skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The degree rule by me: Get one if its required to work on the field e.g. MD or if it's too hard for you to learn on your own e.g. math.

Spending money you don't have on a degree you don't probably never need is silly. You can learn history, women's studies and all that jazz on your own if you only put the time in.
Is this really that far more efficient than what humans do today?

A major managerial problem with humans is sorting out our irrational emotional biases and keeping everyone working on something resembling the appointed task. Can you imagine the productivity gain if that problem suddenly went away?
Statistics no, but I heard this many times, not believed it and then confirmed this with my body.
I'm assuming readers are just starting out, where auto-scaling and bloggable container architectures make very little sense. Configuration management is a prerequisite for those. That said, having a CM in place also makes the please-invest-in-us container ecosystem much less attractive, given that you can easily fall back to singleton-container-on-an-instance patterns (which is a great one for deployment regardless of your approach).

To that end, yes, their servers are probably hand-rolled or provisioned with minimal scripting like Ansible. And so manual secret deployment is to be expected.

If somebody is attempting to autoscale without having this solved already, they are making mistakes.
not really..come on either you want to take a risk and make something and sell it to get higher income or take no risk and go for that low paying warehouse job. Tell us all what risk did any one take in getting a warehouse job?

Gee life is hard...really?
Also, something that is very overlooked IMO is that the engineering process does not need to happen in silico, even though I am not a defendant of using it, bioengineering is a possibility.
Under what circumstances is false flagging your own citizens warranted?

This isn't a contingency like a plan to nuke Canada if they are on the edge of becoming communists.
But we, humans, aren't going at anything like the speed of light. What if we tweaked our DNA to produce human beings with the working memory capacity of 50 items instead of the normal 7-ish [1]? One such researcher would be able to work faster, on more problems at once, and to consider more evidence and facts. The next bottleneck for that person, of course, would be the input/output capacity (reading, writing, typing, communicating), but even with those limitations, I bet they would be a lot more efficient than the average "normal" human. The question is - would you call such a person more "intelligent"?

[1] http://www.human-memory.net/types_short.html
The combination of the US Congress and the IRS bureaucracy is as crazy as a six legged weasel?
200g is what a typical sedentary person breathes out in a day.

You can definitely increase your burn rate by way more than 20% with heavy exercise. A Tour de France bicyclist will burn several thousand calories (4,000-7,000 depending on the stage and rider) in only about six hours. For comparison, a typical sedentary person will burn 2,000-2,500 calories per day. It can be physically difficult to eat enough at that rate, and riders lose a substantial amount of weight over the race. (A friend once told me about an endurance cyclist he knew who would eat a big bowl of cereal each morning, except instead of milk he'd use olive oil. Disgusting, but an effective way to get enough calories in.)

It's pretty tough for most of us to achieve anything like that much exercise, of course. Even Tour de France riders only do it for a few weeks at a time.
Will have to try walking more, this may be good suggestion.
Most open source projects taking that path have eventually been forked when someone created new assets under a free (as in beer) license and changed the name. The original project is now nothing while the fork is big.

RHEL continues not because of assets but because Red Hat has people who staff who know the ins and outs of RHEL and will fix it. Red Hat employs many kernel developers because when a customer has a problem the customer knows an expert will get on the problem right away. The guy they talk to on the phone is useful, and can solve the vast majority of problems (as could any well trained system admin), but when you get to those rare special cases Red Hat is better able to handle them quick.
Demonetization
So you should appreciate all the plans they consider? If they have a plan on how to stop a protest by killing the citizens with drones, or how to start a new war vs country X by killing children in a school and blaming it on X, this plan is fine, let's congratulate them for considering all possibilities including killing the citizens you are paied to protect. There are some things that you should not do, even war has rules.
The author makes several points about AI/intelligence and recursive systems that I think a lot of people who think "AI will take over the world and replace" humans [1][2][3] don't understand.

He argues that general intelligence by itself is not really something that exists, our brains exist within a broader system (environment, culture, bodies, etc.) which is something you can read more about in embodied cognition: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/a-brief-guid...

He also argues that the public debate about "AI regulation" is misleading because it's impossible for a "seed AI" to start designing smarter AI's that will surpass the intelligence of humans which is what a lot of people today think will happen with AI. Automation of jobs and tasks is very real, but completely replacing humans and potentially destroying us all is a joke and only the people who no nothing about AI/brains think this.

[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-do...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/17/elon-musk-robots-will-be-abl...

[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/17/537686649...
Alternatively, it's "you cannot hire employees who are less valuable to you than this arbitrary threshold."

