skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What he seems to be implying is that there are investment funds that exist solely for private equity investments, i.e. investments in startups as "VC" money. If that's true, and it's true that stuff like pension funds are sinking money into these "Equity Crowd Funds," then we're in real big trouble.
… that deliberately takes routes which maximise your exposure to its owners advertising, services and products.
Close, but a more accurate generalization might read: "Nobody is an expert. Therefore everyone can add to the debate, provided their argument has merit."

>There are actually people who are studying AGI full time and have made it their life work, regardless of whether you know about it or not.

You mean like the people at MIRI? In a previous post, you suggest that most of them don't deserve any play at all on the topic.

>How do you figure? There are AGI journals[1], conferences[2], speaker circuits, hackathons etc...So I think you just don't know about them.

Oh but I do, and my statement still stands regardless. AGI does not yet exist. The field itself is in its infancy, and hardly established relative to other fields. As such, there are no experts, nor any consensus, at least not in any authoritative sense.

If you insist upon dismissing the input of select people entirely, then the bar for such a decision should be that they are authoritatively incorrect, or that they are authoritatively unqualified to speak. The problem is that there is nothing to derive such authority from yet, precisely because the field is in its infancy.

>The problem however with your analogy is that the current experts aren't analogous to explosives experts, they are more analogous to Szilárd/Einstein.

Unlike atomic weapons prior to the first test shot (or even prior to Fermi's Chicago Pile-1 experiment), AGI does not yet have a solid theoretical underpinning, let alone a proof of concept. Perhaps the best analogy lies somewhere in between our interpretations.

>This is why I advocate for an AGI Manhattan project.

Funny enough we're in total agreement here. I was even advocating for the same thing via another post in this thread.

>Not thinking about it, building towards it.

There is the question of timing. If the Manhattan Project itself was initiated earlier than it had been, there may not have been enough time for the aforementioned theoretical underpinnings to have been reasoned about to the level they were.
Thank you for sharing. This was a great read. Remind me of the time at lunch when one of my co-workers proudly claimed "Straight men always kill transgendered people."
It's not just Uber to get home; It's the logistics of picking up your car in the morning, paying the overnight fees/parking tickets for wherever you left it, and the additional time it's going to take you to get it back. Getting 'home' is not a solved problem with Uber, unless you have some serious foresight.
"Rather than autonomous cars, we should be focusing on Taleb's antifragile solutions like walking and biking."

Let me guess: you're in your 20s-30s and in perfect health, that you live in an urban environment, and that you don't have a family to shop for.
One of the features of the Y-Combinator context is that the interviews are designed to filter out false positives. So the process is focused on consistently selecting good character rather than correctly identifying both good and bad character. As YC often points out, plenty of good people don't get funded.

The emphasis on avoiding false positives means that errors are more easily identified: bad character stands out in the small pool of YC founders, whereas good character may be common in the pool of unselected applicants. In other words, it's more of a bloom filter than a dictionary.
Dividends and buybacks are functionally equivalent. Think of a company like a short, wide plastic container, half-full of water. Think of the air in the container as being the cash that the company has, and the water as the rest of its value. Each share in the company corresponds to some imaginary vertical slice of the container.

Now, you can apportion the value in the company in a few different ways, but there are two extreme ones:

1. The container is lying flat on the table. Each share has the same proportions of water and air as the others. If everyone's slice of the container is 10% air, you could pay it out to them evenly ("dropping the lid" of the container.) This shrinks the company, but it doesn't shrink the volume of "stuff" that anyone owns, modulo taxes.

2. You tip the container on its side so all of the air goes to one end. If the container is 10% air, now 10% of shares are all air, and the other 90% of the shares have no air at all. If you "paid out" the air now, you're doing a share buyback.

These accomplish basically the same thing for a company -- they have less cash (air) and less market cap (total volume).

