skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Beating humans in Go is, in itself, not all that exciting. Go bots have been beating strong humans for quite some time now (just not the very top humans).

There are other implications that make this AlphaGo progress super exciting though. Go captures strategic elements that go well beyond the microcosm of one nerdy board game.

That's the real reason Go has been around for >2,000 years, and why this AI progress is relevant, despite its limited "game domain".

I wrote about it here, from my perspective of an avid Go player & machine learning professional [1].

[1] http://rare-technologies.com/go_games_life/
ECC RAM? Sounds suspicious when this kind of offers don't mention memory type.
How Supercell is thinking only about one metric - it is called engagement
"The game has long interested AI researchers because of its complexity...the average 150-move game contains more possible board configurations — 10^170 — than there are atoms in the Universe, so it can’t be solved by algorithms that search exhaustively for the best move."

[Source: http://www.nature.com/news/google-ai-algorithm-masters-ancie...]
not only Cardboard, to WebGL too
It is cool.
How did you process title length to show ... on detail scence?
You are not a general purpose strong AI either. Your mind could easily consist of a whole bunch of single-function solvers, combined into networked components.

See this interview between Kurzweil and Minsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ3ahBm3dCk#action=share
I see "AI" doing well in games that have simple inputs, a limited range of legal outputs, and relatively easy "goodness" measures.

I see nothing that might be able to tell us why gravitational mass is the same as inertial mass, for example, or any moves in that direction. This "AI" is good at simple games.
In chess there are various pieces with differing powers, with Go it seems like they all have similar powers. Again, I don't really know the game and might be wrong, but that was my impression.
I don't know why but the author's experience and description of the scene reminded me a lot of Myst and how I felt the first time I ever played it. I envy anyone who is fortunate enough to experience even a portion of that IRL.
Elementary education is mandatory, but the curriculum is only mandated for public schools. The rules vary from state to state, but here they are for California:

1. File an annual private school affidavit.
2. Maintain an attendance register.
3. Instruction must be in English.
4. Instructors must be capable of teaching.
5. Provide instruction in the courses commonly taught in the public schools (e.g., language arts, math, science, social studies, health, and driver training).
6. Maintain immunization records or personal beliefs exemption.
7. Maintain a list of courses of study.
8. Maintain a list of instructors with their addresses and qualifications.

This is MINIMALLY enforced. If the parent has a teaching credential, the rules are even more lax "The child must be taught for at least three hours a day, between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., for 175 days each school year in the several branches of study required to be taught by the public schools and in the English language."[1]

On a related side notes, private schools also do not have to follow the curriculum set for public schools. There are even some public schools that are exempted from parts of the mandatory curriculum (charters).

1. http://www.hslda.org/hs101/CA.aspx
Yeah interesting, so mathematically there are more moves in Go than the other games AI players have solved so far.

Thanks for the info.
The more recent results are even more impressive: https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/05/21/deep-learning-robot-mas...
Who says? I mean, computers can be used for multiple purposes, and although some applications of AI seem more "noble" or "intellectual" than others, the pursuit of knowledge and sexual relationships are both sense pleasures that we indulge in to make ourselves feel good. On a very large scale, one is hardly more noble than the other.
Download+VMware+Workstation+10+Free
Correct me if I'm wrong but you can spin up multiple PHP worker processes to take advantage of those cores?
Does this use haveibeenpwned.com's API? Looks almost identical apart from the interface support for multiple monitors.
I wonder how this compares to vim-mode in Atom (https://github.com/carlosdcastillo/vim-mode) which is based on those two same technologies..
m.imgur.com executes ~500 KB of javascript. That's the only problem. You don't need that much code to show few images with comments. (Wether server-side rendered or not.)

The desktop site is even worse, scripts weighting ~1.5 MB.
The blade servers at Delimiter (https://www.delimiter.com/) are even more affordable. I pay $20 a month for a dual Xeon blade with 16gb of ram.

