skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the link to the paper. I think the older criticisms still stand:

- They created their own data set. Instead of a general Q-A system, they may have overfit to this particular task and question types.

- They set the human intelligence benchmark by using Mechanical Turk. This may not be representative of true human intelligence (given the lower quality of Mechanical Turkers).

As a future work, I hope they look at the work the Allen AI institute is doing with Aristo [1]

There is a current challenge [2] to beat 8th graders on a standardized 8th grade science exam. Here the data set is made by someone else, the questions are closer to real-life questions (vs. simple analogies), progress and results can be compared to other research teams and the human benchmark is set by the actual performance of 8th graders.

For human intelligence, next to accuracy and speed, we also care about simplicity. This system nails accuracy and speed, but it may be beaten by someone who has never read the entirety of Wikipedia. A deep net trained on millions of words and their relations may be too complex for this task (it uses up a lot of energy to train).

As to computer intelligence being different than human intelligence: I once nearly aced an aptitude test where I had access to a search engine. The test involved programming languages I never programmed a single line in. Yet, searching for keywords in the question, combined with keywords in the answers, I could give correct answers, merely by comparing page count statistics. Like the robot in Searle's room, I was merely pattern matching, without a real understanding or insight into the questions asked. The result of my test leaked out on the workfloor, and for weeks I was a headline wonder (having beaten all the senior engineers' scores), without really deserving it.

[1] http://allenai.org/aristo.html
[2] https://www.kaggle.com/c/the-allen-ai-science-challenge
Fantastic point.

WSJ report that NSA spied on Congress and Israel communications very disturbing. Actually outrageous. Maybe unprecedented abuse of power.

— Pete Hoekstra (@petehoekstra) December 30, 2015

If he was just upset at spying on Congress, that'd be one thing. In fact, (and mentioned in the article) Hoekstra basically scoffed at foreign leaders being mad about being targeted for surveillance. But we knew the NSA spied on Congress a while ago. You'll notice he has zero outrage for spying on US citizens.

But the article outlines several of the most egregious hypocrisies. It's staggering how boldly our leaders in Congress support, then don't, mass warrantless surveillance when they find out they're part of the "mass."
Then find yourself another key engineer. :) Or perhaps you do not know what "key" means?

It is rude to lie to people about the value of their options to hire them. ("Your options are 0.866% of the company"). But to try to defend that practice in public is just hilarious.

Heh, at least now we know what it does take to be a cofounder :)
Meta-analysis: best interview questions to spot ideal employees
> BTW, much has been said about Jobs refusing standard cancer treatment and choosing a potentially less effective one

Steve Jobs very well may be alive today had he chosen to undergo typical cancer treatments since his was discovered moderately early.

He ate carrots and drank herbal tea, at protest of doctors and medical professionals, right up until even he realized his course of action was foolish. He panicked and tried to undergo dramatic procedures, but it was too late.

> You are essentially claiming that mental illness is less respectable than physical illness.

Not at all. But this case with Ian doesn't appear to have been caused by mental illness, rather it appears to have been the result of heavy binge drinking ("black out drunk") (and possibly drugs, due to his erratic and abnormal behavior and statements), and people do very stupid things in that state (including commit suicide even though their sober selves wouldn't permit it).

This isn't an Aaron Swartz case where Ian was pushed to the very edge over a period of time, and systematically had his life and everything to look forward to ripped away by a system built purely to destroy him. Ian's death was the direct result of his actions over the period of a weekend, heavily influenced by alcohol (and possibly drugs). That's a different case entirely.

It's a little more difficult to feel the same sort of pain for someone who was upset at the consequences from their own actions (try to break into someone's home, police are going to arrest/ticket you... do it a second time on the same night, and you definitely will be arrested).

It's apparent, in Ian's drunken stupor, he fundamentally believed he did nothing wrong and everyone was out to "get him". This is indicative of a drunk and/or someone on drugs (inability to see cause and effect, and rationalize about one's own actions).
The Math-Class Paradox
> This is not hard to understand. Gov’t officials believe that the work they do is different in kind.

