skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Perhaps someday there will be computer programs where you can write things without typing in funny codes.

You mean like ms word or open office ?
With no ability to take advantage of it because they would need to be technical in some sense mostly.
420 blz it
With regards to 1), I remember reading a paper I found on HN not too long ago trying to argue that no, it does not exist. To generalize, any piece of knowledge only exists after it is discovered. Can't remember what it is at the moment, maybe someone else knows what I'm talking about.

With regards to 3), I would assume Tegmark means laws of physics which we have not yet discovered, but nevertheless govern what occurs inside a black hole or at the beginning of the big bang. It is commonly believe that with a complete theory of quantum gravity, we will find that the singularities in these situations disappear and the laws of physics don't break down.

EDIT: Here's the HN submission from a few months back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10068676
arxiv link: http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03733
I graduated in 2014 and I've definitely seen a huge growth of startup programs over the course of the last 5 years. I don't think some things (e.g. hackathons) existed before my time.
We struggle with that last one all the time. Our sales team can't add issues with tags or assign them without write access to the repo. So they just have to dump them in issues and then engineers have to categorize them.
Importantly it's not SATA.
If anyone at JetBrains is reading this, consider Substance Live's model for a way to collect subscriptions without making it shitty for customers or potential customers.

https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-live/monthl...

The major software packages in architecture/design (Autodesk + Adobe) that have gone subscription only come across as greedy money grabs, where the incremental yearly upgrades are no longer worth paying for, so they've just pulled out the licensing and force you to buy it anyway.

Allegorithmic's model is more fair to customers in that if new releases don't add anything worth paying for, they're not obligated to pay for it. And it keeps the lowered barrier to entry where anybody can pick it up for a month at an affordable price.

Best of both worlds, IMO. Unless the plan is to squeeze people monthly without having to make product improvements.
> Plus the community had developed a careless attitude towards each other where any nastiness got a pass. I saw several flame wars go down in that IRC, bitter arguments that my friends looked at and shook their heads at. One said, "somebody should have been banned long before it got there."

Thank you, it's good to be warned. My main reason for liking Python was that the community was so friendly; having used other languages where you say anything and get shot down it's a deciding factor for future choices.
Cherry ripe (number station)
What're you gonna switch to? Depending on the product, there aren't a whole lot of good alternatives.
> There is no meaning outside of the beautiful, nay, holy fictions we tell ourselves.

The presumption-to-word ratio of that sentence is pretty off the charts.
You guys have a really awesome product, good work!

I think I misinterpreted your question as "How do you prevent the form API from being used to send unwanted email", not email filtering. We also apply a spam filter to outgoing email requests, but as you stated, it's a challenge to balance that with usability.

Thanks for your feedback!
I think rather than saying "The universe behaves according to laws of physics...", it would be more appropriate/correct to say that our "laws" of physics somewhat consistently describe our observations of the universe.
The fact that it integrates with Java isn't what I'm getting at. Developing in Clojure eventually forced me to write some Java, which I didn't want to do. I just don't see Kotlin as somehow solving that problem.
"then you'd see millionaire sewage maintenance technicians and pizza delivery guys"

No, not at all - I wasn't suggesting anything quite so simple and I think any charitable reading would realize that.

What I'm suggesting is that for any individual skill set and current career X, there are often (almost always, in my experience) more lucrative but similar jobs available X' which are going to be more rewarding monetarily and less rewarding in other ways. Most people reach a point where the latter outweighs the former.

You completely mis-parsed "money is a tool that constrains the choices you have" is so backwards as to be laughable." - you are actually agreeing with me.

The amount of money you have access to constrains choices you have(or in your words, opportunities). The point is, it is hardly the only such constraint, and if you fail to consider the other ones, you largely miss the point.
From the article:
"The list of dimensionless physical constants increases in length whenever experiments measure new relationships between physical phenomena. The list of fundamental dimensionless constants, however, decreases when advances in physics show how some previously known constant can be computed in terms of others. A long-sought goal of theoretical physics is to find first principles from which all of the fundamental dimensionless constants can be calculated and compared to the measured values. A successful "Theory of Everything" would allow such a calculation, but so far, this goal has remained elusive."
I'd guess that, at least in some times and places, a religious narrative of life and the forces in it filled that role to some degree.

I don't think it's a coincidence, for instance, that Paradise Lost reads so cinematically.

Maybe modern mass entertainment does have a larger effect, but I wouldn't take it as necessarily true. A little set design and presentation wizardry and a willing audience can fire the imagination in major ways. See: otherwise seemingly sane people joining ISIS to fulfill their role in a religious narrative. Usually if someone credits mass entertainment media for their violent acts, they were unbalanced loonies to begin with.
Yeah, the "all jobs are drudge work" theory does not pass muster with me

good thing that isn't what I suggested, then.
BuyVM offering IP Anycast addresses as a service with VPS hosting
Maybe the universe is a user interface for your consciousness, and physical objects don't really exist.
> Without a mind to understand, interpret, and define mathematics, does it exist?

