skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay but somebody please explain to me the reason for prefix operator column-major notation.

I digress…

>> linear algebra doesn’t exist simply because humanity managed to concoct a system that coincidentally finds usage in many seemingly unrelated subjects

I’m not a stranger to this field, but this article doesn’t make this case at all, and I’m not sure it can be made. Linear algebra is fundamentally a set of notation rules that people built upon and found ways to represent their problems with. It’s ubiquity in many fields is no more surprising than the observation that many different genre of literature are written in English, and somehow nobody is confused enough to think that flight instruction manuals are the domain of English rather than the range of it. There is no practical limit to the number of academic papers one can write which awkwardly contort a simple intuitive computation into an indecipherable representation in linear algebra. If you want the concept of linear algebra to consume all linearity that exists in the world, then fine, whatever, but then the notation sucks. You may call a continuous Fourier transform a linear operation, but try writing down the values of that matrix.

No; there’s nothing fundamentally tying the inner-workings of the world to the mechanics of linear algebra, but has been considerable effort to adapt some narrowly-chosen set of mechanics to represent the world, and some subset of those things work out well, so that’s what we focus on. But this is just path dependency. A different set of rules for writing linear relationships could have worked out better, or worse, but it would have to get there regardless. I expect that the current system will disappear soon as the world shifts to talking about computational tensors, and more flexible rules about how to apply operations. Who says you can’t multiply a row by a row? That’s stupid; we can and should do better. Is the determinant magical, or is is just a an arbitrary series of shift-product-sum which is far more applicable in the general sense? Do we really need a whole matrix to describe a permutation?

Linearity may be considered well-described when there is no longer any need for a separate course to teach the notation and tricks behind it. When I was in grad school, one of my favorite books was Gene Golub’s “Matrix Computations”. It really is an impressive book from an incredible mind, like a book on chess positions written by Bobby Fisher. Regardless, it was hard for me to go through it without wondering why such a thing exists. Much like chess, the human mind can become enamored with any simple set of rules that can be extended to sufficient complexity. Faced with a real problem, sometimes it helps me to get to a solution, and sometimes it distracts me from the solution. I can never be sure which is more common.
So I read that the Google exec and many people here say there is not enough evidence that lamda is sentient.

Now from an ethics perspective, if we accept the general premise that AIs can become sentient, should the burden of proof not be the other way around? Should a single company be able to "own" a sentient being? So I would argue if Google wants to continue to own lamda they need to proof that it isn't sentient. The implications are just too big.
I'm going to have to try using this to activate bank cards and add them to Google Pay while abroad. That's my one use case that VPNs have proven not to be enough for.
If I was a politician and I wanted to get rid of the NHS, I would first starve it for resources then use the resulting anger as an excuse to privatize it and sell its assets to some waiting American corporation for pennies on the dollar. I would expect that's what is about to happen.
It's good there are cons to big companies, hopefully this will drive people away from them until they're good.

I purposefully avoided doing mobile development to stay away from Google and Apple and it looks like, for some years now, web apps are buttery smooth on any device.
Your rent is paid for by the government. It’s called housing benefit in the UK. You can receive up to £20,000 a year in benefits which is equivalent to about £32,000 in pre-tax salary.
Suicide Squad’s Jared Leto has a $5M home fit for a super-villain (2016)
You haven’t included VAT in your effective tax rate.
People working from home still want their bagels and lunches.
Yeah, the tech news just runs with it because fear sells. This is the “intel backdoor” all over again.
Shortsightedness has become an epidemic
I’ve heard stories of people getting up, driving to the office, turning on their computers and sitting in zoom meetings all day from their desk. Who thinks this is a good idea?
you're right, i did mean as a binary. and yes, for example arch users can install it from the aur with e.g. paru/yay, inserting their own changes to the pkgbuild. it's also in the freebsd ports tree (under x11-wm, even though it's wayland-only).
I'm pretty sure we don't need to research that at all. You're conflating what a consciousness is capable of with what it's individual parts are capable of.

Neurons don't sense qualia. Neural systems don't sense qualia. Conscious minds that have neural systems do sense qualia (we're assuming for the sake of argument that qualia exists).

An individual electronic component is not itself a conscious mind. There is nothing about a circuit or a chip, or a motherboard on its own that can "feel" qualia because there is no sensory input. There is nothing that interacts with a circuit to tell it light in the purple wavelength has struck it. Further, there is nothing that reacts in any way to having been struck with purple light.

We can see with an fMRI when a person experiences that. Parts of their brain light up in a complex dance of interaction. The laws of physics do not allow for emergence of consciousness from the electronics in your dishwasher or Mac Book.

