skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The linked article asserts that we're nowhere near that sort of general AI. Do you disagree?

I agree with the premise of the article that a huge job loss is much more likely than general AI difficulties and think that many societies are ill-equipped to handle this.
Sorry, I probably didn't make myself clear (english is not my main language):

Here in Greece there are not too many jobs on local (Greek) companies because of the economical crisis and repression. Definitely there are more candidates than jobs. So most of these jobs would probably be given to the better / more experienced developers while, other, not so good developers will try to emigrate to other countries to find jobs.

Notice that there was no culture of emigrating here in Greece before the crisis, people seldom emigrated because the family ties are strong here and people are raised with a culture of loving their country and not wanting to leave it (and as I said in a previous comment Greece is beautiful - you only want to leave it if you actually starve). This has changed due to crisis of course but I think that a good developer will definitely be able to find a job here in a local company and not need to emigrate.
Henry Miller with the books that influenced him the most
Having recently spent some time in India where labor is absurdly cheap I do not believe the incentive to automate exists in most places. At least... not yet. I believe automation will eventually take place at a large scale but I don't believe it will happen in the next 5-10 years in India.
This is very much aligned with what I have learned, and its only made worse by successful startups often taking 8+ years to exit with many more rounds than before. The stock incentives are aligned with the startup exiting in four years or dying.
Ah, yes, president obama, advocate of the privacy rights of individuals world-wide.

He expanded the powers of the NSA because he could, or had to, or whatever. I struggle to imagine that he then turned around and used the FCC to push meaningful reform along for his citizens.

I think the burden of proof is on you to show that his track record with government spying should be ignored when thinking about his track record with FCC/consumer protections.
I get this error when I type 'ember' in terminal "zsh: command not found: ember"
That was most certainly not the author's main point; he only mentioned it briefly, and he didn't mention a way to fight monopolies. To be sure, when the "Make Network Monopolies Not Exist Somehow Act of 20xx" is up for a vote, I'll probably be for it. But that's not what this article is about.
Also, every single study bar one, from credible institutions like the London School Of Economics (and indeed HM Treasury), predicted a significant downswing in the UK economy post-Brexit.

The lone study is worth paying attention to. It's from a group calling themselves "Economists For Brexit". It proposes that the UK should, post-Brexit, unilaterally scrap all tariffs. Under those conditions, it predicts a minor rise in the UK's GDP, but notes that it also expects "a sharp rise in inequality".

So basically, everyone credible who has studied Brexit, including the guys calling themselves "Economists For Brexit", reckon that it's going to make the UK worse in some significant way.
I look forward to this brave new future of fuzz-testing recruiter bots.
170,000, according to that site (which does not seem entirely trustworthy). 0.3 million is claimed for all fossil-fuel based pollutants.
Rebel Parenting – Raising Scientists and Artists in Our Homes
Especially when a lot of people worry about being employable as an older developer. Makes sense to make enough money to be independent earlier.
Same here. Mostly I would just read man pages and write code, but every so often there's something that only works if you know the proper incantation (call ordering or whatever) and Beej almost always had the right answer, with sample code.
I've done a bunch of NES development. You are correct that the framebuffer is not modified directly.

For the background, there are two layers -- the 2 pattern tables are 256 8x8 tile images each using 2 bpp color.
The name tables are what is actually displayed. Each tile in the background is an index into one of the pattern tables. (Determined by a global selection bit).

However, in some cartridges, the pattern tables are mapped to RAM. This lets the game simulate drawing into the framebuffer directly. Some games use this for drawing variable width fonts, for example. Battletoads does some cool parallax effects. It turns out that the pattern tables have just enough bits to fill the whole screen with a monochrome image, so you could treat it as a framebuffer (it requires timing changes to midframe, though). I created a demo for that http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=14884
> that voting machines were hackable,

After CIA and NSA leaks we found pretty much anything with a chip and an OS is hackable. The question is what can one do with that info.

Initially after elections I understood "election was hacked" to mean there is clear evidence of FSB or GRU intelligence officers hiding around the bushes in Wisconsin with laptops and usb keys, taking out guards and rooting voting machine. We haven't seen a single instance of that.

DNC, and Hillary's questionably illegal server were hacked. Probably by any state actor who wasn't a complete dummy. But that's pretty far from what the initial implications where.

I am still waiting for some solid "Russians hacked our election" evidence. Thought this was finally it. But there is more waiting needed it seems...

This is a bit like the WMD story and Iraq war. Still waiting to find that large WMD warehouse to justify trillions spend on that war...
How is any of that different from the contraceptives that already exist?

