skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While Pokémon might have a higher branching factor than Mario, I don't think that means a "machine can't beat it". First, I'm going to use Gen I/II (Red/Blue/Yellow // Gold/Silver/Crystal) here as "Pokémon", the game, as I am most familiar with them; I am not particular aware if the formula has changed in more recent generations.

> Pokemon is an open world game

… not really. While you can walk around, sure, the actual game is mostly linear; the order in which you explore and visit towns is mostly predetermined. (It has to be, as the Pokémon and trainers you encounter become more and more powerful, so have to progress with that.) Most of the "branches" that occur while walking around any given part of the map will all coalesce on one of the entrances/exits to that part of the map. (I.e., either you leave the town, or you visit one of the buildings in the town, or you talk to someone in the town. Mostly, that's it; my point here is that one can simplify all the "standing at coordinate X, coordinate X+1, ... etc. greatly; those positions are essentially equivalent.)

As for a goal, I would just say "AND them together, then". Or just do the Elite Four; the credits scroll when you beat them, which I think is a pretty clear indication of "win". Catching them all is more akin to completing all the achievements in the game. (And requires running multiple coordinated games, as, for example, the starting 3 are only available once, at the beginning of the game. In order to "catch them all", you need two games where the player 1. doesn't evolve their starter and 2. trades it to you. Since usually the starter is the core of someone's team in a normal human game, I think one would normally run a small game. Or find someone you trust and only briefly trade the Pokémon, then trade it back, which counts as far as the Pokédex cares. Eevee, a Pokémon that can evolve 3 different ways in Gen I, represents a similar problem: you only get one, and have to choose. (I think Gen II's breeding system might work around some or most of this issue.))

While Super Mario is perhaps comparatively easy, I would offer up NetHack. It is "open-world" in much the same sense as Pokémon: you have an explorable area, but one that is still mostly linear. There are several "sub-modes" to solve, like the article notes about Pokémon: in Pokémon, you need to explore, train, capture new Pokémon, battle; in NetHack, you also need to explore, battle, manage items, solve Sokoban puzzles, etc.

Pokémon is fairly hard to "lose"; losing a battle just returns you to the nearest Pokémon center w/ half your money gone. (That might be more of an issue in Gen I, where, IIRC, money is finite until you beat the Elite Four; in Gen II, as soon as you have a trainer's phone number, I think money is technically infinite. Regardless, simply training a few Pokémon to Lvl 100 should be sufficient.) NetHack, however, is very easy to lose; death is permanent, and requires restarting from scratch.

And NetHack has been won by a machine: https://www.reddit.com/r/nethack/comments/2tluxv/yaap_fullau...
Sure. Ultimately I think the question of whether Bezos is good or bad is almost beside the point.
Maybe they'll try to automate some more jobs but I feel like they already automated almost everything they can. Just look at their service centers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-lBvI6u_hw
They're going automate all the jobs they can regardless of wage so might as well pay a decent wage for the few workers left.
Weird. I got a server some months ago and I didn't do anything to confirm my identity. Maybe it was because I was getting a cheapo bidding server, which is only 25 euros a month.
This is a bit of a minor point, but is Sen. Sanders going to rename the bill from "Stop BEZOS Act" now?
+1. Smart move switching away from DigitalOcean. I dont know what the heck is going on with them recently but I started moving away as well. What broke camels back was limit on number of servers you can have which is 12 at the moment i believe. How the heck am i going to grow a startup if thats a ceiling? Google is also full of stories of abruptly interrupted and frozen accounts that you have tiny chance of getting resumed because they don’t tell you what is wring due to “security concerns”.
You can do "big data" entirely in .NET.

You can use Hadoop "Streaming" with .NET easily enough and still take advantage of the "Hadoop ecosystem".

Orleans is not exactly Hadoop, but it's close enough that conversions between are relatively straight-forward, and Orleans is useful for a number of other work distribution patterns beyond map/reduce.

