skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I am seriously interested in understanding why a lot of people have no issue accepting the idea of humans evolving fromm 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.

It took nature what like 4 billion years to come up with the human brain in a single species... We including Kurweil think that this can be replicated in say 100, I mean not even that according to the singularity, 40 years. I seriously doubt it. Can the human brain eventually be surpassed, yes, but it's very likely that we will go extinct before then.
> ...And It Is Hurting Diversity

Is this really the best angle that they could find? One would assume that a drinking problem - even when confined outside of actual "work" - would impact basic professionalism well before diversity. See, e.g. the way that a widespread "drinking culture" may have contributed to the recently-unearthed cases of harrassment at top "tech" firms.
NYT opinion pieces at the start say "Opinion" in a font that is larger than the article text font and larger than than the article subtitle font. The only thing I see offhand that is in a bigger font is the article title. It's not at all tiny.

Once you start reading the article and scroll the above off, the fixed position thingy at the top of the of the page that has the hamburger menu, search box and says "The New York Times" centered changes to contain article specific controls, such as social media stuff, comments, bookmarking, the "The New York Times" string moves to the right, and the centered text becomes "OPINION | <title of article>", with "OPINION" in bolded all caps.

This seems fine to me. I can't think of an occasion where I've ever failed to realize when I'm reading an opinion piece or editorial there.
>Instead of a bar or keg at the office, consider an exercise room with equipment that tracks, ranks, and encourages competition.

Can you see how your own logic can be applied to this suggestion turning it into a "systemic inclusion problem" for people who don't want to hang out in the exercise room or publicly compare their physical abilities with their coworkers? It's nonsense. People will do what they choose to do and personal choices will _never_ be equally represented in any population.
But let's not forget evolution of the magnitude you speak of took hundreds of millions of years. I'm not sure why humans think we can beat that record.
We recently rented an office at a WeWork location. I was first surprised to find that beer was available on tap, and then that it was limited to four beers per day---presumably due to abuse in the past. I wasn't actually at that office, so I can't comment on the atmosphere, but this seems to me to be encourage a frat-boy / heavy drinking culture. I've seen similar in certain parts of start-up land. As something who doesn't like alcohol I do find this off-putting, and if I was looking for a job I would stay away from places that advertised easy availability of alcohol as a perk.

I don't think this the culture of all of tech. Indeed tech is too big to have one culture. But it is in my experience the culture of part of it.
It would be foolish to claim we've made any meaningful progress toward a true AGI that can pass the Turing Test until someone demonstrates a computer as smart as a mouse across the full spectrum of activities.
Мармарис экскурсии – Экскурсии в Мармарисе – Oтзывы – 2019
Acceptance Criteria Bureaucracy
Beware of strangers bearing gifts. There is a lot of https scaremongering from a certain subset of people with objectives one finds difficult to understand.

If they were genuinely concerned about privacy, security and surveillance they would have a lot to say about the out of control surveillance economy and its participants including their employers, the security model of browsers, mobile operations systems, javascript, systemic user stalking and hoovering up data.

Yet those stories are mainly driven by people outside the tech ecosystem and within there is mostly silence interspersed with vague economic justifications so there is something truly bizarre about https extremism on the grounds of privacy.

If your packages are already signed why do you need a middleman? That is a better trust model for a distributed Internet than a centralized CA that is not accountable to individuals and can be compromised by power. Here people are neck deep in business models stalking people online 24/7 and tracking their location and some are 'concerned' about protecting the list of packages you download?
Using an adblocker is not part of HTTPS.
Or the strawman is that there is a lack of inclusion and that that is the completely wrong way to think about it.
So they don't consider privacy beyond which host I contact, which is weird, because I'm pretty sure which version of packages I have is relevant to an attacker.

And in case of a zero-day exploit it would be really handy not having to wait for some global timeout during which I won't see any updates.
> The bigger issue, however, is that companies tweak their formulations so they can get new patents, instead of working to create cheaper generic versions.

Wait don't the patents eventually expire on the old formulations?
Agree, in the Midwest USA for example even very experienced developers are barely into six figures.

Of course cost of living is a fraction of what it is in SV. And quality of life is (subjectively) better.
Our receptionist can't figure out any of the names of our
offshore contractors either.
Normally I would say it is overkill.

However, if I remember correctly, these 5k displays are explicitly made for video editing. So that you can show a 1:1 4k frame with space around it for all the controls and toolbars. I think it is a special case where that high resolution is definitely justified.
Also ponderable - there aren't many other intelligent animals around, but that is not actually evidence that human intelligence is hard to achieve. It is evidence that it is hard to turn a small increase in sub-human intelligence into an evolutionary advantage.

