skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you find this interesting you may enjoy The Village Effect[1] by Susan Pinker. It's a more in-depth look at this phenomenon.

If social isolation is as deadly as smoking or not exercising, should we approach the problem with a similar level of seriousness? Maybe we need "social exercise" three times a week, and if we aren't getting it naturally should contrive a way to get it much like going to the gym.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18167005-the-village-eff...
I have lived in my Manhattan building for only 2 years. Know most of the other residents, the owners of neighborhood restaurants, local politicians, et cetera.

That said, I do not feel that expectation of social and civic engagement in San Francisco.
I dunno, honestly, if you're capable of using Nix in production, you're capable of using Guix in production almost certainly. I say this as a NixOS maintainer (though I'm relatively dormant these days).

I see this as a thing of relative scale. Most people aren't going to run Nix, and in practice, using Nix requires a fair amount of work in practice (often including upstream work). If you're prepared to go through all that, you can probably use Guix in principle, too. (Barring some technicalities, of course, but in general I think this is still true.)
An interesting remark indeed.

Assuming the other people who used that word are me.
Er, that wasn't inventing theories about time travel, just about time.
Yes. I don't see Signal and Matrix in direct competition, just like WhatsApp and Slack are not in direct competition. The technology is very similar (main difference seems to be the size of chat rooms), but the use case and marketing is very different. Signal/WhatsApp is for casual mobile texting, while Matrix/Slack is for working.
I have played around with scikit-learn and love how simple and easy it is to work with, but the story for scaling it doesn't seem super straightforward - is this something anyone here has experience with?

I built a recommendation system in Spark earlier this year that used terabytes of input and would run it on a 40 node EMR cluster so it took less than half an hour. It wasn't trivial to make it run in a clustered environment, but it wasn't very hard either.
Most memorable books I read this year:

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. It took our reading group about six months to read it. Our discussions really added to my understanding and enjoyment.

Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History. From Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics to recently disclosed Russian attacks on American computer systems.

Harry Turtledove, Joe Steele. An alternate history in which Josef Stalin's parents immigrate to the U.S. and their son becomes President in 1932 instead of FDR.

George Dyson. Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. Focuses on John Von Neumann and the computer he built at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.
>Technological progress allows concentration of power in the one who holds the capital

In practice we only see this when a technology market is straitjacketed by intellectual property laws.

The lack of patentability of software is one reason why the market is so innovative - it diffuses that concentration of power.
Dynamic import() in Ripple v0.7
'In particular, there's no physical law that puts a cap on intelligence at the level of human beings.'

Maybe not, but there are definitely very physical laws governing everything else, that a superintelligent being's ambitions would run into.

A superintelligent being isn't going to be able to build a superliminal reactionless drive if the laws of the universe say it isn't possible.

More relevant, a superintelligent being isn't going to be able to enslave us all with robots if the laws of chemistry don't permit a quantum leap in battery chemistry.
The null hypothesis should not be that intelligence requires quantum processes. We'd need to show that: (1) the brain uses this process (2) that it is necessary for certain types of brain functions. Until we run into a wall let's not assume we need more sky ladders.
The homeless problem is SF is so minuscle and the talent and funds available so extensive that the only reasonable conclusion is there is no desire to fix it. Contrast this with the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted by the government on the severely bloated security state and trillions on the banks bailout and one has to question the priorities and loyalties of the american state. There is no lack of money, it seems a lack of will.

I think few other countries if any display nearly the same visceral hatred of poor people or perpetuate a naive black white view of poverty as the US tends to do.

This binary view leaves little room for adversity, bad luck or downturns with commentators in an unholy rush to tar them all as criminals, addicts or mentally unstable. It seems the expectation is the homeless should be at their best behavior while in abject poverty.

Trying to 'help' these folks get back on their feet is 'unearned' and strikes at the identity of individualized americans for whom a bare decent life is a privilege to be earned. And resentment for 'freeloaders' reflexive and immediate. You can't have 'winners' without losers.

The problem is the 'losers' are now in plain sight and making things unpleasant for the winners, and the urgency is not to address their suffering for they must suffer, but to dehumanize and get them out of sight so the 'winners' can carry on uninterrupted.
Maybe you have been seeing things through SV pink colored glasses for too long.

Companies everywhere are shutting down daily with proper warnings to customers, employees and users. It's not uncommon for companies to give several months (or even a year) of warning that they are winding down operations, won't be accepting new users, will honor contracts, etc. And they are doing the right thing.

Every time there's a post here about how people should keep at least 3 months of salary in case things go south, the general feeling is that whoever is living paycheck to paycheck must be stupid. However, when it's a CEO that couldn't do proper planning and screwed the lives of employees and users alike.. oh, sure, let's give the guy a break.

