skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
if you are physically assaulted but do not involve the police immediately, I have very little sympathy. clearly you want some level of emotional vengeance, not justice, and I have no interest in listening to you complain. direct your energies properly.
This might be a really unpopular thing to say around this site, but it honestly scares me that Sam Altman cares so much about this particular topic (the risks of AI). He stands to have a ton of influence over it in the coming years - enough to even lead the charge - and I can't imagine he is smart enough to do it right. If he fucks up, we are all fucked.
IMB is a yes. All of it. Devour. Much like the works of Steven Erikson (Not SF) they're fantastically detailed, which isn't everyone's taste.

The Cyberiad is a trove of beauty, ridiculous, sublime, educational - touching on things as far apart as philosophy and maxwell's demon. Amazing that they're not even in English given the wonderous translation.
I should've been more explicit. I meant that it's better to just give them the money than to make them work for it.
These types of articles are always like: "Americans are so backwards for using Imperial measurements instead of metric!!!1!". I will take them seriously when they advocate abolishing the idiotic hour/minute/second paradigm of time. The reasons for not switching from 24/60/60 to a base-10 time measurement is as equally valid as American's reason for not switching from Imperial to Metric.
No, this includes everything. Houses and cars specifically. These aren't retail. The data is true no matter how you slice it and as I said it is about all the money spent in the economy including big ticket items like houses and cars, not just retail as you falsely suggest.

If you are interested in data also check how many percent car purchases are done because wife wanted them. Cars salesmen in their training are specifically told that a guy showing up without wife isn't serious about the purchase. They will always tell you to come back with wife. Because she is the one telling the guy to pull the trigger. You just pull the trigger. But you won't do it without her approval. The same with house.
You "computers cientists" are such pedants.
goto is merely a tool that got a bad rap simply because it has its roots in basic assembler, back before structured programming was a thing. I agree with you regarding its use, but I'm still surprised by just how many seemingly educated programmers jump onto the "never use goto" cargo cult because of a paper title that they misattribute to Djikstra.

Ironically, from the code I've seen, I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually misuse goto, probably because the people who use it actually know what they're doing. That's just anecdotal on my part, but still.
Goto is the only way to cleanly and concisely implement state-teardown in exceptional conditions in C. The alternative is endless code duplication or to bloat your code with huge numbers of tiny functions with complex cascading call semantics.
You're right, and in an interesting way. This is a great illustration of how irrelevant intent is to systemic racism. The devs weren't intentionally racist in their name check code, but their ignorance - the stuff they didn't know they don't know - led to a very racist policy. Good intentions are not sufficient for eradication of systemic racism.

Edit - it appears the name check wasn't formalized into actual code, but rather policy.
Hugely excited about OpenWorm!

More great stuff about the robotic embodiment of OpenWorm:

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligenc...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745639

Eyewire.org is also really cool -- for example, they have already made an important discovery into how our eyes detect motion: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/online-gamers-help...
You don't get your face/head wet when ice swimming, I suppose?
>without telling them what IS okay

This issue I would have, if I weren't married and didn't have to worry about this, is that if you talk to enough women about "what is ok" you come to learn that nothing is. Talking to or interacting with a woman in any way, as a man, is not acceptable unless that interaction is wanted by the woman. And there's no way to know whether it is wanted since you can't read minds. Many women claim that they should have the right to be left alone and not talked to, even if someone is attempting to do it 100% out of friendliness because the woman has no way of knowing he's only being friendly.
> "Would you try to understand the universe by simulating every molecule? What would you have achieved? It’s going to be just as complicated as the real thing and you won’t understand it any better."

I'm pretty sure cosmologists would love to make simulations to a molecular precision. They currently simulate gas clouds with supercomputers in order to study the formation of galaxies and the more precise the better.
There was also the much hated clone, Obtvse.[1]

[1]: https://github.com/natew/obtvse
Interestingly enough, there is one unofficial API http://pygments.appspot.com/, but supports an outdated version (1.5).
Social Media Hacks Think Again
I'm not following how the "service sector" is any kind of answer to the problems and issues we are facing with regards to automation and labour.
It's a 64x difference. And even that is grossly understating it because most database systems feature write coalescing.

It's actually "ironic" in that database systems were built to avoid random IO because it was glacially slow on spinning rust storage. They do everything possible to avoid it, and in actual, empirical metrics running databases on flash the write amplification has been very low, and hardly mirrors the claims throughout this thread.
That is certainly one point of view but the legions of highly educated unemployed in Western nations suggest that it isn't actually true.
For at least two big reasons:

* A social outing lets people pretend to be friends, and to act like friends, while skipping the months and years of effort it takes to actually become friends. It's an "act the part, be the part" trick.

