skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately for you, I don't. I stay far away from the regulatory stuff - I really only enough to get my job done, mostly in the form of directives from my manager and our quality section.

That said, our software development process is really just a mild adaption of all our other development processes (like ones we use for hardware and reagent development). As I've described it above, it's a pretty standard engineering approach to design control, and there are all sorts of variations on them.

In fact, the FDA makes note of how broad the field of medical devices are, and does not actually enforce any specific design control process, but rather provides a framework for you to develop a process that meets your developmental and regulatory needs. As part of getting FDA approval, your design control process will be audited, as well as how well you followed it. In addition, medical devices are classified into 3 classes, corresponding to patient risk. Our product is currently classified in the lowest risk level, and so we can avoid a lot of additional requirements. As I recall from skimming through the standard (sorry, we only had a hard copy at work.. costs money apparently), higher risk devices with software components must have certain types of tests performed. In our risk class, we have total freedom to define our testing requirements - that said, the rigour of our testing is still under FDA scrutiny, it just means that there are no specific checkboxes to hit (like integration testing for example).

I guess if you want a place to start off, this might be a good place to look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_controls
That's easy to fix with a social security-like scheme that forces everyone to spend at least $1000 on voting.
Maybe somebody who knows about AI can answer this for me: what do we expect of an AGI machine to be able to do when it "turns on?" How will you know it works? To compare to a human, you might say that it can cry, suck milk, and learn to walk and talk over the span of a few years, and then slowly, with a lot of trial and error, learn to do more.
What would you expect would happen to you if you made such a brazen, public display of disrespect against your executive management? Would you have your job after?

They certainly could have gone on strike, when they were not on the clock.
> We can find other people to be police officers.

Can we though? I sure as shit don't want to be one.
No matter where you spend it, money goes somewhere. Why shouldn't people at Porsche be able to earn money from someone who wants and is able to afford one of their cars?
Except usually it goes against peoples small businesses
> the Judeo-Christian principles

It may shock you to learn that legal systems other than the Mosaic law have that "don't kill or steal" stuff. I was thinking of the more tasteless parts of Leviticus. In fact it was worked out and written down thousands of years before anyone was thinking about leaving Egypt.

Another name for it is "Judeo-Greco-Persian-Roman-Christian-Celtic principles", given the roots of the western culture which Britain transmitted to the colonies.

> Why this is a good thing?

Because it leads to a Benthamite political culture. Australian politics is either boring or depressing, American politics is either exciting or depressing. But the boring-or-depressing option leads to occasional outbreaks of good policy. Australia is one of the less-worse governed countries in the world over the past 30 years.

Neither side of politics needs to pander to a narrow base, except as mild lip service. So they tend to be centrist managerialists. Boring but sometimes effective.
"Without gloves, punching someone in the forehead is a reliable way to hyperextend your wrist or break your hand."

That is precisely an argument that relies on a change in behavior in response to increased risk. I think you misunderstood the OP's argument.
> That's a funny example but seriously, a machine smart enough to build paper clip factories would certainly be also smart enough to be able to avoid doing things that harm humans.

Why do you think this? Building paperclip factories is straightforward execution of a recipe, defining 'harm to humans' is a problem smart people alive today can't even figure out for themselves, I can easily see how that might be a problem for computers.
I can replay at least one memory from any year since I was 2. Some of them obviously impacted my identity, like the time I was 4 years old in kindergarten and I spent a little more effort, but not too much, at writing words a little prettier than usual, and managed to beat the rest of the class to win myself a toy car. At the time it was the proudest moment of my life. It taught me I only needed to spend the tiniest of effort more than average to do very well in society. Other memories include seeing a colourful picture of "1995" on the tv and obviously didn't mean much.
And yet when I correct your terminology with a cited reference, I collect a couple of downvotes.

This is why it is unpleasant to correct objective errors on the internet.
> C has the big advantage that having been used for many years, it is very well understood,

C is probably the least understood language I know of. Vast parts of it are undefined, everyone makes their own decisions and compiler writers define the language.

C is a practical choice because it is performant, legacy code exists, and because a lot of people know the language.

Personally, I would never take a job writing safety-critical code in C. To give a single example of a far superior language for such applications, I would consider SPARK Ada, amongst others. I don't know how people that work on safety critical systems using C can sleep at night.

C is for systems programming where performance is king, not for building software that can kill people.
Hey man, I get terribly nervous too. I've gotten just a bit better with time, if you ever want to talk about it let me know :)

Skype n_goles
None of these come close to AGI and combining them in any number of constellations and increasing complexity still misses a qualitative step.

