skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote two articles about general tactics for coding interviews.

The first is the importance of giving interesting answers, rather than those that are strictly correct: https://codeformore.com/technical-interviews-interesting-is-...

The second is about showing your working -- showing the process that you use to approach a technical problem and reason through it: https://codeformore.com/technical-interviews-show-working/
Ask HN: Learning C as beginner better than learning C just after python?
Freshman Year | Autodictact | Non-CS Major |Knows no programming language.
Looking forward to learn coding
for building with best design principles,
gaining efficiency of data structures and
thinking abstractedly in algorithmic rollercoaster of fun.

What is the cost benefit analysis of Going from 0 to C than Python to C?
Projecting responsibility for societal well-being onto for-profit employers is crazy. If we think everyone deserves something, we need to provision it directly as a society.

Corporations are poor stewards of our welfare, and trying to coerce them into this role (i.e. minimum wage, healthcare mandate, obligation to hold on to unneeded workers like you propose here) has the nasty side-effect of inhibiting potentially beneficial transactions (pushes employers towards automation, encourages them to split decent full-time jobs into several shitty part-time jobs to stay below eligibility thresholds, locks the lowest-value workers out of the market entirely, keeps the product category well below its potential i.e. taxis, etc).

If we think people should have at least a certain income (and I do), we need higher taxes and a stronger welfare system, not more labor regulation. If we think everyone deserves good healthcare (and I do) we need single-payer, not an employer mandate. If we think people shouldn't have to face loss of income due to economic conditions, we need to strengthen unemployment insurance, not pressure companies to keep workers they don't want or need.

Going down the path of engineering a perfect society by attaching obligations to the employer-employee relationship just disincentives employers from starting those relationships if they can help it.
Good management is hardly necessary. China has ~5 times the population of the US; it would be shocking (is shocking, sadly...) for it to be economically weaker.
Machines from Xerox running Interlisp-D. The computers had acronyms starting with D. Xerox later also integrated Common Lisp into Interlisp-D.

The hardware was not powerful - for example they had very little RAM.

But an emulator was developed for SPARC/UNIX and X86/Linux. Called Medley.
Yeah, but then how long will you be out of work until the next contract comes along?

Years ago, I tried running my own consulting company. I found that I was fine at the technical side, but I really and truly sucked on the business side. I just couldn’t keep the contracts rolling in, and I couldn’t do the marketing and PR, etc....

More importantly, by trying so hard to do those things that I was really horribly bad at, I ended up hurting myself on the technical side.

So, how long can you afford to not have any income? How long until you go hungry and get kicked out into the cold?
How about this: we treat owning and driving a car as the privilege it is? Whenever you start the engine, you assume full responsibility of the vehicle's behavior. If that behavior results in death or injury, your vehicle is responsible for it, and by extension, you.

This would at the very least make many very cautious behind the wheel.
The first review by the same author was amazing but since then things have fallen off a bit.

Was the privacy aspect even tested? The only line I could find was - " I haven’t read much about instant/private send". So was the PrivateSend feature even tested?

Additionally, what does this imply?

"Masternodes are used for instant/private transactions and governance"

Does it mean only masternodes can use the privacy focused feature?

An additional note, can someone please explain me what is so novel about the governance policy other than instead of asking votes from the entire network (ie bitcoin), the votes are focused only in hands of people with enough coin?
Fixed for opposite gender: You don't need many friends, you need a husband that would listen to your stories, and to focus on your hobbies.
10x exit for a company with the word "Humble" in their name would be very ironic.
That seems to be a very interesting article. However, it’s quite long. Anybody ok with writing a short synthesis or abstract? Thanks
You can't really not have a social life. You're a social network with bells and whistles.
I like it. The Coin Creator seems to work well. Will be curious to see how it grows over time.
Show HN: Priooo.com Agile product development tool
Hi, I'm a junior dev at Integration Partners which is located at Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The main business of our startup is the Ibis Adapter Framework which is built in Java.

https://github.com/ibissource/iaf

We have a team dedicated to developing for the IAF and a smaller team which puts the IAF to use as a backend framework.

