skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Time will tell. I personally put the time between now and AGI well in the decades, possibly more than a few centuries. This is not a mere matter of engineering, it is one of fundamental understanding of which we likely have achieved only very little.

Imagine seeing the wiring diagram of an alien computer with parts on the order of 6 orders of magnitude smaller than the ones that you are familiar with without knowing the contents of its memory and then you are expected to make a working copy. Good luck.
I found the book "Our Mathematical Universe" by Max Tegmark, a physicist, a pretty good read. His idea is basically that the universe isn't explained by math, it IS math. To get to what he means by that he provides a good review of theoretical physics/cosmology/quantum mechanics. No idea how other physicists think of his work but for someone not in the field who has some interest I thought it was a good overview and even if his ideas are wrong gives you something to think about.
Jagdfaust
> I felt like you were talking about pure content quality

You probably just skimmed my post then because I’m really don’t know terms like “multimedia”, “games”, and phrases like “It wasn’t just a mass of text” could be confused with “pure content quality”.

> If one had the time and tools to make games and interactive interfaces from Wikipedia’s content, do you think it could eventually match the Encarta experience?

Absolutely. Encarta isn’t something that is unapproachable. In fact I literally said “This is something you’d expect the web to excel at” in my last comment :)

> Some WP articles have videos/sounds/gifs but I find them too rare.

Not only rare, poorly presented as well. Encarta has an engaging UI/UX, Wikipedia isn’t designed that way. So even the few articles with multimedia content are still less engaging than the average Encarta article.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. Sometimes people want their information presented in a bland broadsheet format, other times they want a pretty infograph. Each has their place.
Facebook Data
Is it possible to retrieve all information from my facebook that has ever been submitted? Even deleted messages and deleted conversations?
Yes, true, though I consider that "structural/procedural" optimization as opposed to "technical" optimization.

This means, I won't bother using "inline" anymore, but I will consider how many subfunctions in total I'd call.
The mainstream media were all, in orchestrated unison, arguing loudly for the war.

This is plainly false.

The New York Times featured e.g. then-Senator John Kerry arguing against war in Iraq: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/06/opinion/we-still-have-a-c...

They also had e.g. news pieces about the UN chief chemical and biological weapons inspector contradicting the US government's claims of WMDs: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/world/threats-and-respons...

This Atlantic cover story opposed war in Iraq: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/11/the-fif...

In the UK, only The Sun unequivocally supported the war, and The Daily Mirror and The Independent both strongly opposed the war: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2002/sep/25/pressandpublis...

Washington Post columnist Katrina vanden Heuvel always opposed war in Iraq, although she's a weekly columnist so I don't have the time to scroll through her archives to find a Post article, but to prove she's not like Trump (who claims to have been against the war, but actually publicly supported it before it started and didn't publicly oppose it until after it started): https://www.thenation.com/article/powell-fails-make-case/

Sure, the US mainstream media broadly supported the war and failed to challenge the government's claims, when they should have been much more skeptical. I've seen estimates that, for example, the opinion section of the Washington Post was 91% in favor of going to war. But being duped or foolish is a world apart from being coerced, as the media is in China. Can you find even a single word in a single mainstream Chinese outlet in favor of Hong Kong democratic demands? 9% is completely different from zero. It's not even comparable.
Given these chips are purely meant for machine learning the issue that "your wafer computer was always going to be sub-optimal at something" is less of an issue now than in traditional scientific programming setups, especially of the Trillogy / Transmeta days.

You have silicon in place to deal with physical defects at the hardware level.

You have backprop / machine learning in place to deal with physical deficiencies at the software level.

The programmer operates mostly at the objective / machine learning model level and can tweak the task setup as needed softly influenced by both the hardware architecture (explicit) and potential deficiencies (hopefully implicit).

The most extreme examples I've seen in papers or my own research: parts of a model left accidentally uninitialized (i.e. the weights were random) not impacting performance enough to be seen as an obvious bug (oops), tuning the size and specifics of a machine learning model to optimize hardware performance (i.e. the use of the adaptive softmax[1] and other "trade X for Y for better hardware efficiency and worry about task performance separately"), and even device placement optimization that outperforms human guided approaches[2].

Whilst the last was proven across equipment at a Google datacenter with various intermixed devices (CPUs, GPUs, devices separated by more or less latency, models requiring more or less data transferred across various bandwidth channels, ...) it's immediately obvious how this could extend to optimizing the performance of a given model on a sub-optimal wafer (or large variety of sub-optimal wafers) without human input.

Whilst reinforcement learning traditionally requires many samples that's perfectly fine when you're running it in an environment with a likely known distribution and can perform many millions of experiments per second testing various approaches.

