skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All this is great, and I am sure Google will use the tech responsibly, but I feel we are rapidly approaching a point where humans can no longer use their senses to discern critical truths about our own reality.

I honestly don't know how that's going to pan out. Just imagining it already makes me feel the kind of paranoia creep you get when you are too high.
"Why shouldn't news organizations be held to a similar ethical or moral standard?" [as advertisers or as broadcasters, apparently]

Among other problems, the definition of "news organization" is completely fluid in this Internet era. What organization in particular gets a truth or balance mandate? Some? All? Which ever ones the censors consider most credible?

"Does it benefit society if the only opinions broadcast as fact are filtered by corporate interests?"

Not sure how you got here. Proposing news organizations obey some "truth" or "balance" conditions essentially is mandating state filtering.

The Internet, so far, has allowed a wider dissemination of ideas than ever before. Are you saying that organizations, on the net, large and small, broadcasting their views, is "corporate filtered news?" Seems like you're stretching things to say the least.
Why? You're still spreading information and view points ...
FF traditionally required a plugin, I think native support is recent?
> It's fashion over function on the business side

Oh, there's a function to it. The 7 year tech cycle generates huge amounts of money for everybody involved. Consultants and consulting companies get a nice influx of billable hours every time the tech changes. Software companies pay to upgrade to the coolest tech because it's relatively cheap compared to the amount of money it generates. Users like it because with each tech upgrade comes an increase in convenience and graphical design. And, in some ways, having the latest version of the hot apps is another way of keeping up with the Joneses. Everybody's happy except for the power users. They tend to get left out in the cold.
> Dell is selling NVIDIA V100s for only about $20,000 for "home use".

or...

https://www.thinkmate.com/product/nvidia/900-2g500-0000-000
They’re pretty sturdy. I’ve used my keychain version to pry off beer caps, and it’s gotten some scratches but works fine. The touch sensor is kind of annoying but it does work.
Title corrected from "Tensorflow Processing Unit"
Nice, I actually had a customer ask about a configuration file (that one of our product produced) as not being readable anymore.

Turns out that an update did not properly write out "\r\n" but rather "\n". Looked fine in Notepad++ of course, but sure enough in MS Notepad ... things look garbled.
Ignore the karma system then. How's your current approach working out for you?
It is categorically different. If your memories of 1000 years ago gradually fade away, only that old version of you is "gone" (in present experiential sense). You and your family and friends have known you as a consistent "self" with mental continuity throughout your whole lifetime. When you die in the current times, you and your family grieve and experience suffering as a result of the lack of your mental continuity. When parts of you later end up in a tree or squirrel, that is not a particularly consoling idea to those who would prefer you continued to exist as a human.
Exactly this. I put together a rough demo of similar AI scheduling in the past and x.ai does this as well. The AI works within a given constraint before proposing new times because the idea is to free up time for you, not make you clean up a scheduling mistake every time something is decided by the AI.
The problem always ends up being "who decides what is not true?".

Many people think that such a thing is not possible, or that the giving the Government such a power would be too much.

I personally think I could be persuaded to give such a power to the judiciary branch. I'd have to think about it a lot more before coming to a final decision, though.
Start writing a blog, now. That will:

1. Give you practice finishing smaller written works before you work your way up to a much larger book project.

2. Let you practice all of the various skills in writing.

3. Improve your writing/marketing based on the feedback you get from people. Publishing on the web is a fantastic feedback loop for learning what resonates with people and what doesn't.

4. Build an audience for your writing. Set up an email list and put a link to it on your blog.

The way you get experience writing is the way you get experience in any other artistic pursuit: practice and feedback.
Okay, I guess I've got the contrarian take this time around. As a CEO/founder, I spend an astonishing amount of time writing emails that are mostly the same. Things like the following:

Dear [name],

[pleasantry].

I'm writing to check in on [$$non-automatable follow-up action$$]. [Have you been able to take care of this yet? Let me know if I can be of assistance.]

[best regards / thanks]

[signature]

...

For me, things like Gmail's one/two-sentence responses on mobile are _honestly_ a godsend. Things like Smart Compose are similarly incredibly valuable. I'm not trying to be the world's best orator, I'm just trying to bang off the dozens of emails I need to get taken care of each day as quickly as possible.
> But hopefully U2F will actually work in non-Chrome browsers in the near future.

I would guess you're referring to being able to log in to gmail (or anything in G Suite) with U2F from Firefox.

U2F is already available in the most recent version. See "security.webauth.*" keys in about:config. It just won't work with Google, at least not yet. Google's implementation predates webauth by a pretty fair margin, and from what I have learned, is different in small but important ways from the standard.