If someone wants to work for $1 / hour and someone else wants to hire them for $1 / hour... what right does a third party have to prevent them from doing business with each other?
The governments routinely implement plans without reasonable research to back up their claims, so why not try this?

There have been some studies, and from my recollection the takeaway is that most people, once their basic needs are met, strive to actually do something "useful". People on average do not become drug-addled sloths.

For many reasons it is difficult to do a comprehensive, long term study on this idea. The first, of course, is the cost. People or organizations with the money to spend on research tend to be motivated by profit, and thus far we've been taught (incorrectly, I would argue) that giving things away doesn't result in having more for yourself.
Context: Y Combinator has funded an experiment in Basic Income, which basically gives everyone in (a city, a country, ...) a guaranteed income independent of labour/capital. A (Universal) Basic Income should let people focus on art/science/... if they want, and ensure that everyone continues to have an acceptable live as automation makes more and more jobs obsolete.

This appears to be the same idea, but in capitalist language (Americans as stockholders in the US.)
Here is another advice. If you can't afford buying a house in Bay Area, and you need the extra cash, you may consider buying a house in Southern part of the country. It is usually about $50,000 - $100,000. Then you can rent out to college students for $300 - $500 a month. When I go to Lake George I rent a house for a few days. The owner is actually from NJ, and he just hire a contractor to look after the property on a periodic basis (maybe $1000 a month for several properties).

Imagine you get $3000 a month for a $60,000 plus $1000 to have someone manage your house on a regular basis. You get back your investment in 3 years. Let's be realistic too. How about in 8 years? Now you have a steady income $2000-$3000 a month. That's a nice bonus to your annual income.

Can you afford buying Apple stock and hope to make $500 a month with the stock is already so high? Every month you are paying more and more to cover more share. You will realize you are not making anything. Buy low-price stocks that will take off instead.

Finally, when you need $200,000 for whatever emergency, you can refinance from the bank. Can you do this from your stock investment which again has very low return? I know people who make several thousands a month but these are rare. Housing isn't. If buying property can't generate revenue, no one would be buying property and renting out. There is a reason why the property market is so expensive now, because owning a piece of land == sell high. We bought the house here for half a million, and if I actually sell it right now to build a condo I could get back my investment in 10 years or less (or sell it directly to someone).
I'm a little unclear how this would work in practice. What is the financial instrument and is it equity in the government or equity in all the companies in the US?

I see no reason why companies would do it and no incentive to take a part of the government (is the US government going to pay a dividend?), I'm not certain everyone having a share they couldn't trade would be worth it. I think the ability to trade state monopolies was tried in Russia, how is that looking?

Finally isn't the stated aim of YC to create companies that are monopolies and use network effects to entrench their positions, accumulating wealth into a few hands?
Yeah with all due respect to dang sometimes I don't have the time or inclination to do so. "It attracts the curious" is (apologies) bullshit.
Irrelevant. As long as you eat less than what you burn, you will lose weight.

If you're not losing weight, cut what you eat until you see results.
Edit: I should say I enjoyed the video. It's much more nuanced than the post that accompanies it.

I thought historians abandoned "moral decline" arguments with the 19th century.

What I find funny about them is they're always characterized as a decline in morals particularly important to the observing historian. And of course, no empirical measure of moral decline is ever given or even suggested.

So what arguments like this really amount to are a feeling. A feeling felt by curmudgeonly historians throughout time. Nostalgia. And most likely, nostaligia for a time they themselves never inhabited. All the better because there are no negative memories to sour the nostalgia.

America in my opinion is not in moral decline. We are reaching for a moral high point actually (but just barely). But that's just my feeling, so it's about as valuable as the ideas on offer here.
Understanding and Overcoming Coder's Block
Costcos average customer makes more than 100k a year. Their average purchase is more than $100 and price per item is $10+.

They are basically a luxury goods store and can afford to pay employees more.
Same logic could be applied 200 years ago, work 7 days a week, 12 or more hours a day , if you don't like it go and die.
Meta question: if this essay about "American Equity" is another way of proposing "universal basic income", why is there circumlocution around UBI?

Possibilities are "UBI" has been poisoned with negative connotations can you can't talk about it anymore. That's possible but it seems like the overwhelming sentiment on HN and reddit is massive support for it.

