skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This topic is honey for political junkies, but there are reasonable geological arguments in favor of this, and many of the arguments opposed to it are political or ideological in nature (the "but man is natural" argument for instance).

Epochs are defined by noticeable, large-scale changes in rock strata in lots of places around the globe: glaciation, extinction events, increased volcanism, movement of the continents.

It's inarguable that humans have had an impact on the planet which will be measurable in the rock strata for millions of years to come. We've tweaked the isotopes found in the air (the atomic age), we've spiked the carbon content of the atmosphere in a very short period of time, and our dominance of the planet has brought the extinction of many, many other species. These are facts which stand regardless of personal politics.

Maybe the best non-political argument against an anthropocene is that it makes the Holocene epoch almost meaninglessly short. I dunno.

Anyway, adopting, or not, this new definition will have basically zero impact on anyone's life who isn't a geochronologist, but here we are.
Most of that user-generated content only exists because the megacorps offered to host it for free. Decentralized platforms aren't going to be free so 90% of that stuff just can't be saved.

But speaking of decentralization there are plenty of proposals like personal servers or federated co-ops that aren't blockchain related.
Everyone talks about US politics as pay-to-play

Only people who don't know what that are talking about talk this way.

Or also, I suppose, people who are lying to you in order to sell you something.
Google's thing wasn't a weapon either. These people don't actually care about violence though; they care about weakening and destabilizing the United States.
Or they may fall on their face, like every other attempt at central planning has.

The economy is basically a distributed optimization heuristic.

If you're talking about "falling behind" in the global sense (using "AI" to centrally plan), then you're hypothesizing that we can essentially port the distributed algorithm into the silicon realm and further optimize it (eg prune destructive adversarial behavior). We certainly have more computing power now than say that past attempt based on fluid flows, but that's still a huge if.

If you're talking in the local sense (that "AI" will help companies themselves optimize better), than whatever extra percentage gained from that will not be enough to outrun the State deploying the same technology (as in the above goal), and destroying the individual businesses.

One thing I do know is that even if this turns out to be the winning strategy, sacrificing our values in an attempt to compete at it will still only net us second place!

--

Having written that, I think this implicit assumption that it will be economically beneficial for AI to be directed at individuals and individual behavior needs to be directly examined. How much individual productivity is actually being left on the table? The US system is quite good at motivating people, so much so that it's common for lower classes to see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". There are a few deviants, but for the most part lack of individual productivity is a failing of the larger structure. Heck, most of the US's criminals are in jail for engaging in economic activity!

Rather, the narrative seems like the age-old keep-the-plebs-in-line play, not a legitimate approach to economic success. If AI has something to offer for planning the economy, then wouldn't that be properly applied to the government-company interface? That's where the structural gains are actually available to be had!
> nobody is 100x more efficient than anyone else

Steve Jobs was. Apple was sinking into the muck with a series of CEOs, then put Jobs in the role. Jobs turned the same company around with the same resources and the same employees from a nearly bankrupt company to the biggest company in the world.

That's leadership of ONE man.
Ship capacity: https://excelerateenergy.com/fleet/

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported Tuesday that demand for natural gas in New England registered at 4.34 billion cubic feet per day and that the regional pipeline was operating at 77.1 percent capacity. The agency said that during a brief cold snap in January, "increased heating demand strained the natural gas system as natural gas consumption in the region, on January 21, 2019, reached their highest level this winter."

https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2019/02/19/natural-g...
Hmm, maybe they should be. I'll make a note to look at that.
Soliciting a crime like that is already directly punishable and not free speech. Very bad example.
Today Everything Is Called AI. Like This AI Based Cat Shelter. Is It AI?
The first one is in the present and the second shows how it was in the past.
> If I have to scale a service to N instances where each of them cache the same type of data.

Actually, they don't. If you're scaling a multi-user system to millions of users across hundreds/thousands of instances of your micro-service, they're likely to cache different data because different user sessions will be handled by each instance of your app. So, local caching in each micro-service is valuable. You just need to set an upper limit on how much memory to consume.
To adjust my fan without air conditioning in my car, I have to 1)Press a Display.
2) Press OK on the display warning me about the dangers of pressing buttons while drving.
3)Press AC display button.
4) Turn off AC display button.
5) Turn up fan by pressing display button.

I was able to do that in my old car in a second or two with physical buttons.
It’s a cynical view.

The real root of this genre is that magazines are dead. There is a market for tweets and books. Everything else is a path to poverty.