Beyond that, the map/reduce pattern is one of the easiest abstractions to reimplement yourself from scratch if you get the itch. I believe Hadoop is relatively over-rated from that standpoint, and arguably IMO another case of Java developers over-ceremonializing what should be a simple, lovely abstraction/design pattern into a weird spaghetti mess of configuration and ritual.
Mystery of the 'blast-proof' material (Searching for Starlite)
Well, OK... but depressingly its still better scope and coverage than my current corporate plan which is also very expensive. So I get more coverage at lower cost from medicaid... Its insurance season (october) and its going to be hard to pay more to get less given the info I've found about medicaid.

For example taking your diagnostic testing example, I can pay cash on the barrel for an awful lot of testing before I reach my corporate deductible and copay levels which are also cash on the barrel just different form of accounting swindling.

Culturally "I'm gonna go medicaid" is very much like cord cutting, right now very few people are doing it, but in a couple years I think its going to be the majority.
Good luck getting that through Capitol Hill.

The Republicans are scum ofcourse but its not like the Democrats don't get funding from vested business interests...
> the physical engineering was more problematic

I always find amusing how dealing with physical world is challenging even if you know everything about it in theory.

Like this scene from Big Bang Theory that I use as an example in every class:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9en6AcVkBo
I used to think HN comments were smart, until you read a thread about Automotive.

Then you realize that this board has no Auto experience, upvotes/downvotes based on their cult hero.

Since HN rules say we cant hypothesize about Tesla Astroturfing these threads, I'll just say that the information on HN regarding automotive is... questionable.
Finally, technology toots its own horn.
You reminded me of a post JWZ made a while back with a TV in his bar. It's neat how these things can be embedded into our collective experince.

(Copy and paste the link, referrer shenanigans.)
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/
Not the old one. The new ones asking for your preferences on where your information can be sold.
University of Michigan | Ann Arbor, MI | Full-Time | Onsite

I am looking for a new boss.

The College of Literature Science and the Arts, at University of Michigan seeks a Research Computing Services Manager. They will be responsible for planning the research technology strategy and will manage 3 existing research support services: GIS, HPC, and Research Support Programming.

You will have the opportunity to immediately impact current research support at one of the world's largest research universities. You will also be a major part of ensuring that we are prepared to support future research work. You must be able to communicate effectively with researchers studying ancient Greek ruins, english literature and high energy physics.

I have worked for/with 6 different universities, and our subsidized, college wide service is unique. We provide a valuable service enabling a wide variety of research. Come join our team as the new Research Computing Services Manager within LSA Technology Services.

Apply here: http://careers.umich.edu/job_detail/163417/research_computin...
Was an earnest question, and related to the topic at hand. How would people vote with their feet?
The issue is not the technical capability. It has been possible to inject javascript into web views in ios since ios 6 (at the least). The problem is that Apple App Store terms state that your app cannot download arbitrary pieces of code from the internet and run it, which is exactly what extensions are. The rule was relaxed recently, to allow for things like teaching programming apps for the iPad pro, but not for browsers.
I too have lived in NYC on very little money, but I was young, healthy, and single. You list "can't save for retirement" as the only drawback, but I'd add "can't have a child" as another.
This is almost sounds eerily like "Blackberry will release a phone that will kill Apple". If it were that easy to just crank out an EV, all manufacturers had a 2 year window to release one and capture the Model 3 backlog. But nobody has released a compelling product. As it is not about just manufacturing a product. It is about manufacturing an EV that is competitive with Tesla's software prowess, monthly over the air updates, massive super charger network, battery capabilities, cooling tech, a no dealership model, and brand signalling. Beyond that, big cos just don't venture into a new market. A electric BMW 3 will actually cannibalize their own 3 series first. Can they actually sell a higher margin electric 3 series ? Otherwise investors will punish BMW. Will their dealership network accept selling a lower margin product ? A product that requires fewer service visit ? There are a TON of considerations on why Big Cos are caught flat footed by disrupters. Look at SAP and how it missed the Cloud movement as Salesforce ate their cake. Google and Yahoo, Walmart and Amazon, and many more
Ironic? No, not at all. Why would it?
Yes, I like to separate, such as they can be separated, the tasks of 'parsing' and 'thinking' when it comes to AI. In the 80s (and really, all the way back to the 50s when we started trying computational AI), the tasks that we were attempting to solve were in the `thinking` category; solving tasks at a high level of abstraction with complex ontologies.

