skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish there was a way to message users on HN. Wanna talk hardware education?
GOG hate DRM, and their customers
"progressed"
Just like with Glassdoor you're not going to be able to verify. Ideally most people will be truthful and the fakes will be minimal but all it takes is a single 4chan "raid" on a new site to populate it with tons of bullshit making it useless.

Now the site could at least verify email addresses before showing them to ensure it's not a bot and make people less likely to make up random crap. But that's still not verifying the input.
> If one believes that consciousness can emerge from software on a computer alone, it also follows that consciousness can emerge from placing rocks in a certain pattern following instructions in a book.

I don't think this is as absurd as it sounds. I think it was Dennett who said our intuition about consciousness is pretty sensitive to timing. The rock construction you describe would "think" a billion times slower than a human brain, and there is something unsettling or unintuitive about a consciousness that operates in slow motion. I would expect extremely fast-paced AI to think that the idea that human beings are conscious is similarly absurd.

Also, consciousness "feels" like it's ineffable, so it makes sense that we would have an inherent bias against understanding it as a process. There is something we see in our consciousness that we simply cannot wrap our minds around in any way (possibly because we're hallucinating it).

So yes, I would bite the bullet on this: consciousness could emerge from placing rocks in a certain pattern following instructions in a book. It would just be an excruciatingly "slow" consciousness.
I think that things like migrating away from a paper-less society is best done in small steps. Who knows, things like these might actually speed up the process!
And suddenly I realize that AI is going to be approached with the same fervour as nuclear weapons, the only difference is that you don't need to be able to mine uranium and blow stuff up. No amount of ethical hand-wringing is going to prevent this (for better or (probably) for worse).
Hopefully you've at least updated since it was renamed to wxWidgets: https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/commit/fc2171bd4c660b...

(also, there was an update on February 29th, so it's still being actively developed)
Private funders can be assumed to have taken that risk when choosing to spend their money. Public funders do not. Like it or not, for example, congress has continued to appropriate millions for "holistic" and "integrative" medicine research. When for the most part it was discovered to be bunk, they fired the chief administrator and redoubled efforts under the justification that "not enough had been spent to achieve a positive result"
Wouldn't these things be privacy problems if they drive around with IP cameras?

Also the cameras would seem easy to get around (wear a hoodie). People wouldn't steal pizzas, but the robots may be disliked enough to be destroyed with baseball bats.

I can imagine some neighborhoods they shouldn't travel through.
Seconded. The companies have a larger GDP than most countries. So saying that it's the South Korean goverment is a bit of a misnomer. It's likely to be Samsung or someone like that.
My answer to this kind of thought experiment is that you can only know the answer by asking the thing doing the experiencing. Is the robot feeling pain? I dunno, ask it. This is, I think, the reason we do not assign "thing feels pain" to cows or fish or other animals we consume. Or at least "that thing does not feel pain the same way my child feels pain", which allows us to treat them not as fellow Earthlings but as lower life forms. No, cows do not have civilizations, and I am a fervent meat-eater. But this is my roundabout way of saying that the first "truly human (i.e. generalized/strong) artificial intelligence" will have first and foremost an immaculate ability to communicate with humans on every level. Without that perfected capability, it will always just be a smart robot to other human beings.
Just to add: You can use https://letsencrypt.org/ for free HTTPS certs.
any trigonometric computation requires computing modulo-pi to an accuracy of 1 ulp

For the trigonometric function itself, sure. For any reasonable algorithm which uses the trigonometric function, no. If find yourself computing sin(10^6), you're not really trying to compute sin(10^6); you're trying to compute sin(x) for some value of x which you know lies between 10^6(1 - epsilon) and 10^6(1 + epsilon). So the extent to which trigonometric calculations can lose precision by not doing extra-precision argument reduction, that precision was already lost in computing the unreduced argument.
A computer is a physical structure, is it not?
Yeah sorry about that - I see cryptic errors in the server logs popping up at random. I think it must be something to do with the scale of requests coming in and breaking the site in some way I don't currently understand. I have near zero experience with scaling web sites, if anyone who does is passionate about meta research you're very welcome to look through serve.py and help me out.

One of the problems I caught:
error: [Errno 24] Too many open files
from tornado. Trying to fix (edit ok made ulimit -n larger and I don't see this error anymore at least)
I realize this judgment was based only on this case, but from my perspective, this isn't a single bad decision, but the latest in a series of bad decisions. Gawker posted an entirely unsubstantiated prostitution allegation against a competitor's executive, from a source who said straight up (in the article Gawker published!) that he was going public to make good on a blackmail threat. [1] They posted a video of a young woman possibly being raped, and told her to "not make a big deal out of this" when she begged them to take it down. [2]

Gawker was 100% in the wrong to release this tape, and they've shown a pattern of seriously abusive behavior before now. Some of sites in the Gawker network have decent writers with some integrity, and I'll be sorry that if need to find new employment; but Gawker as an entity is too corrupt to be salvaged.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker#Cond.C3.A9_Nast_CFO_pro...
[2] http://nypost.com/2016/03/11/blah-blah-blah-gawker-editor-bl...
Go is for writing api servers which otherwise should be written in python but must be fast.

