skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That book illustrates one theory. What I stated is the theory taught to me as a student by the anthropology department at UCLA.

Edit:

I take that back. I just read the synopsis on wikipedia. The books' theory is exactly inline with my statement.

"The first step towards civilization is the move from nomadic hunter-gatherer to rooted agrarian society. Several conditions are necessary for this transition to occur: 1) access to high protein vegetation that endures storage; 2) a climate dry enough to allow storage; 3) access to animals docile enough for domestication and versatile enough to survive captivity. Control of crops and livestock leads to food surpluses. Surplus frees people up to specialize in activities other than sustenance and supports population growth. The combination of specialization and population growth leads to the accumulation of social and technologic innovations which build on each other. Large societies develop ruling classes and supporting bureaucracies, which in turn lead to the organization of nation-states and empires."
I love this story. It offers an important reminder about how our industry really works.

Whenever a practice becomes established as a "best practice", such as automated testing, then the next question that arises is "Why isn't everyone doing this to the max?" And folks that don't follow best practice generally feel guilty and keep quiet. But those who follow fashions in tech tend to underestimate the opportunity costs of doing so.

This is the moral of the above story, and it is a good one:

"Hopefully you are horrified by all things we didn't do that are now considered best practices. No reproducible builds, lack of automated testing, creating and then repeatedly sidestepping technical debt. For a long time, that is how I told these stories: as horror stories that came complete with hand gesticulations to emphasize the "can you believe I had to do that?" nature of it all. Here's the thing though: we were making money. We were growing and supporting ourselves."

I spent this winter working for a startup that had the opposite problem of most startups. The CTO was a serious Pythonista, and he wanted to ensure that all the code was written was of high quality. He wanted to avoid the build up of technical debt. There were 9 programmers on the team, using Python on the backend and AngularJS on the frontend. And he felt they could invent a new way forward, in terms of combining Python and Angular. And so the team was reinventing the whole Python stack: they had their own serialization libraries, their own database libraries, their own web server, their own authentication system. Adding each new feature lead to very long meetings in which people were encouraged to be thoughtful -- everyone was suppose to think about the long term consequences of whatever design was chosen. In some ways, it was a careful style, but it had a cost: the 9 developers spent more than 50% of their time on infrastructure questions that had already been solved elsewhere. In terms of meeting the real needs of this small startup, the startup might has well have had a team of 4 developers -- the money paid to 5 of the developers was, in a sense, an act of charity being offered to the Python community.

We've all ready endless stories about startups that cut corners, ran up technical debt, and eventually succeeded. We read much less often about startups that doing everything perfectly and then become successful. And that suggests that, for startups, cutting corners is the more adaptive path.
> and it may be that we are just complex, deterministic automatons whose consciousness and desires are caused by our behavior (like the steam produced by an engine), rather than causing it.

Then explain that we are talking about it.
>. I like how the reason for "chargebacks" is often touted as "consumer protection" when the real reason it to line the pockets of the credit card duopoly and ensure the merchant always gets screwed.

No, it's consumer protection.

Without chargeback being available many people wouldn't shop online, ever. I might not go that far but I would certainly only ever shop at stores whose names I already know. There's no way in hell I'd send money to some unknown vendor that may never fulfil my order without the ability to get the money back.
I'm surprised with how many self-proclaimed experts in AI related fields complete ignore this point of resource optimization. Any article with a title like OP's that doesn't mention that seems pointless to me and just an attempt to jump on the new bandwagon to dismiss fears of strong AI.
I think the list is misleading and is not necessary for an AI to be dangerous.

>It has an “I,” a sense of self distinct from others.

I deny this is required for a program to be dangerous.

>It has the intellectual capacity to step outside of the boundaries of its intended purpose and programming to form radically new goals for itself (the “I”).

Deny this as well; even carrying out programmed goals can be harmful. In the words of Superintelligence (copied from https://intelligence.org/2015/01/08/brooks-searle-agi-voliti...):

>[W]e cannot blithely assume that a superintelligence with the final goal of calculating the decimals of pi (or making paperclips, or counting grains of sand) would limit its activities in such a way as not to infringe on human interests. An agent with such a final goal would have a convergent instrumental reason, in many situations, to acquire an unlimited amount of physical resources and, if possible, to eliminate potential threats to itself and its goal system.

>It has access to resources on a global scale to carry out the plan.