* Intoxicants create a polite fiction that allows people to be direct and blunt in a way they can't in a formal business setting, which expedites dealmaking.
> 1. Hot-button issue arises wherein the majority of the science agrees with one position, but very specific legitimate issues persist.

Yep. I suppose I'm "anti-GMO" in the sense that I view interspecies and intra-species gene transfer (sometimes called horizontal gene transfer) to be different animals. It's been a real let down when I've brought these things up and I'm treated like I just insulted a recently deceased person.

Then I have to "pull my nerd card" to be treated like a human being again and I'm left wondering why we treat people this way. A great part of science is we get to use evidence and leave emotions out of it. If I'm speaking to somebody with a biology background I'm happy to listen, question my beliefs and learn, but dealing with the anti-anti-GMO crowd only makes me feel combative. I can only imagine how people without a science background feel when they try to join the discussion.
People (and programmers) have many false beliefs. Combine this with a strong desire to automate things and reduce recourse to properly trained humans and you end up with a particular form of tyranny - as we see here.

I'm surprised no one's linked to the below posts already.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programm...
JavaScript has changed a lot since. The way we do asynchronous computation (callbacks -> promises and coroutines), the idioms we like/hate, the runtime performance penalty of different styles.

It's true that crockford, javascript-allonge and JS Garden are all good resources but they are simply not as up to date as YDRNJS and they're not as covering.

This book doesn't cover 'with' in depth or anything like it. It explains idioms that have formed since "The Good Parts" came out - that was a long time ago and a lot happened since.
"The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it."

That's not that simple. The industrial revolution initially destroyed a lot of jobs because it replaced human labor with steam machines.

It created new qualified jobs, it is true, because these new intricate machines would require advanced skills to be maintained - a reminiscence of today's software engineering jobs - but it destroyed a lot of jobs in agriculture and textile because you could produce more with a fraction of the labor.

To the point that people would manifest and destroy steam machines accusing them of stealing jobs (see "Luddites").

Let's not forget that what is typically called "industrial revolution" spans over a century and it took a while for the industrial revolution to create a lot of new jobs (approx the second half of the 19th century), and those new jobs were initially very poorly paid.
Octavia Butler wrote some amazing stuff too.
I take a lateral view of technological evolution. Software is essential, sort of like how fire and the wheel were essential. It's a supremely useful tool as it turns out. But it's not a reason to exist. The reasons to exist are still family, love, happiness, etc. Those never change.
The problem is money and money is intimately driven by basic material supply and demand laws. If you dive deeper, materials become a non-issue if energy is limitless or at least very abundant. So, energy is actually the problem. Thanks to industrialization and computation we are getting closer to tech that will make energy nearly limitless (between say renewable and fission/fusion tech). Once that happens, practically limitless water, materials production, food production, etc become a reality when coupled with robotics.

My theory is that there will come a point where humans are allowed to pursue happiness because the individual humans will no longer be considered a "drain" on a limited system. For this reason alone I've always thought the privatization of energy production in America was a TERRIBLE idea. Of all the cards to hold close, this should have been priority number one.

Anyway, as we approach energy critical mass, more and more humans are being thrown to the wayside. It doesn't have to be this way. If we collectively held a belief that we can achieve limitless energy together, then we could find ways to help those who aren't able to cope with technology still find happiness knowing full well it was a temporary band-aid.
What about the UVA rape case? Fabricated story, targeted a fraternity, lots of extralegal unpleasantness. Throughout, the hounding of those young men was carried out by people serenely confident that they were acting to protect young women's sexual freedom.

Julian Sanchez has a nice write-up of a similar discussion:

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2015/01/27/chait-speech/
Ask HN: This is my first startup, what do you think about it?
Hi everyone, I'm a mechatronics engineer working on my first startup and I'm kind of nervous about how should I do things for getting initial traction and to launch. I've read a few books about it, we use the lean startup methodology, I've watch a lot of entrepreneurship video blogs, conferences, YC online startup classes and now I'm trying to apply all that knowledge in practice, that's why your feedback will be a major help for my team and I.

We're working in this mobile app focus in connect sellers with the people who want their products/service immediately by personal messages, no middle men, just a direct conversation between sellers and buyers, we call this app... Sellow.

The app will be available to download the third week of March and I want to know what you think about the work that my team and I are doing.

You can visit our home here: http://sellow.me

thanks and all the best!

