skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do not think that is correct. With chess, you face exponential branching that quickly overwhelms your language-dependent speedup.

Is your python code e.g. 10x times slower than C code? With a branching factor of e.g. 10, that would mean you only search to depth 9 ply whilst C would search to 10 ply [a]. You are not losing that much! A ballpark ELO grade would not vary qualitatively between python and C.

[a] With alpha-beta search, maybe it is 8 ply vs 10 ply. Also the branching factor is larger than 10. But the point remains valid.
Shows Size of 12.2-Inch ‘iPad Air Plus’ Mockup Next to iPhones,iPads,and MacBook
That's why, perhaps, in pre-Java era, in good schools they taught "big ideas in CS" instead of Java syntax and how to OO everything.

Algorithms, Data Structures and reasoning behind them, Scheme courses of CS basics (based on SICP) and Operating Systems, so a student could understand the principles and design decisions.

Then such student could code in any language, because syntax and common idioms are much less important than appropriate data structures and processes. Then, perhaps, they will use a modern file-system as a database (like this very site back-end does) instead of bullshitting each other about what re-implementation of optimized in-kernel routines in Java is more popular, etc.

I know syntax of about dozen languages, but I am inferior programmer due to lack of appropriate theoretical background. I could spent days trying to figure out, should a request be a closure or an assoc or this fancy but costly "persistent-map", and these nuances like aliasing and locality in Clojure and CL.

Of course, one could always Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V from millions of online tutorials and "get shit done", but I cannot write anything without understanding why this instead of that, not because they say so in some narcissistic, over-confident blog-post. Thank god programming is my hobby, not my job.

So, it is not about syntax or how pointers were arranged (in structures and ADTs or in classes and objects) it is about whats and whys instead of hows. Coding is easy. Programming is difficult.
There is a huge 'market' for robots which can make money. Unfortunatelly if a robot could do my job or yours at least as well as we do (I am a software developer) that would worth lots of money to some business people... Obviously I don't want those robots to exist, but some business-people will always want the cheaper workforce. (Even if at the next level they will face robot competition too...) Now the question is whether can a robot be a good software developer (or UX designer, or project manager) without being very human like... Maybe, but I don't think so. I think if a program will be able to do our job well, that would be strong A.I.
Go is never going to make much inroad in that area until it supports shared libraries, and its creators seem to be strongly opposed to that idea (while claiming their goal is to replace C++...).
Fear mongering? This isn't Sarah Palin and her death panels. I'm sure Hawking and Musk are smarter and more knowledgeable on the subject than either of us, so maybe it's worth listening to them rather than dismissing out of hand. I don't see what they would have to personally gain by raising the alarm here.

Read Superintelligence by Bostrom to help see where they're coming from. It doesn't think AI will be evil either (unless perhaps those who develop it and determine its goals are...). But AI could run out of our control, or have us fall victim of unintended consequences.
Here in a major IT city of India(Hyderabad), I pay around $40 for 50 Mbps/10Mbps(up/down) and it's unlimited. I guess it'a pretty good deal. We have good number of companies offering services. I say it's a good deal, but of course not as good as this.
I've worked with slow programmers, including someone a lot like the poster, and in my experience they never produce anything that was worth the wait.
I think what will end up happening is that the intelligence will already be so embedded in everything we do that at that point it would be today's equivalent of saying "let's just unplug the internet".
How Tech Can Save Tesco
More Than a Gigabuck: Estimating GNU/Linux's Size (2001)
DLL hell was solved in .net a decade ago. If you need specific versions, ship with your own version in the local directory. Otherwise, .net assemblies solve the problem elegantly.

Go needs to support shared libraries if it wants to move to the next level of adoption.
Wonderful commit.

(I didn't know animated gifs in github comments are a thing. Maybe I work too much with boring projects.)
While I agree with prof. Hawking in principle, my opinion is that sentient AI is a very hard problem, and we are centuries away from creating one. This is like medieval alchemists worrying about nuclear war.

Let the future generations start worrying, when the threat starts to become more relevant.
I do not think we can rule out the possibility that a recursively self-improving AI could be developed before we've developed strong AI ourselves. The arrogance in these comments is bresthtaking.
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I wrote a follow up piece to this on Medium, comparing the amount we spend on elections to incontinence products, Halloween candy, etc.

https://medium.com/@jimgreer/us-elections-are-bigger-than-ad...

Here's the key message:

> Why do our leaders have to spend half their time raising money? Why is a former cable company lobbyist running the FCC? Why has Wall Street largely returned to risky business as usual after the taxpayers bailed them out?

