jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
> People reach different conclusions about how to strike the balance, and I don’t think there’s one right answer.

Yes Certainly. For instance if my dad had died of covid the decrease in my quality of life from that would have been permanently effected. Where yours had, your quality of life would be unchanged.
While the continual one-upmanship of ever more intricate biologically plausible learning rules is interesting to observe (and I played around at one point with a variant of the original feedback alignment), I think OP's alternative view is more plausible.

Fwiw I am involved in an ongoing project that is investigating a biologically plausible model for generating connectomes (as neuroscientists like to call them). The connectome-generator happens (coincidentally) to be a neural network. But exactly as the OP points out, this "neural network" need not actually represent a biological brain -- in our case it's actually a hypernetwork representing the process of gene expression, which in turn generates the biological network. Backprop is then applied to this hypernetwork as a (more efficient) proxy for evolution. In the most extreme case there need not be any learning at all at the level of an individual organism. You can see this as the ultimate end-point of so-called Baldwinian evolution, which is the hypothesized process whereby more and more of the statistics of a task are "pulled back" into genetically encoded priors over time.

But for me the more interesting question is how to approach the information flow from tasks (or 'fitness') to brains to genes on successively longer time scales. Can that be done with information theory, or perhaps with some generalization of it? I also think it is a rich and interesting challenge to parameterize learning rules in such a way that evolution (or even random search) can efficiently find good ones for rapid learning of specific kinds of task. My gut feeling is that biological intelligence has many components that are ultimately discrete computations, and we'll discover that those are reachable by random search if we can just get the substrate right, and in fact this is how evolution has often done it -- shades of Gould and Eldredge's "punctuated equilibrium".

(if anyone is interested in discussing any of these things feel free to drop me an email)
Know a good music player for Windows? And don't tell me Windows Media Player. :)
Couldn't you still have sprayers that would help with this?
Having the video not watchable is a large fail for a company that's trying to sell infrastructure services.
As someone else said, different breeds are very different in behaviors, and it's not as simple as you make it out in any way, shape, or form.
I think apple are facing the same problems a lot of other companies face - it's no longer green field development and the existing codebase means they're being weighed down by regression. Maybe not enough automated tests.
However some bugs are basic error really. Take the frequently visited icons on mobile safari. They keep getting the wrong favicon - that's just shoddy programming and testing.
discoveryd is shit. The unofficial no broadcast argument breaks WiFi. You can't disable discoveryd, or it breaks DNS and DHCP.

If there's somwthing you want to block (multicast DNS), get icefloor and/or (Hand Off OR Little Snitch). I use the former and latter.former. OSX Yosemite contains the awesome pf firewall forked from FreeBSD which was forked from OpenBSD. (Apple send some cash to FreeBSD and OpenBSD plz.)
Talking about voxel engines, I used to follow the progress of a minecraf-like game which, among its particularities, offered a spherical world, thanks to a clever deformation of a large cube. IIRC it also offered basic physics (falling trees). I'd like to check out where this game is at now, but I totally forgot the name. Does it ring a bell for anyone?
Deduction not induction, but yes.
Yeah! I want to see an EDSL impl of a nicely typed Tutorial D sometime already!

Personally, I don't know that I care about the distributed part of the stack. I want something like Erlang's actor model in Haskell even on one machine. I think if there was a nicely typed way to do that (and see pipes-concurrent and mvc for nice examples) there'd be some fantastic "large scale" application operating space that would get opened up.

Akka does this somewhat below par with Erlang. I'd wonder if a GHC implementation of straightforward single machine Erlang's semantics could do better with typed effects and true asynchronous exceptions. This would be nice even with just effect typing (e.g. untyped channels and lots of living in some IO-alike) and could be a good interpreter target for simpler strongly-typed organizational designs.

I started fiddling with this (under the name hotep) a few months ago and got sidetracked but it keeps coming up!
Well done - the discussion is now sucked into the Apple void.
That sounds like a story that is recounted in the Jargon File (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html).

I wonder if it's a bit apocryphal. I feel sure I've also read a version where the two processes were called “sheriff” and “deputy”, and you suggested yet a third naming scheme.

“Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at Motorola discovered a relatively simple way to crack system security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick the system into running a portion of the program in ‘master mode’ (supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply.

[…]

Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox field-support rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take direct action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily the system could be cracked and just how thoroughly the security safeguards could be subverted.

They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then incorporated into a pair of programs called ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘Friar Tuck’. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as ‘ghost jobs’ (daemons, in Unix terminology); they would use the existing loophole to subvert system security, install the necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another's statuses in order to keep the system operator (in effect, the superuser) from aborting them.

