skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would never downvote someone simply for disagreeing, and certainly not unless I was 100% sure they were wrong or it was way offtopic. (And you would be surprised how often I admit I was wrong or cede a point!)

You're basically saying "well, it's still subject to logic errors." Well, that's a nonargument, because you can say that about 100% of languages in existence. That is not a criticism you can levy just against BEAM langs. And we were never arguing that BEAM magically takes care of your logic bugs. Just that it seems to handle the "set of all bugs that are not logic bugs" better.

I also apologize for erlang/elixir fans being rabid and insufferable. ;) A lot of us have dealt with many other langs (I spent years on Ruby and other OO langs) and we're enjoying the unexpected (to us) benefits of this new/old world, that's all. Joe Armstrong is basically Einstein AFAIC...
To be honest I didn't read the actually because I gotta run, but right from the outset there is one bullshit bit that always annoys me: there is no "the" singularity!

For those who are in it, there is nothing else, they might not even have a concept of the singularity. For those who aren't in it, there could be lots -- it's not called singularity because there can be just one of them. It just means falling into a well you cannot get out of, and that an outside observer can't distinguish you from the well either. Okay, so I made that up. But whatever the best way to describe it may be, nothing about that inherently prefers fulfilling all our dreams to torturing us forever or something else entirely, that's quite orthogonal to something being a singularity.
>But if you took someone from 1870 and had them wake up 70 years later, in 1940, the world would look entirely different.

>Now skip forward from 1940 to 2010: apart from our obsession with little glass rectangles, the world would be fundamentally familiar.

Disagree completely. The technology and information economy revolution means that a socially well-adjusted blue collar, white collar or even field-hand in 1940 cannot compete at all in 2010 at the same job.
Astro Digital launched its first imaging satellites
Oracle Weighed Buying Palantir in 2016, Investor Tells Court
Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003Z9L4NA/
> For example, I've been examining generics recently, but I don't have in my mind a clear picture of the detailed, concrete problems that Go users need generics to solve.

Collections?
General intelligence evolving independently in another distantly related species implies there is a degree of evolutionary convergence towards this trait given the right selective stimulus. This has implications for the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence and might allow us to rule out the possibility that 'general intelligence' is an astronomically unlikely event - one of the main candidates for a 'Great Filter'.
Yeah, one of the arguments I heard to why India couldn't accomplish any rapid economic development was their lack of protectionism until recent years, then again protectionism alone is not enough.
If the business can't earn a profit at the market rate for the labour required to run the business, then maybe they shouldn't be in business any more?

I mean lots businesses become viable if you only have to pay $1/hr.
I can't afford to buy a Ferrari, however I would really like to have one. Does my need is less important than a need of those who can afford it? Does this mean that now all Ferraris should cost (let's say) $1000?
I don't think your comment is sincere. Looks like you've already made up your mind.
Excuse my French, but bullshit.

Consider Thailand and Malaysia, two neighbouring countries in SE Asia. In Thailand, they opened up markets to car manufacturers and suppliers, with the result that Thailand is now one of Asia's largest car manufacturing hubs. In Malaysia, they imposed protectionist barriers and tried to build their own cars. Ever heard of Proton or Perodua? No? There's a reason you haven't -- they're terrible.
TLDR: Don't assume singularity will come along and solve growing "today" problems.
I fondly remember unaligned access faults "back in the day" with FreeBSD/alpha. We implemented a fixup for applications, but not for the kernel. I seem to recall that even though x86 could deal with unaligned accesses, it caused minor performance problems, so fixing alignment issues on alpha would benefit x86 as well.

Most (definitely not all) of the mis-alignment problems were in the network stack, and were centered around the fact that ethernet headers are 14 bytes, while nearly all other protocols had headers that were a multiple of at least 4 bytes.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If I had a time machine, I would not kill Hitler. I'd go back to the 70s and make the ethernet header be 16 bytes long, rather than 14.
All of these problems could have been found by formal analysis.

"If only we'd had the human, time, money and organizational support resources to plan ahead more accurately, we wouldn't have made this particular mistake!" That's called the benefit of hindsight, and it's the project manager's classic "told you so". To management it sounds like "give me more budget and a slacker timeline", and to engineering it sounds like "someone wants to use a different one-true-solves-all-problems-solution".

Experienced system designers know that the real art is knowing that out in the real world, things will fail no matter how careful you are, so anticipating and detecting both known and unknown failure modes and recovering from them is really the critical need.

