skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like this work but the performance of the network against Sunfish is not particularly informative. What I'd like to know is whether this evaluation function captures any non-trivial properties of the board. If it only captures simple heuristics such as "more pieces are better," that's not very interesting. I think it would be worth trying to find out what is actually captured in the network. If the evaluation function is really smart, i.e. capturing non-trivial properties of the position, it could guide a much more focused and thus more efficient search. This is basically what humans do. That, however, would require a modified version of the network that has a continuous output value telling how promising a position is compared to the alternatives. If the evaluation function doesn't play well, that may be really interesting, too, if the mistakes are psychologically plausible. It seems at least possible that this is the case because the network was trained on data sets containing human errors. In general, I think the value of this approach lies in the potential for investigating and replicating human performance rather than developing a stronger chess engine. The problem of playing strong is pretty much solved. What's more interesting now is to develop chess engines that play bad but in psychologically plausible ways.
I was not aware so I just did - thanks. Very much enjoyed that.
Publishing and peer-review is one part of science, but you are missing an equally important one, which is coming up with (hopefully testable) hypotheses.

But how can you have something testable about something that does not exist yet? You would have to have evidence that an actual, intelligent program does something hostile, which is obviously impossible at the time since AGI has not been invented yet.

However, we do have evidence of naturally occuring hostile intelligence. If an AGI is vastly superior in some regards (for example through much tighter integration in knowledge and control systems), it could in fact pose a danger. The article even clearly states a hypothesis: "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded."

We can’t really assign a probability of occurrence to scenarios like these, thus we have to include it in the list of events that could potentially wipe us out and which we may be able to prevent. Since people are actively working on AGI, it should probably be somewhere at the top where nuclear warfare, global warming and comet impacts are listed.
> The genius who comes from Nigeria to the States to write some code is going to pick up skills and connections that will prepare them to go back and have a tremendous impact back in their home country.

But that's not going to happen. More than 95% of Indians who come here (and can stay here) will not go back to India. And that makes sense on the individual level, they're not going to find back home the safety and the quality of life they can get here so obviously they'll make the decision to stay here. But I'm not sure if we should base the policy on the liberties and considerations from the scope of the individual, we should ideally base the policy on what widely makes for a stable, safe, healthy world. I understand that a nation's job is to look after its own constituents, and nothing more, but I argue in this day and age we should recognize how interconnected the world is, and what magnificently deleterious ramifications our seemingly-benign actions can have.

> But hey: any one of us could go spend our lives living in and trying to improve a third world country.

That's going from, what is in my view, an active-bad action (siphoning talent from abroad, much to the detriment of the nations that are giving up these individuals), to a passive-okay action (letting Nigeria have its smart Nigerians) to an active-good action (we Americans going to Nigeria to make some good changes), aka philanthropy. As a nation responsible for its own constituents, we are not strictly obliged to do that, but we do -- and it's great that we do, we should continue doing it more.
FBI Warns U.S. Companies About Malware After Sony Hack
Cloud Technology and Security Alert News Digest #3
Oh and don't get me started on the terrible "conditions" - relative to the tech-bro startups in SF - where H1Bs are expected to stay insane hours and work weekends.

"Why, you're blessed to be here aren't you!?"
Passing a pointer to a struct is just one way to use the standard Go package. You can also pass a pointer to an interface{}, []interface{} or map[string]interface{} depending on how much of the structure you know. You can also use these types in struct fields.
We might need namespaces for webcomponents purposes probably
Yesterday I added 3 to 9 and got 11. Not my week. 5 floors. Not even going to edit it, as punishment to myself.
At the moment we are taking a very IFTTT style approach where we have monitors that are external facing that can test things like TCP ports, HTTP status codes and anything we can get at with a webhook or API (i.e. Datadog, Papertrail, Heroku). When we resolve things it is all via external services that we can integrate with via API's or webhooks (Commando, DigitalOcean, Rackspace, AWS and so on).

On our roadmap is building an agent (and there is a wrapper for our webhooks), this would allow us to run monitors and reactions locally on the server itself. Where we would shine over a tool like Monit is that once we have an agent you could define that reaction to happen on any server.

So for example if we detected a database error using a keyword search on the web app. You would be able to execute commands to fix it on whatever servers you define.

So think of it like, being able to run the actions across as many servers as you want.
Personally I'd be much more comfortable taking the results and doing my own research or getting a Doctor's advice. I don't see how they can ever turn that feature back on when the risk of people blindly following the advice (and the chances of it being incorrect) are high enough.
Paul Krugman admits to his biggest blunders (sort of)
"Deliberate Programming"?
In fact, to do anything else would basically be logical fallacy. In this case, specifically of the ad hominem variety.
In terms of scalability, is SQL an option for you or do you plan to go NoSQL?
Why read it as "we fear everything we don't understand"? Of course I'm talking about irrational fears. Strong AI not only doesn't yet exist, there's not even agreement on what it is.

