skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I live in Germany, do not always bother to check if the URL contains locale information.

Anyone that actually programmed MS-DOS, knows that we used to program directly against the hardware for actual work. MS-DOS was nothing more than what is usually known as monitor in OS literature.

Continuing the texts from people more relavant to the CS world than me,

"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." - Dan Ingalls on

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk....

"Building Parallel, Embedded, and Real-Time Applications with Ada" - John McCormick

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Parallel-Embedded-Real-Tim...

"Project Oberon: The Design Of An Operating System And Compiler" - Niklaus Wirth

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Project-Oberon-Design-Operating-Com...

And not to let this just be theory, here are a few examples of commercial products using the language runtime to interface with the hardware.

http://www.astrobe.com/default.htm

https://www.mikroe.com/products/#compilers-software

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
Except in this case it sparked an interesting discussion, and definitely doesn't necessarily warrant a blog post to 'qualify' for HN.
> something is deeply different in dog genes, or in how and when those genes become active, and scientists are trying to determine exactly what it is

Darwin famously observed in the first chapter of On the Origin of Species that not one of our domestic animals can be named which has not in some country drooping ears.

Darwin himself attributed it to "muscle misuse", the rationale being that domestic animals are not frequently enough on high alert, but genetic causes are more likely.

The bizarre (and still running) experiment of Dmitry Belyaev who has been raising wild silver foxes for over 60 years to turn them into a domestic species by selecting the friendliest individuals at each generation seems to show that domestic characteristics, including droopy ears, appear "naturally" during this process, hinting at a genetic cause.

Which genes is a tough question, but there are several programs looking for them.
> Can you define 'near' for me?

Not sensibly in terms of years, no.

It's more a handwaving gut feeling combined with an intuition.

I didn't feel like there was a royal road from symbolic AI to AGI. It doesn't feel to me like there is one from NNs either.

As for the intuition: perhaps it's because it was my PhD topic, I have always felt that there needs to be a breakthrough in emergence, specifically in evolutionary computing (or some other system in which there is a tight feedback loop between behaviour and survival). Something to unshackle the development of AI from human beings deciding what behaviours they want to engineer.

The resulting computation would be orders of magnitude less efficient, considerably less understandable (it is very unlikely to wash dishes or write poetry), but crucially much less fragile. And it has always been the fragility of the engineering which has made AI feel a little smoke and mirrors at times. NN are massively less fragile than symbolic systems, (and orders of magnitude less efficient, for problems symbolic systems are good at) but it does feel like we need another fundamental step.

But, my feelings aside, I agree with the article because I recognise this could well be a 'Manhattan Project' type of event.
I guess we can say goodbye to any kind of Linux support then.
Judging from their job postings they are resorting to binary patching more often than not (so it's not only theoretically).
Really interesting question, but to tread on constructive criticism in the age of struggling journalism: it started off great with a focused thesis, but maybe should have ended there.

>When They Grow Up
>And what are socialized wolves like when they grow up, once the mysterious genetic machinery of the dog and wolf direct them on their separate ways?

This is the title of the last section, after some suspense from stating the answers were seen as a "long shot."

Left without anything to say, the author departed the title of the last section and talked about the play pens, the interns, how much the author likes wolves, and the ethical considerations of raising animals in captivity, etc.

I'm not annoyed with, or trying to pick on, this article in particular, or saying it is bad. But I would be interested in higher info/topic and info/words ratios on interesting topics.

In other words, what did I learn about the 'call of the wild?' Well apparently, the answers are a long shot away. And it was a let-down to read through, because the question is so interesting.

Or maybe I'm not reading the right publications?
The alternative is everyone waits for an excuse, the next recession, and then you get a massive 10% layoff.
That's not a lot compared to the ones that did not go well.
The article repeats the urban myth:

The origin of the word bug as
it pertains to engineering goes
all the way back to 1947 when
Dr. Grace Hopper discovered a
moth stuck in one of the relays
of the Mark II computer.

It goes back further than that - there's a cartoon from the 1930s in which a prospective car buyer lifts the bonnet/hood and some moths fly out, with the voice-over saying "The engine still has a few bugs to be worked out."
> Congratulations on making a company which has sold several hundred million dollars of software.

Correction: "software that it not theirs".
They're saying they think it was unreasonable to stay, you say it was reasonable to leave. Both are judgements about the decisions of others.
> There were times I had to restart Chrome to get Hangouts to work again.

Yes, this seems to be a generalized problem
You could equally say that a user isn't going to be able to spot the difference between "news.ycombinator.com" and "news.ycombinator.io".

