Steve Jobs ignored Warren Buffett's advice for a stock buyback - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/79902

<comment><USER2> I read both Jobs and Buffett's biographies (Steve Jobs & The Snowball). I understand these guys' mindsets reasonably well.

The article says that, ironically, Buffett himself never bought Apple stock. The reason is simple. Buffett is an extremely cautious investor who only invested in businesses he understood _perfectly_ , down to how the products were made, what made them superior to competitors, what the cost was of each part, who were the suppliers, etc. Buffett has always admitted he is not a technology guy. During the dotcom bubble, for example, he never invested a single penny in any of the Internet companies.

The advice that Buffett gave to Jobs ("if you think your stock is undervalued, then buy it back") is perfectly logical (after all, who better than the Apple CEO would understand perfectly his own business?), but for that same reason (Buffett not being familiar with this business), it was also logical for Buffett to not buy Apple stock.

<comment><USER3> Even more so, in Buffet's mindset, Jobs can value AAPL better than he, so when Jobs fails to do a stock buyback, it's an indication that Jobs does not think it's significantly undervalued.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Buffett has called Henry Singleton the greatest capital allocator of all time: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Earl_Singleton>

Basically, the Singleton model was to focus on the long term on building his company Teledyne (started out building aerospace systems/microelectronics).

What Singleton did was recognize when his stock was over and undervalued. During periods of overvaluation, he would issue stock and use it as currency to acquire other companies. This was pretty smart because he was able to get new businesses using a currency that was temporarily worth more than cash (the inflated shares). Then, during market downturns, he would repurchase shares. He basically was able to operate efficiently in both periods of over and undervaluation, while creating value for shareholders.

Here's a decent article on Singleton: [http://www.observer.com/2003/04/the- brain-behind-teledyne-a-...](http://www.observer.com/2003/04/the-brain-behind- teledyne-a-great-american-capitalist/)

<comment><USER5> Interesting man!

What I wonder about is how banking fees impacted his ability to issue/buy back shares. For example, secondaries handled by an investment bank cost a fraction of the issue. So his shares must have been significantly under and over valued in order for his buying/selling to be profitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A friend of mine was intering at Apple this summer and during the last week he went to a talk regarding this topic. The rational is that they've always needed a lot of cash on hand because Apple takes a lot big risks with its products and that lot of the cash is acquired overseas so its expensive to bring it back to the US. Just some food for thought.

<comment><USER7> you got this info from an intern who got this information from a talk from some guy other than the CEO/CFO?

<comment><USER8> > you got this info from an intern who got this information from a talk from > some guy other than the CEO/CFO?

The way he "sourced" this information might be questionable, but most of it is indeed true. Apple _do_ have large cash reserves overseas[1], and they have inferred (if not directly said) in earnings calls that their large cash hoard gives them the ability to be agile when it comes to manufacturing.

[1] In fact, they are petitioning the US—along with many other large corporations—to allow them tax breaks so they can bring their earnings back into the country without paying _significant_ amounts in tax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Both a buyback and dividends can be exploited by speculators: they can just buy the stock beforehand and sell it at a higher price or after collecting dividends. A wise thing would be to distribute cash to long-term owners based on how many months and years each has owned the stock multiplied by the number of stocks owned. However, I don't think that's possible in the current scheme. You would need different sets of stock for different dividends and you don't necessarily have records of the cumulate ownership of individual owners.

<comment><USER10> Apple would have to issue a preferred stock for that. The structure you suggest would not go over well with the investing public because of the dilution that would be involved. Also, this scheme is much more convoluted than a straight up preferred or dividend. Too much like a debt product; stock investors don't like doing as much work as bond investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apple recently made an important change in how they operate. Directors must now be voted in by majority. This signals to the market that they are taking their investors seriously.

Which means if the majority of investors want a dividend somewhere down the line, then the chances of it happening are higher.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Somewhat comically, and arguably very Jobsian, Buffet later heard that Jobs had told people that he (Buffett) had agreed with Jobs' argument that Apple should, in fact, do nothing with its cash.

The reality distortion field in full effect, folks."

For the rest of us, it's called lieing. Is it not?

</comment><comment><USER13> 1.They aren't really cash, they are cash equivalent. And it is interesting for other company, Newspaper only signal out what is really "cash" and leave those "cash equivalent" like bonds as separate thing.

2\. Apple likes to have some money in the bank, so they dont need to borrow on anything.

3\. Over 60% of its co called cash are overseas. Which means they cant really do anything with it.

4\. The other 40%, are used for operational cost, paying big in front for favorable price, R&D, and even acquiring companies.

5\. Apple has LOTS of High Profile Stores. Those Stores are long terms liabilities, and they do cost a bit operate. In the case of another huge economy downturn, those cash are what makes them stay afloat.

I was actually wondering what happens if Apple do have 100B to buy into bonds or what ever, that is 2B a year of interest coming from it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've heard it said here that apparently Apple doesn't pay dividends on its stock, so that stock wouldn't be costing them money. Im a stockmarket newbie - what tangible benefits would Apple get from a buyback if they're already not paying dividends?

<comment><USER15> The apple shareholders would get a benefit in that they would end up owning a bigger share of apple.

If you own say 1% of a company and the company buys back 50% of its stock, then you will end up owning 2% of the company with the same shares.

Currently for each apple share you get ownership of a part of apple's business and a part of apple's huge stockpile of money. The business would hopefully grow and create profit for a long time to come (at least you believe that if you own the shares), but the cash would sit around and do nothing. If you think that the business is undervalued, than it is very much in your benefit for apple to swap your share of the cash for an additional share of the business.

<comment><USER16> How so? If they don't pay dividends, what benefit will you gain from the stock?

<comment><USER17> There are a number of reasons to have stock in a company, the dividend returns are often not a big factor, as the dividends are usually far less than the cost of purchasing the shares.

Instead purchasing shares has other benefits, such as certain tax concessions (e.g. franking). To increases in the capital value of the shares purchased which can then be sold for a net profit. Additionally holding shares (especially large numbers) gives you certain voting rights to how a company is run. This is why certain wealthy individuals are known to purchase stock in public media companies. (There are examples were some media influencing has taken place.) You can also lease your shares/work with short sellers for gains. (which is trying to earn money via speculating the movement of the share price.)

A bit more on short selling: (this is grossly simplified)

Short selling is the idea of selling shares that have not been purchased beforehand. Let's say Person A sells person B 50 shares at $1 each, however after the deal is made the share price drops to 50c each. Person A is able to scoop up the 50 shares for half the price, even though person B is contracted to buy them for $1. In effect a decrease in the share price has given Person A a profit. My example sounds a bit fraudulent (selling something that you don't actually have.) In the real world it involves leasing shares and the idea that shares will be available to buy at a later date. Porsche famously bankrupted many short sellers /speculators by quitely buying up all the spare VW shares. (Something they deny publicly.)

<comment><USER16> I see, thank you. I'm not very knowledgeable about the stock market, but at least I finally understand shorting!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gitlab 12.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2019/06/22/gitlab-12-0-released/ <comment><USER2> Here's the brief overview of the top 3 features:

1\. Visual Reviews

GitLab review applications are a fantastic tool to enable stakeholders from Operations to QA to business owners to evaluate and approve application changes before production.

In GitLab 12.0, it's easy to provide visual feedback directly from the review app. It's simple and streamlined, no toggling between different tabs and typing your feedback, helping to shorten review cycles and accelerate delivery. Documentation [1]

2\. Project Dependency List

Projects typically include dozens of individual components, which can introduce vulnerabilities. Often, security and compliance teams need to be aware of the specific components included in a project. Documentation [2]

3\. Limit access based on IP address

In GitLab 12.0, you can specifically prohibit traffic from outside IP addresses from accessing your GitLab data. Documentation [3]

[1] - [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/review_apps/index.html#visual-...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/review_apps/index.html#visual- reviews-starter)

[2] - [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/depende...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/dependency_scanning/#dependency- list)

[3] - [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/index.html#ip- access-r...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/index.html#ip-access- restriction-ultimate)</comment>


A big phone - <AUTHOR> http://mattgemmell.com/a-big-phone/ <comment><USER2> Yeah, I can't use a mobile device as a computer. I've tried, it sucks. Multitasking sucks, its scheduling sucks, its interface sucks. Wireless attachments suck. Not having buttons or expandable storage or bigger batteries sucks. What you really want is a tablet computer. It still slightly sucks, but it's way better than dealing with Android or iOS.</comment>


The May Unemployment Numbers are Here, and Worse Than Predicted - <AUTHOR> http://michaelscomments.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/the-may-unemployment-numbers-are-here-and-worse-than-predicted/

<comment><USER3> It's more than a question of the fact the stimulus doesn't seem to be working - it should be downright alarming what's happening in the credit markets. Because of the spending, world governments and investors are seriously questioning the US dollar's place as the world reserve currency and it's already lost its lustre by many as a "safe haven" currency (as judged by yields - higher yields means that fewer people want to hold your bonds).