Your "in the space of all minds" sentence is also inherently meaningless. A mind that does not think thoughts is not a mind. Even if there were some mechanism that could experience "too much purple" without thought, it could not suffer. Awareness requires thought, and suffering requires awareness.
I agree that, currently, machine learning systems are not there. However, do you believe that human minds are not reducible to a material process in a material entity, but somehow supernatural? Otherwise, aren’t humans an example of machines with such a capacity to have “a ghost”?
Is this different than the attack discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31407528 25 days ago with 251 comments?
Given that the latest article clarifies that the AI ethics concern he was so passionate about was that a chatbot has become sentient and its feelings and desires are not being listened to, and that he hired a lawyer to represent the chatbot's interests... I think "exceptionally naive" is putting it mildly.
Dave Pell, NextDraft - https://nextdraft.com/
I agree with you 100%. To do this we need to put politicians who put science first into positions of power. This means that scientists, engineers, and all science forward people need to accept the discomfort of being political. We are the majority! To make a real difference that can counter catastrophic climate change we need to unite and support politicians who understand the importance of science based policies. We can't sit on the sidelines and watch populist politicians whip up support with pathos and lies. In the USA, I think it's time to start a PAC that lobbies and supports science based policies.
As sibling comment said, you are NOT paying 55% tax unless you're well above the £300k mark. Do not use hyperbole for sake of argument.

I'm in the higher tax bracket and still I'm far away from that percentage. I see that >50% tax rate in Italy, which is the leading cause of tax evasion, with some actually moving their companies to the UK to pay less tax.
You are coming across as condescending and rude. Please stop and get off your soapbox. People are allowed to have differing opinions, and this is a place to have productive discussions with others, not to insult others.
> URLs being invalid isn't an error; it's expected.

Of course it is. Would you report back to the user: "Expected Behavior: Invalid Url."? I bet instead even you would write: "Error: Invalid Url".

>> I ask because 1/0 is perfectly recoverable in most cases.
> It is recoverable, but only locally. No caller has any idea what to do with the fact that the callee divided by zero.

f(x) = x+1/x shouldn't crash your space station life support because it's undefined at 0. Just like tan() is undefined at pi/2. As you said, it's expected.
Solar-powered website: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html
The scary thought is this: That's a system which comes up with plausible responses from a big supply of text, but has no underlying model of what it's talking about. That's about the level of behavior seen by most political commentators.

What AI is teaching us is that a lot of stuff we thought was intelligent, isn't very. After programs beat humans at chess, go, and poker, and not with something that's enormously complicated, it became clear that human abilities in that area were perhaps overrated.

Driving, though. That's hard.

As I've pointed out before, what we have for AI now is terrible at "common sense", defined as getting through the next 30 seconds without a major screwup. Manipulation in unstructured situations is hard. Driving is hard.

The stuff AI is lousy at, a monkey can do.
... this is a smart tv
This does not account for monoamine oxidase inhibition by non-caffeine psychoactives in coffee.
Yes, one was designed while the other evolved. That makes understanding their operation qualitatively different (e.g. one is almost linear sequence of nearly ideal stages with minimal degrees of freedom, while the other are completely non-linear chemical systems with hundreds or thousands of degrees of freedom). Even reverse engineering a GPT3 instance is mind boggling and the number of independent variables is tiny in comparison.
100%. A lot of problems at organisations come managers having far too much job security. This gets really acute the larger an organisation gets, where the goals of managers can become completely divorced from that of the company. For example a managers goals might be to increase their budget and team size in order to justify higher pay and promotions due to experience “delivering” “larger” projects. Whereas more team members (especially those easy to hire project managers or engineering padding like architects) end up decreasing productivity. A really good example in the article was Skype, which went Scrum with dozens of staff (if not hundreds) and was beaten by a team of three engineers with no “formal” process at WhatsApp.

Scrum needs to seen for what it is: a way for management consultants to bill lots of hours and a way for organisations to manage projects where engineers have no agency. In a consultancy, for example, where scrum is almost always used, the real money comes from all of the management consulting fees and design iterations and etc etc, and a build is only done when all of that has been signed off and paid for by the client. Then the engineering team is told to go build it. This is VERY similar to the waterfall methodology that Scrum was supposed to replace. And seen in that context, it’s no wonder that successful tech companies have zero time for it.
1 Password has "toxic optimism"
One man show https://www.dekudeals.com is a labour of love and the best video games deals site that I know of.

Focused on Nintendo Switch, written in rails AFAIK.
> Can you imagine a world where the US agrees to have core technologies under ownership of Russia?

I mean, the west had no issue with depending on China for almost everything.