So we have a situation that drips irony: we have a U2F standard, usable via a standard authentication mechanism - and incompatible with the very web property that drove the concerted push for the technology's adoption.
Indeed, the registry is actually a good feature, it's a configuration database rather than relying on flat files as in the "just go to /etc/<package>/<package>.config or /home/<user>/.package/<package>.config" of the linux world.

The problem is that when it was first introduced in windows 95 the registry would easily and often corrupt causing many issues so some people still associate the registry with being a bad design, when it was actually just a bad implementation of a good design.
The problem is that computers will now be interacting with people and people will become unsure of whether they are taking to a computer or a person. It will create a bewildering world full of mistrust. I would argue that there should be a law proclaiming that computers must identify themselves.
Has anyone tried vmlens (java concurrency bugs detector)?
They increased the pod size by 4X, also each "TPU" has 4 tpu chips on it IIRC.
Don't overthink things. Just do your best, and you'll be setting them up better than 90% of children.
Facebook is making its biggest executive shuffle in company history
For years, Google had a 1-800 free 411 service. Even a decade ago it was expected that they would use that data for AI.
Web of Trust and Reputation Networks.
You conveyed more emotional information in the misspelled "puh-lease" than you would've with the correctly spelled "please".
It would be nice if SV realized there are tens of thousands of these things called LOCAL news sources.

Every piece of news-related tech we get these days just regurgitates CNN, BBC, etc... How about sending me local content from the local newspapers to start -- you know, things that affect people every day.
And places like China are now seeing the same kind of untrammeled progress, as their economy completely explodes under political conditions that 'the west' would consider counter to what they would consider correct/right/whatever.

Now to be clear, I'm obviously not advocating human rights violations, and strict governmental control ... I'm only pointing out that things like 'freedom of speech', while awesome and right IMO _may_ not exactly be the root cause of this age of prosperity.
Nintendo’s mobile Animal Crossing keeps getting better
> If you want professional, there are plenty of professional proprietary vendors out there

I do not see existence of other professional vendors a valid reason for behaving unprofessionaly. Nobody says RMS should behave professionally because otherwise there would be no professional vendors left. He should behave professionally because it's the right thing to do in this context, not because of availability concerns.

> GNU is a social project first

No, not really. Almost all effort is dedicated to code and surrounding matters (yes, GPL too), and very little is dedicated to societal change as such.

> with quality and professionalism being secondary considerations.

If it were true, GNU projects would die long ago. Nobody needs a compiler or a shell that is social project first and quality software second. Nobody would use it (ok, maybe a dozen or so of people would, but that's it). Fortunately, it is not the case at all.

> rms is known for being difficult, not for being wrong.

He's known for both. He has been wrong plenty. He also has been right plenty, including in many important things, but that doesn't make him infallible.
If you can't tell, does it matter?

The reason people don't like phone trees is not because they are robots. Rather, because they often make it difficult to get the help you need or reach the right department. If a live human read the script of a phone tree to you it would be equally (more?) infuriating.

If I called a companies number and got a conversational bot masquerading as a person instead of a phone tree, that would be a dramatic improvement.
Can you explain your views on the ethics?

I think it is a little creepy, but ethically? You're conducting the same activity in the same way you would have done yourself, but now more conveniently. The recipient still has the same experience either way.

My biggest concern about this is that it could be used at scale for "evil" (e.g. junk calls).
I was duped after buying a set of wireless headphones. I did a bunch of shopping online and landed at Amazon. The headphones they had listed had nearly 4,000 4+ star rating, I figured they were all legit so I purchased them. In the box when they arrived was a small postcard which read, "Give us a positive 4 or 5 star rating on Amazon, and you can order any of our products for 50% off!"

This was less than six months ago and clearly after Amazon had outlawed the practice in 2016.
> That means hemoglobin genes were already present in their common ancestor

Or that some DNA capture happened in some part of the road. Now we have transgenic tomatoes with flatfish genes in their DNA. There is not any guarantee that the common ancestor of both species would had developped those genes yet at the time of the code fork.
I already addressed this. The WAF is a temporary solution. It is not targeted at "serious attackers", it is targeted at drive-by scans and generic exploits.
Companies don't go google scale, companies are google scale. It's not a choice, it's a fact they have to deal with.

Pick any large tech company, they have thousands of servers and countless customized software running. That's what is meant by google scale.

They need to manage that and they suck at it most of the time, they don't know what resources they own and they can't figure out what's running or where.
I finally decided I wanted to use OSM as my main app, and what I have been doing is adding things to it when I see it doesn't have it. That way it can slowly get better, and have what I need with it. I have actually found that if I can't find something on it, I can use Duckduckgo to find what I need, then it can open it on OSM and I can mark it.
This should not be all that difficult to do. We have the open map data (OSM) and Valhalla for routing. There are tons of online OSM viewers, so I would guess it to be possible on a phone.
Why is it unethical?
Well, I'm already receiving automated calls about "that car accident" and they connect me to a real person if I happen to respond with a predefined keyword.