One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of unusual phenomena. […]
Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and killed them... and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood was gunned, the following sequence of events took place:

!X id1

id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me!
id1: Off (aborted)

id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff
of Nottingham's men!

id1: Thank you, my good fellow!

Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed, and would start a new copy of the recently slain program within a few milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was to kill them simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately crash the system.”
How does this not include Sergey Brin & Anne Wojcicki?
With that second network users will be able to spend twice, once on the first network and then again on the second network.
Sites like craigslist are in fact well designed, it's just that those sites feature a very minimal design (less = more). In fact if you want an example of a site that veered to encourage bad design MySpace is a good example. But even there you could argue that it was a well designed site because the audience for that site wanted their pages to be ugly and hard to read.

I think you'll find that really good design (and designers) always think of their audience first. This isn't just a design mindset, but a marketing one. That thinking is essential to creating any good product from a website to a cooking wok.
Tried the Momentus XT. It was good... But they have been on 500/4 for a year now. Also have an optibay enroute for the MacBook.

For my desktop I have gone for the Highpoint Rocketraid 1220. it's a two port SATA III <£50. Add a HDD of your choice and an SSD and you have your own hybrid logical disk. I am testing with a 500gb caviar black and an old OCZ Vertex 30gb.... Arrives today!
To gain some early adopters of your social network. Perhaps you could add it to http://startupli.st :)
Not to pick on you, but let me ask this question;

Since you want to be a remote worker, what do you bring to the table that a remote worker in say Mexico doesn't? Or India? Or China? 'Cause sure as hell they'd be a lot cheaper...

And while quantity doesn't equal quality, I'm certainly not so egotistic as to suppose there isn't a single Indian smart enough and keen enough to do whatever I can do for a fraction of the cost.

So why doesn't my boss hire him? Cause I'm in the office when something needs to get done. Because I'm the one who has a relationship with the customers. Because I make the people around me more productive as I pass on my knowledge. Oh, and perhaps because I am the boss.
I don't think it's possible. Instead try a social engineering approach where you have enough broad-based support for the concept that there is pressure on the government not to shut it down.

Wikileaks has been very smart lately in the way that it has expanded its own PR reach before delving back into controversial material.
I've had this as my wallpaper for the past few months on both my laptops (work and personal--although I recently changed one to the Emacs equivalent[1]). It's been super-handy. Before I open Vim, I'll scan the wallpaper to see if I've been forgetting something useful (f/F/t/T are probably my favorites), and make an effort to use it while editing. Also while editing, if I'll sometimes have a weird task come up, and wonder what the best way is to move my cursor from point A to point B. I just tap Super-D, and skim through the wallpaper to find the best command.

And guys--don't forget that Vim is a language. All the movement commands here combine really well with "verbs", like 'c'hange, 'd'elete, 'y'ank, 'v'isual mode, etc. Sure, the wallpaper only covers 30 or so commands, but if you take the time to memorize those four verbs, suddenly you know 120 commands.

1 - http://punchcard.wordpress.com/2010/10/09/emacs-movement-sho...
Looks like the test in question is metal coinage, which Ithaca Hours aren't.
Citigroup is selling EMI.
Sorry, but what do you mean with “would never get away with”?

Everyone’s screaming about this, it’s completely blown out of proportion and crazy conspiracy theories are formulated. That’s different to how the press reacts to Microsoft or Google – exactly, how?
You just reminded me of why the Internet is an incredible invention.
I'd love to get in contact with you. Perhaps I'm just a useless noob, but I don't see an email in your HN profile. I think HN hides the email your provide it, as it's only used for password resets. There's an address you can reach me at in my 'about' section.

Thanks for your response.
Your retail RAM prices are inflated about 3x, but I think your point is correct.

You know how Google has always had that little blurb about how long it took to process your query on the results page? Back when they were for sure running everything out of RAM, it was usually something comically small like 0.00025 seconds. I just checked and it's now more like 0.25 seconds.

Perhaps they've done testing and found that absurdly fast results don't matter (or no longer matter) as much as they thought?
Yeah, that definitely struck me as the odd bit in the article -- being jealous of the "fame" that startup founders get sure seems like a pretty specialized breed of envy!
it's like "Math Magic Land" except even more bad ass
Gave you $8 and reblogged. http://www.thinkgene.com/openpcr-dna-amplification-for-anyon...

Btw, if anyone reading this wants to upgrade their OpenPCR setup with a nice PCR hood, I have a beautiful one for sale for $1500.
How many years of experience did you have using Windows before then? You had a lot of domain knowledge already whether you realize it or not.

"The first time I used Emacs I found all kinds of Lisp functions I already knew. It has a familiar grep command that lets me click on results to jump right to each matching line in a set of files. I used the online help to find a command that evaluates Lisp expressions immediately allowing me to extend my environment just like typing into a REPL. ..."

