skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To tie your analogy back in: There is correlation in intellectual capacity between categories of intelligence (linguistic, mathematic, spacial, etc.). Individuals capabilities vary, but on average individuals high in one area are rarely below average in other area.

(Anecdote: I found it no problem to get degrees in both Computer Science AND English with minors in French and Philosophy. Some people find it strange that someone could do both types of things, but I just like learning everything!)
I read the Vox article pretty carefully and I thought it seemed very misleading. On the key question of, how much does genetics influence intelligence, the Vox article states:

Modern DNA science has found hundreds of genetic variants that each have a very, very tiny association with intelligence, but even if you add them all together they predict only a small fraction of someone’s IQ score.

That is true, but, it's evading the overall question of "how much does genetics affect intelligence". It's focused only on the question of "how many specific genes have we identified".

As far as I can tell, it shouldn't be controversial to say that genetics has a huge effect on intelligence. For example, the NIH states on their website:

These studies suggest that genetic factors underlie about 50 percent of the difference in intelligence among individuals.

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/intelligence

Sounds like our best scientific knowledge is pretty simple - intelligence seems like it's half genetic. The Vox article is quite misleading because it dances around this simple statistic.
Well, to nitpick, the reason anyone becomes professional is to make money, kind of by definition.

Go has something of a higher order attached, its not a sport, its a philosophy of life. Its a way to devote yourself to an art. What you do with that contribution is very important.

We could build robots that paint more and better than what we do, but as humans we are very likely to still be able to produce things computers dont. The great question is if that is true with Go as well, or effectively, its a purely tactical game and all our philosophy, ideas and beauty appreciation is basically a projection of a silly life-form over appreciating tic-tac-toe.
unwind-protect isn't a necessary part of being a Lisp...
Do not let perfect be the enemy of good.
it's worth noting that housing has also gotten much bigger since the 1960s. A source worth looking at is the American Housing Survey, which is put out by the US Census Bureau.

What I find most telling is that average housing in 1970 is comparable to sub-poverty-line housing right now, in terms of total square footage and number of rooms -- and average housing in 1970 had considerably fewer amenities (fewer full bathrooms, less likely to have a full kitchen, much less likely to have AC or in-unit washer/dryer, etc.)

I won't attempt to tease out all of the issues that led to this, from changes in demand to zoning regulations to developer preferences. Just pointing out that "housing inflation" is a major driving factor in the cost of housing. As others have pointed out, there isn't a lot of affordable housing inventory, particularly not in big cities.
From Getting Robbed in Bratislava, Slovakia, to Saying No to Generalizations
Modern democracy is an illusion. Until the pitchforks come out it will be one group after another thrown under the bus.
To be more accurate, the report of UFO sightings dropped significantly after the eighties. The other weird property is an increase in UFO sighting after the second world war. Jean Jacques Velasco (GEPAN) suggested that it was correlated with nuclear explosions on earth. This is nonetheless suprizing because it would imply that they can make interstellar travels at a very high speed. We currently don't know how this is possible.

Anyway, we have to be careful to not consider a behavior not matching our expectation as a reason to invalidate the phenomenon because it is our expectations that may be invalid.
Did the rink have rounded corners?
And yet I'd be completely fine with a ping that was capped to running for no more than a week. YMMV though.

And more to the point, you don't want a program that goes on forever in a setup like ethereum. I guess your rebuttal was called for since the initial point was a little hyperbolic.
Seeing how little time AlphaGo used compared to Ke Jie, I wonder how much computation power AlphaGo is allowed to use this time?
According to the NIH:

Researchers have conducted many studies to look for genes that influence intelligence. Many of these studies have focused on similarities and differences in IQ within families, particularly looking at adopted children and twins. These studies suggest that genetic factors underlie about 50 percent of the difference in intelligence among individuals.

