skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems likely that soldiers will still be fighting on each side for quite a while and moreover, it is certain that there will be civilian casualties aside from the military casualties on at least the losing side.

Think of it this way - war isn't a game. Each side has a strong incentive to make the other side fear to go to war with it. Killing people is a necessary part of this. The progression of technology has generally resulted in an advantage for the attacker over the defender. So two armies in conflict aren't going work by "may the best robot win while we humans watch" Rather, it seems much more likely a robot war of the future would be something "my swarm of death bots kills your people while your swarm kills mine".
I should've probably elaborate on my comment cause of course people will reflexively downvote it, but proxy wars, smaller armies, and now AI driven conflicts are the natural evolution of warfare.

We went from slaughter of millions to hanful of extremely professional soldiers to, eventually fight of machines. (MGS4 depicted it in striking details years ago).
This makes sense. I wonder why we dont hear more people talk about this or anayze businesses this way.

Sounds like it might even be interesting to the layperson.
I feel it is a bit contrived, the plot is

"AAAAaaaaaah! here is this completely benign part of the software development cycle that we are dramatizing because the sky is falling and our company won't survive!!!!!"

Every episode
Well, it's 1 syllable instead of 6.
Experienced teachers in some districts make 6 figures in the Bay Area.
When you send your own people to war there is a cost to society and to ones conscious. Society can also challenge that cost and it may be enough to stop or prevent an unjust war. What happens when we can wage war with impunity? When there no costs? As bad as war is, it may even be worse.
Only a few thousand people clicked through consent pages to share data specifically with the Cambridge professor who shared data with Cambridge Analytica. Facebook's APIs allowed that professor to then get data about those users' friends, who never made an agreement with that professor. Facebook has since shut down that API. https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/
You can 9ffer the same features at a higher price and succeed. It's a big big world out there.
All the legislation and public spending won't make a jot of difference to the state of the housing market whilst one assumption goes unchallenged - that it's ok for one class to "make money" out of speculative property investments whilst the rest of society has to spend most of it's meagre income on extortionate rents. Serious regulation of the housing market is the only way forward.
Open source collaboration is usually bankrolled by something else. E.g. the top two corporate contributors to the Linux kernel each contribute more than all the independent contibutors together. Sometimes the something else is benign (Redhat funds Linux development by selling support), sometimes not (Google funds Blink development through advertising).[1] Trade secrets wouldn’t work for a video codec. Which leaves academic research, which is bankrolled by taxes and tuition. Should tax dollars be used to subsidize development of consumer products primarily used for entertainment? I think the 20 year monopoly is relatively innocuous in comparison, or at least the alternatives are not obviously less problematic.

[1] 802.11fb, now with opposition research acquisition at the MAC layer!
Has SuSE turned these off, or are they going to tell you "you shouldn't have used this feature" when you go for support?
That semi-military approach is already happening https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2016/f...
Not sure about the claim that Adani had halted opening new coal mines. They still seem intent on the Carmichael mine despite the shrinking pool of potential borrowers.

Most of it seems a reasonable evaluation, but the timing may be optimistic.
I agree with your point but find that “oops we built a better world” take really off putting.

The “oops” there is “society collapses and is reorganized” and the collapse and reorganization of society is the exact thing we’re trying to avoid.
That makes sense but is hydrogel rejection really a thing? I thought hydrogels were already safe from rejection because they don’t contain anything the immune system sees as a threat. Same goes for collagen, no?
if only one side has access to automated weaponry, which is easy to imagine in our current environment of asymmetric warfare the barrier to use lethal force may rapidly drop.

We already see this in drone warfare which is practiced in semi-legal fashion, without civil society having a clue of who is being targeted or when. We face the danger of slipping more into some sort of shadow realm where private actors and intelligence engages in war without democratic legitimacy.

Then there is the issue of the technology being abused to target vulnerable populations, like immigrant or refugee groups, again lowering the barrier of using violence or surveillance.
Well, Firefox is sensible compared to Iceweasel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_r...
I don’t think it’s beneficial for society to have standards that are covered by patents.

I agree that inventors should be compensated, but this 20y patented-standard model looks too one-sided to me.
The KLEE project[1] does something similar for general code, with symbolic variables.

[1] http://klee.github.io
Turn your Pi into a vision system
Ask HN: What could I do to improve my latest article about freelancing?
Because I think people take pause when considering sending their own countrymen to their deaths. They won't think as long or as hard if killing the enemy is simply a question of deploying robots. Think drone strikes.

Also, recent developments in machine learning have seen computer programs outperform humans on certain tasks. Granted, those tasks currently are very specific, but if we extrapolate 30 or 40 years into the future, we may have killing robots which can't possibly be defended against by people without comparable technology.

