skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although I know gamers and fans want HL3, and I say this as a huge Half-Life fan, I can't imagine a scenario where releasing Half-Life 3 would be a good business decision for Valve.

Releasing Half-Life 3 or episode 3 in 2008-2010 could have been good for Valve, in the sense that it would tie up lose ends in the story for players and would have sold well enough to be profitable. At this point Half-Life 3 is the most hyped game that has never existed and it'd be very hard for them to live up to most people's expectations. Valve is a pretty data driven company, and they have a lot of data about what sells and what players are playing. I don't think it's coincidence that most of the top played and top grossing games on Steam are Valve games and that Valve has moved away from single player games in favor of multiplayer games as a service.

There haven't been many commercially successful single player only, or primarily single player AAA campaign based first person shooters in recent history. Half-Life 3 could probably follow the model of last year's Doom and be successful, but it wouldn't live up to a lot of people's expectations. Doing something weirder, niche, outside of the box or supporting Valve's new business models (making HL3 VR only or a online competitive multiplayer or sandbox game) would alienate people, even if the game is amazing and innovative, because its once again not what they want from a Half-Life game. I don't believe Valve can make a Half-Life game without angering a large segment of fan base and ending up in a No Man Sky type situation. The cost of AAA single player games has skyrocketed as well, so I'm not sure if Valve wants to hire and spend the money on Half-Life 3 in terms of production values and content. Maybe eventually there will be an HL3 once Valve creates a game making AI that can read your mind and perfectly tailor a game to your expectations :). Valve could also make "Half-Life 3" without calling it Half-Life 3, I guess.

That Valve has not released HL3 and probably never will shows a strength in their business and business model, not an inability to execute or a flaw. Current day Valve is not the same company that made Half-Life and Half-Life 2, but I think they foster innovation and high quality games in a more impactful way (Steam, hardware, VR, etc.)
So the only future you see for humans if something like Ian Banks' Culture universe, where machines completely run the world, but are benevolent enough to harbor, nourish, and otherwise care for humans?
a 2 year chart!?
check the 1 day chart.
or ok let's see where it is in another 2 years.
Updated contact: recruitment@ecsa.io. Thanks!
This position, "AI as automation", is the important one.

Tasks, whether they are manufacturing or service, have a difficulty level in automation. That difficulty is generally scored as a 'cost' with respect to having a person do the task or service and the cost to have them do that.

There are two costs associated with execution, training and marginal cost of execution. So if you spend 10 hours training a factory worker to use a machine, that is your training cost, if it takes them 1 second to operate the machine to do the task, that is the marginal cost. Consider the printing press.

The printing press replaces a fully manual process. A scribe takes 3 to 5 years to write out a copy of a book. They are trained for many years in calligraphy, and each book takes years to produce. The printing press on the other hand you train a 'scribe' to arrange the letters from a type tray into a plate, to ink it, to press it onto sheets. That training takes less time than calligraphy training. Then for each book the scribe puts together the plates, prints out multiple copies of the page, and then assembles the book from the various pages. One or more copies of a single book can happen in a week. Your marginal cost has gone down as well.

Then plate printers, removed the type trays. Then mechanical paper handling fed paper into these machines. Etc to the point where now you need nothing, the author writes, uploads it to their kindle publishing account and the readers down load and read.

But all through this process "employment" around the notion of books changed. And who was employed and how also changed. The product, written and illustrated communication from one person to many, was fundamentally the same but delivered differently.

What we think of as "AI" today allows automating with less people training tasks which defied automation before. And by doing so it changes the market dynamics around that good or service. The most popular example is livery and delivery services with automated drivers. It only became possible to automate a driver when you had a machine that could recognize and respond to a wide variety of conditions in its environment.
That's what I figured.

I don't think it's unlikely that among the thousands of emails Carmack downloaded on his last day, that some of those which involved working with an external developer would have included such attachments.
Wonder if this issue is solved already?

>You can't just point your dish in a particular direction in the sky, because the satellite would be moving....
Deep learning-ish advances can theoretically automate a ton of things now, but it will take a few years for those AIs to be engineered/trained/marketed. That is actually a continuation of automation which is as much a social process as it is about technology.

But if you look at projects like Deep Mind Lab, Open AI Universe, Good AIs Lab and 5 million usd AGI contest, combine those 3d environments with incremental learning transferred across domains, leveraging deep learning, hybrid and other advancements, as well as (hopefully) the existing body of research from the field of AGI (which has existed for a number of years, despite many pretending it didn't) -- we now have very powerful parallel learning tools and many public projects aimed at general agents. And very convincing demos in more narrow domains. Because of all of this I personally believe the core AGI technology will be demonstrated within the next two years. How long before that makes its way into embodied robots and gets trained up to the point it can be readily adapted to various industries may be another few years.

