skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the worry is that at some point someone will crack a self-improving general AI and at that point the time between "we did it" and "oh shit" could be on a human timescale very very short.

Given the potential downsides are possibly extreme (however unlikely) I'm happy that people are paying attention.

I think a lot of "AI" is hype and hyperbole and largely those people don't worry me that much, its the quiet ones doing fundamental research that worry me a bit more.

You are talking about a breakthrough with a threat level in the same magnitude as nuclear weapons, dinosaur killing asteroids etc.

Personally if I had to put my money down I'd say I wouldn't see a human-level general intelligence in my life time but a self-improving/learning intelligence doesn't have to be human level to be very very dangerous either.
It renders it in series -- stuff goes through webrender first, and then whatever webrender couldn't handle gets dealt with with the regular renderer.
Nothing conclusive, but:

1. If we look at rate of change over the last few thousand years, it doesn't seem completely unreasonable to extrapolate that forward.

2. It's hard to argue that no more breakthroughs can possibly be made in physical computing architecture or computer science, though admittedly it's equally hard to argue breakthroughs definitely will be made. However...

3. Modern industry is heavily incentivized toward AI advancement, because of the optimization capabilities it provides. Where such incentives exist, barriers tend to dissolve.
Development environment becomes somewhere between extremely hard and impossible to set up. Resign yourself to running tests locally with staging as the only place to test your services talking to each other. This is my experience at a medium size public company on the bay area.
It can be very hard to hire good embedded developers (I know, we are trying). Also, until you reach a certain scale, the work load tends to be highly variable. What these places need to do is hire one of the many good design houses that can quickly knock out a production-worthy design from an Arduino prototype and put you in contact with reliable contract manufactures to crank out volume.

My employer has an EE/embedded team of 3, and we still rely on a local design house to rev our PCB's, do the generic infrastructure components of the embedded s/w, and design test fixtures. We write specs for electronics and keep the "secret sauce" firmware in house. There are other benefits -- as I write this we have an expensive instrument that we could never justify purchasing sitting on our lab bench because we borrowed it from our design house. We can get a few hours of specialist time here and there for things like FCC compliance testing to augment our in-house expertise.

One person who has been around the track enough laps to be able to write good specs and do program management is sufficient in the early days.
I'd pay top dollar to watch this.
Convincing people that microservices are not a cure-all but just another design pattern.

You have to start out with a monolith and only if you realise along the way that some components might work better as a service (micro or not) you should extract those. Until then, commonplace modularisation will serve you just fine.

Once you have more than 1 microservice running infrastructure becomes a huge problem. There's no real turnkey solution for deploying and running internal / on-premises microservices yet. You basically have to build monitoring, orchestration and logging infrastructure yourself.
Everyone at a storytelling event is a narcissist, to some extent.

This is okay.

I liked her method until I realized she recorded it to put on Facebook. Almost thought it was some sort of way to cope without being on Facebook.
Sensible advice. All the positions I've held have been specialized enough that all I do is write code. There are designers, managers et al being paid to do the other half. I believe there are other opportunities where that's not the case, I went out of my way to look for them during my last job hunt but come up empty. I had no problems finding a bunch of codemonkey-SWE jobs. Seems to me that programmers are fairly specialized and replaceable in most orgs.

I'm not opposed to another technical position. Something that leverages my skills to do something more dynamic would be great.
Google AI Experiments: Some of the coolest apps out there
(If you) can (and want) doesn't mean you should. The debate is still there because it is not something that everyone agreed on. (either the way this should be done or if this should be done at all).
That's a bit like saying you're less concerned about being waste-deep in a tarpit and more concerned about the prospect of your arms getting stuck.

The analogy is especially apt because if you think of web/net commons actually replaces free physical assembly (rather than augmenting it), then you can be convinced to give up your freedom of web/net assembly when whatever next new digital shift comes along. (E.g., not terribly concerned about my arms stuck in the tarpit because my head is connected directly to the VR meshnet...)

edit: clarification
another edit: typo
Love it. The self-defeatist rationalization of the utterly housebroken. "At least I have plumbing", he mews as he faithfully gives half of his profits to his master.
Sure, but I don't think that our modelling and reasoning abilities are superior to other primates primarily due to superior pattern recognition. Yes we couldn't function without it, but no I don't think it's the secret sauce we have as humans. It's what we do after we have resolved the patterns that makes the difference IMHO.