They did have a very long downtime this year with no service credit, but uptime has been reasonable over the past year. If you're looking for a hobby box it's a pretty good deal.
I guess the only thing left is to design a game where you can change the rules of the game as a turn.
Many thanks! I checked their youtube channel many times during the game, hoping they would cast this, as I found the Redmond commentary a little too shallow.

I don't understand how the AGA live stream didn't appear there for me?!
Who forgets to break in switch statements? I mean yea, there was a time when I started programming I did this once or twice but not for a quite long time. Seems to me more like a request for sloppy programmers than anything else.

Also don't forget [Duff's device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff's_device) for how it could actually be expressive.
The Risk I Will Not Take by Michael Bloomber
>Who on HN is willing to start a tobacco startup today in the US?

Meanwhile, an accelerator near you is funding cannabis startups. Not that I mind
The truth, as I see it, about pollution
> Forest for the trees.

Heh, nice one.
Link Bait title. They didn't plunge 25% in February. This is a 25% plunge from the same time last year.
I think another reason is a fear of starting an endless argument with the candidate, when candidate believes he was actually right and the company made the decision already so it's rather pointless. Not sure how likely is it happen though.
It largely depends on critical mass. One large institutional investor pulling out isn't going to harm a company because a pure profit seeking firm will pick up the slack.

But a significant proportion of investors that won't touch a stock is going to have an impact, because even purely rational investors are going to consider the fundamentals of the business affected by the implied lower future liquidity, higher costs of capital and lower ability to retain senior executives with attractive equity offers in future. Even though that impact is unlikely to be large, it's probably large enough for firms keen to avoid being labelled "evil" by activist investors being encouraged to spend a bit more on CSR, tightening up their supply chain and abandoning an unpopular policy or two. It's that secondary effect of encouraging ordinary firms to be more ethically conscious - which GiveWell's article doesn't mention - that's the larger one.

A good analogy is democracy. A few people voting for a fringe candidate doesn't harm the mainstream candidates; awareness there's another party complicating the result might even boost the mainstream candidates' votes. As soon as the fringe party gains some sort of critical mass, however, one of the mainstream candidates is likely to start wooing their supporters by adopting one of their more inoffensive policies in some form.
...but what can we tangibly do?

Maybe write new code in a more consistent language, like Clojure? Or am I sounding too arrogant?
Strong AI is not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of worrying about questions 1 & 2, we could be thinking less about constraint and competition with AI and more about cooperation and goal-orientation: e.g. the work of Yudkowsky (https://intelligence.org/files/CFAI.pdf) or some of the thoughts provided by Nick Bostrom http://nickbostrom.com/. Goal-orientation is preferable to capability constraint because the potential benefits are far larger.

Tl;dr: I, for one, welcome our robot overlords (so long as they don't behave like our robot overlords).
150 Actionable Tips in Grooming Your Dog, Easily.
From a first look APNS2 seems to add very little value over bufort which we are running in production very successfully. I really wonder how you manage to send millions of notifications (over which period of time?) without much boilerplate code.
Firstly there are vastly more positions in Go.
Secondly, it's very hard to evaluate a Go position, especially at the start of the game when there are few stones on the board. In chess you can get a long way using a simple evaluation (K=99, Q=9, R=5, B=3, N=3, P=1).
Well, of course, they do, but people are worried about the long-term negative effects on health.
So many services use the New Tab today, so you have to prioritize what you actually need. For me, such service would better work as an online tool/service, not an extension. A similar concept has been implemented in idonthaveadamnpen.com which sends your notes to your email address.

Anyway, thank you for a nice note-taking service. Keep it up!
Non-clickbait link title: Prehistoric Art Found to Contain Monitor Lizard Hand-Stencils
Show HN: Headless local note app with just-enough set of RESTful APIs
I've been testing the performance of the C2.

