skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like to make simplified agrarian economy metaphors:

Say you had an isolated farming village where people wanted to save to be able to eat in the winter. It is important that farmers invest their profits into additional production to have something to eat in the winter, even if, because of perdition, the stored crops are only worth 90% of the initial investment required to produce them.

Otherwise, if they instead mandate their government to create a currency that keeps 98% if its real value when other forms of savings available don't, most farmers are going to work, trade part of the crop they don't want to eat to diversify their diet and keep their cash profits to be able to buy something to eat in the winter. They will not produce a crop to store for the winter since it would only return -10% and their central banks promised to keep money at -2% real value.

However, now comes winter and all farmers have cash but few have anything to sell because they didn't reinvest their cash in the production of a stored crop for the winter!

It's going to be difficult for the government to control inflation in such conditions because there will be too few goods for the amount of money people will want to spend. If the government manages to control inflation it will be by depressing the nominal value of the crops of the few farmers who did invest and save a crop for the winter. The central bank might do this by giving high enough interests payment on cash to prevent people from wanting to spend it immediately. In any case, people won't eat much during the winter.

This could all have been prevented if the central bank had kept money devaluating sufficiently and farmers would not have kept their savings as cash but would have reinvested them into an extra crop for the winter and have continued to trade during the winter.

What you call allowing "malinvestment", I call allowing sufficient production or production capacity to fill the needs of the future even if the returns are quite negative on this production.

Note that there are parallels with farmers saving for the winter and a baby boom saving in preparation for retiring and stopping to work.
I do this, but it forces me to drive slower, which isn't such a bad thing in the end. Feels like playing music a bit. You have to 'observe' the surroundings through a mental abstraction of many moving things and try to maintain an overall consistency between them all. We are ACID databases.
Conspiracy Theories: There’s Something Behind That
Well except for the effort of building your entire app on Erlang.
There many games that only achieved success years after release (for example Psychonauts). It's the same thing as with films (my favourite: Blade Runner).
> What do you mean by unbounded?

There is no largest integer.

> If you mean something like a 64 bit integer that loops around to negatives eventually, then the statement either "every (non-zero) integer is a factor of another integer" is no longer true.

Sort of, it depends on how you define factor. What stops me from factoring -4 into 4 * 63?

> Which definition does it contradict?

Where you take counting numbers and add 0 and negatives. If you reach a point where you can't count more, you screwed something up.

> You can have a successor function, but if you can only apply it a finite number of times if you don't have infinity.

When you give me an integer n, I only need to apply the successor function n times to provide your factoring example. No problem there.
Classical music generation with recurrent neural networks
So the Dropbox infrastructure is now implemented in Golang and Jamie Turner and others are on Twitter talking about it. Not much information in this posting beyond that.

What would be of some interest is a discussion of how Golang (a nice language, IMHO) enable something in the Dropbox infrastructure that would not have been possible in other languages.

Of course, the architecture of the Dropbox infrastructure, which ought to be programming language independent, is much more interesting than the fact that they chose to use Golang.
Sending data from your server to a third party is something many people are not comfortable with.

In environments with tighter security needs, this is outright verboten.

It is true that those tools help the developers and the admins to monitor their products but where you aren't allowed to use them and have to run your own stuff, you might pay in higher maintenance costs.
“Ben and Ed” is like yeti sports with zombies and a ****load of blood
"The Elements of Style" by Strunk & White.

"The biological basis of teleological concepts" by Harry Binswanger.
Demo (please)?

...never mind, youtube delivers where devs don't :(
I am of course speaking as an outside observer to the ruling class, but I have some personal interaction with this class (Australia is not that big). The vast majority I have met are intelligent and decent people. Their one major flaw is they believed that they made it there on merit, when in fact they all came from very privileged backgrounds (both genetically and environmentally). If you believe that you are rich and powerful because of your own hard work then you are prone to dismiss people who aren't rich as just the people who have just not worked hard enough.
Ask HN: What are the most exciting things for hackers today?
Question in title. Could be anything-- the meta-fact that hackers now have power that extends to various other domains, some specific programming paradigm, etc.
This may be reasonable or not, depending on what are you developing. But there's no one solution for everything.

Is it an app just for you? Exact versions are great.

Is it an app for someone else? You should probably allow security fix updates, so at least x.y.*.

Is it a library? Anything close to a specific version is a terrible idea. Just define a minimal supported version and maybe an upper limit on (x+1).0.0.
Kinda hilarious since we've had completely isolated ports for a loooong time. For non-data-intensive tasks, don't underestimate how fast speaking erl_interface over a unix pipe can be. Plus, free isolation, free fault tolerance and free supervision restarting without any networking required.

http://erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/ports.html (15.1)

Here's one of my old examples (no guarantees to its current effectiveness or correctness): https://github.com/mattsta/libgeoip-erlang/blob/master/c_src... — then the whole thing is opened and run from Erlang like https://github.com/mattsta/libgeoip-erlang/blob/70b58ef5ef8a...

