skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's true, but there is no known way to verify proper operation of those kinds of machines. What happens if your artificial companion stops liking you? What if your negotiation robot throws a tantrum?

Well, then the robot isn't doing what we want it to do. But you asked for human behavior, and that's what you got. There is not really any point in making robots do what humans do. We want them to do what humans can't do -- even if we want them to seem human while they do it.

Addendum:

>(unless we end up with a theory and evidence indicating that machines can be sentient).

I think we'd sooner find a theory indicating that sentience is either not well-defined or not a useful concept for making decisions. If we found that ants were sentient, we'd still step on them and not care.

This kind of talk is exactly the kind of reason I feel most people are useless for understanding ethics: you can't make decisions based on the answers of arbitrary grammatical yes/no questions. It's the same reason mathematicians don't really care if P=NP is true or not. You can just suppose one way or the other and you'll be no better off without a proof.

The value in the proof is an advancement in conceptualization and language. Similarly, an important advancement in ethics/morality/AI will very likely make your concerns about sentience obsolete in a way that should be obvious to you.
Unless you're very close to full retirement (age), the career growth is likely to be the far better choice both commercially and emotionally.

No point earning an extra $50,000 per year if you burnout in 2 years and have to live off savings for a couple of years while you pull yourself back together.

More importantly, I live by the phrase "Income follows Assets". Think about property, think about product development, and think about your own personal skills and energy as your assets. Career growth is an investment in your personal asset base - much like buying a house to rent out or coding a new product, there will be an investment (in this case, both time and lost revenue) and it sounds like there will be a return on investment (income following your new assets) in time.
Absolutely! If you framed your diploma, hung it on the wall, started work the day after graduation, and made "Senior" before you have to dust the frame the first time...
What kirse is talking about is a real thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory
TBH The best advice I can give is to move closer to Melbourne. I don't care for it here, but there's not a lot of dev jobs back home in QLD, either.
Ancient Greek had four words for love, only one of which meant the love a man has for his wife. There was also the love of family, the love of friendship, and the love of spirit. CS Lewis gives a great lecture on the Greek ideals of love, here, https://medium.com/message/radically-renovate-your-relations...
Ruby 2.2.0 Time#parse TZ-related regression
Well yeah, but one thing that bugs me is that many structures, many businesses even, seem to have little purposes beyond making jobs pop into existence, by having bizarrely huge amounts of redundancy, red tape, or by having goals that seem counterproductive, or by being tolerated despite not having reached any relevant goal for a loooong time.

One of my main problem is that there is a huge bagage of material wealth and social status attached to those jobs that look, to me, right now, completely useless.

By tying that to the job itself, it makes it hard to assess the value of the work accomplished, independently of the fact that said job is stable and well-paid.

Hence,

It pisses me off when politicians announce not that some shit got done, but that jobs were created.

It pisses me off that the goal of working seems to be shifting from solving a problem to getting paid for it.

I'm young and stupid and idealistic and I'm angry with the world.

It'l probably pass ; )
Study the history and the theory because otherwise you are running around like a chicken with its head cut off. We need more articles like this.
Yann Lecun, Facebook // Data Driven #32 // Dec 2014
I dealt with ASN.1 some years ago when working on an SMS anti-spam/anti-fraud system. ASN.1 was both amazingly awesome and horribly frustrating at the same time. I have an awful lot of respect for it especially given its age, but I'm also glad to now be working somewhere where I can use JSON, EDN and Transit :)
FAA Issues UAS Guidance for Law Enforcement
Because nobody uses them and supporting them can cause more problems than they are worth.

The author was ranting about unused features, but not all features are good ideas. Sometimes things that look good on paper don't work so well in practice.
I said nothing about STM. I said something about actors vs. "normal programs" ("normal" = "typical").

> are you simply asserting that actors aren't as useful as STM when you need consensus and a stable view of some data across processes?

I'm saying that "consensus" and "a stable view" are things that you needn't concern yourself with if you're not already thinking in terms of the actor model. And you shouldn't have to!
I love this story, and it's sad to hear about companies abandoning features that users care a lot about such as RPN.

