skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Much higher (but still short of general intelligence, obviously) would be beating the best humans at language translation, proving math theorems, or answering factual questions phrased in natural language. Then, if and when computers can write novels which you'd prefer to read over the best human author, now we're talking.

There's a lot of similarity. Take math theorem proving, which is an active area of machine learning; the algorithms tend at the moment to look something like create a tree of possible theorems, then the algorithm tries to traverse down the tree towards the target theorem by evaluating each branch by the probability it leads towards the target. Because of the exponential explosion, it's very important to select good theorems to expand at each level of the tree, and the ML algorithms can learn characteristics of good intermediate theorems by learning on the existing corpuses of machine-checkable proofs, which gives them much higher success rates in reaching target theorems. So right now the best theorem-provers can already reprove a lot of existing proofs. But they're using stuff like SVMs last I saw, and were much less sophisticated than a deep q-learner.

Some links: "Theorem Proving in Large Formal Mathematics as an Emerging AI Field", Urban & Vyskocil 2012; "Mathematics in the Age of the Turing Machine", Hales 2014 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.2898v1.pdf ; "Josef Urban on Machine Learning and Automated Reasoning" http://intelligence.org/2013/12/21/josef-urban-on-machine-le...
How Much Does a Cremation Cost? Depends Who You Call
TL;DR: It's less about "apps" and more about people supported by technology. But I do believe startups can increase prosperity as long as growth (without profits) is the goal.

From someone that spent 5+ years at the intersection of technology-based international development, there's a lot to learn about what works and what doesn't. Kentaro Toyama headed up Microsoft Research India's "Technology for Emerging Markets" research team and oversaw 50+ research projects spanning health, education, governance, and more. He then spent 5 years at UC Berkeley writing a book about what he learnt ("Geek Heresy", http://geekheresy.org).

I did a PhD in this general area (voice interfaces for non-literate users), and Kentaro's main thesis (technology only amplifies human capacity and intent) resonates deeply with my experience. It's all about the people, and technology is mainly an amplifier / supporter of human institutions. An "app for K-12 education" doesn't work in the traditional sense, but an app that connects awesome teachers with students, with an ecosystem that takes care of management, training, incentives, and encourages true mentorship, has a much higher chance of success.
Does a 0% public sector job growth necessarily indicate a failure, in and of itself? To me, that's not probative at all. What if Sweden had simply reached a level where everyone who was employable and wanted to have a job, had one?

"Removing red tape" has been tried quite a bit, as a sole means of stimulating growth. Not only has it failed over and over again, but the negative consequences dwarf even the fantasies of growth by proponents. "Cutting taxes" has also been tried, and has failed, over and over again.
The Guardian for one? I agree it's becoming more rare to see real journalism, and that's sad...which is why it's important to point out the ones who still do it.
I just went back to school for some professional certificate classes and none of the younger students use a pen and paper. I certainly felt like "the old dude" behind the times taking notes with pen and paper. I got a 4.0 though, so it was working. Also some of the young bucks were also always asking me for copies of my notes, so I took it as a compliment!
Like Walmart paying workers less and not giving them insurance because they can still be on welfare.
My short-term worry about basic income is that it'll end up bidding up the prices for goods that poor people buy, especially the rent. I won't be surprised if most of the basic income eventually goes to the landlords. IMO the right solution is to get the government involved in distributing certain goods, not just handing out money to buy them. The state could guarantee free housing, food, healthcare, education and pensions for everyone, on top of basic income for spending money. The USSR managed that with a fraction of the resources.

My long-term worry about basic income is that people have a need to be needed by society and it won't go away easily. I don't know a good way to solve that completely, short of reengineering humanity. In the short term we could get away with making the government pay companies for employing people (the payment should be lower than the salary, but maybe not by much). That could be a nice supplement to basic income.
Support for the DragonBoard is much more limited than other platforms. Android seems to work best although with a stupid "giant phone" sort of design language which is silly. If they had the level of documentation that the BeagleBone (or even the RasPi has) they might be a contender but my estimate is that the platform won't go anywhere.
I bet Angular got a larger fan-base!
> 100% guaranteed positive outcome

I really, really, really doubt that.
Oh, I didn't know that! Here in Brazil, top 50th percentile or so civil servants are likely to be paid about the same as top 10th percentile in the industry (approximating the numbers based on personal knowledge).
The Social Media Marketing Basics
... and then also record the lecture in case you missed anything else!
You're observation is rational, but hard to connect with emotionally. Which is why these self defeating feel good efforts will persist.
Make it illegal to ask what level of education you have received or just where you went to school?
Is there a strategic business reason for this on Google's part other than a safer web is better for all? I don't doubt that a more secure web is better for everyone, I'm just more curious about the business drivers of this from their perspective.

