skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>checking a couple of examples with known outcomes.

How do we know the outcomes are known without evidence? For example:

> The computer can tell you that titles have shrunk (and you hardly need a computer to tell you that: the bulky eighteenth-century title is commonplace and a target of jokes even today

Now of course it's a really god hypothesis that book titles have got shorter. I'd bet a lot that it's true. But the way science works is that we take our hunches and make sure that we're not fooling ourselves by checking against actual data. Of course there is a risk of bias by choosing which hypotheses we test - but that's better than just assuming that all our hypotheses are true!
Snowden never made a claim of illegal cooperation. Glen Greenwald more or less did, but he was wrong.
Reflections on Reflection (We've been doing OOP wrong, 2013)
> It's not a lie because nobody expects the question to be answered with accuracy.

Well, if Michael Corleone takes the stand to affirm that he doesn't know what anyone is talking about, he is not and has never been a mob boss, and in fact no one in his family has ever been a mob boss, that won't surprise anyone (they might be surprised that he agreed to testify in the first place, but no one will be surprised by what he says). Can we conclude that he isn't lying?
Encryption can be done in a matter where the private keys are stored in the user's end, making it far harder for the likes of the NSA to break the encryption.

One example of this is Jitsi's implementation of Off The Recording chatting. When using an XMPP server through Jitsi, the NSA may be able to read the cipher text sent but not the plaintext because the keys are stored on the chat participants computers. Not even the chat server owners know the chat plaintext.
>Anybody who has actually, or is currently, studying AI will know that there are fundamental differences in programming "AI" and some self aware magic computation which is almost entirely unfathomable. With current knowledge, at least, the only way to have any sort of learning is to design and implement algorithms to do so.

I think this is way too strong a statement. I have both studied and worked in AI for over 10 years and I definitely don't agree. Human beings are just learning machines too. Algorithms that both learn and learn how to improve their own learning already exist. In my opinion the major bottleneck at the moment is robotics - we have algorithms that can drive a car or win at jeopardy, but none that can regularly throw and catch a baseball in an open environment.
> No, the reason is that Mozilla just added lots of stuff way before it got into the ES specs.

No the reason is that adding Dart VM to Chrome is higher than JavaScript compliance.

http://www.chromestatus.com/features
Finding Heartbleed with CodeSonar
Should your filesystem just start returning a stream of nulls or other deterministic data if the device isn't ready yet? If there's no entropy to pull from, then the kernel shouldn't try to pretend that there is.
The sp(id)y subset, or Avoiding Copeland 2010 with Objective-C 1984
What's a nice pair of wireless headphones that are rechargable? I'm not interested a $500+ pair, but something a bit more mid-range.

I'm tired of tangled wires and my imac sort of spoiled me in that regard.
It is not ironic, it's just a coincidence.
Less dependency on third party tooling.

Many companies are weary of extra dependencies on their developer tooling.
Pirate Bay Blockade Dismissed By Icelandic Supreme Court
Gözlüklü Kadınlar Nasıl Makyaj Yapmalı?
>The human brain is not magic...

I wonder is this really at the root of a lot of people's failure of imagination. Maybe it's Hoftstadter and Dennett people should be reading rather than the technical AI detail.
Mine was:

"Unfortunately, Google is not a company i have any interest in working for. Thanks for getting in touch, though, and good luck with your hunt."

The impression i've formed is that Google is full of people who are quite smart, but think they're really smart, and have decided to build themselves a technical ecosystem that has no interaction with the rest of the world. That doesn't sound like fertile ground for personal growth.

Also, given that i am in London, it would have meant working on AdWords, which sounds dull.
This is a funny coincidence.
Nah, it probably went down like this:

"Niklas thank you for kindly sharing your worldview with me. I'm always trying to fill the void of my poor intellect's inability to create its own opinions. Is there any feed I can subscribe to? I'm sure I'm going to need more opinions going forward as I waddle through life."
Fraud costs them money the same way support costs them money - it's an operational expense. What I don't know if they are also on a receiving end of any penalty fees, especially in cases of fraudulent merchants.
Why students using laptops learn less in class even when really taking notes
It's more that looking out that far into the future is pure science-fiction.

I for one believe that it's far more likely humanity will develop a symbiosis with it's silicon counterpart that eventually will run so deep that it will become almost impossible to say whether we run the machine or the machine runs us.

