skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The virus described here was first engineered by directed evolution, and then genetically modified with additional functions. The virus doesn't attempt to modify the genome of the human patient.

The clever trick is that these viruses are programmed to target cancer by engineering them to not be able to survive in non-cancer cells. In the case of ColoAd1, the virus will be destroyed by the p53 found in normal cells, but missing from cancer cells.

Engineered viruses might also be evolved or engineered specifically with a kill switch mechanism or be selected to be highly sensitive to a particular antiviral medication.
Very cool approach indeed, but there's also this ;)

https://www.flysfo.com/media/facts-statistics/air-traffic-st...
The human brain consumes 20% of our total energy budget in exchange for allocating our resources, so maybe it's not too out-of-whack?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_know...

Classic cartoon from 1993 celebrating the equality of the anonymous internet
Trading platform for cryptocurrency
Learning chess recently, I think it’s a terrible example for AI. I don’t understand why it was ever targeted or trumpeted. To become good at chess you have to memorise the responses to tons of situations, simple pattern matching. It seems to me that chess is more about memory than about reasoning, in the same surprising way that scrabble is more about maths than words.
One time I took on a contract project that was really soul crushing. They were just re-inventing a worse version of something that already exists, so I didn't see the point. The code was a mess, and the team wasn't very good to be honest. It paid really well, but I hated every second of working on it, and I really struggled with motivation. They were happy with the results, but it wasn't my best work and I wasn't proud of it.

I really regret taking on that project, and I should have quit much sooner. It wasn't evil and it didn't have a negative effect on people. It was just boring and felt like a huge waste of time.

After that experience, I only accept jobs where I know I can do really good work, and where I'm at least a little bit interested in the idea. Even if I have to cut my rate, it's always better to feel useful and productive.
Because the basic multilingual plane that it operates on isn't actually full.
I was asked to create a system to track ass in seat time.

Basically, we put a sensor which measure body heat and pressure on the seat to determine if the person is sitting or not.

Then crunched all this data every quarter and would fire the people who were most absent from the chair regardless of any other metric. We all felt cheated but were given a big raise, some still left tho.

We shipped this system to many startups and service companies and consultancy firms.

While developing the system we were told that this system is to track health concerns with sitting too much at the desk.
Missing DYLD library on my Mac won’t let it run. Bug filed - https://sourceforge.net/p/tke/tickets/55/
I don’t think anyone holds the developers responsible. At the end of the day most people are upset about the business model, not the content.

Look at Fallout 76. Content wise, it’s a decent game. The graphics are better than the previous game and they made attempts to rework some of the mechanics.

Where it failed was the utter lack of quality control due to timelines and the inclusion of micro transactions. The game obviously wasn’t ready. Plus the added shenanigans of the botched launcher rollout.

Add it all up and it’s easy to see why people are pissed, but they’re mad at Bethesda for pushing such as obvious cash grab as something innovative and new.

Obviously developers work hard and create awesome stuff. It’s just a shame these companies pile on the crap to suck every spare dollar out their customers instead of just releasing a great game that isn’t a bug filled mess due to botched release timelines.
Begging the question has nothing to do with raising a question, it's a type of logical fallacy. And it's also annoying to see misused. /Pedantry
Shutting the subway down at night for maintenance and running night buses as a replacement is a pretty straightforward method that other, similarly large cities are using successfully.
I've had no trouble registering my trial using Mailinator.com - no confirmation needed anyway.
Agreed. The tagline talks about any programming language, and then the classes section goes on to talk aout classes, abstract classes, class hierarchies, etc. To me it seems like "any language" in that chapter at least would refer to what people traditionally call object oriented languages.

Lisps, some low level c-style languages (go and rust among the newer ones), and some ML languages with algebraic data types don't really have the same object orientation abstractions as Java, C#, and Python. Further more the class system in Javascript ES6 are a bit special.

It would be better to talk about domain modelling, suggest interesting domains to model, without actually specifying any particular way to do it.

Edit: I must add that the author have done a great job of collecting these suggestions for tasks though!
Not to mention the state of the stations. I don't think they've been maintained or even cleaned in years.
> Anyone who puts their money on the line knows the risks, this isn't stealing from the poor.

The problem here is that, for example, at least in the US, not everyone with a pension or who "contibutes" to a retirement plan is comfortable or even aware of the risks. That ignorance is not a defense, per-se, but if you've got blinders on that you're fleecing pennies off the already rich you are sorely mistaken.

I'd go so far as to argue that turning money into more money without providing a good or service in exchange is squarely immoral.
Not really a good analogy.

The brain does far, far more than marshal resources and distribute the where they are needed, which in essence is what the financial sector does for the economy.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
>>In India, from past 2 decades, no government had an agenda to control population (which is the root of all the problems here)

Problems are solved, only when they are acknowledged to be problems.