Why do I think this? Pattern matching will only tell you this thing or situation is like this other thing or situation you have recognised before. That only allows you to implement a simple strategy re-use or random variation algorithm. To go beyond that you need to reason about the ways this situation is different from previous patterns, analyse it, figure out how previous successful strategies might work or might need adjusting, or conceive a new strategy. Pattern matching is just the first phase. All animals have this to some extent. But the rest is supendoudly more advanced in humans than any other animal, if they have them at all.
> Pseudo-public space – squares and parks that seem public but are actually owned by corporations – has quietly spread across cities worldwide. As the Guardian maps its full extent in London for the first time, Jack Shenker reports on a new culture of secrecy and control, where private security guards can remove you for protesting, taking photos ... or just looking scruffy

This is confusing. Why is the Guardian trying to make private property sound scary and oppressive? Why should I expect that I can use someone else's property however I like and without permission from the owner?
NUMBY?
One could argue the never actually entered the maker market. I can't name one prominent project that used any Intel maker oriented device. That's a monumental marketing/product development failure: offer overpriced products that don't really do much (if anything) new, then completely fail to get people interested in them. No one cares about your instruction set here, so you can't ride on that alone.
> And your link does not point to any inherent flaws in Solidity, just opinions on language fit.

I suggest you read the links in that thread that talk about the requirements of REAL smart contracts, and then come back and tell me Solidity is not hopelessly flawed.

As a language for writing smart contracts, Solidity is a total minefield of unsafety.

As for the reasonableness of "different conclusions", if Vitalik was responsible for Solidity, then I can't disagree more with everything you've said.
You can check in about:support to see if it's actually enabled.

It won't be for dev edition; dev edition didn't build it by default.

about:config isn't user-facing so it will show prefs that do nothing on the current release channel or build.
This is all fine if you are running Windows. On a mac it will spin the fan faster than anything else... with two tabs open. Firefox has become a Windows browser, if anything
I think people take for granted now how good the Times is at these interactive, zine-like layouts for their feature articles. I just want to say another job well done on this one. Each one of these I see is a work of art that clearly took a lot of time across the team.
I agree with you that it wasn't great, but the idea that congress's approval is automatically s seal that something is incorrect would, I think, fall under the category of conspiracy theories. She had no interest in addressing the merits of either food pyramid. (Actually I think it was less of "congress approved this therefore it's bad" and more of "a little guy fighting against the establishment got beaten with his alternative so therefore it's good.")
The NFL isn't a 10 years old league, there's plenty of players who passed away. If anything there would be more examples since equipment was worse before and there were less rules that protected players, especially top/crown helmet leading tackles which started getting penalized with 15yd only in 2013.
I saw it coming when they discontinued Joule and Galileo.

I actually liked the Curie chip, plenty of goodies in one die.
From bluetooth LE to battery charger to accelerometer and gyro plus hardware acceleration for k nearest neighbor (cool for gesture recognition). All that on small form factor low energy die.

Plus, I _feel_ safer using a curie for IoT than just using a raspberry pi and never updating a linux distro.

https://hackaday.com/2017/06/19/intel-discontinues-joule-gal...
Yep, 8 bit 8MHz microcontrollers are already plenty of power for a lot of hobbyist applications. And if not there are plenty of super cheap (<$5) boards with ARM 32 bit processors, or wifi/bluetooth built in
Figma 2.0: Now with Prototyping and Developer Handoff
> If Musk could translate underground the approach he brought to reusable rockets, Flyvberg said, he could drastically reduce the price of a given dig.

The article mentions that the cost of digs are prohibitively expensive. Reducing costs could help LA and the people stuck in traffic all day.
And in the most Orwellian matter, there are those who believe that this is the condition where freedom and liberty is maximized.
Junior devs are a radically different value proposition than senior devs. You have to turn them into good developers, they will all look like garbage on paper if you are expecting someone who can walk in and do the job. Curiosity, tenacity, demonstrable coding experience (even if it's side projects), and interests/hobbies outside of tech seem to be the best predictors for us in hiring juniors.
The Boring Company has nothing to do with Vactrains
You are confusing the vactrain (hyperloop) project with the underground tunnel car-on-sled project. They are separate things.
From 1960-2013 there were about 23,000 players[1]. I don't know much about the growth of the NFL over time, let's say there were 30,000 ever.

[1] https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/5875/get-season...
It may be a creep in the sense that otherwise it would be a truly public space rather than closed private one. The government may be treating it as a kind of 'outsourcing' and public space gets gradually privatised. So it's not the opening of private properties, but twisting of the public ones.
I think much of it functions around how small the team is: if you're in a larger org you're likely to be more specialized. My own career has been spent in smaller orgs where I've had a much greater say in how I do things and the types of work I'd like to do.
I used Electric Imp in college for an electronics project -- glad to hear it's still kicking! It was a great platform, minus the custom Squirrel language (a Python or Lua library would be more familiar to most people).
It's a good idea, but too many people are against it. And, ultimately, the reason we can't do it, is because we're too desperate for money. Modern day society only allows you to reduce your expenses so much - in CA, the latest generation must pay 50%+ of their salary for basic shelter. This doesn't leave much room to trade significant amounts of money for time.

