skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting, what does this mean: "far too much heavy shit going down on a daily basis for any of the more weird guys (like me) to get very far"?
I would not say startups are competing against background noise, they are competing for a most limited resource - human attention. There are just so many startups doing fantastic things that it is impossible for them to all succeed no matter how good they are because humans can only look at so many new things per day.
There's one view of life where everything is only about ultimate timeless contextless values. That seems your perspective here. '...so by the transitive property it's only about fucking.'
At some point in my life I learned that I no longer subscribe to that point of view. The way I read that story is that within the context of flying bombing raids he felt he had no right to live. Which to me as a reader shows that he empathises with the people he bombed. It's not an eternal truth about man killing man happening but it's something he did to another human being.
When he meets the girl in the rain he's in another context in another moment between people. And he feels worthwhile for a moment again. She leaves him in the story so the fucking end goal is taken of the table. It was just an isolated moment that's meaningful in itself. And he feels differently. If we want to give the transition of feeling a name we might say he feels redeemed.
Just like the meeting in the rain was isolated and without end result similarly the posting on craigslist is without end result and follow up but it's still meaningful after 40+ yrs. Which goes to underscore that our emotions in life are often without end result and followed by totally different emotions and attendant value systems. But we have to experience them as meaningful anyway.
Because the alternative is nihilism and depression.

Just an impression of what goes through me at this point in my life when I read that story. I recognise your take on it as well. It's just that I learned that looking at life like that did not make me happy in the end. And that the feeling of intellectual victory was without substance.
Point 2 uses the exact phrase I have use to describe my experience of visiting Valve : "Artist colony." Take smart creative people who often don't fit well elsewhere and let them go.
The foundation of this article is set up on a very poor premise:

> The Web was a brilliant first shot at making the Internet usable, but it backed the wrong horse. It chose space over time. The conventional website is “space-organized,”

The Web didn't back anything, and it certainly did not choose space over time. The wording there is the dead give-away to the poor premise: "conventional website."

Someone building a site or service can easily choose to develop primarily around time rather than space. I've done this countless times in the last decade for varying reasons, as probably have most people that were building Web services during that time. You use what makes the most sense for what the service needs to accomplish. In just the last five or so years, what can be done with the Web has been drastically boosted, there is no time limitation.

That the Web can just as easily accommodate a time or space or both approach, is one of the many reasons why it wins. In other words, may the best approach win - the Web will be happy to enable whatever that happens to be.
Appeal to authority is a dumb logical fallacy in reality geniuses are better at everything and we should prioritize their opinions by some decent weight over everyone else. Obviously.
Hmm...I read about the lack of effectiveness of psychotherapy roughly 20 years ago in DER SPIEGEL. Within a set time period, around 10% of patients receiving psychotherapy got better. Of course, within the same period 10% of patients receiving no treatment also got better :-)
> you seem to go out of your way to find any and every thread that mentions Groovy in any way, and then launch into your rant

The most significant thing you've really said here is that I generally post comments under my own name, as I suspect you also do, given how active your "mindcrime" user is and the implicit assumption in your above comment that you're seeing the entire picture by looking at who's posting comments. Have you considered that other "entrepreneurs" involved with Groovy keep hundreds of HN logins each to obfuscate their mischief here and engage in illicit surveillance of people whose comments they don't like? This I don't say in my comments, instead I keep what I say seemly and do it in my own name. It's because I use my own name that I "seem to go out of my way to find any and every thread ..."
To Defy Amazon, Japanese Bookseller Plans to Corner Market on Bestseller Titles
The risk you talk about does not seem to exist in the real markets. If the US were viewed as unstable like you suggest, it would be priced into US bonds, which are trading near all time highs. If there is a risk in there, it's nearly negligible.
It would fluctuate less wrt to global apples, I'd say. That's far from square one.

(I say global apples, because Apple prices in Australia are probably pretty stable in AUD.)
All of this testing can be seen as very poor, however, I would argue that we are running the wrong tests. Let me explain...

Imagine you were developing a car. As part of the project you would need to test, test, test and test the drivetrain and the engine. For your test data to be relevant you would want a controlled environment, e.g. car on perfectly flat road with no pot holes, turns or aerodynamic consideration. You could then adjust the variables and check the results - power, torque, emissions, noise level, oil use, fuel use, temperatures and so on.

In this development mode the test rig works pretty good. Figures can be produced that are important for the engine/drivetrain development. Variables can be changed and results measured. The figures - defeat device aside - are actually true with the normal margins for statistical measurement (not every engine will be 100% exactly the same even if it came off the same production batch).

The problem - defeat device aside - is when regulatory bodies use this data for what they need to know, i.e. real world performance. They accept data that they know is not real world and accept it as 'fact'.