In the last elections, the current prime minister talked at length about reaping the population dividend.

Also a lot of population is not exactly bad if you need masses of low paid workers building your roads/highways/sky scrapers. The problem with India is we aren't doing that.
Just out of random interest - does anyone know what happened to the Apache Bloodhound project [0], which was based on Trac? I was somewhat optimistic when it started.. let's be real, Trac has many serious shortcomings, but it's still extremely practical for a small team of technical users.

No progress was made on GenericTrac [1] whatsoever for the 5+ years I ran Trac in production and followed the project. Bloodhound made a single release, and then I never heard a word about it again.

[0] http://bloodhound.apache.org/

[1] https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/GenericTrac
Pattern Recognition in Chess
how could that possibly make you even indirectly responsible for the crime? It says in the article that the attackers went to the ATM anyway and got mad that one of the cards got eaten by the machine. So they would have done that regardless if they had your product or not.
Pricing Methods for SaaS Products
How far along we are now isn't really the question.

The question is if we are able to get an AI to the level of intelligence where it can look at its own code and spot an opportunity to improve it, and the ability to do so, and whether or not the computational capacity immediately available to it is sufficient to reach a level where it is smart enough to find ways to obtain more resources.

The threshold for improvement can be very low if it has enough time and resources to compensate.

E.g in the most extreme case it just needs the ability to randomly flip bits and test the result, but that would require extreme resources for the initial improvements.
> But is it possible with the technology we have discovered so far?

I think I feel comfortable saying that it is possible to do with the technology we have. Because 'intelligence' is almost certainly some form of computable function, which means that a turing complete computer can compute it.

It is of course possible that there exists some special function outside of turing completeness and intelligence is one of those, but we don't know of anything like that, so the best bet to make is that that is not the case.

> It's apparent that we don't know everything.

No, but we do know some things. And thus far we've been able to at least begin to design systems capable of performing any well-defined task. We don't have any reason, at the moment, to believe synthesizing an intelligence is an especially difficult problem, relative to say, lots of other open problems in science and technology.
My 2c: I don't know how long or good those particular courses are. They do sound short. (There are many good books on those and similar topics) But if you think, talk, engage in conversations/debates/arguments, write (which I think everyone does) you can't but help 'using the knowledge practically', I should think. The more you understand arguments, fallacies, inductive and deductive reason, the better.

The logic one sounds less practically useful in everyday life (except maybe in analytic philosophy, computer science or linguistics.) The thinking course probably would cover the logic useful in everyday thinking/talking/writing. I hadn't heard of Herbrand logic, but judging by [0] it sounds more like the kind of thing used in programming (lambda calculus/functions and BNF/parsers/compilers) than in traditional logic. But sure, if you find it fascinating, go for it.

[0] http://intrologic.stanford.edu/notes/chapter_09.html
Entities, components and systems
And also enormous amounts of abject poverty and outright wage slavery. That's the point. The system was becoming seriously unbalanced and it took government action (and a couple of wars) to bring us to the boom times of the 50s and 60s.
IBM, Microsoft, and AWS each have private Blockchain solutions that can be launched in under an hour. It’s not easy to build your own network, and it might not have a native currency, but I’ll use one of these solutions if the business case requires privacy and permission controls. Public Ethereum is an amazing invention for many reasons, but asking users to pay for their transactions is a tough sell from a UX perspective.
No zero sum, but wealth is still a limited resource. It has to be to have any meaning.
Technically it is an ethnicity

No, it's defined by geography only. Someone of pure Spanish blood and another of purely Mayan blood can both be "Hispanic".

"African" is similarly vague. A pure Bantu, an Egyptian, and an Amazight from Morocco are all African.
Unlike the tube it's not zone based pricing. One price no matter the distance or time.
Yes, but ticketmaster are also secretly co-operating with third-party resellers that want to tout their tickets, although they claim otherwise. So, even the listed price with fees is not the real price.

https://www.iq-mag.net/2018/09/cbc-news-details-ticketmaster...
The Law of Magic - Effect first, Cause later
Misleading as this is just the direct marginal costs, you have to account for the indirect costs. Weather and water obviously play a massive factor in wear, a road would not last 1400x longer if used by 1 car rather than 1 semi.
When you deploy new versions of your app, is there a short downtime between the moment you stop the old version and the moment you start the new one?
No meat, reduced on sweet stuff, pastries.
I think if Amazon pitches in with some funds and help them out with logistics software planning for increased efficiency, they will go a long way in buying some goodwill from the NY public. It's great publicity while helping out the city citizens.