Unquestioningly so. For instance, there is a number 2 and a number pi which are not caused by thinking. Beings which evolve on separate planets (or whatever) in separate universes have to to come to the conclusion that the ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle is a certain number. Those numbers will be found to agree, though there is no causal link between the two. You can define what constitutes a circle, and define the question of the ratio of its parts, but you don't get to define pi.

Or, if you define "composite" and "prime", you don't get to decide which integers are one or the other, or facts like that two is the smallest prime and the only even one.

The question is: what is the difference between your existence and the existence of pi? Maybe there isn't any.
According to the post you replied to, if you decide to cut back on the tools budget, you could still continue using the version that was released on the last day of your subscription. You just wouldn't get updates.
It's a do more harm than good question.
My paper copy of K&R1 (1978) does not mention void, nor does it mention standard headers other than stdio.h. The linked document may be a later draft (and it's almost certainly a copyright violation).

Prior to C99, reaching the closing "}" of main() caused the program to return an undefined status to the calling environment. In C99 and later (as in C++), reaching the closing "}" does an implicit "return 0;".
An excellent book that I'd highly recommend. I have a copy on a bookshelf not far from where I'm sat, and your mention of it has prompted me to pull it out to dip-into later. Thanks!

And Stewart Brand is one of my intellectual heroes.
So before pi was discovered, circles didn't have a ratio of circumference to radius? Or did have one, but a value other than 3.14159...?
> To make a truly “natural” live recording, it might be necessary to use two microphones mounted on opposite sides of a roundish, human-head-sized, sound-dampening object.

Not exactly, you will want 3d-modeled earlobes as only the reflections, delays and echos caused by them allow proper omnidirectional (front-behind) hearing.

edit: also, sound-dampening the head, e.g. making it out of foam, will diminish a natural reception as a part of our sound reception is that soundwaves from one ear get transmitted by our head bones and "material", as well as through vibration via the ground and the bones of the legs. A truly natural recording is very difficult.
didn't get a chance to read what he wrote :(
Yes, that's why member functions tend to have unique prefixes.
> "And who knows, maybe someone will build a decent MSBuild replacement. Or perhaps the Xamarin guys already have a nice alternative."

You might want to check out FAKE, it essentially lets you write MSBuild configurations using F#:

http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/

This recent announcement means that a multi-platform FAKE in the near future looks like a good bet.
I don't think so. I'm going from memory here, but I think in pre-K&R C it wasn't assumed that every struct/union would be given its own separate namespace.
The Death and Life of Atlantic City
You can run 3 x 24TB as a cluster, built for $45K, and get HA/failover... You can still run SmartOS/Illumos and ZFS for that matter... You should also be able to use any number of databases (Cassandra, RethinkDB, Cockroach) on there.
I really wish more people would revisit predictions to see how good they were. Not enough of this. Great job.
Looks like SLZ hit 1.0 back in April [1]. Has anyone used it in production? Are packaged binaries available to get it up and running quickly?

[1]: http://git.1wt.eu/web/libslz.git/
He is way off about XML.. It is bloated and tedious to work with. For most scenarios, there are immensely better alternatives.

For the record, I was heavily involved with XML years ago and helped create a popular light weight xml-based cms.
Still capped at 4GB you can get other PCIE RAMdisks with higher capacity which are cheaper not sure if they'll perform the same tho...
Writing a Non-Technical eBook: How Much Can You Earn Going Self-Published?
Inside Amazon: Reporter’s Notebook
And in a few generations, marijuana will be seen by young people as disgusting and for losers. They'll look back on us and think we were idiots for glorifying it, just as we now look back at how everyone used to smoke cigarettes with disdain.
This dad went from accountant to product designer of TWO successful Kickstarters
Ask HN: We have a service that finds experts in a given field. Want to try it?
Problem: you need to find and hire someone with deep knowledge of a specific technology (e.g. Mesos, LXC, Kafka, whatever).

Solution: we get you a list of proven people. They could be top contributors to the project, or maybe they have used the technology in notable ways. Optionally we exclude people who are not in the market for a job, such as company founders. We estimate how likely it is that each of these people would be interested in joining your company. You contact them.

How: we have a list of relatively uncommon technology skills. We're building a reputation model using inputs such as mailing list participation, publications, commit activity to a project, etc. We also estimate someone's likelihood to change jobs based on signals such as employment and location history.

