skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If AI takeoff is fast? We're fucked.

If AI takeoff is slow? Basic income -> intelligence amplification -> mind merging. With the option to stop at any point and have a comfortable life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hqgYYASenc
I found Rdio to be the best of all possible options. It still is disappointing to me that 1) Apple didn't buy Rdio and 2) Pandora still has done nothing with the IP they got out of the deal.

Rdio had some really creative curation features. The "What's Hot" feature, which was a current hits list of what your friends like and are listening to was really amazing.

Their auto-play radio feature (it would start playing similar music based on what you just finished listening to) was great.

And lastly their "adventurous" slider, which allowed the radio station song search to land somewhere in the spectrum of just songs in your collection to new stuff you didn't have but was in some way related to the current radio station being played....man.....this feature alone was worth the whole subscription in my opinion.
I tried switching over from Spotify to Apple Music when someone in my family bought a family plan and it became free for me, but after a few months I switched back to paid Spotify. For me, free Apple Music < Paying for Spotify. I just felt like I couldn't get around Apple Music intuitively and it became frustrating.
I never knew those were the criteria. I had assumed "force majeur" -- i.e. that people would threaten to sue bugmenot, which would kowtow to the threats. This is much better.

I also consider bugmenot super useful!
So that Apple could have ruined Spotify instead?
I disagree. You seem to be asserting that ontologies don't drive empirical or theoretical science, but this is obviously false. Einstein himself devised relativity via thought experiments surrounding ontological properties he believed made sense (such as the light speed barrier). Formulating theories and testing them is exactly what science is all about.
It would be `(a(b))(c)`. Interestingly, you're already leaving out parens for brevity.
If Apple wanted good headphones, why not buy Shure?
Yes, I spent a day in a grower's pesticide training course and have a certificate here in Ontario to buy and spray pesticides.

RoundUp like most pesticides is shipped and stored in a highly concentrated state. The farmer will then tank mix that with a whole lot of water to produce the actual usable pesticide.

The video you posted is highly misleading.
Unfortunately, limited information is an inherent consequence of scale. There's much better media coverage of national issues. If I read The Economist, they may provide insight into the presidential candidates. They do not have news about my candidates for city council.
75% of students attend public universities, so the case they cover is the modal case.
Judicial elections are one of my least favorite things about American democracy. I always feel chronically underinformed, and feel weird about voting in line with what the one local newspaper has to say on the matter.
I can't say how useful this might be in the real world, but I appreciate the out of the box thinking. It could be more useful if you could call Python or Perl from the COBOL program, but what do I know.

One thing for sure: I will find a way to use this somehow. :)
Online Hacking Forum Nulled.io Has Been Hacked
What's the technicality? Typefaces are exempt from copyright protection.
I think your objection is that a person is being given a label, which I agree, that's usually not fruitful. But the sentiment must still come across: some objections go against not just the body of knowledge we have accumulated through the scientific process, but the basic philosophy of science itself. I'm also talking about specific positions or arguments, so I'm not concerned with your concern about over-labeling people.
Actually they do have playlists for activities and such - go to New, then scroll down to Activity Playlists.
I think google invites this standard with the mission statements of "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and "Don't be evil"
Congratulations, now you have a bunch of disgruntled, angry people driving murder machines.
I agree with how well Play music works. I did Spotify for awhile and tracks would disappear and I never really did like the UI. Then Play music came out and I switched over and never looked back. I did the Apple Music beta and it was fine, but I'm still on the early adopter Play deal of 7.99/month and now it includes ad free youtube. Hard to leave at this point.
But it’s not `a b c`. Rather it’s something like `verb noun noun`. Which is much less ambiguous.

In a language with currying semantics [(((a(b))(c))(d)] the only logical explicit syntax sugar would be LISP-like, so (v n n), (v (v2 n)). That’s imo way worse — you end up with lots of useless junk)))))))) in anything non-trivial.
This can be summed up with, Favor composition over inheritance. :-)

Indeed it is a good idea to use composition whenever feasible. But your problems aren't over. Suppose you write a method that can accept anything that implements the Fruit interface. You've got covariance again. Suppose you have a dictionary whose values are of type Apple. You can pass those values into that method. That's contravariance again. And so it goes.

It doesn't matter whether you're defining types by classes, or what interfaces you implement. You will have types of some sort, and as soon as you do, you have covariance and contravariance as concepts again.
I did: expectation of privacy.

