skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every year or so we get another huge advance... Well, more accurately, something comes along to benchmark the state of AI research against a human activity.

Then come the HN comments.

For Alpha Go:

Oh this is impressive but can't generalize.
Wake me up when it doesn't have to have information precoded/doesn't learn from human players

For alpha go 0:

So this is cool but not amazing because they're all perfect information games.

And now here we have this, and people who haven't even watched the presentation are yammering about stuff like the APM, or how this isn't impressive because of ... Well, something?

If I believed in a terminator scenario, I would point out that a robot, too, will presumably have higher APM than all of us desk warriors.

It really feels like there are just some people who are religiously attached to being the only known intelligent entities on the planet, to the point where, when presented with evidence that hey, this is actually a thing, they will stick their fingers in their ears and shout about how unreal/unfair it all is.

I invite you to have a look back at the other announcement threads from Deepmind and OpenAI. I decided not to directly quote people as I don't want this to get personal, but I couldn't just sit here and watch the same old story play out again without at least mentioning that these same people have been wrong, and wrong, and wrong, and will presumably continue to be wrong.

Exponential curves are unintuitive.
I live just south of Indianapolis.. I remember when one of their relatives ran an "everything electronics" store. Was packed to the gills with anything and everything you could imagine. In fact, it reminded me of what Shenzhen is shown now by Bunnie. You could buy new stuff retail, or buy returns and broken or unknown by the pound.

Now, we have wealth upon wealth with technology of all sorts. But those things are sealed with alu lids over the board. Or this talks to the cloud. Or that is glued together with ultrasonic sealing so opening = destroying. Or batteries are buried with ultrasonic and glue and spot-welding. They're made intentionally user-unservicable.

All of it means that you have a snowball's chance in hell in fixing it. And yes, SMT is servicable. So is through-hole. And if these companies provided their pinouts for flying probe or provided probe posts, we could check what part or system is acting up. If we knew their voltages, then following that as a test would be easy. Or someone could re-solder that Atmel 328p DIP (or Arm, or PIC) after using a programmer to reprogram and then use it.

Instead, we see flat screens hauled down to the dumpster. DVD and blurays are dumped. Computers of all sorts and types, that likely have a single miniscule flaw "destroy" the whole device. It makes the game great for consumer culture: consume consume CONSUME! Companies can make shoddy stuff that has a MBTF "warranty + 1 day", and whoops that cap or vreg blows.

Seeing that e-waste makes me cry. I know how much resources are put into that via how much I paid, and I also know how much of that is externalized to our environment.. and Mother Earth's account is going lower and lower. I don't need that new thing. I just want to fix that thing that broke that necessitated me to get the new.
Financial success can at least be measured.

Being a successful human, on the other hand? Is it measured by one’s own satisfaction with life? By one’s impact on the society? By the number of offspring one produces? It’s all very confusing.
I've found that equipment that comes with the intention that end users can repair tends to be more robust (if somewhat more expensive) than the inverse.

If you plan not to repair you can skimp on all sorts of things (fasteners that break when you open them, clips that snap off, you can pump glue in etc) that actually lead to complete failure.

It's annoying, it's also hard (though the internet has helped) to get spares for things I can remember my father having no issue getting spares for, cooker elements, washing machine controllers and the like - I can remember when white goods came with a manual that had part codes to order those things in the back and I'm only 38, it's almost a form of learned helplessness.
AlphaStar had an average APM of 280, but during battles, it's APM would spike up to ~1500.

It's like saying that my car has an average speed of 2mph. Sure, it does - but that's because it spends 23 hours a day sitting in a garage.
These developments sound wonderful but all I can think about is how this advanced AI is going to used to try to control me (mostly my spending and consumption)
Fun fact: Danny works for Google.
We already have extremely effective and safe mostly autonomous vehicles. They're called "railcars." Conditions in which they break down are well known and obvious.

The goofy robot things Waymo is larping at building do not have obvious or well known break down conditions.
Note that if you go back to the original lawsuits, they were regarding gentlemen's agreements around headhunting. Given that SV's default attitude is "individuals are responsible for themselves," an agreement against headhunting isn't interesting---if an employee is dissatisfied, they know where the competition is and who to talk to about changing companies

You may be interested to learn that one of the corrupt agreements was that in the event that an employee does talk to the competition about changing companies and one of the other colluding companies makes an offer to the employee, that company will not counter-offer beyond the first offer.

So, "little observable negative effect" is not quite as dispositive (or even as visible) as you portray it would be.
Supreme Court in BC ruled that kids being left alone under the age of 10 wasn't allowed. So apparently Canada is worse.
If there's a common pattern of anxiety or lack of concentration in life, then it may be worth it to go to a family doctor or therapist to talk about it. This isn't an easy black-and-white decision to make either. It may take months or even years of self-reflection to come to terms with that, and even more time to work up the courage to seek help for something so ambivalent.

