skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We all know quite well what "general purpose code" is.

I'm sorry about Itanium, but VLIW has to remain a possible path to faster cores. That my information is old does not mean it is wrong: The guy got 9:1 speedup on 24-way VLIW. Saying that the tricks of branch prediction, out of order execution, speculative execution, register renaming, etc. make VLIW forever obsolete is shaky without some solid references.

Moreover, if we want faster cores, then obvious, right in front of us, are two possibilities: (1) Design instruction sets that make VLIW easier to do and more productive. (2) Integrate and coordinate up and down the stack, that is, from application, e.g., collection classes, string operations, function calling, memory management, exceptional condition handling, to compilers to instructions to VLIW to the gate level logic and look for speedups. E.g., the now famous instruction sets look like they were designed for assembly language programming, and likely no compiler makes good use of all the instructions. E.g., C code, supposedly fast, forces the programmer to do the multidimensional array indexing arithmetic themselves, and to the machine language it all looks like normal work. In fact, that addressing is necessarily ubiquitous across computing, so maybe have an instruction for it. Same for string compare -- the usual C approach is just comparing one character at a time in a loop -- bummer.

In tool making, a key is to design the right tools. Else end up with a huge toolbox where most of the tools are used little or not at all. IMHO, we are still looking for the right tools in the stack from logic gates to microcode, register sets, instructions, caches, compilers, and applications. Then, VLIW in some form needs to be kept in mind.
Introduction to Flink Streaming – Part 5: Window API in Flink
So TaxAct is an option for you.

Can I tell you something which is much, muuuuuuuuch more significant than the $25 or so you're contemplating spending on tax preparation software? It's highly likely that you're running a sole proprietorship (Schedule C). I am not sure from your phrasing that you are aware that you are doing something which can be categorized as a sole proprietorship. It is to your advantage to characterize what you are doing as a sole proprietorship given some plausible assumptions about what your cost structure is, because you will be able to deduct all expenses reasonably required to run the business from the revenue of the business (the number shown on your 1099-MISC) prior to paying taxes on the profits only. What the IRS considers "reasonable and necessary" is not what most natural humans would consider reasonable and necessary.

If you do not feel like reading an awful lot in the next month, bringing every receipt and credit card statement you have from the last year to neighborhood accountant will cost you a few hundred bucks and save you, plausible, 10X that in taxes. This is the bread and butter for lots of small accountants and tax-preparation shops, and they're reasonably good at it. WSJ? Deductible, always, 100%. Phone bill? Guesstimate how much of it was for business? 60%? Good enough; let's find all twelve of them. Do you have any other phones? Think hard. Internet accounts? Same story. 40%? Great. You're in software? What's your computer? When did you buy it? 2 years ago? Did you deduct it then? Nope? OK, so we're going to depreciate it, that will be another $600 or so of which we'll allocate $400 to the business and $200 to you personally.

I thought I was pretty good at this. My accountants are much better. We both color within the lines; they were just aware of entire other coloring books that nobody had told me about. (Most recent example: the Japanese government is sending me a wire for $600 because this year, instead of filing as exempt from paying sales taxes because all the products I make are exported, I am filing a return which shows me paying $0 in sales taxes on all $0 of my Japan-source sales. What on earth is the difference? Well, if you're an exempt business, you can't claim back sales taxes you paid against sales taxes you owe the government. If you're not an exempt business, you can. If you paid more in sales taxes than your tax liability, the government wires you the difference.)
This actually came up in the commentary. Michael Redmond actually mentioned that some amateurs watch to see where their opponent is looking, but he called it merely a "trick", and he said it is not useful in professional play.
DES review at Stanford University (1976)
Publishing used to cost money when it required physical printing/distrubution/storage of journals. Now all of this is basically free, but they still charge. Most theoretical physicists for example only care about "publishing" in the ArXiv (all free, open source). The traditional publishing is ridiculous.
Indeed. No Starch Press's book on TCP/IP by Kozierok is 1600 pages!

