skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Maybe we just haven't reached the level of complexity needed for human-level AI. A hint that this might be the case is that the current excitement with ML seems to be fueled by algorithms that were mostly known by the 80s (sure, with lots of recent incremental improvements, but no new big idea). What made a difference was the computational power and datasets that became available in the 2010s. I suspect the next leap will be of a similar nature. "More is different".

Regarding the nature of complexity and the notion that "More is different", I am reminded of the emergent behavior of vivisystems [1] as described in Kevin Kelley's book Out of Control [2] -- an insightful exploration of the emergent behavior expressed by complex self sustaining systems. If you have not read Out of Control then you might want to put it in your reading queue. I found it highly engaging and thought provoking.

[1] https://www.everything2.com/title/Vivisystem

[2] https://kk.org/outofcontrol/
You can absolutely write specifications for art. And I would consider a pretty technical checklist for quality control that is agreed on in advance (lighting from predetermined direction, adjerence to color palette for corresponding scenery, shadows consistent, required silhouettes recognizable etc.).

I remember an old style guide written by MS for Windows XP that outlined in great detail how icons in the default theme style meed achieve their look. It gave technical details like the exact location of the vanishing point for perspectively drawn icons. So coming up with an art style specification should be doable once the style has been developed.
I see at least two advantages: compared to hydrogen they are not flammable and compared to helium they don't require a limited resource.
> buying some blocks of cheap farmland in the middle of nowhere, adding a HS2 station so the land was 20 minutes from central London, then selling the land to property developers. Obviously you could only add one or two towns, to avoid creating slow stopping services

I don't think any such land ('cheap', 'middle of nowhere', '20 mins from central London') exists in the UK.
if the drivers forced these women into their home or the woman's own bedroom and the woman protested, it would be evident from the video

if the woman willingly went with the driver to his home or let him into her own, this obviously has nothing to do with Lyft
Everyone on HN seems to assume that Google has some sort of grand master product plan.

News at 11 : they most certainly don't, as can be ascertained by the gigantic random walk their product update strategy has been in the last few years.

Observing them from the outside, I sometimes even come to doubt their grand master business plan (I'm assuming they have one of those, which is also a doubtful proposition)
is to make money.
I've been to Tibet and seen with my own eyes how the Chinese government operates there, so it would be a pretty uphill fight to convince me to believe Chinese state media instead of Western/HK media.

Perhaps that's the key then: send everybody in mainland China to watch an actual protest in Hong Kong...
> Yeah and because art has vastly different constraints from coding, wanting to swap out artists is just counterproductive.

It's actually really common. Most games take years to make and in my experience at least it's very unusual to ship with the same team that started. Art is also the side of things that most readily gets outsourced, either through bought and modified assets or through freelancers and outsourcing companies. Maintaining consistency is something that has to be managed.
Eh, i played NES games on my grandparents' ~24" TV, those pixels were clearly visible (though not so visible on my own monochrome TV). Also while "pixel art" is often associated with NES/SEGA by the people who grew up with those systems, it is was also very common in home computers where image clarity was much better than on TV - especially with most games being 320x200 that appeared double scanned on pretty much every EGA and VGA monitor. Even the shitty monochrome 14" VGA monitor that my 386 had had enough clarity to distinguish individual pixels at 640x480

I have several CRTs and pixel art looks pretty much the same in them as it does in modern flat panel displays (blurry pixels is the result of hardware issues and badly configured focus which in many cases it can be fixed). The biggest difference is scaling of low resolution video modes though the integer scaling that is being introduced recently in new drivers should address that (at least as best as possible on a fixed resolution display).
because the US is a union of quasi independent states. US government is built around that fact. The Senate, for example, represents each state equally Originally and by intent these were chosen by state legislatures. Similarly, originally and by intent, states governments play a large role in how Presidents get elected. Personally, I think the changes we've made have confused people about the basic theory of our constitutional system. People should be asking: why do we have states.
> there isn't all that much of anything in Birmingham that makes this worthwhile.

The UK has a weird chicken and egg thing going on. Everything is in London because everything is in London. HS2 is an attempt to break out of that. By developing better rail links across England we allow companies to start moving out of London.

> The idea that HS2 can make Birmingham airport competitive with Heathrow for Londoners is clearly wrong.

But that's not the aim. The aim is that we shouldn't have everyone in the country using Heathrow for all journeys. Currently we have about 80 million people going through Heathrow which is stupid if a chunk of them are only using it to get into the UK.

London doesn't just have Heathrow and Gatwick. London has six international airports.

