skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can understand your point about the language, but I guess I think it's reasonable to set the goal for what you actually want and work towards it. It may turn out to be unattainable, but I think generally you need to at least set it as the goal. It also seems less clear to me that they are close or far from it (I don't think it's on the same level as warp drive).

I don't know about the god thing you mention and the rationalist stuff I've read hasn't been about that. The main argument as I understand it is:

1. AGI is possible

2. Given AGI is possible if it's created without the ability to align its goals to human goals we will lose control of it.

3. If we lose control of it, it will have unknown outcomes which are more likely to be bad than benign or good.

Therefore we should try and figure out a way to make it safe before AGI exists.

Maybe humans just happen to be an intelligence upper bound and anything operating at a higher level goes crazy? That seems unlikely to me given that humans have a lot of biological constraints (heads have to fit out of birth canals, have to be able to run on energy from food, selective pressure for other things besides just intelligence). You could be right, but I'd bet on the other side.

The last bit is if we can solve this in a way that aligns the goals with human goals (open question since humans themselves are not really aligned) we could solve most problems we need to solve.
I found that particular article to suffer significantly once reduced to static print. It takes advantage of the flexibility of being on a screen in ways that significantly enhance the experience.
Rick and Morty Season 4: Taika Waititi as an Evil Alien Intern
Amazon is busy shooting itself in the foot. The problem is, the gun is small and the foot is huge, so they probably don't feel it right now.

Supplements (or really anything I put in my mouth) is one of a growing set of classes of items I won't buy on Amazon anymore. That probably doesn't result in much loss for Amazon right now, but what it does do is:

1. Makes me trust Amazon MUCH less, which means I'm much more likely to forgo purchasing additional classes of items from them.

2. Makes me find new online or offline vendors for the classes of items I no longer buy from Amazon. Those vendors sometimes sell other items I would normally buy from Amazon as well. If I need those items, I'm not going to shop BOTH places. I'm going with the one I trust.

3. Makes me reconsider my Prime membership. (Among other things, like shipping having become less reliable recently.)

There's a tipping point here somewhere, where I'll just stop being an Amazon customer entirely.
I switched to Zoho Docs since I needed to sync across my Windows & Linux laptops (with ecryptfs on Ubuntu).

Their Linux client is great so far in my experience, considering I use it exclusively with Cryptomator (which syncs a lot more individual files).
I'm not the OP, but I have a little bit of experience with STOKE.

STOKE is a superoptimizer, which seeks to solve the problem of optimizing code essentially by means of mathematical optimization (finding the optimal point), in this case on a discrete, highly non-linear input space. These optimizers usually focus on peephole optimizations, which look at short sequences of instructions, because the problem is much less intractable.

The classic superoptimizers (say, http://theory.stanford.edu/~sbansal/pubs/asplos06.pdf) solved the problem by precomputing the best assembly variant for all short (~4 instruction) sequences, but that clearly doesn't scale. STOKE instead approaches the problem in a manner more similar to classic hill-climbing algorithms from machine learning: you randomly mutate the program to discover alternatives, accept the mutation under certain conditions, and do a random walk on these mutations to hopefully arrive at the best result. The result is sensitive to how you implement the details, but it does scale somewhat better (tens of instructions).
Perhaps it depends on the flight; mine are always $15.

See https://www.southwest.com/early-bird/
In Germany everyone who sells batteries has to take them back as well. I thought that was the case everywhere...? Also throwing alkalines into the trash doesn't sound right.
Yes, this. I often have this same conversation with restaurants who don’t have gluten free options. You certainly aren’t obligated to do so, but if you don’t have any and there is a single person in our dinner group who needs them...our entire group goes elsewhere.
Sent you a mail
I am working in a different industry (which calls itself an industry but is a joke and a god sent heaven for marketing consulting gig) but with the same kind of political minefield.

Public servants get demotivated and set to mediocrity.
Hired cattle gets demotivated and try to get out.

Only managers and middle managers are driven by the ego boost coming from "changing things".
Android too. I can't make guest accounts on my phone .. the menu for it is just missing on my phone .. no idea why
I'm aware that I do lose some gems and though provoking discussions, but IMHO the majority is uninformed/offtopic/poor-quality.
> Like, your average priest: how many actually believe? Is it really most of them?

Mother Theresa's personal diaries, anecdotally, complained about her frustration with her own lack of faith.

I personally think that the people who believe active supernatural intervention is a genuine possibility are comparatively rare in the halls of power, and that this has been true for millennia. To copy/paste from wikipedia's article on "god helps those who help themselves",

> The sentiment appears in several ancient Greek tragedies. Sophocles, in his Philoctetes (c. 409 BC), wrote, "No good e'er comes of leisure purposeless; And heaven ne'er helps the men who will not act."