The reason I'm wondering is because with AMP, there seems to be a clear strategic benefit from having all of that ad serving data running through them even if the advertisers and publishers are not using the DoubleClick stack or Google Analytics.

By bringing this to market from the standpoint of "improving" the mess publishers have brought upon themselves and speeding everything up, there's definitely a clear win for consumers here. That said, it leaves the door open for something similar to mobilepocolypse where Google updated their ranking signals on mobile to significantly favor mobile-friendly sites. I could easily see this going a similar route where it is a suggestion...until its not because if you don't implement it you'll lose rankings and revenue (and coincidentally feed Google all of your ad serving data in the process).

To be clear, I don't knock them for taking this approach, because if it works it is a very smart business move that will be beneficial to a lot of parties (not just Google). Just looking for other insights into the business strategy behind something like pushing for encryption, and AMP.
10k/year isn't going to get you far with food and shelter in all but the lowest cost of living areas.
That could be the title for almost every blog post ever, though.
Well, I tried to remember if I ever saw a sexy male in a tech presentation or demo, and I couldn't... but of course, it's not actually "never" and "always".
I'm sorry to hear that. Documentation is in progress :)

As a side note, a better approach for handling errors is coming to graphene soon
The displacement is based on the volume of the sub not the mass.
Basically the Alfa was a small and light sub with probably the "biggest" reactor in terms of power output for it's size.
What you got is a sub with half the displacement of an LA class submarine with a reactor with equal power output which meant that you could strap on some really powerful engines.
So half the displacement with about the same power capabilities means pretty much that you can double your speed.
Agreed. I read the word "emasculating" with the meaning "deprive (a man) of his male role or identity", and was imagining that Page was calling into question his manliness during an interview like some kind of bro, which is funny to imagine considering I don't hear any accounts of him being the kind of guy who would do that.

Managing your public image is something I imagine can become pretty draining, so I'm not surprised he parcels out his comments to simple, controlled, one-way exchanges.
Linked to inflation is a must, I would think.

The CoL problem is currently "solved" in Unemployment and Social Security by tying it to past wages (which probably correlate with this). I think we do need to replicate that in some way.

A similar metric might be to tie it to the minimum wage of a region, which will hopefully capture inflation and CoL.
Wow, this is such a simple, practical, and subversive idea that my mind has been too boxed up for coming up with that. Whether I agree with this genius, devious and trivial idea... not sure yet.
Thank you. I was mostly away from keyboard yesterday. I just saw this today. Thank you for saying it.
I disagree. While college is becoming less of an important step for many careers, education, especially post-graduate, is vital for many others. For example, if I were a large tech company hiring physicists for R&D, I really don't think it's unfair to expect some sort of post-grad education, nor do I think these instances really contribute to any sort of problem right now.
> Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions

You're talking about trade schools? Good. That's a step in the right direction. It doesn't go far enough though. One unfortunate reality of our existence is that people differ markedly in cognitive skill. These differences are innate and immutable. Not everyone can benefit from an education.

If we pitch education as the way to address to inequality, we're not only going to waste a lot of money on useless education, but we're also going to give these negative-marginal-value people false hope of economic success.

We need to figure out an alternate way of living for people who are intellectually incapable of contributing to a modern technologically advanced economy. A basic income is a good start.
Login Flow – demo of a React/Redux register–login workflow
This article is dated April 11, 2011. Can we get a (2011) added to the title, please?
My view on this is that generally if you haven't extensively used at least a couple of existing frameworks, it seems unlikely you'll do anything than re-invent existing stuff (at best) in a slightly different fashion.

If your background is mainly in modern JS development, that’s probably true. I don’t think it holds more widely, though. Modern JS lives a little bit in its own world, and the state of the art in that world is sometimes decades behind the wider programming industry.

With the interest in things like React and Flux there has been a lot of discussion in the JS community recently about unidirectional data flow. However, the same sort of separation of input interactions from output rendering goes back to at least the 1970s and 1980s when ideas like MVC were being developed.

Similarly, React and similar libraries get a lot of attention for the declarative way you can specify rendering and the relatively efficient way they update the DOM, but again we’ve had declarative UI libraries on the desktop for decades, and anyone who was doing graphics programming in the last millennium will be all too familiar with doing batched updates.

