skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Exactly what intelligence is, is still not known, and it is quite possible that we will need an algorithmic breakthrough to create something equivalent to human minds.

Let's assume this is true.

>And even if that happens, making that thing faster and bigger than human minds may turn out not to result in superintelligence -- that would just be another similar assumption as the first.
So it might need yet another algorithmic breakthrough to create superintelligence, and it is possible that neither humans nor human-equivalent AIs will be able to make that breakthrough.

This seems unlikely to be true. Imagine we have a program that is as smart as the human brain. It's running on hardware a million times as fast, though. So at the very least, it can think in one day what a human can think in a million days. Even if it's restricted to human-level intelligence, it should still be far more effective than a human. This is even without considering self-modifications.
If Only Laws Were Like Sausages (2010)
This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage (1967) [video]
Starting graduate school in the Fall! Looking forward to contributing to this site.
Watch This Gross MRI of a Knuckle Cracking
Seriously, speaking as a parent, I can tell you that life gets a lot more complicated when a child is in the picture. I want to be a good parent to my child, and because my spouse also works this sometimes requires that I occasionaly attend functions at my kid's school or take my kid to a doctor's appointment.

From the point of view of a young twentysomething single programmer I probably seem less committed. It's certainly true that I now have additional commitments that I did not have before. Yet I want to keep working, both because I enjoy it and because I want to provide for my family.

Do you want to deny me that? Do you want to deny yourself a job if you decide to have kids down the road? As a child, would you have wanted your parents to have to change careers and start over when they had you because they "weren't committed enough"? Or would you have wanted your parents to be so committed to their job that they had no time for you? If that was your situation, take a deep look inside and ask yourself how you really feel about that.

If you're a young programmer, do you want to benefit from the experience and perspective of older colleagues, or do you want to spend your career figuring everything out for yourself? If you're a responsible business owner, do you want to lose the benefit of your workers' experience just because they start families? To widen the perspective, do you want to live in a Logan's Run future where nobody can hold a programming job after the age of thirty and twentysomething brogrammers have to support a large pool of out-of-work seniors?

All of this is the basis for the assertion that "a flexible environment that reflects the needs of parents will help create a better workplace culture for everyone, kids or no kids".
While I have some appreciation for the fact that Scala doesn't make its `Option` type special from a syntactic standpoint--it's a sum type, like any other--I think there's something to be said for the type union with syntactic support. `optionalData?.methodOption?.method` is much more succinct than Scala's `optionalData.flatMap(_.methodOption).map(_.method)`, or `for (data <- optionalData; result <- data.methodOption) yield result.method`. Scalaz seems to provide some more concise aliases for the monadic chain, but there's still nothing I know of that gives you exactly the method access within a monad quite like `?.`.
Navigation works fine offline. To be honest, I don't think I've ever used it online.

I drove from Graz to Vienna last week. I know the way generally, but didn't really know where to go in Vienna. OsmAnd navigated me to where I needed to be, no problem. Then back out of the city and on to Krems. That's about a 275km journey.

I have had the app crash a few times, but that's only been when I'm out walking in the hills and using it as a walking GPS. Even though it's not open source I now use ViewRanger for this instead (apk available directly from their website, so you don't have to go via Google Play, although it is available there too).

I've used OsmAnd very successfully on both a Geeksphone Revolution and a Motorola Moto G 2nd Gen.
There is a bottom-up build system: http://gittup.org/tup/

It's very nice, but the cost of changing from Make means that most people don't use it. The Ninja design docs reference Tup, so they're aware it exists.

Solving the Latex problem of “Label(s) may have changed. Rerun to get cross-references right.” is hard. The assumption of make is that the only state is in the file system. i.e. running the same inputs should produce the same outputs. The above message shows that Latex violates this constraint.

The simple solution is to (ugh) write a wrapper script which runs Latex, and creates another output file if the labels are wrong. Only after the labels are right does the output file stop changing.

Which means the dependencies are a circular loop. Which Make doesn't handle. <sigh>

The limitations of 1970s design is apparent. But Make is so astonishingly powerful that anything new has to be much better than Make. So far that doesn't seem to have happened.
I completely agree with your points.

It's strange to me to think as humans we will remain at the top of the food chain forever. As such, it would seem a fault of our genetic makeup thinking nothing would capable of knocking us off that top rung of the evolutionary ladder.

It's like we can't fathom building something that would undermine our own existence, or downplay the notion that AI would have some sort of bad intentions since we built it.
It's basically the same thing, except with that syntax, you have to label all the intermediate results
Stacking Bricks – Maintaining Motivation in Side Projects
Actually, a whole brain emulation would, at least for some generations after the first working model, run slower, not faster, than an organic brain.

