skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is everyone afraid of artificial intelligence? I'm more afraid of natural infinite human stupidity. Superintelligence would just balance that out ;-) . But seriously here is my critique of Nick Bostroms arguments about superintelligence: https://asmaier.blogspot.de/2015/06/superintelligence-critiq...
No, unfortunately it's not. I know this from first hand experience. I've been doing my whole life, but the most money I ever made (by a huge margin) came from a stroke of dumb luck.
Well, as I said, it depends on a place. I usually go to places where people are going to play board games, pool, foosball etc. while getting few beers, not drink themselves unconsciously.
The secret of how life on Earth began
> In my world view having a kid is similar to an 18 year prison sentence.

Unless something happens to them you have offspring for the rest of your life; not for 18 years. If you're referring to them leaving the house at 18 y.o. The US trend is that 18 y.o. stay living at home. Personally, I expect students to be the exception to that.
If you're ever on the way back from Hawaii and happen to run into friends of yours that are in-costume Star Wars enthusiasts, it'd be wise not to use the native "Aloha" greeting.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiral_Ackbar
I like it & it certainly better than their previous effort, but the point regarding "charting library" is valid, imo. If I didn't know what Racket was, that would be my immediate impression as well.
I've been seeking just such a power-attenuating alias for a few days now. I find Youknowwho a great candidate.
No doubt that his "inside arguments" have been rebutted extensively by the strong AI optimists and their singularity priests. After all, dreaming up scenarios in which robotic superintelligence dominates humanity is their version of saving the world.

That's why I found the "outside arguments" here equally important and compelling.

> The outside view doesn't care about content, it sees the form and the context, and it doesn't look good.

If it sounds like and acts like a cult, why should we treat it any differently from a cult? Even if the people in it are all very smart, wealthy, well-dressed, and appear very rational, they're still preaching the end of the world on a certain date. All of those groups have only one thing in common: they're all wrong.

The best rebuttals to all this are the least engaging.

"Dude, are you telling me you want to build Skynet?"
Cherrypicked Best Reads of 2016 in Platforms
Reactive Microservices Architecture by Lightbend's CTO Jonas Bonér
How do you tell them when to deliver the stuff?

Can you take some of the items immediately?

Do checkout lines still occur?
Stories about Christmas and New Year Bugs
21 free mobile apps that every college student should know about
If they get to "as good as", they have the advantage of being open source. This could convince _some_ projects.
I've long espoused what jondubois says above and many people have told me what you say here in response. That might be true but now that I'm in a position to see lots of new hires it doesn't seem to make a difference, at least not for CS grads. We hire a bunch of MIT grads and they seem to have roughly the same distribution of success as all of the other new hires. I'll grant you that this is anecdata but it is the one situation where I have a lot of experience where the connection angle does not exist.
The design is ok.
The interactions need some tweaks.
The cursor should change to finger pointer on mouseover on code snippet. Probably it's better to highlight code snippet on mouseover before expanding it on click.

The other issue is all the links lead to pages with really old design. Hope this will get fixed too eventually.
New clothes smell worse than old cotton clothes ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4249026/ ) leading to bad body odor.

Which is perhaps the reason people nowadays think they need to shower daily.
Is going to the store such a big disadvantage? I work from home, I spend most of the time physically away from people. I do enjoy my shopping. You know, a little bit of interaction with people. I have tried online shopping with delivery when living in the UK. Very often, at the door, it turned out that X, Y and Z was not in stock and I had to go to another shop and find the missing bits myself. Waste of time...
Yes, here is open source representation of the ideas presented in this paper: https://github.com/facebookincubator/beringei
What is with the clickbaity title? Flagged, this is not Outbrain.
China Deal Watch 2006-2016- Bloomberg
SafeInit: Practical Mitigation of Uninitialized Read Vulnerabilities [pdf]
What's new in Python 3.6.0: https://docs.python.org/3.6/whatsnew/3.6.html
Lazy Evaluation in JavaScript
“If this is what learning to code is supposed to feel like every day, I’ll be miserable. Is this really my passion?”

“Wouldn’t this be easy for me if this was my passion? Do artists struggle to produce art? Do writers struggle to write a great book? Do athletes struggle to do well in a race? Are we supposed to struggle when we’re pursuing our passions?”

I can't answer the first question but the answers to the remaining in the second paragraph are: not really, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Running a race is shin splints, ice baths and years of stressful practice. No one has ever written a book worth reading without a lot of pain during its gestation. Learning to code comes with hours of staring at a function that a pro could so solve in seconds and re-writing an entire app because you can't figure out database corrupted. Passion is created and comes from your values not from just loving and being good at the the thing you do. Coding became a passion - it wasn't something I even liked when I started.
I found that there are actually relatively few people with the type of experience most of us here at HN have that work in philanthropy. I mean people with IT background, can-do attitude, consider scaling whatever you build to million or billions of people, entrepreneurial and able to pitch well for investments.