The problem is that, even though I'm fairly sure my version is more realistic, in practice it's still just one untestable hypothesis amongst many.
ImageSwaps: Exchange images and chat with random people
Woz is, for me, the ISO standard geek, the distillation of all that I aspire to. Somewhere in Paris is a vault, and in that vault is a platinum-iridium Steve Wozniak, against which all of us are judged and found wanting.
You're planning to have an AI that's smart enough to figure out how to pull off a murder spree, but stupid enough to think it's a good idea for your portfolio?

And it's going to hack into and remote-control peoples' Teslas (or whatever) to pull it off because you can just say "it's an AI, it can just figure out how to do that sort of thing!" without regards to the computational expense of breaking that sort of security?

You're right, it is a little far-fetched.
> Google says “Don’t do evil” on one hand.

They stopped saying that, so past tense should be used when mentioning it.
Electric Fly Swatter Self Torture too funny
I don't know what this guy is think, but a warm applause for doing it.
Use a config file to SSH into a server
Quite a few python programmers I know are physicists or other non-professional programmers who really don't know how to write C, use gdb, debug linking problems, etc. For them I think staying in pure python is really a large plus, even if it means reading a bit about locks and threads.
Thank you for this map! Two questions:
- what implementation of quadtree are you using?
- will you ever consider opening the data for download as shapefiles/any other vector format?
Thanks again, great job!
Schleicher's fable: The Sheep and the Horses
Hmm, fraudulent sellers. So you are basically saying that if someone charges a bunch of customers and then disappears, the chargebacks fall on Square's lap? This doesn't sound right. I'd guess that this is acquiring bank's problem and they hedge against this through their fee structure.
Highschools in Portugal had computing and electronic classes in the late 80's.

I started with electricity concepts and basic circuits in the 7th grade and 8th grade. Sadly had to take mechanic in the 9th as electronic classes were full.

On my last three years (10-12 grade), I switched high school to became a computer technician. We had classes about data structures, programming languages, basic compiler design concepts, DB, network and graphics programming.

It made my first CS years a walk in the park.
Minimum Standards
Isn't the true bottleneck meaning though? As in knowing which goal to optimize for?

I believe that it's essentially an educational problem; where AI will be bound by it's ability to educate us and vice versa.
Google Should Modify these 8 Points
http://www.thegeekyglobe.com/google-should-modify-8-points.h...
So, basically, whoever thought "orchestra conductors" needs an fMRI?
Ship loses more than 500 containers in heavy seas
Does this change pattern matching syntax of recursive data structures, if every node is an explicit box type? Could be cumbersome for matching parse-trees?
I think it must have been. If he was aware of it at all, he would have associated it with the Reverse Polish Notation of his HP calculator, and probably knew that, while they were certainly powerful, RPN calcs were never going to make it to the mainstream.

And actually implementing a basic interpreter isn't all that complex. The loop is simple:

Read a line.

If the line starts with an integer, you're adding a line to your program; otherwise you need to interpret then execute.

Read the first word. In some BASICs, this is the first string of characters that matches one of the keywords; in others, it's all the alphanumerics up to a non-alphanumeric.

(In effect) dispatch to the appropriate interpretation routine based on which keyword you just read in. For example, PRINT goes to the argument handler for PRINT, LET goes to the argument handler for LET, and so on.

Then you just have a bunch of routines (read one variable name, read an expression and interpret it as a number, read a destination line number, etc) and different keywords use them in different ways.

It's pretty simple, really. Way easier than writing a full LALR parser.
You make a real good point. There is something about getting your hands into something that convinces you of reality. Maybe what we need to do is try to encourage more people to take up marine aquariums as a hobby.
> iterm2 and its enormous feature set.

and codebase and dependencies, probably. i like that st is < 1000 lines of C.

> It seems a little embarrassing that the linux world is outdone by the OS X world when it comes to terminals.

yeah, there's something to this. i don't think it's just terminals, but they're a good example:

* xterm is the old standard. it's accumulated a lot of cruft because it hearkens back to the days when terminals were separate pieces of hardware.

* urxvt is a new standard: C++ and still a largish codebase, but handles mutt and mc and so on without hiccuping. also, it's scriptable in perl. does iterm2 have an embedded scripting language?

* gnome-terminal (and probably similar from KDE) aren't as large but have a bunch of dependencies and are part of larger projects

so i think it's in part due to fragmented development effort together with the fact that the unix terminal ecosystem carries a lot of dead weight back in the day of there being dozens of hardware terminal vendors that the software had to take into account ... and still does, despite the fact that emulating VT100 is all a software terminal has to take into account these days.
Although specific claims might have been discredited, quantum processes are relevant to biology, e.g.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7137/abs/nature05...
A day in the life of Pyongyang – how North Korea's capital goes to work
email -> geo-location -> metadata -> adwords -> clicked or not -> data mining, stored as data for every email ever.

dictionary -> fuzzy search -> spelling correction, corrected for every word ever.
I'll take eventual destruction for $1000, alex
Hello i would like to try that in virtualbox since I don't have a RPI. How one would go to load an .img file in virtualbox ? Should I try to convert it to some .iso and boot with it ?
Edit: mixed up the definitions of motivation vs. goal. Still going to keep original comment here.

