skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's a ton of routes to power for a general AI other than network security holes, and someone making a narrow AI just to fix all the bugs in our computer networks will miss nearly all of these. Consider an AI that makes a ton of money on mechanical turk -like jobs online, uses the money to run thousands of shell companies, over time hires the whole population to work on things related to paperclip factories, and crowds out other job opportunities so that anyone that goes against it goes jobless. Or an AI that figures out how to create cultural memes stupidly easily, gets people to vote in totalitarian governments, and then blackmails every single member of the central planning committees to optimize their countries for paperclip production.

These ideas are mainly extreme proof-of-concept ideas, maybe there's ideas along these same lines that are much easier to pull off, but maybe these ideas as-is would be do-able for a possible superhuman intellect. I'm kind of thinking about what it looks like when individuals meticulously plan and then make tool-assisted speedrun videos through videogames, and then scaling it up to what it would look like if thousands of people worked together optimally for thousands of years brainstorming and calculating on how to speedrun through conquering a society. Physical limits permit this kind of computation as far as we know. Maybe this imagery is off-base, but I'm purposefully shooting high and worrying I'm not shooting high enough. Chimps would never even consider the possibility of "super-chimp" intelligences creating nuclear weapons. You can't make narrow AIs to defend from these possibilities if half the danger is our inability to even enumerate them.
But you can write a library in Haskell, verify it with Coq, and publish it on Hackage for everybody to benefit from.
I use project euler whenever I want to learn a new language. I've used it recently with ocaml - https://github.com/nikolas/projecteuler
I find my long-term memory is limited when it comes to technical details. What has served me best is just storing a pointer in most cases and making sure I have access to the reference.

If it's been 6 weeks since I've worked on/with x and now I need to work with x again, what's important is that I have a process to reproduce x or build on x. I'd argue this is a better practice than trying to commit everything to memory because human memory is pretty corruptible. I also find this helps with complex problems because you don't have to deal with the devil upfront, you just have to be able to do some high-level fuzzing.

That being said, I think it's important to commit mistakes to memory because those are embarrassing to repeat.
more of a misguided heuristic for something simpler

To me it's an indicator that the "simpler" is that management (and possibly more, given concomitant hiring practices) has only one way they know how to interact with people: after-class mode from college. In Social FizzBuzz it scores a "Fizz."
> So you are suggesting that Canada doesn't participate in drug research?

I'm suggesting that the type of regulation you seem to favor stifles drug research, yes. If the entire world adopted your policies, there simply wouldn't be any new drugs.

> Martin Shkreli types

The only reason the "Martin Shkreli types" are able to do what they do is that government regulations make it difficult or economically impossible for competitors to enter the marketplace, even with drugs for which the patent has long expired.
Just as a data point — as of this posting, the volume is a whopping... 828.
Ah, I've heard about Deis, I'll check that one out, thanks. My main concern is the fact that Kubernetes recommends running more than one server, which is a luxury my personal projects cannot afford. Does anyone know how well it runs on a single server?
It says, right on the mobile mode interstitial, that it "requires the latest mobile/tablet hardware." And yet, you seem surprised when it doesn't work on older hardware?
This article suggest a variety of plugins and then describes a fairly exotic workflow that's alien to my vim brain. I use vim because it's simple, powerful and available almost anywhere. By the time I've installed a bunch of non-standard plugins and learned a set of tool-specific commands, I'm no longer working with vim but some other IDE-type-thing that happens to run inside vim.
Solutions here:

https://github.com/luckytoilet/projecteuler-solutions
Open-source license violations in mobile apps [pdf]
Ah, thanks, I'll try that. Dokku does have nice plugins, but they tend to be things I can write Dockerfiles for. The other big thing Dokku does is that it builds the image on the server, so it doesn't need a Docker registry, you just push the code directly to Dokku and the image gets built and deployed.
Salaried jobs dry up too.
Yup, but "these attacks" in your first post was specifically HTTP modification, which is the only thing Comcast is capable of doing.
Yes, that strategy works well. I've also found that "hitting the brakes and they'll fly right by" works really well in a knife fight.
Surely there’s a way to keep these relationships alive outside of the system! Even an opportunity to make them more meaningful.
Fractional reserve banking predates deposit insurance by hundreds of years. All of what you say was also true about gold, which was of relatively static supply.
Water security is an issue everywhere. Here in Australia, we have the Murray river. It is a major lifeline to Adelaide. However upstream farmers have been identified as stealing water, and their parent states aren't doing anything about it. I'm sure there's many farming practices that could be improved to reduce water consumption, but with lax policing, it's not happening.
President Trump is such a motivator.
Podcast ads remain stubbornly old-fashioned
First sale doctrine can not invalidate a copyright license or else any person could do it by launder the product through a shell company which only purpose would be to be the recipient of the original copyright license and then resell the work without the attached conditions. A naive legal approach would be that if you buy a work under condition X and resells it then condition will also be transferred in the sale.

