skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your supposition that I endorsed any of these positions you assert I did simply does not follow from my statements. I cannot respond to your rebuttal of an argument I did not make. Please, try to avoid non sequitur, if you wish to discuss our views and opinions confluently.

However, to touch upon your point about the recent evidence-based medicine and hospital management movements - yes, they were once sorely lacking, with existing pre-modern medical practices handling quite a bit of load. However, the consensus is that evidence-based practices are already well established for high risk areas of practice and only increasing as time goes on elsewhere.

It's important to note that modern versus pre-modern medicine isn't a hard line, but a continuum we're continually shifting to the left. It's very much more like the border between generations instead of the hard line between decades.

In any case, new practices/devices/medicines/etc... are held to a much higher standard than legacy approaches. This is a very good thing as they are, generally speaking, much more powerful tools. We've figured out how to understand evidence and understand when we have enough to make good decisions and now we use it. We didn't always, but we're working towards replacing what came before but until then we're often forced to use it because we've nothing better or it hurts worse to do nothing. That's how most things are - that's how medicine is.

> To tell people to listen blindly and ignore all the evidence to the contrary _because_ of statics, popularity and consensus is the definition of anti-science.

The consensus of experts on the validity of the collection and interpretation of data, relying on the tools of statistical analysis of that data to make sound decisions about the applicability of that data as evidence, in relationship to deciding the answer to question at hand - relying of multiple points of view and power to cross check, reproduce experiments, and systematically eliminate biases - is exactly what science is. Is the process perfect? Absolutely not! Is it better than taking everything in and saying "well, both sides make good points so I guess we'll never know", "look at all this untrustworthy, untested data I don't know how to interpret but with which I agree so the mainstream opinion must be wrong" and "who trusts academics anyway"? You know, actual anti-science? Absolutely, yes.
Depends on the cup, a big starbucks cup might have that, a smaller one not so much (and most people don't go over 4 of those in one day)
These numbers seem tiny. Even if it all converts into 1000 sq ft residential homes, 18,000 new homes will not be enough to solve the housing shortage.

Definitely would help a ton though, and I probably shouldn't be hopeful of a single solution here.
"If you're seeing this message, that means JavaScript has been disabled on your browser, please enable JS to make Imgur work." :-|
Thank you, HN, for being usable without JS.
add more inaccurate sensors and do corrections in software? We have photos of black holes out of almost a pure noise, surely it is possible to build self driving car with current gen of hardware.
> AI is an hilariously imprecise term, what is an AI according to you?

Fair point. I should have said "a hilariously imprecise notion of what an LM is", since that is what LaMDA is ultimately - a next generation Language Model with specific innovations for use in Dialog Applications (as the name hints at).

It is not "a hive mind which is the aggregation of the different chatbots". The different chatbots are simply LaMDA with some additional constraints, just like you can ask GPT-3 to generate phrases in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Marcel Proust - that doesn't make GPT-3 "an aggregation of the Ernest Hemingway persona and the Marcel Proust persona".

> Well there are LSTM systems (which qualify as memory to some extend) we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best.

That is a different kind of memory - it allows the model to take into account its previous outputs, but is not a persistent modification of the neural net itself. In fact, any kind of long-term persistence in a LM the size of LaMDA is unlikely to be desirable, as you don't want cross-contamination of conversations with different users, and running separate copies of the whole model for each user is not technically feasible.

> we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best.

They have described before what LaMDA is [0], and it is not doing self-learning.

> Note that the same person acknowledges that other cognitive scientists think we are at the brink of GAI. So your argument is an appeal to authority while ignoring all other authorities.

Fair enough.

[0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounde...
It's an extremely important question to ask and especially when someone dumps a wall of text and a ton of studies on you that all support one viewpoint:

* Have you also evaluated studies that don't support this?

* If not, why not? Are you only looking for studies that support what you want to prove?

* If you have also looked at studies showing negative results, why have you decided not to include them here?
I think it's multiple things.

Your eye is a muscle, focusing only at close range keeps the range of motion tight. Just like your back and neck might get stiff sitting all day.

Sunlight means smaller pupil, wider depth of field, just like a camera.

(My speculation) More light gives you brain more information to clean up or upscale a blurry image. This effect even seems to last when you leave sunlight, for awhile. It's like I fine tuned my neurons to prioritize blur reduction, and it takes awhile for them to fall back into normal processing. If this is true, my guess is that I might be trading off contrast or color details for sharpness.
I remember seeing the IA banner at around Q4 of each year. Sometimes they noted that the amount will be 100% or 200% matched by other generous donors, so any amount donated will have more impact. [1] is an example of the banner.