RINA is a beautiful new redesign of the networking stack wherein "computer networking is just inter-process communication."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_InterNetwork_Archi...
Wouldn't it be more efficient to just tax Apple by the same amount of money and then use it to fund research, rather than turning universities into patent litigants and then having a large proportion of the money go to lawyers rather than research?
I'm not a big fan of the game (love its style, but the gameplay hasn't aged well IMO - playing it for the first time in 2014 probably didn't help), but this is a really neat architecture. Thanks for the link.
Does Google Fi impact this in any significant way? WiFi calling in general?
In the case of Netflix, the video content doesn't need to go through a proxy; only the website does (at the moment). So bandwidth shouldn't really be an issue.
Basefolder – Personal Cloud Storage
Shanghai JavaScript Meetup March 14th at 7pm
Entirely offtopic, but how is it that the xkcd blog suffers from such a terrible spam comment problem?
i maintain a lingering fondness for the [aurora text editor](http://www-personal.umich.edu/~knassen/aurora.html), a dos-based text editor that was, like emacs, largely written in its own scripting language. the editor was sadly closed-source and has now gone the way of most closed source stuff, but the scripted bits were open source, and they were a real pleasure to work with. again, like emacs, you could build some surprisingly non-text-editor-like things on top of it.
$200 is a lot lower than I've seen for top CS conferences recently, e.g. CCS 2015 was over a grand for the full conference last year: http://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2015/pro_reg.html
I've evaluated what I have used over the years...

POSER 4 seems like the most beautiful app.
Isn't it from millions year of natural selection? The reason why a human brain can think, is just by chance.
Maybe you're having trouble reconciling them because they are irreconcilable. It sounds to me like you're awfully close to a "decide what I want first and rationalize it later" style of pondering, or perhaps have crossed that line already.
Not really. In any real civil war, some police forces would side with the rebels. That's already happened in connection with Public Lands issues in the Southwest. Also, at least some National Guard armories would be liberated. It could get very messy.
Coachella Announces Virtual Reality App
Strong AI means a different thing.
I meant taking the code without contributing back
Head First Design Patterns (2005)
Seconded. I'm not sure if this is common for other languages, but I use the Go stdlib as a reference for what good Go code should look like. And reading it often reveals little language tricks that I wasn't aware of.

Example: The Sum method of the hash.Hash interface takes a byte slice as an argument, and appends the hash to it. Why not take zero arguments and simply return a new slice? Because the authors recognized that if you're doing hashing, you probably care about performance. Appending to a supplied slice allows you to save an allocation.

The stdlib is full of little details like that, and it adds up to a really great programming experience. Go may be lacking in some respects, but it has Good Design stamped all over it.
Read David Deutsch's book eh?
I interpret the first amendment to mean we have a right to make sounds come out of our mouths. The content of those sounds, however, is not protected. Since there are an infinite number of combinations of sounds, banning political statements does not impact that right. You are still free to make infinite sounds. The amendment also does not cover the right to record that sound or to write thoughts down on paper. And while the amendment does preserve the right to petition the government for grievances, it does not specify what form that petition must take or for the government to act on such grievances. Therefore, a law which requires all such grievances to be voiced at lowest point of the Atlantic Ocean is constitutional as well.
That's the only empirical way, yes. We can also just talk about what it would mean in theory, though. In this case, we'd say that AlphaGo is well trained to the training data set sampling distribution but that may be far from the actual world game distribution.
Preface: AlphaGo is an amazing achievement and does show an interesting advancement in the field.

Yet ... it really doesn't mean almost anything that people are predicting it to mean. Slashdot went so far as to say that "We know now that we don't need any big new breakthroughs to get to true AI".
The field of ML/AI is in a fight where people want more science fiction than scientific reality. Science fiction is sexy, sells well, and doesn't require the specifics.

