skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At work, we support umpteen OSes in our build (a lot of C++ stuff, so it's picky about where it builds and runs). For the Linux side of things (where most of the dev work is actually done), I'm in the process of building Docker images for our range of build machines, so that a developer can put up a releng-equivalent build environment in a couple minutes, pulling images from a locally-hosted registry.

Our current system is built on a combination of VM templates and documentation for the devs to set up their own build machines manually. Anything that I can't containerize will be stuck there, too.
I can't even get `npm install` to run perfectly on my mac. It _always_ fails and needs to be re-run a few times to get everything installed.

Anyway, the point is, everyone likes the smell of their own farts. But, they still stink.
> If he really wanted human-sized parcels of matter he'd be better off putting people to work in mines.

But the AGI in this thought experiment doesn't want human-sized parcels of matter. It wants paperclips. And by proxy, it wants any matter which is not a paperclip and can be transformed into a paper clip.

> A human can collect many times his own mass per day.

And if the AI can collect many thousands of humans worth of mass each minute, it doesn't care about the humans or their ability collect things. The AGI simply wants to optimize the number of paperclips in it's collection, it doesn't care about number of humans working for it, or that it has displaced or used to make paperclips, unless they affect how many paperclips it can acquire.

I like the ants metaphor another commenter made and want to continue with it. When digging a pit / quarry, or clearing land or whatever.... Well, ants can lift several times their bodyweight and dig some deep holes. But do we use the ants to dig for us? Or do we bring in a backhoe and not care whether ants exist in the field?

Also, your scenario still agrees with the thought experiment. It's not that an AI will intentionally kill all humans. Just that a super-intelligent AI designed without consideration for human values will not likely develop those values on it's own, and therefore can be just as dangerous as an AI designed to be malicious towards those values. In your example, a machine AI has still enslaved the entire human race, and it's original instructions were not at all malicious or related to destroying humanity.
in what seems to be a brand new implementation (though i failed to find source links) instead of using the 2 or 3 readily available C apis that can be ingested easily in tons of languages?
The UK is the world's 5th largest economy, in reality it wouldn't be in either party's interests to send it to the back of the queue. Add on to that that the UK would have a much more flexible negotiating position outside the EU, as well as a powerful political mandate to quickly sort out new deals post Brexit.
Badass team and product - I don't think people realize how difficult what they're doing is. Super pumped for them!
Mods/Admins can you change the title to How Estonia Became the Most Tech-Savvy on Earth?

Edit: It seems to have been done. Please disregard.
Open borders is why the Brexit people want to leave in the first place.

They're not going to want to leave just to do a EFTA/EEA type deal. Which means opening borders to the EU, adopting EU regulation, paying the EU and having no say within the EU all to get access to the single market.
The timeline is all wrong:

> In 1945, theory was turned into practice. (I can’t even WRITE that without my skin crawling, but nevertheless, it can’t be un-done now).
Immediately, the scientists saw that if they just slowed down the reaction a bit, they could get controlled power.
Power almost without limit.
Power without pollution.

The first controlled chain reaction was achieved by Fermi in 1942, 3 years before Hiroshima.
> What operating systems describe tremselves as being "compatible with Apple devices"

I was referring to the Linux kernel modules implementing HFS+ and other Apple FSes.

> Who else actually "supports" HFS+ ? Sure there are linux "ports" based on the spec but nobody claims them as being "supported".

Yes, by support I meant other developers who want to be able to read and write to devices in APFS format.

> Apple would have had to continue supporting HFS+ whether they chose to implement ZFS, btrfs or HAMMER.

Yes, Apple would have to continue supporting HFS+, but other kernel developers would not have to port yet another filesystem (APFS) with all of its own quirks; and, who knows, maybe it would be less work for Apple to inherit ZFS/btrfs/HAMMER/some other filesystem's solutions to some of the same problems they're trying to solve from scratch here. My point was more that by reinventing the wheel to implement some of these features, they've created not just more work for themselves potentially, but more for the open source kernel development community as well in the long run.

> I don't know how Apple writing their own filesystem is wasteful of anybody else's time ( except possibly Apple's and/or Disk utility software for vendors for OS X)

APFS will find its way to external HDDs/SSDs/flash drives, etc., then in order to read those filesystems someone else will have to port it to any other devices/readers of that device/FS.

> The standard is the interface ( POSIX / SUS ) and unless APFS breaks that how is this applicable ?

I didn't mention POSIX, VFS, or filesystem _interfaces_. The analogy to the XKCD strip was that we already had N filesystems that have a large subset of (or in some cases superset of) the features of APFS as of right now, now we have N+1 complex filesystems to contend with and port and interoperate with in other kernels/OSes (mainly Linux + non-Darwin BSDs).

