skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This still fundamentally misses a key point:

AWS operates on a huge scale. Mindbogglingly huge, in fact.

What you see as an outage, AWS might be aware of it being a single rack in a single AZ. One single rack out of hundreds of thousands in a single AZ doesn't constitute an outage, and affects such a tiny percentage of customers that there is absolutely no logical reason why they'd update their service status dashboard.

Despite all the redundancy built in to the system and all the protections they can manage, these incidents are a common event, just by nature of the sheer scale that AWS is operating at.

If AWS was to start surfacing these on their status page it would essentially never leave Green-I state, except to occasionally dip in to Yellow or Red.

Things that you, and I, with smaller infrastructures would think about as being one in a million, or even one in a billion odds of them happening, are an absolute certainty on their scale. To give context, 3 years ago S3 announced they'd passed the 2 trillion object territory, after having hit the 1 trillion object mark 4 years ago.
from August 2016
Thanks! Indeed this is what I was asking about/referring to. I spent a few months in one and the ventilation and the light due to the windows facing into the courtyard made for a pleasant living experience.
Realistically speaking, when would you say the NYT last controlled the political narrative? I would argue that it's not a recent loss of control, so implying that this is a case of sour grapes strikes me as unlikely to come close to the truth.

Besides, Facebook is an appalling, festering wound. It's not just politics, but of course a lot of money and talk floats around politics and a lot of noise as a result. Facebook is a case of a minority using the service to keep in touch with some people, and a vast majority engaged in a bizarre and self-destructive series of narcissistic behaviors.

The evidence keeps mounting that using Facebook and unhappiness are strongly correlated, and I keep seeing people who aren't remotely surprised by that.
Reducing the cost of manufactured goods helps the poor as much as the rich.

For instance: Reducing the cost of farm equipment could enable poor rural farmers to rise above subsistence farming. I could think of countless examples.
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Neural Networks
Anyone actually recommend the book from which the article is taken? I also tried to read the wa v. ga blog post on the site to get a further sense of the author's approach, but the server returns an out of memory error (from a blog post?!).

I've been in Tokyo now 18 months, took private lessons twice costing about $2,000, and feel I learned 10 words. That's $200/word. I joke with people I stopped taking lessons because learning Kanji would bankrupt me. Japanese just doesn't stick in my older and very Western brain. It doesn't help that my office does business in English and one can get by in Tokyo with minimal Japanese and a lot of pointing and gesturing. The glacial progress becomes discouraging.

I tried Rosetta Stone. It takes the same phrasebook approach as the first textbook I was given, Nihongo Fun & Easy, which was neither. The textbook at least had short sidebar discussions of grammar and somewhat useful phrases. I had no idea where I'd get to use the phrase "The children are swimming," that Rosetta offers.

The 8020 article was the first discussion of particles that actually made sense. When I'd asked teachers about particles before the answer was usually something like "Don't worry about that yet, just memorize the phrases." If the remainder of the book is in the same vein I'd pay twice the asking price. I flipped through parts of Nihongo Fun & Easy after reading this article and it suddenly made much more sense. I wasn't staring at a list of phrases I was supposed to memorize and slowly reverse engineer the language, but could deconstruct the basic sentences.

It's much easier for me to learn construction, and use the break down of other sentences to construct my own, even if the rules fail sometimes and lead me to construct sentences no native speaker would utter. That's the other 80% of language idiosyncrasies that takes time.

I don't expect to be fluent in Japanese any time soon, however moving past "sumimasen kore onegeihshimasu" while pointing at a menu item would be awesome.
Very disappointing article indeed.

Alpha Go is an AI project with historical relevance, that had a well specified and measurable goal, which is beating humans in a game that requires to develop an intuition for moves rather than just reading moves in advance.

Having said that I don't understand what's the point of trying to delegitimize the significance of Alpha Go. Implementing what we call "intuition" is not a minor thing.

In contrast, I encountered the Pepper robot in a mall in SF. It was almost impossible to interact with it, so if there is going to be a critique, why not starting from one of his own projects.
The (unofficial) current card memorization record is 14.09 seconds on http://memoryleague.com/
well fuck me sideways, i thought the purpose of technology was to enoble the human condition, lift up society, and make our civilization better for the future generations. didnt realize that corporations profit margin is the only possible good to come out of technology.
Their contracts with major labels could preclude them being a label themselves.
Yes Upcall is different than freelancing platforms, as Upcall has built-in tools, including dialing system for the Upcallers and voice recording, analytics and +300 integrations for the client to bi-directional sync their data with their app.

