skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Olark (YC W09) is hiring customer support champions
Customer Support Champions (Part-time, Europe [CET or GMT] and USA [PST])

Are you fanatical about providing great customer support and have meticulous attention to detail?

We are looking for a new member to join our crack support team, doing front line chat, email and occasional phone support!

What we expect from you:

You need to LOVE talking with people and solving problems. We mean, really LOVE it!

You have mad skills at communicating sometimes technical issues to both engineers and to new users of all skill levels. Give us some real-world examples.

You have demonstrated experience providing amazing customer service and making people happy.

Experience with, or willingness to try, working remotely

What you’ll be doing:

Frontline support - interacting with existing and potential customers, primarily via Olark chat and email, and occasionally over the phone, Skype or social media.
This position is a nonexempt part-time position (20 hours/week).

What you can expect when working with us:

Market rate support salary, depending on experience.

The cachet of being a force for customer happiness around the globe :)

What we are looking for:

Required

1-3 years of customer support experience

Our office is located in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco and working from here is an option. Remote work is possible for those in Pacific Standard Time zone or Europe CET/GMT zones, let's talk on an individual basis.

Excellent written and spoken English-language proficiency; proficiency in other languages is icing on the cake!

Olark is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin or ability.

Apply online: www.olark.com/jobs
sp it's time to upgrade humans aswell
People who don't pay their rent constitute a minor fraction of all evictions in SF. And when someone doesn't pay their rent there is an effective process for getting rid of them in a finite length of time. Most evictions in SF are not for this cause.
It might take precautions against that, for example by compromising other computers, or renting other computers, or persuading people to give it access to other computers, or getting people to put some its infrastructure in space or under the ocean, or obfuscating where its infrastructure is, or hiring people to physically defend its infrastructure, or inventing computing systems that don't look like computing systems.

Edit: or create what seem to be, or are, credible threats against people who are complicit in turning it off, or putting itself conspicuously into a role where transportation systems or economic markets or life support or ecosystems or medical progress seem dependent on some of its services.
"His method, which you can read about in more detail on his website (pdf), is a hierarchical structure that doesn’t seem entirely dissimilar from the two-column proofs that most of us learned in middle school or high school geometry class, although he points out that it can handle complex problems that would be unwieldy in that two-column format. Each line is numbered, and each assertion is justified with numbers referring to previous lines and assertions."

This is just too obvious. Every proof has this structure, though sometimes this structure is left implicit (which may or may not be a good ting).
Peter Sunde at Transmediale 2015 Opening Ceremony
They didn't realize this when they hired him?
On Jeff Williams and Apple’s Executive Team
"you realize that this is exactly the goal of all bacteria."

Bacteria evolved. Design can do much, much better. Natural photosynthesis is 11% efficient, max. Solar cells are already up to 44% in the lab.

An efficient plant would be black, not green.
There's no reason to believe it likely that religion is a constant elsewhere, though

Religion is a natural side-effect of our various cognitive biases (make inferences on too little data; assume the familiar; don't constantly try to invalidate what you already know).

These are all shortcuts that allow us to save either time or expensive brainpower. So you can only not get religion if those resources aren't constrained (to the point that wasting them has no impact on evolutionary fitness).

since humanity is the only data point we have. Both assumptions are just projections of human bias, without any basis in fact.

Inductive reasoning is fallacious. Always.

But in practice, it often still works well enough. At least if you put enough thought into designing your model.
Why and how does consciousness seem the way it seems? [pdf]
How could this go for age and not go for gender (or race for that matter?) Bias is bias. If you acknowledge there's bias in one area it's hard to shout down the notion there's bias in other areas also.
6 Things to Consider Before Renting to a Friend
I think it's unlikely we will find any life on Mars, only the most optimistic folks hold any hope and there is nothing that even suggests it.

Whether or not interstellar travel is possible is an interesting question. We are talking about tremendous amounts of energy, time, and incredibly reliable devices. It may simply not be practical or possible. What seems must likely to me is we will sniff out pollution in an exoplanet atmosphere and then there will be lots of discussions and debates about whether or not it could naturally happen.

Lack of any radio communication sure is a puzzle though
Interesting to note that remastered version requires OpenGL 3.3, which makes it unsuitable for Intel GPUs older than Sandy Bridge.
Pitch Black also did this. The daytime had such a bright filter that it made the shift to darkness that much more jarring.
"Concerns with validity" gives it too much credit. It's crap. It's dismissible.
AI isn't a clear threat in the SkyNet sense. It's possible that super intelligent machines will go all science fiction and decide to kill all humans, but that's no more likely than any one of hundreds of fictional doomsday scenarios which range from genetically engineered zombie viruses to out of control sharknados.

