skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> _I_ am proof? I wonder why you are making it personal. Its not about me though is it?

Fair enough. Your post is proof

> Do _you_ think that all of these large programs, companies, investors would be so publicly pursuing this goal if it were not feasible?

Sure, it happens all the time.

> If not within two years, then how many years do you think it will be before these projects yield results that have human-like generality or abilities?

I'm not sure those projects ever will but in general before we get AGI? It's totally unpredictable. My current best guess is that self-driving car systems won't be as good as promised and because they've pierced the public consciousness, we will get AI backlash setting in another AI winter. This winter will trim the fat of all the crap that gets published now and maybe* a couple new fundamental techniques will be born. Maybe those techniques lead to AGI when we emerge from the winter. We'll get AGI like we'll get cold fusion. When it comes it comes.

> We have already achieved super-human intelligence in numerous particular domains.

Sure but show me a system that can do just two unrelated tasks. Doesn't even have to do them above human intelligence, but something that can say put blocks in holes like a two year old and do some basic language processing. Or play chess and recognize pictures of dogs. What kind of leap is even required to get there?
Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?
I have recently been involved in the overhaul of an established business with poor output into a functioning early/mid stage startup (long story). We are back on track but, honestly, my lessons learned fly in the face of a lot of currently accepted wisdom:

1) Choose languages that developers are familiar with, not the best tool for the job

2) Avoid microservices where possible, the operational cost considering devops is just immense

3) Advanced reliability / redundancy even in critical systems ironically seems to causes more downtime than it prevents due to the introduction of complexity to dev & devops.

4) Continuous integration seems to be a plaster on the problem of complex devops introduced by microservices.

5) Agile "methodology" when used as anything but a tool to solve specific, discrete, communications issues is really problematic

I think overall we seem to be over-complicating software development. We look to architecture and process for flexibility when in reality its acting as a crutch for lack of communication and proper analysis of how we should be architecting the actual software.

Is it just me?
I know that NordVPN use DO for some of their VPN servers. I don't know how (or if) they handle abuse reports from DO.
I mean it in the sense of being independent of employment for income. This is the common meaning in my circles.
> fixed PTO

Why on earth is this a downside? "Unlimited vacation" is a scam.
No way it's double. 1.5x maybe. And they have H.265 now (in Polaris cards).

Not everybody can afford that setup, and I think even an 8-core will struggle with 4K…
To the extent that spirituality encompasses aspects of psychology then clearly it can be studied, but it hardly seems useful to call it "spirituality" then.
Well, scientists often consider the two factors of relevance and rigor. A scientific study must be rigorous in its methodology in order to pass peer review. But it must also be relevant to a question or problem that matters. So you often start a paper with a few paragraphs about "the problem" and how/why your contribution is important. This would be even more important if applying for a grant, because funders want to make sure there's a good reason for the study.
Stockholm ambulances to trial blocking drivers' music so sirens can be heard
I disagree. This is a bit like browsing open source repos on github and laughing because of bad algorithms, issues or quick fixes.

There is indeed bad medical research. Typically, animal research that focuses on just one marker and then extrapolates on what it means for humans. You should not rely on these. At best, they give you cues on what might work for humans. But there are multiple studies that reviews all medical research. They study 5 million people over 20 years, follow their health as well as their habits. Variables are adjusted. In such studies, if you discover that green tea decreases risk of type 2 diabetes, then evidence is high. Much, much higher than the simple animal research where mice were given green tea.

The biggest problem is not medical research. It's the army of bloggers, writers from NYTimes and overall the general population hungry for the latest superfood or cure of cancer. They think that throwing billions of dollars will find a revolutionary food, herb or medicine for cancer. So medical researchers present their results in a way that's pleasing. And then most bloggers are just too guilible. That's amplificated by social media, or even boards like Hacker News (see the upvotes for effect of coffee on mortality yesterday. That study is non-conclusive but the story got hundreds of upvotes. People are just too happy to discover that their daily drink will extend their lifespan, even though evidence is limited)
You Have to Be Quick with Words in Alpha Swipe
This blog post seems like a much better link to use:

https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/
I use Google Keep. But I plan to move off of it after I accidentaly removed part of the note and noticed then that there is no undo at all. Even notepad.exe has 3 step undo, so that is totally unacceptable.
What I learned from my Uber data
3. Can you give us more insight into how the Eich ordeal is looked at in retrospect at Mozilla? Would it happen again in a Peter Thiel kind of situation?
A book suggested to me by my therapist. It's a Dutch one so probably useless to you.

> Is there anything you wish you knew when you had just started getting into mindfulness?

