skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are people who try to be more radical also with regards to limiting their own lifestyle, e.g. Toby Ord founded Giving what we can [1] and is giving away a large proportion of his monthly salary (more than one third).

I personally admire such people, but maybe that is not the right way for everyone. If you consider helping others as all-or-nothing choices in the end less people may be willing to help, so being a bit more lenient likely has overall beneficial effects.

[1] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org
In a later response, IOTA also appeal to authority...

> Did you receive the invite? We can also setup a chat with our ex-NSA post-Quantum hash function experts after we get the initial confusion out of the way.
This is so stupid. I’ve used windows exclusively as my home desktop machine and I work with Linux boxes all day at work using a MacBook. You can run windows at home and also know how to use Linux.
The reverse is also true. You assume humanity will find a way to deal with the trash. Not just the trash that will be made but also the trash that has already found it's way into the oceans.

The number of people who recycle a lot is quite small in relation to the total population. Is the increase in recycling enough to offset the increase in trash and toxins? I'm skeptical that this will happen soon enough.

Since you come from a country where nearly everything is recycled I'm going to assume you come from a wealthy country. If so then you, yes you, consume far more than most humans. You are a drain on the resources of the planet. Your consumption leads to strip mining, deforestation, and industrial pollution. This damage has been conveniently shipped off to poor regions of the world but the ultimate cause is consumers like you and I. Your recycling hardly makes up for the damage that is done for your consumption.

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/810

From the above article:

“If the levels of consumption that...the most affluent people enjoy today were replicated across even half of the roughly 9 billion people projected to be on the planet in 2050, the impact on our water supply, air quality, forests, climate, biological diversity, and human health would be severe.”
The dangerous downsides of perfectionism
Machine Learning Interships
"Looting" of companies by their management is starting to look like an increasing problem. Usually in failing companies, but one day it will turn a success into a conspicuous failure.

UK examples: Jaguar Land Rover, BHS, Carillion.
This is deeply strange to me. If he wanted to support an evil empire or grow a petroleum multinational, you admit you'd have no say. But Gates wants to serve the public good -- now suddenly you're in charge. Seems backwards, at the very least.
You mean his aggressive and hyper nationalistic policies that destabilizing the China Sea?
They're optimistic, but not brashly so. Bill and Melinda Gates have literally saved millions of children. If that doesn't give them a reason to be optimistic, I don't see what would.

Just because Americans are shooting up schools doesn't mean that the lives of people in some other parts of this planet haven't improved by leaps and bounds in the last few years alone.
Most of the technology in use today isn't that different from what it was 10 years ago. It's a bit faster and has slightly different packaging. Any manager who last did engineering as an individual contributor ten years ago should be perfectly fine engaging in a technical discussion today at the level a manager should be doing so.
The combination of navigation, audio, and Google Assistant is what I really like about AA.
Apart from any philosophical considerations about whether the money is "really yours", this evaluation is already built in to the 501(c)(3) process because the IRS reviews charities before granting them that status to see if they serve a public purpose. Not all not-for-profit organizations quality. The status can also be revoked if the IRS determines that an organization isn't meeting the 501(c)(3) criteria in the future.

You can't get the tax deduction by donating money to organizations that haven't passed through this review process.
Suspect the US might be pretty high on the list for danger.
"The idea that the public should not be involved with determining what counts as "public good" is super risky". You are involved in democratic process that drives the laws being passed which not only can determine "public good" but actually enforce behavior that will maximize "public good".
Sure, that work still has to be done. But if you start off by thinking of it as "the job of a manager" then you're assuming your conclusion.
What the flu does to your body, and why it makes you feel so awful
Sorry for the misunderstanding! Which bug were you referring to?
Yes. I was in particular refering to how these countries were ruled during their "growth period".

The Chinese communist obviously don't have a democratic mandate. But I think it would be a mistake to think that they don't have widespread popular support.
Because it is tax deductible!
That's the same than starting a process and mallocing some memory; you will have the garbage of the previous process... Because you have no idea who owned that memory and what it was used to it would be hard to build something on top of that. This being said it's not a bad idea to zero stuff when you start to use them.
What is your argument? Why a group of engineers who can think two times faster than average cannot perform the task of designing three times faster engineer quicker than a group of average engineers?

They will hit economical and physical limits eventually, sure. But what will stop them at the beginning?
> I'm now the proud owner of a shack and a few acres of halfway decent arable land in a remote corner of Uruguay.

So you became a farmer? How's that working out?
A Dictionary of Complexity Theory
That's quite a bad argument when it comes to "existential risk for all of humanity".

Of course, so far no one has any idea how pragmatically it could play out. Maybe it'll start with something as banal as VisualStudio + Cortana providing an advantage to AI design, that helps designing a better Cortana, that helps designing a better Cortana, that ...