We're talking about public servants.

They're given some power and privileges only so they can do the job of serving the public and not for any other purpose. This comes with risks of corruption and abuse and so the situation calls for stricter monitoring and scrutiny of the public servants than of the citizens they represent.

If any public servants hold the view you described then they are misguided and utterly misunderstand the role they've been given.
There's a great Slack resource available for PM's I'd recommend joining for contacts and advice: productmanagerhq.slack.com
It sounds like you're getting annoyed that the devs of certain projects like Node.js have chosen to support an OS that you don't use without asking you about it first... If you're in control of the project - you have every right to ignore Windows users. If you're not in control, then you really have zero right to complain. Zero.

Devs certainly aren't forced to "pay the Windows tax" in any way. Plenty of OSS projects completely ignore Windows. I'm sure you're aware though that Windows has the majority market share of desktop operating systems. If your software is interesting to the vast, vast population of Windows users, you might get some requests to support Windows. And since it's not an outlier in the market, other desktop OSes should obviously strive to be more like Windows ;)
Robots will mine the ocean floor for gold, silver, and copper
People die. We don't have forever. Make use of it. These gentlemen did.
There is a large range of bus sizes, a 40' giant squid would look larger than a small bus ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_bus#/media/File:Blue_Bi... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Bird_Micro_Bird#/media/Fi.... But smaller than an extra large 97 seat school bus.
18 out of 230 bought bought a book, widely accessible and read by most in the early hs, from the over priced campus book store. FTFY. That's not statistics, that's just a single (unenlightening) data point.

A personal anecdote about the fact the OP now feels his standards have dropped (providing no numbers for this nor writing samples so we the readership can appraise the truth of this claim) is also ~not~ statistics.

As for rising test scores, unfortuantely for you and your "twaddle" most colleges maintain a factbook detailing past admissions data. Lets look at a couple of state schools from the worst part of the US shall we:

Clemson University: [1]

Engineering school 2014: ACT = 29 SAT_M = 674 SAT_V = 622

2004: ACT = 27 SAT_M = 655 SAT_V = 596

LiberalArts School 2014: ACT = 27 SAT_M = 610 SAT_V = 604

2004: ACT - 27 SAT_M = 606 SAT_V = 595

Auburn University:[2]

Entire university 2014: ACT = 27 SAT_M = 591 SAT_V = 577

2006: ACT = 24.3 SAT_M = 575 SAT_V = 554

Francis Marion University[3]

Entire Universtiy 2011: ACT = NaN SAT_M = 481 SAT_V 472

2004: ACT = NaN SAT_M 476 SAT_V 472

It appears you have to go down to at least the 76th ranked southern university[4] before the gains in test scores begin to look more like noise and even at that level there's a non 0 increase in performance. We're clearly not talking Standford here.

Finally, the internet represents a tool because it allows for more mental bandwidth to be used on analysis over memory. No longer must you remember the exact quote to make an allusion, just the fact that it exists. This is then indexed to other supporting works a student can draw upon to further support their argument. Machines are excellent at recalling and storing information, however struggle with analysis (especially in the context of humanities). Students are more free than ever to peruse these lines of thinking, to demonstrate meaningful mastery you might say, now that names, dates, formatting, indexing, etc have been outsourced to the machine. Just for an example, when a blind blow hard comes and makes assertions comfortable his eloquence will make up for the lack of facts, the internet allows for the rapid synthesis of numbers to render the argument hilariously invalid.
[1]http://www.clemson.edu/oirweb1/FB/factbook/minifactbook.cgi
[2]https://oira.auburn.edu/
[3]http://www.fmarion.edu/about/factbook/article12711c7605652.h...
[4]http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

EDIT: number formatting
isn't the uchicago college core more of an exception that the rule these days?
Traffic Analysis Research
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10814470
Making a tool, service, website suck is not a good monetization strategy. One natural reaction to a deliberate bad experience is "I will never give them money." Essentially, the site has gone to war with the people who like it. The engineering and administrative effort that went in to making a bad experience could easily have gone in to making the site better.
> Clearing him for release is not the same thing as guaranteeing that he had no dangerous injuries.

