skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So when I upgraded my server a couple of months ago,
> I just didn't bother setting up the XMPP server again.
> Not because it didn't work, but just because it had nobody
> to talk to.

Exactly mirrors my experience. ;_;
And yet, the modern Apple that prizes good aesthetics and design in the service of the customer is what separates it from competing tech companies that focus on the practical and profitable.
I can see where you're coming from, but I don't know if that's a fair reduction.

In the app world we initially thought more everything was better. When apps that took things away (twitter took away characters, snap chat took away permanence) showed up, we realized that sometimes less creates a better social situation.

I love the sentimental value of photography but dislike it's massively redistributable nature. Consider for example this app for... sexual pictures taken with a lover.
> It's more that XMPP was a terrible protocol with a gigantic flaw that should not have been there in the first place...

What is that flaw? Is it the flaw that you mentioned in your opening sentence?

Edit: For the downvoters: This is a serious question. I don't ask non-serious questions. :)
nudes/sextape
That is... an unusual use of regression, to say the least. When I see something sufficiently off the wall, I always wonder how the authors happened to think of that. It also raises a lot of questions like, how much of physics can be usefully approximated by some random forests? Could you replace most of a physics engine with an appropriate small neural network?
> not even pretending to support consumer choice

By my way of thinking, your choice of language (not because of you, the person, but of how the words have become ingrained) is indicative of the problem: "consumer" versus "customer." We consume what the various companies choose to offer to us in the way they offer it. We are not treated as customers, valued or otherwise, in a competitive landscape. There exists a one-way flow, from the company doing the advertising to our eyeballs to consume it.

Look at the businesses people claim to like: local shops, service providers like Fastmail, and the like. In those cases the people giving them money are treated as customers who have other choices and who have made the voluntary choice to continue to associate with that business.

That's what is missing. Customer instead of consumer.
On the Wives of Whalers and Their Dildos, a.k.a. “He's-at-Homes”
Undergrad + PhD? :/
And I thought I was the only one! I always wondered if they had some kind of patent on the sugar coating. Why wouldn't the generics be coated too?
The author specifically argues against this view as something that obscures the superiority, in most cases, of the Bayesian approach:

One downside of this ecumenicalism is a reluctance to ask fundamental questions: having a strong opinion on this matter has gone out of fashion. Who’s to say one statistical philosophy is better than another? Aren’t all statistical philosophies equally valid paths to good data analysis? Frequentism is “true for me”. As in religion, so in statistics. If you criticise a colleague for using p-values when posterior probabilities are clearly more appropriate, it will lead to accusations of being a ‘zealot’ [2] who should stop ‘crusading’

and then later:

If Einstein’s theory were easier (as well as being more accurate), teaching Newton’s would be silly. Yet that’s the way most statistics curricula are structured. The only reason statisticians think frequentist ideas are easier is that they are used to them
And whose position is it that a drug/treatment/whatever has exactly zero effect? Also that there are exactly zero differences between two or more groups at baseline and this continues to be true for the duration of the study (except if due to the treatment)?

Really, who is advocating that hypothesis?

Also, a null hypothesis was originally the hypothesis to be nullified. There may be confusion due to the use of "null" here. Null != nil
that the course was really enjoyable. why is that not nice to know?

edit: here's an analogy - say the article was about a famous restaurant, and someone chimed in to say "i ate there when i was visiting hong kong, and it was one of the best meals i've ever had". now we already know that it's a good restaurant; that's what the article was all about after all. nevertheless, i like that sort of comment; it adds a human touch to the story because (rightly or wrongly) i perceive a fellow commenter as less remote than a newspaper food writer, and therefore their opinion has a certain anecdotal quality to it that the article lacks.
For a more thorough intro, I can't recommend anything better than this http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.00019
"Our approach showed the potential to be a good replacement
of standard solvers in settings, where running times is more important than the exactness of a simulation, such as in computer games or interactive design."

