skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Charlie Savage's book "Power Wars" goes into this quite a bit.

The tl;dr is basically this: administrations before Obama definitely wanted to crack down on whistleblowers, but were limited in their ability to do so. The fact that whistleblowing related arrests/convictions have increased under Pres. Obama is largely due to the fact that we can track people and information much more thoroughly than was previously possible. In the past, you may know who had access to any one piece of information (that leaked) but you would be hard pressed to identify communication channels and specific, time-logged access, etc. Investigational tools have improved so more convictions happen.

This doesn't address the civil liberties expectations/promises of Pres. Obama, but it's one factor at play.
Note for writers: starting your essay by quoting Wikipedia is the 21st century version of starting your essay with a dictionary definition.

http://blog.writeathome.com/index.php/2012/06/please-quit-st...

It's a crutch to help the writer get past the problem of having a blank page in front of them and no idea what to put on it. I can understand the desire to reach for it, having faced more than enough blank pages myself, but it's so commonly used that it immediately flags your work as something that wasn't thought over particularly hard. If you find yourself reaching for it, take that as a sign that you need to find a different angle from which to approach your subject.
Currently miners get new Bitcoin plus a fee from all the transaction in the mined block. Once all Bitcoin is created, miners will still get the transaction fees. As Bitcoin becomes more popular, the transaction fees alone should be enough to incentives miners.

And it is okay of coins are lost forever. If there are fewer Bitcoin available the price goes up. Simple supply and demand. Theoretically Bitcoin can be divided as small as needed to accommodate raising prices.
Disclaimers: I cannot see the future. These are just my opinions. I really appreciate the work and money that SamA, Elon, and others have put into the OpenAI project. The Universe work in particular might help encourage young people, many of whom love video games, to study AI.

But I feel that contrarians, such as myself, have an ethical commitment to young people to voice our doubts and criticisms, so that they can avoid making a long journey down a career/research path that leads to a dead end. That being said, I think this project leads in a very unpromising direction. Here are some reasons:

1. Games aren't a good testbed for studying intelligence. In a game the main challenge is to map an input percept to an output action (am I drifting off the side of the road? Okay swerve right). The real challenge of intelligence is to find hidden abstractions and patterns in large quantities of mostly undifferentiated data (language, vision, and science all share this goal).

2. This platform is not going to help "democratize" AI. To succeed in one of these domains, contestants will need to use VAST amounts of computing power to simulate many games and to train their DL and/or RL algos. DeepMind and others will sufficient CPU/GPU power will almost certainly dominate in all of these settings.

3. Deep Learning, as it is practiced, isn't intellectually deep. With a few exceptions, there is nothing comparable to the great discoveries of physics, not even anything comparable to the big ideas of previous AI work (A*, belief propagation, VC theory, MaxEnt, boosting, etc). Progress in DL mostly comes from architecture hacking: tweak the network setup, run the training algo, and see if we get a better result. The apparent success of DL doesn't depend on any special scientific insight, but on the fact that DL algos can run on the GPU. That, combined with the fact that, except for the GPU, Moore's Law broke down roughly 10 years ago, means that relative to everything else, DL looks amazingly successful - because all other approaches to AI are frozen in time in terms of computing power.
Why didn't you just log into his account on the web and click on photos?
I was in USA few times on J1 as an intern. It is the best visa, if you like to hire someone for 3 months internship while someone studies at Universities.

Though this is not H1B replacement, as this visa require that trainee/intern have intern to leave the USA after the program.

If you are employer, you need to contact sponsoring organization. For all internships I used:
http://culturalvistas.org/programs/us/j-1-internships-traini...
(they got different name before "CDS International")
The paperwork is light, even startups with reasonable funding can get the visa.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.
I don't think he was talking about present day technology; rather, he was referring to abstract machines.

Whoever taught you computer science must have had a very pessimistic attitude, which is surprising to me as most of the academics I've talked with think the computers of the distant future will have no limitations.

In the preset day, though, we have limited time and must choose our battles carefully. I respect the OP for his attempts, if a little a misguided. Just ask any active member of the Linux kernel and they'll tell you how often they see such people undertake similarly bold approaches which deliver little outcome (and, hopefully, a life lesson...)
Wow I like your POV about things. Ok seriously, thanks a lot, it's great to do something that can be useful. Thanks for using it.
People in the Bitcoin community have a number of weird beliefs with regards to how taxation works generally, then apply these beliefs to Bitcoin, and arrive at results which are internally consistent but not indicative of the world we live in.

