skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except that there's no such thing as the field of "AGI" (or if there is, its a subfield of philosophy). Asking modern ML and Deep Learning researchers about their thoughts on AGI is like asking the wright brothers about a mars mission.

Sure, they're the closest thing we have to "experts", but there's not just one, but likely 5 or 10 more field, if not world-changing leaps we need to make before the technologies we have will resemble anything like AGI.

And that's ignoring the people who ascribe diety-like powers to some potential AGI. Air gap the computer and control the inputs and outputs. We can formally prove what a system is capable of. That fixes the problem.
Thank me later ;)
I was at EarthLink at the time. I remember our systems melting down with all the AOL mail in our queues.
> if there is a union that represents you, ignoring a strike would probably not be free, it would just be a different kind of cost

To elaborate on what that cost would be: If a union represents you, it can compel you to go on strike (even for a cause to which you object on ethical or moral grounds).

If you refuse, they can terminate your membership. For a closed shop, that's equivalent to firing you.
Google VR Haptic Helpers
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Default Unity 8

- DESCRIPTION: A functional convergent default Unity 8 DE with essential snap apps integrated in sandboxes. Old promisse!

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Owner of Vitree Consulting.
We have fairly extensive evidence that Sony was hacked by a Russian-based APT group. It is likely they were paid to do so by the North Koreans. Check out https://www.operationblockbuster.com/wp-content/uploads/2016... for more info. TL;DR attribution is based on shared C2 and staging server infrastructure, a shared code base with unique implementations, and even shared public keys.

Disclaimer: I know and have worked with the people on Operation Blockbuster.
I personally don't think this is so much a result of Assange having a bias as it is a result of him being in a compromised position since being imprisoned in the Equadorian embassy..

One the one hand, he has the US wanting to prosecute him and on the other hand, if the claims are to be believed, Russia is happy to use WL as a channel to air their dirty US intel bits, by context implying that he is de-facto forced to take a Russia aligned position since they are the only ones with power covering him.. And of course outing this bias essentially means he plays the one card that might keep him from say, disappearing into a river or mysteriously ingesting rare radioactive isotopes..

If the shoe were on the other foot and the US were not so interested in prosecuting him to cover themselves, and it were Russia/China/Etc forcing him to hole up somewhere I'd wager that the US would be more than happy to play the same game of using wikileaks as a channel, with Assange staying mum, and Russia/China/Etc would be crying foul..

Of course this only presumes the 'wikileaks as russian channel' info is even true, since pretty much anyone not in the gung-ho US camp is branded as a Russian shill (Assange, Snowden) or a deranged lunatic hell bent on global destruction (Assad, Hussein, Khomeni, Chavez, etc.)

By the way, ever notice you don't hear so much about Anonymous these days since about the time of the elections and Hillary's server getting discovered?

There are much much much bigger factors at play than Assange's bias or non bias in this drama..
Excellent job, this has the potential to be huge. I told my girlfriend about you guys last week and she seemed impressed. The first self made female millionaire in the US was in the hair buisness [1], I think it's a market that is underserved by traditional companies because it requires such a specialized touch. Good luck.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madam_C._J._Walker
Not sure if this is directly useful, but specifically for neural networks applied to NLP-ish tasks in PyTorch (Python machine learning framework): https://github.com/spro/practical-pytorch
Seasoned Clojurians: is

(every? #(= % “success”) (map :status (:state task)))

actually considered crappy code? It looks perfectly natural to me, but my Lisp background is more generic.
Trump Is President. Now Encrypt Your Email
55AAH Is the Wrong Way to Represent the Byte Sequence 55h Followed by AAh on PC
Haha, I enjoyed your response! Corn fields and meth labs! I like open spaces and less people, so corn fields are ok. Meth heads are alright if they keep to themselves, which they usually don't :)

But when I read what you wrote, I am reminded of how I once felt about the world- paralysis by analysis.

We are all pretty smart here, so digging for info and analyzing it becomes natural. The midwest looks like a nightmare on paper, and yet plenty of people prefer it. Those same people probably look at SF on paper and can find all sorts of reasons they'd hate it.

Some places are obviously truly tough, like Somalia or Venezuela now. But mostly these details among cities can only be truly gauged once you get a feel for the area. Kyiv Ukraine and Lviv Ukraine feel very different despite similar statistics.

As for the Indonesian smog, yes, that is a big problem for 1 month a year that won't be resolved until Westerners stop buying palm oil soap sourced from Indonesian farmers. But the air is quite good 11 months out of the year, compared to constant car smog in other cities that usually isn't sensationalized or in the news.