Isn't that almost exactly what clearing him for release means? What else are the medics "clearing him" for if not the absence of major/dangerous injuries? I suppose they cannot "guarantee" the lack of injury, but they certainly would have checked for evidence of traumatic brain injury.

It's possible that they missed something, but this is currently unjustified paranoia with nothing behind it except distrust toward the police.
Who writes police reports, do you think?

I was arrested at a protest once, and my police report said I was menacingly carrying a sharpened stick, amongst other things. This was meant to indicate a protest sign, which in fact I wasn't actually carrying... the police write whatever they want in the reports, and if there's a question of police misconduct, they should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
The Invention of C++ – Nice bit of net lore
It's also easy to be fooled by filters disguising clipping. Take a recording with clipping and high-pass filter it at 10Hz. The clipped wave tops will look better but it will sound identical. The vinyl recording process involves this kind of filtering.
FreeDoom is nice too, and it works for ANY doom2 wad, even for the GZdoom ones.

Oh, and for hardcore GNU folks, Gloome has no propietary code, it loads freeDoom and/or brutal doom and any GZDoom game.
I don't think you need FOI requests for this info. What you'll probably find is that occupations exposed to "seeing the worst" (doctor, soldier, cop), and those with rising rates of unemployment, have the most suicides.
You implied that it would be better if luxury items were taxed at a different (higher) rate than other items. They is a luxury tax.

However, if I misunderstood and you advocate having the same tax rate on luxury goods as other goods, then we are in agreement on this point.
3 Years of Go in production
When we ship node modules to be embedded into Chocolat.app, we have to strip out all the tests and documentation because otherwise it bloats the download size. And the computer it eventually runs on may not be connected to the internet.

The nice thing about node is that it's quite small (3.4MB zipped). We don't have to ship npm with the app, and certainly an OS level package manager would be way too large!
Cool. Now I can switch to the Apple plan, get the AppleCare, and jump carriers whenever the mood takes me.
Trying to practice fitness and healthy life, otherwise whole day sitting gives weird feelings.
It depends on what you're looking for. D2 had better monster variety and more gameplay variety than D1, but has more abstract levels than D2. I'd like to see D1's levels recreated with D2's monster/weapon variety in mind.
I don't think gmail will let you register that email address.
I really hate browser- or webapp-side email validation. I've rarely seen a web developer get this right. My advice is to treat email addresses like blobs and attempt delivery with a confirmation link. That will catch users who typo their own address, and it will let people use whatever address format they want (the "+" in an email address not being considered valid is my own personal bugaboo).
Socialism, the labour movement, and communism all come from the same place.

It's funny, you're arguing for progressive taxation, but you don't understand the history behind labour movements, equal rights, welfare, socialism, etc... Or why communism is relevant in a discussion about rational choice, inequality and perceived fairness.

I do get it though - Americans have been taught to hate communism, and thus have purged an entire century of socialist philosophy from their collective thoughts.
LOL. Yes, running experiments on entire countries is "kind of" difficult, to put it mildly.

But the links I shared suggest the divide in macroeconomics goes well beyond that. Quoting from Romer's blog post (http://paulromer.net/mathiness): "The goal in starting this discussion is to ensure that economics is a science that makes progress toward truth. A necessary condition for making this kind of progress is a capacity for reaching consensus that is grounded in logic and evidence. Given how deeply entrenched positions seem to have become in macroeconomics, this discussion could be unpleasant. If animosity surfaces, it will be tempting to postpone this discussion. We should resist this temptation." In the most nice and polite way possible, he's accusing his colleagues of engaging in cargo cult science.
Good and Bad Procrastination - http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

I love it; it always makes me feel better about putting aside some obligations to work on really meaningful projects. I share this with students sometimes, and it speaks to some of them as well. There's plenty of conversation about finding your passion in the world, but not so much about working hard on your passion.
The Bitcoin Foundation was founded and operated by criminals.

