skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Byte2utf8" is a pretty confusing name for a method, considering utf8 is a byte encoding of unicode... :)
Are they? The current trend is to have everything done server-side, thus making sure the users get minimum value possible out of software they use.
The Bible doesn't "do" anything. The Bible is a collection of ancient writings by various authors over a period of time spanning over a thousand years.

One of the most significant obstacles to interpreting the Bible today is the unreasonable burdens placed upon the text. For example, the writers of the creation story in Genesis had no concept of modern science, and their purpose in writing was not to explain how the cosmos were created, but to explain that the cosmos were created by YHWH. When we read it expecting to find scientific explanations for the nature of the universe, we obscure the authors' purpose and the intended meaning. People who do so then discount the entire text based upon their own unreasonable expectations, and then accuse those who find value and existential truths in the texts of being irrational (or worse).

Considering how poorly we humans tend to communicate verbally and face-to-face, I guess it's no big surprise that we tend to do a poor job of interpreting the written word as well.
8 hours is a lot of time for the candidate.
Why should the license for pharmacies not be free?
Round robin is trivially DOS'd . also, sharing your private finance data with your competitors is not an economic efficiency.

Bitcoin isnt good for very much, it's mostly just useful for value transmission and censorship resistance. You're new to blockchains and don't know that, so you intend to blockchain all the things. Which is a way more extreme view.
It's by Stuart Russell's group at Berkeley (he coauthored the AI bible with Peter Norvig). Their tutorial: http://bayesianlogic.github.io/download/BLOG-tutorial-2014.p... Page 58 has some good sample code. Semantics are on page 70.

Every well-formed BLOG model specifies a unique proper probability distribution over all possible worlds definable given its vocabulary
•No infinite receding ancestor chains;
•no conditioned cycles;
•all expressions finitely evaluable;
•Functions of countable sets

They instantiate some parts of the network and do inference with MCMC. I wonder how it compares to the Markov Logic approach from the University of Washington.
Where's the diversity though...
Oh, I'm totally suggesting the US is "dictator-like"--not all US citizens, but the elite. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10748229
Not a bad summary of his work in my opinion. One thing that can be said for his work thinking about controlling AI is that at least he is trying.
Oh by the way, when I looked in your open front door, I noticed all your
computer terminals had their passwords written on post-it notes by their
monitors, and the big safe in the back room had its key hanging right
next to it on a chain.
There's been more good news than bad.

Ontario liberals have agreed with OPSEU that marijuana should be distributed via the provinces monopolised alcohol distribution network (LCBO).
Homework exercises are a large burden on the candidate, so expect to half your pool for that reason alone. I only do about half or less of these, as most are crappy an unrelated to the job. I prefer to plan and do things thoroughly, not rush a solution out in a couple of hours. And to be honest asking for more than a couple of hours is more than you should be asking unless you are willing to pay.
Anyone know if this is the case in Toronto? I've seen one dispensary in Kensington Market but I've never attempted to get a prescription.
The part about downloading entire databases to view your subset of the data. If this were an efficiency - SMTP would have blocks. Additionally, I am doubtful of your claim because information is the product of all hedge funds and investment banking operations - and to hand out your information to your competitors gives them tradable information at your expense. (Which youd know if you worked with any non-trivally finance operation)
How is it trivially DOS'd? You don't need to share all your private data just the data about transfers using the system which isn't going to be particularly sensitive unless you are in a bad way financially and will be worth it to minimize the amount of settlements required of your business.

I'm new to blockchains? I'm pretty sure I'm not.
So the BBC is basing their articles on Reddit threads now. This is where we are.
I don't see that as uncivil or a personal attack. It's either a reasonable direct question or a rhetorical one. And as a rhetorical question, it's not a personal attack, but rather makes the point that other posts seem to damage his credibility.
Wifibroadcast – Analog-like transmission of live video data
Look into paxos and raft attacks. You don't know enough about this science to promote it as the cure for what ails you.

