skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> $2.75 is roughly the maximum fare in Tokyo

You don't know what you are talking about when it comes to Tokyo, mate. 600 yen covers a day pass for the Tokyo Metro only, doesn't cover any JR lines at all. And even then, it is only for the local/regular express trains not commuter express trains. Additionally, Tokyo metro lines mostly only cover, well... the metro area. Not the suburbs or places where a lot of people live.

One way to work for me in Tokyo is about 500 yen and I live relatively close by, I just have to switch train operators twice (you get charged both on distance, and a flat fee by each train operator). Many of my coworkers who live out in the suburbs with families pay a lot more, but luckily most Japanese companies cover transportation fees as part of your salary.

As far as the rest of what you are talking about, you are very much ignoring the difference in economies between those places. 10 HKD goes a lot farther in Hong Kong than the equivalent would in New York.
The article says they even sued former employees (that were not accused of stealing) for simply having the audacity to start a company in the same field.
I think in this case it means "there's not even a RAID card in the way".
The pigeons can be trained again!
The GRB starts, from my understanding, when the core collapses - and that only takes seconds. And then travels at light speed. The shockwave making its way through the rest of the star can take hours, and you might see the explosion take months. But the GRB would hit us before we would see the shockwave, or explosion.

Without the ability to accurately determine when a supernova will occur, we will effectively have no real warning we're about to be hit.

Protecting ourselves from it is also well beyond our current technology. We'd either need to build enough physical shielding to block it from hitting earth, or we'd need to leave our solar system.
If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass — a idiot.
- https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oliver_Twist

of course Mr. Bumble is also an ass, but perhaps it takes one to know one.
Looks really good :-)

I would just change Classes sot something more generic like Domain modeling?

I.e. I am thinking of using this as a list to help me learn some languages I find interesting, currently Purescript/Haskell and ReasonML/Ocaml. I don't think you would model any of the solutions to the projects in the list by creating class-hierarchies (and Ocaml even is capable of creating class-hierarchies.)

Even in more mainstream languages, such as Golang or Javascript, you wouldn't go with classes/inheritance.
> When we see it, we will be able to put a perfectly accurate x, y, z, and t on the supernova in our coordinate system

> our coordinate system

You just defined the whole issue away. "Our coordinate system" is not shared by anyone not in our frame of reference.
> In critiquing universal suffrage, it critiques democracy's core tenets

Why does universal suffrage have to be a "core tenet" of democracy? The United States started out with limited suffrage, even over and above the limitation to white males (the exact qualifications depended on the state but in general you had to own some amount of land). Did that make it not qualify for the "core tenets" of a democracy?

Basically Heinlein is saying that suffrage should be earned, by something more than just being at or above a certain age. How is that opposed to the "core tenets" of democracy?
I’m not saying that you’re not making a valid point, but I would like to point out that you can still install the community-supported whited00r [1] on that 3G and still get some life out of it. Sure it’s probably breaking all sorts of copyright law to do so, and it’s not ideal, but the fact that almost no one on HN seems to know about it, and Apple has ignored it for years, underscores how little demand there is to keep 10 year old devices running.

Meanwhile I have a 5 year old 5S that I use while traveling which runs iOS 12.1 swimmingly, and keeping older devices running longer was a major topic discussed by Lisa Jackson at the last Apple keynote. I fully expect that this old phone will run iOS 13 as well, and I expect that current iOS devices will have increasingly longer usable lifespans than 5-6 years. There isn’t anything close in terms of manufacturer support on the Android side of things.

In terms of keeping phone hardware useful through an alternative OS, you may also want to keep an eye on PostmarketOS [2].

[1] http://www.whited00r.com/features?lang=en

[2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Main_Page
Right on. In many ways, makes a lot of sense: UI automation is a quick-to-implement fix which addresses symptoms, with maintainability being the tradeoff. API integration (a la Mulesoft) can require an overhaul in a whole philosophy of organization and delivery, even though it's fundamentally more sustainable.