It’s not much of a stretch to think that someone with a background building UIs in some of these other contexts might have different ideas to the current JS community about the architecture they want for their UI code, nor that some of those different ideas might be better for some projects than the mainstream today.
Not really relatable to networking terms. That analogy doesn't accurately convey the idea.
The number is arbitrary. The net effect would be the same just differing in degrees... inflation, decrease productivity of the economy as a whole, and downward pressure on the middle class. It would have negligible effect on the problem of inequality with the 1% and above.
Frankly the use of the word "intelligence" to describe advanced pattern recognition algorithms is pretty laughable. Nobody is even close to anything the involves actual thinking / learning. I think your day jobs are safe.
For point #2, the current state of AI allows only for "because you're more likely to win with this move." Today's AI can't reason like a human mind does, it just simulates thousands of scenarios and analyzes which are more likely to be successful, with a very primitive understanding as to why.
Of course, another question is: will the AI's consider us humans to have the equivalent of their consciousness? Or will they think "These humans don't not really possess consciousness, they just exhibit a crude biological simulation of it".

(BTW: This is not just meant as a joke, nor just as instigating fear of the singularity - turning a question on its head can sometimes lead to interesting insights).
+1 for Milton Friedman who almost 50 years ago described a negative income tax as the Revolutionary Subsidy.

Basic formula for negative income tax is to apply tax rates on the basis of median income. Friedman offers maximum of 50% of median income as the largest possible subsidy.

Assume median income of $50,000. Joe Smith earns $30,000 and therefore has negative income of $20k (median income - actual income). Joe would then receive a negative income tax of 50% his total negative income, or $10,000. The sum of his earned income + negative income tax = $40,000 / year.

More here: https://github.com/DeBraid/investing-notes/blob/master/negat...
Do hackernews readers think that computers will eventually have a "mind" and "consciousness" ? Or will it just be simulated?

Personally? Yeah, I do think computers will eventually achieve "consciousness". I don't think of consciousness as being anything magical or terribly special to the point that a computer couldn't have it. I generally think it's just a question of a sort of recursion where the brain is "hearing" it's own internal processing as it works. When we ask questions, run simulations (day-dream) and we "see" and "hear" those things, I suspect it's just some sort of feedback loop between internal modules of the brain.

I'd go so far as to suggest that some computer programs may already be conscious, and we just don't have any good way to measure/test that fact.
> Is there a strategic business reason for this on Google's part other than a safer web is better for all?

The two common reasons for MitM are spying and inserting/replacing advertisements. The latter is stealing from Google, so they want to stop it before it grows too common.
just ban education based discrimination

I am not sure I understand this. If you are going to a doctor, you would want to make sure she is qualified, isn't it? And the only way (currently at least) to make sure is that degree that proves she knows what she is doing. Of course this doesn't apply to all professions.
I think the key is to start from a welfare state that is the same size as the Basic Income system. That is, you have a tax funded system that pays for paternal leave, pensions, unemployment benefits, daycare subsidies, food stamps, and all other types of transfers.

After that you make a transition to a basic income system, with a very small change in total transfers (e.g. 0-20%). This is exactly what would happen in for example Finland, where proposals have pretty wide political support now.
I am disappointed with the number of errors and misconceptions in this piece. He presents machine learning (ML) as though it is the entirety of artificial intelligence (AI), bases his assessment of the field on a false dichotomy between the largely distinct groups of supervised & unsupervised learning techniques, and unfairly reduces the achievements of AI down to "pattern recognition".

AI and ML are not synonymous. They are related, and there is a great deal of overlap between them, but the fundamental goals and approaches are largely different. Machine learning is primarily interested in studying what you can learn from data - for some suitable definition of the word "learn". Artificial intelligence is the more broadly defined problem of studying algorithms that exhibit or incorporate intelligent solutions to problems. That may involve data, or background knowledge, or domain assumptions, or a variety of other things. AI is about more than data - even as he observed that it is a sign of intelligence that humans do not require thousands of samples to learn.

The central challenge of AI is not in transitioning from supervised learning to "general" unsupervised learning (whatever that means). The techniques are different, and often used for different things. There is some overlap, and they are clearly related - but it is not at all accurate to conflate unsupervised learning with "common sense". In broad strokes, supervised learning is about identifying features in the data that correspond to labels, while unsupervised learning is about identifying intrinsic features in the data. It sounds like he's interested in bootstrapping supervised techniques, or perhaps transfer learning.

