skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very interesting, thanks for sharing.
I had one idea of extreme transparency. What if the Signal server used a per-user-thread model where each thread was isolated in a sandbox, which only the user has access to. The user can log in with read only access via ssh and certify that nothing is logged, nothing is tampered with etc. A kind of extreme transparency.
Inference is also becoming a bigger contributor to compute bills, especially as models get bigger. With big models like GPT-2, its not unheard of for teams to scale up to hundreds of GPU instances to handle a surprisingly small number of concurrent users. Things can get expensive pretty quick.
That's pretty sweet information. For columnar db, LLVM definitely helps as columnar wants to cram as much small type data as possible in memory and runs the CPU over them. I would imagine the condition evaluation in the where-clause would be benefited the most since it's mostly an evaluation of dynamic expression.
> It is. And in fact, it’s one of the main reasons we chose this line of reporting. The issue of child sexual abuse imagery really brings the privacy issue to a head, because we’re forced with these very, very stark decisions that we’re discussing here right now. Which is that, is it more important to encrypt the communications on a platform where it’s well known that children interact with adults? Is it worth it to encrypt those communications to protect people’s privacy when we know what the ramifications for children are?

I am interested in this question. As a cryptography enthusiast, I don't these these issues are black and white, one could imagine using ideas like zero-knowledge proofs (which, in this case, might just amount of sharing hashes of images and videos or slightly more intricate techniques like fuzzy hashes used by, for example, VirusTotal) to prevent spread of CSAM while protecting privacy.
117 seconds specific impulse [1] is miserable. It is possible [2] to reach orbit with that, but not efficiently.

1 - http://www.astronautix.com/h/h2o2.html

2 - https://space.stackexchange.com/a/8720
Volunteering sounds like a great way to spend some time, yep. Are there any local (city/regional) volunteer mailing lists or websites you might be able to find?

I've often wondered whether the foundational documents & infrastructure of organizations could be, by default, hosted in public source control as text-files / basic markup.

Technology is still a bit too alien for most people I'd guess - software literacy (and, frankly, software simplicity) still has a way to go. And there's a fear of developing and making mistakes in the open.

But if every organization had infrastructure developed via code -- even if what they actually achieve as a group has a strong basis in the real world -- that'd make it a lot easier for developers like us to contribute back.

Until then, volunteering time and expertise locally sounds good :)

Would be great to hear if you find any useful sites / communities for this.
It's pretty similar to theft of services.
Will it be able to learn the universal Turing machine? We could "train" a compiler & runtime into existence. Probably too much of a correctness constraint (since the output has to be the exact result of computing the encoded program with the encoded machine).
Does that mean that answer grading would become like comparing summaries of a given text?
Business Name Generator Tool for Free Use
> You can't build hand-build a feature detector as accurate as (say) a ResNet50 by hand.

Yes, you can. If, that is, you can actually understand what the produced model is doing. And, of course, no human can do that, because no human understands the algorithm being employed by the produced model, because it's a really freaking complex algorithm whose optimal formulation really is just a graph of matrix transformations, rather than an imperative procedure that can be described by words like "variable."

This is an important idea to absorb, for the specific case where the AI converges on an optimal algorithm that's actually very simple—because the data has a regular, simple shape—rather than on one that's too complicated for our mortal minds. If you already knew that simple algorithm, then the work you did training an AI just to end up back at that same simple algorithm is wasted effort. An AI can't do better at e.g. being an AND gate, than an actual AND gate can. An AI can't do what wc(1) does better than wc(1) can.

If the data is regular—that is, if a model of its structure can be held fully in a human brain—then jumping immediately to Machine Learning, before trying to just solve the problem with an algorithm, is silly. The only time you should start with ML, is when it's clear that your problem can't be cleanly mapped into the domain of human procedural thinking.