Some of the limitations preventing AlphaGo from being general:

+ Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) is really effective at Go but not applicable to many other domains we care about. If your problem is in terms of {state, action} pairs and you're able to run simulations to predict outcomes, great, but otherwise, not so much. Go also has the advantage of perfect information (you know the full state of the board) and deterministic simulation (you know with certainty what the state is after action A).

+ The neural networks (NN) were bootstrapped by predicting the next moves in more matches than any individual human has ever seen, let alone played. It then played more against itself (cool!) to improve - but it didn't learn that from scratch. They're aiming to learn this step without the human database but it'll still be very different (read: inefficient) compared to the type of learning a human does.

+ The hardware requirements were stunning (280 GPUs and 1920 CPUs for the largest variant) and were an integral part to how well AlphaGo performed - yet adding hardware won't "solve" most other ML tasks. The computational power primarily helped improve MCTS which roughly equates to "more simulations gets a better solution" (though with NNs to guesstimate an end state instead of having to simulate all the way to an end state themselves)

Again, amazing, interesting, stunning, but not an indication we've reached a key AI milestone.

For a brilliant overview: http://www.milesbrundage.com/blog-posts/alphago-and-ai-progr...

John Langford also put his opinion up at: http://hunch.net/?p=3692542

(note: copied from my Facebook mini-rant inspired by Langford, LeCun, and discussions with ML colleagues in recent days)
The Turing test is one such measure that is unbeatable by specialized AIs. Language understanding in general requires some degree of intelligence.

I don't think the Turing test should be an actual goal of AI researchers. Turing just proposed it as a hypothetical example.
We can describe Solomonoff-based agents like AIXI. None of them are fully sufficient for true general AI, but you could probably accomplish quite a bit with an AIXI-like agent.
Google reinforces undersea cables after shark bites
26 Disruptive and Technology Trends 2016 – 2018 from Brian Solis
Why is C++ not good? It doesn't grow memory usage on its own. If you can put C code on something, you can do C++ as well. We're talking about things up to 10 MB. It's perfectly fine on those. (actually the smaller your target, the less difference there is - you don't really have to care about APIs or calling conventions on an 8K chip)

Java has many different versions. For example the smallest one (JavaCard) can run on tiny chips in smartcards, so Java as a whole may be a bad generalisation, but it's definitely possible.
Freelance Wordpress Web Developer Sydney,Australia
Does the FSF really depend on non-free components?
Like, duh.
The physical world is so slow to give you feedback, I think DeepMind has the right approach with video games, you can move to 3d games, then games with physics where the agent directly controls artificial muscles, while iterating much faster than you can in the real world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMR5mjCFZCw&feature=youtu.be
No one is claiming that alphaGo is close to AGI. At least not anyone that understands the methods it uses. What alphaGo is, is an example of AI progress. There has been a rapid increase in progress in the field of AI. We are still a ways away from AGI, but it's now in sight. Just outside the edge of our vision. Almost surely within our lifetime, at this rate.
"Useful AI"?
It should also be mentioned that VPNs, even if correctly used (e.g. no dns/IPv6/webrtc leaks), this simply shifts to trust to another provider. Now, your ISP is not able to see your traffic but your VPN provider is potentially able to (even if you self host it on aws or digital ocean because they still have full access to the box), and their ISP. If you trust them more, use them, but I you don't, I see little reason to utilize a VPN unless you want to unblock geo-blocked services.

The only advantage is that your VPN provider (or their ISP) might have little reason to spy on your traffic instead of your regular VPN.
Why link to a fork that's 5 commits behind master?
I thought full AIXI wasn't computable though?
> My impression was that you were implying that having a gun in the house makes you significantly more likely to be the victim of an accidental shooting, which while technically true, really isn't worth worrying about compared to, say, car accidents (or even airplane accidents) accidental gun deaths are very rare.

