xianshou

Square was great. During my time there, the company doubled in size, tripled in valuation, built a plethora of new products, and experienced all the chapters in the adolescence of a successful startup. Everyone was intelligent, most of them treated their coworkers well, and nearly all felt a sense of camaraderie and loyalty to the company as a whole. Left for YC, but if I had to do it all again, I might choose to stay! Those were good times.

If Cringely claims authority on the topic, he could at least spell "Fukushima" correctly. Both the link above and the article misspell it as "Fukishima," the article 4 of 6 times!

Have you gotten any face-to-face interviews, or even been in touch personally with any recruiters? The initial hurdle is often the highest because of the minuscule signal-to-noise ratio in job applications. If you have any friends working at companies you might like, or even friends who can refer you personally, make use of them. Due to the sheer volume of applicants for all manner of tech jobs, the harsh truth is this: submitting an online application without a personal connection, no matter the quality of your work, is essentially throwing your resume into the incinerator.

If you have absolutely no personal connections in tech that you can leverage, apply to Hired (https://hired.com/) or Triplebyte (https://triplebyte.com/) and prove your worth to them however you can. Once you're on the platform as a quality developer, the rest will handle itself.

FYI, Mustafa Suleyman is not CEO, but rather "Co-Founder & Head of Applied AI," as described in the article. Demis Hassabis is the CEO.

*Grammar

(Sorry)

You're going to have to include Seattle in the "expensive" set either now or very soon. New homes are going for millions. But other than that, agreed, just go outside the commuting range of all the major hubs and it's cheap!

Yo dawg, I heard you liked gradients, so I put some learning in your learning so you can descend while you descend.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/xzibit-yo-dawg

Planned obsolescence is extremely prevalent (just see Apple's view on it - http://www.geek.com/apple/phil-schiller-thinks-its-sad-that-...), and this intentional bricking is a close and sinister cousin. Before the idea of regularly replacing your hardware was so widespread, companies needed to at least pay lip service to the idea of continuing support. Now that it's become the status quo to buy a new phone every two years, it looks like some are starting to conclude that the savings in support costs are worth the PR hit.

Very pro-profit, very anti-consumer.

To paraphrase Obi-Wan: I feel a great disturbance in the industry...it is as if a million startups cried out in supplication, and were suddenly funded.

Pure injections of capital may work for basic needs in Africa, but tend to flounder in creative endeavors. From what I've seen, access to resources - a strong entrepreneurial community, top researchers, good hardware, and a flexible and customer-rich business environment - will always trump access to money.

What are the intended costs of the program?

Here is Nature's video, which also explains how AlphaGo works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-dKXOlsf98

A few neural nets, a lot of MCTS, and a little touch of ingenuity.

Here is the paper for Google's DNN-based move evaluation in Go: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cmaddis/pubs/deepgo.pdf

This is an admirable display of tactics, but a poor general strategy. His repeated threats to leave, as well as lies about other offers, only worked because the company in question was already struggling and needed to hold onto him for fear of not finding a replacement. A more prominent and successful company would have jettisoned him as soon as it found a qualified and, in all probability, more loyal applicant.

However, the advice on initial negotiations is solid. Companies generally allow at least 15% headroom on their initial offer for negotiations, and potentially more for those with less industry recognition and thus less negotiating power. I've exploited this headroom in virtually every job I've gotten.

Some distractions are enriching, like the reading of this very article. Others are temporarily entertaining but ultimately disappointing, such as Buzzfeed.

The main thrust of this article is that "we are what we think," and distraction is an integral part of that selfhood. To be fulfilling, it simply has to be a choice: sometimes to let the mind be led, and sometimes to lead it. Both states of distraction and states of focus are vastly improved when we know how to freely transition from one to the other.

This is a complete troll, but a very pleasing and cleverly written one. If you search "Baader-Meinhof", you get the militant group, this article (from 2006), another article referencing the same definition without citation (from 2013), and an Urban Dictionary entry with this definition.

But the question is, by simply naming the phenomenon, even as a joke, has he created it in earnest? If you see this referenced again, then it's the behavioral psychology equivalent of the sentence "This sentence, by xianshou on Hacker News, has only been typed once in the history of creation." - a statement that remains false until it is made.

This is no new phenomenon, but its effects have become more and more obvious and pronounced over the past decade, especially with the massive overrepresentation of Indians in engineering, science, and health. Indian American children actually scored better than any other group on "digit span" tests given to young immigrants, indicating an average IQ of about 112 (79th percentile). For an older article on the same subject, see: http://newamericamedia.org/2012/07/indian-americans-most-edu...

