skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A Chinese civil war would spill all over the place. Look at the chaos surrounding the Syrian civil war and scale it up by at least an order of magnitude. A billion refugees trying to flee across the borders mostly in the east (where population densities are highest) would turn the surrounding countries into giant refugee camps, unless they somehow manage to close their borders.

North Korea is so fragile that it would follow shortly thereafter. South Korea (a US ally) would have a huge mess on their hands.

Japan (another US ally) has got an ocean to protect it, but given the huge shipping volume in the region, shiploads of refugees would try crossing anyway.

So that means that the US would have even more reason to intervene than in other conflicts.

I don't know how much Russia cares about it's eastern territory, but it's unlikely they'd sit around doing nothing.

By now there are 4 countries with nuclear weapons involved, and I haven't even mentioned India and Pakistan, who usually don't appear to be the interventionist type, but they have a common border with China. Who knows how they might react.

Basically, any war involving China is bound to be WW3 levels of bad.
From what I gather from your comment above and another one, the AGI you talk about does not include general intent or free will to act differently from what its creators anticipate. An AGI, perhaps a different variety from yours, can behave outside of our predictions in multiple ways [1], unless we truly solve the problem of constraining its will to a range that is acceptable to us.

(I do not believe anyone has solved that. Ref: A talk by Prof. Stuart Russell, AAAI fellow and author of the standard textbook on AI: https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_russell_3_principles_for_cr...)

[1] Note that there are incentives for at least some groups to develop a highly capable AGI with the characteristics I describe.

> Time is still required like with all things.

I agree that time is required but an AGI can multiply itself and collect all requisite information from the world quite quickly. There is so much available to learn just from the Internet if it knows how to learn independently like humans do. Computational resources might be a bottleneck but presumably a human-level AGI can at least do online work at a minimum wage (e.g. translating documents, simple accounting, ...). It can parallelly execute many 'brains' to accomplish more work to acquire more resources, to do more work profitably....

Humans are limited by 24 hours a day. An AGI can over a fairly short amount of time (months) accumulate sufficient resources to make thousands or millions of its copies perhaps with variations to specialize for different kinds of work. Over time, it should gain experience to perform more and more highly-valued work as well.

> A game with disadvantaged players. A game with incomplete information. A game whose rules/dynamics change frequently to suit inside players.

A smart AGI can form alliance and share benefits with inside players and execute any cunning strategies not available to humans who at least need to take into account law enforcement. There are many other advantages an AGI has over human organizations (some of which I mentioned above).
Makes a lot of sense for the customer. I just wonder what Amazon could try to do to prevent this model becoming prevalent.
> AgeID will log which pornography websites are visited and store them

How is this relevant to age verification in any way? The UK government can't even lie straight about why they want to do this.
It’s not working on my iPhone. But, I think this is what you are looking for

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ldSfRG
All the modern Asian success stories: Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan ... had the same rulers/ruling party for decades.
>A more democratic system would be to let people vote for questions, and promise to answer the ones with the most upvotes.

Internet "democratic voting" sounds great in theory but history has shown that in practice, it just gets hijacked.[1]

Basically, the top most upvoted question would end up being, "What is Bill and Melinda's favorite sex position?" ... or something similar.

[1] http://mentalfloss.com/article/52524/15-polls-hijacked-inter...
Of course not but sometimes operating out of principal makes sense to me. For example if I was precision cast parts — a private family owned business that Warren Buffet bought for many billions — and A Chinese state owned enterprise decided to copy and replace Boeing with their own plane as CEO or owner or founder etc of precision cast parts I would refuse the build. It would hurt me and help my competitors but it’d be worth it.
I am not entirely convinced by the 'most problems are exponentially hard' argument, as problem-solving often has synergistic effects - e.g. consider calculus, developed in solving the problem of planetary orbits, but useful for so much more.

On the other hand, trying to discern a general rule from historical data is complicated by the fact that the number of problem-solvers has been growing exponentially.
you can simulate it in a regular computer and debug there.
Chinese internet had been shocked by the news this evening .Now the govermet has blocked all the key words.Xi has became the second Deng Xiaoping in numbers of people’s mind,so I don’t know whether Chinese people can stand out to oppose this.In recent years,there was a Putin Adoring trend in the Chinese internet.I guess this was induced by goverment
Maybe I've just gotten extremely lucky, but in the 15+ years I was doing software development, with one exception (a CEO where I was employee #1), I never had a "non-technical" manager to whom I reported. Where are these companies that hire someone who literally knows nothing about engineering to lead a group of engineers? I'm not saying it doesn't exist but I've never seen it.

I've seen my share of non technical product managers, project managers, etc. but not engineering team managers. In all cases my engineering leadership were technical all the way up to at least the SVP level.