They're about the same to the shareholders, too. If I have 10 shares in Yahoo and they use all their cash to do a buyback of 10% of their stock, I can sell one of my shares and be in exactly the same financial situation I would have been in had they decided to pay a 10% dividend (I'd have the same amount of cash, my shares would be worth the same amount, and they'd correspond to the same proportion of the company.)
I bet this is about liquidity.

(reads article)

Yep, it's about liquidity.

I bet the HN comments don't mention liquidity categories.

(reads comments)

Nope, not a single one.

How did I know!!!!??!!11

He's right that sub 25M is dead. You're either the next Uber or you're not getting anything. And if that's the case, then money will be on the sidelines waiting for the next big thing, not the next incremental thing. That will cause a shortage of liquidity for new proposals (the dreamers) and keep those capable of bigger proposals busy. (the titans) You will have a liquidity shortage for the dreamers.

He is right. Incremental investment is no longer possible. All you have is a gigantic bar-to-entry for dreamers and when the titan shortage becomes apparent (no amount of liquidity will reveal more titans to keep the game going), the dreamers will be flushed out. A few titans might go down in the fallout as well.

You either solve everything or nothing today. It's an untenable position that will keep liquidity on the sidelines and stifle innovation. It's also very bubbly as you have more money than there are opportunities (As classified by laws) to chase.
Im going to offer this info without comment: The first thing I check for when reading a blog article like this is Ctrl+ f " I ". The word "I" was stated 42 times in this post. Compare this to someone like Paul Graham's blog, who averages around 5-10 "I's" per article.
Seriously? "At no point have you mentioned gender, but are you sure you're not being subconsciously sexist?"

Perhaps n72 should also consider checking his privilege...
How do you schedule a rocket launch when someone else owns the 50-year-old range radar equipment that keeps executing HCF?
Failure modes are almost the best ways to figure it out. H.M. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison) is a famous case of what can go wrong with seemingly small areas of architecture.

One thing to keep in mind is that the brain is not an OS, it is more of a FPGA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array) that is programmed by experience and life. Memory is very much dissociated all over the brain and in non-intuitive ways. For example the motor cortex deals with voluntary (non-reflexive) movement and is in the cortex near the top of your brain. However, given enough time and practice, these movements become controlled by the cerebellum, that little wrinkly thing hanging onto the back and bottom of your brainstem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum#Learning).

Abuse has a much longer history than just the social ones the we humans experience. Though your description of the mechanisms that may underlie this and the reasoning behind it is cloudy, I would assume that the evolutionary pressure to disassociate mentally is a preserved one throughout evolution. We can see this most memorably with dogs that learn to roll over or become head-shy, this may be a form of the behavior that has been with mammals and manifests itself similarly though not in the same way for each species. Also, our view of slavery is distorted and brutal, Roman slave laws were permissive in the later years of the empire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Treatm...) and even allowed legal redress of the slave to the master. If we evolved in this system, then most humans had to be slaves from the point of view of genes. This is possible, though not probable.
nock is great and we use it for testing with great success.

Also a shout out for hock which gives the same API as mock but useful for mocking external services - https://github.com/mmalecki/hock.
Exactly. Dude has some sort of axe to grind. The situation could get bad ... yes ... but not for the reasons he explains. These Angels aren't going to bring down the economy when they lose their bets. When the market crashed after the dotcom boom regular people lost significant parts of their savings, and that contracted demand across the economy.

The only part of the economy that contracts in the Cuban scenario is the market for Yachts and Teslas (exaggerating, but you get the point).

The only way it spreads is if there are other macro factors that we haven't been told about by Cuban (because he doesn't know or understand them).
The number of cars in the US is something like 10 times of the number of cars in the UK.

Also you have to consider a bunch of other variables such as the difference in the traveling distances between work, home, and play.

And take into consideration things such an increase of X in volume of traffic might increase deaths by kX. With k being 2 or 5 or 10.