Further, your notion of "Idiocracy" (believing that the "smart hardworking people" have fewer kids) doesn't match at all with the fact that IQ keeps rising in every generation in the US, and fewer people are poor or jobless than they were in the 50s or before.
> When garbage collection moves to the container runtime, it should mean that the application no longer has to worry about garbage collection, since the container runtime will terminate the container when it reaches its memory limit.

I can't be the only one horrified at that statement.

Whatever happened to writing software that doesn't use infinite RAM + infinite CPU? Why rely on the container / OS to just kill your misbehaving process and restart it?

My background is embedded 8-bit RTOS. We cared about the resources we used.
The biggest lesson that I think that most need is that Redis is a very sharp knife. It is perfect for some problems, and a horrible fit for others. Understanding what it is for is critical to having it work out well for you.
My life priorities will be different when i'm 59.5 years old compared to now.
Learn how to become linux kernel developer
The author, Ben Thompson, sees Machine Intelligence as meaningly different from meticulously designed logic systems. There are some differences of course, but whether those differences will get around the arguments that were critical of Good-Old-Fashioned-AI is something that has been debated since perceptrons were invented.

Machines will replace some jobs for sure, but luckily, they can only really be reliable on the jobs that a fast but dumb slave, or a fanatical bureaucrat could have done anyway.

When my dad started his first job he was in a drawing room of about 50 draughtsmen, making technical drawings from the sketches of a single designer. When he ended his career he was the only designer-draughtsman in an entire company as the computer did the non-creative formatting of his ideas into technical drawings. That didn't require machine learning, and machine learning is never going to replace the "designer" part of that job. Yeah, never.
The point is that powers of veto are less influential than powers of creating policy.

I don't think people are saying that the EU is completely undemocratic (as pointed out above, democracy is a somewhat muddy concept in practice), more that it falls short of the standards of a typical democracy (which to me means a directly elected executive body).
Just wondering if you have any sources to support the claim. I've been under the impression that dynamic languages have had the lion's share of back-end web development for a considerable span of time - from PHP to Rails to Django/Flask to Node.

.NET is a blip by comparison, JSP/Spring isn't even that. Perhaps just a case of different perspectives?
To be honest, I think children adopted very early in life would have better childhoods than children raised by their birth parents because

p(parents are generous/caring/loving | parents are the type of person to adopt a child) > p(parents are generous/caring/loving | parents bring pregnancy to term)

In addition, for adopted parents, we know that both parents want the child. Whereas with birth parents, we know that the mother wanted a child but we do not know if the father did.
Nuclear generates a lot more kilowatt-hours per square-foot than renewables, especially in places that aren't very sunny or windy. I am not advocating for a 100% nuclear grid, but I don't see how we can get rid of coal without a decent number of nuclear plants.
I'm not so sure one needs to be high-IQ to be proficient. Outside of pure CS research, there's nothing in practical software engineering that requires much more than average to slightly above average intelligence to comprehend. the main thing you need is a person that is genuinely curious.
My vpn doesn't prevent my cell provider from selling my location info.
Why do you think efficiency would solve things? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I think only having power sources cheaper than carbon will fix it. Which could potentially include sources cheaper because a carbon tax forces carbon prices to include their externalities.
>The problem isn't that westinghouse made a couple of bad deals. The problem is that westinghouse was completely incapable of finishing the nuclear plants anywhere near their budget or their scheduled time.

There is also no accountability on the part of the customer companies either.

The public service commission pretty much votes to allow ga power to pass the costs to the rate payer.

Georgia Rate payers are already paying for the cost of votgle 3&4 in the form of rate increases when their completion is no where in sight.
Data Science Cultures in Archaeology vs. Astronomy
Wind, solar, dams and wave. They may not replace coal and other fossil fuels today but we can substitute a lot of our energy needs with a concerted effort into those renewables.
I think that actually increases your exposure, as a monthly snapshot will likely be as good as any other month's snapshot and just as damaging (or not) if it got out. If all providers sell your data, that means that purchasers of aggregated data will always have up to the date info anyhow.

I would say the "better" solution would be to find a provider with a good reputation and stick with them, and leave them in a heartbeat if it appears that they've sold your data. It gives them an incentive to continue behaving well through referrals and recurring revenue.
In any bigger project, architecture grows organically. It's easy to say "I would have done better". In hindsight, every flawed system looks like a bad idea. It takes a visionary to foresee all possible error cases.