How do you test RPA bots - just wait for them to break?

If you're interested, it'd be great to hear more about what you think of other tools in the toolbox. Email is on my profile.
Not like C/C++ applications go easy on memory these days, either. When GUI libraries include CSS and JavaScript interpreters, suddenly MFC and Motif look less bloaty…

Never mind Java editors/IDE, which are pretty much standard these days.
That's exactly it. And even keeping to the preferred/qualified vendor list provided by the SoC vendor does not guarantee that the drivers will be in the mainline...
Android's use of the kernel really is fundamentally broken
I had the joy this year of flying across Europe on New Years Eve. NYE fireworks across Germany (I think it was Germany) were truly spectacular from the air.
I learnt a lot more than I ever wanted to know about every aspect of elevators from Elevator Hacking: From the Pit to the Penthouse with Deviant Ollam (who seems to be like a professional elevator pen tester) & Howard Payne, from DEFCON 22. Fascinating stuff, I think it will be worth your time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uh_N1O3E4E
What't the point with software support if OS is unusable? I have iPhone 4S and it became unusuable when iOS 7 was released. I never wanted to upgrade, I wanted to downgrade which was impossible via official means. That's my main problem. If developers don't want to develop for old phones, that's their right. But they must not prevent me from installing old software.
it just doesn't sound very appealing

Indeed. Don't come here. It's horrible. Fires, earthquakes, dragons, locusts, and roaming gangs of hungry zombies abound.
Python for Delphi (P4D) – Set of free components that wrap Python's dll
I really do not understand your frustration. We are running 5 node cluster in production with the keepalived and nobody needs to wake up unsealing if one, or two instances fail. Perfectly good to do it in the morning by copy pasting curl oneliner from the keepass.
I’ve been using vi since about 1985. At the time, emacs was the program that would crash our PDP 11/70 if more than one copy was running anywhere on it. And all undergrads in the EE/CS department shared that one machine.

So, the only people who got to run emacs were the sysadmins, and they were really good about warning everyone else away from it.

It also helped that emacs is a great OS from the 1970s, and the only thing it lacks is a decent text editor. ;)
so many numbers !!!!!
It does not need to be fundamentalist, it can also be utterly pragmatic. If counted the number of times that proprietary vendors have let me down, with no recourse (e.g. the cancellation of BeOS, software vendors moving to outrageous subscription schemes, Apple replacing Spaces by the Mission Control), it would be pragmatic to stop using proprietary software. Since with FLOSS software the community could maintain something ad infinitum when there is interest.

(Disclaimer: I do use some proprietary software.)
Tim Cook asked about Apple's relationship with Facebook in 2012 [video]
Worked on behavior manipulation via social networks back in the day. It was supposed to be used to introduce energy saving habits into people's minds. Got me very depressed a few years ago, but now I got over it, realized I was just a replaceable piece of a big puzzle and if not me, somebody else would have done it.
do not use single node instance, in a HA fashion it is not a problem. Even with the open source version, which we are using.
If smart, intelligent humans are the ones that's going to make artificial superintelligence, wouldn't that make us more intelligent than them? Unless AI can create a more intelligent versions of themselves on its own, I have second thoughts believing this idea.
Python for Delphi (P4D) is a set of free components that wrap up the Python dll into Delphi and Lazarus (FPC). They let you easily execute Python scripts, create new Python modules and new Python types. You can create Python extensions as dlls and much more. P4D provides different levels of functionality:

Low-level access to the python API

High-level bi-directional interaction with Python

Access to Python objects using Delphi custom variants (VarPyth.pas)

Wrapping of Delphi objects for use in python scripts using RTTI (WrapDelphi.pas)

P4D makes it very easy to use python as a scripting language for Delphi applications. It comes with an extensive range of demos and tutorials.
> "I think homeowners need to be paying fire insurance costs proportional to fire risk"

Wildfires are already covered by property re/insurance. The problem is that risk is badly priced, as modeling for wildfires is currently very underdeveloped compared to hurricanes or earthquakes. There has been no wildfire event of a similar magnitude of property losses in recent history.