Heathrow alone at 80m people currently carries the equivalent of Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Bristol combined. We urgently need to fix this.
If it's unfeasibly to stream live to Lyft, it could at least livestream the fact that it is filming. If the footage later "disappears" and the rider claims she was raped, that's pretty damning.
Its a massive Saving in time
A man who brought us flight simulator and video calls has died aged 81
HP-UX vaults were also quite good.
It did happen here (in the West) and your views on China were molded by the framing our propaganda efforts introduced.
Honest question, where does one learn that skill? If it doesn't take that much time, how long it usually takes? I have no clue about art, design, and stuff. Where does I even start?
>I'm being downvoted, but I've been increasingly hearing a shady Silicon Valley practice where...

Well, many posters here are too smart too fall for that, and don't like to see people talking ill of their VC overlords (who will make them rich, of course). Can't risk the spigot being closed off!

I, for one, am happy to see tech employees standing up to these companies and money-men, even when I don't agree with the politics.
The US system's structure penalizes companies for hiring workers between 20-40 hours. Any company that doesn't rely on flexible <20 hour employees or salary + forced-overtime is basically throwing money away.

edit oops- <20..
I think this is due to how writing is taught throughout school. It’s all about a thesis and supporting evidence. There are a lot of parallels between a good essay and a math proof. And yet, there will always be a gap between them because prose does not have space for the rigor required by math. That gap gets filled with bullshit because the path of least resistance is to pick a thesis first, and then cherrypick evidence to support it.

The best journalists are aware of this and also remember the other lesson from English class, which is to consider counterarguments. But even then, there is never enough space for all the counterarguments, so those are cherrypicked too.
They had other gods to serve besides Mammon, and that was part of public life. Today, the only god left to be taken seriously, is Mammon. Serving him earns you respect. Every other deity, pity at best.
The art in that game looks consistent, lighting looks decent and the colours work well together. Sadly all of these properties lack from the OPs screenshots.
Some interesting new arguments here. And the old argument that the fossil record does not show life forms slowly modifying over time has always been convincing.
If you have a 'tube level' map of London in your head it is not obvious why HS2 goes through Old Oak Common. Euston is North and Paddington (which Old Oak Common traditionally services) is West of the capital.

Some commentators in this post have questioned why the article is called what it is when it is just about HS2. For me I think that the title is apt and I now have so much more clarified. This is a really good article and I finally understand and like the project. Before I didn't give a damn about it.
"false equivalence"

That wasn't the point I was trying to make, in the quoted paragraph

Passengers may value the speed more than the capacity. If you quadrupled capacity, but halved speed would that be better or worse for the railway, or the internet?

Door to door train v car journey is more marginal that what you suggest. I would have to spend 2 hours to get to the east cost mainline. In a car I could be over halfway to London by then. And i could have the same problem at the other end. In the same way you'll never be as fast as a plane, but you don't have to turn up 2 hours early for a train.
I grew up playing DOS games on a VGA CRT, most of which were line-doubled 320x200 resolution. The pixels were much sharper than you'd see on a cheap SD TV, and not far from the sharp edges of nearest-neighbor upscaling, which is my preferred style. I also point out that some official artwork for old console games showed sharp pixels (e.g. the Super Mario Bros. cover art). Calling it "false nostalgia" is making assumptions about the hardware of the time and the artist's intentions that aren't universally true.
Hiring s full time employee would more than double his budget. Since his company is a husband-wife team they share expenses and probably live off the equivalent of 1.5 salaries (or maybe 1.0?)
“Pennyworth: The Modern Samurai – Mark Tey” – Read and Discuss on ManyStories
Nethergate looks absolutely awful, and I'm not fond of Avernum's art either.

Exile: Escape From the Pit looks OK, it uses bold colors and a pretty consistent palette, it could be improved (the texturing attempts on the wooden elements) is bleh and the perspective is a bit odd) but the world area at least is fine.
So basically Jeff just need to take some art lessons
World of Warcraft Classic Relase
Are there any unknowns for the causes of higher cancer rates, autism, diabetes?

I'm with you in regards to allergies, though.
The possibility to work part time with pro-rata pay is mandated by law in some countries under certain conditions (15+ employees,...) (i.e. Germany).
I'm so glad somebody sane has shown up.

The guy is doing well, relative to his own aims and objectives, and has found a way to work within his limitations to hit a sweet spot that allows him to support his family in a happy life and provide games enjoyed by a loyal fanbase.

What do we discover from HN? He's a lazy bugger that hasn't put any real effort in to respond to his customer's complaints and has failed to learn key lessons regarding his own business (that he has successfully run for twenty-five years).

Sometimes this place is completely ridiculous.
I’m not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar but I believe this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navigable_servitude

In the US navigable waterways (rivers etc) are controlled by the federal government. It’s in the commerce clause. There’s also probably a reason for this related to the federal government’s role in resolving disputes between states and rivers flowing among and through multiple states.

Since it controls rivers, the government is also responsible for guarding against flooding, etc. from this stems the Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority (damming and electrification of the south), etc
Well if you make games, and visuals are a part of a game, then knowing when your visuals need improvement is a crucial skill.