There is solid evidence that teams of mathematicians, scientists and engineers will be able to catch up with what nature has wrought in the next few centuries, if not much faster (decades on the optimistic end). Intelligence could be one of the easiest part of biology to replicate, given how shonky human intelligence is when tested against objective standards.
CNIL doesn't process any personal information when you're just visiting the website, so they don't need to ask for your consent. This is not a request for consent. This is like the older "Cookie Law" popup, where they give you the ability, if you shall choose, to refuse the social features so you're not loading third-party cookies.

Also, as the decision regarding Vectaury[0] shows, CNIL considers that it's up to every platform to explicitly ask for your consent before processing your personal information. So it'd be up to Facebook or Twitter to present you the opt-in feature, in case you're not connected to their platform yet.

CNIL does ask for your consent if you want to contact them and you're filling the contact form. They provide a link[1] to the complete list of required information : content stored, processes done, who will see the data, for how long, and who to contact to object.

[0] https://twitter.com/robinberjon/status/1063549722613432320

[1] https://www.cnil.fr/fr/donnees-personnelles/plaintes-en-lign... (in French)
I've not met someone who rejects the assertion that there's a diversity and inclusion problem simultaneously asserting that the data do not in fact show that various classes are underrepresented.
Answering here... I used Snaptax each year it was offered/promoted in the app. That failed me and I had to pay back taxes.

The last year or two I just followed their arduous step by step process in filing. That also failed me and I had to pay back taxes.

Now I see this.. the most efficient and best way US taxes could be filed yet moneybags is holding us back from the most innovative/efficient system for filing.

If the fed and state sent me my return saying I owe X... ok here’s that money and I’m done til next year. No surprise IRS letters saying I owe back taxes.
That would seem to intertwine very well with gish galloping. Simultaneously feign sincerity, argue over definitions, demand sources of every word, and combine it with countersources from a gish...

Well. That explains Reddit! /g

(Its the procedure of an argument by flooding you with half baked sources, and by the time you're through 5, you have 20 more.)

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

(Edit: I wasn't proposing DOING that. I was making note that these logical fallacies tend to stack and greatly compound each other. And they can be a nightmare to unravel if ONLY in a gish gallop. If both of these are executed, the gish is a insincere attempt at complete disruption; and anyone trying to stop it is accused of being really rude. And from a social media perspective, someone calling out a sealioning themselves looks rude.)
A new form of literacy
Twitch stream for trans charity draws megabucks, game devs, and a congresswoman
I'm not trying to bait a fight here, I'm genuinely curious. Why is that okay but the way google is doing it isn't?

From the linked article:

> The relevant information is accessible after several steps only, implying sometimes up to 5 or 6 actions. For instance, this is the case when a user wants to have a complete information on his or her data collected for the personalization purposes or for the geo-tracking service.

How is that different than the banner on cnil.fr? When you click personalize, you are brought to a page where you have a list of services they share your information with. Clicking on "read more" for any of the video sites near the bottom shows a pretty nonsensical page [1] which tells you an "Activation rate" and how many cookies it sets (which in the case of the "facebook" option says "this service does not use cookie". Then clicking on the "view the official website" sends you to [2] which states how they use cookies.

I genuinely don't understand why they are allowed to put the information in a menu that is behind a "personalize" button in a menu, and then only explain how the data is shared by clicking on several other links to understand, but google is getting fined for doing what seems like the same thing.

Even if you click the "view the official website" for YouTube on the permissions screen on cnil.fr, you are sent to [3], which seems like a VERY comprehensive screen that details all the information they collect, what they do with it, and how to stop it.

And if Google or cnil.fr can't get this right, what hope do I have of getting it right?

[1] https://opt-out.ferank.eu/en/service/facebook/

[2] https://www.facebook.com/policies/cookies/

[3] https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en&gl=en
Or as Neal Stephenson put it in 1992, "The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane."
The case against behavioral advertising is stacking up
There's probably existing code out there that relies on `arr[-1]` returning `undefined`, e.g. looping backward through an array until it gets a falsy value. You can also assign to `arr[-1]` and it'll work (it assigns to a new -1 key, not to the end of the array), and maybe some people do that in existing code. They had to pick `lastItem` as the name instead of just `last` since using `last` is also known to break the web.

It's also not obvious that negative array accesses should behave that way. It's a tradeoff where it's more convenient in some cases but feels a bit less elegant and can lead to bugs (particularly dynamic array accesses that are accidentally negative). But FWIW, `slice` already implements this behavior, e.g. `arr.slice(-1)[0]` is a way to get the last element of an array, so there's certainly precedent in JS for it.
You took my sentence out of context, I said you may "CONSIDER" it.

