skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not too convinced by the relevance of these groupings (GAFA vs Wintel). For one, Intel is a hardware company. And Microsoft seems to do well in a lot of key areas.

Also, isn't Oracle on the same scale as the other that are mentioned?
Can someone please explain what has happened in ML or AI that makes AGI closer? Whilst some practical results (image processing) have been impressive, the underlying conceptual frameworks have not really changed for 20 or 30 years. We're mostly seeing quantitive improvements (size of data, GPGPU), not qualitative insights.

ML in general is just applied statistics. That's not going to get you to AGI.

Deep Learning is just hand-crafted algorithms for very specific tasks, like computer vision, highy parameterised and tuned using a simple metaheuristic.

All we've done is achieve the "preprocessing" step of extracting features automatically from some raw data. It's super-impressive because we're so early in the development of Computing, but we are absolutely nowhere near AGI. We don't even have any insights as to where to begin to create intelligence rather than these preprocessing steps. Neuroscience doesn't even understand the basics of how a neuron works, but we do know that neurons are massively more complex than the trivial processing units used in Deep Learning.

Taking the other side for a moment, even if we're say 500 or 1000 years out (I'd guess < 500) to AGI, you could argue that such a period is the blink of an eye on the evolutionary scale, so discussion is fine but let's not lose any sleep over it just yet.

What I find most frustrating about this debate is that a lot of people are once again massively overselling ML/DL, and that's going to cause disappointment and funding problems in the future. Industry and academia are both to blame, and it's this kind of nonsense that holds science back.
Using program induction for verification – will this work?
Actually you can protect yourself by NOT using facebook and developing tools to put yourself in a filter bubble you control as opposed to one that controls you.
I don't think you understand the kind of access fund managers have to the companies they invest in. Surely you do realise that they are not poring over the source code written at the companies they invest in (or their contractors and subcontractors), nor read every email or every entry in every expense account.

Shareholders of VW have already taken a massive hit when the stock tanked. Destroying the company would achieve nothing at all. The efficient and fair course of action is to prosecute the executives who made or authorised illegal decisions while minimising impact on those not involved. Shareholders are not a substitute for a court of law, and rash group punishment has never worked out well.
> if your job is repetitive you are doing it wrong.

If jobs weren't repetitive we wouldn't group together a specific set of tasks under a label and hire people who can accomplish said tasks. We also wouldn't even be able to learn a job in the first place because by definition it would constantly be something new and we could never obtain any competency.

All learning is acquired through lots of repetitions across variances in experiences in a specific set of tasks. Machines learn this way, and all evidence suggests we do as well.
What happend with that PR stunt?
Coding interview is a very elemental part. You can deffo skip phone interview.
I never liked the vocals all that much either actually, but I was singularly obsessed with death metal from about age 12 onward into my 20s. I don't keep up with it as rigorously anymore, but for anyone curious I would recommend bands like Infester, Disembowelment, Wormed, Demilich, Pyrrhon, Orchidectomy, Gorguts, Flourishing, Sect of Execration, Diskord, Immortal Fate, Pustulated, Stargazer, Incantation, Wicked Innocence, Miasma, Imprecation, Corpsevomit, Atheist, Fallen Christ, The Chasm, and more to get a picture of how musically varied and interesting death metal can be.
The way I think of it is that different indexing schemes suit different problems. I want to think carefully about the problem domain and use the most convenient convention. For example, when my array stores a time series, I would like the index to correspond to timestamps (and still be performant, so long as my timestamps can be efficiently mapped to memory locations, which is true for affine transformations, for example). When another array stores the Fourier transform of that time series, I would like to access elements by the frequency they correspond to. That stops me from making annoying indexing errors (eg: off-by-1), because the data structure's interface maps nicely to the problem domain. I find that much easier than the cognitive cost that comes with trying to shoehorn a single convention on every situation. But it's difficult to appreciate that when thinking of language constructs divorced from specific problem domains, as one tends to do when typically studying data structures and/or algorithms.
At least you learned what kind of jobs to avoid.
No. Firefox and Chrome don't have proper tail call optimizations.
I love that the responsible state and county officials blame congress,and that the article lets them get away with it. They should blame Californians and jihadis while they are at it.

How’s that elimination of “job-killing regulation” working for ya? Things like this are the point of local government.
Why would you trust Debian more than FireFox?

About the auto-updates. CCleaner recently had an incident where their version .33 something had a backdoor injected by some 3rd party. If you downloaded version 34 you were safe. If you loaded 32 and configured it auto-update you got the malicious update. But that didn't affect the auto-update setting as far as I know, so if you had it on you would in about 2 weeks time have gotten an automatically fixed clean version.

Point: The worst situation was if you did not have auto-updates on and downloaded v. 33. Then you were stuck with that until somebody told you you had malice on your machine.