In this case, condition X is: "Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."

Redistribution does not require creating new copies.
Never said American style suburbanization --that's your inference. If you ever travelled there you'd know farmland is being developed into housing. I'm sure you can do your own searches and verify[1].

[1]http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2747/0272-3638.21.3.20...
The US is a large political entity and comparing it to France isn't fair. A better comparison is to the entire EU, both in terms of population and ecomomy. Where there's France there's states like Georgia which are neither the best nor the worst.
Aren't we losing money by no longer being able to sell our recyclables to China? Isn't the crux of this article the exact opposite of what you're saying?
You're talking about something slightly different than what I asked. You clearly were able to check and conclude that this wasn't a literal quote. There was no difficulty there. You apparently got stuck there, and were unable to proceed from that information to the conclusion that I was restating the position in an extremely similar but more concise form, which would have been a way of interpreting my statement in its most reasonable form.

I'm asking whether, even a person who wasn't making a reasonable interpretation of what I was saying, would have been misled by the way I characterized Comcast's position. Is there a significant difference between the way I phrased Comcast's position on whether or not they were exhorting their customers to purchase a new modem, and the way they actually phrased it? Because I don't think there is.
Ah, memories. Back in 2010 I whinged to colleagues who were using their fancy functional languages to solve problem 1 inefficiently in 2 lines of code...

"
Project Euler problem 1 :-

It helps to know the sum of (1 .. x) is 0.5 * n * (n+1).

Multiples of 3 less than 1000 are (3 .. 999) == (1 .. 333) * 3 = 0.5 * 333 * 334 * 3 = 166833

Multiples of 5 less than 1000 are (5 .. 995) == (1 .. 199) * 5 = 0.5 * 199 * 200 * 5 = 99500

We must subtract common multiples (those of 15), so (15 .. 990) = (1 .. 66) * 15 = 0.5 * 66 * 67 * 15 = -33165

166833 + 99500 - 33165 = 233168

O(1) solution FTW :P Nice looking code is good, but a smart algorithm makes a big difference.
"

OK, I was a smug arsehole, but there's a point to be made y'know?
This study seems to be asking, "What makes a great Microsoft software engineer," given their sample cohort.
> Its a constantly evolving monster that will gobble up everything eventually (Isn't it beautiful :))

As I recall, that has always been part of the dream. Plus the potential for early adopters to become unimaginably wealthy ;)
> But if liberals were running in and giving free aid, and helping lives, those people would start to like liberals.

Not to put to fine a point on it but the #1 criticism I hear from my GOP friends is that Liberals want too much of our tax money to go to welfare programs. Who do you think benefits from those welfare programs?

As a study of human nature it is fascinating. These people don't benefit from tax breaks, they don't even have enough money to be taxed. They do benefit from the social welfare programs. Yet they consistently vote for the party that gives out the tax breaks. It makes no sense.

One possible explanation is the fear that the liberals will give away the jobs to immigrants and oversees workers. I don't have a good answer for those people, I wish I did.

> "Cuz 'rednecks." The only group you're allowed to prosecute on TV, media, and public discourse.

Except for muslims, immigrants, citizens of countries we don't like, LGBT people... and liberals. Turn on Fox, it is 3 hours of liberal bashing. Clearly they are "allowed" to do that, no one is stopping them.

Seriously, I'm not even a liberal. I'm a Libertarian. But anyone can see the holes in your arguments.
There's minikube, but so far as I'm aware, it's not really meant for production use; it exists mostly for local development.

My own company has Pivotal Web Services[0], which gives a Heroku-like experience using Cloud Foundry. Pricing is per-megabyte[1], plus services. I expect we'll introduce a container service before long, because we like to dogfood our stuff with real production workloads.

[0] http://run.pivotal.io/

[1] http://run.pivotal.io/pricing/
Minimum wage laws are already supposed to work like that.

The problem is that companies, Amazon and their contractors in particular, have been able to mischaracterize employees as "contractors" in order to get around minimum wage laws.

It's the lax enforcement of 1099 mischaracterization that has allowed the "gig economy" shit-sandwich jobs to proliferate. A deliver driver who has to maintain a delivery schedule or meet delivery deadlines given by Amazon (and in likelihood follows a programmed route given to them by an Amazon routing system) is in no real sense an INDEPENDENT contractor in the way that definition was originally meant.