EDIT: So, I got to the end of OP's rant and it looks like he's shifted his target from "managers" in general to project managers. He might even be confusing the two.
[AGI Developer]

I'll instead give you something to consider :
* The totality of mathematics is not fully defined. As such, there are can be completely new mathematics that destroys previous conceptions especially as it relates to the limits of computability. Theoretical Limits often reflect one's limited scope of perception. Your limits or the limits someone theorized ages ago aren't necessarily my limits if I find a path beyond them.

Information theory and computational complexity theory are theories... Solving fundamental aspects of intelligence will invalidate a host of theories, create new mathematics, new algorithms, and new theories. Continuing to frame something as ground breaking as an understanding/implementation of intelligence in yester-years theoretical limits is flawed.
Rent control created an disincentive to build new rentals, increasing the cost for new renters....laws against building made it worse.

People complain because they work low wage jobs in the city and need a place to live. If they don't have an affordable place to live they won't be able to do the work that needs to be done.
That would be a completely different visa program, and there are alternatives already. The purported goal of the H1B program is to enable companies to bring in foreign labor when they can establish that there is a labor shortage in certain specialized occupations. That was the legislation that was passed by congress. Of course we've found the actual administration of this program does little to meet those goals.
First, the ECB has nearly destroyed western civilization with their overly tight stance during the past decade. They destroyed the economy of their weaker members like Greece, eliminated the means of subsistence for their vulnerable workers which emboldened fascists and geopolitical foes like Russia.

It was not difficult to spark the "thesaurisation". Excess reserves at the ECB and the Fed shot up by trillions. Natural market rates for investment were estimated by some around -4% and the central banks kept their rates very high at close to 0%. Yes deflation is worst but low inflation can be terrible in some situations.

"With 0% inflation you have a 10$ loss (20-10), while with 10% inflation you have (20 * 1,1 - 10) = 12$ (about 11$ on constant prices terms) in loss (revenue won't grow till next year)."

Not true, inflation means that revenues are constantly rising faster and financing costs are lower in real terms.
Having a bad day, mate? Everything alright?
I have also seen uneraseable chalk boards, and boards where the chalk wouldn't adhere.

Besides, the chalk powder is a great health hazard, and the sound is a great distractor. There's a reason everybody switched into white boards, and it's not because of novelty.

About smart boards, they are great for remote conferences, and for mixing pre-made content with writing. I don't think they are worth the hassle (unless you do remote conferences a lot), but they are not all downsides either.
Unrelated but the first thing this site did was ask me to fill out a user survey. That’s the exact wrong time to ask a user to fill out a survey.
It depends on the implementation. Ion traps are slower than superconducting qubits, for example, although they are speeding up. This paper, from 2014, gives some parameters:

"Logic gates at the surface code threshold: Superconducting qubits poised for fault-tolerant quantum computing"
Campbell et al.
Nature, 2014

https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.4848

From page 9:

Initialization ~50ns

Measurement ~200ns

One-qubit gates ~20ns

Two-qubit gates ~40ns
yeah, waving your arms around wildly when the lights suddenly go out is practically instinctual for many people now :-)
Serious question: may I ask why, in describing a plurality of good managers, you chose to use a lot of singular feminine pronouns and no plural gender-neutral pronouns; while in describing a singular (one) bad manager, you avoided the use of a pronoun altogether in one sentence; used one plural general-neutral pronoun in another; and then switched from using the pronoun you previously extensively used when describing good things (singular feminine pronouns), to instead using the singular masculine pronoun? I was just curious if there was a story behind that or something.
Interstellar puzzle based on Graph Theory
I love the self-awareness in their response to question #8 - we are fortunate that “the king is just” in the case of the foundation, but it is very undemocratic for the wealthy to solely pick causes they care about at such a large scale.

Just last week, Gates himself was arguing that he and other billionaires need to be paying significantly more taxes.

https://phys.org/news/2018-02-gates-billionaires-significant...
I mentioned that approach, yes. But it can backfire if the team member is makes big mistakes. The non-technical manager will have a hard time identifying bad decisions before they blow up.
I'm one of these, it sucks. Several career starts failed, having to rebuild again.
WRT whiteboards - the problem is ironically enough the users. They try to be frugal with the markers, using them as long as they can. I did too, until I did some introspection and realized what I was doing.

Once I had that realization, and identified how cheap replacement markers really are, the moment it starts to crap out it's tossed and replaced from a backup container sitting nearby.

I'm also biased against blackboards, having gone through school with them. I was all-too-frequently chosen to go bang the chalk dust out the erasers, becoming coated from tip to toe in said dust. Too much hassle for the value. Not to mention the need for a deep cleaning of the board periodically, though I guess it shares that with whiteboards.
I wonder how Bill Gates can use a huge yacht for its own enjoyment, while at the same time spending money to fight climate change. I'd be curious to know his point of view.
It looks like it's built on Rasbian with some binaries and systemd units, so it's not really a custom OS.
At work we once found ourselves in the happy position of having far, far too many applicants for a position. We set a simple test as a high-pass filter. One of the questions was about whether garbage collection removes the risk of a memory leak.