EDIT: Let me anticipate the argument here that if anyone's "lives" were screwed then it's their problem that they didn't understand the risks properly.
Also because there are a lot of edge cases in SF.
Actually easy to find, for example here: https://members.loria.fr/RSchott/staceyredujanv08.pdf .
Not programming specific: TANSTAAFL.

Also, Garbage In, Garbage Out is pretty good.
> In particular, I don't see how he can so blithely assume so easily that there is no quantum effect in the brain structure.

Read it more carefully, because that's not what he did. He is saying "The AI riskers claim 'If you accept X, then you must accept Y'", where X is "the brain does not use quantum effects" and Y is "AI apocalypse". He does not himself take a position on X, but argues against the X=>Y implication.

And it's not really relevant, but for what it's worth, the majority consensus among neuroscientists is that the brain does not use quantum mechanical effects and can be modeled using classical physics alone. Roger Penrose is in the minority on this question.
Jevon's Paradox states that the more efficiently a resource is used, the more the demand for it increases.

Jevon's Paradox is a historically contingent observation that held for a while for some resources and has later been unjustifiably treated as a natural law (on occasion). Just like Moore's Law was a historically contingent observation that held for a while.

There is no guarantee that Jevon's Paradox will remain paradoxical, and indeed I can already find counterexamples: electricity for lighting is used more efficiently in modern LED bulbs than ever before, and the effect is to reduce electricity consumption in facilities that switch to LED lighting. "But more efficient lighting prompts people to use lighting where they wouldn't have before!" True, some of the gains are lost that way, but not to the extent that it actually drives more total electricity demand than prior to LEDs. You need total consumption to increase following efficiency gains to get the "paradoxical" result.

"But lower electricity demand causes prices to fall, which leads to more electricity consumption elsewhere!" Also a plausible objection, but remember that you need a rebound effect strong enough to wipe out the original savings and then some for it to be an example of Jevon's Paradox. And we're not observing that.

Sorry for the terrible web site that doesn't let me post a direct link, but look at electricity consumption per capita for the United States here:

http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=WDI&f=Indicator_Code%3AEG.USE...

According to that, the most recent year with data (2013) actually saw slightly lower consumption per capita than 1998: 12,988.3 kWh and 13,154.8 kWh respectively. The all time peak was in 2008 at 13,663.4.
Is there any evidence that the functioning of neurons requires consideration of quantum effects acting on them?

Maybe that's the case, but this sounds like it goes against Occam's razor, and give a lot of extra credit to the chaotic process of evolution that it was meaningfully able to harness these quantum effects.
Jevon's Paradox is a simplified description of one small range of a dynamic equilibrium. It's a range that tends to appear often in practice, but it's very far from the entire history.

Everything depends on how fast automation will hit people. With time (and not total automation), society can adapt and you'll see Jevon's Paradox. But if it happens too fast, and nothing is done about it, you'll see people starving, and violent reactions, just like in the Industrial Revolution.

If it's accelerating, you can be certain it will become too fast at some point.

And then, you can't just wave the issue of total automation away - at some point we'll have to deal with no jobs being available, at least if we escape having something more pressing at the time.
Keep Controversial Git Opinions to Yourself (And Out of .gitignore)
c) a bad practice since it will make your program crash is a node has no parent.

if the node always having a parent is a invariant of your application, you should use `expect` with a clear error message when the invariant is broken.

if your node can have no parents then you want to handle this case explicitly with a `if let Some(parent) = node.parent() {` pattern.
SR and GR explicitly allow time-travel into the future. Which isn't a fully general Time Machine, of course, but is a huge change from 19th-century physics. If SR had just been invented today, and someone who thought it was crazy and didn't know the math was writing a blog post about it, I 100% expect they'd call it "the time travel theory" or some such thing.
As mentioned signal doesn't hide contact discovery. But it does a pretty good job of hiding who you are chatting to from everyone but OWS.

OWS received a Grand jury subpoena and was only able to produce "the only information we can produce in response to a request like this is the date and time a user registered with Signal and the last date of a user's connectivity to the Signal service.".

Certainly a NSL might compel OWS to add additional logging (and not talk about it). With that they could tell who messaged who, when the message was sent, and how big the message was.
I use Guix in production to handle a very complicated dependency tree for some private speech recognition software.
Yes, I considered cross compiling. However I have run into this problem often enough to want a real offline solution and to me it is simply unacceptable for a systems language to depend the Internet for builds involving external packages.
They could become profitable if they exited unprofitable markets and stopped most R&D, focusing on only the profitable parts of their business. They're buying growth and investing heavily in R&D because they want to take over a lot more than just Taxi services.
It is also a branded truck...