Personally I think the textbook style entry on the newer nSpires is a better interface than RPN for a lot of math - it isn't hard to get very fast with the nSpire menus and the display is pretty much as close to actual math notation as you can get. But RPN feels better for engineering tasks to me.
FAST isn't exactly a FIX encoding, it's a key-value encoding that can be translated to/from FIX. Roughly speaking, FAST is to FIX as BSON is to JSON.

But starting to use FAST today seems like a bad idea, because the largest publicly-known production users of FAST have already moved away from it (toward plain, uncompressed binary structs on the wire).
Why would it need reflection? The name is there in the source code right in front of you.
I've been considering running all my mobile data through a VPN for better security, and saving all of it so I can analyze anything after the fact. Anyone doing anything like this?
Great feedback. I'd love to talk with you more about this when the neurotransmitters are replenished in my brain after some sleep. :)
I like the idea that speculation Microsoft may buy github can only be FUD and not simply speculation.
> In other languages like C/C++/Java you always struggle with implicit conversions between int and double.

Not that I've noticed. Uni-typed operators are essential in something like Perl, which has lots of implicit conversions (think of the horrible "+" operator in PHP, or "|" in Perl). They're also helpful in something with type inference like Ocaml, though Haskell does okay without them. But with the plentiful explicit type declarations in C-style languages, polymorphic operators are rarely confusing.
[FREE] Cloud-based Time clock. Very little investment to set up. NFC. Antifraud
On the other hand, there is some research[1][2] which indicates that one way of improving software security and reliability is to (1) realize that any program that accepts input is basically a recognizer of strings belonging to some formal language, and (2) that we should limit the grammar of said language to regular or, at most, context-free. Length fields automatically make the grammar context sensitive which is much harder to secure according to langsec.

[1] http://langsec.org/

[2] http://youtu.be/UzjfeFJJseU
I had some jobs that weren't that interesting on their own, but I found it was much more interesting if I made challenges for myself. Sometimes I joked that I was trying to automate myself out of a job, but then I tried to do that. Sometimes I'd just do silly things like try to game the system by solving as many rally/whatever agile points as possible in a day, just to make a point about how silly some of that stuff was. Sometimes I'd write scripts and stuff in a language I didn't know well to learn more. I guess it depends on your environment and rules, they may be more strict, but usually there's a way to make boring work more interesting by tying it to something else that helps you grow, or challenges you in some way.
That's a rather bizarre comment. Would you care to qualify? Or maybe add just a little bit of substance?

My attitude doesn't have anything to do with statistical reality.
Yes... Wikipedia.
> [expletive]

Is that really necessary? Profanity is part of the English language. :\
Completely agreed. Once Microsoft releases the VS source code, I'll be completely sold on the idea that it's reformed. Until then, this seems like very effective developer relations management.
So the obvious next question is: how many sets do you need to create a perfect rectangle?
> Nobody uses i2p

This is the problem. Anonymity networks are based on the idea of "blend in with the crowd". If there is no crowd, even an iron-clad protocol isn't much benefit.

Yes, some people use i2p, but its adoption rate is much lower than Tor.
> adopt a set of research priorities

Try this explanation on for size: Have
the whole group, with a lot of signatures,
etc., come out with a big statement, a paper,
a position, policy paper, on what the
AI research priorities are.

Then, presto, bingo, any prof looking for grant
money can pick one or a few of those
priorities, adjust the direction of his work,
and claim to both the granting agency writing
the check and the journals to publish his papers
that his work is on the priorities.

And just what is the solid basis for the
priorities? Sure, that paper. And,
reading that paper, it looks solid, right?
I mean, it very much looks like the
right stuff, right?

Or, maybe an AI researcher wants to
do something else. So, they can claim
that their work is leading edge,
disruptive, original, crashes through
old barriers, is better than the
conventional, etc., right? And maybe
that approach will get grant money,
accepted papers, tenure, etc.