The US taxation system is based on taxes on self-reported income. Individuals/businesses are responsible for reporting their income accurately and honestly. Some forms of income are also reported on informational returns, which makes tax evasion regarding them more difficult. Bitcoiners appear to believe that "Bitcoin doesn't structurally generate informational returns so jackpot, no taxes ever" but there are any number of things which don't generate informational returns. You're still responsible for paying taxes; the government's main remedy if you don't is still auditing a very small percentage of returns and coming down hard on people who abusively underreported income.
I look forward to seeing some end-user reviews of this device when it finally ships. I realise that there are plenty of pre-production reviews, but I believe that the final version will have broader matching networks, facilitating better sensitivity on HF and low VHF.
I think that's what a ot of trainers and coaches don't understand. When people (or dogs) meet somebody new they listen much more to that new person. So the coach thinks his method is perfect.

But after a while people will regress to their old habits.
The currency units are divisible, currently to 8 decimal places. If that becomes insufficient, more decimal places would presumably be added. Currently, if you take being able to count to a precision of the equivalent of 1 US cent, the BTC price would either have to go up 1000-fold or every 999 out of 1000 BTC issued would need to be lost for that to become necessary. Assuming I got my math right.
I guess that wasn't factored in.

OTOH the designer was enamoured of a deflationary currency so perhaps he liked the idea of not only a cap but a slowly dwindling supply.
It looks like the image from the server and control information to the server is sent through the VNC protocol. Other information such as the reward signal from the environment server is sent through a WebSockets protocol using JSON:

https://github.com/openai/universe/blob/master/doc/protocols...

You should be able to implement this protocol for your environment and run a VNC server for the rest. A new class for the client representing your environment can be based on this:

https://github.com/openai/universe/blob/master/universe/envs...

Then register the class with OpenAI Gym:

https://github.com/openai/universe/blob/master/universe/__in...

After creating the environment using gym.make you need to add information about your remote in the call to configure:

env = gym.make('gtav.SaneDriving-v0')

env.configure(remotes="vnc://localhost:vnc_port+rewarder_port")

https://github.com/openai/gym/blob/master/gym/core.py#L234

https://github.com/openai/universe/blob/master/universe/envs...

This is only based on a cursory reading, but it should be possible to use custom environments with OpenAI Universe as it is today.
It seems that remoteness isn't a necessary requirement when we have a BSL-4 right here in downtown Boston: http://www.bu.edu/neidl/resources/faq/

Might be a perk though.
Silicon Photonics in Post Moore's Law Era: Architectural Implications [pdf]
I assume skywhopper is referring to undecidable and uncomputable problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem
> criminal gangs

or unregistered companies operating under hostile conditions created by the government?
Quantum Robotics: From Theory to Experiments [pdf]
Announcement at Breakthrough.org: https://breakthroughprize.org/News/34
MongoDB -- New York, NY (ONSITE - relocation package available) | Software Engineer, Cloud (mid to sr. level) | Full-Time | Base + Pre-IPO stock Options

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You must have experience working on distributed applications, multithreading, concurrency, and preferably cloud hosting platforms (AWS, Azure, Google, etc..).

Any interest? Please reach out to me at Matt.Leva@MongoDB.com or apply here http://grnh.se/5afgvk
yeah, you'd think GA would filter for valid accepted options
Seeing APIs that look like:

Chart.Line(data) |> Chart.WithTitle("smth") |> ...

...makes anyone say "yuck" and avoiding F# for any exploratory work. And even after you understand how the pipe operator works and how useful it can be in other contexts. I mean, ugh... Even putting up with superfluous verbosity like `List.Map(myList)` instead of a `map(myList, ...)` or `myList.map(...)` because "that's how F#/OCaml does it, stfu" is ok, but this seems like purposeful obsfucation.

No wonder R and Python are the only languages popular in ML. They are the only ones leading to sane readable code by people having other stuff to keep loaded in their head than language details. I mean, yeah, syntax that doesn't matter, unless it's so f annoying and ugly that you simply can't put up with it as much as you try!
I've had pretty good luck with a simple Yelp query for coffee shops near my current location. The only time that national chains show up is when they really are the only option.

Where Yelp doesn't do a great job is differentiating, say, the top 5% of shops from all others. Searching for a brew method ("pourover," "Aeropress," or "Chemex") tends to bring those up first.
Microservices 101: Getting Started
Yep, this is the problem, just because its bare metal sys-call wise does not mean it does partial/incremental loading correctly! :/
> Can we come up with the true number of deaths (or shortened lives) from radiation?

