skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never heard any of these 'stop studying the brain' statements you are referring to - do you have any citations?

As to the question of the soul - sure there exist religious people who fear that science might demystify something they think should stay mysterious.

But the fact that such people exist doesn't strengthen the argument that consciousness is just a product of a certain kind of machine.

That may yet turn out to be true, but it is simply an unproven assertion at this time. It is attractive to pursue it because we have been successful at using machines to simulate other physical phenomena.

There is zero evidence that we are close to producing consciousness in machines. We have plenty of examples of simulating independent information processing functions that are adaptive to their inputs in ways that are analogous to the brain.

To assert that this indicates that we are getting close to reproducing consciousness is to affirm the consequent - that consciousness is just a paricular kind of algorithm. That's not scientific either.

The radio analogy can't be dismissed so easily by resorting to straw men. It doesn't imply a mystical source. It simply implies that consciousness is not located in the brain. One simple non-mystical explanation for this is that consciousness is a social phenomenon.

If this turns out to be true, then it would change the nature of strong AI from a standalone 'consciousness' to something that can only exist as an extension of our collective consciousness. It also opens the door for AI to do harm to our collective consciousness even without a singularity-like self-improving AGI take off.

Machines are a metaphor. Biological processes approximate machines to the extent that we can develop machines that capture their behavior, but to date these are strictly limited.
You're right that psychology and art can be defined into strict formulas. In fact, they're much better at being put into strict formulas than most of astronomy. That's the main issue: when it comes to psychology and art, we significantly move the goal posts comparted to what we ask of physicists, and I say that as a research physicist.

As an example, I know practically nothing about psychology, having only taken a single intro semester of it at university. That said, from reading your post, I can already make the following claims:

You have a mass of 200kg ± 300kg.
You have a temperature of 310K ± 3K.
Your age is 60 years ± 55 years.

I'll let you pick any star in the sky. Can you tell me the mass, age, and temperature to the same accuracy?
Different for different people, different for different points in time for the same people (e.g. when parenting arrives)... Modeling life is hard. :)
You don't taste the wine, you check if it's corked.
Cannot register - says my email is invalid (contains a plus sign (+)).
Most restaurants in the UK serve house wines from screw tops, but they still ask you to taste it when they bring it to the table. Is it just to make it seem fancy?
Why I gave up on Asana after 15 minutes
I would say that they are held in low esteem because the majority of their content is pap and clickbait, I rarely see an article of substance on gawker media properties.
Humans are quite irrational creatures, aren't they?
The other big thing is the lack of "gotcha" fees. Since T-Mobile rolled out its new plans, there are no horror stories of customers getting stuck with ridiculous wireless bills, which is a common occurrence with other wireless carriers: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023043312045773518...
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016?
well, you should shop at whole foods when you go to the US :)
Pure AngularJs Gregorian and Jalali Smart DateTimePicker with Disabling Patterns
Hacking “Bad Guys” and Mafia and Massive Botnet
#1: Close my HN tab
Enveloupe: snail mail from your desk
may just be me, but if your waiter is playing sommelier with a screw top house wine then yes, it's just to seem fancy :)
Academically the article may hold water, but I tend towards your thinking. There are just as many articles that will declare the values of loosely coupled systems as there are for tightly-coupled. The truth is, most software of any size is a combination of the two.

In many cases, directly-related pieces should probably have a tight understanding of what's happening with their neighbor or ancestor or descendant, and delegates are great for this. But sometimes, I want my software to announce that certain things have happened, or completed, or whatever, and not care who, if anyone, is listening, and NSNotificationCenter is brilliant for this. For instance, a top-level UI feature like an indeterminate progress indicator doesn't need to know of every single bit of work being performed by lower levels of the software, and tightly coupling them - even along a delegate chain of some sort - is fraught with potential edge cases. Simply listening for start and end announcements means dozens of not hundreds of lines of code eliminated, and maintaining a crazy delegate chain unnecessary.

In any case, I've found this pattern extremely helpful and useful, and is one of my favorite bits of working with Objective-C (and now Swift).
> total page is 1 Mbyte of text with 102 calls

I don't think that this is commendable in any capacity. He should have put his money where his mouth is and package those thumbnails in maybe 5 - 10 sprite files and then serve them with CSS.

This way he would have cut considerably on the network latency and fetched those resources faster without relying that the visitor/user would stay near above the fold region as the page is loading and not experience those empty cells waiting for the corresponding image to fill it up.

His proposals like in everything with life, it's always easier said than done.
Upstart at least initially did this, by letting you sell a percentage of your future income.
I maintain a single dotfiles repository also, and have found RCM by Thoughtbot[0] to be an excellent tool for managing said dotfiles.