As for sharing information - youre right... if you don't use blocks
Here is an excellent docu-drama produced by the BBC which discussed the legalisation of all drugs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7Rbi9yhres
Well, it's closer to 'Bought a taxi plate for $400k, it's now worth ~$280k, here's $20k for your troubles'

I'm not sure that the $280k pricetag is going to work given the changes (in Sydney, anyway).

The only advantage now that a taxi plate has is that they can stand at ranks, be hailed and operate at the Airport.
For what you set out to accomplish in the short amount of time you had, it works and good job. Really like Instapainting and just forwarded it on to a few people:).
It really does because it sort of treats each season as a story.

Game of Thrones works sort of the same way.The first several episodes are clearly just setting the plot up, which I find boring. There is no pay off. It's actually pretty terrible to watch week to week.

But shows like Mad Men or the Leftovers really require an episode by episode approach. They each have a story to tell. The seasons and series have arcs, but each episode is also story line.
> Regulations are, in general, extremely efficient at creating monopolies and utterly inefficient in protecting the customer.

Regulations are what keeps your food from making you sick on the spot, what keeps the air you breathe from melting your lungs, what lets you buy a new widget in confidence that it won't burn your house down. Regulations are extremely effective at protecting customers from abusive, greedy entrepreneurs. They're not perfect, and yes, with enough private money flowing into the process, they can create monopolies. But generally, they're good at their job.
OK, just built the Gift Card feature: http://www.instapainting.com/gift-card

You can specify a recipient email at checkout and we'll send them instructions via a special page where they upload photos, talk to the artist, and track the status with the pricing hidden.

Because I'm lazy, your recipient won't know what type of painting or what size until the artist is finished. But let's just call that a feature for now ;).
Just because it requires real hardware does not mean it may be able to spread all over the world. It may just do it by setting up virtual machines in data centers all over the world, or as a botnet with a distrusted processing approach similar to folding at home.
If they aren't contractors, they do if they work more than 30 hours a week.
Am I the only one who, when being interviewed, doesn't mind whiteboard coding?

At interviews where I've later been given an offer, it's usually a relatively small algorithmic design challenge, where the specifics don't matter, just the pseudocode.

In interviews I've given involving whiteboard programming, I've always emphasized that it doesn't have to be valid or even semi-valid code for any language, just a semi-rigorous pseudocode expression of an idea.

I think, "if done correctly", whiteboard coding is a good filter for those who can think algorithmically, who can catch the bugs that aren't typos, but incorrect assumptions.

That said, that sort of mindset may not be what you need for your role. Need to consider that.

---

Tangentially, one of the better technical interview experiences I've had involved chatting for a while, the interviewer describing an actual problem they'd had (relevant to the role and the company's product), and discussing my approach to the problem. (and passing or failing the interview wasn't dependent on using the exact same approach...)
>The part about downloading entire databases to view your subset of the data.

You're not doing this though you're downloading the entire database to verify the subset is true and you're using blocks because adding single transactions at a time when you need to have known ordering amongst a lot of participants leads to a lot of overhead that is removed by batching.

The type of information we're talking about isn't sensitive though(unless your going down the drain and trying to hide it). And yes I just made up that I worked in ETL at MS a department pretty much no one that hasn't worked in knows exists.
I prefer my Pantelligent because I can clean it like a normal pan (with soap and water in the sink), instead of like an electrical appliance (wiping carefully, trying not to get most of it wet). Also, it heats up faster so you can cook eggs in 4 minutes (1 pre-heating, 3 cooking).
Hmm, sorry if my article seems to come across that way? I feel like many of the points I'm making are very much: you aren't going to get rich quick.