And I don't understand your example at all, as it argues in my favor. Starbucks is generally regarded as having no expectation of privacy.
if by spam you mean send election reminders, then yes, we are spammers. we're a 501c3 nonprofit. that means we don't profit off of our work unless helping to build a healthy democracy can be considered profit. also, we use a third-party database to power that tool. this probably won't shock you, but aggregating and normalizing voter roll data from 10,000+ election jurisdictions is messy and hard. there will always be the occasional false negative, which is why we encourage you to check again with your state if you think we're incorrect.

as for the privacy policy: it's too heavy on the legalese. our law firm wrote it ages ago, and we haven't had time to update it. we're not spammers. we're election reformers
It might be worth reading up a bit – Beats music was included too, and Apple's product quality is generally considered to be pretty good.
You just replied to one. I'm trained in horticulture own a small hobby farm, I breed plants, and have a license to spray pesticides.

But sure, go on beating up your straw man.
> Worked on many 10+ year code bases?

Two separate codebases got 10+ year old while I managed the development on them, so, yeah. The latter one is something I started together with one colleague; it's now twelve years old and has 250 million monthly active users - Opera Mini; most of those users are in "growth regions". (I left after ten years of that.)

The main attitude I see nowadays in younger developers seems like an overreaction against technical debt... I blame HN etc. :)
LOL point taken.

On a serious note, why is that Apple services are so... lacking?
I would like to see a security discalimer just like the one at the airport regarding if your bag has ever left your possesion: "Has anyone at any time come to you and asked you to cast a vote for them, or otherwise attempted to compromise your individual right to vote"
> I believe the stronger reason is your presidential election vote won't matter in most states where the contest is already decided. So a candidate winning 70-30 vs. 60-40 doesn't make a difference.

Your vote, win or lose, also communicates very important messages:

1) 'I vote, and people in my community vote'. If you don't vote then why the hell should the politician care what you want? Does McDonalds care about the opinions of people who don't eat fast food? You think they should put more healthy options on their menu? 'So what? Who are you? Stop wasting my time.' The same goes for your community: If your community doesn't vote, then why would anyone address its concerns? In a world of 50% turnout, imagine the attention a community would get if 95% voted - on every issue, they'd be wondering, 'what does neighborhood X think? how does it affect them?'

2) It expresses a political outlook. A politician who sees their constituents vote 80-20 for Clinton over Trump is going to behave much differently than one who sees a 55-45 vote.
I almost felt like adding that. I'm guessing appending a title after a # character would be the most technically simple solution?
We don't know what will happen. I'm not sure empathy helps, either. As I understand empathy at a distance ( because personalizing it here seems creepy ) , it's sort of a scarce resource. And I don't consider scapegoating as the opposite of empathy. I think it's a related process - as delineated by Rene Girard. It's the dark side of the empathic response. Both are manifestations of the mimetic response.

Arnold Kling is fond of "The Diamond Age", with Thetes and Vickies. Thetes are proles who live on a stipend type thing; Vickies are the ruling elite with extremely tight social strictures. Hopefully somebody more familiar with the book than I can help - I'm repeating Arnold's view of it.

BTW, Arnold Kling also does work in "PSST" - Patterns of Sustainable Specialization and Trade, which is largely athwart this issue.

I do think that "opting out" will become more and more important as society becomes increasingly ephemeral.
24,000 twitter followers for $30, one time payment? Makes me wonder what the ratio of live humans to automatically generated bot-accounts on twitter is. And the total number of registered twitter usernames in existence.
Awesome, I just flipped that switch at the top and can see how it calculates the individual handwritten inputs. Great demo!

So I guess during training you're telling it that correct answers should be 1 and the incorrect answers should be 0.

Do the encoding choices that you make regarding the input / output of a neural network influence its performance at all? Maybe for MNIST the way you have it is the most common approach?
it's hard to draw conclusions cross-country. right now i would say that we are very much in a position of denying actual citizens the right to vote, and we need to address that stat. postal mail is one way we can do that. making voting easy in general is the goal here.
Looking at how the American working class got increasing marginalized to the point where it is a popular trope on television to laugh at 'white trash' or 'hillbilly hicks' has always seemed ugly to me. That contempt has always been suspect. That there isn't even a broad recognition of class warfare as an extant reality in American society just makes it worse and further increases feelings of alienation and marginalization. To be frank it is bullying of the sort that is supposed to occur on playgrounds but on a group scale with adults.

I once asked a question on Reddit indirectly asking about working class men and what the Tiny House community (majority women) thought of them since many working class men would have the skills to help construct houses.

After that I felt pretty sure large swathes of Americans utterly despise each other. It wasn't a good feeling.
Even if an individual doesn't see distinctions between prominent candidates, there are usually "downballot" offices, local measures, and local tax measures to vote on.

A ballot isn't an exam -- you don't get penalized for not filling out every element. Voters should be encouraged to vote only on the elements they understand.
THe interface is bloated, but for me Siri, Apple Music and driving is pretty solid & safer then using other music apps in the car.
Wow... This sent a chill up my back. Why? Why? I've tried so hard to forget those days.