I think the number 1 goal is providing humanity with energy. Goal number 2 is improving AI so goal number 1 can be sustained.

In some sense we already have somewhat singular AI - government. We blame them for making sacrifices so the humanity would stay alive, although we choose them to make those decisions.

I guess the real debate is whether prediction models should work for 99% or 100% of population.
> Also, given that i am in London, it would have meant working on AdWords, which sounds dull.

That's the main reason I'll never apply to Google. Not that I won't get in, but that I won't have the political klout to actually get to work on some of the fun stuff.

They're employing tens of thousands of very bright people; yet the truly interesting stuff will have been done by a few hundred / thousand of those.

What reason do I have for believing that I'll be in that small percentage rather than the other 90+% doing boring grunt work...
cat file | stash set snippet_name
There you go: webmails, while extremely usable, help government snooping by their very nature. If e-mail was decentralized like it was meant to be, spying would be that much harder. (Yes, everyone could host their mail at home. Yes, it can be plug&play useable. No, no one bothered to sell the damn stuff, probably because webmails were more profitable —or believed to be.)

But when you think of it for like 2 seconds, automated scanning does help the NSA. Such software is easy to re-purpose. With the right subpoena, I give Google a week before it gives away a nice social graph of US dissidence to the NSA.
Link to the actual article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-tr...
Honestly, I used to think the same way. I am a college dropout that has about 3 years professional experience (thoigh I have been programming since I was a kid) and I suddenly have a Google recruiter coming after me and trying to get me to interview. I have worked with a guy who now works at Google and some people who interviewed at one time or another. They say the same thing as the parent post; Google hires good programmers, and they happen to have some geniuses. Don't quit the race before you even start it.
This isn't a new thing and there are heaps of evidence. Google "ocean acidification" for lots more studies and reports.

Here's 1: http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/ocean-acidification--a-r...

"In tanks filled with seawater, they raised 18 species of marine organisms that build calcium carbonate shells or skeletons. The scientists exposed the tanks to air containing CO2 at today’s level (400 parts per million, or ppm), at levels that climate models forecast for 100 years from now (600 ppm) and 200 years from now (900 ppm), and at a level (2,850 ppm) that should cause the types of calcium carbonate in shells (aragonite and high-magnesium calcite) to dissolve in seawater.

The test tanks’ miniature atmospheres produced elevated CO2 in the tiny captive oceans, generating higher acidity. The researchers measured the rate of shell growth for the diverse species ranging from crabs to algae, from both temperate and tropical waters. They included organisms such as corals and coralline algae, which form foundations for critical habitats, and organisms that support seafood industries (clams, oysters, scallops, conchs, urchins, crabs, lobsters, and prawns)."
I always wonder if all the orchestra was given a click and a copy of the modified video, if the conductor could just sit down and eat a sandwich.

Got to try a rehearsal like this with my high school band (Sorcerer's Apprentice, IIRC). There was still enough other information to get from the director (adjusting dynamics, etc.) that we probably would have sounded bad with just the video.

they often consider this sort of conducting much harder despite these added tools

I'm not sure it's an added tool so much as a more exacting spec.
Of course Wikipedia is not meant as a rebuilding civilization guide, but it's the most useful site I've seen for exploring new things and rehashing the things you know.

I've tried learning both math and physics from the Wikipedia and most of the time I've enjoyed it. If I'm feeling frustrated on an article(I know the feeling you have described) it usually means I should read about more basic stuff first (the stuff which is conveniently linked in the article for me).

What do you think useful information about electricity should look like?
Comparing methods of XML parsing in Android
Pollyanna. The point is, what we are doing now will be dwarfed by what comes next. Which is, a feedback loop. Algorithms that plan, optimize, redesign, ultimately may redesign themselves. And at speeds no biological system (human or otherwise) can hope to match.
Hash with indifferent access [beginner's guide]
So you would say it's worth the price? ($959.50)
From my experience demoscene coders are mainly software people (and they are amazingly knowledgeable at that), and while most of then likely understand how CPUs work at the logical level, won't be as familiar with the analogue nature of hardware and electronics.