Jeff doesn't needs to be an expert in everything, he needs to see what doesn't work and fix it, let others fix it or decide this is as good as it gets.
How Startups Should Network
I don't think it's purely cultural because chances are you have co-workers who don't have these issues at all just as I know people who are limiting themselves because of feelings like this - I would say this is more individual.

To flip it around - do you feel other people who leave the company did something shameful ? Do you see judging from others (especially outside of co-workers where it's incentive based) ?

I think as job market turns from oversupply to undersupply the culture changes simply out of nececity.
As usual, the author also leaves off the training phase humans go through where we have a mix of enhanced learning abilities and humans guiding us (aka parents/adults). The process to produce one of these general intelligences takes decades.
Well, there's that Constitution you Muricans keep harping on about :D On a more serious note, really, your Constitution should help with that.
Retail Store Intelligence
In Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, one of the characters is tied to a cabinet containing a bomb and a laptop sitting on top of it. The character is then told that the bomb will explode the moment he stops typing.
Economically Birmingham is growing faster than anywhere else in the UK except London - https://www.ft.com/content/f53b6ab0-b905-11e9-8a88-aa6628ac8... (subs required)

H2 increases capacity for commuter lines out of London, and one of the reasons it's so f'ing expensive is people in Tory Shires demanding the line is placed in a tunnel
Airliners take off full of fuel. Many airliners have ended in fiery crashes. Yet we still fly in them, all the time. Myself included. We drive around in cars full of fuel, that burn, too. People even drive around in hydrogen fueled cars.

Why should Zeppelins be held to a far higher standard than airliners?
I'd be interested to know if other software developers feel their current working hours are good/positive?

From feedback I've had I'm generally regarded as pretty good at my job and highly productive but my current working hours leave me completely drained, to the point I go home and collapse on the sofa, make dinner and go to bed. And that's off an 8.5 hour day. It's at the point now where it's extremely likely I'll leave software for good.

Software to me is extremely mentally demanding and draining, it requires short burts of extreme concentration, but what is more draining is making up the remaining 4-5 hours looking busy. My experience of software work is that it doesn't scale linearly with number of hours. Unless you reach flow which is extremely rare in a business setting (thanks open-office / scrum) you can get the work done very quickly and then have large periods of unproductive time.

It's my experience that at most 2-3 hours is productively spent, the rest is wasted.

I meet software developers who advocate for, or don't mind, 8, 9, 10 hour days and I simply don't understand it, it's alien to me. Are they being productive all that time?

Edit: to clarify (since I've posted on this topic elsewhere today) the 8.5 hours include a 1 hour lunch break and Fridays are slightly shorter.
The big question is "How much of a body does the AI need?"

Should it know pain or pleasure? Does it need to have a blush response to shame? Does it need vision or hearing? Sense of balance? Stomach pain?

You can see that humans that are born without sight or hearing still find ways to develop intelligence. Some people don't feel pain. Sociopaths don't feel shame. Yet, the brain manages. It's very hard to define what is the minimal set of functions we need to emulate for AI to emerge.
Conclusion: Chinese is absolutely the best language-family to make cryptic, gnomic, multi-layered allusions and sound like you've lived 100,000 years up a mountain eating nothing but fresh mountain air and magical peaches.
> Sure, productivity is rising. But how much are healthcare and education costs rising?

But wait, part of the problem is that productivity growth has effectively decoupled from wage growth since the 70s (in the US, maybe the UK, and similar but not as drastic trends in other comparable Western countries). I find it odd that the article barely even mentions it in passing.
You might be productive, but you can't produce 6 hours a day from nothing.
A housing-strapped city and parking minimums = People living in their cars
Those links are awesome l, thanks for posting!

As far as games with simple but nice art go, there’s also prison architect, stardew valley, Celeste, risk or rain, terraria, sword and sworcery, factorio... and many many more. It doesn’t need to be high res or super fancy, just consistent with a a nice colour palette.
Java 8 saw Map obtain the method computeIfAbsent, it saves a bunch of boilerplate, just like defaultdict.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/Map.html...
The train service from the West into London, is generally reliable, fast and a reasonable price if you avoid peak times
Download Anaconda, get a dataset that can help you solve some problem and figure out with Google what you should do if error messages appear. ML is easy.
> I don't want to speculate why the British did what they did, and that's not the point

The historical record is very clear and malice is at the top of the menu.
>I've been through a few startups as a founder. I have cut similar 1x nonparticipating deals. Unfortunately, my most recent one, no employees got anything because of liquidity preferences

So you had experience with these exact problems, yet still structured your latest startup so that your employees would end up with nothing?
Yeah, it seems like I significantly underestimated the amount of ARRIRAW capture going on (see my edit above).
Drop closes $58M CAD Series B with eyes on accelerated growth, going public
You'd need a very heavy chamber to keep the vacuum balloon from collapsing.

