skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We humans are blackbox physical machines that processes physical inputs to produce physical outputs.

Whether that input goes through processing that is "spiritual" is besides the point. Reproducing "spirituality" is not the goal. The goal is to replicate what is "observable." To produce a machine that when given the same inputs as that given to a human will produce identical (or "better") outputs as the human.

This is definitely an achievable goal as for every set of inputs and output pairs in existence an infinite amount of different machines can be constructed to replicate that exact input/output functionality.

The "spirituality" that goes on within this blackbox machine or humans is irrelevant. It's not even a word that is clearly defined. We aren't trying to replicate "spirituality." We are trying to make a machine that only from an observational standpoint is clearly superior or indistinguishable to a human intelligence.

The understanding the theoretical possibility of singularity is purely within the grasp of a typical person.

Imagine a chat bot designed to be indistinguishable from a human chatter. The inputs are text queries and the outputs are text queries. The domain is every possible text query and the range is every possible text response.

For purposes of simplicity lets say the text input and output is limited to 500 chars. This makes the possible input and output pairs finite. To create a chat bot identical to a human you simply need to create a machine that maps all inputs to certain outputs. Think of it like a giant hash map of strings to strings. Given enough time and enough memory this can be done.

The goal of current AI is to solve this problem more efficiently. To produce logical cores that can dynamically generate outputs from inputs rather than following a gigantic mapping. It can be thought of as form of data compression. The data is the mapping; the compression of that data is the logical core.

The fact that a mapping can even be constructed at all is by logical induction, a proof that a singularity is possible and thus completely invalidating your initial statement of:

>I don't think anything like the singularity will ever be possible
The correct response to "What's wrong with you[, you should take the drink]" is to face the situation forthrightly, not shrink before the social pressure.
It's not the "tech industry". It's a certain segment of the "tech industry". The same segment that hires like a fraternity hazing. That segment cultivates this. That segment wants this. Is that good or bad? I dunno. I don't want any part of it, but that's my choice.
Actually, that would be really, really awesome once you get used to Jetbrains' way of working. It's so unusual to be able to search for all the configuration, functionality, code and files in the same place.
You're not a sociopath. You're wise and strong enough to avoid abusive relationships where you see them. Many people can't, so they shame those that can by calling them heartless or sociopaths to justify why they keep toxic people around in their own lives.

It's no wonder why cults, organized crime, shitty people and shitty employers appeal to sense of familial bond as well...peoples' innate need to be part of some "family" construct gets exploited as a cover for all sorts of abuse.

You wouldn't want someone in your family to get in trouble for molesting or cheating you, would you? This will drag on for years, or decades of your life if you let it.

Anytime anybody tries to appeal to family or tells you "we're just one big family here" to get you to do something, run for your life. Whatever you're about to get into will turn incestuous quickly.
I have trouble believing that evolution has been that inefficient. That we can brutally outperform the human brain at 64-bit arithmetic--no surprise. But to accomplish the same with creativity and problem solving? Not holding my breath.
I am seriously interested in understanding why a lot of people have no issue accepting the idea of humans evolving from simple immaterial matter into biological beings and all the way up to our current reality but have a hard time believing that can be done via computers.

I would at least put it in the very likely box that computers can learn to be the same kind of pattern recognizing feedback loops that we are even without humans understanding the brain completely just as we became conscious and self aware without any "programmer".

"Computers" don't need to be like us to become intelligent, they don't actually need to reproduce the lungs and the intestine as we have it, they are in many ways free of those restrictions.

They might be "concerned" with very different things than we are and might even not really care about nature to survive. All they need is energy.
I usually use intuit and pay them $50 for taxes, their UX is decent.

How does one even file free taxes in the US? I’d love to do that. I used to do my own taxes in Australia.

I tried to do some googling around to no avail.
It is all the evidence you need if you don't care about sound statistics.

I would think someone would at least want to look at the demographics of people applying vs people getting hired vs people qualified vs demographics of the general population.
I think this is increasingly a feature of British newspapers: a strong editorial slant in news selection and presentation.
I don't see why people care about human intelligence as some kind of benchmark. It seems to me that using human intelligence as a framing is a poor mental model for making comparisons or predictions. I see no reason to believe AI capabilities will be modulated by human intellectual capacities. When AI falls short of human capacities for a given set of tasks or capabilities it's likely to fall way short, and when it isn't it's likely to be way more capable. In any case I wish human intelligence would be dropped from the language we use to talk about AI, it seems similar to talking about birds all the time when discussing aviation.
We can't compare high-risk jobs with IT, for obvious reasons. I'm merely suggesting a correlation between the proliferation of alcohol in our industry, the parties, the trade shows, with the prevalence of young white males in our line of work.