I wish it was made more clear to me that this is an evidence-based method with plenty of scientific support for its effectiveness, so I would have been less sceptical and picked it up sooner! My therapist was kind of... let's just say that his master thesis was on astrology.
If you're earning $300k/year in California, you're paying ~$22k in state income tax, so you should be itemizing on your federal return with or without the mortgage, and subtracting the standard deduction from the benefit doesn't seem right.
I agree - even with the VSCode stuff, they're missing their major competitive advantage: Visual Studio.
The US really does have a lot of problems with their tax system to be honest.

For a country whose citizens outwardly hate tax, you'd think they would have one of the best, most straightforward, and fair tax systems in the world. But instead you have one of the most convoluted, loopholey, broken systems in the world.

Whereas in countries where taxes aren't as "hated" (Europe, Canada, etc) they don't pay a cent to file taxes, have less loopholes, it is less complicated, and overall fairer.

If I was an American I'd hate tax too, but you guys made it that way. Why does it still cost money to file taxes anyway?
This is a neat little app, I like the simplicity of it.
I worked at a non-profit that paid pennies on the dollar for their office space, specifically because the building's owner believed in their mission. If they had to pay the full price they probably wouldn't operate.

Do you not know what philanthropy is? Some people conceive of morality outside raw market forces.
Localized jamming sounds a lot less disruptive than turning off the system for the entire world.
Ask a patent attorney anything – live Q&A
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Julian Assange ready for US extradition, one of his lawyers suggests
Or option C. use his position as the sole admin of the account to do a simple recovery. Turn it over to the college, get it it in writing that everything is squared away concerning that account.

Ending on that high note, I feel like he could ask for a good reference and clear up their history. "I wasn't willing to relocate and things didn't work out. I handled this request in good faith and I'd appreciate a good reference for past work and the handling of this issue."

Alternatively trying to bill them reasonably for contract/freelance/consulting work would probably be OK too.
This is true in the US as well. And until the 409a rule, it was also exactly how you state. After 409a, private companies are required to speculate at their current value, and this sets the difference between your strike price and that at which you purchased the stock. It's this difference which is taxable. The US was trying to fix something that didn't exactly have a problem, making sure people are being taxed on profits, I think this was misguided.

The unintended consequences are exactly what is spelled out in this article, people with less means cannot exercise stock b/c of two reasons, the cost and then the tax, actually raising the cost on illiquid assets.

This is broken, and causes the type of self imposed entrapment described in the article. If this is a big deal to you, contact you congresspeople and ask them to "fix" or so that the tax is only due on liquidation of the stock.
It's really unfortunate that most startups appear to be set up with ISO shares. The company I am at now is an LLC and distributes RSUs, which meant when I joined I was able to file an 83/b form which minimizes my tax impact.

At my last company, I exercised options. I owe the IRS tens of thousands of dollars due to AMT this year (not that it was unexpected, as I did heavy research beforehand).

Can anyone shed light why companies aren't set up to distribute RSU's (and allow employees to fill out an 83/b form within 30 days of being granted?). Is it not preferrable to investors for some reason?

The worst part of the AMT and exercising ISO shares at a startup is that it is nearly impossible to make an informed decision on whether or not to exercise (and how many shares to exercise). You can't possibly know your tax liability until next tax season when all your tax forms come in.

Last year, I called maybe 5 different tax accountants for advice on how to estimate what my tax impact would be for exercising shares and got 5 different answers. This stuff is COMPLICATED.

Finally just got TurboTax and plugged in some guesses of my deductions, etc and got some type of estimate. Filed some 1040ES's last year to minimize the penalty and hopefully will get close.

Another sad fact is how few people at startups are even educated on the subject. While one can argue it is up to each employee to do their own research, I think it is in startups ethical interest to have their CFO team give an overview of the stock plan and what kinds of things employees may want to ask their accountants about.
... and stop drinking any alcohol. That has really solved my depression problems. A few drinks and the next day I feel at least a little sad and anxious.
Quick summary on why you think it will fail catastrophically in the long run?
I use C# at work, the syntax is better than Java but there's one huge issue: good luck getting it to work without Windows and Visual Studio.

.NET core is still very immature, we had to back out every time we tried to use it in production. Maybe in a few years it will be good.

Java on the other hand has support for many IDE's, package managers, web servers, JVM's, OS's. You can swap out pretty much everything, no vendor lock in issues at all. The open source community is far stronger as well. So many times I wanted to use a cool database and found out there's no official C# client
>Isn't this a little like saying that men and women are different due to their differing precious bodily fluids?