You probably get the idea.
Well, that depends on what the goal is, right? If I were a MS shareholder and wanted to see them grow and profit and succeed, I'd say somebody like Ray Ozzie.

But since I despise Microsoft and really don't care if they crash and burn or whatever, I'd go for somebody else for either ironic effect, comic potential, or just sheer absurdity. So my list of candidates would be:

1. Richard Stallman

2. Eric S. Raymond

3. Zed Shaw

4. Jamie Zawinski

5. Joel Spolsky

6. Darl McBride

7. Linus Torvalds

8. Paul Graham

9. Tom Siebel

10. Sir Tim Berners-Lee

11. Tony Hayward
I don't think you've actually used it. it doesn't just "trigger" and block just ads from appearing. You still see the ads and everything on e page. On certain pages, you can optionally, manually enter a mode that just brings the text into focus.
Overdoses would certainly be reduced by a large extent by legalization.

Also, drug education that is more rational and nuanced than "drugs are evil and will ruin your life" will go a long way in preventing the kinds you problems you talk about.
It's often a bug in the application that exposes the database, so the same bugs might also be used to expose the private key.

It's also worth noting that it wouldn't just be the web servers that require your private key, it would also be any mail servers you use for sending your newsletters and such like (assuming these aren't run on your web servers - which often isn't the case). Then there's your telephone support staff, who would also may need to know your e-mail address so they could do their job effectively. And any other operators that might compile data extracts, eg for 3rd parties where users have given permission for your details to used / sold.

Quickly you're in a situation where your private key is more available across your infrastructure than the e-mail would have been if it wasn't encrypted to begin with.

Now lets look at the cost of such a system. There's an obvious electricity / hardware cost with the CPU time required to encrypt / decrypt this data (after all, CPU time is the general measure for the strength of encryption) and the staffing cost with the time wasted jumping through those extra hoops. The development time, code complexity, etc - it all has a cost to the company.

So what's the benefits in any companies doing this? They don't gain any extra security? This is really more of a privacy policy for their users; and users which are that paranoid about their e-mail address being leaked should either use a disposable e-mail account or shouldn't be using a cloud-based proprietary messenging network to begin with. What's more the chat history might well have your e-mail address in anyway (eg "hi dave, I'm heading into a meeting shortly, but e-mail me at bob@example.com and I'll have a look tonight")

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for hashing / encrypting sensitive data. But pragmatically we need to consider:

1) are e-mail addresses really that sensitive? Or instead should we be encouraging better security for our web-mail et al accounts (eg 2 factor authentication) to prevent our addresses being abused. Given that we give out e-mail addresses to anyone who needs to contact us, I think the latter option (securing our email accounts) is the smarter one

2) instead of encrypting phone numbers and postal addresses, should we instead be challenging the requirement for online services to store them to begin with? If they have my email address, why do they also need my phone number? Postal address I can forgive a little more if there's a product that needs shipping or payments that need to be made.
No, a simple password like "slack123" should be easy to crack with any usable password storage method.
Try both (Ruby,PHP). Find out about frameworks in php (cakephp, codeigniter) and in ruby (sinatra, rails, etc) And not just read the docs and say "i dont want this thing". Try this: develop a user login and signup system in both. see which one is easier.

Quick facts:
1.) It's easier to find php hosting for cheap. low cost to get started.

2.) It's easier to develop a prototype in Rails quickly, especially if your app has some CRUD stuff, you can get it up and running in no time, but this interface would just be for testing. Its called scaffolding.

3.) You can do the same scaffolding in php frameworks like cakephp.

4.) With ruby you get a lot of well-built libraries which are called "gems". they are handy and are centralized, so you can update to a new version easily.

5.) With php you can get a lot of cheap man power to work on you app if it requires some complex plugins.

6.) If you are going to use ruby, I suggest getting familiar with linux commands. That way you can find cheap vps to host the app (but not as cheap as the php hosts you'll find). Or develop it on heroku's free plan.

7.) Now that you know these, go develop the app on whichever language you find easy.

P.S: If you are seriously out of money, and can spend only in single digits ($x), you should seriously consider doing the app in php. The same applies if the app is too simple
I'll weigh in as a consumer, not a programmer--I'm a writer and photographer, and ordered a 16-inch Toshiba (Satellite A500-ST6647, based on reliability surveys) on Monday. I spent about three weeks revising a spreadsheet, trying to figure out just this, how they differentiate their consumer, business, gaming and multimedia lines. But even harder was trying to calculate actual price.