And then the gap narrows.
Ah, the 280. If Bellevue had wanted to keep that route, it could have done exactly what Seattle did: pay for the route. The other owls (82, 83, and 84 within Seattle) were also slated to be cut and Seattle ponied up $500,000 from its coffers to keep them going. Seattle proposed to split the cost with Bellevue and Bellevue declined.

On the other hand, I can kind of see why. According to Metro's statistics, almost all riders on the 280 were using it as a mobile shelter instead of transportation to a specific point. (Judgment on whether that is good or bad is left as an exercise; I personally had no problem with it.)
If you were to sign that document but not have the $1 million in assets to qualify as an accredited investor wouldn't you be committing some sort of securities fraud?
Because it provides incentive for people to help store the archive, and it solves the problem in their article about defending against bad actors.
sure, I'm game. Send me info in a private message on twitter @smtddr. :)
Something I'd like to add, what's greatly missing in the bicycle world to me is a smart bicycle helmet. My current setup involves:

* Bell Muni helmet
* with rear and front flea lights
* front GoPro
* jawbone which falls all the time
* Rudy project glasses with chromatic lenses

We're already talking about over $500 and 4 different batteries.

I have seen some attempts at smart bike helmets, but none doing it right.

Also, I second that the rear proximity sensors and haptic feedback are likely to be a gimmick, I would drop the navigational indicators and place a built-in anti-theft tracker instead. Besides they are easily confused with turn signals for a buyer looking at the bike for the first time.

As an experienced San Francisco city rider, rear sensors are a gimmick as you learn to grow eyes on your back and you already see these things, or it is too late. What matters though is a front camera first, rear camera maybe.
Show HN: Virtualenvwrapper for Ruby
Dense housing won't necessarily fix this problem. At Beijing-levels of density, we still have lots of problems with cars and plenty of people who bike and walk (including those damn electric bikes).

It works well in the Netherlands because the density is high but "not that high," and bikes are given good infrastructure. Even then, self-driving cars will be a big win for those times when you really do need to drive somewhere (e.g. to go shopping, fill in gaps of good transit, and so on).
Ok - but that's the only protest? An open version would satisfy all the requirements? Syncthing.net, or even plain old Bittorrent should do (especially if it's one static file per 500GB).
I wonder how they plan to allocate them.
email me: info@20n.com
I'm guessing because they're more practical in city traffic..
I'd say UI/UX design too - it's relatively easy to get to a somewhat proficient level & it complements what you're already doing. The ability to design & develop a website through 1 contractor is a lot easier than finding 2.
If they're done between consenting adults, sure.
Those "antifragile" solutions have been used to great effect in Netherlands where they have built a massive cycling, walking, and transit infrastructure.

They were able to build this infrastructure due to a popular protest movement, 'Stop de Kindermoord' (Stop the Child Murder) which was in reaction to exactly the problem we face in the US of deaths and injury caused by motorists.

There is a great video about the protest movement and the transformation of dutch infrastructure here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o
This is an unnecessarily depressing way to see things. What you should believe is that your dreams are not meant for you. They are meant for someone much like you who probably doesn't exist yet. Someone who will actually understand what you've done and how you've helped them achieve what you would like to.

You will die, and someone else will follow in your footsteps. Make sure that person has what they need to live the life you wanted, because you're probably the only person who really knows what that is worth.
Even that quora question didn't give any hard figures.
About $1m to build 21 PB of live storage (not tape), and $50k/year to power it (not factoring maintenance, rack space cost, and cooling)

A service offering live storage at this (Petabyte) scale [1] - costs 22,020,096 GB * 3¢/GB * 12mo = $7,927,234.56 a year. You could build six fully-mirrored copies for about that much, though management of 360 4U machines (30x 48U full-height racks worth) is a business on its own (see BackBlaze photos), and you need to deal with drive replacement after a point.