Contractors are exempt from minimum wage laws because otherwise there would be a catch-22 situation if, say, a plumber you hired mis-estimated the amount of work involved in a job. (If he gave you an estimate that a job would be $100, and it turned out to take 10 hours plus $50 in materials, he could very well end up making below minimum wage. But he can't go back and squeeze you for more money; he's the one who gave you the estimate! But it hardly makes sense to penalize him again for not paying himself enough.) But these exceptions envisioned bona fide independent contractors, mostly skilled tradespeople, and not today's largely-unskilled and entry-level "contract" jobs.
Trading just started and CBOE is not nearly as big and as active as CME.

Also, trading volume for futures in general is pretty low. You're rarely going to see volume above 100k a Sunday night. Coffee futures have around 23k volume right now.
This is the kind of gaming experience I'm hoping webassembly will bring. No installation, just visit a website and play.
>Who is to blame? Amazon? The companies? The drivers? Capitalism gone mad?

All of the above? But mostly Amazon. We need to stop letting companies get away with poor practices by blaming it on a contractor. Companies should be accountable for the behaviour of their contractors.

If Amazon wants to structure their delivery business around contractors, they have a responsibility to require the contractors provide good working conditions.
That "Learned Index Structures" makes it pretty clear that Karpathy was right in his widely criticized "Software 2.0" piece.
The only legal power I see for the retaking of the property would be through eminent domain, which should require fair-market value compensation. But this is S.F., where law often doesn't apply.
As much as I love Vim and R, I think the experience is pointless without embedded graphs. It would be perfect if it was possible to view a graph in a Vim split.
DASH crypto currency was a planned instamine
There's some detail here:

TXO commitments aren’t a new idea - the author proposed them years ago2 in response to UTXO commitments. However it’s critical for small miners’ orphan rates that block validation be fast, and so far it has proven difficult to create (U)TXO implementations with acceptable performance; updating and recalculating cryptographicly hashed merkelized datasets is inherently more work than not doing so. Fortunately if we maintain a UTXO set for recent outputs, TXO commitments are only needed when spending old, archived, outputs. We can take advantage of this by delaying the commitment, allowing it to be calculated well in advance of it actually being used, thus changing a latency-critical task into a much easier average throughput problem.

https://petertodd.org/2016/delayed-txo-commitments
You'd think it was indifference that was most destructive. Papyrus and parchment last hundreds of years, so many works, including Sappho's became lost because the public did not care any longer and did not maintain the contents. Nowadays you'd call this "bit rot".

Incidentally, the Church would consider indifference or acedia the worst of sins, many pieces of spiritual literature are witness to that fact.
'World's healthiest wine' launched at 50 calories a glass
The way out of the fires, to safety, could become an in-app purchase -- a must-have monetization strategy!
An SRE's review of Democracy
I feel like if the work isn't immediately like, "This is a product I myself see an immediate use and a need for," I'll have difficulty working on it.

On the other hand, if the product's like, "This is approximately something I've wanted to work on literally my entire life," my 9-5 is going to be a steady output stream of concise, quality code, with the languages and frameworks of my employer's choice.

My 6-8 is usually arts. I think engineering is art, it's just art whose language is mathematics. A lot of people disagree, but I purchased a GE NE-42 neon bulb and it's good evidence for my theory.
I'll give you that it's not considered "polite" but I guess I should say it's "expected"?

Let me correct myself a bit. I guess what I should have said was public places? For example cafes or mcdonalds you can find tons of people sleeping in there, another example is train stations.

Obviously yes these are very different things, hence my correction.
That can be said of every version control system. Restoration of state to any given version is their defining feature. How they achieve that is always an implementation detail, but those details can still be important and interesting.
I see so many "howto" articles that are just a series of config dumps, occasionally interspersed with the words "then" and "just."
The best point to be made from this isn't that it's more computationally efficient. It's that, compared to something like

sum [x | x <- [1..999], (mod x 3 == 0) || (mod x 5 == 0)]

which is really just bluntly translating the question into a programming language and letting it take care of the rest, your approach involves some actual insight into the underlying math.
I found it to be excellent.

Yes a few typos but the content was incredibly well laid out with good pacing and a nice little TDD tutorial thrown in for good measure. The features of the codebase you build cover a lot of real world things that are non-trivial.
I wonder about the point of torturing a minimalist text editor with no graphics support (such as Vim into a comprehensive development and visualization enviromment, by invoking several plugins and some very specific workflows. Would it not make more sense to take the interface (modal editing, etc) and wrap it into module that can be easily embedded into several different IDEs, to handle text-specific tasks? That way, there is a fully powered system that can handle all the other tasks that the text editor was never designed to handle!
> please try to spend even a few months off of it

I'll place extra emphasis on this, for those that are hesitant. Just give it a try for a few months, and if you want to go back that is always an option. Right in time for New Year's Resolutions: go "Facebook free" for a whole 30 days. If it's not for you, that's fine, re-install / re-activate and there wasn't much to lose. But you can't know the alternatives without trying!

