skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, but while the product may or may not be good, every sentence that I read from you sounds like OMG HYPE.

"The ultimate goal would be to be perfectly guided to mastery"...? Yeah, and the ultimate goal of every NLP startup is to have 100% natural language understanding by the machine... but that doesn't mean that any of them can promise that in the foreseeable future, or that I won't laugh at them if they do.

"I would encourage you to learn a subject towards 100% and you'll see exactly what we mean."

That... is already what I do with Anki, or at least as reasonably close to 100% as possible under reasonable time constraints. It's patronising of you to assume that I don't, or to claim that your product is the only way to reach that.

Good luck with your startup.
"Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine." - Rutherford & "It's like shooting birds in the dark in a country where there are only a few birds," - Albert Einstein - The Pittsburgh Press - Dec 28, 1934 - On the idea that man might some day utilize the atom's energy. Einstein was essentially making the same "parameter space" argument you're making.

There will have to be more true breakthroughs to get to AI, yes; I do agree though that it will take a "long" time, however before this happens.
How 19th-Century Parisians Under Siege Improvised a System of Airmail by Balloon
The secrets of negotiating international deals
Is this just the geometric series? 1, 9, 9×9 = 81

The other ratios in the article are similar: 85:14:1 or 91:8:1

This is just basic Social Network Analysis (https://www.coursera.org/course/sna)

This rule has two parts, given a choice of selections

A: there are only a few "key players"
even if the original selection was very large

B: the ratio of #1 to #2 is about the same as for #2 to #3

This is why multiple choice always have 3 choices typically
- we do not even notice #4...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

loosely related:

Viggo Brun wrote about algorithms to find to simple ratios... he was trying to tune a piano!

He calculated the ideal tuning ratios are close to some simple fractions

log(2/1):log(3/2):log(4/3) ≈ 12:7:5 ≈ 53:31:22

http://retro.seals.ch/digbib/view2?pid=ens-001:1964:10::21
Ask HN: What's the coolest thing you've used Anki for?
Ten Deep Learning Trends I Saw at NIPS 2015
I always find people who claim they can't function before a certan hour kind of dumb. Suggest that they go to bed an hour or two earlier, and they claim that they can't sleep. Yet twice a year we shift our schedules by an hour and usually after a couple of days no one notices.

I used to came out with the same sories until travelling in Chile and Peru. There is a two hour time difference at some points of the year, even though they are on the same longitude. After a couple of days I didn't notice, and I realised it's just a number that you are becoming attached to.
27 Question to Ask Instead of “What Do You Do?”
The operation + on integer types maps to a built in method which performs addition with overflow checks. At the assembly level this looks like an "add" followed by a "jo" (jump on overflow set) to an undefined exception such as UD2.

If you want wraparound addition you can use +& which removes the overflow check.
Cultivating Psychological Safety for Engineering Teams
Nice course, but only if your platform supports the underlying concepts.

For instance, does Python still have the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) issue? It is the reason Python was (at least once) unsuited for concurrent programming.

It was still better than NodeJS which has no intra-process threading; and generators (coroutines) are also not fully supported (no yielding allowed within functions called from a generator).
http://www.reactiongifs.us/what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you-p...
The hard part of the Paris climate deal
Back in late '90s a friend lived in a student dorm which had a then-fast 512 kbps Internet connection. It was heavily firewalled - UDP only to ISP's nameservers, TCP only to ISP's web proxies. ICMP was passed anywhere, though, so he wrote a small program which encapsulated a TCP stream in ICMP "host unreachable" reply packets, IIRC. The other end of the tunnel ran on a machine at the place where he was interning as a junior programmer. Debugging the program was slightly painful because he couldn't obviously be at both ends of the tunnel simultaneously, but he got it to work in a couple of weeks. It wasn't very tolerant of packet loss - IIRC it didn't have any mechanism to resynchronize the connection if there was any, but instead there was some method of reinitializing the connection. Anyway, running SOCKS on top of all this made the ISP-crippled connection usable in a normal manner.
Inlining is often called the mother of all optimizations. On its own, it doesn't gain you much compared to any other optimization, but once it's done it enables much, much more.

There's a reason languages like C that default to static dispatch on value types are so much faster without much effort.
I hate book lists when they're presented as recommendations of books we should all read, while it's transparently clear that the author has not read them. To the author: provide a list of books you have read and tell us why you recommend them, rather than linking to a list from 2008 (!) of books that you haven't read (nor has the author of that list).
It was/still is our largest investment so far, and probably our biggest asset. Not just illustrations, but we also produce our own videos, write articles and more... We do license our illustrations to institutions, individual instructors etc. And we're always looking for ways to collaborate with others in this space. Medical education is an interesting niche. Shoot me an email and let's chat and see? (email on my profile)
Ask HN: How do you fuel your brain on a sugar-free diet?
I have been trying out a sugar-free diet, but I feel that this leaves me less able to sustain long programming sessions.