Interest rates have jumped up especially on longer term Treasuries - <USER2> because things like mortgage rates are based on this, this means not only is deficit spending going to be more expensive (and there's a lot of that being projected) but that mortgages for everyone and the cost of debt for businesses could soar. 10 year treasury bonds had a yield of 3.83 up from a low of 2.07 percent per Forbes: [http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/05/treasury-bernanke- economy-b...](http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/05/treasury-bernanke-economy- bonds-markets-gmac.html). This will mean it will be more difficult for businesses to expand and for people to start spending because they're going to be spending more on just meeting their interest costs.

</comment><comment><USER4> The unemployment numbers are also worse than the "more-adverse" scenario in the bank stress tests.

[http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/06/unemployment- compa...](http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/06/unemployment-compared-to- stress-test.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> "Stimulus Effect: Shit Sandwich"</comment>


Call forwarding service with phone menu? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a service where callers would be greeted by a phone menu that would then forward to different phone numbers.<p>For example the caller would hear the following "For business A press #1, for business B press #2" etc.  The call would then be forwarded depending on the option the caller selects. <comment><USER2> The name for that feature is 'IVR' (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response)). If you google 'ivr answering service' you'll find several companies offering this.</comment>


Why Resumes and Code Screenings Are Obsolete with GitHire - <AUTHOR> http://githire.com/about <comment><USER3> This demand that people write tons and tons of code on our off hours is understandable but is getting, I dunno, obnoxious? If not _tons_ , then perhaps something of very high quality. I could write a nifty little linked list implementation but would it really show that I'd be a good programmer for your particular needs?

If you think it does, I predict having code written in off hours is a requirement will result in github being flooded with just horrible code. It's hard to evaluate code in a quick glance. Let's keep it as a bonus type thing so the pressure won't be so high to produce just anything, to torture a text editor until it gives something that pleases the eye and sleights the mind.

Please, keep the industry from moving to make this sort of thing a requirement. I write crappy code in my spare time for _fun_ not because I think it'll get me hired.

\----

Not everyone can write code for 50 hours a week and then 10+ more at home, especially if they have outside interests, a family or are just plain tired of it.

Writing code in spare hours is neat, and I do it myself, but I think it needs to be seen as a bonus, not as a requirement.

Perhaps employers are wanting to hire burn-out proof people. I don't think there are enough programmers on the planet to meet employer's demands to hire the best. The implication of wanting 'the best' and asking for code in off hours is that if you don't write code in off hours, you are not the best and not worthy. It's thinly veiled and having been through a few interviews (sometimes I showed them code I had written in off hours, sometimes not) recently, my experiences are probably anecdotal but it makes me wonder.

<comment><USER4> I like your opinion (probably because I'm biased of this trend as well).

Unfortunately, we live in the world where people eat people.

For those who have large number of repos and code written in GitHub, they would rejoice when they see this. Just like Haskell people would feel excited when they see the number of jobs for Haskell programmers out there cannot be met with the supply.

These people will push this idea forward because it is for their best interest (only a few who would keep the purity of the community).

At the end of the day, we're all human beings so we have greeds and egos. We want to have high salary or challenging work or the best work place/culture/free-food and we work to achieve that. Part of the work is to have GitHub repos apparently (used to be StackOverflow karma).

Some hackers dislike the notion of getting interesting jobs/deals because of your rolodex because that would suggest sales/marketing/licking butt mentality. They also dislike it because communication (with real people, not over the internet) is not their strongest suit.

For those who disagree with this wave/bubble, we should create our own. We should push our own ideology. We should figure out how not to be attracted with this wave/bubble.

... or we can stand up and be an entrepreneur (one option, not the only option) and say to hell with this job-seeker mob-mentality?

<comment><USER5> Exactly. All of it. If you don't like it, fix it. If you can't fix it, replace it (or ignore it). Just because some companies only want to hire people that write code 24/7 doesn't mean all companies have to. And there are some of us that work in closed-source or secure code that simply don't have a public codebase. And an occasional few that are contractually prohibited from writing public code in their "off" time.

(Does having a large codebase freely available make evaluating a potential hire easier? No doubt. I'm not questioning that.)

I'm a programmer by trade but a hardware guy by birth and education. I don't do endless amounts of coding in my off-time, but instead build things. When it comes time for me to move on, if /everybody/ I talk to requires a large open- source codebase for me to even sit in the same room as them - I won't care. I'll find some like-minded folk and create my own job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Over a million software developers have public repositories on > <http://github.com>, allowing you to see how people use code to solve real > problems

That assumes they put code on github. And that they publish the code. And that you know anything about their code.

Then there are those of us who use bitbucket. There's lots of code which doesn't get published because it's not relevant and if it is, it might be a one off project that I'd rather not make public rather than make it look like it's abandoned. Finally, some code just makes no sense out of context - <USER2> of the code I'm most proud of were just binary patches to firmware of an old mobile phone with delphi gui for hooking it up to specified functions. Without context that's just an ugly delphi form that does a weird version of "patch" operating on a text file and example files. In context, it's a lot more. Not only I wouldn't expect anyone to understand what that project was doing and why it mattered, it would not get uploaded to github because it was outdated before github even existed.

So while the quoted sentence is still true, I think anyone using this service misses out on masses of experienced developers who simply didn't publish their code on GH, for various reasons. If you want to find a standard <recent language> developer doing lots of opensource work, it might be a good offer though.

The difference might not be clear to the people paying for this service.

<comment><USER7> <http://www.workforpie.com> checks both github and bitbucket. They also check HN and Stack Overflow to get a rounded out picture. It's an opt-in service though, targeted at the employees not the employers. I've found that their rating system is pretty fair and accurate. I think of it as klout for programmers.

Forking a bunch of repositories isn't going to earn you much there.

<comment><USER8> GitHub + HN + Stack Overflow eh? I reckon I rank _way_ higher than the likes of Linus Torvalds and other legendary open source hackers. Hallelujah!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is hiring software developers an evaluation problem or a supply/demand problem?

GitHub provides a great signal for evaluating whether someone is one of the top 100 or top 1000 developers in the world. Just check how many follows or forks they have! But Linus and DHH can work wherever they want, and they're probably unlikely to work in SF for $60--100k plus options in your SaaS startup.

Because of supply and demand, the people who are going to work long hours in that price range seem to be recent graduates. As a result, all of the hiring processes I've seen are geared toward trying to get a vaguely passable evaluation of how good a recent graduate is, using the minimum possible developer time. This leads to the coding interview as we know it: 30--45 minutes long and usually involving a trite programming problem utilizing the most advanced class most undergraduates will have taken, introduction to algorithms.

Personally, I would love if tech companies switched to evaluating based on work samples (e.g., code), but I don't think it makes sense given the demographics that they're targeting as new employees and the amount of time to have a developer genuinely evaluate a coding sample (rather than count followers, etc.).

Is it likely that GitHire and similar will increase the supply of good candidates in the right price range, rather than periodically e-mailing the top developers on GitHub and possibly polluting the ecosystem?

</comment><comment><USER10> I searched for "Ruby" devs from my city. I search for Ruby because I know a couple of good Ruby developers and was curious if any of them popped up.

And the results are pretty bad.

Not only did I get awful results from other countries, the actual 2 results I got from my city are 2 devs ranked as being in the " _top 20% of GitHub users by estimated expertise_ ".

One of them has 2 forked projects with NO contributions and is contributing to a third that he just started. He also has no followers. The other is an intern at a local company, with a single project of a few lines of code and no other public activity to speak about. I also searched for them on Google and couldn't find anything else, other than a LinkedIn profile.

Now, I'm not saying that these 2 results are bad developers. But if these are classified as in the top "20%" of developers based on information available online, then the algorithm is doing a pretty shitty job.

To make things worse, I didn't see any personal acquaintance out of dozens that I know have meaningful GitHub accounts and are living in my city. Instead, I got somebody from Istanbul (different country, not even a neighbor) that submitted his configuration files to GitHub and is also in the " _top 20% of GitHub users by estimated expertise_ ".

<comment><USER11> Same in my city (Toronto). I recognized maybe 4 people that I knew were good and 5 that I knew were junior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing something like this misses in comparison to resumes - what was the effect of the code they wrote?

Sure, I can see that you wrote a kick-ass routine to geocode addresses. What problem was it trying to solve? What benefits did it bring to the end user? Did it have an effect on any measured metrics? This is the kind of stuff people usually put in their resumes.

I'm not _that_ interested in the code a developer writes. I want to know what effect they and their code has on the organisation. It's the same reason I dislike recruiters, because they sell candidates to me on "x years in y!"

<comment><USER13> To that end, there is more than just perfection of code. It's great to see a developer write perfect 'debt-free' code, however sometimes it's more valuable to get the code out the door in a simpler easier state.