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

https://www.piriform.com/news/blog/2017/9/18/security-notifi...
JS webworkers add a sort of multithreading. They force an internal copy, or force a transfer of ownership of anything you postMessage() over.
I think Russia interfered in the election, but I don't think Trump is an "illegitimate president". There's no such thing, constitutionally speaking. He won, that's a simple fact. He is the President.

Just wanted to push back on your smearing of anyone who believes Russia interfered as a partisan nutjob. Lots of people, including the IC, the military, and most GOP members of congress believe that Russia interfered. Skepticism is understandable but your inverted confidence seems misplaced.
Surprisingly, despite being exposed to 600 volt pulses, the problem with this 28 volt bulb wasn't that it had burnt out, but that one of its tiny leads had broken.

That's because the bulb doesn't have 600V across it. In a normal application as an actual glowing bulb, it's rated to have 28V across it, pass a certain current, and emit light at a certain brightness.

In this application, it's being used as a current limiter, and the high voltage supply to CRT grids is very low current (several milliamps at most) --- thus, the current through the bulb and the voltage across it will also be very low.
Show HN: Learn Meteor from these books and tutorials
This is a really well-written and fascinating article, but I think the author is stretching the term "gawker effect." In fact it probably should have a different terminology. On the one hand, journalist say they are frayed to publish something out of fear that a wealthy person will sue them. However, I think the real lesson from Gawker, was that publications finally excepted, or appreciated more, what is real news, and what is gossip. The Gawker Result is that journalism has gotten better, and is less prone to publishing gossip, or the happenings of someone's private life, and less it has actual news value.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_horse

They are domesticated.
Well...It is strange to omit Cython, because that's what the package authors actually use :). It's a huge part of answer to the question you pose about how package development works in Python. Cython isn't perfect, but it works very well.

To answer the specific question you had about multiple dispatch: Cython's had fused types for a while now, although I guess they weren't so prominent in the docs when you were trying to solve your problem.

The other problem with your argument is, I think you have the dynamics slightly backwards. Complicated libraries will go where the users are, not the other way around. Maybe my NLP library spaCy would've been easier to write in Nim or D. This didn't matter. I wrote it in Cython because I saw that the userbase would in Python. This has proven correct. It also has the effect of drawing slightly more users to Python, continuing the feedback loop. But each library's marginal impact on the developer community is small, so you're never going to get the marginal package author to switch language for the sake of convenience. What good is it to have a convenient experience developing a package nobody will use?
I've attended a couple ayahuasca ceremonies in the US. The first was very a peaceful affair. The second was not. There was yelling, screaming, the energy was all over the place. At moments, it felt very chaotic, like the top was going to blow off the whole thing. The facilitators (shamans) did an amazing job of holding things together, but that doesn't mean that I didn't experience some very intense waves of paranoia while all of this was going on. We were in a somewhat secluded place, but maybe not secluded enough to have made the screams inaudible to our closest neighbor. It was a rough evening for everyone.
> Is there a plan to help these Americans? People like Trump or Sanders seem to want some sort of forced reshoring, which is essentially taking the job away from the Mexican worker to give it back to the American one. But how is that fair?

There is no plan to help these Americans. They will either take lower paying jobs, or be subjected to poverty for the rest of their lives [1].

I'm unsure what the problem with "forced reshoring" is. In the beginning of your argument, you ask if there is a plan to help these people. If globalization allows for entire factories to be moved across borders to arbitrage lower wages, you must use tariffs to prevent that arbitrage if you want well paying jobs to remain in your country.

Most importantly, you address fairness "How is this that fair?" about who gets the job. Economics and market forces are not fair. They are about who has the most leverage. The American economy has an enormous amount of leverage due to our size, and we should be using it to our advantage.

So, when you hear a Trump supporter (or any American regardless of politics, depending on the job) concerned that Mexicans are going to take their jobs, you might be able to see how its a very legitimate concern for someone who isn't going to be able to retrain into another profession that maintains their middle class quality of life for the remainder of their career.

If you care, get involved in politics. It is the only solution that doesn't involve violent revolution.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/12/beattyville-...
So did the author manage to successfully load a website using this modem? How did they teach their operating system to use the modem?
I've never found any tutorial on Unity to really grab me.

