skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In modern terms I think you could make this critique from a perspective of learning theory and combinatorics. Methodological monism implies that the fitness landscape being explored by science is "well behaved" and can be traversed using a simple stepwise or gradient descent function. We have no reason to believe this, and many reasons to believe that "unjustified leaps" and other heresies may be required to escape local maxima or traverse unconnected regions of state space.

There is probably no deterministic "for(;;) { do X }" formula for learning in complex real-world domains. You could make an anthropic argument here: if there were, life and intelligence would not exist since whatever thermodynamically-favored auto-catalytic processes life does could be replaced by non-living systems of lower entropy and higher probability. The existence of life as the chaotic, ever-changing, evolving system that it is is itself evidence for the non-closed-form nature of evolutionary learning.

I've thought for some time that the slow down in "fundamental invention" that some have observed since roughly the late 1960s to early 1970s is the result of "scientific fundamentalism" and Skepticism. Look into the backgrounds and thoughts of people like Einstein, Tesla, Engelbart, Turing, Edison, or Schrodinger, and you generally will not find them to be fundamentalist-positivist Skeptics.

It seems like the general intellectual trend from roughly 1970 until maybe 2010 or so was the rise of fundamentalism of every kind, both religious and secular... maybe due to an emotional desire for the comfort of absolute certainty in the face of rapid dislocating change.

There also seems to be an economic drive to commoditize humans. If learning can be completely systematized, then science can be rendered into an assembly line process that can be run by bureaucracies, scaled as needed, and in which individual workers can be treated as a 'human resource' commodity. Bureaucracies cannot deal with multi-modality, unpredictable and eccentric 'genius,' etc., so to admit that these things are required for the progress of science is to admit that bureaucracies are inherently limited.

Of course this being startup central, we all know this. If learning could be systematized and bureaucratized, there would be no startups. Big companies, VC funds, and banks would just execute whatever deterministic steps are required to yield progress and maintain 100% ownership of everything.
Lapham's Quarterly is a treasure trove of things like this. It's well worth the $39/year. And no, I'm not affiliated with it in any way. It's a magazine that appeals to the same part of me that always liked James Burke's "Connections", because each issue traces a different concept through various eras and prominent people.
Perhaps you can explain to me what "objectification of women" means? Does it mean being attracted to their bodies? So what would be an OK thing to be attracted to - their ability to recite the digits of PI perhaps?

To me it seems that the "anti-objectification" campaign only seeks to replace one attractor with another. So maybe less pretty women would prefer to be measured by their IQ? Why is one better than the other? Or is it generally not OK to be attracted to somebody - or only once you are married and officially in love?

I'm not saying that I like everything that is done in porn, just that I don't understand what "objectification" is supposed to mean? And it seems ridiculous to me to presume men should not be attracted to the female body. So we should just as likely want to have sex with a horse or a hedgehog as with a woman? "American Pie" was just fiction - at least I personally was never tempted by an apple pie, because the looks of "the object" matter.
You can always put housing further from the center, but the radius of not-insane commute times is much harder to expand. Wider highways encourage further-flung suburbs, resulting in at best the same level of congestion, often more.

Fortunately Chicago already has the CTA and Metra infrastructure, and we could presumably make trains longer (and run them more frequently) for a reasonable price. Though at some point you hit the limits of safe separation between trains and the inefficiencies of block signaling. CTA rail doesn't have the physical infrastructure to run express services (there are very few places where a train on a specific line can bypass another) so building more stations doesn't necessarily help you either.
I wonder how much of this additional engineering workforce is working on things like Bootstrap, FlockDB, Bower, etc, vs internal tools?
I knew someone else who made a jit C compiler similar to this, but for 68K (also where the entire environment is in a single memory map). Functions could be compiled when called. The advantage is that the compiler could treat arguments as constants for further optimization.

It's impressive that he made his own optimizing compiler, even if it is not C standard. From the video it has at least constant folding, dead code elimination and jump optimization. It's interesting that the intermediate code is in the form of a double-linked list for easy editing.

I would suggest to try to make a compiler which uses SSA- it's pretty simple and allows more optimizations, particularly CSE. I worked with Bob Morgan at one point, and I suggest his book on compilers as an accessible resource. He would like your jump optimization outer loop: repeat while we're still making progress.
> No results from a wahatever effort is still axwaste no matter how wonderful the payoff might have been.

That's easy to say with hindsight. No results from putting money into something doesn't mean you made the wrong choice. That might be the case here, but as a general statement it's really quite dangerously wrong.
One concern would be if this provides a larger userbase to Baidu to be used by the Chinese government for attacks against folks like github again.
The pope is bound to be a foremost expert on porn and sexual attraction.
Azure is AWESOME. The core pieces -- compute, storage, queues, and especially database -- are rock solid and often far more powerful than the AWS equivalents. Dig in and you'll start to see big holes in AWS.