A lot of developers I've worked with have problems getting to a stopping point. For hiring someone the 'perfect' code usually wins out, yet that person might not be the best fit.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely agreed. In fact, these kind of hiring services aren't of much interest to me because I think that a lot of developers are "good enough" coders- but that their personality (be it perfectionism, whatever) is more variable.

I'd prioritise finding a developer that is "good enough" and fits well into a team over a razor-sharp developer that can't work to deadlines or participate in meetings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One major flaw: it assumes anyone you would want to hire uses Github, as opposed to Bitbucket, Gitorious, Google Code, Launchpad, the numerous other code hosts I missed, or hosting their code on their own server.

And if Github becomes "the standard" for hosting software such that everyone looks for code and coders on Github instead of other places, that would be detrimental to the FOSS community as a whole - not only in Github's lack of competition with other code hosts, but also in git's lack of competition with other VCSes.

<comment><USER15> don't forget the good old sourceforge and freshmeat.

besides, only about 10%, if not less, of registered github users do actual coding. Most of the users just follow the updates or fork and add patches.

<comment><USER16> _only about 10%, if not less_

Is there a number published somewhere?

<comment><USER15> no, it's just my own feeling based on browsing and looking at who's following my projects :)

<comment><USER17> So it's not only a guess, but you imply patchers are not coders. That's just cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Simple test: myself. Claims I have 5+ years of Emacs Lisp experience. Ahem, I wish. Second test: my boss. Claims he has 3-5 years of C experience (less than me, and less than he has C++ experience). Ahem.

I know these are estimates, but it highlights the flaw: it just looks at your repos and has no insight what's happening. Maybe it would work better if it could detect if your patches are actually being pulled by anone. (That means your code is desirable to at least 1 person).

Eliminating a code screening with this? Come on, don't make me laugh.

<comment><USER19> Same thing happened to me. It claims I have 5+ years of Ruby experience.

But, I learned Ruby in May 2008, because I got a job doing Rails development. (I just looked it up). So, 3 years, going on 4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't see public repositories as being a 100% indicator. The information they provide is useful, but I still want to do a whiteboard interview with candidates. There are a few reasons for this. Most of my personal projects are much simpler than what I get paid to do. Many of my repositories contain lots of good code written by other people and it's unfair for me to take credit for their work.

I like the whiteboard interviews because you can observe the end-to-end problem solving. You can see how people behave out of their element. You can see how they approach "an empty page". And you can ask questions that involve more algorithmic insight than "I wrote a Twitter scraper".

<comment><USER21> You must have a more interesting job than me. Most of my personal projects are way more complicated than what I get paid to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Finding exceptional talent on GitHub certainly a solvable problem, but the real challenge for GitHire is the one you can see immediately when you pull up this page:

<http://githire.com/order>

In the first few reloads, I've seen John Resig, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Yehuda Katz pop up. Maybe they're free to do a quick phone screen?

Here's hoping that there's a lot of secret sauce keeping companies from trying to date supermodels (most of whom are already in a relationship).

<comment><USER23> That page looks like a teaser. I tend to suspect that the "supermodels" are popping up for the same reason that, when you look at those T-shirt ads on the edges of blogs, every T-shirt is being worn by... a supermodel.

In practice, I presume they offer to try to screen for people who actually want to be hired, not just the ones with big scores on Githubbiness. I note that the very first thing they tell you to do on the "Job Seekers" page is to set your "hireable" flag on Github to true. (I didn't yet realize Github had such a thing, BTW. Thanks to GitHire for teaching me that, if nothing else.)

<comment><USER22> I didn't know about the hireable flag either. Cool feature for the genuinely unemployed, but imagine the team morale repercussions of setting your hireable flag to true while in a job you're looking to move on from...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The thing that could be worrying here, is that it could clutter up github with people trying to game it to get a job, instead of actually caring about the project their contributing to.

It seems that in it's current state this could work very well, if this becomes a popular recruiting tool, it won't be sustainable.

</comment><comment><USER4> Each community is pushing their own way of establishing the "great developer" presence and calls their solution the best one out there and the rest are obsolete.

Software Developers around the world becomes this victim of a bubble. Be it the StackOverflow bubble (collecting rewards from answering questions) or the GitHub bubble or the blogging bubble.

I'm tired playing the alpha-geek Fire-and-Motion.

</comment><comment><USER24> Note to recruiters: don't rely solely on the GitHub profile. I've seen a couple of recruiters miss very good profiles because they were focusing only on that.

</comment><comment><USER25> I know more than a handful of exceptional engineers who don't even have GitHub accounts. And I know a few really average engineers who are active on GitHub.

As best (if it works like magic even), this only gets you the cream of a small subset of engineers. But if this is the only source you would use to hire, you leave out a large pool of talent before you even begin.

<comment><USER26> Open source has become a marketing game for some devs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> From my estimated experience: CoffeeScript: 5+ years

Ha ha. (the language has been out for 3 years, became known maybe year after release)

<comment><USER28> I have 5+ years experience with Erlang, a language I know literally not a single line of. It's from a repo (that I forked) that is half/half Erlang, Python.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So, almost all of the code I've released has been part of a group effort-- either something in-house I may not be able to release, or as part of a small team writing OSS.

How does this actually help me? I'm not going to take credit for entire projects, especially not when I'm working on them with friends.

</comment><comment><USER26> Instead of writing a half-ass project on your free time and putting the source code in Github, build and maintain a product/website/app. It has more creds. It shows you can ship a COMPLETE product instead of some code snippets.

<comment><USER30> Totally agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My profile is very flattering: it thinks I have 5+ years of experience JavaScript, Java, Haskell and elisp. I'm a second year undergrad :)

Is there anywhere to submit bug reports? I looked around, but didn't see any email addresses anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER32> It looks like they're basically just selling this: [http://www.hackdiary.com/2010/02/10/algorithmic- recruitment-...](http://www.hackdiary.com/2010/02/10/algorithmic-recruitment- with-github/)

</comment><comment><USER33> What percentage of programmers are doing work out in the open?

</comment><comment><USER34> So...has anyone found a profile that's NOT in the top 20% or better? If I'm in the top 20% for putting in test commits than the software dev world is in dire trouble.

<comment><USER35> > the software dev world is in dire trouble

I thought we were taking this as a given.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think it would be a great tool but only for a segment of the job market. It's good for finding passionate coding enthusiasts who maintain many open source projects for fun and would be a good fit for a silicon valley type company but for the rest who are just professional white collar programmers who work for big companies, the best code can never be made public and conventional interviews, while not perfect, is the best we got so far.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm waiting for someone to write "Why behavioral interviews are obsolete with facebook" next. </sarcasm>

</comment><comment><USER38> As others have stated, how well someone codes is less important than how good a cultural and personal fit they are for the company. I want to know how passionate someone is, how well they do when pair programming, how well they communicate, etc in addition to knowing how well they can code. I can teach someone, who is willing, how to be a great coder, but I cannot teach someone how to fit well into the company culture or with my team.

In addition, I know too many developers who I would hire in a heartbeat that do not have repos on Github and far too many developers that I never want to work with that do have repos.

I also find it curious that on <http://githire.com/order>, when I refresh the page and see people like 37Signals and Omni show up. Not sure they are looking for new gigs.

</comment><comment><USER39> Hey Githire,

I think the service is good, but I have a couple points of feedback.

When calculating the profile of a user, rather than only looking into repositories under the user's name, you should also take into account the code under any organizations the user is apart of. Most of my coding is publicly committed under an organization repository.

A solution is either to look at all of a user's commits rather repositories or take into a user's organization repositories, too.

Other lesser pieces of feedback:

* The typography and a lot of the images look "fuzzy" to the eye and give off a cheap impression. I would definitely rework those until they give a quality impression.

* Add a "contact us" link in your header or footer or both. I shouldn't have to rely on HN to give you feedback.

</comment><comment><USER40> Such saucer-eyed bullshit. Many employers have moonlighting clauses that prevent employees from contributing to OSS projects. All of the companies I've worked for have. If you only go by Github commits, you'll probably be getting only a certain type of applicant and excluding most others.

Github commits might be good _supplemental_ data to have, but if I am to do a fair apples to apples comparison between candidates who might be encumbered by moonlighting clauses, then I'll let the whiteboard coding do the talking.

</comment><comment><USER41> I would be curious to know how it gets years of experience so wrong.

<comment><USER42> # Perhaps like so...?

      if ( does_it_compile() ) {
         years_experience++;
         if ( !does_it_segfault() ) {
            years_experience++;
         }
      }

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Re: Code Screenings are obsolete. I think this is true for some code screenings. However my most recent job, they sent me their own framework, and I needed to make code within that. You're not going to find that on google. Sure I could have had a friend help me, but I think it would have been pretty obvious when I started, and the few that would do that would get weeded out in the first few months.

</comment><comment><USER43> Most of the best programmers I know don't even have github accounts because they're so busy writing great closed-source code during the day, and living interesting and varied nightlives that allow them to stay refresh and producing high quality code during the day.

