skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd rather see a focus on smarter and faster braking then on solving contrived moral dilemmas.
Interesting discussion, but I would postulate that people on HN are typically the ones who wouldn't appreciate - or even understand - such a service. Also, if you are fixated on the details, e.g. "do I need this to reserve a flight today" then you will certainly not get it. You could alternatively think about the big picture, i.e. removing all the limitations and bottlenecks of a personal assistant, and also scaling it up.
Now you say that the cultural shock for a westerner "is no more than you'd find going to any other country in the far east".

The problem is I never said it wasn't and that Japan is somehow more shocking that other far east places. You were the one that attempted to trivialize it, saying that the shock would be the same for Japan "as for anywhere". In fact I specifically mentioned several places that would be more foreign to a westerner and some that wouldn't, not just Japan. At least now you seem to concur that Japan would be as foreign as those "far east" places.

>Which I didn't think I had to spell out. Yes, it will cause some difficulties. No, that doesn't mean they can't take it in stride. Again, Japan is a wealthy country, and these are problems that can be papered over with wealth.

You said: "they'll be a lot better for it, too", when in fact there will be ONLY difficulties. What would be better about an aging and shrinking population, plus economic difficulties? More parking space?

That they can "paper over these problems with wealth" (and for a country with a huge national debt and an problematic economy compared to the eighties early nineties), doesn't diminish the problem. It's just another way to say it would be costly. If you mean that they'll survive and still exist, yeah, duh.
Django async and web sockets with Hendrix
vestigial monotheism

That's a fantastic metaphor.

I'm curious though how someone could act in a religious manner about a self-driving car.

To the original point though, I am very much in the camp of "historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us" and here is why: I believe that intelligence (and "consciousness" if you want to go down that rabbit hole) is completely material and as such it is possible that we will eventually understand the mechanics of them.

If we can understand those, then history would indicate (Historical fallacy) that we can replace or replicate those mechanics with more durable systems or materials than the fairly fragile.
I am in my mid 40s as well and I agree, however for me the main stressor these days is that I feel that while I do have many productive years left (looking objectively I am a lot stronger in my skillset now than I was 10 and 20 years ago) I am not sure how that will map with job availability as time goes on, with the constant thought in the back of my mind of the age discrimination existing in our field.

Thinking about my father at my age he would constantly tell me I was lucky to be allowed to go to school rather than being pulled out and being put to work in the fields when I was 14 like he was; after WW2 there was a lot of poverty in some areas of Europe, meaning, he had to go hunting/fishing to be able to get something to eat poverty, or going in the fields after they were harvested hoping to score some ears of corn poverty.

On the other hand his generation benefited by the later years, when he ended up making a really good living first being a musician (in the 60s it was definitely feasible, not like now where I see bands being paid less than I was in my 20s for bar gigs) and then being a blue collar worker, at my age he was working in a very low stress factory job for a solid middle class salary, and he was able to retire with full benefits at 53 due to having had to start working so early.

In our generation we've been lucky a lot of us were able to go to school rather than have to work in the fields, but the lack of pensions and general different economic trajectory in our lifetime is definitely making me long for the guarantees his generation was able to have in terms of retirement. It's a lot easier to suffer privations when you are younger and healthy and strong than when you are old and are affected with all that old age brings.

I have read plenty of times the U-shaped-midlife-crisis articles and I really hope that they are true, because honestly I am not seeing how there can be an uptick of the U without a sense of financial stability, which seems hard to have in the 50s and 60s given that pensions are not on the plate for us, and savings are vulnerable to market vagaries as well as medical expenses.

Add to this the normal what-ifs about how we'd be able to retire NOW (or at least have enough saved up not to worry about retirement) if we had invested in stock X vs stock Y, or joined startup X vs startup Y, or bought house X vs renting apartment Y, and it's hard to remain positive at times
I love Inside the Ethics Committee.

They take a real situation, and ask a bunch of people involved in medical ethics about what should happen, and they step through the case asking at each step "what's changed?" and why.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007xbtd

Here's one example:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0643x61

> Ashley is 14 years old when doctors discover a brain tumour. Tests reveal that it's highly treatable; there's a 95% chance of cure if he has a course of radiotherapy.

> Ashley begins the treatment but he has to wear a mask which makes him very anxious and the radiotherapy itself makes him sick. He finds it increasingly difficult to bear and he starts to miss his sessions.

> Despite patchy treatment Ashley's cancer goes into remission. He and his mother are thrilled but a routine follow-up scan a few months later shows that the cancer has returned.

> Ashley is adamant that he will not have the chemotherapy that is recommended this time. He threatens that he will run away if treatment is forced on him. Although Ashley is only 15 he is 6'2" and restraining him would not be easy.

