offensive to others would be ignorant and self-centered, as if the world revolves around my views and experiences. If others say they are offended then I respect that; I hope they would respect my concerns if I was offended.

Also, a common cause of discrimination is due to honest ignorance on the part of people in the dominant group. Like all humans, they are blind to things that they don't experience themselves; for example, consider law enforcement discrimination against minorities. It's happened for decades or centuries, but wasn't taken seriously until we actually had film of it due to the spread of cameras. That's another good reason to think that whether or not something bothers me is not evidence of whether it offends others.

Finally, the dominant culture in the U.S. was built at a time of widespread, accepted discrimination, and many artefacts of that time persist. People may get tired of seeing so much of it being challenged and changed, from school buildings named after slave holders; Confederate flags; and movie casts, company executives, etc. being almost all white and mostly male, etc. But being tired of the challenge and change, rather than of the discrimination, is a 'first world' problem, so to speak.
Healthcare. Many companies developing medical software require two layers of QA (programmer review and QA; then a separate QA team) before release. "Works for me" is not appropriate when the "me" in question is not a subject-matter expert, and the subject matter is potentially deadly.
Star Simpson speaks out about how MIT treated her in LED case at Logan
I sent you an email yesterday, did you receive it? :)
>The reality is the free ride on inflation can't last forever and if the Fed fails to predict the future it can get pretty grim.
>Similarly, there are a number of bubble like portents such as resource prices that are showing an excess of capital is being malinvested.

The thing is it's really easy for the Fed to slow the economy down, it's a lot harder to get it started again. So it makes sense for them to wait until they actually start seeing inflation before they decide to raise rates.

It's hard to say whether the mal-investment is due to the current monetary policy or the lack of better investment options in a bad economy.

FWIW, the participation rate for the wider population shows a more significant drop around 2009:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CIVPART

This might be due to early retirement, or more young people not finding work. I don't research this data much.
Pagers? Now it's just a total violation of work life balance through Slack.

My phone has never been so loud.
I think most free marketers would lump (certain) fishing quotas and property rights under "free markets", artificial though they may be.

SOX and NOX markets as well. Carbon markets (as they exist), not so much, but mostly because of completely insane equivalencies baked in, and weird credit schemes.
Disagree...I would say the only thing the new name "means" is that "DowDuPont" sounded better than "DuPontDow".
I appreciate your post and line of thinking, but am not at all convinced that our natural resources and spaces would end up better off being owned by a private company for financial gain. I don't trust private owners to take the required long-term view on those resources and spaces. And in cases where some benefit is derived (i.e., quicker action against microbeads), I think there are likely accompanying outcomes that are even worse (e.g., decreased access to fresh water or natural parks).
In Belgium, an Encryption Powerhouse Rises
What's interesting is that about half of the US have nearly zero disposable income and are living paycheck to paycheck, and their entertainment is presently being paid for by their wealthier neighbors at the cost of collateral damage in advertising annoyance; This is a deadweight loss if you try to quantify that damage.

Most people aren't willing to pay their equal share of the numbers, but most people also don't have the money to pay it now.

It would be hilarious if you took the 20% of the country with plenty of disposable income and made them the subscription base for destroying advertising: it results in ads shown only to the people without the money to justify them, or sites which go subscription-only.
I share your concerns. It also worries me that the brightest ML researchers choose to work at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft instead of public universities. One reason is probably that academia and public grants are too sluggish to accommodate this fast paced field. Another is that these companies have loads of data that these researchers can use to test their ideas.

The downside is that much of the research is probably held secret for business advantages. The public releases are more of a PR and hiring strategy than anything else in my opinion. By sending papers to conferences, Google's employees can get to know the researchers and attract them to Google.

Others say there's nothing to worry about, Google and Facebook are just today's equivalent of Bell Labs, which gave numerous contributions to computer technologies without causing much harm.
The Nobel Prize winner and the author is a profoundly tragic figure. Unfortunately the English language Wikipedia article on her doesn't begin to describe the level of suffering and pain that her family has experienced and that shaped her childhood.

Unfortunately the suffering she went through caused her to have a very negative bias towards the outside world. Her writings are the epitome of depression: imagine a writer describing San Francisco by focusing just on the parts of the Tenderloin district covered in piss. That is pretty much her unique viewpoint on the world and Russia in particular.

Her family has reasons to have gripes against Russians, given that her parents were Ukrainian and Belorussian minorities who suffered disproportionally when they tried to establish independent states. So take her speeches and her writing with a generous dose of salt. She is well known for her agenda and her unhealthy worldview.
Is the Steven Levy who wrote this the same Steven Levy who wrote Hackers?
>Musk: I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there’s not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower.

This is essentially Ray Kurzweil's argument. Surprising to see both Musk and Altman buy into it.

If the underlying algorithms used to construct AGI turn out to be easily scalable, then the realization of a dominant superintelligent agent is simply a matter of who arrives first with sufficient resources. In Bostrom's Superintelligence, a multipolar scenario was discussed, but treated as unkikely due to the way first-arrival and scaling dynamics work.

In other words, augmenting everyone's capability or intelligence doesn't necessarily preclude the creation of a dominant superintelligent agent. On the contrary, if there's any bad or insufficiently careful actors attempting to construct a superintelligence, it's safe to assume they'll be taking advantage of the same AI augments everyone else has, thus rendering the dynamic not much different from today (i.e. a somewhat equal—if not more equal—playing field).

I would argue that in the context of AGI, an equal playing field is actually undesirable. For example, if we were discussing nuclear weapons, I don't think anyone would be arguing that open-source schematics is a great idea. Musk himself has previously stated that [AGI] is "potentially more dangerous than nukes"—and I tend to agree—it's just that we do not know the resource or material requirements yet. Fortunately with nuclear weapons, they at least require highly enriched materials, which render them mostly out of reach to anyone but nation states.

To be clear, I think the concept of opening up normal AI research is fantastic, it's just that it falls apart when viewed in context of AGI safety.
"AI" has a lot of attention, but AI Safety is underfunded, and understaffed.
Maybe this issue needs to be addressed in the whole startup culture.

A lot of startups don’t even consider the fact that there might be people living outside the US, neither in products nor in PR material.
Put in some LEDs and you'll never break one again (or have to change it!).
Nobody cares how Yahoo does anything.