If we look at our own testing for building apps, websites and such like we take a modular approach, testing our dev boxes with some type of 'seige' that does not factor in real world internet connectivity and bandwidth, not to mention how customers might use our products in the wild. We can even prove to our clients that their site isn't slow, sharing our metrics with them. Yet, in the real world things don't quite attain those metrics. Luckily nobody gets harmed if our 'squirrel picture app for cats' app falls short.

So, it is the procedures that are wrong and our standards bodies that are doing it wrong (by blindly accepting manufacturers' test data). We are lucky that VW have been cheating as we now are having the conversation about the testing methodology.
On a second thought, it seems it could be used for 3D shapes in genetic algorithms, with each English letter representing one neighboring voxel. If it hods true that similar DNA results in a similar shape, it could work very well.
Read the rest of the comment..
There are still cybercafes in the UK. They are found now in poor areas, and they do phone calls as well as Internet access. Strange how stuff changes.
US bonds are priced in USD. If the USD is expected to collapse (if at all) if and only if the US bonds collapse, what would you see in the prices?
Best open source sms gateway server script
In a business contexts, rule of law is mostly useful for predictability.
I'd lived in the US for about five years before I bothered to get a credit rating. I remember when I was renting an apartment the agent looked shocked that I didn't have one.

"How can you not have a credit rating? Don't you have a car? Or a phone?"

I said "Uh yeah, I paid cash for my car, and my phone is prepaid".

I had a helluva time convincing him that someone who never has to borrow money (and can buy brand new cars for cash) is a better credit risk than someone who borrows money all the freaking time.

Eventually I gave in and got a credit card for the sake of miles. Sheesh!
I found that interesting as well.

After thinking about it for a while, I struggled to get anything profound out of it. I feel his point is equivalent to saying "a higher level of abstraction can make problems more tractable" which is something we do all the time in all contexts.

Finding good abstractions is an art but I don't think this really maps to insights like Copernicus though. I see a slightly different process happening i.e. discovering a new perspective on a problem. A new perspective can be a different way to decompose a problem but I don't think it necessitates anything about the sophistication of the building blocks. Instead, a revealing change is often because it changes the type of relationships between the building blocks in a radical way that enables new inferences.
I did it - too complicated.
That's rather a long bow to draw based on the occasional overcharge (which you should be able to get your credit card company to reverse anyway).
None, that theory makes no sense because if neither the seller nor the buyer of the oil want USD, it's a zero sum for the value of the USD. If either of them want to keep money in USD, then that is demand completely separate from the oil.
I had a professor who was an astronaut for four missions, the longest being just shy of 200 days, and on the last day of class he just did a presentation about his time with NASA. He said that, with every minute of his day being scheduled, he and the others needed to find something to pursue, and for him it was taking pictures of all the Navy bases where he'd ever been stationed. So he'd keep an eye on the monitors showing where they were, and every once in a while they'd cross near one of his old bases, so he'd snap a picture. It was pretty cool seeing his overhead pictures and knowing he actually captured them (and not from the screen on Google Earth.)

I guess the orbit tracker just reminded me of that presentation.
It's creative writing, which some people like no matter how authentic.

The writer has some skills. The flow and efficiency would earn marks as a school assignment!

"scaled the hill with its golden dome, and meandered into that charming labyrinth divided by Hanover Street"

It might seem simple, but in those few words a lot of information is communicated.

"Ironically, the torture of your abandonment seemed to swallow my self-loathing"

Nicely put! Again, top marks.

As an aside, I've noticed over the years that programmers make good writers. Wit, efficiency, confidence. Obviously excelling at technical subject matter, but even so, sometimes it's entertaining. I wonder if the reverse is true? That good writers and literature-heads make good programmers (if they tried). As in, creative code, efficient code, structured etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord
To me it is less about training than discoverability. If you expect my mum to register for a classroom training or go to a training website you can wait a long time. But she is the typical user who needs to get into keyboard shortcuts
I'm curious about how, it seemed pretty horrible what thy were going through.
If the guy who packs MREs or sews uniforms so his family won't starve is complicit in violence, then you are just as complicit for paying your taxes so you don't go to prison.
Strange that the emergence of non-State digital cryptocurrencies was not even mentioned in this article. Is it that radical to envision that perhaps one day the successor to the U.S. dollar might not be fiat currency backed by any single state?
No its not. I imagine there are millions of lower class people in America that get charged an extra $50-$500 every month with a dare to hire a lawyer or take a hit on their credit score, of which they can take neither, so they pay a thief his made up fees. There's probably other examples of this I could imagine. Without even speaking about the psychological trauma that is present here, it looks about as criminal as stealing lunch money from random people.