Bruce Fenton and others have done huge amounts of work to repair the foundation and I commend them for their efforts.

However I cannot support an organization which continues to support bad actors, to quote myself:

>As a lifetime Foundation member (and a technical contributor to Bitcoin) I think it's within my rights to ask [that Gavin Andresen be removed as chief scientist]

>Consider how frustrating misunderstandings like the below are to me:

>“...[Gavin Andresen is] still bitcoin’s official chief scientist, according to the Bitcoin Foundation, the not-for-profit that oversees the project...”

>http://www.wired.com/2015/08/bitcoin-schism-shows-genius-ope...
I agree. Stock options are a well-engineered exploit of employee optimism.
This is not an essay about 'Traits in JavaScript'
> They all cited the same thing - the over coddling of students by administration or faculty. The stories they told were eye opening to say the least. The crazy part? This was going on in the early aughts, nearly two decades earlier.

In my experience, they're not doing things to appease the students, they're doing things to appease the students' parents.
I've had ISOs in a couple of startup employers, non-qualified options in a startup customer, and RSUs in a couple of public employers.

The only book I've read on stock options is _Consider Your Options_ by Kaye Thomas, which I thought was good. I do my own taxes, and there was enough detail in that book to let me figure out the tax implications of my options. (Including AMT the one time I had to pay it.)

The actual mechanics when you already have options are straightforward. You either exercise speculatively (pay real cash to turn options into shares, then hold the shares), or exercise risklessly (pay cash to turn options into shares which you sell immediately for more cash than it cost to exercise). Exercising speculatively has risks -- you pay real money for shares that then go down in value, possibly to less than the strike price, possibly leaving you with a tax bill even though you made a loss. Exercising risklessly is safe.

I don't like to speculate with meaningful amounts of money. If in doubt, sell the stock and diversify. Think of the worst case (the company crashes and you lose both your job and the value you thought the stock had). Better to not have all your eggs in one basket and sleep well. I suspect this is not a popular sentiment there, though.

The real question with options is when you're considering multiple job offers. Company A offers $100k and 3000 options. Company B offers $110k and 5000 options. How do you value the options? For a startup, the usual answer is that you can't, because there's no anti-dilution protection. If the founders want to hose you, they can hose you, by diluting your shares or by firing you right before a vesting date. So I value them at zero and take the job I like better, or the job that pays more actual cash.

(RSUs in a healthy public company are a bit different, since they have an actual immediate cash value. I value them at 75% of the current value of the stock. The 25% discount is because of vesting periods.)
There is probably some truth there, but I think you are missing reality.

Next time you try to make a sale, express how reluctant you and your coworkers are to recommend the product to their friends.
I think the point is that 'bigger' implies that the squid is actually larger than a bus, not just longer in one dimension. By the logic of the article, I have a garden hose that's bigger than a bus.
I have no reason to dislike humans. They're the best thing we have today. That doesn't mean something better won't come to replace them.

Friendly AI, by definition, is not true AI. It won't lead to singularity. It's worthless.

What I want is for the universe to evolve as efficiently as possible. We shouldn't slow down progress just because we want to survive. The only "we" is the universe. Selfless we should be.

I'm not sure what solution he's offering to coordination problems. He speaks of consensus and monarchy. He criticizes classical capitalism.

I feel like the capitalist model would be good if incentives were adequate. Money and personal wealth aren't adequate motivations. Selfless capitalism, where systems are optimized toward making the universe better. A system where we all adopt god's-eye-view. That's what I was referring to with my universal absolute moral truth.