Compared with a Xeon D-1520 (the current hot chip of low-cost cloud computing and actually very nice), single core speed is less than half of the Xeon D (at about the same clock rate of 2.4GHz); multi-thread speed (8 threads running lame encodes) is about 66% of Xeon D.

Not bad for the price.
Chess is quite tactical and brute-force-y -- the board is quite small, games are quite short, and there aren't all that many possible moves at any given point.

A program can play pretty good chess on modern hardware just by alpha-beta searching with a fairly simple evaluation function for the leaves of the search tree.

The best programs are cleverer than that; they have sophisticated evaluation functions, they prune and extend their searches, etc. But at heart, what makes them so strong is that they can search deeply.

That approach doesn't work so well for go. The board is 6x the size, games are 4x as long, the "branching factor" (number of moves available in a given position) is 10x as large. (All figures very crudely approximate.) If you try to make a fairly-dumb searcher in go, it will play very badly.

So how do humans manage to play well in go? By smarter searching, with a better idea of what moves are worth considering; by thinking strategically; by having a feel for the shape of a position ("moving here is likely to be very valuable").

Those are all things that feel like they are harder to make a computer do, and come closer to actual intelligence, than doing well at chess just by doing an enormous search.

The first of those is certainly correct. AlphaGo (like most modern go programs) organizes its searches in quite a different way from a typical chess program. It's not clear how far it deserves to be called smarter, though, since a lot of what it's doing is playing out lots of games fairly stupidly[1] and seeing how they go on average.

[1] Compared with how it actually plays. One of the achievements of AlphaGo, I think, is that it can reasonably quickly select moves for its playouts that are actually pretty good.

The second is more debatable. But, e.g., AlphaGo selects and evaluates moves using neural networks trained on a large amount of high-quality play, and the effect of this is that given a position it can quickly "see" how good it thinks the position is and what moves might be effective, without doing any searching, as a result of feeding the position through a big neural network that does some mysterious calculation we don't understand well. Which is, at that level of abstraction, pretty similar to what you might say about a human go player.

Whether any of this has any bearing on more general artificial intelligence is an entirely different question, which I will not attempt to get into.
A whole $15k? This could have cost them hundreds of thousands if not millions in lawsuits. That's a pretty crappy incentive, I'd imagine a lot less moral security researchers getting exponentially more money out of something like this by just selling the 0day.

I wonder why the reward is so low. This is literally the amount a code monkey gets paid after 3-5 months of work with minimal skills.
Hacking cars using bluetooth and APK
Has anyone performed any assessment / hacking by connecting a car with bluetooth using an APK?
The company says:
"We help programmers find great jobs at Y Combinator startups."

What's so great in Y Combinator startups? I mean why do they narrow only to such startups? Wouldn't it be better to just say they help with finding jobs in startups?
I spent 5 years studying rich people, and here's what they have in common
I'm sure there's someone on the planet. Which is a very different state of affairs from the one that would obtain if a well-known AI researcher had, say, made a $1500 public bet on AlphaGo winning, while also loudly declaring that worrying about AGI was like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, in the company of other researchers declaring similar combined expectations.

What actually happened was the reverse of that; AI moved faster than I publicly bet a large sum of money on it moving, and I was already worried before then.

I'm not aware of the reverse-reverse having happened.

If you're claiming something as a successful advance prediction to bolster belief in a general model, it's fair play to ask for a record of that advance prediction.
I don't think anyone's claiming that AlphaGo is an AGI in and of itself, just that it's a significant step towards one. There's still a lot to go before we can toss a standardized piece of hardware+code into an arbitrary situation and have it 'just figure it out'.
And? This does not address my argument that the complexity is beyond-combinatorially explosive (infinite spaces). I'm not talking about the space of possible board states. I'm talking about merely the set of all possible actions.