I'm not saying you _can't_ find great developers via github, just that you're limiting yourself to an extremely small pond, even if it seems big.

</comment><comment><USER44> Best of luck to these folks.

The idea doesn't suck. The current implementation might suck a little. They have their work cut out for them in any case, if for no other reason than the barrier to entry for competition seems pretty low.

They've got two huge things going for them: \- $500 is right around the noise floor for a hiring process \- Money co-located with mouth. If the client isn't happy, they don't get paid.

</comment><comment><USER45> Like many, my Github repos don't get the love they deserve. Many projects lay abandoned waiting for the day I have the time to finish them.

It seems this system can be easily gamed by putting more commits into your github repos, even if it's not original code, original ideas or even runnable code.

</comment><comment><USER46> Biggest problem here is that the majority of the code I write is not open source, and OSS code I write is very very different than the code I write professionally (so that my employer has no claim on it), so the github version of me is nothing like the real version of me.

</comment><comment><USER47> How do they choose which project to profile? I have many public repos yet they profile the single, oldest project in my profile.

Lots of room for improvement if you ask me.... <http://githire.com/profiles/aantix>

</comment><comment><USER48> Anyone here heard about Ohloh (<http://www.ohloh.net/>)? This seems like a service they could offer more effectively than this guys, who seem restricted to Github for their data mining.

</comment><comment><USER49> How do they plan to work out if people are jerks or not? Or if they are looking for work, or if they work well in a team? The code itself is a major aspect to a coding job, but not the only thing.

</comment><comment><USER50> Obsolete? This works only with github, which hosts only git repositories. So the only developers who are hireable use git? Am I getting this right?

</comment><comment><USER51> On the search page, how do they determine "Hireable"? And why is mine true?

Why is my python professor Hireable: false?

<comment><USER52> I'd guess it's the github careers page. You opted in, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> @heyrhett, did you already win some customers? Anyone purchased your 500USD package?

</comment><comment><USER54> Is this product developed by Github folks?

<comment><USER55> God no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> <http://githire.com/best> : you guys should check if they are actually human beings, (as much as you would like to hire him, android is not a real person).</comment>


124 Millimeters of Depth - <AUTHOR> http://burningnorth.com/2013/04/124-millimeters-of-depth/

<comment><USER2> This suggests to me that with a camera attachment and creative use of a hat and pipes and glue the author could probably convert their world to a 3d one. Some hackers should get on this. If I had the knowledge to do so I would certainly want to try.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. If you can measure it, you can make it. It could probably take the form of a strange pair of goggles, but it should be doable.

The right CS senior undergraduate would kill to take a whack at the problem. It's hard to imagine a more compelling senior thesis. If the problem turns out to be harder than that, I'm sure some grad students would be happy to give it a go.

The tricky part is that the game designers _know_ how far away things are, and can pass the right information to the display. If you can figure that information out with reasonable precision with modern computer vision, just pipe it to the display, and you win...

<comment><USER2> I imagine you could just use a 3d camera to figure out how far away things are. Or at least approximate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> During her Benghazi testimony, Hillary Clinton was wearing some unusual glasses. One lens appeared to have defraction grating like a fresnel lens. It was speculated (and later confirmed I believe) that this was to treat double vision she was having as a result of a concussion.

It seems that such a pair of glasses could be made to help with this person's situation.

<http://www.doctorsvisioncenter.com/hillary-fresnel-lens/>

</comment><comment><USER5> The 3DS has 3d camera, and the author knows they can see the 3d on the 3DS.

So I guess the author could just carry the 3DS around forever and photograph everything with it.</comment>


From DOS Games to BBSes: Five Ways To Reminisce About Your Online Past - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_ways_to_reminisce_about_your_online_past.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 <comment><USER2> When copying links out of your feed reader, it's useful to get rid off the tracking parameters they add. For example, in this link, the ?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 part is unnecessary.</comment>


The Virtual March on Washington for Immigration - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324048904578320141944040664.html <comment><USER2> > _"In South Korea, Spain and Switzerland, 80% of permanent visas are used for > employment. For Britain, Germany and Italy, it's 60%. For the U.S., it's > only 7%. For a skilled worker, it's actually harder to come to America."_

As a Canadian expat in the US, dear God is this ever true.

The US _doesn't_ have a skilled immigration program. It has a work visa moonlighting as immigration policy. Any reform of the H-1B program is IMO just band-aids - what the US needs is an _actual_ immigration track for skilled people in the same vein as Canada and Australia.

I guess it's a moot point in our industry though. The tech industry in the US so massively out-pays every other country, and out-performs, that most of us will jump through an awful lot of hoops to be here. For me going back home would mean a 60% pay cut and a life writing bad Java code for big banks.

<comment><USER3> If I recall correctly, EB1 and EB2 visas _are_ skill-based immigration visas. IMO H1-B serves the purpose of allowing skilled workers _temporarily_ in the US

<comment><USER4> EB1/EB2 are not Visas, they are Green Card filing categories. You typically file for EB1/EB2 while you are on H1-B.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for pointing that out. But the point that I'm making still holds: there does exist a program to allow skilled immigrants to enter the US

<comment><USER5> The path to permanent residency is however pretty slow. If you are from India or China and your filing is in the EB3 category, at the rate things are moving now it could take upto 50 yrs

<comment><USER6> Although this Immigration Innovation act that's going around will apparently get rid of the per-country limitation, meaning the entire world will get to enjoy multi-decade wait times and not just China and India.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> the US is where a lot of the interesting innovation happens, latest product launches and technologies are here. I think that has a lot to do with why people want to be here

</comment><comment><USER7> What exactly do they mean by a "virtual march"? Thunderclap? Really, that's what digital activism has devolved into?

<comment><USER8> Sort of wondering that as well...clog the "virtual streets" of Washington's network backbone with a civil disobedience DoS?

<comment><USER9> non-distributed Denial of Service: an activity with the philosophical significance of street protest, almost zero cultural recognition or visibility for your message, and a more severe judicial remedy than actually sneaking a bomb into the server room.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> read more at <http://www.marchforinnovation.com/></comment>


28,000-year-old mammoth cells have shown reactivity in mouse egg cells - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40546-1 <comment><USER2> Does anybody know why so much mammoth research comes out of Korea and Japan?

<comment><AUTHOR> It might be geographic proximity to Siberia and thus abundance of research material, which drives some funding to do more research which then drives more funding, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> With the ice caps melting, is there a big demand for Woolly Mammoths right now?

I'm just asking.

<comment><USER4> I saw a program on discovery channel a while back on how resurrecting mammoths would help with preserving the permafrost.

Edit: A related article: [https://www.patheos.com/blogs/shanephipps/2017/06/20/mammoth...](https://www.patheos.com/blogs/shanephipps/2017/06/20/mammoth- solution-mammoth-problem/)

<comment><USER5> Does that make sense? The logic is that woolly mammoths would... am I reading this right? Tamp down the permafrost? Like, they'd literally just squish the ground on top of it to compact it and insulate the permafrost from rising temperatures? And they'd knock over trees... that's... that's the plan?

EDIT: Apparently, yes, that is seriously the idea. But the scale required to make a difference, and the cost to get to that scale boggles my mind. You can't just whip up one pack of mammoths and call it a success...

<comment><USER6> It defies logic but case in point: the re-introduction of wolves actually changed rivers in Yellowstone: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q) .

Not claiming this proposal will have the same impact, or even a positive one.

<comment><USER7> eh.

[https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/scientists- debun...](https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/scientists-debunk-myth- that-yellowstone-wolves-changed-entire-ecosystem-flow-of-rivers/70004699)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have yet to hear a convincing argument for "resurrecting" the woolly mammoth. The entire enterprise seems to be an abominably cruel and misspent effort.

I've heard some argue we might need to resurrect a lot of species we're killing off in the next 100 years, so it's good practice. Better practice would be looking at those animals we expect to go extinct. Or, yanno, trying to stop the extinction in the first place.

<comment><USER9> If you understand French, watch this: [https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/078777-000-A/siberie-les- avent...](https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/078777-000-A/siberie-les-aventuriers- de-l-age-perdu/) you'll be convinced.

If you don't: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park)

Basically we need them for an earth-scale experiment that will try to prevent the permafost from unfreezing, thanks to ruminant eating the grass through the snow, thus breaking the snow insulation that prevents the ground from re- freezing deep in winter. If the permafrost do unfreeze, I believe the climate is doomed.

edits: typos

<comment><USER10> It has english subtitles, just watched, very educational.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These are going to taste like shit.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ah, now I'll have steeds for my robot army!

We won't win the war, but we'll look awesome.</comment>


Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage-2/ <comment><USER2> I look after about 15PB of tier1 storage, and I'd recommend not doing it the backblaze way.

Its grand that its worked out for them, but there are a few big drawbacks that backblasze have software'd their way around.

