skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worry talking about AGI is like going to the early industrial revolution and worrying about man building superhuman biology. A reasonable critic would point at the many aspects of biology we have little hope of replicating, like growth, self reparation, and general robustness.

But history has never been about competing on the same playing field. We don't build cars that perform like poor horses, we build cars that are 99% inferior to biology and 1% far, far superior. When we find something that looks like an existential threat, it isn't the mostly-general superhuman robot terminator, it's the tool that's that-much-superhuman on 0.01% of tasks: nuclear fusion.

I see no reason to bet against this same argument for AI. AlphaGo isn't 130% of a human Go master, it's 1,000x at a tiny sliver of the game. And the first AI that poses an existential threat won't need to have super- or even near-human levels of each piece of mental machinery, and I don't even have much reason to believe it will look like an entity at all. It could very well be something, some system, that achieves massive superintelligence on just enough to break the foundations of society.

Our world isn't designed to be robust against superhuman adversaries, even if those adversaries are mostly idiot. If we have hope of a fire alarm, it's that things will break faster and far worse than people expect.
...the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
Those three questions aren't to pick out good candidates, they're to pick out hopeless candidates. I used to be almost offended when I would interview for a position as a senior developer and get asked entry-level questions about my programming language of choice. Then I started sitting the other side of the table and realised that someone applying with "5 years of experience using C++" actually might still not know when to use public, protected and private. It's shocking how often something like that happens, and if you don't pick it up until an in-person interview, you're just wasting a lot of everyone's time.
As I've grown older, I've come to find peace in letting go of semantics. Is it a dwarf planet, or is it a planet? I'm content simply pointing at the things that I recognize and saying, "There is that thing. Whatever the kids / scientists are calling it these days. I know a lot about that thing, but perhaps not it's name."
The thing is, flood insurance is provided by the Federal government, and is heavily subsidized. No insurance company in their right mind would write a policy for these homes, and therefore the only way you’d be able to build there is if you paid cash.
You can do some google searches about wolves as pets and it's fascinating. Domesticated dogs adjust quite readily to a pack pecking order. Wolves will with a lot of training, but they never stop trying for the top spot. It's a constant battle.

Also, if their pack leader looks sick or injured, the wolf will take that a signal to make a move for top spot. I've heard of owners twisting an ankle and hobbling around and the wolf starts looking at them very differently.

Finally, they have a very strong prey instinct. Stories about the wolf being exposed to children and not taking an eye off them. Practically waiting for an opportunity to pounce.

That's not to say wolves can't be pets, but it take a ton of time and constant vigilance to keep their instincts in check.
Not one of our domestic animals can be named which has not in some country drooping ears.

Neither cats nor horses have drooping ears, except for ones that have serious birth defects or mutations.
You can click on the timestamp, and there will be a reply link there. I think reply links are hidden for a little bit of time after posting, but I'm not sure why.
If you read the OP again carefully, you'll see that you can use offset arrays for every array you make and suffer no performance penalty, because the offset is compiled away. And the development overhead is a single library import call; I replace core language data-structures all the time in any language for features I want, this is no different.
I find that Krita is better for design work while GIMP tends to be better suited for editing.
Long term, this will happen no matter what. There is no way to have wages in US 5-10 times bigger than in other countries only because politicians can do such a thing (if they would). If John Doe is creating X value in country Y or Z, John's wage should be linked to X and nothing else, especially politicians and location. What makes country Y more special than country Z?
There absolutely is still black magic between you and the hardware and thinking otherwise can lead to trouble. Yes you can read the architecture documentation but when you get into the realm of how the branch prediction tables work, register allocation schemes, operation reordering etc, what the hardware does will be "special" while (usually) not violating what the architecture specifies. Don't even get me started with load/store semantics for multithreaded architectures (although this is standardizing more with the more recent ARM)
Disclaimer: I've done more than 60 interviews at Amazon. My views are my own.

When we ask DSA questions we don't care about the data structures or algorithms. We care about the logical reasoning and problem solving skills that enable you to solve those problems. We contrive particular questions to give you chances to showcase those underlying skills.

If candidates can get through an interview by memorizing problems from Leetcode or HackerRank then the interview process isn't working. Most companies miss the mark on this.[1]

Sometimes I ask a question and the candidate recites an optimal solution in 2 minutes. Great, they got an optimal answer. But it's useless for me — I didn't get any data to inform my hiring decision. Maybe they created the solution from scratch using strong logical reasoning and problem solving skills. Or maybe they saw that exact problem the day before when prepping for the interview. Without digging deeper it's impossible to know. In these situations it's the interviewer's job to gather more data.

