skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OP: Just curious, how do you know they don't use deep learning?

@opless: Deep learning may be a fad in the press, but there's substance underneath. It's been breaking one accuracy record after another in raw, unstructured media year after year. ImageNet is just one deep convolutional net competing against another. A lot of other ML algorithms have hit a ceiling, and the ceiling is tied to not having enough humans to engineer enough features. DL doesn't have that chokepoint, and it is able to process vast seas of data that other algos have trouble with. Therefore, for many problems, it will continue to win.
For those with 404 errors, it works if you add "?hl=en" at the end of the URL. https://www.google.com/get/sunroof?hl=en
Ugh. Chrome only.
It is cheaper to put microphone and ask for food, similar to regular shop: "Hey, Amazon", "Order, please", "Bottle of milk and bread", "Bottle of milk «Foo» $2,50. Bread «Bar» $1,75. Total: $4,25. Confirm?", "Yes", "Order accepted, wait for delivery.". Something like Siri, but activated by push of hardware button on the fridge.
That's completely different.
If I share with somebody that I have an issue about something, I want to be sure that people will not conflate my legitimate complaint with my "mood".

It's a really nice way to gas-light folks into submission: "The team has noticed that your mood has been pretty poor the last few weeks; is there anything we can do to lift your spirits? We're worried that your mood is affecting your work." <---- utterly horrifying

Now, I can't say what's going on in your team, and probably at the moment, all is well and nobody is feeling victimized by this. But consider the fact that by binding up two (properly) separate concepts (reporting of blockers, etc. vs. poor emotional state, which is a PRIVATE matter), you will be ruling out a lot of potential employees in the future. Your team could decide to change the policy as they please, but if I came in for an interview and heard about this, I'd run as far as I could.

EDIT: I have worked with people who suffer from depression and mental illness. I cannot imagine how stressful a work environment like this would be for some of these folks. I've been working at startups for years, and I have a thick skin—I can "deal with" the high pressure and culturally necessitated amalgamation of one's personal and professional life (even if I hate it), but there are a lot of really skilled workers for whom this is incredibly destructive.
So that carriers can blacklist it.
Sadly, that doesn't let you create a Hangout on Air. Hangouts on Air would be an absolutely killer feature if only it worked reliably :(
Actually in California a solar panel owner already does have solar rights.

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=prc&gr...

"25982. After the installation of a solar collector, a person owning or in control of another property shall not allow a tree or shrub to be placed or, if placed, to grow on that property so as to cast a shadow greater than 10 percent of the collector absorption area upon that solar collector surface at any one time between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., local standard time."

There are a number of exceptions later in the act, including a notification requirement.

However, once a solar system is installed - a neighbor can't cause the system to be shaded with impunity.
If you don't know if this is the case, how can you say that you know that this systems are not cheaper?
Interestingly enough, when I signed up for Amazon Fresh, I got a version of the Dash that is multipurpose. Instead of having buttons everywhere, mine has a barcode scanner, and voice recognition. When I am out of eggs, I just pick it up, push the "Mic" button, say "Eggs," and it appears on my "Dash" list when I log in to Amazon Fresh.
I don't think GMail is pretty, but it's very functional. Good UX != visual beauty.

As a result of a fairly recent job change, I have been forced into desktop IMAP clients again. I have to admit I have discovered a whole new level of appreciation for GMail.

Just the fact that it actually runs filters server-side and it has a (conceptually speaking) equivalent application for mobile devices trumps everything else. You can actually get it do to what you want.

The company I work for has a very heterogeneous systems landscape and I can say without much hesitation that GMail + Gcal's only serious alternative is Outlook. Everything else seems to me like a digital version of pen and paper.
And there, we disagree.

She was extremely effective. Her students knew English and English Literature very well after her class. They tended to win writing awards as well as stomp the AP test flat. However, very few students and parents liked her (oddly, I did, but my father was an English teacher so I had already been brainwashed that English wasn't easy and to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite), and, consequently, neither did the administration as they had to deal with complaints.

She's clearly a domain expert and way more competent at teaching English than anybody judging her. Why do you think that the community at large has any competence to judge her as a teacher? Of course, many of her students were were much happier with her once they hit college and found that composition was easy, but, unfortunately, very few of them ever came back to the area.

The high-tech equivalent is allowing an HR person on your engineering interview loop (never do this, by the way). Since they can't judge them on engineering, they will wind up rejecting candidates based upon their handshake, their clothes, or a hundred other things completely irrelevant to being an engineer.
digital scrapbooking.

i think the only big difference from all the other scrapbooking apps, is that this one is open source, polished, and promoted with minorities to the point of being obnoxious.
Your Gut as Evidence
:/
its like saying we know how to program in x86 assembly only because of some 34 year old books.
Hacking of Tax Returns More Extensive Than First Reported, I.R.S. Says
Google Delays Test of Project Ara, Its Modular Smartphone, Until 2016
I dug a little deeper on your first link, and it appears that in order to come to a different conclusion, the scientists have just applied a different correction to the data... And, mind you, they're using extraordinarily unreliable ocean temperature measurements... Here's a key quote from a critique of the paper:

"K15 have made some relatively minor changes to the bias correction methods, and the result is a large increase in the post-1998 trend.