EDIT: clarified my language to address below reply.
I feel like this should be obvious to anyone who has ever fallen off a road bike. I know I have, and this is very frequently what happens. But of course if someone has no experience riding bikes and views the video it looks like cheating.
Kloudsec for GitHub Pages – LetsEncrypt certs for your custom domains
Perhaps the answer is that the homework is set but it's not compulsory, so it isn't marked or graded, and there's no punishment for failing to hand it in. Pushy parents can then enforce that their child completes it but more laid back parents can let their children do other things instead.
>after school, all the kids on the street are running up and down, riding bikes, playing wall-all, shooting hoops, and running in and out of eachothers' homes.

Any parent who doesn't actively want that for their children over sitting at home struggling with homework is clearly mad.

I really hope that eventually we come out of the other side of this obsession that children being forced to do large quantities of work that is joyless is a good thing. It is embedding all the worst associations between learning and enjoyment.
I have never used the Instagram API and had to look up what a tagcloud is just now. I can immediately say this will take more than 'a couple of hours', whenever I work with a new API it takes time to setup the environment, digest how it works and research the appropriate APIs I need to use. I am not surprised by your experience. Actually makes me angry that someone thinks a reasonable person could do that in two hours with the background I have described. Yes two hours is the environment is setup to make calls to the API and perhaps you have some familiarity with it - so I can see why the person who asked the question would think 'I could do it in two hours, on my Macbook where the environment is already set up and where I know exactly what API is required and what the data format looks like in the response'.
To me, the appeal of VIM is not the lightness, it's the editing paradigm it is based on. I won't be switching to this any time soon, but I can think up plenty of nice features that a html-based view would allow over the terminal, and I wouldn't mind paying (a bit of) a price for it.
It would have surprised me but it also isn't something I would absolutely rule out a priori :)

Also, it's a pretty bad headline from what I (non-native speaker) can tell. You have a point, not quite sure why you're being downvoted.
@Eliezer, but you might still win the bet, this was just the first match.
I'm aware that I owe you an email reply OP, sorry I have been busy and have stopped cold emailing customers.

Right now, I'm selling to retail / real estate (http://www.retailwizard.co.uk / http://www.propertywizard.io) so to get customers I literally go to their workplace & ask them for 5 minutes of their time. I did try emailing as you know, but I have found going to speak to to them face-to-face to be more effective for my niche.

Obviously email works for other sectors, something I'm looking to explore again in the future.
Whenever I encounter an intrusive add that basically overlays the whole page and send me to some shady site, it goes to the black list. Mistakes happen, so I occasionally review this list, because I care for the revenue of the sites I like. Anyway, today Ad blindness works as good as any ad blocker.
If the school forces too much homework or useless subjects on children, conscious parents can respond by being more lax and accepting less than perfection from their kids. In this system (school-child-parent-exam), the parent is the only flexible link. As parents we don't have to be hard on kids that don't want to do homework or don't to great on some subjects.

My own life experience tell me that success in elementary school does not equate with success in life. In fact even high-school and sometimes college are almost irrelevant to the kinds of tasks people have to solve once they get hired. It's more important to be creative, curious and passioned about something.
You are not a counterexample to Teodolfo's claim, which was about people who did say not to worry.

[EDITED to add:] Oh, I see, your point is that it looks like AlphaGo is doing better than an "AI moves fast" advocate expected, rather than (per Teodolfo) no better than some "AI moves slowly" advocates expected. Fair enough.
Human mind... pshaw. You say this "human" thing is special? I don't see it: In my day we also had protons and electrons... all you're showing me is another mishmash of hadroic matter and leptons. So you've refined the arrangement here and there, okay, but I don't see any fundamental breakthrough only incremental refinement.
Go, Games, Strategy and Life: The Big Picture
Retweet this for a chance to win 10,000 bits Two prizes. Winners on March 15th
That's a great list, all in one place! Thanks to the author of that web page.
How do you see them using it? I know a couple of a Tech recruiters and I'm happy to email them on your behalf if I can understand the use case.
HYPERION system uses 1,550 nanometre lasers for ground-to-air comms
2 examples that affect me every week when serving SMB clients:

- old IE installs

- PDF printing functionality not included in older versions of Office and Windows

More experienced people/sysadmins can probably bring out lot more issues. And I totally agree with you that Java didn't suffer in the end, but how many lawyer hours were spent on stuff that shouldn't have been an issue in the first place?
You forget to normalise by the uncertainty of payment in the blackhat case and the probability of repercussions.

