skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A general purpose reinforcement learning (RL) agent is a machine that can be taught to perform any task from a very wide range of tasks via sparse rewards given by a human or software trainer.

The agent can, like any software, be snapshotted, saved, loaded and copied, creating as many identical agents as needed (given hardware, of course). Agents can and will be trained to perform various tasks, and their snapshots will be sold or made available for download over the Internet.

By saying that your main concerns are technological unemployment of white-collar demographic and increased state surveillance you make it clear that your views reflect that of an upper-middle class western person. On the global scale affluent westerners are a minority.

So, How would such an agent be used to actually improve society?
Consider universally valued, life-critical services: healthcare and education. Only the western people have access to high-quality medicine and education due to a whole lot of reasons (global economical inequality, a very long and hard path to become a doctor or a professor, a very long time needed to establish the necessary social institutions, lack of social stability outside the west, ...).

If we had a general RL agent we could train several variants of it to perform high-quality work in the fields of Diagnosis, Radiology, Paediatry etc. We could also train artificial education agents for many subjects.
The training needs to only be done once. Given sufficiently powerful mass-produced hardware (smartphone SoCs with Nervana-like NN accelerators?) these agents could be given almost for free to billions of people that wouldn't be able to afford such services in any point of their lives otherwise.

How could one be against giving essential high quality services to every human with a smartphone?

And if even that is not enough to justify the utility of RL agents, then consider how much progress in molecular biology and medicine could be done if thousands of agents trained to do life science research worked around the clock to push the state of art further. How many people with debilitating diseases could be cured by such an effort?

And then consider how we could make our currently-crumbling cities and infrastructure permanently well-attended by RL agents inside simple robots. The world certainly could use more smart attention everywhere. I guess the quality of life in such a world would be remarkably different.
Needless to say, I disagree. It can be straight-up misleading to report means without including a more nuanced view of the distribution. You don't need to use a bunch of fancy statistics, but you do need to consider whether your results could have arisen by random chance. That's not a distraction; it's accurately reporting what you found.

Here's one frightening example of spurious performance results in CS: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis501/papers/producing-wrong-dat...
Depends on the author agreement. With the age of these books, possibly not, but there could easily be a royalty payment involved. Either way, let's assume they sell 100,000 copies, that's still not that much money and would be in line with their typical CSR giving (very likely, these authors might have waived royalty for charity too).
Jill Stein to request recount in three key swing states. Donate ASAP
What - exactly - did the DNC leaks show in this regard? All I ever found anyone say is "oh they're in cahoots" without ever being able to point me to something specific.
Are there technologies that aim at physical scoping of networks ? Sometimes I joke to myself that IR remotes will be the next privacy graal. Can't hack my RCA TV unless you've been granted access on my couch.
The central limit theorem applies to independent variables only. If you are not sure your variables are independent you cannot rely on that assumption.
DISCLAIMER: I don't necessarily think the types of regulations proposed are the answer, but at the very least there should be some responsibility on people using high-bandwidth connections. It would probably have to be legally mandated.

Even if his proposal doesn't fix the rest of the world it would set an example for other countries.

It would also give other countries more that they can do themselves. Like with the DNS DDoS, the traffic originated in the US -- even if the perpetrator was in another country.

Getting the US locked down means that those countries can start taking responsibility (and I mean that in a positive way) for their own piece of the internet. Right now there isn't even a place for them to start.
Humble Bundle is an extremely profitable operation that preys on the altruism of people. They secured roughly 5 million in venture capital funding from sequoia capital.

15% of whatever money you pay doesn't go to a charity, it goes to them. This is not explicitly stated. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Bundle (search for 15%)
We've done it with food thanks to the Green Revolution in the 70's. The need to "not waste food" is an artifact from before food was abundant. I'm hopeful like you that we can do it for energy as well.
Agree... I did it about 2.5 years ago and is one of the single best things I have done, next to it is getting married and having the kid.
Every ebook I bought (which is over a thousand now) from O'reilly, Pragmatic Programmers, Manning, and Apress in the past ten years or so has been DRM free.
Loved using Skyscanner when I lived in the UK - great news for them!
aka the fall of lisp
By what reasoning? On the surface I would assume that to be false. Please elaborate?
If you don't like the "regulations to prevent bad stuff" approach, then use the "we'll let you do whatever you want, but if you screw up you're going to pay dearly to fix it" approach.

Then companies can balance the cost of adding a secure enclave and a Grsec kernel (just an example) to their smart coffee maker against having to recall all of their infected products from the market when a botnet takes over them.