Are you sure about the airplane accidents part? Do you have data to back it up? I know that traffic fatalities in the US are about even with gun fatalities overall [1], but if you can show that accidental gun deaths attributable to gun ownership at home are roughly equal to deaths from plane crashes, I'd be very interested in seeing that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
I guess it boils down to a difference in opinion as to what it means to be intelligent.

IMO, AlphaGo isn't "intelligent" because all it can do is play Go. For example, it can't be taught to play chess without completely reprogramming it.

Surely it's using a lot of clever algorithms, but where's the intelligence?

TBH, there's not much point to this post, because the intelligence in AI has been twisted more towards your usage almost since the beginning.
wow, sicl really is a beautiful project. thanks for the pointer.
I don't use GPG keys but instead a smartcard with RSA key pairs (stored as an RSA private key that I cannot access and an X.509v3 certificate which has my public key embedded in it). I access my smartcard via a PKCS#11 module. "Password Store" does not support PKCS#11 modules directly.

Additionally, hunter2 allows you to store passwords in multiple databases -- this is significant because...

Additionally, hunter2 allows you to share individual passwords with sets of users within a database -- any time you change the password is encrypted with all the appropriate user's public keys, so if you store the DB in a shared place everyone who has access to a given password will have access to it as it changes over time.
Legally, there is a huge gradient between length(work), sha(work), train(transcription(work)), transcription(work), thumbnail(work), etc. Your personal definition of "derived" sounds a lot like the mathematical definition, which isn't amazingly useful in a copyright context.

> Not sure about the legal definition.

Perhaps stating "You certainly couldn't release such a model under the GPL." so surely isn't a great idea?
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This is not the reason. Monte Carlo programs typically play bad-looking moves in way ahead / way behind situations. In these situations "bad" moves will sometimes not alter the win probability they measure, so they don't know how to disguinish a more natural move from one that looks bad. This was mentioned in the commentary when one of the DeepMind guys came in.

Go programmers have taken various steps to mitigate this behavior, such as dynamically adjusting komi to trick the engine into thinking it is a closer game, but I don't know if AlphaGo uses any such technique.
Don't forget WebRTC. It can leak your real IP address and might even be able to use that route.

Nevertheless, setting your Firewall to only allow VPN traffic is pretty easy. I've done that on Linux and Mac OS X. I don't think it is complicated on Windows either.
Why Ronda Rousey Might Not Fight Miesha Tate Next
Top Sensors for Raspberry Pi
There are a lot of options you can find online to buy good sensors for the raspberry pi. But, how to decide which will be a perfect match for you. Check this list.

http://www.bestoninternet.com/compute/electronics/raspberry-pi-sensor-kit-projects/
While they weren't card-carrying ornithologists, the Wright brothers studied bird flight extensively and explicitly used it for their designs.

But they concluded that the flapping motion wasn't essential for propulsion, and could more easily be achieved by a propeller.
China's Historic $338B Tech Startup Experiment
The fact that it's a thing at all is outrageous enough.
There's Global Electric Vehicle Corporation.[1] It's a classic startup. Cool web site, new marketing concept ("white label" electric vehicles), hip features ("not just a car, an eMobility vehicle designed to meet the lifestyle needs of today's electronically wired and iPod generation").
They're not actually shipping cars, and all the images of cars seem to be renders. But their web site is really cool.

(Although they're in the Midlands, not London.)

[1] http://www.globalelectricvehicle.com/
My experience is that it takes a certain kind of twisted intelligence to write code that is below a certain level of quality, but still works. Someone like me who is a mediocre programmer? if my code gets too terrible, it simply stops working. I'm forced to use some base level of software engineering if I want to write a large program that runs, just because there's a limit on how many random side effects I can keep track of.

From what I've seen when supporting EEs? People who are that much smarter than I am don't have this limitation. They can write thousands of lines of spaghetti perl and bash and as long as nobody touches the damn thing, it works fine. God help you, though, if you make a change.

But... there is an established job role for this; I mean, you don't want to make your EEs sysadmin their own LSF cluster, either.
> ISP snooping on network traffic really only happened after Google started getting into the ISP business.

