skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's addressing one aspect of AI that can be disturbing to some people, specifically becoming reliant on the expertise of others in your day-to-day life and thus becoming less independent. If your biggest issue with the concept of AI assistants is that they might have insights about you that you yourself don't have, I could see this article making someone feel better about it.

For me at least, that's not the primary fear. I don't fear people becoming dependent on AI. Rather, I fear people misusing the information that AI reveals about others. I don't feel uncomfortable from (for example) AI observing my media habits and using that information to make recommendations for other media.

However, I would feel uncomfortable if someone with access to that AI then fed those insights into some other AI that I wasn't aware of for much more nefarious purposes, such as profiling me to try to quantify my loyalty to the government.

That's just one example. Even if I had absolute faith in my government, bad actors could misuse that information to do other things, like determine which people would be most likely to take on debt on unfavorable terms (so they could be sent a 20% APR preapproved credit card, naturally!), or which people would be most likely to want to help a troubled Nigerian prince who just needs a place to temporarily park a bunch of money.

I'm not trying to fearmonger and I'm actually very excited for the future of AI. I just don't think this piece is addressing the deeper fears people have about the technology.
I always thought of Motorhead more in the spectrum of "thrash punk" than metal.
How fun is history sometimes, would never have thought sqlite wasn't a "standalone" first project.
That just suffering by itself is not immoral is quite obvious. We were talking about _inflicting suffering_ the whole time. And, to be even more precise, about knowingly inflicting suffering by human beings. Therefore all the questions you stated are besides the point.

Now it seems the next argument that will come is that we as human beings are also animals and part of nature, and therefore we can also kill other animals as e.g. lions do.

Well, a female mantis occasionally decapitates its male mates after copulation. Does that mean that it is moral for women to do the same to men? Amezarak's original statement is just too broad.
Somalia sounds right up your alley.
Or maybe the cynical and paranoid strain of thought that goes along with conspiracy theories has been historically important, but obsoleted by the sheer scale of our modern civilization and the complexity of the problems we face.

Being irrationally paranoid that the next tribe over is going to attack you might actually pay dividends.

Being irrationally paranoid that Obama is spraying us all with mind control chemtrails... not so much.
My prediction is based on their newly weighted symmetrical model given at figure 2.

All previous extinction events are when the sun is in the galaxy arms, and we are currently entering one of them.
That was a reactionary. I've removed it.
yes, of course we would invent new languages. We do this continually. In any big language there are many different dialects. This is a way to signal group identity. Over time they become new languages. Latin becomes French, Spanish, Romanian, etc. If you disagree why do you not speak your English with a (choose those that don't apply:) English / southern / Indian / Scottish / Irish / South African / Jamaican / New England / etc accent.

As an aside - I'm confused why you care what language I choose to speak or teach my children? How does it hurt you for me to be multilingual? If you desire to see the world only through the prism of a single language, well, fair enough. Likewise you can feel free to eat the same food for every meal, listen to the same music endlessly, re-read the same authors, program in only one language, etc. Lots of us enjoy experiencing more of the great diversity of humanity.
It depends what you mean.

If you work NZ's Mon-Fri, that'll be Sun-Thu in the US. If you work the US's Mon-Fri, that'll be Tue-Sat in NZ.
I refer to Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Black Swan events. Or fire insurance. Yes, it probably is wasted. However, that is the point: employ a few (few!) neurons on looking out for the "crazy", the unlikely, the improbable. Hope that it's all wasted.

But just like with insurance, when it is wasted you say "Thank god" (I'm an atheist but I can't think of an atheist phrase :-) ), you don't say "what a waste" (that I paid for insurance). You can be sure you have (quite) a number of neurons that if you knew what they do would think are "waste".

Also, the point is for you as someone not into that stuff to ignore them. Not like some of my Facebook friends (former colleagues) who seem to spend most of their day hunting for what they think are examples of the most stupid humanity can create. I'm not so sure that it isn't them who really are stupid. If they just ignored "crazy", nobody would even know such people exist. Instead more people seem intent on bringing the most obscure ideas and idiocies some human somewhere developed to the light that it would otherwise never even have.
The article cites the opinion of several other scientists. For example:

"To be clear, the hypothesis that global warming is destabilizing the polar jet stream is a legitimate idea that has been published in peer-reviewed journals, though it remains controversial. But even the scientist who developed the hypothesis, Jennifer Francis, a professor of meteorology at Rutgers University, suggested it had been misapplied by Scribbler and Beckwith. “I’d say cross-equator flow cannot be unprecedented, maybe not even all that unusual,” she said."