Besides that stick, I would throw a couple of carrots in there, too, like the companies being able to brag that their products are A+ security rated, etc, in their promotional materials and on their packages.
Well they're both the lambda calculus, Lisp just had parentheses.
Well if you go down to it then the only thing you know is that you are witnessing your perception everything else is an assumption.
Are there any devices that do this? I'd be very much a fan of a local IoT I control, perhaps with an encrypted data file on Dropbox or something it can accees. I have no need for cloud storage from the vendor...I can bring my own.
Why not rent out access to AWS / GC instances running your software?
No, there's a difference. The model is something like, "This drug attaches itself selectively to cancer cells and kills them." The null hypothesis is, "This drug has no effect." So you conduct a double-blind study, measure the effect of the drug on cancer cells, collect some data and compute that P(data|null-hypothesis) is 1%. It it not the case that there is a 99% chance that your model is correct and that the drug does in fact attach itself to cancer cells and kill them. Because there are other possible models, e.g.: the drug redirects your Chi and channels it into your chakras which kills the cancer cells. Statistics alone cannot tell you which of those two models is correct.
The free market crowd would argue that the surviving companies will bake in the right security if consumers demand it. If companies don't take it seriously, either their customers aren't demanding it, or they will be replaced by companies that do a good job at it.

The government has a proven conflict of interest and disincentive to harden the infrastructure. Vulnerabilities are valuable for espionage. And there are already regulations like HIPPA, PCI, etc, yet there are still breaches. Regulation will add complexity to business and will protect market share for the entrenched players who can afford to follow it. That will lead to further consolidation and reduced competition while I feel that the opposite is needed.

The fiefdoms described in another post wouldn't be such a bad thing. At the nation state level, competition will also make for better security. Isolationism doesn't work out well in world history. Movement of goods and ideas does a better job at bringing countries together. I feel there's a pendulum swinging back towards isolationism but it goes back and forth over time.
Java Library for Building Efficient Regular Expressions
What EXACTLY did you discover during meditation? What steps did you take and what was the resulting experience? Can you be specific?

Same w Ayn Rand. What ideas did you read, can you summarize?
Channels don't guarantee at-least-once delivery, so you can only use them at best as a refinement - you have to assume your clients will miss messages. Which makes it unusable for many use cases (though I'm sure many negligently ignore it too).
Thank you, I'm one of those impossible customers who goes "oh I want a free tier, and oh, I don't like node, and oh, I don't want to give you access to my Gitlab", but it's great that you have a Go version of the client. I think I'm going to switch everything to you, I've been wanting to for a while!
In an Internet discussion everyone decides for themselves.
I think this is what you are missing.

https://kripken.github.io/emscripten-site/docs/porting/conne...
And without an "edited" mark, which means that any comment of any user can be covertly modified by an admin. Very concerning since Reddit comments have provoked even Congress hearings: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/296680-house-pan...
It doesn't actually allow them to do anything they couldn't legally do before, but it makes the penalties a lot stiffer to discourage large companies from breaking the law.

The problem before was that even if you had a contract, the company would basically say "we have a lot more to spend on lawyers than you, good luck".

Now they have changed that calculation with this law, where if the big company loses it's a huge cost to them. So now their calculation is that it is cheaper to pay their bill than to fight you in court.
if you are compromised in that manner "Employee A has not given his password to Fired Employee B." then no password policy is going to save you.

Also remember passwords are only ONE part of your security armour, they aren't the entire suit.
Google AI translation tool creates its own secret language
Thanks for the warm words!

> ZERO ADVERTISEMENTS, even for the free plan. Supports only static hosting, is free for 100mb websites with bandwidth of 50GB per month, or five dollars per month for 10,000mb with 2TB and a number of other extra features

Haven't announced yet, but these numbers are all increasing soon. Well, except for the advertising one. I'm literally in the datacenter right now working on it.
bitcoin is interesting in this regard. no one is 'in control' of bitcoin but anyone can contribute to its production according to a set of rules and it has value. it's the bittorrent of money.
Most high purity silicon is now destined for solar PV; PV's "scraps of semiconductor industry" phase was a decade or more ago.

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Industry/2007/05/22/...

"In 2006, for the first time, more than half the world's polysilicon was used to produce solar PV cells."