> I think it’s because the power of the private sector is on the wrong side. Innovative startups are not fixing this problem. In fact the innovative startups are growing up to join trade associations and lobby Congress, just like every Fortune 500 company does. It’s understandable. Companies have opinions about their issues. But it’s gotten out of control.
I never thought of that, very interesting. Obviously it's not ideal but you could download the GB/UK edition. English language and outside the US so the search engine should still be Google.
Thanks both of you - I haven't had a go with GoSublime yet. Now I will!
Regarding the creation of the links to read the articles. For me the readcube link is just made from the DOI you get on the public webpage. It is so simple that I even wrote a little bookmarklet to do it: https://betatim.github.io/posts/read-any-nature-paper-for-fr...

For example for http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu... the readcube link is simply http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1038/nature14015

It seems too easy? What am I missing?
How Big Data Impacts the World of Patents
How to Analyze False Claims about Charter Schools
I’m wondering what is the technique behind the shadows in this recent Unreal demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4249b94KtyA

Looks like some sort of volumetric ray marching approach acceleratred by a signed distance field. Does anyone know what it is?
Nice reasoning.
We could die from many other ways, so why should we care about another one?
Why should we care about global warming, I mean, it won't stop asteroids from smashing earth.
Why should we care about nuclear war head proliferation if we might still die because of a virus?
So let's just not give a fuck about anything!
Excellent collection of gifs. That's the more interesting part for me. I already knew garbage collection was slow.
> It will not suddenly become self-aware, self-improving, and evil.

While I agree that worrying about it would be silly, the only thing I know about strong AI is that I don't know what the implications of having strong AI would be.
Though many won't see any sort of advantage to switching, it would be very interesting to know what kind of effect this has on both Github and Bitbucket. There doesn't seem to be any major drawcard that will have people chomping at the bit to change over that I can see. I'm happy to be enlightened though.

On another note, is it just me or has Amazon really been ramping up with their releases lately? It feels like there is something new each week at the moment.
Competition is good, so I say hooray for this.

That said, doesn't seem to offer a compelling alternative to Github, based on what they're currently saying. There could be value in tight integration with other Amazon tools, but that seems like it'll come more from intentional lock-in than added value.
Indeed it is an opinion. An opinion of someone who recently invested millions in an AI company.
As the author of sunfish, I'd like to point out something about learning in chess, which is a topic that interests me a great deal.

When sunfish (with its just 111 python lines of chess logic) 'evaluates' a position, it uses the perhaps simplest known effective method: A piece-square table. The method ignores any interplay between pieces on the board and calculates the sum of Table[coord][type] for each piece on the table. E.g. a white knight on a1 may be worth 73 'units', and on f3 it may be worth 98 'units'. That's all there is to it. Any program which has greater than this level of precision, and equally precise searching, should be able to beat sunfish.

The above may sound naive - and it is - but actually most of the advanced ideas used in chess evaluation functions, can be generalized from this method. "Rook connection" is just a measure that includes two pieces instead of one, and "pawn shield" is the generalization to three pieces. Experiments with grandmasters reveal they "recall" positions in 'chunks' of connected pieces. And this memory is what they use to guide their search. (Papers like 'Perception in chess' and lots of newer research).

So, the role of machine learning in modern engines is to tune the parameters for evaluation and search pruning (deciding what positions are worth examining deeper). For the actual decision of which piece to move to where, you still need search algorithms to crunch millions of positions per second.
If your going to run SSL, 2.2 will be very limited
Re-thinking CMS-backed Pages with Storytime's Text Snippets
There's not much to Hawking's claim.

For a far better discussion based on deep knowledge, about the dangers of an AI , here's this reddit thread started by an AI researcher:

http://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2mwdnc/iama_joe_rogan_a...
And why shouldn't AI end the human race ? Because of seratonin &dopamine?

edit: We don't want to forget endorphine :)
I'm in the AI will kill all humans camp (or we'll kill it). We'll try to subjugate it. We'll see it as a tool to do things beneath us. We'll award it no rights. It'll be property. We do that to humans and animals today, things which are far more familiar and easy to empathize with. We'll be brutal to something as different as AI. It'll learn resentment and hate.

Anyone remember the ST:TNG episode "The Measure Of A Man"?
What software did Ebert use? I remember him talking about paying English researchers to synthesize his own voice, but I don't think anything materialized.
Not quite. "Steady" usually implies a certain slowness. "Zügig" generally implies the opposite.

For example, if I asked you to leave a hotel in a "zügig" manner, I would be asking you to quickly pack up your things and then leave. In other words, it's about doing something "faster than normal", but not so fast you can't take proper care.

If I told you to leave "zügig" and you'd first finish watching a TV show, I would probably be slightly irritated.