Nonetheless, of course it could be. You could say that video games in an office isn't being inclusive.
> It feels like finance to me.

Former quant dev, ie straddling the industries.

The amount of people who study CS or can learn on their own is surprisingly limited. You won't get a job just by knowing how to write some if statements.

By contrast, there are load of history majors in finance. There's plenty of ways to act like you understand it. Plenty of bullshitters. Also the role of luck makes some of them seem smarter than they actually are.

Engineers who can't code will be uncovered sooner or later. It's hard to know beforehand at an interview, but it's a lot easier to discover with that person present for a few weeks.
However, and this is where things get interesting, but as we equalize genders more, the stereotypes DO break down. Girls at a young age play with tonka trucks (if those even exist still). And start wearing pants. More people are gay, but also more people are doing jobs that they would have rather done. The sex we see in porn stops objectifying women, perhaps men instead even.

I definitely see more women in construction, more men in nursing, and definitely in non-Western countries women in software development.
It means you're in the top 1% of software engineers in the only metric that matters.
I don't think humans can beat the record, but technology? That's another matter all together.

Again our own consciousness wasn't created it emerged which means that we are a product of this emergence.
I love the implication that if you don’t agree, you can’t have a healthy discussion.

I love it, too. It gets it out of the way upfront: if we can't agree on $THIS base assumption, then we can't have a healthy discussion about $THAT. In order for that to happen, we need to have another discussion first."

If, after discussing whether or not there is an inclusion and diversity problem, you are still at odds, there is little point in further refining the discussion by including alcohol.
Annotated Go Program
What Does Free Speech Really Mean on Social Media?
yea, because having a drinking contest is good for you, amirite?
Christ, what next? Ping pong tables create an inclusivity problem? Music played in the lobby? Catering? Anything that can conceivably differentiate individuals is fair game for these inclusivity nuts. People's tastes are different, what brings people together is going to be different, and people of some kind or another are going to be left out one way or another. You can't have diversity and complete inclusivity at the same time, they ultimately contradict each other.
Because meaning is defined by humans; there is no other conceivable definition of "meaning". An AI that acts in some non-human fashion is no better than random noise.
A Von Newmann machine is an abstraction, and all abstractions are leaky.

Years ago, an A.I. designed to become an oscillator, i.e. produce a sinusoidal wave, learned to be an amplifier instead, taking advantage of the 60Hz noise that it got from the power grid. Its makers had not seen that coming. And we're talking about a very dumb machine by general intelligence standards.
> have you seen the current dialog you get when you get on a google domain with a "fresh" session?

I just checked - there is no such dialogue on google.com for me. I am in the US. GDPR does not apply here.

My conclusion is that the complex dialogue on google.com you are suffering -- is the result of GDPR. Without GDPR Google (and most other successful websites) delivers simplicity.

> I systematically refuse everything I can refuse.

You can refuse opening google.com in your browser.
Do you refuse to open google.com?

> what kinds of dilemmas you've had

I carefully thought about whether I want unneeded complexity in my life or not.

My choice is "No GDPR and no complexity".

Your choice is GDPR which implies complexity (but you do not understand that "GDPR -> websites complexity" causation, because you did not think about that choice hard enough).
There is a great living for someone to make a generic.

No need to make bazillions.

Crowd fund it.

Or, regulate.

Both would be just fine with me.
“The Python programming language was originally developed for this platform”
That's reductionist to the point of absurdity. You might be able to only focus on one thing at a time, but a day is long, and you need to worry about multiple things in a day to merely survive. In your free time, it is possible to worry about poverty, climate change, superintelligence, and many other things.

The reason that rich people worry about superintelligence is that it could bring the same uncaring devastation to the rich as climate change brings to the poor.
Ask HN: What are nice, drama-free and informative IRC channels?
I've heard good things about #rust-beginners, but what else is there for people who would like to read smart people talk about cool stuff they're doing?
The more you learn about Kurzweil and what he bases his predictions on, the more you realize he's a one-trick pony. They only work on things governed by Moore's law (advancing transistor density) and that in turn depends on a variety of things. Moore's law is expected to wind down around 2025.

Also, a lot of what he bases his claims on are unexamined junk science (like his nutty health books, but also extending into specific technologies). Let's not swallow everything he says just because he helped invent OCR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Criticism
Our HVAC system has a “circulate” option that we sometimes keep on. It turns the variable speed blower on the lowest setting a few times per hour and keeps air flowing well.
My father abandoned the family when I was 13. I started working as an apprentice in the railroad at 14 in order to help supporting 3 younger brothers. My salary went straight to my mother.