PR 101.

https://ot.to
The if at the beginning should give away that this isn't hard data from looking at our current reality, and more a thought experiment as we trend into a future run by AI.

Things like accounting though; a friend of mine got his CPA. Basically required to go through two years of college (he had a bachelors already, was more of a top up in relevant areas), then prep for a shit ton of CPA testing, work under some CPAs for at least a year, before getting the cert. And any legit accounting firm here expects that.

That's not a trivial amount of effort.

But now Turbo Tax is walking me through taxes with a few clicks. Not completely AI managed personal finance, but in 10 years?

What does my 32 year old friend do at 42? Become a programmer? How long will that take him with no prior knowledge?
Hope self-driving tech doesn't take long to mature! Even with the amount of money they've raised, they can't stick around for five years losing $3B per year.
Counterexample - OpenBSD.

Even a micro-kernel won't help. Even there, you have a few "keys to the kingdom", such as compromising the HD driver (If I can write what I want, I can modify the micro-kernel how I want).
Modern pop music is to music what brutalism is to architecture. Cheap, repetitive, horrible.
It's more than just technology: anxiety went up substantially from a mix of

-social status awareness (Facebook and other social networks allow me to constantly compare myself to others)

-for older white Americans the world seems to be under a liberal assault: gay rights, genderless bathrooms, black lives matter, muslim immigrants, a black president, microaggressions etc. All these changes came in relatively rapid succession and the old guard felt it strongly. I'm a liberal man in NYC but I also feel stressed when talking with people: what if I accidentally say something inappropriate, am considered racist or sexist despite my best intentions, wtf is a microaggression etc. I'm for these changes but I think they came in too fast.

-world news are now delivered as they happen, way more effectively than in the past; it's well-known that reading news causes anxiety
-the US Republicans deliberately misinformed and angered their constituency in their quest to fight Obama. They essentially subverted democracy by blindly resisting the other side and not engaging in any dialogue whatsoever. To justify their position and keep their constituency's support, they had to misinform and anger them.

The world is in a much better spot than ever before, but our awareness to every problem around the globe has also heightened. We are also just developing the right mechanisms to defend from information manipulation - fake news, clickbait and super-biased reporting (on both sides) erode trust - it's hard to know what is true and what not anymore, and some people don't even try, they just react (see pizzagate).

I also disagree with the author - a lot of jobs disappeared and this time they are not coming back in the form of other jobs. Through automation and information technologies one person can do the work many many others used to before. Revenue-per-employee increased dramatically because of this very reason, in all areas from finance to tech and services. Many jobs that were be doable with a high-school degree disappeared and they are not coming back.

http://www.medicaldaily.com/social-anxiety-and-craving-assur...

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...
This is at least partly relevant to the discussion: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

As a shorthand "quantum effects" are often hand-waved as crazy powerful "weird" things, but we can certainly model them and they really aren't as "magic" as a lot of popular science would have one believe (as much as even some of us otherwise rational people so strongly wish to believe in quantum magic).
You can't get into the interview pipeline without a referral.
Yes, but they would just be considered regular car accidents, not accidents registered on the company's "official log of self-driving car accidents".
The place where AI alarmists seem to forget this most often is in computational complexity, and particularly in the power of super-hyper-computers to simulate reality. Bostrom in particular doesn't seem to appreciate the constraints complexity theory puts on what an AI could calculate (unless he thinks P=NP).
If you have access to an object store, you can get persistent file system storage for your containers using ObjectiveFS[0]. You can run it either on the hosts or inside the containers depending on your goal.

[0]: https://objectivefs.com
NNTP?
Wasn't that kind of a solution for this?
chemistry uses quantum effects .... so of course brains do.

I think you have to be a bit more specific to claim something particularly special.

I think it's much more likely the important difference is that brains are built in 3D allowing far far more connectivity than wiring in ~5 layers of metal between 2D transistors in the same plane does - it's that added complexity we don't have the technology to reproduce (yet) that's the issue
> "if they look like a crank, ignore everything they say", then you miss special relativity (and later general relativity).

Uh ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#...
> so blithely assume so easily that there is no quantum effect in the brain structure.

He is following the mainstream opinion on this view, so does not have to justify it in detail. Almost nobody subscribes to Penrose's proposal.

> Our best approximations of intelligence are analogous to the comparison between sewing by hand vs the mechanics of a sewing machine, only the sewing machine remains far inferior (at least for now).

There's a blithe assumption of your own, which you don't attempt to justify. Newell and Simon's physical symbol system hypothesis is still taken seriously by mainstream AI, and it has the opposing view: that intelligence is a computational process, and thus we understand many fundamental things about it already.

I'm not taking a position here, just clarifying what the dominant positions are right now.

