skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's some useful feedback to know as I've considered recommending that book but haven't read it myself as it's redundant to what I've already read, but if Bostrom doesn't seem to explain very well that there's a distinction between intelligence and goals/values, I'll just keep linking to some basic online texts. (Try http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Complexity_of_value) The paperclip superintelligence will indeed be able to reason more effectively than humans about what's the be all and end all of existing -- the problem is that its conclusion will always be "to make more paperclips", because that's the overarching value it uses to frame all its thoughts on future actions, and its reasoning will be air tight. It will also be capable of explaining to any human wondering why its being torn apart for paperclip conversion that human values are different (they are such and such) and because it does not share those values, it comes to a different conclusion for the meaning of life, and it will also be able to generate great arguments for why its value system is superior. But it probably won't bother to do so...
> I kind of wish I could find a good way to make Fortran and C play nicely together.

Fortran can call C and vice-versa, at least since Fortran 2003 there is a standard way to call C.
I recently had a good long discussion with a fellow engineer about the number of sequences of coin flips with no streaks longer than length k. (turns out the answer is a generalized Fibonacci number!) So it /can/ happen...
(I'm sorry people are downvoting your post)

I do remember the Adria Richards thing, but as far as I know, it's not exactly a widespread issue in the industry.

Regarding pay, it's not clear to me that it would solve the capping/fixing issue. Even with the no-poaching agreement, developer salaries are usually pretty high in those companies (especially for employees worthy of being poached). Would union rates really be higher than what they're already getting? I doubt it.
It's intimidation, imho. Classic scare tactics, scare off those who can be scared off - and no one cares about those who have nothing to lose (i.e. poor black people).

Fuck you, NYPD.
James Coglan was one of those that revealed figures. Just search on the hashtag to find more.
I just received a bill for some SEO that I never ordered. I explained to my mother that it was a common scam, then pitched it into the recycling bin.

If my company were larger than just myself, that bill would have gone to Accounts Payable, with a good chance that it would get paid. Accounts Payable staff at big companies don't have the headspace to chase down whether someone really ordered $85.00 worth of SEO service; such a small amount would not require managerial signoff.
Yep. This has been the primary source of frustration for me in my communicating with software developer peers. I'll explain the task I'm delegating carefully: why it exists, the big picture of how it should be implemented, what tradeoffs I feel like will need to be made, and what corner cases are likely to exist and they'll nod like they understand to defend their ego then go and implement roughly none of it.
Yes. Though carapace's argument works on a weaker level: the symmetry is broken, so we have no particular reason to expect a conservation.
Not OP, but I have going through a string of interviews. Hopefully I can post a couple soonish.(In the middle of studying for another one)
Fair enough, my analysis wasn't sufficiently specific. I agree that gov't employees should be free from government-imposed consequences if they are critizing policy. In contrast directly disregarding one's boss, while working in an official capacity, should not necessarily be free from government-imposed consequences (i.e., that should be a sanctionable offense). Obviously there's a divding line betwen the two, so it depends where that line is drawn (and where one places the actions of those officers on that spectrum).
> From what I've read, there had been plenty of warnings all day.

That doesn't mean that e.g. someone who had just joined the protest was aware of that warning.
Calling it insubordination is too generous. Turning their backs on their mayor in such setting is downright juvenile. It shows level of deep rooted rotten mob mentality that permeates the force.
Yes, program is a term of art. It means a "term" in the type theory under consideration. A type theory is essentially a programming language with a fancy type system, and there are many type theories, just as there are many programming languages.

It does allow for functions without computable rules. In the case of the axiom of choice, one postulates as an axiom a program with a type that says something like

"give me a type A and an A-indexed family of types, P : A -> Type, such that for all a:A, the type P a is non-empty, and I'll give you a function f : (a : A) -> P a".

As far as I know, there is still no one comprehensive book on type theory. I think the type theory parts of the homotopy type theory book (https://hottheory.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/hott-online-61...) are quite good.

Chapter 1 gives the basics of dependent type theory.

Chapter 2 is about the groupoid interpretation of type theory and is quite nice. Chapter 3 is about "logical things" in type theory (things like axiom of choice).

Chapter 5 is about inductive types which are quite central to type theory (these are generalizations of algebraic data types like trees and lists from functional programming languages).
I got four hours to write a mini-game in C++ as long as I didn't use any libraries. I had a blast, especially since it was relevant to the field in which in the company is in.
I don't think that's good enough. It's unfair to ask candidates to write code on the spot.
They've done it for people particularly important to the community...Steve Jobs and Aaron Swartz (I think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5046845).