[1] http://www.rsync.net/products/petabyte.html (If you actually sign up for this, be sure to send me that $24,000 referral bonus o_o)

Math:

-- Machine Cost --

$300 * 45 * 8TB drives = $13,500 (drive cost)
+ $3,387.28 (pod cost) == $16,887.28 (unit cost)
/ 360TB = $46.91 per TB

$46.91/TB * (21 PB * 1024 == 21,504 TB) == $1,008,752.64 / 21 PB (for no redundancy)

-- Power Cost --

Let's say the motherboard/controllers draw around 100W continuous and each drive pulls 11W (from my post elsewhere in the comments). This is 2,688 drives, which fit into 60x 45-drive 4U BackBlaze storage pods.

2,688 * 11W = 29,568 W (for the drives) + 6,000 W (for the computers) = 35.568 kW to run a non-redundant 21 PB array.

You'll need at least two network switches and moderate cooling infrastructure as well. The heat from using 35.5 kWh continuously takes nontrivial effort to disperse, but let's assume that's somehow free for the sake of simplicity here.

35.568 kW * 24 * 365 = 311.57568 MWh (in a year)

I'm sure at this point you might be able to work out a bulk deal of some kind, but at $0.16/kWh you're talking a pretty low cost of $49,852.11 in power every year.

----

Building arrays of nonredundant live drives would be significantly cheaper over the long term than Amazon Glacier (which is almost certainly cold storage, not live) at this scale.
Hey, I've been building the type that prints and ships it for you. We don't provide discoverability, but in exchange we have extremely low prices ($22 for a 12x12" stretched canvas, no commissions or monthly fees). You can see the link in my profile (amanufactory).
He isn't arguing firms are overvalued by a greater degree now relative to 1999. He's arguing that investments in private firms, which are far more popular now, are worse for small players due to their lack of liquidity.

If things start going south in a private investment, a share holder may not be able to exit even at a large loss.
Some people might tell you it's the only thing that is worth it. I'm paraphrasing here, but Fred Wilson just today said that the way to succeed is to work on things that nobody else things will succeed, and succeed.
What am I missing, just --amend the commit with the stuff you forgot?

Also, with 'git add -i' you can stage individual hunks of a change instead of the whole change. This can be useful when you need to break up changes into multiple commits. I don't think you can 'git stash' your way out of that situation.
Could someone please point out something smart Mark Cuban has ever written? Because everything I read of his comes off as out of touch.
>what do they lose? Simply their bets.

They will definitely lose their bets but it would be excessively simplistic to assume that if a bunch of VC's bust, their bust will not affect the market (stock market, etc) in any way.
Historical Etsy Sales Data and KPIs
Frame of Reference: To illuminate – or to irritate?
I know a guy who's a stateless refugee. He is the son of African nobility exiled from a country/tribal-organization that wasn't recognized by the colonial countries when they divided Africa.

He has to carry UN travel documents on his person at all time, stating his situation. Its a pain in the bum to be stateless.
Tragically this world is not ruled by reason, but rhetoric.
"That said... if someone wants to live in exurbia, he should pay an appropriate amount to access amenities downtown."

Wait: downtowns are dying all across the country, and you want to solve that problem by charging people more money to go there?
Literally laughed at "Halt and Catch Fire" acronym.
Should Startups Hire Consultants?
I can understand that. Why not take public transportation or carpool with friends/coworkers there and then for the way back take some other transportation method?

I'm not sure what foresight is lacked in this kind of situation. Most likely you know beforehand drinking enough to not be able to drive safely. Occasionally that won't be the case.
Walking and biking infrastructure and livable/walkable cities/neighborhoods are key pieces to health from youth into old age.

Just because it doesn't now exist in the United States doesn't it mean it can't or should not.
Startups which separate life and work are hard to find. Especially very early stage startups. This is why you should always get a bunch of stocks when you join startups. Once the startup is doing well, they go the standard route of hiring HR and business-y guys. That transition gets rid of most of the tricycles (mostly because more space is needed to house the extra people...)
But all you need to defend against bad actors is for archive.org to hang on to a SHA256 or 512 for every chunk. Much simpler than a distributed blockchain.
His comment buys into and presumes a number of sexist tropes, primarily relating to the idea that women manipulate men using false erratic behavior and that there exist men, generally characterized in a way the author perceives as emasculating ("dramatic", "hipster"), who welcome this manipulation.