What is the cause? Most likely, an extremely strong self-selecting tendency for immigrants. Most of the Indian immigrants I know attended one of the IITs, and I'm sure many here have a similar experience. The flipside of this self-selection is a pronounced brain drain on Indian society. It will be very interesting over the next two decades to see if, with the rise of India, this trend continues, flattens, or even reverses. Even with the current level of investment, however, the new "model minority" is likely to stay that way for a while.

The tl;dr: Respond to an email and confirm your ownership of the domain within 15 days, or your site dies.

I would discourse further on the silliness of this policy, but they stated it best: "You can thank ICANN...because if it were up to us, and you tasked us with coming up with the most idiotic, damaging, phish-friendy, disaster prone policy that accomplishes less than nothing and is utterly pointless, I question whether we would have been able to pull it off at this level. We're simply out of our league here."

He devoted the last few years of his life attempting to prove himself wrong by sharing his property and belongings with the homeless, only to become more depressed when some of them stole from him and he was eventually evicted. No wonder his biography is called The Price of Altruism.

As one of the most important figures in the last forty years of evolutionary theory, he would make an excellent addition to this list of geniuses with bizarre beliefs: http://kruel.co/2014/05/30/highly-intelligent-and-successful...

For me, stories like this symbolize the incredible compartmentalization of the brain - we can think with complete clarity about the focus of our intellectual passions, and still not have a clue about the rest.

This is a collection of Yudkowsky's blog posts on LessWrong, and it's making the rounds now because it forms the basis for most of Harry's rationalist insights in the extremely entertaining and recently finished Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. (The last chapter of HPMoR went up on Ultimate Pi Day - 3/14/15 - last week.) I picked it up on the advice of some friends, and while the editing is less than perfect, it is overall an impressively well-organized and cross-linked treatise on how to reason.

At the heart of the book is the assertion that rationality is not about justifying why we are right, but thinking how we might be wrong, and paying careful attention to any evidence that puzzles us or could convince us to change our minds. The resulting philosophy is a combination of the falsification principle and the scientific method, applied to your own character. Highly recommended.

The fact that finance is ripe for (and now rife with) technological disruption is one factor pushing the bankers in that direction, but the primary one since 2008 has been this: it's the gold rush of the decade.

A certain portion of the population, including most of the type-As, consistently pursue whatever opportunities promise the most money and prestige in the shortest time for the least work. Until the financial crisis, the best path to that end was getting rich as a trader. Now, startups offer greater risk but even faster and more tantalizing rewards. The exodus of finance towards tech will continue exactly until the next investment winter, at which point it will likely turn into a flight from SV-style tech into yet another sector - my best guess is health and bioinformatics.

I've paid with Apple Pay, and it feels much more pleasant in comparison.

Cash: Get out wallet, count out cash, get change that I'll probably lose anyway. I hate small denominations.

Card: Get out wallet, put card in machine, wait 10 seconds for authorization (I'm in Switzerland - their terminals take longer), sign receipt. I hate signing.

Apple Pay: See prompt on phone, which I'm already holding, with price and card info. Press thumb to button. Wait 1 second. Done. And I like thumb presses.

Not only does it save half the time on every purchase, but it obeys my arbitrarily finicky preferences on how I would like to pay. But you know what? Even if it seems like such a tiny detail, many people share those preferences, and the difference is more than enough to tip the scales of habit for those who do.

Here are a few more excellent resources on the potential and the dangers of machine intelligence. Even if you don't expect to read Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence - a deep, provocative, and thoughtful book, but also very verbose - the above links will give you an excellent primer on humanity's prospects if and when we develop a true general AI:

[Wait But Why]

The AI Revolution, Part 1: How and when we achieve machine intelligence, e.g. strong AI - http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...

The AI Revolution, Part 2: The species-level immortality we can hope for, and the extinction we have to fear - http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...

[Resources on Friendly and Unfriendly AI]

Unfriendly AI: What AI looks like if it does not act expressly in our interests; e.g., a universe tiled over with paper clips - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Unfriendly_artificial_intelli...

Friendly AI: Strategies for designing an AI that respect human morals and metamorals, including what we'd want if we were as wise as a superintelligence (coherent extrapolated volition) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligenc...

Both of those rates are real (I have, in fact, had exactly that salary and charged exactly that rate at different points in my career), but freelancers don't make $300k per year in any but the rarest cases. Part of their pay derives from the volatility of their work. Freelancers don't work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week - they work on whatever schedule they can according to the volume of projects they pull in. Generally, the total number of hours adds up to much less than that for a salaried worker, so the overall pay would be comparable.

Naturally, the range for freelancers varies much more widely, with the most active freelancers making serious money, and the least just scraping by.

The author's thesis is that, since "airplanes don't fly like birds fly," defining AI by human imitation or servitude is really a provincial kind of speciesism. There's a very important distinction, however, between "acts human," "obeys humans," and "acts in the interest of humans," which the article glosses over.