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/intelligence

So, going with the NIH, I'd say about half.
Isn't that a given? I mean, do people not realize that the money has to come from somewhere? Of course it's going to be insanely expensive to insure everybody.

Edit: I'm not arguing against Single Payer, I'm just surprised that this is something so shocking an article was written (and then upvoted) about.
Apparently not if you're 'Uber' scale, which makes no sense, PostgreSQL is perfectly fine for 'Uber' scale, it's just not fit for Uber's architectural decisions they made.

This was posted 12 hours ago and mentions 'Aurora' except that that it uses MySQL as a backing and is currently in Beta with PostgreSQL.

It also mentions that PostgreSQL is on Azure, but says 'hopefully soon' for GCE, even tho... it's in Beta, just like Azure.

https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/features#postgres

Unless it's only referring to High Availability which it's hard to tell from whats written.

------

As a side note, the author needs to update the font used on his site, it's rather hard to read on Chrome / Windows 10.
I don't think the 1% is going to be too keen on footing the bill for something like this.
Yup, Apple, Uber, Facebook, Google, etc.

You really only understand how biased the media is once you've see it happen to your own employer.
It will also provide excellent cover for California's pension shortfalls.
If experience is the x axis and learning is the y axis, and the learning curve is "steep," that might not mean it's easy to learn. It might mean that it's impossible to even get valid experience at first because it's so hard to learn, but if you manage to succeed anyhow, then there's not much more learning to do. That seems to match the common usage. In other words, climbing the y axis costs energy which must be expended to travel to the right.
Improving Customer support with live chat plugins
> And given ~100 million years of evolution it could even become as intelligent as a human.

Birds we're around long before humans, apes or even primates. They had their chance and they blew it.
Sure, in looking at what it would cost to replicate this:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.01444.pdf

They say they used four Titan X cards for a month. I was actually looking at google cloud machine learning since I thought being targeted to tensorflow would be the most cost effective. But it's 0.49/hour per ML training unit, or 1.47/hour per GPU. A basic gpu gives 3 training units, so I thought that something approximately similar would require 12 training units, which comes to something like $4000+ a month. Maybe I completely misunderstood the resources being offered though, because you are right that cloud engine costs seem much lower.

I'll have to revisit the math here, though it worries me that it's not at all clear that a K80 will be much faster than a Titan X for a given problem. E.g. https://www.amax.com/blog/?p=907. It would also be really nice to get some pricing and benchmarks for the new TPUs, assuming they are priced better.

Maybe part of the problem is that vendors are not making it remotely easy to even understand what performance you'll actually get for a given price.
Stochastic rounding shouldn't be entirely necessary for floating point though, no?
Reminds me of an essay written by a civil lawyer who got peripherally involved in a criminal proceeding. tl;dr: Criminal court is a total farce which would be funny except the people going to jail.
There is research done on depression vs free choice - the "Paradox of choice" being the canonical reason that more freedom is not always better. I'll leave you to google the topic on your own if you're truly interested -- "happiness/depression correlation with freedom and choice".

I'm not trying to take a stand here, but your gut reaction (and my initial one) was based in emotion, not on research and facts -- get the facts (or as best you can) before throwing up any more.
You forgot the AWS Internet egress charge per GB..
I'm surprised there was no mention of Amazon dynamodb?
I don't work for google. I'm not even a fan of google right now. No, google shouldn't play along. The media surrounding such topics is so biased and self-serving to the agenda a journalist is trying to push that the less you make public the better off you are because you minimize what material you give for journalists writing about these topics to twist in service of furthering their agenda.
This headline is really misleading and clickbaity. It makes it seem as if the state is facing a budget shortfall. The cost they are referring to is a hypothetical number crunching of possible future healthcare systems.
Well, the lawyers themselves are fighting back in court. So far, they have won an injunction that allows them to keep working. It's hard to imagine that their colleagues on the bench will not side with them -- but now they are spending their time and money defending themselves instead of their clients.
What benefit is there to dynamodb?
Some key differences between this match and the Lee Sedol one are:

1) Ke Jie has an estimation of Alpha Go's skill. Lee Sedol did not know how strong Alpha Go was. Lee Sedol was very skeptical that a bot could have reached such high level.