Hook up a vacuum pump to a flask. It isn't going to rise as the air is pumped out. Edison's light bulbs did not float.
Hey, me too. Was certain it would be about getting fat. Thing for me is, I was not exercising before, same weight for 10 years and I’m not sleep deprived at all with our 3 months old. But I do eat out more, and have a tendency to not really care what I eat - food has become fuel. I’m kind of suprised by the whole thing. Not sure what to do because I wasnt doing anything before :)
Containers vs. VMs (and Why Containers Are the Future of IT Infrastructure)
Postwoman – An online, open-source API request builder
https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman

The Postwoman API request builder helps you create your requests faster, saving you precious time on your development.
Is this (wage stagnation) true for tech? It seems a special case.

I wonder what the exec-pay/wage/productivity growth charts look like if we exclude tech. (Less disparity? More? Less productivity?)
Indeed, this was my first thought when I read the title, and IMO, it still remains the other obious killer app. for blockchain (besides store of value / currency, obviously).

Namecoin is an idea (that failed because IMO it was too early) so old by now that I am truly surprised there hasn't been a full blown distributed DNS solution that works in parallel to the existing one based on blockchain.
Very much this. It's hard to find a middle ground in software. You either bootstrap mom & pop, in which case you have limited output and limited options for development, but with a bit of luck and skill you can keep a solid lifestyle business running.

Or you try and hop on the unicorn train and start looking for external funding - which will invariably start trying to run your business for you, in ways which you may not want.

The big money is in the latter, but not everyone wants to deal with the proto-corporate bullshit that goes with it.

Occasionally you can find niches - usually B2B, because high-worth bootstrap B2C is very hard - which bring in enough to allow solid growth without huge upfront spending on people and offices.

But they're very rare. And apart from the odd flash-in-the-pan one offs, small games are not usually one of those niches.
It’s called the Green Belt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Green_Belt
Which is the best cloud procurement software?
National Ice Core Lab
> Non-Keidanren members, not bound by the guidelines, have been snapping up promising students before member companies have even started recruiting.

Wait, shukatsu happens 1 year before graduation. Does that mean other companies start recruiting even earlier?

When I read that shukatsu was changing I expected it to become more like western societies, not even weirder
It's a cute remark and I certainly don't disagree that the government (hell, even the opposition) are handling the situation horribly. But the sad reality is that post-Brexit the UK government is free to be more business friendly. I say "sad reality" because this is not necessarily good for the general public - we could see healthcare opened up to private US companies, we could see workers rights eroded, reduced responsibilities for companies, emissions standards relaxed, food standards relaxed ...

Tories whine about Brussels forcing all of this stuff onto the UK, they'll gleefully strip it away at the first opportunity. It might turn out to be good for business after all, but in the same way the Iraq war was.
Because any random local dictatorship, be it the FBI or Kim-Jong can decide what does and does not go in the book.
Clearly, a week was meant here
git is a local program that doesn’t require that you put anything online. It sounds like you might be unfamiliar with it and I suggest that you check it out - it might be just what you’re looking for!
> Has google entirely given up on getting a social network?

The problem is moderation. Youtube has enough on their hands dealing with trolls, conspiracy crap, spam, Nazis/other hate speech, propaganda, pedophiles, animal/child abusers, terrorists, copyright, ... - they don't really have the resources to deal with the inevitable sausagefests in the inboxes of women and the other hate that this feature would be used if it were more widely known.

Their obscure social networks (g+, Reader, ...) are/were niche enough to not attract too many abusers of all kind.
A few years ago, I started making word clocks as presents for people. After a while I started teaching a workshop on how to make a simple clock at a local maker space. Now I have a refined design that my wife and I are producing in our basement and starting to sell at low volume: www.finewordclocks.com

Making clocks is also a great excuse to buy cool tools. We have a probotix asteroid cnc in the basement. I have a 3yo and 6yo. It’s been fun getting them involved in making things. Most of the presents for their friends’ birthday parties are home made (mostly by me but with the kids’ participation) and are REALLY well received.
More likely they structured the deal in the only way under which they could get any money at all. 1x non-participating is not a bad deal for the company or employees. It only becomes a bad deal when the company fails to create economic value, at which point are the employees really due anything more than salary for time worked?

Literally GP post says that investors got pennies on the dollar back and you’re grousing that employees got nothing for their (worthless) equity? Without disrespect to the effort of founder(s) and employees, the company created negative economic value. That’s the root issue, not that the investors had fair contractual terms that caused them to lose “only the vast majority of their investment” rather than “all of it”.
Agree, the "enterprise" jibe here is misguided - as an OSS developer, I find the dotnet standard library to be fantastic. I don't find it to be at all bloated or 'enterprisey'.