What does it cost? For a yearly subscription, the price will be in the four digits. Because we're in the validation phase, we'll do one-off requests for $49 for the first ten people who respond. Rationale: we did this manually for a YC company because they were too busy to do it themselves. It took a few hours of work, and they found the resulting leads extremely valuable. They should have known all those people but they didn't. Can you name the top 10 experts in a technology that your company depends on? If not, send us a note: experts@loqix.com
Very cool idea. I think this could become a great way for companies/startups to find really great talent.
Great post. Love the creativity. Wish I was a developer or I'd inquire. I'll check up again- When/If you need some kick ass marketing!
+1 for Madoko as it's free and Gitbook is not. I can use Madoko to create and publish my content and keep 100% of the income unlike Gitbook that takes a cut.
It says right on the pricing page that it's still $49/year for people who currently have a license.
Hm. I think you're saying he's putting a faux-rebuke onto a happy article. Whereas I still think he's putting a happy veneer on what is ultimately a rebuke. I'm not sure how to tell which is the case, or if it even actually matters.

But hey, kudos for a cogent defense of your position. Good internetting!
In this case, it may be. The territory is never observed other than through maps, and the maps are all math. That is to say, the maps may be of the same "stuff" as the territory, and as the differences between the maps and the territory are erased, eventually you arrive at the map being the territory.

At least, they are all math beyond those subjective observations that are possible through the human senses. You might think that some hot gas is "glowing blue", and that this is not "math" to you in any sense, but a more advanced understanding of the light emanating from it gives us a spectrum, and that is just a math function.

Of course when we look at an actual map of some place, we know that the place isn't a picture with symbols denoting its features. It's not so clear for features of the universe. When you're far from the bottom, the descriptions look like maps. The mass and acceleration arrows on a free body diagram of an automobile aren't the automobile; it's all just a diagram.

But the more detailed you make the description of something, the less of a distinction there is between the description and the thing! At some point, the description must be the thing. (If it isn't then just alter whatever is different between the two and patch the description; then repeat.)

Another thing to keep in mind is that math itself has map/territory descriptions. The formula or graph representing a mathematical object isn't that object.

When we say that the universe may just be math, we don't mean that the written math is the universe, but rather that the abstract math described by those representations is identifiable with what is real: the map isn't the territory, but those two territories are identifiable with each other!
I understood your point. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. And I've seen multiple people (including MMM) make that same point in several different places; nor am I relying only on one source for advice. (Though if you're suggesting it has no predictive power for long-term averages, that's ridiculous; it's simply that predictions are not in any way guarantees, nor do they in any way let you time the market.)

But even if you don't buy into the 4% rate, or even if you want to make a more conservative assumption, the math for an estimate still works; just use a different multiplier. And you still shouldn't treat that estimate as a guarantee. Retirement doesn't need to be a binary one-way process, where once you retire if you didn't plan well enough you're doomed. One of the lovely advantages of retiring early is that you're still more than capable of working if you want to, or doing some other kind of work.

Nor should you assume that because you planned for 4% (or 3%, or whatever you like), you should withdraw that much like clockwork every year. You might plan for 4%, but then spend 2.5% because that's what you happened to need. And if the market happens to grow 10% in a year, great, but you shouldn't spend 2.5x as much that year. Whatever you don't spend stays in place, growing your buffer even more for future downsides. If you steal away every unexpected upside, averages stop working, and you'll be more screwed by unexpected downsides rather than just living a little more frugally for a while.

Estimates are just that: estimates. They're useful tools for planning, not guarantees.

Again, see the article I linked about safety margins. You're talking all about all the horrible things that could happen. So, have backup plans, and backup backup plans, and you still can retire before your 60s.
XML databases actually got to be amazing, if that was his prediction he would have been totally right. The fact is that they just got amazing a little bit too late. No one is going to consider an XML database because XML got a bad reputation (and rightly so).

But XML database technology actually has nothing to do with XML. The idea is that you store nested data nodes. Imagine you have a mongodb collection, and in it you have documents, and each of those documents would also be a mongodb collection in which you could insert more documents. You can build full graphs like that, and if you allow references to nodes those graphs can be cyclic too. Pretty powerful right?

Now you might say yeah of course, but that's got to be crazy slow! And at the time Yegge made his prediction you would have been right. But then academics came into the scene, they developed data structures and algorithms that allow you to store these recursively nested documents in column stores (think SQL table with 2 columns, a primary key and a piece of data) in such a genius way that you can make whatever query you can think of (recursive, joins, whatever) and execute them almost as fast as any indexed search query.

That magic happens, and is implemented for example in MonetDB/XQuery which sadly got abandoned a few years ago.