Things go wrong. I think it's an honest post with lots of practical tips.
This was probably my first real job/contract out of college. I was a VB script/web developer and landed a part time gig at this one man wealth advisory firm who wanted to build a side business from processing charitable donation online (back in 2001).

The owner was a very impatient youngish founder who new just enough about HTML/CSS to have the dangerous notion that he new something about programming. Additionally he was obsessive compulsive to the point where when he saw that different browsers didn't render the HTML/CSS EXACTLY identically in all cases, he had me redo ALL text on the site as IMAGES!..because those would look the same regardless of what the browser supported.

Now, the payment processing part. Since he was a cheap bastard and didn't want me spending any time on actually versioning, managing code, doing deployments, testing etc....we only had one development/test environment: PRODUCTION.

Yup, I'd connect my trusty VisualStudio IDE directly to the file system on the production IIS webserver and code away. Whatever I had coded when I hit save...was live.

No issue. Since we had no monitoring, logs, analytics or anything else unnecessary like that, he never could tell how many live transactions were lost because I had forgotten to close some tag, looped once too many times, mistakenly truncated some part of a card number, swapped the first name and the last name field accidentally or mistakenly told the payment gateway to CREDIT rather than DEBIT the charity's account (yes, that one did happen...and he did notice).

I would come home a nervous wreck every day just wondering what kind of pissed off customer calls I'd be hearing about the next day for something I had done that day.
Few Western countries. Population is a huge problem in much of Asia. We should all praise the success of Bangladesh in addressing the problem so quickly, they really dodged a bullet there.
:thumbsup:

We aren't bootstrapped, we raised a seed round. Turns out when you don't need money it's easy to get ...

I'm happy to give you all the gory details if you want to shoot me an email (mrkurt at gmail). I think we triggered the flamewar thing on HN so I can't respond here very fast.
Many are not, as well. There are places in the US where, unless one is a veteran, addict, or actively and imminently suicidal, there are no free or sliding scale mental health services available. None! In a very small town, there might not even be a shelter available.

It also takes a certain degree of sophistication to be able to navigate the various bureaucracies providing what services there are. Even getting to appointments is difficult when there is little public transportation.
One of the reasons nuclear plants are so expensive to build is "citizen opposition and (somewhat unfair) demonisation of nuclear power". I'm all for making sure people who build and operate plants do so without cutting corners, but the US system makes it too easy to tie up a project for years with lawfare.
I'd also add

3) Nuclear power technology is running on technology half a century old.

This gives you a couple interesting points to consider:

- Once built, you have reliable baseload power for generations.

- Modernized power plants could be safer, more efficient, and smaller by orders of magnitude.

Demonization of nuclear power prevents improvements to nuclear power. The industry is stuck in the 60's. The real shame is that it's the only technology we have that is really future-friendly: Planetary colonization can't rely on wind, nor solar, and certainly not fossil fuels for power. Nuclear will really be the only option for reliable baseload power to extra-terrestrial colonies.
I don't get why the US has to make it so complicated. The UK has a similar first past the post system. All votes are crosses on paper ballots, counted by hand overnight. Works fine.
Seems to me like the problem there stems from the French government skimping on maintenance, rather than their decision to use nuclear plants in the first place.
Thanks. I was trying to find some source of worldwide data. This[1] more reliable source says over 10,000 deaths in the US alone every year. It's not implausible that it's in the low hundreds of thousands annually worldwide.

1. http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plan...
SNES Features – Pt. 01 Graphics and Palettes
I don't know if you have been following this saga over the past few years, but the reason that they're going bankrupt is they got several orders for new AP1000 reactors, but couldn't deliver on their planned budgets and schedules. (4 reactors under construction in China, 4 under construction in the United States, zero of them on schedule.)

Was it a court injunction that put the Vogtle project behind schedule? Local citizen protests? "Direct action" work disruption from Greenpeace hardliners? Nope! The locals are mostly looking forward to the tax revenue and employment boost from the new reactors. The project has had no legal interruptions nor on-site activist-disruptors. Whatever has gone wrong with these new reactor projects originates inside the nuclear industry itself.

(I was happy about the new AP1000 builds until they blew their budgets and schedules. Same with the disastrous EPR projects. I still believe that nuclear power is safe enough, certainly safer than continuing to burn fossils for electricity. But at this point I'll only believe the industry's next "this project will be faster and cheaper to build, I swear" promise five years after the project has met all objectives and demonstrated smooth commercial operation.)
Yes the URL is different, but the canonical URL is the same.

