skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I agree with you - but:

a) We are talking about a specific guy

b) The commenters are clearly holding him to a totally different standard

c) Unfortunately - there'd be no public servants if everything had to be disclosed. It'd be impossible. There'd be conflicts of interest. For Attorney General ... these folks are lawyers! How much information can they give about previous clients! Probably not much! :)

So yes, transparency. Tax returns, donations, relationships with foreign nationals, public officials from other countries, persons of interest ... but there's only so much that someone can reasonably give up.
I think it's worth comparing to the deployment to the phone apps and the threat model there. AFAIK the phone apps are not open source, so what if I don't trust the developers? OK, let's assume I trust the developers, but their build server gets compromised (probably much less attack surface then their web interface, but still)?

But if it were open-source, available on F-droid and reproducibly buildable then it could be potentially more secure than a web application. But even then the users either have to audit the source themselves (unlikely), or trust the developers, or trust one or more 3rd party auditors and make sure they run the same code as audited.

For a web application auditing the client code every time you log in is impractical and you can never be sure you run the same code as a third party auditor.
The problem is that the thesis cannot be disproved by one counter example (real or not), because the existential hazard comes from the possibility of just one such instance of an AI.
Eh, if you are talking about something truly human-like rather than what people usually mean when they say AI these days, I think there are other limits.

We're running up against limits on feature-size in our integrated circuits. If you invent an AGI that can make smarter copies of itself... it's pretty likely those same physical limits will continue to apply, meaning that each iteration will be better than the last, but like this year's latest CPU, it will be less better than the previous generation than that generation was better than the one that came before.

And yeah, I am a whole lot less optimistic about AGI in general than when I was as a younger man, simply because when I was younger, there was a lot more headroom in how much better computer hardware could get.
I worked on HR software that was mainly used to decide who to fire. And when I say "fire", I mean large scale restructuration, the kind of restructuration you read in newspaper because it's such a large scale. It wasn't always used to do evil, and in all fairness sometimes a company has to restructure or die, which I think would be worse.

I left after two years for many reasons, one of them being that I knew my work was used to dramatically affect people's lives.

I still hold my stock, and I do intend to sell as soon as it goes public, then I'll wash my hands and never look back.
To nitpick your nitpick, Common Lisp has one of the strongest object oriented abstractions around (The MOP). It would be quite fun to see how far you could abuse the metaobject protocol to implement some of these..
Can you provide me with just one example why money laundring is supposed to be a good thing?

And can you explain how the average person is inconvenienced in any way, shape or form by AML / KYC regulations?

Sorry, but your argument, so far, is just libertarian drivel.
> it might be a defining feature of intelligence.

But if not, and the alarmists are right, deep shit. That's why the author's argument is void. The author needs to show that the chance of an AI with a simple goal and hyperintelligence is negligible. "it might be" is a coin toss, that doesn't help.
Testing Sidekiq jobs: Which mode should I choose?
I second your recommendations and would like to add the blog "Farnam Street." [1] Mostly because, when it comes to reading, it emphasizes comparing and contrasting books and evaluating arguments and having them checked by others.

Getting your arguments checked by others is critical to making sure your arguments actually make sense in form.

Furthermore, if you are interested in getting started with philosophy I would recommend starting with some books in the "Very Short Introductions" series. Not all of them are good but some of them are and enough of a jumping off point.

[1]: https://fs.blog/blog/

edit: added link
> a single person got a k8s cluster running on aws with kops+GPUs in a couple weeks

In the context of your GP's comment:

1. How long would it have taken that one person (or the startup) to get started with AWS+GPUs without k8s?

2. How much effort would it take that person to debug an issue with if/when one springs up?

3. What happens when the single person goes on leave?
Doesn't it seem to you that the problem is those regulations that can allow the exemptions rather than rent control?

I mean, if it wasn't possible to exempt a building from the regulations, there wouldn't be an issue with rent control.
Full movie download site
I would be happy to work on a stack like that, but I can't deny that it seems somewhat career limiting long term.Especially as I am over 40 now. I will be seen as not keeping up to date.

(I certainly think I design and build better software than most people having done a few years of maintenance programming recently, people just create over complex monstrosities for what should be simple apps)
Wise words.
EDIT: just to be clear, I think it's important to note that Nature and these authors likely have a bias towards what they consider more truthful news and that will be reflected in their choices of material and tools for this study.

>2) the third party "Botometer" (machine-learning model) is valid and was trained on an accurately classified corpus.

For anyone curious enough to follow up on how effective their "botometer" tool was, the methods section [0] details what they used and links to said tools. The language used is simple enough for most people to follow. I am not great at following their statistics, but the botometer seems to be at least decently accurate. Certainly, figure 2d seems pretty convincing to me for validating the botometer.

