skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In the case of these laptops, you buy them to the specs you'll need at the end of the machine's useful life, at the full current price.

OK, I see what you are saying. The nit I have to pick with that particular sort of reasoning is that now Apple has put their customers in a bit of a bind:

- either you buy the absolute max spec (and hope that it includes the specs you'll need for that time span), or

- you risk buyers remorse as you end up in a situation where the laptop that you already handed over a small fortune for isn't up to the task

This past year I recently considered buying one of Lenovo's premium Thinkpad T-series laptops, but the fact that they had one (of two) RAM slots soldered put me off. I was buying this laptop for personal use, and so I didn't want to spend top dollar on it right then, but I didn't want to end up in a situation where what I had settled for wasn't enough.

I ended up going for one of the "budget" E-series Thinkpads, because (paradoxically) those do have fully upgradable RAM.
Yeah, but I bet the typical hackernews reader is in an age group and wealth level that is more valuable than the average internet user.
You are of course free to do as you wish, but since you're applying "guilty by association" logic to Brave—regardless of the fact that using it without enabling the ads does absolutely nothing to help the advertising industry—I really hope that you also refuse to have anything to do with any sites that receive any of their funding through advertising. Enabling an adblocker doesn't reduce that contamination in any sense: The site is still "making provisions for the advertising industry" and "aiding its survival", far more so than Brave.

Funding the site with Brave and BAT would at least offer a practical alternative to reliance on advertising. Unless, perhaps, your goal is not to destroy advertising, but rather to destroy all sites which depend on external funding and yet aren't a big enough draw to justify a dedicated subscription?
> if he needs enormous compute resources, he can get it at any of several cloud providers

This is exactly the experience of most teams I've spoken with, be they students or businesses, for all the pre-production phase. You simply can't and shouldn't spend on costly AI infrastructure before you've nailed your solution; in fact any kind of infra not just AI.

What you do is rent some cloud to power quickly through your tests — better have 10x worth of big Nvidia GPUs over 2 weeks than buy 1 or 2 max yourself and wait 5-10x more time — not even factoring that setting up clusters of GPU and running such workflows consistently over days, weeks requires pretty deep sysadmin/hardware knowledge and experience; it took me two years to really master that non-problem part on my home server (but now it's a skill I have so that was worth it, but certainly set my research and learning back by as much time).

Besides, there's a time when the familiarity, safety and general comfort of home simply can't be beat. Notwithstanding pool tables and free soda, lol.
Adding to this, does anyone know if there is a procedure in place to submit a protest of an ICANN decision? There has to be a way for the public to issue a request for re-evaluation, right?
I want my computer kernel to be snowflake free...time to investigate grown-up operating systems
It's more: offer substantiative evidence of your counter-culture claims that vilify most of your reading audience, or take your baseless negativity elsewhere
Ya, i've used this: https://brettterpstra.com/2017/06/15/a-hyper-key-with-karabi... to do that.

And having the hyper key is awesome (command+control+option+shift). Makes it super handy for shortcuts to open commonly used program shortcuts like calendar etc
I was initially impressed with this because I did my PhD work on chaotic dynamics in Hamiltonian systems, an area where progress has been slow -- it was exciting to see a practical and interesting results.

Lately though I have been thinking about how to build a sunshade out of space materials and I find the ITN trajectories often aren't the efficient way to get somewhere.

For instance if you build the "lunar gateway" it is 2.5 kps to get off the moon and then another 1.5 kps to graze the Earth's atmosphere. It is 3.1kps to go direct from the moon.
I am not necessarily sure that only monopoly powers got Microsoft to where they are today.

Microsoft did a lot to cultivate their platform. They invested heavily in developer tools and APIs. Why do games use DirectX and not OpenGL? Better tools and better hardware support. Why do games only run on Windows? Because they use DirectX. Therefore, people buy Windows computers so that they can play games. Microsoft's investment in tooling paid for itself in sales right there. I imagine people also enjoyed Visual Studio (probably more in the past than now), good optimizing C/C++ compilers, and tools like that, as well. They had a platform, and they made it easy for you to use their platform. All that was engineering investment, not evil business practices. Though I'm sure that taking over the world was on their minds. What mattered was getting other people to help them, and that is something they succeeded at.

The other crucial thing that Windows did was allowing drivers to be shitty binary blobs. That is the best you can get out of most hardware companies. They make a million different products a year, and they don't have time to update their drivers when some kernel API changes. And, they stole a lot of IP from their competitors, so they can't release the source code and let the community do it for them. And, their customers probably never update to the latest version, so they'd have to maintain 100 different forks. But with Windows, you just make binary blob and it works for decades. Microsoft gives you an API, you program to that API, and Microsoft does the dirty work of keeping it working as they change Windows. (Linux doesn't have this, and that's why your Android phone only gets updates for like a month after it comes out.)