This sounds reasonable. As http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-n... points out, humans have made billions anonymously, just by being connected to the internet. http://lesswrong.com/lw/k4h/request_for_concrete_ai_takeover... gives some ways an AI could takeover.
Internet.org: delivering poor Internet to poor people
This "Yeah we had a lot of technical debt but we kept finding inventive ways to sidestep having to pay it. The debt metaphor that we’ve adopted is misleading. You don’t always have pay off the debt you created; you can work around it and avoid ever having to pay it off. Technical debt only hurts if you have to pay it back."
But you can't do all empiricism yourself so you introduce a human element middle-man between your skepticism and truth. There's no science in a vacuum.
However, the idea is interesting.

I once used Chrome. I now use Firefox.

Nothing lasts forever.

Then again, what's to stop Google adopting the same technology?
i usually don't give money to homeless people although i will help them if they need something specific.

i don't judge them at all because i (we all) have the same vices just in less debilitating incarnations, but at the end of the day... well, i don't hand out cash to non-homeless strangers either.
Because people couldn't think before Aristotle? Formalizing something is very different than 'giving it to humanity'.
Much as Marx, whose contributions are controversial, the work of Peter Singer has also (to a lesser extent) changed the world.
Fast food workers you don't deserve 15 an hour to flip burgers and that is ok
What is your current career/salary, and how long did it take for you to get there?
Ask HN: Other Requests for Startups
YC has http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/. Any other VCs, etc. that maintain a similar list?
IMHO a big missing app in FOSS Android is a good offline maps & nav program. Nokia Maps are great, but closed. QT's Marble could fill in this gap, if ported.
For me the moral from that story is that in a mature market there is a lot of accreted wisdom and best practices - but in the early stages you don't have that and you need to trudge along with whatever you have. And judging those early projects through the lenses of the learned wisdom is silly.
Wouldn't you agree that the ad market via search is much different than the overall web ad market, especially when 90% of users (in some markets) go through search to find things?
Sorry about all of that free labour and code being offered to you. We'll all try to tone down the creativity so you don't have to think critically in the future
That's not being scared, that entirely appropriate prescribing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9402507

Many people in the UK end up addicted to pain medication after inappropriate prescribing of opiate meds to treat long term pain.

You should be angry about the length of time it took to get you to a pain clinic, not about doctor's decision not to prescribe meds that are both addictive and often ineffective.

Also, "lose weight and do psysiotherapy guided exercise" might not have been right for you but it is good advice for many people with long term pain.
What does that have to do with the impact of Marx's philosophy?
Dell XPS13 Developer/Sputnik Available (Ubuntu Pre-Installed)
I make 70k, and got there with 5 years of military experience, and 1 year as a contractor to become a Intelligence Specialist at a GG-12 payscale.
The author says "MtGox operated at fractional reserve for years". A better and more conventional way to put it: it was insolvent for years.
What did billion dollar companies look like at the Series A?
I hate when heroin is described as some terrible extremely dangerous drug, when in fact it is quite the opposite - it is very gentle and relatively harmless drug. Of course I am talking about medical grade pure heroin, not that Mexican black tar shit or white heroin mixed with god knows what. Even with street shitty heroin, 90% overdoses can be so easy avoidable: just don't mix with it alcohol or benzos, and have someone in your shooting gallery with shot of Naloxone.

I am not even talking about medical grade morphine/heroine, which is gentle and safe as milk (I mean constipation and some temporary hormone imbalance is the worst you can get, compare it with side affects of otc NSAID, which includes renal failure, myocardial infarction, Gastrointestinal bleeding).

And the solution is so simple - just provide addicts with pure heroin, other countries, like Switzerland do this with great success.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Computers communicate with one another constantly. There certainly does seem to be something different about us, but I've yet to see any scientific or philosophical proof that our self-awareness is necessarily involved with our intelligence or behavior. There's a good deal of philosophical literature around this idea ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie ), and virtually no scientific explanation of consciousness.

I grant of course that this may not be a terribly useful way for human beings to view themselves, and it is quite contrary to popular belief, but for all that it could still be true.
I use OsmAnd all the time:

http://fossdroid.com/a/osmand~.html

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=net.osmand.plus

https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand

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

The interface took a little while to become used to, but in general I've found it to be an excellent GPS navigation tool.

Maps are downloaded, so everything works offline. I've used it extensively around Europe and especially in Austria.
This is a false dichotomy. Frege was a mathematician and wrote philosophy attempting to explain what a number was. Questions about which domain this effort ought to be bucketed in don't have an answer.
No doubt. I can't imagine why you're being downvoted?
>what if that $5 is what ends their life by allowing them to OD or buy unsafe drugs?

If they need liquor to stop withdrawals, the money is well spent as far as I'm concerned. Not everyone is in the position to get treatment.
Things are getting so insane that even some top universities have open-plan offices. Am I supposed to prove theorems or to write Lisp in such an environment? Seriously?
Yes, it's a stupid tweet. But essentially saying "I could bring this plane down with my laptop hackery" is a statement about security, not about intent.