Sounds to me like a way to help get grants
and get papers published and, thus,
to keep the parade, party, whatever going.

Meanwhile, back to good engineering, etc.!

That is, if the paper
looks weak for its claimed, obvious purpose,
then maybe look for
the most promising non-obvious purpose!
E.g., some people are good at manipulation,
and some people are gullible. Or, "Always
look for the hidden agenda."! Or,
don't be too easy to manipulate!
This gave me a nice warm fuzzy feeling as I remembered bringing up bare metal Z80s 'back in the day' (can it really be 30 years ago? - yes). One trick I used over and over was to start with a blank EPROM. Every byte is 0xff (pretty much the exact opposite of his 0x00 starting point). The nice thing about that was that 0xff is (from memory) a RST 7 instruction. Which again (from memory) is a kind of one byte subroutine call to address 0x0038. This is nice because it means the CPU (should) settle into a kind of infinite loop, endlessly reading 0xff from 0x0038 AND (very importantly) pushing the return address 0x0039 onto the stack. Of course there is no stack at this stage - but that won't stop the CPU trying, and the effect is an endless series of two byte writes of 0x39 then 0x00 (little endian!) to an address that decrements forever through the 64K address space. It would typically take of the order of a second to cycle once through 64K, and the A15 line would toggle at this rate, the A14 line twice as fast, etc. You could troubleshoot the entire CPU bus interface this way with nothing more than an oscilloscope. Good times.
I'm not sure what I should agree with? (I don't agree with the LE/infiltration argument against this dude; he obviously has no connection to any SR1 staff, that's part of the problem with using the name. The problem is entirely that he's stealing reputation and misleading everyone, which is something you can see for yourself on the Diabolus forums and elsewhere; after it renamed itself 'Silk Road 3', it got more traffic and people apparently think it really is more trustworthy than it is (which is 'not at all').) You should also note that I'm one of the /r/DNM mods and have criticized him for a long time now.

If he'd just come up with a new name like everyone else, my only real beef would be that no one needs a new market, I2P is probably sabotaging himself, and he's an asshole.
SEEKING WORK

I'm an experienced front-end web developer that can help make your web project look good and work right.

I specialize in RESPONSIVE DESIGN - I can make sure your site look PERFECT on everything from tablets to phones to desktops. I am base in Boston, MA. Remote work OK.

As front end developer - HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, Knockout.js, Bootstrap, AngularJS, Sass and AJAX.

As back end developer - Node.js, Express, MongoDb, - Amazon AWS - Version control with git.

Good UX Design - I Program the Hard Stuff - You Look GREAT!
The challenge isn't creating the "Intelligence" but creating a virtual "Environment" that trains the artificial agent to do tasks that learn and alter its environment.

With a purely computational environment, all tasks - that can be learned/mastered - can be reduced to basic complexity classes, e.g. prime factorization. To our "natural" intelligence, this seems a contrived skill but consider...better prime factorization would allow the artificial agent to mine all the bitcoins, break passwords, etc making the AI a very rich "in the real world". And compared to a human calculator, even the worst computer looks like a super-intelligence in this domain.

So to learn the skills we consider important, there needs to be a way to make the AI experience and alter a non-virtual world - the physical (macro) world we live in…basically some physical robot that does I/O from the environment to the intelligence. And until the AI has some reason to optimize for behavior in the non-virtual world - have the most kids instead of have the most bitcoins -natural and artificial will remain alien to each other as neither will recognize the others' reality.

With this insight, I'd diagnose the bottleneck in AI to be in engineering robotics at least as complex as insects, to which we're a long way off.
Keeping a VPN connection alive doesn't do the battery any favors, and bringing up a VPN connection isn't that fast to do it on-demand.
The disadvantage of this over a shared VPN that doesn't keep logs is that there's now a unique IP address that can be tied back to you. A cool feature for a VPS would be to have a shared IP address between a bunch of customers.
The Four Horsemen of the Cyber Apocalypse
Does this work on iOS?
The example minimal do-nothing program there is much smaller (8k), but still results in a dynamic binary requiring glibc.

