skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I the only one that doesn't care about software beating humans at video games?

I'm sure there's some sort of useful learning being done here by the people that created the software that might some day help them create software that can better predict what is needed for a specific application but to me it just feels like entities like OpenAI and Google researching this predictive software are just wasting obscene amounts of money.

How about train the stuff on better typed OCR? Better handwriting OCR? This will have actual commercial application.

Why not make something for grading papers. English papers, math homework, etc? Start at a first grade level and as you train the software up move on to higher levels of education. My fiance is a high school teacher, she currently only teaches math but previously has done math and English, she sits there grading papers off the clock while watching television in the evenings and on the weekends... MANY high school teachers are in this situation, think of how much free time could be reclaimed by training this instead of teaching software how to beat humans in video games!!!

This would even help teachers have more time during school hours to help struggling students, if you aren't trying to grade papers in class while students are doing work you free up time that you could actively be assisting one or more students. Instead, these "AI" researchers keep training software to be the best at video games... facepalm

Then take that and apply it to something like my job. I clear international freight through customs for a living, I look at paperwork all day and then have to determine what tariff number I should use for something (cell phone 8517120050, silver ring over 1.50 USD 7113115000) and classify every single line on an invoice by using familiarity with the tariff schedule/description(s) on the invoice/any other supporting documentation/customer profiles for customers that have paid to have product databases on file with us. My employer, we do thousands of these things a day and have to keep everything for several years (5 IIRC) in the evening CBP or any other OGA wants to see it during that time period.

So take that huge, pre-existing, data set like that, identify which shipments were classified correctly and which were not, and then let the software have a stab at trying to do it with that better OCR you created.

Then, you know, actually get rid of (or drastically reduce) soul crushing, mind-numbing, highly repetitive digital paperwork jobs like mine.
> rabidly using it like a hammer every time the smallest problems happen

A straw man... with rabies!
Indeed this is the way it works but I think you restrict your view by taking social media as some society constant. If there is no way for the public to find the information it looks for in a meaningful way in facebook or twitter, it will migrate to something else or push it to change.

It might push the platforms to feed people with an equal share of all sides instead of feeding them what the "want" and anyone else has to pay
Only 20 minutes to do a pivot table who needs practical skills when you have MS Office installed and the misplaced trust of your company?
The child in me wonders if something like video games (i.e. StarCraft II/DotA/LoL/Card games, something with strategy and thinking) would be a way to fight this onset of cognitive decline in retired folks.

It would be interesting to see a study of retired folks from the millennial generation, providing they play much more games than older generations.
The parent comment cast the first stone by calling the bitcoin users idiots because bitcoin is traceable.

The gap between knowing enough to trace bitcoin, and knowing enough to make bitcoin untraceable is tiny, which means anyone understanding enough to know that bitcoin is traceable bit not bothering to research how it can be untraceable is an idiot (when they go online and call all users idiots, dsspite not having done a tiny bit of research into something pretty well known int the community).

Not normally my choice of words, but I chose to use the language of the comment to humble him a little.

And I was talking to the commenter directly, not generalizing to all bitcoin users. THAT IS an unwarranted extrapolation.
Wage thieves don't flee. There's no adrenaline-pumping chase scene, nothing to tunnel-vision. It's also much harder to see on patrol.
calculator beats top human at multiplication (1957)

AI is just a f.... calculator.
Hempcar will introduce 17B dollars into the economy
They shouldn’t be enforcing most other content either, including nipples. Nipples are like Muslim face veils of the Western world.
We could solve this with just a few simple requirements for online political advertising. Here's some I came up with in the past few minutes—rough ideas but let's see how they play out.

• Require all advertisements to be published N days in advance on a public noticeboard with full details of every aspect of the advertisement—audience, budget, funding entity.

• Do not allow targeting in any political advertising other than to narrow adverts to the geography of the candidate or issue—e.g. ads for a congressperson to their congressional district.

• Require the business unit handling political advertising to have strict isolation from the rest of the company. Maybe require it to be an independent entity.
Most DI frameworks you explicitly pass things in via the constructor. I don't get it.
Why do people constantly evoke this these days? People quote it like its scripture. Is there supposed to be some self-evident truth in there? Because I don't see anything that counters the ideas of person you are replying to.
That implicitly means it's biased towards the status quo.
I wish this were true...I'm the only one in my tech-literate family of 25+ who doesn't have an account. They think I'm weird and all asked why I'm not on FB, it's inconvenient for them to email me. Really? You can't email me? Come on.
The issue here isn’t about airframe cracking in general, which is fairly normal and expected in the lifetime of the plane, but cracking in the “pickle fork” in particular— which is abnormal, as these are not normally expected to crack during the plane’s lifetime according to Boeing’s own modelling and expectations — engineers had rated these at 90,000 cycles, the effective lifetime of the craft.