So my own belief is that we should expect ALL jobs to start to be 'threatened' by AGI systems by around 2022-2023.
tragedy of the commons, I suppose
How we can limit global warming to 1.5°C
Can a Self-Steering Antenna Fix Both Wi-Fi and TV Reception Issues?
> And it shows in the clumsy menus that make sense if you went along for the ride but for a 1st-timer are just confusing.

Would you mind being a wee bit more specific? :)
Working for a company like that, BUT they allowed me to completely rewrite 3 of the tools from scratch in a more modular fashion so that I could do these things without having to modify the old code bases. Now there are two other applications that I still have to support (and were written by a consulting company we no longer contract through). It's night and day. So this isn't really the worst thing if you're given the authority and power to take full control of an application and rebuild it and take ownership of it. Of course, this doesn't really apply to junior devs.
ctrl + shift + d in Sublime is shift + alt + down in VS Code. Multiple cursor copy & paste works fine.
Isn't education the largest part of state spending in France (not saying it is bad thing, but still).
This is sufficiently simplistic to be tone deaf to what's going on. The rhetoric has been "jobs!" but this isn't a complaint that there are no jobs; the complaint is two fold, a.) lack of work that utilize people's interest and/or skills b.) lack of work that pays what people expect or even need to get ahead.

Wage stagnation is a real problem. It's a kind of vectorized unemployment where everyone in the middle class on down is partially unemployed through a combination of more part time work rather than full time, and stagnant wages. The broadness of the problem makes it seem like we have good employment numbers, but wage stagnation is a big problem, especially in contrast to the rise in cost of living, in particular housing.
Yes, and the centralized version comes from a tree that in the Linux workflow is only able to be modified by one person. You submit patches via email or pull requests (literal ones, to pull from a repository); you don't share commit bits on a centralized repository.
I found that looking at the query plans for the SQL I wrote really improved my SQL skills. It is amazing how it builds a mental model in your head. You learn very quickly what looks good and what actually works, plus you get a really good feel when the optimizer is going to walk off the cliff.
Should read: 'Accenture finds a way to bill for another $12B a year in consulting services' :)
There's a crucial difference this time around, though. After the industrial revolution, there were still plenty of jobs that people could do that machines were no good at. By definition, human-level AI is as good as or better than a human at some task. Therefore, an AI revolution means, by definition, that there won't be any jobs that can be done by a human that can't be automated. Adaptability won't help, since there will be nothing left to adapt to.
The crown and the House of Lords are peripheral details in the UK. The elected parliament is the sovereign authority.
I second that! Thank you very much for the link. Looks like the perfect lightweight and powerful mail client. And the fact that it stores each mail in its own file is absolutely bombastic. I guess I can finally sync my mail on different machines using my cloud storage as the sync back-end.
From people trying to protect their own ass by not telling her that Watson doesn't work.
The issue is not that yet another group of cowards is whining. The issue is that once machines can do everything better than humans, we will need a new way to organize society.

Machines have already replaced animals including humans for the application of pure physical force to solving problems.

Now machines are now replacing animals including humans for the application of intellect to solving problems.

It is not clear that there is any next frontier. Would it be "love" or "spiritual practice" or what?

Some people say that AI will not progress as far as industrial-age machines did in obsoleting humans. They sometimes give specific examples, claiming that they find AI-generated art to be dull or that AI-guided robotic surgeons only succeed in narrow tasks, etc. It's OK to argue that this will take a long time but I haven't heard anyone explain why the AIs won't win in the long run. Maybe the run is so long we shouldn't worry about it?

Some other people say "we found new jobs before, we'll do it again." For example, the IBM chief. And that seems like empty wishful thinking.
>stepping through complex applied maths functions manually in pen and paper.

We do that because:

A it helps us understand them better

B it teaches us how to think, the way Feynman said "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved". Granted, it seems pointless to work through what is easily accessible through machine BUT it teaches how to solve new problems. I wouldn't consider using NumPy or Matlab as the first step towards solving a new math problem.

It's like using Assembly vs using a higher level programming language.
Wall Street Clearinghouse to Adopt Bitcoin Technology https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/business/dealbook/wall-st...

Hasn't come out yet, but they're clearly a boring company that isn't chasing trends. We'll know in a year or so whether this is all smoke.
Something being funded by the Kochs doesn't automatically make it a Koch propaganda outfit.

>Its this philosophy that guaranteed the the information revolution dividends didn't go the people the same way they're trying to make sure the automation revolution dividends don't go to the people.