The revolution in Deep Learning has been almost entirely on the parsing side of things. The conversion of unstructured data from sensors (an array of pixels, say) into semi-structured semantic units in the beginnings of an ontology. This makes sense, because some of the greatest success has come from modeling a part of the brain that we understand pretty well; the occipital lobe (specifically, V1), which is responsible for parsing the input from the eyes and feeding the resulting information in to the rest of the brain. This is the motivation behind the layered, columned CNN architecture.

We've seen some success performing some tasks that exist in the (quite large) grey space between parsing and thinking (which are probably platonic ideals anyway, more than they are real things), but I get the feeling we're reaching the limit of how far we can reach into the grey starting from the left side of this continuum.

So I don't think it's a waste of time at all to consider the deep, impressive work from the 80s and the 60s in Philosophy and logic and GOFAI.
Ditto Harpsichord.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a04EO5gNfMw
From the outside (Portland, OR) looking in, it seems like SV not only has a diversity of race issue (which I DO believe can drive different thoughts, look at a map of where most black Americans live -- spoiler alert: it's the south, I wonder how many folks in SV grew up in the south) but also a diversity of industry problem.

I grew up in New York, which has a pretty big tech sector, but also has fashion, finance, publishing as major industries as well. There are folks who work for the big tech companies in New York who have also worked on Wall Street and I think that helps to prevent monoculture from growing out of control.
As far as the HN crowd is concerned I’m so capitalist/conservative that people would probably call me alt-right, though I’m not.

That said, I think this is incredible and I don’t understand the (non sequitur) arguments that $15/hr AS A FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE would hurt businesses. As a capitalist the higher base wages are the less worried I have to be about a socialist uprising of legitimately poor oppressed people abused by a plutocracy. Besides, do we want to live in a nation where someone who works hard is still way below the poverty line? If businesses can’t compete at $15/hr wages perhaps that’s a sign they should have used automation a long time ago.
I wasn't saying they were. This is far from anywhere near. Bezos was not able to make all his money due solely to his hard work, it was off the backs of others including all of us whom have to subsidize the workers that he is making 300k X their near lifetime earnings.
He didnt understand he was wrong. He never learnt a lesson. Years later when Microsoft was launching their Zume audio player, he played a fool on the scene with bunch of people acting that he never heard if iPod.
A new scientific macrohistory: DNA sequencing pre-historic hominins
It does seem like all these .NET projects are reactions to rival technologies. C# is a Java clone, C# generics are an (arguably improved) Java generics clone, .NET Micro is J2ME, Silverlight is Flash, etc.

What are some examples of where C# / .NET paved the way and others followed? Maybe popularizing async/await?

I’m definitely not claiming MS as a whole is always a follower. It seems like Direct3D led the way for the whole industry, for example.
DOTA is a bad example.

Poker is a better example, because Nash-Equalibrium estimating algorithms have begun to perform better than humans in the past year or two.

Pokemon, like Poker, is a game of bluffing and partial information. I expect Pokemon's optimal strategy to be the same mix of fold (aka: switch your Pokemon out to a defensive Pokemon... eating an attack but minimizing the opponent's damage to your team), and bluff (stay in, maybe use a move that exactly counters your opponent's choice. Ex: An unrevealed Choice Scarf Draco Meteor, surprising the opponent that your pokemon is faster than the opponent expected).
Since they mention it a couple times in the article, how do other folks handle auth for their k8s dashboards? I'm trying to figure out the best approach that right now.
Most definitely dance lessons. I've taken both salsa and tango classes and from day one it's been a rewarding experience.
Facebook launches PyTorch 1.0
Reality is what it is regardless of your or my opinion, and it seems to be human nature for individuals to have a tendency to want to paint it in one way or another (for example: "cuz apparently you think the $2 Chinese meals will kill westerners" - purely a figment of that person's imagination, regardless of it's accuracy).