For an accessible, real world study of how this can be achieved with arbitrarily complex software systems, I can highly recommend reading about Erlang, or alternatively deploying a nontrivial pacemaker/corosync cluster. Most engineers never build a system this resilient in their lifetime, but once you have, you can never look back.
Huawei to unveil chipset with AI functionalities later this year – Digit.in
You only learn to write cursive in third grade in the US? So you learn to write "print letters" first and then cursive? In Hungary we only learn cursive, and in first grade. As one gets older they generally move towards a mixture of that and print letters, though. Still I find some form of cursive to be much faster to write compared to print letters.

And even though I don't write huge letters and pages of text in handwriting, I do take notes and write scribbles to organize my thought very often. It's not like typing has replaced all use cases of handwriting.
Quick Thoughts on Creating Coding Standards
Show HN: Write your Privacy Policy once and export to multiple languages
Just because a field-hand's job got automated doesn't meant the world would look fundamentally different.
I'll admit I fall into the camp of not believing the "Johnny Depp Transcendence AI" is right around any corner (neither is an Martian apartment complex for that matter). But I also believe it's the journey to such AI that's important. Even if we will never reach this ultimate goal.

We're already reaping the benefits of what we have learned from this struggle. And I think we gain so much insight into ourselves as we try to reverse engineer the most important part of our meat vehicle.
The quotas are here for 3 reasons:
A) make sure that the hardware is available with the Google SREs (to make sure there are enough VMs, SSDs, etc...)

B) validation for fraud (billing fraud, or free coupons and do bitcoin mining with it)
You could create 100 projects get 100*n quotas.

C) prevent human errors

Because of B), billing quota requests follow a standard quota request
How Artificial Intelligence is Outpacing Humans
I like Go concept: very simple and minimalistic language, yet usable enough for many projects, even at cost of some repetition. Generics are not a concern for me. But error handling is the thing I don't like at all. I think that exceptions are best construct for error handling: they are not invasive and if you didn't handle error, it won't die silently, you have to be explicit about that. In my programs there's very little error handling, usually some generic handling at layer boundaries (unhandled exception leads to transaction rollback; unhandled exception returns as HTTP 500, etc) and very few cases when I want to handle it differently. And this produces correct and reliable program with very little effort. Now with Go I must handle every error. If I'm lazy, I'm handling it with `if err != nil { return err; }`, but this style doesn't preserve stack trace and it might be hard to understand what's going on. If I want to wrap original error, standard library don't even have this pattern, I have to roll my own wrapper or use 3-rd library for such a core concept.

What I'd like is some kind of automatic error propagation, so any unhandled error will return from function wrapped with some special class with enough information to find out what happened.
It depends.
It seems that you see inflation as a kind of taxes and that you are against taxes.

If the government "print" new money to create more roads or to give healthcare and this cause inflation is that so unfair?

Only if you consider that you are entitle to a part of the economy, only because you have savings, nevertheless the needs of the society where you live.
Feds seek to seize movie rights, Palantir shares in Malaysia corruption case
A dream can't be failed. A dream is a dream.
I could ask the reverse: "why isn't China more successful?"

It's such a complicated issue that you could argue almost anything. I think any discussion must acknowledge Hong Kong, however, as an important data point.

My opinion is that the Communist party, even despite its "GDP obsession" [1], has gotten in the way more than anything.

As an (admittedly, very rough) estimate, if you take Hong Kong's GDP per person and multiply it by China's population, you get $58 trillion.

[1] https://www.economist.com/news/china/21689628-chinas-obsessi...
I appreciate the point of view this post is providing. It is always important to think about the potential limitations of AI, and the fact that once again, we may hit the ceiling of our current attempts at AI much more quickly than we realize, and no singularity will ever occur. We need to think about how to solve our problems realistically, now, without waiting for a godly super AI to come solve them for us.

However, what's bizarre is that he is painting a world that is already wrong. In particular:

"We won’t have massive, perfectly coordinated networks with optimised flow and distribution — think traffic networks (those self-driving Teslas that act as taxis when you don’t need them)"

But... we will. We're already making it. It might not work very well at first, but automated cars are a real thing, and they are going to happen. We have preliminary automated cars right now. Perhaps he is instead claiming that our autonomous cars won't scale, but this too makes no sense. Of course we can make them scale. Once we've solved the hard problem, which is actually driving the cars around and not hitting things, 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], which we currently use, right now, to solve things like scheduling airplane flights.

And then he brings up a point that seems completely perpendicular to the entire rest of the post:

"We won’t have total surveillance (à la Reynold’s Mechanism or Brin’s Transparent Society)"

This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with cryptography. Whether or not the singularity does or doesn't happen is completely irrelevant. Indeed, it currently looks like we're headed towards having total surveillance with or without the singularity, unless we do something about our privacy laws.

