skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Several people started one as a "first Pony project". I'm not aware of anyone completing one.

Pony is very "roll your own libraries" or "wrap a c library" at this point in time. Still pre-1.0.

Lots of chance for folks to contribute and make there mark is the optimistic way I look at it. Pessimistic view is "not many libraries".
That logic should also work in reverse: If high-skill talent is rare their wages should rise. I do not see that happening. Well, at least not here in Germany. Industry is crying about a skill shortage but the corresponding wages are stagnant.

My theory is that wages are not that much about demand and supply of skill or labor. More evidence is that wages differ so much regionally. A Silicon Valley software engineer is paid more than a Montana software engineer even if skills are equal. The companies are willing to pay the premium so their engineers are close to the headquarter. The startups need to be close to the venture capital, but I still wonder why the big companies stay there. Why don't Google and Apple move away?
This Silicon Valley morality tale still has life! It's time for the WSJ to get John Carreyrou back on the story.
> "Technology companies need to diversify their hiring practices to include more people from backgrounds in philosophy and psychology if they want to tackle the problem of misinformation online, the head of one of the biggest internet charities has warned."

If it's misinformation, shouldn't intelligent people of any background be able to identify and flag it?

> "we are intentionally building the next generation of technologists who have not even the framework or the education or vocabulary to think about the relationship of Stem to society or humans or life."

Oh. Because it's not about truth or critical thinking but frameworks and vocabulary.
This will be exciting. His book "on intelligence" was my favorite book on how the brain works nuerally and how that relates to computers. Much better than Ray kurzweils books in my opinion.
This happens in the back of cabs in a lot of places I seem to remember and it’s incredibly difficult to switch off... we essentially are heading for some super weird dystopian sci-fi film right now. It’s terrifying.
Nobel Minds 2017 [video]
The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Kavanaugh were deliberately structured to give the appearance of "he-said-she-said."

Senator Grassley prevented both sides from presenting witnesses that would have corroborated their testimony.

The GOP members of the committee unanimously voted down a motion to subpoena Mark Judge[1].

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/28/republican-senators-vote-dow...
We have to decide as a society to not support platforms or organizations who attempt to extract all possible value. This of course creates opportunity for competition, however with perhaps more difficulty once an incumbent has reached large economies of scale and has strong network effects.
> In general though ad tech is so primitive it is embarrassing

It's not that it's primitive, it's that it's still run by humans. At least from what I saw while working in ad tech, targeting is very much a manual process. There's no algorithm deciding that you might be interested in magic crystals, there's a magic crystal seller targeting their ads at people in whatever demographic you're in. They decided that (for example) people ages 25-34, in certain income brackets, who are interested in fitness might also be interested in crystals, and Facebook was happy to take their $0.001/impression in exchange. To my knowledge most ads aren't targeted with a scheme like "hey targeting server, figure out who might like this kind of ad", or at least they weren't as of this time last year when I couldn't take working in the industry anymore.
> To improve workers’ wages across the board, the report calls for local and state government to support workers’ rights to organize, adopt better labor standards for subcontracted workers, increase taxes on corporate headquarters and provide affordable housing.

Nobody claims the solution is CEO-mandated "artificial" wage inflation, the report emphasizes the need for strong workers unions that can demand more equitable pay.

The problem is that the unionizing workforce needs to have some basic level of skill or expertise with machinery or the business process that isn't easily replaceable. That and they need to be legal citizens, which isn't always a given in agriculture/food services/landscaping jobs. And provide something that a team in India/Ukraine can't.

We are "here" (large and growing inequality) because our educational system is failing to emphasize and produce the necessary amount of high skilled workers that can replenish the middle class through the value of their skilled labor.

But more fundamentally we are here because the pace of innovation in technology is slowing to a crawl, there are hardly any new machines being invented in silicon valley that take new skills to operate and generate real returns to raise the average American's standard of living. Most of what I observe from startups is either garbage powered by the ad economy, solutions looking for a problem, or get-rich blockchain/AI/ML get-rich-quick schemes looking for an easy VC buck.
Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life (2015)
Paraphrased from the article: "Yes, but we don't recommend it."
Both..?
The author's stated stance is that you can, but usually shouldn't.

Personally, I think to myself before using regexes to parse HTML:

1. Am extracting more than the contents of a single element?

2. Is the input HTML prone to change?

3. Will there be issues if the parsing completely fails?

4. Do I plan to use this code for more than a few months?

If the answer to any of the questions is "Yes", then don't use a regex :)
The world simply doesn't work the way of naive economic theories.

One solution, that was common until neoliberalism became the defacto in the western world, was high taxes for the rich.

Neoliberalism has been an obvious bust, growth is anemic, wealth distribution is becoming civil-war causing bad, political corruption rampant, but because no-one else has a meaningful alternative we're all still stuck in this 'the rich getting richer means we all will' fallacy.