I think it's also simply a matter of imagining the particulars of a world with sophisticated killing robots. Imagine some kind of hunter drone tracking you, finding you, and dispassionately killing you. Do you want to live in that kind of world? Would you want to suffer that kind of fate?
You won't send machines to die, you send them to kill other humans.
> Statistics: regressions

vs.

> ML: supervised learners, machines

I think ML uses the term regression for the situations where the output is numeric value (as opposed to a label), and supervised learning is more than just regression. Usually regression models have mean squared error loss function, that's one way to spot them.
The case for collaborative Programming -Alan Cooper
MPEG-LA is not associated with the MPEG. It’s a company that holds patents which are crucial for implementing MPEG videos.
A well armed state sending an effecient army of machines against a less-well armed state makes for some power-problems, and it isn't machine-vs-machine. It's going to be machine-vs-people-who-can't-afford-machines.

Imagine the first Gulf-War if the USA didn't have to care about how many of their own people were dying. It makes it easier for scorched-earth policies.

... Then take one more step. Many military advances are then handed down to the services like the police.

It doesn't matter if you have the right to bear arms if the rather cheaper machines outnumber you, and can outgun you.

Governments have a serious problem with scope creep. They promise things will only ever be used for one thing, and definitely not the other thing... Until the next government takes over. Or in the case of the current US government, tomorrow.
Or rather than being trigger happy they could have higher standards for targeting than even the ICRC suggests. Leave the cook instead of shooting him as a combatant. Shoot to disable rather than kill. Use less lethal weapons even in a real war if appropriate. Deliberately take 90% casualties in order to minimise civilian or even enemy casualties.
It seems from a few comments that some people would rather US suffer than Trump be proven right.
There's a lot to the question of morality. Can an AI exercise the same moral judgement a human would make, or is it just an imperfect copy doomed to eventually commit an immoral act? I think the latter is obviously true, given that humans aren't perfectly moral decision makers, either. Is the creator of this AI responsible for the actions of their creation? And many other dilemmas and consequences that seem overwhelming to consider, regardless of your conclusion.

Also, there's the more practical worry of the Skynet scenario. Once a machine is empowered to make judgement decisions to kill humans it's a real possibility that even something as innocuous as a bug or design flaw could turn the world into a sci-fi cliche.

I don't really know where I stand honestly, but I do find the prospect paralyzing.
It's a stronger argument than I’m getting tired of...
Do you have a reference for the crypto trick you described?
What I learned (and re-learned) from working at Yelp for 3 years
This is my take on it.

A government with an AI army is free to suppress its populace.
A government with a human army may suppress its populace, but the army can refuse to do so.

Civilian control of the military, and a military that is composed of citizens (particularly in a democratic republic) may not choose to obey an order to suppress fellow citizens. An AI army would (presumably) have no conscience.
Learning to Love Robots
They are switched off. You can't use them. They patch btrfs-progs to prevent accessing those features.
The monetary costs of war will still be huge even if humans are no longer on the battlefield. Modern weapons are extremely expensive already, and getting even more expensive with each new generation. An F-35A unit cost is $85M. A hypothetical AI controlled drone with similar capabilities would only be marginally cheaper.
It's not an argument of sending men to die instead of machines.

It's an argument about sending machines to conduct an incredibly asymmetrical and highly efficient method of dispatching humans with reduced oversight and ability to determine if particular orders are controversial or not (Arkhipov comes to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov)
...uh huh.

I don't use Chrome, and don't use Google. I'm pretty intimately aware of the point. ProtonMail can still do their part. ;P
Tough to swallow pills.
Ask HN: In 2018/2019, is a bootcamp a good idea?
Two people close to me are considering web development bootcamps. One is 40 and the other is 30. They're both quite bright.

I'm a software engineer but haven't met many bootcamp grads professionally. So I tried to research programs online.

I've had trouble sorting the marketing from the information—it seems like bootcamps do a really good job of shaping the public conversation around their product.

So I ask y'all: these days, is a bootcamp a good way to break into software as an engineer/developer?
Or ~00000002b?
OR-Tools is fast and portable software for combinatorial optimization
> I don't think "real" military AI is that close because things on the battle-field have to be robust and current AI seems to be inherently fragile - not always reliable and less reliable in chaotic situations.

Do you think the military contractors pushing their military AI solutions care about that? Do the people approving those solutions (usually those in Congress that assign the budgets) know enough to make the distinction between "highly effective AI" and "poor/broken AI that won't achieve its promised objectives during battle"? Do they even care, or do they care more about their campaign donations?

The CIA and NSA have already used awfully inaccurate algorithms to send drones to kill "targets" (like people who they thought used a certain phone number). Why do you think it will be any different with AI killer robots?