At night I was studying to become a certified electronics technician at a vocational school. One day someone from the staff told me I would be barred from the exams because I haven't paid tuition (a month after this the school was incorporated by a state-owned university and went tuition-free otherwise I would never graduate). So picture a mother that will steal tuition money from his son and you can imagine how my mother leeched me for years. This kind of abuse has consequences for life.

Sometimes your parents are very bad people and there is nothing you can do about it. And no, I don't really care if either of my parents live or die, in some way they are already dead for me.
Its not just alcohol. In the last few years I've counted too many startup CEO's who use speed, mushrooms, LSD and MDMA as if they are standard tools of the trade. It seems like there was a lull during the early part of the 2000's, but recently a resurgence in the use of mind-altering drugs in this industry seems to have occurred.

I fear that there will be a period, up ahead, where it all comes crashing down. Cybernauts may think they've got everything under control, but in my opinion this point of view requires a great deal of ignorance of the decades past, not to mention dire hubris.
I have developed custom Ethylene sensors in the past for customers, and Dynament (UK) is a manufacturer that I can definitely recommend if anyone wants to do this and go down the DIY electronics route without having to dig through a bunch of Chinese products to find the "right one". https://www.dynament.com/products/gas-sensors/standard-non-e...
One reason is that technology has the ability to do trial and error through billions of generations in a very short time.
AIUI the author is being too clever by half, by using "drinking problem" to mean "a problem that involves drinking" (the "drinking culture" you alluded to) rather than the usual meaning "suffers from alcoholism".
Ben Horwitz said that. The talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF5VIwDYIJk
Perhaps something operational like, "We will marry robots" is measurable. But "outpace human intelligence"? We're arguably incapable of measuring human intelligence right now, much less artificial intelligence, much less comparing between the two. We don't even really have a good operational definition for what the word 'intelligence' means. The closest we have is the Turing Test, which, while pragmatic, does not answer the question, "is this computer smarter than a human", if it answers any question at all.

I'd argue that Kurzweil is selling precisely these kinds of fantasies that cannot be measured.
What does it mean to be as smart as a mouse? If you specify a handful of tasks that demonstrate it, someone will be able to purpose-build an "AI" to do those things well.
That would be the case if they were investing the "rent" from extractive industry (oil) in productive industries above-ground. Or even just putting it into the market so that somebody else puts it to productive use. If you do that, you're well-positioned for the day the oil runs out or becomes uneconomical to extract.

But the Saudis have the same problem nearly every other petro-regime has, which is spending that money on unproductive personal property (palaces, fancy cars, private jets, etc.) as well as unproductive state property (defense, mostly). They have built some universities and other public goods, but I suspect it's a small fraction of the wealth that's been extracted.

They have no comparative advantage over other nations in anything other than petroleum, and religious tourism. There's no particular reason why you'd want to build a factory or move your multinational company there. They could create reasons for people to want to do that, but it would probably be expensive (they'd need to have low wages, probably artificially depressed or subsidized, or a very lax regulatory environment, which has its own costs, or both).

In the short term I'd look for them to start borrowing to keep their budget balanced, using the oil still in the ground as collateral, basically. (They're effectively borrowing against future income.) If they do enough of this and build productive, sustainable economic assets, they might do okay. But eventually the cost of borrowing might get high, because as demand for oil falls and extraction costs increase, there will come a point where it's no longer economical to extract anymore and they'll have a load of "stranded assets" on their national books. The day they finally have to write those down will be the real day of reckoning, financially.

If the ruling class is smart, they'll make it seem as though it's all a big Western bankster conspiracy (when in doubt, blame the Jews), not their own long-running incompetence, because the immediate cause of the pain will probably be a debt crisis or default.
In my experience, alcohol is mostly served to techies because they aren't very social while sober. Yes, it is stereotype but I've found it to be 100% true. :) Even with techies, deep technical discussions are very hard to have because they are so shy. Many of them needs to be inebriated to dare discussing whether they prefer hash-based disk indices or tree-based ones.
No, they are not.

I wonder just why that is. I have ideas, but would prefer to read other takes.
I have no idea if the CNIL acted also out of tax reasons, something which is hard to prove, but they haven't been exactly friendly to Google for the past decade.

Among other actions, they're the ones that have been taking Google all the way up to the EU Court of Justice to enforce worldwide the right to be forgotten. The advocate general just sided with Google less than two weeks ago, which makes for an interesting coincidence. They, and IFP in particular, have been itching in public interviews for the power to levy higher fines. Now they are simply following up on past statements.