As far as I can tell, "UBI" doesn't have negative connotations such as the phrase "welfare queens". UBI is already widely understood. What's the motivation for the neologism "American equity"? (My guess is it's a UBI-indexed-to-GDP.)
LOL @ the type of journalism The Guardian promotes... I'd rather burn money than support a publication that published articles to support my country's corrupt politicians. God forbid law enforcement investigate them. The Guardian always has their back.
The technique I'm referring to is including race as a factor, and then instructing your model to disregard that factor. Not being race-blind, but being race-aware while attempting to be neutral to race.
NEXT Browser: A NEXT Generation Extensible Lisp Browser
Here is a book on the topic that has had much more thought put into it than a Sam's short blog post.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

https://www.amazon.com/Equal-Unfair-Americas-Misguided-Inequ...
He could start with his companies giving out a much larger share of equity to their employees. I always find it fascinating when VCs advocate for things like UBI or this American Equity plan while at the same time being a major contributor to income equality. They could do a lot right now bit instead they make some vague proposals while keeping their money.
> The government simply doesn't have the resources and logistical capabilities, to identify and address each need in turn.

We already made the assumption that they do, with the original claim " If every member of the park was getting some form of basic income, the state could require the trailer park to install a septic system".

Without that requirement, you're taking on the risk that the rentiers will extract the additional income and make no changes to the sewage system. That assumes a few things:

(1) The trailer park owners don't currently have the money to building a sewage system

(2) The lack of money is the only reason that the owners aren't building a sewage system

(3) The owners don't have other goals that they prioritize higher than providing a sewage system to tenants

(4) The amount that the rentiers would be able to extract from the stipend would be enough to cover a sewage system

I'm generally pretty sympathetic to the premise that allowing rational actors to choose how to spend their limited resources tends to produce results that ~everyone agrees are better than top-down planned efforts. But when you're talking about a situation in which the negotiating leverage of the two parties is so drastically imbalanced, and a problem which has such wide-reaching externalities as this one does, that's a really big leap of faith to take. Compare that to the alternative, where we've identified a concrete problem that we're looking to solve, and we use a normal process for budgeting and directing funds towards a targeted goal.
TL;DR: America should implement basic income.

My usual objection to basic income applies: Basic income in some form already exists in most European countries. It's just a not-that-big parametric change to our current systems plus a change in mentality and social perception of welfare.

Suggesting that we should implement basic income of x euros is roughly equivalent to suggesting that we should increase the welfare unemployed people get today. If it was politically / economically feasible, we would already have it by now.
And this radiolab episode: http://www.radiolab.org/story/brown-box/
"An individual brain cannot implement recursive intelligence augmentation. An overwhelming amount of evidence points to this simple fact: a single human brain, on its own, is not capable of designing a greater intelligence than itself. This is a purely empirical statement: out of billions of human brains that have come and gone, none has done so. Clearly, the intelligence of a single human, over a single lifetime, cannot design intelligence, or else, over billions of trials, it would have already occurred."

The same argument could have been about human flight (or any other invention). Billions of human beings over millions of years had come and gone, and yet none had been able to fly. Until they did.

There's also a point to be made about humans not having adequate tools for introspection or self-modification. We can not simply look in our brains/minds and read our source code, nor easily tweak it to see what would happen without great risks to our lives. A computer could. Furthermore, a computer could potentially run billions or trillions such experiments in the course of a single human lifetime.

"no human, nor any intelligent entity that we know of, has ever developed anything smarter than itself."

What about humans simply having smarter children? In many ways, humanity's creation of AI could be seen as analogous to giving birth to a child that's smarter than its parents.

"Beyond contextual hard limits, even if one part of a system has the ability to recursively self-improve, other parts of the system will inevitably start acting as
bottlenecks. Antagonistic processes will arise in response to recursive self-improvement and squash it ... a brain with smarter parts will have more trouble coordinating
them ... Exponential progress, meet exponential friction."

The problem is the author is looking at human-level problems with human-level intelligence. A superintelligence may have no such problems, or be able to easily resolve them. Once over the initial speed bump of creating such an intelligence it could be smooth sailing from then on. There's no way to tell, really, what its limits will be until it exists. Besides, even if it can't exponentially increase its own intelligence forever, even a relatively slight increase of intelligence over humanity could be a massive gamechanger.
Except employers pay less, which would help make them stop complaining about wages costing too much.
This looks like a pretty comprehensive package for live and VOD workflows. In my experience the devil is in the details with these kind of services so I'm guessing we'll be doing a fairly deep dive into this at my workplace to see if any of the services are applicable to what we do.