>1) third party fact-checkers (eg. snopes) are credible and reliable.

The methods section talks about how their model works with Onion articles. The great thing about The Onion is that it is a perfect positive control i.e it is always false. The authors state the following in the methods section:

>Many low-credibility sources label their content as satirical, and viral satire is sometimes mistaken for real news. For these reasons, satire sites are not excluded from the list of low-credibility sources. However, our findings are robust with respect to this choice. The Onion is the satirical source with the highest total volume of shares. We repeated our analyses of most viral articles (e.g., Fig. 3a) with articles from theonion.com excluded and the results were not affected.

0. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06930-7#Sec8
Oh do fuck off you millenial snowflake.

Fucking hell, it's like some of you alt-right cryto cunts have never used the internet
How about building new better houses for the rich or the richer, and so the old houses would be left for the poorer?

Why not deal with the problem by manipulating the supply side of the equation?
Sean Carroll explaining why "the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood". (renormalization group, pair production at human energy scales)

https://youtu.be/Vrs-Azp0i3k?t=2046

(this specific explanation starts at 34:06, but earlier parts are worth watching if anybody wants a nice introduction to the Standard Model and QFT)
> That he was the sole member is not relevant.

That he was the sole paid employee is relevant to the minimizing deflection you keep making that he was merely “part of” the entity.

> And you're misunderstanding the issue of 'non profit'

No, I'm not (but you are).

> he was not operating a profitable entity.

Not that that is germane to anything, but non-profit doesn't mean that an organization isn't profitable, it means that there are no equity claims on any profits (that is, it doesn't return profits to it's owners.)

> His comp. doesn't count as profit for the org.

Which would be relevant if he issue was whether the org was making profits, but not when it is whether he was making profits.

> This guy worked for this odd non-profit long before anyone could have conceived that he would be the US chief attorney, so there's no smoke here really.

The former might be relevant to the latter if the accusation was that he was being bribed in anticipation of becoming AG, rather than the opacity of the background of a non-Senate-confirmed and otherwise non-publicly-vetted appointee as Acting Attorney General outside the normal line of succession.
I guess it's give and take - on one hand containers would isolate processes such that a security bug in an application shouldn't allow an attacker to propagate to the rest of the system. On the other, updates are not centralized anymore as you pointed out. Then again, the most commonly used distros have a slow update cycle anyways, so I don't think it would change that much if they rebuild container images rather than packages for each release. Plus, isolation would allow software to be tested independently from each other, so rolling distros could become easier to handle for the maintainers and more stable. IMO from a development perspective it makes sense as a step forward.
The list of cities that offer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_public_transport is growing. Maybe this is the model for the future!
I offer a different, human-centric, POV: we are in a managerial-driven society with actual trend is more and more form Ford-model workers to use and control for business.

Human in this model are a problem: too stupid they are
unavailing, not-that-much-stupid do not accept to be used as "the manager in charge" want. So? Better found replacements. Mechanical one. AI one. So the rest of human being can be used for reproduction, pleasure, gameplay, whatever and form them as stupid as possible is not a problem anymore since they are essentially unneeded for managements, only toys.

So today's managers dream "intelligent systems" in factory, "AI developers" (they already manage to cut off admins, too powerful and expert (they know the big picture so they can act autonomously) to being controlled as today devs), they dream a future in witch they simply order something to a machine and get obeyed without contestant, law limitation etc. TV series like Continuum, films like V for vendetta, The Handmaid's Tale only foreseen, as good artist do, that kind of future. Mass production of fantasy films with a religious background do the same on the opposite field.

That's the real troublesome point for us. AI today is not "AI", only pattern matching for automation without any comprehension of the physical world. New dictatorship instead is already there and more and more powerful.

Consider a thing: we do vast majority of our social critical tasks (identity management, banks operation, medicine, ...) on computers, so on proprietary systems made by very few more and more powerful vendors. Our data pass through very few more and more giants webservices, so someone else computers, free communication software was put into oblivion (from usenet to email to the concept of desktop-centric, personal computing from Xerox Alto&c to LispM passing through Plan9 and modern GNU/Linux desktop) substituted or jailed in proprietary systems (VoIP tech are mostly open but nearly all VoIP calls pass through very few companies, emails are open standard but most of user now are pushed to webmails etc). We are at a point of jail free software over a proprietary blackbox (think about WSL, DeX, Crostini), we have invented locked-down hardware that can only run proprietary software (secure-boot &c). Now imaging how easy can be steering the entire society for few people in the right position. The rest is simply a matter of time.
Even in his studio?
We (https://ideatostartup.org) have helped several non-tech founders build their MVP and can help you too.
No, this is just the vocoder part (like Wavenet) that converts from some representation to audio. You could probably use a Tacotron2-like approach to predict input features (which appear to be 18 Bark-scale cepstral coefficients and two f0-related parameters) from text.
I didn't list my trading records online. I worked at a trading firm and a hedge fund so that performance is confidential. Mostly dealt with bond futures. We did decent, nothing too fancy. After which I trade my own money. Turned 5-digits to 7-digits in 2+ years. Take that with a pinch of salt because a lot of the returns came from cryptocurrencies.
> Is the job fulfilling? ...