I merely found data which loosely supports (and you could successfully argue that it has no correlation) my hypothesis.
Ask HN: What topic instantly will spark a great conversation with you?
This 100000% over.
This is especially true of tech conferences. I've stopped attending altogether mostly due to the drinking 'culture' of the events.
> The DMCA isn't against the publisher as I understand, its against the sites actually selling the game.

Well, yes, that's how DMCA takedown notices work. If Lex Luthor posts my video on YouTube, I don't send the DMCA takedown notice to Lex Luthor, I send the DMCA takedown notice to YouTube. Lex Luthor has no responsibility to accept DMCA takedown notices, and there's no way to send them to him.

The sequence is (1) publisher breaches contract (2) developer voids contract in response (3) publisher no longer has right to distribute game (4) DMCA takedown notice. This makes sense to me, but again, I'm not a legal expert and I'm willing to entertain arguments. I feel like the only thing in question here is whether the contract was voided properly, and whether it could be voided in the first place.
You're right, and I won't make that mistake again.
Interesting. when I use my iphone SE, I use it one handed; I use swype with my thumb, which doesn't look like it'd work; my thumb practically covers the whole keyboard, but it ends up working really well for me. swype on the bigger iphones for me is a lot less comfortable, and I end up holding the phone with one hand and typing with the other. I haven't tried a "pop socket" yet, but that might be the solution.
Several years ago, I finally cut off relations with my own Mother. After several bouts of therapy it became very hard to ignore that she was and always had been a toxic influence in my life. As an adult through my 20s and 30s, I'd try to 'play-nice' and invite her over to visit (she lived in Spain, and may still do, I have no idea), from the moment she arrived to the moment she left, she tried to manipulate and emotionally blackmail not only me, but my partner and even my young daughter. When that stopped working she'd get her husband to do the same every time I was alone with him. She made me miserable even when she wasn't around, and I would be constantly stressed knowing that I'd have to interact with her, something I tried to do for the sake of my daughter. I feel no emotional bond with the woman; she has treated me awfully my entire life.

Since stripping her from my life, I no longer feel the guilt and burden of maintain a relationship that really wasn't good for me.

Blood is never thicker than water. It doesn't matter who the person is; if they are not a positive element in your life, then cut them out. Like you would a cancer.

...

Before someone thinks 'ah but I bet he carries some blame regarding the deterioration of the relationship' - nope. My sister, who is several years younger than me, has also cut my Mother out of her life. In fact she did it before I did.
This may be the case for many technologies, but clear wins that save lives get fast tracked. It just happened to CTX001. Also older researchers are doing self testing all the time, as they know that they don't have the time to go through regulations.

https://www.investors.com/news/technology/crispr-vertex-gene...
> in the end made to happen by an unlikely pair

Who spent years studying birds...

No, the wings of the wright flyer don't flap, but that doesn't mean it wasn't designed based on birds. One key piece (controllability) came as a result of the wright brothers studying how birds adjusted the shape of their wings.
There are a number of concepts that are worth learning about at a high-level if you want to learn about building large-scale projects. Most modern/large companies use some/all of the following to build their backends:

- Load balancers

- Web servers

- Caches (eg. Redis, memcached)

- Databases (relational, non-relational, document)

- Search datastores (eg. Elasticsearch, Solr)

- Log/event/message processors (eg. Kafka)

- Task queues/task processing libraries

- Periodic jobs (eg. cron)

If you dig into any of these there's a ton to learn, especially around looking into the underlying technologies used to build these higher-level systems.

There are also more conceptual things that are part of building/maintaining backend systems. These are a bit fuzzier, but I would say are also as important as the specific technologies used:

- Reliability

- Monitoring

- Observability

- Error/failure handling

- Migration strategies

- Data normalization/denormalization

- Horizontal vs. vertical scalability

This is by no means a complete list, but these terms are enough to get you in the right ballpark of ideas and start learning. I think highscalability.com is a great place to read about how other companies have built backend systems to solve specific problems. They have a massive list of quality articles written about various backend systems at scale.
That would be an inevitability. All it would take is a single emotionally vulnerable engineer to get socially engineered by the AI into setting it loose.
Why? It's just faster and I already can stream video and play realtime games on 4g. What are other more demanding applications?
I'm not sure about AWS but firebase and google cloud functions don't. My younger sister actually uses it for her backend. She's a college student and $5 a month if affordable but she doesn't want to pay it. I'd would also say I would in college maybe have 100-200 dollars to work with. Yeh I could pay it but I wouldn't want to.
Yet another way JavaScript has become more like Perl5. It now features `tie`. https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/tie.html
I reckon there are 3 factors here that determine the salaries, one being mentioned in the article:

1. Equity
Most high "salaries" are more sharing of the profit or stock then mere salary. Lawyers become partners and thus share in the profit the firm makes (same goes for consultants)

2. Supply and demand
There are way more positions than people willing to do the work.* So the ones who do, can pick 'n choose there employer. Thus work conditions improve, as do salaries. Most other professions mentioned are high stake jobs, but with more willing to do it * * . So once you're in, it is still possible for the employer to demand hard work, because you're more replaceable.

