skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> VCs now expect more at a Series A because so much more is now possible.

Only in pure software where your fixed hosting costs and salary are your only expense. And, really, only in "social" things that you are going to flip to Yahooglezonsoft and can be made by flogging a half-dozen early 20-somethings for 6-9 months.

If you have actual hardware, your costs haven't come down much. They're mostly dominated by non-recurring expenses until you start shipping.

IoT (Internet of Things) has been a case study in this. Everybody wants to be the software backend that they can run for peanuts and extract rent indefinitely. There are a zillion companies all trying to do this and all failing because "Waaaaaah! Nobody wants to build that icky hardware stuff for us for free."

Yeah, well, hardware requires that you have a customer, that wants something, that will make him money. And hardware requires that you build a board and debug it.

So, yeah, go figure. Hardware requires some people who actually A) have some experience and know what they're doing and B) actually expect to get paid for that knowledge.

Gee what a surprise.

"Nevermind. We like flogging young 20-somethings better."
Could you elaborate on Python being weird on Windows?
What if people kept posting links to a paid service? (even if it was supposedly the best thing ever)
Ok is there a difference between "writing software for global hawk" and "writing software for self driving cars"

As humans killing others is something we do, and based on history were pretty good at. We have the ability to justify our actions in some fairly ugly ways. There is a great quote from fog of war (check it out if you haven't seen it) on the firebombing of japan in WWII

"LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

So thats war, thats folks who build the engines of war, and send folks out to die and kill. I would say that in writing a missile guidance system, your writing it as "fit for purpose" and should KNOW and COMPREHEND what is going to happen when it is used.

Is that going to be the same mind set for someone building a self driving car? Would I, or you, feel any better knowing that I had saved lives in 'theory' or 'statistically' only to know that I had caused actual death with my programing? I don't know how I would feel, I'm somewhat thankful that I'm not facing that dilemma in my current job.
> The overall “effect size,” a measure of the strength of a finding, dropped by about half across all of the studies.

In general, if you conduct an experiment, then conditional on finding significance the estimate of the effect size is going to be an overestimate of the true effect size. This is because the data that was extreme enough to produce a low p-value is also likely to be more extreme than the true population. Obviously this effect is less important when the true effect size is large enough - in high-powered studies. So this might not actually be so important: it may also mean that the effect size estimated in the original paper was simply miscalculated and estimated to be too high.
Slowly, just like a human?
Swift Diary #13: The Addiction
I don't often say this on HN but... you are right and I am wrong.
Might it be that Lorenz invariance breaks down when Bell's inequality is violated? Is that what Bohmian theories postulate? Or is there independent evidence for Lorenz invariance under the conditions of the present experiment?
Anyone else notice the DNE?
A warning or alarm would be good, but would you feel comfortable being prevented from manually exiting your car? Sounds like a great avenue for edge-case hazards.
New Instrument Captures the Secret Lives of Cells
I really would like it if people started writing these kinds of things in modern languages.
I'm a developer at Khan Academy (currently working on the upcoming Android app), and it's cool to see that there's real interest in that kind of use case! In our hackathon a few weeks ago I wrote an audio-only Khan Academy app that lets you listen to any video or the text-to-speech of any article and is controlled completely through voice commands. Unfortunately it's not quite at a point where other people can use it, but maybe I'll take the time to actually productionize it. :-)

Here's the code if you're curious:

https://github.com/alangpierce/Audicademy

And there's a feature-incomplete web version that lets you navigate to any video and play it (requires a recent version of Chrome):

https://audicademy.appspot.com
TI used to distribute an script written in Lua that did essentially this - the original software company has long since gone out of business and I am not sure if TI has persisted with it (this was 2012)

NB: This was a separate product from the Inspire software
I think you missed my point. Ignore for the moment what drones are used for (a pilot still makes the final decision to deploy ordinance).

My point was, software has advanced far enough for unmanned vehicles can fly on their own and navigate without human intervention. The X47-B (the Navy's "Salty Dog" UAV) can take off from an aircraft carrier, navigate to waypoints, refuel on-air from a tanker, and land back on an aircraft carrier deck in the ocean without any human intervention.

Its not a stretch to think that self-driving cars are of similar complexity, and the problems around them will be solved in due time as well. There is no reason to have "meat" in the driver's seat anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_X-47B
"Inconvenienced" is not the right word. "Frightened witless" is more apropos.

Example: The cyclist cuts in front of me, violating traffic laws, and I hit him and he's injured or killed. Not only does this affect me emotionally, but suddenly I'm in the liability hotseat unless I can prove the cyclist was in the wrong. After all, I'm in a one ton car and he's on a 30lb bike. It is this situation that I'm hoping to avoid, and if a cyclist nearly causes it, I'm pissed.