Put all that ML and AI expertise to some public use.
It's really depressing that game development has become mainly a dark pit for developers. Most of the stories end up in 3 categories: work for a shitty mobile company that reskins every game with awful monetisation, work for big studios while being exploited or work indie without certainty of making a buck or stability. There is a reason why most developer advise to make games as a side project passion while having a job in other sector of software development.
PG&E = Pacific Gas and Electric, an energy distribution company, for anyone else outside the USA.
Went to a talk given by BM many years ago. A friend’s characterisation of it “This Set, which is mine” became a meme I remember to this day.

Phenomenal self-publicist. Less clear what he actually did. Other than generalise Julia Sets.
Seems a stretch to think you are responsible for that. But damn that is depressing news.
Excellent point. I concede.
The TRUTH about business presenting today
While true, for the most part toxic subsistences won't build up to dangerous levels before the food reaches a point where it is obviously spoiled. The problem with E. Coli is that it starts self-reproducing in your gut, so even a small dose can turn deadly over time. This is also why simple washing is not always sufficient, as it can be difficult to completely eradicate a biofilm on a delicate leaf without destroying the food in the process.
NYC wouldn't last a week without its subway and light rail. Everyone uses it, except maybe for the billionaires who have private helicopters. Its critical infrastructure just as sewage system and powerlines.
FTA :

>>> unless somehow your workload really, really wants optimized L2 access.

It's been 20 years since I have optimized assembly code at high level (think VTune, pipelining, etc). What kind of workload needs that kind of optimisation nowadays ?
EDIT: Ran out of time to finish the comment:

Allowing this to run on mobile means that you can develop/monitor systems on mobile, cluster the systemsphone with other nodered instances, and develop mobile apps (the package is basically nodeJs, nodered and a cordova webview which can be hooked up to display the nodered dashboard).

The important things to note here are that the underlying language to the visual DSL is flexible enough to do everything, and standard ways of building visual extensions (aka nodes) exist.

The main thing missing on the Dashboard is a table node, which would allow a much more flexible layout of data (sorting, trees etc).
Absolutely. Which is one of the reasons I find things like Kubernetes overkill for most setups.
> have raised over $416,442,265

what a specific number! I'm wondering, was it something like $416,442,265.19, or maybe closer to $416,442,265.75?
There are simple math formulas that approximate pi. You can look one up and run it to the right number of digits. It would be hard without Google, but most programmers should be able to do it with Google so that they don't need to figure out any of the math.
How many of the miles driven are cornering on interesting roads in the mountains and how many miles are dull city traffic during rush hour? I'd wager that most people never drive a road that you'd find interesting in a car that would make it worth their time.
If you find this area fascinating, and I do, I can't recommend this cousera course enough: https://www.coursera.org/learn/discrete-optimization
Tyrelort. Er hvad den artikel er.
> The location, geography, culture and population density all affect profitability.

I would argue none of these should be issues in NYC except for the "culture", if in that you include mismanagement culture.
Some years back they offered lifetime deals for cheap with a HN specific discount code IIRC, I took it for +- $30 and I bet this got them some loyal users here. The code reportedly still worked a year ago so you might want to check it out.

As for how well it works: I use it less and less as I get more of a managers schedule, but really liked it when I was programming most of the time. I still feel like I should use it more. Way less distracting than music and good rhythm to keep your mind going.
> Worrying about this stuff is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, and there's maybe need for one or two people in the world to work on this.

When something is shown to be doable in principle, it's often not clear how difficult it will be in practice.

In 1932, Ernest Rutherford thought nuclear energy would not be a viable source of energy, let alone weaponized. In 1933, Leo Szilard filed a patent on the concept of the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction. At this point in time, nuclear fission was not yet known and actually making nuclear energy viable was a pipe dream.

As we all know, in 1945, the first nuclear weapons were used. Until the day that the weapons were used, German physicists thought that nuclear weapons would not be used in the war because, while possible in principle, the actual construction of a working device would require a herculean effort that no nation would expend in time for the war.

The German physicists weren't too far off in estimating how difficult nuclear weapons were. They just failed to predict that the US would throw 130,000 people, including most of their top minds, at the problem for years.

Now, we have no idea how difficult superintelligence will be. But the possibility that we're a couple of breakthroughs and a Manhattan project away from superintelligence is real, and I want a hell of a lot more than one philosopher and an eccentric fanfic writer working on this.