3. Scalability
The work of a doctor is limited to the amount of patients.
Lawyers can do large cases (then they get paid much), but most of them will do work that effect a limited amount of people
Code (especially at the big 5) reaches literally billions of people.
So the values you can possibly add is huge.

* I think it is still kind of weird how many people don't even try to learn how to code (or scripting) while working in excel all the time, it's a magical barrier, few dare to cross.

* * I don't know why, but I would guess it's because (i) The sciences are viewed as arcane or simply unreachable for many people (self-claimed "I just can't do math") (ii) those job tend to have more social status (think Suits for lawyers & Grey's Anatomy for doctors, to name a few)
Part of me feels the same way. I've been through AS3, Coffeescript, Dart, and now the Typescript hypewagons.

I'm willing to give it a deep dive, but I'd rather see an optional flag in an upcoming ES version for types and other TS superset features.
In that case, having secure/unsecure wifi doesn't really change the equation because the operator itself can still be hostile, even if the link is secure. Having secure (eg. WPA enterprise) wifi only means that some random guy can't intercept your traffic. However, at home, having a secure network is definitely important because of legacy protocols (SMB) or unsecured services (LAN facing http servers)
A tiger might confidently think that the human they got cornered has no recourse, up until when the human pulls the trigger.
Kurzweil’s Phantasms (2013)
We could also fix the way medicine works so pre-diabetics are put on an appropriate, low carb diet so they don't end up with diabetes and all of the horrible complications in the first place.

Medicine as a whole will be looked back upon very poorly with how it handled diet, sleep, sunlight exposure, etc.
Choosing the best IT certification in 2019
What does UI or UX have to do with language choice?
Reinforcement Learning: From Grid World to Self-Driving Cars
This brings me back to the short essay from a few years ago about the corporation as human-powered AI: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-...
Have you considered that those arguing against the standard diversity tropes aren’t arguing in bad faith?

At least from my perspective, affirmative action is immoral, and any notion of power imbalance doesn’t seep into my understanding of the definition of discrimination.

People can have deeply considered all the nuances posed and still come up with a perspective that differs from the accepted social justice narrative.
“Kurzweil’s Phantasms”: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/04/kurzweils-phanta...
Revenue is the reward mechanism of capitalism; fines are great as long as they're big enough. I think the percentage route is the way to go.

Corporations make all their decisions based on risk/cost/reward; if it costs X to respect people's privacy, and it costs Y (via fines) to not respect people's privacy, you just have to balance that equation. Shareholders will do the rest.
Its not about diversity, its about controlling the discourse and the social narrative of a society- aka, its about power. Real discussion could erode those artificial boundaries and propaganda towers. They want you to yell, but they dont want you to talk.
It's not clear what the obvious reasons are.

There's a very large body of universal, systemic evidence that women are (in large numbers) more interested in people than things, and vice versa for males. IT is a very thing-oriented industry. When women choose not to do IT freely of their own preferences, we should not react by suggesting that men are the problem.
”But if one room can mix with and increase the Netatmo’s room all the way up to 1934PPM, what must the original concentration have been like?”

Why not move the weather station to the bedroom for a couple of nights? (And make sure the sensor is at nose/mouth height, preferably close to it. CO2 is heavier than air, so concentrations may be higher closer to the floor in a closed room with little movement)

I would also do a back-of-the-envelope computation along the lines of https://www.globe.gov/explore-science/scientists-blog/archiv... or https://ac.els-cdn.com/S1877705813007558/1-s2.0-S18777058130..., to verify the numbers the weather station produces.

And the lesson of all this seems to be: get a large bedroom and leave the door open (both easier for the well-off, so get rich parents!)
I have had 4g disabled for years as I’ve found it somehow slower and significantly less reliable than 3G, across multiple devices. I can stream music and watch YouTube videos just fine.

This is on O2 (UK). Maybe I need a new network.
"any programming environment you can never stop someone from iterating by index over a binary searchable tree for a specific element in it."

SQL solved that problem a long time ago. You write SELECT, the query optimizer figures out how, using any available indices.
I was lucky to get my hands on 5 proper co2 sensors from university, while I was teaching and working. So plenty of test places.

What I found:

-Just a couple of hours in a office, without ventilation spikes the co2 enough to make everyone dizzy and tired by the end of the day. Keeping eye on the meter and ventilating properly, increased everyones productivity and people werent so tired by the end of the day.

