skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it helps, he didn't really found PayPal or have much of anything to do with it one way or the other. He founded X.com, which merged with PayPal. He left after not doing much beyond arguing with Max Levchin about Windows vs FreeBSD. IIRC.

Most people considered him kind of a joke before Tesla and SpaceX were mainstream successes.

He's done amazing things with that PayPal money though. I bet a few dozen people on HN have ambitions as big as Elon Musk's but haven't lucked upon an easy $160M cash. He's the proof of what's possible when the right kind of person does.
What is the 'why now' of your startup?
The problem is that a true company-wide firing of bottom 2% of performers is impossible - you would have to somehow compare and rank people with vastly different roles to pull it off. So the way to do it is to first choose unlucky departments and set a quota for each department, then choose unlucky managers and let those managers choose unlucky employees. Which makes it a lot more similar to a layoff than the company likes to admit. These employees may be perfectly solid workers but now they have to bear a stigma of being fired for "performance" reasons.

I had a manager friend whose company went through a "not-layoff" when approx. 2% of the workforce were let go. His group was among the unfortunate ones so he was told to choose one victim among his subordinates - but there was no one with unsatisfactory performance in his opinion. Still he had to choose. Didn't improve his morale that much - he quit shortly afterwards.
This is just wrong, and insulting; the Unix philosophy is not about laziness.
Wolf Mothering: Raising Wolfs to Resist the Call of the Wild
I think it's a useful discussion to be had. I think where you have put forward your feelings, there will be 10 or 20 more that don't feel they can for the same reason.

Acquisitions are a genuine thing to fear when it's a service you know and love. I'd say the gut reaction is natural. I don't think this is a case of aquire the talent and dump the service, the worst possibility for service users, but there's always a risk Humble Bundle won't be the same due to corporate demands and undisclosed strategy behind it.
Shakira New Album Song Coming Soon
Bingo.

>At least if you're a plumber or (was a) typewriter repair person, you can physically show ordinary people an example of what you do and they are likely to at least grasp the general concept.

If real people do not care about what you are working on, then what's the point?

Am I working towards a thicker wallet or a few more zeros on my bank account? And if so, why?

>Telling people today that I was an expert in 'FabulousDraw' gets me blank stares, the same as mention of the company that distributed it.

LOL! I couldn't even find a reference to it on Google. Was that the software's actual name?

P.S. ... I noticed that you have been on HN for almost 3 years now and have only left a handful of comments. I encourage you to write more, as this comment in particular was profound imho.

Thank you very much for it.
We’re just as bad at predicting in the other direction. General strong AI has been about 20 years away since the 1960s. Nanotechnological antibody robots were supposed to be coursing through our bloodstreams making us near immortal long before now.
There may be evidence that meditation has significant benefits for some people, but there is also evidence it can cause anxiety and reactivate PTSD in others.
UNIX is a trademark; It's "the Unix philosophy", not "the UNIX philosophy."
It's quite common in investment banking. A bunch of them do it.

https://www.quora.com/Could-Goldman-Sachs-strategy-of-firing...

I think Barclays also used to do it.

It's shitty thing to do to people. But you don't need me to tell you they're shitty companies.
They take a bit of a cut when people buy “bits” too (twitch local donations).
[am not your google]
Not sure where this malice comes from, but GP specifically said "impairs their ability to drive." You're striking at strawmen.
Many choices for a new operator would not cause backwards incompatibility, as it'd currently be invalid syntax.

However, allowing block scope variables would make the interpreter internals far more complex for dubious benefit.
> 22 hours of social activity a week

I wonder how "social activity" is defined in this context. For example, I regularly spend my evenings in the local hackerspace. My primary goal is to write some code or configure something on my servers, or just to read some HN or play Minecraft. That's all stuff that I could do at home, but the hackerspace gives the chance of having the occasional chat when someone brings up an interesting topic (and the possibility of an expert sitting next to me when I run into some weird problem).

Do the hours spent at the space count as social interaction, or only those few minutes when I have a chat?
If you have uBlock Origin installed, you can tweak styles with its "My Filters". I have these in there:

news.ycombinator.com##.comment code:style(white-space:pre-wrap)
news.ycombinator.com##.comment pre:style(max-width:none!important)

The first line makes code blocks in HN comments word-wrap (while still preserving whitespace otherwise); the second lets them expand to the width of their containing comment.
Oh, of course! The article itself puts some effort into repeatedly stating the fact that people are saying 50 years does not in any way imply it will actually be 2 years and it might well be 500.
> no one right now is even really trying

And we're supposed to judge by the author's description of "silence" and "nervousness" that befell an expert panel. I can assure you that most AI researchers are trying, and are just not in the business of writing long-form articles to the public asking for donation.