I think the answer is not to blindly trust convincing-looking strings and to actually ensure that you're browsing the correct site.
Actually modern CPU can make around $20 per month with $5 electricity cost.

https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/intel-cpu-...
Game design is a broad study and difficult to do well. Programming a game based on an existing design is the easy part.
One hypothesis I've heard is that companies have found that the kinds of questions that get asked in programming interviews can serve as a decent proxy for IQ tests (which are effectively illegal for hiring purposes), if they choose the right questions.

So even if these questions aren't related to the day-to-day work programmers do at the company, it could give them a legal way to filter for intelligence.

I say that it could because I think they'd have to select the questions fairly carefully to ensure they're achieving the intended result, and then compare the success of the candidates hired via those questions vs. the success of those hired via work samples or different types of interview questions.
>I was spending 22 hours or more each week on social activities.

I often get envious of people having that much social time.

But the fact is that I would not be able to cope with it. Talking to people and having good interesting conversations is extremely energy intensive.
Since when is avoiding arguing semantics a bad thing?
I used to be of the opinion that a company should have full right to drop dead weight as and when it chooses fit. The thing we forget is we, citizens, pay extortionate taxes to run a government which provides favourable incentives for companies to form and provide employment. They should, in return, be obliged to demonstrate some level of mutual benefit to employees, rather than purely incentivising shareholders' and directors' bonuses.
I generally don't know where in the code to "defend" until I've actually written the algorithm -- I don't start writing during whiteboard coding or coding sessions with a solution in mind, I start with the first (okayish) thing to come to mind and iterate from there as I run into problems or edge cases. (Example: do I need to guard empty lists or not? Well, it depends on if I for-all over the list or try to index explicitly.)

So in terms of writing flow, it usually goes something like core work function/code, often as helper functions -> control flow structure -> guarding, edge cases, etc.

This also works well for a conversation: how do we model/solve the core problem? how do we want this to actually execute? what are our constraints, special cases, etc? You're moving from the general (abstract problem) to the specific (guarding bugs in my code).

This has worked out reasonably for me.
just a note: as with all wolf-looking dogs, the biggest risk
is unscrupulous breeders who will sell you something much more ... shall we say "authentic" than just a big friendly dog with some wolf phenotypes. buyer beware.
> whether humans are the fittest carrier of information for our DNA

We humans are defined by our DNA, so are we not by definition the fittest carrier for it?
> But those fundamental limits are beyond the horizon.

And that is the part I disagree

Especially when you have a large amount of people in the same place (stadium, busy street, etc) Or even your office wifi
Can this be done using software ? can i ask some software/expert-system - i need this and that properties, and it can tell me - "use this structure" ?
Or just chuck CloudFlare infront to make it look secure.

Just kidding of course.
> Immediately announce that you are done coding.

Why?
We're at ECMAScript 2017 now. The author is one version behind.
That's literally the least important aspect of that situation.
This is an essay, and as such it has the freedom of using some literary flourish, including rhetorical questions.

The question was the motivation for visiting that farm, and the author does recount his interactions with the wolves there. They just weren't terribly exciting.

A complete account of what the scientific literature or other second-hand sources have to say on the question wouldn't fit with the personal style of the article. That's why we only get the bottom line in the last graph:

Then he said what all wolf specialists say: That even though wolf pups look like dogs, they are not, that keeping a wolf or a wolf-dog hybrid as a pet is a terrible idea.

Regarding your quest for higher info/word ratios, I'll start by saying that the term information is somewhat ill-defined. In an article such as this, it may appear at first that the information content is low.

See this example:

The humans were still groggy from a night with little sleep. Pups at that age wake up every few hours to whine and paw any warm body within reach.

The first sentence adds nothing to your understanding of wolves that isn't also included in the second. As a wildlife enthusiast scanning the article for "wolf facts", you wouldn't highlight the first sentence, and you'll probably regard it as useless human-interest fluff.

But what that's missing is that this article isn't (just) about wolves. It's about human/wolf relations as well, and specifically about the group of people working with wolves.

And regarding those, we learn, for example, that these university researchers don't hesitate to get their hands dirty, and are willing to spend sleepless night for their research.

Journalism such as it's practiced at the New York Times isn't intended to prepare you for a face-to-snout with a wild wolf. They aim broad rather than deep. And all the extra information in this essay touches on any number of topics that are much more likely to be relevant to real-world decisions (including votes), such as the morality of zoos, research funding, or genetics.
Typically you’re fired when you do something bad. I wouldn’t consider what Tesla did as firing anyone.

Poor performance isn’t typically a “bad thing” in this sense. For instance, if someone went and pissed in the coffee pot, they would be fired. If a big group of people were simply told to not come in anymore it’s laid off. Tesla specifically said this wasn’t laying people off so I’m not sure how that works.