You have a nice story, but it's simply not true.
While it may be a problem that people „unthinkingly do what they are told to do“, I don‘t think requiring engineers to take an ethics class will fix that.

What it does is give people the tools to properly articulate thoughts they are already having. It won‘t make someone an activist who just doesn‘t care.
I assume you are from EU state. GDPR is valid only for EU citizens no matter where their data are around the world.
If you are company (no mater EU or no-EU) and you have personal data breach you should report it to your local regulator in 72 hours or you risk 2mln euro or 4% from the turnover fine.
I think one reason Google+ to be closed is they didn't report personal data breach so have to pay 4% of whole turnover of Alphabet which could be billions.
In order to be compliant with GDPR companies have to encrypt, mask and pseudo-randomize personal data. This isn't possible even for big companies to be done on time. And on top of this you should have rigorous incident management process so not missing 72 hours deadline.
I can tell you that even big companies are not ready.
Definitely agree that they need to rethink it. Look at their community center, how many hours has Support spent on doing this process manually, over and over again, in the last year alone?

https://community.spotify.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/messa...
Amazon's biggest R&D team of AI / facial recognition engineers is based in Ukraine. They make less than minimum wage in San Francisco. The point is capitalism focuses on keeping costs down over paying people what they are worth, regardless of their country or zip code.
It also (now) can verify that the @my_cool_username@mastodon.social is the same person/group as runs my_cool_web.site, by using a rel=me link on my_cool_web.site. So it ties verification to DNS, which is centralized enough to serve for that kind of verification. You can also prove that you hold both a mastodon identity and an identity on another social network, if the other social network lets you post rel=me links in your profile.
Vanilla -- ‘hide Mac menu bar icons’ (https://matthewpalmer.net/vanilla/)

Clocker -- ‘Menubar World Clock’
he spreadsheet wasn't being used to stop men from getting jobs

The linked article on Scribd says that that was the purpose of the list.

a time of vigorous anti-union activism

"They're not union members, this is, umm, some other list" won't fly in front of any judge.

----

I can't reply because I'm "posting too fast" so here is my reply here:

I'm familiar with the case. And so there is no doubt: those who have actually committed crimes mentioned on the spreadsheet should be in jail. But anonymous blacklists are not the way to get justice for anyone, they are too open to misuse.
I never understood those. Why almost everyone has an ad on their license plate frames?

One explanation I heard is that companies give them for free, so most people are happy to take them and don't bother with removing the ad.
Weird, literally used this in a source for a commment today.
You'd have to completely reframe the penalty for crimes to be percentage based instead of fixed amounts. Even when caught the penalties are often so low that they don't matter, so white collar criminals go right back to it. When you can routinely make $10 million doing something a $1 million fine the one time you get caught just isn't a big deal.

The cost-benefit analysis almost always favors the criminal for white collar crimes (or any non-violent crime, really) when you have money. If I had $100m+ I wouldn't really pay attention to the law either.
How much battery life are you willing to pay for that?
And, as I understood it, he was able to read arbitrary emails sent to support@ by getting access to their ticketing system instances just like he got access to Slack.

He doesn't say so explicitly, but presumably he did the same thing with ZenDesk as he did with Slack - he signed up for ZenDesk with support@target-company.com and then the target company's service with, say, no-reply@zendesk.com. And then once he had access to their ZenDesk instance he could read all emails sent to support@target-company.com, which opened up all kinds of doors.
Trees Could Change the Climate More Than Scientists Thought
That is very odd. Why limit that at all?
I have been following Jeff's work since 2005, only time will tell if his work will bear fruition. But science will be immensely grateful to Jeff for igniting the passions of several AI researchers during the deepest and darkest of AI winters (mid-2000), I was one of them and pursued research at MIT.
Okay ... but who is "they"? A few individual, grey-haired heads, filled with the history of similar fiascos, did think of consequences:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_Monetary_Union

But the levers of political power were, then as now, in hands guided not by stale history, but by fresh opportunity for self-advancement.
> > You add more money to the system and where does it go?

> Probably from rich person to rich person, but there's the hope tax money goes to actual services. At worst we're in the same position.

no, the worst case is that capital was misallocated, and growth that could've happened, didn't.

all future humans are then harmed.
Because not showing you ads would be "leaving money on the table" and that just won't do.

If not showing ads wasn't part of the deal, ads will be shown. If not harvesting your personal data wasn't part of the deal, personal data will be harvested.