Nowadays its cheaper to use an engenio based array like the MD3260 (also sold/made by netapps/LSI)

First you can hot swap the disks. Second you don't need to engineer your own storage manager. Thirdly you get much much better performance(2gigabytes a second sustained, which is enough to saturate to 10 gig nics). Fourthly you can get 4 hour 24/7 response. Finally the air flow is a bit suspect.

we use a 1u two socket server with SAS to server the data.

If you're brave, you can skip the raid controller and the JBOD enclosure instead and ZFS over the top. However ZFS fragments like a bitch, so watch out if you're running at 75% plus

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer: Backblaze employee here.

> Nowadays its cheaper to use an engenio based array like the MD3260

Cheaper than what? Backblaze still builds it's own storage pods because we can't find anything cheaper. We would LOVE getting out of that part of our business, just show up with something 1 penny cheaper than our current pods and we'll buy from you ENDLESSLY. NOTE: we have evaluated two solutions from 3rd parties in the last 3 months that were promising, but when the FINAL pricing came in (not just some vague promise, wait for the final contract/invoice) it was just too much money, we can build pods cheaper.

If your goal is to keep your job as an IT person - spend 10 or 100 times as much money on super highly reliable NetApp or EMC. You won't regret it. Your company might regret the cost, but _YOUR_ job will be a bit easier. But if you want to save money - build your own pods. NOTE: remember Backblaze makes ZERO dollars when you build your own pods.

<comment><USER4> Disclaimer: VCE employee here. VCE is an EMC Federation Company [tm] with investments from Cisco and VMware.

> We would LOVE getting out of that part of our business [...]

That's a common theme when I meet with some unique companies that are still building out their own stacks of kit and just enough software to keep their consumption patterns consistent. It is about necessity some years but often comes down to the assembly line methods and sunk investments.

I'm curious how much variance you guys have / tolerate or if you ever see reaching VMI (maybe you are already there?) procurement levels?

Market wise, it isn't too outlandish to expect many of the "super highly reliable" options to have a future that is a spectrum of DIY + software (100% roll your own) all the way up to a full experience (status quo). Today, that roll your own option is a progression of hardware compatibility lists to reference architectures but there are only a few companies that go beyond that.

I'm curious to hear how much you see as "too much money" to keep your team from getting out of the rack/stack/burn/test/QA/QC/deploy. Do you plow the "too much money" less "build pods cheaper" into a value that can be compared an opportunity cost for the labor involved?

<comment><USER3> > I'm curious to hear how much you see as "too much money" to keep > your team > from getting out of the rack/stack/burn/test/QA/QC/deploy.

Early on the "too much money" would have been maybe a 20 percent premium. But now that we have scaled up and have all the teams in place, "too much money" is probably even a 1 percent premium. In other words, if we moved to a commercial solution now it would be because we actually SAVE money over using our own pods. That shouldn't be impossible - a commercial operation could make their profit margin out of a variety of savings, like maybe their drives fail less often than ours do because they do better vibration dampening. Or since this is "end-to-end cost of ownership" if the commercial system could save half of our electricity bill by being lower power then they can keep 100 percent of that.

We have a simple spreadsheet that calculates the cost of space rental for datacenter cabinets, the electricity pods use, the networking they use, the cost of all the switches, etc. It isn't overwhelmingly complex or anything. It includes the cost of salaries of datacenter techs with a formula that says stuff like "for every 400 pods we hire one more datacenter tech", stuff like that. Hopefully if we went to a commercial built storage system we could increase the ratio like only hire one more datacenter tech every 800 pods. The storage vendor could pocket the salary of that employee we did not hire.

Or heck, maybe a large vendor can get a better price on hard drives than we get. We buy retail.

> reaching VMI (maybe you are already there?) procurement levels?

I'm not completely sure I understand the question, but here is one answer: in a modern web and email and connected world with tons of competition, I'm not sure there are any economies of scale past the first 10 computers you build. Places will laser cut and fold sheet metal in units of "1" for extremely reasonable prices, it's AMAZING what the small manufacturers can do for you nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-storage- pod-4/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-storage-pod-4/) here is the latest version. I have loved being able to follow the iterations of the storage pod. They are very thoughtful about HW choices but leave it open which I think is the best part!

<comment><USER6> Yev from Backblaze here -> Glad you're enjoying the posts! We enjoy spreading that information, it's a rare thing, so we're pleased as punch that folks are reading them :)

<comment><USER7> It's more than rare, it seems that you're the only real-world, large-scale source on a lot of the topics you've been covering.

I may not work in IT but I crave well-written accounts of technical problem solving. Yours are among the most interesting as you're so open about sharing details that no one else would consider releasing.

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here.

Awww, you are so kind you make us blush. :-)

I do wonder why big companies like Google and Yahoo and Apple don't release more interesting statistics on drive failure. I've heard many people assume they are getting some sweet pricing on hard drives with an agreement never to release those numbers. But if that were true, why won't Seagate or Western Digital or HGST ever give Backblaze a deal to shut us up? Those three companies have refuse to sell to Backblaze "directly" (their business plan is to sell to distributors like Ingram who mark up the product and sell it to NewEgg who marks up the product and sells to Backblaze). I assure you, there are no backroom undisclosed pricing deals for Backblaze.

So I suspect Google and Apple pay retail drive prices also, and is not disclosing drive failure rates because they don't see the profit in it?

<comment><USER8> 2007: [http://research.google.com/pubs/pub32774.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub32774.html)

<comment><USER6> But no names named :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've always been very suspicious about backup vendors offering unlimited space for fixed price. These storage pod posts by Backblaze was primary reason why I decided to give their service a try. Knowing the technology behind the system made it much more credible for me.

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here.

This is EXACTLY one of the reasons we released the information. People would write about Backblaze and say we were losing money and it was an unsustainable business funded by deep pockets. That was frustrating to hear because we self- funded the company for years (no VCs) and I assure you there are no deep pockets here.

So we released the info on the pods partly so we could point at it and say "see, the math really DOES work!"

<comment><USER10> That: no VCs. That is a sign of a healthy company if you can do it without someone else's money (read: selling your soul for cash). I often see people with an idea worrying more about getting VC money than executing the idea and I can never understand it. If your idea is solid you don't need external money. There are valid reasons to chase it (facilitating rapid growth for example) but I rarely see VC money sought after for the right reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > A Backblaze Storage Pod is a Building Block

> But the intelligence of where to store data and how to encrypt it, > deduplicate it, and index it is all at a higher level (outside the scope of > this blog post).

I'm curious about their software that works outside the nodes too. I've been working on storage clusters over this past 9 months using the Ceph ( [http://ceph.com/](http://ceph.com/) ) open source storage software. Its pretty amazing -- and I suspect it could be deployed to a set of backblaze pods too.

It seems to be that for production environment where you wanted to maintain availability you would to build at least 3 of those pods for any deployment - enabling replication across pods/storage nodes.

<comment><USER12> Care to write something about your experiences with Ceph? I was recently looking at something that could be a use case for it, but it is a bit too close to the holy grail of storage for me to feel comfortable. I've toyed with similar systems in the part and they've always been very iffy with their POSIX semantics.

<comment><USER11> We're not doing anything explicitly posix with ceph - not using the ceph filesystem. We're using ceph for block storage under virtual machines that use KVM/QEMU with libvirt etc. The block devices exposed to the VMs end up using having an ext4 filesystem on them but that has nothing to do with ceph.

So far seems fantastic from a VM perspective -- I can take down storage nodes, add new nodes etc, all while the VMs running up top stay alive and well. I once lost 1/3 of my cluster (on a 3 node cluster with 30 disks) ..and everything stayed running until I fixed the broken node.

Ceph also supports Object storage and an S3 interface -- I haven't experimented much with that yet, but I hear its good.

<comment><USER12> Thanks, that sounds like a very interesting use case. It sounds almost perfect for KVM storage. How do you expose the file system to the KVM nodes? Just mount it?

What's performance like so far?

<comment><USER11> qemu has support for ceph's "rbd" ( rados block device). you create an image of a particular size using the ceph tools, then when you create a vm xml definition you specify and rbd disk. ( see here [http://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html#elementsDisks](http://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html#elementsDisks) )

finally, when the vm is booted you can use that block device like any other machine. for first install it will be empty ( need to attach a cdrom image to get going ) then youncan start making snapshots for "thin provisioning" using copy on write clones ...very sweet stuff :)

re performance ...i think its good, but i have heard its not as good as expensive proprietary systems. the product we're building is around storage analytics on open source. ..so eventually well know more :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What do you do when a drive goes bad? Do you move ~50TB of data, pull the entire pod out of the rack, and then try to determine which of 45 drives is bad?

<comment><USER14> Why would you need to do any of that? RAID6 can tolerate 2 drive failures and Linux will tell you which drive is bad. Just slide the pod out and replace the drive, no data lost, very little down time.

<comment><USER13> Three drive failures? My question is how do you practically determine which drive to swap. I don't see any labels or anything. Also I read the current version supports rails. The one in the article looks bolted to the rack. The article had no date on it and it sounds like a lot of the issues have been addressed.

