skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The real headline is that VR is finally confirmed to have hit a major roadblock. If John Carmack gets frustrated with its progress, there's something up.

I've long thought that the issue with VR is a conceptual one, not a technical one and maybe that frustration comes from there. "Running forward" is an unsolved problem in room scale VR. For a seated experience, you're basically back to a neat display gimmick + accurate hand tracking.

Any real solutions need, on the one side, real-world physical constructions (think running threadmills) that soon hit holodeck-level limitations and, on the other, software that actually benefits from the real technology VR brings to interactive media: super accurate hand- and head-tracking. The first gets impractical/impossible soon, the second limits development to a few niche genres: Shooting ranges, cockpit sims, dance/party games and some vague "experiences" where the actual tech is pretty much ignored and you just say "but it feels so immersive!" (honestly, it does work for horror games!). It's basically motion controls 2.0.

The only place I could see the technology shine is, oddly enough, AR. It has way less mainstream hype to it but it makes much more sense because you actually benefit from the tracking of your real-world movement: You're still a part of it! The holo-lens demos that pop up on youtube might seem clumsy, but I can totally see a use case for replacing physical monitors with arbitrarily sized and positioned displays you can virtually move in any office space. There's rumors of Apple working with Valve on AR tech. If there's any technology that could follow the smart phone, AR is my bet. I'm honestly surprised Carmack didn't move in that direction rather than deciding to become a general AI guru.
Nope—Brave uses zero knowledge proofs and other fancy technology so they don’t know anything: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/8v11fr/how_will...
Bugs are what you get when you move fast.
Correct: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/8v11fr/how_will...
He invented modern graphics as a practical problem by himself as the sole researcher. Given the tools at the time that may have been a harder problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelli...
Just wanted to say holy crap that video was amazing - exciting and suspenseful!
The point the poster above is trying to make is that given the same amount of data, improvements in technique is leading to significant improvements in accuracy.

An illustrative example comes from the first lesson in fastai's deep learning course: an image classifier that would have been SOTA as late as 2012/13, can be built by the hobbyist in like 30 seconds.

That said, I don't disagree that this is all narrow AI, at best.
What's your number?
I agree with the OP in that link.

I don't have a credit card and don't plan to have one.
I chose GAE because it's the only one which does not need credit card.
I can compromise with the GAE heavy limitations because of that.

Because of this I might as well just choose AWS.
That's an interesting extrapolation of your personal experience. You think that's more likely than the widely reported explanations of why Al Jazeera America closed up shop?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_America#Closure

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/01/1...
"640 kB ought to be enough for anybody"

(yes, that was in reference to a PC, not a server.)
If you want to run the prebuilt models you can use the colab Jupiter notebooks that user tugstugi put up on this page [1]. The voice from the comment above comes from WaveRNN and Tacotron2.

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS/issues/272
Ask HN: Custom mod MBP to reduce weight?
Looks like Apple finally produced a laptop worth upgrading to. (At steep cost...) I’m disappointed the weight went back up vs the previous model. Anyone tried custom modding your mbp to reduce weight? Basically wondering if it’s possible to trim some of that aluminum off somehow...
Intel processor riddled with vulnerabilities over AMD's 7nm state of the art processors which are cooler and more energy efficient?

Overpriced soldered RAM?

AMD GPU that's basicaly useless for ML instead of NVidia?

None of these are good selling points.
I'm not sure that is cost effective. It can be long term cost effective, but companies generally don't operate with that much flexibility in their yearly budgets (i.e. if you have excess money to spend, spend it to improve your product).
Capitalism with guard rails is just capitalism. It's never socialism or communism. No country has a completely unfettered free market, it's always on a spectrum with many socialist policies and regulations for the greater good.

The question is which policies are used and how they're enforced, and America has always tended toward more individual choice over state mandated actions.
FWIW, "seriously contributing to this kind of problem" sounds basically the same as "pushing the envelope" to me. They both suggest contributing something novel and useful.
I think you're recalling the end of this comic[1], which was on the front page of HN a couple weeks ago. So the quote is probably attributable to either Scott Aaronson or Zach Weinersmith.

[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3
The sheer corporate-ness of this is completely antithetical to the typical cypherpunk ethos.

Who does Samsung hope to convince to use this? Unknowing consumers and businesses?
> Which leaves only one hypothesis - that this is somehow related to advertising.

Of course it is, they'll earn more if it takes you longer to search and you are more likely to click on one of the ads. I think it's as simple as that.
I expect John Carmack to follow a trajectory of someone like David Ha who with little previous background started to write very creative and thought provoking papers (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=J1j92GsxVUMC&hl=en)

It won't be AGI by most definitions but I bet it'll be pretty cool and I'm happy to have that.
Or maybe when he is talking about making a dent on AGI, he is talking about a very long term objective (say 20-30 years) and he still has to figure out everything.
There are no absolute freedoms, otherwise we'd be fine with pay-for-hits markets like what was revealed in the silkroad investigation or child labor. Everything is nuanced and regulated to some degree.

