skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Someone needs to go take one for the team and go through the hassle of a petty lawsuit (which will be an open and shut case in front of any judge), and the judge will find that if you're a $400bn operations company and have a status page, it needs to be accurate. This is simple, like a judge forcing you to turn off your "we're always open! Yes, right now! Come on in" giant flashing billboard, whenever you close.

It's ridiculous that people need to check a $7 server that shows if amazon is down or not. Someone go through this petty lawsuit and force them to sort their shit.

If you're amazon, sort your shit or you deserve the huge legal damages of making someone take one for the team and actually go through with a lawsuit. This isn't even a grey area.

It's trivial for you to report this accurately. If you have a page purporting to do so...do so.
You can train with the techniques at https://memoryleague.com/

Start with "images" by linking each image to the next one to form a story, and pick up the techniques for the other disciplines at http://artofmemory.com/start
The results of the research being made into a product now, managed by a new foundation named Gen Z.

"BUD17-503 The HPE Machine and Gen Z" at Linaro Connect 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BVtChDQVyQ
Well, I might be wrong, let's get that out of way first.

Second, market cap is actually $420B, but Buffett was talking about value, and BRK value is much higher, certainly over $500B.

But this is the way I see it. Berkshire could easily sell $90B in ten year bonds for some low rate, let's say for 4%. Those bonds are better than float in some ways? one is it's easier to use more if the proceeds to buy long term investments, much of float has to be tied up in safe and liquid investments approved by regulators such as short term bonds. So the long term returns should be higher using borrowing vs. float.

The counter is that float is free, often better than free the way Berkshire insurance ops are run. Let's assume BRK averages being paid 1% a year to hold the float, that makes the cost advantage to float 5% a year. If he can earn 2% more a year because of the fewer restrictions on what he uses borrowing for over float, the net difference per year would 3%, or less than $3B a year, or less than 1% a year in additional investment returns.

Now that's a significant benefit but far from a huge edge. It also might easily be less than that. One reason I might be wrong is "why not both?" If float doesn't preclude debt, then the float benefits stand alone, and could easily be worth $6B-$9B a year, and that's a pretty big benefit (2-3% a year).

But I don't believe both can be done because all that float requires WEB to hold dry powder against unforeseen mega-losses. If he maxes out BRK borrowing and his insurance subs suffer massive losses, he can only raise money through a horribly priced secondary or forced asset sakes and he'd never allow himself to be backed into that corner.
No, it's about contributing to society with work.

Being given UBI, you don't get any fulfillment from work or a feeling of contributing back to society.

If you bring in jobs, even just government jobs, people get a feeling of contributing because they work to produce something or provide a service and they pay taxes.

>If they want jobs so badly, why aren't they making them?

This is as stupid as saying, why don't poor people stop being poor by getting money? Good paying jobs take big investments that nobody cares to make. Look at orgs like Y combinator and other VCs. They will rarely even hear a pitch from someone not living in the bay area.
It just seems like "democratize" is one of those new startup buzzwords. But yes, it seems like really what they want to do is bring it to market, and by democratize, they mean have everyone buy it.
Wouldn't a "third AI company" be a net positive for society? Especially if it wasn't tied to a large network of other interests/products like the existing ones are? The biggest risk right now is that a select few companies are buying up every single company that "does AI" which massively limits the market.
It can be hard to attribute control, if 100 news organizations all push a narrative and that narrative sticks maybe all 100 of them had some control, maybe one had control and the other 99 were just mindlessly parroting what they said. The last time the NYT's narrative matched up with the generally accepted version of the truth? Probably as recently as the 2012 election, possibly even more recently. Was that control? Certainly looks like it to me but you may disagree and as I said, control is tough to prove. I don't think the parent comment is unlikely to come close to the truth though. It seems to come from pretty reasonable observations.
Many items on that list aren't actually bad things, they're just described using language with negative connotations.

For example

>Uber breaks laws all around the world to enrich itself, including allegedly trying to deceive government officials across the world.[4]

Detecting malicious users and protecting drivers by shadowbanning malicious users is neither illegal nor wrong. Uber has no legal nor moral obligation to help the governments entrap its drivers, or perform sting operations. [1]

> It refuses to treat its drivers as true employees, even though legally they are considered such in many jurisdictions, and only complies when faced with court orders.[6][20]

Stupid jurisdiction should not be complied with above direct legal necessity. Treating uber drivers as full time employees hurts both the drivers and the company (why do you think uber driver pay got lower the more 'benefits' uber is required to provide them?).

People shitting on uber always seem to ignore how much public utility it provides in every town it enters. I remember ~10 years ago when I was in Warsaw, coming back from a new years eve party, and I had to walk ~4 hours to get back home because there was no night public transport in that area, and no taxies were available at all. I was in wasaw again 2 years ago, and in the meantime uber has moved in. Getting a drive back on NYE was trivial - maybe we had to wait 20 minutes, and pay ~4 times more than a taxi would have been (but of course there were no taxis available); but split 4 ways it was still a great deal.