What is the appropriate nutrition for sustained mental activity?
Google Says Its Quantum Computer Works, Is 100M Times Faster Than PC
Bostrom brought up the orthogonality idea before Eliezer, who consequently (not immediately) changed his mind.

EDIT: I am unable to find the source. Might have been a halluzination, but I thought I remembered them having a discussion where Eliezer more or less still thought "let the AGI win, humanity be damned". Ah, my brain and I are not in a good relationship.
Help a bunch of kids believe in crowdfunding
I think the AR UI in the video is pretty cool. The trouble is, AR itself hasn't taken off. My theory is people really dislike reality. Reality is ugly, it's dirty, and when people operate upon information, they(we) do want abstraction over reality, want simplicity over complexity, desire focus over distractions.
The important part is not the unzip, it's the backsmaling (converting the .dex file in several Smali files), which is akin to .exe decompilation into C files.
How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publihing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7360076

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/quarkx...
For anyone else looking into Tiddlywiki, and wanting to get to the meat of it w/o having to read about wiki software etc:

https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5

This is the Tiddlywiki built on Node, and it looks quite good.

Edit: It is currently built on Node 0.8.2, but preparing for 5.1.10, so that's good.
#TIL, thanks. I had always thought it operated like strace.
That generally how I think when I "dislike" a nation. Its not individuals, but the governments.
The perpendicular force of the magnet to gravity doesn't negate gravity, the friction force does.
But how many reviews are from Taser, and how much are they affecting ratings? There are always bullshit reviews (and whole blogs making fun of them). Is this just a few execs being petulant little shits, or is this part of a significant, organized effort by Taser?
Yes, I'm talking about the compile-time (i.e., static) macro metaprogramming, as in Lisp, Scheme, Template Haskell, CamlP4, Converge, Nemerle, Rust, Julia, etc.

As opposed to a dynamic metaprogramming (e.g., expression trees in C#).
It also doesn't work if you want to support a non-trivial update rate, or if there's any possibility of contention with another process trying to do the same thing. It's the sort of thing that app writers get addicted to, because it does work in the super-easy case, but it doesn't help at all when you need to solve harder storage problems than updating a single config file once in a while.
Do you offer data export? I have similar concerns as cle, and am currently satisfied with anki, but am always interested in doing better.

On a different note, from reading through these comments it sounds kind of like you guys are specifically focused on full time students and the unique problems they face trying implement anki. Does your service offer benefits to people who aren't and don't have the resulting new card review burden or need for cramming?
You are misrepresenting my thesis by saying that respect and equality would mean that the user expects charity. It's about how you would expect and want to be treated if you were a user of the system. A company that provides you with food isn't necessarily trying to own your eating experience. A company that provides you with physical flash cards isn't trying to own your learning experience. It's very clear from their business model that they are not trying to sell a product that enables and empowers people to learn better and easier, but instead are seeking to own the learning experience of the user by giving away the tools for free. These are completely different models, so comparing their model to giving away free food is an unfair representation.

Additionally, do not give them credit for providing a paid privacy system. Their paid privacy system is not private. The admins still have access. Other companies have shown that they are able to share and sell this information with impunity. The past has also proven that these companies have no responsibility to adequately protect this data from attackers.

The owner presented their product as a better Anki. Anki is a product that you download. You are the only person who has access to the flash cards you create. You own and control your own creations. This is not a better version of Anki if you are forced to give away control of your own content so that others may profit off of it.

The business model here is not to sell you a better wrench, but to give you a better wrench in exchange for everything you create with it.

I could be ok with this, if the author was just honest about it. But instead the author is adamant that they are just selling you a better wrench. So because the creators are clearly not interested in being straight forward, because they use double-talk to try to placate people and hide their true business model, fuck them. And fuck anyone who's going to treat their users in ways they would never treat themselves.

Sorry that was so long. I appreciate you taking the time to read my previous rant and type up a response. I would love to continue this discussion.

edit: you are the same person who brought up the github argument. My argument there is that git can be used completely independently of github. In this case, github completely owns and controls the use of git. "They own the wrench".
Eden (YC S15) is hiring our first iOS engineer
4 year reporting would have been good, with each country having to publish its report just before the Olympics.
Exactly this. Re-reading and editing breaks the flow of writing - too many hesitations. When writing with "screen switched off" I can't correct mistakes beyond the last typed word. This forces me to write as I would speak.

I'd be interested to know how it worked for you.
Criminals seem to actually deal with a bit of a distributed trust problem. They rely on a reputation consensus to determine trust but that seems to require a culture of disclosing what you've done (bragging).
Working through this right now as a directed reading with a professor and a couple of other students. Would definitely recommend this as a follow up to an intro PL course.
Very interested to see how accurate this is in practice. Could really help cut down the google -> stack overflow -> copy -> paste round trip time.
5 MB from IBM in 1956
Your comment reminds me of how people first looked at blogging, twitter, youtube, and many other technologies.