The question is where you draw the line, and there's real difference of opinion on this front.

The fact we have different states experimenting with these laws is what makes the US form of Federalism great.

Expect more legislation and regulation of the new markets created by AirBnB, Bitcoin and Uber.
Shades of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program)
Carmack has had a lot of commercial success, which is great and I value his creativity in the space but working on a research question that is about ten paradigm shifts away is a different task than putting in hard labour to build games.
Well obviously, but again, why? Is it strictly for one handed data entry, or do you find it easier to move your hand from the home row to the numpad when entering a number mixed with text? (I.e., is it that common for touch typists to not touch type numbers on the top row?)
There is probably nothing wrong with doing that.

Some people would rather pay and have it all in one place. Some people would pay for you to check its sanity and for having someone to blame if it's wrong.

Sometime it's the corporate paying, and the dev team does not care.
To be fair, getting high percentage revenue from subscriptions is a very recent phenomenon, and the NYT is one of the exclusive few (arguably the only one) that is finding this strategy and trend to be viable.
Well said.

I would add, "setting their on schedule" likely refers to independents choosing which loads to take and where.
Show HN: PoC “web macro” recording and replay
Out of the loop, anyone know when/why Jerkcity became BoneQuest?
You are saying "probably wipe out humanity" is a bad thing ?

I know of several million species that would strongly disagree. Especially if AGIv1 decides to tune the genetics of say most mammals to append 'sapient' to the end of their species name.

Perhaps more constructively consider that AGI is simply the next iteration of 'humanity', yea sure the old versions are redundant anarchisms and apart from some living reserve specimens functionally extinct, but nobody cares as you can sim one up at almost no cost.
That story is fake, its source is 4chan. Carmack himself debunked it[1]

[1] - https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/352192259418103809
Nope, just the JDBC Connector configured for Postgres. It wasn't that Debezium didn't work out of us, more that it brought in more complexity (e.g., https://debezium.io/documentation/reference/1.0/postgres-plu...) than the payoff justified.

If we had a need for near instantaenous model updates, then I'd definitely go Debezium. We didn't use it because we didn't need it - a generic KC JDBC source with a poll period of 5 seconds met our needs.s
Show HN: Our team built an API to help game devs Buff their games/apps
Maybe there is no secret. Just like image recognition is just a bunch of well connected matrices running a dumb algorithm, but at a great speed by GPUs, intelligence is just 100 billions dumb nano-computers with the logic of a fairly simple finite state automata, but with 10 thousand network connections per node. How does nematoda transfer intelligence to its copies? By encoding the FSA properties in the DNA. If this is the case, we'll see the next chapter of AI once a typical smartphone runs a million dumb programmable nanocomputers with a very sense network topology: people will just run the same dumb algorithms on this devices and discover that it exhibits the basic properties of nematoda-level AI. And thus AI would be a dumb engineering problem.
This resonated with my recent experience. I have been using Docker and docker-compose quite comfortably for a few years now. I thought it'd try and dip toes into Kubernetes to extend my containerization skill-set and learn something new.

I ended up shelving it until I have time to take a proper course and dedicate the time to it. Docker compose was very easy to learn for me, with a few easy early "wins" and reasonably comprehensive and helpful documentation when I wanted to expand into new areas. For some reason, I really struggled grokking how to structure a k8 chart. Maybe I'll try again after a good night's sleep.
There is a Chinese science fiction movie that is about this (although instead of slightly shifting the earth’s orbit, they make earth a spaceship itself) called The Wandering Earth. I believe it is on Netflix. The subtitles for the theatrical release were not the best I’ve ever seen but it was a fun movie.
My take on it is you can add so much more value to a product with ML, but to succeed you need to have a lot of data.

So you're getting into a "We need to grow really fast to get more data than our competitors so we can add ML and create more value to the product so we can grow faster and get ahead of competitors".

I.e. ML is a competitive advantage which is often hard to come by for startups.
AGI means it can solve any problem posed to it and interface with any sensory and motor peripheral.
The claim was flags on the stage. Not some audience member with a lapel.

They were added the next day, after being called out.
From dispersion to apathy – How technology makes us lonely
I wonder why the investors weren't concerned. They've replaced their CEO for the second time since May.
> I'm pretty sure that really just means that they digitized footage and the analysts did the actual tracking manually but it reads as having good image recognition back in 2006.