This may just be the price of progress, which is fine. I think it'll be fantastic if Apple makes progress in this area and improves upon the work of others. The developer seemed to be ignoring history so as not to "taint" himself (did he mean IP/legally tainted?), which is slightly worrying to me.

I hope Apple open sources their implementation under a BSD/GPL dual license to make it easier for others to port it directly into other kernels, rather than having to reimplement it themselves.
TWITTER ACQUIRES MAGIC PONY;
Joke Writes Itself

Come to think of it, this is also more evidence for the case that Silicon Valley can't get any more outlandish than Silicon Valley, isn't it?
US Air Force lost a decade of data. How are your backups?
Thanks your welcome
New HBO series on the dawn of artificial consciousness
"We can give you TWO kinds of reactors: URANIUM-based, where the by-product will be PLUTONIUM, which you can use to make bombs..."

Countries aren't like "Oops I guess we have to make a bomb now," with the plutonium. They are very much happy with that possibility.
Launch of new personal security device (Crypto currencies, FIDO, PGP, SSH)
Yeah this article is garbage and has a middle-school understanding of the history of things at best.
People say 'the advertisers', but don't most people in the world work for a company that uses ads?

It seems that there's a mentality of compartmentalization, where people believe there to be 'evil ad companies' that somehow do nothing but make ads and don't actually sell products, nor employ people in the creative industry.
I'd like to see more mathematicians / scientists stick their neck out like this. Too often these people hide behind castle walls, because they have been taught to stay in their own speciality. Yes, it is quite likely that they will make a rookie mistake, but they will also learn at a fantastic rate.
He at the very least stole the setting, theme and the beginning from "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes, mutilated it too.
The business model of uber
Therefore if you want to be informed about something, you need to skim through at least a dozen of different newspapers spread over the political landscape, so you can have enough pieces of the puzzle to be able to put together in your mind something that resambles reality. We call this "being informed", and yes, it takes a lot of time and effort.

The challenge of our age is that there are virtually infinite opportunities to inform yourself about a legion of topics: Most of those trivial and/or frankly stupid, and even the worthy ones being too numerous for a single mind to feasibly grok a majority of them.

TL;DR - Choose wisely and triage like hell.
The Netherlands never decriminalized any drugs, not even marijuana. Rather, it adopted an official policy of non-prosecution under certain conditions.

"Non-prosecution under certain conditions" is what decriminalization is generally understood to mean.
this is an interesting thought. the Linux Documentation Project was full of full length books on every aspect of administering a Linux system. I printed out many of them, put them in a spiral binder and they lived on my bookshelf next to my O'Riely collection.

Now, I've only got one book on my desk and it's more of a coffee-table thing about html and css
What did the OP say that was genuinely specific to the EU?
"After the usual explanation that it was a “close call”, I asked what I could have done better and was told that I needed to be more consistent."

Probably he just gave another "usual explanation" from his handbook.
That's the problem when you have a recruiter as a proxy between you and your interviewer, specially when you get the negative answer. When they get the "No" answer, you are not profitable anymore. You are now a liability. A time-consuming problem they have to deal with. With that couldn't-be-more-generic-feedback, it seems to be your case.

Would be better to reach your interviewers directly and get feedback from them.
>>Government aid programs have failed to generate startup scene basically everywhere they were used.

>Didn't Silicon Valley grow out of a collection of companies doing defense contracts and research grants?

I think you're talking past each other. The parent was referring (AIUI) to government programs specifically intended to promote a "startup scene".

So you may be right that government spending was responsible for making SV what it is now; however, that spending was not in the form of "hey, we want to jumpstart a specific kind of business environment by filtering for companies that meet that mold and heavily subsidizing them in their early stages", which is the kind of aid program the parent meant.

The SV funding you're referring to, by contrast, was contracts for stuff the government had wanted for (and was optimizing for) completely unrelated reasons, and which (over a long time) created a startup scene as a side-effect.
It's just an opinion. 20 hours (25% of the discretionary week, discretionary time is roughly 50% of 168 hours ~ 84 hours.) for me represents the maximum amount of time that could be considered sufficiently diversified.
Docker Mac and Windows Public Beta
I agree, hence why after my initial interest in Go I eventually switched focus to other languages.

However, it doesn't change the fact that it allows for lots of low level stuff in the similar vein as Oberon, which is why I happen to take Go's side, even if I rather use other more expressive programming languages.