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

Estimates will range a bit, but we can say with complete confidence that all nuclear accidents thus far haven't come anywhere near that one dam failure.
Sorry to sound cynical but haven't they taken something that's existed for a long time and spent money on marketing it to add / repair value to their brand? It feels a little obvious to me to be honest?
Why would all bitcoins be lost? Even if only one bitcoin left, you can divide it in billions of pieces. And when you've lost every piece but one, you can further divide it. It won't be lost forever, not until our universe will die, and long before that we probably will be able to break SHA-1 and mine lost bitcoins back.
Thank you, that was very informative.
Perhaps there's intended subtext saying that computers have the capability to do such things, but we are unable to do such things with the current technology and knowledge. I mean, you're right. The statement shouldn't have been said without being explicit.

I dunno. I'm just trying to give benefit of the doubt.

In writing this defense of the article, I realize that such a flawed premise shouldn't exist when talking about teaching fundamentals.
One of the biggest drivers of economic inequality between the states is their business strategy. New York, California? They build new businesses. Kentucky and Louisiana and Kansas? Try to lure old businesses to move. The former strategy is obviously superior, hence the resentment the latter states hold.
FYI, Mustafa Suleyman is not CEO, but rather "Co-Founder & Head of Applied AI," as described in the article. Demis Hassabis is the CEO.
I'm not an astronomer, though I do work with them. My impression from talking to them is that there is no consensus around whether or not habitable planets are common or rare.

Our principal detection method for finding planets excels at finding gas giants with masses similar to their host star. This is not a great tool for finding habitable planets. Direct imaging of planets is not feasible at an intergalactic scale; I'm not sure it's even really possible for stars further out than a few hundred lightyears. This greatly limits our sample size. The less you know about your distribution, the less accurate your simulation is going to be.

A priori arguments from simulations have the problem of either producing an absurd cornucopia of habitable planets or making too few. Steven Dole's _Habitable Planets for Man_[1] discusses the odds and convincingly argues for a large number of habitable planets, but it's pretty out of date. His ACCRETE simulation is great at producing solar systems that resemble our own, but it is not well-respected by astronomers. The time I spoke with an astronomer about this, he said that current simulations have trouble getting from rocks to planets. ACCRETE is a pretty crude simulation; to Dole and his coauthors the interesting thing about it was that such a crude instrument could produce such legitimate-looking results.

One of ACCRETE's problems is that there are a number of parameters, and if you change them slightly you get very different solar systems. I would think a good simulation would have a small number of these parameters but they usually give you enough rope to hang yourself. In any event, to choose the right settings you must have either physics dictating them or accurate numbers from samples, and we still have a very small set of examples.

As an aside, the sheer volume of stars makes a strong argument that even if the odds are vanishingly small, there ought to still be a mind-numbing of habitable planets.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Habitable-Planets-Man-Stephen-Dole/dp...
Wow. So groceries without checkout.

I thought that at some point RFID would replace barcodes providing similar experience. However, this system claim to be based on cameras and image recognition.
If your goal is to build General AI, getting access to the game state information is cheating and ultimately self defeating because it does not generalize across games. Expert humans are able to pick up and play a brand new game with a high degree of initial success despite zero knowledge of the memory states within the game. We do this by reliance on our vast knowledge of video game and literary tropes as well as experience playing past games. I have yet to see any video game bot make use of this stuff to figure out how to play Zelda, for example.
sbt still uses ivy and so do many other projects that not just use sbt but ant ones that directly use ivy.

SBT is quite a used one too.
Am I normally unaware of Amazon's new products, or have they been releasing an abnormally high amount of new offerings recently?
I wonder how they plan to deal with fraud... some kind of check-in process instead?
I read the post before it was removed. I don't agree with a lot of it (like declaring lists of things true and then qualifying individual items with "probably because"), but I get your point.

You have to tread very carefully. A better example would be a statement made by Trump's recent pick for National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, in his book "The Field of Fight":

"I don't believe all cultures are morally equivalent"

Just that statement seems to bother many people, enough to have it included in Trevor Noah's Daily Show recently.

But why? Why is that statement such a big deal? I believe Western culture is better than, say, Saudi Arabian culture. I realize there is no objective standard to base this on, but even if it is the same nationalism/tribalism Saudi Arabians judge Western culture, so be it. If you make the argument that we can't judge other cultures, wouldn't it also be true that you can't say they're equivalent, since that is judging them?
Theres a reason for this. Two of them are enabling us to look at things. One of them is enabling us to do things.
I am curious as to what issues you had with the AF5x. I've personally deployed about 50 of them with nothing but overwhelming success. The entire AirFiber line is some of the best equipment I've ever worked with.
The original article title was a (now corrected) typo. Suleyman isn't CEO, but "Co-Founder & Head of Applied AI" (from their website).
The point of the Senate is to protect slavery.
When I started reading the description, I thought: "someone finally delivered on that RFID pitch of just walking out of the store". Was surprised that it's actually computer vision.
"Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning."

Very interesting choice of comparison ha... I suppose this is Amazon trying to attract the tech crowd? It almost sounds satirical.

