skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whn it comes to reasoning about AI and automation, and their potential effects on employment I think hjournalism is doing a terrible job. There's a borderline dishonest blurring of the lines between has-happened, is-happening and may-happen.

..automation is eradicating our jobs. But — unlike in the past — new ones aren’t being created to replace them.

This is very often written about as if it had already happened or at least halfway there. As of right now, this is still a speculation about a future that may happen, not some known fact about the past or present.

This reason that I bring it up here is that this article is specifically about "what if we're wrong about the future."

Predicting is hard. Predicting technology, predicting economy, predicting culture... It's all hard and we need to remember that we're speculating.

If we travel back to the futures predicted 70 years ago (as he suggests), many of them were wrong. Keynes predicted drastically shortned workweeks. The era was named the "nulcear age" or "Space Age." There were also predictions about the continuation of the mechanisation (a close cousin of automation) trend, which did turn out to be true.

Keynes' workweek never happened, even thoug the workforce grew as women joined it. The space & nuclear ages kind of happened, but so far nothing earth shattering has resulted. The continuation of the industrialization-mechanisation trend has resulted in much cheaper durable and consumable goods. Cutlery, soap and such is very cheap.
There's always one of us in every group...

https://www.crossing.us/intersections/ball/nut
But they spelled it appZ. (Emphasis mine, or theirs, come to think of it.) /s

Apps/z was shorthand when typing, and arguably period correct, but a majority still said (and to a lesser extent, typed) Programs. It is even the verb used, to program. Does one app?
> is it considered bad form to give a recruiter reference contacts, without first asking those contacts for permission?

When I was last looking for work, I called up my references and told them that I'm applying to jobs over the next few months and asked if it would be okay to list them as references. One of them said "no problem". The other said also said no problem, but "it would be helpful if you shoot me a warning when I should expect a call, if possible".

Basically, just ask your references. It's bad form on the part of recruiters/employers to contact your references without telling you explicitly first, but it happens, so it's good to have your references on board.
This is exactly my thinking. Things like faster than light travel or whole object teleportation are wishful thinking. Things like intelligence explosions are not, because one has happened in the last 100,000 years. That intelligence has come to dominate every animal on this planet and the biosphere, even to the point of escaping the planets gravity well itself. To imagine that we are the pinnacle of the optimization of intelligence (especially when we cannot tweak our bandwidth or input devices much) sounds like hubris.
> academia is a reflection of how wealthy and educated the population is

This is correct, but that doesn't mean causation. Look at any civilization and look at what came first wealth or academia. It seems to me that wealth creates academia.

> That's an "observation" based on racism and nonsense.

Saying something is "racist" does not constitute an argument. I didn't say whether it was "good" or "bad" to have a culture that promotes or suppresses risk taking...no one can. It is not "racist" to say that two things are not exactly the same.

> The things you need to "innovate" are wealth and security. Innovation is a luxury.

Dead wrong. Wealth and security create complacency. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is not just some stupid quip.

>What makes you think they won't?

I don't. My entire post was a postulation, which is why I used phrases such as "it could be", "general observation" and "there may be", etc. It appears that you are merely looking for a fight instead of having a conversation.
As someone who has also been working with PHP since early 4.x, I find I have a lot of sympathy for the haters. It has improved a lot, but there's a lot to hate.

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ is a pretty thorough overview.
My life is complete
"Aren't the Chinese essentially just playing on foreign greed"

Sure they are.

I'm not an expert but my perception is that China is using two carrots: cheap labour and big markets.

If you are foreign capital, in order to profit you need to create a "mix enterprise" with local capital. The result is that they get the know-how and knowledge and they diminish the chance of relocation to cheaper places.

When they sell their products abroad, they also get foreign currency that allow them to import technology and expertise.

That is very well done.

If you think this is morally wrong (even if every developed country did it), considered the following:

"according to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China’s poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012"
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China)

500 million people. That justify a little trickery I think.

Compare that to the morality of people in IMF and other institutions that advice poor countries (in collusion with corrupt local authorities) to open totally their markets.
I'm gonna be honest, I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
I'll see if I can find the error string in the console about that (we should state the why). There are (used to be?) Upgrade your account things all over the place, but perhaps your setup was sufficiently mixed mode to have the limit yet not the prompt? Feel free to email me (contact in profile) your project number and I'll attach it to a bug.
Sure, and you get runtime errors instead of compile time errors. That's the point.
You are just racist.
The challenge is getting the market to value the token that miners are paid in, such that the chain is sufficiently protected by their proof-of-work. Digital money may be the only thing valuable enough to absorb the capital loss associated with the energy spent on proof-of-work, whereas a messaging board -- or any other application that creates relatively little value -- will not generate enough profits to cover the miners' work.