"In our future work we want to [...] combine learning methods with standard solvers to obtain both fast and highly accurate simulations."

From the paper's conclusion.
What's entryism?
Predictor-correctors is the principal behind a lot of physics engines. I guess they just got a better predictor.
The Only 10 Slides You'll Need for Your Pitch
In Silicon Valley and on communities such as HN, when people talk about STEM, they seem to usually focus on CS/EE. Given that there doesn't seem to be as much focus here on, say, hydraulic engineering, or medicine, as there is focus on what is necessary to create tech startups, I'm surprised to see that people are objecting to Art. Doesn't this industry have a more pressing need for UI/UX designers, HCI specialists, web designers, and video game music composers, rather than astronomers or zoologists?
The 414s: 1980s Milwaukee Teenage Hackers
In theory this is the case, but in practice since nobody actually checks on what you spend the money on you can spend a fairly large chunk of resources on whatever idea you want. You just need to ensure you put enough effort into whatever area you can get money for to allow renewal.
Any project with a TRICKS file is bound to be good.
While it's not like xmpp/jabber protocol is perfect, it leaves lots of space for extensions. Any company serious about it could either implement (post 2011) or propose (pre 2011) extension like XEP-0280 (message carbon copy). There's another one for accessing archives, googlable if anyone wants it.
This was not a "company town" in the way that is being referenced in the comments. It was quite literally a prototype community where residents would only live for about a year. It was primarily funded by other companies to showcase their products and develop R&D labs. Walt's stated goal was to inspire cities around the world to develop their urban centers in this model. Before he died, he said, "I don't believe there's a challenge anywhere in the world that's more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities." Whether this design would have succeeded is the subject of much debate, though there were many elements that were radical in their time (wedway people mover, airport of the future with oval runway, tiered transportation levels).
Actually, what they have here is a way of generating predictors from the corrector; which theoretically can be optimized for your domain.
Different people romanticize different products. For some people clothes are luxury goods where books are a utility, and for some the reverse. Different people put different importance on different aspects too - Bob may think the environmental impact of his purchases is of first rate importance, but doesn't care about a community forming around his retailers. Jane may not really care about either, but fondly looks back on when her Mom took her to the library as a kid...
I largely agree with your sentiment, but what of the fact that poorly integrated immigrant populations have been hotbeds for radicalism? I think it is not enough to simply allow the immigrants to live in our country, but to also have a culture that is pluralistic enough to accept them. Not that the US is perfect at doing this, but I think that having a national identity that is less attached to a concept of ethnicity or monoculturalism has been helpful.
Guy I went to college with in the late 1990s had measured phone service [0] at home in Illinois. It's still alive today [1] and it's the cheapest way to get a phone line, with the caveat that substantial usage can become pretty expensive.

[0] https://www.techopedia.com/definition/4986/measured-telephon...

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/17/business/la-fi-lazar...
What about Donald Knuth and TeX?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX
In what way is Israel ahead of the US? I could see them being equal to the US, but their economy just isn't big enough to be ahead technology-wise.
We talk about engineers and scientists in the ancient world,because that's what they did, not because they had engineering schools and PhDs. It was a more primitive understanding but the craft is the same. I don't see why software engineering is any different.
A typical wholesale price as set by a publisher is about 50 to 60% of the RRP for mass-market stuff and 80% for specialised titles.

But most bookstores buy their stock from middle-man distributors on a returnable basis. That's a couple of clicks of about 10 to 15% each on top of the wholesale price, plus the store has to add their operating costs and margin onto that. So discounting is very difficult for a small shop.