The only unresolved symbol is:
__libc_start_main@@GLIBC_2.2.5
Photoacoustic spectroscopy
Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot
Intro to Bootstrap and Resampling Statistics [pdf]
To hit the most important point of what you mean by "change based on the request", this doesn't mean "changing your request changing the resource you get" (which wouldn't make any sense).

It means that the act of GETting the weather right now will never change the weather. (If you want to change the weather via HTTP, you'll need to do it with a method like "POST /weather/hill-valley" and a body like '{"rain": "stop"}'.)

Think of it like a getter function that gets syntactically hidden by the language: you wouldn't want "if (user.accesses < limit || user.accesses > threshold )" to have two different values for "user.accesses" based on the number of times you referred to it.

In a less ludicrous example, it also means "GET /tokens/reset/dsf46JtCb385PDs2" shouldn't log you in and invalidate the token, something that most password-reset pages fail to comply with.
Well, if SENS has the answer, the TFA has a $1M incentive for them to prove it, since this prize isn't about mechanism at all.

I think the idea of focusing on understanding and slowing the accumulation of damage is partially based on the assumption, or hope, that the body can repair itself, or be stimulated to repair itself, if damage accumulation is slowed enough. In particular, if damage to the repair mechanisms themselves (e.g., stem cells) is slowed sufficiently.

If you have kept up with drug development news you will know that target-based approaches and other highly complex interventions have almost uniformly failed. To this day, we can't and don't design interventions based on the understanding of systems, we just see that a drug inhibits, say, gliomas, and find out the mechanism later, possibly after FDA approval. If we can't even do this for diseases that are simple compared to aging, how do you think a highly complex and interdependent set of interventions as proposed by de Grey is going to work out?

Many repair-based approaches are proposing we build a rocket to the moon when we can't even build airplanes.
Part of it might also be that employers may not feel a 62 year old can do what a 32 year old can. (Unmarried at 30 is an unrelated issue.) Are they wrong?

Where are 95 years olds going to work? What are the going to be capable of doing? Uber drivers?
They are going to have to fix a bunch of stuff rather than just extend life for this to be feasible. I hope they do that first, and worry about extending life after they have fixed degeneration.

Or we, are going to have to re-arrange our social/economic systems considerably so work isn't such necessity.
Cron Practices
The Year 2014 in Open Access – a subjective review
It isn't just the tor browser bundle that causes this. I believe it has more to do with either bots using tor to access google or google forcing captcha on access from known tor exit nodes. I have seen the same behaviour from vanilla firefox while trying to use google from tor. I would still rather input captcha than use bing!
I guess there could be religious arguments for not using the life extending medicine, since god didn't make humans with that longer life-span. So if there are arguments against contraception, they could also be used against long life.
"Gone in an instant".

That's why we have books.
Tearing down the silos that Cloud Apps create
I would love to read a blog post about why they thought it was impossible and maybe walking through the implementation.
What happens when you install the top 10 download.com apps (HTG)
Related discussion from 3 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8394136
Nice to see more applications of it. But you don't even need a fancy ASN.1 compiler; OpenLDAP's liblber will do BER/DER just fine. (It uses malloc, but that's because LDAP messages have unbounded size. And it doesn't overuse malloc...)

XML and JSON are both ridiculously inefficient, both for static storage and especially for communication protocols. Can't wait for them to die.
Free Trial Marketing Tools Back Office
Honest question. How many 'early stage' startups would hire an English major straight out of college? The only way I see this working is if they already know the founders beforehand or if there are varying definitions of 'early'.
I think the fact that this leaks DNS lookups is really quite key because that gives away a huge amount about what you're looking at over your "vpn", not to mention services like netflix that are pointing you to different responses based upon the source of your dns lookups.