> Euripides , in the Hippolytus (428 BC), mentions that, "Try first thyself, and after call in God; For to the worker God himself lends aid." In his Iphigeneia in Tauris, Orestes says, "I think that Fortune watcheth o'er our lives, surer than we. But well said: he who strives will find his gods strive for him equally."

So even back then, there was the attitude of "whether they exist or not, you'll have to live your day-to-day as if you're on your own."
The OP got flagged, so I will post here.
--
Assuming what you say is true, it seems odd Google would have you interview the same person twice. It also seems statistically unlikely that they would get the same interviewer, unless the role was specialized. But then why would she have been interviewed 4 separate times? It's also weird that you are writing about it here.. I would assume you'd have been told not to discuss it and are probably bound by the settlement to not discuss it either. Remind us of what the definition of incompetence is?
And yet, the performance is still bad. And that is only 1 of many reasons why electron is bad.
And those countries are?
> macleginn's complaint was that we haven't even modelled simple behavior

No, the complaint was about modelling the behavior of simple organisms.

Certainly we can model some of their behaviors, many of which are highly stereotyped. But the real fly (say) doesn't only walk/fly/scratch/etc, it also decides when to do all of these things. It has ways to decide what search pattern to fly given confusing scents of food nearby. It has ways to judge the fitness of a potential mate, and ways to try to fool potential mates. Our simulations of these things are, I think, really terrible.
Finally, a sensical comment. You're exactly right.

Given the constraints of politics/funding, NASA can't pull off long-term & ambitious goals like they used to in the 60s-70s, and the administrator of NASA, Jim Bridenstine, knows that.

Using your term: ISS on steroids, the next stepping stone would be the Gateway on steroids: an orbiting station around Mars.

Here's a cool pdf from NASA that goes into details:

https://arstechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2019-Why-...
The Mathematician's Glossary of 25 “Non-Mathematical” Terms
I dropped Dropbox on Linux for (of all irony) OneDrive and am working through configuring the client that’s on Github.
What does the continued distractionary tactic by those in power in government and the media, (especially in the UK relating to trans issues) of wringing hands over gender and sex have to do with a site ostensibly about hacker news, especially on a site where it seems wholly heterodox to suggest any sort of alternative societal structure might be needed to combat climate change, as that is quickly denoted as off topic, and something that market forces will eventually solve. I honestly could care less for the hand-wringing of academia in a field completely non-relevant to "hackers", and this simply feels like the sort of thing used to distract from broader issues at hand, and a way of us v them-ing society in order to manufacture consent for an impending climate catastrophe where those with massive pecuniary hoards will further divide society on identarian (sex/gender/race/location) lines in order to distract from the broader issues at hand.
Following your reasoning, flying with the speed of light is possible because photons travel with the speed of light. We are not photons though. Is it possible or not to travel with the speed of light with a spaceship?
They said (and say) the same thing about DJs who use automatic beat-matching and mp3s. Fascinatingly Berlin still clings onto vinyl (for now). It's fair to point out that the current users of the tools aren't seasoned/world-class producers/DJs, and don't have that level of training and practice or their musical ear though.

It's amazing that these tools exist, along with those that can operate them, so music can be generated via code, live, and it comes down to (your opinion on) whether or not these tools ever grow past the "research" phase that they're currently in right now. IMO the tools will continue to evolve until they are useful in the hands of "creative originators [that] can use grammars expressively".

There's a impassioned community building and refining the tools and tooling, and its my belief and opinion - we don't have to all agree - that the algorave tools will eventually get to a place that's useful for creatives, and into their hands. Then the music being generated becomes the attraction, instead of the coding tool being a gimmick of an attraction.

After all, what's a drum machine, but a clumsy, analog "for" loop?
Google has a history of age discrimination and losing in court, going back to the founders of the company.

See Reid v Google where Brian Reid, a key developer of the tech we use, was told his ideas "were too old to matter" and that he was an "old fuddy duddy."

Google fought it and lost.

https://www.law.com/therecorder/almID/1202464321723/?slretur...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist...
Former Huawei employees say client information was discussed at Chinese embassy
Behaviour driven automation testing in .NET Core using BDTest
I think Apollo was lucky that Johnson came in after Kennedy. I think if a republican had won in 1964 probably there wouldn’t have been a moon landing. By the time Nixon came in there was already too much momentum to cancel it.
The fact that employee in SF gets $200k doesn't mean that the labor is worth $200k in Bucharest. It is worth whatever somebody is ready to do the job for and what the company is ready to offer, in this case - SF it is $200k while in Bucharest it is $100k. If the employee is happy with $100k in Bucharest then the salary is fair.
LockPickingLawyer (Youtube) has a series of videos on the poor quality of "Amazon Choice" for various locks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gflpf0DrCgw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ1_P5oqf6Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkdJti43IgU (Branded Amazon Basics)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-bndzHmMfg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtTneV8SaB0
this is bizarre to me. I don't really see how this move makes sense for the CCP. Maybe I just wanted to think that things have changed since 1989..
I think the history of Servo has been retconned a bit. See for example this fluff piece from late 2012, shortly after the project was publicly announced:

https://www.geek.com/chips/new-firefox-rendering-engine-serv...