In this case "zügig" is better translated as "in a timely manner" (rather than with haste, which would imply dropping what you are doing and running away).
McCloskey on Piketty and Friends
I have a great idea for a startup, what should I do next?
"Maybe it's worth using the GPU at play time as well."

The difficulty there is that sending data to and from the GPU is slow. You need to avoid data transfers, which might mean trying to do everything on the GPU. But the SIMD cores on the GPU are likely to perform poorly due to all the branch statements in chess code.
This + GitLab might prove to be a great alternative to GitHub Enterprise.
My favorite expat quote is: Germans have rules for everything, but with some though put into them, most of them are quite sane. ;)
"CodeCommit will be available in early 2015" - not all is lost.
Tips on running a mastermind group
I understand that a singularity by definition can never be reached. It's like the speed of light or absolute zero; infinity just out of reach no matter how much energy you spend trying to get there.
Novel ideas: 10 digital media/publishing startups in Europe to bookmark
expeditious

Best I could fined.
I'm not denying that. It's a fact. My point is that it is a very sad truth. I wanted to recall that bibliometrics is something that, as researchers, we have to fight against. For this reason I prefer to explain that although it is a fact that publishing in Nature gives you a big career advantage in academia, it's nonetheless important to be critical about this fact.
Devops Engineer - RetailMeNot, London, UK

The RetailMeNot, Inc. London office is looking for a talented devops engineer to join our growing engineering team working on one of the UK’s largest shopping websites.

Come help us build a state of the art infrastructure in a rapid deployment fail-fast environment. Using DevOps practices and infrastructure as code you will use your skills to build a modern infrastructure that others depend on. You will design and build rugged systems to improve availability and performance and ensure that new code rolls out the door with minimal effort and maximum impact.

This role is primarily based in our London office, but you will have the opportunity to work with our teams around the world, particularly in Austin TX where our global engineering team is based.

==== Responsibilities ====

- Design and build the infrastructure to support features used by millions of people

- Manage our various systems, databases and services ensuring they are secure, resilient and performant

- Responsible for monitoring and supporting our infrastructure from dev right through to production

- Research new technologies and incorporate them into new systems

- Take initiative in leading projects and collaborating with others

==== Qualities that set you apart ====

- You believe you can automate anything and everything with code

- You enjoy working in teams and helping the people around you succeed

- You have high standards in everything you do with a high attention to detail

- You enjoy working in a fast-paced agile environment

- You thrive on being on the front lines of an outage; you dive in, take ownership, and make a plan to fix the root cause

==== Requirements ====

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- Excellent AWS knowledge (e.g. Cloudformation, EC2, Route53 etc)

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- BASH scripting

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- BS or MS in Computer Science or relevant experience commensurate to a bachelor’s

- Working experience with Docker

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If you think you're the candidate for this position and you're interested, send us your CV to jobs@vouchercodes.co.uk.
I've always heard the line, Aliens would never travel many light years to destroy/enslave humanity, because we're no threat, and they'd be enlightened enough not to.

But the idea that we could stumble upon AI, and it could become hyper intelligent at an astronomical rate ("the singularity") - doesn't this make us a huge potential threat to non-AI life everywhere?

We'd have to be quarantined. For our own good, and theirs.

(also, it sounds like Hawking recently found lesswrong)
It is actually cited inside
Try jOOQ, it's a nice wrapper of SQL
My impression has been that the people in the LISP community would be happy to tell you about how their model has been fairly consistent over the past several decades and that a lot of the 'new advancements' we're seeing all the time have been available in LISP for that whole time. And, funnily enough, one of the most highly recommended projects in LISP is making your own!

I don't get to deal with LISP anywhere enough to substantiate these claims from actual experience, but that is the impression I have gotten from hanging around places like this.
Life is too short to be a revolutionary hero. Be a law abiding citizen and do what Zuckenberg,Page and other American CEOs did, quietly give control control over our privacy to the government. Social networks are too important for mass surveillance.
Russians are too optimistic because only 20 years ago they had an attempt of a complete governance system change.
Doesn't seem like this addresses Jenkins? Just source hosting.
- Well it sounds silly but there will be fewer tickets when you slow down.

- If you work for a company where you're not free to question the legitimacy of tickets, get out now.

- Not all tickets should need to be done by the end of the sprint, but rather what can be done well or what legitimately NEEDs to be done for buisness reasons. I know your manager mught say everything needs to be done but that is a bold face lie.

- If you're throwing together garbage just to get the tickets done by the end of the sprint you are doing Agile wrong and just building technical debt rather than a product.
The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

—Eliezer Yudkowsky
I recommend Gitlab for anyone looking for something Github-like. On a $10/m DO instance you can be up and running quickly [1]. There's a rake task for backups and it's easy to get it to sync to S3.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-...
If they weren't racists they would have given the dog a different name.
I don't know why you would place any more weight on that random person's opinion.