I still use AWS for some things.

But I'd also avoid the newer, weirder stuff both places. Amazon API Gateway? Amazon Lambda? Azure Data Factory? Azure Active Directory B2C? Yeah, expect pain.
Hmm, I think this clue is new since I last read about this: In January 2015, Fenn revealed in a new interview: "I know the treasure chest is wet." Maybe this means he recently visited the treasure site? Maybe it's worth it to surveil him in case he goes again.
Your own ignorance of history is on you alone. If you wish to relieve it you could research railroad settlement of the American West, specifically land grant subsidies thereof and abuse by the railroads of their power over settlers.
Does anyone know how network cards with support for multiple virtual interfaces (ie. anything modern) fits into this? I'd guess they get separate ifdevice_t instances (reflecting their interrupt and I/O rings)?

I wondered if there was any value in representing the fact that they all come from the same physical card in the abstraction?

It seems a little odd not to mention it given current hardware.
It's probably worth noting:

* Google is blocked in China

* Google and Bing are not blocked in Russia

While we're at it

* Facebook is blocked in China

* Facebook is not blocked in Russia

* VK (Facebook alternative) is more than twice as popular as Facebook in Russia
Show HN: Extended JavaScript Regular Expressions
'Mars Mystery Solved': NASA to Announce 'Major' News
There are most likely some people who would want to have kids under those circumstances. To the extent that the traits that lead them to act that way under those circumstances are heritable, either genetically or through parents-raising-kids (some religions are obvious candidates here), these traits would be selected for in subsequent generations. If a supermajority of people lack these traits, the problem may be put off for some generations, but eventually it will make itself felt. That said, I think there are a few possible solutions, and I certainly am in favor of developing immortality.
@mjaneczek, this is a cool project and a nice take on yet another error tracking service. We built this feature into Airbrake back in 2012, https://airbrake.io/blog/extension/airbrake-chrome-extension but we didn't get enough feedback to get it back into local development. Projects such as https://github.com/charliesome/better_errors have been a great addition to the Rails error workflow.

It's a tough business to get into, but I would suggest talking to the large players and having a standard for exception replays. I wish you the best of luck, feel free to reach out and keep up the great work.
Every once in a while we get this kind of articles that tries to create a story from a few studies that have found loose correlations (but never causation) between what people watch on cinema, TV and now computers/mobile phones, and what they do in real life.

The problem is that if the theory of modified norms and behavior has for all the studies never been strongly linked. In theory, we should all be committing much more crime and violence in direct relation to the ease of access to news and movies, but crimes have steady gone down rather than up. Yearly statistics do show however an increased fear of crime in relation to reading news and watching movies, so it seems our perception about others behaviors has had a much larger impact than on our own behavior.
I don't. I just wonder what the purpose of getting people physically together is if they are going to be using their phones.
> a cultural norm that not everyone agrees on

We are guests of ycombinator.com. They get to decide. We have influence, but there's no requirement for universal consensus.

> yet almost no one does

That's because those that do get flagged, and the accounts get banned.
True, I changed the post title. The idea is not connected to specific platform but for now it is only for ruby programmers, sorry! ;)
As I understand it, every fab generation requires a bunch of changes and new tricks, but they're generally in different areas of the process - and you need most or all of the tricks learnt in creating the previous generation of fab in order to build the one after that. So you probably don't save all that much time or money by skipping a generation, and in the meantime you're a generation further behind and have nothing competitive to sell.
disclaimer: I'm the original author, and a technical salesperson of sorts at GCP

What could we do to make this better? I'm super serious; I talk to customers every day, and we're working hard to deliver a platform (all of it - product, docs, support, sales, customer advocacy, OSS, etc) that exceeds expectations and delivers results. What could we do to impress you from a customer engagement standpoint?
>it is delightfully ironic to witness many of the older generations I hear chastising people like me for a variety of grievances commit one of the cardinal sins I actually don't

That's abusive generalizations for you.
Title was difficult to parse on the first try. "Gates-funded" should be hyphenated.
Wow. Kind of surprised such a borderline-desperate sounding post was allowed on the official Google blog.

I basically read this as "we're so technically superior in several ways ... wtf is everyone still using AWS instead of us?"

It reminds me of the attitude of one Google engineer I know, which is basically Google is such an amazing place, with such visionary leaders, and across-the-board smart engineers, that they can wander into any domain they want, and just assume they'll succeed/print money like AdWords.

I'm paraphrasing and also probably putting words into his mouth, so apologies for phrasing it in the extreme to make a point.

Part of me wishes it was that way: as long as you had the smartest people + biggest warchest (which they basically do), victory would be pre-determined. But capitalism has a way, if anything, of handicapping the existing giants, and you can't just wander into a field "because we're really smart" and assume you'll win.

