skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Portion of payroll taxes is ~7.5%, plus an extra 2.5-10% for workers comp/etc depending on your rates.

If they had to reclass as employees, they would just raise prices to end consumer 10-20% to compensate (or fund it via other's money like they're doing now to price out rest of market).

They'd also put a cap on hours per week so drivers couldn't drive more than 30 hours per week. Companies aren't legally required to give benefits to part-time workers (up to 30 hours).

The big draw of independent contractors is that you've just converted labor from a fixed cost to a variable cost. There are tons of Uber/Lyft drivers (namely, anyone not doing it full-time, which is the majority of drivers) who prefer this since they can drive as much or as little as they want.
Yes, I think you missed that. From the article:

"It takes less than five seconds for your address to be harvested and scanned. The entire scan takes less than one second and scans over 100 common TCP and UDP ports. "
At that point, would humans really require jobs? And will the value of money still be the same?
The End of App Stores as we Know Them
Hermes outspends everyone else on war and invades countries on false pretenses, murdering millions of people in the process. There is no dichotomy here.
If a link opens in a new tab on Android, the back button closes the tab.
Moving from GitHub to Bitbucket – Why and How
I don't trust Zuckerberg one bit. He wants to rule the world. Gates and Musk say AI is a threat and they actually want a better world and are doing something about it. Zuckerburg isn't doing shit to improve the world other than trying to run it.
I'd used minimax before but not heard of Monte Carlo tree search. It sounds interesting.

From [1]:

> Although it has been proven that the evaluation of moves in MCTS converges to the minimax evaluation, the basic version of MCTS can converge to it after enormous time. Besides this disadvantage (partially cancelled by the improvements described below), MCTS has some advantages compared to alpha–beta pruning and similar algorithms.
Unlike them, MCTS works without an explicit evaluation function. It is enough to implement game mechanics, i.e. the generating of allowed moves in a given position and the game-end conditions. Thanks to this, MCTS can be applied in games without a developed theory or even in general game playing.

> The game tree in MCTS grows asymmetrically: the method concentrates on searching its more promising parts. Thanks to this, it achieves better results than classical algorithms in games with a high branching factor.

> Moreover, MCTS can be interrupted at any time, yielding the move it considers the most promising.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_tree_search#Advant...
Good to see they haven't updated the curriculum since I did it fifteen years ago!
I always install Java from here [1], and it doesn't include any sponsor offers. Or maybe it's because I install the JDK rather than the plain JRE.

[1]http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/inde...
I've done this for a variety of subjects, and I rather like it... but it depends on having a very good tablet and a very good stylus (e.g. iPad Pro, Surface Pro, or so on).

For me there were two key points: it makes it very easy to drop in photos of slides or diagrams, and it makes it very easy to rearrange page contents after doing a first pass of ad-hoc notes.
Not specifically law, but the number of patients on Medicare. You're essentially eliminating at least 15% of potential patients(and growing as the population ages) That doesn't even factor in the age of patients. Only 15% of that 15% are under the age of 65. That leaves you with 40m+ people on medicare who are over 65. Who tends to go to the doctor more frequently, a 25 year old or a 70 year old? Dependent upon specialty, you could have 90% of your patients on medicare. If I dropped 90% of my clients, I don't think "comfortable" would be an accurate description of my workload.

It's a tough position to be in. Many doctors ARE dropping medicare due to the large amount of paperwork, costs of auditing, deep price discounts, etc. This means that the doctors who DO accept medicare end up getting swamped with patients which increases the patient wait times. So, as a medicare recipient, you either end up paying more out of pocket to see the doctors who dropped medicare or you wait longer to see your doctor. As a doctor, you either lose your patients or gain an unmanageable amount of patients along with drastically more paperwork. Lose-lose.

All that being said, it's clearly a lot easier to criticize than contribute meaningful suggestions. The only thing I could suggest is to put much more effort into preventative medicine. Preventing disease is drastically cheaper than managing symptoms. While it comes up a lot, it doesn't seem to be a focal point.
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.

Being middle class in the US in a second-tier city is just totally freaking awesome. The corporate job I have now is night-and-day better than the lifestyle I had in my twenties. Breaking through to the next level is so far down the list of my current priorities that it could never happen and I'd be totally fine with it.

What else do I do with my time? Learn to make music. Date. Cultivate good habits. Plan trips abroad. Have dinner with friends. Eat right and lose weight. Actually get better at programming instead of just scrambling to Get Shit Done. Read. Try out hobbies like Rubik's cube. Sit at the coffee shop on weekends and chat with random people. Go to the bar in the evenings and cultivate a social life. Work on myself and become a better person.