What are you referring to? Vague, unscientific claims of class victimization, with no statistical support provided, is the bread and butter of socialist demagoguery.
I think given the prevailing network conditions of the past 6-12 months the statement that "Bitcoin is fast" needs a [citation needed] qualifier.
Make Jobs and Stay: Department of Homeland Security Foreign Entrepreneur Rule
It's kind of you to go out of your way to thank me, and not all the other folks who are providing similar anecdata. I feel blessed.
It's not about what salary that engineer deserved, but what they could command. That engineer might have done $1 million worth of work a year, and deserved a $1 million salary; but he couldn't go to another company and proclaim he was worth $1 million. He could probably go elsewhere and get a slightly above average salary, your company knew that, and that is why they paid him that.
Pokéapi / the RESTful Pokémon API
Optimizing Linux for Slow Computers
I call it the burn and churn model. Game studios and IT MSP's both engage in it habitually. The firm I work for has a 200% yearly rate of churn for IT managers. They expect 24/7/365 on call and pay below market. Really its just a place where people go until they find a new job.
It's all speculation. Increases in productivity (GDP per hour worked) are typically accompanied by rising wages. So you're likely to see job losses in impacted industries accompanied by rising wages in aggregate. It's not obvious which direction inequality would head.
EBay Rival Letgo Raises $175M to Grow Secondhand Market
There is just no way you and I, amateurs commenting sporadically in our free time, have the resources to combat armies of paid trolls.

I think that there are armies of amateurs with tons of free time. However, these are largely manipulated by armies of paid trolls. What's worse, is that the manipulation involves the normalization of non-thinking conformism, social coercion, and hate-filled groupthink. This applies to both sides of the political spectrum.
>And against all of this, unemployment is still near its target rate.

Unemployment is a synthetic measure. A mom working 39 hour shifts at Walmart so she doesn't get benefits isn't the same as a cush office job that's rolling in benefits. When we look at post-industrial societies, we look at late stage job creation being problematic. There's a lot of Mcjobs, temp jobs, and contract jobs. Technically those people are employed, but its not sustainable for them.

Yes, the US has done well but its an exception for the most part due to the massive economy at work here and the relative lack of competition, until recently, from other regions. French youth unemployment hit 26% a few months ago. Spain and Greece are just as bad, if not worse. Jobs in many European economies are lifer jobs because if you leave, your chances of getting a new one is slim.

The real question is, when is the camel's back going to break. Another good career job replaced by a McJob thanks to automation won't change the unemployment stats, but it will make people unhappy. It will drive down the economy with less spending and other issues. In other words, wages matter, not just employment numbers.

I would not assume we are sitting pretty right now. This dam is going to break. Arguably, the surprise win of anti-automation, anti-liberal, anti-globalization, and anti-intellectual candidates in the UK and the USA are the first signs of a major fault.
Thing is, there is no universally accepted "standard set of axioms" in mathematics (let alone in all of "science"). Not since around the early 1900s anyway. Even assumptions that may seem obvious to most people, such as the famous Axiom of Choice, are only accepted provisionally in modern mathematical texts. In the extreme case of what is known as the "intuitionistic logic", even some of the most widely accepted laws of logical reasoning are rejected. If you add the fact (Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem) that given enough axioms there always be statements that are impossible to prove or disprove, the whole situation with logic will become, well, complicated.
As a former C++ dev, you can't compare Ruby LOC to C++ LOC. Just 4x the Ruby and then it becomes more fair. C++ is just verbose. #import <algorithm.h> doesn't fix everything blocks fix.
Money is a good way to tell me I'm valued.
> That said, from reading the forums, the dev team seems chronically understaffed to the point that some of them are less than polite to users.

Are referring to threads on BlenderArtists where users regularly give hell to Krita developers? :)
> It’s hard to believe that as of 2016, the best method for offline storage in a web app was localStorage

IndexedDB has been around and usable for long enough that I used it on projects >3 years ago, with a fallback to localStorage just in case (looking at you, IE9). Apache Cordova even gave a nice little abstraction over sqlite so that using IndexedDB + phonegap was seamless and gave even more storage (IIRC). It was a pretty solid success for the data-heavy project I was on at the time. Load times the second time around were slashed to almost nothing. The app logic just needed to retrieve anything new since <latest timestamp> from the back end and update the UI.

Our experience was pretty great, though. I definitely highly recommend implementing some sort of domain-specific data caching layer with IndexedDB if you have the chance and if you're moving enough data to justify it. Just make sure you think through the update logic (e.g. use timestamps or log-structured data), and handle merge conflicts appropriately if necessary (i.e. if your app can be used offline).