2) Ke Jie has been able to study a game where Alpha Go was beaten.

3) Ke Jie has been able to play Alpha Go before, with faster game settings.
For reducing cognitive load, I think the opposite might happen, at least for me. I keep wondering if what I've typed so far is correct, so I keep going back and forth, and become frustrated when the data is lost during page transitions.
How do stored product pests get water?
If the remaining voters then don't vote in the interests of those net recipients, where will that lead? A medicated underclass?
Is Viper Turing complete? If so, is that a mistake? Bitcoin Script specifically is not.
In the early part of the war the T-34 outclassed everything the Germans had. More were lost to mechanical failure than enemy action. As the war went on, the Soviets continued to simplify it until it became classic example of Soviet design we know about today (like the AK-47).

The extreme weather conditions and lack of availability of spare parts in the USSR lead to some awesome engineering:

Soviet aircraft can operate from the world's shittiest airfields: https://youtu.be/uWUG1FuALaw

MiG-29 has extra intakes on top so it doesn't suck in junk from said airfields: https://youtu.be/MpPSPQq7oas

Russian trucks: https://youtu.be/5BRu-XGKdgU
That assumes that all species are expansionist. Even our own species halts it's population growth once a certain standard of living is achieved.
My theory is that Silicon Valley (aka "white men" in the most air-quotes way possible) have moved on to solving the problems of the whole world (whether the world wants them to or not) because they don't have acute social obstacles they have to deal with.

I think it's a mistake to assume that anybody who isn't complaining about something doesn't have anything to complain about. Look at somebody like Robin Williams. Who expected him to kill himself? Nobody.

In general, men are discouraged from complaining about their problems in public. It's unseemly and unmasculine. So to be fair to everyone, we should not assume that the volume of complaints is any reflection on how hard people's lives are.
Czechia is an exception in this part of Europe, Poles/Lithuanians are more likely to have this "problem".
Go + MySQL + Angular JS
I miss line numbers
4) Ke Jie has been able to study 60 AlphaGo games (albeit with faster time settings)

5) No one expects Ke Jie to win.

6) AlphaGo has had more time to train. Between the Lee Sedol games and the 60 game series, there seems to have been noticeable changes.
Yes, ha, I was just taking the piss. It's an old Slashdot trope to declare things dead by Netcraft survey.
TLDR; $400 billion total, $200 billion is currently spent on subsidies and medi-cal, $150 billion is already spent by employers.

The state would need to "find" ~$50 billion or ~$1,300 per resident more to fully fund this.

Personally, this seems like a relative bargain and some modest extra taxes should offset the difference. Article reads pretty poorly and sensationalist.

Not to mention that the missing amount is less than most people have in various deductables and co-pays already.

EDIT:
Turns out in 2015, per capita health spending was $9,990 already, which translates to ~$390 billion for 39 million Californians. So $400 Billion is cheaper than what we already spend in 2017, assuming modest growth since 2015.

Further, if we assume that this money already gets spent, just not very evenly, we'll end up with a much fairer system and a lot smaller downside for people if/when they get sick.

Personally, I'll gladly trade some immediate savings for long term protection from not having insurance when I need it most. The data seems to imply that I won't even have to pay all that much more.
Yeah, this is more like the used car dealership noticing that a lot of their clientele drives Toyotas. SPIES!
For anyone looking for an alternative right now, there's https://postbelt.com - a text-only social network that's built around privacy, and has no ads.

It charges a (small) monthly subscription over a certain number of connections, making you the customer rather than the product.

If it sounds interesting, please check it out (it's a side project of mine).
It is actually quite disappointing that they make these broad conclusions after being quite careful to qualify earlier.