It may be too ambitious but I from an artistic point of view I am interested in the ability of VR to put me in the same room as a fictional character

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53oJdX0SRz0

For instance, in VR a character can move close to you or away from you and thus trigger feelings related to your personal space.
I know a guy who knows some Google VPs who say Google is afraid people will go directly to Amazon for all their shopping searches rather than starting with Google, hence ad spend is threatened. Big deal for Google.
I'm not a GIMP user but I just chipped in a few dollars on your behalf. In the future, if or when you are able, please consider paying it forward.
Given standard homeowner's policies don't cover flooding, do they even care? They still get to collect the premiums but aren't exposed to any additional risk.
Wouldn't surprise me at all if government was born from coercion of the individual to the needs of the state.. it is after all the definition of government.
You mean Windows 1.0 from 1985. Also Macintosh Toolbox from 1984. And maybe some others from that era - event loops were not a novel thing even then.
Same here. It's like staring into the sun when it's off.
The attitude that political viewpoints should be protected from criticism seems to be very common among right wingers lately.
It's not just something particular I need it for; it's everything.
Bitcoin Is the Trump vs. Antifa Antidote
ATLANT-World's Real Estate Blockchain Platform ICO Set to Launch March 2018
I'm starting to wonder if software engineering as a discipline needs to become one of the professions.

All of the big companies have roughly the same interview process, and ask roughly the same sort of questions. It seems like a huge waste of resources to me.

I'm wondering if it would be better if everyone got tested on the same set of tests to eventually achieve a qualification that is universally recognised. So like "SE level 1" would do your standard data structures and algorithm puzzles from Cracking the Code Interview, "SE level 2" would be like system design, maybe doing a project etc.

That way the interviewer just needs to test the candidate on the soft skills, would they be a good fit for the team?

I know software engineering is multi faceted, and people might specialise on certain areas, so they could focus on those bits if the job needs those requirements, but I think having the baselines stuff in there would at least indicate to the employer that this person has passed the reverse a binary tree stuff and so on.

This would probably involve Google/Amazon/Facebook etc working together to organise such a qualification path, but surely this would be beneficial to them in the long run?
>Goldman Sachs has never been accused of paying bribes

In fact, they have(0).

But winners getting away with it happens all the time. Winners sometimes win on merit, sometimes by rule, and sometimes simply because they don't get caught. I would argue Wall St is mostly the last two.

During WWII Curtis LeMay was distraught with his position as leader of the firebombings of innocents in Tokyo. He said "if we lose the war, I will be tried and executed as a war criminal."

It's the same thing here. No one has been indicted for in the financial crisis. No one for Iraq WMD lies, either. The ruling class go to great lengths to not let thenselves be tried as criminals. It doesn't mean they're not owning you.

Case in point: Reasonable people have put the cost of the financial crisis at 6-30 trillion, or more (6 being the lower bound of the Fed's very own estimate). The higher figure is $93,000/per citizen, and it very will could be more than that.(1)

After this, any sane person would have overhauled Wall St, but no one did. We will see big shake ups in Airbus, but not Wall St.

So the corruption in Wall St is either legal, or people don't have enough power to indict them.

0 - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/13/goldman-sac...

1 - https://www.cnbc.com/id/101022718
It's Time for a New Old Language – Guy Steele [video]
> But how is that fair?

Who said it was fair?

Trump and Sanders both campaigned on doing things for the benefit of American and its citizens. Prioritizing the welfare of steelworkers here rather than in Mexico is pretty much what their supporters wanted.
I'm fairly sure there isn't really such a thing as disembodied cognition. You have to build the fancy sciency stuff on top of the sensorimotor prediction-and-control stuff.
Exactly. I have no problem with idiots that want to build in flood plains, but I get upset with federally-subsidized flood insurance program and FEMA who come in to rescue people who make shit decisions.
I don't fully agree that we're "past" it.

It's definitely out of fashion, but when something complicated breaks, where is the "adult" you call to figure it out? :)

I do 100% agree that commercial systems / enterprise / game dev is past the low level era, but the knowledge of the area is anything but obsolete for the reason I mentioned before.
An ice giant, like Uranus and Neptune.
Is it their job to be fair to the world, or to support the interests of the citizens that they represent? If the government isn't fighting for their interests, then what good is it?
Every homeowner was advised of and signed disclosures to the effect that they were buying a house in a FLOOD ZONE/ flood control dam.

Every licensed real estate agent and licensed insurance agent is tested on knowledge of this.

How can a reporter write something so stupid? It depicts homeowners as illiterate elementary school children who have been victimized by the big bad developers.

This is an example of how truly simple the media, journalists, and public officials have become. There is no honor in being a logical responsible thinking individual in a post 2008 America.
Did you never have a dog as a child? Children raised with dogs will naturally befriend the dog, and the dog might take the role as protector.

No assholery there.
I mean, select(2) (and thus event loops) was in 4.2BSD ~10 years before windows 3.1 was released, and it wouldn't surprise me if there were earlier examples of I/O multiplexing.
I just wrote up some thoughts on the topic:

https://www.exratione.com/2017/10/in-search-of-the-spark-whe...

Essentially, the question asked is just the setup to watch someone approach a novel experience. If the candidate is not in a natural environment, i.e. working with a comfortable IDE and with access to Stack Overflow, it is kind of pointless. You want to see what they do in a situation fairly close to the mundane daily example of "how do I do this new thing."