Francis hardly sounds like someone who doesn't believe in climate change (since her research is about how global warming destabilizes the jet stream).

Also, neither of the two people who made the claims are established climate scientists - they're a writer and a PhD student:

"The two bloggers who have perpetuated this misinformation are Robert Scribbler, who describes himself as ” a progressive novelist, non-fiction writer and emerging threats expert,” and Paul Beckwith, who is working on a PhD with “a focus on abrupt climate system change” at the University of Ottawa."

If this was really an unprecedented event that signified a threat, why didn't any of the thousands of climate scientists notice it? If it was really a significant result, wouldn't the PhD student (and his advisor) have tried to get it published in the peer reviewed literature before going public with it on a blog (a publication medium which has no value to an academic researcher's career)?
much history? This is exactly the way new languages evolve.
Regardless of the result, I highly doubt that the GFW would be removed or even relaxed... What does it take to shove a decision down the throats of people operating the GFW?
To be fair, the urgency of figuring out whether basic income will work is largely driven by the concern that the number of available jobs will be reduced due to AI (or automation in general). Reduced job availability is about the only legitimate current concern (sub 30 years) of present day AI advances.

It makes sense they are discussed in the same comment to an article about whether we have dealt with the influence of the equivalent of AI for thousands of years through efficiency and specialization.
These are typical web app based tasks and IO is usually the bottleneck in such situations, not the language.
Gerard Judd is the chemist who recommends brushing with bar soap [1]. It's cheap, readily available, and works better than anything else. And when combined with a second round of brushing with baking soda, my teeth stay squeaky-clean for longer than any toothpaste I've ever used.

[1] http://www.fixyourteeth.org/

Just yesterday my brother & his wife were commenting on how good my 8-year old dog's teeth are. They've never been professionally cleaned. When she was a puppy, we fed her raw chicken with bones. When she got to be full sized this was too expensive, so she now she eats dog food. I think the main reason she has such good teeth now is because she had adequate calcium and other nutrients when her teeth were forming.
Grown adults generally don't like being "supported." They want jobs and a sense that they are in control of their lives.
I was basing it on the priority date for my category (EB-2) when I first considered getting my green card.

For Indians in the EB-2 category the priority date is July 2009, so assuming that the demand remains constant it would be roughly 6 years until my hypothetical priority date would be current.
>The discussion of how there is an impulse for people to get upset and defensive when told they're wrong, and how it impedes learning, is very well established. It's not worth wasting time on a weird side argument about it. The answer is just 'yes, that happens a lot'.

What the hell? I guess that's what I must have been talking about! Thanks for informing me of what I was talking about! I totally agree that "people to get upset and defensive when told they're wrong, and how it impedes learning"; I'm experiencing it right now! Of course, now that you've shaped the discussion toward your end, I won't even try to have a 'conversation' with you.

>Hey, feel free to continue with the rest of the conversation without me. I'm not going to judge. I'm only going to snip at weird unproductive semi-insulting tangents

With unproductive semi-insulting tangents; it's almost like-- ah, sorry, everything is suddenly illuminated. Carry on.
Poor article. This subject has been covered many times, and others have put in the key references.

Python's dynamism is part of the problem, of course. Too much time is spent looking up objects in dictionaries. That's well known, and there are optimizations for that.

Python's concurrency approach is worse. Any thread can modify any object in any other thread at any time. That prevents a wide range of optimizations. This is a design flaw of Python. Few programs actually go mucking with stuff in other threads; in programs that work, inter-thread communication is quite limited. But the language neither knows that nor provides tools to help with it.

This is a legacy from the old C approach to concurrency - concurrency is an OS issue, not a language issue. C++ finally dealt with that a little, but it took decades. Go deals with it a little more, but didn't quite get it right; Go still has race conditions. Rust takes it seriously and finally seems to be getting it right. Python is still at the C level of concurrency understanding.

Except, of course, that Python has the Global Interpreter Lock. Attempts to eliminate it result in lots of smaller locks, but not much performance increase. Since the language doesn't know what's shared, lots of locking is needed to prevent the primitives from breaking.