The only reason the Bitcoin blockchain is mined so heavily is because of its tokens' high price -- and sufficient market depth, which can absorb miners cashing out their earnings -- which basically sets in motion something that can't be stopped until it reaches non-profitability, unless the entire world decides to forego profitable Bitcoin mining.
Recent discussion, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14746169
> The fraction of things that humans can do which machines cannot is shrinking monotonically.

That's only true until it's not. Our little enclave of civilization that currently exists on this planet has a finite lifespan, just like every other civilization that's ever been run by uplifted killer apes. Either we will achieve a takeoff point within that lifespan, or we will not. If not - and I think that's the more likely outcome - there is no reason to expect another industrial revolution now that the easily accessible fossil fuels are all gone. Our descendants will eke out a living as subsistence farmers until evolution eliminates the overhead of general intelligence or the sun autoclaves the biosphere.
Your first paragraph is spot on.

The "singularity" is really just 17th-century metaphysics. It's Rene Descartes all over again imbued with religious undertones of salvation and transcendence. Most of the "aspirations" of its occurrence are nonsense. Kurzweil has fashioned himself like an AI prophet. For some reason, it has caught on among people, some very smart, and has lead to this general passive-ness to solving real problems today. The "singularity" becomes the answer for everything, "it's definitely coming!"
That would be the time zone configured on your device. In this case, Irish Standard Time. Which, unlike the American nomenclature for time zones, is a Daylight Saving Time time zone (Ireland uses GMT outside of DST).

Note that the page has "2017/08/01 00:00 UTC" in the source, but uses a "Localize dates" JavaScript function to change that to your configured time zone.
Agreed. I used some awesome java apps back in the say, but always shared between friends via sync cable. Data was for people more affluent than I. I still recall selling nokia headphone adapters like crazy. They had pins, but no 1/8" jack was commonly available, so I hacked the handsfree ones, moving the mic pin to be stereo instead, and doubling up the grounds on either side for a better connection.
The problem is that their systems aren't very good so if it's just APIs then it's more than likely a cloud provider would provide similar APIs and eat their lunch. The only thing they seem to really be able to do in this space is consulting
But of course you can talk about simple physics without invoking quantum physics. What do you think physicists did before? Most everyday phenomena can be approximated very well by classical physics, and modeling the full wave-function for every particle wouldn't even get you any results in a reasonable time.

Since neurons are relatively large and dense, I expect a classical approximation wouldn't show any observable difference in behavior. Unless a deviation is shown, I don't think it is necessary to postulate things like Roger Penrose's quantum-gravity "explanation" of consciousness.
There's obviously overlap, because people here have shown a dislike to the 60 minutes show.

Overall that probably helps the brand with some groups, and harms it with others (scientists, engineers) so you may have more work to convince them, though the puff pieces might help sell it at the exec level.
My default is Fiona. It seems like the cadences of a Scottish accent help mask the shortcomings of TTS technology.
What would you if you have to start from nothing?
Based on your experience/knowledge, what you will do as a living , If tomorow you have to start all over from 0, (you get fired at your job, or your startup failed, and you have no money left)
Amounts up to about £1m, it seems: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/greenpolitics/legal/75...

In case you think that's rather a lot, remember that the modal barrister may get paid a lot less: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/richard-bentwood/legal-aid-r...

And it's certainly small beer compared to CEOs, footballers or top TV celebrities.
It's included in disc 2 of the re-release.
You could, but why should you spend the cycles on that at runtime when you could've done it just once in the compile phase and errored out at a useful time instead of six weeks later when you hit the one branch you neglected to write unit tests for?
Hacker's guide to Neural Networks (2012)
Still lame, just cropping and increasing saturation/contrast. Some of the pictures in the blog post look worse than the originals, they are artificial.
Uh, ever heard the statement that premature optimization makes changes harder further down the road?

The problem with the body/mind system is the insane level of interconnection and feedback loops. "We made you 20% smarter!, uh, sorry about the 60% incident increase in cancer though". The size of the problem space when dealing with human minds is astronomical, we will likely need intelligent systems to solve the problem, which means the silicon Strong AI will come before the Wetware AI.
Ok... Then explain why it was common to encounter the phrase "killer app" in marketing materials in the 80's.
I have a 3 year old who has all kinds of plans for Christmas. I seriously doubt a Raven is capable of that.
He advocates flatpak, which is basically desktop Docker. You package all your dependencies so you can choose any of the 15 to put inside your flatpak, and it'll work with any of the 15 outside your flatpak.

You get the normal trade-offs for this approach -- large downloads, disk space, slow security updates, UI inconsistencies but XKCD 927 doesn't really apply.
> solving distribution and flow is almost trivial. We have all sorts of systems for solving distribution problems and finding maximal flow along a network. There's even an entire class of algorithms to solve it with[1],

I would not be so confident with that. Yes, in a perfect world with perfectly rigid, cubical cows, and passengers that are never late you can make flow algo's that reliably hit near 'global maximums'. Things do not change dramatically if you feed the problem to some ML algo.