> Is the job moral? ...

But in what way do you consider your job meaningful?
Pepole say that serverless keeps thing simpler. In reality its just moving the complexity to different areas (devops as opposed to application complexity). We have been writing applications for longer, so it should be easier to keep the complexity lower if you keep the logic there. Are there similar well known patterns / best practices / ways of structuring devops that have been developed for applications over the years?
For anyone that enjoys looking at the older discussions, you can actually find them all by clicking on "past" right under the title.
How would this work for offline transactions? Cards need to be able to verify PINs offline and provide feedback to users & merchants, otherwise someone can type a wrong PIN at an offline terminal (on an airplane, etc) and get away with free stuff because the transaction isn’t valid.
The subway systems in London and Paris are pretty old but work reasonably well. You have to properly maintain and modernize the system then the age of the original structures doesn't matter as much.
Me too, surprised this hasn't been down-voted to hell on here.
Everyone agrees there is some magic smoke necessary for AGI that we haven't figured out yet

Do they? I don’t (with the possible exception that a definition of AGI itself seems to be this magic smoke)
Depending on the result, it could tell you a lot more about libraries than no result. For example if a large proportion do use the library, that's not necessarily evidence of high library use generally, but it does show that high library use is possible and that libraries are used in some places at all, where before you might not have known either of those things.

Furthermore even if life on Mars was seeded from earth, it tells us that seeding between planets is possible and therefore likely occurs in at least some other solar systems.

See the German Tank Problem. Even a sample of one tank is vastly better than no tanks, and even two tanks can be a surprisingly useful data set.
> The penultimate premise is if we create an artificial intelligence, whether it's an emulated human brain or a de novo piece of software, it will operate at time scales that are characteristic of electronic hardware (microseconds) rather than human brains (hours).

I never understood that argument, why would that be true? If I train a state of the art convnet it takes days on the most efficient hardware I can efford, why on earth would we go from nothing to superintelligent that also runs incredibly fast. Isn't it way more logical to assume that it will be slow at first?
Japan is doing pretty well I believe because they privatized the transportation system and set up the incentives so the better the transportation does the more profit the transportation company makes.

The Tokyu Corporation (one of the 10 or so companies running trains in Tokyo) is currently building several 20 to 40 story buildings in Shibuya, one of which Google Japan will move into next September. They make money renting the building all of which are next to their station
C# - Add Discriminated Unions and a Maybe / Optional type and F# style records.
C# - I'd remove null propogation, I'm sick of seeing code like this now

foo?.Bar?.FirstOrDefault(x => x?.Quax?.Something == y?.Something).DoStuff();

We have someone here now who just makes all null reference exceptions go away by appending a ? to every call!!!

Drives me nuts.
Yes, perhaps at first, but it can invent its own optimizations.
I got the same email. I complained to customer support and was given $5 credit.
I'll just say I'll never get close to adtech ever again
Cool Life Hacks Using Simple Technology Hacks
It's hard to imagine that such a shift would
be more efficient

There was an article linked here the other day [1] that said homes can be designed to withstand wildfires through choice of materials and vegetation clearing.

If the intervention you want to incentivise is replacing wooden roofs and removing fuel near the house, raising insurance bills for people who don't do that could be one way of doing it.

Of course, there's also a case for incentivising not starting the fire in the first place.

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/
Well, yeah. And they should probably be having discussions based on something beside snarky retorts and popcorn-throwing too, I guess.

But I guess those discussions will need to happen elsewhere.
> what is the point of reinventing the wheel?

The point of reinventing the wheel is to develop a more intimate familiarity with the tool or framework or utility you're trying to re-create. Yes the original ls program is perfectly functional but recreating it can be a good way to learn how to write C programs. This is applicable to any type of project really.
Yes indeed, MC does this pretty decently. I tried it myself, but I found the product is very much catering to marketers. Which is fine, of course, but for people that only want this functionality, it seems like overkill.

