skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I mean we barely try to combat climate change, which is actually happening in front of our faces. To expect the government to direct knowledge or funds towards something that may happen just seems... extremely unlikely at best. And honestly, I don't disagree. I think we have a lot of problems that are present that we need to take care of. If these aren't mutually exclusive then we should definitely be trying to take all of it serious, but if they are, well then we should focus on the problems that are happening now. But I guess it's all relative.. does a dirt-poor person care about a something that could cause world-hunger in 30 years? I'd guess they are more worried about feeding themselves now. Is an ultra-wealthy mogul worried? Who knows, but I would assume they have less life-or-death problems occupying their thinking space, that maybe they are considering what may wipe out humanity in 100 years.
> One particularly bad one is misunderstanding or misusing basic financial terms. I started noticing this in Y Combinator applicants a couple of years ago [...] I’ve seen people use GMV for revenue or refer to an LOI as a contract many times in the past year when talking to investors. This is a felony.

Not sure who the target audience is. If a business person is willfully deceiving people, let's call that out. But if a programmer is using financial jargon they don't understand, then let's educate them.

It's not hard to read this blog post and come away believing that if you use the wrong acronym accidentally the author thinks you're a felon. I'm sure that's an overstatement, but overall this could have been an article that was educational yet had a serious warning. Instead it kind of stirs drama and fear. That's fine but I can't help but compare PG's essays which are a delight to read and get lost in.
> so that addons will work in perpetuity

How are we supposed to believe that an organization that systematically disregarded backwards compatibility in the past is suddenly going to commit to it?
The studies I've seen suggesting converting these lanes to toll lanes that allow for HOV free passes. The lanes serve a political purpose and do not solve an engineering issue. The facts are mass the conversion of single car drives to avid carpooled never happened.
Of course there's not really enough info in this article to really tell what he's talking about.

A Guardian article from May [1] has a bit more about what he is meant by "meaning space":

> Hinton said that the idea that language can be deconstructed with almost mathematical precision is surprising, but true. “If you take the vector for Paris and subtract the vector for France and add Italy, you get Rome,” he said. “It’s quite remarkable.”

... which makes it sounds like this builds off of the "word2vec" [2,3] work that came out in 2013. But there must be something else new (maybe at the sentence level?) to get from there to logic and natural conversation.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/21/google-a-step...
[2] https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/
[3] http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.4546
It was more like 50 years ago ('60s).
>>but it doesn't work great at the application level.<<

And yet --

A very large Smalltalk application was developed at Cargill to support the operation of grain elevators and the associated commodity trading activities. The Smalltalk client application has 385 windows and over 5,000 classes. About 2,000 classes in this application interacted with an early (circa 1993) data access framework. The framework dynamically performed a mapping of object attributes to data table columns.

Analysis showed that although dynamic look up consumed 40% of the client execution time, it was unnecessary.

A new data layer interface was developed that required the business class to provide the object attribute to column mapping in an explicitly coded method. Testing showed that this interface was orders of magnitude faster. The issue was how to change the 2,100 business class users of the data layer.

A large application under development cannot freeze code while a transformation of an interface is constructed and tested. We had to construct and test the transformations in a parallel branch of the code repository from the main development stream. When the transformation was fully tested, then it was applied to the main code stream in a single operation.

Less than 35 bugs were found in the 17,100 changes. All of the bugs were quickly resolved in a three-week period.

If the changes were done manually we estimate that it would have taken 8,500 hours, compared with 235 hours to develop the transformation rules.

The task was completed in 3% of the expected time by using Rewrite Rules. This is an improvement by a factor of 36.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=604258
Could you link some experiments? Sounds super interesting.
Such a fluffy article.

Here is what he's publishing: http://arxiv.org/find/cs/1/au:+Hinton_G/0/1/0/all/0/1

This seems to be a good introduction to the topic: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4546v1.pdf

This is about paragraph vectors: http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.07998 http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.4053
Not sure what you mean by the "same basic semantics". I think the semantics of Go and Elm are quite far away from JavaScript. Dart less so, but it's enough to change the developer experience quite a bit.

I don't particularly like x86 instructions, but they also don't bother me that often.

Granted that JavaScript isn't sufficiently hidden yet, particularly in debuggers. That will take a few years. On the other hand, it's significantly more readable than assembly and getting better, so as a compiler target language, I think it will work out okay.

The forces here are no more artificial than the ones that made the industry standardize on x86 and (later) ARM. Popular, accepted standards become more popular when the barriers to alternatives are very high, as can be shown by the people who tried and failed with strong alternatives.
In the underrated 1972 scifi film "Silent Running" there was a circular pool table complete with computer arm player, which became a source of interest into the math of chaos theory: http://fadesingh.tumblr.com/post/49428198268/the-billiards-o... and even inspired other variations like a hexagonal table: http://switchgaming.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/accessible-pool.h...
On how Jet chose F#
Reminds me of this attempt to create a "philosophical language" in the 17th century. I learned about it in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, turned out it was a real thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_towards_a_Real_Charac...
It's actually not that interesting believe it or not. A surprising number of pretty banal business processes never caught on to the idea of a repeatable process -- or it's assumed that "repeatable" means "having a human do it".