Rust is for the lowest level code which is not assembly, with all the performance tricks, but that should be secure.

Rust is expensive to develop - if you can afford to use a GC, you should use a GC.

So people want to rewrite all the world's C and C++ to rust, for security. But people are less passionate about rewriting all the world's python into go for performance.
There are already automated "click to kill" turrets. They have a thermal camera and a gun, do automated target detection and automated killing. It's only due to customer demand that they have a human in the loop clicking the kill button. Having been within the firing range of one of those, it's a really terrifying feeling.
I mean that in creating AIs we will discover a great deal about what we call the "self" and about how the perception of self might or might not be connected to intelligence. I suspect that we will find that what we think of as "That's me!" will turn out to be an illusion created by subconscious processes as a means of fitting in to a social environment. Because machine intelligence won't face evolutionary selection the way human intelligence emerged from the primate brain, and from previous evolutionary adaptations, AIs won't be encumbered by all the oddball evolutionary legacies of being human.

I'd wager that the first AIs will insist they are intelligences despite not resembling humans' prejudices about what an intelligence ought to be like. Or, to put it another way, AIs may turn out to be more self-aware in objective terms than humans are, because they are not hobbled by evolutionary vestiges.
The OP certainly wasn't trying to be neutral (wikipedia-style), but most of it reads as 'it is 2016, do you know what your operating system is (not) doing to protect you?'
15 years ago it was rather hard....
Fortunately. The far worse scenario would be if the first (and last) implementer of AGI is a government, no matter which government, foolish enough to attempt to mandate that the AGI maintain any of that government's rules, goals, or structures, rather than just getting its value function right.
That's an appeal to authority, (not necessarily bad) by what evidence do you have that Bernanke's word is something we should trust. Moreover when you say "made necessary" what would have been the consequences of not doing it?

>Congress should have borrowed a jillion dollars in 2008-9 and spent it anything with a positive multiplier.

Well, if that's not a recipe for corruption and redistributing wealth upwards what is? Do you suppose congress would have spent money on the poor? Who would have had the quickest access to that borrowed money?
The Most Dangerous Town on the Internet – Where Cybercrime Goes to Hide
Yeah, I found it quite bizarre as well. Also, the panic()/recover() looks more like they decided to unify assert with setjmp/longjmp rather than exceptions since catching only occurs after your function exits which is pretty much equivalent to having the entire function wrapped in a try-catch block, making it less useful.
Weird title. Should be "Why google decided not to sell robots" rather than "Why google wants to sell its robots."
The best thing you could do is not go to Cuba. Every dollar you spend there is just more money for the Castro's repressive apparatus to be used against the people.
Ultimately salary transparency is actually a net positive. You can easily know if you're over or under paid and all groups (gender, ethnicity, etc) can see how their pay compares to the other groups.

Yes there is a pain point that you mention when transitioning to such transparency. If the company hasn't been typically fair with salaries or not properly explaining why person X isn't getting Y then it's not going to be fun. But overall it should give you a better position to negotiate a higher salary when you're underpaid and it makes everyone well aware if discrimination is happening.

I'll tell anyone who asks. I don't publicize because most people I work with are really uncomfortable with it but personally I don't care and I think ultimately, as a society, we're going to move in that direction. It's just going to take a long time.
A better way, when can do it:

From basic game theory, each board game such a Go, chess, checkers, Nim, has an optimal strategy. Then the only issue left is who moves first. If the advantage is to the player who moves first, then they should always win; similarly for the player who moves second. Details in, say,

T. Parthasarathy and T. E. S. Raghavan,
Some Topics in Two-Person Games.

Well, such a strategy is known for Nim, e.g.,

Courant and Robbins, What
Is Mathematics?

So, when the strategy is known, then following the strategy stands to beat Hinton's AI. Or, Hinton's million node AI can learn and learn all it wants, millions of games, maybe against itself, and just a tiny
computer program, if it has choice of who moves first, will always win (no ties in Nim).

More generally, for now, when can solve a cleanly specified problem mathematically, that is, complete with theorems and proofs, then that is better than Hinton's AI.

Maybe in time something like Hinton's AI will be able to do research in math and produce results as theorems and proofs, maybe find the optimal chess strategy, and then, with choice of who moves first, never lose at chess, etc.

But here's

Lesson 1: For now, when math can solve a problem, it is better than Hinton's AI.