I quit Facebook years back because I somehow just realized that it provided no value to me. Keeping in contact with my real friends was something that could either be done in person, by text message, email, etc. Then add on top of that a lot of content is just noise, rather than wholesome original thought. Original posts are down... more people are just re-sharing crap from large groups. IMO Facebook is just a glorified, yet heavily stripped down, email client that allows people you didn't directly message to be dragged in too.

I think people by-and-large see Facebook as something larger and more praise-worthy than it actually is. There is a lot of mainstream hype around the platform that is strange from someone like me on the outside (because I quit). Maybe it is mystical because it's a story of a college student becoming a billionaire so quickly, and it gives people the impression that if someone so young got so much money in such a short amount of time, then the platform must be that good.
Great job! You think some Enlight projects would fit well there?
> Surely there’s a way to keep these relationships alive outside of the system!

Yes: RSS and/or email lists. I have a blog and email client, but I also know some people who wouldn't use those things. It sucks, but that's the way things are now.
That's the plan. Any suggestions for forum software? Discourse? Flarum? Trying to implement it before the new year.
Summary on Interpretable AI Debate at NIPS 2017
Yeah, minikube is just for trying K8s out. PWS looks interesting, but, as with other managed/cloud offerings, it's much more expensive than a dedicated server (50ish EUR/mo for a 64 GB RAM i7).

For my side-projects, where I am cost-sensitive, I think the best solution would be a dedicated server with something like Dokku. It would just be nice if the "something" could be an industry standard.
Even if you're a great developer, you might not be getting paid to care about performance. If "loads fast" is not a deliverable your employer cares about, they are not going to give you the time or budget to care about performance. Think of how many websites, especially for marketing purposes, are built by contractors who are getting tasked with making shiny, asset heavy websites that look good on the nice macbooks of businesses paying them. I've never seen a heard a client say "oh and make sure the page loads in under 2s" to be honest.
@mirmir: Point taken. In the context of this as a more general subject, I think your observation is perfectly reasonable.

However, I think (1) few are as lucid as you on that particular point and (2) whatever the merits of this as a general debate, and I think there is some merit, I think the question is whether this norm improves conversation in a thread like this. I think it was invoked frivolously, spawned a long, 50+ comment chain, and it didn't clear up any of the confusion that it seems like the norm is supposed to be designed for.
Project Euler was so much fun when I discovered it, it also helped prepare me for an unexpected interview which included similar challenges and they seemed a breeze in comparison. Had I not been challenging myself, no way would I have passed.

Solved 38 problems and forgot my password after a short pause, haven't been able to log in for years :(
Well, the choice would have been for the article to have a factual title or get flagged off the front page. HN seems to have chosen the second option.
Ask HN: Uncertainty in US H1B visa program
With changes to US policies since Trump came into office there has been a lot of talk about the future of H1B visa program. As an employeer, this makes me nervous to consider OPT candidates. I wonder will I even able to sponsor them for H1B in the future?

Does anyone else feel this way? What do you think will happen to this program?

Please note that I’ve previously hired OPT and later sponsored them for H1B. I value all types of diversity in my workplace.

Anyone have strong opinions about this visa program?
I’m well aware, it was meant as a data point for anyone not aware who could possibly think for a second their public website going down has anything to do with demand :)
As a parent and someone who has always found social media unpalatable, I think this isn't new or specific just to FB. The competition to control your children's mind begins early and never stops when it comes to any institutionalized power mechanism, that's how power is reinforced and retained over generations.

This is just another thing you'll need to teach your children about as you do your best to ready them for the world and help them become independent thinkers.
While the "everything assumes unstructured text; destructure and restructure at will" paradigm is still incredibly powerful, and set the bar super high for data interoperability and uniformity, I think it lowered expectations for [meta]data complexity that could be supported by simple, small programs.

In Windows, PowerShell is a very good example of a low-ish-level (composable commandline apps and snippets) programming environment that isn't shackled by that paradigm.
>1-MB block size limit ensures mass adoption of Bitcoin

There is nothing stopping anyone from tweaking consensus rules to their liking. This is what the bcash team did. Sounds like you're mad at people who didn't adopt bcash.

Again:
If users want low fees and low security, they got what they wanted by forking off to bcash. People who wanted high security and high fees, they got what they wanted by sticking the legacy consensus rules. What is exactly the problem with this paradigm?
Because ads make people money.
Correct. And on the internet, the whole big sites with valuable content disappear overnight. That is why I actively support the Internet Archive and would like to motivate others to do the same:

https://archive.org/donate/

Also:

"Right now, a generous supporter will match your donations 3-to-1—so you can triple your impact. That means for every dollar you donate right now, the Internet Archive will receive $4 in all."

I really believe what they are doing is very important even relatively short-term, that is, even measured in years.