skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Well, I do have around 100k years of evidence that the ending of human life is not so easy

We have 4 billion years of evidence that nearly ending life on Earth is easy and has happened multiple times. You would not be standing here today if that were not the case, the previous die off put the dinosaurs to the side and made space for mammals to become what they are.
Yes? Either I'm misunderstanding your comment, or we're just running in a circle now.
It's totally superficial, but I find it fun. It's something to check once in a while and be like "hey, I have a dark green box. I wonder how many times I committed that day."

When I left my previous job, they revoked my Github access and I lost 3k commits on the calendar and it was a bummer. I wasn't throwing a fit or anything. I just had to start over :).
Similar idea on HN a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9022311
Negotiating – 5 Tips to Improve Your Odds
A beginner's guide to GitHub
According to this post it seems like you need 624 consecutive values from mt_rand to recover the seed: https://jazzy.id.au/2010/09/22/cracking_random_number_genera...

(I agreed with everything you said, but it was just hard to follow without understanding how mt rand is usually cracked)
It would be interesting to see full length feature films developed in this technique.
Yes exactly that. In the same way you need a camera to be a photographer, and you need to be competent in its operation, but the endless search for a better camera is not what photography is about.
And if he said $5M ... Would we be reading about an awesome investor and partner on her blog today?
Definitely, top of my list.
A Crucial Flaw in Democracy and a Five Dollar Solution [1:02:37]
Interesting point. But it brings up that scarier part of AI. I believe AI will become better at humans at mental processes far before it will be better than human physical labor. For exactly the points you mention. This is already becoming true for many logistical industries. What happens if AI replaces all the high level decision making positions and humans are relegated to handling the low level "last mile" tasks? Where is the inherit quality that makes AI replace unskilled as opposed to skilled labor? Order pickers still exist but the employees that handled what to pick, what truck to put it in and in what order to do it were out of work quite a while ago.
Here's how we stop AI from ending humanity: deny them property rights, require human approval of all AI decisions.

Every single argument for AI destroying humanity requires humanity consenting to being destroyed by the AI in some way. I don't think we're that dumb.
heh...

> (#11) People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.

Well, not really sure how to fix that one!. Maybe one day postgres will be able to index a column of handwritten images, but until then I think I'll just stick with being 99% ok.
Valve has a concept of T-shaped people. You have a broad range of skills and you have one domain that you know really well. Know 8-12 languages, by good with 2. Similarly, if you are marketing guy knowing what EBITA is may help you.
'Things like focus groups, market fit, etc. are not recipes to build amazing products, but rather ways to avoid making really bad product'

Never thought of it that way. I like this
> When I was in India ...

Useless jobs are endemic in India. Once, I was in a Mumbai apartment building with several elevators, and one of them had a full-time operator, despite being a normal, modern elevator. Why? "Because he needs a job."

Many places in India, the lawn is "mowed" by a bunch of guys bending over with scythes. Not even when the job could be easily done by one person with a push mower. Why? "Jobs."

And there's construction. Laundry. And so on...

To be honest, India has so many people (and labor is so cheap) that I'm not sure what a better solution would be. Would the poorest still be able to make a living after being displaced by automation? I don't know enough about basic income to say how it could work in a nation of 1.2 billion people.
“Equation Group” ran the most advanced hacking operation ever uncovered
> I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually misuse goto

I've lived through the 80's, when 8-bit Microsoft BASIC was a popular programming language. Misuse of GOTO's was quite common, albeit unavoidable.
فيلم the dramatices a comedy
You can't have a reasonable assurance of privacy unless your software is open source.
When Grandmasters Blunder: Even the best make mistakes
Interesting... I don't live in India, I'm born and raised in the US and live in Colorado.

I don't actually think that India is great, either. But thanks for guessing.

There are obvious problems either way... but to look at another commenter who posted the Voltaire quote, that is more along the lines of my thinking.
Since I am not an economist or very experienced in these matters may I ask what would prevent the cost of goods simply going up due to basic income being supplied? Wouldn't we end up in the same situation all over again except the government would then be forced to write checks as the population would be dependent on them due to increased costs?
I liked what I first heard described as "t shaped" people when I read the Valve new starter guide [0]. That is people whose experience covers a fair amount of breadth with pockets of depth. The breadth is good because knowing a lot about what is out there helps you know where to look when you encounter new problems. Depth is also good because you don't really develop your understanding of how things are put together and what the challenges are until you get into a lot of detail. Multiple areas of depth, particularly where they are related (say knowing oo and functional style programming well) are particularly useful because what you learn in one area expands on what you learnt from the other. You can start to really understand what the design trade offs were and what works well in different situations.

