skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I appreciate the engagement in making this argument more concrete. I understand that you are talking about returns on compute power.

However, your last paragraph about how investors view deep learning does not describe anyone in the community of academics, practitioners and investors that I know. People understand that the limiting inputs to improved performance are data, followed closely by PhD labor. Compute power is relevant mainly because it shortens the feedback loop on that PhD labor, making it more efficient.

Folks investing in AI believe the returns are worth it due to the potential to scale deployment, not (primarily) training. They may be wrong, but this is a straw man definition of scalability that doesn't contribute to that thesis.
I use XMonad but used to have lots of Gnome based services running in the background, in order to have sensible "modern" plug-and-play and easy configurability (e.g. printers, monitor layout, network, etc.) Sadly, as they move more and more things to the Shell, this is becoming a harder task. gnome-control-center which used to be very useful even in my custom setup, is now useless if you don't run a full gnome-session or gnome-shell. My setup has become a Frankenstein of pieces of, xmonad, taffybar, suckless, Xfce4 and Gnome.

But I don't blame them, since I understand that their goal is to provide a sensible and consistent user interface for general users and that I am a total exception :-)
You make less money than you used to. Blame your iPhone
By most used: maybe F#, Erlang, Clojure and Haskell. However mindshare in any of them is still pretty small compared to the object-oriented or procedural ones. Also, JavaScript and other mainstream languages also lend themselves quite well to FP-style programming.
A lot of these "uncontacted" tribes have actually had contact in the form of smugglers, loggers, drug cartels etc...many of those experiences ended with them getting killed so it's not surprising they would avoid us.
Just because you haven't seen humongous publicity stunts involving pratical uses of AI doesn't mean they aren't being deployed. My company using similar methods to warn hospitals about patients with high probability of imminent heart attacks and sepsis.

The practical uses of these technologies don't always make national news.

I'm sure you would also have scoffed at the "pointless impractical, wasteful use of our brightest minds" to make the the Flyer hang in the air for 30 yards at Kitty Hawk.
You raise the bar of what you need to deliver which will change your approach, and don’t ship products that aren't ready.
I agree on a lot of things, but not on the extensions, I have about a dozen installed that make my desktop much more organized and snappier to use.

Also don't understand the uninstalling totem part, then again I watch a lot of movies.
>$0.15/GB

that's pretty expensive
Maybe I should have stated it as "paid academic journals don't create any marginal value for society vs. unpaid journals"

Nature is just a bunch of noted academics that come together and do peer-review (for free btw)... is that enough value creation to charge exorbitant amounts to universities and block content to the public that is funded by government grants?

If academics could build a peer-review board themselves (hint: now they can... thanks internet!) ... then everyone would have free access to science.
Open Source Data Dictionary App for Local Government
A brief overview of the Raft algorithm (2016)
I don't think that is the right lesson to learn from the given point. There are lot of $1 apps that are successful. There is a huge difference between $1 and free if you can see it.

This for example.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.halfbrick....
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.explodingk...
Well, then, here, take my hug (>^_^)>
> Another thing I've wondered about - regular two team football, but with more than one ball ('MULTIBALLLL!')

This reminds me the scene from 1938 Russian book "Старик Хоттабыч" and its 1956 Soviet film adaptation where ancient genie grants every football player his own ball. Sadly they don't understand it and remove all these balls from the field.

See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZRKypTrjto&t=4000 (since 1:06:40)
I'm having a hard time rectifying the "Ruby's Bundler"+"solved problem" axiom. Take my experience with Chef. It is Ruby. Berkshelf is supposed to solve cookbook versions, but you can use bundler around that. As a "not-a-ruby" guy, it is all a bit confusing actually. All I know is that Bundler and Berkshelf have caused me untold issues. Never resolving dependencies that leads to manually finding what version update broke what. When I heard about using the Minimum Version Solver, my first thought was how that would have saved me so much time during my Cookbook Version wars.
https://mikrotik.com/products/

or if you want, just board:
https://mikrotik.com/products/group/routerboard

Anyway their routers are cheap and very capable, but the administration is NOT (!WARNING!) for normal users. You will need to know a lot about networking.
I totally agree with this. We learned it pretty quickly that classification does not generalize across domains so we narrowed the problem space by focusing one domain at a time followed by predefined and fixed set of categories so that we can measure effectiveness of our solution as we experimented with different algorithms and deployment pipeline.
Looks appealing, but when I click "Start free trial", nothing happens, except "ReferenceError: cli_show_cookiebar is not defined" in the console.

Not a good start.
> I ended up writing a bash script that will chunk and scp the files to a central server, and if it fails a chunk, it leaves it in the directory for her to manually re-run.