There's a reason people choose to use uber; and there's a reason people choose to be uber drivers. And yes, it sucks to be a taxi driver who has bought his way into a monopoly by buying a permit, and now cannot recoup the cost that easily. I wish there was a way to compensate them at a cost of the people who benefited from bringing in license requirements in the first place. But I don't see one, and in the end I believe it's more important to dismantle the broken system.

[1] http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/03/greyball-uber-app/
For that use case, absolutely! We made do with the version that could not even support label appends (limited joins). The current version would allow us a lot fewer workarounds.

The probabilistic hyperloglog data type is also a game changer compared to say redshift, but again it's only viable if you are dealing with counting (estimating) unique entities across billions of rows and super-wide dimension sets.

If you are doing a general purpose analytics store, Redshift is hard to beat because of reliability and ease of implementation.

Druid is a purpose-built race car. Redshift is a good cross-over - far less headache and can do almost any job good enough, but you won't have the tuning or performance (when tuned right) at scale. Although, I'm continuously impressed with what redshift actually can do, dispite the humble feature set.

Druid's main weakness is lack of SQL support, so it's not a great analyst datastore. You pretty much have to wrap it into a reporting app.
"In an Urbit world, your data is no longer trapped in a jumble of proprietary servers. Your urbit is a permanent, versioned, typed archive the size of your digital life."

https://urbit.org/posts/overview/
In fact, reducing the cost of manufactured goods helps the poor more than the rich in some sense, since a marginal reduction in cost of living for them is much more impactful than for a rich person.
That's not irony, just circumstantial.
>...it's a [S]tark comparison.

Subliminal shilling or decent understated joke?
> Apparently an unpopular opinion. Do those here think otherwise given he joined the company less than a year ago (and is thus not part of the original culture), but instead could try to repair the damage done by the uber-bro culture instead of looking for an easier paycheck?

Maybe 'uber-bro culture' is not actually a thing, and he doesn't see a possible solution for the PR problems?

It's really hard to stop the hatetrain.
The key here seems to be that performance does not drop off very much under load. DRAM cache hides latency, but only up to a point. Hiding latency is like a magic trick, and you can only hide so much before the trick starts to break down.
College hoops are gentrifying with most scholarships going to the middle class
The Last Patent on AC-3 (Dolby Digital) Expires at Midnight
Part of the money insurance customers pay the insurance company for insurance. They are required to hold reasonable amounts in safe investments to pay out claims with, and the insurer gets to earn interest or investment gains on it. The longer term the insurance commitment the more aggressively the insurer can invest part of it, because it won't be "owed" for years,
It pisses me off whenever I'm walking around Manhattan and I see new buildings going up that are only a few floors tall. It's such a poor use of limited space. And yet there are zoning regulations that limit vast swaths of even Manhattan to low heights (often lower than many of the existing structures that were built awhile ago). Check out this PDF of East Village as an example: http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/zoning/zoni...

All of those R7* and R8B zones only allow floor area ratios of 3-4, meaning that if a building takes up the entire lot, which is common, it is limited to those numbers of floors.
I know people whom moved from my rust belt home town and after the crash in 08' lost job(s). The one person was living in Florida for years before the crash. They were basically strong armed by social services into returning to their home states if they wanted to keep receiving assistance. I imagine they felt family ties would help ease the burden, if said person were back home near family however, in this case his only sister wasn't able to provide much beyond emotional support. I remember reading of similar cases in Hawaii after the crash, in those cases people were given flight vouchers for a resettlement to their home states.
I feel like there's a chance that they wanted to say 'triumph' but muscle memory took over after 'tr'
The dashboard shows region health, not AZ health. You don't even need cross-region deployment, just multi-AZ in the same region. The issue was isolated to a single AZ, not an entire region.
It's not surprising, but it's very difficult to discuss. It's one of those truths which we're culturally unable to admit; we all pretend it's not true even when we all know it is.
What would prevent this company from being bought up? And is "select few" and "select few +1" all that different?
> We want to level the playing field for startups to ensure that innovation doesn’t get locked up in large companies like Google or Facebook.

AI and ML are exciting because they promise to help us evolve systems and machines quickly to perform more accurately.

This requires access to a constant flow of large, proprietary datasets.

Providing cheap access to datacenters and compute power is a great first step for leveling the playing field for startups.

I'll be interested to see how YC tackles the (IMO) more important problem of providing access to the data needed to train models.

I think IBM has taken an extremely wise first step by acquiring the data assets of The Weather Company. This will give its Watson IoT portfolio a leg up on other companies that need to rely on a patchwork of public and private data sources when factoring something as integral as the weather into algorithms and logic engines.

