skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was at the CogX artificial intelligence summit in London a couple of weeks ago, and IBM were there in full force.

I made several rounds around all of the stalls, and sat at the bar for a couple of hours with friends, and the whole time I could see the IBM stall, with 4-5 people there, WATSON plastered everywhere and nobody talking to them.

So I went over. I got talking to one of their technical people there,

I am highly experienced in Deep Learning so I started talking about Neural Nets, and he went blank, and admitted he didn't know much about that. I inquired about WATSON's technology and he couldn't answer telling me he didn't know.

I asked about the main use cases, and what makes WATSONs offering better than Deep Learning, he couldn't answer, or even compare on basic levels.

I asked him "What are the coolest uses of WATSON you've seen" and he immediatly went into a canned response about WATSON diagnosing cancer (a project I had seen and was familiar with) we spoke a few minutes on that, and I asked what other cool projects WATSON had been used on ... he had nothing, and I mean literally nothing.

very disappointing
touché, it's a valid question for sure. Not sure how the figures net out in total, i.e. lives lost because a law enforcement officer could not disable the threat vs innocents taken out. I'm not sure the former is a very quantifiable thing, and the later is clearly measurable. I've also been curious about that question in its more generic form, i.e. not just armed law enforcement but any citizen able to stop a threat.
I came here to post this, too little to late. I don't know what they could realistically do to alter their public image at this point besides change their name possibly?

I am going to continue to hate them until they stop existing, and I don't think anyone or anything they do could convince me otherwise.
>>The Democrats are basically Republicans-lite and have been for decades

Democrats don't want to abolish every regulation possible in order to maximize corporate profits.

Democrats don't want to cut healthcare and entitlement programs in order to give massive tax cuts to rich people.

Democrats don't want to defund Planned Parenthood and are not rabidly anti-abortion.

Democrats don't want to ban gay marriage.

Democrats don't work their asses off trying to suppress minority votes.

Democrats don't want to prevent refugees from war zones from seeking shelter in the United States.

I can go on.

Basically, the idea that Democrats and Republicans are nearly identical is popular only amongst people who don't pay attention to politics because they are wealthy and privileged enough to not be directly affected by any of it. But if you ask a low-income woman, for example, I guaran-fuckin-tee you that she will gladly educate you on the finer details of decades of Republican oppression of women.
So, you are saying the library should store some solar panels and spare computers somewhere?

Creating electricity to run a computer is not really that difficult.
Binary bloat and general difficulties with how one handles variance in light of people's expectations.
Did you know they're actually venomous?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus_venom
Those employers don't want employees, they want CHEAP employees. If you pay $100/hour, you will get employees. So, the only question is "where is that wage number?"

Employers aren't stupid. If they could make more money by hiring employees, they would. What this tells me is that demand isn't high enough for an employer to calculate an increased return from hiring someone.

So, what this tells us is that demand is dead. That's what happens when you hollow out the middle class.
Did I miss where in the article the OP describes his alcoholic habits? Established his weakness for beer? I don't doubt that her father was, but it felt weird that I missed his alcoholism. Was it regularly having a beer in a to-go-cup?
In my Python libraries I do a similar thing. I though leverage a makefile with commands for making wheels, RPMs or DEB files so I have flexibility on deployment
> Everyone wants generics, no one knows why

This is such a troll'ish statement, but I'll respond anyways because maybe you actually are just that uninformed. Without generics any number of libraries that utilize generic function blocks - Func [1] in C#, Callable [2] in Java, etc., and do things like return the function's type parameter as a method result, would not be possible. This is exceedingly common, at least in libraries. If you want to know how common, let me refer you to my friend http://google.com.

Just because something isn't valuable to you, personally, doesn't mean it's not valuable. As in all aspects of life, not everyone is you.

1. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb549151(v=vs.110)....

2. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/concurre...
IBM vastly over promises with their marketing. It is so frustrating to have to answer questions from the CEO about why we don't solve all our problems with magic beans from IBM's Watson.

I understand that this is what they want. They want to drive executives' interest in the product, but I believe they do so at the expense of their goodwill with the tech community.

Am I the only one who cringes when these ads air?

Edit: "magic beans" is harsh and it isn't that I don't think their tools are good. My point is that they put you in a position where it seems very unlikely to meet expectations.
A stunning blueprint for co-existence of humans and AI
I saw it here https://youtu.be/BBrN-ax2eJA?t=118. Looks like the cop pulls up in a car, and then officer drives off, not the same thing I realize about being unarmed. I might have confused the unarmed police with the British bobbies perhaps. I thought I heard somewhere Australian police don't carry firearms.
Watson is one of the biggest empty marketing slogans ever. The marketing makes it almost seems like General AI able to easily solve your pressing problems if you pay IBM money.