One memorable answer was simply "Of course not." Maybe it's the same guy?
Well, we have that process on both ends of the political spectrum.
'Arrows on the ground to guide aeroplane pilots.' might be a better title.

The arrows are concrete, though they were built in 1920s with metal too.
That's what I was thinking. Really, the problem with most managers is that they are not empathetic with both the business side and the tech side at the same time. Good managers know how to set expectations and communicate with correct language when talking to either cohort.
Notable Notes- Hashgraph's Beachday Conference
I believe there are objectively bad things to do and killing people for a false sacrifice is certainly bad.

It's true that people need empathy, though, partly so they can be wary despite their own good intentions and clean consciences.
Turning lights off remotely is nice when you intended to go back to a room, but got ready for bed instead. You could turn it off with an app or a voice command, but instead you have to get up and walk to the far side of the house to turn it off.
cost for both DynamoDB and Amazon Redshift can both get out of hands real quickly. I've seen it first hand. With Redshift, the problem is that data teams do not adjust the default configuration of 5 query slots. So when things slow down, instead of increasing concurrency for a given node, they add more nodes. I've seen monthly invoices of $100K+ for a workload that could have been done with less than a $2,000 / month.
You're not wrong, but that is a fairly extreme fringe view. There is a strong consensus, based on very solid physics experiment and theory, that that is not the case.
So cool! Thanks for sharing
This guy had a problem, slow fps in a game, knew the generalized view of how Wine worked, and used the tools they knew of to try to fix the problem.

I've never written a line of DX, GL, etc but I know what command buffers / driver synchronization / AZDO are like this article mentions.

I also play WoW on Linux, and am kind of embarassed I didn't think to try perf monitoring the game for easy to fix huge slowdowns like this. I kind of assumed since WoW is one of the most popular Wine games and generally pushes the DX api support to make sure it always works that the main Wine devs would optimize it more.

That being said, buffer_storage is a GL 4.4 extension and Wine has this awful habit of trying to strictly support OSX, which will never see OpenGL beyond 4.1, and I'm not sure if buffer_storage is available there. That alone might mean these patches are never merged mainline, which would be... inconvenient.
Maybe one of the most controversial statements they make is: "In our U.S. work, one premise we start with is that a college degree or career certificate is critical to a successful future. In short, a college education should be a pathway to prosperity for all Americans."

I wouldn't dispute that having enough skill/education to offer value to the global/US marketplace is critical, but I have some doubt about whether what we call "college education" is the way really large numbers of people (not just the elite) can obtain that skill/education.

Maybe we're over investing in an outdated, inefficient process and it will never be good enough.
I think they meant a war with regional powers and/or the USA
As somebody younger (and more naive) that is only 2-3 years into my career, I do my best to remain professional. What's some things to look out for?
> The NHS does worse in treating cancer than other countries, but many of those countries (Germany, France, etc) have public health care also. It's not clear that the difference in performance is because of public, vs privately, funded medicine.

Right, I'm saying that the difference isn't simply a matter of private vs. public funds, the way OP claims. You can really trivially create a private system that has the same bad incentives with respect to costs and care as the NHS does. You can also trivially create a public system that has the same bad incentives with respect to costs and care as the US does.

That said, Germany and France aren't really publicly-funded as well the way people think. Both rely on a private network for care delivery (unlike the NHS), so it's a bit of a stretch to say that they're "public health care" systems. Even if you're looking at funding, in those two countries, taxpayer funds only cover 75% and 70% of expenses, respectively.
Yea, I picked up on this too. I was pretty confused reading through the rant. Is his beef with his engineering managers or with his project manager(s)? It looks like he's frustrated with project managers.

My rule of thumb for "how you know you need a project manager": As a manager of engineers, if you find you have more E-mails than you can possibly respond to, or more meetings than you can possibly attend, or more people "pinging" you than you can possibly satisfy, then you need a project manager.

If you're an individual contributor engineer, you probably are not in the position to even know if you need a PM or not, especially if your manager is doing a good job.
>Virtually every corporate treasurer in America would recoil at the idea of issuing a “cost-of-living” bond — a noncallable obligation with coupons tied to a price index. But through the private pension system, corporate America has in fact taken on a fantastic amount of debt that is the equivalent of such a bond.

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_tips_glan...