As long, 99% of the population is still shelter insecure (the lowest level of maslow's hierarchy of needs), we won't be able to trade money for time.
Many years ago we worked on releasing an Arduino compatible design.

To do so we had to:

1) Release the board files - fine.

2) Open source the code - ok.

3) Pay the foundation 20% of our retail profit - ~record scratch~ - not going to happen.

There is not enough margin in retail to justify asking for a $40 license per chip for a $5 hardware part. The Arduino compatible initiative was dropped and we built on bare metal instead.

Other Maker boards have some leverage here (Raspberry Pi, Next Thing Co, Electric Imp) because they have control of an exclusive chip supply. Arduino being a clone of the Wiring SDK + an off the shelf chip on a break out board never got to exercise their position effectively in the enterprise / mass market consumer electronics space.

Analogously the Apple ][ started as a development platform for hobbyists that became the business workhorse with VisiCalc. Arduino never left the hobbyist space and scared off a lot of legitimately interested businesses with the ambiguous licensing terms and Genuino debacle.
We should look at bit earlier 2009 at least.

That doesn't mean we'll find a larger jump there, I found it for my self, but the KFF study shows there wasn't in general. However discarding date legislation has passed is also dishonest as factcheck did. Companies which are affected by regulations monitor them closely and adjust to them correspondingly.
The Rise and Fall of the property-owning democracy
High School teacher here. I generally try not to take offense when I am talking to a student and they don't make much eye contact. Some of my coworkers take great offense when students don't make eye contact but I think it's just something that teenagers don't do (with adults/uthoroty figures). Also, some of my students are giving you the most attention when they are NOT looking at you.

Doesn't help that student desks are too damn short so talking to a sitting student forces you to loom over them like some cartoonesque evil authority figure. No one likes making eye contact in that kind of situation.
Documenting Electric Utilities’ Early Knowledge and Deception on Climate Change
Technically Prism is a means of investing in cryptocurrency (which is primarily motivated by speculation in these cryptocurrencies), thus I think it still falls into the idea that most things are pretty incestuous still in this market.

I think one thing that plays against using these cryptocurrencies for other things besides speculation is that they are so speculative, huge ups and downs with lots of opportunities to win just trading them. Because of that they are being treated a lot like stocks (which often appreciates if you hold it) rather than currency (which is usually slowly depreciating, which encourages spending.) I think the incentives for these cryptocurrencies is sort of wrong, they are cryptostocks.
What I want to see in junior developers is simply enthusiasm for programming and their ability to learn. Both are easy to spot by having a nice conversation with them and maybe pairing with them for a few hours.

> we had so many applicants (400+) that it was a tough challenge discerning the best candidates

You just want good candidates that fit your company. Then you /make/ them the best by teaching and mentoring them.

> I would like to hire senior developers instead, but they are too expensive for my budget

Sorry to say it but this sounds not like a good place for junior developers. You can't just put them in a senior position and expect results for cheaper payroll costs. They need to learn (experienced developers need to learn too, but juniors even more so).
I think this is highly dependent on the company. I've worked at a few of the top few tech cos as both an engineer and a product manager, and I don't recall working closely with anyone who came from consulting, although there are probably a few. A handful have MBAs, some come from engineering, some have weird liberal arts degrees. It's a very diverse group of people in my experience. It can be a good career path for engineers who are more excited about the problems they're solving and the people they're solving them for than about the raw technical challenge.

Upward mobility is also highly dependent on the company. I've found some companies to be more product-driven, and some to be more engineering-driven (e.g. goog). Upward mobility for product managers is obviously better in product-driven organizations.
The fact that setting up SSL on Google's platform in 2017 requires reading a long article and repeating steps is really bad publicity - if this post is official it ought to be embarrassing. AWS, Heroku, Cloudflare have all moved on to automated certificate management for all their hosted services.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/acm-overview...

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/automated-certificate-...

https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/
At this point it's not that much different from bookmarks.
Now if they can only fix the memory leak, that chews up gigs of RAM in only an hour.
Authentication / Authorization. If you end up with a round trip to your big iron anyway, the benefits get muted.
Weird. When I was at Mozilla (2011), almost everyone had a Mac.
No. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is one of the better journals out there.
Ask HN: How do you identify your own itches, in order to scratch them?
Scratch your own itch. Great advice. But how do you do it? How do you find an itch that could be a SaaS for example. Why am I not seeing oppurtunities?
All understanding of X11 feels this way. Read the docs and source yourself sometime.
That sounds more like you're screening for who can market themselves better, not really a skill-based assessment since there's no way to reasonably compare.
Any reasons for not having Facebook login (and perhaps deeper integration)?
Honestly, I'm gonna go with my edit above. I didn't say that there was no money to be saved, I said that there is no way to stop the public being the payer.