"A new rendering engine for Firefox is being developed by Mozilla, and it’s being built from the ground up for multi-core computing environments. Mozilla has delivered some pretty major performance improvements to Firefox over the last few versions. The IonMonkey JavaScript engine is firing on all cylinders, and now it looks as though the Gecko engine may soon be replaced by something much more modern."

If this wasn't Mozilla's intention from the beginning, they certainly didn't do much to temper this enthusiasm or clear up the misunderstanding.
2-4 may help some but #1 is the real answer. The "people usually against it" should not have so much power to prevent building more housing.
New and different ways schools innovate with time
The problem with supporting Linux, for commercial desktop software, is that it's extremely heterogeneous. Some user might be on Ubuntu, another on Redhat, another on Mandrake; all with very different details.

Thus, what happens is that so-and-so runs such-and-such which happens to be incompatible because of some whacky configuration alignment that no one considered.

The test matrix then becomes much more complicated than a traditional test matrix targeting common Windows and Mac configurations.

That's fine for expensive software where the end user might have a very close relationship with the vendor, but for "cheap" software the cost of supporting every possible way someone configured their computer is significantly higher than targeting Windows and Mac.

(Otherwise, the Linux version of a program might cost 2-10x what a Windows or Mac version will cost.)

I like to think of desktop Linux as a DIY hobby; but not something that you can expect commercial software vendors to support.
Absolutely agreed... while I think that online accounts are probably better for most users, it's horrible to make it this hard to create a local account.
I didn’t even know you could do that! Any idea if it works on the pi4 or not? The docs don’t mention it.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
AGI would dwarf those 7 billion people because it would concentrate tremendous power into the hands of a very few.

It's the dream of being one of the few who gets to control and direct that concentrated power that fuels these dreams, which is why it's imperative that they dress it up in the language of benefiting society.

The essence of the ethical problem with AI is that there is no person or small group of people who can be trusted to use such power without creating a real dystopia for the rest of us.
No, they will get bought by Google soon tho so doesn't matter anyway
Point being that's every TED talk.

(1) Outline a problem everyone agrees with, (2) present cool research that works as a prototype, (3) skip over any scaling and manufacturing issues, (4) end with a joke.

Everyone leaves happy. ;)
"Arguably" in the sense that you just decided to claim something that has no relation to reality? Like Ghostbusters 2 was "arguably" the highest grossing movie ever made in Albania by a crew of chipmunks?

Gimp starts off as an emergency last minute replacement project for two undergrads at Berkeley that does basically the same thing as Photoshop. It wasn't ever anything like Microsoft's Paint.
I came late to realize the existence of this problem, and discovered it when someone on Twitter blocked me simply for asking about Jordan Peterson. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I fail to see how sanctioning/blocking/banning/censuring/deplatforming is compatible with open honest debate (these are all basically the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_baculum fallacy, "punishment-as-argument"), in any event, and since I strongly believe in the latter, I fall on the "strong free speech" side. (My Twitter account has all of 9 blocked accounts, and those are mostly things like low-signal-to-noise-ratio businesses with lots of promoted tweets)

There are people who believe that ideas exist that are both bad and that cannot be defeated rationally, but I think they are wrong. Take racism, for example (I've argued against racists): They will come at you with supporting (correlational) data, so you come at them with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence and then you ask them whether they're shorter than average and still want to act on these correlations they put so much stock in, because in that case they need to now act against their own interests (favor preferential hiring of tall people, etc.), and you just wait and let that sink in because most of them will go quiet. ;)
Note that in EU alkaline batteries should not be thrown in mixed waste, so that is moot point around here.
I realize there’s a lot of speculation happening here, but as a long time (since beta) user who was not looking forward to moving because of the plummeting Linux support...Thank You.
I think it would be more accurate to say you could build a basic Zookeeper on top of FoundationDB rather than use it as a replacement.

It depends on what level you're using Zookeeper at. Because it's fairly trival to slap together a consistent store on top of FundationDB because, well that's what it is.

But if you need ephemeral nodes tired to heartbeated sessions and sequentially consistent set of watches to be triggered... Well that's quite a bit harder.