That is what I at Priooo. With the IAF as backend and Angular for the front end, we are building an amazing tool for agile scrum product development.

https://www.priooo.com

Yesterday we opened the free sign up because we think our product has reached a stage where it's stable and functional. Both teams within the our company use Priooo as our leading tool for the agile scrum process.

We offer an easy way to manage and filter trough your backlog. A roadmap to visualize what is going to happen in the future. A great kanban board to support you with what's going on in the current sprint and a way to look back at your historic sprints.

We are constantly looking to improve and listening for feedback. I'd say take a look at Priooo and feel free to leave your suggestions and thougts. They will be discussed within the Priooo team.

Many thanks for reading,
Laurens
I think firing without giving warnings and opportunity to improve is sick. These people don't even know they were doing badly. I can't tell if they've been told where they screwed up. These people could be spending a lot of time figuring out what went wrong when everything seemed to be going fine. They don't deserve that, regardless of performance.

They are people, they have lives and it wasn't anything like gross misconduct.

I think Mr Musk has a lot to answer for.
Why AGI and not "Artificial Consciousness" ? Is it because people think that consciousness is a by-product emerging from many kinds of pattern detection algorithms that suit all cases? (if so, what is the evidence for that?)
How to Train Your Dragon was released in 2010. They haven't made anything as good since then, but it feels unfair to blame that on a 2016 acquisition.
The only non-speculative and relevant claim here is that the experts were wrong about Winograd Schemas. The paper Eliezer cites to prove that we've made unexpected progress in Winograd Schemas only deals with a very specific type of Winograd Schemas, and not an arbitrary one. This is awfully dishonest for someone purporting to be a skepticist.

Also, the wording seems to imply that WS performance is already pretty high in the 50%-60% range. WS is a binary task. Randomly picking the answer would have 50% accuracy. Even 70% performance on a small subset of typed WS is pretty bad, and as the authors point out in the paper, this is a start, and far from a breakthrough that would make experts/predictors nervous.

Trust the experts, please. They are wrong a lot, but the best policy is still to trust the experts and not charlatans who want to monetize fear, especially when the charlatans themselves make zero falsifiable claims, and are simply turning the table to say "Why can't YOU prove to me that God doesn't exist?".

This debate is so easily won by them. Simply come up with a falsifiable claim about the short-term future. What will the AI community get done in 2 years according to you, that all AI experts right now will say is impossible? When that thing does get done, everyone would convert. Win!

Alphago was not such an event. Yes, we did predict that Alphago is decades away, but that's assuming that academics will continue working on it at their pace using their limited resources. No expert was surprised with Alphago. No expert will be surprised when Starcraft or Dota is solved. It's simply a matter of compute and some tricks here and there. Why? Because these are closed systems, with good simulators available. You just need to keep playing and storing the actions in a big lookup table a la Ned Block, and you're done.
ΔΙΑΓΩΝΙΣΜΟΣ FREE FUCK 15 ΟΚΤΩΒΡΙΟΥ 2017 – ESCORTS – ESCORT ATHENS |
Is there a reliable estimation on how much they make per visit?

The article states $43k for approx. 500M visits, so that's below 0.01 cents per visit; this in turn corresponds to a 'Cost per Mille Impressions' (CPM) of around 10 cents. So it seems that traditional ads would still make more money.

Can someone comment on how they came up with the $43k?
It's a good idea to question assumptions. And to me living in China since Hu, the main difference is that Chinese people themselves perceive Xi as much stronger than his predecessors, and probably rightly so: the crackdown on corruption is no joke, I have relatives who gave back their German cars to avoid issues. Also people of the diaspora or in Taiwan follow closely the tiger hunt at the head of the state and it seems to not be nowhere like catching butterflies. So yes Xi has earned a reputation.
Same for performance or space optimization. Always measure. I'm working on embedded systems where performance and sometimes size matters. I know so many senior engineers that "optimize" a lot of things without measuring, it's insane.
Last time I checked, the power balances are not necessarily complex, they are opaque. They could rely on tea leaves readings for all we know.