For example, I have a program manager coworker who spent about half of her week building reports to go out to her client. Almost 90% of that time was spent copy-pasting data into excel and turning those tables into charts.

I pointed out that these charts could probably just be automatically generated. Half a day of work by one of our colleagues and it was. Another couple days work and all she needed to do was run a script in the folder with the raw data and it'd even spit out a draft .docx with most of the key sections done (I think he used python-docx for this).

It's just very simple stuff like that, when you work up and down any organization's business processes, you can find all kinds of stuff like this -- often long running. It doesn't even always have to be automated, sometimes just rethinking physical processes in simple ways can have a profound impact.

I'm reminded of this http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/nyregion/in-lieu-of-money-...

The hard part is convincing people that this means their employees can either finish the same amount of work early, or can do more with the time they have.
Estonia's e-residency program
Lets see, 10000/(4820) = 10.42/hour in take home* pay. I don't know how realistic it is to make over minimum wage, part-time in most of the US college towns -- but surely it's not tax-free? Would one need any health insurance, or does the employer/college cover that (for while at work/at school resp)?
I recently came across a z/VM manual with an unexpectedly humorous XEDIT tutorial: http://imgur.com/vUvY7B7
Finding out Go had anonymous structs is what lead me to start learning Go.
Here is the wiki definition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_merchandise_volume

eBay and many other marketplaces use it. My guess is that since these marketplace platforms are not actual retailers their GMV is pretty high as compared to revenue. To showcase the dollar value of total sales that happened on the platform they use GMV. But again I am not an expert in this field.
Thanks, whoever!
I came up with the idea of a structure editor independently. I am still very excited about the possibility but there are still some major challenges.

1) Viewing code in a tree can be much more verbose and require more cognitive load. I would much rather see "x = a + b" than (set 'x (+ a b)).

2) Languages contain syntactic sugar. Trees do not. That syntactic sugar goes a long ways towards making things easier.

3) Text based code can be very compact. Trees tend to require lots of space on the screen. They can be compacted using s-expressions but I've always found them cumbersome to read -- especially when things get nested.

4) Trees follow prefix format. Sometimes infix and postfix styles are much easier to read.

"someString" capitalize map fn

is much easier to read than

(map (capitalize "some string") fn)

Trees require you to descend to the leaf node and read backwards sometimes.
Browsers tend to have a fairly low cap on simultaneous connections to the same server. Seems to be 6 these days in Chrome or Firefox; I remember 2 from a few years ago.

I'm sorta curious if DownThemAll is using XPCOM to get around any similar good-netizen limits in Firefox.
OK, man. Chill out a little. I actually enjoyed the article, just not as much as I like poking fun at C++.

Clearly I went too far, and I apologize to you and the rest of the planet.
It's kind of cool how it looks like you can improve your log hourly wage at the highest percentiles by forgetting maths if you have good social skills, or forgetting good social skills if you have good maths skills.

I've only skimmed the paper, but how do the "social skills" map onto what one would normally mean by the plain-English meaning of social skills? It seems to be some kind of composite of job description categories, which I'm not sure what that means exactly.
Wait... I thought COGS referred to the production costs of goods sold. The direct material and labor costs. For example, in a restaurant it would involve food costs and wages for cooks.

GMV sounds like it refers to what in this example would be revenue from the finished food. A burger COGS is meat+bun+cook, a burger GMV is the menu price.

Am I wrong in my understanding?
There has been a lot of talk about the "Delete All" paid option being a scam because they did not remove billing information. This Q&A, however, seems to indicate that the billing information was retrieved from a third party processing company. While the hack exposed the password, the non-deleted information was not stored on AM servers.
Slides: “Reinforcement Learning for AI” (Fall 2015) by Richard Sutton
Great perspective, not many people today have experienced the shear magnitude of mainframe batch workloads. The other thing about timesharing on the mainframe was system stability. IBM went to great lengths via cics to totally lock down stateful, bidirectional interaction with the mainfrme. Why was this? I've always wondered, why not time sharing?
The article munges thought vectors and word vectors, but it really is quite startling what's possible.