You need to practice to get good at something for a long time. You need to take the long game approach to building an audience (Basecamp took awhile to build up its audience which eventually propelled its product which still took awhile and never became a 'unicorn'). Going to where your customers are is a grind. You just keep talking though and eventually you find a ton of value from those conversations. Inkling (YC W06!) was a long grind. Never turned into a unicorn. Never got rich. But... all the hard work eventually led to us figuring out how to make a living from it. Same with Cityposh from YC S11. That was a total bust. But eventually, after a ton of pain and even had to take a break and do the Obama campaign tech team, figured out some value that turned into Draft (http://draftin.com) which tada also hasn't made me rich. But it makes some decent revenue for a thing that runs on its own and took one person to build and maintain.

A lot of grinding and figuring this stuff out and doing stuff I mention in this article kept getting me further and further and further. And now all this stuff led to me taking over Highrise (http://highrisehq.com). I'm not rich like some f u money acquisition, skyrocketing, startup success story, but through all this long hard work for a decade I've been able to largely wake up and work on whatever I deemed important, and explore lots of weird ideas, write, not travel so I could hang out at home with my family (my consultant days sucked) and 19 month old daughter.

I think anyone can repeat this too. There's usually always a way to make some money from something we think we're passionate about. It's probably not plan A, B, C, D, or E. But eventually we can figure out an angle. But you're right, it's not quick. The stuff in this article took me a long time. But it was worth it. And I'm happy to help anyone I can figure this out. What can I do? @natekontny on Twitter and nate.kontny on Gmail. Please let me know how I can help.
You find Perl "too quirky" compared to... POSIX shell scripts.

Remarkable. ;)
This section was 100% written by a lawyer, and is intended to sound obvious without in fact being obvious at all.
It is not that really that we shouldn't be paying for failing investments, but that some sort of moral hazard should exist for businesses who don't proactively keep up with the times.
I used Hetzner a few years ago, in the space of 6 weeks I had 3-4 times I couldn't login because the network was saturated under a "DDoS", I had random and sporadic network drops even when they said they weren't having problems.

Latency was an absolute disaster even typing characters via SSH was horribly slow.

The management platform was hilariously bad (they where still sending me notification emails about 9mths after I cancelled).

We went back to linode for everything after that, for our needs it hits the sweet spot between cost and reliability (back then DO was new and had it's own issues, largely due to a flaky network).

Now I'd possibly consider DO for compute or job servers but I think I'd still use Linode for anything that wasn't running on my own hardware, I've been a customer with them for something like 6 years and they've never let me down.
The Facebook reply does not state that he was using his company email address to report issues or to communicate prior to them reaching out. The researcher says that he only used the email after Facebook got his employer involved.

The Facebook post does not, in any way, contest that.
"RR is trivial to DOS look at these two other schemes and the fact you didn't means you don't know what you're talking about".

I think we're done here. You're not doing anything but saying Nu uh! and calling me a liar.
I saw it more like:

Researcher: "I found a way to unlock your door"

Facebook: "Thanks, here's $2500. We've now fixed the problem."

Researcher: "Ohh hey about that bug. Turns out that
door, if the guys from the Ashley Madison breach found
first, your entire company would lose billions in market
cap, you and all your friends would no longer have jobs,
and the trust placed in your company by the public would
be so eroded that there's a good chance it would no longer
exist."

Facebook: "Well this is embarrassing. Our boss found out
and talked to your boss, the subject of lawyers and law
enforcement may have been mentioned in an effort to keep
this info getting to the public, and when this failed, he
made a highly visible blog post discrediting your
professional conduct"

Researcher: <gobsmacked>

You can make the case for misconduct on both sides but I'm more inclined to side with the researcher. If you define bugs and the associated bounty by the amount of possible damage it could cause, this one would definitely be 'catastrophic'. And Facebook would still be none the wiser if he hadn't dug deeper.
LifeLock Agrees to Pay $100M Fine in Settlement with F.T.C
there is only one myth that needs busting. that these tools solve any real problems that can't be solved better.
None of this matters. One (or two) *REALLY big accident(s) of history: The Great Flood of PeeCees came and 'C' was ensconced by Borland and then the use of 'C' in Linux.