I doubt USA had a ton of Huawei gear in its networks, but plenty of other countries sure have.
it really does kick the llama's *ss
That is not in the article. If you got that from another source, would you mind sharing it?
Yes, there were viable alternatives right up till quite recently but unfortunately that wrong something seems to be ubiquitous now.
My work and all our customers do most communication on Whatsapp now.
My spouse's work is just the same.
Ditto for most other potential employers / customers / clients now.
Everyone I know pretty much exclusively uses Whatsapp for messaging now.
It sucks and I don't much like Whatsapp but its the reason I even own a smartphone - and without it I doubt I'd even be able to put food on the table now.
Would you mind sharing these other reports?
It's a great story, and would make a good first act for a movie script. Some kind of tragic comedy, maybe with an uplifting ending? [1].

The other thing going on here is that no-one knows what is sentience, anyway. This attitude of "know it when i see it" is just pretty flimsy, as this whole story is making evident.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_(2010_American_film)
Well, first of all, most people don’t have that word in their vocabulary and have no interest in ever adding it.

Of those comparatively few that do know it, you clearly exemplify some number that seem to believe they physically exist.

I can’t count all the rest of us, so can’t speak to “most” so confidently as you can.

But since you seem to be very passionate about philosophy and theories of consciousness, I hope you get an opportunity to find value and merit in some of the other ways of thinking about things. Some of the them open some pretty wild and enlightening doors. I think you’ll enjoy the journey.
I refuse to hang a TV on my wall at all. That's why I have a projector.
I am not suggesting anything supernatural, but the opposite.

> do you believe that human minds are not reducible to a material process in a material entity

It may be possible, but I don't think it will happen in silicon based machines.

> Otherwise, aren’t humans an example of machines with such a capacity to have “a ghost”?

Sure, people exist that are motivated by believed entities other than themselves.
Well Google Map still knows where I am when my VPN is activated.
So I'd say yes, unless VPNs on mobile are less reliable than on PC
Yes, the level of misunderstanding and gullibility borders on the pathological, at least in the examples given. This feels similar to believing a decently well-written video-game character is trapped in a tragic story and trying to rescue them out of the game...
This made me nostalgic. There was something special about those days. Also, I haven’t seen the HTML Writers Guild logo for a long time.
Life is easy. Why do we make it so hard? [video]
I do think some of your points are good, but please do carefully look at which things you're taking for granted as axioms. E.g., you say you believe that sensory input is required for qualia, but does that mean that you think that the hypothetical "brain in a vat" would feel no qualia at all? That does not seem true to me. I think that brain would probably be very scared and would have dreams or hallucinations to make up for the lack of input.

> The laws of physics do not allow for emergence of consciousness from

My point is that we don't know this. The phenomenal binding problem is one of the great unsolved problems today. Without understanding something as relatively "simple" as a complete theory of quantum mechanics, I don't see how we could yet have a theory of phenomenal binding, which probably requires a complete theory of quantum physics before even beginning to start on the binding problem, if I would guess at the research timeline involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem
A new kind of time crystal has been created and lasts 10 milliseconds
Cars have uses other than killing or entertainment. Cars currently are regulated. The government can take your driver’s license away.
60% _marginal_ tax, not everall.
Yep. Sweeteners have a terrible impact on the body because they produce an insulin response despite not being sugar in your bloodstream needing to be flushed.
A CPU is not an evolved organism that flees damaging stimulus and embraces nurture. It is a rigid, delicate, unchanging mechanism.
no one was talking about cars, or guns. Article is about airtag, my joke is about airtag and I was making the point about airtag.
I didn’t realize the evidence is strong that daylight keeps kids from becoming near-sighted. Making young kids study all the time is killing their eyesight!
Dear Website,

To reach a port, we must set sail.

---

This is what I got when I first clicked through it. There are some very interesting motivational messages in there, as well as some very sad ones, many people grieving or pining for a lost love.
Linear algebra isn't about matrices. And I heavily disagree with last paragraph.

>Computers certainly helped accelerate the development of linear algebra and vice-versa.

Computers have helped with matrix analysis given floating point constraints inherit to computers. But linear algebra has been in a pretty solid place as theory since Halmos published "Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces" in 1942.
To be fair, most analytical models working with data already incorporate a lot of 'data science' techniques. That does not have to be ML or NN, but could be as trivial as a least squares regression to fit you model to a set of observations that overdetermine the system of equations.

A more advanced example of a technique that was used before it was called data science is data assimilation (DA)[1]. Here you assume that you have observations (e.g. sensor data) that you want to use to inform the model, but they are noisy in some sense. With DA you take a set of observations at t=0 and fit a numerical model to that. Then you time-step the model to t=1 where you have new observations. The model and observations don't necessarily agree, but there is value in incorporating information from both. Based on e.g. your statistical description of the sensor noise, DA techniques give you the tools to combine data and models.