So do any companies use tips to fund their pension obligations?
Not even I have the patience/desire/stomach to answer most of the questions the general public could ask about me, and I'm a not a famous billionaire with a well-known business past and well-known philanthropic present of whom, naturally, the masses might inquire much harder questions.
It is difficult to make arguments in something that has no grounding. I'd expect someone who claims to have a valid argument for an [intelligence explosion] event to have formal education and industry experience designing computational systems such that they could clearly define how exactly it could occur. I have yet to see such an individual w/ such a viewpoint. Instead, I see a ridiculous argument being forwarded by people who are least informed/experienced so as to push fear, uncertainty, doubt either for profit/attention or because it fulfills some sci-fi oriented religious prophecy. Internally, companies require extensive and well reasoned documentation before funding an initiative. Externally, someone w/ no expertise/proof throws their hands up in the air speaking about armageddon and they are able to secure considerable attention and money.
China Moves to Let Xi Stay in Power by Abolishing Term Limit
How to Succeed as a Programmer: Hard-Working or Talented?
> If Bootsnap is an opt cache I'm all for it.

It does integrate with the ISeq API in recent MRIs to acts as an opt-cache yes. It's not what brings most of the performance gain though.

> If it's some sort of `require' and `require_relative' hackage black-magic jiggery pokery then no.

Well, there is no black magic, it's computers, they are machines, not magicians. And yes it's mostly what Bootsnap (and bootscale before it) does.

> Bootsnap needs to be 100% bullet-proof before I go near it.

The thing is it can't. There is a couple corner cases in Ruby's require semantic that just can't be replicated. So yeah, there is about a few dozen obscure gems out there that will break if used with Bootsnap, but for the vast majority of projects it's gonna be a drop in boot time gain without any headache.
I recently brought my first smart TV. I tried to avoid it, but the cheapest not smart alternative was more than twice the price.

But you know, except for a "do you want to update now" nagging that made it unusable for the first 2 hours after I plugged it on the net, and a immediate "please accept this EULA so we can display ads" that I declined, the smart features have been nice since then.

I am still wary of a future "we are shutting down our servers, this TV will be no more", but not of much more.
Taiwan is most certainly relevant because it is free. I’ve spent a lot of time in Taiwan. The people I’ve encountered there don’t seem to have any desire to reunite with the mainland. Additionally Taiwan now has a functioning democracy and I am impressed with what they’ve accomplished. I also think Taiwan is well on its way to becoming culturally distinct from mainland China. I can’t put my finger on it exactly but it’s a strong feeling I have from visiting both places a lot. Any push by China to force Taiwan to reunite with China I feel will lead to war with the US. As an American, I feel we have an obligation to protect Taiwan and would strongly support defending Taiwan.
Or just have managers with engineering experience. Just saying. Cause it seems pretty straightforward to me.
"Are you imposing your values on other cultures?" and "Is it fair that you have so much influence?" are close to the touch question I expected them to not have. The big complaint I see from the left is that billionaires get to determine the direction of philanthropy--two unelected people get to impose their ideas about public education, for example.

That said, while those questions are close to the big tough question, I don't think their answers really addressed them in an adequately thoughtful way.

(I think the Gates Foundation is mostly making good choices with their philanthropy, but maybe we just got lucky. How about [Soros|Koch] (pick whichever you like least)?)
I’m never going to ask someone to renounce luxuries when they are clearly donating much or a majority of their wealth. That’s a recipe for no giving.
Swear jar is a great analogy. Also, that'll be $2.

It's a game mechanic that encourages people to be more thoughtful about how they think about a problem. Not perfect, like the swear jar, but it has some value in changing behavior.
This is a really great explanation.
Yes, the page suggests to sandbox using -user-data-dir.
I think looking at something like DynamoDb as a wholesale replacement for anything that needs a relational schema is... well begging the question a little.

DynamoDB as a hugely scalable limited-scope data-source in your app are likely where you'll find the optimal cost/scalability point. By using Dynamo for scalable read-heavy activity your let the rest of the app be barebones and 'KISS', preserve competencies & legacy code, and retain the benefits of relational schemas. Dynamos scaling then becomes your cloud-cost tuning mechanism.

By way of example(s): if your editors all use RDS and you publish articles to DynamoDb you could be serving tens of millions of articles a day off a highly non-scalable CMS. If all your reporting functions pull from DynamoDB you could be serving a huge Enterprise post-merger while using the same payroll system as pre-merger. Shipping tracking posted/grabbed from Dynamo, purchasing logic on the best Perl code you could by in 1999 ;)
Mom Died No Life Insurance-Homeschool Mom
It always amazes me how pessimistic people can be in terms of where the world is heading, especially people who tend towards populism (on the left and the right). In debates, I eventually point out actual data about living conditions[1]. Looking at data instead of news stories, it becomes clear that extreme poverty, vaccination, child mortality and education are vastly improving for a majority of humans on this planet. This leaves aforementioned populists with nothing to argue about but the validity of the data they are seeing, unable to reconcile reality with their world view.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...