The flow problem for airlines is in bigger part a problem how to make decisions given near random occurrence of things like sudden worsening of the weather, traffic redirection due to something happening on the runway/airport, fueling trucks being late, and of course the need to maximize revenue per seat. The best decision making algorithm here would not be the one that maximizes throughput, but one that can keep routes more or less consistent given all those changes.

Here, I see that even if you had a near-perfect routing algorithm, and a transportation system with no human driven cars, the whole routing map may have to be changed completely in response minuscule externalities like somebody jaywalking. This class of problems is altogether different than any kind of optimization.

Ironically, the logic class most adapted for solving such problems is the long forgotten fuzzy logic.
I think "generation" here is referring to EC2 generations and not GPU generations – AWS tends to use that term to refer to new instance types being released.

((Next Generation) (GPU EC2 Instances)) rather than ((Next Generation GPU) (EC2 Instances)) :)
Yes, it's great!
Disclaimer: this is a throwaway account, and I used to work for IBM.

I like Cloudant .. it is not too bad. In a recent project (after I left IBM), I needed to get a data tier up quickly and I actually used it for the initial POC. And yes, it was an acquisition by IBM. I was a bit worried that bluewashing would have made Cloudant crap but looks like they have managed to avoid it. The caveat I'd suggest is look closely at the pricing model. If you want QoS and scale, be careful of the pricing model. For small projects and projects that need fast completion (what project today doesn't?), it is actually very nice. You asked for caveats .. I think some of the language bindings were a bit out of date .. but since it uses REST calls, it wasn't too hard to bypass.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_t...

Historically, the country which claimed international jurisdiction over the sea was the UK.
> So you believe "rights holders" rights are unlimited, and they should have the power to demand anything?

That's exactly not what I said:

> The rights holders and/or distributors have every right to demand certain conditions for you to view their IP.

"Certain conditions" here referring to a subscription to a given service as many artists do on sites like Patreon, subscription through an exclusive DRM-enabled device like an Apple TV or FireTV, heck you could even consider the set-top boxes used by cable and satellite TV companies as that sort of requirement (and an active subscription of course).

The only media to which this doesn't really apply is OTA TV, Radio, and YouTube videos (mostly, excluding stuff confined to YouTube Red) and what I'm saying is that the creator of any given media has every right to decide which media channels it will be distributed through, at what cost, and via what channels be it iTunes, Patreon or Amazon or all of the above (as it's able to be.) You, for example, couldn't record all episodes of Last Week Tonight, and post them for sale on iTunes; the fact that HBO doesn't do that doesn't give you the right to then do it yourself, for profit or otherwise.
The premise is wrong.

"We’ve been told the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is right around the corner. But what if it isn’t?"

Google Photos already picks out objects in photos to make photos searchable by keyword, removes obstructions (eg. fences) from photos. Tesla cars already automatically follow the speed limit, automatically brake, automate lane changes, etc.

A few years ago this article might've had a valid point, but not anymore.
Thanks, interesting read!
7 YC startups find success in the heartland
Very few of:

http://pythonbooks.org/for-experienced-programmers-new-to-py...

Are for experienced programmers new to Python, which is a shame.
One option instead of making them a website (which they probably don't care about) is selling them leads (which they probably do).

Instead of them saying they don't like technology, you just say that you'll send them leads for $x per go.

You then build the sites and bill them for each contact that goes through (or phone call - bit more work).
Today the Democratic Party is almost entirely positioning itself on "not being as bad as the Republicans" without any sort of positive vision. That's the reason all they can talk about is Russia and Trump; it keeps them from even having to articulate a position other than being against these enemies.

There are a handful of figures to whom this does not apply, but the greater party apparatus fights tooth and nail against any substantive change (on the grounds that the current strategy is the only way to win elections, even as they lost all three branches of the national government and are irrelevant in more and more states) so I'm not holding my breath.
Yeah, it's more akin to Auto Tone/Auto Contrast/Auto Color in Photoshop: often a quick and easy way to tweak levels/curves on a photo that's already decent, but much more varied results on anything with mixed or more atypical colors and levels of light.
The thing about self driving cars is the point at which they become generally viable is defined by human social issues.

We could have self-driving cars today. Heck, we could have had them in the 90s. In limited scenarios, and with some small infrastructure investment.

I don't personally view it as a super-hard technical problem. It is a much much harder social problem.
I'm not even going to ask what a nut hatch is.
Usually, people who point out that money is a human-made construct are not trying to say that money is useless. Rather, they're trying to encourage you to question how money is constructed, likely because they think that making some tweaks would lead to it being more useful.