No seriously. I'm sure there is a need for a cobol bridge, just surprised to see it pop up.
The main issue with Spotify for me – bearing in mind it's the music subscription service I use – is that the applications have continued to become shittier and shittier with each release, to the point where I'm actively considering escaping simply so I never have to use them again.
The title reminds me of "the 500 mile email"

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
My main problems with a hosted solutions are:
- How to access my data / server
- How to export data
- How to export / download files
- How to migrate files
- Server locations + latency
- Guarantee for operation, in order to avoid a second Parse shutdown
i would go for better over perfect.
My first job as a developer was writing COBOL (in 2007), and I only did it for a few months, so grain of salt here. I'm fairly certain PIC A(100) should be PIC X(100). A is "alphabetic." X is "alphanumeric" but supports ASCII characters that aren't a-z or 0-9.

That said, COBOL is weakly typed, so you can probably store non-alphabetic characters in a variable typed as alphabetic (at least without the compiler correcting you), but it might fail if you try to do certain operations on them.
That's correct. If we knew of an experimental technique to distinguish interpretations of quantum mechanics we would be in a much better place than we are now. This article is a classic of article titles stretching science journalism, stretching the press release, stretching the paper, stretching the basic result.
"Why exactly is democracy the best, or shall we say "least bad", option?"

Because it does allow for choice. It makes the leaders accountable to the electorate, as they can always vote them out next election. Most other forms of government do not allow for the government to be changed easily.

If you have a better form of government in mind, I'm sure we'd like to hear it.
> Replace non-locality with infinite universes, which is more troubling?

The nature of the multiple universes is deply misunderstood. If you just think of the universe as a very large N-bit quantum computer, then the "multiple universes" are simply the superpositioned state of the computer itself. Nothing magical or non-physical about it.

And since we are almost certainly living in a simulation [1]... ;-)

[1] http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
Funniest thing all week. Point extra here please!
We need a TV channel/website that simply states the facts of the positions each politician holds, where they are from, when their elections are coming up and their voting record based on their supposed stance.

There are SO many things that we can do.

We invest supposedly in physical and technical infra, but never in political....

THAT is the revolution I want to see.
Google Must Answer Lawsuit for Manually Removing Websites from Its Search Index
And you think that this wasn't happening pre-industrial revolution?
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

There have been a number of studies on the relationship and they all seem to point to a positive correlation between PR and voter turnout.
> it demonstrated this by showing that there is no contradiction if you take in account nonlocality

The article suggests pilot-wave theory "apparently" contradicts special relativity. We know the other interpretations "only" have a problem uniting with general relativity.

Perhaps the core issue is Steinberg's quote in the last paragraph: “The universe seems to like talking to itself faster than the speed of light. I could understand a universe where nothing can go faster than light, but a universe where the internal workings operate faster than light, and yet we’re forbidden from ever making use of that at the macroscopic level — it’s very hard to understand.”
Ignoring the human side, I would be thrilled if I could have my dog live 20%-30% longer with a daily pill. I suspect many pet owners would feel the same.
You're not the target audience :).

Welcome to the XXI century - when companies finally figured that marketing has a much better ROI than producing anything of substance. I wonder if in the limit we'll hit a future when people will be selling each other stories and dreams, not bothering with actual products or services anymore? :).
The iphone WAS so good. Now when I buy an iphone I have to go through 10 dialog boxes of nagging for Apple Pay, Apple Music, iCloud, etc, etc. And regularly, whether after a system update or a randomly, the nagging starts all over again. This is really annoying. At one point in the iphone music player, I would regularly be redirected to the apple music tab while trying to get to my playlists.

It's a race to the bottom between Apple and Microsoft. I omit Google as I do not really have any experience with their OS. Are they doing less nagging for their services?
Checkout lecture 10 here. Great stuff, will be an edx course this fall:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL700757A5D4B3F368
Which is really odd to think about. Super local newspapers used to be the norm, but as the conglomerates got bigger the number of papers fell so they no longer had the space to cover the truly local news.

A variety of web sites have tried to fill the need, but the money needed for local news far exceeds the revenue they're able to generate.
I signed up for Apple Music but returned to Spotify because it's just simpler and more pleasant to use the Mac app instead of iTunes, and the iOS app works better for me with its "recently played" list that allows me to better return to recent discoveries.

Apple Music fails becaus it's not magical like the iPod was versus the competition. It's a complicated player.

I believe Apple Music should be more like Google for music. A big search button and a recently played music easily accessible, also publicly playable widgets so you could share music on the web instead of resorting to YouTube.
Where to draw the line? How about "people you have seen"? But the line is less important than the reason for the line being where it is -- and that is about things like the principle of least authority, stability against tyrrany, whether progress is held back even a little by chilling effects, etc.