Not concerned about the votes, just curious if the topic of canonical URLs, clusters, etc. had come up.
Whatever estimates the nuclear power industry made in Germany, they're argued to be insufficient, so they're capping the upper liability limit for these companies. The government's own stress testing suggests there will be a shortfall that'll ultimately be picked up by taxpayers.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-utilities-buy-ou...
As a Nikola Tesla fan, just a honorary mention, Westinghouse corporation is (one of) the (main) reason why we have AC. When nobody believed in Tesla, George did, even after the bullying by the Edison camp, the smear campaigns. I have read that per watt of AC current, Nikola Tesla was supposed to get some $2.3, but Westinghouse told Tesla that he would be bankrupt if Tesla was to be given that Royalty, the legend has it that Telsa tore the contract saying something like this, "You believed in me when the world didn't, I don't want the money", even if he didn't say something fancy during this time, but the act in itself, if it really happened, is touching. I nearly cried when I read it in a book a long long time ago.

It is sad to see that a energy giant is going bankrupt. End of an era for a Tesla fan, the company who believed in Tesla is going bankrupt.
Truth is that no one really knows. Deep storage is one alternative, but 100.000 years is a long commitment. Breed reactors might reduce that to 1000 years, but it's still a commitment.
An incredible story of life! I agree with you that few pesosas are bothered that developing software or undertaking startups has a high risk and cost to health.
Gull wing doors are about the only thing there that are more complicated than features in other higher end cars. Air suspension's been in luxury cars for several decades, and there are all sorts of complicated locking mechanisms for doors, including pneumatics in various mercedes vehicles. When you start getting into the luxury lines, you start seeing all the added complexity because everyone needs some signature feature to distinguish themselves from just being a nice comfortable ride.
There are many people who would largely consider recursive mutexes a complete mistake, for the most part. I'm one of those people. :)

But I admit I sort of willfully skipped over this point precisely because I dislike recursive mutexes. But they are there for this case, you are 100% right.
i agree. Population is an existential crisis here and that probably breaks through mental barriers.

Having said that, I would also say that contraception (and its weird, twisted forms) are very much part of our culture ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pregnant_King
I'm not sure how many companies would agree to it, but you could potentially work those items into your contract so that they are on the same level as other benefits (e.g., salary, health care).
Cloud Storage Report 2017 – Dropbox Leads Cloud Storage Market, Google Growing
Might have something to do with those men who preach virtue having a tendency to be incriminated in soliciting illegal male prostitutes or fondling children.

Also regardless of political correctness, the US at least doesn't seem to have any problems ruining young people's lives in order to appease to religious groups demanding to dictate what consenting adults can and can't do to their own bodies.
There are also a lot of startups that simply need to focus on some of the basics of management, such as "be reasonable" or at least "don't be completely psycho".

One example that was discussed on Hacker News previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10662128
... clearly Java doesn't have a ggplot2

JFreeChart[0] is likely what many would reach for in the JVM ecosphere to perform ggplot2-type functionality, though Scala devs might want to use something like scala-chart[1] or similar.

0 - http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/samples.html

1 - https://github.com/wookietreiber/scala-chart
While I definitely agree that advances in ML in the last 20 extremely important (and potentially revolutionary), I think this article misses the mark in a few places.

>Now, instead of humans designing algorithms to be executed by a computer, the computer is designing the algorithms. (Albeit guided by human-devised algorithms)

This line is way off in both tone and substance. On tone, it really underplays the human effort involved in effective machine learning (as it is practiced in 2017) and anthropomorphizes "machines" to an unreasonable extent. In substance, I fail to see how a machine that "designs its own algorithms" according to an algorithm designed and implemented by a human is fundamentally different than an algorithm coded directly by a human. To use the author's example, machine learning allows humans to build complex software systems in less time just as a bicycle allows humans to cover more distance with less energy. It's a big improvement, but it's not, say, teleportation.

>it is only now that the machines are creating themselves, at least to a degree. (And, by extension, there is at least a plausible path to general intelligence)

I could not disagree more strongly with this addendum. Simply put, I fail to see any path from state-of-the-art ML/DL research today to AGI, and I would even go so far as to say that humans have made approximately zero progress on this task since it was first formulated in the 50s. I think we know about as much about "intelligence" (and consequently, what would constitute AGI) as star-gazers in ancient times know about the universe. That's not to say that it will take millennia to invent AGI, but the path to get there is probably quite orthogonal to modern ML research.
Your first sentence is a non sequitur. Profitability and salaries aren't linked.
Sure, and they ruled so well that today that half of the world lives in peace and it is proud to have been a British colony.