There isn't one right answer though. The answer depends a lot on what you want to do. Do you want to lead a team, become an architect, go contracting, become a consultant, go into academia, join a Google, join a start up, write financial software, help cure cancer, invent new ways to do things, become an expert? There are lots of ways you can develop a career in software and whatever happens will most likely be part chance.

Don't worry about it too much, except to make sure you don't get too comfortable in a particular area. If you keep trying to challenge yourself and doing things that are interesting, you will keep getting better. Doing things that are interesting to you is important because it'll help you avoid getting too hung up on what everybody else knows and will help fuel you through the parts that are painful or tedious.

[0] - http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...
Programming languages matter some, but algorithms and data structures matter a hell of a lot more.

While it is true that learning different programming paradigms can help you evolve as a programmer, I strongly believe (I have been programming professionally for about 20 years) that that is far from the best way to evolve as a developer, and learning algorithms and data structures will help you "level up" faster and better.

The reason is simple. Programming languages are a medium of transforming programmer intent into something the computer can execute (perhaps indirectly). This is not an easy task by any means, but all an ideal (nonexistent) general purpose programming language can hope to achieve is the reduction of what is known as accidental complexity. Programming languages vary only in how much burden, and -- just as important -- what kind of burden they place on you when you commit your chosen algorithm from your mind to code on the screen.

Knowledge of algorithms, on the other hand, will help you tackle the far more important essential complexity of the problem at hand.

So, in a way, focusing on programming languages is indeed a distraction, at least as long as you haven't yet familiarized yourself with the more fundamental -- and more useful -- tools of computer science.
To echo what others have said, and what worked for me: work at a small agency for a few years. Learn how to write good contracts, handle invoicing, and communicate with clients. Then take a few contracts on the side so you can figure out a rate that works for you, and so you can work on those skills in an environment where you aren't relying on the income. You'll know when the time is right to switch to full time freelancing.

Once you have proven yourself, you won't have to compete on price. Good clients will come to you.
I am so glad I installed the chrome extension "Butt To Butt Plus 1.2". I will never go back.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/butt-to-butt-plus/...

http://gizmodo.com/a-chrome-extension-that-replaces-cloud-wi...
I think a subtext of this, which remained unsaid, is that this kind of oversight would be most effective by an overarching organization having dominion over all suborganizations. That is to say, i don't think it would be as effective if this is instituted nation-by-nation.

But the conclusion of this, brings up a dystopian, at least in many minds, idea of a one world government.

But, if you want to place controls, and it's in effect voluntary by from the point of view of each nation-state, why would one state which wants to overcome any other state subject itself to this kind of embargo?

Let's say you're Japan. China poses an economic (and thus, arguably, an existential) threat, why would Japan feel obliged to put their research to sleep?

To me, unless everyone agrees, and we have verification mechanisms, and violations have severe consequences exceeding any benefits from this technology, there will always be an actor who thinks they can sneak by and pounce on the others.
Although I am one, I will never understand the mentality of the American worker. You would rather give up your time and freedom to have someone tell you want to do (and that's "dignified") rather than be given total freedom which with ... you would sit on your ass and do nothing? Is there really such an utter lack of creativity out there that that's the best use of your time you could think of if you didn't have to work?
Show HN: Edit native mobile apps live without installing an SDK
Yes, that along with dealing with Last-Modified, If-Not-Modified, ETag, and other similar HTTP Headers is what is meant by HTTP Caching.

From what I can tell Varnish uses these same concepts to do what they do (caching HTTP reverse proxy).

See

* https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7234#section-1

* http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html

* https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Caching_FA...
The difference between a high school diploma and a bachelor's degree is halving the unemployment rate. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm
Oh they're a forerunner that's for sure.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Prism_sl...
Agreed. Let's take it one step further than let them use their fingernails. An honest day's work for all!
It was a Christmas gift. I didn't ask for it. So, I don't have any particularly strong feelings about my watch other than "it's neat". I didn't spend any money on it.

Yes, Apple sells tons of smartphones to people who could get one just as good for much less money. Neat trick, if you can pull it off. Ecosystem lockin helps, I suspect.
I've been consulting/freelancing for about 13 years professionally, full-time. Started when I was 23. From day 1 until today, for me, it's all been "who you know" and "tell a friend" when it comes to getting new business.

I started asking friends and family if they needed a website, help with web work, or an office IT guy.

I found a few people who needed a website that way, did a great job, and they told more people about my services, getting me a bit more work.

How I REALLY started getting business is when I agreed to do some IT work for a couple real estate offices about once a week. The offices agreed to let me offer my web development services to the agents when I was there.

