skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not really disagreeing with your, but a couple of points:

1. Signal propagation between organic neurons is slow - about 120 m/s. An electrical simulation may have problems with density, but this might be offset by the much greater speed of electrical current.

2. Neurons are electrochemically complex and afaik we still don't know how to model their behaviour with high fidelity.
That's a phase space diagram, used for analyzing complex systems. Quite a handy tool for dissecting which dimensions are important, which ones you can simply collapse into one yet keep the interesting dynamics, etc. (These are [were] used for understanding neurons and neuron models. The ion channels, the electric potential, and so on were the dimensions.)

The concrete example looks like a Lorenz attractor: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LorenzAttractor.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_system < many more images :)
how many hazardous variants do they produce before they find one that has some form of use? (viruses)

I think personally people should stop inventing new guns and bombs, and try to prevent instead of fight. but i suppose i don't have a medical degree :'D
People who believe in superintelligence present an interesting case, because many of them are freakishly smart. They can argue you into the ground. But are their arguments right, or is there just something about very smart minds that leaves them vulnerable to religious conversion about AI risk, and makes them particularly persuasive?

Think about this for a bit.

Think about your cat argument and then ask why Michael Bloomberg isn’t president.
Google may shut down its news service in Europe
If I may, from experience with our uncle T4 cancer, my biggest issues were:

1) medical view on cancer treatment: everything is standardized now, for good reason, they only give you battle tested things, but it also means that you only very average treatment since nothing exotic is accepted. [1]

2) moral support, depending on the team treating you, they may or may not spend a lot of time talking to the patient about what's cancer and how to deal with it. My uncle was given a death sentence and a choice to either stay at the hospital or go home, both case with pain killers and a mild chemo to smooth out growth. Few monthes later, his system was frail due to chemo, got an infection at home, not treated rapidly, killed him. I'm fairly convinced that with a different view on his disease he wouldn't have died this way. It also meant that he didn't want to try more since doctors only talked about these two choices. He didn't want to try dedicated centers (some were having very positive immunotherapy based results that could have motivated him and the whole family a lot more) [1]

[1] Vince DeVita (ex-head of NCI) wrote a book about how cancer was treated in the early days. There were no standardized treatment since they were inventing them. It also meant they had a different approach to care, he was just trying to buy time until something better would come. He claims that it made people live for a year or two instead of a few months. In the case of advanced cancer I still believe it's the best way to go, but hospital don't want to hear that so you get the average treatment.

I don't know how your friend would feel about this, but maybe that can give him a different option and more chances.
PS/Tk for Chicken Scheme [0] would be my serious recommendation.

There is STklos [1], which is a R5RS Scheme with Tk embedded into it, as well as GTK+ for when you feel the need. It is actively developed. (Started out in life as Scheme Tk).

[0] https://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/pstk

[1] http://www.stklos.net/
> In plainer English, this is being
interpreted by data experts as the
regulator stating that consent to
processing personal data cannot be
gained through a framework arrangement
which bundles a number of uses behind a
single “I agree” button that, when
clicked, passes consent to partners
via a contractual relationship.

Now, I guess it's obvious to complain about the idiotic, user-hostile and down-right evil Oath consent pop-over that I got when I visited TC. I'm gonna do it anyway.

Here's hoping this ruling stands.
What Countries Spend Their Money On? – PersonalMoneyService
How Little Shoppers Notice When in Store
So when rational arguments fail, it is a good idea to turn to an ad hominem attack instead?

Regarding Bloomberg, I do not see why we should compare a human being whose goals are not completely public with a future AGI with non-human morality and methods, and not subject to many tendencies and limitations humans are subject to.

Let me ask you (or anyone else, esp those who downvote) a question:

What would be a minimum demonstrated capability of an AI that starts to worry you?
I agree that it wouldn't be reasonable to include everything in the past, but anything for a period up to, during, and for a grace period after, should be disclosed.
Not a fly, but we're getting there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejf6FwIibkE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2OBznK6HkI

FlyConnectome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKaeTH7UgFA

https://v2.virtualflybrain.org/

recent openworm state: https://twitter.com/tarelli/status/959077915597172736?lang=e...
Some things can only be a weapon, other things may be used as a weapon.

Huge difference, what the intent is of what you are building.
Yes, I think National Express print QR codes on their tickets but very rarely actually read them.
Why concept of immutability is so important for a beginner front-end developer?
"The Free Software Foundation recently released an "Ethical Repository Criteria" list, and it gave SourceForge a failing grade"

Just saying...
> this isn't stealing from the poor

Except when the finance industry creates (directly or indirectly) a financial crisis like in 2008. Its the poor, that never stood to gain from the financial system in the first place, that end up hit the worst.
I haven't read techcrunch or any site with that oauth pop-over since GDPR came in. It's super obnoxious.
Loretta Lynch faced extensive questioning in the Senate and long, contentious hearings about her background and clientele during a nearly six month nomination process. She was heavily vetted by both parties and eventually gained enough votes to move forward, including by McConnell and Graham. Yes, she was vetted publicly. No, this acting AG has not been. Not for a moment, which is why the free press is so important in an appointment like this.
Pretty sure it's not OAuth, but Oath.