While a strong AI wouldn't need to be designed expressly to mimic humans or slave at their bidding (what the author argues against), it would absolutely need to be programmed to respect, support, and further human needs. Almost any other way of designing a true AI, if it succeeds, results in instant extinction for humans. This is simply because if we are irrelevant, then we and our environment represent a useful source of raw material.

The simplest and most commonly cited example is the paper clip maximizer, which is seeded with making paper clips as its primary goal at some early stage of its development. Even after achieving superintelligence, it keeps that fundamental goal, and thus converts the solar system and whatever else it can access into a giant paper clip factory. (See http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Unfriendly_artificial_intelli... for more.)

Many have in fact argued that the only moral way to design a superintelligence is to imbue it with the desires of our more perfect selves. This theory is called Coherent Extrapolated Volition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligenc...), and the core idea is that the final goal of superintelligence should be whatever we ourselves would think of, if we were allowed to keep iteratively perfecting ourselves according to our current values until we reached a local maximum.

So while the article is interesting from an egalitarian perspective, the final issue comes down to this: any superintelligence had better be interested in us, because due to its immeasurably greater power, either it likes us or we're dead.

Practially speaking, design is legally indefensible as intellectual property - if you actually paid lawyers to make a case for you, you'd only be depleting your own war chest to make your copycats go through the relatively small hassle of a redesign. The only effective way to counter it is loudly naming and shaming the companies responsible.

Kudos to CB Insights for doing exactly that. Not only will it make the copying more trouble than it was worth to Techlist, but the threat of public embarrassment will help deter copycats in the future.

The sheer level of interest combined with the widespread lack of knowledge about supplements makes them easy to exploit in ways that would normally not be tolerated.

For another example, take a look at this ad from the Yahoo homepage, which spoofs Discover Magazine's entire website to plug their fake "limitless pill": http://politicsjunkie.com/yahoo-homepage-now-featuring-scams...

On the basis of regression to the mean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean), or what we might call the "J.K. Rowling effect," it would be far too much to hope that the sequel will match the original. Nonetheless, this has got to set some sort of record for the gap between a novel and its sequel.

Interestingly, there is a list of gaps between film sequels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_longest_gaps_betwee...), and the longest gap is over 63 years, but there is no such list for books!

A perfect application of the Forer effect: humans have an amazing ability to interpret what can apply to anyone as having special significance for themselves.

It's the same reason why horoscopes and fortune cookies work. Stepping back and thinking logically, it's easy to see why their messages might apply to a lot of people. But when you're reading one, you can't help but think, "Ah! It says that I would encounter adversity at work this week, but overcome it! I knew that presentation wasn't the end of the world." And if you're a little lonely or down and need emotional rapport, you can't help but feel a little spark of excitement and connection when that Mechanical Turker claims to like your favorite TV show - especially because the text messages from the fake partner look just like they would from a real one.

No matter how deeply we trust our logical conclusions, our emotional response remains the same. We can't help but feel worthier when we're being praised (even by computers - see the Silicon Sycophants study: http://pdf.aminer.org/000/307/350/information_requirements_a...), hurt when we're being insulted, and connected when we're being connected with.

At its core, this piece claims "no life without death, no love without war" - and that there is no more intense experience of all of these than in the midst of war. This is one of the great paradoxes of progress. In the most peaceful age in human history (read Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" for a deep statistical defense of this fact), our deepest fear is no longer death of the body, but death of the soul. Most of us have no need to worry about death in the form of starvation, or bullets, or awful diseases. Their replacement is the fear of an inconsequential life: of dying without having ever really lived. The greatest danger for many of us is traveling the well-sterilized paths, starting on the carefully-monitored playground and continuing through the Ivy League education, the comfortable Google job, the eventual promotions and sensible marriage, the repetition of the cycle through our perfectly-protected children, that allow us to deprive ourselves of all experiences of true intensity or meaning.

It's a topic I often wonder about: now there is less war than ever, but also more depression and despair, even among those with peaceful, affluent lives. We humans have always been running from the fires behind us - what if, having outpaced them, we discover that what lies ahead is ice?

The world, pre-Google, abounded in serendipitous quests to find one piece of information offline.

The world, post-Google, abounds in serendipitous quests to find many pieces of information online, such as starting at a given book on Amazon and moving down the chain of Amazon's "Customers Also Bought", or embarking on a semi-infinite dive through Wikipedia.

Any of these can turn into a game given the right mindset. Who can connect Klein bottles to the Gettysburg address in the fewest links?

Of course, that's not to disparage the fun of lacking access to proper information. Just look at these bodybuilders arguing over the number of days in a week: http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/233107/two-body-builders-arg...