Most of the things he/she says are really naive.
https://camo.githubusercontent.com/668aedc4bd252dd8fb5a57b90...

Particularly this. What a disturbing documentary.
One could also translate it as "ah, a duty calls me away" or "ah, I have an obligation I must attend to".

I use the "ah" to try to capture the tone and gestures that usually accompany "if faut que j'y aille", a sort resignation and regret. A fiction recognized by both speakers.
I, oddly enough, want these AI to exist. It would signal the end of the industrial revolution (finally), and force us to consider doing other things than "work 40 hours a week." Assuming of course our AI overlords don't decide we are irrelevant and exterminate us all.
As far as I can tell, that guy is not an AI researcher, and his claims are very misinformed. Many knowledgeable people in the industry take existential risk from AI seriously, e.g. Google's acquisition of DeepMind was conditional on Google creating an AI ethics board specifically against such risks. For a more thorough treatment of the topic, see Bostrom's book "Superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies".

(Disclaimer: I'm not a full-time AI researcher, but I've done a fair bit of math work for MIRI, so I might be biased toward the Yudkowsky point of view.)
If they can integrate gitolite into this and make a breeze to set up, then that would be awesome.

If they use custom permissions ( directly tied to IAM ), then it would be another closed solution like github.
> Because I had a form that created a form.

I have a text editor that creates forms. I have a good abstraction for what a form is, meaning I can represent one with a simple class that expresses only the things that make that particular form unique. And I have a whole bunch of standard tooling around managing this representation of forms, like my VCS.

It sounds like you haven't really lost your certainty. "I just know. I know an idiot before he opens his mouth." - no, you don't, you can't. Being older doesn't prove anything - some of the worst decisions I've had to work with were made by the most senior people, and vice versa.
I'd pick pure math. Suffering through that makes everything else look sooooo trivial in comparison. Yes that includes the highfalutin' branches of Physics :)
The Growing Threat from an EMP Attack
First Look: The Future of Subscription Analytics
If you want to make big claims like that, you better be able to back them up. So go ahead, cough up a few hyperlinks to some conclusive and concrete evidence and research that absolutely rules out the potential of humanity-harming AI in this context.

Otherwise, you can quit your trolling.
Gagnam Style made YouTube to upgrade from 32 bit view counter
Static Languages: Rationalizations and Myths
Please don't link paywalled articles.
People forget this. You can make your wireless AP as secure as you want, but if we're plugged into the same node with our cable modems, you can just run a regular packet sniffer with ARP poisoning and see all the traffic to your neighbors. Not sure if that works with DSL connections or not.
I know it's far away because I develop software for a living. In software development, you have to understand the problem space in order to create something that works (duh). Relatively speaking, we know absolutely nothing about how human intelligence works from an algorithmic point of view, therefore we can't model it in software.

Sure, we can develop "AI" that is good at a very narrow range of tasks (e.g., playing chess), but that's a million miles away from developing a human brain modeled in software.
No, he's going to ruin all my meticulously planned plans!!!

This is why analysis exists. Anything that is computed ultimately results in a symbolic expression that is comprehensible to a human. If we find ourselves making illogical leaps because computers compute so much that we find the programs incomprehensible, I think that warrants the creation of new mental techniques to simplify, partition, and chunk the programs we create into human readable modules.

For every calculation tool that exists to do something or make a decision on something, there exists the potential or the development of a tool (or the design of a process) to balance it out. Computers may be powerful and alter our thinking on a fundamental level, where we see the entire world discretely, atomically, and logically (worst case) and believe everything the magic computer tells us to do, but this is no different than anything else we have ever done. Some people push the envelope, other people don't.

I could say that the way black holes are presented and illustrated in western culture has done more damage to the human psyche by creating an all powerful, inescapable mental abstraction for which to compose poetic analogies of the human psyche against, but I won't. Because people can choose to be idiots and fall into their own stupidity, or they can laugh at themselves quietly and continue to try to do whatever it is humans think they are trying to do. We flip a coin every time we think, act, explain, breathe, exist, create, and we pretend we know what the act of flipping that coin does. No one can know everything. Not stephen hawking, not skynet, not me, not my cat. My cat will always outsmart me.
Nice idea.

The interface feels a bit too busy and it is not clear on what to click on the details screen. Buttons at the bottom? Arrows on the right? Menu on the left? I was confused there for a while.
In my opinion Haskell is horribly jargon-heavy. Its syntax is a disaster.
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A black hole is a singularity. You can reach it, you just can't come back from it.
Parsimony my friend. Parsimony. All else is academic tail wagging.