Not to mention the possibility of selling the same thing to multiple black hat buyers.
Discreetroom – חדרים לפי שעה בחיפה
All you need is ubuntu
Thanks for the intel re the London DO datacentre. I'm glad it's not just me :-)
I tried Scaleway last year. I was very disappointed with the usability of their offering (I was trying to run a simple Ubuntu Minecraft server - it was unnecessarily complicated to set up everything from ssh keys to snapshots), and stopped the account quickly. That very next day and for the first time ever my card picked up a fraudulent $3000 bar bill in Las Vegas. I don't think it was a coincidence.

I cannot recommend Scaleway.
Tim Cook and Elon Musk Reportedly Holed Up with Senior Republicans to Stop Trump
I'm just miffed that the company managing my pension somehow feel that they need to my moral guardian.

- "How do you want your pension fund invested?"

- "Weapons would be good"

- "Sorry, we can't morally justify that"

Well why not? The only that that's happing now is that people who aren't me will be making a profit on those stocks. If running a munitions company is legal, then it shouldn't be morally wrong for my pension to be invested in it.
unlimited bandwidth. Is that for real?

300 Mbits. Let's assume you can pump out 100 Mbit sustained. That is about 10 MB/s. or 26,000,000 Megabytes/month. 26,000 GB / month.

AWS & google cloud are about $.10/GB. That'd cost 2600 USD to serve.

Scaleway claims that'd cost just 12 euro.

For realz?
When did the new meme become calling everything link bait? These metrics are measured year over year, so there's nothing remotely misleading about it.
1202 CPUs and 176 GPUs is the figure mentioned in the Nature paper. But it's important to understand that this is the computer used to train the networks used by the algorithm. It took about 30+ days worth of wallclock to train it. That's about 110 megawatt-hours (MWh) worth of energy required!

During the play, the computational requirements are vastly less (but I don't know the figures). It's still probably more than is feasible to put in a smartphone in the near future. Assuming we get 3x improvement in perf per watt from going to ~20nm chips to ~7nm chips (near the theoretical minimum for silicon chips), I don't think this will work on a battery powered device. And CPUs are really bad at perf per watt on neural networks, some kind of GPU or ASIC setup will be required to make it work.
Something being invented previously doesn't mean that it existed as a matter of engineering practicality; improved performance is some but not all of that. Just describing something in a paper isn't enough to make it have impact, many things described in papers simply don't work as described.

A decade ago I was trying and failing to build multi-layer networks with back-propagation-- it doesn't work so well. More modern, refined, training techniques seem to work much better... and today tools for them are ubiquitous and are known to work (especially with extra CPU thrown at them :) ).
Aside from everything already said, C integrates very well with Python; understanding C will let you write Python bindings for new libraries and will let you easily rewrite performance-critical chunks of Python in a faster language.

For Java, you could learn C++ (via JNI) for the same reasons - but Java is less likely to use C libraries, and going from Java to C++ usually doesn't produce as much of a speedup as going from Python to C.
Fail0verflow GitHubs PS4 Linux Loader
It you "mention C" in an effort to game the system, any competent interviewer will eat you alive.

I remember when "having a Github" was a signal, as soon as word got out everyone had one, but most were zero or near-zero original content.
Technically, the executive branch isn't passing laws - it's always been legal for them to do this (Congress did not forbid it in FISA & Co.). They just never exercised that right up until now.