> See eg. the recent paper by Grace et al.

A self-selected group of NIPS/ICML authors don't constitute experts. NIPS/ICML authors are the core of the community. The experts would be the top 1% of the community, i.e. either the authors with the most citations or most papers or just generally regarded highly by peers.

edit 1: Go players are not the experts I'm talking about. I'm talking about AI experts, and no not amateur AI hobbyists who know how to do Pseudo Monte Carlo. I mean, such as, people doing RL research. Watch, for instance, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMm0XaCFTJQ
I don't have any way to prove that you're conscious. It seems premature to assume that a hypothetical future AGI will necessarily possess consciousness, even if we could agree on what exactly "consciousness" is.
>One question, you say "CL is very strongly typed". Then you also say "Optional type checks". Are you saying CL is optionally very strongly typed?

Note that I wrote "optional static type checks".

CL is always strongly typed. A character array, for example, stays as a character array. It can't be used directly in place of a byte array, for example.

But what it allows, optionally, are type declarations. These, in implementations like SBCL, allow compile-time ("static") type checking.

The declarations also allow big enhancements in code speed, because this produces code that is specific to a data type (you can always see the compiled assembly code for a lisp function by using the "disassemble" function)
Airbus Corruption Scandal May Lead Straight to the Top
I haven't read The Selfish Gene, but from what I've heard it tells the exact opposite: That every gene's goal is to propagate, for which task it merely employs the living organism.
Workout Hacks That You Can Do at Your Office to Stay Healthy
A reference for MSDOS programming on a German amazon page... Am I missing the joke?

Tanenbaum and Silberschatz both have excellent textbooks covering the fundamentals of Operating Systems. Neither book focuses much on "language runtimes".
How about the future of Space travel imagined by extrapolating trends just after we landed on the moon in 1969? Until SpaceX came along space tech was basically frozen in the past and still the Russian's ancient soyuez capsules are the only way to get astronauts to the ISS.
Your fallacy is assuming that the desire for kids is passed on to children. If that were so, people without the desire to have kids would have died out thousands of years ago. Reality disagrees with that conclusion.
Weekly suggestions is pretty good for me but daily suggestions can be horrible for less widespread listening. Yesterday I listened some Iranian traditional music for first time with Spotify and It didn't take much time to suggest based on traditional and theosophical music, some dirty hip hop music full of swear words.
EDIT: Not healthy, though, if that 2% is a quota, rather than the happenstance fraction of people who fall below the performance bar at evaluation time.
Diverging diamond interchange
How is an "annual purge" of low performing employees any different ethically to a day-to-day purge of low performing employees?

The only difference is HR strategy. Perhaps they want to signal to the labor market that they're not shy about ridding themselves of second-rate colleagues? I don't like working with second-rate colleagues; it certainly makes me want to work for Tesla.
>even without any government protection remaining on the generics in question

Go try to make and sell some generic drugs and see how far you get. Spoiler: you're very wrong.
I worked at a bigco during a RIF (reduction in force), and underperforming /teams/ or even /sections/ had their management told, “your team underperformed — fire X number of lowest performers”.
Then the manager was effectively forced to just pick people to let go.

Shitty, but par for the course for many bigco places (outside tech), from what I have heard over the years.
Build an army.
Markov Analysis of Software Specifications (1993) [pdf]
Bitcoin Competitors Are Being Built in Ex-Google Coders' Laptops
I've just checked online and this is what I'd take https://www.walmart.com/ip/Prepaid-GSM-SIM-Card-Unlimited-Te... at $9/mo (t-mobile network), it's only marginally more expensive than what I'd pay in Thailand, Malaysia or Vietnam. Enough for my emails, whatsapp, occasional web browsering. Doesn't seem a bad deal. I think those that want a subsided jesus phone with the payment rolled into the monthly or insane amount of data are the ones paying $60+ month.
Life is more than just work and social interaction. From the article:

> I was able to build in more concentrated pockets of work where I otherwise wouldn’t, but I also gravitated to activities that were previously neglected – the gym, practising the piano, and meditation.

This resonates with me. If I were to die tomorrow, my biggest regret would probably be focussing too much on work and social interaction at the expense of other pursuits.
>Stay calm and composed.

Ironically, reading this makes me hyperaware.

>Sound enthusiastic! Speak with a smile and you will naturally sound more engaging.

In my experience, some people force this and it comes off a bit creepy. I've had better luck not thinking about this.

IMHO don't treat the social side the same way you treat the technical side (i.e. preparation similar to homework). The social side should not be overly deliberate. Don't overthink it, just be polite.
Most of their games are not DRM free, and haven't been for a long time. Almost everything they sell these days is Steam-only. You're better off shopping at GOG if you care about DRM-free.
"And we're supposed to judge by the author's description of "silence" and "nervousness" that befell an expert panel."