Earlier they state:
"That is not to say that socially defined race is meaningless or useless. (Modern genomics can do a good job of determining where in Central Europe or Western Africa your ancestors resided.)"

"In reality, the racial groups used in the US — white, black, Hispanic, Asian — are such a poor proxy for underlying genetic ancestry"

What they don't do is link these statements. That a persons genetic ancestry to the three major groups: African, Caucasian or East Asian is strongly established as they admit. And that difference in IQ test scores linked to this ancestry is based in fact. They use the words "socially defined races" to avoid this but later make a much more broader conclusions of Murrey doing "junk science"

There are good counter arguments to each of their bullet points. Specifically this one:
"Murray’s assertion that it is hard to raise the IQs of disadvantaged children leaves out the most important data point. Adoption from a poor family into a better-off one is associated with IQ gains of 12 to 18 points."

They don't mention that the studies of high SES black vs low as a counterpoint to how this increase is gained.

None of the arguments they made falsify Murray's hypothesis. Murrey does not state that environment doesn't matter. He uses evidence from Twin studies and Adoption studies to show that genes matter more. We also know how to reduce intelligence via environment far better than we know how to increase it.
> Of course it's going to be insanely expensive to insure everybody.

The entire rest of the western world would indicate that it's cheaper than the current system, better too.
As someone who grew up in coastal Downeast Maine and has been lobster fishing on multiple occasions, it is my understanding that the lobsters partially feed off the dead herring used as bait. Fresh herring (freshly dead) is used as bait in the traps. Every time the trap is pulled up to check for lobsters (every 1-7 days), the old herring is pulled out of the bait pocket and fresh herring (freshly dead) is put back into the bait pocket. The old herring is tossed overboard where it sinks to the bottom and becomes food for lobsters. In a sense, the fishermen are cultivating the lobsters by feeding them. Here is a photo that I took, while lobster fishing, of herring that was used, pulled out of a bait pocket, and subsequently tossed overboard. Warning: graphic picture of dead fish. https://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1120/5100863905_1d9520e7eb_b.j...
Indeed. Our expectation that ET would have an interest in colonizing planets may be wrong. With a space vessel, they would have a perfectly adapted and mobile environment. They can avoid danger and explore to accelerate their technological and scientific evolution.

We are still rooted on the ground like vegetals while they could move freely like animals.
they collapse and quite possibly the person operating it nicks off with all the btc
https://cointelegraph.com/news/polands-bitcoin-exchange-bitc...
Right, it adds an insane cost. You then need to raise that same amount of money.

However, when you consider that people are no longer paying for health insurance there's a large pool of money available.

CA needs somewhere between $50-100B to fund this project. The population of CA is around 39M (https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&...). That means, you need about $2,564/person/year. Or about $214/person/month.

If you compare that figure to the average health insurance cost for people in CA everything starts to look possible or reasonable.

Of course, there's still some massive political hurdles to get over. But the money is out there.
Traffic-related air pollution linked to DNA damage in children
I think you're missing pjscott's point. Sure, a fixed set of genes determines the maximum intelligence across varying environments, but it's equally true that a fixed environment determines the maximum intelligence across varying genes. How is one or the other "the" maximum?
it's great how their official Windows tool doesn't even offer this update automatically - you have to check your version and download it manually [1]

[1] https://community.logitech.com/s/feed/0D531000055gw8YCAQ
And even further, they are misrepresenting that somewhat. They admit further down the article that after offsetting from the existing employer based tax that "total new spending to implement the system would be between $50 billion and $100 billion per year". They make it sound like it's $400b more, rather than total.

