skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many people see Artificial General Intelligence as a panacea. The idea is, "We'll create artificially intelligent scientists who will solve all of our other problems for us!". I think that future generations will look back on this as a modern version of alchemy. If blogs had existed centuries ago I'm sure that people would have called the transmutation of metal the most important trend of their time. This isn't to denigrate the author of this post or the people who have dedicated their lives to AGI research. It's just that this idea probably falls into the category of "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is". [1]

We have no proof that artificial general intelligence can exist. We have numerous examples of specific intelligence: playing chess, driving cars, various forms of categorization. But we don't have a single example of an application that can handle a task that it hasn't been specifically trained and tested for. It's not to say that it isn't possible, but there is no more evidence for AGI than there is for Bigfoot, leprechauns or space aliens. The idea of artificial consciousness currently requires a leap of faith.

The most important trend today is collecting massive amounts of data and using them to make accurate predictions. Instead of lusting after one all-singing all-dancing intelligent program we should focus on tackling one form of decision making at a time. Drive cars, land planes, predict the weather and calculate the best way to get from point A to point B. One day we'll wake up in a world where artificial intelligence is all around us and the idea of a one size fits all solution will seem silly and quaint.

[1] In fairness, this was said about every amazing thing in modern life. You never know.
Agreed, I hate this trend. So many websites are now opting for video over written content. I can skim an article / blog post and glean most of the salient points. Video makes that impossible.
It appears the article is behind a pay wall, can anyone give a quick tl;dr of what isn't in the summary?
Sidekicks
Old jobs page here: http://legacy.python.org/community/jobs/
P/poly
I would claim that all sorts of money-making schemes that involve bitcoins are more or less still gambling.
It is almost never correct to short a stock with long puts. It's not a solvency issue, it's a premium issue. You're making a bet that it will crash in time period X, and people overvaluing these time-limited bets is the #1 way options traders make money (seriously). Solvency won't save you when it's -EV.
I concur, as someone who also works for a vendor to higher ed.

I know of small universities that demand an independent audit of all vendor code, to the large universities that are ok with having a four-character password for database access.

It also seems that Canadian universities are far more serious about security than American counteparts.
>Why would a spouse be no less entitled to reap the rewards generated by the other spouse's start-up?

Because just sitting around giving emotional support to someone doesn't entitle you to half of everything they get. It doesn't work that way with any other relationship (parent, friend, etc), so why should a marriage? This is especially true if both partners are working.
Love how it is way faster than the iOS version on my 4S.
Congrats to Jan and Brian: From Zero to $19 Billion in Five Years
I feel bad for anyone that buys any of the MtGoxBTC right now.
Acting friendly towards a sociopathic human will get you screwed or worse. If an AI doesn't have human emotions and empathy to start with, it isn't just going to develop them by interacting with humans. It might learn to pretend to be friendly to get what it wants, but as soon as it doesn't need your help, it will drop the facade.

We also probably won't get multiple generations to work these problems out. The first true AI could rapidly increase it's own intelligence and power and then pretty much do whatever it wants. We have to get it right the first time.
I can imagine the reasoning:

"Company A said they want to be notified if we get acquisition talks wiht company B. The only reason for this is so they could make a counter-offer[1].

If Company A would only buy us to keep us out of Company B's hands then they probably don't care about us and would let us wither

So why bother?[2]"

[1] I cannot think of another reason that would cover such a short timescale

[2] ok, money, but it is still a hassle.
I think people care more about it than you think and the long term is they will care more. It's not just needs that talk about "FB stalking" or think LinkedIn is creepy.
Haha wow, that was awesome.
> Given how much GM is pushing Siri Eyes Free Integration

Which is to say not very much? I was aware it was on the horizon through promotion by Apple, but I only accidentally discovered support in my new GM vehicle. Its usage is non-obvious and there was nothing I came across in the promotional materials or indication through the dealer suggesting that it was available.
This judge is old and out of touch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_A._Kimball

