skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Do you think we'll never know enough about physics to simulate a small box with a person in it?

In the sense you mean simulation, ie., describe with all required detail some system -- we can barely simulate a few atoms let alone a room with a human being in it.

Im not sure this is even a question of knowing the physics. The problem is that even an atom has an infinite density of "descriptive information"... ie., in order to describe in toto we would be calculating forever.

This is not what any one in AI is even trying to do by the way. This isnt machine learning. This isn't AI.

I'm not convinced simulation in this depth will ever be achieved, I cannot imagine it could ever be performant. Every single causal interaction taking place over a second is an entire universe in itself. To have this second alone described in simulation is a vast undertaking, let alone a conversation.

Maybe I would agree that while this system would be "good enough", if it could predict an appropriate response by simulating a target human being to this depth... all the way down to how dopamine bonds to receptors in the frontal lobe, etc. -- then sure, I could see that it would be close enough.

However this isnt what anyone means when we say something is "simulated". They mean that it a single aspect alone is idealised into a single equation and treated under perfect conditions without any other factor being relevant, and then a calculation involving this equation is run.

People in AI are not even considering animal consciousness as being a relevant thing to simulate (even though that's what consciousness is). They think it is just a matter of some idealized formal structure.

If they realised that it would require an electronic system to calculate every descriptive quantity regarding every particle of some animal, computational general-AI research projects would be binned for the next millennia at least.

In the case of AI, no one is trying to "simulate a human being" in the sense you describe. They are trying to find an extremely simplified highly idealized equation to describe thinking.

They are trying to model intelligence as if the salient features of animal consciousness were not biological but equational. "Good Bye" follows "Hello" because insert program...

No, "Good Bye" follows "Hello" because people who speak english have lived a life of speaking it in which experiences have been acquired in response to the world ie., their brains have developed under sociolinguistic conditions: with light and sound bouncing off their bodies and the bodies of those around them such that their neurological structure as evolved to causally associate "hello" with akind of social circumstane and "goodbye" with likewise.

There is nothing apart from this connected social-neurological system that constitutes why "goodbye" follows "hello". That is how it comes to be. Any rule or system which appeals to an equation that isn't modelling this entire process to its full depth is just "accidentally correlated" with english-- and will be trivially easy to expose.

And so on for every aspect of consciousness.
I haven’t laughed so much at one of these since p-p-p-PowerBook [0]

0: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=10...
Don't say "Hello" when you answer the phone. Anything other than "Hello" is treated as "reached answering machine", and the predictive dialer hangs up and sometimes takes that number off the call list.
Luddite much?

It's insane anybody thought electronic baking was a good idea when paper money has worked for hundreds of years.

Electronic voting machines aren't problem.

Bad implementations are the potential problem.
I hate this recurring tendency of HN commenters to myopically reduce every issue to one involving technology before forming an opinion on that issue.

Hint: the applicability of an analogy does not extend infinitely in all conceptual directions.
> so 95% of our test code mostly just exercises its own mocks

Yikes/uggh

Unit tests are great for those little ... 'units' that you can feed specific test cases.

I've found that the code that needs lots of mocks to be tested is exactly that which is best covered by integration tests.
A Lightning Network transaction results in one of two things - a proof that a certain amount of bitcoins can be withdrawn at any time (minus some delay), or a proof of cheating. Surely a proof that you can withdraw a certain amount of bitcoins is more-or-less equivalent to that many bitcoins, and therefore any rational actor - including your suppliers - should accept it as such?

This isn't equivalent to unconfirmed transactions - it's tokens of exchange which directly and provably represent bitcoins. Settling on the blockchain shouldn't even have to happen monthly.

One of the other interesting things is that Lightning Network allows for payment in one cryptocurrency while you hold another by channeling it through a very simple, provable currency exchange. This could behave similarly to, for example, paying for something in USD when you hold GBP - practically automatically. So the lack of scalability in Bitcoin's blockchain might not matter so much - if something else turns up that's better for a given person holding money, they can start using it while still continuing to trade with all the people using Bitcoin.

IMHO, cross-chain transactions like this are one of the most important parts of Lightning Network - suddenly, network effects around a specific currency don't matter so much, people can hold whatever they like - Bitcoin people can trade with Litecoin people who can trade with Ethereum scripts, and when something new that solves more problems turns up, people holding that can still buy VPSes with bitcoin.
I get it, thank-you.
The question should be, what should happen so that it stabilizes. If Bitcoin and cryptocurrency marker were to stabilize, the competition between different cryptocurrencies should mean the trade off between their different features will be directly reflected in the cost to their user. The possible features are:
- Transaction time (Bitcoin is relatively bad here)
- Transaction fee (Bitcoin is also one of the worst options here)
- Smart contacts / other integration features (Bitcoin is going nowhere here)
- Anonymity (Bitcoin isn't in the best spot here, might have the advantage of being the most commonly used BUT this is a matter of momentum only).
- Resistance to attacks from large groups of people (Bitcoin's biggest advantage, but again only a result of it's initial momentum, which might not hold forever).

