skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Somewhat tangential. I went to Jamaica with my pregnant wife in 2012. At the time of our arrival I did not realize that we were visiting a country with omnipresent violent crime. During our visit, we had (very luckily) a small taste of this crime, but consequently also were given a chance to understand the situation.

We casually strolled through the crowds in Ocho Rios and enjoyed the beach and the novel sites. For example, a dreadlocked older gentleman with a grocery bag chock full of ganja openly selling such in the central town square.

We were staying in a very nice hotel, and one side of our room was on land, the other was cantilevered over the ocean. On day five of our visit, this vista turned out to be a liability. While we are at dinner, marauders arrived in a boat, climbed into our room, and fleeced everything that was easily accessible. We are careful travelers and so stored most valuables in the safe (which also stunk like ganja). The total damage was around $150, but mentally we were afraid.

As part of the investigation, an extraordinarily kind local policeman was sent by to take our statement. He spent 15 minutes on the crime, and then another 2 hours chatting with us. He was erudite and well spoken, and gave us his take in detail of why the country was the way it was. He conjectured that extreme disparity between rich and poor, a history of colonial violence, and lack of accessible quality education had set them up for failure.

I was born in India, and have spent about 1/4 of my life there (as a member of the upper middle class). My grandparents view of the British Raj was very benign and shared by their peers. I wonder what it is that led to one perception in India and another in Jamaica, both poor countries, but one which lives in fear of violence.
I agree that IoT is rather dreary, but I think blockchain still has a chance to be something interesting.

(And I dig the Adams reference.)
Leap seconds have no business being tracked in the core logic of our programs.

Just like timezones and calendar changes, leap seconds are a display issue. While obviously very important in some circumstances there's no need to keep track of them through absolutely all of our code.

If the way you measure time takes leap seconds into account, you have no way of saying "exactly X Système international seconds from now". This is a big deal.
I remember when I started python that one of the big differences was that there wasn't a 1000 ways to do something, but one right way.
Ask HN: Does the VC funding a startup affect your decision to accept offer?
Hi HN,

I'd like to pose two hypothetical questions for a friend looking for some guidance. First-hand experience or insight into your thought process are both welcome.

1) If you received a job offer from a company backed by an investor who had a bad reputation within your peer group, would that affect your decision to join that company? How much might a difficult investor affect the day to day experience of working for a startup?

2) If you received a job offer from a company backed by an investor with whom, say, you very much disagreed on social/political issues, would you have qualms working for said company? Is working on a fine project with fine people somehow unethical if the fruits of your labor accrue to a person you disagree with?
That feedback that the commands are queued or can't be processed is key. I encountered an issue on an app I manage at work where the UI showed that a certain state changing action had taken place before it was resolved on the sever. Needless to say it caused a variety of issues as users thought the system had processed a significant action(hiring a candidate) when they hadn't.
This makes me think about Carla Scalletti's lecture on emergent systems:

https://vimeopro.com/symbolicsound/kiss2016-presentations/vi...
Sure, Earth Could Get Hit by a Deadly Asteroid–But There’s an Upside
It's well within the 1000 - 10 range. May be an overall approximation somewhere on the paper.

But I was just summarizing it. Looks like the kind of calculation one does when he's entirely convinced it's impossible, but needs to verify anyway. I liked reading it, and I was surprised they didn't take meteors into account.
> this generation of Intel CPUs usable in a laptop

Dell XPS says hi. I don't care if it doesn't have much battery life - give me the choice, dammit. If I wanted ultraportability and umpteen hours on battery, I would have bought an Air.

> the slightly smaller battery was not "arbitrary"

I must have missed the day a tank threatened to blow up Cupertino unless they reduced the battery size. Again, nobody asked them to have an MBP as thin as an Air. It was an arbitrary choice, and (IMHO, of course) a bad one.
Yeah, I don't really have a problem with the old way:

print("My robot's name is {}. It's {} years old.".format(name, years_old))

Seems reasonable to me. I don't really see any reason to hack in the locals splat. I guess the one thing it saves you is ordering issues, but in practice, I haven't found those to be terribly inconvenient, and in the rare case they are, you can just do "{name}, {age}".format(name=name, age=years_old)).

Yes, both forms are a little longer, but as you state, it's easier to see what's going on. One of Python's biggest attractions, IMO, is that it's batteries included, but not batteries-sealed-under-1000-layers-of-carbonite-locked-by-a-mystical-incantation, like many other dynamic languages. It's usually pretty easy to get in there and see what's happening without having to traverse tons of indirection due to Python's design principle favoring explicit programming styles.

I won't lie and say I've never wished for more conventional style string interpolation, but it certainly wasn't a showstopper, and it's not something we should assume we get for free.
I think the fundamental difference of opinion--between those who worry about the existential risk of gAI and those who don't--is not whether or not gAI can pose a risk to humankind, but rather whether it will, and if so, whether there's anything meaningful we can do about it now to prepare for it.