[0]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm
Why software developers don't “just write the code”
Carpet cleaning Markham
It seems like pure speculation on the part of the author of the article. Maybe these words basically write themselves in any article containing the words "women" and "jobs".
I thought for sure that was going to be this: http://youtube.com/watch?v=PZbqAMEwtOE
I worked for TMo in the pre-Legere era. About 8 years ago.

The climate was toxic. IT was just a cost center. We had multi year waterfall death march projects.

I eventually resigned after most of the work was pushed to offshore contractors, the onshore teams gutted, and those that remain responsible for rewriting the crap the offshore teams produced.

I ran into a old friend who is still there recently, and I was surprised to find out that despite the huge public changes under Legere, IT was still a huge mess with the same leaders pushing most of the work offshore.
I think the MVNOs, combined with smart phone market penetration, are the real driving force removing 2 year contracts. People aren't so bad at math that they won't eventually figure out that $200 (or less) + 24 * $40 is less than 24 * $60.

I guess the price point on good enough smart phones is also at least headed below $300 (for me it's less than $200, but people like shiny things).
Great post. I felt the same when I tested it!

User Onboard should review this site. Check them out if you haven't already (not my site) https://www.useronboard.com/
Alexander Flemming on antibiotc resistance (1945)
Ridiculously high resolution displays are rapidly becoming the norm.
>> … almost 6x faster … over 50x faster … We think this shows how can be optimise more effectively on more realistic Ruby code than synthetic benchmarks.<<

Might the difference simply be test coverage?

-- The other Ruby implementations have been testing performance on those same synthetic benchmarks, and have already taken the opportunity to improve performance for those cases.

-- The other Ruby implementations have not been testing performance in other cases, and still have considerable opportunity to improve performance for those cases.
The comment in there by Alen Lecher is pure gold.
So...I just have to know...was the lawyer able to convince the jury (or the judge)...that this was basic math? Because in this day and age, I would think the average adult would honestly think, "Hey, it's unfair to make someone do math without their computer programs!"

Also, is this really "middle school math" (as described in the NYT's caption)? Decimal numbers were covered in 4th/5th grade I thought? (I remember learning algebra and geometry in 7th and 8th grades)
Yeah thats just to make them seem fancy. Again most restaurants will allow you to return a bottle if you don't like the taste of it but it's not why they ask you to taste it.
How much money do you think the NYT put into making this video? How much should they have? At the end of the day you are at the mercy of who shows up at the casting call, their accents, and their ability to duplicate a regional accent.

Or, for all you know they were hired for the opposite rolls, but during takes they each exhibited affinity for the opposite role, and the casting was switched.
I hope the "future of media" doesn't revolve around optimizing purchasing decisions. I'd rather think of this as the future/now of marketing where the line between content and advertising is increasingly blurred.
It's an excellent paper. The way it describes logic programs as a stream of environments is very general. I've taken the basic concepts in this paper and implemented them with Clojure lazy seqs, CSP (https://github.com/halgari/async-mu-kanren/blob/master/src/a...), and transducers. Monads (as described in this paper) probably have the fewest drawbacks, but the technique can be implemented many ways.
> How much should they have?

About zero, considering the actual deposition video is available on YouTube.
Ask HN: I just quit my startup – what now?
I just quit my startup and I have no clue what to do next.

I live in Denmark (no kids, no wife) and I've been programming for over 20 years now - for both fun and profit - the last 3 years in Node.js. The last couple of years I've slowly been building my profile as an open source developer and have been speaking at a lot of big conferences because of this. The last 8 years I've co-founded a couple of startups and worked as a freelance developer for other startups when money was tight.

As mentioned above, I just quit the company I co-founded a few years ago. It was no longer for me. I wasn't happy going to work any more.

So what now? One thing I've learned is that I need to work on something that excites me - on something that changes the world for the better - I don't want to just make "another app".

I've of cause thought a lot about things I _could_ do - from joining a big tech company to doing open source full time. But I think I need to find "my cause" first - something that I really want to change in the world. But every time I think about this I end up dreaming of exciting cool stuff where I'm not really an expert (yet), like joining SpaceX to program rockets, or working on cryptography or doing cool stuff in bio-tech. How do I choose what to do next? Which companies do really rad stuff now? Is Google so last-year? I realise now that I don't really know what I'm asking you guys - I guess I just need your advice on what do consider at this junction.
Thanks for the question. I needed a term that would fit the README without sounding too extravagant either. Here is the explanation from fisher(7) [https://github.com/fisherman/fisherman/blob/master/man/man7/...]

Basically, a flat tree takes advantage of fish's lack of private scope (it bundles everything into the same "public" scope).