I do not know the specifics of the software used in the Gorgon Stare program, but SRI started work on automated image surveillance under DARPA contract in 1982 with ImagCalc. The system was later expanded to video and continued development until two years ago:

http://www.ai.sri.com/software/freedius

I am not sure what year they added automated video tracking. At the 2007 International Lisp Conference Christopher Connolly and/or Lynn Quam (can't remember) showed a demo of FREEDIUS that, among other things, had automated track analysis on aerial and CCTV surveillance footage; by that time the problem was long solved, and they were working on automated event detection.

Same year (2007) the same SRI group also published this paper, "Recovering Social Networks From Massive Track Datasets":

http://www.ai.sri.com/pubs/files/1552.pdf

The "massive track datasets" were automatically derived from surveillance motion sensors, of course.

Automated surveillance capabilities were very far along by 2006.

The really interesting thing is that FREEDIUS is publicly available under the Mozilla Public License:

https://github.com/SRI-CSL/f3d

Drone away!
I reimplemented the comic-drawing algorithm in Ruby almost 15 years ago because I wanted to make my own daily comic based on our IRC chats. It turned out that I wasn’t as funny as I thought.

Source and artwork is available here: https://github.com/statico/spittoon
Everything John Carmack touches he makes better. AGI will be no different.
> But, if this is a 100% replicated brain, doesn't that mean its suffering is just as real as a real brain's suffering, and therefor just as cruel?

Yes, it does.
Even this article says that...

> it is true that if you eat vastly fewer calories than you burn, you’ll get slimmer (and if you consume far more, you’ll get fatter)

There is no escaping that axiom I’m afraid.
Perhaps you should examine your seemings then.
Of course you shouldn't contribute to evil as you see it. Contributing to that against which you fight is stupid.

The problem with applying that to licences is that they have to apply everywhere, to everyone, equally.

Who defines what evil is? You? Me? The person with the most power? The person with the least? How do you measure that? Is there even an absolute definition of evil? I seriously doubt such a definition exists. I'd go so far as to say I hope one doesn't - thinking of the implications.

I wish you the best of luck - because that's all it'll be; in terms of denying evil access to your software.

Of course, your licence choice matters because we all know that evil follows all the rules - especially those which don't suit its purposes. /s
> He invented modern graphics as a practical problem by himself as the sole researcher.

No, he didn't, and that is not a claim that he would ever make himself.
They're working on it.

As a trucker, I have no problem with automation. No one has the right to any specific job or career.
Registers are finitely faster, not infinitely faster, than L1. Now if registers were infinitely faster than L1 then that table would really want to raise that hosanna to the highest.
What am I missing... these all seem like non-sequiters.
Isn't this backwards a bit or did I get it wrong - not sure if I am phrasing this right. But to simplify from a laymen's perspective a reading of The Selfish Gene - all creatures will work to continue their genetic line unless misdirected as you describe. So if in some way continuing their genetic offspring is something that activates their opioid receptor, that's what we'll do, creating and raising offspring or as grandparents/cousins/aunts/uncles, helping raise relatives. This can be applied generally to all life on earth.
Hello. This now has record/replay ability.

In order to do that, you need to enter the following commands in the OmniBox/address bar (in the virtual browser):

do:rec:<recording_name>

do:stoprec:<recording_name>

do:replay:<recording_name>

do:stopreplay:<recording_name>

For example, to record a macro called m1, do

do:rec:m1

To stop recording, type

do:stoprec:m1

To replay, type:

do:replay:m1

Limitations:

1. It's very limited in the sense that it only records exactly what you send.

2. This means that if you opened any new tabs when recording, you need to keep those same tabs open for the replay because when switching tabs the replay will try to switch based on the same tab identifier from the time of recording, even tho it will also open another new tab in the replay itself.

3. There is not attempt to discern what you click on, in other words, all input events are transmitted based on pixel positions

4. Because it's just recording and transmitting pixel positions, you need to manually put each tab back to the state it was at the start of the recording (url and scroll position), before you start the replay, AND you need to start the replay in the tab you originally started recording in.

5. When replaying, you cannot interact.

These limitations make it pretty clunky to do anything, but it does demonstrate the PoC of recording and replaying a stream of events.

important: Also, during replay, you need to keep moving your mouse (or tapping/touchmoving your screen) to trigger frames from the replay to be sent back to you.

Finally, even tho the virtual browser supports things like uploading files, I have not tested these in recording.

If you want to be on the "waitlist" for the private beta of this workflow automation tool, you're welcome to sign up on the Form[0] or just email me cris@dosycorp.com

Technically, the basic idea is that the workflow automation can be delivered on any device, presenting a UX just like a regular browser, but you can record the events, and the edit that recorded sequence, to extract data, insert data, and repeat sequences of actions, in order to achieve workflow automation.