The guy has bad judgment, but he's not saying anything that should trigger any action against him (they should investigate the basis for his claim, not him as an individual).
Show HN: Hooks
Notice:

It took a long time, but for nearly fifty years this effort has carried on, successfully I think, but hardly anyone recalls that the origins of the effort were very deliberate and came about when the nighttime downtown was the precise opposite of what it is today, and few people probably think of it as involving a conscious goal then or now. They just think "that's the way Seattle is." But Seattle wasn't.

This should remind us of yesterday's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400259) about the importance of long-term planning. The good things about today came about because people decades ago consciously made efforts to make them happen. The good things that are to come—light rail, bike lanes, reasonable rents that stem from increasing housing supply—are only going to come if people consciously make efforts to make them happen.

See also Zero to One (http://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/24/zero-to-one-peter-thiel-an...).
More info, specifically on installing Linux on a Windows version of the laptop, here: https://github.com/mpalourdio/xps13
Great site and nice UI. Congratulations.

Issues/sugestions:

1. Couldn't find an option to add my app.

2. Screenshots of apps would be nice (some people might be more interested in the app itself than in the source code).
In previous generations we had a draft to sweep up these kids and send them to fight in places like Vietnam. Today, with multiple overseas wars underway, our volunteer army is almost entirely populated with the rural poor, and society gives urban youth a free pass to lounge in the streets.
Thanks, it was a bit buggy last time I tried. Besides, is navigation working well when offline?
California's Agricultural Water Rules and Lax Oversight Are Sucking It Dry
A couple of sucking trends - lax oversight and agricultural subsidies have water leaving California at record rates.

NASA water report says there is about a year remaining: http://bit.ly/18xFwXC

Glennon crunched some numbers and figured that in 2012, roughly 50 billion gallons of western water—enough to supply the annual household needs of half a million families—were exported to China. Not literally bottled up and shipped, but embedded in alfalfa crops grown with irrigation water. See:
http://bit.ly/1ejzg1o
California's Agricultural Water Rules and Lax Oversight Are Sucking It Dry
A couple of sucking trends - lax oversight and agricultural subsidies have water leaving California at record rates.

NASA water report says there is about a year remaining: http://bit.ly/18xFwXC

Companies are siphoning the water out and not applying moral considerations: http://bit.ly/1G8IxfY

This quote from link below:
Glennon crunched some numbers and figured that in 2012, roughly 50 billion gallons of western water—enough to supply the annual household needs of half a million families—were exported to China. Not literally bottled up and shipped, but embedded in alfalfa crops grown with irrigation water. See:
http://bit.ly/1ejzg1o
Dell XPS 12, 80GB HDD, 1GB RAM

Bought it with WinXP, but have since replaced with Debian (which runs headless). Original 802.11g wifi replaced with 802.11n, and upped the RAM to 2GB. The screen is a bit degraded (not sure what the technical term is), but I no longer use it's screen.
From a practical standpoint, food tends to rot quickly in nutrient rich environments such as the tropical rain forest.

Why save the fish if it's going to rot?
Mainly because I haven't seen any evidence. Special purpose AI is not evidence. That point is debatable, but most AI practitioners agree; it's only some technologists like Elon Musk et. al. that seem to be extrapolating.

Sure, humans exist, and we can already make humans by combining DNA from a man and a woman :) That method does not lead to superhuman intelligence.

What makes you think we could devise some other method to make human intelligence? Have we demonstrated any progress toward building humans?

What we have demonstrated is extremely rapid progress in making computers and software systems that can take in a huge amount of data and make decisions that look intelligent (but are still brittle and trivially broken by humans). I think this path will lead us to many great things in the future, and it will have a lot of risks that are more important to think about then whether computers will overthrow us.

Computers and humans are completely different things. If you watch a child grow up, this is obvious. A child can do things that are impossible for a computer, while it can't speak, read, or write. A computer can do things that no human could ever do. They are qualitatively different.

I also want to bring up a related point: AI advocates always seem to bring up "simulating the universe" on a computer. Nobody has shown that this is possible. In fact most evidence suggests it is unlikely. The universe is not a computer.

Computers, human brains, and the universe are just different things, and I see a deluge of sloppy thinking connecting them. There are of course relationships between them, but they should be made precise. To do so often require considerable technical expertise, like the author of this article apparently has.