Blogsend is meant as a much simpler, more focused alternative. This is all it does, and the features to be added in the roadmap are almost exclusively to help bloggers, not marketers or a general audience.
I don't use Emacs, but those Emacs jokes kind of stopped when having 64MB of memory became common. So circa 2000 :)
Slower progress in microprocessors is a good point but specialized hardware like TPUs could overcome some limitations. Also, slower does not mean stop. When we talk about decades into the future, even a 20% average annual improvement amounts to 3 orders of magnitude in 40 years.

Malicious humans are in general easier to deal with since we know most of them are subject to ingrained psychological tendencies we have learned much about over the course of history and they depend on other humans to pull off something as catastrophic as a world war.

A general AI would have certain immediate advantages over humans:

- Immensely larger communication bandwidth
- Broader knowledge than any single group of humans
- Faster thinking speed (at least by enlisting other processors)

Let me ask you (or anyone else) a question:
What would be a minimum demonstrated capability of an AI that starts to worry you?
What about the "Native Vim Support" listed on the homepage? I can't find any more info on that. Has anyone tried it?
Yes. I find it very hard to really learn a new language without a project to use it for, but most projects I want to work on are too large to do in a language I don't yet know, or I want to actually finish so it doesn't make sense to use a new language, but a list of smaller problems like this is really useful.
Every year or so someone brings up the prospect of moving from Trac to something else (mostly github recently). October was the last time this was brought up[0].

I'm of the opinion that Trac is probably blocking a number of people from contributing, even if that contribution is participating in comments and voting on issues.

But that's exactly the kind of thing the community as a whole can be empowered to do without the old guard of core vetoing the suggestion outright. The python community are considering doing just that now with PEP 581.

[0]https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/django-developers/ai...
[1]https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0581/
Wouldn't you get paid extra for working on such a day?
In one of Terry Pratchett's books an intelligent tree wonders why the sky keeps flickering.
Can you elaborate any more? I'd be keen on hearing about what made it so off putting and what could be done better to improve that situation.
Pfff, I got plenty of choice

I made management system for family doctors that was selling private patient data to pharmaceutical industries

Facebook scapers used by companies similar to Cambrige Analitica

Create systems that cut money from the payroll of fast food workers if they spend to much time at the toilet

And much more...
Amazon "open sourced" OpenJDK, which has been open source since the day 0 of Oracle purchasing Sun? Oracle just committed to maintaining backports for OpenJDK 8, and that part of Oracle's business it might be commoditizing: paid support for legacy versions, not the code.
In the argument the cat represents humanity, which is being manipulated by a superintelligence. Humanity is not a single organism, so you can pay a group of people to do some things for you.
Devil’s Dozen: Top FinTech Trends in 2019
If I created WhatsApp I wouldn’t worry about fake news - those can still happen over other platforms or even plain old SMS.

I would be worried that the platform is now used to silently steal the contacts list of millions of users without their informed consent.
With Twitter and Instagram, it feels like there are more bots than real people. Facebook, I'm less sure of, but with as many random friend requests as I get from unknown "people" with half-baked profiles and no connections, it's happening there too.
Wow, this blew my mind. And it's so simple, too.

def nthHexDigitOfPI(n):
return 4/(8*n+1) - 2/(8*n+4) - 1/(8*n+5) - 1/(8*n+6)
What does the 'U' stand for again?
This is not an argument. Not all drunk drivers kill people either.

A good argument must imply that social media bots are a net benefit to society and democracy, not that some good ones exist.
I got a server can't respond to your request type message this morning. OK, the server wasn't down, but it was loaded enough that it couldn't serve me. A page refresh and it was working.
> That there was 1 or more people is irrelevant, and I'm not deflecting anything.

> "So it very much seems like he was running around doing radio interviews and making (rather large) profits."

This statement implies a lack of understanding of what a 'non profit' is, because there is no indication of profit here.

But it doesn't matter - by all accounts, this was just a regular non-profit. There's nothing curious about it.

> "The former might be relevant to the latter if the accusation was that he was being bribed in anticipation of becoming AG"

He was employed there since 2014 - you're implication would be that somehow, years before Trump was elected, years before his nomination, that someone could have bribed him - which is totally far fetched.

Also - again - hypocritical if you don't apply the same logic to other members of such offices, all of whom have 'opaque' financial backgrounds were they in private office. Who paid Loretta Lynch's millions for 10 years before she became AG? And where was the uproar then?

There are no loaded dice here.

Just regular DC inanity.
I wonder if you can blow the whistle and raise it with your country’s privacy regulator?
Visual editing and selection-before-action allow for users to be much more confident that they’re doing the right thing, and to build up commands step by step with feedback along the way. The problem that multiple selection solves is then the same thing that repetition of a bunch of commands solves in vim.

A bunch of longstanding vim users I know now use kakoune because of the visual feedback they can get when doing something new with their editor.