If I work as a reasonably successful IT entrepreneur (I don't think I am going to be Gates, Brinn or Zuckerberg). At most I will be able to give away few million to charity/philanthropy. That is going to have a relatively limited impact. International development funding is $130 billion / year.

Taking my skills and helping spending those $130 billion sensibly, by applying my skills is having a considerably bigger impact, I think.

My team is routinely involved in country level data-to-decision work around things like drinking water supply, sanitation access, food security, agriculture efficiency, climate change adaptation, disaster respons etc. If I add up the population of the countries where we our tools are used for rural drinking water mapping and prioritisation of investments, we end up with about half a billion people.

For me, the best way to use my time I think is helping others by applying my skills to the problem at hand. Working for a faceless shareholder (mine and your pension fund and a bunch of rich people) on something that may be technically interesting, but didn't make a big positive impact on the world and the people in it, just wasn't enough for me anymore. What I do now is more satisfying and has a much bigger positive impact, I think.
LinkAges – Connecting Generations
>> "Are there other solutions out there? How is your solution any different?

Negative? I am only reflecting the questions back at the post/site that they're asking themselves.
New Ebola vaccine shows 100% effectiveness in a study of nearly 6,000 patients
That's really not limited to France though. I've seen the same at Tesco, Waitrose and Saintsbury in the UK, in several chains in China, in a bunch of Germany as well (Aldi?), and in Australia (Whoolworths, Coles...). Ikea has had that for a while as well. So has Metro all over the world, obviously.

I have been using self-service checkouts for more than a decade in most countries. I'd be surprised if that was considered news.

Amazon Go and instant payment systems are a different topic entirely though.

Also, "very fast" is debatable: it's often broken, and some items are subject to different buying conditions and can't be purchased via these self-service checkout lanes, like alcohol, or "luxury" items with high margins, like razor blades.

Quite often, if given the choice of an almost empty till queue or a self-service line, I'll pick the almost empty till queue. It's often more efficient.

Self-service is great for 24/7 supermarkets though. I remember really huge Tesco stores in the UK that are but where you can shop at 3AM and use the self-service. Most employees at this time of night are the stock management people, and there's only one or 2 cashiers left (and security, obviously). The rest is self-service. For that scenario, it's indeed convenient.
I am one of those who is convinced that AI will destroy humanity and Elons/others efforts will not help.

Its hard for me to argue against the fact that this idea isn't eating me.
Here in Belgium the Carrefour also introduced that system. It's fast if the system doesn't (randomly) pick you out for inspection. Nevertheless I like the system.

What I have also seen in the Hypercarrefour in Bruges that they scan your groceries when waiting in line to the checkout. Then they print a ticket on their mobile printer which you just need to give to the checkout and pay.

A local Delhaize (Food Lion in the US) experimented with a fixed POS where you needed to take out all your groceries, self-scan and pay. I have also used the same system at Tesco in Prague. Not the most pleasant system in comparison than the mobile version Carrefour and also Auchan uses where you just walk through the store with a mobile scanner.

Other local retailers (colruyt, aldi, lidl, Albert Hein) are more classic in that regards.

"t's often broken, and some items are subject to different buying conditions and can't be purchased via these self-service checkout lanes, like alcohol, or "luxury" items with high margins, like razor blades."

To be honest that's not a problem when using self-scan at Carrefour. Only if you buy alcohol or tabaco they may ask for your age or if you are picked out for an inspection. There is no limit in what you buy.

Although that is the situation here in Belgium.
> PEP 515 adds the ability to use underscores in numeric literals for improved readability. For example:

>>> 1_000_000_000_000_000
1000000000000000
>>> 0x_FF_FF_FF_FF
4294967295

> Single underscores are allowed between digits and after any base specifier. Leading, trailing, or multiple underscores in a row are not allowed.
> it usually manifests in the form of 'what if something goes wrong???' and spirals from there.

That is because we compare to the successful rich only, not all those who tried to become rich and utterly failed.

This is just masculine vs feminine thinking. Or VC versus slow growth. Or the way we nurture children in the West vs cats, or in Africa. Or quality vs quantity.

You never hear about all the times people prayed to $diety and it didn't help. You never hear about all those people who went to Stanford and didn't graduate. You never hear about all those people who made a startup and failed. OK, you do (on the latter, here), but it takes courage, shame, and selfishness.

PS: You might wanna use some capital letters at the start of a sentence.
It depends how big the field you have to plow is. Having many kids helps in keeping and maintaining the field then using it to grow food (for you and your free plowering kids).

Some kind of bootstrap if you will.
>Deep learning isn't perfect

Didn't claim it was.