This article is written as a rebuttal to another article (http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm) adapted from a talk. That article reconstructs the gAI-is-risky argument and then provides a series of counter-arguments that show that the gAI future is not guaranteed--that there are many ways in which it might not come to pass. The point it's trying to show is that the gAI-dystopia is not a given, and therefore we should question its plausibility. In particular, it raises the notion that there may be something about very high-level thinking ("being smart") that makes causes very knowledgeable people to overestimate the probability of gAI-dystopia. It then suggests that the indirect consequences of promoting the gAI-dystopia theory might outweigh any possible benefits we get from worrying about it right now.

Then this article responds to each of those arguments (about how it might not come to pass) with an argument about how it might come to pass. It closes with a remark that any engineering discipline should ask what the consequences are if we succeed.

Obviously, the two camps could go back and forth all day, both being completely correct, neither making any progress, because these arguments are based in rhetoric, not analysis. There's nothing wrong with rhetorical arguments, but any two sufficiently skilled rhetoricians can push their point infinitely far; the real question is which premise you accept:

After hearing the arguments put forth by the gAI-dystopia group, do you think the dystopian scenario is likely and that we can meaningfully prepare for it at this time, or do you think it's unlikely or that we can't meaningfully prepare for it?

The gAI-dystopia crowd is not necessarily wrong, but it's a minority of the community because it can't attach any meaningful risk analysis to its claims without making shaky assertions for the prior probabilities. There are infinite ways we could end up in a gAI dystopia, and there are infinite ways we could not. Existential threats are hard to accept, so until we have more evidence that such a future is at all likely, it will be hard to convince any significant number of people. In this sense, it is just like a religion (but I don't say that as an insult).
Wait, can't you just buy a dongle to convert from USB-c to Thunderbolt 2 and continue to use your nice (I'm jealous, personally) UAD Apollo 8 with a 2016+ MBP?
I'm making to no claim to being an expert. Nevertheless, my question is "Does one second matter to your application? If so, how does Javascript's single threading, garbage collection, and default asynchronous programming idioms fit with the needs of a real or near real time system?"
On your last sentence, melding these is a key area of interest for me as well. Drop me a note via info in my profile.
You're right. Was a bit rude, but reflected my feel in that moment. It's very frustrating when developers kill mobile experience by copy&pasting html boilerplate without even reading the stuff they paste.
I think the main source of the confusion is that the connector is called USB-C, but devices that use the connector may not be USB devices at all, since they can fully expect to only be used with devices that support a specific alternate mode (e.g. Thunderbolt). Yes, they all have to support USB at some level to negotiate the alternate mode (i'm not sure if for USB-C this is a passive signaling like sense resistors or something active like an authentication chip), but devices don't have to fall back to USB data modes at all if they don't want to.

If they had called the connector something distinct, like for example "Omnibus", then you could additionally specify the signalling required to make it work. So you could sell a device as being "USB via Omnibus plug", or "Displayport via Omnibus plug". Maybe even come up with little icons for each mode and place them on the host computers and peripherals to help people figure out what is going to work. Really just anything more than what they've done currently would be useful.
Carla Scaletti, developer of Kyma, discusses emergent systems [video]
There are a few things I noticed and I'll cover a few right now.

Firstly, they are talking about using microservices which would be ok (I've used a few microservices for specific applications that actualy make sense to service-ify) but I would by no means consider this a safer way of doing things. When you're talking about services run by our government, who isn't notorious for having their network-security done right, I'm very weary of them moving to a microservice architecture.

MTD is another thing that sounds concerning. This seems like the bottom of the barrel of security ideas and looks like it would be far more complicated then the other methods mentioned. If used this along would probably introduce more bugs.

"Education and Training" can basically be summed up as universities being stuck in the 70s and not teaching CS but teaching the Math that CS needs.

The "Liability" section is keeping me torn.
What was the challenge with circular relationships? I work on an offline-first system and all inter-object relationships are managed by GUIDs, so cyclical references don't present any problems - objects are sent and received as one big list keyed by guids, not as a tree.
The article sums it up pretty well. If the fund goes up and down a lot, the managers make money in the up years but don't lose it in the down years.
I read Kafka on the Shore in 2016 and let me tell you, I'm not a big reader (I'm working on it), but it had me thinking about it for weeks.

The book itself is like a dream state, it's magic; There's something about it where even when I think about it again, I get taken off into the lands within the book. I hear other Murakami works are similar in that regard. It is really hard to explain but it had me thinking about my life, who I am as a person to outsiders who meet me, how I see myself and what I feel my purpose in life is, etc.
It depends what model you have. I had a 2015 15" rMBP with discrete GPU, and I typically got 5-6 hours with my usage pattern (Chrome, Outlook, Terminal, Sublime Text, doing most of my development locally but running code on cloud servers in AWS).