As I'm sure you've seen, there are insane discounting schemes, and base retail price means nothing. And then after scouring for coupons and coming up with a number, that number is only good for two days, because it was a Memorial Day sale and that's over, but wait, here come the Father's Day discounts.
Loneliness would probably work too, then. Arguably, this is a form of fear. It's also arguably external.
I make infrastructure for high frequency trading desks. Since the algo is a fairly small piece of code, and the OS is massive, there are big opportunities reducing latency in firmware, kernels, schedulers, transports, locking mechanisms, interrupts, and interconnects. Most investment banks are forming dedicated low latency infrastructure teams now and they're severely in need of skilled people.
And, in fact, my git setup has evolved to rely on magit (an emacs-based git GUI of sorts) for some operations, and the command line for others, and GitX for others.

In this case the best tool, even for experts, is a hybrid tool.
I'm not sure I'd set up an opposition between SAT solvers like Z3 on
one hand, and ASP on the other. I recommend to think of ASP (and other
approaches like CSP (constraint satisfaction problems)) as high-level
languages for solving combinatorial problems.

In this understanding,
high-level (ASP, CSP) contrasts with low-level (SAT and SMT) for
the same problem domain: just as with high- and low-level
programming languages like Java are compiled down to low-level programming languages like x86 machine code, high-level formalism like ASP, CSP, ... can be compiled down to low-level SAT/SMT.

SAT/SMT is the assembly
language of combinatorial problems because you have to state
explicitly all forbidden solutions using CNF (conjuncive normal
form). For examle if you have variables x, y and z, then the CNF
( x \/ y \/ not z ) /\ ( not x /\ not y )
has as models all maps from {x, y, z} to {0, 1} except {x=0, y=0,
z=1}, {x=1, y=1, z=1} and {x=1, y=1, z=0}. The problem with using CNFs to enumerate forbidden solutions is that the formulae can be long (just like assembler programs can be long). With high-level formalisms like ASP you often get a much more succinct specification.

With a
bit of squinting, you can even see first-order logic as a high-level
formalism that compiles down to propositional logic (via skolemisation,
resolution, unification, herbrand etc).
I have been giving Python a go for writing a programme which concurrently scrapes and collates data from multiple sources.

I chose to figure out how to do this in Python instead of my usual Haskell because I wanted to see how productive I would be compared to how I did similar things in Haskell. I wanted to get away from what I call type-wankery, which the author seems to be complaining about as well.

I’ve been using the Python asyncio library and have been thinking that Python could certainly do with monads in this context. Then I remembered what a ball-ache stacking monads is. In any case, I can’t help seeing programmes in an algebraic context after using Haskell.

The author, and many people who complain about types, seem to forget that types and interfaces exist whether or not they are explicitly defined.

Is the problem with such an attractive type system that they lead to people defining interfaces before they are fully explored? In that case, maybe it could be argued that a less attractive type system would keep people away from so much type-wankery.

It’s hard to know where the best balance is. I am considering F# now. It also seems to have working IDEs, which is nice.
As far as I understand, Haskell’s original intent was to be like a testing ground for research into functional language design, which I think it really succeeded at.

Additionally, I do know of more than a few production deployments of Haskell in finance, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that is what Haskell excels at.
In what area would you like to program in?

At least on the types-are-documentation front, I find that really helpful - just see what you have, what you want, and then find a way from one to the other. In JavaScript on the other hand it's hard to tell what the structure of some object needs to be.
Haskell is pretty nice for building web applications.

Thanks to it's type system you can build much more stable web apps in less time. Usually later in the application life cycle you have a hard time refactoring stuff when working with e.g. JS or rails. Without tests you will definitly break stuff. With haskell you can confidently refactor your code without worrying about breaking stuff, the compiler will tell you.

The way data structure are declared in haskell is also very nice for domain modeling. You don't have as much boilerplate as e.g. when using PHP with doctrine.

The performance is also pretty good compared to python or rails.
The line which sprung out most to me was the one claiming that "Clojure took the world by storm". This is simply not the case. JavaScript has taken the world by storm, as has Python. Ruby, PHP and others have taken the world by storm before and are slowly fading. Clojure has never taken the world by storm and (IMO) never will. Neither will Haskell btw.

To me, Clojure is very much on the same level as Haskell: an extremely niche programming language with a small (sub-1% in TIOBE) but dedicated following that is unlikely to grow much beyond what it already is.

Rest of the article: meh. It presupposes a lot of what it thinks Haskell should aspire to without investigating whether those things are actually what it is aspiring to be.
You can write quicksort in C++ in about the same number of lines using std::partition from the standard library.
> Section 230 is not important to protect the Internet: Other businesses host speech without it just fine

It's important if you want scalable P2P platforms; the offline businesses you are talking about have pre-distribution human editorial review of all content, which effects scale and focus and permits essentially only top-down communication.