It's true that the intermediates in silicon refining like are quite hazardous, but in a well-run production facility those intermediates don't get released to the biosphere. They affect the toxicity of the end product no more than the intermediate use of acetic anhydride in aspirin production, or the intermediate use of uranium hexafluoride in nuclear fuel rod production. There was a famous story in 2008 about a Chinese silicon production facility that was illegally dumping SiCl4, but if you're going to pick the most horrifying Chinese examples you'd think that nothing at all can be made safely.
That's an interesting question, but I don't know if it really applies. As an example, how much is it worth for you to get a cup of coffee? Depending on your mode of transportation, or the temperature of the coffee, there is risk. There's risk in everything, which is what you're getting at I think.
> Without global collaboration, this philosophy is the beginning of national internet feifdoms - moreso than what exists today - and the beginning of the end of the global collaboration we freely enjoy today.

You mean like a national network? I believe something like that existed in several countries. And the Internet of old grew over them, as a way to interconnect nodes within disparate networks (thus the name Internet).

Give it enough time, and the national networks will merge into a single global network again.
Can you explain in more detail?

I am finding that everything we say about consciousness is just an artifact of our language. If we are careful to always include the subject of the sentence as well as the unspoken assumptions then I have not come across any questions that don't have a straightforward answer. Same with morality.
When you do business, understand money makes everyone into a sociopath. So you are dealing with a sociopath. A sociopath that has the law on his or her side. Remember this well. Don't trust sociopaths, and don't trust anyone that you do business with to hold up their end of the deal if they can get away with it. Start with this and you'll limit your exposure. They will still screw you now and then, but you limit the amount of damage they can do to you.
Genetic Algorithm to Draw Images
A template is a good way to cut down on how much time your attorney spends drafting your services agreement but it in no way substitutes for legal review. "Scaring the client" is not the game. Securing a higher class of client is the game. Having a defensible contract that you know forward and back, along with an attorney to consult if the client breaches it, is the goal.
No worries, Macs will soon switch to "OS - a spiritual descendant of iOS and macOS, that we call just 'OS'. It's revolutionary."

It's really iOS without the i, and it's a worse combination of touch UI and mouse/keyboard UI than Windows 8, but it's made by Apple, so the tech press will praise it, and people who should know better will buy devices running it by the millions.
Spring Making Robots [video]
In a buffet common sense reigns because everybody knows what a buffet is: an all you can eat deal in a single meal. Everyone knows this because buffets are numerous and have existed long before you or I have existed.

A humble bundle is not common sense. There is only one company currently doing this and therefore there is no intrinsic knowledge of the nature of what I am purchasing, in fact the humble bundle was invented within the last decade meaning most of you existed before humble bundle existed. There is nothing "obvious" about this.

You cannot equate this to a buffet. It's a ludicrous analogy similar to equating linux books to atomic bombs because both involve software of some sort. Honestly how many of you knew there was a one dollar minimum without reading about it? Or did you even know about the "free tier" without reading about it? Nothing on that page is obvious.
This is likely a strategic investment by a major user of Palantir, and neither party really want to make a big PR deal out of it.
The Royal Institution's (Lawrence) Bragg Film Archive
The fact is anything digital can be modified this way; it's probably good that it happens and there are public examples so people learn not to trust it.
Isn't this what ZigBee and Z-Wave are for? Local-only wireless network for your things, just bridge out to the internet for services as needed? Instead of making dropbox the nervous system of everything?
Except is rather everyone be using an open source, minimal logging version of WhatsApp
Not directly no, but https://support.1password.com/1password-in-wine/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13018201
It's more concerning that Congress is that stupid (one can only hope the Courts haven't been making rulings based on untraced emails and anonymous tweets). Social media is a canonical exemplar of hearsay.

There's a reason Wikipedia isn't an acceptable source in college-level courses.
If you are collecting 5k at a time, you are doing it wrong. Your client should not be holding more than 1,000 of your money at a time.
This is great news for skyscanner. Unfortunately, the media in the UK will go all nativist and claim that Britain is being sold out to foreign countries, as they did with ARM.
You mean less useful and smaller denominations, not "newer". They are trying to make cash unappealing to use by requiring more bills to carry out a transaction.

If the government came and said "Because terrorists drive cars between the hours of 1pm-3pm, we are banning all car use between those times." You wouldn't say they replaced the current driving rules with newer ones, you'd be upset you couldn't drive between 1pm-3pm and instead had to use a less efficient means to carry out your business.

The government is unjustly punishing the whole class because some individuals made the decision to break the rules, and as punishment, it is now harder to maintain financial privacy. Yay. Just what I wanted, less privacy in the age of everything is in a database and everyone is on a list.
I have encountered pay what you want deals that included zero dollars, just never at Humble Bundle.
If this holo tech gets real traction I'd hope (and expect) that they'd go cross-platform with iOS/Android as first class platforms. I like WinMo but its not exactly hoovering up market share from Apple and Android.