Shameless plug: At tensorflight we are actually starting some prototyping of wildfire risk models for the insurance industry based on satellite imagery.
Top 9 Tools to Take Full Page Website Screenshots
In my experience, people have more ideas than we have developers to implement every idea. It is very hard to work out if an idea is a good idea or not before you implement it.

You cannot implement a system for every idea because you will not have enough developers and you will waste time implementing ideas that sound good but are useless. Visual Programming applications like Access allow less technical users to implement their ideas. Some of these ideas will go nowhere. This is fine because you will not have wasted developer resources. Some of these Access applications will solve genuine business problems. It may be difficult to decipher them but it is no more difficult than trying to figure out what users want. At least in this instance, you have an application you can test against.
So what is the brain if not just matter?
Official Launch of Groundbreaking Data Trusts for AI Training
The US had a very different path to modernization than most other developed countries, because it never underwent absolutism.

The typical effect of absolutism was to introduce an efficient and effective civil service, as part of the general centralization of authority. Absolutist states were monarchial, militaristic states; the combination of taxation and destruction was hard to endure and eventually they had to transition to something else as a result of revolution or defeat. After either event, though, the civil service stuck around and with it a norm of publicly provided services.

The US got off the train at just about the time that absolutism was getting going in Europe -- indeed, because it was getting going in Europe -- and thus retains a decentralized -- not necessarily selfish -- structure and outlook more characteristic of medieval Europe. These "Tudor Institutions" are discussed by Huntington in Political Modernization: America vs. Europe: http://pscourses.ucsd.edu/ps200b/Huntington%20Political%20Mo...
The corresponding talk is on Youtube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gES4-X6y278
The business entity that owns the subway being profitable is not the same as the subway being profitable. MTR for instance is a real estate developer as well as a subway operator:

"As compensation for the cost of building railway networks, the government grants the MTR Corporation land development rights along its rail lines, stations and depots – an increasingly lucrative business in recent years amid a red-hot property market."

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/economy/article/2136403/...
Ehm, I agree with the Vim point, but think of those who won't/can't spend time getting past that Vim learning curve.

Especially for people dealing with csv files, tabular data or digging through logfiles, Multi-Cursor and Multi-selection are concepts that are easy to grasp, and can help productivity immensely, with things that are not that easy using Nano or Notepad.

Simple cases in point : Use a regular expression to find and copy all lines with a particular pattern, or copy-paste a few csv lines with a couple of fields modified.
Doesn't seem to package Tcl/Tk (despite things being one of its strong points), so make sure your local system has a recent enough version.
> many people produce nothing of real value (i.e. value that would actually reduce housing, food, and medical costs)

Worse still, many people do work that exists for the purpose of raising housing, food, and medical costs.
Proper forest management, including controlled burns, have always been difficult due to the politically powerful ignorant.

Because controlled burns experienced increasing friction, policy evolved to a "let-burn" policy for naturally-started fires (brush gets cleared without anyone having to take responsibility). Problem is, if an area is unnaturally overgrown, fire can have disproportionate severity and become impossible to constrain.
Yes, it is. That's what makes it fundamentally different from DRAM, which isn't being continuously refreshed, which is why the memory controller has to manually refresh DRAM at frequent intervals. DRAM has much simpler cells, at the cost of more complex control logic.

I recommend you just take a look at Wikipedia or something for an explanation of SRAM. Each bit is typically implemented using six transistors, four of which form a loop of two inverters.

They are continuously powered, which causes the continuous refresh the parent was talking about.
He's treating a thing that happened in fiction

I think in this case it might be you who is mistreating what's written. This also produces the same not-working result but for somewhat different reasons.
Outside of being a useful trope in scifi can you imagine any reason why information but not matter would be able to be transferred faster than light?
> But there's also the risk of a runaway reaction, where a machine intelligence reaches and exceeds human levels of intelligence in a very short span of time.