A good example of DA is 4DCOOL[2], combining temperature sensors in a datacenter with a CFD model. Because the model is physics-based, after some time you get a good idea of the temperature distribution in the whole room, even if you only have pretty sparse sensor data. (disclosure: I work for the company)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_assimilation
[2] https://www.vortech.nl/en/projects/a-digital-twin-for-the-in...
http://unmoralische.de

Its in german... and a giant treasure chest full of little humour
which one is it?
Your comment makes me wonder, what may happen if we don't like what the AI observes and perceives? What if it is uncomfortable?
This seems written for american democracy. In the Netherlands, we have a party system with seats divided among all parties based on the votes received. The 'musical chair' isn't there because all people who hold power are present. And if you've got less than 51% of the votes, which is always the case so far, Then you are forced to work together with some other party. So your influence is based on votes and likeability. If no one wants to work with you, no policy change will happen.
I like bitching about JS as much as the next guy, and as someone who has implemented ECMA-262 I guess I’m more entitled than most.

But let’s not get carried away with it. Eich had 9 days from unreasonable manager to shipping physical media. To do kind of a cool Scheme/Self thing from scratch in 9 days? I’ve been on some high-G burns, but that’s fucking nuts.

But since there’s no scientific way to quantify any of this, I’ll throw my anecdote on the scale in favor of my opinion and note that Brendan Eich was a hard-ass Irix hacker at SGI before he followed Jim Clark to Netscape.
By that description though, Go also has first class types. And that kind of makes the distinction meaningless because essentially every programming language has types.

There might be room to claim first-class support for green threads? But if so it's a very weak "first class" since all you can do is start them.
Vim mode is pretty neat. It seems like the whole app is kind of just like a python gui app wrapper around webkit? Looks like it would be pretty good if I was using linux and a tiling wm as my main thing but these days I'm pretty bound to Windows for the type of development I'm working on.

Most of my linux desktop usage these days is stuff like writing scrapers in cloud containers that need a real browser that I can control using selenium or puppeteer or whatever though, is it supporting anything like that? If this works on Windows too that would be a bonus.
> if we accept the general premise that AIs can become sentient

This is a pretty big if and I believe is widely contested.

Either way, proving a negative is notoriously difficult. Requiring any company to definitively prove that something is not sentient (and, I assume, also somehow prove that it's not a sentient AI pretending to not be sentient?) would be ridiculously time and resource consuming, if it's even possible at all.

Attempting to determine if something is sentient has been the subject of thought experiments for decades. I would only assume that definitively proving that an arbitrary subject (for all subjects) is not sentient would be even harder.
It's the marginal rate, not the overall rate.
I am mostly in the same camp as you - I think there is some merit to AI ethics, and especially problems like the one this guy was actually assigned to work on (social biases in the training sets leading to social biases in the output of such algorithms).

What gives me pause in the case of Mitchell is that, according to this author, she actually took his claim seriously and helped him devise an experiment that further convinced him his ridiculous concern merited escalation...
I think it could be because some people love hierarchies, and others hate them; most are somewhere in between, and I would certainly expect those who are more hierarchically-oriented to prefer working with the virtual desktops than those who want a flat "everything at once" model. You can see this in how different projects' source code is organised too --- some are full of deeply-nested directories and very "branchy", while others have lots of files in one directory, or few files with lots of code in them. I'm personally on the "flat" side; I prefer there being fewer levels of hierarchy, with more on each level. Even tabbed browsing, which seems quite popular, is something I make little use of --- I'd rather open new windows so I can see them all in the taskbar among everything, and switching is thus a single action rather than two.
Probably about food and water more than anything physical. You'll need a few hours a day to gather/hunt/prepare. Then, humans in groups move slower the larger the group gets unless very well trained and equipped.
Sure... but then how do you stop others from taking, using or damaging your property?
Panasonic OLEDs are it i think. I have a FZ800 (there are more recent updates of this model) and it’s perfect. No ads anywhere. Turns on (everything ready to use) within 5 seconds, picture is amazing because OLED, has no bezel so no branding. It is technically a smart tv because it has Netflix and other downloadable apps but it works perfectly fine without internet or using any of these apps: for the features that matter it behaves like a regular non smart tv without any obnoxious interface, just plain blue text on grey boxes.
I spent a short time at a place where I had both an office desk and a desk in a lab room. I never figured out why I would ever work from the office desk; the lab was superior in every way.

Judging from the people milling about the lab corridors, other people except the most senior ones and/or managers thought the same.

And sure enough, if my current workplace had a lab room to offer, I'd be much more inclined to go there.
I feel like if they wanted to monetize through subscription they’d need an editorial team to keep the quality high.

Early medium felt like you could trust the quality of an article based on the domain, the same way you used to trust that tomorrows issue of a newspaper or magazine would be high quality.