</armchair business insight>. Feel free to correct my assumptions/biases.
I'm quite surprised by this. My experience with floppies (dos-formatted) was that in a bike ride of 1 hour 1 out of 10 floppies would have corruption. Or maybe the drives i used to copy on them just did not do write verification.
Mozilla and Apple don't make Internet search engine (although some speculates Apple is making a rivalry search engine). They integrate with the Internet search engines out there.
I'm on 5.0 and it's under Settings > Security > App Permisions. I can select each permission in each app and switch individual permissions from the default of Allow to Deny or Ask. I'm on a stock ROM.
The fact that in certain times there are popular and less popular areas of study, or topics, has nothing to do with the scientific method.

At any time, anyone, could posit any kind of idea, like "the Moon is made of cheese", and the whole scientific method boils down to basically everyone else demanding "prove it."

The fact that at times people might be afraid or uninterested in testing ideas which seem far-fetched or unpopular in their community, is another thing entirely.
It was meant to be taken in a kind of tongue in cheek way, but I'm also aware that one of the "P" is for Pacific; but I also feel that if it did come up that China would be calling out the hypocrisy even if they weren't a part of the treaty.
disclaimer: I am OP and work at GCP.

Watch out for minimum file size on Standard-IA: it's 128kb, and if you write a file smaller than that they round up. It's little gotchas like this that can really burn you...
Related to the subject of declining violence: http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-bill-gates-re...
Did you mean google.com or google.com.cn?
One at a time please, take a number. /s
It went away in 4.4 but I have it again on 5.0. I had to use Xposed to get it to work on 4.4 but now it's on again by default. I see people complaining it's not present in 5.0, though. Strange...
the critics of string theory need to consider this, instead of just dismissing the theory as un-testable
A detailed discussion of the book at SEP can be found here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/#2.13
The obvious falsehood in this concept is science is based on idea nullification as such it seeks places where a theory breaks down. In physics for example it often seems that adding yet another decimal to some constant is more or less a waste of time, but precision has broken many theory's and as such it's not 'safe' territory.

PS: Abstractly, gradient descent seems to get you stuck in a local optima, but fractals for example are not 'safe' places. Look to close at the head of a pin and there be dragons.
China, because no democracy would tolerate this level of risk.

liquid sodium designs require elaborate safety controls to separate the coolant from air and water, to avoid catastrophic explosion. Kinda a problem when you're really just boiling water to create steam to turn a turbine to make electricity.

As a result of numerous fires from leaking systems, operating sodium-cooled fast reactors to date have been shut down more than they have run. Maintenance is ...challenging.
fundamentalist-positivist Skeptics

This seems to lump several different things together. Could you give us an example of this sort of character?
Think of it like type annotation in Haskell. It doesn't change things, but it lets you pin things down where you know them to make it easier to figure out the bits you don't know (and lets you resolve ambiguity).
Catalonia vote: Pro-independence parties win elections
The things that they show (running a web site with lots of UX, slicing, image processing, materials data, catalog of customizable designs, etc.) fit pretty well into a powerful web site/service with a small CPU in the laser cutter. Adding a powerful CPU, etc, would add to cost and complexity - it is much easier to run a web site than to support thousands,of users' local installs, etc. Though i agree that makes the device dependent on their service, that's becoming a pretty common tradeoff these days.
I'm not sure what you mean by "fundamentalist-determinist" but Evelyn Fox Keller's account of the work of Barbara McClintock might be relevant here.

I can only find the following article online, which is critical of Keller's conclusions. I'd say Feyerabend is more philosophically sophisticated than McClintock.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/demythologizi...
The railroads screwed with everyone including the Left Coast, how is this unique to the section? Hell, some of the stuff they pulled on the east coast was pretty bad.
I wasn't aware there was a Go VM.
I don't know exactly what you want to do, but creativity plays and large role.Many years ago when I was younger I wanted to write screenplays for Hollywood, used this book as a way to explore my creativity. Also reading as much as you call and watching classic movies would help as well. The book is called the Artists Way.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1585421464/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...
Usage rates of, for example, marijuana went down after it was effectively legalized in Amsterdam. Usage rates of heroin went down after decriminalization in Portugal. You can't just say that usage would "undoubtedly" go up; it's very doubtful indeed.

> Are you also arguing we should legalize that because if someone really wanted to they still can get child pornography???

Absolutely. We should be going after the people making and selling CP, not possession. It's in the creation and distribution of CP that people are being hurt, not in the consumption.

If some guy is mentally ill and enjoys CP but otherwise doesn't hurt anyone, how are we better off for putting him in jail?
John Cleese, of all people, summarized our current knowledge of the nervous system best in this video: https://youtu.be/FQjgsQ5G8ug?t=20

We are clueless. A lot of what is published is just neurobabble, even in 'serious' journals. As others have pointed out, we still don't even know how to simulate a brain of a tiny worm with 302 neurons. Talking about simulating billions of neurons is beyond fantasy, and funding such a projects is.. well.. not surprising from politicians, but that is another matter.