This always puzzles me. I don't have enough knowledge about AI to be objective about that kind of statement. But deep down, I feel skeptic about it.

Not long ago I saw an episode of a show occuring in the late 80's. This kid had just received a computer as a gift and was talking to a kind-of-AI program through keyboard and screen.

The AI reactions to the kid's input was not dumber or smarter than Siri or any other currently widespread kind-of-ai program.
I don't know if the show was accurate vis-a-vis this particuliar software but I like to think it was.
If it was, that means in the last 30 years AI hasn't really gone further. Computer power has. Algorithms not so much.

I'd love to get the opinion of someone that has a good understanding of the current state of the AI art.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/amazon...

Same here
Melbourne trams are awesome! Sure, they're not everywhere or go everywhere but for near the city center and some main routes they make so much sense.
Depends primarily on how far away it is. Scientists are pretty sure they're only 2-3 degrees wide at the source, so the closer you are, the less distance you would need to travel. Of course, the farther you are, the less energetic it is.

So, if GRB are 2 degrees wide at the source, and it occurs 8000LY away, and is pointed directly at us, we'd need to travel 136LY away.

The solar system is moving at 1/1300 the speed of light. I'm not sure how Apep is moving relative to us, but assuming it's stationary, we'd need ~175k years to move out of the crosshairs by sitting here on the planet.
Why we should build human-level artificial intelligence
Same email received. Found this article.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/amazon...
I don't know what to think about this. Do we really need an AI with human-level of intelligence? I don't doubt that AI helps make our jobs easier, but should we really build an AGI just because we can? What do you guys think?
>There was a time when humans thought brains were very complex systems of microscopic clockwork because gears were the pinnacle of technology.

In a general sense, microscopic clockwork isn't an incorrect way to put it. Any known chemical or biological reaction is just some microscopic physical reaction. We know about more subatomic structures but I think the crux of the argument is about the same.
> if we think that moral axioms are subjective, where does science enter into it?

In the same way that science enters into the making of pink or blue paint. It does not say which color is the prettiest, just how to manufacture them and the characteristics they have.

Similarly, science can tell how morality systems appear, are transmitted, what their consequences and eventual contradictions are: You think we should have equality of chances? Here are the likely outcomes given our current society. You think we should have equality of outcomes? Here are the factors to adjust for.

Right now, deep learning programmers are having very interesting philosophical discussions on ethics because their models, trained on real datasets, end up acquiring the bias of the real world. E.g. a CEO is more likely to be a man and a nurse more likely to be a woman.

They are struggling with how and when correct the biases and when leaving them. We are now rushing laying the theoretical groundworks for a practical theory of ethics because we are the one who will be blame for what our models learn and because, quite frankly, philosophers have not done their jobs there.

> But what epistemic principle tells us that affirming or disaffirming observations are important at all? How can we derive that principle, if it indeed exists?

That's another conversation altogether, and in our case irrelevant: we are doing science here, even on a philosophical subject. The whole point of science is to build a predictive model of the world that is coherent with observations. If you are doing science, you care about reality matching your model.

I know philosophers like to ponder this question a lot instead of thinking about harder practical problems but really, this is a distraction. I find it very reasonable to assume that we care about reality and to ignore solipsism for now.

> If we're modeling some system of morally relevant actions, what metric are we using, and where did we get it from?

The question of metrics is indeed very important, and economics and sociology have that discussion. They use imperfect metrics and build a model using them, while in the same time trying to get better ones. Specifying a moral system in terms of objective metrics is indeed a first step. Why has there been so little work on this?

Things like life expectancy, likelihood of violent death, reported happiness or freedom, HDI, are all metrics that can be used to evaluate if a model is succeeding at its goals.