I would say that there's a market for that. How long before rough agents implement good AI for their operations? How long before we implement defences against AI?
yc can be weird with downvotes sometimes.
Google: ARCore MLkit
Apple: ARKit CoreML
Same boat, but does this help at all? https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SRTM
The cost to develop that functionality is not feasable with curent silicon limitations.
"...while giving other longtime Facebook executives new responsibilities, including a new effort to tackle blockchain technology."

Is this a case of a large company not wanting to miss out on what might be a "big thing" or something else?
A few observations:

* In the example where Google asked about holiday hours -- they can now automate gathering information about businesses in bulk without having to rely on any APIs or user supplied info. Interesting thought experiment is Google validating their reviews/business listings by actually calling businesses and speaking to a real human.

* This is going to be fantastic for accessibility. Maybe I struggle to speak, and I want a reservation. I can have the machine do the irritating work, and focus on just having a nice meal or getting a service (like a haircut).

* Google can scale out your requests, one to N. For example, 'Make me a reservation at a 4 star restaurant next Friday.' Google can immediately initiate calls against 15 restaurants and let you pick from the successes, then automatically cancel the reservations for the places you did not choose.
Now that North Korea is becoming more friendly, one only hopes he's not grasping at straws to create a military conflict to create a distraction from his personal issues.
>Are you seriously trying to argue that TYPOS are the anchor upon which genuine human interaction hinges on?

I said no such thing. I stated, correctly, that typos convey information. Removing typos removes information.
I'm not as pessimistic. 3dfx and Matrox didn't look like easy to knock out opponents in the 90s and yet here we are. Markets are powerful incentive mechanisms.

"Slowly grinds the mill of the gods, but it grinds fine."
I recommend you look at the statistical evidence. The average wage in the developing world has doubled, and the global poverty rate has halved, over the last 20 years. That's all thanks to automation.
I disagree about the ethics of this. This is no different than having your (human) assistant make an appointment for you.

I'm assuming that if the machine can't determine what to do next, a simple "I'm sorry I'll need to call you back" and notifying the user that they need to call manually is all that will be needed, much like how a (human) assistant that is faced with a question they can't answer alone will need to excuse themselves and call back at a later time with that information.

Now obviously if this ends up wasting a significant amount of time for the business for no gain, I could see an argument about ethics, but making the receiving end aware it's a machine won't solve that problem.

Also, I think making the "user" aware that they are talking to a machine might reduce it's capability significantly. As long as the person on the other end thinks it's human, it seems like it can do a pretty good job. Once the other side knows it's a robot, they will dumb themselves down to how they expect they should talk to a robot, which means they won't say things like "Is 10AM okay?" or "what kind of service do you want done?".
Is there going to be a way for businesses (any and all receivers really) to opt-out of receiving these calls?

Could it be opt-in on the receiver-side?
Even at that price that's less than a year for continuous use and I'm sure that NVIDIA would be happy to make you a deal if you ordered enough of them.

Now if you needed a few 100 of them for two weeks or so that would be a different matter.
I haven't followed Skripal, but in the case of all attacks, I would like the fp establishment to wait for UN inspectors to render a report based on evidence before declaring whodunit.

The mainstream political opinion got us into Iraq, Vietnam,
sold arms to the Indonesians in East-Timor, and concocted a nuclear missile gap with Russia that never existed. I don't think it deserves any credence except where concrete evidence is provided (and this goes for everyone else outside the mainstream too).
Anyone else think it's kind of silly that half the front page of HN is google press releases today? And about 1/4 of those are dupes.

We get it, there are a lot of googlers on here.
What app are you specifically using? I find it hard to find a well done one for Android.
Private space companies no longer have to follow the law
Improving Cyber Literacy in Political Campaigns
They're not unaware of this concern. From the article:

> The Google Duplex technology is built to sound natural, to make the conversation experience comfortable. It’s important to us that users and businesses have a good experience with this service, and transparency is a key part of that. We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context. We’ll be experimenting with the right approach over the coming months.
Are you sure that's not Waze? Google Maps is deliberately a lot like the latter, even if both products are from the same company. Maybe there is something in the road network (e.g. a segment with bad information) along the route you are thinking of that results in what you describe.
Twitter Sentiment Analysis Using Node.js
These constant attempts to assert that "everything is political" are getting really old. All people have the capacity to be political. Nothing else is.

I wish I could understand who taught you people that insistence of stupid horseshit is the key to achieving your goals.
Partly because, growing up you didn't have to put in effort. Later on in life there are different social mechanics that not everyone readily adjusts to.
It doesn't have to be out of frequency (since that's probably filtered anyway), could be just a really quick burst handshake identifier which could encode an IP address to communicate over instead of a crummy phone line.