There are plenty of great wrappers out there that simplify most use cases, too. We ended up going with localForage [1] to simplify refactoring away from localStorage.

[1] https://github.com/localForage/localForage
* I don't understand how IndexedDB and WebCrypto have anything to do with a distributed chat system like Slack*

Uh, what? The OP didn't mention Slack at all. I mean, you could make this kind of...comment on anything: "What does X have to do with Y?" (In this case, X=(WebCrypto & IndexedDB) and Y=(Slack)). But it's not very useful.
People transfer money based on WhatsApp messages from acquaintances, without at least a phone call confirmation?

Seriously, even for good friends and family, I'd expect a phone call when asked for money, not a message. It's basically a matter of respect.
Does the wattage coming in entirely converts to heat? I always assumed it didn't, but have no idea in what proportion.
The needs of a corporate security team are the same as the needs of the free-software-loving individual user: the actual owner of the machine needs control over the computing being done on that machine, and someone who has temporary access to the machine, including an authorized non-owner user with physical access or malware that temporarily gets access (even perhaps root access) to the machine before being removed / before the machine is reimaged, should not be able to subvert the computing freedom of the owner of the machine.

A corporate security team wants to make sure that whether ME is on or off, it stays that way and can't be flipped by someone with temporary access or by malware. That's exactly what individual end users want too for their computing freedom.
Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?
I'm hoping to have a technical discussion, emotions aside.
I've heard about NASA's Flight Software teams being very strict on 9-5 work hours, with lots of code review and tests. I was under the impression this wasn't as strict with the competition from SpaceX and Blue Origin now that we aren't sending people to space on our (USA) own rockets. Is my impression incorrect?
After Cellebrite Breach, Hacking Team Lashes Out Against ‘Vigilante Hackers’
A distributed and coordination-free log management system
'Planet Nine' Can't Hide Much Longer, Scientists Say
Harvard’s complete photography course is now available for free online
Ginni started at IBM as an engineer so I'm pretty sure she has some level of technical competence.
raise doesn't always mean money. It's counterintuitive, but from my experience, it's more the act of being passed up or not cared about than the actual $$ count that matters.

Like, you might still make less money than you would elsewhere, but if your employer at least makes an effort, people are much happier.
It is, although the discussion of health insurance centers about various approaches to rearranging deckchairs (When, instead, the entire system should be torn up, and replaced with single player. It's not clear if even doing that will be enough to really save it.)
H.R. 170 Will Allow Large Companies to Consolidate Talent in the Tech Industry
I've observed the same about performance, slight key input latency. On my home workstation (beast) it's unnoticeable, but it's an issue on less-snappy systems like many laptops out there.

For the life of me I can't understand how the core function of displaying text in a freaking text editor isn't optimized to hell and back. And I love Atom, but I don't get why the latency. It's like the most core of core functions... There's no excuse in my book, like cold french fries, or dirty restrooms. (Other editors are plagued by this too btw, it's a not an Atom-specific issue.)

I really hope this gets optimized eventually, because otherwise the whole JavaScript and CSS frontend (CoffeScript) is an awesome paradigm (I actually think this should be the way to make whole OS GUI moving forward, in a bid to make it easier to unify an app's appearance regardless of the platform. But I'm digressing).
>Yes, that could deter people from working, since they already get their money.

One thing that this also does not discuss, I do not consider this a bad thing at all. In fact, I think it is great. If someone is purely content with living on their UBI paycheck, more power to them. They are now spending money on things to contribute to the economy whereas before they were not.
Dribbble 2.0
What's the state of development of this? Did somebody use it with Raspberry pi? I want to use this over Clojure(only on pi) because I have read Clojure is slow on Raspberry pi(even 3, not sure how true that is).

Also, how fast is this? How does it compare to other lisps(or schemes) in terms of speed? Can someone port the benchmarks to https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org.
Gallium-based thermal compounds are commercially available, often called "liquid metal". See "Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra" for one example.

They're very effective, but must be used with extreme care because aluminum is highly soluble in liquid gallium. Aluminum is the most common material for heatsinks, and it will literally dissolve if the gallium touches it. Gallium is also electrically conductive, so if you accidentally dripped any into your processor socket I assume you're going to have a problem.

If you're careful with it and make sure to get a cooler with a copper contact area, it'll cool more effectively than traditional thermal pastes. I thought about trying it, but it seemed like more hassle than it was worth.
Products are more often sidelined by technical debt than they are killed by it.

A typical scenario is:

1) Product becomes too hard to change but has many existing customers

2) Product is off-shored, and costs of maintenance are under-estimated because it depends on a vast technical ecosystem

3) Alternative products are developed to replace revenue of the original

The original product can live in this moribund state for decades.