It's the combination of those two problems that's the killer. Javascript has almost as much dynamism, but without extreme concurrency, the compiler can look at a block of code and often decide "the type of this can never change".
Have you read the article? The condition has to be stronger than simply not teaching it to your children. You have to absolutely and completely remove the worldview, cultural heritage, geographic knowledge etc that comes with it.

Thus to get my (and the article's) point, you need not just stop teaching it to children, you have to completely erase the underlying knowledge the language holds and start over in a new language. This is the point: you lose much more than what appears on first glance.

And concerning programming languages, I don't see how picking up brainfuck for example is easy, but someone still put the effort into creating it. Imagine a universe in which you'd have to solve every single programming problem in C. You could dream up all sorts of programming language concepts, but you could never use any other language than C. I bet you'd find that a bit boring and tedious...

Make no mistake, I'm not advocating for languages to keep their purity. I think it's a good thing they mix and borrow concepts and words. But I do find the idea of having one world language an utter absurdity.
For your first scenario economic growth must be fueled by a proportional growth in energy consumption.

Fossil and Nuclear fuels exist in finite quantities, and the rate of sunlight that hits earth is more or less constant.

Most people would still starve as fields would be repurposed to produce fuel.
As much as I feel sad about losing so many amazing languages, these arguments are weak emotional appeals at best.

The only legitimate argument you can make for keeping minority languages around is to basically reframe the context and say your goal as a society is to promote cultural and linguistic diversity because society needs it more than it does a highly effecient raw information processing system.

As a programmer, when you think how much easier everything would be if there were only 1 OS, 1 Web Browser, 1 programming language, 1 data exchange format, 1 byte order, etc, etc. and then you think about languages its clear how much easier everything would be.

Of course, we have different OSes, Browsers, Image Editors, because they are all better at different things and we aren't one organism - we as humans have different needs & preferences - which we bring to the table everytime we choose from one of the zillions of different options available to us.

Its the same with languages, when you want to be amazed by poetic eloquence and the rhythm and rhyme of words you read Pablo Neruda in Spanish, when you want to delve into highly analytical thought processes you read anything by the German Think Tanks such as Freud, Marx, Nietsche, Gauss, in German. When you want to talk to a superior in a formal setting, you adapt a different tone, appearance and language, as opposed to when you are splurting out your particular workplace jargon with collegues. The list goes on and on virtually forever, its even the case that the language we speak i.e. English, Spanish or whatever it may be - is completely unique to ourselves like a fingerprint which can identify us from all the other people on the planet.

Social Scientists study these aspects of our humanity, believing they give us insight not only into how people function but also into the optimization of more subjective qualities of that functioning such as happiness, group behaviors, moral motivations, etc.

But why does society need diversity more than efficiency? Someone else can give that one a try :)
> "the invisible hand of Provenance"

_Providence_, perchance?
Show HN: A Haskell.js webapp to compute basic income levels under different hypothetical AI rapture scenarios
I concede your point.

I suppose the nice thing here is that we both now have two ways of doing the same thing.

I've explained why I prefer running the underlying tooling; hopefully it will be useful as one of those snippets of internet knowledge.

Independent of debugging, I would contend that this set up is better than running babel-node with something like nodemon, again, because of much better reload times.

Again, thanks for babel-node-debug, I've used it before, and I won't be too surprised if I find myself reaching for it again in the future.
There is nothing ironic about his comments. A necessary precondition for democracy is self-determination: people choosing to throw their lot in with other people who have compatible values.
My E-3 process was always about 2 or 3 weeks (including interview) except for the one time the US Government shutdown while I was trying to get a LCA.

The six month process for the labor requirements for a green card was longer in processing but also longer due to non-processing time spent getting letters attesting to my skills from previous employers and my current employer running job adverts to try and find local candidates that met the skill requirement.
Right. Let's again substitute the meaning of a word or a concept for another one and start up another dictionary debate.
Real time embedded neural net applications
Per-language package management seems to be the way to go lately. I think this is mostly because some operating systems don't have a package manager, or have one that is difficult to create and distribute packages for.
Knee replacement isn't much prettier. Here are some links to time stamped surgical highlights

sawing bone [5:55 mark] - https://youtu.be/bGOspdD25Dw?t=355

hammering [11:10 mark] - https://youtu.be/bGOspdD25Dw?t=671

Swinging a hammer like a baseball bat to remove a pin [entire video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnBvpSU1Fcc

Dentistry is gruesome but so is surgery, in general.
It’s too big markets and subsidies

"Citing data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Musk lamented he’s “competing against something that has a $6 trillion per year subsidy,” and that the low gas prices that subsidies create are “weakening the economic-forcing function to sustainable transport and clean energy in general.”
Source: http://ecowatch.com/2016/05/05/elon-musk-fossil-fuels/

At the global scale we have a big mistake since decades. Fixing it is going to be the most difficult challenge ever to date. But I’m optimistic in the accelerated speed of change in tech-science, market, prices, policies and social awareness even with the fact the we are now far from the right path to achieve it.