In firefox you want to go to about:config page and turn on network.proxy.socks_remote_dns
I second the advice about starting a Toastmasters chapter - not only is TM an amazing organization, but it sounds like a perfect tonic for this organization...
> Nobody uses i2p

Here is an analysis that was done less than a week ago. https://thetinhat.com/articles/2015/i2p-survey.html

TL;DR ~25,000 constant nodes, mostly in Russia and United States. With Russia having a lot of short lived connections.
Forgot, and Never Brought to Mind
Sorry for terse list form, but I'm knackered after a long day and still have plenty to do. But I sympathize with your plight so here goes.

#1 Diet and exercise. Healthy body, healthy mind.

#2 Take the paychecks. If you can phone it in at work, and your employer is undeserving, then make money for no mental effort.

#3 Consider full time remote work. This is more and more viable. You can work for an awesome company with driven and smart people right from your home, or local library, or beach in Tahiti.

#4 Exit strategy. Focus on maximizing money and ease to move into something else. Get planning, and be selfish and strategic.
Sorry for terse list form, but I'm knackered after a long day and still have plenty to do. But I sympathize with your plight so here goes.

#1 Diet and exercise. Healthy body, healthy mind.
#2 Take the paychecks. If you can phone it in at work, and your employer is undeserving, then make money for no mental effort.
#3 Consider full time remote work. This is more and more viable. You can work for an awesome company with driven and smart people right from your home, or local library, or beach in Tahiti.
I hoped that they come up with high resolution, flexible, multi color, large size, touch sensitive, affordable panel(1), but they are into wallpaper business instead.

Ok. Fine. But I am still a bit disappointed.

(1) They actually have high resolution 9.7" panel http://www.eink.com/display_products_pearl.html but no color and no touch (this is probably a major show stopper);

They have color panels http://www.eink.com/display_products_triton.html but no high resolution and large size and no touch;

They have flexible panel http://www.eink.com/display_products_mobius.html/display_pro... but no color, no high resolution and they are either ultra small or too large and no high resolution or touch;

So we are almost there but still not there.
Cracking Trivia Crack
In my tinkering with both Go and Rust, and liking the looks of both, I get vague feelings like Go is to Python as Rust is to Perl. This may be damning praise for some folks, but it makes me lean slightly toward Rust more than Go (slightly). There seems to be almost an anti-library culture in Go (i.e. "use the standard library" is almost a mantra in Go) whereas in Rust, there's more than one way to do it (even this early in its existence).

That said, in many ways neither language is like the one I've compared it to, probably in enough ways that it's not a useful comparison for much other than this one metric (the TIMTOWDIness of the language). But, it's how my head is processing these two quite novel (to me) languages; which would make sense, as I've written more code in Python and Perl than probably anything else, so they're the known things I compare these unknown things to.
If you aren't partial to OpenBSD, I've had good success with this:

https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install

You can turn off logging on the server with

/etc/openvpn/server.conf

log /dev/null
status /dev/null

Remember to restart the openvpn service after that.

That said, this wouldn't deal with the VPS provider's logging etc.
Language Theoretic Security (2013)
From the report "In our dataset, 9,370 of the 172,030 links submitted to Reddit became popular (5.4%)." where popular means it was on the most popular page at some point.

They crawled every 10 seconds for 17 days, so found about 10.000 submissions/day. 10.000 a day! No wonder some post are ignored, that sounds unmanageable.
> There's nothing to be gained from knowing someone's "Real name",... Thus, anyone who claims too loudly to be using their real name is making a bluff which is difficult to call them on...

What? Calling such a bluff is not so hard: with a full name and just a bit more info (e.g. birth date, partial SSN, mother's maiden name), you're well on your way to stealing someone's identity. With a full name and forum handle, you may have blackmail material. If the information is fake, you lose nothing by trying a dozen "John Smiths." Read Kevin Mitnick's books for how far you can get with persistence and just a bit of knowledge.

Robustly faking information takes effort; most people are too lazy or careless to do so every single time they write something online, and the Internet is Forever. However, handles add a bit of friction to the stalking/surveillance process, likely enough to prevent idle snooping and bulk collection.