>how would you suggest those cases are handled?

Obviously the same way as you suggest.

But the parent talked about them MERELY using human operators behind cameras, like it's just some mechanical turk-based fraud...
Who lived and worked in Paris for most of his life.
I agree it's an issue. Java and C# also suffer from it. In Java probably each webserver implements it's own network framework on top of NIO and in the end you have dozens of incompatible event loops runing.

However it's not an easy issue to solve for a general purpose language, unless you want to tie all those IO semantics (and probably a big runtime environment) directly to the language. C++ and Rust don't want to do that, since they want you to be able to use the language even on bare metal with zero runtime.

What you can do as a library developer for these languages is to try to make them as integretable as possible into all kinds of surrounding environments. I normally would try to make my library usable for blocking calls as well as in a nonblocking way within an external eventloop. You can do that by spawning your own thread/eventloop, handle all the library logic in there and provide thread-safe external APIs that communicate with our eventloop.

Framework development (in the sense of Netty/Tokio/etc) is harder. If often won't be possible to develop code that runs in multiple frameworks.
Thanks for that. I have had building a trial progressive web app on my "I want to do list" for a while, so I am going to go for it.
Interesting. My experience was a while ago as I said, 1989, so maybe it was just different then as it just seemed like a club for middle-aged socially men really.
Doing a weekly digest on JavaScript
$47k, not million. Amounts in that spreadsheet aren't in thousands.
They basically did with their actions.
> If it sounds like and acts like a cult, why should we treat it any differently from a cult? Even if the people in it are all very smart, wealthy, well-dressed, and appear very rational, they're still preaching the end of the world on a certain date. All of those groups have only one thing in common: they're all wrong.

Occasionally the crazies are right. Remember when the idea that the NSA was recording everyone's emails was paranoid conspiracy theory talk, except turns out they were actually doing this the whole time.

The fact that the world hasn't ended tells us virtually nothing about how likely the end of the world is, for the simple reason that if the world had ended we wouldn't be here to talk about it. So we can't take it as evidence, at least, not conclusive evidence. Note also that the same argument works just as well against global warming as it does against AI risk.

Turn it around. Suppose there was a genuinely real risk of destroying the world. How would you tell? How would you distinguish between the groups that had spotted the real danger and the run-of-the-mill end-of-the-world cults?
I was thinking when I read the headline "having rich parents is a bigger factor".
Maybe instead of --fast-math we need a new type aprox_float to indicate, we (the programmes) allow this variable to take some shortcuts during computation. While we promise not to do things like div0.

Edit: we must agree on a max deviation/error for this type.
To each their own of course, but I find even mildly impaired people annoying. You don't realize how much an effect a few beers can have alcohol is deceptive that way, that's why you see people down a bottle of vodka and get behind the wheel. They honestly believe that they are fine to drive.

A tip if you do decide to try this advice, don't let anyone know you aren't drinking. Not only will you often get accosted "Come on buddy just one!", but at the end of the night you will often be pressured to become some sort of unpaid Uber.
> For instance, in a series of three consecutive tests, the 13- inch model with the Touch Bar ran for 16 hours in the first trial, 12.75 hours in the second, and just 3.75 hours in the third. The 13-inch model without the Touch Bar worked for 19.5 hours in one trial but only 4.5 hours in the next. And the numbers for the 15-inch laptop ranged from 18.5 down to 8 hours.

What could possibly the reason for such drastic variations in the same laptop, over a short period of time, when the testing conditions remain consistent?
Finalist of Alt.Ctrl.GDC 2017: Doggy tug-of-war game control
Shouldn't a superintelligence be smart enough to become another Gandhi? Why not?
After I bought a domain name without using whois protection on accident, I started receiving emails like this all the time. Offering things like mobile apps, seo optimization, redesigns, logos, etc.

They all word it to sound otherwise, but it's just a money grab.
> For instance, in a series of three consecutive tests, the 13- inch model with the Touch Bar ran for 16 hours in the first trial, 12.75 hours in the second, and just 3.75 hours in the third. The 13-inch model without the Touch Bar worked for 19.5 hours in one trial but only 4.5 hours in the next. And the numbers for the 15-inch laptop ranged from 18.5 down to 8 hours.

How could this happen? Did each test follow the same process?
Background processes and vastly different webpages visited. That's all I can come up with.

Frankly, I'm not sure either is a valid excuse for such a huge deviation.
EmojiOne already do this.
NVidia and I think AMD. Mobile is a different story.
Trawling the deep ocean ought to be banned. These ecosystems regenerate extremely slowly because they're so poor in nutrients and sunlight.
Not so sure about this line:

"bitcoin is closing the year on a high note, surviving its (expected) mining changes with grace"

Adoption of technical improvements like segwit has become more of a political game than ever with less technical people shouting louder, so much that it's become a joke with parodies like Bitcoin Ultimate.
A qualified defense of slacktivism
The URL should be changed to http://www.consumerreports.org/laptops/macbook-pros-fail-to-..., since this only reports on that.
When they say: "ran for 16 hours in the first trial, 12.75 hours in the second, and just 3.75 hours in the third" they don't mean that each of the three trials consists of the same load.