I got a lot of new clients, and those agents knew people in all types of businesses and started referring me to others, and from there, it's been non-stop word of mouth.

I also hooked up with a couple print-advertising businesses locally that needed to refer off their web work.

I stopped doing IT work after the first year.

I advertised once in the Yellow pages in 2004. Got 1 client out of it, and it was NOT a good situation. I will only work by word of mouth anymore because it's too stressful otherwise.

Not to mention, selling myself is MUCH easier when the client is referred by a good friend of their's who has already told them that I am THE person to work with. That way, when they call or email me, they are ready to get to work, and I don't have to wine and dine - which I suck at so much it's embarrassing.

I'm not offering advice here, just sharing my story because we all get the ball rolling differently, and hopefully reading about all our experiences helps you think outside the box to find your way into a long-lasting freelancing business.
Set Preferred Payment Currency for Your AWS Account
I totally get why people don't want to be tracked, even on public roads, but the transportation engineering/urban planning part of me feels like the (anonymized) data would be FANTASTIC for transportation agencies who spend time/money on getting similar but less accurate data through surveys.

I considered trying to figure out if people could voluntarily submit their trip/GPS data (also anonymized) to agencies instead of the traditional survey but have little idea how to do that kind of stuff.
Why do you want to start a startup?
I'm an American, when I think "justice system" I think of justice not on a personal level, but on a punishment level. Justice is having a punishment that fits the crime. If someone wanted personal justice, I think they usually qualify it with "personal" before "justice".
Just wanted to point out that the lump of labor fallacy is not a fallacy in the same way a logical fallacy is - whether it is fallacious or not is dependent on what economics axioms you choose to accept. In fact, the history of the fallacy leaves it far from settled[1]

[1]: http://econpapers.repec.org/article/tafrsocec/v_3a65_3ay_3a2...
Quite the blast from the past although it doesn't quite square with my recollections of the time. While the LCD screens of the time were pretty awful, I'm not sure I agree that "The word processing and spreadsheet packages commonly available for them are intended to accomplish tasks to which laptop computers are simply not well suited." Grey-on-grey LCD notwithstanding, a system like the DG/One was as suited to spreadsheets or word processing as a desktop.

My memory is that price was really the big issue. Laptops--as opposed to luggables--carried a big premium over desktop systems that were already (by today's standards) pretty pricey. It's probably also worth noting that most business travelers wouldn't have been able to connect to company systems from the road (and many wouldn't have had email anyway) so the utility of traveling with a computer in 1985 would have been pretty limited in most cases.
>> They also hosted an underground art show featuring replicas of paintings stolen in a 2010 heist.

Uhh...yeah, sure.

Fairly unconvincing denial:

>> I can’t help but ask: Did UX steal the paintings from the Museum of Modern Art? Wouldn’t that be the perfect way to alert the French to the appalling job their government does protecting national treasures? Kunstmann denies it with a convincing curtness. “That,” he says, “is not our style.”
> We can —and we will— redistribute wealth

But should we? And if so : why ? Also : who's "we"?
The short answer? Game theory.

The longer answer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer%27s_dilemma

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

And, more broadly:

http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html#coordination_problems
Theory #2 sounds like something Mr. Data would say to explain a bright colorful swirl that the away team has just encountered.

(Of course it's an optical post effect, so the actors are just trying their best to look astonished.)
The pecking order of the sciences ...

Psychologists answer only to Biologists.

Biologists answer only to Chemists.

Chemists answer only to Physicists.

Physicists answer only to Mathematicians.

Mathematicians answer only to Philosophers.

I would add that Software Engineers answer only to Mathematicians.
Also programming languages and frameworks quickly go out of date, while the fundmentals like algorithms help you out no matter which language you're working in.
Can someone ELI5-with-a-CS-degree why I should be concerned about AI ending human life?
I don't see these are in conflict at all. Both talk about spending the long period of time needed to attain Mastery. Mastering concepts is essential but mastering your way of working so as to maximize your productivity and the effectiveness of your practice is equally important. You do not want to be a dilettante who knows everything but produces nothing of substance or value.

I wrote a book specifically on how to go from good to great or at least how to become the best you can be... targeted to developers in the first 5 or maybe even 10 years of their career.

Level Up! How to Become a Great Professional Software Developer

https://leanpub.com/level_up

None of it has to do with any specific language or platform. The techniques I describe are not the only way to do it but I guarantee if you take at least some of them to heart, you will improve a great deal. I do espouse going deep on at least one platform or stack for at least several years. You might even get so formal as to build a competency map to track your progress. Much of what you learn is transferrable. 10 years or 10,000 hours will get you there no matter what but following the techniques I describe will get you there faster.