We need a very holistic transtion to save people and planet from climate change and pollution dramatic impacts. Including re educating society towards sustainability. This includes helping to transform skills of people and professionals from traditional unsustainable industries and societies to sustainable ones. This requires action from private, public and nonprofit sectors and people, to cope with the speed of the change needed according to majoritarian scientific consensus.
Not too much new in this piece.

I wonder why the interviewee is so confident that the world will always be a place of conflict. I can think of no rational, or no necessary, reason why multiple conflicting powers should exist based on the lines on a map.

Perhaps it's for the same reason he is religious (i.e. he's just wrong sometimes, like every human).
Please keep in mind that the UN is an arena for international cooperation. A lot of organizations fit under their umbrella, which does everything from coordinating the global mail system (UTU), international telecommunications (ITU), maritime safety (IMO), international civil air travel (ICAO).

Any country can join these charters as long as they follow the rules agreed upon. What good would it do if you couldn't send a letter to someone in a country under dictatorship? Or if we stopped eradicating polio because the remaining countries are deemed unworthy?

The UN is not this singular place, where you can get "a vote". That is true of the general assembly, but they presumably had nothing to do with this report.
Apparently the author wasn't willing to write about what he heard. Pretty low content ratio here.
Obviously being down voted for being too pragmatic.
Thank you for the reminder.

I've just added a calendar entry for 6 years time to consider whether or not I am willing to be subject to an exit tax (and give myself two years to plan alternatives if I'm not).
I wrote that algorithm! A year later I found Hacker's delight, a wonderful book that had a much "faster" version of the same algorithm (less ops).

For anyone interested in this kind of things, you should go read that book. It actually is a delight.
BigQuery support for the GitHub Archive
> Why invent new programming languages when you've got C?

The practicalities of PLs aren't at all like spoken natural languages. For one thing, all computers can run any PL with little effort.

Secondly:

> Are you willing to stop speaking, reading, thinking, writing in English and use Mandarin?

What the OP thinks is irrelevant, it's whether this would be desirable or not. It would also not be a "do this now" thing and more of "in years to come, humanity will do this".

I think mankind will one day set foot on mars, and this effort will be a good thing - this does not mean I should be willing to be put on a rocket today.
CoffeeScript is terrible. Full of implicit rules and magic. Python generally seems to be the opposite.
Federer as Religious Experience (-by David Foster Wallace. 2006)
People laser-cut those clock designs out of wood at TechShop all the time. It's really easy, and almost a cliche.

I tried cutting a clock escapement from a wood clock design out of steel plate with a CNC plasma cutter. But TechShop's old plasma cutter wasn't precise enough for that. I could probably do it with their water jet. But after building too many heavy steampunk objects, and lugging them to conventions, I'm sort of over that.
IIRC Gimp was invented even before GTK (i.e. Gimp ToolKit).
Maybe it would only last a few years. But once we can convert capital directly into labour in a manner that scales, we will get insane amounts of economic growth.
Male rats where less likely than female rats to start opening cages.

There is a huge tendency to build up story around a single video, but this is a repeated experiment with far more evidence than shown.
> Have you read the article?

'Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."'

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think for a lot of people, it's simply impossible to believe that people could be that cruel. Most of us have not seen and blissfuly have not lived through the horrors of World War II. I feel like this element, more than anything else, drives a lot of the nonsense views that the Holocaust or the wanton slaughter of people the Japanese deemed inferior is a made-up number or that it "wasn't that bad" and so on.

I remember when the Holocaust was being discussed in school and having to read books like Night in school and I was actually fascinated by this; the depths of good and evil that people can do are simply unfathomable. A British journalist wrote about the aftermath of the Battle of Shanghai when he visited what was once a densely packed suburb, "I saw only 5 Chinese, who were old men, hiding in a French mission compound in tears."[1]

[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=zNN6M97vYMEC&pg=PA70&lpg=P...