[0]: https://forms.gle/yE5cHY398Tu7a9rZ6
Looking at that map I'd assume they're planning on building the factory in the cleared area at the top, just off the Lichtenower Weg, with good close access to Highway 1.
I am thinking the guy that made Doom is the guy that's making SkyNet and I'm totally cool with that.
Fooling face recognition algorithm as a fashion
I would love to do the same, except I'm not at a point where I'm financially independent.
Yes, a practical problem. The math behind computer graphics (i.e. optics) had been around hundreds of years. The trick was using numerical analysis to optimize and approximate on limited hardware.

We don't have the laws of AGI like we had the laws of optics (Asimov notwithstanding.) Tons of research effort was poured into the wrong avenues in vision (hand-tuned HoG, transforms, optical flow analysis) and ML (support vector machines, computational learning theory) until a chain of breakthroughs hit on the right mathematical approach for vision and supervised learning more generally.

We have some mathematical approaches to try with AGI (e.g. policy optimization/max-Q in reinforcement learning), but they equations are plagued with fundamental issues (e.g. reward sparcity, easily-gamed artificial objectives.)

Carmack optimized some very difficult equations when he worked on graphics, but in AGI we still don't have the right equations to optimize.
And maybe the output is he helps bring about one of those ten paradigm shifts, which would be a wonderful success. He didn’t say “solve” it, he said work on it.
I'm wondering whether this will set off a wave of folks working on AGI given that today the tools are way more accessible.
On AWS K8s provisioning a basic 4-node cluster to sit there and do nothing costs over $300 per month. The amount you spend in a year can be used to build an unreasonably powerful cluster in your home or office.
> I think that Disney is doing to SW what they do to everything... they make it appeal to the maximum possible audience for the maximum possible profit. There's no deep desire to create amazing stories, there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. The stuff they make is "good". You'll still pay for it, and enjoy it, but you'll always end up feeling like they could've done better.

For Star Wars, at least, that's a pretty solid step up. I paid for Episodes 1-3, but didn't particularly enjoy them. Episodes 7 & 8 at least left me feeling good about what I just watched, and I quite liked Rogue One (I didn't see it in the theater, though).
The Earth is a progressively changing place ever since its formation it's been changing how long are we supposed to try to hold Earth at "normal" "correct" levels? Climate change is most probably natural at maximum accelerated a slight amount it was always going to happen.
No, multifactor authentication uses different forms of evidence (i.e., something you have, something you are, something you know), not just multiple accounts. Given password reuse, cookies, etc., e-mail is a terrible second factor.
I’m somewhat in your camp. Why I’d like the ad industry to die is because they’ve collectively decided that privacy is a relic of the past.

I’d rather they work with the likes of DuckDuckGo and share context based ads. Context does NOT include my personal details :)
And I think I'm amused by the trick. I admire its simplicity and far-sightedness, that's all. I mean, people have been adding their cats as co-authors just because a paper couldn't have a single author.
> It gets worse as time goes on because of the "no duplicates" policy; the more questions that are in the system, the harder it is to come up with a question that isn't marked (correctly or incorrectly) as a dupe.

I'm curious why they don't have a no duplicate answers policy.
I'm not sure why it would bother you. I can generate random data in the same format and you can't figure out which is real or who's data it is. Thinking about data as if it has intrinsic value by being recorded is foolish, as many find out during acquisitions.
Or instead of giant death robots, you could have remote-controlled first responders. They could be dispatched quickly by drone and not put a human at risk.

Personally, I'm most excited about the possibility of robot backup dancers.
I didn't even know they had a mobile site. Every time I view a link I apparently get the desktop site, which is the worst thing I've ever tried to use on my phone in my life (text in readmes cuts off and doesnt wrap etc)
"This isn’t one way. If you’re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time."

-- Bezos in his 1997 letter to shareholders
It's not terribly hard for something to be the next graphene, being that graphene's main characteristic is that it generates good clickbait headlines for things it can do under very specific lab conditions but decades after discovery still has no significant practical applications.
Babylon 5, which (somewhat infamously) ran at roughly the same time as DS9, was much more aggressive in adopting CGI (also courtesy of Amiga and Video Toaster, I believe) for space stuff, but still used a lot of practical effects for interior shots as well. The CGI ultimately had a negative impact on the DVD and LaserDisc releases. Live action was shot for widescreen, but CGI was only rendered for 4:3 standard-def broadcast. The plan was that if they ever did a widescreen release, they'd re-render the CGI for whatever the target resolution ended up being. But when production ended the assets were lost, and they ended up having to manipulate the standard-def video into a widescreen aspect ratio. This isn't too bad for the pure CGI space stuff, but there are a few composite shots that look awful on the LaserDisc and DVD releases because of it.

I guess sometimes no matter which tech you choose, it ends up being a double-edged sword in one way or another. Especially in the early '90s.