That you paid money is irrelevant.
In the Ferrari case, you just got one huge expensive advertisement of the company. Just because you are not famous. If you'd be famous, then the Ferrari would pay you for wearing their logo. If you are not, you have to pay them lots of money for the same.
"That's just like, your opinion, man"
absolutely. the problem is there are cheaper engineers abroad and tech CEO's only care about their personal wealth, not those of their employees.
I had no idea what Helicobacter pylori was. It's a bacteria that, apparently, lives in the digestive tract of half the world's population.[1]

[1] http://www.cancer.ca/en/prevention-and-screening/reduce-canc...
This is true. The performing engineers are underpaid; the underperforming ones should be trained or fired.
If you need more info on GDPR feel free to contact me.
This seems to be article that gives more information:
A Theory of How Columns in the Neocortex Enable Learning the Structure of the World:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5661005/

Excerpt:
A simple thought experiment may be useful to understand our model. Imagine you reach your hand into a black box and try to determine what object is in the box, say a coffee cup. Using only one finger it is unlikely you could identify the object with a single touch. However, after making one contact with the cup, you move your finger and touch another location, and then another. After a few touches, you identify the object as a coffee cup. Recognizing the cup requires more than just the tactile sensation from the finger, the brain must also integrate knowledge of how the finger is moving, and hence where it is relative to the cup. Once you recognize the cup, each additional movement of the finger generates a prediction of where the finger will be on the cup after the movement, and what the finger will feel when it arrives at the new location. This is the first problem we wanted to address, how a small sensory array (e.g., the tip of a finger) can learn a predictive model of three dimensional objects by integrating sensation and movement-derived location information.
And I’ve been running an irc network myself for more than half that. It’s hard to beat the effective simplicity even if it’s janky to use and limited in functionality.

That said I wish IRCv3 was coming sooner. The ability to replay messages and handle TCP connection loss somewhat grafefully has an immesurable appeal; because despite how fast the internet gets; it never seems to get more reliable for individual long lived connections.

Edit: shameless self promotion if you want to use my network for your own needs or meet my 350+ friends then point your favourite irc client to irc.drk.sc/+6697 (ssl-only)
Many of the people who go into STEM do so because they want to deal with the task put in front of them without it being complicated. They don't want to deal with a bunch of icky emotions, and they don't want to trip themselves up asking murky existential questions about why they're doing what they do. This is a condition of temperament, you can run them through a gristle mill of humanities classes, it doesn't mean they'll internalize it if it isn't what they're inclined towards. You can lead a horse to knowledge, but you can't make it think.
"If someone believe that something as easy to replicate like a stick should make him extremely rich, then he is going to have to face reality."

Tell that to those who recycled 3rd grade, sometimes even used, ball bearings to build and sell a shitload of fidget spinners just a few years ago. We can't know how much people is willing to spend on a product if it hits the right string in their brains.
I completely recognize myself in this post, when it stated that hosters will provide clients the last version for new hosting and change version when asked.

But if you think that explaining clients that there are new versions and they should upgrade works, think again !

I still got 6 or 7 websites I’m hosting with PHP5.2 ! And I know they won’t work as it if I migrate them on 7.x.

For the last 2 years I’m pushing them to update the code. But they won’t, as it’s websites done by agencies that don’t exists anymore, and it has suits them for years so why change ?

So what do I do ? I can’t shut them (as they sure won’t like it and might send their lawyers after me). I can’t refuse to host them (as they are already clients and, in France, it’s difficult by law to refuse to sell to someone).

Of course my hosting contracts should have been better 18 years ago and it’s mostly the fault of the young me.

But here I am. My best solution would be to make the changes by myself under their validation. And no one will pay me for that.
If I was an architect, I'd be headed to Florida first to survey the damaged and undamaged and see what design elements worked and what failed. Then hang out my shingle to offer this expertise for the rebuild.
It'll probably only expand to the UV side of things, the lens doesn't really filter out IR at all and you can see some of it already without any changes to your eyes. But your eye isn't very sensitive to it, so you have to block out all other light to be able to see anything.

edit: quick way to do this https://www.wikihow.com/Build-Near-Infrared-Goggles
And if you pay each person for their marginal impact on revenue, many business models wouldn't work. E.g. the engineer can only drive another $1m+ because marketing and product management and support staff and everyone else are also doing their jobs. If you pay for marginal impact, you'd have to give the same dollar to multiple employees.
I've seen your response to this effect in another branch of this thread. Your suggestions there seemed pretty half-baked and none of them seemed like they would solve any real extant problem.
Essays reveal Stephen Hawking predicted race of 'superhumans'
In a nutshell: Because they make more money that way.
Why is anyone taking the veto diet seriously?
I was referring to the content of the notification dialog.
> At ~current funding levels, the IRS brings in ~$3 for every $1 spent on it. The federal government could bring in more tax dollars just by funding the IRS at a higher level; it doesn't, for reasons.

Here are some of those reasons.