So don't ask standard related to business challenges that have answers online: find novel exercises. Write a sort function that sorts everything except for at least two items. Write a linked list node that sabotages the user in the most subtle way possible. And so on. Fortunately these are easy to create, as there is an infinite space of engineering exercises that no-one would carry out in reality as they are self-defeating, or pointlessly destructive, or otherwise non-productive. But they still serve to illustrate how someone thinks their way around a new concept, and that is the important thing.
Most gamers distinguish games made by a small indie team and those made by Ubisoft, THQ, etc. Had the Ubisoft bundle been Humble Bundle's first ever bundle, they would have came across as a very different organization.
Which continent are you missing? I went to a dance party in Antarctica (Freezing Man, 2016). It was strange, but a lot of fun. There were a lot of balloons, and due to the dryness, they clung to my beard very well. Unless I moved my head too much.
GIMP only always remembers me how much I miss Paint.Net on my Mac. Just last week I had to do some image manipulation. Since pretty much all Paint derivatives for Mac suck hard, I preferred to spin up a Windows EC2 instance, install Paint.Net and get the job done, instead of using this UX clusterfuck named GIMP.
I love when I can yell and scream for a little. It's half the reason I go to concerts I think, cause no one cares if you just holler your heart out. It can be tough to find times to just viscerally yell at the top of your lungs in NYC.

I'm not even really particularly angry or anxious, I just feel great after letting go of literally everything and letting my heart and soul and voice and mind rip for a few minutes.

Sometimes you just want to yell, I understand why it's weird to do so in NYC and it'd be terrible if people felt more comfortable doing so, but god damn does it feel good to let the chest soar, the voice yell, and the entire body become one with that very ephemeral energy.
This is frankly a non-response. You're defining corruption as "things I don't like". If you're going to argue that someone is corrupt, you need to be specific as to what you're accusing them of, and how that fits into a theory of corruption.

Your "case in point" points out the obvious: that people lost a lot of money in a market crash and economic downturn. But market crashes don't require any wrongdoing.

In this case there is in fact evidence that some people were criminally dishonest. Some mortgage brokers who were complicit in applicants' lies, for example. But it's not readily apparent that investment banks did anything wrong, other than make bad decisions for themselves and their customers.
Here I thought it was the Island of Sealand...
Right. Point is there are two types of bad downloads. You can download a version which is not malicious but is insecure. Then auto-updating it makes it more secure.

Or you can auto-update to a version which is malicious. Then you are screwed. But your previous version you downloaded to start with might have contained the threat to start with. So just saying don't auto-update does not really protect you from malicious versions. Auto-updating does mean that you get updated security fixes making you less vulnerable.

The original non-updated version can be malicious even with a vendor you think you should be able to trust because it is a popular product used by many others:

https://www.piriform.com/news/blog/2017/9/18/security-notifi...
A simple theory of baseline mood
Do you commenters have any concept of property ownership?

MORTGAGE LENDERS REQUIRE FLOOD INSURANCE IN THESE AREAS.
Very open to feedback and would be relieved to be wrong on almost every point made in the essay.
[video] How to Generate Pseudorandom Numbers
I just sent them $15 through the donate link at the top of the post.
iTools 2018: iOS 11.0.3, 11.1, 11.1.1 and iOS 11.1.2 iTools 4.0 Download
How is one big communications company substantively different then another big communications company? I trust a merged Magenta/Yellow combo then I'd trust comcast.
What is the endgame of all of this? If a nation is composed of rich people who live off wealth created in other countries, and a great many very poor people, for how long do those other countries continue to send the wealth they generate to foreign rich people? And advances in wealth creation; those will happen in foreign countries. The rich people in the country that no longer generates wealth will only survive by buying into those new wealth generators.

Eventually, will there be a leftover country composed of rich people who own some wealth generation in foreign countries and a great many poor people? I suppose eventually, Mexicans will be complaining that their jobs are going north to people who will work for much less money.
Why would it be gaseous if Pluto is rocky? Is it the size?
Because the rules for parsing it would be more complex. That would be an exercise for the student: How would you describe the rules? Then the teacher would show them all these edge cases they haven't considered, taken from real programs so that they don't complain its a contrived example.
I'm constantly shocked at how massive, important open source projects turn out to have so little funding. It's hard to tell which ones are Mozillas (super rich and sophisticated), and which are OpenSSL and Gimp (grossly underfunded working out of a bedroom). I imagined gimp being a 50 person team in an office.

It is shocking, especially because so much of all infrastructure depends on these projects, especially OpenBSD, GnuPG, OpenSSL, etc. I would absolutely pay for a 'subscription' where I could, say, spend 20 Euro per month and the money gets automatically spread over the open source programs/projects that I use. Things are heading in the right direction with Patreon, BountySource, et al. but I would like to sponsor on a amount-of-use basis.