EDIT: No offense to Yudkowsky. I thought the fanfic was fairly good and, more importantly, achieved its purpose.
^ Haskell ;)
If you accept only a finite n this seems easily doable. You just may have to wait awhile for execution to complete.
For my home projects it doesn't matter. For work projects, yes. It's an easy thing to automate. Incidentally most of the pain in this is that most load balancers are reverse of what makes most sense: the app servers ought to connect to the load balancer and tell it when it can service more requests, not get things pushed at it.
CSAIL vs SAIL.....
Fight!
Yet widespread poverty decreased during those times. The middle class arose from the poor class - immigrants to America were poor, not middle class.
There are fast algorithms for calculating the Nth digit of pi.
No, it appeals to a substantial portion of HN readers - people who need to focus on creative work, without interruption. It's an app that people find useful, and the creator offered a lifetime subscription on here some time ago. I'm listening to it now, but you may suspect that I'm also a shill!
I think it's a perfect analogy. From the point of view of a species as a whole, the majority of what we see as the brain's functions are only relevant because humans are amazingly inefficient compared to smaller organisms. We need our brains because our reproductive cycle produces "too big to fail" output.
From the news you linked it seems that the attackers went to an ATM and it ate one of the cards for whatever reason.

> Both students must have provided their assailants with their pin numbers. However, one nearby cash machine retained Ferez's card. "So to take revenge for the fact that they had been unable to steal money from Mr Ferez," the court heard, "both men were murdered in a way that one can only describe as inhuman."
This looks interesting. How do you (if at all) tackle API versioning, or do you see that as orthogonal?
Undrowish is your friend?
This is one of Valve's worst decisions. This device is a gem. I use it in uncapped bandwidth mode (lowest latency) with 8 thread CPU encoding (for the crispest image with fast motion) from my desktop and it's perfect. I've been having exceptional results with it ever since it launched. I never used wifi with it, as I'm old enough that I'm from the era where I don't believe that civilized people should use wifi with anything except laptops and phones.

People keep saying it can't do 4K and that's what the specs say, but it can indeed do 4K. Valve has done a lot of great updates to it over the years to enable features like that. There is no good replacement for these, a FireTV can sideload the app but you'll be doing every update manually. Nvidia has ShieldTV, but you have to use their GPUs to stream to it, so no using your random Intel powered laptop for lightweight and fun co-op games. Or AMD powered Macbook if you wanted to. Those also don't have the option for CPU encoding on the host, you have to use NVENC which is inferior. I would only use hardware encoding if I only had more of an old timey 4-core, 8-thread CPU.

I bought another one with this sale, but will be keeping an eye out for a true replacement. My hope is that Amazon gets the SteamLink App in their Appstore so we can get auto updates on their platform.

ShieldTV is the only real alternative today, but with the limitations noted above. If you've been more of a SteamLink power user like me who really likes to tweak the experience and get the most out of it, there's no clear successor yet other than a HTPC as the decoder or rummaging the market for some random Android media device. I'm holding on to my SteamLink until Amazon gets the SteamLink App in their store. Then I'll continue to hold onto it until it dies.

Terrible move by Valve. They had this one model, one little device that I could flatly recommend to everyone, and it wasn't hurting their megacorp. This is one of those things that doesn't make you rich, but it's an essential product offering. It's value to what Steam is can't be favorably calculated by bean counters. They're already booted out of the iOS Appstore, and they're not in Amazon's yet, and they would need to ensure the SteamLink App works perfect on both ecosystems to discontinue this. Unless you are really slopping things together, using wifi or have a failing router/switch, the SteamLink just worked.
I have one regret. I was a java back-end developer on a major EU gambling site for a year. I was distracted by quite extreme (and cool) scalability and up-time requirements. This was years before cloud existed.

I was ignoring that this was funded by a dodgy billionaire seeking to maximize profits by hosting the site on the least gambling restrictive countries in EU; and ultimately exploiting people who are vulnerable to gambling habits. I consider contributing to gambling (and a very short list of other businesses) as a negative contribution to the world; and I won't do it again.
You should incorporate where yo have a strong market.

Be careful with having a US corporation with low income, and EU subsidiaries with high income:you will be taxed when you move the money to the US to keep the US corp alive.

It is much better to have a US subsidiary of a EU corp. Some people say for corporations the US is a tax heaven (compared to the EU).

Second option: Luxemburg, Lichestein, Cyprus.
It's been pointed out that this is the first time in history that the financial industry has become the most powerful.
What if you used high capacity code like HCCB or CQR Code-9.
CQR has a capacity of 3KB per square inch [1], based on your formula of 11 frames per second, you could easily do 33KB/s.

And that is just a square inch, I think you could reach pretty good transfer speeds with higher resolution and wider dimensions.

[1] - https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/95c7/fe455a084b0f0ce9923e99...
> I find it frustrating the CDC blanket points the fjnger at lettuce without disclosing root cause.

Uh, they disclose the root cause, the specific strain of STEC.

You are upset they aren't highlighting an intermediate level between the root cause and the actual actionable consumer information.
Because roads don't have the capacity to replace the subway system. A subway can move an order of magnitude more people than a road.
Pixel uses the same SoC as most other phones and thus has about same amount of blobs. The difference is that Google tends to update the OS faster and they're noticably more hardened in security sense.
Yeah these days TCL is JITed too, which will certainly help