And in the topic of useless platitudes, "X could end the human race" is also one.
I would say the most idiomatic way is having defined structs and using encoding/json. Even when you don't know the json schema in advance you can still parse it into an interface{}.

Here's an example: http://play.golang.org/p/jrqBcPuQei
That can only be transmitted in one direction. Its Herpes Duplex you have to worry about.
Wonkavator? Guess the author of the article is not a Star Trek fan.
Have a friend- early 20s, speaks 5 languages, graduated from one of her country's top law schools, worked in corporate law, received a full scholarship to do a decent LLM program in the USA- she finished the program with a 4.0. She won a green card, but when it came time for her to interview for the green card she was told- "we filled the Eastern Europe quota." So now she's getting kicked out of the US, shouldn't the goal of an immigration system be to attract and retain the best and the brightest?
Yes. US economists believe supply and demand meet at price, but he does not seem to. I would love to hire lots of people here on HN for minimum wage. I know though if I want talent, I have to pay.

Of course it is about cost. Because if he kept upping his offer, he would get someone (if the office is a normal place). He simply does not want to pay the going rate for the skill set he needs. I'd like to hire lots of people on HN for minimum wage as well - I know that's not reasonable though and I don't whine about it.
Show HN: Launch. An Audio Documentary of My Self-Funded Startup
A cautionary tale...

I bought an Ancestry(.com) DNA test a number of years ago. The product had the advantage that it was integrated in to their genealogical research platform (a subscription service). When you found a match in the database you could click straight through to that members family tree

.... then they shut down the "old" platform entirely, gave me X days to download my data, and told me to get lost. Visiting the site today we see "The AncestryDNA product is not currently available for purchase outside of the United States"

Furthermore, their "all new" tests are focused, like 23andMe, on telling you about more gimmicky crap like your health, ethnicity, and ancient migratory ancestry, and not helping you find distant cousins you can work with. Really sad.

I cancelled my ~$160 annual subscription on principle after that
"We" don't need anything in this. Immigrants don't assimilate the moment they get here. They never have. The old saying is, "The parents don't speak English, the children are bilingual, the grandchildren speak English". There have always been ethnic neighborhoods, as long as there's been immigration.

Having said that, H1Bs are indentured servitude.
No, not make them better, but there is an interesting story here which I heard when I attended a lecture at my job researching HIV.

HIV-1 is the "HIV" we all know and fear. While HIV-1 was derived/evolved from SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus), it's actually not as similar to SIV as HIV-2, another strain.

HIV-2 is far less dangerous and transmissible in comparison to HIV-1, and doesn't exist in large quantities outside of sub-Saharan Africa. Critically, there is some new research which shows that infection with HIV-2 first provides a substantial amount of protection against later infection by HIV-1. People who were infected with HIV-2 before being infected with HIV-1 had lower viral loads and slowed disease progression in comparison to people who were infected with HIV-1 alone.

This lead the researcher giving the talk to state the extremely stunning (yet perhaps true) fact: "HIV-2 is the best vaccine against HIV-1 that we have."
Plague: A different way to spread information
Since the start... ;)
> 2x4 foot size is about $300

2 micron thick coating probably costs $0.1 for the same size.
+2 on Toml, it's a great config file language.
Great group who recently went through Techstars Seattle and identified a very needed area of technology.
I'm talking NYTimes Sunday crossword here, not your in-flight magazine.
Yes, it was 100% in response to our customers' needs.
HDDWatches. The geek watch made out from a HDD
Yeah, that's a fair point. I'm not sure of a good fix for that, either.
Great rules. I'd spread the advice except that I cannot stand that it advices to be greedy.

Greedy is self-serving and it will block things sooner or later.

Way more interesting is to advice Ambition.

Positive ambition.

Possibilities-expanding-for-all kind of ambition.

Subtle you might say. Yet greedy and ambition have different ethos in the long term.
Show HN: Postfactor – Collaborative code refactoring
"Why become a Christian out of multitude of religions?"

"So why should one believe Jesus was the Real Thing and Brian was not ?"

Those are fair questions. I would suggest that you read the book I recommended. It might answer those questions for you.
The author of the article also says he sometimes starts over. That his first attempts just explore the problem domain. There was a post about Jon carmack throwing out some "gross" code because as he worked on it he found the true crux of the problem and it reduced the complexity significantly. Almost an aha moment. Different problems take different styles to solve, but I see a lot of people on here have the same experience that quality takes time, if you get it on the first time or the third depends on if your environment can tolerate the intermediate steps.
"My parents didn't leave their lives half a world away to come here for the weather."