This appears to indicate (yet another) QC and manufacturing deficiency (Boeing already is dealing with other such issues with the 787 and KC-46).

The claim by OP that this is normal because aluminum cracking is normal is really wide of the facts. This part was engineered to withstand the forces it experiences for a certain timespan, and the fact that some now appear to be failing in less than one-third of the lifespan the materials engineers expected it to calls into question whether Boeing or a subcontractor is failing to engineer these components to spec.
And one obvious refinement of the `Env`/`Context` God-dependency pattern is to have it implement a bunch of fine-grained interfaces for subsets of the dependencies it aggregates, so that you can both reduce plumbing (only one thing to inject) and still make it clear which specific dependencies a given call might use.
> in moments of self-forgetfulness, moments in which, by whatever means and processes, the Ego simply disappears?

This is very reminiscent of Buddhist thinking. Did Kierkegaard write at all about Buddhism?
Rich is when your money makes enough for you to live the life you love.

If you have to work to live, then you arent rich.
Has anyone read the actual paper ? This summary really makes it look like "mission accomplished", but this was much much more interesting than that. We saw AI do "obviously stupid things", and we also saw them improve a lot in the middle of the trial, as many youtubers showed.

AI was also much more interesting when playing the protoss race, and really felt like it was responding to the opponents actions, and the other races not so much.

But most surprising is that it didn't make any "breathtaking" moves or actions, as opposed to AlphaGO. Actually not a single game made pro player realize something new about the game. Which is really embarassing, because it suggests that the AI just was able to correctly reproduce existing strategies and build orders, that it probably "learned" from existing pro games in the training sample.

I was really hoping for a more interesting report, honestly explaining the shortcomings of the technics used and giving hints for the obvious blunders. As well as a roadmap for a second round, this time aiming at beating the very top players.
Go find a biotech company hiring software engineers where the biochemists are in the same room/ building. Get a job there. Get to know biochemists and ask them about their work and work problems, listen to their talks, read a lot. Get mentored by a PhD in the field at the company.

When a new biotech product team is getting formed get yourself on the project.

Whatever you do, don’t compete with biologists.... there’s just too many of them and the lab skills are valuable but in abundant supply.
> This man was firing at police. That warrants a SWAT response.

Absolutely. And there is no reason they couldn't have cut utilities to the property, set up a perimeter, and waited him out.

One of the biggest problems with SWAT teams today is that they seem to feel that they have failed if they don't go in all-a-Rambo. Protocol should be just the opposite: the most successful missions are the ones where a cop never has to fire a gun.
The internet is a better place when it's treated like a network of people instead of a network of Brands™.
Stick to Sports? No Way. Deadspin Journalists Quit En Masse
SpaceX’s Starship Mk1 prototype heads to the launch pad – but why?
Same here. I'm prepared to be sorely disappointed though. They're going to clamp down hard on people (although, this might even lead to a bigger storm).
No-one is violently forcing provinces they don't even live in to stay in their country so I'm not sure what you are insinuating there.

People were disrupting public order and doing an illegal activity (referendum) with public money. Normal people couldn't get to work or go to the doctor because people were blocking roads.

That is what police is for basically, I am glad we have police to protect us.

Maybe your constitution is different than ours, I don't tell Canada how to rule itself. I find it baffling that people think they can tell other countries how to govern themselves from so far away!
> Claiming that we must be reliant on private corporations for free speech is a corruption of the very concept

I don't disagree with you! And I think if you'll look around, you'll see it is true. Your ability to get your viewpoint out is, perhaps more than at any other time since the 19th century, dependent on it being deemed acceptable by a handful of powerful gatekeepers. Between the incredible amount of consolidation we've seen in media companies, the dominance Google has on search, the dominance Apple and Google have on app stores, and the dominance a small handful of social media and messaging corporations have on communication, it's kind of amazing how few entities control what so many get to see in every context.

I really, really welcome suggestions on how to fix this. But I don't think pretending it doesn't exist is the answer.
I'm in my 5th year of a chemical biology PhD and I'm looking to potentially move into computer science/data science (been programming for 15 years) after I graduate. Maybe we can just switch? I work with CRISPR for my project.

In all seriousness, you are going to need a PhD if you want to truly understand all of the background of the field. Human biology/biochemistry is just about the most complex thing humans have ever studied. It would surely be easier to just find people with the requisite skill sets.

Even if you just want to start a company, I feel that it would be really hard to pick out a scientific direction/what your company is going to do, without a rigorous scientific background
There are two areas where you can jump in more easily with a CS/software background. Many companies are building informatics/analysis pipelines. That’s likely closer to what you know and you can pick up enough biology along the way.