The AI programmers of the 1960s were not wrong to start with Expert Systems (i.e. attempting to write general algorithms) for deduction, and only begrudgingly turn to fuzzy logic later on. Many deduction tasks are algorithmic. If you don't require the context of "common sense", but only need operate on data types you understand, you can get very far indeed with purely-algorithmic deduction, as e.g. modern RDBMS query planners do. There would be no gain from using ML in RDBMS query planning. It's regular data; the AI's trained model would just be a recapitulation of the query-planning algorithm we already have.
Outsourcing in south america is growing pretty fast. I think a big part of it has been the local govts and laws. Sometimes in the past they flatly outlawed it or else charged exorbitant taxes (some still do from what I've seen). But they have been wising up and making the laws more friendly to attract outsourcing.
Ok, you might have a five year window max for that to remain a valid point; batteries continue to improve year by year.
Try the value data center providers like he.net.

A 42u rack and 1 Gbps connection is $400 per month.

Put cheap supermicro EPYC servers in rather than threadrippers (or build your own). High capacity RDIMMs are cheaper than UDIMMs.

This will give you a much more maintainable solution than workstations at employee's home via overlay VPN.

There is a maintenance cost for infrastructure that people tend to forget these days.
Sure, happy to help.
Sorry, my bad - I meant to reply to @melling, not the top-level
>- PR firms are so powerful now they can make any brand great again. See Microsoft.....

Well, yes in an era where any kid in their early 20s can be CTO of a startup, and get their 5 min of fame for saying Webkit is the new IE, thinks IE era meant IE 7 and never developed a thing during Pre IE6. Of coz they get moved by PR and Marketing. For those of us "old enough" who have been burnt, or at least old enough to be a little less idealistic. I am not really seeing the power of PR.

On the subject of Microsoft, it isn't really a powerful PR I mean you have to give them credit Satya's Microsoft is a lot different to Mid 90s Microsoft. There are lots of signs they are moving in right direction ( even though it is still bumpy ). From Xbox, Gaming, Windows, Azure, Open Source. While the quality still isn't there yet, but at least they know their quality is not good enough. And that is much better than old Microsoft where nothing is a problem as long as the sales are moving.
The specification of the problem doesn’t say anything about integer size, wrap-around, and the like, so we should assume that they mean ‘mathematical integer’ when they say ‘integer’

One can easily hit a bug in that code for small arrays, even for an array with only 2 elements.

There also is an edge condition bug for an array of size zero.
> It should, I hope, go without saying that nobody is required to run a bounty in the first place, and most companies probably shouldn't.

Really? Most companies? That seems like an extraordinary claim.

I'm not a security researcher but if I stumbled on some security issue in something that's not open-source and not owned by my employer, the only way I'd consider reporting it is if they have a bug bounty / responsible disclosure program. Otherwise I'd expect it would be about as likely for me to receive a "thank you" as a knock on the door from law enforcement.
Repped
We have JIT compilers that can optimize "better" than static. People are still using the latter because there are other benefits that nobody from the ivory tower can beat.
Social-media political bots about to get harder to detect.
The problem is that big companies don't care about giving quality support for their products, and for the most part they get away with it. From their perspective there's no problem to solve.

Your solution basically boils down to "companies are failing at escalating support issues well, so they should escalate support issues well."
I dunno, but DNS entries are actual data.

I certainly don’t know what all the DNs entries on my 15 domains are, so if they disappear it’s not going to be easy to get it all back.
I posted this under the wrong parent comment, moved but cant delete.
Fossil fuels are done. Even if they get a reprieve for another four years, they'll be done after that. As someone who currently works in the petroleum industry, I wouldn't recommend anyone start a company in it now. It's far too volatile, and the political winds are shifting strongly against it.

I don't believe anyone who says that we're getting close to AGI. There are interesting techniques that might get us closer, but they're so far behind in terms of compute power and scaling that it's hard to see how they could be practical in the near future. Anything that's based on back prop is not going to get there. The singularity is a loooong way away.
>but how certain are you that _all_ records are restored?