Compared to Amazon which buys huge volume directly from publishers on a non-returnable basis and can park slow-selling stock in warehouses for years at a very low per-item cost.
I feel that http://matrix.org/
Is the proper open source replacement for XMPP. I changed over to it from XMPP and haven't looked back.
These examples may be true, but they're not necessarily representative. For example, writing is at the heart of history and literature, but it is not easily taught to engineers (or anyone, for that matter). Becoming a skilled writer takes years, and it probably also relies on innate talents as well.
Hm. That's a good point. Try making it to the members of Congress behind the "Congressional STEM to STEAM Caucus".[1] . "Current members of the caucus include Reps. Jim Langevin (D-RI), Jared Polis (D-CO), David Cicilline (D-RI), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), Gerald Connolly (D-VA), Dave Loebsack (D-IA), Matt Cartwright (D-PA), Bobby Scott (D-VA), Louise Slaughter (D-NY), Tim Ryan (D-OH), and Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH)."

The Rhode Island School of Design seems to be the main force behind this. They're not really a design school, in the industrial design sense; they're a "fine arts" school. Teaching kids the rudiments of industrial design might be useful. It's not about self-expression; it's about what the user needs.

[1] https://bonamici.house.gov/press-release/reps-bonamici-and-s...
Duckduckgo has their own XMPP server you can signup for, its what I use for everything. Not sure what extensions it supports (or lack thereof) since I only use it for single user chats.
Price? The margin in generics is already pretty thin.
Social Organization of the Computer Underground (1989)
Like brogondwana says, from the commit log on their github repo, it's clear (years after that fastmail blog post) that Process One has abandoned ejabberd 3.x. ejabberd 2.x appears to continue to have updates. [0]

Having said that, for my single-account, single-site needs, ejabberd worked just fine for me for the several years between the time that I learned about the fact that Google Talk federated with XMPP servers and the time that Google stopped federating with other XMPP server operators.

I can't speak to how comprehensive ejabberd is, but for one-on-one chats, and multi-user chats, it worked just fine when I was using it.

[0] https://github.com/processone/ejabberd
No links?
I use Hangouts, but that's mainly because it integrates Google Voice, which I've had since it was Grand Central and even then, I mostly do SMS with it (including desktop).

It's actually really sad to see these events... one of my favorite things in the late 90's and early 00's was actually the voice chat rooms in Yahoo messenger, but the bots ruined that platform... it was proprietary, but it was fun.

These days, it's pretty much SMS only for me... I don't need an app that only works on my phone, not my desktop, and actively spies on me, and sucks my battery life. I do have skype which I use sometimes, mostly for those that I talk to overseas on rare occassion.

I had high hopes that XMPP or a decent replacement would evolve that actually worked well... same goes for Diaspora and a bunch of other things though. In the end people like their walled gardens. :-(
So how this works with federation? I don't see any open/common API.
It appears to be based on Navier-Stokes, from the abstract:

> We designed a feature vector, directly modelling individual forces and constraints from the Navier-Stokes equations, giving the method strong generalization properties to reliably predict positions and velocities of particles in a large time step setting on yet unseen test videos.
I don't know about you, but I found Bayesian approach much more intuitive than frequentist one. The only reason to use frequentist approach is to have a procedure that you can do with pencil and paper on real problems (and unlike Bayesian methods only under some often weird assumptions). But with computers and statistical packages, that need is going away.
Why Retailers Should Recruit a Chief Omnichannel Officer Now
> Back in my days as a professional translator

This is nit-picking, and I apologize, but presumably you mean your days as a professional interpreter, based on the description?
I wonder, if we were proper customers of Facebook and paid them to transport our messages, whether it would open the possibility of a Ma Bell-style antitrust lawsuit. Force interconnectivity to allow the little guys to play too.
The Advertising Bubble
Random story: I remember the first time I had a real Advil. A girl I was interested in (when I was 12 or 13) gave me one. The flavor really struck me for whatever reason, probably enhanced by my youthful infatuation. She had a stash of various pills at school. Never found out what the rest of them were for. Probably for the best.
I don't see what good this would do. Art & design are certainly valuable for making a good product, but the fields are not at all alike.

