skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Posting identifiable information on the internet should never be done. Perhaps middle schools and high schools need to teach kids about the dangers of the internet.
Ethereum is Turing-complete. Bitcoin is not. Many more differences among the cryptos, including governance, privacy, etc.
I regard public transportation much in the same way people regard piracy. It’s a distribution, not a cost problem.

If taking the bus is a major pain then people will always opt for the easier method. And in most of our country outside urban centers, it’s a huge, time consuming pain.
Oldest evidence for animals found
I'm not sure how I feel about this.

On the one hand I think its great that the humanities are getting increased support in general, and a sort of "upgrade" with more focus on integrating more statistical and analysis techniques / technologies.

But on the downside this seems to only fuel the hype bubble around "AI". I'd rather see existing departments and courses get updated with the technologies and techniques they are trying to integrate rather than a new "College of AI".
Technically not a tech talk but since it was at Talks at Google, this one: Frank Abagnale: "Catch Me If You Can" | Talks at Google - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMydMDi3rI
I wrote something that will get you the python interpreter stack from any running cpython process : https://github.com/benfred/py-spy/ , and rbspy can do the same for ruby https://github.com/rbspy/rbspy
Compared to what?

Generally, the traditional university model has been adding "<insert job title> program" for a long time, whether or not they have a useful curriculum to put students through.

There are office management and msft liscencing degrees. The most popular degree (at least where I live) for both undergraduate and graduates are various generic "business degrees."

In practice, universities have curriculums for accounting, finance and ecocomics.

There is no curriculum for social media or digital growth hacking. There are job titles. There are students who want to enroll. Employers are asking for these graduates (in theory, graf salaries for these are low). Politicians are willing to fund them...

Does a bachelors of social media businessing serve a student 10, 20, 30 years later?

So, will these ml/ai these programs really produce better graduates than maths, statistics or CS programs? Dunno. I'll wager that they're a whole lot better than business stuff degrees.

I'd actually wager that MIT will put students through decent statistics classes. Hopefully they'll also have them write a decent amount of code too.
Just out of curiosity, how did you learn to code on your own and what did you build?
They've infiltrated the SWP for nearly 40 years and yet have found no evidence of the organisation itself pushing violence or other crimes.

It doesn't seem entirely out of place to keep an eye on them. It does seem a bit odd to consider there to be a need to infiltrate them continuously for ~40 years when neither your infiltration or their actions shows evidence they're a threat. You'd think after a couple of years they'd scale things back. Keep an eye, maybe check in on them if they see worrying signs.

It's the amount of resources put into tiny, mostly ineffectual, fringe groups that is most staggering. I mean, in a way these groups should be flattered that they were taken so much more seriously than their activity would suggest.
I guess people always have preferences. For example privacy, speed, decentralised vs centralised etc.

We also don't need 10 different messaging apps.
AFAIK this is how Felica works which is the system for many of the transit systems across the world as well as a payment system built into feature phone since 2005, Android since 5-6 years ago and iPhone since iPhone7 in Japan and 8 everywhere else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa

I don't know for a fact that it works without a DB but I do know that they exist in places that don't seem to access to a DB and they work instantly (no long pause like credit cards).
It doesn't require comparing one's own intelligence to those guys. One can pick any number of Warren Buffetts who think cryptocurrencies are not good investments. Even though I think Buffett's at least partially wrong on this subject, in a vacuum I'd trust him over all the guys you named combined. But that's just personal preference.

(I have no idea what 'HR' or 'LF' are.)
I doubt it. There is nothing to implode. Most of the activity in the "industry" is shuffling around tokens between the various blockchains as their respective cheerleaders hype their chosen coin and spread FUD about competing ones. All of the "real" economic activity surrounding cryptocurrencies (e.g. darknet commerce) will continue regardless of the price since darknet prices are pegged against the value of government currency anyway. The cryptocurrency world will continue to churn with activity indefinitely because creating the appearance of activity is what the industry does
Two points of clarification (for other readers):

1. Combat 18 is a neo-Nazi terrorist organization associated with several murders, not a left-wing political campaigning group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_18

2. Undercover Police officers in related animal rights groups (the ALF, rather than SHAC) have been identified as suspects in fire-bombings, and accused of perjury during trials for terrorism offenses, for which those groups were blamed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lambert_(undercover_police...

... It's hard to know how much of the animal rights movement's reputation for terrorism was based on their actual actions rather than police agent provocateurs, because police cover-ups are still on-going. And this point also applies to SHAC: we know about the police undercover agents who have been exposed, but by definition we don't know about the ones whose identities remain secret — in particular, whether the Met/ACPO infiltrated SHAC and actively incited their more outrageous actions, as they did with other groups.
Two anti-crypto stories on the same day?