Now you can also notice that all these features are composite. If you really want to pay for anonymity, you can tumble though the most anonymous currency. If you need smart contacts, go through eth. Resistance to nation state attack is a noble ideological concept, but has low demand, and a cheaper but weaker coin will be dominant in most scenarios.

You will also know a market is stabilized when there no incentives to create competition without innovating. There's nothing stopping you from creating yet another crypto coin, which will have better transaction fee and will still be as decent as others.

Anyway you can clearly tell the market is clueless when the talk isn't about which coins gives you the best features for the most cheap price, but instead about which coin rises the most (which is usually exactly the opposite).
I've been planning a switch to gopass but haven't made the jump yet. I'd love to hear some feedback from people who have been using it, especially any downsides or caveats.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/401227.stm
This isn't a new trend. In 1820 72% of Americans worked in "farm occupations". Today it's less than 2%.
As is often the case - the truth is more complex.

That said: it’s often that the Bay is more socially progressive than fiscally or infrastructurally.

Plus they’re just shit at getting things done (often due to NIMBYism).
Or it leads to avoiding overpopulation and depletion of resources. I think the intelligent thing for us to do would be to limit ourselves to a certain population size and stop growing.
>Totally thought this was going to be about an algorithm that tags videos of whales with text, and and how they noticed a pattern by looking at the tags.

same!
I think Bitcoin has maneuvered itself into a corner where the remaining dev team doesn't dare to do any hardforks in the future even if they are important to keep Bitcoin competitive.
https://feedbin.com/blog/2017/05/05/testing-huge-postgresql-...
Interesting, I noticed a hit on my credit report for a legitimate debt caused by an urgent care who sent the bill to the wrong address and eventually sold the debt to a collector (despite me writing my current info on the signin documentation they gave us!). I have offered to pay-for-delete with them but they have not responded at all. I'm thinking about what to do next.
I'm an IOTA fan* but there aren't enough full nodes in the tangle at the moment (and also no direct financial incentive for more public ones to be created, afaik?). You just had to witness their slack last night to see that. People were setting up nodes and getting overrun almost immediately (I saw a guy complain he'd set up 4x 32GB nodes and watched them get swamped and CPU pegged within seconds). I gave up on a bitfinex withdrawal after waiting 12+ hours for it to process.

But, yes, at least with IOTA the tech is proven. More nodes will let it scale. I just wonder how they will incentivize these nodes to come in to existence and keep ownership of them reasonably decentralized/well distributed (and make it easy for light wallet users to find and use them).

* though admittedly I don't follow the project too closely - so apologies if some of the above is off-base/wrong.
In a past life I was at a SaaS company that was asked this from every single customer (and they were BIG customers). We always said no. No, no, no.

You know why? It was not secret sauce at all and boolean logic. Amazing how the wool was pulled over a pile of rubbish ;)
Likewise. Needs to be a crowd-funded fight-the-man where the patrons can vote on the cause and watch progress.
Are you going to audit all of their code changes from now into perpetuity as well? It seems like you kinda alluded to the thing that would actually be effective, which is not synchronously calling external services in high-uptime-requirement applications...
You can find templates for proprietary information agreements at EveryNDA:

Defeat the Confusion: Confidentiality v. Non-Disclosure

https://everynda.com/blog/confidentiality-v-non-disclosure/

Examples of Microsofts Shared Source licensing can be found as well. These contracts are typically reserved for heavy hitters. Who have enhanced security or performance requirements. FBI, JP Morgan, etc. And of course Microsoft has open sourced large portions of its own dev tools and sdks.

Microsoft Shared Source Initiative

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/

I think what you may begin to realize is that its their alternative data that represents the motherload. And its not your algorithms but level of service that will differentiate you. The insights mined from that alternative data may be so valuable as to outweigh your other concerns. And gaining access to it might be the paramount mission for your startup. As the executive, ultimately its your call. Good luck!

https://blog.quandl.com/category/alternative-data
Not really, this is an intended feature of Bitcoin, not a bug.

Every so many blocks, the number of new Bitcoin handed to the miners is halved, and eventually it will drop to zero. When that happens, the only incentive for miners to continue mining (And thus keep Bitcoin going) is the fees collected from the transactions. So required fees are only going to go up.
The point on commit messages is mind boggling to me. I have yet to join a team where I am not the first one that uses non single line commit messages.