Not to downplay the tech -- this looks incredible.
Dumb Password Rules
Hey, pretty neat idea. These screenshots look impressive.
> With our Just Walk Out Shopping experience, simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products you want, and go! No lines, no checkout. (No, seriously.)

Yes, seems like you check-in with an app.
Show HN: konfd – Manage Kubernetes secrets and configmaps with Go templates
Its about exposure, not learning enough to be a professional.

For example, I learned some basic mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, geography, etc in school. Until I got to university, what I learned wasn't enough to make me a mathematician, physicist, chemist etc. It did give me a baseline on which I could build and it gave me exposure. This exposure was forced on me, but what I did with it (a computer science degree and a programming career), was something that was left up to me to choose later.

I see computers/software the same way. Its common enough in day to day lives now that I think a baseline of computer literacy and some basic exposure should be required and afterwards the students can choose if they wish to explore more or not.

The exposure doesn't necessarily have to prep them for real work (I'm pretty sure dissecting a frog isn't going to prepare me for veterinary work...), just give them a taste of how things work.
Conceptually speaking, 'statistical word match/associations' and rules engines are not very far apart in their level of 'artificial intelligence' or 'magical ability to solve a currrnt hard problem' which was my point. You're probably right about how it's done.
Free ebooks are every day. Normally it's something older. No Email notifications for the freebies normally. Worth checking up on occasionally though.
People with high-profile jobs are severely constrained in what they can say (even though this guy is not the CEO, contrary to what the title claims ATM).

And we already saw that google doesn't want to touch the "uglier" aspects of ML/AI/robotics with a ten-foot-pole (e.g. see how they reacted to Boston Dynamics's humanoid robot video).

So I'm not sure if we should take this seriously. DeepMind technical views are mostly on its papers. Not press statements.
How to Design with Cards – 7 Big Mistakes You Must Avoid Pt1
“If Animals Have Rights, Should Robots?”
> or "If you get dressed, I'll tell you something interesting about Mercury."

Gonna have to try this one - my son loves collecting facts. Thismay prove very helpful. Even if it turns out not - thanks for the idea, it's a good one.
I have been through a number of SDRs - Softrock, RTLSDR, HackRF, and more recently I have a Red Pitaya (http://redpitaya.com/) and am ICOM 7300 (http://www.icomamerica.com/en/products/amateur/hf/7300/defau...), which is a traditional looking radio with SDR at its core.

The flexibility offered by doing all the work in software is ground-breaking... really only limited by imagination.
I would guess that they trained AlphaGo from many thousands of hours of match footage. Writing a computer vision script to segment / extract the data may cost cycles as you say, but would save many human hours by eliminating the need to re-watch the footage and literally type out state information for each move.
More comprehensive studies have ben performed: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/where-we-live/wp/2014/06...

I just bought a home myself and looked this up, but the takeaway is that the Zestimate is within +- 5% 50% of the time. So, not that accurate. Are people really using it in negotiations though? I'm sure people do, but you'd have to be pretty uninformed to do so, and I'm also sure you're real estate agent would tell you exactly that up front.
A tangentially related question (I am a complete ignoramus when it comes to bitcoin).

Suppose I could harness the power of 1,000 or even 10,000 private computers distributed over the internet and all contributing resources. Could I profitably mine bitcoin?(This is not a theoretical question, I actually do have a way to do this)
.
Semi-offtopic, but I've always wondered why something like a medical diagnosis AI doesn't exist. The doctor (or operator) would enter all your symptoms and test results, and the software would use statistical data and research results to give you a probability of each disease (e.g. a headache is overwhelmingly probably a flu, but if your test results for X are elevated, the probability for brain cancer increases, etc), as well as a list of tests the doctor could run.

Something like this would be immensely valuable, and would immediately improve healthcare everywhere, since the software could be updated with new or obscure knowledge right away, so you wouldn't have to shop around for doctors until you came across someone who had read of a very rare disease somewhere, the software would already know everything you might have.

Is there something like that out there? It sounds like there must be, but I don't know of any doctors using anything like this.
If it truly is based on cameras and image recognition, that would allow them to roll out to already-existing stores pretty easily. That way they could market the infrastructure rather than build their own stores, which I imagine is less risky and more lucrative.
Technology aside, shoppers are going to feel so weird doing this at the beginning.

There's already social anxiety when people pay for things and walk past a security guard, or a security barrier. Whether it's an airport, or a clothes store, or a ticket barrier, there's always a nervousness about being called out.

It's bad enough in the Apple Store where you can pay and walk out, this will take some real getting used to.
Getting started with 'Bug Bounty'
Most of the announcements were from AWS re:Invent event: https://reinvent.awsevents.com/