> You mention "reality," but we haven't overcome the tension between subjective moral axioms and an objective, scientific, decision procedure for moral choice.

I think this one is simple, (assuming I understand correctly what disturbs you). Do as in math: state what is true, given some explicitly given assumptions. "If we consider only positive integers, then a^3+b^3=c^3 has no solution". "If we consider only numbers in Z2 then 1+1=0"
Not to detract from your other points, which I agree with, but our star won't supernova. It doesn't have enough mass. It will go red giant and toast our planet.
If it's 3.3V logic, and the voltage dips for some reason to 3.0V, it will immediately rise back up to 3.3V. A DRAM cell would stay at 3.0V until the next refresh cycle. That's what I mean by a layman's "continuously refreshed". It has constant input power keeping the voltage at the same level.
I can't help but take a stab.

Argument from cats. Remembering that the cat represents humanity: $5 for a group of neurons which will make the cat sit at this point (which happens to be at the entrance into a cat carrier), then $5 for making the cat backpedal a little.

Emus. There are many tactics humans can't use for various reasons (saturation nuclear bombardment, for example). It doesn't say much about intelligence, but more about economics and ethic.

Slavic Pessimism. So we'll get problems on nth try, when AI is sufficiently fine, but security measures are still a mess, because there was no chance yet to battle test them.

Complex Motivations. Maybe, but if not we are screwed.

Actual AI. Why not from actual general AI, like in humans? Or use wall clock time and not the amount of data. AlphaZero: zero to superhuman in tens of hours.

My Roommate. Argument from ignorance. If we don't know how to build general AI now, then we surely will not be able to shape its motivations when we will know.

Brain Surgery. The idea that a brain surgery skill requires specifically designed circuitry and cannot be learned and therefore improved by improvements of general learning/planning capacity is... curious, I guess.

Childhood. Maybe, or maybe it already has very good knowledge of the world from previous attempts that we did in Slavic Pessimism argument.

Gilligan's Island. Well, if someone wants their AI to reinvent all the technology, or to build an AI and then not use it to design better technologies, they can do it. Why everyone will be doing it is not so clear.

*Added some "the"s.
But the poor are getting richer, thats working perfectly well. Its just the middle class isnt benefitting of it as much as the richest.
> If we knew enough, and had the technology, we could exactly copy its structure and emulate its behavior with electronic components, just like we can simulate very basic neural anatomy today.

Being able to simulate a brain with electronics, if it is possible, is not enough. You have to simulate it without a large increase in the space or time requirements. If there are 100B neurons in the human brain but it takes 100B^2 transistors to simulate it or the simulation takes polynomial time to complete a task that the human brain requires only linear time for, it's a bust.

Just because we can easily imagine it does not make it easily achievable or even possible.
JVM Ecosystem Report 2018
You usually are awarded stock options. A paper that gives you the right to buy stocks for a specific price. Those options (like most things employers will give you) are seen as income, because the employer give it to you as a reward for your work (just like salary).

So usually, when your company exits, that's when you then "exercise" your options (aka actually buy the stocks the options allow you to buy) and then sell those stocks.

Then:
- Exercising the options triggers income taxes on the value of the stock you are getting (minus what you pay for it)
- Selling the stock triggers capital gain (short term if you sell before 1 year, long term after holding them for 1 year)

A simple example:
- You join and receive 100 stock options at $1. That means you can buy 100 stocks for $100 total.
- Your company IPOs at $5 per stock.
- You decide it's time to sell. You "exercise" your options -> so you spend $100 to buy 100 stocks at $1. Those stocks are worth $5 each, so you receive $500 in value. -> You get taxed on $400 of income (just like salary, bonus, etc).
- You sell your stocks for $500 instantly. You get taxes short term capital gain on $500.

So you had in mind you'd make $500 (yayyy we IPO at $5 and I have 100 stocks) but you actually end up with ~$200 in your pocket.