Yes, of course, it's unlikely in the coming next 1-2 decade, because the best "AGI" we know (the human mind), is a hodgepodge of specialized faculties jury rigged together by ancient code lossy compressed and stored in a multi-stage bootloading wetware that takes years to learn reading the magnificent ~26 letters of a latin alphabet (but similarly takes the same time to learn walking, talking, hearing, rudimentary thinking, a minimal concept of self, a theory of mind and so on, and for some reason it has a shitty API, it must go through all of the aforementioned to even begin learning chess).

So far AI is focusing on computer vision, some NLP, (strategy or easy to evaluate) games. At least the current progress/results are clustered around those areas. We don't know when will be the next big leap, maybe in knowledge representation, or goal formation, maybe in other kinds of very useful, more general intelligence related areas.
You don't motivate people by making their already shitty situation even shittier. That just drives them even further into depression and hopelessness.

What we should be doing is giving them more help, better educational options, activation courses that actually benefit them, instead of wasting their time. Offer them actual training for another your of job, if the one they used have isn't viable anymore. And drop the stupid requirements to send so and so many applications every week, which is just pointless busywork.

Make a positive change, rather than a negative one.

I say let the couple hundred or so deliberately workshy persons be. You're never going to convince them to work, and if you force them, they'll do a shitty no-effort job of it, probably reducing other people's productivity in the process. Just let them be, let them be artists or whatever. It's the least costly option.
spotify seems to have a few professional scrum masters and it seems to work for them. I'm less interested in typical cynicism and more interested in how this gets done -well-. Any spotifier's care to comment on having fulltime scrum masters?

edit: It seems they are called "Agile Coach"es.. is that any different?
Google provided an open source operating system, web browser and built a container solution used by every major cloud provider.
Woah!!! This is crazy!!!
>Just last week, Gates himself was arguing that he and other billionaires need to be paying significantly more taxes.

Instead of trying to tackle problems of wealth inequality in such a roundabout bureaucratic way, why not just start directly dividing income up more evenly with your employees to begin with?
In my area (the southwest), it's not unusual for modern municipal airports to have their standard airport beacon mounted on a tower that was originally installed for an airmail route beacon. Sometimes the tower has been moved, but sometimes it sits on the original base, usually sans arrow as it seems that intermediate fields (which were often later turned into municipal airports) didn't always have an arrow installed. My old home of Socorro, N.M. has such an example, and although I have not been able to properly confirm this it appears that the airport beacon there is actually the original airmail route beacon with lenses and electrics replaced. It nicely matches the drawings I've seen of the beacon lights. Many, even most, of the municipal airports in the southwest date back to CAA intermediary fields often placed along beaconed air routes, so keep an eye out in AZ, NM, TX. I'd guess this is true of other fairly rural states as well.

In Grants, N.M. there is a particularly interesting example at the municipal airport. There, there's a fully intact and nicely painted generator hut and beacon tower. It's been restored and is now operated by a historic society. Unfortunately, it had to be moved from its original location on a nearby hilltop into town because the actual beacon once located at the present site of Grants airport was removed many years ago. Still, one of very few I know of that is being preserved as a museum piece.

To my knowledge the arrows were not lit. In many places there are beacons without arrows, my understanding is that this was done because, at night, the next beacon was supposed to be visible by the time you flew over the previous beacon so that you knew which direction to head. During the day the arrows could be placed less frequently, generally only at turns, since pilots could see the direction and the towers in between would serve as confidence markers that they were on course.
> Imagine a world where the top two richest guys, instead of deciding to use their wealth to fund vaccines and education, used it to fund warlords and dictators. We could have just as easily gotten that dice roll instead of the Warren Buffet and Bill Gates world.

Actually, you did get that dice roll too. Look up the house of Saud.
Like most businesses on a cloud provider, we're fairly locked-in to AWS without major changes. Going offsite would replace S3 PUT costs with significant bandwidth costs.
At this scale you you would have 1m of stock that you would not have to sell if you didn't want to donate that 1m to charity. How that would make things better?
I think that description fits anything from the B2 bomber or newer made by the US. Stealth implies on some heavy trade-offs.
Yes, there are publications with support both ways. IQ is basically meaningless and it pains me to see it constantly brought up here.
What distro of Linux? What kernel version? Do you have graphics acceleration working? Are you running it primarily
I’m not assuming your politics here, but replace Bill Gates with Koch Brothers, and Donald Trump with Barack Obama, would you still feel comfortable with your statement?
> they don’t provide a single UX improvement.

They don't (well, soft touch radio/heat/AC/etc. buttons). And in my opinion, this is one place where some more safety regulations really are needed to force a return to physical buttons.