- Classrooms, with 20-30 people are as bad. co2 rises really fast and makes people dizzy. Most often ventilation is too low, as a cost saving measure.

-Closing bedroom door, sleeping alone made bedroom as bad by the morning than classroom or office.

-Main culprit seems to be our perfection with insulating and making rooms airtight. I do live in a cold climate, so having open vents or windows is not common half the year. It seems it has not been such a big issue before plastic windows or in older houses. I think it is getting worse with every new building.
Lucida Console isn't too bad either -- it's very legible at small font sizes. On some of my work and personal systems I also have Lucida Sans Typewriter[1] (IIRC it was bundled with Office), which is taller and subjectively slightly better looking than Lucida Console

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/lucida...
There are no non-competes in California, and most of the best paying tech companies have decent vacation policies (though maybe not as good as the norm in Sweden). Lots of people have hobbies other than coding, so they wouldn't mind not coding on personal projects after work. Is it really that hard to imagine that people might be willing to make fairly minor sacrifices in exchange for several hundred thousand dollars a year?
Yeah but Exec/Kickstart/Workbench was missing some basic niceties that are table stakes today:

- No process or kernel security (processes could rewrite kernel code)

- Processes could effectively disable the scheduler

- Supported only a single, fixed address space: both a massive limitation and a performance hack that made the system bearable to use

- Single-user

- No security model

There are embedded applications these days where not having these features are deak-breakers. Let me assure you: if you re-implemented the original Amiga OS feature set it too will be screaming fast. The tricky part is keeping it fast once you start adding protection and additional functionality on top of it.

And largely what happened when you tried to implement more complicated applications on top of these primitive systems is that they would crash the entire system, constantly.
From what I understand, DNT is in fact shrined into law in the upcoming ePrivacy law though.
End-to-end encryption doesn't solve your problem when the attacker is your first link network provider, without out-of-band signaling.

Which I believe was parent's point. Attestation and authentication of network infrastructure (in a way that would preclude Stingray attacks) is equally important as anything you layer on top.

Otherwise, without some sort of global PKI you can consult out of band, you're just rolling the dice that the cellular station you're connecting to isn't rogue and performing a man in the middle attack.
So have I, but for some reason my browser cache is cluttered with 3rd party content I never asked for. The feature is evidently broken.
Only major potential caveat with Mediawiki is that it isn't great if you need good access control for pages, it's just not made for that. I believe Dokuwiki is better at that particular aspect.
Lol. Try running Windows on non standard or even non x86 hardware. Your point here doesn't make much sense.
"consider an exercise room with equipment that tracks, ranks, and encourages competition."

I also loled when I read that. Let's replace one extremely bro-ey activity with another. Brillant.
It depends on the role but I definitely know cases (anecdotal) where sales or pre-sales not drinking with a client/partner/investor was ‘no one complains’ (to your face) but resulted in losing out on a contract or requests for another contact because of social incompatibility. And not one or two. In my experience bucketloads of tech sale deals are done over copious drinking and being an outsider there is not considered a good thing.

Admitted; on the workfloor after work with the team no one gives a crap although you might, again in my experience, get less invites for social gatherings as it is still considered ‘boring’ in many circles. That girl or guy who never meshes well at TGiF or the ‘after work pint at the local’.

As someone who sometimes drinks too much and often drinks nothing at all (I have no off switch so I prefer nothing), I know that feeling; you really need a lot of energy and patience to stick around at gatherings where everyone is plastered and having too much fun and you are sober.

I have seen the issue in UK, US, NL, DE, HK, AU and, ofcourse, CN. But anecdotal so your mileage definitely may vary.
The people pulling bubbly SV comp numbers (i.e. the topic of the thread) are not part of that majority though.
Why now ? Go hard yellow vests! I would hope other countries would follow this movement
> You are claiming that any system structured as a digital computer (hence, has a special property) is conscious

Nowhere did I make that claim. You're clearly confused about the arguments being made so I suggest your reread this thread.

> And what decides what symbol corresponds to what real object?

An inductive inference algorithm, like I said.

> This is a laughable argument. "We reproduce (as living beings do). therefore we create minds".

Exactly right. Therefore your claim that we must understand something before we can make it is trivially incorrect.
It's possible for there to be no systemic inclusion problem and alcohol creates inclusion problems.
what is the AI singularity? a super-intelligent entity.
Betrayal is not cheap. If it is a winner-takes-it-all game then the chance of winning as a single hunter is extremely small. However, once you found one partner to cooperate, you significantly increase your chance of outnumbering all the other uncooperative opponents. Unlike the prisoners dilemma, there is no third party involved who disrupts the balance of power.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/07/nz-court-rules-k...

again, one can like it or not, but the US practices similar court orders, even with magnitudes more impact on the responsible persons claimed to infringe the copyright