If you're serious about trying to discern the reality of this situation as accurately as possible, the most useful metric I know of to look at is the affordability ratio, assuming you can find a source with genuinely honest, unmassaged data.

To me, the fundamentally important question seems to be: has the ability for the average person to own/rent the average shelter increased, decreased, or stayed constant over time? My opinion on the matter would be the whatever the answer to that question is. I don't happen to know the correct answer but I think a related question, how broadly is wealth distributed throughout the population (completely ignoring the "righteousness" of it), would be helpful in making a good guess at it.
Sure, but the claim here isn't that the person passed the bar or is a lawyer, just that they were able to produce a lawyer-like document requiring knowledge of one specific subset of the law that they happen to have had lots of exposure to in their regular job.

Sometimes marketing people that sit with the engineers actually learn to code. It has happened at my company. Do they have all the skills someone who got a CS degree would have? Maybe not. Do they have some subset of those skills necessary for the particular tasks the team is faced with daily at this company? Sure.
I would never register any domain I care about with GoDaddy. I did it once, but their spammy dark pattern practices really turned me off.
> I was told that the entire final run of hardware was reserved for Apple internal use.

I get the sense that Apple's strict devotion to its product line is (to put it nicely) creating a discontinuity between their own practices and what they offer to others. It makes me think Apple needs a separate company or brand to offer practical utilities (and perhaps consulting) to companies wishing to deploy Apple software -- things like licenses to use macOS on non-Apple hardware (like a Dell EMC VxRack SDDC[0]), productizing some of their own IT solutions, special iPhones with a 1Gb RJ45 port attached for automated testing, and even "catch the vision"-style marketing to promote their idea of a data/compute center that integrates macOS and other Apple technologies.

[0] https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/converged-infrastructure/vxrac...
They are also cutting down south american rain forest to grow soy beans to feed their cattle.
[Habitat](http://habitat.sh/) builds on the concepts in Nix, and here is a relatively old experiment I found on optimizing Docker layering with it: https://github.com/chetan/habitat-dockerize-layers
Audi, Porsche compete with Toyota ?
Any recommendation on an alternative for a well documented API similar to Google Places?
This probably becomes Shrodeniger-esque. The observed and to act upon.
You are correct. It is very hard to be different in the wrong ways in the Bay Area, and the social sanctions against being different affect all aspects of your life including loosing friends and jobs.

What is the wrong way of thinking is largely defined by people that seem to believe they know the truth and will do anything including lying about how you are different to further their agenda.
The intrinsic value of gold is set by manufacturing and jewelry; it has not changed much. The investment value of gold is (primarily) set by two things: the need for an inflation hedge, and speculation. Speculation is pretty much dead at the moment (nobody's buying gold because they think gold is going to go up). And gold's use as an inflation hedge is declining, because people are less worried about inflation than they were.

Why were people more worried about inflation recently? Because they thought that QE was going to cause a ton of inflation. As it now looks like the Fed will be able to unwind all of that without triggering mass inflation, people see less need for gold than they did, say, five years ago.
The comparison to chess and go seems strange to me, I wonder if you could elaborate?

Certainly chess has a mental component, players develop styles, study one another, and try to throw opponents off balance. But all of that happens as a layer on top of the need to actually make good moves over the board - a bishop and knight endgame simply has a correct answer. Go is less constrained, but it's still alternating turns in a deterministic, perfect information setting.

