skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first AI winter came after we realized that the AI of the time, the high level logic, reasoning and planning algorithms we had implemented, were useless in the face of the fuzziness of the real world. Basically we had tried to skip straight to modeling our own intellect, without bothering to first model the reptile brain that supplies it with a model of the world on which to operate. Being able to make a plan to ferry a wolf, sheep and cabbage across the river in a tiny boat without any of them getting eaten doesn't help much if you're unable to tell apart a wolf, sheep and cabbage, let alone steer a boat.

That's what makes me excited about our recent advances in ML. Finally, we are getting around to modeling the lower levels of our cognitive system, the fuzzy pattern recognition part that supplies our consciousness with something recognizable to reason about, and gives us learned skills to perform in the world.

We still don't know how to wire all that up. Maybe a single ML model can achieve AGI if it is adaptable enough in its architecture. Maybe a group of specialized ML models need to make up subsystems for a centralized AGI ML-model (like a human's visual and language centers). Maybe we need several middle layers to aggregate and coordinate the submodules before they hook into the central unit. Maybe we can even use the logic, planning or expert system approach from before the AI winter for the central "consciousness" unit. Who knows?

But to me it feels like we've finally got one of the most important building blocks to work with in modern ML. Maybe it's the only one we'll need, maybe it's only a step of the way. But the fact that we have in a handful of years not managed to go from "model a corner of a reptile brain" to "model a full human brain" is no reason to call this a failure or predict another winter just yet. We've got a great new building block, and all we've really done with it so far is basically to prod it with a stick, to see what it can do on its own. Maybe figuring out the next steps toward AGI will be another winter. But the advances we've made with ML have convinced me that we'll get there eventually, and that when we do, ML will be part of it some extent. Frankly I'm super excited just to see people try.
It says "22 lines of C", not "22 statements of C".

For this type of exercise it is assumed that some readability is going to be lost... just look at Perl golf competition. These tend to be written in a single line and it is not always given you are going to even be able to tell where statements start.
A lot is said about portion sizes nowadays, but that chicken dinner from 1960 looks like a gut buster!
Launch technology isn't the only thing space research and exploration is about.

It's an important one for sure! But it's just not true to say NASA hasn't accomplished amazing stuff in the last decades with the funds and focus they're allocated.
Yes. Nevermind that you actually had conspiracy theory level skulduggery going on under the guise of a public health measure further undermining the already tenuous trust that exists under for the neutrality of the public health edifice.

Amazing the level of mental gymnastics that people are prone to when the objectives of national security come into relief.
Yeah. The original claim by parent commenter is "I know many people with long-term VACCINE complications".

What that seems to translate to is "I regurgitate propaganda videos and claim that they're my first-hand knowledge"

Which is pretty sad, TBH.
Looks like a lot of fun! I hope I get to see what people will come up with.
Coke Freestyle Lets You Pour a Drink from Anywhere
What motivation does SpaceX have to cooperate? SpaceX is way ahead on any metric that matters. Nothing to gain.
Standard Pi perhaps, but the official Pi Compute module supports sata. Geerlinguy did a nice writup about it.
Let alone that blacktop is the big win of reuse and recycling already, and these plastic additives likely make it less reusable
Is that during the Fauxhebro vs Chango bit? I came here to say exactly the same thing. Fantastic subversion of the medium.
Ha.

Let me know when the ocean has .5grams of nano-sized plastic particles per Liter.

That would be around 300000000000000 Tons of plastic, all in the form of nano-sized particles.

Then — and only then — would you begin to see an effect on Mussels.

But, of course, long before that, the world would have ended.
The meme that the number somehow matters at all while completely ignoring the massive growth
> I consider a overtly Christian show about vegetables pretty edgy.

When you say "edgy", do you mean "novel/creative"? That would explain the confusion. Definitions 3, 7, and/or 8 at Wiktionary are what we're using: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/edgy You seem to be using definition 2, which is not the common meaning today.