At my new job, I only got a 2015 13" rMBP without discrete GPU, and I now get 8-10 hours with the same workload. It's because I don't have to power as big of a screen and a discrete GPU.

Workload matters, but discrete GPU and larger screen also matter, a lot.
I suppose it's mere cargo culting. A rastafari would hardly visit a moloch born of babylon, like HN.
Pls help me improve my campaign
It is my first time I post a crowdfunding campaign. Please let me know how I can improve the campaign so it is better accepted by the audience.
The link is https://igg.me/at/SixrjLZ98Oo
>>and spotted a new enemy

There is something about this that just makes me chuckle. Don't know why.
Here's a detailed overview of so called 'domain fronting' https://www.bamsoftware.com/papers/fronting/

Some VPNs use a module called obfsproxy which uses the fronting technique. One VPN service I recall using it is called Tunnelbear. You can read more about this feature here: https://help.tunnelbear.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2435...

This is not an endorsement of Tunnelbear, I just thought it would be noteworthy mentioning that VPN services offer this now to thwart censorship.
It seems like the real problem is:
For people who go to Ivy League schools, most of them can only imagine rabidly pursuing the next rung on the career ladder

The key to me, is that they have a choice then and have choices later in life... you can learn to be not_rich=middle_class at a lot of different times in your life. Many of them will make you unhappy.

Perhaps it's a bit worse going to an Ivy League where everyone else is the same, but you could say that about staying in the same state, or joining the military (which has many different people, but an enforced culture).
A lot of this echos Daniels Bernstein's email about CPUS are designed for video games. https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/noise/2016/000699.html
Well, this is their twitter. So, same source :)

I just thought that it's a bad idea to link homepage instead of event-page
I've used and enjoyed themoviedb in the past.

https://www.themoviedb.org/documentation/api
This is exactly what the meek [1] pluggable transport does. It was developed by David Fifield, of the original authors of the domain fronting paper [2].

1. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek

2. https://www.bamsoftware.com/papers/fronting/
How many government employees were arrested since Modi took over?
Don't see the corruption angle. The measure was primarily to improve governments tax receipts and to eliminate the cash economy (thereby increasing governments control over the economy).

Right now it seems that every measure seems to be to increase governments control over the masses and to reduce their corruption, without any measure to increase governments transparency or reduce government's corruption. Trickle down economics and trickle up anti-corruption measures.
I think this is an exception, until we don't have a good offline experience this article will be current.
The problem is that achievement tests and grades are a measure of IQ.

Imagine I have a direct relationship, y = g. Now I measure compute a noisy data set, (x,y) with x = g + noise. Depending on the size of the noise I'll discover that y is correlated with g with some R^2. My regression coefficient will come out to be approximately y = 1x.

Now imagine I made a new noisy data set, (x1, x2, x3, y). Here x1 = g + noise, x2 = g + noise, x3 = g + noise. Here x1 might be IQ, x2 might be SAT or other such g-loaded test, x3 grades, etc. My new regression coefficients are y = (1/3)x1 + (1/3)x2 + (1/3)x3. Suddenly x1 has lost 2/3 of it's predictive power!

The problem is that my measurements are correlated, that's all. And as you note, table 2 shows a pretty solid correlation between IQ, personality, achievement and grades.

If you actually want to draw the conclusion that the article is trying to draw, you need to decouple IQ from the other measurements.
I was recapitulating the quote. The ants' interactions are not meaningless; their meaning is just difficult to observe from a single interaction. Analogously, one finds intelligent people struggling with the concepts of money and prices.
By the time of Columbia, we had already had the Challenger failure and 9/11 had recently occurred. There was no teacher on-board with students watching. We know that astronauts are as prepared for this kind of thing as they can be. So, it wasn't quite so shocking.

Also, people have a certain capacity for tragedy, pass it and you start to go numb.
It's using OMDB.js:

const omdb = require('omdb');
The 'meteoric rise' of lifts: will a new breed of elevator transform our cities?
"That's not the definition used by the person you're replying to, so I'm not sure what your point is."

There is only one classical definition of upper class, the other is the very generic 'economic' version.

The commenter is clearly not referring to 'economic' upper classes as he referred to 'behaviours' 'social standing' 'expectations' etc..

He indicated his family once had a noble title but sold it - this is definitely the classical version of 'upper class'.