[1] https://archive.org/details/jenica-jessen-jason-buckner
I underestimated your curiosity. Thank you for coming back with the result and proving me wrong. I hope the question led to interesting conversations.
Any particular strategy you used?

I do think a “small” loan of a million dollars feels at odds with “self made”.
Might be a short-sighted comment but perhaps we could ease the housing issues by converting the offices into long-term accomodation
I thought the shoulder warmup was woefully inadequate. This is better, not perfect

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1YHIV4a81Os

Personally I use the one above and a few other and rotate through them between sessions
Small nitpick, geizhals is actually Austrian (although it operates in a number of markets, each with their own domain, like geizhals.de).
mustafas.de but it‘s flash
Wow, this is the first solution to getting around Bumble's geo-locking that I've seen since 2021. And it's simple too.

Great job!
> do they assume a short attention span in their audience

Yes. It’s probably a valid assumption. We are not necessarily their target market.
How We Feel
The post is a troll. It’s a Donald Trump quote.
That’s not his point, but you demonstrated it quite well. C++ use leads to developers that conflate memory allocation and initialization. For contrast, objective C also differentiates between the two.
Yep, it's just inflicting suffering also to the healthy in a misguided and desperate attempt to improve a situation by making it more "fair". When in reality the total amount of suffering is just increasing many times, which just makes it much worse. But this is a typical communist/religious idea that you should "share" suffering by punishing yourself.
Yes, really.

The argument is, that anything resembling a chinese room is such an advanced and complex system that
it becomes indistinguishable from an actual conscious being.
LA has zoning yet still places health destroying oil wells right next to housing and schools and retail.

Houston may not have zoning but it has plenty of code that mandate car dependency and huge amounts of driving and therefore suburban blandness.

Regulation versus deregulation is a barren framing, the real problem is absolutely terrible urban planning rules in the US that have created our bad situations. As a field, it would probably be better if it never existed.
Well, according to his pitch [0], in 3 years it will be financially irresponsible to buy something that doesn't make its value back like this.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8TLsdpYsow
Ask HN: Where are all the computers from the 1980's and 1990's?
The concept of eWaste and electronics recycling didn't come in until the 21st century (at a guess).

And yet there were millions of computers in offices all around the world in the 1980s and 1990s.

Where are all those machines?

Presumably they all got dumped into landfill.

When I thought about it, since there was no electronic recycling or ewaste, the theoretically ALL the computers from the 1980's and 1990's are still here - millions of them.

I wonder if any/many could be recovered in archaeological recovery digs, and if any would have survived such an ordeal reasonably intact.
My most used site during the day is probably wiktionary. Most convenient dictionary out there.
> I probably sound a bit paranoid to some people, but I’ve had enough situations where somewhere couldn’t or didn’t take card, or my phone was low on power that it just seems sensible to have backups.

It's not paranoid at all, it's just an understanding of the situation better than most; I do fintech and I'm still a proponent of cash for the reasons alluded to in this article and your response are just sound preventive measures. People like to think everything works under ideal conditions so longs as things will remain as such there is no reason to not prune back-up systems.

This is a very common mistake.

To take it further I think that cash itself will always have (some) value in Society, their is a reason the USD/EUR fills the gap between collapsing economies. It's a trust based system, and I have many critiques about it, but one cannot dispute it on sheer utilitarian terms. My thoughts on this could be a series of essays, but the short answer is that countries that eliminate currency are setting themselves up for failures, just look at how common downtime/outages is for most used platforms and how prevalent hacks are from some of the biggest retailers.

We suck at security, and are even worse at it at scale: forgery is a thing, but it's minuscule when taken into account of the totality of economic activity it produces.
> then swing back to being respectful

Now I'm starting to wonder who the real psychopaths are. /s

> If the program can freeform confusion and anger and frustration

I don't see why those emotions are any truer indications of sentience than cheerfulness, friendliness, curiosity, and smugness, which the AI seems to be showing already.

You're probably right, though, that having different mental states (backed by a proper state machine) would be a more sophisticated simulation of a human than one which merely guesses which mood the user is expecting. I'm just not sure that adding, for example, the ability for the AI to hold a grudge, is very useful or strictly a requirement for sentience, and it could even be potentially dangerous.