A solution to this is to keep DNS under version control with eg Terraform and deployed by CI. master is then authoritative
The language Self was just released couple years before that and I thought it was the coolest language since sliced bread. Then Javascript came out and wow, it incorporated the key ideas from Self.
Kimbal Musk 2005 SpaceX Blogspot – Kwajalein Atoll and Rockets
Ombudsman services are able to resolve conflicts where the customer and business don't agree. They're appropriate for regulated businesses to draw a line in the sand as to what is a legitimate complaint by independently settling cases where the customer and business did not agree. If the Ombudsman hears 100 unresolved complaints and upholds only one then probably the ordinary customer services are working as intended. If they uphold ninety nine something is gravely wrong with your customer services and the regulator needs to step in.

This isn't so dissimilar from the method used in pathology to deliver consistency in results across multiple labs and assay methods. You identify some boundary cases. This is definitely normal, this is definitely cancer but this is borderline, repeat a few times. You replicate and get all the labs to mark your samples. Then you can identify labs (or assay techniques) that aren't reliably putting things in the right categories and demand they improve or stop.
I'm sure your right for your case. But I'd add one caveat for those less experienced: if you own the hardware, you need to be prepared to go to the colo when something breaks. The various clouds are a much nicer experience when hardware fails. At the very least people should have enough spare capacity that a hardware failure means going sometime in the next couple of weeks, rather than getting up at 3 am and fixing things under pressure.
Assuming facts are as you state, what does this have to do with bias on the subject of climate change? I mean, if they do or do not have a list of notable Holocaust revisionists, does it/would it indicate a position on the subject? Or might there be technical considerations?
(I've done work in QA and have played at building Jeopardy style QA models)

Watson (Jeopardy Watson, not the IBM branding exercise Watson is now) has much weaker text understanding models, but has much much better optimisations for the incremental style of data release that you see in Jeopardy (ie, you get more and more data the longer you listen). IBM did a lot of work optimising when to answer as well as trying to get the correct answer.

The closest analogy that is regularly studied in modern QA research is "Quizbowl"-style datasets, but these tend to be much smaller than the SQUAD datasets that most modern neural network QA systems are built against.
There are studios moving to rust, and there definitely is a great amount of interest in rust among my peers because of the 0-cost iterator features. The borrow-checking isn't even a big draw, it's the other features!
> It’s not clear how strongly he held the conviction, or if he really believed it at all. His publicist, Darren Shuster, said Saturday that the “flat Earth thing … was a PR stunt we dreamed up” to get publicity and attract sponsors for the rockets that the self-taught engineer made in his garage at his home in Apple Valley, Calif.

https://archive.md/1QX2W#selection-2017.0-2017.330

Sounds like he wanted to build and ride rockets, and this was a way to get strangers to pay for it.
That might be an interesting counterfactual for a blog post (or series). What if {x} had been the dominant web scripting language?

What does that language offer that JS can’t match, and what trade offs does it make to get there? I suppose you’d have to write a hypothetical spec for dom APIs, etc that don’t exist in the target language, and then pretend to use it and see what the pain points/unexpected pleasures are.
I love this comment, and probably wouldn't even disagree with "It's basically horrible" :), but just to point out a few things:

- "The generated result won't even have proper indentation." Actually, what you see in the typeset output generated by weave/cweave is what Knuth considers proper indentation, and he has written paeans multiple times to Myrtle Kellington (executive editor for ACM publications) who developed that style, etc. There are a lot of lines in WEAVE devoted to getting the indentation exactly so. I personally find it hard to read as well (as I imagine do most programmers), and both McIlroy in his review ("Second, small assignment statements are grouped several to the line with no particularly clear rationale. This convention saves space; but the groupings impose a false and distracting phrasing...") and Harold Thimbleby in his Cweb article mention these departures from what C (etc) programmers are used to.