The algorithms will likely be just as inaccurate based on the biased/flawed data the AI will be fed, but the damage (civilian casualties) will be multiplied 10-100x due to how much easier/cheaper it will be to create and operate AI killer robots.
This is exactly the reason why I fear to use many new services these days, setting up and putting in all the efforts and time to get started and after a few months the service is discontinued. I have seen a lot of product links going 404 or blank pages on product hunt.
I get how that would happen if a company used the name commercially, but wouldn’t this be classed under fair use as long as the usage was non commercial? Anyways, IANAL.
Exports are about 20% of China's GDP [1], and 18% of those exports go to the US [2]. So even you completely erased all of China's exports to the US, without substitution, you would only subtract 3.6% from its GDP, i.e. little more than half a year's worth of growth at the current rate of about 6.5% per year. Possibly a short recession, definitely not a crash.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?location...

[2] https://www.thebalance.com/china-economy-facts-effect-on-us-...
Is that drone carrying out kills w no humans in the loop?
When you're pushing the container stuff, Btrfs becomes extraordinarily valuable. Being able to snapshot a base thing and then layer on top, and do trivial rebasing, as well as cheap replication of container volumes is _very_ useful.

On my Fedora and EL7 systems, I use Btrfs for the OS and for my containers for those purposes. It's awesome.
Paving the way for public autonomous mobility
Obligatory Brave recommendation as well which is built on their own degooglified chromium. They list what they've removed here https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
Hang on a second. Why would there be a badge reader to get _out_ of a conference room? Can anybody who's been at Google HQ confirm the setup?
But most communities do have an elected city council that's supposed to represent the will of the voters. In my community any attempt to build new housing results in a lot of current reidents showing up at planning meetings and complaining about how the new development will ruin their quality of life, take away street parking, and cause gridlock.

Oddly, I only know of two people in my condo associate that work in tech, and both of us support new housing, the ones that are most vocally opposed have been here for 20+ years. Ok, maybe that's not so odd, the people that have been here the longest don't want more change.
> I don’t completely trust military organizations, because they tend to put duty before morality

Ah, first, a duty flows from a moral position, so perhaps the master misspoke. Second, I submit you can strongly trust military organizations to do their duty. They will stop at nothing to kill their enemies with extreme prejudice. And the people who lead military organizations, in most cases, have thought quite long and hard about their moral positions. It is the nature of the business, when sending people to die, to question everything about yourself.

Now, that doesn't mean war is a civilized affair. It is awful, insane. And I frankly don't know a lot of senior military leaders who have ever been eager to go to war, except in cases where they believed the operation truly met the standards of jus ad bellum. What you often find in histories are senior officers getting replaced when their advice to not enter war is not in line with the positions of their civilian leadership.
How would comparable technology protect against swarms of drones designed to track down specific people or even worse just a large swath of people?
There actually used to be a "legOS" project (homebrew firmware for the original Lego Mindstorms) and they were politely but firmly asked to change their name.

https://news.lugnet.com/robotics/rcx/legos/?n=2641
Aggregated data doesn't really have any copyright in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right
Valve discontinues the Steam Link
The main thing is that the less you care about performance, the more useful they both are. And vice versa.
The "a better Dropbox" comment was quite tongue in cheek. You can think of git-annex as a way of managing files in git without managing the contents, which is exactly what we want for binary blobs like PDFs, word documents, whatever.

The syncronization between computers is done essentially how one would do it with git. Personally, I sync to a private VM host so the content is available "in the cloud".

At the moment I just sycn everything manually, but it's possible to setup git-hooks to make it automatic. git-annex is nice for power users, since it allows fine grained control of where to keep what content. The file metadata is stored in git, but you choose when and how to pull or push the actual files themselves.

That makes it possible to sync cross sections of an entire library, for example. This is how I manage what to put on my kindle and what to keep off it.
Which server would you use to host it?

Hint: It's a trick question
I am surprised on people that believe politics shape reality, as if a political will could bend laws of nature.
It is not about morality in the case you describe but in the potential of having more wars and victims, some of my reasons I dislike the idea are:

- in a democracy you need to convince the society that they should give their lives so you need to have or invent a good enough reason, this means you can't start a war easy.

- humans trust computers too much this days, one example was a person that almost drove over a cliff because Google map told him to do it, he noticed for a while that something is not right but trusted the computer more then himself.

- humans can think and most of the time take good decisions and avoid pointless deaths, I am thinking at a Russian soldier that could have launched a nuclear strike because some faulty "sensors" a computer would have just done it.