This isn't civilized behavior and it should not be tolerated in the USA.
Xerox PARC systems were great and it is a pity that the mainstream didn't adopt them as such, only a few pieces.

Every time I dig into their archives I come out marvelled with how programming might have felt in those Workstations. Memory safe programming languages for the whole stack (+ Assembly of course), automatic memory management, OS wide REPL, visual debuggers, code correction, modular systems...

Specially since Smalltalk and Oberon (Native and BlueBottle) allowed me to have a glimpse of it.
> ...because we had (at least) 2 different exceptional qualities...

On the topic of exceptional qualities, what is thought to be behind New Caledonian Crows and their expert tool use & building is their eyes are more rotated to the front of their face than other crows. Thus, they can focus their vision in front of them easier than other crows of similar intelligence and makes it easier to manipulate and use objects.

I think there's been other crows that have used primitive tools in lab settings, but nowhere close to what New Caledonian ones do in the wild or in the lab.
Why iPads and Chromebooks Won’t Save the Classroom
The original article title doesn't seem to be accurate. Should be "Effectiveness of Talk Therapy On Depression Is Overstated, a Study Says".
This isn't working for me :( Even after following the link from Google, I get the paywall treatment...
Interesting idea. However it misses the food in the plate: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rj8tgj4f01d2ux1/Screenshot%202015-...
Yes. The post is clearly fake. Even if the author hadn't messed up with any facts, the style of the writing gave it way. You'll notice that there are tons and tons of details. Everything is as specific as possible in an effort to adhere to "Show Not Tell". Even if we believed someone could have a memory this crystal clear after 40 years, many of the details are completely meaningless to the premise that is presented (a man thanking a woman for human interaction when he needed it most).
That's why you tell them you are moving overseas.
I think the main advantage here is that it's a one-binary-file webserver.
Very simple to install and ideal for file sharing among coworkers or similar situations. A modern equivalent of "python -m SimpleHTTPServer".
Is this true in all seasons?
I think the best part is the "what's new" section: http://home.mcom.com/home/whats-new.html

I imagine that today every minute more new stuff appears on the Internet than in all of those what's new pages combined. Just shows how far we went from there.
I just finished the article, and saw a reference there to a New Zealand study about Rudolf Steiner schools. I attended the same Steiner school as the author of the study, and I would consider several people from my class to be functionally illiterate. This mostly comes down to the quality of the school rather than the philosophy - when I joined it was very new and run by a bunch of well-meaning hippies who had basically no idea about education.

If you're going to have a child-led education system where you assume that if the child isn't reading it's because they're not ready yet, you better be damn sure you're not missing the signs of something more serious, because if you do, when you come to address it it will be much more difficult the later you intervene. It sounds like the teachers in Finland are probably good enough to catch this - ours were not.
I have only read the introductory few pages so far and hope to read the rest tonight, but I just wanted to say good luck and I hope you can help correct this devastating mistake.
I don’t quite understand what your question is, so I’m going to assume you were trying to ask, “When would you not want to use automatic differentiation?” I think the main time you can’t get much out of automatic differentiation is when your function is a black box or approximation, e.g. it comes from measuring physical data, or is the output of some kind of simulation, etc. I’m not an expert though.

You can get a lot of hits if you google related keywords (e.g. a query with both terms "numerical differentiation" "automatic differentiation" in quotation marks). But here’s a start, http://alexey.radul.name/ideas/2013/introduction-to-automati...

You can probably get useful advice if you ask on http://scicomp.stackexchange.com or similar.
It is amazing this isn’t it. Being rich enough to not need to borrow makes you a bad credit risk.

We seem to have some very knowledgable people here so why is it that credit scores don’t start at a default value and go up or down based on your credit history. Why is a rich person with no debt and huge amount of assets more of a risk than an undischarged bankrupt?
Show HN: Honeymoon – A Swift Web Framework
This is a thing that happened once. What if it just cannot be recreated?
There being no effect at all is a ridiculous statement. Sure, it doesn't work for many people, but it worked for me. So if it works for some people, which I prove it does, then it has to inhibit recovery in others in order to have no net effect. I don't buy that at all.
It doesnt seem like a lot of thought has gone into making the colour / drawing choice actually visually significant. Eg. given blue is much harder to see here than red, are we over-estimating similarity because there is a lot of red?

I suspect they need to talk to some visualization & human vision people to make this compelling.
Investments are only safe if there's strong consensus that they're worth what people say they're worth.

I don't know all the details, but didn't a number of investors from all around the world lose money when the US switched away from the gold standard?

As for a safer investment, how about land ownership?
There are a few examples of people who were about to die by suicide when someone asks how they are and if they need a bit of help.

it doesn't take much to stop most death by suicide.
I haven't yet read the paper proper but this statement surprised me a little:

> In particular, ownership has forced us to avoid concurrency in the kernel and include more code than we would have liked in the TCB.