Fisherman then only needs to "load" the one single path where plugins/snippets/prompts/etc are transferred after being downloaded to the cache.

This is faster than, loading a path hierarchy per plugin and also means that performance is not affected based in the number of plugins installed.
What you look for is not a game system, but a game master. At the
beginning of every decent rule book is a sentence equivalent to this: "this
book is by no means definitive; if tearing it apart and throwing it out of the
window is what brings you and your team most joy, you should tear it apart".

If you enjoy playing a character and you want it to be the most important
aspect of the game, you need to look for something called "storytelling" and
you need to find a game master who favours this playing style.

You can easily do storytelling in (otherwise heavily formalized) D&D/d20, it
only takes rest of your team to agree.
((3 / 16) + 3) * 20 = 63.75

He fiddled with the calculator, perhaps as he did it, he recognized his drawing didn't add up to the stated 68 feet (1 inch to 20 ft scale) and stonewalled, knowing that if he did the calculation for them, he would have demonstrated himself incorrect.

But yeah, incompetent people are everywhere.
Why Hapi?
From a software engineering perspective, no. From a software ecosystem architecture perspective, yes.
npm 4 dep management is more complex. In fish there is no private function scope so things are much simpler (but not as powerful indeed).
Another tool that helped us out tremendously was http://stackshare.io/skylight.

It allowed us to quickly determine what pages were slowest and why, but also what pages were being hit the most by users. Sorting by 'agony' means: "This page is a combination of being hit the most, and the slowest. Take care of it pronto."

Amazingly, we started knocking out 'agony' problem areas, and our site is super quick now with minimal effort.

Here's an example of what their dashboard looks like:

http://i.imgur.com/b4zhh6Q.png
IANAUIE (guess what that stands for. ;) )

Yet I am primarily responsible for the UI on the product on which I'm writing code. I started out with a bland and crappy interface expecting the client to look at that and provide their branding and suggestions for how it should work. Most UI elements are their default colors. Style? Please, I'm an engineer! I thought at some point they would provide a detailed list of requirements to provide a decent UI. I thought wrong.

I have done what I could to provide an easy to use intuitive interface. Unfortunately what is intuitive for me is not going to be intuitive to others.

Eventually I did receive some usability suggestions. I'm not sure they were carefully thought out. One point I would have suggested aligned with a marketing video on their web site but did not match their requirement.

Until producers of products of products care about the appearance and usability of their products, these things are not likely to get better.

As for my own feelings about UI, there are a few beliefs I hold deeply.

If a UI can model some sort of physical reality, it is going to be easier to use. If not a physical reality, at the least a consistent model.

I hate UIs that change depending on state. Disappearing menu items or screen elements drive me nuts. Think of shifting sands.

Discoverability is something that concerns me. Much of the S/W I work with has options or key shortcuts that I never know about because I'm too lazy to read through the manual. I do not know the solution to this, but I do know the problem.
PT employment laws are not helping either. I had a company there with employees and it all just is too protective of them. So you rather not employ someone. I thought the Netherlands was bad but PT and ES are far worse. And that is definitely hurting hiring.
How hackers grind an MMORPG: by taking it apart
The story behind casual contributors in OSS projects
Seriously? Are those even practical skills? For all we know, your parents are great at parlor tricks and terrible at their jobs. What engineer works without a computer these days?
Don't forget Oliver Heaviside: The four equations we all know come from him: http://theinstitute.ieee.org/technology-focus/technology-his...
Disque 1.0 RC1 is out
Say you are a 35 year old manager. All else equal who do you hire; a 25 year old or a 50 year old? Is it age discrimination to hire an individual that you think you'd be better able to manage?
Causal induction is a different thing from Solomonoff Induction.

https://cocosci.berkeley.edu/tom/papers/tbci.pdf
Extraction Library – Query-Based Tree Extraction for JavaScript Object Graphs
Is this your site?

The owner should consider creating a more visually telling site. Sure, it explains the steps but graphics that explain every step briefly in 1,2,3 would be much better.

Some examples of snail mails that you've sent would make it even better. I want to see what the "product" looks like (quality etc.)
This argument is reasonable on the surface, but when you think about it a bit more, it seems quite unlikely that missing 2 years of work 20 years ago would result in lack of relevant experience... Most people never have 20 years of experience (more like 20 times 1 year of experience); furthermore, whatever experience another person might have had 20 years ago is most likely either forgotten or completely irrelevant by now.
I'm glad you're so lucky; in the past 10 years I've made many returns solely due to product defects. Recently I had a door knob that wouldn't install and a printer that tripped the circuit breaker when it warmed up. Sometimes you can exchange but then you run the risk that the next item will be equally defective.
Wow, didn't know that, thanks. Just tried it, it works in Chrome.
New gadgets and apps are trying to make mindfulness meditation easier
Ya, I liked the real video more. It wasn't "exciting", but it gave me a much better sense of what happened.
Offline installation of npm packages
That's possible, but his defense about not being a mathematician and not being able to "derive the formula" indicates he's truly clueless, not clever and thinking several steps ahead.
I'd give it a chance. They may have made poor decisions earlier, but there's a good chance they know that, too, and they would have learned from it.