Sidenote: If you've seen the same question recently it's better to tell the interviewer. If you pretend that you're solving it from scratch your interviewer can probably tell. And if they don't notice you'll just get harder questions later in the interview that you'll probably strike out on

[1] Gayle McDowell has a lot of insight on how to conduct effective coding interviews if you're looking to improve your company's process.
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I would like to see that as well.
You’re engaging in the time-honored tradition of dismissing progress with the term “just”. In the spirit of the article, I recommend you list and publish specific things that are too hard to achieve in the next five years. And then commit to not dismissing them post-hoc.
You have to hit enter.
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Good developers are expensive in India just as they are in the US.
Google Tone[1] is a similar work.

1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-tone/nnckeh...
If it were that easy the disputes would not have already taken more than a decade to be resolved.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-41152544
I'm curious—do people get "pet" wolves spayed/neutered? Because that basically sounds like the behaviour of non-neutered cats; it goes away completely when their gonads do.
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It's also pretty well established that in state-free, agro-forager areas of land with relatively non-low population density, foraging people have tended to ensure the sustainability of their lifestyle by eliminating the menfolk of bands of hunter foragers from rival tribes; a common theme seems to have been indiscriminately hunting and killing a member of a rival tribe as a male rite of passage. And it's widely believed humanity wiped out most large mammals long before the emergence of cities in the Quaternary Extinction Event.

The story of, say, Kalimintan or the pre-Columbus United States might be mostly unwritten, but definitely isn't a story of love and harmony for everything around it.
> Learning effectively is not the same thing as doing effectively.

You have to learn in order to do and doing is the means for learning. Its iterative and both reinforce one another. So from my viewpoint, which admittedly is largely from an ML perspective, they are the same thing. Playing basketball effectively is a function of training which is just another word for learning in my mind.

> I'm not arguing that every programming job should be entirely devoid of repetition, just that by its nature it shouldn't be repetitive.

I think we're just using different meanings for "repetitive" and perhaps some other words and that's leading to apparent disagreement which in actuality I doubt we have.

I was speaking generally i.e. not about automating your build/deployment/bootstrapping pipelines or building/using a library to solve problem X, but about the process as a whole and the more general tasks that go into that process. In that sense of repetitive, i.e. a set of tasks like "building the login", "integrate 3rd party API", "deliver mail", "build a chair" etc. I think virtually all jobs are very repetitive. In the sense of repetitiveness I think you are talking about, i.e. programming the exact same function every single time you need that functionality in a new app, I would agree with you.

Anyway, my point was jobs are about performing a specific set of repeating tasks - generally speaking :). Further, we've poorly designed the labor supply side of our medical systems given the set of tasks doctors are required to perform and we could allocate supply/demand better and innovate at a higher rate were we to remove some of those systems engineering errors.
The problem is that you're also filtering out the candidates who are not
interested enough in the company yet to take a day off from their current
job. And most of the good programmers probably already have a job that's
comfortable enough.
At a previous job, we used to do a short phone screen, and then send the candidate a small homework assignment they could do on their own time.

The assignment was to build a simple client-server (in C) that solved a particular task, and the short spec (4-5 sentences) was intentionally non-specific about a number of things (that we did not care too much about anyway) but quite specific about some others. The task was similar to a small component of our embedded product, so it was relevant for the role.

The candidate would then spend half an evening or a weekend or whatever time they needed, and send us their hopefully working code. It normally took about 2 hours for someone familiar with this sort of thing, maybe 4 or 5 if they had no idea. We didn't impose any deadline, but most got back to us within a few days or after the following weekend. On a couple of occasions we never heard back.

We would then verify that the requirements were met, and we would take note of some of the design decisions where there was flexibility and things didn't matter so much. If they had at least made a good attempt we then had lots to discuss at the technical interview.

We had them walk us through the code, describing the flow and their design decisions along the way, so we could tell who actually understood what they had done. This was particularly interesting for certain sections where there were 2-3 potential ways to solve a problem, we would ask what the others were and how they had chosen to solve in this particular way, e.g. what tradeoffs they had considered. We would ask how much testing they had done (most said "thorough"), and whether they felt it met all parts of the specification (it didn't always, despite the "thorough" testing).