It is even crazier when they do write some about their commit, but only in some stupid review tool where I then have to follow a bloody link to get to it from the commit itself. (I'm curious if some jerk thought referral links would help them know when reviews were useful later... Please let that remain the idle joke that it is, btw.)

I'm slowly getting folks to put more in the commit message, but leading by example is taking forever. :(
One that comes to mind: it would be profitable for miners to burn through $12 million dollars every 10 minutes for the block reward alone.
Real money or free to play?
Sounds obvious but maybe it explains why Bitcoin's scalability problem doesn't seem to have any effect on its price.
No downsides I've experienced. I switched over 6 months ago, didn't change my .password-store directory at all really, and everything has been smooth. There was even a bug a little while back I reported that was fixed pretty quick.

I had to switch over to support a team who were using gopass too for secret sharing, otherwise I'd probably just be on pass still.
I do support the AGPL as well, I just don't see it being a large concern that this operating system will become a web service.

I don't see issue with other open source licenses, they all push toward the correct direction. I just also prefer licenses that prevent corporations from hiding the code in a binary after selling it. Sometimes the corporation benefits from taking an adversarial relationship, especially those who are hoping to hide their flaws and backdoors from users. You can argue once the users find out it really hurts the corporation, and they'll always eventually find out, but you can bet that the shareholders will have cashed out long before that happened. While the best growth is always mutual gain, some are willing to take a less effort win/lose, and I would like to be able to trust that some of our software is safe from that. It's my personal opinion that FreeBSD throws pearls to swine, and that we should be using such a license for libraries that we don't mind being incorporated into commercial software, but not for our entire operating system. We both benefit from the competition, but I don't see much benefit in giving the most powerful party even more power than they already have.
Deep Empathy – Inducing empathy with deep learning
Goodbye, Digital Camera; It Was Fun, but We’re Done
According to to their stated motivation, they're not actually interested in the source code: they want to know how your software makes decisions, presumably important ones on behalf of their business. The people who articulate such a request (management), as a rule, are not qualified to answer it by looking at the source code. If that is indeed their concern, they've probably filtered it through their internal development shop, who's come up with the idea that they could review the source code and answer. Management thought that was a splendid way to do it - no need to bother you guys with such tedious busywork (OK, probably slightly rose-tinted, but the general outline of the narrative is plausible).

If this understanding is what they're really after, then that's what you need to think about answering. Worrying about ML as an opaque black box is a bit of a thing these days, so it will probably come up with future clients as well.

If you answering this is not satisfying to them, and they keep insisting on the source code, and they can't articulate why, then they are not being honest, and you should walk away (or at least clearly state that if they don't withdraw that requirement, there will be no agreement).
I have little sympathy for most cases in which people rack up debt and try to escape the consequences

You might want to empathize a bit more. Most debt is racked up because those medical bills you mention are legitimate, but can't be covered due to lack of insurance.

The other way is to make a purchase and then lose your job, at which point you can no longer sell your purchase and no longer sustain the payments.
> Or the malware on your phone could... idk order 200 gallons of laundry through the amazon app on your phone? Seems a lot easier, I don't think the app requires authentication for purchases.

it was just an example. If arbitrary, easy to replicate signals without an authentication start to represent meaningful device input, then that means anything that can generate these signals (such as maybe your phone, or maybe someone with a transmitter sitting in your driveway) can spoof your intent. It's like if someone could come into your house and start typing on keyboards.

and yes the example of speaking arbitrary voice commands to wake up alexas and google devices is a real problem too.
I think it's getting carried away to say there's no different. The US isn't quite what we'd like it to be, but you will not be kidnapped and charged with a trumped up crime for running a book store that sells books critical of the United States government. Noam Chomsky remains a free man.
Shameless plug: I also work on another landing-page generator: https://realtykit.net
Considering that people are still harassed for out-of-statue debt, and some even pay, there is actually some relief. Of course, not $15M relief that's certain.
The parent comments author has this in the profile:

>about:	CEO at http://www.3scale.net

I'd venture to say there is at least some qualification to answer here. </sarcasm>
New lucrative Industry for Hackers- $300M stolen through ICO in 2017
Azure Container Instances vs. AWS Fargate
Stolon with etcd or consul is a far superior solution for HA postgres.
Microsoft also has enough legal resources to assure recompense for any license or ip violations...
I'm a mechanical engineer with strong minors in applied computational mathematics and scientific computing, and math has been, for me, a super-power. It opens all kinds of thermal, structural analyst jobs. I can optimize all kinds of stuff. I can automate simulations and plot the results in ways that the non-technical can get a good idea of the right direction to go. That all comes from math.