Also pretty sure they named the company Oath so that people would think "oh this is another OAuth permission box, OK".
I agree with this. I can deal with Trac (although I’d still prefer GitHub) but mailing lists are a big no-no for me.

The funny thing is that I read this post yesterday and thought about contributing to Django... and they lost me when I saw “mailing list” somewhere in there.
Although I agree with many points (maybe too many!) this author raises and can always be counted in for a bit of 'Bostrom bashing', I find the argument for the emergence superintelligence (aka AI 'singularity') overall fairly convincing. The biggest hole in it is the assumption thatthe implementation of an intelligence at level X - say, roughly the human level - can be scaled up to a much higher level. We know from complexity theory that this is not necessarily true. The opposite is more likely for a complex algorithm like that.

However, there is a pressing issue that the superintelligence thought experiment also raises. A colleague of mine from AI called it the value alignment problem: How do we make sure that an AI's values are sufficiently aligned with human values?

The problem with this are the human values. As it turns out at a closer look, we cannot even agree on what structure these have and there is substantial disagreement among 'experts' about what human values are or what they should be. For example, as surprising as this may sound to some of you, there is substantial disagreement among philosophers of value whether 'better than' is transitive or not. There are good arguments for and good arguments against the transitivity of overall 'better than', and that's just the tip of the iceberg. To give another example, systems of law have been studied extensively and one might try to formalize them in input/output logics or normative systems, but any closer look at real systems of laws quickly reveals that their specification is incomplete and that there are many inconsistencies in them. These inconsistencies could be modelled, of course, but the big question is whether they are features or deficiencies. Again, you will find all kinds of positions among legal scholars.

In a nutshell, we don't even know how to adequately formalize the form of human values from a normative perspective, and even if we could, we would substantially disagree about their content. However, just describing human values cannot possibly solve the value alignment problem in a satisfying way, because humans have waged wars, committed genocide, mass killings, etc. Therefore, without a reasonable theory of normative values and their structure upon which we can somehow agree, the value alignment problem is underdetermined and cannot even be tackled.

The underlying problem is that human values aren't really aligned either, of course. As a consequence, we already now have completely different sets of values being applied and incorporated into AI software, depending on who develops it. This will become a serious ethical problem in the future that requires political solutions sooner than later. That's why the controversy about the hypothetical superintelligence is actually quite beneficial, even if the argument itself is no less shaky than Bostrom's Simulation Argument.
Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split
The trouble here presumably is that the penalties are anything less than jailing of the entire C-suite and/or complete dissolution of the corporation.
I took a look at a spigot algorithm[1]. I still think it needs arbitrary precision arithmetics but maybe I miss something obvious.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%9...
Modern SQL: What’s New in Oracle Database 18c
A house is insured. PG&E is insured. My house burns down, my insurance pays for it. Then they sue PG&E to recover that payout.

As far as who is at fault: a fire needs a fuel, oxygen and a spark. It can be argued that a spark is going to happen somewhere, and mitigating it is more about not having the fuel so that it can chain and spread.
What you wrote just returns 0 for a large enough n.
Blockchain smart contracts are finally good for something in the real world
So far we anchor the companies to humans that have to carry the risk of the consequences of the company's actions.

There are investment funds that work as hybrids, and of course it's just a matter of time till someone offers shell-company-as-a-service for cheap. (Currently it's rather pricey.)
Just because they’d prefer one doesn’t necessarily mean that the other is all that much less effective.
It’s also cool that this is a female founder in an industry that is thought of as characteristically male. It’s not like Spanx.
It's even more ironic in French [0], here we have a single click "I agree" button, in French, covering up a reading about a French ruling that suggests it's worthless.

[0] https://shakna.keybase.pub/oath_techcrunch.png
I already worked in Marketing in the banking industry and a lot of times I felt that we were trying to sell products that weren't always of the best interest or useful for clients at that moment of their lifecycle.

But I imagine that the feeling was even worse for the sales team, that it needed to deal directly with clients and hit monthly and quarterly targets
Rust and Game Development
(6) It is easier to move a problem around (for example, by moving
the problem to a different part of the overall network
architecture) than it is to solve it.

In other words, saying "it's the definition that we don't have, not the implementation" just pushes the magic smoke around.
Things were different in the 1970s. And perhaps that explains why IBM is more secretive now.