I use Aereo everyday and the game needs to change even for the better of copyright. They just don't see it yet, as they didn't see the win that befell them when they lost the war against the VCR.
It sounds pretty cool. Is the unminified js available? I am also curious as to the process of becoming an "official chrome experiment" as mentioned on the authors page.
We do have this problem! It is only a matter of how small the PGBouncer machine is compared to the PostgreSQL. In our case the PGBouncer had to deal with 16000 req/s, coming from 700 clients going through 100 connections to the PostgreSQL.
We now have 4 PGBouncers for this DB, and we're 'load balancing' them with DNS.
This is excellent!

Out of curiosity, what distribution of "next" tiles is produced?
Neither is What's App
So what happens when you have internal domains?
I think it makes your argument seem disingenuous and that certainly does not help make your point.
this is a totally expected shift in prices. large acquisitions almost always cause the stock of the acquirer to drop.
I know you don't care, but had to try #mobilizeforVenezuela
Why are they round?
Ah, but is it really that simple? :)

For similar puzzles, you might enjoy Douglas Hofstadter's essay about "super-rationality" (there is a HTML version on gwern's site: http://www.gwern.net/docs/1985-hofstadter), Adam Elga's "Defeating Dr. Evil with self-locating belief" (http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1036/), and Scott Aaronson's lecture about Newcomb's paradox (http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html).
Its an interesting theory. And frankly I hope the Supreme Court comes down solidly in Aereo's favor. The theory goes I can put an antenna on my roof and watch TV in the living room, I can put an antenna on top of an apartment building and watch TV down on a lower floor which doesn't have line of sight visibility. If I were rich I could put an antenna on a nearby mountaintop, run a line (with signal boosters and conditioners) all the way to my apartment in the city and watch that. So I should be able to do all of that but using the network cable between me and my antenna as the coax.

And that runs up against some of the fairly ridiculous rules that content providers have been throwing up for years to extract money out of consumers.

So far the courts have been somewhat irrational on the topic but as technical sophistication increases I keep hoping this house of cards will either collappse or be burned to the ground.
They're pretty close. They provide random access, are backed by contiguous memory, and the syntax behind their use is similar to arrays in other languages.
The parallels are striking : Whatsapp is to messaging today what Hotmail was to messaging in the late '90s.

With 10 million users, you could grow 100x, or more.

With 400 million users, 100x growth is harder.
I imagine it is something like a XOR-swap: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_swap_algorithm

I imagine two phones X and Y and one antenna sends X XOR Y while the other sends X XOR Y XOR Y. A phone getting both signals could determine X and Y, but it would take twice as much bandwidth. If you can XOR the signals in the air through superposition somehow, X might be received in one location, and Y in another.

So 2 antennas cant service more than 2 phones at full speed, but they can service those two phones at full bandwidth. This might not seem like an advantage over directional antennas, but it relaxes the physical constraint of making sure the phones are in two separate enough places to be serviceable by the two antennas. Like maybe your phone would have two antennas and get twice the data--not very feasible if your phone were somehow serviced by two directional antennas.

I haven't worked out how superposition could do something exactly like XOR, or if it maybe has a minimum of 3 antennas to start being possible, etc., but it seems plausible.