I don’t know if there’s any legal or contractual grounds for one or the other but I’d guess it would matter what state you’re in.

I know for a lot of states collecting unemployment benefits does require some sort of reason for termination that is related to the above distinction.
For me, the "smoke under the door" moment was Karpathy and Li's Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions [1]. The almost perfectly grammatical machine-generated captions of photos were unnerving to me in a way that simple categorization was not. It somehow called to mind the image of a blank-eyed person speaking in a monotone while images flashed in front of them. What if they wake up?

[1]: http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/
Better than being a broke duck.
We are defined by DNA but DNA has evolved.
This is not for Germany only. The majority of EU contries have similar benefits guaranteed by the law.
Why is it problematic to mark a good bot as a bot?
Advanced System Optimizer 3.9.3645.16880 Crack and Keygen
How to Play MP3 on Arduino with No Shield, No SD Card
> I think Go is a great example of "how would they do it now?" which goes further than compiler techniques and back to rethinking what the runtime should even be.

Agreed, but I wish they released the runtime as a separate component, in the same spirit as LLVM.
Fun fact though: Actual legit psychopaths are very charming. The biggest symptom is that they have a history of failures and bad referrals. But they are good at convincing you that they were victimized, and that they trust you to bring them to the next level.

Usually at the end of an interview, the interviewer ends up feeling like this person is a great guy, just unlucky. They might have failed a lot, but failure is good in Silicon Valley.

You end up with a person who becomes a core team member because they care the most. But they end up being manipulative assholes who are well connected.
> We usually just tell them "shut up Bob and take your meds" and that's it.

Other times, Las Vegas and we shut up because we come up empty -- at best talking about gun control as if someone choking 3 people on a bus was substantially better and not still something where we come up empty.

> Why would such AGI have the means of turning all of the planet into anything?

How does getting off track with that address the main point, namely "Intelligence does not imply goals"? Are you going to prove that while that may be true, there just can't be a way for that to ever have a bad outcome because "Bob"?

> I also think the Terminator is a decent movie, but that doesn't make it a reasonable blueprint of the future.

Neither is "Bob".
Presumably one bit of Tesla culture they can't bring to Germany is firing low performers.

I worked for a German company for over a decade. I don't know if it was due to their culture or their laws, but I never saw anyone get fired for poor performance (except for failing the initial 6-month probation after joining). And it's not like we didn't have low performers — once I got into management it became quite clear that there were a handful of people who were borderline useless, but it was just accepted that they were employees, that the company should look after them just the same, and find work for them to do.
I wouldn’t say I’m inherently against conglomeration, except that that word has negative connotations. I have certainly at times been excited about companies I like getting acquired by other bigger companies I like, simply because of the vast resources that can be made available to the smaller company.
Yes, in Switzerland, for instance, a company is required to offer "job relocation" services for employees that have been working for the company for some years (I'm not sure how many exactly). These services (re-teach how to write a CV, how to prepare yourself for an interview, etc.) cost between 10K and 14K CHF per employee.
It's the Jack Welsh management style.

https://www.manager-tools.com/forums/jack-welchs-20-70-10
I think GP's point is more along the lines that people who care less about grand things like society and the planet tend to also reproduce more.
Don't forget the drones with GPS flooding the world and taking pictures of everything everywhere
Me and some friends have started cafes. Don't go that far.

It's surprisingly common for hackers because we tend to work consulting, which is more emotionally scarring than prostitution.
And it's almost the same trajectory for Leonid Brezhnev.
I’m not sure how appropriate that analogy is. Why would the farmer be so off on his estimate of the value of his farm? That seems unlikely, unless the buyer has some ability to re-sell that the farmer lacks, or an emergency situation where the farmer needs to liquidate very quickly and can’t afford researching or looking for competing buy offers.
Wishful thinking? Most of the news seem to be very pessimistic about the future.
> Xi greatly suppressed political dissent, online and off.

But was that different from his predecessors?

> He also arrested and otherwise suppressed many political opponents, at least in large part under the guise of an 'anti-corruption' campaign.

That I would like to know more about. Most of the times, people just quote Bo Xilai (who seem to have been a genuinel crime ring boss) and his successor. I have a hard time understanding why the official version is just dismissed.

> and a Mao-ish cult of personality for himself.

Is there a place to read about that?
If you writing complex code, you are going to be having bugs, abstractions or not.
What HN has going for it is its large user base of above-average intelligence who are willing to share their thoughts on a variety of subjects, both within the realm of IT as well as outside of it. On the former many here can speak from experience, on the latter this is often more debatable but the discussion is interesting nevertheless.