"Blockchain isn't about democracy and decentralisation – it's about greed "

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219256

I'm not a fan of cryptos, but it's fascinating how so much of the media ( even in different countries ) push the same narrative in almost a coordinated fashion.
This is a very well written and formatted article... I found it easy to read!
"...AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough..."

Its ultimate subject is how to make machines think as well as brains think. Arguably, brains are the thing that distinguish homo sapiens from other animals, and we don't know how brains can be engineered or how such devices can be made efficient and accurate.

If you conceptualize that math/engineering/biology/philosophy question holistically, it is definitely worth an independent college.
Scooter companies may have found a loophole in cities' limitations
How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language
German Techno Trance stations?
Hey, I don't disagree completely, but it's hard to decide how to answer this
kind of question. In short, we are trying to figure out a way to identify a
class of stories, based on a single example and on the observation that it has
some common elements with other stories we happen to know. The difficulty is
in the fact that there are many such "common elements" we might decide to
focus on, or ignore, and each set thereof can substantially change the stories
we identify as "similar to" our single example, the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

So, for instance, we could broaden the description to include any story of
losing control over one's, or someone else's creation- therefore "covering"
stories as diverse as the legend of Icarus, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and of
course the stories of Sañjīva, Phaethon and Abhimanyu. We might focus on the
moral dimension of the story, which draws more stark parallels to the story of
Sañjīva but also King Midas. We might choose to stay as close as possible to
the them of "magical automation" in which case, we 'll only include stories
like the original tale in Lucian's work, the Sorcerer's Apprentice many
versions, and the story of the Golem of Prague, all of which include something
like the Paperclip Optimiser AGI. And so on.

I guess now I make it sound like navel-gazing, but this is actually a
legitimate problem with very real applications. For example imagine trying to
organise the stories I list above, plus who knows how many others, in
appropriate categories _automatically_ based on their narrative
characteristics. It's probably impossible to do that sort of thing with
current NLP techniques, or at least to do it in a way that would satisfy a
majority of human classifiers. Not to mention, the problem of choosing what
part of a _story_ (as opposed to what portions of _text_) to attend to when
categorising a document is also not something we can currently solve
convincingly.

So it's an ill-defined, hard, classification problem. Perfect subject for a
machine learning paper :)
I meant a number of second layer solutions, but lightning is one of the best examples right now.

Check this visualisation for a current view of the size of the network: https://www.easyzoom.com/image/126770
> out yourself as biased garbage?

Biased based on your opinion.

I personally think this is a very big deal and I don't see anything wrong in that sentence. If you think Google is innocent, just look at the facts.

1) They had an internal memo discouraging public disclosure.
2) They only came clean with the leak after WSJ reached out for comment before the publication of a story.
3) They buried the "leak" announcement in a gigantic blog post. The blog post was meant to announce a new project, but about halfway through the middle they disclosed a data-leaking bug. I'd say the tone of the article is in response to Google's observed and recorded actions.

Yeah, I'd say the article and letter's tone is just about right.
Google defines inflation as: “a general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money“.

Let’s take a step back and remember how Bitcoin’s purchasing power has lost nearly $15,000 since its all-time high. So yes, he does need to.
I’m pretty neutral on Chomsky’s politics. I’m only pointing out that he is controversial as any good liberal arts professor should be.

That being said, his LAD and UG theories have mostly not been useful, as we’ve seen to have done better with....ML (ironically enough).
Messenger systems compared by security, privacy, compatibility, and features
According to the finance industry and finance media, the cryptocurrency industry, and cryptocurrencies in particular, have been on the brink of collapse since 2008, when Bitcoin first surfaced and was worth $0.

I guess they're going all-in on the whole 'stopped-clock' prediction strategy, no?
Smart Bundling: Serving Legacy Code Only to Legacy Browsers
I agree Bloomberg knows a lot about it, but the financial industry as a whole would rather Bitcoin die because its a threat to their banking monopoly. Go read the Satoshi whitepaper. The recent buy-in from bloomberg and Goldman et al is just a "cant beat 'em, join 'em" strategy.
Devcon 3 was in Nov 17 when Ethereum had run up from approx $9 to $300 over the past year and launched a wave of 10x ing ICOs so you can understand them being a bit puffed up.

Now that Ethereum is down from $1300 to $200 and most of the ICOs have crashed or run off with the money I think you will have less of that problem.

By the way you can see all 4 days of devcon3 on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=devcon3+day+str...
Neural networks are all "nonlinear function approximation". Last I checked, the state-of-the-art in all the fields you mention is some variation of deep neural network.