The only shows on that list that are "edgy" by the everyday definition are Ren and Stimpy, I Am Weasel (a spinoff of Cow and Chicken, which was a straight ripoff of Ren and Stimpy's visual and writing style), and sometimes Animaniacs. The rest may have slipped an off-color joke under the radar from time to time, but it wasn't their main thing.
Martial Law Has Arrived in Australia Military Summoned to Occupy Parts of Sydne
In perhaps the most draconian move yet from any country, the Australian government has officially enacted martial law in Sydney.

After the Freedom Day protests that rocked Australia’s largest city, the Sydney lockdown was extended to at least August 28th.

But it appears the military will enforce the lockdown this time.

Military personnel will patrol the streets to prevent future protests.

I’ve repeatedly referred to Australia as an open-air prison.

But the ‘open-air’ aspect of the prison is shrinking by the day.

Here’s the latest:
> Why not build a dyson sphere and sell contracts on the energy instead

Because bitcoin miners would buy it and "waste" it
SARS-CoV-2 is now endemic in the worldwide human population, just like several other coronaviruses. It will never go away regardless of what people do. Fortunately the vaccines can limit the death toll.
It is "common knowledge" among people who construct IEDs that the fertilizer needs to be mixed with diesel or another fuel to generate a large explosion. However ammonium nitrate will act as its own oxidizer and fuel.

They may have falsely believed it would be a small explosion because it was lacking what they thought was a critical component.
> I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX will turn out to be the reason we won't be able to explore space at all for a few hundred years.

You seem to be referring to the Kessler syndrom. If that happened, it would not mean that we could not send probes to space anymore. It only becomes unviable to have satellites at the altitude of the debris field. We could still launch through it into higher orbits or onto interplanetary trajectories.
Isn’t /tmp always mounted in ram these days or is that distro specific?
Six corporations control 90% of America media
This is amazing. I am going to try running this on a Raspberry Pi emulating System 7, and relive the hours I spent logging in to remote machines back in the dial-up days.
Didn't last Mac OS 9 versions have memory protection? I mean there's a reason it's hard to run 9.2 on an emulator — it requires a working MMU.
First of all, thank you for the amazing read! I thoroughly enjoyed the entire article, and it gave me a new perspective on the feasibility of CRDTs for real world applications performance-wise.

Though I am curious now to hear your thoughts on the conflict resolution side of the equation for complex data structures like deeply nested JSON.

The biggest takeaway I got from Martin's talk on the topic from a few years ago was that while CRDTs are theoretically guaranteed to eventually converge, the resulting converged state might not make any sense to applications that need to consume and act on that state [1].

It seemed like a pretty fundamental challenge to using CRDTs to store arbitrary application state to me at the time, but I imagine the field has progressed immensely since then, so would love to hear any insights you might have around strategies that could be used to alleviate or at least work around this challenge if I wanted to build a CRDT-based app today.

[1] https://youtu.be/8_DfwEpHE88?t=2232
Atlanta 96 was a great case study in this. Atlanta built a ton of infrastructure that continues to serve the city well. Many of the venues built in downtown and especially on the Georgia Tech campus went on to be very productive and useful. Georgia Tech has a world-class gym and still uses some of the olympic village as dorms as part of that legacy. There is one big exception - a massive tennis center built out in the suburbs. It was too far outside the city, never got much use and was demolished in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Mountain_Tennis_Center
Same boat. Used to be a big Firefox fan back in the day but even if it's not bad for me these days it doesn't do anything special. Edge works just as well and feels slightly less cumbersome.
Says report failed when I try.
Idiot. Enjoy your inflation.
The old menus seem amazingly bland.
You may be over-reading what I meant when I said real (I did use speech marks?). I don't mean any offence, sorry if I caused some.