The main similarity with Upwork is the rating/review system from the Upcall community.
There is still the problem that without the competition that Uber provides, Lyft likely becomes a more typical company and begins increasing their margins in ways that customers and employees dislike.
You can learn COBOL. It will be like swallowing a barbed cube shaped pill. That is not the hard part. Many of the bank systems are 20, 30, 40 years old and are swamped with technical debt. They have been modified, extended, updated, moved to new hardware over and over. Documentation, if any, is hopelessly out of date. The existing programmers are proud of what they have accomplished,the software system works!
I think the more you learn the more you basic your thinking becomes. I felt the same way listening to this podcast also, i.e. "my biggest priority is to workout in the morning" because health comes first.

It's like so many things in life are really simple but because of too much information and our nature to keep finding better, faster solutions, we keep getting lost. Consider for example, weight loss, there are a bazillion things on the internet about "Keto diet", "Paleo diet", this diet, that workout, but at the end of the day the formula is still as simple as calories in - calories out = weight loss.

Same goes for making money, there is an often cited pdf here about making money[1] written in 1880 which still beats most of the contemporary "cool" advice. The rules are simple and don't really change that much over time but we like to add layers and layers of our own stuff over it and then think to ourselves, gee look I've found the answers and my answer is the best answer.

[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/barnum/moneygetting/
Not shockingly, we've already moved beyond caring about local ram for many problems. Any system that is running distributed should be taking into account how long it takes to get data from across the network.

Similarly, the difficulty in large data problems is often more of getting the data in the first place. This is often about coordinating the data creation of many machines and systems.

So, for most of us, this shift will not be huge. Because it is mostly irrelevant. Even systems that do have this much data often benefit from algorithms that don't rely on directly accessing and processing all of it in one shot. If only for resilience. (That is, if a system failing doesn't mean reprocessing all of the data, restarting and recovery is often faster and easier to deal with.)
I was thinking the same while typing that (that due to being somewhat mainstream, "Hacker" News might not be understood for what it is). I personally use the catb.org definition[1], which is quite broad and lists 8 definitions -- if you count the 'deprecated' use of referring to 'computer criminal', which I do count as one of the popular definitions.

[1] http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
While it's true that there have been, are, and will continue to be a loss of manufacturing jobs as a result of automation, robotics, and AI, we also need to consider the other side of the economic spectrum, and look historically to see what has happened when these kinds of shifts come.

For example, I'm sitting next to someone who is working on robotic apple-pickers. The amount of cost from buying apples is about 75% represented by labor. So yes, there would be job loss, but what if apples start to cost 25% of what they currently do? What if we extrapolate that across all fields?

What if we could do this with everything we need - food, consumer goods, housing, etc? It's a shift as big as the industrial revolution and moving away from an agricultural society from a consumer perspective. In short: Life would get much better and cheaper for all of us and fast.

But then there's unemployment. What will the masses do? Well, what did the masses that used to be farmers do when we moved from 50% of the United States being farmers to the current levels of ~2%?

The answer historically has been that entirely new types of employment are created, and the pain is remarkably short-lived considering the size of the shift and the decrease in costs, and the Luddites look silly in retrospect. It's usually hard to see looking forward, but somehow it's always worked out.

I'm not sure what the entire picture looks like; I do think that we will need massive re-education as a society, and we're completely unprepared for that. In the past we've replaced unskilled labor with new unskilled roles, and I don't see those roles hanging around anymore. (I moved to San Francisco from a very rural town, and I get stressed whenever I think of the economic future of that small town. Until there's risk-free education available at will that area is economically doomed.

But I don't think the proper response is to slow innovation because of pending job loss. If the AI shift will be as big of a deal as the Knternet, imagine how much better it makes the lives of everyone - is that really something we should actively fight against? I'd argue history suggests we shouldn't.
Nothing new. Just look at a PDP-11 tape drive vs the cassette used with early micros.
"the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior"

That's what I would define as weak AI. So yes, even algorithms which do not adapt their behaviors by learning, but can imitate intelligent human behavior to some extent would be weak AI, such as AI in video games.

Now strong AI would be: "the capability of a machine to originate intelligent human behavior"

This means the intelligent behavior would originate from the machine itself. Some Machine Learning algorithms exhibit strong AI, in that they find ways to even outperform a human, by themselves, through the learning process. Sometimes, we can't even understand why it chose to do what it did, but it appeared to be even more intelligent than what most human would have chosen to do themselves.

Now Artificial General Intelligence, or sometimes called strong AI also, but I think there needs to be a distinction as I explain before. This would be: "the capability of a machine to originate any intelligent human behavior"

The reason a lot of people are talking about true AI, AGI, strong AI, etc. today, is because Machine Learning is seen as the be all, end all of AI. Yet practitioners and scientists know that it is not, at least in its current form. Currently, it can solve simple decision tasks, probably the kind of decisions a person makes in under a second or two, like driving. But it does not solve them generally, so a person must train different models for each tasks.