It's just cleaner to stay outside direct VM linkage as much as possible.
Fare Trade: Breaking Down London's Taxi Debate
wow - was thinking the exact same thing. Weird co-incidence in both of us noticing the same parallel. I'm guessing you got the newyorker link off reddit too?
> It is designed to be as small as possible, about 10 MB, as opposed to Cygwin which can run well over 100 MB depending upon options.

What's the size of a new cygwin install? Well it can be larger than 100MB, sure. It has lots of packages.
I would say that investing looking for growth and creation(Y-Combinator), is much different than buying an unchanging asset, doing nothing to it and simply collecting a non-trivial portion of the renter's value created. It's the difference between creating new value and simply gaining control of a static asset to extract rent.

EDIT: I should add I appreciate that you took the time to shed some light on what the downvote may have been about.
I would be more interested to see a life saving face-off between going to medical school and basic science. Since the golden era of physician/scientists ended, the vast majority of life improving technologies have come from science specifically, while medicine enjoys massive amounts of credit for science's advancements.

U.S. graduate schools are filled with people from other countries, because students know that compensation for scientific careers is awful. We squander enormous amounts of intellectual capital making physicians, while people involved in nobel-prize winning advancements often have to leave their careers for lack of funding (c.f. http://discovermagazine.com/2011/apr/30-how-bad-luck-network...). It's a horrible failure of our medical system that the incentives are so misplaced.
What kind of AV software requires your personal info when you download it?

What kind of naive person ever fills out one of those forms honestly? Usually my address is "123 Fuckyou Boulevard" on those things.
Ha! Wow, thanks man. Hope you enjoy it.

I remember the old days of reading about video games in catalogs. Do I want Ultima V or Wasteland or Kings Quest?

Ironically, those are all still active properties in one way or another, after 30+ years!
Small rocks etc. is one thing, but going around a city there's so many manmade obstacles as well. Every sidewalk curb, cobblestone, pothole, with this thing you have to stop, bend down and pick it up, walk a step or two, put it down and resume. At least on a skateboard/longboard you can kick it up and throw it down again, or even just ollie shit.
Evolutionary biology is a real big field. Typically population genetics is its own separate subject at the university level.

I was not suggesting to not study evolutionary biology (we should just call it biology as there is no such thing as non-evolutionary biology), just explaining what is the area you need to study if you want to understand the question being discussed.
+1 for Canto, it was my go-to reader when I still used one. Nurses is great for distraction-free reading.
iCracked (YC W12) Hiring UX Designers and Many More. Apply Today
You don't need to be a star to make good six figures. You just need to be good enough to get into a top-tier studio.

While financial data is hard to obtain in general, luckily, the Activision lawsuit has made a lot of it available to the public, everything from project budgets to the salaries[1] is now a part of public record.

1. http://gamerant.com/activision-lawsuit-infinity-ward-salarie...
So binaries in source control, source files in release. I don't know what to write.
At lower speeds would it be much different to a moving walkway? As for use cases these would be unlimited! I imagine 10km/ph is as fast as a taxi would average in a busy downtown
Haskell: https://gist.github.com/gigamonkey/6249d85021bc8bf54eb4

Erlang: https://gist.github.com/mattsta/b6749e566f5cfd75762a

List comprehensions make no sense to anybody at first. But after you work with and struggle against them for a few days/weeks, everything will click. You'll be a better developer for understand them more intuitively.
Hi Paul! Sorry, there's no demo for our game. The first Spider game is a much smaller version of the one we're releasing now - you can buy it cheap on Google Play or the App Store. If it looks good to you, the new Spider game is currently on the front page of the App Store and on Steam. You'll get much more content, way higher production quality, crazy cool new features like real local weather and time of day, etc etc..
Yea, but you are probably talking about a completely different event than the other person, or whatever happened in your memory, or maybe just a past version of yourself. The world is not naturally quantized into discrete events, causes, and effects, and it is in this disagreement over simple assumptions that "this event happened" that cause people to disagree about "certain" things. Look at how utterly useless witness testimony can be, no matter how hard they swear up and down, if the memory is suspect at all.

So, if you want to lie to yourself, I guess you could "prove" something to yourself. But you know you can't trust your observations for about a billion different reasons.

Why is this important? Because you can always know if a bridge has failed, but you never know if it's not going to fail. Never. No matter how certain you are, unless you can form a deductive proof showing that the structure will NEVER fail (which I suspect is impossible for a computer, let alone a human), you will always have doubt. If you don't recognize the doubt, you are lying to yourself.