I make this judgment based on, among many other things, the tiny budgets given to people like Tetlock to study predicting events even a few years out; the fact that Kurzweil's very simple methods, basically "just draw a line through the curve", are still considered big news among many financial and political elites; that nobody had bothered to spend $100K on a good survey methodology for AI prediction, before the paper I linked came out earlier this year; that a friend of mine, who is supposed to run a (small budget) government program on forecasting, has to ask me where to get datasets on past tech progress because nobody has ever bothered to compile them into a standardized form, and so on.

"I can assure you that most AI researchers are trying"

What serious forecasting attempts, with specific dates attached to specific events, have been done in this vein?

"The experts would be the top 1% of the community"

IIRC, NIPS has around 5,000 people, so the top 1% would be like 50 people, and most of them won't respond to a survey. That's not a reasonable sample size.

(edit: this article doesn't ask for donations to anything; the links at the bottom are all to various papers and research materials, so getting money is obviously not the main goal)

(edit 2: the video linked is from after AlphaGo came out. I'm sure many people, after AlphaGo happened, claim that it was easily predicted. Again, hindsight is 20/20.)
It seems to me that intelligence is something that needs to be acquired from other intelligent beings through a lengthy process, thus it requires first and foremost learning how to interact with people, what we call socialisation. Therefore I believe if machines ever become intelligent we will absolutely notice, because we will have to teach them like we teach babies, and we will have plenty of time to adapt.
In other words Haskell's STM prevents bugs that Clojure's merely supposes the programmer not to have written.
This is a useless claim though. There are an infinite number of things that could happen that would be very bad for Earth that could happen anytime between 2 to 1000 years from now. We're bad at forecasting ALL of them. We can't use this indeterminacy to prove we should be working on X when the same is applicable to another thing Y.
Firing people is unethical unless they're actually violating their contract. VIOLATING it. Not just 'not the perfect employee I hoped you would be'.
First, you have to decide if you are going to multi-class, dual-class, or get into one of the specialist schools of magic.

Also, being certain races helps with your intelligence boost or natural affinity for magic — elf, gnome, etc.....
If someone is disruptive or negative, then you should get rid of them immediately.
>> It's not literally true that interference is a myth. And there are fundamental physical limitations that we'll eventually bump up against. But those fundamental limits are beyond the horizon. In the context of historic and contemporary spectrum policy, interference is indeed a myth.

> Technology may help, and the technological effects mentioned in the articles do happen but there is a fundamental limit

Parent mentioned exactly that in their comment.
> As a matter of fact, China's ascending is the most peaceful and constrained among all past super powers in the world history

The late forties granted the United States a global nuclear, and near industrial, monopoly. We didn’t exploit it.
> As well as no longer caring if games are cross platform.

As a Linux gamer, the fact that some of the non-Humble Indie Bundles contain games I can't run is annoying (I am fine with these being offered, just don't mail me about them unless I can run them), but the Humble Indie Bundles tend to contain exclusively or nearly exclusively cross-platform games, like they always have.
High IQ May Lead to Increased Risk of Mental Illness
You know there's a reason why doing that is illegal in the entire developed world outside the USA.
I've heard of tales from Cisco where managers tried to get internal transfers of bad employees to their team so they'd have somebody extra around to fire when cutting time comes.
AGI is not coming, DL methods have run into a plateau recently for the past year.
Vanuatu allows buying investment citizenship using BitCoin
There's nothing healthy or reasonable about firing anyone. If you are firing employees, you have failed.
I was on an elevator full of people, and between two floors something went wrong and we went into free-fall for part of a second.

We made it to the next floor, the door opened, my fellow passengers were content to stay in the elevator.

I turned, said "My plan is to not die in an elevator today" and got off. What is wrong with people?
OK but here's a little gedankenexperiment: suppose I had a machine that could simultaneously simulate 2 consciousnesses (either parent/child configuration or sibling), (bear with me) import recordings from conscious beings, and allowed one consciousness to query the other. Then it could know if someone were conscious or not.

(if I am getting this right) those would be the minimal criteria for being able to (contentiously) prove if a person were conscious or not.

But the thing about humans is that they cannot simulate 2 consciousnesses simultaneously (apart from culturally-designated illness known as multiple personality disorder), nor can we import another's consciousness. Nor do we even particularly (barring Totoni's work, or Tegmark's work] know what consciousness is. Those two properties are (probably) never going to be human-capable. In that regard, humans are unlikely to be able to ever be a (or 'the') kind of being used to determine whether or not something is conscious; if ever it will be possible, that will be a machine's task.
Why Most NASA’ s spaceships have Greek names?
Passports by Rank
From the blog post: "Except for some basic UNIX tools, like grep or make, it's almost impossible to find anything that's truly finished, not simply abandoned."