As for the gum, you can buy it here, it's just that the local state-legitimized bureaucratic mafia has some rules against importing or selling it. You can find it easily here I think.

In Singapore you should probably be more concerned with avoiding quirky but obvious crimes like graffiti, aggresive political speech, drugs. Those are dealt with through literal ass whoopings and hangings.

It's a problem I'd like changed sure, but in the US it would be nice if cops didn't shoot, detain, or extort you before your speeding ticket trial :)
No you won't. You can get bored at lunch and just not come back if you want.
OK, but as director of whatever, perhaps one shouldn't be tweeting controversially. And if one is tweeting controversially, perhaps as part of one's job, then one ought to practice good OpSec.

This isn't a new issue: http://www.learnliberty.org/blog/anonymity-and-doxing-in-the...
have you considered swapping out to a BIIIG mouse pointer? that's what I do on my home 65" HTPC/ TVPC :)
Unity 5.6
> completely eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The IMLS was established in 1996 with an annual budget of merely $200 million. As a comparison, the funding for libraries in tiny Arlington County, Virginia with a population of only ~200,000 is 13 million dollars[1]. This department may be doing meaningful work, but it is hardly work that could not be undertaken by local governments coordinating for the betterment of their own residents.

As a broader argument, libraries are primarily supported at the local level with state oversight. There's no real need for an entire Federal department to further oversea and attempt to control the practices of local bodies.

I am a great fan of government, and government funding of the arts and education but I believe it should be done at the local level where citizens can meaningfully affect the government which is doing the work.

Federal funds, if given, should be given gratis to states without any mandates or provisions the most general sense.

[1] https://arlingtonva.s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/wp-...
Sure, but Toronto and Waterloo have different reputations when it comes to Engineering and Computer Science.

And if it really matters to you that Waterloo be involved, it's obviously worth pointing out that Pearl Sullivan (Dean of Waterloo Engineering) is on the Board of Directors for the Vector Institute anyway.
Spamford Wallace got sentenced to 30 months in jail last year: https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2016/06/1...
The influx is temporary, is probably what was meant by the phrase. When AI becomes as ubiquitous as, say, the internet, noone would call it AI.
A business's returns are based on products, customers, relationships. Specific proprietary knowledge may be a part of that, but it's quite often a very small piece. The more so for companies which open source core (or all) infrastructure.

Not releasing core tools can itself be a major impediment. Several years ago, a Google architect, Yonatan Zunger, noted half-in-irony that he'd settled on a hiring decision heuristic: "No".

That is: the answer to whether or not to hire anyone, was to not hire them. Again, somewhat in jest.

But also partially serious: Google has highly complex systems, operates very much on an NIH mindset, and has significant risks for any level of failure (though they've also engineered some impressive systems against many of those causes of failure).

I thought, and wrote, at the time that this was actually a major concern for me over the future viability of the company. If Google literally cannot find qualified talent, or figure out how to make the talent it does find qualified, then it cannot continue. Even accepting the hah-hah-only-serious nature of the comment, it's troubling.

Much of this problem can be avoided by opening up more of your core infrastructure, as it allows potential talent to both gain experience with your tools, and to demonstrate that experience, most particularly to you, which would then be of interest in an employment context.

Some additional context comes by way of a YouTube engineer I'd spoken with some years before that, who was commenting (this in the mid-2000s) how Google's technology was really old. That is, Google had settled on a software stack in the mid-to-late 1990s, and has (or had) to a large extent sealed itself off from the world since. As a consequence, Google's tools were diverging (in Google's interests) from those of the rest of the world.

(I don't know how that situation's played out since, though the comment sticks with me.)

Back to the question of IP: claiming rights to both what it is you teach your workforce, and what they come up with on their own (as I've seen written into employment contracts) ... betrays a staggering level of short-termism to my mind. It works out for the current King of the Hill, for so long as they're KotH, but tends to end rather poorly. Not only for those companies, but their customers, who are ultimately saddled with old, stale, one-off software for which the potential employment pools are small and generally less than stellar.