You want me to throw that all away for a vague promise of more money, sometime in the future? I already have, right now, vastly more options for improving my life right now.
they also train a mapping from the board state to a probability of how how likely it is a particular move will result in winning the game (the value of a particular move).

How is this calculated?

When some termination criterion is met

Were these criterion learned automatically, or coded/tweaked manually?
This is awesome! ;D
> movement relative to other objects is fundamental

I agree that "objective space" in the sense of "a space that is the same for everyone", is not required to give an account of movement of objects relative to other objects. However, the only reason we know that is that we have an alternative: a theory of objective spacetime that gives an account of movement of objects relative to other objects.

In other words, according to our best current classical theory, general relativity, Newton's argument was flawed not because nothing objective is needed to account for the bucket experiment, but because he got wrong what thing was objective: he thought it was space, but it's actually spacetime. More precisely, it's the geometry of spacetime.

On the GR viewpoint, we can indeed view the rotation of Earth, for example, as relative in this sense: we can adopt a "cosmic" frame in which the Earth is spinning and the rest of the universe is at rest; or we can adopt a "geocentric" frame in which the Earth is at rest and the rest of the universe is spinning. Both frames are valid; neither one is "preferred" by the laws of physics. But both frames are describing the same underlying objective thing: the same geometry of spacetime. They are just describing it from different viewpoints.
If this is indeed the way it does play out, and what you have said all sounds very plausible, it's going to raise all sorts of difficult questions for future generations.

Who will decide how many of these AI's can be created? Will AI's ultimately be able to create their own offspring? We already have limited resources, this will only increase the demand :-) I see trouble ahead... as well huge opportunities for advancing our understanding of the Universe.
I recall in ~1990 I read a paper which described exactly this (attempt to make the same mistakes as humans). The argument for doing so in the paper was, IIRC that computers beating humans at chess was just a matter of time, but no longer interesting for AI research.

It seems quite likely that the book that paper was in was Computers, Chess, and Cognition https://www.springer.com/us/book/9781461390824
(revised contributions from the WCCC 1989 Workshop New Directions in Game-Tree Search, May 29-30, 1989)...and was probably the one by John McCarthy (yes, that McCarthy)

Edited to add: Found it! The paper I recall reading was 'Artifical Stupidity' by William Hartson, in Advances in Computer Chess 4 (1986) https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Advances+in+Computer... ... perhaps nothing concrete came of this though - Hartson was a player and author, not an AI researcher.
Well, let me lay out the plan for you that Zuckerberg et al have in mind.
1. Create AI
2. Purge 80 - 90% of humanity in a WW
3. Live as kings of the planet indefinitely (since AI will have figured out a way to stop aging in humans by then).
Personally, I have no problem with this plan even if it means my death, and that feeling is confirmed every time I turn I read the news.
I can't help but think...I got my CP/CS degree with pencil and paper, and the only computer I used was a timeshared VAX and PDP11 at the university lab, so I'm not really sure what the big deal is here.

Sure I wrote some code on those systems, but 90% of my work was done with pencil, papar, and a HP11c calculator.
Wefre Lets You Stream Free Music Online with No Ads
It should be possible to cap the APM of an AI if there is a desire to make it play more like a human, but I would find an uncapped version interesting to see what tactics work well when control is not an issue.
If you have "say" installed (Mac OS Users), try the command "python demo.py | say" and wait a few minutes... :)
> But if you have different ideas about how to structure things, come up with new abstractions that you find solve the problems at hand better than any of the abstractions available to you, then by all means do roll your own. We don't need more clones, but we do need fresh thinking and ideas that don't follow the pack.

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. But otherwise I definitely agree the "use whats out there" gets way out of hand -- but for me this is mostly for relatively straight forward stuff.
No, I don't check my spam folder. Never had any reason to do so in the last couple of years.
You can write code with pencil and paper
If they truly have insider government backing, they may never collapse for the same reason as GM, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, etc. If your backer is a state with access to a printing press, failure is synonymous with either failure of said state or loss of political favor. Such entities are de-facto government agencies and are not subject to the normal rules of economics.

From the government's POV the advantage of creating and sustaining these kinds of private sector de-facto government agencies is that by being nominally private they escape reams of government red tape as well as FOIA and congressional oversight requirements. You get all the (ironically) privacy benefits of being private but are still more or less a government agency. It's basically a cut-out. The CIA is fairly well known to do this a lot since it also lets them conduct domestic operations that are technically forbidden to them. It's also done for a lot of black project government R&D to exempt said projects from disclosure requirements that would bust their secrecy.

As with all government activities, whether this practice is "evil" or not depends quite a bit on the details of what is being done and why. Federal red tape is so onerous that to some extent you have to escape it to get certain kinds of work done at all.