Furthermore, once you realize how.... loosely science binds together, you realize that the "laws" we think we "know" are broadly accurate but fall to pieces in the details.

So no, proving a negative is not possible. It's not a proof unless you can show the state of the universe, which is again impossible without consensus, which is itself probabilistic and flawed. If you are 100% certain that an event has happened in any way that you could deductively prove something, that gamma ray burst could easily mess with your plans.

A non-deterministic universe is one of increasing, but always <100%, certainty.
The simple solution is to eliminate street parking and use it for all the other better alternatives for driving. Most of the rules are there because of how incredibly dangerous cars and trucks are.
People pointed out the first automobiles were doomed due to the state of dirt roads
Not everything is classification and there are problems better solved with other methods. For example I also haven't seeing anyone playing chess or go with DBN's. Also Compression, general programming...
It's a risk - but then it's a risk in OCaml too. How real-time are we talking? I've seen Haskell used in videoconferencing and it performed very well.
Ultima V is still my favorite ;)
Here's a tool that you can play with to see how well Elixir scales with an embarrassingly parallel task (matrix multiplication) when throwing more CPU cores at it: https://github.com/a115/exmatrix
Thank you for the detailed essay and sharing the code.

Have you considered training with the works of one composer at a time?
I'm afraid that's not enough information for me to understand it, so I can't tell you whether there's something comparable for Python.
Even if you removed all these single family homes inside city and built skyscrappers instead, the additional units will get filled up pretty soon and at some point not too distant, you will be in the same situation again where you are now. The key fact here is that cities are seeing huge migrations from other areas since last couple of decades. There 100s of thousands of people piling up each year. Eventually they will get saturated. In large scheme of things, cities are artifact of ancient times when transportation was hard and natural landscape for habitat was scarce. Now both problems can be solved even for extreme places such as Dubai and there is no reason for huge swaths for human population to be concentrated in cities.
I was a game developer for 20+ years (Looking Glass Studios, Harmonix) and boy oh boy were there a lot of technical and creative challenges. I ended up leaving largely to reduce stress and because I wanted to try doing something else with my career, but if what you want are technical and creative challenges, it's a pretty good job.
AKA "back burner" AKA "sleep on it". I've grown more and more to appreciate and try to use this modus of thought as much as possible. For me, it's cycles of active research and "cramming" everything I think is relevant to a solution into my mind, then a complete release of the stress of an active search away while I do something else and let thoughts of my previous problem come and go as they please. Sometimes, creative solutions come in the form of a self conversation in "language", other times it's sort of non-verbal, like visually seeing the problem from different perspectives. For me, this happens in the gym, while cleaning, doing dishes or other chores, while driving, etc. It takes practice but it's a very interesting thing to experience. I feel like sometimes it's the release of focus that lets the network of systems in your brain accept new stimuli from other systems and senses and tickle the thought in new ways.
Huh? I could have sworn that Python didn't allow a break after a function call. There is something odd in the grammar that does weird things that I have tripped over that forced me to use a continuation character where I really wanted to just use a line break. And, it should be Python because what I'm remembering would need to be a whitespace-delimited language. I'll leave it up to the language lawyers to find. :)

> Interestingly, notice that in your quick back-of-the-envelope example your variable and function names are quite redundant.

Agreed.

The keyword argument is likely to specify things like "maxBufferLengthBytes" even as the variable does. The problem is that they serve two different purposes. The variable is moving around the program and needs to carry it's meaning with it, while the keyword argument serves to document the API that the function is part of. Because they are orthogonal, they are redundant.

In the end, the goal is productivity. I can live in 80 characters if I have to, but, if I'm in charge, it's 120-130.

Raymond's warning about reformatting introducing bugs is spot on though.
Using Elixir at Tufts University's Lab for Playful Computation
>a game about programming in Assembly language.

That sounds very intresting. I'm currently enjoying TIS-100, which is on the same subject.
Altcoins are (amazingly) even worse, but that doesn't make the Bitcoinsphere good. It still has no actual use case beyond illegal drugs, and is riddled with scammers and criminals at every level.

I detailed the problems as I saw them as of January here: http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/594396.html Things really haven't improved in any regard.
Choose Erlang when your single most important characteristic is uptime.

Erlang is excellent for problems where latency is an issue. It's really good for problems where scaling is an issue.