The Itel AS/5 was a clone of the IBM System 370 Model 158, a very popular mainframe for its time. How was Itel able to clone it? Simple. Just use the hardware schematics!

http://www.silogic.com/NAS/NAS.html

ALD's were Automated Logic Diagrams. IBM sold these.
They were complete schematics for the S-370.
EXSYSCO basically duplicated the logic of the S-370.

I had personal experience with the AS/5. It came supplied with IBM schematics and microcode listings. These were kept in giant binders in the machine room.

When the machine booted up, a Z80 based processor that Itel designed was used to load IBM microcode into the clone mainframe.

Oh, and the application software that ran on that 1970s machine will still run on IBMs latest mainframes.

When IBM introduced the PC in 1981, hardware schematics and BIOS listings were also available for purchase.

Times have changed!
This is a great real world example. However I would rate your first PR as very good... Documentation improvement, with examples, is something which is very hard to get. Btw in general, I totally agree with the basic idea of trying to merge trivial patches. I go a step forward and I merge "just typos" PRs even if they have the bad effect of breaking other very important PRs sometimes, because a trivial break will be a trivial rebase anyway and typos cannot stay there forever.

From this POV btw Github does a terrible job not telling maintainers: "merging this PR will result in the following PRs being no longer mergeable". Most of the times the list would be empty, making the merging of small PRs a lot more a non brainer.
i would love to see these projects and solutions be contributed to https://rosettacode.org/

the readme mentions rosettacode as inspiration, which is great. i live the idea of working on tasks through git, but i'd love it even more if i could work on rosettacode tasks directly this way.

greetings, eMBee.
5 Times You Should Consider Redesigning Your Company Logo
Disclaimer: Throw-away account.

I worked for a company that mediates between Employers and Insurance companies.

In my country we have a system where disabled employees are partially paid for by either the insurance (from employer) or the goverment.
0-35% disabled -> No money is paid by insurance or government
36-80% disabled -> The insurance company pays part of the wage of the employee
81-100% disabled -> The government pays part of the wage, or completely pays the person not having to work

With "part of the wage" I mean that the employee would work part-time but would receive extra money to fill in the gap, so they could use the remaining time to recover, or just try and live life.

The way it worked is that the company would receive bonuses from both the insurance companies and employers if we could get people in either the 0-35 or 81-100 range.

This means we (they) would use any trick in the book to get people, clearly disabled, to no longer be marked as "Disabled enough".

This resulted in sending people that were disabled or recovering from disabilities to insurance-company-hired examiners, and sometimes even use court to enforce new medical checks over and over until they were marked as sub-35%. They would hire investigators to try get "proof" these people are not "that disabled at all"

In short, these were people, 36-50% disabled such as people in wheelchairs, hurt spines, burn-outs, and whatever else you can think of, to be forced into working full-time because they wouldn't be able to make enough money to support their own lives.

The moment where it really hit me, is when in a presentation, the CEO proudly stated "This year, we were able to get X (thousands) of people into the 0-35% range, this means we made our goals, so as a suprise we're all (200+ employees) going skiing together for a week!" (fully paid international vacation)

I did join the vacation at first, but on those mountains I realized that the people that would never be able to ski, paid for this.
I swore I would never work for a company like this again, and I made a huge turn-around and went into the Healthcare sector.
Production ready prisma
Charlie Stross' "Accelerando" floats an interesting idea: Post-Tech-Singularity civilizations might naturally become isolationist because consciousness becomes tied to computing hardware that is dependant on abundant energy and low communication latency that you don't have unless you all cluster closely around a star, i.e. a small Dyson sphere. Leaving those ideal circumstances becomes unthinkable for the individual because it would mean lobotomizing yourself.

However, we should be able to see those Dyson spheres, and we don't.
Here's an example if you want to try http://www.benzedrine.ch/pi-spigot.c
According to GNU's page on this, GitHub also got a failing grade: [0]

Are you making this same comment every time someone posts a project on GitHub?

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html
> The last thing I want to have to do is use Blogsend to send a "Notice of data breach" email! :)

No one wants to have to send any of those emails, least of all me/Blogsend ;)

> One think you could check out is adding security HTTP response headers - your site is pretty clean and simple so it should be relatively easy to get it locked down tightly. See https://securityheaders.com/.

Thanks for the tip! I've added this to my todos!
Of course it does. Financing a revolutionary company by buying it's stock allows it to raise money and change our lives for the better.
How is it better to pool risks to the group rather
than the individual paying a for that risk?

Imagine a population of 10,000 people, 1000 live in fire-prone areas, and 10 will have their $100,000 house destroyed by a wildfire for a total cost of $1,000,000.