Similarly, a lot of scientists are researching themes like 'consciousness' and 'executive functions' and still don't know how to make a robot walk like a normal person on two feet. We should be concentrating on trying to understand the simple stuff - the reflex arc, muscle control, grasping, and pointing a finger toward something.
Although it requires watching, I'm a fan of https://youtu.be/NGFhc8R_uO4
SpaCy Natural Language Processing Library Now MIT Licensed (from AGPL)
SkyDNS supports whatever naming scheme you want to use. You set the names yourself. That means it can be compliant with RFC2782 if you choose, or the names can be semantic -- like Kubernetes uses, with each position in the name implying a semantic meaning "servicename.kubenamespace.domain"

Disclaimer: I invented SkyDNS.
Why do we need a mnemonic or a meme for this? Is understanding distribution really that much harder than memorizing FOIL?

At the same time, understanding distribution is so much more powerful because it generalizes to many other uses and later concepts.

I think FOIL sticks around primarily because it is what people are taught. Even when people actually do understand distribution, they may not realize that FOIL is just a special case of distributing.
disclaimer: I am the author, and work at Google Cloud Platform

Stephen, thanks for the direct feedback, seriously! We weren't shooting for desperate, if anything I had a bit of geek pride in my voice when saying it at our GCP Next events, and then typing it down for this post. As I've been helping folks onboard and understand the platform, I found myself explaining these facts pretty frequently, so I figured having it written down might be helpful for others. Any suggestions on what kinds of content you'd like to see us deliver? Things you'd want to know? I'm game!
I think the desirability of eliminating this kind of bias depends on the context of the problem that the algorithm would be used to solve. Per your example, suppose that strength is what an algorithm is predicting. We might not want the algorithm to lowball the strength of a candidate just because that candidate "looks like a woman" due to some other causally unrelated correlation.
Oh yeah. Rust was really four different programming languages over a roughly eight year period. Always the same focus, but radically different ways of accomplishing it.
Some see it differently: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/optimalscientist.html

But it would still be anarchic (without the laws of human psychology and social interactions at least). However, it would be an algorithm, and thus, in its broadest sense, a method.
I remember taking a class from Feyerabend years ago. Similar to what Wikipedia describes, his basic argument, his only argument really, was starting with a certain form of rationalism and showing that it didn't work or couldn't exist.

I felt like his entire deal was supremely boring. Take anything interesting, whether a scientific theory, a poem, a piece of music or a religious text. The interestingness of any of these things comes from there being layers of meaning and a structure one has to spend time learning.

If someone's only activity is putting together a straw version of science and knocking it down, again and again and again, there's nothing interesting (even if the rationalism isn't entirely "straw" in the sense that some philosophers of science have pretty rigid schemas, the process of merely saying "no that wrong" remains dull).

People compared Thomas Kuhn's work to Feyerabend and I think that's a disservice to Kuhn. Kuhn's work, correct or incorrect, involved a broad effort to draw a picture of what actually scientists actually does. Feyerabend's work seemed to me to be little more than a sort of act of petty vengeance, endless effort to tell STEM people "ha, you're not so smart after all".
address bar popping up over content [true]
popups offering to remember passwords [solved]
typing in a url rather than tapping an icon [solved]

we're not that far from a good user experience. even the bar problem is only ios specific, android browsers have a better support for full screen apps
Looking at disaster recovery from a hardware-less perspective
I agree. The thing that makes me critical of string theory isn't that it's (so far) difficult to test, but that it's been The Thing in certain quarters for a long time and has yet to yield much (unless something's happened I'm not aware of).

It also seems to get more complex over time.
>So kids are forgoing realworld sex. When did that become a bad thing?

Since the sexual revolution.
Smart move to offer to buy the artifacts without fear of prosecution. They probably saved tons of items which otherwise would have been lost forever.
I am not sure that this would be the case. If all the firmware has to do is process G code, that's oh well understood problem, and runs on Arduino's, and whatever is grilling this printer has to be at least as powerful as we oh well understood problem, and runs on Arduino's, and whatever is grilling this printer has to be at least as powerful as Arduino, and he clearly has four more storage since it can buffer print streams coming across the Internet which is a lot harder then coming in local connection. The only limitation I see is that the device does not have a USB port, which means that even if you're printing off-line you're going through Wi-Fi. If the company went under, I'm wondering if the answer wouldn't be to reverse engineer enough of the server-side to print, and run a copy of that locally, without having to change the printer's firmware.
Code is here: https://github.com/gonzopancho/rtree
I think the OP probably assumed there were fewer tech company opportunities in the area.