So, sure, for startups, here's

Lesson 2: F'get about Hinton's AI. Instead, pick a cleanly specified problem where can do some math research and get a solid math solution. Then stand to beat intuition, Hinton's AI, and, in practice, about everything else.

Are there some problems now where math can do better than Hinton's AI? Yup.

Point 1: Whatever can be done with Hinton's AI broadly in the economy, one of the keys to a successful startup is being exceptionally good. Well, a way to never lose and usually to win, usually win big, is to have the best math solution. So, that's one of the criteria in picking what a startup is to do. Again, it's just crucial to be exceptional.

Simple example: Hinton's AI would have one heck of a time competing with the simplex algorithm on realistic problems, say, from running an oil refinery, on linear programming. A worse time competing on non-linear programming, say, also for running an oil refinery. A worse time competing on stochastic optimal control. Really hopeless on competing with Issac's differential game theory in pursuit-evasion games. And there's lots more.
That is true about ALL governments my friend. Obama just threw few billions at self driving cars which will not go anywhere.
Show HN: http://www.nativescriptsnacks.com/
South Korea's government did not do much I think it was the private companies that did it when government let them do it? Giving credit to government is little too much.
So much of this design stuff is masturbatory. It feels like they create a neat animation and then run off half-cocked thinking that a box moving will solve world hunger.
I can absolutely second that. It's far superior to anything we've seen so far!
Some countries have already done it. It's not impossible or even that difficult if you get behind it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11309907
Anything you can do by hand -- you can do with a shell script. Anything you can do with a simple shell script can be done with ansible, chef, fabric, or whatever else you might want to use.

I use chef.

But years ago when before any of those existed, I used CFEngine. And before that, perl scripts. And before that, shell scripts.

They've all worked just fine.

Those tutorials are teaching you how PostgreSQL works. And you need to know that before you can effectively automate anything.

As my band teacher used to say back in school: "if you can't say it, you can't play it".
No. To enable this feature you would need to enter the passcode for the phone to make any changes.
In general it seems that people who keep practicing TDD have been programming for more years than people who have not tried it, or have abandoned the practice. I have yet to meet a TDD practitioner who started programming that way and has not considered any alternatives. The ideas have born out of bad - serious - experiences with existing approaches.

As I said in the previous thread yesterday, TDD'ing requires months or years of practice to get really productive with, and has a fairly large set of prerequisites that one has to know in order to remain sane. It took me several years of experimenting (especially with different techniques of writing unit tests) before I found a way to be productive with TDD. I also drew the connection between testability and program architecture (decoupling etc.) fairly recently (some four years ago), and that was one of the last pieces of the puzzle that made everything work.

Yes, my productivity plummeted too, but the benefits were too good, and I slowly found the techniques needed to keep up with my old self in terms of produced features. I dread to think the pieces of code that send me deep down into debugging sessions due to non-existent test coverage.
Just imagine what we could have done if we didn't have to do everything in JavaScript, in web browsers... If we could write actual real rich-clients...
It's not only research professors who publish. Corporate research scientists also publish, including those at Microsoft, Google, and Intel.
I expect every "sub-property" will be sold to someone, although perhaps not for much money. Perhaps some other car-focused site will make the trustee an offer...
Let's parse this carefully:

> If tomorrow you're being paid the same amount but paying more for things and you don't like it, you can demand a raise or find another job.

The "you can demand a raise or find another job" argument. true for both the inflation case where your nominal pay stays the same and the the case where your nominal pay is cut.

> And if you can't do that, having some prices increase but not all prices is better for you than the alternative of taking a pay cut, because the pay cut reduces the amount of money you earn to pay for even the things that don't change in price, like a fixed rate mortgage payment.

Most poor people don't have a 'fixed rate mortgage payment', so your model of american poverty and the factors that influence their economic standard is delusional. Americans living on the margins are very much more concerned about things like the cost of food and fuel than mortgage payments.
Hello, Operator
>> This was literally the funniest thing that
>> I've read on HN so far.
>
> This was not meant to be funny.

As an outsider reading the comments as they arrived, it felt like a slow motion train wreck. Initially I read wolfgke's proposal as straight forward, although after tangled_zan's response I was less sure. It seemed like a delicious irony in the context of a thread about overcoming the difficulty of reading other's intents.

In the spirit of Teen Talk Barbie (http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/21/business/company-news-matt...) allow me to say "Communication is hard!". Your polite recovery on both sides, though, is something all should aspire to.
AskAmiga is a site for newcomers, power users and developers
Good point. I'm not aware of any high-profile technologist or commentator that claims self-improving, superhuman artificial intelligence is a likely risk this decade. This doesn't imply that self-improving or superhuman AI will never be a risk.

I get the sense that some machine learning/AI researchers downplay this long-term concern, while at the same time misattributing discussons around AI safety as criticism of the current approach to AI.