A. They added 0.12 oC to readings collected by buoys, ostensibly to make them comparable to readings collected by ships. As the authors note, buoy readings represent a rising fraction of observations over recent decades, so this boosts the apparent warming trend.

B. They also gave buoy data extra weight in the computations.

C. They also made adjustments to post-1941 data collected from ships, in particular a large cooling adjustment applied to readings over 1998-2000.

Taken together these changes largely explain the enhanced trend over the past 15 years. So now everybody needs to decide if they think these adjustments are valid.

Perhaps they are. The main problem for us observers is that other teams have looked at the same issues and come to different conclusions. And the post-1998 K15 data don’t match that from other independent sources, including weather satellites."

To put it plainly: if the data doesn't fit, just make some convenient corrections and then suddenly it'll fit exactly what you want it to.

I encourage you to read the whole critique:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/a-first-look-at-possib...

The more I dig into this stuff the more I realize that the data, at least prior to satellite measurements, is just crap and needs to be discarded.
So let's get this right...they couldn't write a stable IDE (reaching version 1.0) without re-writing it several times, inventing crazy tools to get around their platform limits (Lighttable runs on NodeJS?!?). And now they expect us to think they can revolutionize computing not just an IDE?

Sorry, but this project is way to ambitious and run by people who have way to weak of a track history to inspire confidence. Go back and finish what you started on, and what you took money for, instead of taking more funding for an even bigger project.

Reminds me of half the Kickstarter games these days: "whelp that didn't work, good thing we don't have to give you your money back!".
I'm confused. Shouldn't the large space on right be where the IM window was supposed to pop in? Is it just a launch interface for already-available hangout app?
Show HN: Turn any image into ASCII art
Probably the closest to the vibe the person is looking for would be the Google Waterloo office where I work, or the Pittsburgh office the other poster mentioned.
Phabricator, an open source, software development platform
> I mean the XMPP days.

oh XMPP, you mean the protocol that required a TCP connection, and thus battery-draining maintaining a persistent connection ?

I was an XMPP enthusiast. Sadly, it never made the jump to mobile properly. I wish they had amended the standard to to add a session manager that would work well with mobile. Instead, last I check, everyone implemented their own hack. Google first, with Android GTalk. They used ProtoBufs [1]

Hey, did you know WhatsApp was based on XMPP? Yeah, good luck using that with an open client: their terms of service allows them to kick you off for using an unofficial client.

[1] I've come to think ProtoBufs would make a perfectly good transport for a hypothetical XMPP2. It's better packed, can be better framed, and as far as I've glanced allows the same extensibility as XML gave XMPP.
I have the browser extension Disconnect enabled, and it stops that page from functioning.
His Noodliness moves in mysterious waves.
Yes and no.

On the flip side, if I have a router (in this case Comcast's Business Class modem + pfSense with GigE ports, and a CPU load of under 10%), and I'm connecting to comcast.speedtest.net and my 150mbps connection is only getting 80mbps... that -is- absolutely under their control.
> Last time I checked ad blocking on Android was quite difficult to set up.

Nope, just install Firefox, go to Tools:Add-ons, find AdBlock Plus or uBlock Origin, install it, and never see an ad again. No rooting, no proxying, no goofiness.

Only works in the browser, but it works well enough for me.
If machines do take over, maybe we should have raised the minimum wage sooner. If robots can do the job better than humans, why did the restaurant owners drag their feet? Maybe they thought they could continue to exploit low wage workers, and not invest in more efficient plant and equipment?
Hey guys! This is a project I made three or four years ago and figured I might as well share! Questions and feedback welcome.

:)
It's just the UX guys at Google acknowledging this article from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10036061

Namely, Joe-the-user can't see the hamburger menu at the top and looks for more tools where they are supposed to be: after the first few tools. So the UX guys at Google put an affordance there for him [0].

I've seen this quite a few times, especially for interactions where the search box is within the hamburger-driven overlay. Some sites/systems add a dummy, redundant search box on the main UI that just opens the hamburger menu and focuses on the newly-displayed search box.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
There are, but as you might expect when a project like that gets started, even the smell of it attracts a lot of people. I can't say that anything I've seen at Google iterates quickly compared to where I've worked before. It's just not a company built for quick iteration -- between the code reviews and style guide and readability restrictions, a lot of discussion around design docs, interacting with a lot of other teams, etc.