In 1960, Gladwell stuff and Freakonomics, etc would be feature articles in Life or US News & World Report, or Fortune. Now feature writers are extinct.
This is actually pretty insightful, and it leads to an interesting question:

If CEO pay is a rational outcome of protecting the equity in a company, and CEO pay is too high, does that mean there's "too much" equity?

There's some evidence that income inequality is bad for society in some ways, which I tend to agree with if it means inefficient/uneven distribution of resources/opportunities/community investments. In this sense, and considering the previous question of "too much equity," is it possible that a company's market value can be too high?
My point is, that in some ways it looks like a new bubble for me. Or at least many mediocre companies will also jump on this bandwagon.
Free Exchange: Weakened Communities Threaten Liberal Democracy
I wish it was that simple.

If you can bounce through an SSO provider to set a first-party cookie, you can bounce through an ad tracker. Even with a heuristic that requires action on the interstitial, how do you distinguish between redirects to services like Google that support social login and ad tracking?

Separating SSO and ad tracking is nontrivial and may result in collateral damage.
I'm curious about another root problem: why are corporate civil cases heard by a jury in the first place? Never mind that juries are bound to be influenced when billions of dollars are at stake[1], how about the fact that these cases are both technically and legally complex?

I'm not an expert in this stuff but as far as I can tell the USA is unique in allowing juries to hear this sort of trial, even among countries with a right to jury in a criminal trial.

1. E.g. the Samsung skating rink in front of the Marshall Texas courthouse
I guess you have no issue with Patreon and Mastercard deciding which business you can give money to either ? Not so diffirent from banks refusing to serve cannabis stores, or pornstars.
Banned Skills: The Forbidden Club
Is this natural or artificial? Ever asked if a part of the rainbow is black or white?

Ultimately, let's not forget the name of the game: survival of the fittest. Unless free-will allows the choice to play another game ;)

Edit: apologies for my first downvoted comment, never meant to bring negative value to the discussion, especially on a topic that I'm glad to see here. Any improvement tips to share? :)
Wait, you mean they just barely demonetized them? As in, they've been paying them for clicks this entire time, even after all of the measles outbreaks the last few months?

Crazy... to think YouTube execs had no clue that there is a direct correlation to the media they help propagate and the outbreak of previously cured diseases!
Retired People Could Be Ideal Customers for Self-Driving Cars
> his inability for empathy and emotional understanding was the crux of the problem

oh the irony!
Oh pooh, I as a lower/middle class employee got a lot of stock options. They were worthless because the company stock sank, but I liked getting the options, and if the company had been managed better I would have made much bank.

> I'd wager most lower income folks would take the money, since that's food on the table.

Instant gratification is a large reason why lower income folks stay poor. (As for "food on the table", lower income people "invest" in lottery tickets. They clearly do have discretionary income.)
The most important feature that HN would need in my opinion is a "top of last X" view, as Reddit introduced with the redesign.

It's MUCH to easy to miss interesting stories if you don't check the site at least twice a day.
I didn’t once mention Google so I’m not sure what about my comment makes you think I have different principles for Google when it comes to privacy.
This sort of sexist joke about traditional gender roles is mildly offensive in 2019 and, in any event, not very funny or interesting
Digital Assistants and 'Moral AI' on Whether to Report Illegal/Immoral Activity
You know he banged that pigeon though.
It used to drive me crazy as well. Couldn't understand why my old 980 Ti card ranked better than many of the 10xx cards that came after it.

I researched this recently, and this article [1] did a great job clarifying things for me.

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/11/627456486990...
> is great for retention.

So move to a company that meets your standards. I don't really understand the complaining.
Life and society are increasingly governed by numbers
Oh hey, they actually did something decent for once. It doesn't help much with their other recent mistakes (accidentally banning channels who used CP for Pokemon GO/Club Penguin videos, demonetising videos/channels based on comment content, outright telling a large channel they were disabling comments on their videos at random, etc), but this anti vaccination conspiracy stuff shouldn't really be a thing in 2019.

Then again, this is probably the one place in which my views on free speech would come into conflict, since while I do feel people should be allowed to say/write what they want for the most part, anti vax stuff is both scientifically/factually wrong, dangerous to society and dubious all round.
How many immune system compromised individuals die of vaccine-preventable diseases in the United States each year?