> Should the medical team and his mother persuade him to have the chemotherapy? Or should they accept his decision, even though he is only 15?

It's probably on other podcasting platforms too.
I am not particularly concerned with the "above-the-table" profit margin. I am concerned with the possibility that using private contractors is prone to abuse, a loss of accountability (shell games) and a race to the bottom for quality of service in a venture where human quality of life is (or should be) the primary goal. Sure, the prime contract might be locked-in to a small profit margin, but I find it hard to believe that the same owners don't have their hand in the pot somewhere lower down in the supply chain. Which would lead to them making more than the prime contract 3.5% profit margin might suggest.

Then again, it's not like public-private partnerships (or project delivery methods in general) are brand new concepts. Governments have somehow managed to get roads and schools (infrastructure) built for a pretty long time. (Not without complaints of overruns and abuse: see any megaproject in the United States.) Though perhaps there is something to be said for the qualitative difference and value of human life that distinguishes a "race to the bottom" for building a road, compared to providing temporary shelter and food for actual human beings.

I agree that it's good that a government saves itself from getting into a "non-core" business so to speak. But I think that without strict oversight from government, refugee support services could turn into yet another field where shady business practices are the norm.
> why fix what ain't broke

Because it will break eventually. That decrepit PC full of metal dust running XP that controls this here multimillion CNC mill will, given enough time, fail. Some part or other will fail, and eventually you won't be able to find new parts anymore that work with it. Granted, for an XP PC it's far in the future but still.

Besides, a Win 3.11 or XP PC won't have a 15 year uptime, it will probably have a sticker on it reminding users to reboot it daily.
On December 31st- the limited commercial license for this technology became available.

Until now only the US Military and its allies have had restricted access to this technology.

It combines three most powerful elements in machines today...artificial intelligence, robotics, and networked sensors.

It is a global game changer! Think of the world pre-smart-phones 10X...

You can verify these and other technical aspects later.

But right now, what we need to focus on is this: Are we good fit? Should we be doing business together?
Beyond general purpose in servers
It's a challenge. These are a few things you should look out for:

* Feedback: when you have a boss/leader close by, they may be able to give you more immediate feedback in case there's something you're not doing right or if there's a better way to do it. You can partially overcome that via regular check-ins.

* Mentoring: as mentioned by smt88, you learn a lot by observing how other people approach their tasks, and talking to them e.g. over lunch. You can do that partially in a remote setting (e.g. observing their commits, chatting, etc.) but it won't be as effective.

* Bouncing ideas: it often helps a lot to be able to quickly chat with someone (particularly if more experienced and/or more knowledgeable of the existing system and domain) -- sometimes a few minutes of conversation can help you get a better idea of how to solve a problem.

In short, I think this is not impossible to overcome, it's just harder, particularly when you're getting started.

You may want to find out if there are meetups in your local area that you can join to be able to talk with other developers. That might help a bit.
A simple visual guide to understand why you should care about Net Neutrality
One of the biggest problems with Scrum (as mentioned in other comments) is that in a lot of large companies you have strong top-down enforcement of budgets, deadlines & expectations, which usually means the PMO is in control. This means you end up with a project manager as an awkward intermediary between the stakeholders & the product team. In almost every case, the product owner should be the project manager, but this very rarely happens in enterprise, and Scrum fails.
Of course they are, and “Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day" is complete and utter guff. This was immediately after the systematic, thorough going population centre bombing campaigns of WW II. Which planet are these people from?

nevertheless the fact remains that most nuclear weapons are tactical or mid-range and therefore not primarily suitable for population attack. The primary reason Russian tank divisions didn't swoop through Germany in the 1950s wasn't because atom bombs would rain down on Moscow (although they would) it was because atom bombs would rain down on the tank divisions.
I suspect the Javascript-or-death crowd are a (vocal) minority of web developers. Most will jump at the chance to use whatever language they please in the browser.
Life Scientific: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015sqc7

(I think it's excellent.)
what is the promo code?
Sometimes, at the tail end of a day, I'll be sitting in front of my computer, with a clear idea of exactly what I need to do and how to do it... and yet I'm just sort of sitting there stupidly, because my brain feels fried. It's the same sensation you get when you crank out one too many reps at the gym- you're sending all the right signals, the nerves are firing, but your muscles just don't work.

When I get this fried brain feeling, I've found that eating something sugar-rich, like a piece of chocolate, can attenuate this feeling- not completely, but enough to get me out of the paralysis and started, at least. I don't know how much is placebo, but hey, it works, so I'm not complaining, and there seems to be at least some studies supporting the existence of similar effects.
Disagree. The chances of NK using a nuclear weapon offensively is 0.03% They're crazy in Pyongyang, but not stupid. Same situation if Iran builds one. Doing so would be suicide, and they know it. This is about defense.