Bear in mind that without whole brain emulation (or nanomedicine sufficiently advanced to confer biological immortality, which is an even considerably more difficult engineering challenge), you're going to die. So are all your family and friends. Everyone you ever cared about.

Being confused about the difference between Hollywood and real life is not harmless.
Which cryptocurrency can you mine with your hardware
You are conflating the electricity producers with the grid. The grid itself actually saves money by installing storage, when compared to upgrading links, and does so when it can.

As to, if they do not need the power, why should they buy it? Well, there are two reasons, one is that everyone else on the grid already gets to, so it would be anti-competitive to not allow it for the little guys, and the other is that someone will always want power, so it makes economic sense to buy the power and build storage to offset it and make money through arbitrage.
That is a pretty amazing video. It reminded me of videos of lava flows in Hawaii (but without the glow and sparks).

Interesting that the high tension power lines were dragged along so the section has been stable prior long enough for those lines to be erected.

The other thing that I found fascinating is where and what is the new material that is displacing this material? You effectively have a horizontal flow at the camera position but what is pushing it from the back to move? The side of the hill coming down? Gases coming up? And while the "article" suggested snow melt I could see that lubricating the material but pushing it?

Glad I'm not responsible for keeping that road open, that seems like its going to be closed for a few weeks while they dig it out.
The idea that a single company can perfect search - even one employing a significant percentage of the world's PhDs - is absurd. However, Google will likely continue to dominate search even in the face of superior alternatives because of their position in the marketplace and in the minds of consumers, just as Microsoft continues to dominate the OS space long after the introduction of viable free alternatives. This is why, if you have ever tried to pitch a search startup to VC's, you have almost certainly received a less-than-polite "no" along with your coconut water.

These tools will be interesting to use for a handful of techies like myself, but Google will remain safely ensconced in its fortress of cash for at least the next several decades regardless of this and whatever else comes along that may enable the creation of superior search engines.
I have a very close friend who this article described perfectly. None of us grew up in a great environment, so when his friends suggested Oxycontin it wasn't abnormal or even strange to do it. But it's been 9 years since and after being homeless, a methadone patient (it's hard to call it treatment when they themselves are so predatory), and endless amounts of family support he is slipping into the harder street drugs that are cheaper and more abundant to find.

Growing up in that world has given me an appreciation for the very slight difference between obsession, which drives us to be great and addiction which drives us into the ground and I wonder why I got one and he got the other.
One thing I don't see discussed much in these superintelligence/singularity scenarios, is the possibility that there is an upper limit to intelligence. Maybe it simply isn't possible to be much smarter than what we already are. So maybe we build AIG, but even with all its smarts it can't improve beyond - say - Einstein level (or what have you).

But surely I ca't be the first to make that suggestion, so who has discussed this possibility?
Well they kinda rescued it, remember that alongside the iPhone came the iPod Touch. Basically an iPhone without the radio. Also, the iPhone was tied directly to the existing iPod infrastructure via iTunes etc.
That's because you don't need movement to stabilize your thinking and that expense of glucose depletes your resources. My experience is that ADHD kids need some sensori-motor input to help them reach their cognitive baseline.
However, I don't agree with the study's conclusion because it tested a sort of "carpet-bombing" approach to the problem (i.e. lots of movement, injection of endorphins).
I think that a much more efficient way, and I believe, more durable also, would be rock-climbing because in addition to the physical expense (i.e. energy output), it also stimulates very powerfully concentration/focus and the zones of the brain associated with it (i.e somewhere in the pre-frontal cortex) and can actually teach concentration and focus.
I even wonder whether the best rock-climbers are not self-medicated ADHDs rather than so-called "adrenaline-junkies". Jumping off a bridge gushes adrenaline system-wide, climbing a face does not.
As greenyoda already pointed out, there can be people who make 140K who don't mind making a lot less than they did in their last job. My dentist decided to quit and become a musician. A friend took a job with a pay cut because his wife moved for her job - it's easier for a system admin to find a new position than a philosophy professor.

In any case, you don't like employers who eliminate based on a single point of information, so you must not like an employer who eliminates candidates only because their current salary is well over the available funding. That doesn't sound like you like their use of that information.

And that signal level is going to be lousy. The primary signal is the job roles/work experience. I can't see salary adding much useful information. In some areas, like government, salary is closely tied to one's job position, with only some variability based on skill level. There's almost no information there in the first place, much less something that's easy to disentangle.

It would also say that Lilly Ledbetter wasn't as successful at her job as her male counterparts, because she was paid less, even though the reason she was paid less was due to 1) discrimination on the basis of sex, and 2) a policy of not revealing salary information.