For me working around wafer level hardware deficiencies with machine learning makes as much or more sense as MapReduce did for working around COTS hardware deficiences. Stop worrying about absolute quality, which is nearly unattainable anyway, and worry about the likely environment and task you're throwing against it.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.04309

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04972
This makes sense for individuals, but how does this work for countries?

Let's say the US were to export more stuff to China. Now American companies have more money to buy assets. If they use this money to buy assets in the US it would just cause inflation. The land prices go up, but the total amount of land owned stays the same. If they use the money to buy land in China, I am not sure that it would have much impact on the US economy.
Taplytics Engineer Job Description Breakdown
> was mostly saying things like that the people are clueless in Hong Kong and don’t understand the law about extradition

It is important to understand there is some truth in the statement, while it neglects the symbolism that Hong Kong citizens have rallied behind.

It is no longer important, but the possibility of extradition to mainland China was a very small part of the bill, which updated a long list of countries that extradition would be possible to. It also lowered the number of crimes that were extraditable.

So on its face it was a meaningful updating of an old law and mostly kept the existing process which was full of appeals and approvals of various departments to actually extradite someone, but the mere inclusion of one particular country allowed everyone to channel their disdain for crossing an ideological line.

So when the first protest happened, China's cherry picking of the issue is not at all inaccurate. Coupled with the understanding that all the disdain comes towards them, from their own autonomous region, it is pretty embarrassing.
The quote in my comment has "independent public broadcasters". I think they will depend on third parties in order to make that determination.
> This is true in practice because enough real-world C code has “I know what I’m doing” casting away of const.

I found this out the hard way when I implemented OptimumC, the first data flow analysis optimizer for DOS C compilers back in the 1980's.

I had to undo doing optimizations on const.

Anecdote: Optimum C blew away all the other C compilers on a magazine benchmark article because it figured out that the benchmark code did nothing and deleted it. The author didn't ask me about it, he just assumed the compiler was buggy and gave us a bad review. Sigh.

When other compilers did DFA, the benchmarks got changed.
Displaying dashboard on a TV: Setting up the hardware
Yes: row traversal (no hopping around in memory and causing cache flushes) and block size reads/writes are a big deal. Luckily they're easy enough to do right every time once you know. I used to take some flak from the "premature optimization blah blah" side of the house on occasion.
Marlon James: X-Men saved me as a gay teenager
I agree that they are at least misrepresenting their achievement. However, for the sake of argument, electric motor efficiency goes down quite a lot as overall power potential and RPM both drop. So it's possible they've come up with a sizeable efficiency improvement in a worst-case scenario, i.e., improving efficiency of a small motor in low RPM, part throttle situations.

If that's the case, however, it doesn't really bode well for them, as their efficiency gains will not translate to the high-RPM, high-power motors used in cars. I'm not EE, but I do know that most engineering involves making trade-offs. So I wouldn't be surprised to learn that techniques to improve low-power, low-RPM efficiency probably sacrifices high-power, high-RPM efficiency.
MasterCard 90k Personal Data Leak (In German)
Advanced Persistent Threat

https://attack.mitre.org/groups/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_persistent_threat
Wouldn't that be against C++ philosophy? I mean fast by default, you need to explicitly enable anything that costs cycles.
Same in chrome on iPhone. I love this library btw, good job! :)
Like it was discussed, if you're already dead, why kill your enemy? It's vain and childish, because in this case killing doesn't serve any purpose. Revenge comes from an emotion, that's why I'm saying it's not really rational.

Nuclear weapons are weird, because it's not really designed to kill soldiers, and even if it does, you can't hide from it.

It's an honorless weapon. And remember why it was designed.
RemoteTech gets you there. It adds a flight computer that can be set to execute maneuver nodes for you - which is crucial for remote operations e.g. when you have to execute a burn at a point where the planet of interest is between your probe and your comm network (before they added comm networks to stock, RemoteTech was what you used to introduce comm range, relays and speed of light delay).
Why is scarcity of resources not discussed in this article? There’s a curved frontier where the return on yet another human to a geographical region or virtual grouping is negative.

Too little people and you can’t do much, too many people and everyone is eating each other.

The data on elites preferring not to work harder for a promotion is irrelevant. They’re not working to be richer, they’re working not to be poor.

The terror of being poor after growing up in comfort is aggravated by a lack of social services safety net in the US. Lose your job, have a medical emergency and you’ll die without private health care.

It’s a brutal system.
How many of these corporations are putting their money where their mouth is and enshrining this in their charters, bylaws, and official procedures?

How many of these corporations are putting their money where their mouth is and lobbying lawmakers to make these things mandatory for all corporations?

How many of these corporations are putting their money where their mouth is and putting money into raising the minimum wage?