Like I said, if it's thousands I might reconsider my stance. If not, sorry, but it doesn't justify the government forcing people to do things to their body.
BlackBerry Is Becoming a Cyber Security Company
Hunter Thompson has said it a few times in print, though I don't know exactly where. I've definitely read it in at least one of his letters. I first found the quote in a video of him at a podium answering questions for college students. Probably on YouTube but it was a long time ago.
Yes, definitely lots of Apple users in Collin County, and the Willow Bend store and Frisco stores were always packed. Galleria location isn't that far from Plano or Frisco, so I'm sure it won't be a problem. Most probably work in the North Dallas area anyway.
Oh possibly— I meant to write that 'he also* tells'. It was likely the same line, in a later instance—repeating what he wrote in the book.

BTW, I think the doc was "Born Into This": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h32g3g7r4Q8
The first day is actually https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09.

In the first few months, there were quite a few days where nothing was posted (see the difference between https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61 and 62). If /front works for a day, but shows no stories, that means HN existed but there were no stories that day.

The navigation links work until they point outside the ultimate beginning or end of the data, and then stop appearing. That was a bit tricky to get right as I recall.
>But it's no more or less "natural" than ever. "Natural" is probably not that useful a concept in general, it doesn't really mean anything in general, just like it doesn't mean anything on your food label.

The term "Natural" is very useful, it purposely separates phenomena as resulting from human activity/technology from those that are the result of long standing, generally slow moving evolutionary/geological changes. As humans can introduce change rapidly into our environment as a result our ability to design, it makes a lot of sense to have a word to quickly describe the general high level cause of such quick change.
I beg to differ. It's way too lenient to only restrict their children to access public spaces. No, they should be tried for the attempted premediated murder of every child their children meets or simply put, a crime against humanity. Biological warfare is a war crime, you know. Hand out a few thousand year sentences, watch anti vaxx sentiment disappear.
Uh, PTSD is really common among drone pilots.
True, lets do more of it
The Plano store was the first one in Texas and 3rd one overall.
>. Racist comments are and should be unpopular but when the definition racism is widened to include half the population then censoring "racists"

Half the population didn't vote for Trump.

I think that's what we're supposed to be reading between the lines here, that half the population voted for Trump and have now been unfairly demonized as racists and homophobes and that, because of this, the terms "racist" and "homophobic" have no meaning... but no. Those terms still have a definite meaning, and half the population didn't vote for Trump.

Also, the demonization isn't entirely unfair. At least, it's not entirely arbitrary and without merit. There was a definite and overt narrative of racial identity and struggle behind the populism of Trump's campaign, and its appeal to white supremacists was well documented by mainstream media, and the narrative of Trump's success as a revolution of white cultural identity was even defended here on Hacker News a few times.

Trump supporters can't have their anti-establishment cake and eat it too. They can't support a campaign which galvanized right-wing extremists and xenophobes and then complain that people think they might be racist.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. In retrospect I didn’t think much of Children of Men or Gravity either, and I can’t even remember what I thought of Y Tu Mamá También, so it apparently didn’t leave much impression on me. Maybe he’s just not my cup of tea.

My upset with Roma was given how critically acclaimed it is, I was expecting a lot more. I appreciate your perspective but I still don’t think the film is worthy of the praise it’s been given. I went and read a ton of reviews after to try to understand what I might be missing and I just ended up getting more and more annoyed. Oh well.
OP talked about a carbon tax, as am I.

You're talking about "carbon tarrifs", which I've never heard of, and don't know what they are.
Probably uninformed opinion given I haven’t worked at either, but I suspect you’re right.

Microsoft seems to be a lot more grounded in the dollars and cents of running a business. I doubt a few squeaky wheels distract them.

Google seems to still attract many idealists who feel they’re creating a better world (ironically, through advertising). They seem to operate with a flatter management structure that gives engineers freeer reign.

Also, the nature of the projects seem to be fundamentally different.
Why should a private company make a cake for a customer asking for the display of a message they disagree with ? Private companies are already bound to anti-discrimination provisions, this is no different. Either private company are free to do business with whoever they want (including on a gender, race, and religion basis), or they don't. You can have it either way, but not both.
Living in USA Moutain Time Zone, "move to an urban area" seems a very weird approach to address 5G range limits.

Broadband wireless tech has generally helped to address last-mile connection with less infrastructure. But it is very often all or nothing; radio waves don't punch through rocky mountains. Covergage maps are theoretical at best, and won't feel very relevant when you have to go into your kid's bedroom and hold your phone out the window in order to place a call.