Most of the "analysis" you read are pure speculations based more on wishful thinking and prejudice than on facts.
Stashed.io: A Fast, reliable and just work Cache for Microsoft's C/C++ Compiler
Python would be easier introduction to programming than C (https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ is great resource for this)

could you add some more details why you want to learn C as well?
I probably won't do an article on it, but I did have a couple-years old Shogi engine in Haskell:

Implementation: https://bitbucket.org/MichaelBurge/shogi/src/f2370832b328ae1...

Tests: https://bitbucket.org/MichaelBurge/shogi/src/f2370832b328ae1...

The code & style are pretty similar between the Haskell and the C. I found the C easier to write: The C engine was written and debugged within about 3 days, while the Haskell Shogi engine has a couple weeks of commits.
For some perspective, consider kinetic energy. You possess 4x as much energy travelling 40mph as 20mph.

Put another way, it takes 3x as much energy to go from 40 to 20 as it does from 20 to 0.
If you like the look of Wolves, there is a breed you can look into - Československý Ovčák. It was created by then Czechoslovakia last century by breeding Carpathian Wolves with German Shephard. I think the original intent was to use it in the military. From what I’ve seen they’re surprisingly timid, but a bit stubborn. My friend just got one(below) and it is adorable. 4 months old or so and she’s already tearing around with my 2 year old Vizsla, who is pretty rowdy. I think they can be quite pricey though.

https://imgur.com/gallery/gHbaN
KeeperRL is a game being developed and sold in that model! It's both on Steam (where I bought it), and on Itch.io (which seems to be the thing, for indie games now..?) and on Github -- same thing, full open source. If you buy it, you're essentially buying the build/bundle/autoupdate conveniences, and I think some assets; if you build it from source, you've got the same essential product.

- http://keeperrl.com/
- http://store.steampowered.com/app/329970
- https://miki151.itch.io/keeperrl
- https://github.com/miki151/keeperrl

Not a shill or by any means a sockpuppet; just a pleased owner/supporter, and I like and want to support this model!

Mind, this is a game, not an "engine". And I'm okay with that; building an "engine" rather than building an actual game is something that we OSS nerds are already prone to self-nerdsniping on, and the resulting engine-with-no-game doesn't really help anyone (including, typically, other game makers, because without a single trial-by-fire, that "engine" code tends to be pretty useless). It's good that it's OSS, even if (and especially if?) it's not an "engine".
To be honest DreamWorks had been stuck in the sequel mud for some time before it's aqcuisition.
> Steam [...] the chat client is slow

> Hence I'm trying to figure out how to get everyone to migrate to discord.

ouch!
I think the strongest point in the article is this: "After the next breakthrough [in AI], we still won’t know how many more breakthroughs are needed, leaving us in pretty much the same epistemic state as before." That means that if we aren't prepared to start work on AI alignment now, there's not likely to be any sort of future event that will convince us of that.
That's a really interesting idea!

But it looks like they are only after money? [0]

They only ask for donations, fundraisers, or to join their newsletter. Is there any actual work to be done?

[0] https://www.bridgestoprosperity.org/what-you-can-do
> One of the major modes by which hindsight bias makes us feel that the past was more predictable than anyone was actually able to predict at the time, is that in hindsight we know what we ought to notice, and we fixate on only one thought as to what each piece of evidence indicates. If you look at what people actually say at the time, historically, they’ve usually got no clue what’s about to happen three months before it happens, because they don’t know which signs are which.

> When I observe that there’s no fire alarm for AGI, I’m not saying that there’s no possible equivalent of smoke appearing from under a door.