But they _do_ provide an additional line item in the list of "comparison specs" to show a check-mark for their car and no check-mark for a competitors product. And that is the reason for the 'race' to add touch screens for everything that used to have a hard button. Look at our car, it has so many more "features" than theirs....

That, and the fact that a single touch screen can replace a whole host of hard buttons, eliminating the design, tooling, manufacturing, shipping, and assembly costs associated with all the old hard button devices.
Cool puzzle, and really slick interface.

My one bit of feedback would be that you should make it get more difficult more quickly. I lost interest and stopped playing it because it didn't seem to be getting substantially harder, it was just basically the same thing over and over again, but the design of the puzzle is good and means it should be easy to make more difficult levels.

Perhaps you could have a difficulty selector so that the player can advance at his own pace.

You could also introduce a little twist after a while where some of the points are fixed in space, and you must rearrange the others around the fixed ones, instead of being able to move all of them.

You could potentially also make different types of edge (e.g. red edges in addition to the green edges), and for example a red may cross a green, but not another red.
Those vectors are only used to generate the move trees though. That part of the architecture is common to pretty much all MCTS board game AIs ever. The value in AlphaZero is in the neural nets used for the expert policy and the value functions and those don’t have anything about the game rules encoded into them at all.

I agree it’s probably quite constrained in the range of possible applications. Everyone was expecting Deep Blue to revolutionise AI applications too. I know the tech is different, but the fact it seems optimised for a highly constrained problem domain isn’t, and in fact arguably the problem domain addressed by deep blue seemed for a long time to be much more general.

How adaptable is AlphaZero to arbitrarily multidimensional grids though?
That may be a contrast with a widespread negative view. Much of current media are dominated by negative stories. For instance, every time I’ve tuened on local news the top stories are murders or rapes. Everytime he can Trump says the people are worse off and etc. anything that doesn’t fit the “wallpaper” stands out.
Tours of Duty and Job Half-Life
Well that's your own damn fault for not RTFM! (Had that system at an office: it came with a manual of ~200 pages, but nobody wanted to learn the special variant of Morse code that the lights understood. Somehow we found the commands for "full on" and "full off", and the manual was abandoned. Seriously, 200 pages on operating a light? Technology making lives easier, riiiight there.)
I guess the argument is, that so far no one showed good examples of how would that lead to a total extinction. How would it start, etc.

So it's kind of a (fallacious) argument against "black box"-ing the whole intelligence explosion problem. If you can't define it, you can't analyze it sort of thing.
I like this idea. I wish more of the places I have worked had explicit guidelines around how to work as a team (e.g. don't trivialize work that isn't). It doesn't take many poor timed comments to shut down a team's discussion.
Hmm, with the TSA baggage check that probably took longer than riding a horse between the two towns.
What would be the cost difference moving to Google Cloud or other cloud provider? The reason why I'm asking is that the move itself requires a re-consideration of all production configuration. The indicated savings assumes that Dropbox was using Amazon 100% efficiently to begin with.
Parent comment was an anecdote that basically implies that there would be less opposition within or outside the party to counterbalance Xi & supporters the longer he remains within power. Opposition is a form of conflict or argumentation to provide a counterbalance against bad/extreme ideas. So if there's less opposition, then likely this could signal the beginning of the end of the current system in China.
had the same rulers/ruling party for decades

Alternatively (with apologies for playing a bit fast and loose in terms of President/Prime Minister/Secretary - political systems come in many shapes and sizes) and note that in some of these political party doesn't make much sense - when a military strongman stages a coup and holds power for a decade and a half, is there really a ruling political party?

Japan-
Liberal Democratic Party: 1955-1993, 1994-2009, 2012 to present

Singapore-
People's Action Party: 1959 to present
Lee Kuan Yew: 1959 to 1990
Goh Chok Tong: 1990 to 2004

South Korea-
Syngman Rhee: 1948 to 1960 (interestingly, exempted himself from an eight-year limit in 1954)
Park Chung-hee: 1963 to 1979 (took power in military coup, assassinated)

Taiwan-
Chiang Kai-shek: 1950 to 1975
Kuomintang Party: 1950 to 1996, had the advantage of being a single-party state until roughly late eighties

Definitely some decades in there.
Prices are not stable, but increasing at 3 to 4% per year.

Employment is okay, but more than a 10th of the population is in their working years but not working.
USCIS aren't fooled by job title inflation. Applications for these sorts of visas require substantial supporting documentation - typically org charts, detailed descriptions of responsibilities, resumes of people who report to the visa applicant, evidence of compensation commensurate with the claimed responsibilities, etc.
They can do whatever they like of course! But the way they constantly sell themselves and their openness and simplicity and whatnot is hypocritical.
Indeed. None of these apparent positive gains will matter for very long if we destroy our own ecosystem in the process
> SVG supports JavaScript.