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here.

> how do you determine which drive to swap

Every two minutes we query every drive (all 45 drives inside the pod) with the built in linux smartctl command. We send this information to a kind of monitoring server, so even if the pod entirely dies we know everything about the health of the disks inside it up until 2 minutes earlier. We remember the history for a few weeks (the amount of data is tiny by our standards).

Then, when one of the drives stops responding, several things occur: 1) we put the entire pod into a "read only" mode where no more customer data is written (this lowers the risk of more failures), and 2) we have a friendly web interface that informs the datacenter techs which drive to replace, and 3) an email alert is sent out to whomever is oncall.

Each drive maps has a name like /dev/sda1 and these drive names are reproducibly in the same location in the pod every time. In addition (before it disappeared) the drive also reported a serial number like "WD‑WCAU45178029" as part of the smartctl commands which is ALSO PRINTED ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE DRIVE.

TL;DR - it's easy to swap the correct drive based on external serial numbers. :-)

<comment><USER13> Ok, thanks for the info. That doesn't sound too bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> But in 2014, 1PB in S3 – with 11 nines of data durability – costs ~USD$30,000.

<comment><USER16> That's $30,000 per month. These pods will last 3-5 years, which is $1-$1.8M of S3 storage.

Say you store 3-4 copies of the data on the BackBlaze pods in order to attempt comparable durability, and then the cost comparison comes down to power, space, network, and manpower costs. These costs are _extremely_ variable, so depending on access to these, I could see someone still going with S3. S3 also scales larger and smaller quite quickly, unlike investing in your own equipment.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, so, over three years in us-east-1:

      S3 = ~USD $1,085,552.64

Or more realistically:

      Glacier = ~USD $377,487.36

<comment><USER16> I wish Glacier was a realistic option for me, but I need to look at my data again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This has always interested me. I need to do decently big storage for genomic data. It doesn't have to be fast, but it needs to be able to survive one data center blowing up. If I have 3 data centers, need to store 2-3 petabytes and need storage to survive in the case of a data center failure - the solutions really narrow down when you have to get under the $200/tb range.

Playing with Swift now - but it has really opened my eyes to how much more difficult 2-3 petabytes of storage is (disk failures, number of disks in your infrastructure, the time to redeploy a datacenter on a 1gpbs connection). All the little problems become much bigger!

<comment><USER18> Don't know if swift has erasure coding yet, but QFS[0] has it.

[0]: [http://quantcast.github.io/qfs/](http://quantcast.github.io/qfs/)

<comment><USER19> Single metadata node still? Seems like a good way to manage a large amount of data, and then lose it all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tech aside, I'm quite curious about the economics of storage here. By the price tags and 'Debian 4' I'm guessing this is an older post. But still, $7867 per 67TB and $5 per month, means they need 131 users pay for one year to recoup the cost of one pod, assuming those 131 do not generate over 67TB worth of storage in that period of time. I've not factored in data centre costs, salaries etc. Just a pod. I'm guessing they have enough users as they have been around for many years now, but still, $5 seems a bit on the cheap side to me (not that I'm complaining)

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here.

> I'm quite curious about the economics of storage here.

When we started almost 8 years ago, we were CLUELESS about the economics of it all, and scared witless over it. :-) But I'm happy to report the grand experiment has been a modest success, we are profitable (by a small amount). We even have a little money left over every month to spend on marketing efforts now, and we're growing by every metric - more customers each year, more revenue each year, more employees to swap failed drives (38,790 spinning drives as of yesterday - some fail like clockwork each and every single day).

<comment><USER20> any change you will ever offer backup without the need for a client. Sometime a user could just use sftp or something to send the files to. Something more open so I don't have to install your software. That's what holds me back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how they can guarantee data integrity.

Are they checksumming on a higher level and is that cheaper than using ZFS with necessarily more expensive hardware?

<comment><USER16> As of 2012, they checksum each file and check it every few weeks, and if a file went bad they have the backup client retransmit it:

[https://help.backblaze.com/entries/20926247-Security- Questio...](https://help.backblaze.com/entries/20926247-Security-Question- Round-up-)

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here.

Yep, we checksum the file on the client before sending it. In practice for any one user the number of "silent bit flips" on disk is very low and you probably wouldn't notice it (maybe 1 note in your mp3 file is slightly off). But when we check the checksums every few weeks we absolutely see it occur in our datacenter at our scale probably every day and take steps to heal the files (either from other copies we have or ask the client running on the customer's laptop to retransmit the file).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I decided to try it. You can only select entire hard drives and work around this by excluding folders. That's odd but what i don't understand is why you cannot exclude your c:/ (or Main Drive). Why should anyone be forced to backup something?

Seems to me like the design is backwards and doesn't make any sense.

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here.

The focus of our backup system is being "easy to use". We get a lot of advanced users who are computer savvy, but we also get some mom and pop novice who aren't very good with computers.

Ok, so we don't allow you to unselect your C:\ (main) drive. Here is the reason: when given that choice an alarmingly high number of novices accidentally unselected the drive. (sigh)

We don't charge customers any more or less on what they backup, so there are almost no legitimate reasons to UNSELECT a drive. What data do you have that you hate so much you MUST lose it when your computer is stolen? So we error on the side of helping these novice users and don't allow them to unselect their main laptop drive. The down side is it sometimes irritates the advanced customers who know what they are doing. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you submit an old article even if newer versions of it exist, at least mention the year in parenthesis.

</comment><comment><USER24> Honest question, why JFS vs say, ext4?

<comment><AUTHOR> In later blog posts they discuss moving over to ext4 despite the 16TB size limit.

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here.

Correct, we are entirely on ext4 now (there might be one or two old pods running JFS left, I would need to double check).

We figured out a way to work around the 16 TByte volume limit originally, but now ext4 even supports larger volumes so that isn't a problem at all anymore.

More random history: At the time we chose JFS it looked like XFS might lose support (XFS was created by a now defunct company I used to work for called SGI). Well, the world is a strange place and XFS now has more support than JFS, despite SGI going out of business. But in the end, ext4 is the "most commonly used" linux file system and therefore is arguably the most supported with extra tools and such, and the performance of ext4 in many areas seems higher than JFS (at least for our use case) so the decision becomes easier and easier to go with ext4.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >In the future, we will dedicate an entire blog post to vibration.

In the meantime, does anyone have a link?

</comment><comment><USER26> Do they only do backups or also cloud storage? If they have an API for uploading / deleting / viewing files, I'd use them over S3 given how lower their costs are. But, I can't find any info on that on their website.

<comment><USER27> No API. Only backups, and you need their client.

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here.

To expand on this, we require our client because of our pricing model, which is $5 per computer for unlimited storage FOR THAT ONE laptop or desktop. An API would mess with that pricing model, so we haven't opened it up yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'd love it if either Backblaze or a 3rd party makes a business of selling these pods!

edit: just spotted it, their boot drive is PATA?! Why is this, given that PATA drives are slower and more expensive than SATA ones?

<comment><USER29> 45Drives [http://45drives.com](http://45drives.com) is one company that's selling pre-built versions of the storage pod.

<comment><USER28> [http://www.45drives.com/store/order- beerinator.php](http://www.45drives.com/store/order-beerinator.php)

A 4U beer cooler, not sure if awesome or stupid... but still, a nice idea.

<comment><USER6> Yev from Backblaze here -> We are about to have one on order...maybe a whole cabinet full ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Need the Add the Year at the title. This post is old.

</comment><comment><USER31> Great article!

Love to see more write up on software selection process, tradeoff, failure recovery process/methods and benchmark data.

</comment><comment><USER32> Quite detailed post. Loved reading it.

</comment><comment><USER33> why such an old and expensive cpu?

<comment><USER34> It's an old post. See the latest post,

[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-storage- pod-4/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-storage-pod-4/)

for more details on the new one.</comment></comment>


What Google DeepMind Means for A.I. - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/deepmind-artificial-intelligence-video-games

<comment><USER2> This is impressive. The current approach will work only for games where the whole state is on-screen and planning isn't required. A pure reactive system will work for that.

I used to say that a key component of AI that was missing was the ability to get through the next few seconds of life without falling down or bumping into anything. I went through Stanford CS when the top-down logicians were in charge of AI. That approach was totally incapable of dealing with the real world. Now we're seeing the systems needed to deal with the real world in the short term starting to work.

Once you can deal with the next few seconds, a strategy module can be added to give goals to the low level system. This is very clear in the video game context. As the game playing programs advance beyond the 2D full-screen games, they'll need a low-level system to handle the next moves ("don't fall off platform", "jump to next platform", "shoot at target" are primitives for the 2D sidescroller era) and some level of planner to handle tactical matters and strategy.

It's possible to explicitly build hierarchical systems like that now, using classical planning techniques to modify the goals of a machine learning system. It's not yet possible to get a hierarchical system to emerge from machine learning. Medium term planning as an emergent behavior is a near term big challenge for AI.