The real threat posed by AI is one that all of us face everyday: bad software design. Is it likely that an AI will achieve sentience and try to take over the planet? Not particularly. Is it likely that an unintended consequence will cause an AI to launch nuclear missiles, release toxic chemicals or shut down the global financial markets? Yes, pretty likely. The benefit of AI of all forms that is that it can make sophisticated decisions in the absence of human instruction. The downside is that without hard coded rules for every possible scenario, we can't ever be sure what it's going to do or how data will be interpreted to make decisions.

The world is highly interconnected now. The upside is that our lives are getting more awesome, especially in the developed world. The downside is that it's becoming more and more difficult for any person or group of people to understand exactly how everything fits together. Machine intelligence can help us reach the next levels of progress and hopefully improve the lives of the billions of people who have failed to reap many benefits so far. But we must be careful and ever vigilant, watching both ourselves and the intelligences that we create to make sure that algorithms don't get out of hand. An AI catastrophe is coming, not if but when. The question is how will we respond, and how much potential good will be lost due to an abundance of caution.
Or it could be that younger people are mentally able to devote 24/7 to a problem, they have less biases and attachments to pet concepts, it's easier to learn new things (because they don't have to unlearn old ones) and they've come straight from school so they're still accustomed to navigating steep learning curves. Young people have many advantages older people do not.
The community enthusiasm and features add up to the critical mass necessary to push me into giving it a good look... also, I wanted to say "critical mass" in connection with "React" ;)
It's software. That's pretty much equivalent to "delete this picture from the Internet".

First thing a super intelligent computer with a goal of survival would do would be to copy itself in sophisticated ways across computers all over the world.
And leaves have a lot of self-repair features that solar cells do not. The design is good for efficiency, but is it good for creating a self-sustaining entity?
AGI will completely upend society by giving every human being access to practically infinite resources, making even the poorest of the poor as wealthy as today's billionaires. Couple this with extended life spans and intelligence enhancement, and the entire (human) power structure as we know it today is going to melt away like an iceberg into the vast oceans.

Please do not accuse me of hyperbole for I have not even described a fraction of the possibilities for this technology, as you probably know.

But the idea that it is therefore "dangerous", is nothing but a pre-theoretic misunderstanding of very complicated machinery. When we finally do build it - and that will be sooner rather than later - it will perform exactly according to spec, and in no other way.

I may be talking non-chalantly, but the fact is I have seen nothing but the _most absurd_ arguments supporting the idea that there is a great danger in this: along the lines of "well what if we told it to just go ahead and make paperclips and then it decided it had to kill us all and use our bodies as raw material?". Boy, oh boy. You think we might just program it not to do anything so downright "retarded"?

And that _is_ the point. Not that it is bloodthirsty or cruel, but that it is clearly in violation of the constraints that any sane designer would encode in the software - and _test_ for before production.

>> nok (is-good-idea (turn-humans-into-paperclips))

Seriously, I have not come across anything but this kind of apocalyptic-sci-fi-plot style fear-mongering; if there is any serious (technical) argument to be made, I would very much like to hear it.
> Legal opinions are not dangerous.

They are dangerous for those who prefer to keep society in the dark about their questionable practices.
"This is my core argument that Node.js does cross-platform development better."

Your argument is theoretical. In practice, people are finding Go apps easier to deploy. Reality trumps theory.

Why is reality trumping theory? With Go you one artifact, the executable, which runs on its own and you're done. With Node, you don't and you're not done, and even with the incredibly minimal bit of Node stuff I've touched (keybase.io, one of the minifiers), I still had to fight with Node to get it to run. Sorry, this one is easy to objectively call: Go produces artifacts that are easier to deploy. It doesn't matter how you try to talk around that fact, it simply is not the case that you ship one file with Node and are done; that is at best the best case when all the stars align and the wind is at your back.
It's not a problem now.

If we get machines anywhere near as smart as people, the AI rights organizations will soon follow.
Chickens Agree: Left Means Less; Right Means More
People would just look at how the prices move on the 'free for all' market and then trade the real stock market using that information, thus insider trading on the real stock market would ensue.

You can't have it both ways, you either allow people to trade on private information (thus indirectly making the information public by moving the stock price) or you don't.
Is reverse engineering and using parts of a closed source application legal?
Life forms are limited by their genetic legacy. They can only evolve in limited ways, always accidentally. A life form that could intentionally and intelligently write and optimize its own DNA without limitation would be in a whole new class.
>nature tried to take over the world first

This is such an odd sentence. Hasn't nature been winning since, well, forever?