The original article just moved here: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=61024#c637759
An AI would not be 'smart enough' to figure out what is a good idea or not. That requires a human context, that's the whole point. An AI is not good or evil, its ultimately a loose cannon with no understood (or even understandable) motivations at all.
Most likely, because at the beginning the Android team got a few well known Sun/JVM expatriates on their architecture team, like Chet Haase and Romain Guy among others.

Does anyone from Plan 9/Inferno work on the Android team at all?
Why gaming needs its Game of Thrones moment
The most obvious Larry Niven book for this concept would have to be Footfall - http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall

Humans beat up on some invading aliens that got their interstellar tech from one such reboot library, and then go and invade Earth. We win because their knowledge is deep but narrow, and we exploit that.
It's not fraud because Kickstarter is not a store?

The project creator made a promise to deliver. I'm not sure how Kickstarter's TOS (repeating that they have a responsibility to deliver, but that Kickstarter isn't a party to the contract and can't enforce it) immunizes them against their own obligations.

I've sold things on message boards, which are also not stores. If I didn't deliver, why shouldn't I be prosecuted under the same law?
Maybe not the idea itself but a method to print it?
Bizarre Japanese Town Where Artist Replaces Dead Residents with Life-Size Dolls
the example might not be well thought, but it conveys the basic idea that the motivation might be a side effect of some rule in the system that plays the role of the evolutionary fitness function.

We think in terms of physical survival, but we can use an arbitrary fitness function to train a genetic algorithm.
Since it's made the top spot on HN, the recruiter himself no longer matters. Hundreds of Google employees will read it today.
I'm also in London. Last time (5-6 different Google recruiters over the last 6-7 years) I went through phone screening with the recruiter after she was very convincing when telling me why this time would be different (after I'd given her my "standard" paragraph by e-mail about why I generally think talking to Google is a waste of my time). This was for a management position, and she then got me set up for technical interview.

The guy in question gave me a bunch of totally idiotic questions about details about filesystem implementations, and clearly didn't like it when I pointed out to him that there wasn't one single answer to the questions he raised the way he'd asked them, and proceeded to give him an outline of the various solutions that applied for a few different filesystems. He wanted specific textbook details about a filesystem that was entirely irrelevant for the position.

My impression was that he was "textbook smart", and would answer questions about the specific stuff he'd studied very well - the questions he asked fit very well with that -, and would probably excel at brainteasers, but his interpersonal skills and broader understanding of the subjects he asked me about appeared to be so weak that had I been on the other side of the table, I'd never have considered hiring him.

I "failed" that interview, only to have the recruiter bring it up in some recruitment committee or something and get it set aside and get me through to the next step on the basis of the notes I sent her of all the issues I saw with the questions. But only after she spent a lot of time lamenting the process (this is a common team with Google recruiters - every one I've spoken to has been incredibly frustrated at their own processes).

But by then I'd lost interest - the guy in question was in the group I'd have managed, and I really did not like the thought of having to deal with him on a daily basis. Or the thought of a team staffed with similar people... Or the thought of working somewhere where the HR processes are so messed up that their recruiters spends half the time they talk to me apologising about how their recruitment works.

I know there are lots of great people at Google, but every interaction I've had with their recruitment process makes me less inclined to want to work there.
Hey, the first thing that crossed my mind when i opened this post was "why the hell are we even discussing this? Don't these people realize what sort of computational improbability it is at this point?"

So yes, this very discussion is EXTREMELY far fetched. So any statements I make here, come with "assuming we actually HAVE a system capable of performing such tasks".

Hence this comment was in response to my parent's comment that "Even if we have such powerful machines, what would be their motivation for doing something like this?" hence i gave my opinion that perhaps it is just trying to perform a task it was told to do, and based on available data, its strategy includes crime. So perhaps you may argue that this would be an inefficient strategy. Perhaps you are right. But none of us can be really sure that the system would see it that way too. After all, how many of us have never seen a program do something it wasn't intended to do?

I am just saying that maybe the proponents of this discussion have some point. That perhaps giving too much power to systems is bad. (Assuming we CAN give them this much power)
I think the big problem with Google is their obsessive compulsiveness in collecting data. Searches, chat logs, locations, everything is collected because storage is cheap. The collect it to improve their services, sure, to better target their advertising, of course. And Google may strive to protect that data and not share it with others. However, all this data makes Google a gold mine for governments, and giving out the data is not really in their control.

There are other companies that have business models don't necessitate all this data collection. When these companies have to cooperate with governments, there's a limit to the amount of useful information they can hand out about their customers.