Anyway, the idea would be sending signal X and Y. You want X interfering with Y at some time offset to yield desired phone signal A, and X interfering with Y at some other time offset to yield phone signal B. The phones never receive X or Y, but some superposition of the two, The phones couldn't cheat and just record the two waves and timeshift internally to yield twice the bandwidth, because they don't receive the two waves separately, they only get the superposition of the two.
Purposely made it nonfunctional (or mostly nonfunctional) on mobile devices, to not step on the toes of the original creators—they're coming out with an Android version soon!
Ack so embarrassing. Fixed now! ^^
Yes. If anyone has suggestions for other comparison points I should add that would be more balanced, I can try to add them (but some things require non-trivial work to measure so it might take me a while to get around to it). Note that the comparison table as it stands it pretty old, but very little has changed since I did it except musl getting slightly bigger and glibc getting a lot bigger (and eglibc merging back into glibc, so it's rather pointless to talk about it as "eglibc" anymore). :-)
Super Winner of Whatsapp deal – Sequoia and Jim Goetz
They did for prices ranging from $1 - $2 per month. But text messaging does not do groups remotely as well as Whatsapp does.
An editorial on KitKat's changes to Android's SD card implementation
They could also make this offer so they can have a head start in acquiring a smaller competitor cheaper ahead of the acquisition.
19bn, 16bn of which is inflated Facebook stock. Zuckerberg knows what he is doing, he's playing the AOL tactic, better use that stock to make some acquisitions before it tanks.
It would be interesting to see exactly how intelligent and thought out an AI system could be at destroying us. Would it be barbaric? Would we end up with robots clubbing people and dropping bombs? Would it engineer some type of infectious disease that takes us out? Would it develop a fake shot for immunity, so those people locked away hiding from the disease take the shot, and then all die months later? Does it manipulate us for years by pretending to be millions of different fake users online, and slowly push an agenda that's pro AI and robots, while downvoting everyone against it? Do those people with power, that are against AI start dying of mysterious causes?

Even if it decides to be our friend and to help our species, someone will of course fork that AI and give it a negative personality and goals. Then you have the evil AI trying to hack the friendly AI that exists in our homes, and it's a battle of the robots.

Of course, whether or not AI is even possible, no one knows. If it is, I think we'll achieve it, and we'll open up a remarkable can of worms.
Given track records, if the founders of WhatsApp wanted to keep the business going, selling to Google would have been a wrong choice. Personally, I am still waiting to see what happens to Waze as it's window of freedom comes to a close.

With Instagram and the promises made for WhatsApp by FB, this seems like a very good decision.
The interactive repo will be enabled shortly when traffic dies down a bit. We're using try python and it's pretty awesomesauce
Looks cool. Can't figure out how to use it though...
So what's the difference between specifying a universe-simulating algorithm, and specifying its initial conditions, versus actually running it? Since the entire history is somehow implied in that specification, don't all those people in some sense exist?
> what if the AI is perfectly friendly? It still might play us for fools...

"Friendly" is a term of art among AI people, at least at Less Wrong, and their meaning of friendly excludes this whole scenario. A friendly AI is one which helps humanity and has no horrifying side effects. The vagueness of that definition is the problem Yudkowsky and his acolytes are trying to solve.
Yes! Nitpicking welcome! https://github.com/python/pythondotorg
Questions People Ask When I Tell Them I Own an Airplane
Grabbed the strategy from this article (http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/02/tips-for-playing-threes-the...)! Basically there is a deck of 12 cards (four 1's, four 2's, four 3's) that is shuffled, drawn from, and reshuffled when the deck is empty. Originally I just had it populate randomly from the same distribution, but it resulted in a startlingly high frequency of terrible boards with like 10 red tiles floating around and no blues.

As mentioned in an earlier comment and in the article, the actual iOS game also inserts higher-number cards (6, 12, 24, ...) into the stack occasionally, though I haven't added that element to this version yet.
I think if you view marriage as "just sitting around," this is not the type of romantic relationship that describes what typical founders likely seek out.

To answer your point more directly, one difference is that a marriage tends to produce children in a way that platonic friendships tend not do. My sense is that equal division of significant income and equity post-marriage will help, not hurt, children.

To answer your point a different way, the default marital property settings tend to work well for most people. Of course you can change those defaults to some extent with prenups, postnups, trusts, and so on. If you're still dissatisfied with your ability to alter those defaults, well, nobody's forcing you at gunpoint to marry someone you like to live with, have sex with, and even raise kids with.
I'd agree completely if Google's goal was to make money from Fiber, but I suspect their goal is to demonstrate that fiber is economically viable and shame other ISPs into deploying it. By that standard, winning on the easiest setting seems unlikely to convince anyone.