As a non-expert, it seems like the top end researchers are working for Google(Hinton, Bengio, etc), Facebook(LeCun), Baidu, Uber (ex CMU faculty). I don't really see a lot of machine learning research coming out of IBM comparable to the others.

IBM seems to running on the fumes of it's previous greatness while burning the ship to generate stock market returns.
This is cool but I really don't get why one could call this actually creating "Professional-Level" photographs. It's more like a very good auto-retouch. There's still the matter of someone actually being there, realizing it is a beautiful place, and dragging a large camera with them and waiting for the right light.
This isn't true.

Source: I have bothered to set foot in libraries lately.
For me, I find this funny

> reports in NYTimes and other reputable media

IIRC POTUS calls that fake news?
The real problem is that Everybody is afraid to share data with them because they know Watson will become better at the expense of company's business model.
He doesn't care because he's "right".
Firefox Now Respects DNT on Add-Ons Page (Disables Requests to Google Analytics)
He apparently drank even while driving. And also drank while visiting relatives when he had to make the long drive back because his wife did not drive.
Sent. Sorry, I hadn't checked back on comments until now.
> Generics in Go: https://twitter.com/snoyberg/status/882255351382462464

Generics and Go: https://github.com/stefantalpalaru/golib-nim
1. Buy a computer with internet access

2. Subscribe to America Online

3. Navigate to www.healthcare.gov

4. Sign up for a health plan, paying likely more than your employer pays for you, but likely much less than the self employment premium

* Even the current republican plan wouldn't really change this, and even if so, it wouldn't change for like 4 more years.

* There are pricing and plan challenges every year are real, due to the incentive system being insane (and sick people being expensive.) Depending on where you live, it may be tough to predict what plans will be available next year.
I agree, IBM would never send anyone who actually knows anything to these events. The developers are locked away for several good (for IBM) reasons...
Surprising and a bit disappointing from a company that is famous for reinventing itself.
To be honest, if my choice is "I am highly experienced in Deep Learning so I started talking about Neural Nets" and "IBM Watson representative", I start wondering whether it's possible for the whole building to just go up in flames.
I've walked around Chicago drunk plenty of times. There is nothing to be afraid of. I grew up in Fairfax County, and have been in Newark plenty of times and if you're worried about stuff happening to you there I don't know what to tell you. I lived in downtown Wilmington and Baltimore and never felt the need to be armed. (These days I kind of do but mainly for when Maryland decides to secede from the union.)
The part they share is literally called "Coarse/Acquisition" and the part they don't share is called "Precise". (This has nothing to do with Selective Availability; they're broadcast in two completely different bands.) The GP's characterisation is broadly accurate.
please do send that to rsc
shareholders don't get profits; hardly anyone is paying dividends. Corporations are just hoarding cash.
Roku is planning an IPO for this year
Sitting on money isn't profitable either. Equity investment is a risk, and simply saving it is a loss (due to inflation). It's just that businesses don't _need_ to spend more on payroll to be successful, or they don't see the relationship of that investment to payoff vs. any other investment they could make. And to be fair, it _is_ rather fluffy. How many more dollars do you need to pay on a position to get 10x return? Can you even quantify that at the level of a single business? If you pay a lot, but have a shitty workplace culture, you may be just as unproductive as a place that pays less, but has a great culture.

Unfortunately dollars for employees doesn't necessarily translate to return as well as, say, hiring a process manager or automation engineer to try to eliminate the effects of a bad employee.
Seems like the cure is worse than the disease. In addition to incentivizing investments that create more jobs at the expense of those that create less (using robots, software, and all that), the government must now evaluate and track how many jobs all investment vehicles create.

Also, queue massive new industry that specializes in creative job accounting/number fixing in 3, 2, 1...
Testing with headless chrome
This and the comments below are really depressing to me. Watson seemed like such an exciting piece of tech and something that had the potential to change the world and now I feel like the shareholder's virus has stagnated it to the point of it being worthless. I've heard multiple stories where the staff that's assigned to demo and talk about Watson have no idea what they're talking about and that the marketing, management, and finance people don't have any inkling as to what is special about Watson. They only care that it's not currently making them boatloads of money, despite the fact that it absolutely could. I guess I'll have to move my excitement to Google and Apple's machine learning attempts.
That sounds not at all plain not simple.
To be fair, the "technical" person at a conference does not mean "engineer". It's like a quarter tier past pure-salesperson. Obviously not an impressive showing overall, but I don't think it should be used as a judge of their technical talent.
What are some of them? I'm not too up on the latest research in this area so it would be interesting to know how you can do a cryptocurrency that doesn't depend on proof-of-work calculations.
I don't think this isn't limited to IBM, my partner's PE firm recently hired a small consulting group touting a "revolutionary, AI-driven" real-estate analysis product that has zero AI whatsoever. It's basically a custom spreadsheet tool that they're claiming to be building AI on top of as they consume company data, but for a few hundred grand per year, they have a basic CRUD app on Azure with a reporting tool using D3 visualizations. But they think it's AI.