Those entities who don't exist for the greater good will be naturally selected out. The fittest will be the most righteous. We need a system to measure righteousness. I'm working on just that.

TL;DR: We can coordinate through the universal absolute moral truth. We just need better tools to accurately grasp it.
The 3 easiest ways to start saving for retirement
Hosting Survey: GoDaddy #1, CloudFlare #2
That also works in Perl, Ruby, C#, ADA, D, and Julia.

According to Wikipedia [1] underscore was proposed for C++ but rejected because it conflicts with user-defined literals.

Is there any reason they could not have used space? Offhand, I can't think of anyplace where a space in a literal number would not currently be illegal, so adding that as a separator should not introduce any problems, but C++ has grown massively in complexity since I last seriously used it so I could easily have overlooked something.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_literal#Digit_separa...
It was amusing to see the quotations from Wikipedia articles (which I have worked on) that appear in the authors' paper without any citation to Wikipedia. They have made some effort to look up the background of IQ testing, to the extent of cribbing from some Wikipedia articles, but their citation of the actual peer-reviewed psychology literature on IQ testing is all but nonexistent (they cite mostly machine-learning papers), and as several astute comments point out, training a machine (or, for that matter, a human being) to perform specifically well on the specific item content of a test does NOT raise the inference that the specially trained human or machine is generally smart at whatever else the test-taking-trained human or machine does.

Another serious objection to the study, also brought up in some previous comments, is that IQ scores are norm-based scores (they compare test-takers to a general population, not to criteria of correct or incorrect answers), and it is very likely here that the Mechanical Turk recruits found for the study are NOT a representative sample of the relevant population of human beings for comparison to the machine's performance.

But my most serious objection to this study, among several, is that the item content chosen for this study was not even items professional developed and pains-takingly tested item by item by psychologists for inclusion in an IQ test battery, but rather the kind of dreck usually found in unvalidated online IQ tests, which are simply parlor games and should not be taken seriously. The study to a very great degree demonstrates the well known computer science principle "garbage in, garbage out," and does regrettably little to advance the literature on artificial intelligence.

For readers who would like to read some of the legitimate psychology research literature on IQ testing, I strongly recommend the Wikipedia article "IQ classification," which has a better bibliography (by far) than any other Wikipedia article about IQ testing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification
> Our platform enables beginners to code & experanced developers to deliver, fast!

typo: *experienced
Try diffoscope online: one of the tools behind reproducible builds
Yes, we are working on releasing a iOS and android app as well.
An interesting paper at NIPS aims to combat the lower quality of Turkers with gamification. Instead of yes/no answers they offer a choice of: absolutely sure, yes, don't know, no, absolutely not. Monetary reward is doubled if they answer a question correctly with a high certainty, and it is zero'd when they are wrong.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.1387 "Double or Nothing: Multiplicative Incentive Mechanisms for Crowdsourcing"
You're right, but with a few asterisks. Citizen's arrest can only be for felonys. The citizen who is arresting also is liable in the scenario where the arrestee isn't guilty--- because then the citizen arrester could be liable for kidnapping.

(Fact checking myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_arrest#United_Stat... I'm almost right. It's any crime in your presence, or a felony not in your presence. And for an incorrect arrest, the charge would be false arrest, not kidnapping.)
A friend referred me to an attorney at a well-known SV firm. She gave me a free consultation back and forth over email. By my own judgement as well as that of the founders and attorneys of my new company, the advice was good. It covered both my negotiation with the company as well as my personal tax planning and accounted for various possible outcomes. Following the advice, I learned more of the nitty gritty financial details of the company, got a calculated split of ISOs and NSOs (to early exercise), and also a decent cash bonus.
Interesting, and I generally agree, but the parent post could easily be interpreted as "there's nothing to see here, we already know everything, so no need to look into it."
This ridiculous, almost(?) cowardly aversion to any and all risk is a growing problem with all government agencies (at all levels), not just the FDA.
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