skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Phil Harrison drove Playstation worldwide studios game development through their glory years and is now running Google's game streaming efforts 'Stadia'. He was at msft xbox for a while and knows the overall landscape well. This 'deal' may be a bid to counter the smartest guy in the space and Google vs Azure for hosting
> This shows that the developers have absolutely no control, say, or ownership over their work.

Developer here. What role would you see developers playing? This is more strategic than technical, so I wouldn't expect much developer input at this stage.

If management asked and the developers didn't like it, people would say "why the opinion charade?". So the only options are don't partner or get a strong (whatever that means) majority vote from the developers before doing anything. Both seem like bad options to me.
Hahaha hahaha! Hahahahahaha! Ahhhhhhhhhh. /sigh/ wipes tear from eye. Best laugh I’ve had in awhile, thanks for that.
Citation?

The one person I know who is getting full state funding for community college in Oregon is waiting to see if the program they're in will be renewed next year. If not, they won't be continuing on to a bachelors degree. Note that this program is only for those that are essentially financially destitute.

Edit: All I can find is the Oregon Promise covering only up to 18k highschool students with a GPA over 2.5. This program does not cover anything beyond Community College. Seems much more limited/shitty than the Seattle Promise (free Community College for all highschoolers)

https://www.oregonstudentaid.gov/oregon-promise.aspx
Paid taxi service with humans at the wheel. It's not an autonomous taxi service until you can take the driver out.
These rules don't make US companies "another arm of the US government". US companies can (and do!) push back against the US government, through the courts, political parties, and ultimately elections.

Chinese companies, on the other hand, have no such recourse against their government.
Public domain? Or is it death of artist plus 20 years plus 50 years plus the year of birth of their third child multiplied by 3?
Re: bizzaro undercover boss, If it's for a week, "just don't fuck it up" would be fine. If I got airdropped into something where I had no experience or relevant insight (e.g. CEO of LVMH for a week), the only thing I could realistically do is try to keep stuff that was already working working (by deferring any decisions or just making "what would you do" delegations to subordinates), and spending the week learning about operations/industry. Maybe there would be a little value in someone from a different industry doing a high-level review of functional areas (e.g. seeing how LVMH manages inventory vs. wherever he had experience, or for me maybe digging into IT/security, or if you have nothing, just do "secret shopper" traditional undercover boss and then report back to the real CEO when he comes back).

A month to a year, depending on the industry and company, would be a lot harder. With a big company with long product cycles a month might largely be a vacation/autopilot too, but at a startup or in a critical time for a company, even a month could be life or death.
Wandering the quiet digital halls of Habbo Hotel
This is what I'm most interested in. The picture that the media paints of Mexico City is one of constant violence and crime, I'd love to hear a differing perspective.
> Does writing python 2 code stop being 'worth it' at some point? If so, where is that point? It sort of sounds like you're already there.

How do you know I'm there? If nothing else I still have my own previous Python 2 code that I've spent time on and that's useful to me! Why would I just throw them all away or waste massive amounts of time rewriting them into Python 3? Is my goal supposed to be to please the masses here?

Honestly that's sufficient reason already. But if you want a more "standard"/politically-correct response: Python 2 is still being supported, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS literally only just reached EOL last month and can be found in the wild, Python 3 support is lagging in a lot of places (e.g. PyPy is still on 3.5, although I'm just using it as an example; I don't use it much), and I still come across Python 2-based tools and packages once in a while.

So I guess the answer to your question is it "stops being worth it" when I stop coming across situations where I'd regret abandoning Python 2.

> There's still people using P2 at least in part because of all the hoops people are jumping through to keep supporting it, no?

"Because" is an odd way to put it... it's true that if they didn't support P2 then people would use P2 less, but people use it because it benefits them, not "because it's supported". I mean, you're also alive "at least in part because" of all the hoops people jump through to grow and bring food within your reach, but I doubt your conclusion is that this should stop being the case...

> They've kept a minimum target language which is far behind 'current' or even 'currently supported', and it's been a catch 22.

What I don't understand is why are people supposed to keep abandoning good software just because someone made something shiny and declared it "unsupported"? I hate this "you have to like my updates... or I will force you" attitude that every organization seems to have nowadays. People are trying to solve their own problems, not please the leader they're following.

> Hosts keep supporting PHP 5.4, for example, far later than they 'should' have, because people kept writing new stuff targeting PHP 5.4.