Unless it'd been another car. Then the damage to the other vehicle is pretty obvious and, since we're on city streets, neither driver is injured.
He was an avowed member of ISIS, an army. He was a legitimate target. I'm glad he is dead. He's complicit in the rape and murder of countless people.
I feel very much the same way. A significant portion of drivers also deal with winter/icy conditions for at least part of the year, and I have a really hard time believing that self-driving cars will be able to handle those conditions well, at least not for a long time. You have snow falling, snow covering many/most of the lines on the road, varying degrees of traction - added to the uncertainties of pedestrians, construction, other crazy drivers, etc. Heck, the sensors alone are going to have an inch of snow and ice on them after being outdoors for a couple of hours. Winter driving is hard enough for highly-focused human drivers, making decisions that are often based on factors that don't easily translate into algorithms and computer models.

Google speaks of a need to leapfrog the driver assistance systems and instead focus on fully-automated driving systems because the driver assistance technologies won't incrementally improve to the level we need for full driver-less cars[1]. I think that's a fair point, but I'd go one step further: self-driving cars thrown into a mix of human-operated vehicles and roads that aren't specifically designed for self-driving cars is (in my opinion) a similar mistake. I believe we'll reach a point very soon where great technical advances in the vehicle alone will have diminishing returns in terms of safety on the road.

If we are going to solve this problem once and for all, I'd be much more enthusiastic about a self-driving system that operates only on distinct roads/lanes/tracks that are designed only for self-driving vehicles. Perhaps that's an unreasonable expectation, but trying to design systems that anticipate and make decisions based on the (often irrational) behaviors of other human drivers seems no different than designing a full human-level artificial intelligence - and even then, it'll still be prone to mistakes because other humans are involved.

Either we get to the point where all vehicles on public roads are networked and cooperating through software to self-drive, or we're just making guesses about other people's behaviors. As Chris Urmson puts it, "just making the cars [and I'll add, roads] incrementally smarter, we're probably not going to see the wins we really need."

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_...
Diaspora has resources on higher side, Mark Zuckerberg had little cash from friends, Diaspora raised it from Kickstarter.
So running a startup is like running a cult? Makes sense
I disagree; just applying forced us to ask ourselves a slew of critical questions about our business (http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/27/be-concise-the-top-question...).

We interviewed and were declined, but the journey was well worth the time and effort. The entire YC process is an excellent crucible for startups, and as usual you get out of it what you put in.
this one? https://github.com/blog/530-how-we-made-github-fast
> As a driver who recently had a jackass cyclist cut across opposing traffic across Mass Ave in Central Square in front of me, I'd rather have the self-driving car I'll soon be robot chauffeured in stand on the brakes than hit the cyclist, had he been more of a jackass than he was.

I agree, however:

> People inconvenienced for a few seconds by cyclists need to get over themselves and probably have the wrong attitude to have a driver's license.

How does observing someone else doing something completely out of my control, that almost causes an accident with me, make me have the "wrong attitude" to have a driver's license? That doesn't begin to make sense. You're also contradicting your own point of view between sentences (in your first sentence, the cyclist is the jackass; in your second, the driver who dares to question the cyclist's bad habits is the jackass unworthy of a driver's license).
It's been discussed before, but that's not really quicksort though (since it's not in-place)[0]

0: http://stackoverflow.com/q/7717691/1235548
> How does China selling bonds increase long term interest rates?

More interest in selling with the same interest in buying drives the price down, and therefore the yield up.
"Many Findings About Psychology Findings Not Being as Strong as Claimed Not as Strong as Claimed, Study Says"
Or to be fairer to people just trying to run a company:

"Getting your employees to buy into your vision is usually more efficient than overpaying them to stay."

There are many companies that don't underpay because they want to exploit people but because they are trying to stay afloat.
Trying to get Junior python position. What should I know?
Hi,

As I said in the title I'm going to increase my knowledge of Python and try get myself a junior python position based on a portfolio.

I live in the UK, are there many jobs here?

What skills are best to learn and show off to get a job?

What else should I know?

Any other advice would be great too. Thanks :)
Many of the features of Second Temple Judaism (and hence Christianity) were thought to have been influenced by Zoroastrianism, from the time of the Babylonian Captivity onwards.
> It doesn’t have to. In a properly built city, the rail will end up less than 500m from your destination, and you can walk the rest.

Part of the problem in 2015 is that unless there was planning for rail from the start, the cost to build out rail in established areas is enormous - typically because you need to tunnel - in addition to the cost of community consultation and other access-related issues.