Israel
You're obviously unfamiliar with gutsybroads.com
It's a breadth and depth thing. You need both.
Collecting basic income doesn't preclude you from also working, if your current job becomes automated. Write a book. Learn to draw. Sell inefficiently produced but quirky hand-made widgets on Etsy. Or go back to school and learn to do something else. The whole point of basic income is to make those latter options feasible.
unfortunately the actual article is paywalled.

In the abstract they say there are 2 theories of the plume's source:

1) CO2 or H2O ice particulate reflecting solar radiation. They don't state where the particulate is coming from, but they claim the plume is likely cyclic in nature.

2) strong auroral emissions 1000x the brightness of earth's aurora. Caused by a strong magnetic anomaly.
I think folks are taking issue with the notion that it must be comparable to be viable on a large scale. If you can charge at home, then you don't routinely need to "fill up" because you have more than enough range for your daily drive. If many public parking spots start to include a plug (a whole lot less capital-intensive than a gas station), that need goes down further. Only long-haul driving needs fast public charging, and the supercharger tech already available is adequate for most people's needs, and likely to improve iteratively.
This is a very skewed view of how things are for these construction workers. I'll give you the benefit of doubt that you have chosen a terrible example to make your point. But in general, 'jobs that don't come back' are usually replaced by higher skilled, more 'meaningful' jobs. It is related to the so called 'lump of labor fallacy'. See more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy and here in an NSF white paper on employment and technology, https://www.aeaweb.org/econwhitepapers/white_papers/David_Au...

Now, on to the Indian construction worker. Their lot is pretty miserable. Anecdotes: there were two or three construction sites (homes and apartment buildings) that I witnessed first hand within a 1 block radius around my home in India in the approximately 10 years when real estate was booming, and I remember at least three severe injuries. They don't wear eye or face protection. There is dust everywhere. Children are usually brought up on the construction site because that's where the workers live. The children are routinely exposed to the same dust as their adult worker-parents. Some times children as young as 6 years old lend their hand in the manual labor.

Now, let's ask this question: If they used more machines, would such terrible conditions continue to exist? The answer is obvious: a big resounding no. There would be fewer employees, higher skilled ones, higher wages, better work practices would follow.

There is a reason we have the Jacquard loom and not a thousand weavers and seamsters and seamstresses.

I would like to look for citations, but even a cursory Google Image search on Indian construction workers (vis a vis, say American construction worker) can show you how egregiously wrong your reasoning is.
I subscribe to a bit of both -- the Broken Comb approach. Being a little of everything but never getting deep into anything is just as dangerous as being a one-trick pony. http://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/06/27/broken-comb-people/
Someone makes an AI whose goal is to maximize shareholder revenue bar none. No conscience, no idea that people might be valuable somehow in some abstract sense, nothing. Shareholder revenue (as measured with a stock price!) and nothing else.

It doesn't take the AI long to figure out that trading in various markets is the most profitable endeavor and the one best suited to its skills. And it starts to maximize away and does quite well.

During this process it somehow ends up on its own and is no longer owned (or controlled) by anyone anymore, but because the AI is in charge and it pays the bills, nobody stops it from continuing. It would be like a bitcoin mining rig in a colo facility that's got a script to keep paying the colo in bitcoin whose owner dies. What mechanism stops that mining rig from mining forever? Same idea but for the AI which has substantially more resources than a "pay every month" script.

The AI with very large amounts of money at its disposal continues to trade but also looks into private equity or hedge-fund-type activities ala Warren Buffet and starts to buy up large swaths of the economy. Because it has huge resources at its disposal it might do a great job of managing these companies or at least counselling their senior management. Growth continues.

Eventually the AI discovers that it generates more value for itself (through the web of interdependent companies it controls) and the economy that has grown up around it rather than for humanity and it continues to ruthlessly maximize shareholder value.

The people who could pull the plug at the colo (or at the many, redundant datacenters that this AI has bought and paid for) don't because it pays very, very well. The people who want to pull the plug can't get past security because that also pays well. Plus the AI has access to the same feeds that the NSA does and it has the ability to act on all the information it receives, so any organized effort to rebel gets quashed since bad PR is bad for the share price.

Most all of humanity except for the ones who serve the machine directly or indirectly don't have anything the machine wants and thus can't trade with it, and thus are useless. Its job is to maximize shareholder revenue (as defined by a stock price!) not care for a bunch of meatbags who consume immense amounts of energy while providing fairly limited computational or mechanical power (animals are rarely more than 10% efficient, often less in thermodynamic terms) and since there's no value in it, it isn't done.