But it has other strengths.
Have you seen the work on Gneiss (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~shihpinc/gneiss.html) on user programmable spreadsheets?
Staff turnover at the Google office I work in is very very low.
"xargs" is basically what you're thinking of as "map", and "find" is more powerful than simple globbing.

find . -type f -name \*.mp3 -print0 | xargs -n 1 -0 some_command
Anyone else getting a 500 error?

All I see when I visit is

500. That’s an error.

There was an error. Please try again later. That’s all we know.
LG Unveils New Paper Thin OLED TV
I'm glad to hear that there are people at Amazon who have had good experiences. But I'm surprised at this attitude:

> The hardest problems in technology, bar none, are solved at Amazon...They come here because innovation in technology happens here more than anywhere else...Today, we’re the world’s most innovative technology company that just happens to sell books, among other things

I wonder who outside the company would agree with that?

The idea that Amazon solves the hardest problems in technology, "bar none," is ridiculous.
It is possible to “See through walls” using Wi-Fi
> If there are people of non-English decent

decent -> descent.

Muphry's law strikes again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
Transferring within Google is easy. Yes, you would be expected to stay on your first project for a reasonable chunk of time, but transfers after that are not only possible but expected.
I'm one of the founders of Circle Medical. Great to see a thoughtful discussion here.

Most people don't realize how most of the payment for an office visit with a doctor doesn't actually go to the doctor. We eliminate the need for office space and having someone handle paperwork and insurance and replace it with software.

You're right that there are other doctors with concierge medicine who charge for the convenience. The point is we are making this accessible to patients who have a regular insurance plan and can't or won't pay extra for the convenience factor.
What would you want to use it for? It seems like HOA sessions for most of the use cases that spring to mind would be scheduled ahead of time, and therefore not suffer as much from the bad-contact-list issue.
We are barely halfway done
> I wonder if it would be useful to run emacs within a browser based editor like Atom

Considering Emacs is already thought of as a decent OS ("lacking a good editor"), I can only think:

"We have to go deeper."
Looks like the authoer coded himself into a corner and gave up, and is trying this instead. Not inspiring faith in the prospects for Eve.
Can You Teach a Computer to 'Feel' Suspense?
I remember using VM/CMS in school, in 1981: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_%28operating_system%29

How much is really new?
If it were the case that the telecom company is providing the government decrypted information, wouldn't they be giving the government an already-encrypted information if I were to use a VPN app like expressVPN on my smartphone?
I gave you an issue-tracker-spirited upvote for this. Pretty much the only reason I still put up with Skype.
No, because it's mostly a musing from me, although something I've been thinking about for a long time. I mention it mostly in the unlikely hope that someone runs with it and implements it, cause it'd be something I'd love to use but probably never have the time to make.

Hrm. Complete was probably the wrong word. First order logic is complete in the mathematical sense that it can be used to represent and solve any problem, but the issue with AI / AGI is one of practicality. First order logic suffers from term explosion on any non-toy problem, leading to the need for higher order logics (of which there are many), and/or integration with other kinds of systems to manage that complexity. First order logic is also not probabilistic, and dealing well with uncertainty is a hallmark of natural language. Most AGI logic systems are not first order logic, although you can implement FOL in such systems. So better summarized my research question is basically "Practical AI systems need tools beyond what first order logic provides to represent thought. I wonder what would result from applying these extra tools to a logical conlang?"

My intuition is that the right way to approach this is to ask "What would a conlang based on probabilistic graphical models look like?" The reason being that PGMs are the underlying theory for most modern approaches to concept representation and knowledge databases. Examples of PGMs are Bayes nets, Markov random fields, and restricted Boltzmann machines, aka the state of the art in modern neural networks. PGMs also underlay to a more limited degree many probabilistic concept network formulations, including the atomspace of OpenCog.

So what would a PGM-based conlang look like? I'm not sure actually, but I can tell you it probably wouldn't look much like Loglan / Lojban. It'd be easy to represent any Lojban sentence in this hypothetical PGM language, using the "first order dialect," but the converse is probably not generally true.
It's got a lot better, but in years past we've had stories make front page because someone got shot near Facebook, and a serious car accident near Twitter HQ.
I agree, action -> result always sounds more impressive.

But to a point it's always felt disingenuous to me as far as engineering goes. Sure, I implemented the BarBuzz feature. But a marketing person gave the idea, a product person specced it out, a UX person designed it, a UI person made it pretty, and all I did was the final implementation.

Did I really add the feature, or did I just implement it?
Well, if you used a one time pad and burned the pad, it's essentially impossible to reveal the key. It does not matter how much some one chooses to torture you.
Uhm.. no. What is special today about deep learning is the hierarchy of features. Yes, we are talking primarily about CNN's and RNN's trained with SGD TODAY. Yes,the entire catalog of ML techniques are still very interesting. Yes, in the future many of these techniques will be viable in a deep setting. But, no, you don't just get state of the art results by using linear regression or HOG and SIFT SVM's on a big data set.