Money talks, bullshit walks.
Not sure that you'll find any "Made Easy"-type (abstract) algebra texts, but my college textbook was "Introduction to Abstract Algebra", by W. Keith Nicholson, for what it's worth.
Scale effects? To be popular, you need large database. It took Yelp years to get there. It will take another company years too, but now their risk is much larger since there's Yelp already which dominates the field. So company founder has to get somebody to invest not in just developing a new field for years, but in developing for years a field where there's an entrenched and popular (even if shady) competitor. Ultimately, I guess, if Yelp continues to be shady, it will pop up, but may take a lot of time until it's useful.
“The artist, the musical composer, the architect, the scientist all feel a fundamental need to discover and create something new that is whole and total, harmonious and beautiful.”

“Having seen that the perception of harmony and totality need not be a purely private kind of judgement, one can now understand in a new light the fact that the really great scientists have, without exception, all seen in the structural process of nature a vast harmony of order of indescribable beauty… Indeed, every great scientific theory was in reality founded on such perception of some very general and fundamental feature of the harmony of nature’s order. Such perceptions, when expressed systematically and formally, are called “laws of nature.”

-- David Bohm, On Creativity
Melting Glaciers Are Helping Capture Carbon
Wow, that is a thought I didn't have before. Thanks!

Still, we wouldn't even know what real time is, or what the "x" is, rather, until after we have achieved AGI. Also a mind bender.
Advanced Persistent Threat - a hacking group that finds an open door (or creates on by phishing), gains access, spreads little backdoors and malicious code into a bunch of machines, any of which, if removed, can be re-created by the others. Not easy to detect, very hard to get rid of once infected. Many groups have differences in the tools they use, which enables those in the know to say "Oh, that's APT X" when they look at an infection.

You may have heard of "Fancy Bear". That's one APT out of Russia.

For more information, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_persistent_threat
I wonder if anyone would find Einstein's field equation aesthetically pleasing.
This issue is why D has both const and immutable qualifiers. const can't be optimized because there may be other mutable references to the same memory object. But for immutable references, there cannot be.

It is possible to cast away const and immutable in D, but these are only allowed in system code, presumably where the programmer actually does know what he's doing.
Really? Where's that documented?
This is so refreshing to see. Good on Facebook and Twitter for trying to be part of the solution.
Then play guitar for the rest of your life. It might be a short life.

"Productivity" techniques are inherently flawed by the way they put capitalist "productivity" at the top of the most important things in life. Check the blogpost where the author describes playing a computer game as "life down the drain" and how their productivity tips have to tightly control that.

If your life is to be commercially productive and own a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar house and get paid for docker-compose, then you can't switch to playing the guitar and have the same life.

But if you consider your deathbed and think a life of fighting Docker was a total waste, what was the point? The "resolution" to the discrepancy doesn't come from a productivity technique, it comes from a enlightenment; losing the desires to control particular life outcomes and desiring "good" outcomes and fearing "bad" outcomes.

Go far enough down that and you'll unpack the fears and anxieties about not being good enough, not being perfect, making mistakes, being inferior, etc. which cause procrastination in the first place, and be more able to work on Docker without feeling bad. And more able to turn away from it and play guitar without the anxiety of "what if my boss says I wasn't productive enough".
How old is your knowledge? China changes fast - my impression was that it was quite straightforward to go to HK. At least for people in SZ...
> the likes of which the US only ever imagined in the depths of paranoid delusion

Back in 2012 I went to a few Occupy Wall Street protests and encampments, I was very surprised to see how many advocates for "real" communism - since nobody has done it correctly - really were hiding in the bushes the whole time.

(I did read up on this seemingly comical notion, and I can at least tell you that they're correct, communist countries have never gotten to level 2 which calls for abolition of the state, and all fail during the pitstop of centralized power.)
Thanks for the information!!

On your last paragraph, the thing I'm concerned by is where this extra priority information is stored and propogated, as the term "task" is interesting: isn't every single separate thing being awaited its own task? There isn't (in my mental model) a concept that maps into something like a "pseudo-thread" (but maybe Rust does something like this, requiring a very structured form of concurrency?), which would let me set a "pseudo-thread" property, right?

As an example: if I am already in an asynchronous coroutine and I spawn of two asynchronous web requests as sub-tasks, the results of which will be processed potentially in parallel on various work queues, and then join those two tasks into a high-level join task that I wait on (so I want both of these things to be done before I continue), I'd want the background processing done on the results to be handled at the priority of this parent spawning task; do I have to manually propagate this information?