I'm less familiar with etcd, but I suspect the devil is in the details.
I dont know ___a single___ software that can do these either. This is exactly one challenge for AGI, to know which pattern recognition part to pull up in which situation. An insect can make decisions when to fly, crawl or procreate. I do not think that we have something similar in software just yet.
https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

Another fun fact from that lawsuit: Steve Jobs threatened Palm with a patent war if they didn't join the cartel. Oh, it was a fun time to work in the valley...
Who Pays Writers has been around many years and does a good job of sharing info. I wish there were more entries on it, though, especially in technical disciplines.

BTW, if there's anyone here on HN who is genuinely good and can write about modern JavaScript, Ruby, Go, React, Postgres, or front-end development techniques, hit me up (see profile). We pay!
Why so serious? ;)
There was also a service where you could enter your collection of quotes/snippets and it would send you an email daily with a random quote.

Anyone remember what it was called?
Threat Hunting via Sysmon – Sans Blue Team Summit
How would universal suffrage last beyond 2046, at which time the mainland government can just rewrite all of the laws?
It's a big issue: supplements, batteries, cables, headphones etc...
> However, if a form of intelligence where adding more hardware adds more capabilities in the fashion of present computing but where the capacities are robust and general purpose like humans rather than fragile and specialized like current software, then we'd have of amazing power - brilliant people can amazing things.

That's a very big if... Also, I'd argue that most progress happens not because of some brilliant people, but because of many people working together... Then if your AGI only reaches the level of intelligence of humans and maybe a bit more (what does more even mean in terms of human intelligence? more emphatic? faster calculation ability? more memory? what would the use of this be? all things we can't really oversee), it raises the question whether this would ever be possible in a cost-efficient way (human intelligence seems like it is, in a certain way, "cheap").
Ask HN: How competitive is getting a job at a FAANG?
As a more rural-living SW dev, my general impression is that if you work for Google, Apple, Amazon, etc., then you are the 'best of the best' - akin to something like admittance to Harvard compared to a state school, for example. How true is this?
$1 billion - costs of operating exclusively on Azure.

Not that it’s a raw deal, but it smells a bit disingenuous to peddle it like this. MS gets a big chunk back thanks to that exclusive arrangement.
More big companies punished by payment of pocket change. Makes one wonder why they don't skirt laws on a more regular basis.

Perhaps soon they will.
I set up a Linux computer for a family member a good 3 years back on an old computer. When that died, they switched over to Windows because I didn't have time to come over and install their new laptop.

About a year later, they're now asking me to come over and reinstall Linux on the new computer. Setting up Linux is the hard part -- if they don't need to worry about that, their comparison is that they had a Linux computer that just worked, and now they have a computer that keeps asking them about some thing called One Drive, and updates at inconvenient times, and that forces them to use some kind of weird photo software instead of just letting them organize their files into folders.

If you have a non-technical person you're trying to support, often the easiest thing is to set up a small system that does exactly what they want and nothing else. Linux makes that easier than Windows, at the (small) cost of forcing you to actually take some time and set up the computer correctly from the start.

It feels weird, because when I started using Linux this wasn't the case at all -- but Linux is nowadays my go-to solution any time I want to set up a computer for a tech-newbie. A big part of that is you can set up a system once and trust that it will continue to work the same without missing out on security updates. You can still set up a Ubuntu system with Unity if you want to.

That's a massive advantage, because it means I don't need to re-teach people how to do things every time Microsoft or Apple "innovates" their interface.
Personal and Painful reasons why Founders do not get the investment
Nobody brought up radicle yet? HN what's up?

There you go: fully IPFS based version control and collaboration.
https://radicle.xyz
Philosophy is absolutely a form of hacking. It's about pulling apart concepts and the unreal while building and applying systems.
Warp drives travel faster than the speed of light? That's what I meant by not possible.

Ignoring that if we saw miniature warp drives everywhere around us in nature then yes I would be more confident they were possible.
How to make a friend fast – the scientific method
Look no further, I am one of them here, AMA!

I can start by stating that beliefs are built on other beliefs up to a point. When you truly believe an all powerful and omni-present Creator designed all things,further beliefs built upon that foundation which you seem to have a hard time with make perfect sense. Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to suspend critical thinking to believe in a Creator. And also,yes, to varying extents most peope in history and in the present actually and truly believe the things they profess to believe.

I think this will get downvoted severly but I hope you understand my intentions, understanding how and why someone makes a decision to believe something is better in my opinion than dismissing them as uneducated fools without asking further questions
Brings their total to $828M raised since 2013. I'm honestly surprised they haven't taken money from the Vision Fund yet.
I use Arch too, with BTRFS, but made a mounted sparse file for Dropbox, which has been an utter nightmare setting up on all my computers. I'm tempted to just keep it in case they reverse course again.
I think you significantly underestimate the cost of discovery/wasting time of non-legal folks.