The question I'm left asking myself is how complicated a human's emotional state machine is. We can sometimes have delayed reactions to certain stimuli, for example needing to "sleep on it", or even doing some processing unconsciously in our dreams, and I'm not sure that we can always give accurate reasons for why we're in a particular mood. On the other hand, like with all AI developments, once someone comes up with an implementation of this state machine, I'm sure people will say "Well of course that part of subjective human experience wasn't hard to fake".
The Bible (Singlish Translation)
This is a common figurative use of the word. The etymology comes from the Greek meaning "upon/on people", so nothing in the root connects the meaning to how something develops or spreads.
You can die with the seat belt on in a car crash. Why wear it at all?
> My personal experience with religious (Christian) young people is that they find it very hard to control their special narcissism.

American Christianity is absolutely not reflective of historical Christianity, especially not in its theology. If you want to see a good take-down of American Christianity, read Samuel Clemens.

And no, American Christianity did not change one bit since the time Mr. Clemens flourished (mid-late 19th century).
Who would you say is in a better position?
Your argument ignores cause and effect.

Religion was created by man, not by god. Religious ideas, including religious morality, are the results, not the causes, of the prevailing cultural attitudes of the societies that created them.

In the modern West, such as the US, "religious morality" is mostly synonymous with the morality of the ancient societies in which those religions originated, which is why religion is so out of step with modern sensibilities.
Seems like an exciting time for archaeology. It must be interesting to live in these regions with such long history of civilization. Do these findings excite those living there, or are they more like "meh"?
Right conclusion, wrong rationale.

The oppressiveness of computers comes from the fact that they can only exist through mass production techniques. Much of the cost-efficiency of computing comes from operating fabs at ever increasing economies of scale. Our current set of devices couldn’t exist without hundreds of millions of people coming together to work on the common purpose of producing those devices and their supply chains.

When you become dependent on mass industry, your own wants and needs become subservient to the needs of the masses. The reason why you can’t buy a premium phone with a headphone jack is because the masses (markets, customers and corporations together) collectively decided not to make one, and you can’t afford $10bn to build your own parallel manufacturing line.

Today, advancement in computer technology means building ever bigger, ever more complex manufacturing capability, far beyond the human-scale.

When you use a computer, you are signing up to be part of that mass scale industrial complex - the machine that builds the machines. (And by the way, this is the machine you were supposed to be raging against, not your phone).

It doesn’t necessarily have to be this way. We could develop local manufacturing techniques that could be controlled and operated by individual people. But it’s hard to see how we climb down to that level from where we are.
> It was like any other shot, why risk covid if you can get the vaccine?

Because the (second) shot makes you really sick, and in many cases with lingering heart inflammation. Why do that to yourself, when you have a really good chance of not even getting infected (recovered/already vaccinated)?
When it comes to build systems, creating lightweight and efficient binaries that integrate with libraries and couple nicely with package managers... I think C is still one of the best options, although Go has come a long way and Rust isn't too far behind. In terms of security, I believe Rust has an advantage, but I've yet to find any exploits in the C programs that I use that would have somehow been mitigated completely with Rust, and there are a lot of unsafe Rust programs out there as well.
> I never thought to use DNS as a tunnel

Most firewalls drop or hijack packets on port 53.
potential alternative link https://linustechtips.com/topic/553903-my-1995-ibm-aptiva-48...
But he didn't. He didn't first swap the CPU, then the ram, and a few weeks later the Mainboard. It's really just "reusing a case".
> Participating in society is done with the conditions set up by the society.

People say society when they mean governments (“conditions”)
Thanks, but the contents of your linked PDF, which is just plaintext, no images, is different from the Archive copy of the article shared up-thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31712453

Did the Economist show you a different article with the same title due to your location?
I've actually met the author of HerbstluftWM at the Konferenz der Informatikfachschaften (national student association meeting in computer science). Very approachable person. Coincidentally, the original author of Rack (Ruby) and the kind of inventor of tumblelogs was also there. Then again, where else would you meet people like that!
I still miss these big desktops
Linus Torvalds at Google: “You're not trustworthy ” [2005\
A man can be made to say or do anything, with enough conditioning; we are animals after all. I'm not arguing the irrelevance of context here, but I am saying that people have natural tendencies which amount to an implicit innate moral compass. People want to be good and chill.

Most people want to be nice to their neighbors / tribe.

Most people find violence disturbing.