I mean, this isn't even the same situation? I'm not targeting Python 2 or introducing a dependency on it generally. I try hard to keep my code both Python 3 and Python 2 compatible. So the decision as to whether to move on or not is left to the client (which is often myself) and there's no obstacle either way.
I don't necessarily think accepting this kind of interim CEO thing is the worst possible call for a company sometimes, but it's definitely not something I'd want to publicize even after the fact as the "CEO", VC firm, or operating company.
Yes, that was one of the big distortions of the whole campaign. The mine looks like possibly being an environmental disaster, which isn't great given it's proximity to the Great Barrier Reef - possibility of more coal run-off going into the reef (keeps happening whenever it floods already from the existing coal port), and pollution and physical damage from the extra shipping that will go through the reef area to the port. Then there's the massive amount of water they're going to be allowed to draw from the Great Artesian Basin (which is already depleting at a worrying pace). And all that's before even thinking about climate change.

But the conservative side of politics managed to make it all about jobs, even though the mine, being highly automated, will deliver very little. I believe the most the company expects is about 1600 (even though for years they were claiming 10,000 which still isn't that many). I believe more people have already been employed installing and maintaining renewable energy this year than will ever be employed by this mine, if it ever gets funded (a lot of banks have said they wouldn't fund it because of the environmental problems, as well as the fact that it doesn't seem like it will stack up economically, because the extra supply will likely push down prices making it, as well as other mines in the state less profitable - possibly to the point of unviability).

So it turned into this culture war over coal based on a mine that probably won't go ahead and even if it does won't actually give the community the jobs it needs...
This is false (of Oregon.) I live here and have a kid graduating with honors from High School this year. Wish it were true.
I agree with that. I'm proud to have worked on FirefoxOS as part of an effort to create such competition! (Which is still going on with KaiOS.)
Dude come on, theoretical physics is harder than plumbing. We dont need to leap to the defence of plumbers here.
I'd rather not go too deep into it but if America suddenly changes it's approach to the market as it looks to be doing it's a massive risk to rely on services from any American companies (through no fault of the companies in question).
Considering the average person drives 10,000 miles per year, that means the average person could live to 10,000 and not have a single crash.

Your math is a little off. 100,000,000 / 526 is a crash every 190,000 miles. So every 19 years, not 10,000 years.

I guess I've been unlucky. In probably 500,000 miles of driving in my life, I've been rear-ended 3 times. Fortunately all at low speed, by distracted drivers, e.g. a mom with screaming small children.

That doesn't even count the time I tried to turn right from the left lane. It didn't end well for my car and was the only accident I was at fault for. And there were a few other accidents as well.

Perhaps "crash" is defined as including an injury? That makes the statistic more believable, because nobody ever got hurt in any of my misadventures. All my "crashes" just involved car body damage.
Interesting, I hadn't seen that. All my work has been with the AZ office.
AGI is our generation's Nanotechnology. From first principles, it's reasoned, it could build anything - including itself! Despite this 100 Quadrillion dollar idea looming on the horizon for two decades, nobody ever makes material progress, or, gets all that excited about it anymore.

Instead of General intelligence, AI will be deployed for several decades as a suite of Specialized intelligences. I think it will completely transform creative work, where writing, music and visual arts, and "streaming content" are almost universally produced with a human as a first mover but the computer doing rendering, and major assists in brainstorming and editing.

On the other hand, I think it's going to be very difficult to replace the average middle manager with Watson 12.0 - it's hard for me to articulate why but it comes down to who I'd want to work for. Meanwhile, I'd have no problem with watching GoT season 33 where 1,800 frames of a Peter Dinklage sprite are churned out every week in Adobe Simalacrum.

The point as it pertains to OpenAI's value prop is that I think they are targeting the wrong market, and their secrecy and insularity will be counter-productive when success relies on helping content producers produce. In personal computer terms: you want to be the AppleII company, not the company that wins the contract for the Dept of Defense's mainframes.
How Many of These Game of Thrones Characters Can You Remember?
I’m not impressed with the comments here. The author has eight years of experience in finance and was apparently the best person to fill this role despite her lack of directly relevant experience. (You might disagree, but that was the perspective of investors with a lot of skin in the game.) The article makes good points and is well written. And yet it seems half of the comments can’t get past the fact that she worked as a waitress back around the time the iPhone came out. I’m not one to cry sexism, but I’m seeing s lot of it (and perhaps some classism too) in this thread. Please do better, HN.
A pack of ramen noodles with a can of mushrooms, canned chicken or spam, and a little chedder cheese tossed in is still my guilty pleasure. It's terrible for you, but it's delicious and cheap.
"Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved."

- Marvin Minsky, 1967, Computation
Last time I was using Azure was in 2015. At the time, their UI was completely broken. My company was getting charged for using our support hours to get support for a broken Azure UI, and they were telling us to use their APIs instead of the UI to do basic stuff like launching mobile services and VMs.

Our Microsoft rep recommended we consider deprecating our SAP instance with Dynamics CRM as we could get more discounts and support hours as part of a better valued package and our CIO in that meeting laughed in her face.