But uptime is the big one. The whole immutable, recursive calls, and kill-and-restart quickly is a very good architecture for when you need all those nines.
Meditation is NOT an absolute goal with an absolute value in and of itself. The whole point of meditation is to help get you in a state of flow. If, once in that state, you ignore your impulses, you're no longer in the flow. You might as well be struggling with your daily worldly problems then - you are no longer meditating, you are trying to escape yourself (which is struggle, which is the opposite of flow).
Honestly, I'd recommend anyone to just install native GNU/Linux operating system. Getting the awesome, absolutely amazing coretuils to work on Windows seems like swimming upstream.
You're welcome, I just stumbled over it on Twitter :)
Yahoo Paid Around $200M for Polyvore
Congress and Obama Are Too Timid on Marijuana Reform
Naveen: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.3409.pdf

anyways, that's not my point. i'm saying deep learning for image analysis has been a huge success, and people should explore ways to apply this success to medical imaging.

but just for your info, neural networks are slowly being generalized to a lot of other challenges. look around for topics on recurrent neural networks, memory networks, reinforcement learning, etc etc. i don't think we've fully finished exploring the many ways neural networks can help solve life's challenges just yet.
Can you elaborate on kill and restart? I feel I must be missing something. How is restarting processes different than wrapping workers in a try/catch, or just restarting OS processes?

More interestingly, how does this help uptime? I've been in telephony for a while. My software related downtime (vs human error breaking things) seem either related to logic bugs (restarting won't help) or load (simply too little hardware for a, say, 100x increase in traffic).

Maybe Erlang's selling points make more sense compared to C instead of a managed language? For instance I often hear about the robustness of the Erlang VM, yet JVM or CLR integrity has never been an issue for me.
I use this technique to great effect, and i would recommend this. Woff i very well supported generally, and then i put a backup to the actual file for the lagging browsers.

http://caniuse.com/#search=woff
> I don't believe I come close to saturating it.

Well your HD streams are very compressed and possibly downsized resolution.

People DO want 4K 60 fps uncompressed streams, but there is just no way to support them all at once.
"It’s not going to be too much longer before we declaratively describe out systems as well as our code. I am looking forward to that."

Amen! Been doing that to the extent possible for a while and it is terrific!
I've definitely considered it, but so far I haven't found many single-composer datasets that are large enough to train with. I also think it would be pretty cool to try training it with music from specific musical periods.
The Influence of Shor's Algorithm [video]
The Fallen of World War II
Remember that uptime isn't just your backend although. Backend sends bad data because of a logical bug in a new feature, which screws up your client? Your 'uptime' has gone down.
Cars are infinitely more anti-walking, inasmuch as they require the creation of non-walkable environments (and, correspondingly, the elimination of walkable environments). These, in contrast, can easily coexist with walking.
I agree you can think about it on that level.

However, there is a level where it is not about the words, but the actual things. In your example, the word 'alien' is real, but there is no 'real' definition of it, in the sense that there is no definition that can be given that could select an actual instance of 'alien' (I may have confused the quotes by this point) precisely (perhaps) because 'aliens' don't actually exist (even though there is a word that can be mapped to some vague concept of what an alien might actually be like).
IMHO and from my experience, the main keys to addressing complexity of software
are just to (A) define the data, input,
inside the software, data base, key-value store,
etc., and output,
(B) organize the work for any real time
parts,
(C) organize the code
essentially a calling hierarchy of
pieces, where each piece is
fairly easy to test well, and
where the purpose
of each piece is fairly easy to
document,
and (D), most important,
document everything so that
it is all easy enough to understand,
check, modify, etc.

For really big projects, there is more,
but (A)-(D) are the basics and where still
in practice a lot of problems are.

A curious but crucial part is that nearly
all the meaning of the system is
just in the documentation, not the code.
Wow, how on earth is it acceptable to get anything just by knowing an SSN and a DoB? Banks here require proof of ID (physical or certified copy), proof of address and signature to give you anything. Looks like the problem is that some companies don't really have strong KYC rules, not that the SSN is an identifier.

We have our national ID number uniquely identifying us, our VAT record number as well, but neither is secret (companies will ask them for verification, or to issue an invoice for purchases for the latter). There's no identity theft I know of, as you have to show your ID to do anything sensitive anywhere.
wow that is really cool. of course no one could confuse the results for a human, but they are interesting to listen to, so clearly you are on to something. every so often i see something along these lines, but this is by far the best result, and most interesting write up. well done
> The "smart contract" stuff is real working technology

As noted above, there's a curious lack of evidence and that the example relies on handwaving https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027569
That's a good hypothetical, but, as the sibling said, you'll have family to vouch for you, or the police will have your photo and fingerprint.
bach doesn't have enough music? it seems like his music would be particularly suited, based on the results i listened to
Mosquitoes are worse. Fire ants don't carry disease.

Not only that, but it seems like the "invasive" nature of fire ants is starting to get resisted. Local fauna have finally figured out that fire ants are a useful, concentrated food source and some predators are finally starting to emerge.
Tesla Keeps Delaying