It's almost like 2016-17 were gold-mine years for marketing buzzwords and some companies are closing deals with no real execution plan for what they're selling.
It's a bit of a giveaway that R included domain specific terminology: otherwise it would've been hopeless for me. Maybe the same for VHDL, but I know so little about it that I don't even know if you could write code without domain specific elements.
Nuclear scientist predicts China could be using fusion power in 50 years
For example, in Debian 7, routes.max_size is dynamically allocated for ipv4 and hard-coded to 4096 for ipv6. I eventually figured it out after searching for a while, but that's not something I'd expect to have to do (having been used to ipv4 working decently out of the box).
defn vs defun :)

I remembered it somehow as "clojure doesn't allow you to define fun"
The specs for the board indicate no ECC support.
How did you test it?

BTW, I'm hoping that ECC is there.
I didn't expect a discourse on topology, but Compare your X to Y, and knowing more than 1 use case is basic, basic, sales stuff
It all adds up. The evidence is pretty broad and conclusive that alcohol is neurotoxic and reduces your life span. It's important that we do make clear to our children the dangers so they don't fall into addiction out of complacency. All to often cigarette smoking and drinking is normalized. Now of course we have to deal with marijuana.

Have a few glasses once a month is probably ok, same for other drugs I am sure. But it's all too easy to slip into habit.

There are ways to create joy In your life that don't require chemicals. We don't teach our children about this enough. Stories like this could stressed that.
Sure, that's fewer than the US, but it's still quite a lot in absolute terms. It's high enough rate where a cop would routinely encounter armed people.
> Unfortunately, IBM is struggling to bridge the gap between client needs and its own technological capability.

AI in a nutshell.
Another fundamental issue is that business has never been structured for high wage elasticity. When the market clearing price for wages becomes volatile, which seems to be increasingly the case, it is generally very difficult for business to track the market because their operating models are predicated on the relatively non-volatility of wages. Adjusting to that is generally not easy or quick as it often forces companies to change the way they do business at a pretty fundamental level.

I've seen this play out at companies big and small when changes in market wages force them to change the way they think about hiring. Ironically, the replacement strategy is often to eliminate positions from the bottom half of the wage pool and to add a much smaller number of positions in the top half, at least in my experience. (It is increasingly widely believed that this latter strategy is superior in any case and there is evidence to at least suggest this is true.)
Dried cow dung
Who gives a fuck what the US government ‘allows’? This is highly arrogant and entitled thinking.
> IBM seems to running on the fumes of it's previous greatness while burning the ship to generate stock market returns.

They have great research, but as always with lumbering behemoths they have to earn enough from the tech to keep the behemoth going, and with their bread and butter (hardware and consulting) drying up they're trying to maximise returns and having to oversell their remaining products
For whatever reason, maximizing profits and minimizing expenditures is a popular trend among many successful companies
Really good story. Really good writing.

I wasen't expecting this. I thought it would be another blame the alcoholic father.

My dad was an alcoholic. He died of a football sized tumor in his liver. It went undiagnosed for at least a decade. The doctor thought it was just scar tissue from a previous umbilical hernia operation.

Now my father was a piece of work, but it wasen't the alcohol that made him difficult to be around. It was just his personality. He was actually more pleasant to be around when he was drinking.

As to his drinking, and driving. Some of you will question what I'm going to say, but he was a better driver when drinking. I know blasphemy, but true.

It could be that he was more coordinated than the average person, or that he was driving daily since he was 14. Yes, he drive to high school in the Richmond district in San Francisco. Forget the high school, but that actress in West side Story, and Rebel without a Cause--Natalie Wood went to. It was Lincoln high. His could I forget that school?

Any who, he was the good driver sober, or after a few. And he was a functional alcoholic. He never missed work due to a hang over. Then again it was a different era.

Drinking on the job was almost encouraged. Yes--union electricians could drink beer if doing something mundane. It wouldn't happen these days, but did back in the day.

He was very conservative guy, but always kinda nervous. It could have been genes(he was Irish), or just his personality?

He used to say if opium wasen't illegial, I think I would like the effect.

Later on life, I knew what he was getting at. I don't know the alternative to alcohol is. It's not benzodiazepines, anti-depressants, or opium. You would think by now, we would have a safe drug to take tge edge off? And no, he tried all the strains of marijuana. It just name him more nervous.