At the same time, having a way to automate decision making of a single simple task is huge in terms of potential. There's so many things we can automate through this, and if we combine them, you can create even more complex autonomous machines. That's why people are excited. Though I understand that it is not as awesome as having found general AI, or AI which can make complex decisions. The dream of AI continues, but the practicality of it are closer then ever.
The only solution to this problem is new, denser housing. That way you can accommodate the people who've lived there for awhile plus all the new arrivals. But unfortunately it won't happen with rent control, strict zoning regulations, and restrictions on knocking down existing apartment buildings (to replace them with bigger ones). That's why SF has such a terrible housing crunch that is growing worse over time. I don't know why Berlin would want to go down that road too, but it seems to be their desire.
I'd guess the real problem is that Jones can't change things without other upper management agreeing to his proposals, and they're not agreeing.
If you find it hard to sell AI based solutions, just call it automation rather than AI. It is a term that people react to differently.

It's like the term "technology". Spoons, chairs, bricks are technology. The modern usage of the word technology is what people used to call "high technology".
I don't think this is a fair use of the word "normally".

The service may have been working within SLA. Based on the data in this article, it was not working the way it works most of the time. I think most people would interpret "normally" to refer to the latter.

Or, let's drop the word "normally" and take a step back. A good dashboard should be designed to inform. Amazon's dashboard was not providing the information that Ably or their customers needed. And this isn't an isolated complaint; if I had a nickel for every time someone had complained about the green mockery of the AWS health dashboard, I'd have... well, several dollars, anyway.
Odds are that Chuck's Rock and Roll will outlast mankind. Ironic?
It's overly simplistic. For example, Haskell's do notation allows asynchronous programming in a linear "task list" (to use your phrase). Yet most popular imperative programming languages do not; one must instead use callbacks.

As to whether programming with expressions is fundamentally harder, I'm not so sure. Since Fortran, most languages have supported arithmetic expressions over primitive numeric types, since they are certainly not easier with an imperative approach (MOV, MOV, ADD, PUSH). Haskell allows one to easily take this further using arbitrary objects and algebras, for example, expressions with drawing primitives, parsing grammars, financial contracts etc. With a small amount of syntactic sugar, you can even make expressions that look exactly like imperative programming (Haskell's do notation).
A 40-Year ‘CONSPIRACY’ of Hackers and Dr at VA Hospitals
On the other side, I used XMonad for a while and it crashed frequently.

I did submit a bug report and it did get fixed, but there was another crash I couldn't be bothered to try to track down, and just switched back to the standard ubuntu shell.
I've spoken to a few people who are interested in applying machine learning to hydroponic farming with the aim of creating vertical farms.

If you could isolate the different rooms sufficiently, you could run machine learning to optimise yield (or Vitamin C).

I have doubts as to the commercial viability of this, as farming is pretty low margin, so the overhead requirements for the capital expenditures would require pretty substantial gains in efficiency, which I think just don't exist.
People certainly talk about general_ai.exe.

Often I imagine I had a technology such as general artificial intelligence or world-class NLP. Perhaps I lack imagination, but I have not yet thought of an exciting application. These are tools, much like Perl scripts, and it is not clear to me which will displace more jobs during my life.
Definitely written by someone not in, and not closely related to anyone on.

There is a sense of puzzlement that help isn't sought. But in some MOS and some fields and some clearances seeking help is career suicide. Not all, but some. Not all soldiers are career and not all MOS and security clearances require no mental illness diag of course. So a soldier will only seek help if he's ready to pull the trigger on career suicide in which case doing the real thing is a microstep. You can tell people to seek help all you want to make you feel better about doing something, but if they know by example that their lifes work will be wiped out and they'll be unemployed in weeks if they actually follow thru and seek help, well, you do the math.

Second gaping hole is some of the support REMF (I was a REMF so I can use that acronym "proudly") have higher sec clearances than some front line. Naturally that means some front line both see some interesting stuff and if they get help for what they saw they might not lose their job. And the REMF now a days might get blown up in a convoy or IED or whatever as bad as a front line, yet if they seek help its bye bye MOS.

I have no personal experience with this, I was in during the early 90s but I kinda keep up with the times. There's an old saying about it being a rather permanent solution to a temporary problem. Young kids tend to have poor concept of time. A year in Korea is bad, but not worth offing yourself, unless you're a dumb kid, but then you don't want to speak ill of the dead, so ...