Also, sewing machines are better at sewing than 99% of people by any metric I can think of, and faster than 100% of people. They also do probably >90% of all the sewing on the planet. So I don't think your analogy does the work you intended.
I read the first and last link, had not seen the second. Looks like what I need, thank you. Surprised that Rust seems to expect people to have Internet access to build.
Totally unrelated to this; sorry for the hijack. Recently, I requested Uber for me and my friend from SF airport to San Jose; the rate was around $52 for two. Taken aback by high price, I opened Lyft and it quoted me $36 for two. My friend who uses Uber quite frequently switched to Lyft almost exclusively because of this pricing difference.

Even though I commend Uber's disruption in the Taxi space, it's actually scary once Uber attains absolute monopoly.
Nix and Guix don't need multilib support because every build is isolated, unlike in other package managers that stuff everything in /usr which is the reason multilib exists in the first place. You can just build the package for the desired architecture and run it.
> but living with someone is more likely to destroy your friendship than strengthen it.

Never live with someone you aren't prepared to hate. Nothing kills a friendship like becoming roommates.
Uber lawsuit alleges employees were misled on equity compensation
Ah, so that was Uber's leverage [1]. Make California and its laws look bad, and get a PR statement from a competing state likely offering incentives (or receiving knock-on benefits from relocation).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13234265#13234809
France. There are various internships dues during the PhD and the final paper is done while working 1-3 years at one place.

Basically, everyone has experience when they graduate from a master or a PhD there.

Not all experiences are born equal. e.g. Some work is at top tech companies, some work is at universities or low quality research centers with little work & expectations.
"The second premise is that the brain is an ordinary configuration of matter, albeit an extraordinarily complicated one. If we knew enough, and had the technology, we could exactly copy its structure and emulate its behavior with electronic components, just like we can simulate very basic neural anatomy today."

We could have a computer program that perfectly simulates the brain, but has some nasty O(2^N) complexity algorithm parts that are carried out in constant time by physical processes such as protein folding. Thus, in theory we could simulate a brain inside of a computer but the program would never get anywhere, even assuming Moore's law would continue indefinitely.
i speak with strangers in bars all the time, seriously. I thought it's one of the reasons bars exists. Even most tinder-dates start in bars, because if it's not going anywhere there other people to talk to. You just might not get laid.
I see. So the difference is really just a more easily accessible list of accidents. I'm sure records of "regular accidents" would include descriptions of the car involved, and a determined person could FOIA the information about all accidents an Uber self driving car was involved in regardless, right?
Social isolation is a huge problem. There's stigma around declaring it.

I'm doing my part to address this problem right now:

Any HN'ers in downtown Vancouver reading this post, let's
grab coffee near Robson Square. My email is in my profile
and synced to my phone so I will reply promptly.

I've been just reading principles.com (from the other HN thread) and inspired to take action.
It's the same if you talk about seeing
structures in old terrestrial tv noise
patterns.

Noise has plenty of patterns and structure, but it doesn't get repeated. Similar with modern classical music.
Does Apple run on a MicroKernel? Microsoft? Google definitely doesn't (it runs on linux).

The problems they solve are orthogonal to kernel issues.

Sandboxing thwarts userspace attacks (any program I install has access to my userspace). Microkernels solve kernel side attacks.
After a quarter of an hour, I keep coming back to two books/audiobooks that have shaped this year. The rest is of no significance in comparison.

The Tao Te Ching
by Lao Tzu
Translated by Gia-Fu Feng (1919–1985) and Jane English (1942–)

Here is the audiobook read by Jacob Needleman, with additional commentary at the end. You can listen to it repeatedly on daily commutes, gives you something to consider:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACr-EGYv71k

Dhammapada, The Sayings of the Buddha
Translated and edited by Thomas Byrom
While Byrom's translation is not generally well received among literary scholars, I enjoy his poetic edits, and believe it is easier to remember the verses in everyday life. I carry it a Shambhala Pocket Classics edition with myself, usually, and read it as a reminder whenever I lose the way.

Again, read by Jacob Needleman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbtSvgL2fEU
Another comment on this thread linked to a paper[1] that tells a narrative that the "Prove to me we can't go" was specific to this launch (specifically it claims that since NASA didn't want to ground all shuttles for 2 years, they instead accepted the recommendation that no launches be made outside of the environmental envelope of previous launches, but then this decision was reversed specifically for Challenger).

Not in the paper, but from my own memory, the launch was high profile due to the first civilian on a NASA mission and was repeatedly delayed by the time they launched. In fact my family had tickets to the launch, and we ended up getting various tours of the space center instead since they kept on delaying.

[edit]

Also, my understanding is that Kranz's hard-line began after the Apollo 1 tragedy. Was your friend there early enough to comment on that?

1: https://people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/FINRobison.pdf