While we shouldn't assume AI will fix all our problems, the examples provided in this post are bizarre, to say the least.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_flow_problem
That totally works today. Its one of the many applications of blockchain tech due to its "immutable ledger" property.
Egs: ipfs.io
Besides this there are even many cool applications such as "golem.network- airbnb for computing", "filecoin.io - airbnb for storage" ,"ethereum dapps" etc.
Try an avocado milkshake sometime and you might change your opinion of avocado. The creaminess of avocado gives the milkshake a wonderful mouth feel.
Show HN: StuCo: The Student College for Hacker News Community
Yes, but you can buffer inter core communication, cores don't need to be in sync. I think. I'm not a CPU designer.
Show HN: CLI Roulette gane
How is your magical-problem-avoiding-technology recommendation any different from theirs?
Sep 9th actually. 0146 GMT.
> we must strive to be more than we are

To what end? Is a computer with our collective brains as AI orbiting a sun more or less than what we are? what should we be striving for as an ultimate utopian end to progress? Does/can such an end even conceptually exist?
Right, but lets say between 1920 and 1990? The difference would be less pronounced. I would say there was a discontinuity in the 90s and 2000s. But it is entirely possible that once everything has been "internetized", we will reach a plateau for the next decades.
I think we are also conditioned to not trust China. Certainly in the U.K. coverage about China is always negative, from dog stews to mafia-styled political stories. And of course the fact that China is gobbling so much and so fast ... Alibaba is apparently much bigger than Google and Amazon combined. Who's to say that Alibaba isn't the commercial face of the Chinese government? I think that's what we're really wary about.

Rational or irrational, we're definitely jealous, so whatever, that's high compliment for China. But China really is becoming a super, which means it's a threat to the old order. In South East Asia, it was once unthinkable to not see the US as an ally. Now this is shifting, for better or for worse cough South China Sea
'begs the question' is a bad translation of petitio principii, which is itself a bad translation from a greek text. The general usage of the term is the only correct interpretation. The phrase seems to be a trap for a certain category of pedants.
StuCo: Founders at Work
Some dreams are nightmares.
Gee, I wonder why a country with notoriously tight control of information would help funnel business to a single domestic cloud infrastructure provider...
Decoupling doesn't seem like the hard problem to me.. I.e. if you somehow have a separate SETI chain of verified claims about the hashes of sectors then it is easy to change the satisfiability problem to one where you need to buy your solution to the transaction chain hash as an inclusion a reference to a portion of a cycle in the other chain (which determines the payout of new coins, leaving you transaction fees.)
StuCo: Passwords: An Overt Enigma
TIT (This is Thailand), we can only speculate what happened here..
Its laughable that the 5 eyes make this policy, and try to use sympathetic old politicians who have no idea what it can entail, to implement it everywhere as policy in those countries and elsewhere.

Its reasoning is contemptible to western values. The banana republic-ization of the west continues. Its a disgrace.
StuCo: Solving Problems by Asking Questions
Windows called them programs (until recently), and Android & iOS call them apps, so it's likely that most people have only started hearing the term in the last 10 years.
Enter a pair of names to see if any intersections in the US match those names
StuCo: Introduction to StuCo
Very bad business decision, they are
killing their own product right there.

In the future everyone googling for a password manager
will run into these blog posts where reputable security
researches explain why 1Password is a bad choice.

It's hard to imagine a more harmful reputation
for a company trying to sell a password manager.
I eventually figured it out: once I created a separate billing project not attached to the free trial credit and attached it to my account I was able to proceed.

I mean: totally understand the fraud issue. Incredibly deceptive error message though. Just say what you need so I can be objective about the next step I should take: I already had multiple credit cards and bank accounts attached to the payment profile, but it took me nearly 2 hours to figure out that "you've reached your quota" means "you need to create a billing account that doesn't have free credit attached".

Free advice, so worth what you paid: your experience here would be WORLDS better with a simple "Upgrade your account" button that runs the $10 charge or whatever you've decided is required for forward progress.

That said: once I was past that gate, progress was swift, so there is that. Worth the money: you just need to make it straightforward to take my money.
Data transfer between EC2 and S3 in the same region is free but incurs costs between regions.
Plus black people now get to sit anywhere in the bus.
Borrowing what? Do we have time machines now?

There is money and there is real resources. Money is just a real resources distribution technology.

What is important is the real resources of a society. We (as a country, whatever is your country, if it has its own money) will never be short of money.