So sure, there's a good possibility that requiring police to carry individual liability insurance would lower costs. The public would still ultimately fund the premiums on that insurance.
I recently rewrote an (admittedly old and stale) django app from the ground up with Elixir/Phoenix. The website gets quite a bit of traffic.

I went from an elaborate multi-tier caching setup, with varnish and memcache, to a ZERO caching setup. The amount of complexity reduced by doing this is huge.

The Elixir app hits the postgres db for nearly every request and I'm getting average response times around 45ms. Quite a bit of that is database wait time. It's super stable and efficient. And I'm running it on a dirt cheap, tiny node in the cloud, where before I needed two small EC2 instances to keep up with peak loads.

Also, now that I've gotten the hang of it I think it's actually more efficient with regards to development than either Django or Rails.

Here are the google crawler response times directly before/after the switch to Phoenix:
http://imgur.com/a/FASyJ
While thousands is ridiculous, a hundred isn't that unreasonable. I often keep open many as I'm researching new things, or putting sites in my to follow up, or read later queue.
Yes, but I'd like to add to other's points that unless you get your hardware architecture juuuuust right, you might start getting bugs in your code as you make the transfer. Furthermore, there are difficulties if you don't judge properly your run of production, need to have another go, and find out that maybe some dumb little module is no longer available in exactly that forma, causing you to use a slightly different one, causing another fracture in your code base. Now you're supporting two, and developing on a third, etc. I've never experienced this, but it's come up at iot conferences as I talked with folks.
Almost. It is more like a temporary bookmark with an instant on feature.
It is so easy to use and useful (and doesn't use much ram 8n Firefox) that I frequently hit 1000 tabs open. In Chrome it was impossible.
If you can reproduce the issue with a clean profile or in Safe Mode, please file a bug report.
There are some companies out there trying this, but then you're locked into a single hardware solution for your gateway. That tends to meet with a lot of resistance.
Creating tunnels in an efficient manner is orthogonal to concepts such as hyperloop
This isn't a hyperloop. It's just a new alternative transit system to bypass LA traffic
I want to push back on the "every sport is dangerous" argument I'm seeing in here.

There's a difference between "you might die right in the middle of this very fun activity" and "you might die slowly and horribly years from now when you're retired and in the midst of raising a family."

I ski pretty aggressively, and of course I might die doing that. But every day I go home and know, "well it wasn't today! Today was just great clean fun." If I had a nagging thought of "but today might give me a mental disorder in 20 years" then I'd be much less inclined to participate in the sport.
Usually very nearly zero.

The primary codebase I currently work on is typical. When I arrived here, the only documentation we had was a sorely out of date document about how to get a working copy running on an OS used by only a fifth of our developers, plus the very occasional inline comment.

We now have:

- Up to date instructions on installation on the most common development platform

- A couple documents about some of the more confusing corners of our codebase

- A test suite with perhaps 20% coverage, which serves as documentation of intended behavior

- More inline comments than before

- More Python doc strings than before - not API docs so much as "purpose of this function" docs.

I would guess that about 5% of our code is commented. A bit more might not hurt. We're never going to go in and backfill commentary for half a million lines of code, but I'd like the team to get more into the habit of adding it as they go along.

I find standalone documentation to be more trouble than it's worth for small teams. It gets out of date too quickly, and nobody has time to keep it up. What's more valuable is documentation for frameworks and libraries. We rely on a handful of major open source libraries as well as SDKs for vendors, and we have a very strong preference for those with good docs.
IBM used to make all of it's money from Mainframes, but then over the years commodity computers have gotten good enough to replace mainframes in most businesses. There are still some customers who need them, but the lion's share of the market is now dominated by commodity x86 servers.

Now x86 is in the process of being disrupted. Look at ARM for example. Currently, most ARM chipsets are focused on mobile applications where low power is necessary. They are not powerful enough to compete with x86 on the server (yes I know there are ARM server parts, but it's still early days), but soon they will be for most customers. And at that point, the power/cost advantage will cause customers to switch over. This is already happening in laptops, with both Apple and Microsoft moving to ARM for their desktop OS. So I think it makes a lot of sense for Intel to try and address this concern, and competing with ARM/MIPS head on for the IoT market is one way to do this.

IMO the mistake Intel made is trying to take their x86 process, which has a value chain designed to serve high margin server markets, and shoehorn it into the IoT market which is dominated by low margin, ultra cheap parts (think ESP8266).

Take a look at this book for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
I have seen a massive downtrend in flash use already. Is there anyone building building new and serious projects in it now?