If someone wins the startup lottery then spends the next few years working part-time to spend the rest of the time working on Linux kernel development, then said employer will regard the person as being unsuccessful, because options aren't part of the salary information.

At another friend's startup, the employees took a pay cut for a year, to help with cashflow problems while they did a pivot. That didn't work, so they looked for new jobs. Again, your supposed signal would indicate that those employees must each be individually unsuccessful.

Sure, asking a job candidate about marital status, or children, or where the candidate goes to church is not "unethical in and of itself." But these are not standalone questions completely uncoupled from the interview process, so your idea of splitting is apart is somewhat ridiculous.

Again, I say that all salary and income information should be public. Then all sides will have an idea of what the market is like. The salaries for government employees in the US are public, as are all the salaries in some countries, so it's not like keeping this information secret is essential for the organization's well-being.
https://f-droid.org/contribute/
Show HN: I wrote a safe templating langage POC for python
Interesting methodology. I've used John J. Ratey's 2008 book Spark: Revolutionary New Science of Exercise & the Brain to regularly remind myself, for my own health, of numerous ways exercise has been demonstrated to help mental health including its place in my anxiety and depression toolbox.
Absolutely agree, especially for think-intensive things like software development where "flow" is so important. Closed offices are marginally more expensive but the productivity improvements massively outweigh the investment.

The lack of privacy is just uncomfortable. It always feels like you're being watched, even if you're not.
BTW, I'm one of the co-authors of streamparse, one of the DARPA-supported projects that is being developed by my company, Parse.ly. It lets you integrate Apache Storm cleanly with Python.

I just gave a talk about streamparse at PyCon US (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja4Qj9-l6WQ) a few days ago, it was entitled "streamparse: defeat the Python GIL with Apache Storm". I'm glad to answer any questions about it.
There is bias here though. They mention that cities with good downtowns have stories histories that people come up with about the planning that went into it. That will happen with every single successful thing. Conversely, nobody wants to take credit for a failure so people are happy to say that a downtown got crappy because of a lack of planning.

Downtowns die because money flows out of the city due to the economy or because the culture transitions to one based on suburbs. There are many people that have no interest in living in an expensive downtown apartment. If you start to lose the small percentage of the population that desires and can afford the downtown lifestyle, it will either on the vine regardless of the amount of planning that goes into them.
This was actually the study I was thinking of. I don't believe I've read any from the military now that I've checked, but I wouldn't be surprised if their conclusion was based on lack of sleep due to the military giving Dexedrine to pilots for alertness on long missions (which is to be expected; lack of sleep and not eating is not a safe way to use stimulants)
counterpoint: https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-te...

edit: In summary, the more pairwise interactions between people your team has, the more likely they are to be a productive, successful team. Open office plans lend themselves to more serendipitous interactions between people.

My 2c, is that open office vs closed office is simply a matter of tradeoffs. It seems easier to 'opt-out' of distractions (by putting on headphones) than 'opt-in' to interaction (by say wandering the halls talking to random people in their cubes.) People who complain about open offices probably are complaining about a culture where an open office results in distraction, not the office itself. If you have a culture where people can be sitting next to you but can signal they shouldn't be interrupted, or there is ample quiet space for private work to be done, you can have the best of both worlds.
If you only need basic DNS, this is probably overkill, but NSOne has a very cool product.

https://nsone.net/
Would love to see a pr model breakdown of that. Do they put the iPod Touch in with the rest of the iPods, or in with the iPhone?
>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.

Do you think humans can do things that no computer will ever do? If yes, could you give an example? If not, doesn't that imply that human-level AI can exist?

> AI advocates always seem to bring up "simulating the universe" on a computer.

I very rarely see this come up, could you give an example?

>Have we demonstrated any progress toward building humans?

Well, we have intelligence enhancing drugs, does that count?

>I predict this will be the story for the next 50 years, and general AI / strong AI won't enter into it.

Many of the people arguing for safety measures in AI think that it's likely to be more than 50 years away as well. See https://intelligence.org/2013/05/15/when-will-ai-be-created/ and https://intelligence.org/2015/01/08/brooks-searle-agi-voliti....
You are mixing two things that doesn't have anything to do with each other.

There are thousands of advertising agencies but only a handful owners of those. There are millions of products but only a few owners like Proctor&Gamle, Johnsons & Johnson etc. This trend of consolidation will continue.
> Doesn't this cover it quite well?

No it doesn't. What Andrew_Quentin meant is that even ignoring the gap (grey line) or taking it into account (red line), both show that 500k BTC are missing by Nov 2011, and this all happened in a mere 5 months, between Jun and Nov: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Np_kU7aOZOY/VS_HpjyMq2I/AAAAAAAAC3...