Not to be despicable. On the contrary, function approximation is a very rich and deep topic.
LinkedIn. Cloudflare. Akamai. Fastly. the CDNs can't enable webs who dont sign a consent. But.. you kinda need to look a bit harder.
He is still an emeritus professor at MIT.
Another economic downturn is just a matter of time
In mathematics, good and consistent notation does help learning stuff; but I noticed that it can also have some sort of "parasitic" effect and interfere with the true understanding of things, and so I find it useful to try and see if I can understand something given a less elaborate notation (or without one at all).

In general, one has to remember that mathematical notation was invented to make calculations (on paper) more efficient and not with the goal of making it easier to understand things.
This is literally the definition of victim blaming.
You might even say that they're being racist. Pre-judging the internal motivations and thoughts of some people based on their skin color.
Studies have actually shown that electric cars produce more than 90% as much particulate-matter air pollution as fossil fuel cars.

The reason for this is two-fold:
1. Modern gasoline cars produce very clean exhaust.
2. Most of the particulate pollution comes from wear on tires, brake and the road surface. And electric cars, being heavier than average, produce more wear on tires and road surface.

Electrification is part of the puzzle, but we also need to get people out of giant, heavy vehicles into right-sized vehicles for their trip. (And the majority of trips are less than 5 miles!)

--

Edit for the people asking for sources:

The lit review suggesting EVs have >90% as much particulate emissions as internal-combustion: http://www.soliftec.com/NonExhaust%20PMs.pdf

Another review that acknowledges these numbers vary depending on rainy vs dry climate, use of snow tires, etc...

https://www.kau.edu.sa/Files/188/Researches/65862_37290.pdf
On the one hand it's interesting to see the machines get hacked. On the other hand I love living in a country where the machines generally don't get hacked or vandalized because it means we get to have the convenience of more machines.
"... Instagram enables easy sign up via just an email address"

Is the "easy sign up" such an important selling point, that anything more complicated drives away users?

I'm wondering how could be possible to avoid hoarding burner accounts just for the sake of trolling, while at the same time not requiring 1Billion people to send in scans of their ID to prove their identity.

Not to mention that even requiring ID for proving identity, one can still troll and harass as long as it's not caught on the fact
I try not to be snarky, but only because it invites downvotes. Your "pity" comment came across as sententious.

What do you mean by "that kind of thing"? Searching for " conversation with Daniel dennett" returns more appearances, on podcasts, with Dawkins, with W.V.O. Quine, with Sam Harris. Dennett is a big self-promoter even by the standards of academic celebrities.

Dennett and Pinker are both massively overrated and past their sell-by dates IMO. But instead of having a substantive discussion that might enrich this thread you seem to be intent on low-effort idle speculation about what kinds of public appearance Dennett might or might not be keen on. It is exasperating.
Yes a nationstate does protect the value of it's money with a standing army but to imply the purpose is to protect the currency is false. The armed forces and stability of the country bring about the value of the currency, not the other way around.
> 1) CMU establishing a 'department' of AI (where MIT had merely an AI track within the CS program)

CMU's Machine Learning Department was founded in 2006, before the current AI hype cycle started. If this is MIT's response to a 'department' of AI, then MIT has been asleep for >10 years.

Perhaps you mean CMU's new undergraduate AI degree. But that is not a new department. It's merely a separate major within the existing school. And not really comparable to MIT's recent announcement, which is much more focused on research than new undergraduate majors.

> Yet I can't imagine why an entire 'college' of AI is needed. AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school.

The article discusses this point.

Let's start from the premise that MIT is going to focus a lot its hiring efforts on "Computational X" for all X in which it hires. There are basically three advantages to introducing a new academic unit instead of hiring Computational X people into the X department:

1. Collaboration

2. The "X" department might be ossified and unwelcoming to "Computational X". So from a P&T incentive structure perspective, starting a new department/college can make sense.

3. Naming rights => $$$

> Each of this college's AI degrees will span distinct problem or solution spaces? Not likely.

They're hiring 50 faculty, and half those lines will be dedicated to non computer scientists. That's larger than many R1 CS departments. So, they're certainly hiring enough manpower to run several innovative educational programs.

This also explains why it's a college instead of a department. Hiring historians, philosophers, MD/PhDs, biologists, engineers, and computer scientists into the any single pre-existing college would be pretty awkward.
Reminds me of Joel Spolsky’s “Marimba Phenomenon” concept. His argument is that the amount of marketing and PR you do has to stay in proportion to the amount of polish and sophistication in your product, so you don’t end up giving everyone a bad first impression that they never revise.

“The Marimba Phenomenon is very hard to avoid when you spend too much money trying to launch a new product. It’s easy to spend on marketing and PR, since that just takes cash, but it’s hard to spend on software development, because that actually takes time and talent.”