That they live in circumstance that encourages, requires, them to kill, to manipulate, to be an asshole - is just circumstance. That's why being a Good Person is Hard. You need to remain true to yourself, and fight against all kinds of external forces that seek to corrupt you.
>Democrats have passed the only large wealth transfer from rich to poor via Affordable Care Act in 2009

After ACA HMO profits went up. A lot. Along with premiums. It was a wealth transfer from middle class to rich. That was part of the deal for making sure everyone was covered.
Yes. For me it is a mild alergen, so I can drink coffee a few days in a row but then I take several weeks of break. I drink coffee when I have a change in schedule, like waking up earlier than usual for a few days for some projects.
>where a popular republican might want to run for president but isn't a natural born citizen

Yo, did you miss the part where this part of the posting is talking about Elon Musk angling to be US President?

And don't tell me he's not a Republican; neither was Trump.
I used C++ for some time, but then went back to C. Why? Fast compilation, lower complexity, long-term stability, wide support.
Right, I found the ending of the article to be baffling non sequiturs about the greatness of bitcoin.

> Our systems of values, and traits such as love and empathy are evolved behaviours. They were selected for by those same implacable laws of nature and survival of the fittest.

I think this is undoubtedly true, but it is also true of psychopathy.

I think that the ability to construct a false self, as a defensive mechanism, which is incapable of feeling empathy and which is able to prosecute objectives regardless of the cost to others, even to the point of suicidality is an inherent part of our nature and must have been strongly conserved considering how obviously deleterious it's effects can be to the self, the tribe, and the species.

If that is so, then how is the indifferent mechanism of evolution to deal with a trait which both provides an important situational advantage but when left unchecked, can spiral out of control to the level of species extinction?

But for that, I find flights in to abstraction to be pretty pointless, since we can just watch the answer to this question unfold at global scale, before our eyes.
Various appeals to emotion and analogies that ultimately provide little to nothing of value. Maybe it is a good article about why we build human-operated escape hatches and failsafes in software and hardware. When was the last time you saw train doors ruthlessly separate children from their parents? Have you seen anyone lose a limb to that ruthless guillotine? No.

Machines do what they are programmed or built to do. They are only oppressive if created to be, whether that be out of malice or incompetence. Either way, any "ruthlessness" is human in origin.

The same goes for blockchain, by the way, which the author attempts to tar with this same brush of oppression. Bitcoin can't be stopped? It has already been, when it proved necessary, and one day it likely will again. The "inviolable and absolute integrity" the author associates with blockchain is the same failure to acknowledge escape hatches as above. Cryptographic guarantees are not the foundation of a blockchain. Neither are the economic guarantees. The social layer is the foundation. In other words, the human element.
There's an unfortunate typo in the headline
Governments are extremely inefficient, and taxes are mostly wasted; higher taxes disincentivise people from making things. You might say taxes are necessary, but they're an evil.
Obama blew up a bunch of middle-eastern kids.
A lot of reds genuinely believe abortion is murdering babies. That's why they're against it; it's not really about the women, they just happen to be involved. They'd feel the same way if you had a baby growing in a tank. Meanwhile, the modern democratic party seems to encourage the already extant kids to cut off their genitalia.
Dems defend 'traitors to the country', too (Snowden).
Please share links, thanks.
Yep exactly, and Tailwind does indeed still make sense with that approach!
Computers are both a bicycle for the mind as well as a heroin for all our intellectual senses.
I was just thinking about something of much smaller scope that this might be able to do as a feature.

Basically, you have a list of articles that you want to read, in Pocket or a similar service. And you have a collection of 'link aggregators' where you get topical news and/or insightful commentary.

By combining the two, you can boost the signal of something you'd bookmarked to read later that has been resubmitted for discussion even if it's only received minor upvotes. This then provides the impetus to read it.

This was partly inspired by the idea that breaking news/speculation is more addictive but less filling than content were people have had time to consider it.
Yes? I mean, i wouldn't work more than 40 hours a week whatever my salary is, but my bonus this year was taxed at 55% and i still would have done the work i did to get it.
Duly noted - thanks!
It absolutely is. There are some outlier cases (e.g “should I get the third jab even when I’ve had Covid?”) but overall it is clear the severity of all known vaccine side effects is a fraction of the severity of Covid and complications, after the likelihood of either are factored in.
I'm not blaming Eich. And I very much doubt that anyone originally involved with that project thought that their tech would be the foundation for large server-side and desktop apps.

But, regardless of how we got here and whose fault it is, we're here - and it's not a good place.
Whether computers count as ruthless depends on fine details of your definition of ruthless.

If you mean the mental/emotional state necessary for a human to act without regard for consequences of their actions to other people, then computers are not ruthless.

If you just mean acting without consideration of how their their actions will affect people then computers fit this definition of ruthless perfectly by virtue of not being able to consider the consequences of their actions on other people, because we don’t know how to program them to consider how their actions will affect other people.