Alternatively there’s a lot of algorithm/classifier development you could jump into.

It’s usually easier going the other way though. Biology is a complex beast.
Isn't it his/our/everyone's role to protect democracy? What's wrong with that idea?
> The banned users start forming their own sites and attacking you. Bread crumb arguments are spread to lead new users down a dark road and create more enemies.

> Eventually what works is banning all known bad actors and mention of those sites.

How do you reconcile these two? Because it seems like the first defeats the second.
Paying for a $3k or so license, have the ATF, FBI and whatever other alphabet soup agencies turn your history inside out, and then buying one of hundred few, $10k+ fully automatic weapons.

People who buy them don't go on shooting sprees.
Ask HN: As a developer do you take part in professional contests or challenges?
If yes, what motivates you to join?
What Is Framework in Software Engineering?
Sounds like OpenGL or HTML canvas to me, if I'd had to make a contemporary comparison with what I know.

Fun times, having bugs with OpenGL because of this. Oh, fun times :-D
"It doesn't hesitate to publish numbers that indirectly fuel undemocratic narratives, even if they are true. I personally think we should be PC in those cases and think about what effects it will have on society."

I'd love to see an example
Yes, metal cracks and Boeing provides service intervals to inspect various pieces of the airframe. These cracks are appearing sooner than expected. The pickle fork is a critical piece of airframe - if it cracks badly, the wings come off. Grounding the planes is the correct action in this situation.
We really, really need a second run at Biosphere 2, only this time integrating what the failures of the first run taught us. (Only 25 years ago, with no serious follow-up!)

The next step would then be something like a Bigelow B330 module in LEO, which is close enough to get the astronauts home from in a hurry if something goes badly wrong.

(These steps can be commenced with current tech: Heavy/Starship not required.)

Step 3 would be a bigger test hab out beyond the Van Allen belts, preferably a couple of habs revolving around a hub to provide centrifugal "gravity" at Lunar or Martian levels. Goal is to test systems for use on planetary surfaces exposed to cosmic/solar radiation (because outside our atmosphere). Starship is probably mandatory for this phase, because it's a lot more massive and a lot further away. Alternatively: conduct this experiment on the Lunar surface, once astronaut return capability is available (but why waste expensive reaction mass if you can simulate a gravity well?)

Without a lot of R&D work under these conditions, a closed-circuit life support system for Mars is a huge safety risk for the astronauts who set it up (and who are too far away to rush home in a hurry if it goes badly).

And without closed-loop life support, a Mars "colony" is no more a colony than an Antarctic research station reliant on resupply for everything except air and water.
> They're going to clamp down hard on people

How hard can they clamp down really? Have a peaceful protest outside the venue in public and there is nothing they can do. (I'm assuming you have freedom of assembly and right to protest in the US)
> Unfortunately, most of these proving languages are constructive and thus it's possible for both of those to be unprovable.

The fact that it is possible for a given proposition P to be neither provable nor disprovable has nothing to do constructive mathematics. This happens in classical mathematics as well – in any incomplete theory. All theories which serve as foundation of mathematics are incomplete (ref. Gödel).

It is just that a constructive mathematician can be at peace with this situation, since they does not believe P ∨ ¬P to be a tautology – while a classical mathematician will forever be tormented by the existence of theorems they cannot prove in their chosen formalism.
I am starting to think that restricting the number of people you can follow/add as friends to a number that would actually be possible to follow without specialized algorithm might be a good idea.

As long as there is such informational overload, there is no escaping from having algorithms sort things for you
This is a really interesting one to digest. As with previous announcements about AlphaStar, much of the feedback (here and elsewhere) is about the fundamental challenge of assessing human vs. machine in an RTS. These points are very valid - stepping back however, this still feels like a pretty incredible accomplishment.

I'm a gold league SC2 player, so maybe in the 30th-50th percentile. Three years ago, when DeepMind started this project (and after nearly two decades of research into SC/SC2) I could probably have beaten the best non-cheating AI. Now, after 3 years, this AI is playing at a Grandmaster level, under at least a reasonable approach to fairness. By comparison, according to the AlphaGo paper [1] the best Go AIs prior to AlphaGo were playing at a 6 Dan level, which looks to be somewhere in the 90-98th percentile [2].