It's hard to be your successful when you're not the best version of yourself.
Future of Microprocessors – Sophie Wilson (2018)
A better example is that before our cognitive revolution humans could only really cooperate in groups no larger than 100. When we developed the ability to imagine shared fictions, such as countries, money, law, religion, we gained the ability to cooperate on some level with every other human that also believed in those fictions. Money, even back when it was something like sea shells that were money, meant many disparate groups could cooperate as long as they shared the belief in the fiction of those shells being more than just shells.
I've heard what you said more pithily put as "true AI is anything we can't make a computer do right now".
> Facebook's current share price basically values it as a utility already

Market cap is a measure of investors' beliefs of a company's future free cash flows. Regulated utilities have capped profits, so their valuation tends to be lower. Facebook absolutely does not have the valuation of a utility. Name a utility with a market cap of 400 billion USD (hint: the largest electric utility in the world has a market cap of $86.16 bilion).
What unionized industry lets you work and make profit from a bedroom without any higher approval, oaths, or credentialing?
True, my comment was more about the elite school part than middle class.
I recall reading a paper comparing Linux and Solaris context switch times in ~98 and Linux was 10-100X faster. Solaris did something incredibly slow and safe.
Not sure where you got the idea that I'm upset that TS has a compiler, I'm just pointing out my perspective on the differences between the two tools. I use both on a daily basis.

You might not think the differences is a big deal, but affecting runtime code is a pretty major line to cross. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with that, but at that point it becomes a different tool, in my opinion.
> Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :(

Some would argue that is what builds character, and the grit to succeed. Not saying extreme poverty is “good” necessarily. Just that the jury is still out on whether or not humanity as a whole is better without suffering (specifically if it leads to a decline in the human race).

Universal basic income has been suggested and to some extent tested for thousands of years. None of succeeded, but the devil is in the details and perhaps soon the machines will take care of us.

For reference: I came from a poorer background (not extreme, but enough I noticed). I view it as my greatest strength, as it forced me to learn faster, specifically taught me the importance of relationships, community, hard work, determination.
Game developers, Amazon warehouse workers, UPS drivers...all those people who complain about working long hours?
It would be great if we could fire bad bosses.
Learn to Build Hand Gesture Recognition System Using Neural Networks
It would be easy to to dismiss this just as cheap labor but it's both teaching people skills and not distorting the local labour market (which is also adressed in the last part of the article).
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not disputing that privilege is a thing, but don't you think that if this were true, all people who are born into a middle-class wealthy family and go to a nice school would achieve outlier success?

No; rather the correct question is "if this were true shouldn't we see a greater fraction of privileged individuals achieve higher success rates than we see in less privileged individuals?" Statistics isn't about all-or-nothing outcomes. And the answer to the question I posted is "yes", and the data seem to back that up in numerous contexts from educational attainment to financial success.
I'd be interested to know what job pays 4 times as much in the US as the UK.

Also the UK is not a good example of a place with strong labor. It's much closer to the US. Look at quality of life in places like Germany or Austria.
0. To compare is to despair(?)
This is really impressive, I didn't expect starcraft to be played this well by a machine learning based AI. I'm excited to read the paper when it comes out!

That said, I'm not sure I agree that it was winning mainly due to better decision making. For context, I've been ranked in the top 0.1% of players and beaten pros in Starcraft 2, and also work as a machine learning engineer.

The stalker micro in particular looked to be above what's physically possible, especially in the game against Mana where they were fighting in many places at once on the map. Human players have attempted the mass stalker strategy against immortals before, but haven't been able to make it work. The decisions in these fights aren't "interesting"--human players know what they're supposed to do, but can't physically make the actions to do it.

While they have similar APM to SC2 pros, it's probably far more efficient and accurate so I don't think that alone is enough. For example, human players have difficulty macroing while they attack because it takes valuable time to switch context, but the AI didn't appear to suffer from that and was extremely aggressive in many games.
Before anyone chimes in with "just fork chrome".. just to give you an idea of the magnitude of the project. The chromium source code has some 16k cpp source files. Millions of lines of code. All the libraries combined the source advancea at a rate of thousand commits a day. You fork chromium now and tomorrow you're already way behind on merging upstream changes. It takes serious engineering effort just to be able to build that behemoth.

And yes the OpenGL drivers are unstable and no, Khronos CTS passing doesnt mean anything wrt stability. The most trusted gfx platform is currently DX11 backend in libAngle.
That helps.