In C++2a, I would model this by having a promise type that is used for my prioritize-able tasks and, to interface with existing APIs (such as the web request API) that are doing I/O scheduling; I'd use await_transform to adapt their promise type into one of mine that lets me maintain my deadline across the I/O operation and then recover it in both of the subtasks that come back into my multi-threaded work queue. Everything I've seen about Rust seems to assume that there is a single task/promise type that comes from the standard library, meaning that it isn't clear to me how I could possibly do this kind of advanced scheduling work.

(Essentially, whether or not it was named for this reason--and I'm kind of assuming it wasn't, which is sad, because not enough people understand monads and I feel like it hurts a lot of mainstream programming languages... I might even say particularly Rust, which could use more monadic concepts in its error handling--await_transform is acting as a limited form of monad transformer, allowing me to take different concepts of scheduled execution and merge them together in a way that is almost entirely transparent to the code spawning sub-tasks. The co_await syntax is then acting as a somewhat-lame-but-workable-I-guess substitute for do notation from Haskell. In a perfect world, of course, this would be almost as transparent as exceptions are, which are themselves another interesting form of monad.)
Recap of React Week '19 in NYC
As I read the article, I can't help but feel that the tone is exceptionally unfair to Mast Brothers.

It seems the primary charge is that 'some, but not all, of their earliest sold chocolate bars were made from mass-produced chocolate,' referencing bars sold at a flea market (wherein they allegedly acknowledged to a buyer that some-but-not-all were made from mass-produced chocolate).

The article then criticizes them for browsing the largest Chocolatier forum on the Internet for advice... Is this supposed to be a serious criticism?

Then it goes into the quality of the chocolate and alleges that it's overpriced. I would argue that it's subjective, and there isn't anything inherently wrong with strong marketing. Maybe their chocolate isn't that good (I've never heard of Mast before reading this) and they're just convinced it is?

Finally, the article ends with attacks based on mere speculation and attacks on the general chocolate industry as a whole.

I'm not making any judgment on Mast Brothers chocolate one way or the other. It's just that this article has a whole lot of aggressive language propping up some pretty weak evidence.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." ―Arthur C. Clarke

Wikipedia has several articles about these phenomena (e.g., information theory, thermodynamics):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_level

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_...

PBS Space Time has some great videos on the cosmological side of all this. Their video "Are You a Boltzmann Brain?" does a great job of explaining entropy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhy4Z_32kQo

Kurzgesagt has some entertaining videos on the subject, too:

* The Most Dangerous Stuff in the Universe - Strange Stars Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo

* The Most Efficient Way to Destroy the Universe – False Vacuum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijFm6DxNVyI

Most of this is unnecessary for the subject of this thread, which is more about biology, ecology, and evolution than physics.
Actually diamond is a really good heat conductor. Dave's big idea was that the actual "thickness" of the chip that was needed to implement the transistors was actually quite thin (think nanometers thin) and that if you put one of these on top of another one, you could use effects like electron tunneling to create links between the two, and even bisected transistors (where the gate was on one of the two and the channel was on the other).

So here is an article from 4 years ago on diamond as a substrate: https://www.electronicdesign.com/power/applications-abound-s... which talks about how great it is for spreading heat out. And one thought was that you would make a sandwich of interleaved chip slices and diamond slices, still thin enough to enable communication between the two semiconductor layers without having to solder balls between them.

In that scenarios the package would have an outer ring that would clamp contact the diamond sheets to pull heat out of everything to the case.

Of course the mass market adopted making chips really thin so that you can make a sleek phone or laptop. Not really conducive to stacks in the package. Perhaps that was the thing that killed it off.
<pedantry>
"Kopi" is Indonesian for "coffee", so "kopi luwak coffee" is in the same vein as "ATM machine" and "PIN number". "Kopi luwak" or "civet coffee" are the preferred terms.
</pedantry>

All that said, it's delicious.
What's the standard this implements?
> I wouldn’t call it very realistic. The aero modeling is quite hacks/primitive and even the gravity is rather simplify... afaict they only calculate to the dominant object in the sphere of influence so you don’t get Lagrange points, for instance.

Perhaps this will change with KSP 2?
KSP always looked very cool but I've heard a couple of things that threw me off:

- KSP devs are or were treated poorly by their employer (low pay, no compensation for the success of the game)

- apparently the program collected a lot of data (I can't remember what exactly) about its users and the machines it was running on, to the point where even non-privacy minded people were calling it spyware

Does anyone know anything about this? Afaik discussion about these issues just kinda stopped after a while but we never got a conclusive answer to these points.
I always thought MechJeb and such should have already been part of the base game. Learning how to do manoeuvers manually is an important and rewarding part of the game. But after flying your 1000th craft into orbit, I just want to automate and manually fly the stuff I haven't tried yet.