The vast majority of human beings eventually die because they can't afford food, can't afford land, etc. It takes generations but humanity dwindles to less than 0.1% of the current population. The few who stay alive are glorified janitors.
Serious question: is properly handling the "Not Modified " status code really considered caching or is there a better name? Maybe client-side caching? HTTP caching in my mind is associated with something like varnish.
Do you want to be a really expensive Japanese sushi knife? Or a high-quality, extremely versatile Swiss army knife?

Those are the two career paths illustrated. Different people have difference preferences.
Some of them might even be judged as getting paid for a net negative effect to society...
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During Online shopping users can enter Zippie Codes instead of Shipping or Billing Address.

Zippie(getzippie.com) is on AppStore. Check it out.

Here is the explainer video :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQqqKyGCA3o
I think you're overemphasizing Hickey's first thought. His second boils down to "be careful to recognize the actual game involved. Programming mastery has little to do with languages"

To me it sounds like he's saying "understand the underlying patterns and techniques that make good programs in any language" not "stick with one, and only one, language until you know it inside and out".
Pick up marketing and business skills in addition to web development skills, intern for an agency to learn how to hustle and network, intern for a product company to learn how to produce iteratively, and learn how to teach what you know even if you think everyone already knows.

Don't be afraid to specialize, over the years you'll have specialized in a number of areas as your interests and passions drift. Specializing can tell you what you do better than others.

Specializing can mean focusing on a framework but it can also mean focusing on a market. Don't always think in terms of code. For example, if you decided to focus on church sites you would be able to advertise by word of mouth (church leaders talk to other church leaders) and you would learn the needs of that industry making it easier to anticipate the needs of others in that market. Fish around, pick a few things to focus on that inspires you, and focus on that. Refine your strategy as you go.
The block chain is a sequence of bits, of course. It's roughly immutable, other than (obviously) appending to it.

I have never claimed that anyone can steal bits. I said that people can steal bitcoins. Bitcoins are not just bits, any more than the USD in my bank account is just bits. If you take money from my bank account without my permission, I hope we can agree that you have stolen money from me. The same applies to bitcoins for precisely the same reasons.

> The analogy is imperfect sure. Copying a movie doesn't keep you from selling that movie to someone else.

But that's exactly the problem. Larceny (and theft, more generally) is traditionally defined as the taking of someone's property with the intention of depriving them of that property.

> But the only thing that keeps you from double-speding a bitcoin is the external confirmation process. Bitcoins aren't inherently scarce--the protocol makes them that way, just like copyright makes digital works artificially scarce.

I'm not sure what your point is here. Bitcoins are not inherently scarce, because they don't inherently exist. Someone had to invent and implement the Bitcoin network, obviously. We are (hopefully) agreeing on the definition of the word "bitcoin," and thus we would agree for instance that 10 years ago no bitcoins existed. You can't have a bitcoin unless the Bitcoin network exists, and thus in that sense bitcoins are inherently scarce. The same can be said of USD, or financial assets like stocks and bonds, but I would guess that we agree those can be stolen.
Why should anyone ever be put in such a position where they even have to think of saying something like that? Your entire framing of the situation is exactly why it is a cultural issue. Why does sexual harassment have to devolve to physical interaction before it can be called out? Why is it "worth exploring" potentially discrediting aspects of the victim's stories, but not worth exploring the events that lead up to the story with good faith interpretations?
I think you have to balance the two and not put all your eggs in the same basket.

Choose one or two language and get mastery from these, but also look for other languages to learn from.

That way, you'll have a balanced portfolio.
In an economy where there aren't a lot of jobs and a lot of poverty, just about any decent job would give someone dignity. In those economies, it's probably cheaper to have human labor than machines.
"Lone" is also the 13th most common name for females in Denmark.

Source: http://dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/navne/navne-i-hele-befolkni...
I think Hickey is referring to more of an abstract "level up", while Norvig is talking about a general accrual of specific skills.

Think how all programming languages can be reduced to lambda calculus or Turing machines. And think how design patterns and algorithms can exist across all programming paradigms. If you can master design patterns and algorithms in one general-purpose language, then to pick up other languages you just need to learn the syntax and idioms of that language.

On the other hand, a quick way to expose yourself to different programming concepts is to take a crash course in very different languages, as Norvig suggests. The risk with this method is that you never attain mastery in any one thing ("jack of all trades, master of none", s/trades/programming languages/)

I think Hickey is right in this one, but fundamentally they are talking about two different things. Hickey is talking about mastery, while Norvig is talking about "programming success" ("success" is word with a slippery definition, but to be "successful" definitely does not require one to be a "master")