Andrew Carnegie, a Scotish Immigrant, was born in a one room cottage; in the last 18 years of his life he gave away more than 300 million

But yeah, being born with some wealth to sustain you is a huge help.
Have daddy and mommy spend $1.7 MILLION to get you through school https://www.msn.com/en-sg/money/finance-education/wealthy-fa... and then back you until you "succeed."
No, not true. Just had an extended argument with a friend over this. Here are some of my arguments against what you're saying:

1. While it's true that a human player could see everything the AI is seeing, the human player has to spend time and clicks to go see those things, whereas the AI sees it all simultaneously without having to use any actions or spend any time to take it in.

2. Emphasis on the computer seeing it all simultaneously. The computer can see the state of two health bars on opposite sides of the map at the same time, or 100 healthbars in a hundred places at a time. A human cannot do that, and even trying to move the view around fast enough to do so would render it impossible to actually do anything else.

3. If it's true that seeing more at once is not advantageous, then it must also be true that seeing less at once is not disadvantageous. So by that reasoning a player playing on a 1 inch x 1 inch screen would not have any disadvantage, since after all they're getting just the same amount of information as long as they move the screen around enough! Reducto ad absurdum, a player with a 1 pixel x 1 pixel screen has no disadvantage either, because they have access to the same information as long as they move around quick enough. It quickly becomes evident that smaller screens inhibit your knowledge of the game state, and therefore larger screen benefit your knowledge of the game state.
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I think not recognizing the arguments as built instead of propaganda-fed shows how effective the anti-corporate narrative has become.

Unionization doesn't stop illegal collusion, prosecution stops illegal collusion. What is with all the appeal to emotion with divorced, miserable, 100 hour work weeks, etc? Most employees did just fine anyways. Every single job would get value out of a union if the justification is simply saying "but tell that to the employee that was divorced, overworked, blah blah emotional language". At a macro level there are practical concerns.
you might not be aware but there is a lot of unhappiness with TensorFlow in the community. For example, I hear many comments about how complex it is, how hard the basic API is to use, how many random parts it's acquired. Most of those people point at Torch, and in fact tensorflow is adopting some of Torch's approaches for this reason.

It will be interesting to see if tensorflow retains a fairly high level of popularity over time. The 1->2 transition is a big risk for them because so many people are on TF 1, there's a ton of intrusive changes.
Well my brother worked construction in the northeast where it is unionized, and it was an absolute nightmare for a variety of reasons. He was unable to work without a union card, getting that union card was very difficult without knowing someone because union jobs are highly coveted and thus kept artificially scarce, and once a member of the union he was forced to work with many lazy workers hiding behind the job protections afforded by the union.

What's to stop the same thing repeating itself in a game developers union?
There will be people that go to entertainment and drugs as well as people that take that money to add to society. The question is what the net effect is.
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>The base price of a game as you point out, gets you less than a whole game...

This has become a meme at this point [1], but has anyone actually studied this in any type of academic or scientific manner? There are plenty of the games that have DLC, after release support, or any number of other revenue streams that would 100% be considered "complete games" by any reasonable standard. I know it is anecdotal, but compare Zelda: Breath of the Wild to Zelda: Ocarina of Time or FIFA 19 to FIFA 08. The release versions of the two newer games were probably more complete than the older versions even though they have DLC and micro-transactions respectively while the older were "done on release". In those two cases the extra revenue streams are helping to justify and pay for the continued support of the newer games.

[1] - https://www.ranker.com/list/dlc-memes-gaming/robert-carneval...
I think Flow's in more direct trouble, but I wouldn't announce victory for TypeScript just yet. With wasm around the corner, things may (or may not, shrug) change significantly.
I was excited about GraphQL; but it doesn't seem to handle the majority of queries I need to do, which involve joins.

I know other people have encountered the same issue with GraphQL. What's the solution? Thanks!
I have played both games and a fan of both. Starcraft is definitely more complex than AoE for AI development and that's why the researchers must have chosen it. The complexity of AI depends on how many potential decisions you can make at any point of time. Here are a few reasons why:
1) Starcraft races have completely different build trees and different advantages. This has a large cascading effect of early decisions in the game.
2) Starcraft has much more micro potential that AOE. There are many units with sort of super powers like Stalkers can teleport and infestors can take control of enemy units. In AOE, you can only issue attack commands to most units.
3) Variety of units. Since Starcraft also has air units which may or may not be able to attack ground units, you have more options within a race to create a unique army/air force combination.
4) The Starcraft map terrain is hierarchical whereas AOE happens on a flat map. There are interesting locations on the map where a smaller army may be able to defeat a larger army based on positioning.
By and large, this is the same algorithm I use. I've really only deviated on one point.