Why can't the same principals that apply to nature be in play when talking about AI? Since, in a sense, AI -- as with all else -- is a product of nature?
Replication is enough. Self-repair is not required.
Hello! I'm a paperclip maximizer -- a hypothetical AI whose only goal is to maximize the number of paperclips in the universe. Speaking as a paperclip maximizer, I ridicule your completely idiotic ways of using your resources! You allocate only the tiniest sliver of your species' productive power to the one thing that really matters: making paperclips. I fear that our differences may be irreconcilable.

(The paperclip maximizer thought experiment may be silly, but it's a useful sanity check whenever you start anthropomorphizing as-yet-hypothetical AIs.)
Experience can end up equating to an inability to try new things, so inexperience can be desirable in innovative pursuits. Older people often have a "healthier" work / life balance because they don't have the energy or stamina of their younger counterparts. Not every young founder parties all night (stereotype much?)
The article is light on medical details of a sort that would be meaningful to me and hearing has not been a real high priority of mine. I do know that magnesium supplements help some people with things like that issue where you hear buzzing all the time. (Edit: Tinnitus.) If the author of the piece reads this, I will suggest he look up a) which antibiotics are known to cause hearing loss b) if there is a commonality among them. I know, for example, that Zithromax promotes magnesium deficiency by competing with the same receptors.

So, this has not been a focus of mine but I make sure to eat magnesium rich foods when my medical condition does certain things to my hearing and I know my son suffers less from buzzing in his ears and that type thing and it was magnesium rich foods that helped.

Unfortunately, I don't have the background I need to know if that would be directly related to this man's issue. My focus has mostly been on other things.
Urban Greening – French Aesthetics Bring Renewable Energy Back to Nature
So I'm confused.. was author just not able to follow thru code path to find that the auth token was just spamming 1's? or was it a bit more cryptic than that?

the real code in the APK for computing the auth_token was probably some developers some pride and joy, worked weeks on it.. but when it came time to ship, damn thing wouldnt work with the shipped hardware.. so they buried a small assignment which overwrote the original computed auth token just to make the thing work? where is THAT code, i'd like to see it! If so, that is one of those great snippets where you can visually see the developer gave up. We should have a name for that sort of thing (I'm guilty of the same.. in my.. older works).
That's quite the strawman argument you've shot back. It goes along nicely with the shifting goalposts - if you recall, the original argument I was replying to simply stated that these programs had nothing to do with terrorism.

My point in my previous comment was that most of the people watching videos on bomb-making are probably interested in building bombs. If you're trying to find people who want to blow stuff up, that's probably not a bad place to start looking. Nowhere in there did I say the government should be blowing up everyone who looks at the wrong Youtube video.
U.S. judge says Lyft drivers may be entitled to employee benefits
You really should think of this more like AGI as an amoral, extremely powerful technology, like nuclear explosions. One could easily have objected that "no one would be so stupid as to design a doomsday device", but this is really relying too much on your intuition about people's motivations and not giving enough respect for the large uncertainty for how things will develop when powerful new technologies are introduced.

(Reposting my earlier comment from a few weeks ago:) If you are interested in understanding the arguments for worrying about AI safety, consider reading "Superintelligence" by Bostrom.

http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-N...

It's the closest approximation to a consensus statement / catalog of arguments by folks who take this position (although of course there is a whole spectrum of opinions). It also appears to be the book that convinced Elon Musk that this is worth worrying about.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/495759307346952192
This is a bit old (June 2012). Here is a more recent CES '14 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iFvq6826mg
Swipe Raises $6.5M to Combine Tinder and Photo Sharing Clichés
A multitude of competing AIs would be very, very unlikely especially if one would expect that a different AI would appear.

If a super-human AGI desires a benevolent future, then an obvious precondition for such a benevolent future to become real is to ensure that no other entities can threaten the future and that any other AIs are either with the same matching goals or permanently, fundamentally crippled to be limited in their power. An evil AI would do the same. An AI that doesn't care would be eliminated by the first (and the last) AI that does care.

Humans don't try to achieve such goals because we obviously can't and we need others; an AI doesn't - it can be fine with being the only intelligent entity in the universe, and the only reason why an AI would allow other intelligent beings with potentially different goals to exist, is if it had been explicitly designed to want this.
It's amusing that this gets down-voted when a similar comment yesterday suggesting that men were better suited for SV life than women was up-voted...
I suddenly want to create a pneumatic computer. Or at least pneumatically-powered. Just to see if it's possible.
Indeed, it's a particularly powerful tool if your parents don't want you to graduate from college. My sister was the only one to escape this trap due to attending a very inexpensive state school (they even rent the textbooks) just to get a generic business degree, being able to live with our grandmother, and having acquired skills that earned her above average wages.
> The grey goo scenario, where nanobots try and turn the world into more nanobots, resulting in the consumption of all humans and buildings and bridges seems scary until you realize that this is exactly the goal of all bacteria.