The Linux community says "drivers must be free", "only the highest quality is allowed", "software freedom is more important than having the latest features", and "we're sorry that you can't use patented algorithms without getting caught, join our fight against software patents!" The hardware manufacturers said NOPE to that. They don't make software, they don't invest in software engineering, and they'll do the bare minimum to sell their chips. Microsoft recognized this and made something that would work for them. The result is where we are today.

None of this is to discount Microsoft's questionable business practices. They certainly engaged in them. But I don't think they were as crucial to the success of Windows as the engineering investments they made. They had a stranglehold on the browser market for years and were even investigated by the government for it. Then someone came along and wrote a better web browser, and now nobody even knows what Internet Explorer is. Bundling it with Windows didn't matter; people use the built-in browser to download Chrome the instant the Windows installer exits.
I'm sure neural nets will herald AI right after the mechanical gears and pneumatic pistons that were envisioned as the secret sauce during the turn of the last century.

The key, of course, is redefining life and intelligence as whatever the current state-of-the-art accomplishes. (Cue explanations that the brain is just a giant pattern matcher.) It makes drawing parallels and prophesying advancements so much easier. Of all our sciences, that's perhaps the one thing we've perfected--the science of equivocation. And we perfected it long ago; perhaps even millennia ago.
John in particular has shown a propensity to translate his skills into disjoint domains pretty well. I don't think he's good at what he does because he's good at computers. I think it's more that he's really really good at understanding problems and designing reasonable paths to solutions.

And then he has the ability to power through learning what he needs to in order to build toward those solutions lightning fast.
D'oh you are correct! It's a bit late here. Anyways the rest of my point stands about the author's intent. To connect that to your original comment: a rotation is not "observable", instead, it's a transformation that modifies a physical system. In quantum mechanics, physical observables (energy, momentum, position, mass, etc) are always associated with Hermitian operators that act on the Hilbert space of states for the system.
I discovered recently the QR codes are dumber than I thought; you can even print the QR codes out or store them as screenshots depending on your threat model.

Cite: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/guide-common-types-two...
BeOS is one of those weird "parallel universe" products, where the history of tech could have gone in a very different direction. The old BeOS videos [1] are some of my favorites.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4A0Lc6DI7A
It would be cool if he specified what he was going to work on.

Current narrow AI is all about data and computer power but I don’t see AGI coming out of more data / more power anytime soon.
This post feels a little bit like something that'll be upvoted to top spot many years from now, for one reason or another. :-)
But do you care about all the services google provides? Do you use their search, email, etc? Those would also be things you would need to pay for.
Back in the day it wasn't easy for people to find OEM licenses so they would have had to buy far more expensive retail Windows licenses which would have essentially raised the cost of each PC by ~$200. The "MS tax" actually saved money for the vast majority of customers.

Also, I suspect many people would have failed to install Windows. People used to say that Linux was hard to install, but they were comparing against a PC with pre-installed Windows.
Technically it just means a significant change in the capital structure. In context usually something like: exchange a bunch of debt for new equity, typically with high dilution for existing shareholders.

So you avoid dying from that debt in the short term, gain a bit of breathing room to do necessary things (e.g. layoffs) and to fix what is broken in your business model before you start running out of money again. Maybe you are lucky and debt load was the biggest part of the problem - but probably not.
Same as the last go round. In ten years, a new generation will think that this time, they know how to do it right. Maybe the hardware will even. have caught up.
A Review of the recent Google paper about a user-space networking project Snap
What would be awesome is if he just said one day "I need 100 million dollars for my AGI project to buy hardware, anyone who wants to share in a 20% cut of the business just send funds to bitcoin address ### or ethereum address ###". He would be fully funded within an hour, probably.

Unfortunately that could never happen because of the SEC.
One interesting hypothesis, re: lithium isotopes in Posner molecules: https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/users/mpaf/p17...
I don't like the "convenience fee" for two reasons:

1) I object to being charged to give someone money. If you tell me I owe you $90 and that you accept this list of methods to pay and I go to use one of those methods and you reply "oh to use that method I will charge you an extra $3.95," I am going to use the method that costs me an extra $0 because I already agreed to give you $90; you can work out how to collect that $90 in a way that only costs me the $90 I owe you.

2) It is an outdated fee. When it first started, electronic payments were new, novel, and cost actual money to put into a workflow. Now, physically handling checks and cash often have more cost to the merchant than paying electronically because the cost and logistics of electronic payments have been so streamlined. This fee has turned into a cash grab.