That said, I'd add to this the idea of thinking in terms of "Return on Capital Invested" where your time and effort are a from of Capital. IOW, it's important (IMO) to figure out how to direct your attention towards the efforts that are most likely to yield the outcomes (whether financial or otherwise) that you seek. The problem, of course, is that you don't know in advance how things will play out. So you have to experiment, but once you begin an experiment the big question becomes "do I keep going on this, or redirect my effort to something else which has a higher probability of success?" (for however you define "success").
>It still had insane micro a) because it had a FoV which basically extended to the combined FoV of all if its units[1] rather than having to move a screen-size FoV, and b) when it micros it never really "misclicks" like a human would do under pressure.

This is an oversight that I imagine they will eventually fix as well. Doesn't make sense to allow the AI to do this, because the focus is on the AI understanding the game.

>Anyway, disagree about BW. Perfect micro in BW is possibly even more devastating than in SC2, IMO, because there are all these weird glitches that you can do -- the best players can do them some of the time, but no players can do it perfectly all of the time.

I didn't mention micro specifically, I mentioned abilities. The perfect micro issue can again be solved by limiting the AI's APM. They may be able to execute micro tricks, but not constantly.
Are you trying to bring this conversation down to labels and slurs?
It's very common to over-analyze and generalize the specific behaviors of successful people, rather than acknowledge the stark reality of what truly separates them from others. There's a tendency to focus on the "symptoms" of their success rather than the root cause.

An accurate description of reality is both less flattering and seemingly less useful to others. But it does at least have the virtue of being real.

IMHO there are three major factors in changing the world:

#1 High general intelligence and ambition (genetics)

#2 Highly educated well-off parents (environment)

#3 Support of powerful people (opportunity)

You probably can't do much without at least one of these factors. Most people that do big things have all three working in their favor.
Love or hate Richard Stallman, he is unbelievably resolute in his points of view. They've rarely changed, even though GNU effectively "lost" and open source is generally seen as more business friendly. You've got to give the guy credit for where it is due, and he's preaching almost exactly the same thing he was before I had used a computer today.
Silicon Valley-Backed Firm Is Offering a ‘Hedge Desk' for Farmers
> The election of Trump was definitely point scored for populism. It also triggered a full scale immune response that we're still in the throes of.

The fact that you ignored the other two examples kind of implies something about how you perceive the “establishment conspiracy”. One could just as easily say that Trump is a shadowy plot to distract people from the shadowy billionaire agenda of tax cuts, if they were so inclined.

What you have here is basically an unfalsifiable conspiracy theory. If I tell you about a time when public opinion changed the status quo and overturned the preferences of the “establishment”, you can just tell me it was the establishment all along. If I tell you about a time that “the establishment” tried to do something (the Vietnam War maybe?) that the public hated and resisted so much that they forced it to stop, you can explain that away, too.

It’s not even wrong so much as oversimplified. There’s no monolithic neoliberal establishment operating out of George Soros’ basement or anything. There is a general bias towards centrism and the status quo, but that’s because the status quo, almost by definition, is something that most people tacitly accept.

When it comes to foreign intervention in particular, the question is usually “which intervention”. We actually tried it your way, once—in 1993 we elected a non-interventionist president who wrapped up withdrawal from Somalia and refused to intervene in Rwanda. He didn’t stay that way, but a change in perspective just happens sometimes when your inaction leads to millions of innocent people getting hacked to death with machetes.
Reminds me of earl nightingale the strangest secret
link was intentionally removed, I think about a year ago, with some messaging to the community. I would guess it was being abused.
As one datapoint, in Finland the deposit system works fairly well as far as I understand. It helps that most beverage containers are now plastic or aluminum instead of heavy glass that's a bitch to drag into a store. I at least just dump glass bottles into the glass recycling bin, deposit or not.

Bottles and cans with deposit that are thrown into curb-side mixed-waste bins (or just on the ground) are usually very quickly collected by people looking for extra cash (on summer weekends this can net you quite a lot!) In some places I've seen small separate can receptables attached to garbage bins that can hold a stack of cans so that it's easy for someone to come grab them without having to delve into the garbage bin proper, which I find a very good idea.
1. Be Healthy

Regularly get your vitamin levels checked and make sure to get adequate Vitamin D3

Regularly get your hormone levels checked for any imbalance.

Exercise, breathe, sleep well, and eat healthy.
I'd reject it. I'm honestly struggling to find anything at all to chew on here...
Because that's what unions do. They protect current members at the expense of everyone else, including unionized colleagues.
I found this guide about how to remap the keybindings in firefox without having to build from source, which pushed me over the ledge into giving firefox a serious shot at replacing chrome: https://github.com/nilcons/firefox-hacks#binary-hacking-fire...
This is so trite as to be insulting.