I think it's a difficult task in that you can't include everyone...but I think it'd be fine if the admins did it by personal consensus...I imagine who they think would be noteworthy would be in line with what most users think.
Here's the definitive one with Jason Calacanis interviewing him from three years ago:

http://thisweekinstartups.com/dave-goldberg-of-surveymonkey-...
To give some context, in Washington, DC, it's explicitly legal to march in the streets without a permit, regardless of the amount of people.
Cops: We Need Rights More Than You, Citizen
Why would you only allow 30min at the stage where the candidate is writing code? 30min is for the phone screen, in-person is when you're serious.
Perhaps you've just never been criticized or had someone look at you like you were stupid. Maybe you've never had someone dismiss your concerns immediately, give you a rushed response which has nothing to do with your question, and act like they had to do the work for you. This happens all the time, in all areas of life. I am impressed you've never run into it.
Counter opinion: I have done this in the past to signal the candidate that I am not watching over his shoulder, just to help the person relax as he figures things out. I feel glad now that I have done this after explicitly indicating this to the respective candidates.
I'm no gamer, and I love the IBM travel mice for its handy size and scroll wheel "feel." I tend to buy them in big batches and spread them around. Sometimes you can find batches of 10 on eBay quite cheaply.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00006HYQ5
Yeah, but then that gets into the realm of doing a lot of work in your spare time for free, for a job you may or may not get.
Fun fact: Its the same in Arabic. Numbers are read from right to left.
The paperclip maximizer example is a thought experiment designed to drive home the point that AGI architecture and motivations may be completely alien relative to human cognition.

That same paperclip maximizer, while lacking the ability modify its fundamental goals (a core human trait), could very well far exceed human capability in every other realm. The question of whether such an entity still constitutes an AGI is certainly an interesting one, but likely irrelevant none the less.

After all, the paperclip maximizer (as defined in the thought experiment) is capable of world domination. The degree to which it can introspect or modify its goals, and thus qualify as a true AGI, is merely semantics at that point.
The way I see it, you can master coding interviews by practicing solving small problems quickly under pressure. But this kind of practice takes time--time that is probably better spent mastering the skills you'll use day to day.

The studies that get brought out every time this comes up are very clear. The best predictor of future success is a work sample test. Solving a bitesize problem in 20 minutes while someone watches over your shoulder is not a work sample test--it's about as far away from a work sample as you can get and still call it programming.

At the very least why not let the candidate work on the problem on their own for 30 minutes and then check back in.

I've said it before, the best interview process I've ever heard of is this:

Pair the candidate with an interviewing engineer, give them an hour or two to solve a problem as a team. The interviewer isn't an adversary; their job is to assist the candidate like they would if they were working on a real problem.

Repeat this process if necessary.

Get everyone together and talk about past projects the candidate has worked on. Have the interviewers evaluate the candidate, and make your decision.

You know whether the candidate can code, and you've removed the adversarial nature and unnecessary stress from the interview process. Most importantly, you got to see them work in a much less artificial environment that's closer to what they'll be doing day to day.
We use a variation: the scenario is that us, the interviewer, is a junior developer and we've submitted our code for code review. Then later we ask the candidate to add some trivial functionality.

We've found this works really well. There are unit tests, so its always a promising sign if they go for them first. Depending on what they pick up, change or ask questions about, lets us a lot about the candidate.
Any good virtual credit card providers?
We need to setup a few dozen user accounts with various online retailers to make test purchases over a period of two or three months. The purpose is to gather process and quality control data for how our own products are being sold, supported and serviced by these retailers.

It would be desirable to have this activity be anonymous. We've pretty much solved the IP address, name, email, physical address and phone number portion of what we need through the use of various services and VPN.

We thought we had the credit card part solved by using a product called "Blur" by Abine.com. They effectively allow you to create any number of virtual credit cards (well, prepaid debit cards actually) that you pre-load with whatever amount you want to spend. It sounded great.

As we begun testing it became problematic and erratic in nature, throwing errors here and there and generally making life difficult. In addition to that, for a company that is effectively acting as a payment processor for your transactions the fact that they don't have 24/7 support makes it very painful. At this very instant we have a problem that put all of our testing on hold. It looks like we won't be able to get any help on it until Monday. That sucks.

Anyhow, can anyone suggest an alternative to this service? Perhaps one with equal or greater capabilities? We'd even go for a turn-key solution that effectively allows us to make anonymous purchases of our own products. Our current process has the purchases sent to a distribution warehouse that consolidates the shipments and sends them back to us.

Thanks!
None of this makes perfect sense, and reads like just-so stories. On 1), you could just as easily say "of the 10 candidates you liked, 8 of them were still interested given the salary bracket." For 2), you could say "the job pays $X-Y, with flexibility on the top end if they really want you."