Agreed. They probably came here for a better life and opportunity just like most immigrants. What is your point though ? Your parents immigrated here and now you think " immigration is already too much". I am not attacking you personally but trying to understand your point.
What is this culture and institution that you talk about ?
For running Docker under Supervisor, you may get some inspiration from https://github.com/ibuildthecloud/systemd-docker
Great post. I completely agree, and was making this same argument to someone yesterday. There are a few important trends and facts:

- Containerization allows more tenants-per-server than virtualization

- The entire business model of cloud computing is maximizing tenants-per-server

- Because containerization has a direct cost benefit to cloud providers, they will adopt it quickly

- Quick adoption of containerization will trigger a "new wave" similar to when Linux gained mass adoption

- Cloud companies are scrambling to invest in hot containerization rather than build their own

- Docker has developer street cred and a solid team

- Post-dotcom, post-web2.0, companies invest in open source software now. This is new.

- Cloud companies compete with each other

- Different cloud companies invested in Docker, CoreOS

- Docker, CoreOS are competing

My logic is a bit fragmented, but all the necessary facts are there, and the conclusion that logically follows from them is that it makes rational business sense for CoreOS to diverge from Docker. There's billions of dollars at stake in the latest "platform war" (previous wars include desktop, server, mobile) -- the battle for the cloud. Containerization directly reduces costs and the "metric that matters" for cloud hosts, tenants-per-server. Therefore any open source company with a good containerization solution is going to attract a lot of investment. But bigcorp A does not want to rely on strategic direction of bigcorp B. Therefore they diverge their open source offerings.

It makes sense from a business perspective, and it's kind of sad from an open source perspective, but also good if you believe in free market economics. The question is, how much do free market economics apply in open source?
Thats a good point, right now we work solely off of API's and don't offer any way for us to store usersnames/passwords. The thought is that API credentials can be revoked easier. In general we are looking to meet the market of folks who are 100% in cloud environments, where the adoption of a SaaS solution is not as much of a concern. But in the future there are some ideas on how to handle self hosting and not sending credentials to the SaaS environment.

But we are open source, and our license does allow for self hosting: https://github.com/asm-products/cloudroutes-service/blob/mas...
Apologies I threw that in there, I agree with you -- as much as I believe it hurts those groups to do such a thing.

Agreed -- absolutely indentured servitude.
Like most things online, G+ turned out different from what its creators expected. G+ is actually very successful at replacing lightweight Wordpress sites.

Here's the compelling use case: you want to publish an opinion about something. Probably a few pages long. It obviously won't fit in a tweet. Setting up your own Wordpress site is overkill. Where do you post? G+ is perfect for that. It includes comments for free and community feedback, great.

As a Facebook or Twitter killer, it didn't quite work out.
> The H1-B program keeps the worker captive

Let's be serious a few minutes, no H1-B worker is held captive at all. I've been on H1-B for 4 years and still on it, and have changed employer twice with no issues.

The only case you can make is that if a H1-B is applying for a Green Card then he can have to wait a while before moving, but it's nothing to do with H1-B itself.
For those of you in the Bay Area that want to come out to the sticks a little bit, SVAS (Sacramento Valley Astronomical Society) has a pretty nice observing site in the Sierras. (check web site, contact somebody to get in as a guest) Midnight in August provides a very nice view of the Milky Way.

Andromeda looks pretty good (bright) through some of the large scopes that people bring up there, as well. (magnification is fairly trivial, you need a large telescope to get brightness)
That's right, and I think you'll find they are quite different looking products, although fulfilling a similar set of requirements.
OK I skimmed through the article. Not much technical content here. The original was published in 2005. Here is what they are doing right now. http://www.wired.com/2014/12/spare-parts/ pretty depressing when compared to what they managed to accomplish 9 years back. Hopefully they are happy.
Based on my experience in 2001 at Lucent, there are "real" technology companies that also playing the cost game. One of my coworkers was a very smart Jamaican and arguably a better match for the job than me despite my much greater general experience and age. His salary, posted per the law, was 48K, mine was 80K.

Or take HP: I have an Internet acquaintance who got laid off along with a number of other older workers at the same time (around age 50 for him). He later noticed an explicit (yes, we all know that's against the law) attempt to hire someone through the H-1B program for quite a bit less than he had been earning. Again, "real" technology work on their more serious printers.
NASA sending humans to Mars
Also keep in mind a lot of people have their phones/laptops set to join any available wireless networks without asking them, making a spoofing attack a lot more easier.
Algorithmia: Open marketplace for algorithms
This is awesome. I built a small API type application with this but it was nowhere near production stable. This library is a step in the right direction
>There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay

But this is precisely what defines an economic shortage. There's no shortage of anything, if the price offered is right.