Can you hand-code a solver for Maxwells equations or Navier-Stokes (lid-driven cavity flow)? That opens electronics and thermo-fluids. How are you with classic and singular perturbation methods? That gives you signal integrity at Intel - they pay pretty well. Get a few languages under your belt - icky things that are gold plated. MatLab, LabVIEW, Python, SQL, and C. That gives you most of mechanical engineering, lab-based data collection, tons of current "data science", being able to work with previous content, and making your code go really fast, respectively.

Try not looking for jobs on monster, or dice or such. Get friendly with a technical recruiter at Manpower Technical and ask them to get you a few decent contract positions to help you both return some excellent value, and to grow your professional breadth. Make sure some of the positions are business, production, design, and leadership in that order. If you do leadership first without the others, you are wasting yourself.

Read a few books on how to negotiate salary. Your earnings at age 25 determine your total lifetime earnings, so if you let yourself get low-balled early, it can cost you a few million in total lifetime earning. You don't want that.

Once of my heroes is Karl Kempf. Read what he, applied mathematician that he is, has done. He returns a defensible $8 billion per year every year in new value to his company. He is someone to emulate.
You would probably enjoy Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz.
They've printed a billion dollars worth of tether in the past few months with nothing backing it. They fixed something anyway.
You can make an unsolicited offer to homeowners too. In both cases, something being "not for sale" means the price should be higher because there are large transition costs with unexpected moves.
Promote WordPress and earn money
I like Stolon: https://github.com/sorintlab/stolon
Show HN: Effects of House and Senate Bill on California Residents
No way. Land has low carrying cost and people will sit on it for years to speculate or hold neighbors hostage.
Yahoo v. Mozilla – Breach of contract [pdf]
License compliance is incredibly important and unfortunately overlooked by many smaller firms. The potential liability to a GPL or other violation is just not worth it.

Anecdote: We have released code under the Apache 2 License (our biggest project by far is https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx) and we've been roped into negotiations because some companies tried to take shortcuts by copying our code without proper attribution.
VW Executive Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison for Diesel Role
Good point. If the OP company is doing something they can't then how are they going to know its fit for purpose? From my experience the big guys don't really have those skills in house OR the ability to organise said skills in a timely fashion.
All Chrome apps are coming to an end in the next month or two :(.
Rust Regex Engine on JVM, via WebAssembly, Example and Benchmark
Another important piece of advice. I see elsewhere in this thread that you've "applied for a couple jobs." Given that you don't have any professional connections right now, you're probably going to need to apply for 50+ jobs before you get your first offer.

With that in mind, you absolutely cannot apply for one job at a time. If it takes two weeks to hear back from someone, and you're only applying for one job at a time, you'll be spending two _years_ looking for a job. Once you get out of the one job at a time mindset, it's totally possible to reach out to 5-10 people a day. You should be getting in touch with so many people that you need to keep a spreadsheet (or notes file, or something) to remember who's who in your job search.

Also, Don't let any individual rejection get you down, just treat is as another possible future connection and move on. Fortunately, when you're talking to 5 new people every day during a job search, it's a lot easier to not take rejection personally.

Good luck! I'm sure there's a position out there for you.
No, it's definitely harder to raise seed money right now.
What's the benefit of this over doing a direct exchange. ie. Local currency <--> foreign currency?
I'm not sure to what extent this remains common, but certain git clients do or did encourage the user to stick to single-line commit messages.
Absolutely. This required an exorbitant amount of compute, but DeepMind had to do novel, nontrivial research to make use of those resources.
Ah, now you've run into one of the many political problems surrounding voting: most states don't require a government issued ID to vote and 40% of states don't require voter ID at all.

Good luck getting anything like you suggested passed in states like California or New York.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8UePdbDmMw
This was one of the keynote speakers at the 2015 IISE National Convention. Nancy Currie was/is works for NASA and has education in Industrial Engineering. She worked extensively investigating the Columbia space shuttle incident. Her involvement shows how industrial engineers participated in making space flight safer / better. It's really not grokking the physics that can make things better. Excellent presentation.
Perhaps a sign of uncertainty? There seem to be many risk factors right now:

- A government that is close to shut-down

- A president that could get indicted or fire the special prosecutor anytime, either of which will cause rioting in the streets

- A fed that seems on-target to raise rates this month, which will have many ripples in the economy

- A stock market that is standing on it's toes to justify the lofty prices of the day

- The possibility of nuclear war with North Korea

- An enormous tax cut bill that is still being crafted whose impact is yet to be understood
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_and_Reservoir_Plan

Chicago's blows that away. 17.5 billion gallons of storage, 110 miles of tunnels. I think it's the largest current public works project in the US.