“By contrast, small companies that don’t have great marketing budgets are in a great position to launch early and often.”

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/02/massive-frontal-pr...
ServerlessTalk ep 2: ops in serverless
I fail to understand the point of your post. The author was simply sharing his personal experience on what appears to be launching his first paid app and how it allowed him to stop freelancing thanks to the profit. It isn't a "they", it's a he.
The saddest thing is that the "Classic" skin, which emulated the Windows 2000 look, and is light-years better than anything Microsoft has done since, disappeared after Windows 7. Windows is now so "advanced" that it can't even emulate how it looked 20 years ago.

I use WindowBlinds to sort of emulate the Windows 2000 look, but it still has so many of those user-hostile flat UI features which inevitably reduce your display to a mess of indistinguishable pale rectangles.
The US just bomb Muslims with drones instead, much more humane.
Fair points, but you can search/replace Chinese with American and the statements are arguably as true. From cozy relationships to telecoms, to compromising electronics for their own ends, to engaging in industrial espionage for US organizations (including against companies of allies -- the CIA and NSA are both engaged in economic espionage, and share useful information with corporate partners).

It is a bit strange seeing the US yelling the warnings about China when really they just gained a peer doing the same things.
That 20 page document is most likely needed to counter FUD on the management level, not to inform developers.
It's funny how picky and particular HN gets over the wording or sources whenever the story is about Google. In nearly every article you see comments like this upvoted to the top within 10 minutes of posting.

Any other topic or company: the wording or journalistic techniques are an unimportant aside, if they get mentioned at all.
The problem is that the US government has stated it considers Canada as the enemy.

The correct response is for Canada to remove its dependence on the US. The behavior of the current US government basically destroys their “soft power” for a very long time - who will trust treaties with the US when the next admistration can arbitrarily end them? How much of a sweet deal will countries be willing to give the US in treaties anyway?

I suspect the current behavior of the us administration is going to have very long term consequences - the biggest being a long term reduction in global influence as countries (like Canada) seek to reduce their dependence.

I say this with the assuredness of a random commenter on HN ;)
There may be survivorship bias because his slower, low-cost strategy is a good way to survive! The longer he survives, the greater chance his product takes off. If you go guns blazing, you effectively put death in the business plan and success is only a contingency.
Sure, just saying, Canada should review any orders it makes towards telecom companies (full disclosure, I started and ran a telecom company from 2001 until 2010) from entirely a Canadian perspective and not account for any input from the US; doubly so given how the US government (like it or not, Trump is their president and reflects their government internationally) has treated Canada over the last year and a half.
Why then don't you use the classic style without any initialization?
It's an arbitrary number that looks nice and can be used to generate publicity for IPv6.
A Hypothesis of Understanding Human Intelligence Through Quantum Cognition
Many programmers are still committed to manual formatting, or fixed width fonts would have been obsolete already.
Not sure where you are going with this, but yeah, Bitcoin does not have a standing army. It secures itself from attack by proof of work.
The top 5 most referenced tech talks on HN are:

- Douglas Engelbart - The Mother of All Demos

- Bryan Cantrill - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos

- Guy Steele - Growing a Language

- David Heinemeier Hansson - Startup School 08

- Rich Hickey - Hammock Driven Development

The top 50 are listed at https://techyaks.com which I recently updated with a ranking "techyaks score" that ranks talks (first) by HN reference count.
We never intended to come our was user experience experts - I have made a repo; rather a blog to add articles created by the actual 'experts' so enthusiast like ourselves can share and learn.

But we are just starting - every feedback will be taken into consideration to further improve the product. This is just the beginning.
Orwell's dystopia is more palatable than Huxley's we are to blame in Huxley's version.

We become Brave New World by getting exactly what we ask for: entertainment, leisure, sex, escape/drugs, distraction.

Compare that to 1984, where the dystopia is imposed on society from above, by a bureaucratic Party.

People (en masse) are not introspective or forward-thinking. Of course we prefer to believe we're living in a dystopia forced upon us unwillingly, rather than one of our own making, brought on by our own inability to see the consequences of our own mass desires taken to their current extreme. We have no one to blame except ourselves.
You're grossly underestimating how dedicated and adept some people are at finding PII given even minute details [1]. The only real way to avoid sharing PII is to stay off the internet entirely.

And even then, pandora's box has already been opened. Your PII is available even if you haven't explicitly chosen to share it [2].

1: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/4chan-shia-labeouf-secret-l...

2: Equifax.
People on social networks who talk about US politics, to a foreigner, are a complete shitshow. Like monkeys in a zoo hurling turds at each other. You just have to see the responses to any tweet by Trump or Clinton to see that. I wonder if this new or if this was always the level of politics debate.