Also, I'm glad you brought up the point about a neighbor with the gun. When somebody has a gun, you're not likely to walk over and screw with them. Nuclear weapons have lead to a great peace between nation-states.
>If it works for one person, that proves that is does actually work.

Well... he's not wrong.
"the anonymous HN commenter is talking out of his ass"

Anonymous commenter versus 11-hour old throwaway account... who wins?

Looking at a few words in your rebuttal above and combining it with the tone you're using, I can come up with quite a few reasons you might not have gotten the discount you sought.

I'd suggest you put down the "CTO email list" and let an actual business person handle this for you. Handshakes and existing relationships still matter in this world. Good luck!
Wow! I read /u/thefinder's account of the lisp machine. What a find.

> Forth as a programming style is the definitive predecessor of the DSL, so I see no benefit in using it for standardization.

Yup. I believe that standardization-of-language exists because we're illiterate. My analogy is writing. Any literate person who's been writing for a couple of decades can begin with a blank page and end with a bespoke piece-of-writing that accomplishes the intended goal. Areas of writing where normally-literate people are illiterate are law and programming. In those areas normal people rely on standards and scribes to do the work for them, even if normal people can casually read those writings.

My loose prediction for the future of programming--say 200 years out--is Forth. Start with a blank page, end with a DSL that accomplishes one thing. Everyone will do it, because they'll grow up in a culture that uses it.

The quality you mentioned: everything-is-right-there-ness, to me mirrors the skilled writer using everything to accomplish something.

Again, I'm being loose. Above, I called it a belief.
As a developer, doesn't it make you _itch_ when you repeat yourself? Do you feel that itch when you repeat the same application logic on the server as you do on the client? Getting the client-side validation in-sync with the server validation? This is where JavaScript is fan-fucking-tastic.

All of my recent projects have been isomorphic react apps. I build my app like it were a fully client-side single page web app, but I get server rendering when there's a new http request. Once the page has rendered, the web app takes over and uses history pushState. There are very few pieces of code that aren't used in both places. Once you get the hang of it, you very naturally create mockable interfaces that can be swapped depending on environment.

In my opinion, this is pretty much the only category that makes JavaScript "Best-in-class"; It's the easiest language to build isomorphic web apps.
> I just don't get why you think you are alone.

I would hope I'm not but it sure feels that way.

Maybe I'm not reading the right stuff or talking to the wrong people.

Can you point me to some (contemporary) arguments along the line I propose?
ok I get it, thx!
Do they specify the VMs tested? AWS has a lot of different versions of things in play and most of the people I know fall into two camps: fairly generic VMs running compute jobs, which probably would compress well, and VMs running huge databases / image farms / etc. which do not. By VM count I'm sure the former dominate but by total storage consumption I think the latter wins – I would, of course, love to see if anyone has hard data.
If you are in a situation where there is a risk of falling off a mountain and you are driving fast enough that you can't safely stop if you see people in front of you, you are doing something wrong. A self-driving car should definitely not even get into situations where it's forced to make decisions like that.
Flexibility is a polyfill for Flexbox
The Best EBook of 2015: “What Is Code?”
They're tweeting about it, that's hardly "capitalizing on" them.
It sounds like you got a lot of positive things out of it. Which is great. Also great that you are iterating and not sticking to what the coach gave you. My take on what made many elements of SCRUM work for me follows.

2-3 hour backlog grooming sessions is a warning sign. Of what I couldn't say but maybe it is time to evaluate team size or how meetings are being conducted. Push as much stuff out of meetings as possible.

If you have a morale issue due to stuff slipping (and I suspect maybe you didn't capture everything in this post) then it may not be planned sprints that are the issue. Expectations that people have of themselves and of the team are something you are free to set. I think SCRUM tend to end poorly for developers because they are placed on top of dysfunctional systems of expectation that discourage many kinds of failure.

I am perfectly happy abusing SCRUM and letting things slip from sprint to sprint sometimes excessively. Fitting things into 2 weeks was a goal to gain the benefits of constrained scope and clearly articulated and designed implementations or requirements, but failure is something I made sure to embrace. Sure we had retrospectives to see what could be learned and what we could do better, but you have to be very careful to make sure it isn't second guessing or moving the goal posts. You shouldn't fault people pretty much ever as part of SCRUM, but definitely don't fault them for slippage. There should be next to no onus on an assignee for a task to prove they did the right thing.