I didn’t know that, probably because I never had to use JS in a SVG.

Probably it works only when SVGs are rendered by a browser, so this feature is a bit of a hack for me.
This news is already on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457998
The best teams I've been on have done well without much management at all. Mostly the managers were there to shield the team, the rest of the time the managers just got out of the way.

On the very best projects, individuals will step up and lead for a while, then decide to do other things and let someone else run the show a little. Maybe it will be feature ownership, or to handle a different phase of a product in its ship cycle. (Meanwhile there will be managers behind the scenes, hopefully not many, making sure that forms are getting filled out, HR duties are attended to, and nonsense meetings are canceled and kept canceled).

Most of the places I've worked could have used less management. A lot less.
I once read a statement that if absolute power corrupts absolutely, then endless power corrupts endlessly. Term limits are one of the most effective checks on a county's leadership because those with power will eventually find themselves without.
"Manual QA then? That will be even slower than automated..."
> Everything looks correct in debug, where (as mentioned) the variables are initialised to nice values like 0. When you compile with -O3, you get really large values instead.

Uninitialized variable. Turn on warnings.
And that's just to plateau.
Design by Contract: A Missing Link in Quest for Quality Software (1998)
My point is it’s funny. It’s a group of charlatans dealing with a competent person for the first time.
Example? I’ve experienced too many instances of just-justification, where a manager has said something like, “it’s just JSON”, or “it’s just UI”, or “it’s just talking to the backend”. This not only unravels their credibility in knowing anything about software, but it also devalues the work that a software developer needs to do to build a working product.

Well, I've had engineer colleagues use that kind of language at me. It's a type of bullying really, and it doesn't necessarily correlate with technical cluelessness.
He is not trading in money he is trading in ownership to give to charity. There are many individuals that are not doing that and for the most part no country is taxing owning stock.
Mark Felt-Tipped: Uncovering top-secret information by counting pixels
> We can be a society that ensures social needs are met while allowing vast concentrations of wealth.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "social needs" here. you could be referring to a specific level on the mazlow hierarchy, if so, I'd like to know why you pick this specific level as the benchmark. or you might be referring to some more vague concept of societal needs.

the particular definition of "needs" is very important to the validity of the quoted claim. if basic or "social" needs are defined as some absolute standard of living, this will be increasingly easy to fulfill as society grows richer.

I very rarely see anyone talking about needs this way though. instead, the definition of needs seems to move as people at the top grow more wealthy. it seems more likely to me that, as long as billionaires exist and live lavish lifestyles, people will never agree that their needs are being met.
You didn’t watch the video did you. That’s not how it works. The key is your device passcode.
I like using the word "rockstar" to describe coders, because the word has similar negative connotations as in the music context. An actual rock star often doesn't (but sometimes does) have: classical music training, knowledge of the music literature, vision beyond their area of expertise, humility in the face of their equals or betters, a desire to learn and ability to change with the times, the temperament to fit well with the business side, etc.

If that's what you want to hire, go hire your rockstar coders.
San Francisco's position at almost the most extreme west point of the country has given it a lot of interesting distinctions in aviation history. Crissy Field, now a rather pleasant park just off the Presidio, was once an army airfield and the ending point of the first transcontinental flight completed in one day, dawn to dusk. There's a small plaque there commemorating the event. For many ears in the early 20th century it was a stopping point for air mail flights. A few of the buildings along there, now under NPS management, are old hangers from its previous use. Treasure Island also used to be a major seaplane airport, even after aviation use of the island itself ended (it had once been slated for the location of San Francisco International Airport, as a bit of trivia).
Perhaps we could be. But that's not the society we live in today, and has that ever happened before?
I don't think anybody will argue that if you have a specialised workload (CPU heavy, storage heavy, etc) there's definitely cost savings at scale for DIY over cloud.

But the calculation is harder than that. People are terrible at estimating the ops personnel cost for DIY. Turns out it's hard running with minimal downtime, or engineering hardware + software to be fault-tolerant. It's hard to put a price on dev tools/APIs/doco/the whole eco-system.

Especially for that last reason, I have never been "blown away" by Softlayer, even when their instances were way beefier than anything AWS/GCP offered. YMMV.
Why the smartest player can't cheat too? Do you assume that there cannot be such a thing as generally smarter player?
Russian spies hacked Olympics and tried to make it look like North Korea did it
That is, historically, false. Concentration of wealth always ends up implying power, whether soft or hard. Having such amount of power outside of democratic institutions is a threat .
It's sale of stock to fund this donation. He would not have to pay any tax if he simply keeps the stock.
And how many times do you need to do it to get the precision you want?
Nathan Myhrvold, myth buster