Duplex: <beep beep> (I'm available to chat)

Other bot: <boop boop> (Oh hai! Wanna get intimate?)

Duplex: <blaaaaaaaart> (Come find me on duplex://64.233.160.0)

<insert hack attacks and other nonsense here>
I don't think the intention of this system is for your boss to use Google to call you and ask for passwords. It seems very limited to scheduling appointments.
> Yes, duplex is for completing specific tasks, but how much of a difference is there between "Duplex, book a table for four at 8pm" and "Duplex, ask my victim about how their day was"?

The former (booking a table) is much more "constrained", as in the conversation would most likely not go into much of a tangent, because there are only so many responses to a statement like "book a table for four at 8pm" (8pm is full, 8pm works, etc).

Whereas asking someone how their day was would give the "victim" a much bigger breadth of responses (and additional questions!) that would cause the AI to stumble and fail to give a satisfactory answer. That, and running this 1,000 times simultaneously so that no one person would be able to intervene to "help" the AI would just be a highly unscalable operation.

So yes, huge difference.
if it's trying to be a database, it's doing a terrible job. all the problems of not being files (can you do "find HKEY_CURRENT_USER -name mypackage" to see what the uninstaller left behind?) with none of the benefits of a database (ACID).
I think it was intended to be f(n) = 4n^2 + bn + c.
Not that I've seen. The most advanced IVR systems that some banks are using have voice fingerprints and recognition etc but the TTS is still noticeably robotic.

Other companies are using huge libraries of recorded human voice for communications and concatenating them together in intelligent ways.
The type of strong typing that Erlang has is not a useful definition of the term, as the only weakly-typed language in current use would be assembler. By any other useful definition of the term, Erlang is weakly typed. Erlang + Dialyser can be read as incrementally typed, if you follow my idiosyncratic view of considering the entire programming environment in such decisions rather than just the language itself, but I don't think that's a majority viewpoint, and still doesn't yield a strongly typed language... just an incrementally typed one.
What will be interesting to see is if they are going the hardware specialization route, like Nvidia with their support for efficient 4x4 fused FP16 matmuls with FP32 matrix output (they call them 'tensor cores' - hah).
I suspect with the liquid cooling, they are just dialing up the matmul speed, which is probably the right way to go, IMO.

We are doing data-center experiments - using oil cooling. It's suprising to see circuitboards dumped in ordinary oil and working away, no short circuits.
LA Homeless Population Map (2016)
I interpreted it differently. It isn't to give the appearance of slow thinking. It is to wait for the other person to be ready to accept the answer.

When talking to real humans, I've encountered people who don't do this, and I find it makes communication difficult and frustrating.

I'm not 100% sure why I need this pause, but I know I need it. Maybe I'm considering whether my question made sense or needs corrections/additions, so that I can't focus on the answer yet. Or maybe it takes time to switch the brain from "speaking mode" to "listening mode".

At any rate, when people do this, I have to ask them to repeat the first few words they said because I didn't catch them. And the reason I didn't catch them wasn't mumbling or background noise or anything. Well-formed sounds made it to my ear just fine, but my brain wasn't ready to accept them for a fraction of a second.
maps.me (https://maps.me/download/) might be just what you are looking for. Maps, routing and traffic, mostly usable mobile app.
What function? I'm talking about physically opening the hardware and sticking two cables to the battery connections.
All great suggestions.

I'd also like to add Janet Lansbury [1] as a great resource

[1] http://www.janetlansbury.com/
Making computers do harder and harder things. My current project is dynamic robot control, using some machine learning. I'm not even close to making them do anything I want in this domain (nobody is).

[PhD in CS, programming for 38 years]
I have a feeling it's because this is such a limited domain.

During the demo it all sounded very realistic, except for some parts like the times. It would flow naturally then all of a sudden pause awkwardly and then say a time like "12 pm" in a weird way.

I have a feeling they are getting it to sound so realistic because there's a fairly small amount of responses and questions it needs to work with, so they can either pre-record real humans, or heavily tune a ML voice to sound as natural as possible.
It’s almost as if we shouldn’t deviate from standards just to get features out of the door faster
A CEO sleeping with subordinates absolutely crosses ethical and moral lines, but it isn't rape. It's not rape unless it's rape.

There's too much depressing shit in the world to report and publicly name and shame everyone that decides to be a cad. If he crosses over from cad to monster, that's when I want to hear about it.
To be fair I think any mediocre dev could do that now simply with headless browser automation.
I should have said that your concern is valid where two systems might issue conflicting commands that could create a dangerous situation, it is just that I don't see it likely in this particular combination of systems.
This might just be your first go at it. A semi-successful university project that you unplug and move on to your next idea that is in a better market. Or you might be able to make it work. Restaurants are an interesting space, but really hard. Don't be too married to this idea though.