I get your point, but what else are we but a bunch of bodily fluids?
Heat can be transmitted through EM radiation (of all frequencies, but IR is predominant for temperatures we're accustomed to) but also by direct contact between materials. For typical temperatures, radiation doesn't transmit much heat. Vacuum makes for a pretty good insulator. If you want to remove 20kW of heat from a small space, you'll need to do most of that removal by transferring the heat to a fluid of some kind, e.g. by putting it into the air.

To see the difference in practical terms, pick an item that's noticeably warm, but not hot enough to burn you. Hold your finger very close to it. The heat you feel there is radiated. Then touch it, and feel the heat that's conducted through touch. You'll feel much more heat with the latter.
JIRA is what you make of it. My comment is that it requires a ton of gardening to keep it useful. You probably need 1 person for every 5-10 devs who has JIRA-wrangling as a primary responsibility that eats a significant chunk of their time. Part of this is the nature of project management, but part of it is that JIRA's workflows for basic tasks like "close as duplicate" or "do this action on all issues linked to issue X" are terrible and require way too many clicks. In shops that don't properly allocate people to this task, it's extra debt that just piles up and becomes a mess, so I could definitely picture some of the hate being as a result of those experiences.

The author may also be using "JIRA" as a proxy for a heavily pre-planned waterfall culture with a big emphasis on time tracking, doing what you're told, fake-metrics success theatre, etc. (cf. https://hackernoon.com/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-f...)
This advice is often given but it's easier said than done. Let's say you work at a unicorn for 3 years and in that time it goes up 10x in VC fantasy land valuation. On paper you have a lot of money and the company reasonably might go public a couple years after you leave.

Let's say you're granted about a year's salary in shares when you first join so you've vested $100K for a round number. When you leave that equity is worth $1 million. Now, you have to come to the table with the $100K to exercise and probably another $200K to pay the tax man. If the company goes belly up, you lose $100K outright and are stuck with a $200K tax credit that you get back in $3K per year deductions for the rest of your life.

Or, you could have exercised the shares as you vested and paid a bit less in tax with the lower 409A valuation..but you're still maybe looking at a $100K total tax bill.

Do you take the risk or not? Or do you end up locked in for a few more years of handcuffs while waiting it out?

It'd be really hard for me at least to walk away from this situation with nothing..so then I have to value the equity as something. And if I want to treat it as 0 it'd be really tempting to wait a few years and see..which again means the equity is worth something to me.
I'm interested in working for a non profit in the future and I expect to take a pay cut. I justify it by thinking of the good the org will be doing and other benefits likes more PTO, remote work, flexible schedule.

My ideal is working for a non profit in a developing country and being able to live there. Even a modest salary would go a lot further.
Since the exchange functions as a market maker, do they also make money on the spread ? Or is the Ask and Bid an exact match ? Maybe there is no way to know for certain without two accounts.

Also do you trade on multiple exchanges to perform inter-exchange arbitrage or for some other reason ?
This is very interesting! How is the overall performance? Is it being used in production?
I'm a bit surprised cashless exercising wasn't mentioned (although perhaps the author isn't aware of the option).

Here is a link to a HN discussion on equity compensation from about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10880726
We can go back an forth about this (or not, doesn't matter), but my point still stands.

> An an economic sense, an investment is an allocation of capital.

As I said.

> Certainly consumer purchases of durable goods are not investments.

I relate this to the consuming of your primary residence ("home").

> By investing, one becomes the beneficiary of some of the means of production. Real estate is a perfect example. Real estate is always an economic investment, whether one then consumes the output or not. Also, by the way, many investments in this sense are consumable, usually with long rates of depreciation. That applies to a CNC machine, it applies to a fleet of productive vehicles, and it applies to buildings, including primary residences. If the fact that a house degrades with use makes it not-an-investment, you argue yourself into an obviously-silly corner.

Your home is not a mechanism of production. Sure, if you buy your house, you may be able to sell it for a profit down the line. However, you home is a place a residence. A CNC machine, a fleet of vehicles, a building that you will then fill and rent out all are mechanisms of production. The idea of your home as a means of production is based upon the false idea (prevalent in the US, and apparently Canada) that home values will always increase. Non of those other "consumable" investments are based upon the value of the investment themselves... they produce value due to usage, not inflation.

> Your line about "it's a bad financial one" is almost too foolish to touch. A bad financial investment is still an investment. Telling people that a bad investment is not an investment is not communicating, it's posturing.=

I was probably being a little hyperbolic there, but my point was that you should not consider your home an investment.

> Financially, if you buy a candy bar, and its value drops, it was still an investment (a poor one).

Again, didn't I say that?

> If you want to make the claim that housing is a poorly-chosen investment, that's a different claim. Although, without knowing more about the life circumstances of the would-be investor, a fairly preposterous one, since it's clearly a good investment for many people, in practice.