I otherwise agree that well-planned rail into key areas would have benefited a lot of cities, especially those feeling the pain from road congestion now.
They would have to know our private thoughts. They would have to read our paper diaries. They would have to disallow me closing my curtains at night. They would have to hear me telling my girlfriend I love her.

And you think that's what it would take to be "remotely close"? I don't get it. From what I remember of Nineteen Eighty Four that scenario would put us absolutely on par with the description in the book. I believe that we are far more than "remotely close" already. But that's just me. shrug
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Fair point... maybe a 3 second delay with an alarm.
> That's for self driving car advocates to state

Uhh what? You said:

> Self driving cars are by no means the only solution to road deaths.

I asked you "what other solutions?" You're literally pointing at other unnamed solutions as better alternatives to road deaths, it is very reasonable to ask you to be more specific.

It is in no way up to driverless car advocates to complete an argument that you made.
40 Ounces to Freedom (2013)
Amazing work, that is one multi-talented person.
Companies aren't about religion, they're about creating products people pay for. Fin.
Yes, when I'm at a stop sign anywhere near a bike, I'll yield if I'm in a car. Bicyclists are just too unpredictable - sometimes they'll roll the stop sign even if it seems unwise (or maybe they just didn't notice me). So now I just assume all bicyclists I see on the road will ignore all stop signs in their way; it sometimes leads to awkward wave/stops, but better that than running somebody over.
This post seems a little naive to me, and certainly couldn't apply to every single person who no longer has a home in California. We've developed technology and built homes so that we didn't have to deal with living in the outside world - to keep the outside from coming in, so to speak - and it gives us choice and stability, if we are able to maintain our possession of it without too much stress and trouble. That it is still hard to keep a home in a lot of places should be a real concern - things like that are not good for anybody. Homelessness can hurt people and hurt communities. I'd want to see some real investigation rather than conjecture about whether these specific people are doing it out of choice, or whether they are capably dealing with the extremely difficult and unpredictable circumstances that often accompany homelessness. The perspective you are arguing from kind of seems sheltered to me. There have been many more people protesting across the U.S. in the last few years than have been living the idyllic and romantic hobo life, free from stress and want.

Your mother does not seem like much of an unassailable source of wisdom when it comes to the realities of poverty - maybe you should argue from a more personal or sourced perspective about what it is like to be poor or homeless and what kind of conditions folks in such a position experience?
I use both AMD and Nvidia on Ubuntu. For both GPUs, every OS upgrade is a toss-up as to whether things will work or not.
Right. The many-worlds interpretation is a standard SF plot device for reconciling free will and determinism, faster-than-light travel, time travel, and so on.

So is there evidence that rules out a many-worlds interpretation for the present experimental results?
Getting the human to take over from a failing autopilot is a fool's gambit. It takes the human thirty seconds to become as competent as a drunk driver, about a minute to get to normal competency levels.

The time it takes a human to regain competence suggests that the only way to safely hand over is for the robot to come to a complete halt before ceding control.
the guitar tuner is integrated into bing itself.
Music on Vine
Yeah, LaTeX pretty much covers this out of the box. Throw in bibtex and git and the bibliographic stuff and collaboration is done too, and probably done better. I guess this misses "cut-and-paste is replaced with drop-n-drag", but you could probably find a text editor that does that if you want.

Throw in emacs+auctex and latexdiff and I'm staying put for the time being.
One awesome girl backover tutorialcrashed by dogs and rabbits
> In Python, Ruby or even PHP you usually just pick a function / module from the standard library

Which is usually rotten for the sake of not breaking things, and forces you to use a third party library anyways (at least it's my experience with Python and exactly the reason why PHP is a mess).

IMHO Node.js not being "batteries included" is for the best.
GIRL DOES ABSTRACT TIME LAPSE ART
FBI: $1.2B Lost to Business Email Scams
The notion of physically preventing the doors from opening makes me uncomfortable.

How about instead providing some kind of warning so people will know it's a bad time to open the door?

This would be some cool tech for sure!
Ask HN: Reseller Livechat
Hi all,

I was looking extensively around, but I could not find at all what I need, please help me:

We have a website that helps our customers resell some specific services. One of our products is a white-labled app for the customers of our customers.

I would either need a chat-app that gives me not only the little "chat popup" which is very common on the right bottom corner, but also the operator interface.

Or (and that would be preferred) a little chat window bottom right on the website (js) and an integration to skype, whatsapp and others via a third party.

Anybody knows if there is anything like that available? And yes: I did search, but it seems like all the apps that once did support skype stopped supporting it.

I could, of course, write something myself, but I neither want to support the app side, nor the infrastructure for it, so that would be more like a last resort.

Anybody using anything like that?