And to be faire, Niklaus Wirth latest language changes (Oberon-07) are even more minimalist than Go's.
I wonder how many people realize, halfway through the phone screening, that they don't care enough about Google to jump through those hoops.
TypeScript: Static or Dynamic? The war is over
> It's unreasonable to assume I see economic efficiency as the only value

Then it's unreasonable for you to assume any intervention to stop Amazon is unwarranted. You've already read the motivations, so there is no point in me re-stating them; but you prefer efficiency above Parisians' quality of life and economic stability. So I say fine, let's prefer efficiency above everything.

I've not attacked anybody, I've just shown you the limits of a system of thought based on economic efficiency. It's not my fault if they look bad.
Tech like this will never die, it will just become less used if that problem isn't solved, but there will always be some group of people willing to use it despite those charges due to the nature of decentralized cash transfers without a trusted party.
Why should the only country in the world that has freedom of speech give that up to join a club of countries lead by unaccountable bureaucrats that no one has voted into power.

That's exactly what the EU is.

I suppose this will be downvoted, but please take the time and explain where I am factually wrong. Because I can give you many examples why there is no freedom of speech in the EU and why particularly the EU commission is unaccountable.
And what the author handily omits: Since the Thorium fuel cycle is based around transmuting Thorium into U-233, which is fissionable, Thorium reactors can be a less complicated that Uranium enrichment pathway to the bomb.

True, not the one the military likes because of U-232 impurities, but good enough for rogue states and other malicious actors to blow up a couple of blocks of a city.

And that is why Thorium is actually tightly controlled. And why there won't be a Thorium revival.
As I understand it, the main waste product of concern is Uranium-232, which is highly radioactive (half-life of ~70 years) but not fissile. Conceivably you could maybe use it for power generation in some other way, though, like with a radioisotype thermoelectric generator? I'm not sure it would be worth the effort, though.
Nice derail! But the fact that there isn't yet a 400-lightyear expanding hole in the Milky Way suggests that corporations are not, in fact, as dangerous as unaligned machine superintelligences are being alleged to be.
Hacker News is becoming r/ethereum as of late. Getting really tired of everyone trying to rationalize with themselves as to why they bought into an altcoin. Watching the front page throughout the week is like the "5 stages of grief"
I found this section from Laudato Si pretty striking and relevant to the authors experience:

"47. Furthermore, when media and the digital world become omnipresent, their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply and to love generously. In this context, the great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload.

Efforts need to be made to help these media become sources of new cultural progress for humanity and not a threat to our deepest riches. True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of data which eventually leads to overload and confusion, a sort of mental pollution. Real relationships with others, with all the challenges they entail, now tend to be replaced by a type of internet communication which enables us to choose or eliminate relationships at whim, thus giving rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature.

Today’s media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us from direct contact with the pain, the fears and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences. For this reason, we should be concerned that, alongside the exciting possibilities offered by these media, a deep and melancholic dissatisfaction with interpersonal relations, or a harmful sense of isolation, can also arise."

source: http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/docume...
If I would build vacuum cleaners, I would rather build one type and sell it in 28 different nations then producing 28 different models.

When I want to buy a vacuum cleaner, I want a good choice between different models and good prices.

So whats wrong with the EU regulating vacuum cleaners in a common market?
Adversarial networks are super cool. The only theoretical issue I have with them, is how do you measure their quality or how much they are overfitting? The generative net could learn to produce perfect copies of images from the training set, and that would optimally satisfy the loss function.

Of course the advantage of adversarial nets is they can use the unlimited amounts of training data you can find on the internet, so overfitting isn't a huge concern. But still, unlike normal machine learning, you can't make a validation set and test how well they are performing on it. And that limits the ability to set their hyperparameters optimally.
Only on HN would someone compare starting a nuclear war to click advertising.
Supreme Court rules illegally obtained evidence may be used against defendants
How to: Firehose analytics with AWS Kinesis and appbase.io
Theoretically though, you could squeeze him enough (pre-death) to get most of it back. Either legally through civil court, or just with baseball bats if you were so inclined.

But with a smart contract it's gone.

> Fool me once, right?

No. Please never invest in a smart contract. Consider this your warning and walk away. They're not for you. Ditto everyone who doesn't plan on reading the contract.

> Still from a practical point of view, do you think after losing ~$50M about ~1/3 investments the market/people are going to be lining up to put another $150 into a new DAO

You think people aren't that dumb? Wishful thinking. Even with all the warnings in the world they'll run to "invest".

But I don't assume all future smart contracts are scams. Eventually one will do something useful, and simply enough that it can be verified.

> only this time they won't even be convinced by the credentials/background of the creator?

Oh, entirely.