> What I’m saying rather is that the smoke under the door is always going to be arguable; it is not going to be a clear and undeniable and absolute sign of fire; and so there is never going to be a fire alarm producing common knowledge that action is now due and socially acceptable.

Should give you the general idea.
It's worth reading. With that said, the jist is that for every technological advance that hindsight will later show to be a precursor to AGI, it will be easy for AI "luminaries" to explain why it is not AGI, until it is, and then it will be too late.
Does a Spider Use Its Web Like You Use Your Smartphone?
If the article's main claim was "AGI is imminent", that would be a valid criticism. But it isn't (as the article says explicitly). The main claim is that technological progress is hard to forecast in general, especially for those not personally at the cutting edge of the field, and that almost no one right now is even really trying. Therefore, we should be very uncertain about AGI timelines. There's plenty of historical evidence, both in this article and elsewhere, to back up those claims.

(edit: I think your point about Winograd as a binary task not being explained clearly is valid, but that's not the article's main focus)

(edit 2: As far as I can tell, "trusting the experts" here means believing that we are very uncertain about AI timelines, which is essentially this article's main claim. All expert surveys I'm aware of confirm that the average AI expert is uncertain, and that there's also lots of disagreement between experts in the field. See eg. the recent paper by Grace et al.: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf)

(edit 3: "No expert was surprised with Alphago." just isn't true. See eg. this discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/2wgukb/why_do_people.... Hindsight is always 20/20.)
Yes, but you're forgetting that the situation is getting better, not worse. In fact, way, way better.
Sure, but Microsoft doesn't want to incentivize people who write mediocre apps that make no money to write apps for their app store.

They want to incentivize people to write apps that bring in the big bucks. So they can get a cut.
http://stashed.io
"How PCBs reached the Mariana is still under investigation"

Well in Western Australia PCB's by the truckload in 44 Gallon Drums were dumped into the ocean and left to rust away off South Fremantle for many many decades, so this does not surprise me if this was happening all over the world.
Research shows the long-term effects of disruption are a function of its duration. (If you’re looking for the paper I am referencing, it was an IMF paper on the effects of conflict on economic productivity.) Short and harsh is better than long and simmering.
Well I think they did at a time exist for Linux ports and I think they were somewhat successful in causing the industry to often support Linux. In that respect, by creating the expectation that game devs should offer linux ports, they have been a success. Sometimes it takes someone to blaze the path.
Follow NBA with Basket Hoops – Giving Away Promo Codes
Hello,

The NBA is restarting with a new exciting season to come. To follow the NBA each day on your Android smartphones and tablets, I created Basket Hoops. The application is available in two versions on the Google Play Store :

* Free supported by Ads : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ssaurel.baskethoops
* Paid with no Ads : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ssaurel.baskethoops.pro

Basket Hoops gives you all the news, scores and stats for the NBA league. You can discover Basket Hoops in action in that Youtube Demo Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXm6OFH-WcM

Basket Hoops is an unofficial application that lets you to follow the NBA (National Basketball Association) on your smartphones and tablets. The application offers you :

* Latest News with all rumors and trades
* Complete Scoreboard will all the scores and results 24h/24 and 7d/7
* Access to Box Scores of all the games
* Complete Calendar of the season will all planned games with starting time and all previous results
* Standings for East and West Conferences with Wins, Loses and Winning Percentage
* Leaders for all statistics categories (Points, Rebounds, Assists, Steals, Blocks, Field Goals Percentage, Field Goals 3 Percentage, Free Throws Percentage)
* Players Stats by Teams

Basket Hoops is still in development with more features to come. So, don't hesitate to give me your feedbacks or ideas to improve the application. I created 100 promo codes for people wanting to try the game without any ads. It let them to give me their feedbacks easier. So, if you want to try Basket Hoops, just comment below to get a promo code via pm. And don't forget to share your feedback regarding the application.

Thanks
Bitcoin Smart Chatbot: CryptoFriend
Explain that to the ad industry. Of course a list needs maintainance.