My point above is that English is made of 2 languages (Old German and Old French) and they have been messily combined and never cleaned up. That's really not true of any other language I am aware of? Most languages come from a root, evolve and exist. Taking 2 and splicing them together is the reason behind it's unusual grammar, illogical spelling and it's low overlap of nouns with other languages.
Blue Origin is doing non-launch things. They are working on a lander system and studying lunar mission concepts at a level of seriousness that does deserve some respect.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/a-telescope-on...

I appreciate SpaceX's focus and god bless em for what they're doing in that sector, but there are other things to space than just delivery driving.
Taking the tech wage collusion example, the wages themselves were still very high (we're talking about Google and Apple salaries here) but the collusion to keep them from being higher was still a crime.

Tech CEOs can talk about whatever they want. The talking isn't the crime it's the act. They could talk in theory about colluding, it becomes illegal when they DO it. I'm not sure how else to explain it.
Between this and JEDI I get the impression Jeff feels he simply deserves things, regardless of the established protocols which decide he does not, and he’s more than willing to take the government to court to prove it.

Maybe that’s just the kind of attitude it takes to be the richest person alive, but it definitely rubs me the wrong way.

Not like he cares who it rubs or in which way, of course.
'Rain drones' in Dubai use electric shocks against clouds to trigger rain
It's indeed very notable that there's a lot of talk how to make people generate more value to others, and nothing about how people find ways to consume the value that others create.
كلمات اغنية اصفكله محمد محمود
Great that you would consider this! The format doesn't matter all that much to me... JSON is the thing of the moment, seems the most obvious choice. XML would be fine too.
Just... No.
Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work.

I'm definitely better off than my parents or grandparents. Hell, we have stories in our family where my uncles would shower at the communal bathhouse cause their home didn't have a bath nor hot water. Everyone used to wear hand-me-downs. We used to send cassette tapes to family abroad because international calls were so expensive. We flew every few years instead of multiple times a year. We saved up for CDs, and I literally never, ever went out for dinner to a restaurant (outside of a rare holiday) with my parents. My dad lost both parents as a child to old age, my grandfather worked 6, sometimes 7 days a week, my grandmother spent almost the entire day running the household (e.g. washing clothes by hand), they had no retirement and lived like that till death.

I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off. The conversations usually revolve around housing, healthcare and college having become drastically more expensive. (although, never normalised for interest rates that dropped from 15% to 3%, homes that average 2x larger than 60 years ago with fewer people, life expectancy increasing by a decade since 1950 etc etc). Life isn't better in all respects, but on the whole I certainly wouldn't want to trade with past generations. And a lot of that boils down to productivity allowing new measures of wealth for many.

If we look at it on a worldwide scale, the difference is much, much more pronounced. Many lower income countries saw massive productivity improvements. We shouldn't forget that the past 3-4 decades have been all about globalising markets. Factory workers in the US now compete with those in China. IT staff the UK is competing with IT staff in India. Technology is relatively mobile and goes across borders easily. You cannot measure ceteris paribus productivity improvements in terms of gdp per capita in the west without correcting for increased competition abroad (e.g. in China). And in doing so, you will find that there's even bigger productivity increases in lower/middle income countries, too.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to insult or offend anyone. I'm just recounting my observations based on my understanding of the subject - and that is really not to disparage the amazing work that's being done, but rather to highlight the scale of the problem you have to solve when you're talking about creating something similar to human intelligence. It's entirely possible I'm wrong about this, and I would love to be proven so.

Do you disagree substantively with anything I have said, or do you just think I could have phrased it better?
> silly little PR stunt

The media has been grossly unfair to Bezos. What Bezos actually did was risk his own neck in the first manned flight of a totally new rocket design. It was a massive display of faith in his engineering team.

Musk didn't do that. Branson didn't do that - and earlier test pilots of his craft died.