All those machine learning tricks have been available for the longest time, the two orders of magnitude speed-up that we have received (courtesy of the gaming industry) should be seen as such a qualitative step and yet we are no closer to a general AI than we were before that speed up took place. If anything we've learned how incredibly hard the problem really is and the predictions on how close we are from a decade ago have already slipped significantly.
Sure, creative pricing strategies aren't always in the interest of the consumer, but purely hypothetical suggestions of possibilities to personalise prices to a maximal extent is not a justification for eviscerating marginal airline routes by forcing the airlines to price weekly.

As for user-agent sniffing, I suspect it's less prevalent in the airline industry than most other areas of e-commerce, since nearly everyone comparison shops, most airlines' tickets are available from multiple vendors at prices fixed at a given time by a purchaser-agnostic GDS, and the meta-search sites sometimes accused of agent-sniffing not only don't control the prices but often have to rely on outdated caches to actually display them at all...
I used to box for a few years and competed so may I can add a reply:
-Headgear is good to avoid cuts and bruises but it's cumbersome. It impedes your vision, moves around a lot. It doesn't protect much from being knocked out.
-5 pounds difference is OK but when it gets to 20 you start feeling it. Especially if your opponent knows how to use the weight. Height/reach difference can also be annoying.
-Liver shots are bad. You get hit, think you are OK, but after a few seconds you can't breathe and go down. I have never managed to keep going after hit in the liver.
Part of this was nerves, part of it was insecurity, and part of it was two people being bad at communicating with each other.

Bad situation, but I don't draw any conclusion from it. There are lots of inherently hard things in life that get messed up if you are nervous, insecure and can't communicate. That isn't necessarily an argument against them.
Approximate solutions are better than clearly wrong solutions.
Even if you can afford it, you've got to ask for it, if you're in the tech field. A professional basketball player, and probably also a coach, is going to have their physical health watched over, whether they take the initiative or not. Wealthy people in many other fields are free to go to the doctor as rarely or as often as they want.

That said I think his wife probably made sure he got good access to healthcare, if he didn't take the initiative himself. But it probably is somewhere between every three months and every year. Major sports players, top celebrities or Paul Atreides have the level of access that make it extremely rare, but a well connected tech executive just has a level of access that reduces the risk somewhat.
Yeah, it's pretty bizarre. Protesters are often arrested, held for 12 hours or so, then released without charges. Another thing I don't think the author mentioned is they often make you sign a form certifying your belongings are OK before giving you your belongings, so if you piss off a cop they can, for example, smash your smartphone and get away with it.
They're not idiots but their funding depends on them being able to move the needle within their career window.

As for the warning letter: Asimov and other SF authors have been writing such letters for the longest time, there is nothing new there that hasn't been covered many times over.
This summer a fan-made Earthbound (well, Mother) game called Mother 4 will be released for free.

http://www.mother4game.com
> I'm not sure how C is specifically to blame for something like int overflow

C is not a good choice when safety is paramount.

"The low-level nature of C and C++ means that bit- and byte-level manipulation of objects is commonplace; the line between mathematical and bit-level operations can often be quite blurry. Wraparound behavior using unsigned integers is legal and well-defined, and there are code idioms that deliberately use it. On the other hand, C and C++ have undefined semantics for signed overflow and shift past bitwidth: operations that are perfectly well-defined in other languages such as Java."

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/overflow12.pdf
No, without the glove a boxer cannot do as much damage. The glove makes the hand much more powerful. Now a punch is only limited by arm strength and skill. Take the glove off and the boxer can either wreck his hand, or punch differently, which he would have learned in practice.
I wonder if, barbaric as it sounds, introducing more non-monetary punishments for corporate crimes would help with this. If CEOs of price-fixing companies were punished by public flogging or other pain-based punishments, something outside the normal money-based calculus...

Though I suppose the chances of something like that would be even less than such folks seeing jail time, which would also be a non-financial punishment.
Just playing devil's advocate: that doesn't necessarily rule it out. You could argue that part of your memory is lost and so it doesn't effect your identity. Or more likely, when those memories were fresh they influenced behavior which created the new more relevant memories. That would explain personality and identity progression. I also kind of like the idea that people's identity becomes less malleable as they grow older, which would make sense if it's all based on "higher order"/more specific memories.
I think that there are more dimensions than such classification implies. "General" naturally means that it can be applied to any intellectual task (dimension of generality), but "super" means that it can solve them faster/better than humans (dimension(s) of speed and quality). Looks like slow general and fast narrow AIs already exist, so realistically the thing people call AGI (AI at least as general and as fast as human mind at anything) will also be ASI (faster/better than human mind at something).