In all, most candidates told us they thought it was a good task without being daunting or time consuming, and we felt that we got some good insight into our candidates before we made a hiring decision. No puzzles, no grammar nazi questions!
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> My ideal setup is actually a MacBook Pro. But I am forcing myself to live out of the Apple ecosystems, and it hurts.

Why? In all of the digressions I would like to read about this is a big one. I have been considering the same. The only Apple product I have left is a MBP. There are soooo many choices on the PC side of things. The paradox of choice hits hard when looking at; Samsung, Acer, ASUS, Lenovo, Dell, and HP. Some $700 models have the same specs as $1500 Mac's with touch screens and pen support.
I'm arguing against the government doing things to make sure voters vote the "right" way. Reductio ad absurdum, my argument would turn into this: voters are always right. But that's simple enough to refute. Pick some examples of democratically elected leaders who ended up being terrible. Pick some Jim Crow laws enacted through the democratic process.

I think it's more likely in the U.S., at least right now, that the government starts interfering in speech or elections in undemocratic ways than that the electorate would elect a tyrant.

That being said, there are some provably false stories floating around out there. There should be a good case for revisiting American libel and slander laws, or at least revisiting how they are prosecuted and enforced. If the slanderer is a foreign power, Washington has a responsibility to judiciously ensure that doesn't happen again.

But babysitting the American voter is a bad idea. If they can't be trusted, we've picked the wrong form of government. And while liberal republican democracy has its issues, it has proven better than the alternatives, at least the ones attempted so far
> their programmers in Bangalore don't actually do as well as they hoped.

Which is because they went to the rock bottom bidder and that came at a price: you got the newbies, and the outsourcing company was training them on the job (ie _your_ project).

I heard stories that some companies rotated out their folks into higher paying projects (which existed) once they gained sufficient experience, replacing them with the next batch of newcomers - making the cheapest customers pay for "intro classes" (also known as amateur errors) during the entire project's lifetime. If true that would be a shining example of "you get what you pay for".
>There is ScriptProcessorNode but it’s deprecated and performance is not up to audio rendering standards.

On the web, "deprecated" doesn't mean you can't use it. It can take a long time for "officially deprecated by the standards" to become "I can't use it anymore" (obsoleted).

The replacement is the "AudioWorklet" interface and the purpose is to fix those exact synchronization issues. I wouldn't expect ScriptProcessorNode to disappear from the browser until the replacement is actually rolled out.

The Web Audio API started as the Audio Data API in Firefox, which was nothing but a buffer to blast samples into, then the Web Audio API was a refinement/competing standard above that extremely simplistic API (I adapted a Javascript-based .mod player to use AudioData instead of sticking an <audio> tag in the page circa 2011).

You've been able to generate and play back samples in browser (without Flash) for ~6-7 years now, they're simply making official changes to the underlying API in the hopes of improving it. "Deprecated" is just bureaucracy.
I suspect that "flexibility" and "precarity" are effectively the same thing here, especially if more flexibility results in less pay. If everything else was equal, flexible employees would be more expensive - like contractors and flexible plane tickets.
Or as Feynman put it, Names Don't Constitute Knowledge: https://youtu.be/lFIYKmos3-s
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Interesting security implications for air gapped systems, gotta yank the 3.5mm too!
Docker for Windows seems to be just a Linux VM running on Windows 10's Hyper-V support, so if VirtualBox is faster, Docker for Windows is probably faster too.
This is where Julia really shines. Hopefully as more researcher's realize they can quickly make customized/specialized implementations for their projects it'll help reinforce momentum. It's awesome being able to quickly dig into a library, grok the algorithm and tweak it. Actually could make for some fun hackathons!
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California no longer allows keeping half-wolves as domestic pets. I have a friend who had a half-wolf, half-husky when that was still allowed. She's
an endurance rider and runner, and wanted an animal that could keep up.
She says she never allowed the animal alone with her daughter until the daughter was bigger than the animal.

You really have to be a competent animal trainer to keep one of those.
Ehh, I’m not so sure this is true. I think people are open to, erm, analagously powerful forms of computation. I was under the impression that, at least before powershell, the ability to compose programs and form scripts was super limiting, and by now bash is realistically far to entrenched to replace on the unix side, and people don’t really want to target two scripting languages.

However, there are alternative ways of doing this that seem quite powerful, like the lisp machine—it didn’t fail because it couldn’t handle tackling abstract problems, it failed because unix ended up doing it cheaper and faster. There might even be arguments for visual shell scripting.

That said, if you’re doing anything like unix, you might as well go full unix :)
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Impressive lack of backlash in the beginning part where the swords are tip to tip.