I still think if a crazy person sets off to go build a database company (crazy people like that seem to be quite popular in SV these days) they could make a lot of money forking MonetDB/XQuery, and search-replaceing every instance of X with J and every instance of XML with JSON. Crazier still, you can even let MonetDB/XQuery results be formatted as json, even before MongoDB became popular I think.
> Why do people think they can build anything worthy of the name "AI" by just fucking around with neural networks instead of by specifying exactly what sort of models and exactly what sort of inference constitute "intelligence" in the first place?

Doesn't this go back to the second paragraph of the article?
Silicon Valley's Quiet Cousin, Innovation Alley
This is an interesting model. How do updates work for someone renting-to-own (presumably receiving updates) vs. someone who purchased outright?
The author's amazement at the oblique reference to teletype outputs is hilarious. Kids these days forget that much of Unix (and most other things) were created without the benefit of "glass teletypes" (aka screens).
My department (for the most part) has a "no subscription" policy when it comes to most things, especially tools. I love using ReSharper and 0xDBE (possibly the number two application in my toolbox), but it will be hard to justify this to management. If you offered a perpetual license after 12 months, or kept both SAAS and the perceptual license(you could charge quite a bit more in this case) it would be excellent.

Edit: If you charged me 10 bucks a month for 0xDBE I wouldnt be able to get it approved even on a good day. Charge us 500 a year then the check would be cut that afternoon.
The Next Generation of SmartThings Is Here
FWIW, Intel's latest 750 PCIe SSDs are benching over 2.5GB/sec read speeds if you want to be really blown away :-) http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-750-series-ssd,409...
Show HN: Backboard, a motion-driven animation framework for Android
Redshell – Easily Execute Windows Commands from Linux Using ZeroMQ
finally...every time there is a release, managers want to lock out the branch.

Gitlab has similar thing to prevent checkins. Glad similar feature is coming to github as well..managers in enterprises will be happy..
I've been looking at Xamarin now for a while, how do you like it so far? Does it live up to its claims?
Yup, you're right!
AWS to add GPGPU video transcoding as cloud service
He's hard on himself over the smartphone start, the orignal iphone had sales numbers that were a rounding error.
To all the Christopher Alexander recommendations I'll add Notes on the Synthesis of Form. It's his best book in my not-so-humble opinion, and it's been under-rated ever since Richard Gabriel called it 'juvenalia': https://www.dreamsongs.com/Essays.html
Chrome improvements for a faster and more efficient web
.co is a country code domain belonging to Colombia. It was never "designed" for businesses, simply allowed to be registered by anyone outside of the country.
> The costs of screwing this up are pretty high, and will make people pretty mad. You need to have a process where the vast majority of mistakes are caught before they get out the door.

Its interesting to reflect on this statement in the context of Zenefits vs the insurance industry.
That's according to a post earlier in the thread from the guy I presume is from JetBrains. It's also similar to the license Epic had for Unreal Engine, before they got rid of the monthly fee.
I'm not much of a mathematician, but I found "Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty" by Morris Kline (http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Loss-Certainty-Oxford-Pape...) very insightful in regards to the development and current state of mathematics. A brief synopsis:

From Amazon:
"This work stresses the illogical manner in which mathematics has developed, the question of applied mathematics as against 'pure' mathematics, and the challenges to the consistency of mathematics' logical structure that have occurred in the twentieth century."

From goodreads.com:
"Most intelligent people today still believe that mathematics is a body of unshakable truths about the physical world and that mathematical reasoning is exact and infallible. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty refutes that myth."

Edit: This was also interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlMMeqO7wOI , a video by Stephen Wolfram. I know he is often criticized for various reasons, but much of what he says makes intuitive sense.
you dont need to deliver any blobs, binary blob is a bootloader in rpi, once it loads you dont need additional blobs to run your code
Well, for starters this thing is almost 10 years old now. So comparing it to something developed in the last year isn't really fair.

That being said, where's this list of RAMdisks, in a PCIe form factor, with a capacitor/battery backup, and hardened Solaris drivers? I don't think I've ever run across one.
Facebook Makes It Easier to Optimize Ad Campaigns Based on Conversions
If you don't like the defaults you can change it to what you want with a local default stylesheet. The issue isn't that the default is sane but that changes from default are jarring.

White text on a blue field works well for me.
Another concern with approving drugs more easily: you might then never find out if they really work or not.

The reason we need very large, expensive, and strict clinical trials is because it's hard to see if a drug actually works or not otherwise - too many confounders. So if we pass drugs through with a higher error rate, we'll likely never know if some of them actually work or not. Maybe not a problem for a disease with no treatment at all, but imagine you have 10 treatments and you suspect that 7 of them don't actually work, but you don't know which 7. Is that better than just having 3 available treatments where only 1 of them doesn't actually work?
"They don't yet have a concept of truth and lies, and so are free to live entirely within their dreams."

The best description of working in Silicon Valley that I've ever heard!
Note: the question applies to all executed commands.