Verizon is effectively a monopoly where we live, as its longer-wavelength coverage seems more forgiving of the canyon topography here. They continue to invest in infrastructure upgrades, but I don't know what aspects of 5G will be relevant in actual use in the near term.
You are always going to have disagreements about what the words mean in the context of particular a case.

I can see smart contract tools continuing to evolve to help draft or validate contract language. There are some enterprise contract management systems that do some this already. But, if things go sideways, IRL facts have to be interpreted in view of the contract you will still need lawyers and courts.

Also, not sure how equitable grounds for breach could be accounted for. A person can have the law (contract, statutes, etc.) squarely on her side and still lose a case because of equitable reasons that are not anticipated by the contract or statutes at play.

2 + 2 doesn't always equal 4 in a court of law.

And, if such systems become available, it seems unlikely that contracts will more understandable to layman. Instead of trusting their lawyers or legalese, people will have to trust the code/proofs.

edit: typos 2x
AI Ethics and the Value of Human Life
Could you point to some examples?

Don’t design frameworks like bootstrap foundation and material design represent utility-first design?
> Those who appreciate the theory of evolution, I think, will have a harder time determining where the threshold between human and nature would be.

All human terms are subjective that way. The universe is relative and probabilistic. Ideas like "nature" can be useful, but that's not to say the universe has a boolean type called "Nature" that actually exists in any objective sense.

Yet we keep having these sorts of debates year after year. Nothing exists in the ways that most people think them to be. I could care less whether something is "natural" if the conclusion has no use.
I don't like Kerouac at all and found "On The Road" to be a poorly written bore, but that's a pretty broad stroke to paint by someone who likely has a lot of reason to paint it grotesquely.
But it’s not stopping the merchants from offering discounts for debit and cash, debit cards of which have capped fees and are very cheap to process.

Merchants are choosing not to give those customers discounts.
> emergent problem

How exactly is it a problem? Surely we'd rather overvalue CEOs than under-serve them?

> these payouts are totally asymmetrical and completely independent of how effective a CEO is

What are good metrics for this claim? How should we measure effectiveness-salary ratio? Why should they not be asymmetrical?

Just curious and trying to clarify the points being made.
> If you're working on a technology that you know is created in contract with the military, is that not concerning?

Implies to me that I should feel bad morally. Just my reading of it, but if lots of people are reading it that way as well, you may want to work on the wording if people are attributing more than you intended.
KitchenAid’s Key Ingredient: Investing in Workers
Tl;dr because they use AWS lol

k.
Equilibrium is a delusion of humans whose lives are too short, and whose brains are ill-equipped to comprehend the universal constant of change.
You're right but for the name. That's how the fission nuclear bomb works. Then you combine it with a heavy hydrogen fusion stage to get a thermonuclear ('hydrogen') bomb.
Weird MongoDb Update Bug While Updating Array Element
You are doing an obvious right thing to do and I wish you huge success.
the definition of natural means apart from humankind
Several is usually not used in that context, the word in the headline should be "a few."
You're assuming that there is a platonic ideal 'you' that the living person you are should be compared against. Ask yourself if you believe that statement. It doesn't make any sense to me.

If we can generously interpret the underlying desire as: "How can I live in the way that will make me happiest with myself?" then it's not complicated:

- Reflect on what you want for yourself as the person you are right now

- Consider how your recent actions do or do not support those goals

- Do this again next week, forever
Data Scientist Warns Against Trusting Ai Scientific Discoveries
Thinking in MapReduce, but with SQL, by Craig Kerstiens [Cross Post From
Yes, exactly. However in this case, the offset is multiplicative.
I was scrolling through amazon video rental last night and I was surprised to see an anti-vax documentary in their “highest rated” section. When I clicked “more movies like this”, there were dozens of similar documentaries that came up.
I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out in different ecosystems. I’d hazard a guess that ecosystems like Go, JVM and .NET will fare much better in an arm world, compared to languages that more commonly pull in native binaries.
That's what it seems to me. Religion is much more dominant here than in Germany where I come from. For example I don't think a non-christian presidential candidate would have much of a chance.
I'd go so far as to say that net positive energy from fusion is a solved problem, because the theoretical portion has been done for decades. The only limitation is refusal to throw money at it, space race or Manhattan Project style, to iron out the engineering problems.
That's idiotic.

Honestly, I would have upgraded a while ago if I knew what I was buying.

They should have called it the 2055.
I found it interesting that self-driving made the "backup" driver sufficiently inattentive that it rendered their help ineffective. Reminds me a little of the book "The Efficiency Paradox".
When did HN become Reddit?