One of the strong points of Rust and its owenership system is that it allows writing concurrent code with greater confidence. I would have hoped that it'd encourage rather than discourage using concurrency.
IaaS, PaaS and SaaS: intro to cloud computing
I don't feel like that page is entirely fair.

The PNG and GIF comparisons are unfair; they're the same low resolution as FLIF, but given nearest-neighbor upsampling instead of bilinear. Most web browsers use bilinear or bicubic upsampling for progressive pictures now, so FLIF isn't nearly as unique as it presents itself. Aside from that, progressive is only useful if you're on a slow connection or the file is broken; in other cases re-rendering multiple times becomes a bottleneck and battery drain. In general it's rare that progressive decoding is a win anymore (although progressive encoding of JPEG is always a win).

In another comment I pointed out that jpeg2000 can be encoded to any size, even 1k, even though the q-scale doesn't go that low, by using the target size parameter instead. It looks better than anything but BPG and is fully progressive. Of course, J2K is a dead format outside of DejaVu, PDF, and the medical field, but it serves as a useful baseline.

A comparison to JXR would have been nice; it's an open, patent-indemnified format that fully supports progressive decoding, and compresses about as well as WebP. That format's the biggest disappointment for me, I thought it had everything in place to displace JPEG.

BPG could be made somewhat progressive, but only by changing the underlying HEVC bitstream, while one of its goals is to stay as close as possible. The inclusion of a thumbnail is the only recourse.
Well it is still C anyway.

For example, I find worthless the Annex K of C11 as solution for memory corruption, because the functions still require to keep track of a separate pointer and size, while making sure they match. And the Annex is anyway optional.

However OpenBSD coding guidelines do look quite good:

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man9/...

I like that they request developers to make use of static analysis.
Question: Why don't we see this rate of invention in open source community? It is already (apart of it corporation-sponsored part) an artistic community, people work on stuff they like, there's no business pressure and so on.
I would not be so harsh on biologists, but I do agree that we waste far too much time arguing over garbage like this. As I used to tell my students taxonomy is just a tool to help humans make some sense of all the complexity in living systems, but it is not real.
Not knowing/using keyboard shortcuts is one of the banes of developer productivity. Using the mouse to right-click, copy, right-click, paste is bad enough when a "standard" user does it but for a developer it's painful.
Therapy absolutely has an effect.

That effect, however, happens to be about equivalent to placebo.
Someone will have to call up Blizzard and tell them they have had the kiss of death when using LGPLv3 libraries in Starcraft 2. Without patents to do xml parsing or image handling, how can a game like that ever be sold with commercial success? The game only sold 5 million copies, and an other million for the expansion, so that can't possible have earned revenue for the company to support their employees and investors.
I'm pretty sure this is nothing new, but where is that app/website that allows to skim through startup one-liners that indicate the stage they're at? Say,

Phonodrone - drone that keeps your phone in front of your nose while you exercise
Electronics / Hardware prototype (70% complete)

Meowr - rate my cat's meowing sound
Web / Launched (100% complete)

etc. Product Hunt is kind of that, but posting is closed to the public (and it's not an easy task to get there, at least I failed), plus the stage is not included in one-liners.
Google Doubles Android App Size to 100 MB – What Does It Mean?
> "The big problem with Xerox is they only wanted to make billions. And that's the problem with most companies. When you're doing kind of stuff you're actually in the trillion-dollar range."
It created trillions in value. Why not try?
I had this experience in my own company for a very very brief time when we had enough money for it. We were (trying) doing innovation in the our R&D dep first but after that I tried to make that into something more. Unfortunately in a commercial entity (as is indicated in the article) this is extremely hard to do as when the time for new budgets arrives my co-founders would ask where the tangible (as in money) results were. Results did come and in the end it did actually break even but the freedom was stripped too soon to really make something happen. Sounds like the ultimate job to be honest.

And that at SAP of all places. I worked with SAP software and consultants and probably as many here who worked with SAP as well will probably agree; that is a far shout from this invent lab...
Because the majority of the open source community are either people building up their CVs or working on side projects.

Innovation like the one at Xerox PARC needs lots of money.

Imagine how much a Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Mesa/Cedar workstation would have cost in the 70's versus a plain PDP-11. Also a reason (among many others) why the market didn't adopt their technologies.
How do you know you are not one of the 10%?
It's a little ironic that an article detailing how you select or define words on a phone is on a website that has somehow disabled the ability to do both on an iPhone.
Really? Because personally, I don't want to be sitting in a room full of developers all talking to Siri all at once. That sounds pretty insane to me.