$3 for every $1 is an extremely misleading way of putting it, as though the IRS is a business and everything is good as long as it's turning a profit. A better way of putting it is that collecting taxes through enforcement has ~33% overhead, which is high. By comparison, the overhead of normal IRS tax collection is a fraction of a percent.

It also only accounts for the government's side of the expense, not the cost (and stress) imposed on innocent taxpayers who get audited to no avail in order to catch the smaller number of people who were actually committing tax fraud, and who are almost always small business owners because they're the ones with unusual tax returns. So the actual cost is even higher and is paid by a group of innocent people who create a disproportionately large amount of economic value while being at high risk of becoming unviable when you impose large surprise costs and time commitments on them like that.

The IRS also prioritizes its enforcement to maximize effectiveness, which means they're already taking the low hanging fruit and increased enforcement would be at the margin rather than at the existing average. For the average to be at parity you would need to be doing a lot of audits that cost more than the revenue they generate in order to cancel out the revenue gained from the net-positive enforcement that is already occurring.

It's possible that we could actually raise government income by doing less enforcement, because $3 is the average. It would be a net gain to eliminate the ones where we're spending $1 to raise $.50 (or $0) as long as we keep the ones where we spend $1 to raise $20.
We have a systemic problem though. This kind of sociopathy is pretty much legitimized, and being specialized in it is treated as respectable occupation.
> The extent to which it is hard to find an airline with a very simple pricing structure testifies to the economic infeasibility of these structures

Perhaps. As I've said elsewhere, another explanation is that it's easier to collude than compete, especially in markets with entry-barrier-induced low participant counts.

The "it came to be this way therefore the market has revealed the optimum" claim misses frequent realities of limited market control/visibility, greed/laziness (i.e. collusion), and intermediate or catch-up evolutionary behavior (i.e. it's quite hard, absent lots of historical evidence often lacking in recent markets, to tell whether something represents a stabilizing optimum or a state of flux as emergent behaviors pursue changing realities, and there are many reasons to presume the latter).
I do like this all encompassing approach and was a fan of his book "On Intelligence"

In computer hardware and software terms: we don't necessarily need to clone an x86 CPU, glue and I/O chips, and run an actual copy of firmware, bootloader, and Windows. If we understood just one of these, how the x86-like CPU works, and could implement a functional simulator that works similarly enough that would be extraordinarily useful. ANNs are a primordial stab at this.

But this article is incredibly light on detail. I hope he does something like a follow up book to explain what he has learned in the time since.
What the Tech? You can make some extra cash online
The premise of this research, that the cortex is broken up into discontinuous “columns”, is only partly true. If you record several neurons that are lined up one on top of another in different layers of the cortex, they will usually respond to the same stimulus or activity: for example, responding to touch on the same finger.

But the word “column” implies discontinuous modules. You can actually observe this in sensory cortex of mice and rats, where each whisker has a 1-1 relationship with a “column” of neurons that primarily respond to that whisker. This observation is what originally led neuroscientists to propose the concept of the column as a fundamental unit of organization of the cortex.

But it turned out that lots of other brain regions don’t have this kind of discontinuous organization. Neuroscientists still use the term “cortical column” but they’re really just referring to the fact that vertically aligned neurons seem to be closely connected.

When the Numenta people talk about “cortical columns” they seem to be describing the original idea of cortical columns that didn’t pan out. It’s really weird.
And don't have kids. Am I supposed to subject my children to hardship, or quite literally put them at increased risk (less financial buffer, possibly worse Healthcare) during formative years because I wanted a different type of job? A big part of being a parent is being around, and making sure you know what's going on. It's not impossible to do while trying to make a startup work, but let's not act like it's so simple to make changes for everyone, and it's just a matter of being willing to tough it out yourself.
Software Engineering has only been ABET accredited for a few years and there are currently only 21 programs nationwide: https://www.softwareengineerinsider.com/articles/abet-accred...

We've applied the title "engineer" to many, many people who haven't been through a formal engineering program, accredited or not.

* My undergrad is one of those 21 but I went through as EE, not SE.
Yep. I used to spend most of my time in IRC chatrooms as a kid. Went back to a few recently and a lot of my old buddies were still there.

I always have a Weechat session running on my machine these days. IRC may not be the best tech on the scene, but I love the communities that have sprung up in the IRC space.
This isn't going to be popular, but the "general idea" of what could be fair and "the specific application" will never be on the same side.

Why? On one hand - I love the general idea that everyone should start on the same playing field.

On the other hand - My work ethic should infact give my children a major advantage.

I know it's not PC to say that, but most fathers would like to "give an advantage" to their children. It's baked in to our basic psychology.

Maybe the question is "who decides" and then "who enforces" fair?
The problem with that reasoning is: whose belief system? Where do you come up with a prior that everyone agrees with?