As for the BO rocket being totally automated, that was the original intent of the Mercury missions, until the astronauts objected. Nobody called them joyriders or ludicrous.
> He fell out with the British government when he was ambassador to Uzbekistam and broke protocol by protesting about the treatement of Uzbeks by their government

Sovereign nation states have no morals or ethics, they have interests. To represent these interests to other sovereign nation states, they have ambassadors. So, for ambassadors, "acting with humanity and integrity" when that is not conducive to their nation's interests is a grave dereliction of duty. (Not saying this is a nice state of affairs, but if even I know that's how the world works, how could he not know? Also not saying acceding to Uzbek human rights abuses actually is in Britain's best interests; only that apparently the establishment in Britain thought so.)

> I used to follow his blog and it was a mixture of reasonable analysis and unsubstantiated consipiracy theories.

If he's "a decent guy", he should have known he wasn't cut out to be an ambassador and should never have taken the job. The more I read about him, the more it seems his problem is that he's just simply pretty damn stupid. Weird, one wouldn't have thought jobs like ambassador routinely get offered to stupid people.
Constraint, emotion and time.

Over the years, this is I have found that worked best for me, but it is not fast. :-|

Constraint/limitation/dogfooding:
Replace any convenient tool, service, etc with what you are trying to learn.

Specific skill: Feel comfortable in a terminal

Example: Use Word or Excel? Replace with unix text coreutils, vim/emacs and/or perl/py library. When limitation is imposed, things get more concrete, less abstract and easier to process. Step by step self-enforced incremental challenges that layer atop one another. Chunk, Chunker, Chunking!

Emotion/motivation:
What do you really want to learn that is so important? Things I really wanted to know add emotional salience. I was invested intrinsically, not for external gain. The more motivated I am and USE what I learn, made/makes the next learning step/challenge easier. I think this is underestimated. Otherwise what is the point? If you are compelled externally (such as a job) see the Constraint step above. Make notes (learning) yours: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...
Specific skill: Learn Jira
Example: FTS! Use other tools that you enjoy more, ie VimWiki or another DIY issue tracker that maps to Jira fields then transfer to satisfy external demand.

Time:
This is the glue that binds the above of constrain/limitation and emotion/motivation. The only discovery here is that we have more time that we think/waste we have. Small caches of time really do add up. I think the Duolingo IPO is onto something ;-)
This is really wonderful. I can transform my old 68k machine to a dumb terminal and do real work!
Japan burns most of its plastic for energy in a pretty clean way, why not copy it to other places? Maybe not ideal but pretty decent solution
Thanks for responding. It's helpful to understand exactly the argument some people are making. Would it be fair to characterize your rebuttal as "Because I'm a counter example, the article's conclusions are wrong"?
Hanlon's razor is rusty, mangled, and doesn't cut for beans anymore. Put it away before you give yourself tetanus.
BO wanted 10B compared to SpaceX's 2.7B.

They also got court injunctions preventing SpaceX from starting it's program, kinda deflating your whole 'just wanted to play along' narrative
I absolutely desire to support it, but just being realistic it is at least 1-2 years off, pending our overall success as a company. The market just isn’t big enough to justify the R&D expense at this stage. Sorry :(
Jokes on you: I never wash anything!
Democrat Leader Arrested in Washington Swamp – The Police Just Handcuffed Sheila
You know congress funds a lot more for space than SLS, right?
This is a great exploration of what's going on here without being too "pro" or "con." I see a lot of people here trying to quickly summarize "what side he's on" and I don't think that was the point here.

I think he's correctly pointing out a very human barrier to adoption. There's, for example, a reasonable argument that bitcoin might be like gold -- really valuable, but perhaps not as moveable as a currency. What the author is pointing out is that gold is different because it's shiny and pretty and you can shape into things -- and like it or not, that MEANS something, even if that something isn't easily captured in a rigorous (nerdy?) economic analysis.