As with most big messes there is no simple solution and the more you know, the more complicated it is...
There is absolutely a rational difference between 30 and 50%.
Improving Bayesian Reasoning: What Works and Why?
> Look, you can't put up a blog post titled "How We Engineered CMS Airship to Be Simply Secure" and say that when asked "well, how did you actually engineer it to be secure?". In your post you talk about problems all solved by a framework, and apparently you haven't even evaluated what is out there already and rushed headfirst into building it all yourself.

I've looked at Laravel, about two years ago. http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2015/Apr/57

I haven't looked deeper at what it's done since then, since nobody is paying me to do so. I wasn't impressed then, and instead of waiting for them to get around to doing things right (while figuring out how to preserve backward compatibility), I started from zero.

You don't have to like that decision, but that's the decision I made.

> Again, using a framework makes your code way easier to review and a lot smaller to boot.

Sure, use a framework.

And then this happens: https://kivikakk.ee/cryptography/2016/02/20/breaking-homegro...

I designed my own because, unfortunately, most of the PHP community either doesn't prioritize security enough to be trustworthy, or is simply in over their heads.

We use third party libraries (Twig for templates, HTML Purifier for allowing some HTML but avoiding XSS vulnerabilities) because they're well-studied and trustworthy libraries.

However, I do not trust most other PHP developers to do anything security-critical correctly. And thus, I will not design something meant to be secure based on an insecure foundation.

If your only reason for Airship's status as "probably insecure" is because it's "ad-hoc" and/or "bespoke": Sorry, that's insufficient. Got a PoC handy?

Otherwise: we're talking about pure hypotheticals that are far removed from the real world and there's not much point in that. You can frame your criticism as "things to make the code easier to read/understand" and whatnot, and they stand alone. Citing them as "probably a vulnerability" is questionable, however.

> It's hard to tell, in this graph (https://github.com/paragonie/airship/graphs/contributors) is 'paragonie-security' a single person?

For the moment, I'm the only technical person at Paragon. That will change, and that account will be delegated to signing/committing the code changes made by other employees.

> As someone who works in the security industry it's just a bit tiring to see yet another homegrown PHP half-framework full of it's own intricacies and potential issues with the ever familiar problems described in all my comments above, coupled with a post saying how it was engineered to be secure from the ground up.

You've raised legitimate concerns over:

- Apparent NIH-syndrome, which in this case is justified
- Minor code quality nits, which are now fixed
- Bus factor

...but none of those are, directly, a security problem. :)
The first Chomskyan argument looks plausible (though still speculative) to me, but I share your skepticism of the ‘embodiment problem’ claim that a body and rich set of senses are necessary prerequisites. Anyone seduced by that argument should consider the life story of Helen Keller, who did have two-way interaction with the world, but only through the biological equivalent of a teletype.
Has anyone else noticed that in the last year, services have begun naming upstream vendors on their status pages when service is disrupted? In other words, saying "Our service is down because AWS is disrupted" rather than "Our service is down because our upstream infrastructure vendor is disrupted".

Naming the vendor during an availability incident is un-classy, I'd even say childish, yet is seems to have rapidly become a mainstream practice in our field :/ In the case of naming Amazon, practices of theirs such as those described in the article bring this on themselves, since we are only human, and we resent Amazon's dishonesty. Still, we should switch away from dishonest vendors rather than use them as scapegoats when our systems fail. (my point does not apply to postmortems, where every detail counts and is useful, including the specific vendors involved)

Example (singling out a vendor that I otherwise think is great, sorry Filestack!): http://status.filestack.com/incidents/lzl06yzw1jq5

What do we stand to gain by naming the upstream vendor? (genuinely curious)
There is some information on this page on reusing memory palaces: http://artofmemory.com/wiki/Memory_Palace
Totally agree, and very happy to see this statement at the top of HN. I'm against hyping up AI or misinterpreting it just as much as the next guy (especially coming from a position where dealing with a lot of higher-management people has made me very wary of articles and vision-pieces from the other end of the spectrum that are all like "invest now in AI or lose it all"), but this is just clickbait for the sake of enjoying playing devil's advocate.

AlphaGo solved one of the hardest challenges which we believed to be very far out in the future before it came along. I'd say the field is on the right -- and very exciting -- track; people just need to learn to approach it in a clear-headed manner.

Good on IEEE though for welcoming opposing viewpoints.
iOS subscription free trials automatically charge the user after the trial period is up, so it at least wouldn't require an additional action from your users.
I immediately thought of Naspers. Not a single mention of it still.
Don't you think he tried?
The point wasn't that this employees have terrible jobs. Some sure do, some doesn't.

The point is that if factory work is automated - they'll have no other possible job, and no safety net, unlike the west. Thus they are vulnerable.
6 years into development, rather huge tasks will feel like weekend projects ...