Steven Talcott Smith,
Master Developer, Chief Happiness Officer,
ÆLOGICA

http://aelogica.com | Great Rails teams for hire

http://appexpress.io | Rapid Application Development
but I'm a bit older (late 30s), I don't want to do the "hostel" thing

Assuming you haven't done much traveling, you'd be surprised at who shows up at hostels. It varies greatly by area, but it's not all the partying, early 20's kids that you might imagine.

Also, there are many things besides classic hostels that sort of fall into the hostel category. For example, I stayed in a very nice guest house in Thailand, and in a great dormitory-style apartment in Tokyo.
> It would be hard to argue that inequality increased between

Based on averages, why would it be? Inequality does not measure where you are coming from, it measures the relative economic distance between groups now. We can all live better these days and yet have a far greater difference in wealth between the richest and poorest.
If you managed to get in before they upgrade the guards at the gate then you're in, otherwise you're stuck outside.

Change of policy over time turns what was possible in the past to "no longer acceptable" today.

Keep in mind that you have no right and no control over anything in the facebook world and you can explain every quirks.
Even if I had more revenue I would rather have a more unified hosting setup with billing occurring at one place. The situation is pretty confusing for me right now - I'm a minimalist and I like simplicity. Speaking of that, I've just realized that if I could simply get rid of WordPress, I wouldn't need such complexity. And I think this is what I must do. What kind of junk is a piece of software that requires so many engineers' work (theme designers, plugin developers and sys admins) to load at normal speeds? This is ridiculous, my site is mostly static. I've been playing with Hugo (gohugo.io) this weekend for another project and I've just realized it might be a perfect match.
Ruby wrapper for YouTube-dl
Going that direction, one could argue that what you open source might not be what you are running in production.
Most cited reason I've seen is the patents/copyright mess. Just look at how System Shock 2 is handled for example. Patches being anonymously contributed by a group/person that is said to have access to the source.

There's also the situation with the lost source code. For example, as I've understood it, the only reason the Dark Engine source code became available were due to someone finding it in an old Dreamcast SDK.
Apple has released a tiny number of products that sell extremely well and are very profitable, in Japan and English-speaking markets (USA, UK, Australia, etc).

Their competitors have released more products that cater to a wider range of people, and dominate the market elsewhere. In most European markets for example iPhone sits at around 10% market share. It spikes when they release a new version of the iPhone once a year then quickly settles back down again.

So it depends how you define success. Apple could be successful for a long time in the same way Microsoft were successful for the last 15 years - by being highly profitable and cranking out new versions of their flagship products, whilst releasing very few new notable hits.
It's a Patrick Stewart sketch, not sure from exactly what. Quite humorous though.
Still, note what they don't say that the user data will be encrypted before transferred to the cloud, or even more important for Europeans, that the European data would be managed strictly in Europe. Interestingly, the money received in Europe is without problem for all these big companies so managed to not end in the US (avoiding the taxes), the data, it seems still not important?
It's more complicated than that. The poster here isn't "cracking" MT, he's recovering its internal state completely. Partial information gets you to a place where you can run a cracking-like process against a system of constraints, though.

In any case: as Stefan Esser points out on Twitter, Wordpress doesn't rely on mt_rand for its password tokens.
Altman sees the problem, but is vague about what to do about it.

He's right that this is a new thing. It's not "software", per se, it's automation in general. For almost all of human history, the big problem was making enough stuff. Until about 1900 or so, 80-90% of the workforce made stuff - agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and construction. That number went below 50% some time after WWII. It's continued to drop. Today, it's 16% in the US.[1] Yet US manufacturing output is higher than ever.

Post-WWII, services took up the slack and employed large numbers of people. Retail is still 9% of employment. That's declining, probably more rapidly than the BLS estimate. Online ordering is the new normal. Amazon used to have 33,000 employees at the holiday season peak. They're converting to robots.

After making stuff and selling stuff, what's left? The remaining big employment areas in the US:

State and local government, 13%.
That's mostly teachers, cops, and healthcare.
(The Federal government is only 1.4%).
Health care and social assistance, 11%.
Professional and business services, 11%.
(Not including IT; that's only 2%)
Leisure and hospitality, 8%
Self-employed, 6%.

That's about 50% of the workforce. All those areas are growing, sightly. For now, most of those are difficult to automate. That's what the near future looks like.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm
[2] http://deadmalls.com/
Pretty sure if an arms dealer promoted, even indirectly, the use of their firearms for illegal purposes, they'd also get some people going through the justice system.
I assure you this is not a troll, I'm trying to figure out your thought process.

How is one dignified and the other not?