It's interesting ("gaining intelligence") to read an account of recruiter allegiances, though.
I do agree that current methods like deep learning's neural nets will end up being a part of some future general AI -- e.g. the convolutional deep nets used for image recognition are already reputedly similar to some aspects of human/animal biological vision systems.

Yet even if all we need is this sort of "seed AI", we still need new architectural insights to be able to create it in the first place. Otherwise someone would have surely demonstrated it by now? If nothing else, such a system would need to evaluate effects of its outputs on its inputs over time (e.g. if I shoot a basketball, it takes seconds before it either goes in or doesn't; if I plant a seed in the ground, months will pass before it sprouts -- or not, depending on conditions). Research into recurrent networks, one possible avenue for doing this, is still pretty primitive.

And I'm not sure I'm convinced that this core "seed AI" is sufficient to emulate human cognition. Such a system might effectively integrate audio and visual senses, for example (in order to combine both for prediction tasks), but could such a system ever emulate the sort of continuous verbal inner monologue we all have which narrates our experience? That we have this inner monologue which seems to run alongside our other senses but yet makes use of them (along with stored memories) suggests, at least to me, that some more complicated pathways are involved which link together these various "component systems" (senses, stored memories, emotional states, linguistic synthesis, etc.) beyond just the simple prediction/reward circuitry which I presume the "seed AI" would encapsulate.
Yeah, the newer methods are getting quick and useful results. But I've heard some good arguments that it's unclear if these techniques are useful towards a general purpose AI or if they're just a distraction and we'll have to go back again and try to actually figure it out for real.
And by sticking to that limitation, you're seriously undermining the predictive power of your interview.
I have a really basic question: What crime was she being charged with? Protesting?
You might also want to talk to Matasano. They are really keen on work sample tests.
I once had to implement a simple API during an interview. I'd done it many times, but the stress of having an interviewer breathing over my shoulder made it a painful experience and I completely flopped. Not to mention there was another interview trainee in the room.

I can write white board code with ease as those are almost always two way conversations
It's better than encouraging them not to fill out paperwork.
Why? Isn't writing code exactly what you are interviewing for?
But "NK sympathizers" !== "North Korea"
Sauce Labs - San Francisco - Core Services Engineer

We're looking for backend hackers to help us scale our massive cloud of Windows, Mac and Linux virtual machines. If you're, like me, bored by all the media sharing rails/django/express webapps out there and want to solve complex problems, like horizontally scaling a highly available backend service, shoot me an email at santi at saucelabs. We're looking for SENIOR engineers with experience and interest in distributed systems. DevOps is a smaller part of what we do, but experience is a plus.

About Sauce:
Sauce Labs is a SAAS+E2E series C startup in the bay area. We provide an automated testing cloud service so other companies don't have to build their own Selenium or Appium grids. We pride ourselves about our values and transparency (https://saucelabs.com/our-values). Oh, and a nice to have these days: we have a real business model!

About the Team:
Our CORE team is currently 8 people and we plan to grow in a controlled fashion this year, hiring only excellent people who are excited about what we do. Most of the team is in SF, with some members in EU working on a re-location. We build a highly available service that runs thousands of customer Selenium tests in real time using VMs hosted in our own infrastructure. We own all our hardware and we collaborate tightly with our Ops team to manage it.

About our Stack:
Sauce Labs runs on a Python + Twisted stack and we're currently discussing technology changes to take it to the next level (Go is a clear option). We use KVM, LXC and VMWare for virtualization, MySQL, Redis, Ansible and other fine tools.
I've long shrugged off the shame of asking stupid questions. You see this phenomena throughout school, university (though for God's sake after the lecture, please) and in the workplace. People are afraid of looking stupid so they sit on their thumbs waiting for things to magically click.