The mechanism sounds highly random too: "Consumer Reports tests battery life using a real-world test: They turn on the laptop's screen and surf webpages using Chrome. It's not a test based on benchmarking software or watching video that wouldn't require internet access, and the publication said that even recent software updates did not help the problem."

Such tests should be repeatable, with same webpages, durations of visit, etc to have any meaning (and to be able to actually indicate issues with different battery life, and not merely different load).
Show HN: SQL expert on demand
Because you can't cheat people forever.
Every language should have this.
Great to see even more support for type annotations. Having to specify the type of variables in comments was never a good solution.
If they have some automated setup for doing this web browsing (maybe a selenium that visits websites for 10 hours?)

They should be consistent after a restart and I bet they charge them to full before conducting the next test.
Nice. Just played it. Works perfectly.
The most exciting science-fiction films of 2017
If it were just a disagreement about physics then it would be safe to ignore.

But in this case, if they're right then we're about to wipe out humanity. That's not safe to ignore.
Good thing they removed the battery time remaining indicator. People will never notice. /s
As with many things I feel the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

I spent my 20s working in STEM and living in between MIT and Harvard which meant that a large portion of my social circle was drawn from those schools. I see where both sides are coming from here. On one hand you're right in that there were also plenty of people in our circle who came from very different backgrounds. By and large these were normal people and not the sort of socially awkward weirdos the article describes.

On the other hand the article rings true at times. The bit about worrying about their occupation due to the 20 year reunion, I heard that exact thing countless times. The lack of recognition of the second chances to succeed or that they have a ridiculous social network that others do not was also a big thing. And through it all there was always a certain baseline, well, elitism. It was almost never direct but it was always there. It wouldn't be directed at the rest of us but you'd hear it amongst themselves, "I can't believe a Harvard graduate is doing that" when "that" is something that their good friend also does. That sort of thing.
Socialism for one. Anti-Capitalism for another.
Do you have examples of compile time guarantees I mean?
max 1.05% ? wonderful choice
How Luke Hodorowicz Banished Sim City
Doesn't seem fair to base a test on using Chrome when Apple bundles a more power efficient browser with the OS.
The point that I was trying to bring attention to is that one's perception of the AI risk movement changes substantially once you turn your focus from content to form and context. He brings many examples of this (the cult in the robes, Art Bell, etc.)

I wouldn't call suspecting the government of surveilling people "crazy." Claiming you know the timeframe for the apocalypse with precision is different. I am from North Carolina -- try a Google Image search for "May 21, 2011."

Ray Kurzweil believes he will never die. Balancing content with form and context, what we have here is clearly an atheistic, scientist version of "May 21, 2011."
That's a crazy high level of variation to blame on relatively small differences in tests.
Can't you just make this yourself? Why does it have to be a part of the lichess platform?
I have used a similar machine. It was purchased used for about $3,000 for a pregnancy resource center. And as a Test & Measurement EE experienced with some high-density analog cables, I was extremely impressed with the quality of the cable in that device.

But reading your post and this one:

> ... and then it's got to connect to the cables off to the system - all 100 to 200 wires down a cable that's a couple meters long, and thin/light enough for someone to use 8 hours a day without getting repetitive strain injuries. Do you know how thin that makes each wire? Try calling a few cable vendors and ask for a small diameter cable with 200+ connectors that will actually conduct a signal without significant crosstalk and let's see where you end up on price.

It also mentions the system being mounted on a cart. This seems like an area where technology can make some serious improvements. Mount your ADC (for which speed, accuracy, power requirements, and channel counts have been steadily improving) within the probe, and stick a high-speed serialization/deserialization chip on the other end of it, and run power and digital data over a much smaller, cheaper cable. That's the direction that industrial I/O is going, at least.

I guess the point of all this is that there are opportunities to make significant changes to the way these devices operate that will make them easier to build. Switch out the ASICs for GPUs, the analog cable for digital, the custom computer for commodity hardware, and so on because these technologies are more capable than they were in the past.
And yet somehow humans rule the planet and tigers are an endangered species, surviving only as a result of specific human efforts to conserve them because some humans care about doing so.

How well an AI could survive on a desert island is an irrelevant question when Amazon, Google and dozens of others are already running fully (or as near as makes no difference) automated datacentres controlled by a codebase that still has parts written in C. Hawking can easily get the cat in the container: all he has to do is submit a job to taskrabbit.
TiddlyWiki App Engine Server