Pokemon, meanwhile, looks to me somewhere between DOTA and poker. It's nondeterministic on crits, paralysis, accuracy, and a great deal else. It's effectively nondiscrete, in the sense that there's lots of variance which has only a chance of mattering. And it's heavily hidden-information - defining features like moveset aren't revealed. Meanwhile, the OpenAI Dota restrictions are heavily centered on removing hidden information (invisibility, wards) and unexpected state changes (summons, quelling blade, infused raindrop).

I expect Pokemon would be more tractable on these issues because the hidden information is usually discrete. (Think "does he have Protect" as opposed to "is he standing invisible on this pixel?") But they're still major stumbling blocks, especially with randomness that massively expands the branching factor of each interaction. A given Pokemon move might look something like "if Ferrothorn uses Leech Seed, will it hit, and if so will he switch out, and if so will he go to Kartana, and if he does will it Swords Dance or does it have Choice Band or does it have Fightinium Z, or will he go to Koko, and if so does it have HP Fire or is it a bluff?" Everything there past "use this move" is laboring under a high branching factor with high randomness.

I don't think it'd be impossible to do fairly well on the Pokemon Showdown ladder with a medium amount of advance work; an AI can run a damage calculator and just assume every enemy has one of the recommended movesets from the wiki, and be assigned a viable team with relatively low variance and branching. But if you take away any of that hand curation, I expect things would go downhill pretty fast. And if you take it out of Showdown premades into a format where the enemy lineup isn't known in advance, I'd expect the now-intractable branching factor to lead to very poor performance with incredibly slow progress.

It'd be a damn interesting experiment, though.
FBI vs. Facebook Messenger: What’s at Stake?
The students can't buy coffee from that joint even if they want to: Their money's no good, they only take data. Wow.
I would venture to guess they are problem cars. It is more expensive in many cases to diag a new car than just to roll another off the line and reuse the known good parts when convenient. This is not ususual for any carmaker. While I harbor major moral issues with Tsla for their buisness practices, this seems like nit picking by shorts.
I think auditing needs to be part of it too. Otherwise what's to stop companies from just never disclosing data loss? The way I understand it, right now companies intentionally don't look for data breaches so they can claim ignorance if anything comes to light.
What really made computers click to me was reading a book that had the premise: "learn just enough assembly to be able to implement C features by hand; we'll show you how". Sadly, I don't remember the title.

Another revelation much later on, was, as discussed here, the realisation that C is indeed defined over an abstract machine. I think much of those realisations were because of reading about how crazy compiler optimizations can be and how UB can _actually_ do anything.
> You're talking about strings here, right? This is not true in all languages, but certainly is for C :)

It costs O(1) in memory to delimit strings with a null terminator and O(n) in time to execute strnlen(), right? It's not free. Though, if you're lucky your string is in rodata and the compiler can calculate the sizeof() in advance, this is very-nearly-free.

EDIT: misunderstanding, disregard
Highly recommend you check out more of Scott's blog posts, they are almost always thought-provoking and insightful.
Now if only they'd shutdown WaPo.
> dedicated devops.

I have dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me.
There is a limit though. By the time you get to the point where you can store more high-definition movies than you can possibly watch in a lifetime you have definitely passed the point of diminishing returns. And with non-volatile storage, we're pretty much already there.
> their legal duty is to maximize profits

I am not nit-picking, asking in good faith: is that enacted into a law ? Or is that part of a contract between shareholders and the board of executives ?

I have heard about that walmart competitor run like a family business and that gives every employees a voice (a cooperative ?).
Risky. If you ever run for political office the media will find out how much alcohol you REALLY drank at university.
> "I said Thoughtcrime according to Minister of Truth and PC Thought Police."

Judging by the reaction, he's not wrong (and given a similar reaction to Damore's memo, which was written in a much "nicer" style, this statement wasn't the cause of the reaction - i.e. it's not a self-fulfilling prophecy).
Well, sure, but most engineers don't regularly submit patent challenges. This engineer is not typical.
Don't mix common sense and internet.