Use Syncthing, it traverses NATs, it is trivial to set up, it is seemingly very secure by its nature, and crucially for you, it transfers in blocks. You can administer it through a web interface with credentials (or with none, if it's just listening on loopback).
You don't even really need examples of casual writing to discern that this attitude is nothing new. I mean, look at stories from throughout history, from the debates of Roman senators to Salem Witch Trials and back to Chinese oracle bones-- since when have people ever avoided ad hominem attacks, fallacious logic, and overwrought outrage on topics they barely understand?
Try not paying your taxes with Dollars.
New WaveNet-Powered Music Translation from Facebook Research
And maybe add an +1 so its always offiset to miss the target, and deadline appearing before reaching peak productivity
That's at least a logical belief, but it's still a threat, because we don't know how it will behave and we'll be helpless to control it.
It works in Gnome too!
I don't think the claim is that AI isn't useful. It's that it's oversold. In any case, I don't think you can tell much about how well your classifier is working for something like cancer diagnoses unless you know how many false negatives you have (and how that compares to how many false negatives a radiologist makes).
Yes, they have a test set. They don’t check every video, but they do check every video in a sample that is of statistically significant size.
But humans could learn in the same way that AlphaZero does. We have the same resources and the same capabilities, just running on million-year-old hardware. Humans might not be able to replicate the performance of AlphaZero, but that does not mean it is useless in the study of intelligence.
I wouldn't fault it for lack of technical craft, that's not a specific statement in the original manifesto, except loosely maybe "working software". Largely forgotten now since more than a decade has passed, but even the poor implementation of Scrum has helped shut down the RUP hyper-documentation madness, massive unshippable releases with hundreds of bugs, etc.

When trying to explain "Why agile?" to new devs out of school, I struggle "Well... it helps to have been through a soul crushing waterfall deathmarch. If you read the manifesto after that, you will start to weep for joy." But they don't really get it.

So i could argue that even when badly done Scrum has improved the success rate and business satisfaction across the industry. Every couple of weeks the business gets some new functionality and the devs get feedback. Great! But I would agree, it's been long enough with Scrum, I'm ready for the next evolution in this story.

Much of it does also depend on the type of team, product, environment so that scrumbut customization seems nearly inevitable in my view.

Agree we need a way around the short-sighted prioritization, we've overlain some classical PM roadmap concepts to make sure we also chip away at longer term initiatives and debt.
I'll have to check that out. I was just desperate one afternoon after dropbox was failing to sync because of connectivity issues, and I knew bash just well enough to split, scp, rm, repeat.
One tree (us) either appeared first and dominated resources, or we wiped our the other trees. Evolutionary forces work at levels above species. Two trees can compete with each other.

If this happened it did so at the microbe level. Physical evidence would be extraordinarily difficult. If we did find evidence of another tree it would be so 'alien' to our tree that might mistakenly call it extraterrestrial.
Are man made structures that interfere with the crashing of waves are having an effect on atmospheric CO2?
Agree, except I think it's more that it makes him (hazarding a wild guess it's a guy!) sound like a total jerk, an empty loser and an epic twat, probably with a tiny dick.
bookmarking this to read later...
BGP allows anyone to issue fake certs, so it does have a relationship to web PKI.

And sure, if you have a couple billion dollars, you can set up fancy infrastructure and response teams to monitor the whole web (that you are aware of, that participate in CT) for a strangely-issued cert.

Or you could just get a cert issued by the CA you normally use. In which case, now we have to track some kind of "customer number" per CA. If you use more than one CA (Google does) now you're tracking different customer numbers on different CAs. And all that has to be standardized.

Most of these "fixes" for web PKI's glaring holes are intended for large multinational corporations, or are optional, or specific to a particular browser, and don't address the main concern: _do not trust an IP address to be who it claims to be_.
Very true. It's very hard for people who don't make children to not just get replaced with people with different beliefs.
The idea that pay raises come from some sort of collective negotiation with a bunch of executives is just bizarre on its own. Executives do not get to decide the pay level of employees.

The point of the tax law was to lower the cost of employment and investment in the US (specifically, the cost of repatriating foreign profits to pay US salaries and buy US-based infrastructure). The hope being that lower costs cause companies to value US labor more, which tightens the labor market.

A tight labor market causes the raises: companies will continue to offer what they want to offer, and they will be unable to replace attrition because the would-be new hire can do better. The employer is either forced to offer more wages directly, lower their standards to poach employees from lower-paying employers, or do without and leave profit on the table.

But none of that involves buttering up CEOs and getting them to pinky-swear that they're going to give out raises just because they can. The wage level is always "as low as they can get away with"
I think this has been discussed before - The whole foundation of SalesForce is absolutely tracking every inch of a user, who you were what whitepaper you downloaded, where you're from, which stage of the funnel you're in, which industry you belong to, what's your company size, what's its revenue and the list goes on..