In all but the most egregious cases of sexism, it will be possible to find justifications for how the negative connotations could apply to all sexes. This is a pernicious way in which sexists recruit otherwise neutral parties to their defense -- our natural desire is to give the benefit of the doubt and particularly on HN, we love to find technicalities and loopholes. The key is that they will generally fall into existing sexist tropes, as this does, and more critically while they could apply to men, in the context provided they do not.
No he wasn't (who can justify this "the majority of stupid human beings are not American", that's just plain fucking stupid and wrong. And there were no subtlety, unless calling most of the people outside of 'murica stupid is considered oh, so fucking subtle. And I never intended to say that Americans were less smart than members of any other country...
Whoa, heavy duty! Thanks for the education about the Hukou system.
Amazing. The twin that exercized looked different and was more healthy.
Steam Gauge: Measuring the most popular Steam games of 2014
I haven't been prevented but I found that most startups even in the valley want to give you peanuts in terms of stocks and in fact many of them are now calling this 'industry' standard.

This is a major ploy and most developers appear to fall for this. The founder sells them a vision of a billion dollar company and gives the 0.01% in exchange when they are employee no. 10.
I don't think it's a sad day for MetaFilter. I think it is another example of Matt Haughey's wisdom. Knowing your limits and admitting them is hard. It is something a lot of very otherwise talented people mess up.

It is the end of an era, but I think it makes it more likely that MetaFilter will continue to be successful and not become a has-been. It is in good hands with cortex (aka Josh Millard) at the helm now.
Don't feed the troll. :) He obviously has an axe to grind and isn't looking to have a rational discussion. He even chose to take the good fight to Github, on Steve's pull request to the kanaka/mal repo.
Last week I took Uber late at night one mile in a downtown area near where I live. It cost about $6 USD. Usually a beer is about $5-8 in that area.

But I agree, it depends quite a bit on distance between where you are and your destination.
VC's are not risking their money they are risking yours.
VC's get money from your insurer, pension provider, 401K and similar saving options.
While you might invest and gamble with your own money, VC's are literally gambling with everyone's future. And these days the regulations limiting insurance companies and private pension providers in investing their money in a VC or other types of risky capital are looser than ever.

While I won't to pretend to understand the details behind the article, but just looking at the many "startups" without a clear business plan, revenue stream not to mention profits which are valued in billions of dollars all of a sudden should make everyone's eyebrows rise if just a little.

10-15 years ago if you made an exit in 100's of millions it would be a worldwide sensation, these days it seems you sneeze and get 100M in funding and the WSJ posts an article about your company being valued higher than the GDP of some developing nations.

I remember when in the mid 90's Checkpoint got like 70M $ in it's NASDAQ IPO which was then a sensation which was talked about for year, these days that's considered a cold round 2 funding run for the next sexting app.
Even with "inflation" and all that other nonsense the fact that since 2006-2007 you could probably count at least 40 US techstartups which got valued for over 1bln should hint a that something stinks.

Heck evernote which their current business model seems to be more focused around selling 70$ socks and 200$ messenger bags instead of you know their own actual techonlogy is valued these days at what 4-5bln, really? A company with 18M in yearly revenues after almost 8 years with no real assets to speak off, with a user base smaller than even marginally popular online games with almost no profit that hasn't even returned it's initial investment runs is valued at 300 times their pre-tax income?
Can someone explain the huge performance difference between nim and C? I though nim compiled to C, therefore I would think that good handwritten C would more or less be the upper performance bound for nim.
Horror tales from the cloud computing planet
Without NASA there is no customer for manned spaceflight.