As always, Peter Thiel has a great contrarian viewpoint in his book "Zero to One". The future is in human + machine intelligence. They both do different things, and the sum of them is very powerful. I predict this will be the story for the next 50 years, and general AI / strong AI won't enter into it.
The fact that somebody scares the uninformed public shouldn't be the determining factor for whether it's appropriate. Especially if it's true: "a hacker can bring down the plane" is an important claim to investigate. Even if you disagree with how he said it (and I certainly do), it shouldn't be forbidden just because it's sensational.

The appropriate sanction is the professional scorn that he's already beginning to receive.
BBC Newswatch – 1930s
All this hype about the coming AI menace seems like old fears about new technology, like the 19th century fear of the explosion of printed material exhuasting and destroying children's minds.

We still don't know how to create a human level general intelligence and it may be far more difficult than we think. I suspect that the pace of brain/mind research will be tied in with AI research and the boundary between AI and the human mind will blur before general AI has a chance to take over. We will be augmenting our own intelligence in step with AI progress.
Lein-try – try out Clojure libraries in a REPL without creating a project
I don't fear "AI". What I fear is AI being used as a replacement for human judgment or as a justification for greed and/or bigotry.

We already have this problem, where decisions that should be made by the humans involved are restricted under the "policy" excuse of bureaucracy, blind to the reality of unusual situations that require an exception in the usual routine. I fear AI because it is harder to fight complicated systems. I fear AI because - like the dubious "studies" that came before it, it will become a tool to obfuscate and hide bias and prejudice.
Open floorplans are worse than cubicles. Not worse than four people crammed into a sweaty two-person cubicle, but worse than 1-2 people in a cubicle. Significantly, obviously worse.

We've gone from half-walls to no walls.
Gravity exerted force before Newton formalized its effect. I think Newton's contribution was still valuable.
You probably just put yourself on the no-fly list.
It works fine, way better than Gmaps does.
There is a disconnect between market forces in energy production right now.

Right now, short-term grid frequency and voltage stability (periods of seconds to a few min) is regulated automatically by the governor response of the various generators on the grid. These governors bid in advance to set their proportional gain for frequency stability. Basically, they promise to autonomously raise or lower their throttle in the future based on the observed grid frequency and voltage, and get paid later when they make good on their promise. Long-term stability (periods of 15 min or so) are regulated with market action in the spot market for power. Very long term stability is regulated by markets that clear 24 hours in advance of their estimated delivery.

However, some energy producers effectively have flat rate contracts that don't participate directly in grid stability. Wind and nuclear will negotiate a fixed power-purchase agreement (typical prices are about 50 USD/MW-hr or so in the US) that will be fixed for years at a time. Likewise, residential solar customers sell back their power under the same, basically fixed rate schedule that they use to buy power.

So, as the penetration of fixed-rate power increases into the market, the pricing volatility continues to increase as well. There are technologies that can help. In fact, it is trivially easy to get a grid-tied inverter to be sensitive to grid changes with controls that model virtual inertia, impedance, throttle, and so on. This is part of what I do as a controls engineer. The difficulty isn't in implementing such controls, it is in adjusting the markets such that all of the existing players are comfortable with the result.

Witness this in Hawaii - the retail price of power is so high that it makes obvious good sense to install your own generation. But instead of adjusting the rates to reflect the new availability of supply, the incumbent utility seeks to raise barriers to competition instead.
Do they patent the important parts from their search engine? I thought they just kept it secret.
Pretty harsh criticisms. You must be an expert. Ok, what electrical generation capacity would you have built for Hawaii?
SocketPlane ?

https://github.com/socketplane/socketplane/blob/master/demo/...
Proposal for new REST methods
This is absolutely true. If you look through github, you will not see a lot of higher-level abstractions, class hierarchies, lambda abstractions, or higher-order functions from dolphins. (I don't mean to generalize here, this is just my experience.)

However, this could also just be a matter of educational opportunities, as most dolphins spend their time swimming around in the sea. Even in captivity they are often made to perform and do not usually have a lot of time to code or for self-study, and obviously enrolling in computer science programs and attending lectures, despite ADA, is logistically prohibitive.

Someone should do a kickstarter to give captive dolphins access to Udacity or Coursera education. There is a large educational gap here and it would be interesting to see what they come up with.
The quote is about general engineering of the companies. MSR is very detached from the products (e.g. I've seen research from them based on Firefox).
How Uber surge pricing really works
The 0, 4, and 100 hour work week
They had potential volunteers play PoP for 5 min as part of a screening process, to select individuals that wouldn't have problems playing a similar videogame. The actual game they used was called "Raiders of the Lost Treasure", cited as:

11. Silva AP, Frère AF Virtual environment to quantify the influence of colour stimuli on the performance of tasks requiring attention. Biomed Eng Online. 2011; 10:74 doi: 10.1186/1475-925X-10-7421854630

With a link to the article:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3201025/