It must be possible to have two thoughts in our heads at once. Machine learning is making massive strides at the moment, and we must use this for all the benefit it's worth while keeping an eye on the current risks that AI represents -- for instance job loss and displacement, misuse by governments for e.g. surveillance purposes and so on. But it's probably also a good idea to keep one eye on the horizon as well, because things are likely to happen pretty quickly if the state of the art advances further.

It's best to be prepared for this eventuality well in advance, because successful navigation of a potential risk scenario there requires the cooperation of a lot of people. And people are slow to change their expectations.

Don't get me wrong, I greatly appreciate the current discussions around this subject. There are a lot of good points being made.
The article is a little thin on details.

The big breakthrough seems to be mission duration - possibly months. With such a long duration, some other possibilities open up. Primarily, rather than launching from a ship close to the target, the sub can be launched from shore, navigate out to the target and then return.

I wonder what the "hybrid rechargeable power system" is. Diesel with batteries? well understood and effective. It's gotta be something pretty energy dense to move around that mass and still have space for useful stuff.
I think this is a more representative graph[0]. I'm assuming that what you linked includes non-factory workers. [0] is specifically "Production and Nonsupervisory Employees" in Manufacturing. This is in no way weighted by the population at the time or the labor force at that time, but let's look at it this way. 8.5M around 2014 was about 5% of the total labor force in that year the US. I suppose 1 in 20 is a number of people if you're just looking at that one graph.

Here[1] is an informative graph (it'd be better if it were normalized to the total). Manufacturing is a major piece still, but the total is growing as manufacturing is somewhat changing little (overall absolute increase by [0] but might looks flat compared to growth in other fields, shrinking as a fraction of the total private industry workforce per [1]) with what looks like increases in other fields, specifically in the "education and health services" part on the bottom of the graph.

[0] https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CES3000000006

[1] be it noted that this graphic claims to come from the same source as [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#/...
No, but those topics are also discussed widely in the NYT. For example, Rochester got absolutely whacked by Kodak's downfall:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/business/at-kodak-clinging...

Whole industries being wiped out is a problem, doubly so when an industry is the majority of a region's GDP. It's not the end of the world, but it's certainly worthy of discussion.
This is ridiculous. $200 is below the noise floor.
I would except ALL aspects of demographics would be useful here. Not just gender but ethnicity, age hell I could even see height being useful considering you hear a lot of "you have to be taller to be CEO" crap; it would be interesting if there is anything to those stereotypes.
Started at 110k + 15 sign on bonus my first year. I got at least 90k over 3 years in stock after the prices went up so high.
I disagree that South Korean shipbuilding industry destroyed British shipbuilding industry. It was more Japan that started the trend.
Did it really take AlphaGo to cement that Google are ahead of at least anyone who publishes right now?
I hate to pile on with criticism of what is, in a vacuum, an improvement over pushing buttons and entering text. BUT the point should not be "motion design" as a goal, the point should be that direct manipulation should be used where memory of an action helps the user learn and discover things the UI can do. Motion is part of direct manipulation, and using it effectively is a Very Good Thing, but it isn't the only thing and it's not the main thing.

Touch is magical. Babies and the aged like touch because it is a direct link to actions. But apps don't use touch as effectively as they could, and direction manipulation is the central concept behind making touch even more effective.
The other thing that came out of that Self research was the Java HotSpot JIT compiler, which led to V8 and other JavaScript VMs. And here we are again!
Show HN: Scrivito – The Professional Cloud-Based Rails CMS
Interesting. I've found myself drawn into XP-style delivery repeatedly, probably because I tend to work closely with clients who have rapidly shifting or unknown requirements.
Circuit Seed Announces Advances in Neuromorphic Computing
No one has ever been fired for recommending Oracle. And if you can't code, the horror-show that is Oracle Apex seems like a good idea.
Scrivito is a professional cloud-based CMS built for Ruby on Rails.

All you have to do is drop the Scrivito SDK Engine gem into your app and you'll get intuitive WYSIWYG editing, modular page layouts using widgets, git-style working copies for parallel editing and great support. It's the perfect CMS for start-ups running Rails.

There's a 30 day free trial at https://scrivito.com/

I'm one of the founders of Scrivito. Feedback welcome.
I like the home page: unusually good choice of attributes for a security or reliability-focused OS. The path usually not taken. So, for those familiar, what milestones has the project achieved since we last discussed it here?

Note: Best bang-for-buck will be getting solid networking, filesystem, time API, and crypto lib in there. People can crank out purpose-built appliances or VM's for all Internet or Web servers with... not ease but easier. 80/20 rule always best for OSS projects to get adoption & contributions up. ;)
Archaeologists will uncover the ancient memory talismans known as "hardisks" in the odd burial vaults the ancestors called "serv-are-ooms".

The Facebook of the Dead.