We waited for Ada, and she showed up decades late.
The Dilemma of Giving Christmas Gifts
> Scared because I don't have a degree and at 30 I'm competing with younger, new grads.

10 years work experience > fresh grad with a degree that has no idea what lies ahead. You know the ins and outs of companies, the kind of people you deal with, you don't throw tantrums, deadlines are deadlines.

> I've built banner ads for advertisers, booked online campaigns in various platforms Google DFP, Yahoo APT.

Yep, experience in different platforms is a huge plus.

> I'm a jack of all trades master of none. I've always taken that as an insult rather than a compliment. I hear it as "your mediocre at a bunch of things...not really good at anything."

I hear it as "I know that much, too much." Being a jack of all trades means you know enough to move around. Your wide range of experience allows you to look for a wider range of jobs. You are more flexible to position change. You are no stranger to being moved across projects, across people, across locations.

> what advice do you have for a 30 year old who's about to embark on a new adventure?

- Read up on the latest trends. Most job interviews will have questions about them (though the job itself may not actually use the latest tech).

- Be sharp, concise and confident in job interviews. I've heard from my co-workers who do the interviews for new candidates. They find resumes good, but they fail candidates because they were terrible at interviews.

- Up the ante. Take up higher positions. You probably make a good project manager with that 10 years around people.
And I don't understand why. Take the two most popular mobile platforms, iOS and Android: people there routinely download and install new applications and typically never interact with Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or Instagram via their browsers. Why should the situation be different on the desktop? I feel that the efforts should not be going into making the browser into an OS that can run general-purpose software, but rather getting a packaging system that is cross-platform and easy for users to use. My own preference would be something based off of Nix so that you can avoid many problems related to library versions and whatnot, but anything where a user could be pretty much guaranteed that if he clicks "install", he'll be able to use his application in the next couple of minutes.
Great read! Can we get an update, please? I'm pretty sure Room Key uses Datomic, would love to get a CTO's perspective of that as well.
A couple of thoughts on this topic:

* Whether the source code to advanced AI is open may have some importance, but what determines whether some individual or corporation will be able to run advanced AI is whether they can afford the hardware. I can download some open-source code and run it on my laptop - but Google has data centres with 10s or 100s of thousands of computers. The big corporations are much more likely to have/control the advanced AI because they have the resources for the needed hardware.

* Soft / hard takeoff -
I think a lot of people miss that any 'hard takeoffs' will be limited by the amount of hardware that can be allocated to an AI.
Let us imagine that we have created an AI that can reach human level intelligence, and it requires a data centre with 10000 computers to run it. Just because the AI has reached human level intelligence doesn't mean that the AI will magically get smarter and smarter and become 'unto a God' to us. If it wants to get 2x smarter, it will probably require 2x (or more) computers. The exact ratio depends on the equation of 'achieved intelligence' vs hardware requirements, and also on the unknown factor of algorithmic improvements. I think that algorithmic improvements will have diminishing returns. Even if the AI is able to improve its own algorithms by say 2x, it's unlikely that will allow it to transition from human level to 'god-level' AI. I think hardware resources allocated will still be the major factor.
So an AI isn't likely to get a lot smarter in a subtle, hidden way, or in an explosive way. More likely it will be something like 'we spent another 100M dollars on our new data centre, and now the AI is 50% smarter!'.
Doesn't seem to be under active development. https://github.com/BayesianLogic/blog
For anything launching processes, I always regret it if I don't use a bash script. (Not sure if you're lumping or separating sh from bash...)

I like Python for anything that processes a pile of data, but doesn't need to glue many other programs together. I like Perl if and only if it's a one liner or very straightforward text filter, I just prefer Perl to situations that might otherwise require sed/awk.