Hierarchy of features is important.
I actually agree, if you mean the present Gmail. I referred to the original Gmail.
I don't understand how people connect oil and gas imports to electricity generation. Go read this article
http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/power-plants...

Now how much electricity is generated from oil in the US? A whopping 1%.

Now while it is true that we import a lot of natural gas...
"Natural gas imports to the United States, 98% of which arrive via pipeline from Canada, have decreased almost every year since 2007, and in 2014 reached the lowest level (2,636 Bcf) since January 1995."
According to http://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/importsexports/annual/.

So if you think putting solar on your roof, or wind, is going to make any OPEC countries upset please think again.
I think the release lag for OEMs is far longer than Google thought it would be.

Also, this lag is the reason they won't get rid of the Nexus program. Without it, they would not have a test bed for Android.
Is that the Gmail UI re-themed?
Android is marching ever further away from open source with every release. They're boiling the frog and you didn't notice.
Wow, this is amazing. Wonder who called the feds in, since it sounds like UMG was liking this idea.
That's not necessarily bad. It just means someone thought that it was more important for the interface to be easy to discover than it was to keep it clean.

In my opinion a good IM system needs to be both easy (as it targets a mainstream audience that needs to voluntarily adopt it, a trouble that MS's offerings never had) and powerful (as it quickly becomes a big part of your day to day). Not the easiest tradeoff to design to.

The clear upper hand granted to the former in this product release is pretty telling of Google's conundrum: they need to gain adoption over everything else.
Author here. I get this counterpoint a lot and for good reason. My best response is that a resume isn't something you come up with on the fly. It's a document you have every opportunity to show to people, get feedback, and improve upon. Therefore, if you're not a native speaker, you should presumably have the self-awareness to mitigate that disadvantage by enlisting outside help.
> Anything less than that is like using snake oil crypto: it might make you feel good, but it's not really there.

While technically true, it doesn't help the situation.

Against the NSA, yeah, you have to be perfect. However, most adversaries are not the NSA.

Encryption on the wire stops random eavesdropping on you while someone else is a target. Having your mail store on a colocated box instead of Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo means that someone has to get a warrant and physically access your machine rather than filling in an automated request and having it turned over.

It's a modification on the old joke: "Sure, if the tiger is after me, I have to outrun the tiger. But if the tiger is simply hungry, I just have to outrun you."
Migaloo Mystery
The only thing a super complex formula is missing is the notion of a for loop. In lieu of that, I used to pull a column down as many times as the loop needed to run. Then I discovered macros, then I discovered javascript.
If anyone is considering downloading this to use his voice to annoy your best friend John with things like "Hello, my name is Steven Hawking. The universe is big, but not as big as John's mother.", let it be known that this software doesn't sound like Hawking.
Zestimate details
I don't know the real answer in Boston Dynamics' case. However, in general, the answer is that Deep Learning is just beginning to be integrated into the pipelines of major robotics/reinforcement learning pipelines. The same thing took time in complicated speech recognition pipelines.

Deep learning is great for recognition/classification but robotics is much more.. Deep learning has to coexist with a number of other critical components.

However, there is major and extremely exciting work being demonstrated in the literature art recent conferences on this front. Expect major developments this year
MicroReact
One of these days I need to write a blog post on how to do it, but I pair program with my colleagues over ssh and tmux.

Briefly:

- Set up a guest account on your computer. Write a small script containing "tmux attach-session -S /tmp/guest-session -t guest". Make this shell script the login shell for the guest account (make sure you are patched against heartbleed ;-) )

- Create a guest group and add your user and the guest user to it

- Write a script for you that contains "tmux -S /tmp/guest-session -t guest new"

- Configure ssh for RSA login

- Whenever you want to work with someone, add their ssh key to the guest account's .ssh/authorized_keys. Then run your script to start the tmux session.

- They still won't be able to log in until you give read and write permissions to the tmux socket (which allows you to have some control over when people can log in). To allow them to log in: "sudo chgrp guest /tmp/guest-session"

Note that you still have to trust the person because they will be sharing your session. However, you will be able to see everything they are doing. When they ssh in, they will immediately join your tmux session (unfortunately without any notification -- need to see if there are some hooks you can use to notify when people attach to the session).

Having a shell script as a login shell is obviously a potential security hole, so you should make sure that authorized_keys only contains keys when you want people to log in.

There is a project somewhere that contains a lot of scripts for doing this kind of thing (I forget what it is called), but I think it is better to learn how to do it yourself ;-)
MircoReact source code, just 343 lines of code: https://github.com/witheve/Eve/blob/master/ui/src/microReact...