You want a 'pop culture' reference for actual 'upper class' (though it's 100 years ago) -> Downton Abbey.
I think the case is more that opening theory is very deep. A computer without an opening book is having to work out what humans have spent hundreds of years learning/memorizing. It may also be that since the eval function of an AI can skip opening/endgame with tables, it doesn't need to focus on some of those concepts as much in favor of being optimized for general midgame positions
What about in cases where the commands may fail because of the actions of other users? For example, say you had a virtual market in a game and someone did a "buy from John" command while offline. they then proceed to use this purchase to beat future levels. However, once the user reconnects online, it turns out that John already sold to somebody else, and thus their purchase and everything after it is invalidated.

In your command queue pattern, what sort of ways do you handle this? Have certain "chokepoints" where the user must be online to proceed? What if you have an app where that sort of chokepoint seems to occur too frequently to make the queue useful?

Edit: I think this is similar to Fiahil's sibling comment, also relevant points made there. Thanks for the quality thoughts everyone!
It's not a huge problem for humans. I see no reason to think that a computer say, 10x as powerful as a human would have major problems with heat dissipation.
Show HN: Encourage your teams on slack with sticker chart
Syntax is why sinatra and express got bit.

Just add a callback for your route and off you go.
Your friend's site and this article suffer the same basic problem: blockchain technology is really only effective at solving these problems:

1. Timestamp validity is of utmost importance (proof-of-existence).
2. Transactions are being heavily censored and there is a need for truly peer-to-peer value transfer.

This article has a terrible introduction that explains blockchain as enabling an upside-down communication method allowing users to aggregate their requests among many apps. This isn't something that a blockchain is needed for. In fact, I'm finding it hard to see how a blockchain improves upon traditional solutions already implemented.

Also, as you said Afton, traditional contracts work just fine and are preferable to blockchain contracts in almost every real-world scenario.

In the case of agriledger specifically, I am wondering why ECDSA concepts aren't enough to solve the problem of authenticity of records.

Blockchain apps can really redefine many concepts and processes, just like Bitcoin's blockchain is redefining money right now. However, I'm hesitant to over-prescribe blockchain as a solution to all that ails the tech world.
Two examples of MTD at work are:

(i) address space layout randomization: this is by no means impervious but it is worth doing
(ii) there being several "official" Etherium clients such that if somebody hacked just one client they could not take over the whole network.
> HNers would describe humanities and social sciences as subpar

Curious assertion -- is that true? I know I prefer to hire engineers with at least some humanities background.
Wow, I decided to make the switch to Safari when I got my new mbp to optimize for battery life. I guess this is the end of that experiment. Safari devtools are terrible anyway.
The whole ongoing Thunderbolt display fiasco where there are two different kinds of adapter from USB-C to mini-DisplayPort, each of which supports a non-overlapping set of monitors, is almost entirely Apple's fault though. They were the ones who decided to push Thunderbolt monitors using the mini-DP connectors, then chose to make and sell an adapter that didn't support actual DisplayPort.
>He is completely skipping the most important part. The superintelligence has to have some reason to be in conflict with us. Human beings don't go out of their way to hunt down and eliminate ants. They don't find out what ants eat and sieze control of it to manipulate them. There is no reason to think that a superintelligent machine would be likely to present terrible interference to us proposed.

That depends on whether eliminating us is simple, like stepping on an ant-hill you didn't realize was there, or complicated, like going to war.

I don't buy the argument that for an AI to eliminate us would be relatively simple, that it would be as subjectively simple as we adults find reading and writing, while still involving cognitive effort. That would still require deliberate effort.

The trouble is whether the AI wants, for instance, our electricity infrastructure, and doesn't care about the riots and social breakdown caused when we humans can't get electricity for our own needs anymore. It didn't go into conflict with us. It just killed a lot of people (for instance, everyone on life-support in a hospital reliant on the electrical grid) without noticing or caring.

Likewise, maybe it decides that rising sea-levels and accelerating global warming are good for its own interests somehow. That stuff will kill us, but it doesn't require a complicated strategy, it just requires setting lots of things on fire. Any moron can do that, but most human morons don't want to.

I certainly agree that a "hostile" AI which perceives itself as requiring complicated, deliberate effort to kill all humans will probably not kill all humans. It'll find some lazier, simpler way to get what it wants.
"We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works." -Douglas Adams
Ah okay! And ugh... boring. And HN title is misleading.
It seems like I am seeing something about SAT solvers almost every day now.
How much of a factor is mental health in success?

Someone could be a 4th standard deviation IQ genius yet be debilitated by anxiety, depression, or some other condition.

On the flipside many successful people have credited drugs with some part of their success by boosting ambition, endurance, creativity, confidence, etc. If a Cocaine substitute was discovered that had no negative side effects, could this positively affect scientific progress?

Occasionally a mental "disability" can seemingly be related to success. So many great scientists have been on the Autistic spectrum, or suffered from severe OCD. Can the success of the person be separated from the disorder? Could "cures" for Autism and OCD actually negatively affect scientific progress?