I agree that the examples we are usually given are not massively impressive, but neither is the ability to post info, or share your videos online.

I think IoT has been oversold in many ways for the short-term, exactly as you are pointing out. But in the long-term, I think it will be very impressive.

For example, my fridge knowing that I'm out of milk and reminding me to buy some. Sure, that's a pretty useless case. But what happens when we aggregate that over a large population and then we connect that with the grocers and dairies. Will we have JIT milk processing and production, saving significant energy and resources?

We just went from a very big 'so what' to potentially having a significant impact on the environment.
On that note, one of the best books I've read for teaching the concepts is Learning From Data by Yaser Abu-Mostafa et al. I highly recommend it as a way to refresh or introduce the fundamentals: http://amlbook.com/
What's wrong for asking for the same terms as the latest round?

Let's acknowledge that there is an opportunity cost for early hires.
I agree with this, but in some professions this is a very established way of doing things with a long history that's been passed down from mentor to students for a long time. If you refuse to work in these types of situations then you had better not try to still work in that profession.
They are doing a Cortex M0, which is their lowest end ARM core. I think the 2 micron NMOS process basically dates from the early 1980s.
11) reading lists of mistakes written by admitted failures
I use Anki as a part of my college strategy (http://markbao.com/notes/college-strategies) by using the Cornell notetaking method to write up questions and answers for my notes and piping those 'cues' into Anki. Turns out self-testing is one of the best ways to learn, so this combination is surprisingly effective.

It's no replacement for actually learning the concepts, but they help in drilling down the foundational knowledge that helps me understand the bigger-picture concepts better.
Incredible. You're the unsung, bootstrap SaaS success story of HN imo :)
Classicists, Your Name Is Legion
Isn't this active by default in Eclipse? It's rather accurate and useful. But also remember to filter imports you don't want in Eclipse settings. For example the dreaded java.util.List vs java.awt.List etc.
This is the right way to do it. Microsoft got AV companies to change for XP SP3 (something to do with Windows Security Center?), maybe they can do it again here.
Power laws show up in many systems, as the 80-20 Pareto rule, graph theory's "scale-free network", even electromagnetism and gravity.
> ...he/she sees ordering an Oreilly book on the topic as a valid part of the learning effort.

It's easy enough to see the difference between ordering a book and reading it.

Regardless, in response to your overall point, some people can actually learn a great deal by reading a book that interests them. In addition, books can be read when working through an online tutorial is impractical -- standing on a train on your way to work, lying in bed before going to sleep, sitting on the beach or by the pool. Finally, books provide context missing from your run-of-the-mill tutorial: history and motivation for the technology (why things were built the way they were), references for further reading, etc...
The story written there doesn't make sense. Why the heck would I want to connect a button on my toaster to my mixer? Why not have a "Timer" object in my phone that can be connected to the mixer instead?
Or worse still - "if I build a great product people will love it and tell their friends, I don't need anyone in product/marketing/sales"
Posted 6 times about a month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397555
Ahh, dorms are often the first place people start experimenting with this kind of stuff :)
I remember doing something similar at a friends dorm. They had a filter to only allow HTTP/HTTPS traffic via their proxy, so I used some HTTP tunnel tool to push a VPN connection through it.
It was pretty weak but it worked for basic usage. I remember having a real hard time figuring out what was causing VPN connections to drop intermittently. That's how I learned about HTTP keep-alives.
I've been using Apktool for years. Great work. I had to do a double-take when I saw it on the front page though, given that it's been around for quite a while and I thought it was a pretty standard dev tool.
It's not "cool", but I'm a professor who's always struggled to learn my students' names. A few years ago, I started to populate an Anki deck with their photos from the college lookbook paired with their names and a few other details. Now I usually recognize most people on the first day of class and just about everyone within the first couple of weeks. (I had trouble that year when I had identical twins in the class.) Anki has transformed a point of shame to a point of pride, and I'm grateful.
Rollout flags are IMHO best implemented when they are pushed to the machines that need to read them by a technology like zookeeper. Pushed updates are then cached in memory by the machines receiving the updates and can be queried in the hotpath without having to worry about cache invalidation and the extra overhead of network calls.
This sounds like a stereotype, but tax evasion is done on a really wide scale in Greece: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/greece-pledges-rid-tax-evasio...

It actually has an incredible impact on the greek economy and the state's coffers.
You have good points. My only counter point is that rescuing people from ruble is easier if there are not much fires around.
Over the years, I saw the language in the Taser article on Wikipedia go from "less-lethal" to "less-than-lethal" (shortly) to "non-lethal" (current) when describing the weapon. In retrospect I wonder if the Taser company was involved in that change too.
I could see it taking a chunk of FPGA and custom ASIC markets, but also making new markets for itself where small scales and low costs lower the barrier for entry.
I have been a fierce antagonist of modern architecture for many years.