- "Web and CWeb are programs geared toward someone who is an academic, mainly interested in writing a paper that revolves around a small amount of code." I would disagree: yes they are geared towards someone who is an academic -- specifically Knuth -- but from everything he's said, his love of LP is about the programs themselves, not papers about them. (Look at https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html for some of his programs; he says he writes several programs a week and keeps most of them to himself; the ones published online before Sep 2017 I had typeset here: https://github.com/shreevatsa/knuth-literate-programs -- I ought to clean up and refresh that stuff.)

- Finally, WEB arose out of certain specific constraints. After he had written the original version of TeX in SAIL for his personal use, it turned out there was widespread demand for it, and people at other places had started porting it into their local systems/languages (with risk of incompatible/irreproducible implementations). For this he decided to embark on a two-year rewrite into the language that was available at the most number of university computer systems: Pascal. This language had been designed primarily for teaching, and at this time there wasn't even a Pascal standard by that name -- every compiler did its own thing. So he was targeting the "common denominator" of Pascal compilers, which meant no separate compilation units to be linked in; everything had to be in a single file at least as seen by the compiler. (In fact his TeX78 in SAIL had been written as several separate files in a more conventional (to us) style.) And yeah, the fact that he had been requested to eventually publish the source code of TeX (which he did, Volume B of Computers and Typesetting) played a part.

BTW the author/maintainer of Axiom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_(computer_algebra_system...) has been writing it for years in a literate programming style, and whether that is insane/suicidal is beyond my ability to judge at the present. :-)
JavaScript is perfect example of Worse is Better http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

Early JavaScript sucked bad. It sucked small planets.

As PG said 2005 about Web 2.0. http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html

>Basically, what "Ajax" means is "Javascript now works."
How about Lemon Party... oh wait
Before firebug there was Venkman debugger (mind the Ghostbusters theme) as Firefox (or Firebird and Netscape Navigator 9) as well as Thunderbird and their other components where built using JavaScript+XUL (pronounced Zool, as in Ghostbusters)
How a Hot $100 Million Home Design Startup Collapsed Overnight [HomePolish]
If I ever have someones direct email I don’t think I would use it in any situation that I wouldn’t appreciate getting one myself.
In my experience, the trick is to remove `using Linq` from the entire project.
The thesis of the article is that this is going to be called consultancy.

Single-focus disruptors bad. Generic consultancy good - with ML secret sauce, possibly helped by hired specialist human insight.

Companies that can make this work will kill it. Companies that can't will be killed.

It's going to be IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc all over again. Within 10 years there will be a dominant monopolistic player in the ML space. It will be selling corporate ML-as-a-service, doing all of that hard data wrangling and model building etc and setting it up for clients as a packaged service using its own economies of scale and "top sales talent" (it says here).

That's where the big big big big money will be. Not in individual specialist "We ML'd your pizza order/pet food/music choices/bicycle route to work" startups.

Amazon, Google, MS, and maybe the twitching remnants of IBM will be fighting it out in this space. But it's possible they'll get their lunch money stolen by a hungry startup, perhaps in collaboration with someone like McKinsey, or an investment bank, or a quant house with ambitions.

5-10 years after that customisable industrial-grade ML will start trickling down to the personal level. But it will probably have been superseded by primitive AGI by then, which makes prediction difficult - especially about that future.
What if rising sea level puts Panama under water?
JavaScript Object and Array “Rest/Spread” is a newish syntax. Learn it
I've been playing with custom-built 2080 Ti workstation for a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF3JYEIsjH8

Several issues: 1. electricity bill is still an issue, I've been paying anywhere between $500 to $1000 per month for this workstation (always have something to train). 2. something with a decent memory size (Titan RTX and RTX 8000) cost way too much; 3. once you reached a point of 4-2080Ti-is-not-fast-enough, power management and connectivity setup would be a nightmare.