So, this is pretty ridiculous coming from a CEO of such a company, but hey, any publicity is good publicity, right?
Is your 20$/mo server 1Gbit? At a fairly common 100Mbit these file transfers would be 1/10 the speed and also need to be downloaded. Even slower if you need to send to multiple people.

Running bit torrent let's peers share the data you upload and get the same net effect as this. But, that's not as far as I know a browser plugin.

PS: I don't think it's a big deal, but executed well it might be a valuable niche.
Riemannian geometry in machine learning in Python
If a European butcher takes notes on his customers using a paper notebook or Excel, are these different modes of data-management subject to GDPR? That's a pretty relevant question esp. since the article is on a butcher. The entire discussion is on the scope of GDPR.

What does US IP law have to do with this?
A consumer protection law like GDPR would probably be a good thing for US, but it's hard not to see this as SFDC saying, "As a multibillion-dollar SaaS vendor, we welcome regulation that might slow down or prevent a competitor from unseating us."
feed and water are very expensive, as is the calf
This is an interesting idea by putting some userspace stuff back into kernel. But I wonder how much overhead you can save as the supporting argument is just one sentence.
If you look at probability distributions rather than single estimates for every term in the Drake Equation then the absence of visible aliens isn't so unlikely.

http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/media/eps/jodrell-ba...

And just the existence of life doesn't mean there's complex life. We don't have a firm lower bound on how long life took to arise on Earth after we got liquid water on the surface but it can't have been more than 120 million years. Photosynthesis, mitochondria, and other innovations allowing for complex life like you and me took way, way longer. I made a diagram for a blog post here:

http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-drake-eq...
Thank you for the link to the paper. We had not come across that one.
I understand the point that we might be too backwards to see the signs of hyper-advanced civilisations, but how is it that _all_ the other civilizations are super advanced to the point that any trace they leave is impossible to understand?

And, won't uncontacted tribes in the amazon have seen airplanes and such?
When every single failure of a methodology is explained away with "you aren't doing it right," I begin to question the methodology itself.
> The left-pad issue [0] highlights how one developer can unpublish their code and result in breaking every package depended on that package.

How they could unpublish their code. left-pad's specific issue is no longer allowed by npm and thus could not arise today. That's not to say other issues could not crop up, of course.
Link to the research paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3322/caac.21457 and press release: http://pressroom.cancer.org/releases?item=770
Climate change is not an existential threat - primitive humans survived for 200+ kyrs when temps were 10°C cooler and thrived during warmer temps.
And didn’t they just do all of this? It’s not like 5 years have passed. Does he expect results like this every month?
Elon Musk Should Know Better
Thank you for working on V8 and the WebAssembly implementation. :)

I still think that this is a case of knowing how the sausage is made. I've operated public-facing Linux systems for many years (but I am not either a kernel nor V8 developer, so you know what you're talking about more than I do) and the Linux kernel is ... not good. You take security seriously, and find hundreds of bugs, and it scares you, which is great. The Linux kernel does not (remember the whole "security bugs are just normal bugs" thing, plus the resistance to architectural improvements that kill bug classes, which as far as I can tell you folks seem to be very excited about).

I would hope that you think that V8 + the associated Chrome sandbox (which, to be fair, I think does not have an equivalent in this project) is secure enough to be exposed to random JavaScript / WebAssembly from malicious parties on the internet running and updating 24/7, and keep things reasonably safe, because a billion people do exactly that. I'm not saying it's perfect or unbreakable - I'm just saying I definitely don't trust Linux to be secure against random userspace from malicious parties on the internet running and updating 24/7.
Maintenance will be a recurring cost (amortised) cutting into the yield percentage.
You can take a look at: https://github.com/sfikas/medical-imaging-datasets or http://www.radrounds.com/profiles/blogs/list-of-open-access-...
Limiting global warming, the world could save itself more than $20 trillion
Everything has some level of intelligence, but the intelligence to develop tools and civilization beyond tribes and sticks is something else.
True, although I expect the ISM pressure to be fairly directly measurable. I wonder what the magnitude of all possible affecting things is compared to the gravity of planet like objects at various distances…
Bowel disease is becoming a widespread problem in the United States, and is a big factor behind the increasing popularity of specialized diets such as The Whole 30 Diet, Keto, Paleo, gluten free, etc.

Many people's bowels are not happy, and they're looking for answers by modifying their diets.

The increase is colon cancer among younger people is likely a result of the increased bowel disease among younger people.

The medical establishment is not really equipped for handle this rise in disease; much of the focus is on the development of expensive drugs that are basically cash-cows for pharmaceutical companies. For example, Remicade costs up to $20,000 a month -- and the market of potential users of it is many millions of people.