Makes me consider setting up a consultancy helping companies stitch these services together. Up until now it has been a pain doing many of these things yourself.
But our emotional biases are also what keeps us on the appointed task!
That is very interesting. Is it related to coal? Will the trees today nor form coal because they will be processed by fungi?
> If intelligence is fundamentally linked to specific sensorimotor modalities, a specific environment, a specific upbringing, and a specific problem to solve, then you cannot hope to arbitrarily increase the intelligence of an agent merely by tuning its brain — no more than you can increase the throughput of a factory line by speeding up the conveyor belt.

The latter part makes no sense at all. Of course you can increase the throughput of a factory by speeding up "the conveyor belt"--a standin for the complex processes going into manufacturing.

The whole statement is also wrong. Of course you can increase intelligence by optimizing the process of learning. Fewer trials, quicker reactions, faster construction of models, more complex understanding of fundamentals of a given problem.

The author makes broad assertions like this with glaring holes with zero evidence.
> child labor didn't stop because parents stopped being willing to sentence their kids to labor...

No it did not, it just moved overseas. It is hard to beat the free market -- it just finds the most economical way to get things done, it does not care about human plight.
Because the impact of any one individual on the economy is so small, and because people can't be "fired" from the US like they can from a company, the free rider problem could be real. This could end up just being an added cost to the country that doesn't actually increase productivity or incentives in a meaningfully different way that other forms of putting more money into people's pockets (lower taxes, universal basic income, etc)

I think it is awesome though that influential people are putting forth creative ideas on how to make our country better. We need this
Yeah, that is the main problem. If it takes you even 10 minutes to get to the crapper, fine, as long as the employer is willing to compensate you for that. It's unethical to force workers to choose between taking a crap and keeping their pay or their job. You can't just choose not to take a crap.
You're assuming a constant factor there that isn't necessarily constant.
You're arguing that it's not an exponential that doesn't continue to the right indefinitely.

But what if it follows a sigmoid instead, but the plateau is much higher than the current level?

This is what punctuated equilibria look like -- even if the 'new thing' isn't actually a singularity, it may be enormously disruptive and completely displace whatever came before.
The opposite of rising inequality is not total equality. That's just an attempt to kill the discussion.
I find this argument unconvincing not just because the evidence doesn't support it (and it doesn't), but because this claim is the same one made whenever anyone proposes anything to put more money in the hands of the poors.

Every time, it's the exact same argument, "if you give the poors more, everything will cost more, and they'll be right back where they started." And, well, we didn't always look like this. Obviously it's possible for there to be a different equilibrium in society, one with less disparity. So something has changed.

Seems like there should be ways to change it back, even to the disparity we had (overall, I know life was horrible for PoC) in post-WWII America. That'd be a step up from this.
Then go to a Unitarian Universalist church?

"Unitarian Universalists believe that each person is free to search for their own personal truth on issues, such as the existence, nature, and meaning of life, deities, creation, and afterlife." -Wikipedia
"This isn't about my own personal stances."

I'm not trying to 'slander' your character. Your complaint with the Guardian was literally about an article calling out Milo, a controversial bigot who, as was recently revealed by BuzzFeed, fraternises with Nazis for his own gain. This is a pattern I've seen recur among angry MRA/alt-right types - saying they got sick of news source because of something related to feminism.

If you're not MRA/alt-right then I'm sorry, but I'd suggest picking your examples more carefully.

I'm not sure why the editor owed you a reply either. You're free to not read it. It can't have meant that much to you as you didn't seem to fight it all that hard.
To turn a Nation-State into a "for-profit" for citizens will make US a weird version of Petro-State without Petroleum.
I agree. UBI is such a fascinating idea, but much like communism it feels like an extreme that will never work in practice.

Everyone gets an extra $1000/month. Great. That's extra money flowing into an economy which absolutely affects supply/demand for the things everyone needs (food, shelter). Food might be fine because there's a lot of competition, but landlords? Rental prices are almost completely set by market demand, not cost of service.

Its possible UBI could help sidestep this by allowing more people to purchase homes, but housing supply is constrained in many urban areas today; adding more capital to that market will increase prices. Granted, this isn't as bad a thing as money entering the renter markets, because that money just goes to build more developments and eat up more land that could be owned by people to build equity instead of corporations. But its still something to keep in mind.
People already have a share in the GDP. That's what it is, the total domestic product, the sum of all the little parts. The problem is not that people don't have share in it (and this goes for every country, not just for the USA), but that they have a disproportionate share in it.

Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that raise your taxes on the rich and lift up those that are at the lowest end of the scale. That will have a lot more effect than some fiction where you get to do a bunch of make-believe bookkeeping.

Of course in the current political climate this will not happen, in fact the reverse will happen, tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the poor and the middle class.