(That first point is why I still use paper checks. My apartment complex charges almost $50 to pay rent with a credit card and $10 to use a debit card. But walking the check three minutes from my front door to the night drop the day I get paid is entirely free since my credit union gives me a box of checks every year and I go through far fewer than one box per year. If my apartment complex finds that taking paper checks costs them money but electronic payments don't, they can adjust their pricing to reflect that.)
I personally generate several Gbs of healthcare data per day.

I know we generate a lot of data. I also know it's data that's so unreliable that its business value does not lie in its real-world use for improving healthcare pathways. It's very valuable politically and from a managerial standpoint, though. Unfortunately.
Hell on Earth.
I see it as a wealth level thing. People will still be buying $30 Canon printers at Walmart with USB-B ports and USB-A flash drives in 20 years. Not everyone buys their entire family the newest, most expensive hardware every 2 years. It'll be ages before USB-C and USB 3 hardware becomes as cheap as the massively produced USB-A/B and USB 2 hardware.
I think NP's do.
I SOMEHOW KNEW IT WOULD EXIST!
> Current AI is missing common sense for example.

And normal doctors do not? Are they infallible? Does papal infallibility apply to doctors to? I know a bunch of doctors, they aren't all that different from normal humans except in Australia we work them until they are sleep deprived. They will be making potentially lethal mistakes continuously and it isn't being detected. Every so often there is a scandal when an egregiously bad doctor is found.

Consistent bias and repeatable mistakes are a lot safer to work with than random bias and random mistakes.

We have a lot of examples where humans could initially compete with machines until one day they no longer could. Patient analysis has hallmarks of being a solvable problem (pattern recognition, image interpretation, consuming huge amounts of data, etc). If someone is allowed to compete it will end well for everyone. Once that goes 'doctor' is a title that means something different to what it does now.
That was fun to watch. The NG warnings at the end are pure gold.
Deepmind and openai are probably not on a reasonable track to AGI. IMO if we ever make an AGI it wont actually be especially good at things. An AGI, like humans, would probably be pretty bad at math naturally. You could get one to be great at math, but first getting great at math and backing into general intelligence is probably impossible.

Substitute math for anything you want.
I can't think of a better site for him to make such arguments. What's the point of such criticism if the subjects of the criticism never read it?
How is this different compared to creating a new VM for every single application?
If you wanted a RPM that installs on multiple versions of RHEL, you would take the oldest RHEL you could find, build a rpm with all your dependencies except glibc included, and ship that. The resulting rpm would work on all later versions of RHEL

Problem is, you still need to update your dependencies, so sooner or later you’re bootstrapping modern GCC and Stdc++, openssl etc all from a Centos 5 base just to get a forwards compatible rpm

A that point you start tarring up your chroots so you know how to reconstruct this Frankenstein build enviroment

Thank Docker for giving an easily portable environment that’s almost as easily accepted by customers as a RPM
Hopefully short term includes going on Lex Fridman's podcast
That's literally the argument that sgslo was countering. I agree that it does not seem like the most charitable position to argue against though.
Keep in mind the truism that most retail lossage leaves through the employee entrance.
I use four external multi-TB drives, swap them around every couple of days, and run rsync to copy existing files into a directory with name of the current date and time, with hard links to the previous backup. This gives a live current copy of the existing files, but reduces storage requirements by not duplicating files every time I backup.

Those drives get carried around haphazardly, are often in different physical locations, and usually only differ in content by at most a week of data.

But I'm odd, happy to write my own scripts, and don't want to trust cloud-based solutions for my personal data.

By the way, I regularly pull randomly selected files from the backups to test that they exist and are readable. Backups aren't backups unless you can restore from them, a lesson I learned the hard way three decades ago.

Also:

* What has changed since you asked this 6 years ago[0]?

* What have you already tried?

* What are you using now?

* What is your experience?

* Why don't the solutions offered there work for you?

* Will you share your experience with us?

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6708474
I'll say this: I'd prefer if the brightest minds approached the matter from the "AI safety" angle (a sub field concerned with building not just AI but "safe" AI, ie that we can control or understand in a practical manner).

Because that's really where the line of human history will be drawn if AGI and above becomes real. AI safety, how advanced we are in it, will directly map to civilization's progress or endangerment as a result of AI.

Edit: this is already true with regards to "psychological safety" from undue influence or outright manipulation with motive (usually financial) by current "ANI" algorithms (newsfeeds, "recommendations", ads, etc). It's a real topic that reduces to human psychological freedom, freewill. It's a BIG topic.
He's "good at programming" like Galileo was "good with telescopes." Computers, telescopes, hammers, they're all just tools, and Carmack has proven himself as far more than just a handyman.

He's the kind of person where, if you show him what you're working on and he doesn't understand it, you probably need to go back to the drawing board.
No one is making arguments for optimality of society! If your argument is that societies which traded off mental health of their members (almost certainly an individual fitness hit) for other benefits that allowed them to outcompete individuals in other societies to overcompensate that fitness hit (similar to farmers beating hunter gatherers), I'd be curious to hear what these psychologically more idyllic less successful societies far less prone to PTSD would have looked like.