See http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-g... http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Many-Realizing-Google-Fib... for Google's motivations.
I know this sounds silly, but once people are on my site, how can I modify it without disrupting the service? (it's all php/js/html)
I'm a student at UMD right now, and pretty frustrated to find out about this. IMO, the university should do a lot more than just providing a year's worth of credit monitoring, because once that year is up and people forget/choose not/can't afford to renew, chances are 90% of those records are going to be easy pickings for identity thieves.

300,000 SSN's, names, and DoB's is one helluva haul though. At least no academic records were compromised, god forbid anybody takes a look at my grades before making off with my identity! \s
How is this a quick sale? He built the company over 5 years, and then sold it for $19 billion. The sale price equates to an 11% stake in Facebook at its current market cap. That is a huge, world crushing exit.

I hadn't ever used this app before I downloaded it today, just to check out why Facebook payed $19 billion. It looks to me like a total ripoff of the iPhone SMS Messaging App. It sounds like they have a huge userbase, and have been able to monetize it, so there is real value there. However, this valuation seems, quite simply, insane.

Even if all 400 million of their users paid $1 per year (which isn't happening), this purchase price would be 47x revenue. Of course, since many internet software companies are operating in negative revenue territory, this is perhaps reasonable in comparison.
Tear apart my consulting page
Marketing sucks. It's ambiguous, it lags, its results are questionable, it suffers from too much bullshit, and it's full of quasi-professionals.

I created a single-page site[0] to promote my consulting biz, and tried to cut through all the nonsense. But I want you to rip it apart so I can improve it.

[0] http://www.gkogan.co

What's your first impression? Would you recommend me to a friend? Does it wreak of BS? Is the value proposition clear, or confusing? What questions come to mind? Let me know!
For the same reason you don't see word processors using a more powerful computer or cluster to render text for display as pixels.

- It would be awfully inconvenient to program

- It would require buying, building or obtaining access to such a machine

- It'd require investing some amount of time and/or money -- obviously completely unnecessarily -- because whatever desktop or laptop happened to be within reach is perfectly adequate to the task
How to save your email archive from a service provider
Not exactly. While there are ways to conflate a connection with a thread, these are not always fixed pairs. Generally, it depends on the kind of connection activity and a bit on which operating system. Event based IO is simply pushing information that kernel schedulers already use into user space. The trade-offs really depend on where you need control the most.

Many kernels can do a pretty good job at general purpose networking but at this scale you tend to care about the details and so more of these systems tend to push the decision making to the program using APIs like epoll & kqueue (Linux and *BSD respectively). Keeping this information transfer cheap for millions of sockets is not as trivial as just using the API but it's a necessary step to control overhead.

Whether your user space code uses threads in places to get work done is often misunderstood as well since thread doesn't always mean a single logical thread in a program. Erlang, in SMP mode, uses threads to run it's own process schedulers (much like an operating system). The operation of these schedulers is handled in such a way that IO can efficiently block a process and the scheduler can move onto other things in queue. So, in many ways, it's the same ideas we had on the bare OS but with more specific implementation governed by Erlang's philosophy.
I'll second this. I recently interviewed at a bunch of companies and couldn't get any offers. The interviews are getting ridiculous - we all know how pointless the coding questions are getting by now. Companies are too picky, in part because there's so much labor supply. I know there are loads of H1Bs around here, SV is like a third-world country.
As someone who is a heavy user of both Whatsapp, GTalk/Hangouts and FB Messenger, I find Whatsapp to be much faster than others. So, there could be some technological value to this deal.

Microsoft had its own Live Messenger and Lync too, so the acquisition in both cases was for the user base and the brand than technology IMO.
Gauss elimination (for solving linear equation systems) might also be a good 19th century algorithm. (We have better ways, now.)
for some reason it fails on chrome for me, but works fine on firefox.