(I work for ABB but not in robotics)
The books referenced in the linked article appear to discuss the topic in historical/anthropological context. I haven't read them yet but from the reviews I have read, they look promising.

As a teenager I read the novels of Daniel Quinn (known best for Ishmael), which is non-scholarly and has its problems. However, it prompted me to pursue a degree in bioanthropology. Most of the enthographic literature is consistent with the hypothesis that people don't willingly join civilization (city-based, hierarchical societies) when given the choice. Civilization has its clear advantages but its externalities have not nearly been solved.

But seriously, the domain of anthropology (cultural as much as biological) is where all relevant scholarship has been done. People make fun of anthropology for not being STEMy enough, but as a field it has a 100+ year history of delivering the goods. There's a classic essay by Marshal Sahlins called "The Original Affluent Society" that has been both influential and controversial. You can also look into the distinction between hoe-based farming and plow-based farming.
Almost. In threaded programming a thread will wait/block until the lock is released and then make use of the protected resource. In async world you would probably just check some flag and if it's "locked" then register a callback to some "unlocked" event to mimic this.
Wow, it really is a lost continent, like Mu, or Hyrule from Wind Waker.

As I keep saying, the world is a strange and pretty awesome place.
Ah hey, I made this. I was going to post it but it looks like I don't have to :)

Here's the live demo of it https://quiet.github.io/quiet-js
I'm wondering about this part: "using this strategy Julia actually can produce static binaries like compiled C or Fortran code."

Is this something that works now, something planned, or just speculation?
The other part is significantly better hardware support (including powersaving and wider range of devices) which would also be completely undone by a unixy kernel.

I really kinda fail to see what would be gained by rewriting a piece of kernel that works just fine (well, except that ./ users would finally declare that they were right all along!)
Revisiting one of Star Trek’s most political episodes, “Past Tense”, set in 2024
Outside of very special circumstances, I don't think it is a good idea to replace Python code with Clojure code. In fact, judging from my own contracting experience and seeing the many mistakes made by first-time Clojure programmers, I more often than not suggest moving from Clojure to anything else.

The problem with using esoteric languages is multi-fold. First, you have to trust that the original programmers actually know the language enough to not create a massive disaster. Are they comfortable working without a framework, are they knowledgeable about all the issues that arise from building closer to the metal, so to speak? It seems to me that the answer is "no" more often than "yes."

Once this happens, you end up in a read-only code situation, and this is a problem because they leave the project with tons of bugs and downright stupid decisions. You are then left in the position to ask 15 people if they can make dollars or sense of anything written, and if you are fortunate, you will get one "yes." I joke that I know all 50 Clojure programmers in the US, and sadly, that's not much of an overstatement. If you want your code to exist, and you aren't a real somebody, then good luck. If you aren't located in SF, LA, or some other city that attracts talent, definitely do not use Clojure or any other esoteric language!

Of course, I didn't read the article, as it isn't loading at all.
> I feel that software engineering in its current state is more of an art than a science

It's a craft. What makes you say it's an art? What exactly is "artistic" in
programming?
Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed it. Especially the later parts. Looking at your GH it looks like it lost some steam? Did you continue on it and if so did it produce anything "surprising"? As in, this should not really be a good coaster but it has great score :-)
Similarly, the pastoralist agriculture way of life wasn't sustainable, and it fell to mass-production capitalism in the 30s and 40s. The Green Revolution could be viewed as the final death knell of that societal organization: now, small family farms worked by hand labor are virtually extinct, and all of the seeds are owned by Monsanto, which charges monopoly prices for a single harvest with no possibility of using the seeds from that harvest for the next (they've been genetically engineered to be sterile), and they require large fossil-fuel fertilizer inputs to grow anyway.

And it's likely that mass-production capitalism is beginning to die as well, killed by robotics, computers, the Internet, micro-manufacturing, and the Information Age. The key developments of that revolution are just in the labs right now, so it's a bit unclear what form the eventual civilization will take, but the writing's already on the wall.

Life has never been about sustainability. You could look at each phase of evolution - from protists to eukaryotes to vertebrates to land-dwellers to dinosaurs to mammals to humans to hunter-gatherers to agriculture to industrialization to information - as a phase-change in complexity levels, one which usually kills off the vast majority of diversity at the lower levels. In other words, life is a pyramid scheme, and death is a natural part of it. Death doesn't mean the absence of anything, it means the emergence of something new and unforeseen.