I find it surprising that WizSec doesn't advance the following theory, but it is likely that the same hacker from the disastrous June 2011 hacking incident (which I blogged about; http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=55) is responsible for stealing the MtGox bitcoins which started disappearing right around this time.
Mumford and Sons, Deathcab for Cutie Singer Rip Jay Z's Tidal
That's kinda what the study finds: the worst group was the non-ADHD group that exercised.
Because your wallet can be stolen, but not your phone?
> In his free time, he enjoys running and skateboarding, playing with his cocker

Almost like me... almost...
Up until the creation of the personal computer most machines were specialists. They were large computers designed for specific computation tasks or machines made specifically for manufacturing certain kinds of goods.

Sorry, but that's just not true. Back in the 60s, way before personal computers, the were many time-sharing companies, selling general "computing resources" to different people who would dial-up into the machines and run their own programs.
Find your lost Android phone using Google search
If the vendor has screwed me, why should it only count if it's above a certain amount?
google is also aiming at recreating the frat environment for their 20-something workforce. apples and oranges.

I'd lean more on private space for every team working on a single deliverable, but that's just my preference.
Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.
I saw an anecdote on a different thread here yesterday saying that assistant professors are basically becoming managers. Their job is to write grant proposals and have meetings with other faculty and staff all day, and navigate the political systems of academia in order to secure approvals and funding, while their graduate students do all the actual research work.

I don't doubt that at all, and to me it would explain why university offices are trending toward open-plan. Managers tend to like open-plan.
I got a lot more done than I expected when I worked in an open office. Not as much as I would have liked, but it wasn't a complete wash.

That said, for productivity, nothing beats being able to close my door and put on headphones in my current office.
One of the supported projects is splash, which is basically WebKit-as-a-service. It takes an interesting approach to crawling where it renders the page using WebKit, and then exposes the "rendered DOM" -- so that your crawling code doesn't need to actually use JavaScript for information extraction. See:

https://github.com/scrapinghub/splash

People often use Scrapy + Splash together in the Python community for crawling more dynamic websites.

A team I collaborated with is also working on a project to make Scrapy usable in a "cluster context", it's called scrapy-cluster. The idea is scrapy workers running across machines and a single crawling queue (in the current prototype, powered by Redis) in between them all.

https://github.com/istresearch/scrapy-cluster
EICAS is the Airbus terminology.

The 737NG engine instrument display is somewhat similar, except non-engine warnings are on other displays. Some warnings go on the Primary Flight Display. The 737NG also has a warning panel with lightbulbs.
How does one get their commercial project supported by DARPA?
>As yet another tech pioneer with no connection to artificial intelligence steps out to voice his fears about AI being catastrophic for the human race, I feel the [sic] need respond. While I respect Steve Wozniak’s technological contributions to our culture, I fear that he, like so many others (Musk, Hawking, Gates), is poisoning the well for fear of something he doesn’t truly understand.

He gives no indication in the article that anyone working in AI shares these worries. To me, it sounds like he thinks that only people "outside" AI are worried. (If he's aware of people inside the AI field who have the same concerns, why is he debating those outside the field? That's called weakmaning, although this doesn't even deserve to be called that because he doesn't quote any direct argument from anyone.)
> if we make machines that are smarter than us and have desires, they will influence the future to achieve their desires. If these desires conflict with our own

Aren't you anthropomorphising them here? Just because something might be intelligent, it doesn't follow that they automatically gain other attributes that we have, such as desires. Why would any AI have anything that could meaningfully be called "desires", except in the sense that it is designed to achieve its purpose, e.g. a self-driving car "desires" to get to its destination?

> there is no reason to expect the first AIs to have goals that correspond to what we want.

There's every reason to expect this. Look at the ways in which we use AI at the moment. It's to achieve our goals. We build self-driving cars to get from A to B. We build optimising query planners to make our databases run faster. We build software that designs antennae so we have better antennae. Nobody wants to build software that doesn't do what they want it to. You know what you call intelligent software that has a goal that doesn't correspond to what we want? Broken and useless. Who wants to build broken and useless software?
If anyone's interested in modern Icelandic literature that echoes Laxness, I'd heartily recommend the recent novels of Jon Kalman Stefansson, translated by Phil Roughton [0].

You'll certainly get a feel for why they drink coffee.

[0] e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Heaven-Hell-Jon-Kalman-Stefansson/dp/1...
A gruesome legal case turned Voltaire into a crusader for the innocent
This is required of all rooftop solar installations, and automatic. The problem you think exists... doesn't exist.