Perhaps YC can consider something similar, pooling investors and VCs together to acquire/partner with providers of essential data.
You can also attach batteries to the RAM. This is already a solution people ship in production.
Another reason: some very durable materials are no longer legal. For example, beryllium copper and leaded solder.
I would greatly appreciate it, if the exporting of neo-liberal ideology and the resulting civil wars, could be limited to the capitalistic hellholes in other countrys.

I gladly pay taxes here in bavaria for that.
Because they're unrelated? Mixing in the Waymo suit does nothing to clarify the situation around Jones. Sure it's juicy, but it's a different story.
There is very little in this article that deals with Trump, and it does so vaguely and indirectly. Mostly it's just a summary of the book's plot and some trivia on it and related subjects. I was disappointed.
Well, speech provides 10-100 bps, which isn't much. But I doubt that pulling speech-driving data would do any better. You'd need to work at lower levels. There's probably lots of multidimensional parallel processing at play.

Requisite plug for Echopraxia by Peter Watts :)
I thought there was a story about nike interns(or some other big company) using interns to leave good reviews and comments on reddit.

Anyways this is nothing new and something that obviously goes on without saying.
Outside of the sexual harassment claims, literally none of this is different than any other huge tech company out there. People want to see Uber failing has a lot more to do with narrative than reality. People have created a caricature out of Uber's failings and applied it to every aspect of the company. It's starting to feel like an agenda more than actual concerns, it's pretty annoying actually. Once Uber is gone, if it ever goes, people will move on to Lyft or the next threat to the status quo. AirBnB and Uber are the current enemies because they endanger established businesses more than anything else. They don't have heavy B2B relationships like the other big players (Amazon, Google, etc) so they are naturally the targets of business that have no interest in seeing them succeed. This has a long history of happening well before Uber existed, people want to protect their interests and create and build upon a narrative of rapacious heartlessness.
Uber is still the big dog in town, I doubt they'll disappear completely.

Also, if you listen to the Lyft founder talk about the company, he sounds like he actually wants to help the world. Not to say that they can't become a shitty corporation, but it seems less likely.
> So a soldier will only seek help if he's ready to pull the trigger on career suicide

This matches my relative's experience. He only got help with PTSD once he was given the green light to retire from 20 years in TS clearance job.
It's pretty frustrating, once you see how dramatically their life improves following a few months of seeing a psychologist. He could've gotten that help a decade ago.
>And I think back a few years when people said we'd never be able to fly seamlessly from orbit down to the surface of a procedurally generated planet.

Starflight[1] could do that back in 1986[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFMxNlK8L4g&feature=youtu.be...
If you're the kind of person that's interested in taking up this challenge, but you currently have the coding skills without the deep learning skills, we built something that can equip you with most of the current best practices in deep learning in <2 months: http://course.fast.ai/ . It doesn't assume anything beyond high school math, but it doesn't dumb anything down (key mathematical tools are introduced when required, using a "code first" approach).

We don't charge anything for the course and there are no ads - it's a key part of our mission so we give it to everyone for no charge: http://www.fast.ai/about/

And yes, it does work. We have graduates who are now in the last round of applications for the Google Brain Residency, who are moving into deep learning PhDs, who have got jobs as deep learning practitioners in the bay area, etc: http://course.fast.ai/testimonials.html . Any time you get stuck, there's an extremely active community forum with lots of folks who will do their best to help you out: http://forums.fast.ai/ .

(Sorry for the blatantly self-promotional post, but if you're reading this thread you're probably exactly the kind of person we're trying to help.)
Animated fractals drawn with Raphael JS
Is AlphaGo really what we want to classify as 'intelligence'? It is a calculating engine – one which outperforms humans, to be sure, but no more intelligent than a properly-wielded pocket calculator.
Its more like AlphaGo is a PIECE of strong AI. Deep learning, as its implemented today, is probably not the secret sauce of consciousness, but it is a powerful and useful subsystem. In that sense, it is a tangible step towards the eventual goal of general strong AI.
So, basically the Chinese Room brouhaha all over again...
Not exactly, they're complaining that ANOTHER company is controlling access and therefore the financial gains associated to the news industry. It was never a battle simply about ideas, but about the profits behind the news-producing machine.
Niemand hat die Absicht einen Flughafen zu bauen.
http://www.dougengelbart.org/firsts/1968-demo-interactive.ht...
There has been some outliers though. I seem to recall Palm used something called "run in place" on their early generations. But then perhaps storage on those devices were battety backed RAM.
>if there are more people than available apartments, prices rise so that >at some point the number of people who can afford to rent becomes >equal to number of apartments available to rent.

What about speculators?
Thank you for the serious reply.