An extension that tries to identify and stop all forms of js mining is probably hard to maintain and equally subvertable.

As long as the effort to block an entity is much lower than the effort to subvert the blocking the concept will probably work.

Especially since curating blocklists is somewhat more scalable than subverting the list.
Basically, humans historically are rather bad at predicting future technological advancement - even those people directly involved. The article gives the examples of Wilbur Wright saying heavier-than-air flight was 50 years away in 1901 and Enrico Fermi saying that a self-sustaining nuclear reaction via Uranium was 90% likely to be impossible 3 years before building the first nuclear pile in Chicago. So AI researchers saying that AGI is 50 years away doesn't necessarily mean any more than "I don't personally know how to do this yet" - not "you've got 40 years before you have to start worrying".

Oh, and the first sign pretty much everyone had of the Manhattan Project was Hiroshima.
Cloud Foundry adds native Kubernetes support for running containers
Confessions of a Middle Aged Techie
Some of their employees are not good. Some of them disrupt the others. Some of them are negative. They make the other talented employees not want to work at the company. So you remove them. The remainder of the company is then happier and produces better results.
I think it's just because intelligence is better defined and easier to test than consciousness.
> Defensive coding. Check for nulls, empty collections, etc.

While this is important to avoid bugs in your algorithm, I've had candidates who spent way too long on this and it comes across as inexperienced. I don't really care that you know how to check null-ness, if you just mention "assume the parameter is not null", it's more than sufficient to me.
That's a curious way to phrase "Congratulations on making a company which has sold several hundred million dollars of software."

I don't get why HN, of all the places in the world, would seek to tear down software companies, literally started on HN, which produce a service that people love and which achieve a successful outcome for all concerned.

I also don't think we should teach people that a middlebrow dismissal passes for financial analysis, so some toy math using their public data: they report ~$106 million in charity. Their users probably don't alter their split materially, so if one models their bundles as their main revenue source (which, knowing nothing about the internals of the business, I would), that implies $106M / .15 = $700M in gross sales. Their cut of that is 20%, or ~$140M over the lifetime of the company. I model them as being a rather briskly growing business, so I'd estimate last year's revenues in the ~$30 million range. I'd also estimate probably ~60% margins.

You want the lower on a $47 million acquisition price on a quickly growing software company with $30 million a year in revenue? Yeah, I'll take the upper. Not a hard call. This was clearly a very successful outcome for all concerned.

[Edit to add: Above paragraph is incorrect because I misread the parent as raising at a valuation of $4.7M. If they raised $4.7 million the valuation was probably ~$20M. Do I still think 10x is plausible on that? Plausible, not nearly a given.]

Disclaimers: no non-public information used above, no commercial relationship, although I did pitch them on a consulting gig once. I have paid them a few hundred dollars over the years for video games.
No, if anything it's the opposite. Too many people who are irrevocably hung up on the "hard problem of consciousness" would object to the language.
A conscious system might be unintelligent, while it’s possible to imagine a highly intelligent system with no consciousness. They’re just different things.

Also pattern detection is often raised in the way you just did, but it’s realy a distraction. Pattern detection just helps recognise things, it’s not inherently related to the ability to reason about things. So you need both, but they are not the same thing either.
Probably because it's best to not use terms that are likely to spark debate just by word choice unless you actually want to have that debate? If you're concerned with AI risk, it doesn't really matter the precise nature of your philosophy of mind as long as it allows artificial devices capable of reasoning with possibly adversarial goals.
Examples of underlying computing problems that are unsolvable if one follows the Unix philosophy? Keep in mind that it's often misunderstood what the primary tenets of the Unix philosophy are; your comment demonstrates you, too, have misunderstood.
Whats the actual strategic thinking behind this? IGN expanding into retail? Why? They're effectively media company. I dont see any sense in this acquisition. And that worries me. Do they understand what made HB so successful, are they going to give it managerial autonomy, what are their plans?