There is an objective, correct answer to questions in science to the point where disagreement is simply wrong. I don't think there is an objectively best art or anything like that. So the studies are nothing alike, even if art and design can provide real value to technical projects.
Behind ‘King Lear’: The History Revealed
> I've basically stopped using instant messages all together and switched to an even more proprietary/archaic system (SMS)

You and me both. I don't have space on my phone for every individual messaging app that my various friends use.

"Have you got whatsapp?" No
"Do you use Kik?" No
etc.
I take both ibuprofen and acetaminophen(generic tylenol) and it seems to be more effectiveness than either alone
Bayesian thinking is so pervasive, and in most cases so unconsicous, that you don't even have to look that far.

"Where did my keys go?"

They vanished into thin air is not even considered, because its prior is zero.

I must have put them somewhere else is the instant frontrunner, because I do it so often.

After much unsuccessful searching, hypotheses such as "someone is playing a joke on me" or "my wife accidentally grabbed them" might be considered -- low priors that require additional evidence.

Probably only after noticing something like a broken window would "someone broke in and stole them" be considered -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

And so on...
Setup Ruby on Rails on Digital Ocean
Dang the probability of correct attribution is inverse to the fame of the person quoted.
The price of white meat
So, for the last 11 years, since the Allied "powers" destabilized Iraq, at least around 100 people have been killed each day by terrorist attacks there.

I've never seen Amazon.com put up a special banner up to reflect these tragedies, nor seen Google.com put ribbons to reflect these tragedies.

Today, Amazon.com has a huge Solidarite banner with a silhouette of the Eiffel tower, and Google has ribbons on its home page.

Ergo -- it's true! White meat is more valuable than the dark variety!!!
Its our fault for letting our parents and cousins and friends start using imessage / hangouts / etc instead of XMPP. We are the ones to blame for its death, because the unwashed masses got locked in to regressive proprietary chat platforms over the past five years and we never pushed the issue.

But it doesn't help that XMPP was always awful. It has OpenGL syndrome - too many extensions, described too vaguely, and implemented in too many broken ways to work amongst one another. You get a swarm of mismatched servers and features, and if it did the same thing that would have saved commoner OpenGL adoption, it would probably still be king.

That problem is a blessed default implementation. If the foundations that wrote the specs for these low level pipeline APIs were also burdened to make sure the blessed implementation supported the entire standard perfectly, there would be an out of the box open source permissively licensed base for everyone else to build off, rather than the vague wording of technical documentation.

I'm just hoping Matrix becomes something. In the same way Vulkan can hopefully save universal graphics programming, Matrix might save IM, but we need to support it. I'm working on the Telepathy integration for it myself on weekends in a sketch repo.
Check out NeuroAnimator[0] from 1997 (also early work from Hinton). It covers some of this using local-spaced hierarchies of neural networks that predict the deltas for the next time-step.

[0] http://web.cs.ucla.edu/~dt/papers/siggraph97-sketch/
2 years on subscription (though I meditate without Headspace more). There're many techniques and ideas in different Headspace courses that were quite useful for me and I added them into my meditation practice.
The blunt claim is that
the way Israel got materials
for nuke bombs was from the
US, from some place in Pennsylvania, and, IIRC from
the claims, that the material
was plutonium ready for use
in a bomb without further
processing.

The claim was that
the accounting error was
deliberately overlooked in
the US as
a way to get Israel the materials
and bombs.

In the movie Sum of All Fears, a German neo-Nazi bought such plutonium from
an Arab, had it made
into a bomb, and blew up
Baltimore.

The plutonium
came from an Israeli bomb
from an Israeli plane
shot
down in an Arab area,
and some Arabs found the
bomb, thought it was
worthless junk, sold it
to a guy in Damascus
who knew that it was
an old, lost Israeli
plutonium bomb, and
sold the plutonium to the German.
The German wanted the US
to think that Russia set off
the bomb. When the hero
of the movie communicated
with a high, secret guy
in Russia, he asked the Russian
where Israel got the material,
and the Russian said that the
US had given the material to
Israel. That is, the
Russian knew about the
accounting error.