(Look up the recent HN discussion of the MUMPS programming language and the firm which continues to utilise it, largely in medical software, based out of Minneapolis. Cautionary tale. And yes, I'd heard of MUMPS decades before, and run then.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13859961
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: A good post-X11 replacement for xkb / xmodmap

- DESCRIPTION: I have such a productively complicated keyboard configuration with the two tools above, both of which will die with X11. I'm afraid I'm more likely to buy a Mac and use Karabiner than go without custom keybindings in Mir.
Bloomberg.
Technological advancement has been responsible for most of the increases in human welfare, most notably allowing us to (at least temporally) escape the Malthusian condition. It's not implausible that technical research likely to be neglected by markets and academia could be a better use of money than even the most efficient African charity. But I drink the AI-is-very-likely-to-change-everything-we-really-mean-it-this-time Koolaid, though.
"CSS Pixels" are actually supposed to be based on viewing angles:

http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx
Abstraction isn't necessarily what loose coupling is about. It's worth some thought at the beginning to structure dumb code, to reduce waste and speeding up debugging. I agree the there's a useful element of Darwinism in coding, but Modules of cheap, dumb code are better than a big ball of mud made of cheap, dumb code. However it does depend a lot on how much you like rewriting and refactoring. Most people don't seem to. If you like it a lot, which I don't think is a bad thing AT ALL (it's just not common) I can see the attraction of starting with as much dumb code as possible and evolving from there. (But beware of local maximas.)

Even so, some decisions turn out to be extraordinarily hard to undo. One of my great blunders was a poor choice of data structure (too greedy with RAM it turned out.) The more experience you have, the more likely you are to sidestep those fatal early choices, of course.
Waterloo is good at churning out entry-level software engineers. UofT is much stronger for ML and research in general.
That may have been true twenty years ago. Not today.
I believe you have to switch to the "beta" channel, because 3.3.x is deprecated.

imho, you should do this urgently.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-Us/firefox/addon/lastpass-pass...

https://blog.lastpass.com/2017/03/plans-to-retire-the-lastpa...
True, I forgot about the extra monthly fees -- though you can just use free, 20 minute delayed data. I also forgot that the US is so cheap -- I pay $6 each way with IB on the ASX.
Simply for the sake of meaningful discourse, I'd like to believe there's more to this thought. But you offer little.

1. Is there proof you have of this? Or is your statement just one of "This is something I think /they/ would say."?

2. More importantly: If a statement comes from the mouth of someone you feel is unsavory, does that make the statement invalid? Is everyone who then utters that statement unsavory, and so on? Do you think you can come to that conclusion? Particularly with EduardoBautista's thought: do you think you could come to that conclusion?

Attempting to associate EduardoBautista with Stormfront (with a comment like yours) would be considered a damning accusation to many, though such tactics have become painfully commonplace. That is not what you intend, is it?
Yes, of course, "people shouldn't be assholes online".

But there are at least two problems. One is subjectivity. As in "terrorist" vs "freedom fighter". The other is that there are lots of assholes out there. Billions of them. It's like spam. You just gotta filter it out.
Blockchain are timestamped, cryptographically stamped and immutable.
Whether I do or don't, they're just going to imprison me until I comply with a judge's order to turn over the password I've forgotten from all the police beatings and solitary confinement I would have been through at the point.

Technical defenses don't work under fascism. Fascists will just physically and insidiously torture their rivals.

Security through obscurity is the only way to be pretty safe, and hopefully you can get some truly powerful political candidates elected that won't sell the populace into fascism, which is what the US is on its way towards. Beware, truly brazen fascist states will assassinate your political leaders of the opposition. See Russia and China for more details

Until then, stay underground!
Court overturns probation condition limiting use of ‘encryption…software’
Do you really look at code you wrote three months ago -- or any code you've just written -- and not see a lot of things you could improve? This isn't about not having foresight or failing to plan or not designing well.
Really?

Show me the set of NYT/WaPo/ETc pieces consistently outlining an editorial position for any one of the following issues:

Unaccountable global free trade deals are a bad idea, Assad is not an evil guy that should be replaced via direct or indirect US action, That Syrian rebel groups are in fact heavily islamised, that Putin is not trying to be Stalin 2.0, that the Ukraine is a mess due to problems on all sides, that a Palestinian 1 state solution is preferred to the current 2 state strategy, or equating the level of theocratic social repression in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Does the occasional piece crop up hinting that these could concievably be valid positions if they weren't actually incorrect? Yes. Does that mean they are consistently viewed or even evaluated by pinning down biases and weighing them against objective comparitive philosophical standards, particularly applied to the topic at hand? Ha!
Scala changing name to Skala, embracing German keywords and grammar: http://scala-lang.org/blog/2017/04/01/announcing-skala.html
L. (YC S15) Is Hiring: Finance for a Cause
Overview

Based in San Francisco, L. makes organic personal care more accessible to all. For every product purchased, L. distributes one through a female entrepreneur in a developing country. L. works with over 3,000 female entrepreneurs and has donated millions of health products. We hope you’ll join us.