Kind of like people who tweak fonts to make them more useful, to stick somewhat close to your alphabet example.
Weekend JavaScript: ECMA-262 aka ES2017, and Other Articles
Yeah but there's lots of cat owners who want to read about cats and (speculating) cat health diet and behavior and maybe show cat photos and talk cat.

Build a website for them and do the cold calls to cat food suppliers to sell ads.

Or sell websites to cat owners for their cat - every cat needs a website.

Or make "hot or not" for cats.

Or combine all these into one site.

The internet was mostly made for porn and cats so you should be able to get the cat thing to work.
This is what Brazil does and it is definitely not winning.
Two major factors of China's apparent success are cheap labor and creative reporting.

The country's problems, aka the price paid for the industrial success, are a bit less prominently seen. Western countries faced the same problems (pollution, bad work conditions, etc) at the time of their first industrial revolutions, but by now are totally unwilling to pay such a price any more.
I think he means those problems are real AI, and current solutions stink.
I am no better.
https://www.crossing.us/intersections/cock/ball
figuratively
Yeah, they use an open diff + electronic braking to send wheel to wheel, seems to work pretty well.
If you have to raise your wages it generally means your competitor also has to raise theirs, so yes, businesses can usually remain profitable.

And if your competition is foreign you're usually even better off -- wages in China have been rising a lot faster than wages in the States.
Or rather keep Intel from munging the order their processors write bytes in.
OT - new user here, what does green mean? I assumed it was staff/moderators.
I'm a neophyte to ML, but one course I very much enjoyed auditing was "Learning from Data" [1] taught by Caltech Professor Yaser Abu-Mostafa. I found concept of the _Learning Model_ particularly fresh representation of the ML activity (starting at 14:39 in the first video linked here [2])

[1]: http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html
[2]: https://youtu.be/mbyG85GZ0PI?t=14m39s
Pretty sweet! Anything similar for JavaScript?

This is prolly there best list of Python books I've seen. Great job!
You need to sell the sizzle not the steak. Nobody needs a website. some business need new business. some need ways for existing customers to more easily schedule appointments, etc...

Also, the more risk you can absorb the better. don't sell websites sell appointments. or take a commission.
The books in that section are topical books or reference books that contain a condensed introduction to Python in the beginning.
World’s Blackest Material, Makes 3D Objects Look Two-Dimensional and Featureless
تحميل برنامج انستقرام بلس للأندرويد أحدث إصدار عربي Instagram Plus
Components of Improving Sales and Processes to Build Intelligent Businesses
Here's a working link for the 'magic story' link from slide 29.

It's a great bit of hacker lore, if you haven't yet read it.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
My pet theory is that if everything goes as well as it can go, people thousands of years from now will call the period we are currently living through the singularity.

I mean, if you look at the definition of singularity that is implied by the site behind your link -- "self-accelerating technologies will speed up to the point of so profound a transformation that the other side of it is unknowable" -- then to be quite frank, that has basically already happened.

BTW, I'm not trying to say that the singularity has ended already. It's a development that started 1-2 centuries ago and is currently ongoing, and pedants of the future will quibble that it's not truly a singularity (but then again, true "naked" singularities simply don't exist in nature, so that point is moot).
Has anyone done much Linux gaming on EC2? I want to be able to play xonotic again but I don't play it often enough to justify buying a high power desktop.
Corporations pay lobbyists to weaken or remove laws that hold them to task for pollution. That is they chose to do it. (for many reasons)

Its not me or you thats changing law to pollute on behalf of corporations or companies. Its lawyers working for corporations.

So how is the commentator "Straw-manning"??
WhatsApp now lets you share any file type with other users
> "the Sony rootkit CDs" -- was this illegal?

Hacking computers is very illegal - to crazy extremes, indeed.

But the other examples are relevant, thanks! Upvoted.
To be honest, I'm more worried about the lack of education we have these days. We seem to take for granted that a certain level of knowledge is unnecessary these days -- because we can just let the factories deal with it. How many people know how to make preserves? How many know how to make beer? How many know how to grow vegetables? How many know how to fillet a fish? It's just basic information that used to be common knowledge in every household -- it's already lost to the majority now. Of course we can relearn it from books, but I often think that together with this explosion of access to knowledge, we're already in a bit of a dark age. I suppose the cause is that most are uninterested. Even me, if I'm honest ;-)
Milan and Borussia Dortmund to Meet for Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang
Not trying to be inflammatory, but why the need for books? Inspiration? Or do they come with nuggets of gold?

I'm just use to googling everything so forgive me for my ignorance.
However, it is a good idea to move our heavy industries off Earth if possible. Once we have access to space, we can get things from space cheaper than we can get from Earth, with asteroid and moon mining and all.