In practice, for many people, it's not. See the 2008 housing crisis.
1) Is a vote about leaving the EU, not joining it
2) Is not a vote about about joining the EU. It was a vote about an association agreement, which is different, and also it was people in one country voting about a different country. Not a great idea really.
3) The Greek referendum is not a vote about joining the EU, and in any way the greek government, after it downed on them how disastrous would be to follow the vote, went the opposite way.
4) and 5) prove that it is a voluntary union, and are not about joining the EU - all the countries are already members. Not sure what your point is.

"The EU most certainly does not have the consent of the governed."
Yes it does, and its approval rating is still way over 50% in most countries.

"This has got to be the stupidest move yet."
Actually it sounds rather good to me, but I'd like to have a link to that decision please. Medical doctors are however free to work in any country for years already, they still make very good money and there are still shortages o medical personnel everywhere (source: friends among emigrated medical professionals).

Southern Europe was given enough rope to hang itself and it did, but again this all were decisions of (corrupt and irresponsible) national governments, not of the EU.

"The EU parliament has no power."
It does have some, what I am saying is it has too little power.

"Power exists within the European Commission"
and also within the European Council (the summits), where all major decisions are taken. And this body consists of heads od the states.

"The EC has the power to unilaterally impose laws on the member countries"
It does not.

"as was demonstrated with Greece"
It was not demonstrated - Greece has to do things because otherwise the money will stop flowing and it will go bankrupt, which is a decision the Greek government can take at any time.

"There are very few things that are beyond the reach of the EC."
There are quite a lot of such things, national governments are still the institutions where most of the power resides. See the dictatorial tendencies of Hungarian and Polish governments, where the EC does almost nothing.

"The EU has been an unmitigated disaster for normal people in the EU."
Most of which currently live in the most prosperous era ever.
Got any good sources on what exactly the rules are in Canada?
This was by design, in that Jobs intentionally chose Cook because he wanted someone that could keep Apple running well and stable during the iPhone boom. It was obvious a few years into the life of the iPhone, that it was going to be a monster product and generate immense profit (although I seriously doubt many expected $40b in annual profit). Jobs didn't believe Apple needed another product guy to come in so soon and tamper with that setup. Cook's job was almost solely to shepherd the iPhone and the supply chain through its growth phase. The guy that comes after Cook, will have to be the next product guy and in theory he'll have immense resources to work with.
In some cases volatility is categorically good, e.g. if you have a put option that's in the money. Volatility increases the chance of it either going far into the money (so you profit) or far out of the money (in which case you can just choose not to exercise the option): it increases potential reward without increasing potential loss (you'll never lose more than the premium you paid for the option).
Ability to search inside torrents is being considered and will be added soon.
Just to expand on this more, there are some reasons why this is. The biggest one is that even if you have all cap-table information available at the time of your offer (which you almost certainly don't), you don't have to be told when things happen (bank loans, bridge loans from investors, terms of new investments, new employee hires, expansion of the employee pool of stock, more shares issued to officers, new stock classes and more).

And that is just as an employee; you can't possibly be on top of all of this information without being a C-level employee, and if you're constantly asking for updates on this, you're probably not doing your regular job. Even so, you may not be privileged to some information (investors getting more shares issued if target revenue numbers aren't hit, for instance). And you definitely don't get a say in any decisions that affect this (unless you're a C-level employee, again).

When you are leaving the company, there are so many ways you can get screwed. Regardless of the 90 day exercise window, unless the company is on the very precipice of IPO-ing, you're never going to find out the terms of new investments / bank loans / (see above). And honestly, the easiest segment of people to screw over are the former-employees. The company can issue new classes of shares to current employees that render former employees' stock worth effectively $0. The company has nothing to lose; current employees are happy because they get a bigger slice of the pie, investors are happy because they didn't have to give up anything; the only people upset are the people who aren't around anymore.
Most people in the UK don't even need to do tax returns.
Firstly you're implying that psychology is entirely defined by physiology. Secondly, and because you're making the first mistake, you're assuming that the study says there can't be psychological sexual differences.

All this study shows is that the brains are pretty much the same physically. Now as someone who has seen the effect of hormones on friends going through a gender change, have seen girlfriends use hormones as birth control methods I can tell you that hormonal activity can have a huge impact on the way the hardware runs.

Consider for a moment that the hardware is the brain and the hormonal activity brought forth by the body is like the OS.
Hahahahahahahaha - brilliant trolling!
> This is a reasonable reply and I appreciate the very relevant data points.

Faith in humanity restored. Thanks, this line made my day. Hope I can have the to use that same spirit today.