I don't know just how in bed Palantir is, but they certainly seem to be such an entity from an outsider's perspective.
Friskr: New 3D Text Search UI with Concept Discovery
Engineering is about solving problems, but not all problem solving is engineering.
Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

I think basic income is important to do but decreasing the cost of living is a critical component as well. I'd be very interested to hear thoughts from the HN community about what we could be doing here.

Edit: please respond in the main thread so we don't get an unbalanced comment tree. I'll be in the discussion here for a couple hours, but if it feels like there's momentum in the ideas we might do a proper Ask HN about it next week.
It's worth reading about the Canadian experiments with basic income in the 1970s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/colby-cosh-what-th...

The experiment allowed households to opt out, and after a while most did. However this result is convoluted by the fact that the income was not inflation indexed, and inflation rates in Canada in the 1970s got quite high.

The main conclusion from this is, basic income is going to have to be VERY carefully implemented to work at all.
$10,000 * US_POPULATION ~= $3.2T ~= The total annual tax revenue of the US federal government.

Something to keep in mind when discussing this topic.
In Japan, taxis do park opportunistically, waiting for customers ; but they let their engines run. All the time, winter like summer. Even when they leave the car to go for a piss/coffee/cigarette at the next convenience store.
That's amazing. I wish it were horizontal though, and that I could buy prints and put up in my hall way.
The photos in questions are headshots, wearing a hat, with clothes on, smiling or smirking at the camera.

If that's too sexualized for you or your workplace, I'm rather shocked.
I am at university and in most part of the year I can't spend how much time I would like to programming. My mind is too tired after several hours of studying, especially during final sessions. Am I the only one?
There's a very relevant section in this book ( The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies - http://amzn.to/1KFJ1Iu ) , that I just read last night:

> "His view is strongly supported by the work of economist Andrew Oswald, who found that joblessness lasting six months or longer harms feelings of well-being and other measures of mental health about as much as the death of a spouse, and that little of this decline is due to the loss of income; instead, it arises from a loss of self-worth."

The idea being that a basic income is fine, but having people sit around idle probably isn't.
This is awesome. This is my favorite interpretation of a basic income and how it might fit in a capitalist society:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
Shannon numbers: Chess: ~ 10^123. Go 19x19: ~ 10^360. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity

As a non-expert, may I ask (as the term does not appear in the paper): How valuable is the Shannon number in order to evaluate "complexity" in your context?
Because of the censorship, it's super slow to visit those english sites. And of course there is language barrier. The largest tech site in China is perhaps csdn.net
Your link is broken. Removing the 'bis' suffix seems to fix it.
The TV as a product category basically does not exist anymore. Instead it has splintered into three categories: panels, computers, and services.

The panel manufacturers are now building computers into all their panels. Unfortunately, they suck at software and do not have any services.

The service providers are also building computers into their service boxes. They are much better at software, and obviously have services.

Apple is a computer maker who is trying to become a service provider. Unfortunately for Apple, the existing service providers are not as dumb as the music industry was and will not give Apple their lunch.

Panels are a commodity with low margins and slow replacement rates. Which is why neither Apple nor service providers are trying to sell panels.
This is a great advancement, and will be even more so if you can beat Lee Sedol.

There are two interesting areas in computer game playing that I have not seem much research on. I'm curious if your group or anyone you know have looked into either of these.

1. How to play well at a level below full strength. In chess, for instance, it is no fun for most humans to play Stockfish or Komodo (the two strongest chess programs), because those programs will completely stomp them. It is most fun for a human to play someone around their own level. Most chess programs intended for playing (as opposed to just for analysis) let you set what level you want to play, but the results feel unnatural.

What I mean by unnatural is that when a human who is around, say, a 1800 USCF rating asks a program to play at such a level, what typically happens is that the program plays most moves as if it were a super-GM, with a few terrible moves tossed in. A real 1800 will be more steady. He won't make any super-GM moves, but also won't make a lot of terrible moves.

2. How to explain to humans why a move is good. When I have Stockfish analyze a chess game, it can tell me that one move is better than another, but I often cannot figure out why. For instance, suppose it says that I should trade a knight for an enemy bishop. A human GM who tells me that is the right move would be able to tell me that it is because that leaves me with the two bishops, and tell me that because of the pawn structure we have in this specific game they will be very strong, and knights not so much. The GM could put it all in terms of various strategic considerations and goals, and from him I could learn things that let me figure out in the future such moves on my own.