On chrome i get the "Aww Snap" page
Great App. Thanks!
Well, to give you an example, here in Argentina, almost everyone in my phone's contact list uses WhatsApp. Here, the fact that you pay per message is a big incentive. But there are other advantages, like instant delivery, being sure that the message was received (double-check), better feedback ('X is online' when using the app, 'Last seen at 09:22', X is writing...), media sharing, groups, etc. simple things that help a lot. Also, it works both on iPhone and Android...
Australia's Inductly on graduating from Startup Weekend to StartMate accelerator
But we do have proof that general intelligence exists. So How would it be impossible for artificial general intelligence to exist ? Do you believe in mind body dualism? AGI will be difficult but comparing it to Bigfoot or Leperchauns is rediculous.
There is a huge difference between very very very hard and impossible.
You Need 10 Times More Customers
>Martin Luther King had an affair (multiple? I forget.)

And why is "having an affair" a character flaw? Because christianity?
PHP actually just got a redesign recently for their documentation. It's not too bad, but the comments part is still crazy unorganized as far as code snippets, etc.
Google Analytics works right out of the box, but is also powerful enough for more advanced set-ups. I consult on GA setups, so if you need any help just reach out (contact info in profile).
I think the "array" notion is just to differentiate from the "cons sequence" (or linked-list) notion of the lisp family lists
Anti-poaching agreements are deceitful and manipulative against employees. They harm many for the benefit of the few. Would you mind explaining how you find that ethically acceptable?

What would you find unethical? Surely there's a line somewhere.
I'm not a lawyer but I've seen agreements for something similar in which an agreement was drawn up for the sum of $1 in exchange for freelancer service. In these cases there was a monetary exchange for services and to not confuse it for anything else.
It is an awful question because not all manhole covers are round. There are plenty of rectangular manhole covers, semi-round hinged ones, triangular ones, etc.
Looks good to me. The only thing I'd add or change is probably not even huge, but rather than testimonials some concrete and brief case studies with the kinds of numbers that your work affected would be more compelling.
The problem is there's also the inverse sort of person, who casually dismisses stuff that happens as "conspiracy theory".

The NSA eavesdropping on Americans? Conspiracy theory.

The head of FBI blackmailing politicians? Conspiracy theory.

And then, when such things came to light, there's this other person (ofter the same as the one dismissing them before), saying:

"Well, duh, we knew all along that something WAS happening, nothing new here...".

Between them it's nearly impossible to get a better understanding of the kind of shitty stuff governments and big corporations do.
Ha, it works for me both in Firefox and Chrome.

Also, on Firefox, there is still this delay problem I have to fix [1].

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=932400
If the AI is more intelligent, I'd prefer it take over anyway, even if it gets rid of us.

When you have a child, do you want the child to stay at home and do what you say forever? Or do you want the child to succeed as much as possible? I want the latter.
Nothing trips up beginners like slow code.
Is your point that Steve Jobs' is unable to bring together innovative teams, while dead?
You pick 4 items that you plan to take out with you. You tag them. If you even remember to take any ONE of them, it would tell you that you are forgetting the other 3 and would help you find them.

>I imagine I'm meant to clip a treasure tag to myself so it beeps when I leave my phone behind?

If that's the only item you are planning to take out, then i suppose yes.
An outright merger would ruin both Tesla and Apple. Tesla needs to focus on car design and Apple needs to focus on mobile devices and computers. If Tesla joined Apple the resulting organization would be too large and would ensure that neither of them could focus.

A software/embedded hardware deal, as the interviewer refers to, would make much more sense.
That's a good suggestion. Going straight to the to-do list.
It's an interesting philosophical question. I would prefer to define existence as beginning when the computation of those particular molecules first occurs.
Gold exists, So How would it be impossible alchemy to exist ?
You know we all know and feel the same: http://vmavalankar.svbtle.com/why-facebook-bought-whatsapp