I wonder if the discrepancy between supply and demand for labour in the Valley has to do with the fact that, unlike most other industries[1], so many companies aren't making money, and hence can't pay, but still demand much labour? It seems like labour shortages are built into the system.

[1] Speculation. What are some examples of companies with billion-dollar valuations and no-profits, outside SV?
Tired of Being Bored? Watch This Video
Why focusing on killing advertising makes the Internet worse for all of us
Oh sure, but at least my limitation in the future will be Git being able to process and handle large files (and maybe the cost of storage) and not Github's file and repo limit.
The more highly skilled labor enter a free economy, the greater the demand for lower skilled labor.

Of course, the opposite is also true.

That's because there is a demand for both from the other. An economy with an abundance of workers with no skills presents opportunities to the skilled. And vice versa.

I think it makes more sense to attract the highly skilled. Competition and wars are won with technology and the more people we have comfortable with technology, the faster we'll be able to adapt to the inevitable innovations that are coming.
This analysis is spot on. There is nothing wrong with what Docker or CoreOS are doing. As the OP pointed out, stuff like this happens all the time in computing.

What makes it awkward is that you can't say this stuff and hope to convince the critically important group of people for open source software/companies: user communities.

Users care a lot about their software and community around it growing and improving, but they won't be convinced by the needs of venture-backed, growth-oriented corporate strategy. (I am not saying this is good or bad but stating the fact).
Downvote all you want but please share your perspective also.
I'd like to know about the "standard, normalized ways immigrants have come to the US" that you mentioned.
The future of education: real projects with others
The U.S. has a fixed capacity to absorb immigrants while integrating them into our culture

I've heard this said before but never seen any data on it, though similar rationale was used in the Immigration Act of 1924: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924 , which helped condemn millions to death in Europe.

Bryan Caplan makes the case for open borders here: http://openborders.info/bryan-caplan/ . Separately, his books, The Myth of the Rational Voter and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, are both great, and full of brilliantly contrarian thinking.
Also if you wanted to stand up your own instance you could follow this.

http://runbook.readthedocs.org/en/master/developers/install/

It's geared more towards a development environment for the reasons I mentioned above but it would get you a running instance for sure.
Your average friend is likely to want a close to market price for that room. Relying on friends is not a way to plan an economy. A lot of people won't have friends willing to let them stay.
and eat you.
My understanding of magnetism is that exists solely as a placeholder to reconcile the different ways charge movements look for observers in relativistic frames...

In looking at spin ice, I'm struck by the similarity between the "trail" or "string" between monopoles and the way long bar magnets behave. As a bar magnet gets longer it behaves more and more like 2 monopoles separated by the bar.

Here's a little gedanken. Imagine a south magnetic monopole did exist as a single particle at (0,0,0). I'm thinking of the force it would exert on a charged particle (a proton for example) at (1,0,0) moving in the positive Y direction. The magnetic field would point at the origin, and a force would tend to push the particle out of the page... in order for angular momentum to be conserved, the monopole must now spin. If we ignore conservation of angular momentum, and just stick to regular momentum it must still move in the opposite direction of the force on the proton so it would create a sort of weird unequal orbit around a common axis.

It's fun to think about these things.
SQL should be fine with sharding. Evernote has actually a great article on how they sped up their sync by rethinking the sharding. http://blog.evernote.com/tech/2014/01/28/synchronization-spe...
American? The North American accent pronounces "Python" similarly, as "py-THAWN" instead of "PIE-thn".
I'm not sure that a server-side rewrite addresses the core issue. Git is designed so that a git fetch pulls the entire repo down. The reason large binary files are a problem is because you are going to pull down the entire history of those files in order to clone the repo. Unless they're also shipping a custom git client (unlikely) then I don't see how they can solve this problem on their end.

edit: Come to think of it, the feature they could potentially implement their side is somehow making it so binary files have their history purged somehow. I'm not a git expert but if they are able to trick git into think the files are new, and have no history, each time they change then I guess that could work.
Well, the problem of playing strong is pretty well solved if you have lots of computing resources. The problem of playing very strongly on a battery-powered mobile device (for example) is not yet solved. This is where an insanely-accurate evaluation function would come in handy.
You're still parsing the entire JSON document at once. I believe what OP meant was getting a nested property without all the overhead of writing structs or parsing the entire JSON object into an interface{}, []string, map or whatever else is appropriate.