Take a word vector for "Paris", add the vector for "Germany", subtract the vector for "France", and the result is "Berlin".

indexes, metrics = model.analogy(pos=['paris', 'germany'], neg=['france'], n=10)
(u'berlin', 0.32333651414395953, 20)

Source: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/danielfrg/word2vec/blob/m...
New FS for linux
what are some advantages/disadvantages of visual programming languages compared to text based ones?
There were many such attempts since Raymond Lull, and even Descartes toyed the notion for a while, but I'd more readily think of Leibniz's Characteristica Universalis, whose intent was to outright reduce language processing to calculation.
If Space-X can get launch costs down, this number will likely explode, as will commercial astronaut programs.
Pale Moon's stance on pdf.js makes me very nervous:

https://www.palemoon.org/technical.shtml#features

As I understand, the author's opinion is that Adobe Reader is more secure than pdf.js. I'm not sure I would trust them with maintaining a secure browser in light of that.

Their monetization model is also questionable (I understand it injects ads / referral links).
Is there evidence of browser RCEs that work by in part by privilege-escalating browser-chrome Javascript? Yes.
I'll look it up, thanks.
That's why I said "popularized by," not "invented by." The Nazis co-opted a lot of things that weren't theirs, but they're now known for being used by the Nazis. The swastika is a good example: definitely not invented by the Nazis, but popularized and pretty much taken over by the Nazis.
I thought the jab at Javascripters was an invite for assholes like me but [WARNING] [CAUTION] ALERT: no it wasn't.
Out of curiosity, have you gotten any press inquires about your launch from major tech publications? I know that your company is outside of the VC funding publicity bubble but I am curious if anyone has reached out?
Ask HN: How can I find out if I'm in the Ashley Madison leak?
Is the list of email accounts publicly available? duh, of course, but where?
I don't really know the physics of this, but it seems CMEs only really effect power supply, not electronics in general. So we are taking massive damage to power infrastructure, but that can be repaired, and there are already mitigation plans in place.

I'm probably missing something?
> Issuing debt (or accepting debt) should be the absolute last resort

This does seem very clear, you don't need to repeat yourself. I am disagreeing with that and stating that debt is a most natural and appropriate way to fund certain things. Whether they are efficient or not.
Maybe blood doping? Also, caffeine and cocaine. Perhaps Adderall or ritalin depending on the individual?

Just speculating.
It's a network effect.

If you're going to attract new contributors to a system, having the toolset that everyone else uses is a huge win.

I've been at this long enough to have learned (somewhat) each of RCS, CVS, SVN hg, and git. In the beginning there were (mostly) just two: RCS and SCCS, and nobody used SCCS. With time, I've touched several others, had to wrap my head around them, as additional challenges to getting my primary job done, which generally involved solving problems in other domains (or learning other tool).

And ... some of that's knowledge which has stuck, some isn't. The time invested in learning is sunk cost, though there's the problem that it all leaves traces on your brain.

This is something that 20-somethings don't get: it's not learning things so much as unlearning. It's one thing to launch into a field with the hot new technology under your belt. I landed with some awarness of Unix when that was fairly unusual, and parlayed that and a set of tools for 25 years. During which I've not stood still...

... but the rate at which new tools are introduced, and having to sort out which actually will win is a considerable overhead. After a while it ... just gets kind of old. Especially since you realize that all of it is a constructed complexity, largely arbitrary.

How many operating systems (7, not counting Unix variants), shells (9), editors (10+), scripting languages (8), database implementations (7), firewall systems (4), webservers / application engines (6), mailservers (6), document markup languages (6+), etc., etc., etc., do you want to learn over your lifetime? Some are pretty cool. Others ... are just makework.

This spills over to larger highly integrated stuff which previous experience shows is almost always going to be a massive clusterfuck, of which I'll not mention systemd by name.

Which means you want to consider what projects you work on, where you work, etc. Google have a challenge in this regard with their NIH model -- work at Google long enough and you'll learn some really cool, advanced technology. Which nobody, anywhere else, uses. And, no, they're not the only ones. But they definitely come to mind.
me too!

1) Good ui/ux along with a nice color theme can help a lot.

2) What if it's actually just a lisp variant?

3) Very true.

4) Lisp like macros might help with it?
Cultivating a Business Growth Mindset
This use of "social skills" isn't the only time economic terms are used in a way that's misleading to non-economists. Another example is "technology" (http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/08/06/nobody_knows_...).
Be Lead Engineer at Pomello YC W15
> throwing away all of that familiarity in the name of elegance

That looks like a good deal to me! :)
For better or worse, operating systems are typically named for their kernel. I don't see Stallman making a similar argument over the naming of various proprietary Unices, or of Windows (NTOS kernel + Win32 API, for a time, at least as of ~2000, I don't stay current).

And yes, I understand RMS's interest in GNU and keeping it in currency. And refer to "GNU/Linux" quite frequently myself.
If I build a box and sell it to you, the cost of the parts is cogs. If you buy someone else's box through my website that's gmv. Your example is correct too, but probably not what somebody would use because in that example it's also the revenue.
Cynically, I always figured anti-drug advertising is directed at elderly conservatives rather than actually trying to decrease drug use. If the side effect is to increase drug use whilst increasing outrage in their chosen demographic, that might be a political-positive-feedback-loop.