The speed at which AlphaStar overtook previous AIs seems to me to be nearly unprecedented in AI research. This is like if the world's best chess AI had gone from losing high school tournaments to being competitive with Kasparov in less than 3 years. Valid criticisms aside, this feels like an incredible achievement.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16961.pdf
[2] https://senseis.xmp.net/?KGSRankHistogram
It sets 7700 and broadcasts what's happening, incapacitated pilot is an emergency so that's what it will tell everybody. If there's a controller on frequency it's up to that controller what to do about it, but there's no use arguing with a machine and the pilot is incapacitated, so my expectation is that a controller will keep other traffic out of the way, and if the autoland has picked somewhere with a local tower they'd call that tower and give it heads up it has got an incoming emergency, expect to close the incident runway while they clean up the aftermath.

Regardless, the machine will be broadcasting its intentions and again, there's no arguing with a machine other pilots will just have to accept that it's intending to land and stop on the runway putting it out of use until further notice.

Since the machine can't see lights, I assume it doesn't care whether they are functioning. So in the dark it's likely to land at some small airfield which is actually closed, slightly scary for the passengers to just come to a halt in darkness far from anywhere but arguably safer since nobody else is going to make the error of landing when the runway remains occupied.
No, because fixing these scams would increase their expenses and/or decrease income, which would lead to the company being valued lower at their IPO.

The purpose of AirBNB right now is to give the current owners a nice exit. After that occurs, then they can worry about customer service and the related expenses.
Professional players that play in tournaments know each other and how they play. This might be a further weakness even if Alphastar can beat the best players.
Other players may adapt to the play of Alphastar when they know that they play against it.
Free speech, as a value, is a broader concept than mere lack of government restraint on speech. It can also pertain to the exchange of ideas in certain private forums.

And by the way, the First Amendment disallows not only prior restraint, but many other government restraints on speech as well. It's just that prior restraint is considered the most egregious and hence subject to the greatest judicial scrutiny.
+1 for this is a PhD level thing. The science and technology is not at the sort of commodity level where you do a masters and you're done really. A good approach is to just get in the face of a lot of lab people working on new tech/IP who could really use software support for what they are doing in an area of trial and error that could otherwise scale. But if you are thinking biotech with lab, you need huge seed investment to begin with for the lab, unless you are spinning out of academia.
Hands off – Garmin develops autoland system
> I'm interested in learning more about the skills needed to start a biotech company, but I'm lacking the masters degree in biology. What skills are actually needed to get into the field

You will need two basic skills

1) The skill to understand that trying to manipulate by yourself a delicate and exquisitely calibrated machine without knowing what you do, is a bad idea.

There is a fair possibility that you end with either bad products like a method for pursuing suspects based in DNA of a chunk of cut hair (made entirely of cheratin that does not have any DNA). Incorrect biological explanations or a very expensive machine broken are also probable results

2) The skill to hire a trained biologist that will do the job
To be more specific, the first company I worked at had three co-founders; an algorithms person, a functional biology expert, and someone with experience in building software teams. The first two came from academia.
Design for Errors
the second point still gives too much power to facebook
Where exactly ayatollahs talk about people rights and free speech? Comparing J.S. Mill to a bunch of religious maniacs is a bit far-fetched.

The fact that Mill wrote those words 200 years ago does not mean they are incorrect. We stick to the rules of Roman law in many aspects, although it was written pretty long time ago. Pythagoras formulated his theorem quite long ago too, yet we still learn it at school.

There are certain ideas that seems to be universal, that just make people lives better. People tend to challenge them and thanks to that we get goodies like Communism and Nazism.
Oh, interesting. Thanks for clarifying.
Suppose we applied a basic test to a potential ad: does it sell a product or a service? If yes, you can buy ad space for it. If it's "selling" a concept, idea, way of life, promotes a group, organization etc (basically, NOT selling a service or a product), it's deemed political and cannot be aired.
Would that work?
> the user still wants to be able to use the service in the future.

And this is why Airbnb doesn't care. This is insane to me that they end with "Dealing with Airbnb’s easily exploitable and occasionally crazy-making system is still just a bit cheaper than renting a hotel." after ALL that. It's like the author has stockholm syndrome. I can't wrap my head around why you'd ever use Airbnb again after an experience like that, esp. when hotels are about the same cost.
How does this API works? You are charged for API call?
What are some of these many cases for US businesses?
Uncontrolled airspace is much more of a concern, since there is no tower HQ can call.
Corporations being tone deaf is a regular thing, but the evoking of "Every Voice Matters" so often after shutting down, and punishing, champions of their tournaments (it has happened twice! remember) for supporting a good cause is of historic levels.

Many people seem to think you can't be professional and allow things like this, but you absolutely can. You can let someone who wins a tournament have a few seconds to say something personal, we see this all the time in sports. Lance Armstrong was allowed to lie while disparaging all of the people who were correctly accusing him, Peter Sagan was allowed to make a wonderful political message.

When sports bodies crack down on this in the name of 'professionalism', history does not judge them kindly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Olympics_Black_Power_salu...