Beyond such a two-level system, we're going to need intercommunicating components that do different parts of the problem. The components may be evolved, while the architecture may be designed. When AI systems can design such architectures, they're probably ready to take over.

<comment><USER3> I remember an AI researcher (I forget who) recently said something to the effect that early AI research produced all sorts of planning algorithms. E.g. the top down camp of AI. But they weren't capable of working with the real world because we didn't have very good low level perception. E.g. this complicated algorithm for planning the robot's actions, but it depended on getting input about where objects are.

Now we have decent low level perception from the bottom-up camp of AI, but they are limited by a lack of high level stuff like planning and reasoning.

But you are right that there is no obvious way to just combine these wildly different algorithms without lots of human guidance.

<comment><USER4> I think you hit the nail on the head here. That's one of the most interesting parts of thinking about GAI for me. Which parts will end up being top-down and which parts will end up being bottom-up? And even if we have evidence that a certain part is TD or BU in humans, do we even _want_ machine intelligence to work the same way?

The article says something to the effect of "no matter how much you advance this strategy, you never get a toddler out of it." And that makes sense because, presumably, certain parts of the human brain exercise some sort of top-down control over the sensory-data-processing and other parts.

For example, it seems like the human mind is built to see things as _things_. Does the human mind _reallY_ start off seeing "pixels" and then learn by itself to think of the word as solid, whole objects instead of collections of similarly-colored photons/pixels or atoms? It seems like this is a universal use-case and it would make sense if our tendency to see the world in terms of "things" instead of patches of color is built-in (gestalt psychology seems to suggest this as well).

It sounds like the AI in the article starts off from pixels and then builds up _some_ _sort_ of model of blocks, the ball, paddle, game physics, etc, (but then again, maybe it doesn't have those models at all and is just doing statistical analysis on patterns of pixels). Either way, it likely doesn't have any higher, context-independent model of objects/things like humans do. I suspect this may be one of the hurdles in transfer learning. Humans think of objects as having certain properties. When other objects in other contexts appear to have similar properties, we guess that they may have other properties in common which gives at least a rough model of the new object.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is: Humans have hierarchical models of the world that let us think separately about patterns of light, atoms/molecules, whole physical objects/things, systems, etc. They are all first-class citizens and we ascribe properties to each of them. We already have a rough-model of anything at the same level, but a different context, and with similar-enough properties to something we already know. It seems to me like this is fundamentally connected to humans' ability to do transfer-learning. Could this effect be achieved through bottom-up algorithms, or are we going to have to figure out some top-down way of developing transferrable, generalizable, hierarchical models?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "video games" (read "world simulator").

The important thing about their work is that it is deliberately marching down the path of more and more complex world simulations.

We experience the world at one second per second. To learn to walk we must first fall, and we fall at 32 feet/second^2. There's a hard limit on how fast we can make mistakes (like tripping) and so there is a hard limit on how fast we can learn.

Computers can experience a simulated world at many hours per second. When they're learning to walk in a simulated world they can fail, and learn, thousands of times before we've finished our first step.

This ratio of simulated experience to real world time is also going up. Eventually the minimum amount of time it takes to grow a toddler like AI in simulation will be just under the time an AI researcher is willing to wait for results. When _that_ happens we'll see a real improvement in the quality of AIs.

<comment><USER6> There are two sides to this, world simulation and AI. As the other replies already said, current AI isn't close to toddler-level (there's no reasoning going on in the DeepMind work, just statistical correlation). We're also way off on the world simulation side - show me a realistic world simulator that can run close to realtime. Physically-based rendering is indeed impressive but this only accounts for visual perception and learning to walk involves much more than that.

<comment><USER7> > (there's no reasoning going on in the DeepMind work, just statistical > correlation)

I've seen 100 people make this statement and mean 100 different things, so I just wanted to clarify:

How are you defining "reasoning" here as distinct from statistical correlation?

<comment><USER8> Reasoning involves inferring and applying causation which is different from correlation [1]. One can possibly define process of "understanding" as building a "model" of the system where previously unseen events can be predicated or justified using the model. The big difference in "human understanding" seems to be that we can extract fairly minimal set of laws that govern the system from our observations that we can communicate and apply very efficiently.

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation)

<comment><USER7> > Reasoning involves inferring and applying causation which is different from > correlation

A couple points here:

* The way humans model causation is just non-naive statistical correlation (controlling for variables). That technique is still accurately described as "statistical correlation"

* I'm not even convinced that human reasoning _does_ imply generating a model of causation. Let's exclude things like rigorous scientific studies for the purpose of the discussion and focus on day-to-day human reasoning: I think the thought processes of most of the people I know could most accurately be explained by correlating things across time. Modeling causation is often incidental (X often happens after Y is a reasonable enough heuristic for general use).

<comment><USER9> > Let's exclude things like rigorous scientific studies for the purpose of the > discussion and focus on day-to-day human reasoning

I think you'll need to look at the other end of the spectrum to see an abundance of (wrong?) models of causality: Religion and Law.

There are no "confirmed" cases of anyone actually going to heaven or hell or purgatory (or whatever else), and yet many of us still conform to some arbitary ruleset in the hopes of eventually ending (or not ending) up in one of thoses places, because we have constructed some model of how doing this gets you into hell and doing that gets you into heaven.

Similarly, we have plenty of evidence on how companies spend huge effort on finding loopholes in tax laws in order to avoid taxes, and yet instead of simplyfing the ruleset (so that there are obviously no holes in it) we still opt for piling on more laws (so that there are no obvious holes in it) because we construct (faulty?) models of how those new rules will prevent further exploits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "the A.I. has not only become better than any human player but has also discovered a way to win that its creator never imagined."

That's a pretty standard Breakout/Arkanoid technique - getting the ball behind the board and letting it do the work for you.

Not knocking the AI, just nitpicking this writer.

<comment><USER11> That confused me too until I realized the author of the article was talking about the creator of the AI, not the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For all of the New Yorker's clout in journalism, sentences like the following make me wonder where their editors are. The run-on and sea of commas is atrocious! It's not the first time I've noticed this in the last few days either.

"Hassabis, who began working as a game designer in 1994, at the age of seventeen, and whose first project was the Golden Joystick-winning Theme Park, in which players got ahead by, among other things, hiring restroom-maintenance crews and oversalting snacks in order to boost beverage sales, is well aware that DeepMind's current system, despite being state of the art, is at least five years away from being a decade behind the gaming curve."

<comment><USER13> That's not a run-on, and all the commas are properly used. Its _stylistically_ awful because there are way to many apositive/parenthetical phrases getting in the way, and because they are _nested_ without using an alternative device (like setting the outer one off with dashes rather than commas) as well as pointless excess verbosity ("at least five years away from being a decade behind the gaming curve").

<comment><USER12> When I say run-on I guess I mean the sentence just drags on when it could be two or three separate sentences with no negative impact. It makes it difficult to read and I, at least, lose track of where I am in it.

It's not _incorrect_ per se, it's just not well-written as far as I'm concerned. But what do I know, I'm not a journalist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another issue that this article sort of touches on but doesn't make explicit: the real world is not a Markov decision process. There are complex, variable- order time dependencies which we are barely aware of but which influence our thinking every second of every day. Trying to model this in software leads to an exponential increase storage and time complexity. The curse of dimensionality has been with us ever since Bellman coined the phrase almost 60 years ago; it's not going away anytime soon. Thus, it's difficult for me to see how deep Q-learning (or any other MDP-based algorithm) gets us any closer to human-level understanding.

<comment><USER3> Recurrent neural networks with e.g. Long Short Term Memory ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_short_term_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_short_term_memory)) can model very long term dependencies effectively, and there has been some work lately that get good results with simpler models.

They don't use it because it's computationally expensive and totally unnecessary for Atari games, but it's certainly possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "also discovered a way to win [breakout] that its creator never imagined"

I don't understand. We often would bounce balls between the top wall and the bricks while playing breakout on our Atari 2600 back in the day. And I wouldn't say we were all that good (it didn't happen right away).

<comment><USER16> Yeah. It's a bit odd that the author didn't know this or discuss his thoughts with somebody who knew this (which would be most people who've played Breakout, it often happens accidentally).

edit: Having just watched the source video, she may be actually referring to the creator of the AI and just badly rephrasing what the guy in the video says ( he says that they didn't expect the AI to be able to work that out with the abilities they had given it ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really like this line of work and I expect will grow quite substantially over the next few years. Of course, Reinforcement Learning has been around for a long time. Similarly, Q Learning (the core model in this paper) has been around a very long time. What is new is that normally you see these models applied to toy MDP problems with simple dynamics, and linear Q function approximations for fear of non-convergence etc. What's novel about this work is that they fully embrace a complex non-linear Q function (ConvNet) looking at the raw pixels, and get it to actually work in (relatively speaking) complex environments (games). This requires several important tricks, as is discussed at length in their Nature paper (e.g. experience replay, updating the Q function only once in a while, etc.).