Now, granted, must of us on anything Unix-like is on a BSD or Linux, not on a UNIX, but grep and make are still being patched, here and there. Even 'ls' gets commits. We could get into a pedantic discussion on when something can be classified "finished," but that doesn't seem fruitful. I think we just need to realize that despite following the Unix philosophy (or something similar), which is mainly about modularity and composability, not a single part (modular piece, service, etc.) of modern systems can be left unmaintained, it can never be in a "truly finished state."
Eh, I'm not sure that I consider controlling access to their servers the same as DRM. The lack of LAN multiplayer is bad, but is GOG responsible for that?
The Second Amendment grants the right to bear arms as part of a well regulated militia. Not unregistered Glocks with silencers under your mattress or in your glovebox.
I understand that JG Ballard lived apart from his partner of 40 years.
That's interesting, but could you elaborate in more detail?
Its like the "Survivor" TV show. Or "The Apprentice" - hey who was the host of that?
>I would like to know if any HN'ers would provide me some insight into why Lisp is so popular?

In the late early 80s it was rather popular but it required expensive specialized hardware and software. Or you could execute it on more common hardware, but memory requirements were pretty high, which adds to the expense.

It's not like in 2017 where you can have many excellent Lisp implementations for free and they run blazingly fast on your machine, without needing more memory than what you have already.

It also has something to do with the triumph of UNIX over the Lisp machines
I'd recommend learning C prior to Python. Although you've stated Non-CS Major, C language can introduce you to many important CS fundamentals better than Python (Not saying Python can't do that).
IMO, it's like climbing a ladder, first grasp CS Basics with a simple language like C itself then head towards other language(s).
Software design pattern is a mental and communication concept, which has nothing to do with compilers/languages/etc. Design phase happens before you start writing your code - you have to first think about how the system will work and what will be its internal structure, and that's the moment when patterns start working. Then, even in Java you don't have to call your class "SomethingStrategy": you may simply follow the pattern to correctly implement what happens to be a strategy or to explain the behavior of the component to your colleagues. When you have the common language based on pattern names, it's much easier to say: "Look, this is a Builder for data model, which offers convenient internal DSL", rather than explaining everything from scratch. Patterns are ubiquitous tool for developers, not an evil. The evil is incompetence, with which some people blindly apply various programming concepts in totally inappropriate ways (including design patterns, functional and parallel programming etc).
He's a craftsman practicing his craft. You have a strange concept of what is unhealthy.
My high school chemistry was a year of learning the names of glassware and many experiments of just measuring water. We did one titration at the end.

once, we got to watch the teacher go into the back room and get two chemicals, mixing them together and we watched it change colors. then back to usual. Didn’t even learn dimensional analysis til undergrad.
I thought I was good at hiring - doing it for 20y - but have no idea.

Three things I want to learn from a candidate:

- Does she/he feel responsible?

- Does she/he self reflect and learn or blame others?

- Can he/she solve problems on her/his own?

Any ideas on how to find out?
But where does consciousness arise? Is the ability to reason about things independent of this concept?
Do these things keep running as long as you are on the page? If so then in effect people who read slower will pay more to view the site.

That seems shady to me, at least for sites where the costs to the site are the same regardless of how long it takes the reader to read. If it takes me 5 minutes to read an article, and it takes some stay-at-home parent 20 minutes because they had to pause to deal with the kids, they pay 4 times as much as I do.
Scalable Software and Big Data Architecture
This is how you catch and jail the bad boy who's scraping your website :P
Having done some work with the state-of-the-art of AI, I personally don't think AGI is near - might not even be possible. But the catch is the unreliability of (even expert) predictions on technology futures. My take is that it's worth taking pragmatic steps towards studying AI safety measures (i.e. OpenAI), but not going as far as to talk the likes of 'AI research regulation'.
"I am shocked -- shocked! -- to find gambling going on in this establishment!"

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_MEx )
Frontier – Part 4. Sharing data across router methods
2.12% would be a strange quota.
There are some public German schools in this document. No way they would install that miner on their own. Looks like a portion of the sites are hacked to run the scripts.

Edit: reading through all .de domains at least 80% (or more) have no intention or technical ability to install this on their own, e.g. schools, craftsmen, small businesses, etc.
Wouldn't be surprised if this is to distract people from bad publicity such as production delays and handmaking of parts https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-teslas-production-delays...
Sentinel-5P successfully launched to monitor world's pollution
Ah, so the AGI term users are like "ha-ha I chose a vague term, now you can't argue semantics, take that!"