I think the author would agree that it's too early to tell if the above "something" is a deal-killer or not, but it is certainly significant.
Ah. US credit card transactions have an id that looks like a hash, presumably because card charge descriptors have such a short maximum length.
The bitcoin price is correlated with the price of other cryptocurrencies. Greater bitcoin price -> greater other-cryptocurrencies-price -> greater motivation for people to mine these other cryptocurrencies -> greater demand for GPUs for mining.

Well, I suppose I'm conflating correlation with causation here. Are the two correlated because a higher bitcoin price produces a higher other-cryptocurrencies price, or the other way around, or another thing which causes both of them, or maybe some mix of some of these 3?
Many companies are becoming increasingly unpleasant to work for, largely because of the increasing political speech at work. I wish more companies would take a Coinbase or Basecamp type stance on avoiding politics at work, and downsize their HR departments so they focus on benefits, compensation, and so on, rather than acting like political commissars and social activists within the workplace.
The data's not available before 1947, but the trend is clear: you're looking at the early part of a compound growth formula (with large annual variability).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/

US GDP per person has grown about 1% per year on average.

Wages stopped increasing to match productivity in the early 1980s, and that trend continues.
The gold standard made inflation nearly impossible. Thus prices stayed the same long term.
Tl;dr: Two billionaires fighting over who gets gifted our tax dollars to launch spy satellites.
Makes sense, if they shipped with the software already preinstalled, it would mean that they open themselves up to liability and other legal issues. So they don't have it installed as it's pretty easy to download and install from their Github
You’re holding it wrong..this is for connecting a classic Mac to a Raspberry Pi.
By studying the atoms configured as neurons, we've managed to develop machines that can learn to play board games and Atari games better than humans, and can write prose and poetry at a convincingly human level. Those skills may not require consciousness, but it's not clear that these machines would be more useful if they could "receive a conscious field".

Do you think that animals receive a conscious field? Could we create an accurate representation of a mouse's brain just from modelling its neurons? If a mouse brain can't receive a conscious field, but a human brain can, then what relevant physiological differences are there between the two, other than size?
The Romans left before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, so when they replaced the existing peoples the latin influence mostly disappeared. I don't think they ever made it far enough into North Germany to influence them before they left but I don't know. It would be interesting to see how many romans lived for how long in England, Northern Germany and (say) France (as a reference). I wonder if you can see a correlation between that number and the amount of Latin retained?

Latin had a pretty big influence all over the place so I don't want to talk it down. We can add it to the mix, but then you have even more volcab and grammar mixed up in an even bigger mess that still never got standardised. And that's sort of my point here. Other nations have 1 language. England has 2 (plus latin if you like?) mashed together badly and never cleaned up.
A look at the Lotus x Hope HB.T: Team GB's radical track bike for Tokyo
> People hate bitcoin because they don’t understand what it is and perceive it as being somewhat of a threat.

I dislike Bitcoin because (a) it's causing quite a bit of environmental damage and (b) it has revolutionized kidnapping and ransomware.

This is supposed to be a fair trade-off for letting people circumvent e.g. onerous drug laws. I'm not convinced it's worth it.
I have no idea what this is from that webpage
Quick learning or quick mastery? Seems like you're already good at just "quick learning". Mastery takes time, dedication, and effort - no way around it. You gotta drudge through it.
FACEBOOK HAS NEVER KILLED ANYBODY! MYANMAR IS NOT THEIR FAULT! /s
Are you aware of any interesting benchmarks? I’m curious what the performance difference is in different kinds of applications.
I think maybe it's the recency bias but Bezos put up a show the other day.

Press conference after flying on his own reusable rocket and back, and the 100M for Van Jones and the other person.
Non paywall: https://archive.is/1egdy
Couldn’t they just compete anyways as the “Japanese Olympic Committee?”
A wise investor reduces downside risk by conducting due diligence research to identify frauds.
I noticed and admired how thoroughly you addressed the actual content of the GP comment you replied to, in stead of just going ad hominem.
How is being able to make a million dollars by outright patent fraud a positive aspect of capatalism?