You might be correct (and one sibling commenter has for example already blamed a change in the availability of social support networks), but it's certainly not obvious to me what the difference might be that suddenly made PTSD a recent "discovery". So I still think it's everything but "obvious in retrospect" in at least one meaning of that phrase.

Maybe it was always with us, and people just failed to recognize it, but naively it would seem that live almost everywhere ought to have been massively more trauma inducing than in the contemporary West.
So if I operate a website, Brave can remove my monetization and replace it with their own, without my consent? How does that work?
Haha... for production workloads?

Definitely not.

Docker is a lovely developer tool, but it’s not, in my experience, ever been (even with swarm when that was a thing) suitable for production workloads.

Containers: yes.

Docker: that’s a container runtime, and definitely not mainstream for production workloads.
Yes, I've noticed this. It's led me to avoid using a lot of newer languages for anything but toy and learning projects (outside of work, where I use what is required, which includes some of these languages).

For my own serious work, language stability over time is a core need.
A lot of diseases are treated symptomatically. Every time the doctor prescribes aspirin/Tylenol/ibuprofen, rest & fluids, cough suppressants, or anti-emetics, you're treating the symptoms. Rest, isolation, and IV fluids for Ebola is treating the symptoms, and does it very effectively, to the extent that the death rate from Ebola is 10% in developed countries but 80% in the DRC. Psychodynamics, CBT, DBT, and most other types of talk therapy treats symptoms, though I think what we're finding out about the mind is that there's a bit of a causal loop and if you treat the symptoms long enough that is the root cause. To the extend that medication treats root causes of psychiatric illnesses it does so in a very blunt way; wasn't there just a HN comment to the effect of 'People like to say things like "seratonin is the drug that makes you happy," or "oxytocin is the drug that makes you feel love," or "dopamine is the brain's reward mechanism," but those statements are simplified to the point of being wrong.' [1]. Our regular treatments for injuries like burns, acute organ failure like pancreatitis, or physical trauma like car accidents is to treat the symptoms until the body has time to heal itself.

Oftentimes the root cause in medicine is something we can't fix, and sometimes something we can't even identify. Biology's the domain of complex causes, where few things have a single cause and a lot of things are interlocking systems governed by homeostasis.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21519901
I'm sure he knows his stuff, and is venturing into this knowing that there's somewhat of a "hard problem" to be solved here; serious proponents of AI like Kai-Fung Lee have stated that AGI may never be possible.

The fact that he's making a public statement like this leads me to believe he may already have some novel solutions on how to tackle the problem. We won't be expecting to be seeing the same old parlor tricks coming out of John Carmack. He is already on the forefront of this stuff after all.

That's exhilarating but also terrifying. Our still-barbarian level human systems are still nowhere near ready to deal with the socioeconomic problems that may arise with AGI.
Here it is, reformatted a bit for HN:

|vi,j|^2 ∏k=1,n;k!=i;(λi(A)−λk(A)) = ∏k=1,n-1;(λi(A)−λk(Mj))

Including it in the article wouldn't really make much difference for most readers. Those for whom it would can easily find it on the first page of the 2.5 page paper on arxiv.org that the article links to.
P.S. I just wish GitLab were more like GitHub. GitLab has always been more clumsy; don't differentiate on what's good about GitHub, GitLab has so much to offer.
This is correct. The Linux desktop works, but the last ~10% of polish and UX attention is what takes like 95% of the time. It's the little things, the edge cases, the things that just sort of work or break at odd times or in odd ways. The parade of edge case issues that must be fixed to make something really high quality is endless.

That sort of polish is the least fun aspect of programming. It consists of brutal iterative bug fixing, polish, design tweaking, and repeat. It's endless. Since this is the part of programming that is not fun, people rarely do it for free. Linux desktop has basically no economic model so it has no way to raise money to pay people to do the nasty grinding work required to make it truly competitive with a commercial OS.

The other huge problem is unnecessary fragmentation. There are like six popular desktop distributions that are all fairly similar under the hood. There aren't any fundamental differences between them sufficient to merit a fork. So you have to distribute your app many times to target one platform: Linux.
Imagine if there were other computer manufacturers.
> gene editing

Gene expression is often tied to the environment the organism is in. Mere possession a gene isn't enough to benefit from it. Some expressions don't take effect immediately, but rather activate in subsequent generations.

Epigenetics is a whole equally large layer on top of this system. A single-focus approach may not be sufficient, and even if it is, it's not likely to cope with environmental entropy very well.
Yeah seems simple to ask you to sign message with your key to prove its you!
Apple's Schiller says kids with Chromebooks are “not going to succeed”