ISPs have always snooped. Maybe just in limited circumstances, true. But the key point is that they can, not how prevalent it is.
Nothing is "free", the only question is: "who pays, and how does that change the incentives and results?".
Totally awesome! I was just about to make exactly this tomorrow, now I don't need to.

My problem is that I would like to generate wrappers for an API, in a variety of popular languages. I could just implement each wrapper separately by hand, but maintaining them as the API changes would be obnoxiously difficult.
Looks like "they aren't from the Plan 9 world".
Yes to all of the above, except the last.
Indeed, it's essentially two books in one, and that half of it was always a slog to get through.

Marooned in Realtime is better for getting the Singularity across, although you really need to read The Peace War first; this collection has both plus a bridging short: http://www.amazon.com/Across-Realtime-Vernor-Vinge/dp/185798...
I'm not really interested in those particulars but offered it as possible rationale that isn't there for academic publishing. I don't think patents (or copyrights) should be granted for publicly funded research at all, as it's effectively work-for-hire already owned by the public. But it gets more difficult when public grants are only a minor part of the funding.
As fas as I know, the only thing existing AIXI implementations have demonstrated, is to learn to play Pac-man at a somewhat reasonable, but not in any way stellar level.
I completely agree. It sounds like the opposite of beautiful software if you ask me. Maybe it's interesting, thought-provoking, or amusing code, but not beautiful.
> The hardware requirements were stunning (280 GPUs and 1920 CPUs for the largest variant) and were an integral part to how well AlphaGo performed

Is that really true? Demis stated that the distributed version of AlphaGo beats a single machine version only 75% of the time. That's still stronger than virtually all human players, and probably would still beat Lee Sedol at least once.
Sorry for the confusion - I expect to spend money, but preferably not at Turbo Tax.
Good or Bad Parenting?
China Burns Hedge Funds as $562M Yuan Bet Turns Worthless
I prefer computational intelligence to AI, so maybe CI?
> owning a gun doesn't really protect one from a modern intrusive government

At an individual level it doesn't. At a population level there is an argument that it makes a guerrilla civil war potentially winnable by the rebels, which has a deterrent effect on extreme totalitarianism.
This seems like semantic quibbling. All those terms seem synonymous to me.
There has been a lot of progress in AI research, and AlphaGo does represent some of that. But AlphaGo is not any kind of progress from the AI before it towards AGI. It's progress, but progress mostly perpendicular to the goal of "true" or "general" intelligence. It's similar to the same kind of AI that was built for chess, just for a much more difficult problem in that same class of problems. No problems useful to general intelligence were solved in making AlphaGo, just harder problems in the field of special intelligence. It's still a tremendous accomplishment, just not one that puts AGI happening within any of our lifetimes.
I can't help but think this is madly in-efficient with cache misses and the like.
RxJava Design Retrospect
It is abundant added than a Marvel
https://sway.com/AFXG3GesMKLN9bCi?ui=en-US

https://sway.com/AFXG3GesMKLN9bCi?ui=en-US

https://sway.com/AFXG3GesMKLN9bCi?ui=en-US
It seems to me a more practical strategy for staying "under the radar" is to use cash for small daily purchases, for things where cash is more reliable (e.g., private sale of a used car), to help out a contractor I'm paying, and for purchases I don't want traced. Why draw attention to myself by paying my rent in cash?
I was going to post this. Not only is Zach's work very creative, but it's very well written, composable stuff.
I've always found FreeType to be quite wonderful; it integrates the artistry and mathematics of typography with entertaining low-level wizardry.

Take a look at the rasterizer, for example: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/freetype/freetype2.git/tree...
I feel that there's a legitimate reasons to split them into those terms as there are some significant distinctions that could be made in terms of "level of intelligence" of the AI.

For a much more detailed exploration of this topic, I think Wait but Why's article did a pretty thorough job: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...