I would like to ask you and anyone reading this: what exactly gives AI/ML the "edge"? I mean, faster computers are a given these days compared to any other time in humanity. They are giving us simulations so accurate that people in the 80's would be extremely jealous. However, my question is why these new techniques are superior to the established techniques. Why would an AI solution be better? In what sense would it be different from any other method?

Again, I am not anti-AI or anti-ML but I'm interested in hearing opinions. If you could give me concrete examples where AI or ML is better in a way that is different from "faster computing" I would be sort-of satisfied.

For the ones pursuing the CTM line, forget that. I know it's BS and I hope nobody​ falls for that stuff. However, s/AI/TCM/g in the post would not make clear what the "edge" of AI is over conventional computers.

Thanks for the civil discussion.
I used to think that the rarity of human mastery of games, and games' abstraction from the physical world, were what prevented most humans from perceiving machine intelligence as intelligence. Then the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge for self-driving vehicles showed that machines could perform a task that most adult Americans can perform, that no non-human animals have ever been taught to perform, and that requires significant awareness of the physical world. But AFAICT it didn't cause a sea change in how most people think about intelligence, human and otherwise.

There has been an uptick in people pondering the economic implications of driverless vehicles and a more robotic future. That discussion seems kind of oddly isolated from re-considering the nature of intelligence, human and otherwise. It's as if after the Industrial Revolution people kept narrowly scoping the meaning of "power" to "muscle power" rather than acknowledging mechanical forms. Oh, yes, that coal fired pump can remove water from the mine faster than I can... but it just uses clever tricks for faking power.
"Unintentionally"
> In the past we've replaced unskilled labor with new unskilled roles, and I don't see those roles hanging around anymore.

The sad reality is that there's a nontrivial chunk of the populace that isn't able to pick up highly skilled roles. It also ignores the role of unskilled jobs in providing space for people whose job class has been destroyed and need to retrain (or mark time until retirement).

I'm not advocating slowing innovation to prevent job loss. I am advocating avoiding magic thinking ('there's always new jobs to go to'): we need to start a serious conversation about what we do with our society when we have the levels of unemployment we can expect in an AI-shifted world. Right now we're trending much more towards dystopia than utopia.
All the Turing machines and lambda calculus interpreters and Pythons and Lisps and OCamls care to disagree.
If the celiacs meant the carbs were less well converted to glucose and that's why your levels stayed normal, why not just eat less carbs now?
I think the irony is in Microsoft, traditionally thought of as a "embrace, extend, extinguish" proponent, being the one providing an open-source tool facilitating escaping their own DirectX vendor lock-in.
Jobs are made possible by consumption. Illegal immigrants are consumers too.

Without them, we'd have fewer workers competing for jobs, which seems like a good thing, but we'd also have fewer jobs to go around because of decreased consumption.
Finding an apartment with Clojure
It isn't just the advances in the field... it is the accessibility of it all. The resources to run it are becoming more available, as GPU-focused cloud instances are now generally available, as well as just buying your own GPUs. Education is available to coders on how to get up to speed on this field, so it isn't just those with a academic background in it who are able to contribute to projects anymore. I'm not saying that us weekend dabblers in this field will surpass those who have dedicated years of study to it, but we are gaining enough understanding to come up with innovative ways to use it, and to contribute to projects. Even if we are not doing the ground breaking work, more people working on more projects will bring more innovation.
This contradicts the evolution of languages, they don't evolve into making people do more work. It's way more likely that writing proofs will never become a thing, but academia will simply get too out of touch to be even noticed.
Have you looked at applying the techniques used in Google's Wavenet to your corpus? In addition, any interest in releasing your corpus?
Uber's rates are already unsustainably low. Competition is one thing but unhealthy, unsustainable competition is another thing entirely.

It's probably for the best that rates go up a bit.
Can you explain to me the difference in practice between

'a rewrite of an existing code base from language A to language B'

versus

'Saying you will support language B as well, dropping language A after a while completely, then announcing you are going to try to complete it in language B'

Because I am not sure I perceive a large semantic difference.

I happen to agree with an earlier post suggesting that if you want to run off with the money, then this kind of thing is a pretty good way of creating noise and cover instead of results.

Also: can you please stop shitting on the HN community with your posts and keep to the topic?

I get that you want to rant for some reason, but it would be better for us all if you did it in notepad or emacs rather than here.
Technology does not have purpose. We use technology to our own ends.
That's just not even close to being true, for at least half of the country. You're not controlling anything if an order of magnitude more people listen to Rush Limbaugh than read your paper. For a huge section of society, the NYT has been seen as basically untrustworthy or a "liberal shill" since Reagan to be realistic, and Clinton to be charitable.
So you're saying there will be a web assembly version in a few years that will claim to be a huge advancement?