Azure might be just as good as their competitors in 2019 or even better but your question reminded me of way back when it was a piece of shit and our clueless CIO was mostly bought in because Gardner could have told him to fellate a horse, and he would have obliged.
Sure, in the abstract, but it’s not purely about prices. If I’m a business traveler who uses Uber in 90% of the cities I visit, I’m not going to price shop when I visit Austin - a) it’s not my money and b) the friction about downloading a new app, creating a new account, etc. is probably not worth it.

Secondly, it’s not enough to look at Uber’s price manipulation, it’s necessary to look at the opportunities that the small, local startup lacks. Even if their prices are competitive with Uber’s, they likely don’t have the cash to do what Uber did, namely subsidize/incentivize drivers to drive even when there are not enough customers.

It becomes a trap: Uber artificially lowers prices, boxing out the smaller players. Once the market is cornered, raise prices. The smaller players are now price competitive, but the two-sided marketplace has already been defined. The passengers are already in an app with their preferences, and the small percentage who are comparison shoppers might fire up the startup app, only to find that there are not enough drivers - why? Well the drivers don’t have enough capacity to keep them busy, so they drop off the startup app to focus on the big guys.

Free markets are fine and good in a vacuum, but the equivalent to a truly free ride sharing market would be where there was only one app, all the platforms put their inventory on it, and users could decide where to put their money, based on price, luxury, ideals, whatever. To claim the current system is free market is to willfully ignore the other dynamics at play.
Even if you assume that the human programmer is better than the query optimizer, which I think you'll agree is assuming rather a lot, the query optimizer still has important advantages. It can react to changing conditions.

The optimal query plan for a given query can change as data is added or deleted. Moreover, there can be multiple optimal query plans at the same time for "the same query" (or at least the same parameterized SQL statement).

I'm not suggesting that optimizers don't produce bad plans that have to be worked around. My point is that comparing the optimizer to an expert human only makes sense as a thought experiment. Most bad query plans are caused by bad selectivity estimates/stats, not bad cost models.
I'm a long-time Google Fi customer and moderate another community about Google Fi. Some of the criticism about Google not being as customer focused is valid, but the two biggest problems with Google Fi are:

* The dependence on rigid processes. Customer support reps are cogs in a machine with no ability to override automated actions or to circumvent when processes go awry.

* Google does absolutely zero of the inventory or shipping. It's contracted out to Ingram Micro. Anyone in the IT world who has dealt with them knows they screw up a lot. Not terribly, but unless you have a direct line to them, you're hosed.

Combine these two factors and then add some typical call center metrics focus and nobody is empowered or interested in going to bat for you when the process falls apart.
18% U.S. exports to Vietnam
82% Vietnam exports to U.S.

25% U.S. exports to China
75% China exports to U.S.

As a percentage of trade with each country, we already have a bigger trade deficit with Vietnam than China. So what's the actual metric for the policy? How could a business know that Vietnam isn't next? And how is a regressive tax that disproportionately punishes the poor and working tax an ethical way of negotiating this?
That's correct. State is handled by the user, which is great for some things(dynamic quantities of elements - no caching layers, just feed it a for loop) and awful for others(maintaining pre-committed state for e.g. a configuration panel with checkboxes, text fields, etc.)

Ultimately the ground truth in both instances is that you have potentially many data models that the UI has to aggregate, and the source model, layout, display properties and hitboxes of elements are usually but not totally related and can change due to many kinds of events. Any formal structure you might come up with is bound to run into exceptions. As a result I tend to have this policy:

* I don't trust the framework

* But I leverage the framework to produce early results, and both immediate and retained modes offer ways of doing that

* I expect long-term maintenance to involve a customized framework design regardless
Thanks for sharing (and @snowe2010)
That is horrifying.
It's not the same approach as CDCL(T) (the stuff in z3, cvc4, and other classic SMT solvers).

Basically CDCL(T) uses the theory part (the "T") as a callback in the inner loop of the SAT solver (to validate partial models). iProver and similar refinement provers tend to have their own outer loops ("refinement loops" in other communities) that makes a succession of calls to the SAT solver, to completion, and use the model or unsat core to refine their own abstraction for the next iteration of the outer loop.
I’m not betting on US, pun intended.
How would one do this? Wouldn't all cars in public road have software signed by strong cryptography?
In-state tuition at University of Maryland is $10,000. You don’t need to take loans for living expenses, you can get a job. (A big part of what has made college “unaffordable” is not tuition increases, but the idea that people must be full-time students. That tacks on an additional $15k or so in living expenses each year, which is more than the tuition at all but the most expensive public colleges. To be fair, part of that is the exploding price of housing in many college towns, the bad job market for high school graduates, and the fact that we have infantilized teenagers so that they don’t go into college with job experience that might make them employable.)
> Each takedown request would take many hours of intervention to resolve properly. Who is going to pay Google's legal department $100+/hour to defend their content, when it will take 50-500+ hours to defend a single request? Maybe the 0.01% of content creators, that's who. And those issuing the takedowns are not stupid enough to go after the 0.01%.