Once the bomb went
off in Baltimore, the
radiation
spectrum of the material
confirmed the origin, US
Savannah River, that is,
the reactor that had produced
it, in the US. Thus, the movie
also used the same old story.

So, my conjecture here was
that the OP was to
remind and alert
Mideast enemies of Israel
about just where Israel got
its plutonium, to remind
those enemies that Israel
does have the nuke bombs.

Tough for me to believe that
all this has been so
difficult for the HN
audience to understand.
I thought that everyone
would understand my first
post. What is this, a
shortage of coffee in the
HN audience?
suicides will increase overnight
It wasn't actually uncompiled, it was a bunch of proprietary binaries wrapped around an Xcode project that resigns them.
It's been on textfiles.com since 2001
Bret Victor – The Humane Representation of Thought [video]
These are both good options:

http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-Learning-Informati...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-Statistical-Learning-Pred...
I wouldn't be surprised if we see embrace-extend-extinguish-style tactics from Google around business IMAP/SMTP within the next decade, if Google Apps for Business is able to take enough market share from Outlook.
Heh, Trillian and Pidgin worked pretty well before the newest batch of walled gardens. Whatever happened to reverse engineering for interoperability?
Some Handy Tricks for Designing Remarkable Apple Watch Apps
It's strange that after a couple decades of meditation you call obviously helpful things "stupid".

Please be mindful, everybody has their own ways.
WhatsApp is paid (after a year), but it doesn't help with supporting any open IM standard.
I too have appreciated the slightly sweet mild candy like coating of Advil.
If you're the kind of person who "likes to make things" and is going to college, you basically have two options: art or engineering.

As a teenager I was totally turned off by engineering. It seemed like a bunch of dudes who wanted to discover the best way to make something, but with a total disinterest in why that thing should be made.

The art (and design) people seemed to get it. They were intensely curious about the bigger idea, and wanted their output to connect to some visceral and/or moral and/or political outcome.

So I wound up in an art program. I learned how to make aesthetically satisfying objects and was exposed to a ton of cool things that have happened in art history.

Later on when I got into software, I came to it with a mentality of wanting to make "things" that were in some way complete and satisfying. That turned out to be enough of a motivation to learn programming, and it turns out the demand for software is insatiable regardless of your background or skill level.

So if I were to talk to someone who was going into school, I would tell that person to do what excites them, and suggest that STEM doesn't really deserve to have a monopoly on creation.
Image Slider using css3 Animation without jQuery
I see it as it always "human-in-the-loop" since the beginning of computing. Human using spreadsheet to do accounting is a human-in-the-loop operation with human deciding what to add, and computer doing the adding. The key difference with AI is that it's now more difficult for the human to understand what the "smart" computer is doing and how to cooperate with it. For e.g., how do the self-driving take over control from and hand over control to human/ How to visualise and give directions to complex algorithms / how gain business insight from data.
I'm not sure that is true. Anything on the rails has to inter-operate with rail traffic and control systems. A drone can inspect the track regardless of rail traffic.
If you think about homemade porn, it makes some sense.
What's the best JavaScript library for visually representing, animating, and interacting with general data structures, such as various tree and hash algorithms?
We are a social animal. We care what others think about us.

But we don't care what computers think.

So there is also a role for humans in mentoring systems. Software can remind us and track whether we've met our objectives. It can do the boring, repetitive work.

But the interactions really only mean something if your mentor is in the loop. He or she might be asking you a question. Or maybe its the software, with the mentor having only approved the question and seeing the response.

This blended system could greatly reduce the effort involved in mentoring someone. And if everybody knows its the software asking repetitive questions (Is this done yet?), the mentor doesn't come off as a nag either.
> Given that it is also comparably inexpensive

I had to pay 150$ for a 1 month visa, so I don't know how they can encourage tourism with such high visa costs.
Your writing style is very much in line with the output of a person going through a manic episode.