But for shell scripts, like makefiles, I'd love to see a better alternative, but I just don't think one's out there. For certain kinds of tasks, I don't think a good alternative exists.
The problem is that taxi plates were so expensive and the fees went to the government as a requirement to be able to drive a taxi. A taxi driver that spent 100k to the government for an exclusive right to drive passengers should be compensated by the government when they break their end of the deal.
"In two strides I was behind the schoolgirl. I reached up, seized her ponytail at the roots and gave it a sharp downward yank. Her head snapped back. In a voice I didn’t recognise I snarled, “Give it a rest, darling.” She twisted to look behind her. Her eyes were bulging, her mouth agape. I let go and she bolted away to her friends. The three of them set off at a run. Their white ribbons went bobbing through the crowd all the way along the City Square and up the steps of the Melbourne Town Hall, where a famous private school was holding its speech night. The whole thing happened so fast that when I fell into step beside my friend she hadn’t even noticed I was gone."

The city is Melbourne, the author Helen Garner [0] and the casual racism is pretty accurate. Yet the response should not be condoned. If you switch a 70 year old woman, to a 70 year old man, the man would be detailed and assault charges laid.

As ugly as the racism is, using this kind of force shows a level of entitlement you often see with people who have had authority. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Garner

[1] Garner was a High School teacher till '72.
Will be a huge pain in the ass. Go's compiler uses Plan 9, and WebAssembly uses LLVM.
This post is basically a repackaging of Nick Bostrom's book SuperIntelligence, a work suspended somewhere between the sci-fi and non-fiction aisles.

As a philosopher of the future, Bostrom has successfully combined the obscurantism of Continental philosophy, the license of futurism and the jargon of technology to build a tower from which he foresees events that may or may not occur for centuries to come. Nostradamus in a hoody.

Read this sentence:

"It looks quite difficult to design a seed AI such that its preferences, if fully implemented, would be consistent with the survival of humans and the things we care about," Bostrom told Dylan Matthews, a reporter at Vox.

Notice the mixture of pseudo-technical terms like “seed AI” and “fully implemented”, alongisde logical contructs such as “consistent with” -- all leading up to the phobic beacons radiating at the finale: “the survival of humans and the things we care about.”

It's interesting, the technical challenges that he feels optimism and pessimism for. For reasons best known to himself, Bostrom has chosen to be optimistic that we can solve AI (some of the best researchers are not, and they are very conservative about the present state of research). It may perhaps the hardest problem in computer science. But he's pessimistic that we'll make it friendly.

Bostrom’s tower is great for monologs. The parlor game of AI fearmongering has entertained, rattled and flattered a lot of people in Silicon Valley, because it is about us. It elevates one of our core, collective projects to apocalyptic status. But there is no dialog to enter, no opponent to grapple with, because no one can deny Bostrom's pronouncements any more than he can prove them.

Superintelligence is like one of those books on chess strategy that walk you through one gambit after the other. Bostrom, too, walks us through gambits; for example, what are the possible consequences of developing hardware that allows us to upload or emulate a brain? Hint: It would make AI much easier, or in Bostrom’s words, reduce “recalcitrance.”

But unlike the gambits of chess, which assume fixed rules and pieces, Bostrom’s gambits imagine new pieces and rules at each step, substituting dragons for knights and supersonic albatrosses for rooks, so that we are forced to consider the pros and cons of decreasingly likely scenarios painted brightly at the end of a line of mights and coulds. In science fiction, this can be intriguing; in a work of supposed non-fiction, it is tiresome.

How can you possibly respond to someone positing a supersonic albatross? Maybe Bostrom thinks it will have two eyes, while I say three, and that might make all the difference, a few more speculative steps into the gambit.

In the New Yorker article The Doomsday Invention, Bostrom noted that he was "learning how to code."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invent...

We might have expected him to do that before he wrote a book about AI. In a way, it's the ultimate admission of a charlatan. He is writing about a discipline that he does not practice.