Russian classification traditionally also have distinction between terms "artificial intelligence" and "artificial mind" ("искусственный разум") to keep the problems of autonomy/agency/consciousness out of field of AI.
Nothing is going to eliminate risk in boxing. It's a dangerous sport and the audience likes it that way. There are several ways to reduce the risk, but boxers will still pay a high price with their bodies. Gloves change the risk from surface and flesh injuries to deeper harm, such as concussions.
Do you think that avionics software is an appropriate application of C?

Boeing does...

http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/01/boeing-787-dreamliner-sof...
This is just not true. Tech culture is rife with long days, nights, and weekends. In my experience, companies that truly care about work life balance often have to remind people of this just due to the fact that so many people are used to this culture and often have a difficult time escaping the mindset.
Thanks for the great post. The author, even if he were a bad programmer, is a great writer. The text grabs the reader and makes him sweat in the interviewee's shoes.

Live programming interview tests are rubbish, because:

a) They produce a huge rate of false negatives. People who do not "interview well" flounder in a programming task with someone peering over the shoulder.

b) They can only test "algorithmic" tasks (for lack of a better definition). Most programming is not algorithmic, it's higher level: glueing already written libraries, with very light data manipulation or validation.
From my experience MMA fighters and kickboxers spar extremely hard. Boxers seem to be a little smarter that way.

I expect that a lot of amateur MMA fighters will end up with brain damage from training even if competitions may be a little safer.
Sex immediately comes to mind too.
They have strong unions. That allows them lots of things regular workers don't get. Unionized workers get these kinds of benefits --not that I agree with unions, as I think they are past their expiration date, but the strong ones provide great extra-work related benefits.

Similarly longshores get pretty sweet benefits too.
"The family of Paul R. Hudak created this Life Tributes page to make it easy to share your memories"

http://www.siskbrothers.com/obituaries/Paul-Hudak/
No, Market Cap is defined as total dollar market value of outstanding shares of a company.

Seriously, is this a game where people come out of the wood-work and just start saying words that describe metrics measured in dollars and then misapplying them?
With all due respect, if you're a MBA, you've just followed such stereotype.

So what I didn't even graduate college? I'm proud to have built a company whose employees are happy and treated with dignity. Diligence, respect and passion drove people like me to success, not a HBS MBA.

From experience, that's not what usually happens with MBAs. Because of an 'alumni list' or a privileged network, many feel entitled to success and will do anything to reach their goals(often unethically).
> I just got back from 12 hours in NYPD holding. If I can get arrested (with all of my white privilege and generally perceived non-threatening stature), so can anybody. ... Obviously I don’t know what happened in each person’s actual arrest, but I do know that the criminal charges overwhelmingly fell to people of color and those with more masculine gender presentations.

One of the most distressing things I find about the language of 'privilege' is that it denies that women can have it as a group. In this last sentence, she recognizes that women can be privileged over men in some situations.
Emacs is good for this. A buffer of clojure code in cider-mode can be (re-)compiled easily when you're jacked into a running session (as he does above).

Of course, some of the issues the author faced can't be solved by Clojure's compilation step. When his code fails at runtime in the repl, it compiles successfully.
> What was the motivation for switching to C?

Invariably, cost. SPARK Ada is demonstrably superior to C for safety-critical development (I can't cite the sources for this, but a major company developing safety-critical software has shown this to be the case).

But, SPARK Ada requires a lot of highly skilled manpower and it's slow to develop. C gets the job done, albeit with lots of bugs.
Without gloves you could only punch someone in the forehead so many times before your hand starts to hurt/gets injured. With gloves you can go all day.
> momentum - and energy - are only conserved across a long enough timeframe

> In order to have conservation of anything, one has to make a vector integration over a sufficiently long time frame

My understanding was that the time frame was strictly a matter of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- if the time is less than specified by HUP for the situation, then conservation generally does not hold, but if time is greater than that, then conservation is strictly held.

The simple model of virtual particles involved in Feynman diagrams is that they are precisely the ones that take time less than HUP.