It isn't necessary to restrict others ability to see, know or remember per se, but only to prohibit the application of those powers -- by means of large computer databases collected by many people -- to particular purposes. In exactly the same sense, it isn't necessary to constrain people's ability to move their arms and hands in order to prohibit strangulation.

Perhaps your dilemma is caused by something along the lines of a tacit incorrect assumption that moral principles are not constrained by other moral principles. Can you think of a moral principle about freedoms that is not restricted in any way by harm caused to others and to society?

I think you are right to say that "it just feels unnatural" is not a good argument, but I don't think that's because you are arguing with the majority: the majority are often wrong.
ok, let's keep this simple: until having a drivers license is a requirement to vote in this country, let's not rely on driver's licenses as a requirement for voting. the DMV was not built to administer elections. that's what local election offices are for
> the standard view of quantum mechanics, often called the Copenhagen interpretation

No. The Copenhagen interpretation is not the "standard view."
I'm increasingly becoming of the view that The Diamond Age was a documentary from the future.

There are worse options!
Please have a look at the data before writing such statement. In the latest CloudFlare article [1] about it (Feb 2016), they concluded that only 52.93% of their users are connecting over HTTP/2.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-impact-on-the-http-2...
The biggest reason people in the US don't vote is because they don't have enough options so they never get to choose people they really care about.

Sorry, this is complete malarky. The calculus of voting is: vote for the least of two evils. If we had 100% voting and everyone did this, the politicians would get better over time, because they would learn that being a certain way would result in failure. The general pool of would-be politicians would learn that maybe it would be OK to run since more normal people are winning.

It's that damn simple. Everything else is an excuse to service some BS idea.
I loved GonzoHacker's explanation of Quora: "It was going to be something huge and it ended up a well moderated subreddit"

https://twitter.com/GonzoHacker/status/721131562679422976
As you point out, being "uninformed" seldom means total ignorance and a random vote, so throwing relatively uninformed non voters into the mix is unlikely to be neutral

So the question is what factors people who are largely indifferent to and ignorant of politics will incorporating into the statistical aggregate to a greater extent than voters that do care.

I'd suggest that the little pieces that people who don't know or care very much about politics tend to be aware of are [i] the recognised status quo (incumbent, major parties) [ii] the status quo ante (incumbents actually picking up votes based on old campaign promises they didn't deliver! and "the party of Lincoln") and [iii] the most simplistic elements of campaign advertising and media coverage.

Are these likely to be signals of who will be the more competent and popular government which the more motivated and generally more informed voters have tended to unfairly overlook, or just noise?
Bill Gates' summer reading list
Subway is complementary to high speed rail (or hyperloop).

The trains travel (on average) about 1/10th the speed, and the distances covered are much smaller.

The Hong Kong MTR (the worst commuter crush I've personally experienced) handles an eye-popping 75,000 commuters per hour per direction: https://www.mtr.com.hk/en/corporate/operations/detail_worldc...
I've noticed that printing is still one of the poorest UX aspects of *nix/OSS and regularly seems to suffer from errors so egregious that they can only be attributed to OSS devs not dogfooding these features. I'm assuming they just don't print much (I mean, we ALL print less than 20 years ago, but all the more reason to test these features which, when you need them to work you REALLY need them to work).
This article makes the (obvious) assumption that a humans purpose is to work so AI taking our jobs will be a bad thing. Realistically it most likely will be a really bad thing, but optimistically it will free man up to reach his full potential. If we don't need to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day we'll be free to contemplate existence, philosophize etc or play video games and get drunk! AI should bring about utopia.
> we're not spammers. we're election reformers

I support what you do. However, that comment's blase-looking dismissal of privacy and spam concerns, rather than a serious attempt to address them, doesn't give me good feelings or confidence.
The thing that you're missing here is that the "ai revolution" is not going to be the singularity. We're not going to magically, one day, have robots that outperform humans at all tasks.

Low hanging fruit here is education, tradespeople (AI will not be repairing your car for a while), managerial and oversight tasks, QA engineers, blah, blah, blah. There are plenty of things that humans will be doing better than AI, and from those we'll probably continue specializing and be more ready to handle when automation of more complex tasks does eventually happen.
If such a robot reliably makes you .... $10M a year in 2016 dollars and costs $1M to make, that's a trivial finance arrangement - 90 days or less maybe.

I don't know what would or could prevent that assuming the ratio and rough magnitude between those two figures. At that point, you'd hope that the pursuit of status would presumably move elsewhere.

Engineering incentives is beyond difficult. Many, many of the things people complain about most in the modern economy is due to some crufty legacy incentive-engineering left over from years past.