There is also no discussion of the kind of external savings this might create. Usually that kind of thing is included in budget office analysis.
Do you not think that you see strong Go moves as beautiful because they're strong, rather than the other way around? Take AlphaGo's unexpected move in the first tournament - no-one thought it was beautiful, just weird, until it played out.
Dang you... I spit up on my screen a bit~
What do you think of Rust?
How do you know that? A NN often maximizes its performance against a goal
I don't want to defame the author, but I must ask: are they in any way affiliated with Amazon, do they resell Amazon services?

I ask because there are things that would appear to be errors on the comparison matrix, and Amazon Aurora is listed as receiving full marks in every category, as if it was the greatest of all the solutions!

Some issues I see:

Amazon Aurora has checkboxes for horizontally scalable (none) and automatic data sharding (none), and for latency, this is simply assumed. But Aurora is backed by disks (or provisioned IO SSDs) and it's not at all comparable to memcached in terms of latency. (See: >5ms writes in [1], which places Amazon Aurora about what I'd expect any SQL database to be at, 1-10ms for read and writes.)

CosmosDB has no checkbox for ACID or Automatic Data Sharding. "All JavaScript logic is executed within an ambient ACID transaction with snapshot isolation. During the course of its execution, if the JavaScript throws an exception, then the entire transaction is aborted." [2], and "Partition management is fully managed by Azure Cosmos DB, and you do not have to write complex code or manage your partitions. Cosmos DB containers are unlimited in terms of storage and throughput." [3]. The "partition key" might be something of a misnomer. For a multi-tenant service, the partition key can be used to limit the performance of a tenant by assigning them one partition key, but if there is no desire to restrict performance, the partition key can be a randomly generated identifier.

MongoDB has no checkbox for automatic data sharding, but practically speaking the hash-based sharding is fine. It's really curious that the author gives Aurora a checkbox here, but not MongoDB. Is it not normal for `distributed` tables to be used in MongoDB deployments? I would guess it is.

Lastly, I just don't think Aurora is the same type of database as Google's Cloud Spanner and Microsoft's Cosmos DB. The latter are, really, a new kind of database, and Aurora is a managed MySQL or Postgres instance.

[1] https://pagely.com/blog/2015/08/we-benchmarked-amazons-new-a...

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/documentdb/documentdb...

[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/partition-d...
Still makes a difference to have an idea of how strong your opponent is.

A strong component behind Lee Sedol's performance was that uncertainty, as mentioned in his interviews.
One of the most promising companies among the whole S16 batch. Congatz!
Yes, of the connection the server is party to. It's bad security to record them, but how is it spying?
During the first game against Lee Sedol commenters labeled many Alpha Go moves as "mistakes", as well as "slow". It wasn't until the end when they started seeing the results of those moves.
A web user interface is just a user interface to the actual program, which I always construct as a commandline (cli) program. It should also be easy (or at least doable) to build a mobile and/or desktop user interface for the same backend cli program. All of that should naturally be able to run as docker microservices. In other words, web "frameworks" are just a pile of retarded crap that is totally incapable of doing any of the aforementioned.
You were downvoted... but you make a point that I (as a woman) would have no problems following.

I would call / message / text his mom. His sister. His boss. His dad. The new girlfriend.
Few know this:

The United States currently spends more money per capita on socialized medicine than any other country except Norway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

In fact, the US spends more on socialized medicine than Japan, the UK and Finland spend in total, private and public spending.

The US healthcare system is totally out of control. Nothing will fix it until there is a collapse.
>We could build robots that paint more and better than what we do.

For some definition of paint. Namely, if you give it an image created by a human; and call the computer a printer. We are nowhere near computers creating art at the quality of humans.

>The great question is if that is true with Go as well, or effectively, its a purely tactical game and all our philosophy, ideas and beauty appreciation is basically a projection of a silly life-form over appreciating tic-tac-toe.

Is this even a question? Go is a combinatorical game. There is a solution; one of the two players has a winning strategy. The only question we are facing is if it is feasible for us to find the winning strategy (a question which AlphaGo does not help us answer). With sufficient computational power, finding the winning strategy is trivial.