It can, however, get short of real resource if it leave infrastructure and knowledge diminish.
You can't be sure that your local library is free of regional or national bias. Sure, you might have a wider bubble by browsing cards randomly, than browsing recommendations on Amazon. But you could equally well browse Amazon somewhat randomly (e.g. by repeatedly clicking the least attractive book from the recommendation section).
Maybe not in the same job, but why does that matter? Are you saying they couldn't learn to drive an Uber or work at Starbucks? An unskilled worker today is a millioniare by 1940s standards but I don't think the work is any more complicated, in some ways I'd argue less because being a field hand takes a lot of knowledge about fields.
Lots of crop types haven't been automated partly due to the presence of cheap labor, and the difficulty in automating. Some fruits are very difficult for mechanical pickers to not bruise, and a human touch has been required up to now. Of course if the economics change or human like mechanical picking hands become common, that would change.
Well, karma be damned.

Libraries would be the _one_ chance that humanity would have to reboot from a dark age.

Imagine the power went out. For a month. Or a year.
E.g. we are very vulnerable to a massive solar flare like the Carrington event in 1859 (http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-a-massive-solar-stor...), which could knock out power for months or years at a time.

We'd need a way to maintain society without organized computer networks, at least in those areas. Given how interdependent we are, one really wonders if society itself would not collapse.

I know, it's crazy. But imagine you woke up to a world without any computers or computer networks. Maybe that world is 1 year after such an event, or 20. How would you reboot society, or the very least, find and learn what you needed to learn? The answer would be a _library_.

Books will survive. At least, until we digitize and upload all of them, then throw them away.

Apparently we have already thrown away the paper copy of the index. This is extremely dangerous.
This needs to be updated everyday seeing the rate at which new achievements coming up. Just yesterday, an algorithm outpaced gynocologists in IVF.
We are an organic based AI. It is possible.
We believe the web needs a conversation platform that's open, respects language and discourse, and is free from the influence of advertising revenue.
Show HN: PλPI
Thanks for this. For the first time in my six months using Go the 'peek definition' and 'goto definition' options work correctly!
Yes, but those aren't Byzantine failures. Byzantine failures present with incorrect values, not simply the absence of a value (as seen by a total hardware failure).

See the abstract in Lamport's original paper introducing the Byzantine generals problem [0].

We also see a similar issue in error correction -- an introductory undergrad course might teach this via Lagrange interpolation [1], where you need only n+k of the coefficients in the presence of erasure errors, but n+2k in the general case (where n is the size of the actual message, and k is the maximum number of errors to correct).

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

[1] https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs70/fa14/notes/n8.pdf
Those ASICs will cost as much as GPUs or more for the same amount of performance.
I don't understand why he finishes with this paragraph:

I’m as excited by the idea of colonising Mars as much as the next nerd. But not at the opportunity cost of not solving the problems facing us on Earth. That’s a bet too big.

Making an effort to colonize Mars does not carry such a cost. People who are interested in solving this issue will not magically do whatever you'd like them to do instead. We will never solve all problems we have here on Earth, that shouldn't stop us from venturing out into space.
A Quantum Computer Foundation for Standard Model and SuperString Theories (2002)
Well, for starters there are two well engineered solutions pre-built and battle tested that can be applied to arbitrary problems, by HN readers, now.

Further, instead of the "build the perfect system" philosophy put forward in the presentation (ie. formal analysis), both solutions use the alternative "tolerate and control for failure". This is a significant philosophical and practical distinction.
8 Metrics to Boost Up User Engagement with Your Mobile Application
Still using it? We went from Gmail (for business) to Notes because IBM Sales managed to convince the leadership that they could track and file everything better in Notes. Now we have to deal with this shitshow of an app where it takes 10 clicks to open a message because you have to file it under a project first and good luck if you ever need to search for anything.
AI is no more a failed dream than normal intelligence and i chsllenge anyone to come up with an argument for why we could evolve from basic elements of the universe to what we are today but that this couldnt happen with "machines". AI is already a reality its not just wishfull thinking. And people would notice the difference quite a as it would have become way more granular.
The police will probably correctly identify the person fleeing the scene while carrying a tv as the perpetrator. If for whatever reason the distinction is not so easy to make, they can just capture you both and ask your neighbours which one of you lives in your house. And presumably there is some way to prove that you live there, e.g. the house is on your name, there are pictures of you laying around, the dog listens to you, you know the color of the cups in the closets in the kitchen, all the clothes in the house happen to fit you... need I go on?
A blueprint for coexistence of humans and AI
They do?

http://www.spacex.com/missions

About half the missions on there are non-US government flights.
Then you would want pass-tomb

https://github.com/roddhjav/pass-tomb#readme
I second this. "A Guide to the Good Life" is a fantastic introduction to Stoic principles.

I also read "Stoicism and the Art of Happiness", but did not enjoy it as much. I think Irvine's book is more to the point.

I've found that stoic practices help me in things I would not have thought of: job interviews, for example. Doing negative visualization, imagining interviewers asking me stuff I don't have complete knowledge of, and imagining how I'd respond to it was extremely helpful recently.