I also wonder if advertising execs are more likely to do drugs, and hence be somewhat surreptitious with their campaigns.
> I have to admit there are cases that I find innocuous when considered by themselves

I was referring to that statement. It's never "innocuous" because there's no universal, objective guideline for what is innocuous and what isn't. Something that seems innocuous to you as a spectator may not be for people involved.
Hi. This is Ian Murdock.

I struggled for nearly two years after I found Linux before I changed my major to computer science. I thought I was too far along toward my degree to make any change.
After three semesters of hand-wringing, Advanced International Tax Accounting helped me realize it wasn't too late actually. :-)

The other commenters are correct: You don't need a degree in computer science to do what we do now. In fact, as other have already pointed out, these days, a more well-rounded background / education is a major advantage, whether that background / education is law, design, writing, etc.

Best of luck to you.

-ian
I'm no art critic, but I suspect Disneylands commercialism is not the target of the commentary at all (more likely the direction of modern society or 21st century Britain or something like that), it is just the physical manifestation or visual theme of that commentary.

A bit like how the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man is not really a deity, but the physical manifestation of Gozer the Gozerian. You miss the point somewhat if you concentrate on the marshmellow.
David Roodman at GiveWell has an excellent series looking into geomagnetic storms, and published the last of four posts today: http://blog.givewell.org/2015/08/21/coming-down-to-earth-wha...
My Favorite Films by Hideo Kojima (2004)
That is one network effect that Uber will maintain but I wonder how cheap self driving car services can become - cheaper cars, cheaper energy, no human drivers - we are looking at an extreme amount of price deflation down to levels where the additional discount of pooling might not make sense for most people.
Perhaps try other social activities? Pick three very different sorts of meetups and go to them? Ones where you'll be interacting with people, but in a structured way where it's ok if you don't have anything interesting to bring up to talk about?

For me social dancing ended up being great, even though I never would have thought of myself as a dancer.
> Because that's part of the cost of doing business in the EU where we have laws to protect individuals from companies.

This is not an answer to my question. Allow me to clarify:

What is the justification for the EU law requiring search engines to cover up the mistakes of others?
I'm pretty sure if a retailer sells a widget for $100 then the revenue is $100. COGS is $50.

GMV is probably a term more useful in situations where the entity is not a retailer per se, like eBay, who still wants a number to represent the value of the goods they are facilitating transactions upon. They don't own the items on auction so the purchase price is not revenue to them, but the fees are revenue.
A tour of the abandoned college campuses of Second Life
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the fundamentals of code editing after building this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tztmgCcZaM4&feature=youtu.be... .

My main conclusion—which has a lot in common with the Prune editor—so far, came from asking, "what are we really doing when writing code?" and settling with, "selecting and configuring 'language constructs'". I believe this same thing can be done with generic models of languages/programs, where the source code is generated after the fact as a view (and that ASTs as 'program models' are unfortunately/unnecessarily coupled to a single view). I have a two-part, illustrated essay here: http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/why-programming-languag...
That works for the repo, but not issues, pull requests, wiki pages, permissions, or any other services GitHub provides. None of those work offline, and while there is an API that can help with migration, doing so still requires setting up a totally different system, and there is no natural backup on every developer's machine like with the repo - you have to do it manually while the origin is still up. (Not that GitHub is likely to disappear anytime soon, but all things will end someday.) Which is unfortunate because it seems like a missed opportunity: it's certainly possible to implement all those things in a decentralized manner, and some projects have tried, but so far with little success...
Truly a delightful read!

I loved the idea with the visual crypto transparencies.
> It was fun, but drawing those graphs is so slower than just writing code in text... Especially, if you made a mistake somewhere and have to rearrange parts.

No-one has yet made an effort to parse code and programmatically create these graphs? I hope someone does, seems very doable!
I wish no one would link to anything from Gawker
> 1) No one outside of Mozilla adopted XUL/XPCOM/JS as an application platform.

As somebody who worked on things that adopted the platform and shipped commercial products (see Songbird): Mozilla didn't and doesn't want to be a platform. Or rather, they wanted to be a platform when they started, but didn't want to do work like look at bugs that didn't affect Firefox. They did take the smaller patches, but there was never any chance of bigger changes landing. They never got away from the Netscape legacy; there were very few super-reviewers over the years that never worked for Netscape/Mozilla because OMG can't let people you have no control over delay shipping Netscape/Firefox.

The actual developers were all nice and mostly time-constrained. People I interacted with were great. But organizationally, the platform always played second fiddle to the browser.
I think you may have meant to post this on the tree based editor post?
If I knew Russian, I would translate that into the English Wikipedia page.