- there was a case posted here on HN where a german pilot decided not to destroy a damaged enemy plane because he saw the enemy pilot and he could not just kill, aka most humans do not like killing where a killer robot would have no problem killing children, wounded soldiers,doctors.
Men don't have the potential to all have the same bug or get hacked which causes them to kill anything that moves.
Overall I agree with you. And I'm pretty disappointed with this experiment page. The previous ones were better for sure.

But to your Amazon example, doodles might be the new best way to find "that thing with the stick out the top and the bell looking thing at the bottom. I forget what it's called"

I'm glad Google is playing around with this. This one though just feels flat compared to the others.
X labs actually does great things. Nobody has invested into such different areas of scientific research as Alphabet. I love SV, but hated that potato cannon joke. They painted X Labs as a joke, which it isn't. Sure, they have had their failures,but I'd rather take their failures rather thn "successes" like Snapchat, Tiktok.
Craig Frederighi demoing Memoji is much more laughable.
One of the first cyberpunk books I read opens with a drone hit on some European business man at a company resort.

It seems like we’re hell bent on making this reality. I mean, military AI is basically an inevitable future for us at this point, and while it’ll probably take a few years to leak into private hands, it eventually will, and the world will be a little more shitty for it.

Aside from that I’d rue the day the Americans get AI murder drones, especially if I was living in one of the 7 or 9 countries they are currently assassinating people in with the use of the current drone fleet. As terrible as a murder assassin drone is, it’s at least controlled by a supposedly moral being.
My first thoughts were on the failure of logic of just being opposed to the military doing things without proposing how they should reasonably behave but...

Well it seems like the author of the article had the headline in mind before even talking to YB. The responses don't seem like well thought ideas on a complex topic, they seem like random off-the-cuff answers to a journalist's leading questions, and it isn't fair to criticize them.
The technology giants didn’t deserve public trust in the first place
Let's reserve judgement until China actually orchestrates a Fallujah scale bombing.
> I have no way to distinguish if I actually am affecting this "world." For all I know someone is just modeling stuff, and when I draw a "fence" it goes and finds a random fence and says "here's the fence you made, yay for you!"

I have a feeling that's exactly what's going on here because I drew a small bush and it said "Thank you, the world needed 4 of those!".

Also take a look at where most of the trees were created at. Shoreline Amphitheatre. :)
An Open Letter to Hobbyists (1976)
Does anyone use genetic algorithms still?
Although during the interview, how do you assess just how noisy the open office is going to be? The interviewer will likely say, "it's not very noisy".
It is not OT. The site doesn't work in Edge, which indicate to me that they are not testing in all browsers. This makes me doubt if they are doing testing at all and ReX.js could be a low quality solution.
If they have more disposable income, their spending decreases. If you have no disposable income, your spending 100% of your income.

Moreover even if that proposition were somehow true, spending is not a measure of progress of any kind, not nominally and not in real terms. Inflation is a good exercise on this topic.

It's a funny thing that trickle-up is never ridiculed in the public eye.
Hey friend. Sorry to hear about this. It's a real predicament and in your shoes I'd probably do what you are doing. Hope you can find that time.
To paraphrase Johnny Depp: "... but that's called 'communism' and is frowned upon in most societies."

Seriously, we have all the tech to radically reduce emissions starting now. But it costs businesses money to do it, and the future benefit is distributed across all humanity, so nobody does it voluntarily. We need governments to agree to force everyone to do something that benefits society, which stands in stark contrast to market capitalism.
MRAM Research at VLSI 2018
I remembered one of our students has a brother who has severe ADHD (to the point where he had to be heavily medicated). He comes in and tries to learn but couldn't seem to hold his attention for more than a few minutes before disappearing into reddit and gaming sites. I wasn't able to help him. Remembering that, I realize my response above is (unempathetic? I can't find the right word to describe the feels) and I apologize for that.
Dnata continues to invest in the US market; launches LAX operations – Aviation
I highly recommend listening to the interviews Wallace did with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's Bookworm.

https://www.kcrw.com/people/david-foster-wallace
How Amazon DynamoDB adaptive capacity accommodates uneven data access patterns
Source?

In most of Europe (the UK is one exception I know of) diesel costs less at the pump than petrol. The cars themselves cost a little more, but the fuel usually is cheaper.

Excluding hybrids, the current generation of petrol engines (as they historically have done) have a lower fuel economy that diesel. A new VW Passat for example can be configured with a 1.5l petrol engine which achieves 53.3mpg (UK) or a 2.0l diesel engine that achieves 68.9mpg (UK) [0].

Diesel fuel itself has around 15% more energy per volume than petrol, and the properties of its combustion just make it more efficient than petrol, so I don't see how this will ever change, unless a new method of combustion is adopted. I don't really see that happening though, as hybrid and EV technology will likely take over from pure ICE vehicles.

[0] https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/app/configurator/vw-gb/en/passa...