I implemented the DQN algorithm (used in this work) in Javascript a while ago as well ([http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/demo/rldemo...](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/demo/rldemo.html)) if people are interested in poking around, but my version does not implement all the bells and whistles.

The results in this work are impressive, but also too easy to antropomorphise. If you know what's going on under the hood you can start to easily list off why this is unlike anything humans/animals do. Some of the limitations include:

\- Most curcially, the exploration used is random. You button mash random things and hope to receive a reward at some point or you're completely lost. If anything at any point requires a precise sequence of actions to get a reward, exponentially more training time is necessary.

\- Experience replay that performs the model updates is performed uniformly at random, instead of some kind of importance sampling. This one is easier to fix.

\- A discrete set of actions is assumed. Any real-valued output (e.g. torque on a join) is a non-obvious problem in the current model.

\- There is no transfer learning between games. The algorithm always starts from scratch. This is very much unlike what humans do in their own problem solving.

\- The agent's policy is reactive. It's as if you always forgot what you did 1 second ago. You keep repeatedly "waking up" to the world and get 1 second to decide what to do.

\- Q Learning is model-free, meaning that the agent builds no internal model of the world/reward dynamics. Unlike us, it doesn't know what will happen to the world if it perfoms some action. This also means that it does not have any capacity to plan anything.

Of these, the biggest and most insurmountable problem is the first one: Random exploration of actions. As humans we have complex intuitions and an internal model of the dynamics of the world. This allows us to plan out actions that are very likely to yield a reward, without flailing our arms around greedily, hoping to get rewards at random at some point.

Games like Starcraft will significantly challenge an algorithm like this. You could expect that the model would develop super-human micro, but have difficulties with the overall strategy. For example, performing an air drop to enemy base would be impossible with the current model: You'd have to plan it out over many actions: "load the marines into the ship, fly the ship in stealth around the map, drop it at the precise location of enemy base".

Hence, DQN is best at games that provide immediate rewards, and where you can afford to "live in the moment" without much planning. Shooting things in space invaders is a good example. Despite all these shortcoming, these are exciting results!

<comment><USER18> Thanks, karpathy!

I did submit your JS implementation to HN when I came across it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9108738](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9108738)

Monte Carlo Tree Search could be the missing link. In other words, use DQN to model the world and map actions to a value function. Then use playouts and backpropogation of action tree results to find tactics. Of course, it does not solve the big question: how to model "memories" and "inferences"? Indeed, very exciting times for AI/ML!

<comment><USER19> We need a model to use Monte Carlo Tree Search... which is missing in this approach since it uses model-free reinforcement learning. Unless the deep convolution net can extract some latent features as state, it would be impossible to do planning on top of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm only loosely familiar with the "general game playing" literature but I think learning the structure of the game is the interesting research problem here. An immediate experiment that I'd like to try would be:

(a) Identify games considered similar (+maybe define what it means to be similar)...let's take Pong and Breakout as suggested (b) Trial and error run of one of the games to learn the action-reward structure (c) Compare a fresh relearning of the second game to a start where the similarities/differences are pre-input to the AI "somehow" (some sort of diff between the game rules etc.)

I'm thinking of a gamer thinking "oh this is just like X,Y,Z except..." when picking up a new game.

<comment><USER21> This idea is known as "incremental problem solving". Some external oracle, eg. a parent, teacher or programmer, provides a series of problems, where each builds on ideas from the previous.

An example algorithm is the Optimal Ordered Problem Solver, which tries to solve each problem by generating simple programs. Successful programs get stored in read-only memory, then the system moves on to the next problem, generating programs which may call out to any previously-successful programs: [http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/oops.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/oops.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > "They can find their way across a room," Mason said. "They can see stuff, > and as the light and shadows change they can recognize that it's still the > same stuff. They can understand and manipulate objects in space."

Isn't this just adding extra dimensions to the input space? We have 2D now (plus time?), we're missing Z, sound, sensation, maybe emotions. Each added dimension gives the algorithm exponentially more bits to crunch but if computer speed is doubling every 2 years or so, why is this so obviously a dead-end to Mason?

<comment><USER23> I think the distinction is that the algorithm gets to observe the 2D space directly, whereas the whole notion of 3D space has to be learned from 2D projections.

Also, note that the games they do best on have a nice clear objective function: Montezuma's Revenge on the other hand does not have such a numeric objective to optimise.

To be fair, Hassabis does freely concede these limitations in his talks (at least in the ones targeted to academic audiences), and it will be certainly interesting to see where they go from here.

<comment><USER24> That's a good point about Montezuma's Revenge, and similar games. Very rarely does a greedy algorithm help you in that game unlike in a breakout style game where you simply want to acquire as many points as quickly as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article says humans can do "transfer learning" while machine can't. It shouldn't be impossible to implement transfer learning in machines too.

<comment><USER26> I don't see anywhere it says machines can't; it says DeepMind doesn't. There are a few philosophers who believe human thought is more or less magic and can't be replicated in any way but all of the arguments I've seen are either deeply flawed logically or are so specific as to more or less read they can't "be" human, which I'll accept as true but isn't terribly interesting.

<comment> one-more-minute There are plenty of smart people elsewhere who believe the human mind is un- simulatable. For example, Roger Penrose argues that thought processes are deterministic but non-algorithmic.

I've never really understood that perspective, though. Surely, in the absolute worst case, we could just make an atom-for-atom copy of a human brain? Even if you take seriously the idea that there's some kind of magic consciousness juice that exists outside the universe, evolution has managed to hook into it and surely so can we.

<comment><USER9> Except that atoms are not homogenous entities.

Even assuming you'd somehow manage to produce and combine atoms to a spec, there's positively no way of obtaining that spec.

<comment> one-more-minute Even if thinking does somehow depend on quantum effects, it seems hugely unlikely that it would depend on the _specific_ quantum state of individual atoms.

If it does, you don't need a spec of that state, since we know that it can emerge from something simpler (humans start out as a single cell, after all, and so in fact did all of humanity). You don't need the whole system, just the right initial conditions.

At that point you're growing a brain rather than engineering one, and maybe it takes you no closer to understanding the mechanics. But the point stands that it must be possible to construct a brain _in principle_ , because it's already happened so many times before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "In the longer term, after DeepMind has worked its way through Warcraft, StarCraft, and the rest of the Blizzard Entertainment catalogue, the team's goal is to build an A.I. system with the capability of a toddler. "

Wait ... what? You're going to teach this thing using violent video games? This seems like a bad plan...

<comment><USER28> The AI doesn't have a notion of "violence". There are goals and obstacles to that goal.

Goal: Human health, obstacle: viruses.

Goal: Clean energy, obstacle: friction, entropy, battery limitations

There are concerns that humans might inadvertently become an obstacle to some greater goal, but training on Warcraft/Starcraft where you are "fighting" isn't special in this regard. In chess or you are battling your opponent too, "killing" their pieces, etc.

<comment><USER29> Goal: Make paperclips ([http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I will get excited once it can solve Bongard puzzles: [http://www.foundalis.com/res/diss_research.html](http://www.foundalis.com/res/diss_research.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> The video referenced at the beginning of the article: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfGD2qveGdQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfGD2qveGdQ)

</comment><comment><USER32> Freeway isn't a driving game. It's a chicken-crossing-the-road game.

I'm looking forward to the upcoming entry in next week's _New Yorker_ "Corrections" section.

<comment><USER32> Um, holy shit, the article's been updated to refer to Freeway as "a chicken- crossing-the-road game", and there's a footnote acknowledging the correction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is actually pretty scary. It is basically giving AI a human-like form of will. It "desires" what you program it to desire and goes about achieving it, learning from its' own mistakes and becoming increasingly proficient at manipulating its' environment to achieve its' goal(s) along the way. It makes me excited, but also quite frightened to think what goals people might give AIs like this in the future...

<comment><USER34> This is a really poor rendering of "desire". If the word "desire" is meaningful, it has to be self-actualized. Otherwise it's just a programming condition, no different than a fuse box or a dead man's switch.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't matter what _word_ you use, the AI is still manipulating it's environment to achieve that "programming condition".

In any case, everyone's desires are programmed into them, just via genetics and evolution rather than humans and programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Hours after encountering its first video game, and without any human coaching, the A.I. has not only become better than any human player but has also discovered a way to win that its creator never imagined." this is where I stopped. A 12Y old could find this trick, and most of us have used it when we played.

<comment><USER36> Bad writing, sure. But the fact that you're comparing the ingenuity of a computer to that of a 12 year old is a sign of profound progress being made in AI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Shall we play a game?....</comment>


United Airlines Borrows $2B - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/united-airlines-borrows-2-billion-to-pay-transaction-fees-and-other-costs-2020-03-12 <comment><AUTHOR> If the situation doesn't improve by March 2021, they will be up the creek.</comment>