All Stockfish tells me is that it looked freaking far into the future and it makes any other move the opponent can force it into lines that won't come out as well. That gives me no insight into why that is better. With a lot of experimenting, trying out alternative lines and ideas against Stockfish, you can sometimes tease out what the strategic considerations and features of the position are that make it so that is the right move.
The Thiel Fellowship is a data point of basic income for 18 - 22 year olds, in lieu of continuing education in college.
I think this is one of the most important components to study.
"What happens" is, the only reason 99% of humans are allowed to exist in the first place is because they were a good source of labor/taxes for the ruling class. Guess what happens the 99% no longer have anything worthwhile to offer?
Are games against Fan played by the distributed or single machine version of AlphaGo?
When it comes to natural resources, ownership /= control.

The city may have ownership, but the local/state/national governments still have say on things like environmental protection. Owning a forest doesn't give you the right to clearcut every tree. Owning a reservoir does not give you control over where that water comes from (the watershed) nor any of the environmental or safety rules governing water.
Bah, I think mine which is pure css transitions is better -> http://cache.getlazarus.org/videos/flip-photos.mp4

And simpler too.
The bit you quote says "the same résumés" - if that means documents that show different schooling and experience, that seems awfully disingenuous.
I worked on a Go player using neural networks in college 15 years ago. Very interesting project and fun. Mine wasn't very good cause we didn't have a lot of training. But it would make legal moves and it was exciting to see when it made a "good" move (i.e. a capture or block).
I am curious : on what kind of mobile apps are you working on your free time ?

By design, the NDK can only access a very small part of the platform APIs.

It is not an issue if you are making something where you are supposed to use the NDK (like a drawing app or a game), but for a 'traditional' app, that's another matter.
You are the best kind of correct: Technically.

Confounding factors include:

- Dietary affects on metabolic rate/'calories out'

- Digestion differences on calories in

- Food/portion affects on satiety

- Food addiction

- Long term diet maintainability

We've known about calories in vs. out for years, yet our society is not seeing the results we want. The important question is: How do we control that equation?

Your conclusion is as helpful and callous as abstinence-only sex education.
it's on my nebulous "someday" todo list to add this sort of thing to quackle [one of the two current leading-edge scrabble programs, elise being the other one]. ideas include simming opponent play with a reduced vocabulary, attempting plausible phonies, and adapting the search tree to account for how well opponent's previous moves matched the simulated best move for them. on the other side of the coin, that would also allow quackle to have realistic skill levels (right now the only skill adjustment is essentially "stop thinking after a certain time and just play the best move found till then")
Fast-Food Chain Wendy’s Investigating Potential Credit Card Breach
Exactly my thoughts as I was reading the article. To me, a 10x developer is 10x more effective, not productive. This encompasses everything and is very hard to measure, but I think the point is there is the potential gap in the value of an employee, which doesn't exist in many other industries.
bingo

check and mate

TLS Certificate MITM Is now the fucking de-facto crypto

thats the end of the story as far as ssl/tls security goes.. you wont hear about it anymore.

and if you dont have it you are not trustworthy. thats it. no objections. no court hearing. youre just done.

(its probably a good time to bring up the W3C president states this is not https3 this is tls labeled as https. and the 4 show stopping bugs tls has had so far. the downgraded exploitable encryption for other countries. the noob crypto bugs like null nonce/reusing nonce and the other one i forget, the authors published MITM kit, or the open bug for 1 year in usersupplementaldata for a buffer overflow, and how the heartblood code was using variables 'payload' not 'buf' or 'msg' but you know those were already downvoted -15 on HN. could also bring the fact they pushed this into all the popular ssh clients and the ssl, and IRC, so now they are capturing way more ssh, irc, and ssl.)
Bah, I think my solution looks better, and it's mostly all CSS transitions (simpler) -> http://cache.getlazarus.org/videos/flip-photos.mp4
Apple was once that company: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...
A Story About Why We Exist
Swift Async Testing with Quick and Nimble
My first formal CS class was in high school (last two years), and my teacher then personally advised parents not to get a computer just for that class. Looking back I think that was one of the best things a teacher has done for me.
Yeah, Handson.tv starded as a webtv in silicon valley. Rodrigo Barros our CEO was recording a lot of event related to entrepreneurship over there, then he decided to create something bigger and useful for everyone who wants to learn about entrepreneurship.
"avoiding fats" was quite possibly the worst thing to ever happen to the American diet, mainly because they got replaced by sugars in most situations.
There are more people of middle and upper class economic status posting on HN, we just got used to it, etc. etc.

The majority of fashion is targeted at women, therefore there are more female models, therefore there are more quality pictures of women out there than men, therefore it makes sense to use it as a test image gallery.

Also, if the code is being used to display test images, this is probably closer to the normal subject matter it'll be used for.
Here's Uber's long-term plans ... sanitized in the online version:

https://twitter.com/neilanalien/status/627873374505562112
Really, a lawsuit?

If that's not discouragement from listening to employee suggestions, I don't know what is.