Microsoft seems a bit more pragmatic about multi-platform now. I'm sure the business model will revolve around running your holo-server on an Azure instance or running holo-skype meetings from your corporate Office 365 subscription tied to your corporate iPad. They are moving towards device/platform agnostic services. The lock-in is server side in the cloud :)
The sparrow with four sexes
Ask HN: How to escape the rat race?
It's that time of the year again. Everyone is scrambling to get home and have a family get together.

I have been thinking lately about escaping rat race. I am 31 already. My goal is to achieve financial independence and live in a suburb in my 40s and 50s with my (future) wife and my kids. I want to be there for my kids everyday, coach and guide them to really become best.

But, as like most people, my story is dull. I work for a tech company. I am a project manager, but no people management responsibilities. My company has internal leveling guide for employees. I am seeing that people with much less experience are getting hired at same level as me. I talked to my manager, but it looks like he is making excuses for moving me to the higher level.

On a grand scale, I feel I am tired of this day-to-day routine. There are not many interesting things to do. I don't have any hobbies and I am lifelong single as well. Nothing excites me besides making money.

What are your thoughts on how to escape rat race to achieve-
1. Financial independence (5 million dollars)
2. Do something meaningful in life.

Cheers
Just going to leave this here: "New and improved modern UI" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDkOxnSTUMY
ah, I guess that's what the glasses shop are using (or close enough I guess)

THANKS
In which people discover admins can admin a database.

Also, ceo of reddit looks like a horrid job.
This is false, at least, in how you present it. It is clearly stated, and configurable, where your money goes.

When you make a purchase on Humble Bundle, it by default has a divide between the developer or publisher, the charity being supported, and Humble Bundle. You can modify this percentage at purchase time, for instance, by sending 100% of your proceeds to charity, or stiffing the developers if you despise them.

Arguably, Humble Bundle bears a large chunk of the operating cost here, since they have to provide download bandwidth for things like the eBooks and non-Steam-based games. But only asks for 20% by default, from what I can tell. Of course, I'm sure Humble Bundle has done the math on how many people pay the default cuts, and how much they need to stay profitable as a business.

So, no, it's not that Humble Bundle is a charity, but yes, you can get games and books really cheap while supporting a charity.
It was something of a pain to get the URL with googles AMP, but I found this, which showed journalists crossing boundaries and getting too friendly with DNC insiders:

http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/11/hills-shills-leaks-have-ex...
Why? Would you add some context to your comment?
Assume all news is fake, start from there.
Glad he admit it, or someone can say they are just doing something to correct misinformation.
some 3d glasses in cinemas seems to fit my glasses just fine, Sony-made AFAIR
I agree. The part that bugged me about the article was it took a quote:

'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.'

Then immediately launched into saying

'Tech critics should be very careful what they wish for when they say that they wish that tech companies would tackle the "real" problems'.

I think this misses the point. I don't think critics are clamoring for tech companies to "solve" real problems. They want people, smart people, to focus on solving these problems.

A company doesn't solve anything people solve things not organisations.

He could have just as easily talked about all those PHD physicists working on High frequency trading and used that to launch into a tangent about how Wall Street is not suited to solving difficult problems.

The original quote is a serious issue publicly funded R&D outfits cannot offer the financial incentives large banks, tech outfits and other private organisations can offer.

Whether you think this is a good thing or not depends on how cynical you are I suppose. Personally I'm skeptical that private research interests will ever align with anything other than creating value for shareholders - which for google means selling more Ads...
Wow. And he knew it was stupid when he did it. There's been a lot of talk about having the right temperament for leadership lately, and this is an excellent example of lacking it.
Acually, for safety, do NOT try to short the battery. Just youtube it.
No, but Wikipedia's sources usually are. I feel like there's a world of difference between a well-sourced encyclopedia entry and a comment on a somewhat anonymous forum.
Coming from a no-design-ux background, I never considered this and it would be a perfect issue on our github. Would you be interested in creating it? github.com/webpack/webpack.js.org/issues/new
If coworkers are unhappy with it, they can (and should) make guidelines for acceptable syntax. This is no different than using camel case in Java instead of snake case (or using the $ in identifiers, which is extremely rare). If it's a problem to use it in my code on Github, you can always use somebody else's code or fork mine to change it. Maybe we should use the compiler to force every line to have a comment so we don't have any undocumented code on Github too?