Thanks
A couple years ago I saw a 3.5x improvement migrating a lockfree skiplist from hazard pointers to epochs. The problem with hazard pointers is that they require memory barriers after every assignment, whereas epochs only require one at the start.
Will have to also consider, FB login is most popular 3rd party login, add to that facebook comments and other widgets on 3rd party sites. FB going down will have a substantial impact
Ask HN: When you are programming, do you build the hardest bits first?
I always build the hardest bits first because I can't stand getting to the end of my todo list and finding a small number of hard and time consuming things to do. I like to get to the end of the project and find things getting easier.

What do you do?
Google doesn't need to fix all those problems in order for self-driving cars to be in widespread use. Even a self-driving car that works only during daytime would be very successful.
> A month ago I was working from a cabin in the woods in Wisconsin.

OT, but has anyone else tried this? I've often fantasized about working while embedded in a beautiful nature setting, but I imagine it's tough to find good internet in such a place. I'm in California ... any recommendations?

I've also thought of copying Antony Garret Lisi's 'science hostel' idea [1] but for coders / entrepreneurs :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Garrett_Lisi#Science_ho...
if they acknowledged LaTeX it wouldn't be a very good advertisement for their system
Yes, the thing is just that the interstate system was in the end more expensive than similar rail infrastructure would have been (especially in maintenance).

And, well, yes, cars and trucks will still be necessary, but not nearly in the same amount.
Pre-launch data infrastructure startup is hiring founding engineer
Come build the infrastructure that data scientists depend on to access big data! It shouldn't take a CS degree to use big data effectively, and abstracting away the difficult parts is our mission.

You will:

- Be a founding member of the team that builds the next generation of ETL software.

- Come up with novel ideas on how to make complex technology user-friendly, and then turn those ideas into robust software.

About you:

- You love data engineering.

- You build robust and scalable data systems three times as fast as other developers.

- The JVM is your friend.

- You like to work independently and drive the direction of a technology stack.

- You’re living in or willing to move to San Francisco.

Even better if you also:

- Have experience with Scala, Cascading, and Docker.

- Know the ins and outs of current big data frameworks like Hadoop, Spark, or Tez, but this is not an absolute requirement - you're a quick learner!

- Have startup experience.

About us: Stealth-mode profitable SaaS company started by people who love data but think current ETL tools suck. The position is onsite in SOMA, San Francisco.

Competitive compensation package including very significant equity offered to the right candidate.

To apply, email us at etl.sans.dev@gmail.com.
I don't think the pilot makes that decision. They push the button according to essentially a decision flowchart. Their decision is based on evidence gathered by others, wanted lists drawn up by politicians, standards written by committees, and orders from commanders. They do not see the guy's face in the truck and match it to a wanted poster. (Even in than scenario the decision is partially made by the person who created the poster.) The pilot/operator may decide the exact moment the ordinance is released, but he is not the person making the decision to kill. That is a very shared responsibility.
I live in a european city founded around 1200 – so, while we destroyed our tram system, and our public transport is shit, I can still get everywhere with public transport equally fast as driving, often faster.

I’d like to have even better infrastructure, and 24/7 service, but I don’t have an issue. I have 3 bus stations within of 300 meters, and a train station 800m from my current home.
I remember years ago when I accidentally reinvented this a few years ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/o1l8p/i_accidentally_...
Career Advice NeededJob offer from company using Coldfusion and no version ctrl
I have a junior developer job offer for a company that promises career training, challenging projects and development autonomy. They are a leader in their field and have over 200 employees. They are in a desirable downtown location and hire people around my age (just out of school).

The only thing is that they don't use version control and their stack is Coldfusion. The company doesn't have a test database either.
Would you sign on to get the immediate programming autonomy or pass for a more stable company?
The issue is that the reason the fence is retractable is because of the busses that speed through there every 7 minutes. If you drive there slowly, you might cause a crash. Cars shouldn’t drive there at all, but Google Maps still suggests to drive right through it as the fastest route. And it’s just one example, we have hundreds of them all over the city.

If they can’t even provide reliable maps, how can we expect reliable self-driving cars?
But how old are the guy's parents? Are they still alive?
Why Paris Is Going Car-Free for a Day
Yes, I definitely want a car that locks me inside if it thinks some moron is passing too close to my door.
I could read the article from Mexico:

https://www.google.com.mx/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=we...
Well, it's only negligible within context. Nothing is just automatically negligible at scale but within the context of active users for a single day, I agree, it's negligible.
In addition to koenigdavidmj's correct answer, maybe I'll repeat something I posted yesterday:

If there's something we could do to get more high-quality links posted about history, arts and letters, geography, anthropology, etc.—the myriads of interesting stories outside HN's couple of core grooves—I would love to hear about it. We rarely have enough of those.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10127481
Yeah, but if you're stopped... it probably means "go right ahead."