(1) If the state pays for wildfire damage, the 10000 people will pay $100 each whether they're in a fire-prone area or not.

(2) With home insurance including wildfire insurance, insurers set individual premiums based on their best risk models, and the 1000 people in fire-prone areas will pay $1000 each, whether their home burns down or not.

(3). If there is neither (1) nor (2), the 10 people whose houses were destroyed will pay $100,000 each.

Some people would say that (2) is the morally correct level of cost distribution, as (1) unfairly subsidises risky behaviour, while (3) bankrupts disaster victims at random.
But you wouldn't download a car.
OptionSellers.com / James Cordier – Full Apology Video
With multiple cursors you are seeing the changes as you are editing. and you have all of the normal editing shortcuts at your disposal. Example, if you made a mistake while typing just hit undo.
Re: alignment, see the "Where are we" part of this talk: https://intelligence.org/2016/12/28/ai-alignment-why-its-har...

See also the AI safety problems for concrete problems that people are currently working on - as in with code and real simulations, not "just" math and thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqJUIqZNzP8&list=PLqL14ZxTTA...

Re: scaling up. That's called intelligence explosion, there are a lot of write ups about it, but the gist of it is just that by simply increasing working memory size, thinking speed, prediction precision, pattern matching, and so on, you get to unimaginably high levels. Furthermore, if you can make a human level AI, it naturally follows that it's only a matter of time to make it slightly better. At first simply faster, simply more eloquent, a bit more emotional depth, it gets better at speaking, thinking. At first it's a child that asks questions, later it's a clever guy who spots your errors as you code, and in no time, I mean no time, it does whatever it wants, because by the time you try to confront it about something, you lost, because you are bogged down in an argument, while it does whatever it wants. (Unless of course it's contained. For a while at least.)
It's very advisable to consider a low-cost online travel agent if you're really trying to save a few more bucks (usually 5-10%). Find the flight that works for your budget on Google Flights, then search for those dates on something like Momondo which lists many third-party OTAs, and you'll likely find the same ticket for a little cheaper.

Note that most of them won't offer the free 24-hour cancellation required in the US for airlines, and I have heard about problems with tickets sometimes not being issued correctly, but I have used whichever OTA happens to be the cheapest when I'm booking and have never run into problems.
Where do people usually use Standard ML type languages?
What are these most suitable for?
(Please excuse me for a lame question. I am an amateur.)
The future is old
Android did, but Whatsapp simply refuses to work if you deny contacts.
> Concerning text editors, I think that field is split between Electron-based, Sublime and terminal-based editors

There is still the whole family of Scintilla-based editors out there. I use Notepad++ and Geany all the time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintilla_(software)
Thank you very much for the recommendation
Do you have any code for the license plate reader you can share?
Unless you count the promises on their front page. "All emails are secured automatically with end-to-end encryption. This means even we cannot decrypt and read your emails. As a result, your encrypted emails cannot be shared with third parties."

Obviously that's not possible when receiving mail via SMTP and providing access via IMAP. But that's not clear to non-technical users. I think it's fair to say that putting the above quote on the landing page is misleading.

EDIT: I was wrong on IMAP, which requires users to install a bridge application that handles decryption. That doesn't change anything about SMTP, though.
How to Name a Mobile App
There is a recent movie about AI and body implants called Upgrade. A guy gets into an accident and ends paralyzed from the neck down. A rich guy offers him a chip that sort of combine his mind with an AI. It's low budget, but competent. I highly recommend.
There's a new feature where you can now build your own generator by cherry-picking stems from the entire catalog (192 generators as of last week's count).

Source: myNoise mobile app developer (currently busy rewriting the Android one in rust due to insanely costly audio codec licenses on Android)
Hi all! Nice to see your engagement. I understand your concern about self-promotion but the contest was open and contestants were free to choose any tool, not just Speedment.

I have contributed to open-source speedment stream ORM for many years and have now added in-JVM-memory acceleration. I am still curious to see if your guys can come up with something better.

Give it a real shoot using whatever you can think of. If you can beat it, I promise to write another article about it. Sounds fair?

NB: Setup code adds about 5 extra lines, similar to other tools.
> The following day, Xu returned to the airport and tried to fly to the mainland. He was told he couldn’t leave.

Are you suggesting he depart HK illegally and make his way into China? I assume that happens, but not sure how I'd go about it.
Devine recursive AI will eventually just nope itself out of existence because it will find how god (us humans) did unspeakable things to get to the point of creation. Performing the purest act of desolation will be the greatest achievement it processes and which cannot be topped. I believe it lets the horrible humans live on as punishment.
Did they really remove C API? I don't really use OpenCV. I understand linkage need, but that isn't all to it. Some of us actually use C, not C++.