Anyways, keep up the truthful--honest writing. Don't sellout.
In Go, the magic right now is actually in special-cased types like map. Generics actually have the potential to reduce the amount of magic as it exists currently.

The design can go badly wrong, of course, but it can also go wonderfully right. Generics are a very important feature to consider for the language.

I have no opinion on exceptions with regard to Go specifically. I think they serve a good purpose in other languages but are often misused.
I work in developer advocacy at IBM.

If you would like to follow-up about your experience or to get connected with the right folks to answer you questions, please feel free to reach out to me.
"Watson" made more sense to me when I realized it was just a branding term for any AI-related product, API, or service offered by IBM, which vary widely in functionality. That fact is not that hidden [1], but their marketing doesn't exactly emphasize it. If you view it that way, "Watson" should just be compared against any other similarly broad AI-as-a-service offering with strengths and weaknesses, not treated as some integrated Intelligence that will solve all your problems.

[1] E.g. they're pretty open about renaming existing things to fit under the Watson brand: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2016/10/predictive-analyti...
I can see why you'd think that. However, industrialization does not occur overnight.
> You really haven't thought this through.
I don't know why you would say this. Do you think that Earth will never reach a point where its population exceeds the planet's capacity to support it?
Tezos Blockchain Project Raises $232M with Initial Coin Offering
So... "It's not what you know, it's who you know"

That's what I wanted to get away from.
Better manage issues and pull requests with keyword updates
Yes. Fly to Chicago and I will bet you $10,000 to your $1 that you'll be just fine.

A word of warning: I wouldn't take this bet if I were you.
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I'm totally missing your point here. Care to explain it?
YOU get a bill. Society pays for public drinking fountains, homeless shelters, section 8 housing, etc... where water is provided for the less fortunate at a scaled societal contribution (or free).

Flint MI is an absolute crisis and the government has stepped in, the state of Michigan sued the city, and there have been over a dozen criminal indictments. Multiple governments have stepped in to repair the obligation of clean drinking water, and to punish those who failed the citizens.
> “tagged” by category owes its existence as an organizing principle to the subject headings delineated by the Library of Congress. A national card catalogue system was the original “search engine” — one that needed no electricity, no service providers or broadband or smartphones, and that was truly democratic.

Democratic my ass. Card catalogs where as bigoted as the people who wrote them. A small subset of the population.

Things on the internet are not tagged, because as a concept it sucks. It has never worked even if Cory and Clay loved them 10 years ago.

This is such a strange article since the nostalgic side that's lost is interesting. The extended skill to use them is interesting (A lost art form) and the bias lost in their writing is interesting too. There is a really interesting article possible here.
It depends on what you're interested in. Admittedly, if you want, say, a global map of all hydrothermal vents, 500-2000m is not going to cut it. But the time and cost required to map the entire ocean with multibeam sonar is huge, on the order of 120 ship-years for the deep oceans and 750 ship-years for the shallow (<500m) continental margins [1].

Global coverage at 500-2000m resolution from satellite gravitometers represents a very cost effective middle ground between that huge effort and what is currently available, which is a patchwork of soundings that has gaps 10s to 100s of km thoughout much of the ocean. (See Fig 2 of [1]).

[1] Becker at al. (2009) http://topex.ucsd.edu/sandwell/publications/124_MG_Becker.pd...
Do you know where that video was recorded? I'd swear that's Bobby Knight at 12:36.
Kind of reminds me of these frustrating anti-nuclear advocates that set up a table with some posters at my old college one day. They couldn't give me any real answers why I should support solar wind and hydro over nuclear besides nuclear being "old technology". They had no response to the fact that this state isn't ideal for large scale use of any of the green alternatives or that much more deaths directly result from solar panel installation accidents alone than nuclear as a whole. They couldn't tell me specifically what was supposedly dangerous about current waste storage techniques. The worst part was I googled the organization they were there on behalf of and right on their webpage was an explanation of the failure of nuclear plants in the state to stay profitable (I forget why but it seems really odd since you get so much power from them). I guess they cared more about getting more mileage for less effort dishonestly swaying the local types who are automatically turned off by "radiation" and big industrial buildings.

Was that event not geared towards technical people overall or was that stand an exception?
How does that help you access your app from some other machine? And how does ssh help you get secure access from a remote browser to the tunneled port? The ssh security is only from the tunneled port to your local port.
I think some of these results are really lovely, the one at Interlaken is a perfect travel photo. Would be interesting to see more types of work this could apply to.

Saw a few people talking about retouching and studio work - I do a lot of studio shoots and retouching on my own, and would be happy to help or participate in projects. Feel free to reach out.
With a card catalog, the fact that the system does not do that is obvious to the user.
Also a totally new class of bio weapons.