Why not Google themselves? If they're willing to take on the responsibility for false takedown claims by actively taking steps to remove a content creators': why can't Google themselves pay for enforcement of truth in the matter? They are creating EULAs and contracts around users basically having no choice in the matter, after all?
You could implement requests without urllib. You cannot implement C without assembly. That's the distinction between useful layers of abstraction and pointless ones. If a better interface to subinterpreters is bound to be developed, then that should've been the stdlib interface in the first place.
Einstein's annus mirabilis was 1905 and it took decades of determined, international promotion of the Einstein brand, World War 2, a letter from Einstein to Roosevelt, plus another 6 years and 33 billion 1945 dollars (473B USD today), and a staggering collective of the smartest minds to ever walk the Earth in an existential race against a mortal enemy to develop nuclear weapons.

NASA's shuttle project started in 1969, cost $200B, was shut down in 2011 and never got close to it's planned 50 launches per year.

This stuff is hard.
" and yet there aren't bombs going off on busses every day, "

I don't know if that's true (except maybe in the literal sense that it's not every day, just frequently). As far as I'm aware this is a pretty big problem.

"Society kinda works because the vast majority of people are not homicidal."

I agree with this, and that self driving cars will only work under this assumption, but I don't think having vehicles communicate for safety-related (braking) information is the solution at all. If you're relying on that and can't get by with observed data alone, you open yourself up to a huge accident caused by a tiny rock or bird or anything unexpected (way more so than we do now).

If it's just supplementary as an extra layer of safety (attach this pod to your bike to make double sure all cars see you, but they're also still looking) then sure.
My Georgia tech tuition was less than 25k/year.

Their estimates total for tuition + books + room & board...etc is 28k/year. With the hope merit scholarship it's <18k year
MS has a history of eventually getting things right when they put their minds to it. Not sure if the case yet, but they must be motivated.
There's one literally fifty meters from my house in Perth, but ok
In lots of datacenters around the world you can rent anything from space for a single server to entire rooms of servers with your own access control. That offers you more locations than AWS/GCP/Azure at a lower price (if you only want compute and your load isn't uncommonly bursty pretty much anything is cheaper than the big three cloud offerings, even more so if you have a bandwith intensive application like streaming).
Cryptography just guarantees that the message hasn't been tampered with or read by a 3rd party, there's no way to mathmatically prove that you will accelerate
DO you have a quick explanation or any reference on using SAT solver to find equivalent bit-wise functions? I can see how you could easily verify equivalence, but I am struggling to see how you could use SAT solver to generate alternate functions using bit-wise operators.
Glad we agree on escaping.

I'm still not sure what the value is over CSV, which also has visible delimiters. It's true that you have to establish/enforce a specific convention around escaping and quoting, since CSV has historical variation here. But it would make more sense to me to encourage any particular consistent handling of CSV, rather than yet another entirely new separator. At least some tools already support CSV, whereas nothing currently supports USV, as far as I know.
Hey Dan. Do you agree that Anne Wojcicki is a very close personal friend of Sam Altman?

What issues I have been discussing with my long time personal friend David here are inappropriate?

Is ycombinator just a sham site to push BS and ban legitimate questions and calling out of scams, all in the service of market manipulation and PR?

Please ban me Dan. It is long overdue and completely in line with Sam's agenda.
Original was "affordable for a family making $60k"

Drop the fam back to $60k, and that "$3,000 a month for saving and other expenses" drops to $2167--and I would put special emphasis on "expenses": few hundred a month for vehicles, a few hundred for groceries, occasional co-pays (that can get pretty big as you get older and have more things wrong with you), emergency repairs, school clothes, etc.

There will probably be some left over if both parents are employed--not a lot though. I guarantee that the average family will go deep into the red if mom or pop are unemployed for more than a few months in the $200k house + $60k/yr combined scenario.
> it was a piece of shit and our clueless CIO was mostly bought in because Gardner could have told him to fellate a horse, and he would have obliged.

2018/19 that's still the only kind of CIO that would choose Azure if the choice is otherwise unconstrained. Most Azure offerings are somewhere between Alpha/Beta stage of maturity with glaring issues, only cursory (often outdated/outright wrong) documentation, zero community around them.

The only way Azure gets picked is if the decision maker is an idiot guided by the likes of Gartner, or there are other factors at play. Other factors usually being the Azure sales teams leveraging existing MS mindshare and pandering to entirely non-technical decision makers with co-investment or support, the sum value of which is still far less than the cost of choosing Azure.