What HN has going against it is the ever-present phenomenon of group think in many areas: the large crowd of Apple fans ready to defend anything no matter how fruity, the spectre of political correctness looming over anything related to, well, politics, the frequent killing-off of items which counter the current narrative on some subject, etc. While annoying these factors do not (yet) outweigh the positives.

I do visit HN through my own news aggregator, negating the popularity contest of articles rising and falling on the front page. This is, in my opinion, a good thing as it undoes some of the effects of the mentioned group think.
I kept their emails in my inbox for a long time, even after being burnt out of their offerings for some time, just like you.

Recently I saw a humble book bundle that included a book about the healing power of crystals.

At that moment it became clear (crystal clear even!) to me that it is no longer what it used to be, and I finally unsubscribed.
If human-level intelligence in the upper bound of intelligence, then there's nothing to fear.

There's also not much to fear from slightly-smarter-than humans machines.

But why would you think that's the case? Because we're the best evolution has come up with so far, here on Earth?

"Why would such AGI have the means of turning all of the planet into anything?"

An AI as much smarter than a human than a human is smarter than a dog would think of a strategy far, far smarter that what you, or I, or human civilization could come up with.
I watched the first four or five weeks of episodes, but I'm still a bit puzzled by who Casey assumes to be the target audience. Granted, this is a really difficult endeavor, but I often find that he spends endless amounts of time explaining trivial things which, if you don't know them already, you'd have no chance of following along anyway. By that I mean, if you don't already know some algebra, you might "get" everything that he explains, but it's hard to imagine that you'd be able to actually internalize it to a point that you understand how it is later used in various parts of the code.

I know from my own experience, though, that it can be "fun" to explain things that you know inside out in (too much) detail because it gives you a feeling of satisfaction and appreciation of the material you're going over.

However, I can't help that for anyone to whom you have to explain high school math episode after episode, the rest of the show, i.e., actual (and sometimes rather low-level) programming would be completely over their head.

That said, I do enjoy watching the shows quite a bit and I still plan on finishing the full run. I just wish the trivial stuff wouldn't receive so much time, or that there was a good way of skipping forward without having to fear to miss something important.

One really awesome thing is that the source code is bundled up after each episode so that you can really easily get back to speed after a longer break, like in my case. What I plan to do is to find the last episode I watched, then download that episode's code, and remind myself of the current state of affairs by studying the code, rather than trying to remember the content of everything I already saw.

I think this whole series is such a cool thing to do. And you can really tell that he knows his shit.

Casey, if you hang out here on HN, two thumbs up for this awesome effort!
It would be more useful if in the version they could use the year that most people will likely have a browser that supports these, rather than the year they were introduced
Sorry but I don't quite understand your comment. What do the chemical underpinnings of evolution have to do with AGI?
Whenever talking about security, it's all about probability. The probability of a user distinguishing "io" from "com" is higher than then distinguishing "frh2dj3" and "frh2di3".
They don’t just crash the C parties, anything or anyone that’s not on or who is not on Rust is fair game as far as they’re concerned. If you aren’t singing along with the Rust evangelism strike force party line and voice any kind of dissent expect severe repercussions justified by “lack of arguments”, even when the arguments presented are their own damning statements or criticise concrete code and syntax.
That applies to many thing though, cannabis, alcohol an ecstasy can all be triggers but people think that psilocybin or LSD are worse because of their heightened effects.
This is a ridiculous analogy -- Hospital patients (for the most part) don't have control over their diseases, employees (for the most part) have control over their performance.

(Also, patients are customers of the hospital -- you should be comparing this to hospitals firing their worst doctors every year, which IMO, would be fantastic.)
Benedict Evans: The scale of tech winners
The Romans called this style of management "decimation." It's unfortunate that it's still fashionable in the 21st century.

Also, this sounds straight out of the Ministry of Peace:

"It also said the moves have generally boosted worker morale"
The comment I replied to, however, was about Germany.
Is this a joke? It's presented a bit as a joke, but not sure.
Yudkowsky isn't claiming "innovations always turn up quicker than expected", to which indeed fusion would be a counterexample, he's claiming "very soon before an innovation turns up, it often seems decades in the future even to most practitioners", and fusion is not a counterexample to that.
Monero powered lottery
Our SMB Software Market Thesis
Somewhat related: CBC documentary on Pit Bulls.

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/episodes/2017-2018/pit-bulls-unleash...
Sure, it's like I said in my comment that I'm not saying the article is bad, and I'm fine with you enjoying the meandering style. But for me I was more interested in the main topic, so it felt like a little bit of a bait and switch.

Actually, what I said was maybe it should have stayed more focused, or, maybe I'm reading the wrong publications.

I didn't say I wanted to read scholarly articles, either.

I think there is maybe a little bit of a void in journalism here? I find sometimes bloggers fill this space with the ability to chime in efficiently.