Then I saw some modern architects using natural materials (wood and stone) and realized that much of my antagnoism was due to the synthetic materials they were using, and less the style itself.

There is something deeply humanizing about wood and stone.
There are so many tools for apk decompilation and analysis out there - lots use apktool in the backend even. How do I as a beginner know what to use and what to trust?
How do you define verbal abuse? We all have different codes of morality. Is manipulating your employees verbal abuse to you? Is lying or placating things verbal abuse to you? What about going behind your back and telling another employee to talk to you instead of telling you face to face? Is that verbal abuse? Well it is to me. Whereas, I could care less if someone said "Where the fuck do you think you work, McDonald's?" I am extremely offended by the other examples. I think they are never ok in a professional setting, "never ever". Not even justified by success, revenue, or majority vote. Please realize that your morale code is not the only morale code, that your way of communicating, is not everyone's way of communicating. Trying to say that your rules, that your methods, are the ones that everyone needs to follow is childish.
Shame this post doesn't have a subtitle attached - it is about Freedom of Information
New Ph.D. incomes 'surprisingly' low
It would be fantastic if C# could see language support for channels sooner than 8. I've done quite a bit in Go and C# async/await and find channels much nicer to work with than BlockingCollections and the like..
Visions of a Techno-Leviathan: The Politics of the Bitcoin Blockchain
Dear White People, You Suck at Diversity
Certified Programming with Dependent Types (available online as well http://adam.chlipala.net/cpdt/) is also a good resource for learning Coq (note: I just started working through the material this weekend).
Even done in the best way possible, SSL inspection puts end users at increased risk. In the real world, vendors make mistakes, which put them at even higher risk.
https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/cert/2015/03/the-risks-of-ssl-i...
How to Write a 21st Century Proof (2011) [pdf]
>Do you offer data export?

We have this at the admin level and plan on making this a user-accessible feature as soon as we can.

>Does your service offer benefits to people who aren't and don't have the resulting new card review burden or need for cramming?

It depends on your goal. In its current iteration, Memorang functions very well for mastering new concepts on a shorter-term scale (e.g. hours, days, or a semester). However, long-term retention on the order of years is something that we are working on a different implementation of. That will be a huge focus in the next semester after we finish shipping this 2.0 launch in January.
The Myth of AI
You seem to be somewhat conflating "mass consumer adoption" and "useful".

I'm not a fan of Facebook's mass consumer adoption strategy, I don't think it's ready.

I am very long VR over time but I think we are at the Palm Pilot stage not the iphone stage. Metaphors are not precise in these matters but perhaps that one is useful to you.

The input devices are a huge part of the story for VR and the 3d/VR wand controllers ie Oculus Touch and the Steam Lighthouse controllers are only in the hands of a few hundred people at this point.

We've had 2-3 years of tens of thousands of headsets but terrible input solutions so far.

That has produced shoddy demos and kiosk applications because of the lack of good input into the 3d environment.

Facebook is doubling down on this terribleness by going to mass consumer launch using xbox one controllers.

As others have mentioned, VR is transformative when the input solution fits.

Elite Dangerous with HOTAS controllers. Several driving games with steering wheels, Dirt Rally is great fun. Amazing experiences for more serious simulation games.

With proper 3d wands there are a number of new serious game types that will be very compelling but the content needs to be designed from scratch with VR input in mind.

As the serious creative applications (ie Blender or Maya3d, CAD/engineering,medical/science visualization, music etc.) actually get accurately tracked 3d wands I think we will see some transformative creation experiences.

After laying out vertexes in a properly designed VR application I think people won't go back, for example.

Trading desks and financial sectors probably have a lot of territory to explore as the screen pixel density improves.

TLDR; The money in VR is largely seeking AngryBirdsVR but I don't think that's going to happen soonish.
I am a pretty slow reader (when it comes to novels). I hardly ever read them when I am working, as I usully have plenty of other things I feel the need to read up on (usually new / interesting sounding tech). I used to read a lot when I was travelling / working as a river guide a number of years back. I wish I had the time to read more now.
If I had, it wouldn't matter. Lots of smart people have been sucked in by novelty experiences to say, "OMG REVOLUTION" and then been wrong. E.g., Google Glass or the Segway. Heck, I thought Gopher [1] was the best thing ever and would change the world [2]. And I've made the mistake a number of times since. With, e.g., Jobs's NeXT. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29

[2] And it was the best thing ever, but that's not enough to change the world.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer
haha. i had to reread his title "strategic communications". Sounds like a great corporate culture, anybody know if Taser is hiring.