Unless you're talking about relativistic effects where adjustments are needed, but after those adjustments, it's back to the above again.
This sort of interview is insulting. There are real problems to solve in business and elegant solutions to the 'next number in sequence' isn't one of them.
A few of the people making these claims are actually in the field.

This does not cause me to take them seriously. Unless there is something secret in a government black project, there has been almost no progress on AGI... at all... ever.

We have narrow domain specific algorithms that can ape intelligence in limited domains, but only if they are front loaded by human intelligent designers with a priori knowledge about the meta structure of those domains.

There is one class of algorithms that shows some general learning behavior: evolutionary algorithms. Ironically these are the least favored algorithms by CS AI people. I've heard those who work on them made fun of. It's because while GP/EC shows general ability it does so at such prodigious cost in compute cycles that it takes supercomputing resources to get it to do anything interesting. This makes evolutionary algorithms uncompetitive with fast but narrow search and optimization algorithms designed to solve specific problems.
When I had cancer I just wanted it gone. Since it could be cut out, I went with that. Every time I caught a cold I worried that it had returned. I did not want to be on the wrong side of a statistical curve. That others survived would not have comforted me as much as knowing that I would survive. Your mileage may vary.
Turkish Airlines ad parodies startup culture
Glad to see Thucydides down there on the list.
> if I abstain from voting for a number of cycles

The whole point of the system is to railroad people into only voting for what really matters to them, by "saving up" their votes. I think this isn't a flaw but a feature.

I'd expect that there'd be a fairly large number of tokens so that quantization wouldn't come into play too much.
> So it's no secret in the world of boxing that fights with gloves create fights that otherwise would be rare (12 rounds, back in the day even 15), radically increasing the damage that 'counts', which isn't the cut or the broken hand, but the permanent brain damage.

This is straight-up backwards, if you're arguing that gloves extended the length of matches. It was not uncommon for bare-knuckle boxing matches in the 1800s to go 30, 40, 50, even over 100 rounds, until someone collapsed in exhaustion or broke too many bones in their hands from badly-placed punches to the bonier parts of their opponent.
that's why the top topcoder coders use java under pressure
Worst case, he's implying that illegal drug use is a factor in the death of somebody known to people here. Best case, he's bringing up something irrelevant on a thread where people are paying their respects and/or dealing with a deep and sudden loss and is doing it in a way where he's oblivious to the possible implication. Either way, I think shitty is a reasonable word.

If he wants to talk about an issue in Silicon Valley, he can do it pretty much anywhere but this one page.
Lang-8: For learning foreign languages
I'd be more comfortable coding something more concrete and familiar than Collatz and Happy number sequences personally.
PEP is solely for HIV.
http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/pep.html
Yeah I could imagine how stressful that situation was.
Show HN: Dead simple mac app to capture animated gifs
No matter how badly I was doing in the interview I would walk out when I saw the engineer pull out his phone and start checking messages. How embarrassing for the company to have someone that disrespectful conducting interviews. An interview should be a conversation between potential peers and him pulling his phone out is just as rude as if you had pulled out yours because you were bored of hearing about the company.
Agreed. Throwing more and more GPUs at the problem in order to eek a couple more percent out on ImageNet is never, ever going to lead to the sort of AI that most people associate with that term. My takeaway from the past 5 years of deep learning is: ANNs can store a ton of patterns. Which makes them incredible useful for certain things, but AI it AIn't.
Awesome post. You have some really good memory!
I wish I would see more post interview analysis in this depth here in HN. Great read.

P.s. You are not a bad programmer... Pressure can mess your mind. My secret to finding great developers that everyone else misses is by making them feel calm (giving them an easy problem and giving them encouragement so interview stress becomes less a factor, best way to find good developers who just are bad at interviews)
NEW: Altoids Survival Kit 3.0 – Robust, Lightweight, Versatile
The announcers were clearly caught flat footed. They kept expecting Williams to land a big punch and turn the fight around. At one point they admit Williams may feel some pain in his nose next morning. (Yeah, seems like.) Ali kept dancing around Williams' efforts and landing that left jab.
Kickstarter HQ: Projects We Love - https://www.kickstarter.com/newsletters/weekly

NASA Earth Observatory - http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/

ESO News (European Southern Observatory) - http://www.eso.org/public/newsletters/esonews/

Designers & Books - http://www.designersandbooks.com

NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology - http://www.nist.gov/

WeekendHacker - http://www.weekendhacker.net/

Maptia - https://maptia.com/ ("discover a world of remarkable stories, told by some of the most inspiring photographers, writers, and adventurers on the planet")