Would love to know other people's opinions on the on-prem setup, especially whether a consumer-grade 10Ghe is enough for connectivity-wise.
The second interview was about the «2048 game». It was the first time I couldn't understand the task clearly, maybe because I hadn’t played the 2048 game at all. The questions were about a strategy to win in the 2048 game and an elegant solution to generate the next board state. Only two days later I realized that the 2048 game is some kind of «Game of Fifteen» and the solution could be found with the help of A search algorithm.*

That is just absolutely silly. How can they expect to hire quality people with a process like this? Someone who has never heard of the "2048 game" (including myself) would be at a steep disadvantage, regardless of their coding talents.

I'm very sure that I wouldn't pass this interview process, and I'm equally sure that I'm a more effective developer than many of the people who do pass it.

The only conclusion is that Google, not being stupid, is optimizing for something else.
And the film trailer: https://youtu.be/609Sg0gSRY8
Indeed, I found myself very curious about why the bot of "Swedish physicist Sverker Johansson" was writing articles in Cebuano (a language mainly spoken in the southern Philipines). It turns out that Cebuano is his wife's native language.

I'm curious about the actual quality of these articles. The OP says "the majority [of a random 1000] were surprisingly well constructed", but it's not clear what that even means. Does the author of the article know Cebuano (or Swedish or Waray-Waray, which are other languages this bot writes in) well enough to judge? Or does it just mean the articles looked like regular articles (ie they have all the infoboxes and other trappings of human-editor-driven articles)?
How would this perform on the reading comprehension part of the SAT?
England had an advantage in that coal mines, iron mines and limestone quarries were reasonably close together, facilitating the smelting of iron.
Fuchsia Programming Language Policy
Oh I remember those days and yes IE was the better browser even in the early Safari days. Back in '03 I still had get a VirtualPC instance running for a few websites and let that crawl.

The old MS/Apple relationship is kind of weird almost like the Gates/Jobs relationship. For you young folks it may be hard to believe but Excel started as a Mac App.
I think it speaks really poorly of an org if they can't even find 6-8 people who they're certain are actually positive about the company to conduct interviews. Especially the lunch interviewer, who is there to get and give a personal perspective on the process.
Most dating services are little more than ad platforms; you advertise yourself and you can pay to have your ad shown to more users (though their prices are ridiculous with no indication of effectiveness, and border on scams that actually hinder matches unless both people are paying, especially Tinder with its severe nickel-and-diming and predatory dark patterns.)

A true match-making service would automatically match people based on their criteria, preferences and shared interests.

Of course, if a dating service is truly effective then its users will no longer need it. :)
"Nearshoring" in Mexico is successful primarily (IMO) because of cultural compatibilities. Plug: my firm https://magmalabs.io

When I was CTO of Andela one of my main claims to fame is pioneering the "month one" curriculum, based on principles of Applied Improv -- taking comedic improvisation education and setting it in a business context. Nigeria is definitely one of those cultures where junior people are culturally ingrained in them not to disagree with their superiors. Extremely important to break them of that practice if they're going to succeed as software consultants.
And god forbid you got yourself in an alert() loop!
I guess you've never worked for a company that A/B tests products?
Yep, if you survived childhood, you’d likely live long enough to see grandkids and ‘retire’ in Rome. In addition, a Roman army field medic/surgeon from the late republic/early empire onward was probably just as effective as any medic/doctor anywhere until the 19th century. Amputations, suturing lacerations, and so on didn’t really change at all until antiseptics and antibiotics.

It’s crazy to think how medicine didn’t really advance for ~2000 years, and then vaccinations, antiseptics, and anesthesia (and later antibiotics) came into use and medicine advanced rapidly. Oh, add in a dash of germ theory and the scientific method, and stir. The Romans were really quite amazing!
I was 1000+ miles away and the whole thing took less than a week start to finish. From my observations that wasn't an anomaly.
Perhaps the Job Description Is the Problem Not a Shortage of Programmer Talent