My first response: ugh...yet another famous and lauded geek icon wading into the subject of AI. At least this doesn't seem to be in any way connected to all the Nick Bostrom garbage. But if I'm allowed some snark, perhaps if he wanted to be an AI expert he should have stayed in school... ;-)
> I may become an entrepreneur some day, but I will have to have climbed the social ladder to the upper class before I even attempt it.

it sounds like you've been blessed with the temperament to not actually want either of these things.

you probably don't want to buy expensive stuff or exhibit control over other people or be written about either. that's also a blessing.

none of this stuff 'just happens, someday, maybe'. people who are driven by these urges are totally different than you. they wake up with the uncontrollable urge to do these things. when they see/think about something they want they are consumed by some kind of positive or negative emotion. you obviously don't experience any of this stuff because you're a normal person, but don't let yourself believe that you 'might do it someday', because you probably won't.
Let's also ban previous-employer based discrimination. ;)
> Most of that cash stayed in reserve at banks (see 'Repeat After Me: Banks Cannot And Do Not "Lend Out" Reserves').

This is a very misleading use of terminology. It is true that banks can't lend out "reserves", if by "reserves" you mean the 3% reserve that banks in the "upper reserve tranche" at the Fed (which is basically any bank you've ever heard of) have to keep in their accounts at the Fed and not lend out.

But the actual balances of those banks at the Fed are far in excess of that 3% reserve requirement; they are being kept in "reserve" by the banks not because the Fed requires them to but because the banks choose not to lend it out. Why would they do that? They aren't saying, at least not publicly, but the obvious hypothesis is that it's because their expected rate of return from lending it is lower than the rate of interest the Fed pays on their balances. In other words, they are worried about borrowers defaulting and driving the banks into insolvency and then bankruptcy, and the government refusing to bail them out because it wouldn't be politically acceptable this time around.

So the reason inflation has been so low is that most of the several trillion dollars the Fed has printed in the last few years has never actually been put into circulation. (The doublespeak about "collapse of the money multiplier" is just a roundabout way of saying the same thing.) Which says nothing at all about what would happen if that amount of money were put into circulation, as it certainly would be if printed money was used to fund a basic income program instead of "quantitative easing".
Maybe both. They'll get drunk a few times, and then find something cool to help with and earn additional income.
This is actually a problem I've given a decent amount of though on (although not necessarily reaching a good conclusion), but I think these problems are actually related and not impossible for this simple case. It comes to an issue of what parts of the analysis and at what depth did a best move come to vision? Was it bad when it was sorted for 8 ply but good at 16? Maybe that won't "tell" a person why a move was good, but it gives a lot of tools to help try to understand them (which can be exceedingly difficult right now if a line is not part of the principal variation, but ultimately affects the evaluation by an existing "refutation". But I think the other "difficulty" is that 1800 players play badly in lots of different ways, 2200s play badly in lots of different ways and even Grandmasters play badly in lots of different ways, but very strong chess engines play badly only in a few sometimes limited ways.
same here - e-mail in my profile. i have a good amt of experience on this type of stuff.
Would we still need child-care if we were playing video games all day while the some elite did all the productivity?
Fantastic. Basic income should start entering the political vernacular in a massive way. Even in the short term, it seems like a more elegant solution to the progressive lefts "lets build giant infrastructure" plan.

I'm looking forward to this research answering the basic revenue calculus. How much of the required spending can be supported by dismantling the current welfare infrastructure? How much would general productivity need to increase (and be maintained) to make sure the tax revenue can support this?
Is there any effect of this on capital investment (the lifeblood of SV)?
For me, it's that I get to save an hour and an half of not commuting (and my commute is not bad at all, just walking to/from BART), that hour and half is an hour and a half more of sleep or reading or anything else. It also means I dont have to be in an obnoxiously loud open office plan with people some from other department whiteboarding 3ft behind me.
Removing red tape has indeed been tried in America... but almost exclusively for the benefit of already large near monopolistic corporations. It has rarely happened to the benefit of small/medium businesses. Especially if you're talking about deregulation that happened in the financial industry in the 2000s.

The companies that most struggle with red tape aren't mega-corps but the smaller companies who can't afford teams of lawyers to fight through them, or the
lobbyists to implement them in their favour.

There has been very little significant deregulation in the USA in the past two decades outside of Wall St/big corps.

Context matters, except when discussing politics it seems...
What about the very rich people today? They have practically enough money to live on. Why do they continue to work?

Quick! Let's tax them at 100% so that they have an inventive to work!
I wonder how much they paid him as I'm not sure if this looks good in the carrier to be the first professional Go player loosing against an AI (?)
I'm not sold on density. I think improving rural logistics is more key. Make more land attractive rather than making more use of current land.

That is logistics both for people, data, and goods.