A newer framework from the same people has at least one thing going for them: they aren't likely to make the same mistakes.
That's my understanding, it does not compute the expression directly unless you ask it to. Could be wrong though, I've only used it a few times.

AD does involve symbolic differentiation of each individual instruction, but instead of keeping the symbolic expression it is replaced with the numeric value, so the whole expression is never computed. It isn't magic and there are cases where it blows up. For instance, there are two basic ways to implement it, forward and backward propagation, each of which is good for a certain situation that the other is terrible at.
I used to value working at a "SpaceX" company much more in my 20s, but these days I'm grumpier and more selfish. Now I prioritize happy with job, good pay, work-life balance, short commute even if it's just some website. I figure if I have those things right now, there is no reason to leave.
In the music business, folks talk about the "Guitar Center Rental" where you buy some gear from Guitar Center, use it for a performance, then return it the next day. Needless to say, it's frowned upon, and I wouldn't do it myself.
This is what puzzles me. It did seem like stonewalling. But I also believe a non-math savvy person could take a course, cram the formulas, and become an "expert". It's not like this guy is a PhD physics professor who is moonlighting - he said he took a course and was trained how to do this. Given the wrong answer, I lean towards inability rather than a simple mistake. But who knows?
As a person staying in a country without US-like return policies, I'm incredibly jealous of the choices American consumers have. Out here, its more like "buy it if you want, we can't open the packaging for you to see how it feels in your hand and we won't accept returns unless it is defective (or you are exchanging it for something more expensive)".
not sure what exactly you are implying, but in my limited experience, I'd take the 50 year old over the 25 yr old in a heartbeat. you say all else equal. thats a dream world. the 50 yr old will have, very likely, a vast range of valuable life experiences (unless theyve been living in a proverbial cave all their life).. and yeah im 37 and i lead a team with a variety of ages. age is not an important factor, like at all. enthusiasm and genuine-ness is.
But this isn't a memory thing. This is math with a calculator. He isn't being asked to recite the multiplication speed tables by memory. I'll admit that it can take me a couple of seconds to remember what 9 * 7 is when calculating the bill for dinner, but I can most definitely do it with a calculator, because I know that that's how math works.

I agree with what another poster has said [1]. It's likely this expert knew how to use the calculator but then saw what the answer came up as and realized, "Oh shit!". But maybe this was the "right" tactic to go with, if the expert wanted to be able to weasel his way out of a mistake (perhaps he just made a typo when he initially did the work?) without technically perjuring himself.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10826365
If the 50 year old has the same amount of experience that the 25 year old has, they have been doing something seriously wrong. That is reality, if people want to keep working at a given position they need to constantly develop and improve to remain competitive, all else should not be equal when the older candidate has been working for 25 extra years.
One of our stated goals is to run code is to run code without modification, including extensions. We have no intention of creating a third ecosystem. However, with Truffle's polyglot interface, someone certainly could write a JRuby+Truffle specific extension -- that's just not our general plan for extensions.

Early in its life, JRuby+Truffle was a separate project and its goal was to run everything MRI can. Thanks to efforts on both the JRuby and Oracle sides, the project was open-sourced and merged with JRuby. That brought along a ton of benefits for us, but did open the JRuby ext. can of worms.

I'm trying hard to answer your question without committing to solve a problem we haven't looked at in depth. I suspect we'll wind up supporting some portion of the JRuby ext. API, but whether that ends up via an alternative implementation, a sandboxed JRuby runtime, a bytecode processor using something like a hypothetical TruffleJava, or something entirely different, I don't know. We've had enough pure Ruby code to try to get working that we've been able to defer the extension discussion for a bit.

Having said all that, to really get the benefits of JRuby+Truffle you're going to want to use Graal. While JEP 243 [1] should make deployment scenarios much easier starting with Java 9, you'll probably still need to coordinate with your ops team since the JAR needs to be on the bootclasspath. That's really just to say that you won't be able to just drop the JRuby JAR in and get optimal performance -- there's still going to be a second step that you might not be able to "backdoor" into your stack.

[1] -- http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/243
Building an ElasticSearch Cluster in AWS with Packer and Terraform
Doh! Unfortunately the post is over 2 hours old and not able to edit it :(