IMO That kind of feedback comes best out of band on a very macro scale when there is a pattern of failure for an individual to address AND you must get buy in from the individual that there is improvement to be had. The reason I stress this is that I don't want people to try and avoid things that they might fail at. That pushes people away from important work that needs to be done.

I think that planned sprints and retrospectives are the 1-2 punch of SCRUM. By estimating what you should be capable of you are then capable of reasonably identifying WHY you didn't achieve that and trying things until there is improvement or you establish that the estimates are wrong. SCRUM without high functioning retrospectives is missing 50% of the goodness IMO.

It's great that you kept regularly scheduled meetings. There is a huge amount of buy in, knowledge sharing, and consensus you get for relatively low cost by having regularly scheduled meetings. With small enough teams you can get it all done with one hour long interrupt per week. Socially it's also good because it discourages backroom deals, planning, and cliques which are toxic. Doubly so if you have remote workers.
I think foremost consulting companies actually do the job you describe.

They basically try to find the right information in the data. It often takes them weeks to do so. I could imagine that especially those consulting firms as well as their clients have a strong interest in a solution like that
That "glitch art" looks like a video-card driver problem to me. It's also possible that the solitaire site uses more texture space than your card/driver can handle causing issues.

The Aframe examples you linked seem to be simple geometric shapes with no textures so you may just be getting lucky there.

Also, Phaser, the library GP is using uses Pixi.js for the webGL drawing code if I remember correctly and Pixi is supposed to fall-back to plain canvas rendering if webGL isn't supported -- so disabling WebGL for the site may make the solitaire site work.
Google Cardboard Experiement from Pictures I Took in SE Asia
Where are your parents from? Iran?
It is but only really for 1 day a week at the moment.
We need to ban myth busters -- Hillary
SLOTH – Security Losses from Obsolete and Truncated Transcript Hashes
The US could have "ended" the war by simply walking away. At that stage the war was effectively won and dropping the Bombs had very little to do with military strategy.

The argument that the Bombs "ended the war" is patent bs, and it keeps being repeated unchallenged as a justification for what was effectively a war crime.
Oh yes. The noise. Especially in this area: http://i.imgur.com/fuz85Fu.jpg Also the marginal dirt traces on the road. Fascinating. I wish I could have photographed the site for a longer span of time.

There is a blog idea ;)
I suspect most of Europe? And Central and Eastern Europe for sure.
Oculus Rift: Available for pre-order
Most authors either don't know or don't care to make their content accessible and occasionally you have the author knows but is intentionally hostile to the idea. The definition of what is unreadable is very personal and can be a minefield of user preference and also physical impairment.

Frequently I'll come across websites linked to form HN that seem to fall into the hostile category. Not that they are intentionally making their content hard to read but rather that they say "browser defaults should be good enough" with motherfuckingwebsite.com in mind. Amusingly these plain looking websites often have very complex markup or css that just makes matters worse. I know that people have said bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com shows how little it takes to make a site readable but honestly it only takes 2 of the 7 rules used there coupled with browser defaults to make your site's content readable.

There's some basic and very loose rules any author can follow to make their reader's lives easier.

1 - Paragraphs should be ~60-80 characters wide. Too narrow and your eyes get fatigued, too long and your brain loses focus.

2 - White space, have some.

3 - Line space, 100-150% of font-size.

4 - font-size, 16px/12pt or greater.

Accessibility and Usability doesn't have to be onerous or difficult.
Two Documentaries Introduce Delia Derbyshire, the Pioneer in Electronic Music
I've preferred Kanban for a while now.

When I started doing work on a git-flow/feature branch basis, the sprints lost their value to me. I've begun to wonder if the sprints were simply an artefact from poor practices in old CVS/SVN workflows (like needing a short, regular stabilizition and release cycle)?
Next Generation Oculus Rift Pre-Sale Starts Now
You're right. I missed the comment about a minimum buy-in. That definitely puts it outside of the reach of someone who may find it useful for simple, occasional tasks. I guess they still want those people to use standard Magic.
So how do ideas get to the stage where the 'research institutes' agree they're worth investigating?

It seems to me like you're saying "I don't like these ideas, no one should be working on them". That seems a worse principle then "everyone should work on ideas they find worth investigating".

I also have no idea how you distinguish 'Bullshit Ideas' from non-bullshit ideas without investigating them. Your gut is not that good at distinguishing truth from a blunder.
By the way, I would like to see US & Russia decrease their nuclear arsenal size by half or more. But there's no denial that since the advent and usage of the nuclear weapon, there's been no major world war. We're in one of the, if not the most, peaceful times in recorded human history. Even considering the current instability in the middle east.

http://www.fallen.io/ww2/