The financial math for researching non-drug treatments simply pales in comparison to the potential payoff for successfully developing a drug, even if the results are far-inferior to alternative approaches.
Nvidia wants to dominate the AI cloud arms race
People will keep buying natural diamonds, because they are more expensive. Just like $30K handbags will continue to sell because they are $30k. Some people will buy copies, but many people would rather have nothing than a fake.

For status conscious people (which is most people) they would rather have a smaller natural diamond than a larger man made diamond. This has already been proven with pearls.

Most sheeple would recognize when someone else is wearing a diamond that is too big for their status and decide it is a fake. Many people wouldn't wear a too-big manmade diamond for that reason.
Why New York beats Silicon Valley as a destination for some startup founders
> The optimal time to start work has already passed.

This is affecting my life really bad. I've been trying to fight this for years with next to no success. If I pass the optimal time to start a task I find it almost impossible to start after that point. Say, sometimes I know that if I do it a bit faster and maybe sloppier I can still make the deadline but for some unknown reason it's so hard to do it and I go back to procrastinating.

Another similar problem I have with procrastination is "soft deadlines". When something has a deadline but it's not the end of the world if the deadline is passed (say you can still accomplish the task 2 days later and it'll be ok) I find it incredibly hard to do it after the soft deadline. You have no idea how many troubles I collected this way since I kept procrastinating sending important documents to people, government etc... If I send them the day they're due everything is fine; if something comes up, say like scanner breaks, I forget etc... it takes months for me to send that document.
It’s never about being first to market. It’s about being the last
AI winter? Hardly. Current methods have only been applied to a very tiny fraction of problems that they can help solve. And, this trend will only accelerate until computing resources become too expensive.

As long as there is ROI, AI projects will continue to be financed, top thinkers around the world will be paid to do more research, and engineers will implement the most recent techniques into their products and services to stay competitive. This is a classic feedback system that results in exponential progress.
How I Used Machine Learning to Predict Bitcoin Prices?
I accept that he's polarizing to some, but Jocko Willinck's book "Extreme Ownership" has some interesting stories on this topic. One of them is at Navy Seal training camp, where there's 6 teams involved in a multi-stage boat race exercise. Half-way through, team 2 is destroying everyone and team 6 is losing pretty badly. So, to teach a leadership lesson, the instructors decide to switch the leaders from teams 2 and 6.

At the start, team 2 continues doing awesome, and while team 6 doesn't win, they improve. Next round Team 2 isn't doing quite as well, but still good. Team 6 has improved a bunch. After a couple of rounds, team 2 is falling apart and team 6 is now winning (or 2nd place, I forget).

My experience, admittedly anecdata, is that great teams perform well when they're in an environment where they're allowed to succeed. I've worked with great teams who did terrible work, and it was pretty much always due to a bad environment (e.g. an owner who would redirect their efforts every few days, so no feature ever got to done-done). I've also seen (but not personally led) teams that I had originally somewhat written off, who under good leadership managed to do some pretty damned impressive work.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not devaluing the potential contribution from a single amazing person, or a team full of amazing people. My clients hire me because I have a (locally) rare set of skills that their team doesn't have, and help them get over hurdles that their team can't (currently) tackle on their own. But if you take a great set of individuals and put them together in a shitty environment with a shitty leader, you're going to get what you get.
Proudspire Manor won’t buy itself
'Murdered' Journalist Is Alive and Well
One nice thing about working at a place that doesn't have levels is that this crap doesn't happen.
I think you’re overestimating the need to manage everything. There are hundreds of companies in the US alone that provide private jet management with a range of different services.

For example, my wife’s boss has a Dassault Falcon 2000. He keeps it under management with a company at the nearby executive airport. I also have a few friends who are pilots for the same management company. The management company maintains the aircraft, hires, trains, pays, and schedules pilots, and handles every aspect of a flight. He simply has his assistant call to schedule his trips.

The aircraft is used for a mix of business and personal use. In addition to everything the management company provides for his personally owned airplane, they also have a fleet of other aircraft that he has access to for a significantly reduced fee. This is useful for when some people need to be one place but a team of other people need to travel from the main office to the distribution centers or vendors. When you’re moving 5-6 people for a trip the advantage of being able to complete the trip in a day vs an overnight is pretty significant. By the time you factor in 5-6 airline tickets, lost employee productivity, and hotels for 5-6 people for a night. You come out about even, if not ahead, by using the jet.

Often when they travel they’ll have a flight attendant and catering that provides easily just as good, if not better, service than you’ll get on most domestic business class flights in the US.

In summary, better service, on-demand, and basically no effort other than an e-mail or phone call. I’d say it’s worth it if money means nothing to you.
The individual nucleobases (cytosine [C], guanine [G], adenine [A] or thymine [T]) are made from the 4 most common elements, and appear to be modestly simple molecules. Is it so unbelievable that they naturally occur like methane or sodium glass?