Essential Responsibilities

• Establish and manage a corporate budget, keeping a close eye on all current expenditures and forecasting future spend
• Develop and pull reporting on said budget and provide regular status reports that analyze all KPIs
• Own the relationship with the external CPA, establishing clear lines of communication for maximum success
•Develop process to ensure all suppliers, vendors, and employee reimbursements get paid in a timely manner
•Establish reporting for sales, inventory, and margin
•Own the company financial model and prepare relevant information for use of executive team
•Design, produce, and maintain data visualizations to support reporting of analytical findings and monitoring of business performance.
•Specify SaaS software platforms and solutions to assist with and support objectives related to monitoring of business performance

Key Qualifications

•4+ years of FP&A work experience, eCommerce and CPG experience a plus
•BA/BS required, MBA or related technical degree preferred but not required
•Knowledge of relevant SaaS financial management applications
•Strong ability to communicate financial and quantitative findings in a clear and concise manner to both technical and non-technical personnel
•Experience working in high-growth company a plus
•Versatility and willingness to wear multiple hats in a small team that works together closely on planning, management and execution
•Ability to thrive in a fast-paced startup environment

Perks:

• Ground floor opportunity with the team; shape the strategic direction of a fast growing YC startup
• Be part of a company that uniquely leverages the buying power of consumer goods to empower women globally
• Fun office environment
• Competitive salary
• Full Benefits (Medical+Dental+Vision)
• Equity
• Daily lunch in the office + snacks
• Light-filled office in a great location in Southpark/SOMA SF.

More about L.

L.'s products include 100% organic cotton tampons, pads and liners, as well as a line of low-protein, natural condoms. Our products are distributed in Whole Foods, Target and CVS stores, as well as online through a fast-growing subscription service.

L. was named "Best for the World" by B Corp and has been called a "future-forward company" by Fast Company, "a model of sustainable innovation" by Forbes, "our new favorite" by Women's Health and "a product that could change the lives of millions" by Vanity Fair.

Start Date: Immediately

To Apply: Please send email and resume to caroline@thisisL.com

To learn more about L., please visit thisisL.com
You're right. I'm thinking 1.x because it has kept and augmented all the useful 1.x behavior which the regular 2.x somehow managed to butcher.
having to manually copy a directory from disk is not what I'd call "feature"
Yeah, I get that. But what happens is that threads on one site become trolling topics on other sites. So harassment becomes part of the trolling game.
I've been using Ubuntu either part or full time since 2007. I've literally never encountered this.

Which is not to say you're lying, I'm just sort of flabbergasted that this is an issue for so many people. Do you run autoremove much? Maybe that would solve it for you?
Every time I prepare a travel itinerary across multiple timezones via Google Calendar I'm reminded of my feeling that it was written as a front-end for a database of calendar items, not as a tool for busy people to organise their lives. It is basically impossible to input an arrangement of items that usefully and quickly illustrates where I need to be and when.

A simple example is that here I sit in Hong Kong, and my upcoming flight from San Francisco to Melbourne (which departs at 00:50 PDT) is showing as departing at 17:50 HKT, which is true but useless. That's the hallmark of a system designed with the data structures in mind first. With (too many) clicks I can change it to display in PST, but now my diary for today in Hong Kong is wrongly displayed.

To some extent this is a flaw in iCalendar's data model, but it's not insoluble, if you start with the right perspective i.e. user stories. So my general complaint is that this kind of "data first" rather than "utility first" design pervades the Google Calendar application.

(Don't even get me started on the "world clock" extension, it's just garbage).

Judging by the listing of optional extensions in the "Labs" section, Google Calendar has languished with little serious development since 2009. The main utility to me these days is that it can aggregate multiple calendars, including subscriptions to external feeds, and then pass on that aggregation to mobile clients.

So I think it's another dying Google product, one that was misconceived in the first place, and I too am interested in alternatives. However calendaring is hard and none of the alternatives I've considered to date were actually better; all limited or flawed in other showstopping ways. So Google Calendar remains the least crap of my options.
Nuclear plants go up in decades, solar and wind generators go up in months.
Especially unfortunate, given that in a situation like you describe, it's probably not the teenager who was looking at gay porn.
Yeah, but that'd show Robinhood's user base there is no need for the product.
Ask HN: How to reconcile open source software with privacy?