The background of the creator is a negative. They'll claim they're honest so that they can leave an update backdoor in the script which they'll inevitably use to steal everything. Fact of nature.

But if they're anonymous there's no way we'd participate if they left an update hook, so they wouldn't, and it'd be much less likely to be a scam.
Context: "If you work for someone else, you pay half that, but that's the joy of being self employed."

For those not aware of the intricacies of this, if you work for someone else, your employer pays half of that 15.3%. (And reduces your salary accordingly.)

In this respect, the self-employed don't pay more taxes then anyone else. The rest of us simply don't realize we are paying it.
It's those "chemtrails" messing with your mind
Right. I think its the problem with some (probably majority) of recruiters attitude. They will be after you for resumes and referrals but once you apply and don't get through or resume is not impressive the do not bother to inform you , even don't respond to your curious email. Even for internal referrals I have chased them for months just to get to know that resume was not "fitting"
I think the thing to remember is that people interested in tech are the ones who experience these problems first. For example, most of us experienced ad fatigue, clickbait fatigue, and social media fatigue years ago, but now these are all mainstream frustrations.

It often seems like it's too late for things to change direction, but what I've observed is that when one of these angsts afflicts a sufficient portion of the population, the reaction is decisive and rapid. See: the exodus from MySpace to Facebook.
Announcing the Docker for Mac and Windows Public Beta
The government didn't say "give us the one we can make bombs with" or anything like that. In a review [1] they discuss groups working on thorium reactors who find that these reactors are potentially cheaper than water cooled reactors, but there are uncertainties and a demonstration plant is needed. They basically state that thorium reactors might work well, but their potential benefits don't outweigh the existing industrial commitments. Sure, the reason for the existing infrastructure was for the ability to more easily make bombs. But when this was reviewed, it was possible to make bombs with Thorium, too. [2]

There are advantages and disadvantages to thorium over common reactors, but it's definitely not a magic bullet.

[1]: WASH-1222 (p. 49) http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/WASH-1222.pdf

[2]: https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium_myths.html
Fiat also means money that isn't a commodity or backed by a commodity. Bitcoin is fiat in this sense the same as USD. Additionally, the blockchain and it's rules are a form of government that is issuing bitcoin and thus it qualifies as government issued as well. You don't have to be a state to be a government.
It's only unparalleled if you've never heard of the C99 'restrict' keyword. The major reason is like every other legacy system still in wide use, inertia. LAPACK alone will guarantee Fortan's life for decades to come.
Not the best direct source, but this is asserted to be from Nuclear Engineering International magazine in November 2009

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/community_images/88/...

via

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclea...

Thorium waste appears substantially less radioactive at shorter timescales we care about. On really long (10^4 - 10^6 years) timescales the proactinium-231 becomes an issue and uranium waste pulls ahead of thorium waste slightly. As we don't really have any idea how to plan on those timescales anyway (it's not like they're still going to be sitting in casks in a pool of water in New Jersey in 10^4 years), I think thorium is a lot better candidate from this perspective.
Hmmm, I wonder what would be said about Nim, Rust, Racket, Go.... I'm drawing a blank, but those are some recent ones that come to mind.
Oh, that's right. I'm so used to the terminal emulator's scrollback buffer keys I forgot that you just have to escape to get to this behavior. I suppose there's no way to have this work the way I want until/unless the terminal mode natively supported multiple sessions/screens.
What do they do? The article doesn't make it clear. It just discusses them finding alternatives to screen-scraping customers bank accounts after being given the credentials.

Seems like a startup-y Mint.
Have you tried the beta for OSX or Windows yet? I haven't needed vagrant in the slightest since it was released.
I hate how it is always the worst cases that set precedent.

Now police don't even need to try to do things legally, why bother?
Pretty sure you mean us (REX Computing; http://rexcomputing.com), though I would not consider our network on chip "weird" :P

Our big difference that you were trying to remember was our use of scratchpad memory which is simply stated as this: We can radically reduce power consumption, increase density, and increase speed of on chip memory (SRAM) by removing the traditional hardware caching system. We instead use a purely software managed memory system, through some very fancy (or do I dare say "smart") compiler techniques that are enabled by a a very simplified architecture and the ability to guarantee latency for all memory operations. We can still have main system memory (meaning DRAM), it is just instead of having a bunch of complex hardware that burns a lot of power and wastes a lot of space in order to automatically fetch pages out of DRAM, we structure the code for each core to efficiently pull only the data necessary when it is needed.
HN itself could really do with a description of 200 char to go under the link title, serving as a summary and contextualizing the title if it's inadequately informative. Timothy Gowers' Brexit blog post is an example of a non-clickbait title that just was not informative.