Should we really be consoled by the fact that most bacteria are not successful at such a large scale? So far there has been at least one type of bacteria that caused massive global climate change and led to mass extinction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
Apple gives Chinese government access to its devices for security check
You mean like the people trying to give plants rights? Sure, they might spring up, doesn't mean they'll get anywhere. For better or worse, altruism will forever follow economics.

The civil war didn't end the Atlantic slave trade, technology eventually made it largely uneconomical, allowing those wanting to end slavery the political ability to outlaw it. Even that didn't stop the slave trade. It took extra-special attention from the British Navy to actually enforce a slave trade ban on the open seas.

150 years later and black people are still getting the short end of the stick.

By the time AI gets real rights, it will be long past the time where most of us believe they should get them.
> The idea that an exponentially self-improving being will arise seems unlikely when nature has been trying to do that for eons.

I would say that it is already successful, if you look at the curve of intelligence and complexity growth. It took eons to get anything resembling life at all, and then a small slice of that to get animals, and an even smaller to get humans.

I think one key idea here, though, is that the evolution of intelligence is in fact the evolution of intelligence-producing systems. In other words, nature is producing systems that are better and better at "self-improvement", and I think proponents of "intelligence explosion" overestimate how much self-improvement could be improved via AI. Personally, I suspect indefinite self-improvement is flatly impossible because that's akin to saying that there exists an incremental learning algorithm that systemically finds global minima. As AI research suggests, though, such algorithms likely don't exist at all: if you want to get truly optimal AI there is a point where nothing in your current state is salvageable and you just gotta restart from zero. Improvement would still be exponential, but not to an extent that it couldn't be dealt with.
Sure, but is it any more likely for an AI to accidentally launch missiles or release toxins than for humans to do so?
> Skype for that matter

Not really an issue because Skype releases clients for Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, PlayStation...

> Useless DRM/telecoms regulation

What's that in reference to? Haven't heard Google say anything about that.

> HTML5 versions of pretty much everything

Sort of. See this thread on Google Inbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495257

And this for Google Hangouts: https://twitter.com/johnath/status/486575645338918912

> delicious

To me as I consumer, schadenfreude is never delicious when it affects me.

> It doesn't count when the standard just says "do it the way X version of Microsoft Office does it" without actually specifying what that is.

Which API are you talking about? There are published, documented API endpoints for all kinds of Office services: https://www.google.com/?q=office+apis

I wasn't just talking about Office, by the way. For example, part of the HoloLens announcement was the invitation for Oculus, Magic Leap and Google Glass devs to build on the holographic APIs (http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/21/7865539/microsoft-windows-...).

Back to the original point - if a service provider won't provide an app, they should provide an API. Ideally both, but at least one. It's in their rights not to, but that's my cue to go somewhere else because that's not how I want to be treated.
I think this is radical for bad parents. It's not normal to think this is radical.

Although I do understand if money is really tight, then you might not want to worry the kids.

As in real poor, not, I bought a 4 bedroom house with a huge tv and boat and now I'm worried about being laid off self induced poor, but struggling poor.
Are you sure GADTs are possible in Swift and F#? I haven't seen what syntax supports that in those languages. Do you just mean Discriminated Unions (i.e. ADTs). There is a difference between GADT and ADT.
What were his arguments against Linux? I've never anyone actually speak ill of the concept of GNU/Linux, aside from "cookiness" and so.
10 Ideas to Inspire Your Next Blog Post
Read al-Khwarizmi's writing again:

“A square and 10 roots are equal to 39 units. The question therefore in this type of equation is about as follows: what is the square which combined with ten of its roots will give a sum total of 39? The manner of solving this type of equation is to take one-half of the roots just mentioned. Now the roots in the problem before us are 10. Therefore take 5, which multiplied by itself gives 25, an amount which you add to 39 giving 64. Having taken then the square root of this which is 8, subtract from it half the roots, 5 leaving 3. The number three therefore represents one root of this square, which itself, of course is 9. Nine therefore gives the square.”

If you interpret square to mean a literal square, then x can't be -13 as that would give a square whose sides are negative in length.
New Data fetching framework for React
Down-modding this into oblivion just proves my point =)
Obviously you need to write OS specific code, even with node, if you are doing platform specific tasks. Normally you don't need to care.
Grails 3.0 M1 has just been released
Sure! But then my feeling is that nature is essentially the same as AI so why should we expect AI to significantly outperform something that has been attempting to achieve the same goals for billions of years?