This goes a long way when you're talking to clients or partners too. You often need to ask questions that will appear stupid to them, but that you don't know the answer to. They normally take it that you actually care about the job/problem, and often you'll gain some important insight that you otherwise wouldn't know.
+1 to that. A lot of people predicted rapid fall of the US dollar following various stages of QE, and the number of Silicon Valley headlines with the word "bubble" in them went up significantly in the past 2 years, and yet...
Same here. Fluent in 4 languages.
For me the best advantage is not learning just the language, but the whole culture. If you can't laugh to comedy standup stars and understand the culture of other people, it really doesn't help much if you are fluent in one language or more. Languages also promote a more liberal worldview and more tolerance for others.
Idea: Sow discord between [group a] and [group b]. Profit as they fight.
You might be interested in reading this little known book: Military Nanotecnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control (http://www.amazon.com/Military-Nanotechnology-Applications-P...) I see many parallels with concerns about nanotechnology being written off as scaremongering and little action being done in preemptive measures of control. No one on the danger side of AGI thinks monte carlo tree search will doom humanity, just as no one on the danger side of nanotech thinks that being able to move a single atom up and down in a crystal will turn that atom into a humanity-killing pathogen. But they are steps, and the future dangers are totally ignored.
These things are not so separate as you portray, voter turnout can increase when people learn the people governing them are total dipshits and bullies. There are a lot of motivating reasons, and people are different.
Oddly, they will vote for candidates who will push for fiber at the municipal level, but once you get involved with the Republican machine at the state level it is about bending over for Frontier.
The Black Bar memorial mode should be invoked by community vote
Every time someone important to the community dies, there's talk of hoisting the black bar and questions about why or why not, the ultimate decision being left to the discretion of the administrators.

It makes more sense to let the HN community itself decide who it chooses to memorialize. Setting the threshold sufficiently high (e.g. 3/4 or 4/5) preserves the implicit intention that the bar not show up every time some schmuck we've heard about kicks the bucket while bypassing the criticism that memorialization is an arbitrary thing imposed by admins.

Whether the threshold value should be a ratio of for/against votes or for vs. total possible votes (counting abstentions against) is debatable.
Best info I've found so far: http://gizmodo.com/how-teslas-powerwall-stacks-up-to-other-e...
Fantastic question. QV does not really address this much; at a quantitative level you are right that it reduces the problem a bit, but you can't beat those asymptotic properties you highlight.
The right solution is representative bodies (or random samples). Great work on this by Jerry Green and Jean-Jacques Laffont: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01718517?LI=tru...
If you make the set of deciders smaller this starts to go away. This is arguably the fundamental justification for representative rather than direct democracy.
There is a nice property we believe QV has that we (myself and Richard Zeckhauser) are working to prove which is that if you have representatives elected via QV and then those representatives use QV to vote you get efficiency in a hierarchical fashion. So while I don't think QV directly solves this issue, I think it fits nicely into a broader system that does.
Agreed. If I have you in the office I may talk to you for the rest of the day and I schedule accordingly.
> If financing (of some kind or another) is available for housing, education or health care, prices go up.

But if there's no financing for housing, builders are realistic about their chances of selling something that's that expensive, stop building, and prices go up due to the lack of supply.
The practice of having a European forename comes from contact with Christianity. It is customary in Christian baptism to take a name of a recognized saint.

This naming convention has been a long tradition in Europe, making the names appear indigenous to that region, but in many cases these 'European' names actually originated in North Africa or the Middle East which had Christian populations before Europe did.
> And as a matter of principle, they should not. When in uniform, a police officer is not a private person, who has rights, but rather a representative of the government, which does not have rights, but authority delegated to it by the people.

Oh, they still have rights when in uniform. Eg at the most basic, the right not to be killed. But you are right about the free speech. Just like any other employee in their capacity as an employee, only more so.
Going on a tangent, but that Clojure code looks incredibly convoluted. Compare to this:

next = (n) -> "#{n}".split('').reduce ((p,c) -> p + c*c), 0

happy = (n, set = []) ->
return false if n in set
return true if n is 1
happy next(n), set.concat(n)

console.log(n, happy n) for n in [1..100]

That complexity certainly makes it harder to solve the problem under pressure. This is really an example of an interview process that focuses on specific language skills and not actual programming abilities.
"Awarded" = He's allowed to spend (some) of his own money.
With respect to needing to mimic biology: not necessarily, though it is certainly true that e.g. a purely feedforward model could NOT achieve AGI, since it can't make predictions over time. Feedforward just means that the outputs of the network don't "feed" back into its inputs -- and as a result the same input will always cause the same output regardless of previous inputs. Humans/animals certainly take time into account when acting -- e.g. something as simple as coordinating muscles for simple movements requires varied output over time, despite most inputs (in the form of tactile senses) being mostly unchanged (at least for some kinds of movement, e.g. waving your hand).

Recurrent models (where some outputs are connected back to the inputs) are one possible way to account for time, but the work is still really early on these methods, and it's not clear what architecture (e.g. which and how many inputs and outputs should connect) would be efficacious.
I think the URL and the post got smashed together somehow.
That's why it's really stupid to do that. You're testing something that's not going to be used at the job.
Yeah, that's exactly what I look for in problems like that. How does this person approach the problem? How do they decompose the problem?

For that specific problem, I'd probably be satisfied if they wrote a function that took a number like 341 and returned [3, 4, 1], and then mumbled something about a set or a hash (or a list even) for storing the already seen numbers.