skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me, the most remarkable thing about recent neural network research is that a very substantial proportion of the human brain is dedicated to vision, and neural networks can now achieve human level performance at object recognition, and with similar, robust representations (see e.g. http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...).

I see two possible conclusions that can be drawn here. The first possible possibility is that neural networks really are close enough to the way the brain works, that they learn the way the brain does, and that with some algorithmic tweaks and the right training data they can learn to everything the brain does. This is the view that Luke is rallying against, and I tend to agree that it's too soon to make this claim. On one hand, the frontal lobe is not all that different from the temporal lobe. If we can achieve the same things with a machine as with one giant chunk of 6-layer neocortex, it's not too hard to imagine that we'll be able to do the same with other pieces. The problems may be different, but the biological implementation is strikingly similar. On the other hand, as sdenton4 notes elsewhere in this thread, the big difference between sensation and cognition is that recurrent processing is that the former can (apparently!) be accomplished in an entirely feedforward manner while the latter requires (or is at least thought to require for efficient implementation) recurrent processing. And just because we have efficient ways to train one kind of neural network doesn't necessarily mean they'll generalize easily to others.

But there is a second possibility, which is that neural networks don't learn or function quite like brains, but somehow both can find similar, nearly optimal strategies for encoding information in sensory domains. In this case, we're probably more than a few years away from machines that can think, but to us neuroscientists this is even more exciting. Vision scientists have been looking for decades to understand how the visual system works, and in this scenario, there's some underlying theory to vision and we have an easily observable system that implements it. Even if it turns out that vision is too different from cognition for these insights to generalize, the success of deep learning for object recognition still has vast implications for future understanding of the brain, and thus probably for future artificial intelligence. If we know the representations the brain uses, that makes figuring out the mechanism by which it computes those representations far easier than if we had to figure out both the mechanism and the representation from scratch.

So my perspective here is that we don't know exactly how far recent neural network research is going to take us, but it's hard to deny its importance. Before I started graduate school, I didn't think that machines would achieve human-level performance at object recognition before we figured out how the brain does it, but here we are. But I suppose that historically, huge advances in AI research have been followed by stagnation and disappointment, so who knows how far we'll get this time.
I find your writings very clear and refreshing to read. Regardless of what happens with BTC, thanks for your efforts!
No humans speaking, just 90 minutes footage of the BMW i3 car production / assembly line. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29VHdcOvnK8

It's incredibly hard to find really good documentaries, they are basically all fluff pieces as you mentioned :/ I have however good experiences with old docu's on Youtube (propably made in the 80s/90s and digitized from video casette). These kind of docu's don't have as many bad interviews as modern ones and just have more content imo.
You don't have a backup until you test its restore.
You are essentially completely strawmaning the argument ... or, more likely, not understanding anything at all.

Nobody suggests that we should give of division of labor. Got that? That's just one big fat straw man that you made up. People (like RMS) simply analyse what kind of power structure results from how specifically the division of labor currently works/where it currently seems to be headed. And then he points out where those power structures might not be in your interest, so you might want to do something about it.

So, sure, you don't grow your own food. Nobody suggests you should. People just suggest that maybe it's not in your interest to sign a contract that prevents you from buying food from anyone but Foodle Inc., even if they promise you the easiest food on planet earth. Maybe with one option out that has "migration costs" of 10000 USD attached to it. Or that it might not be in our interest to have any entity know everything about us, because that makes them a very powerful entity, with huge potential for abuse of power. Because there is a difference between your doctor knowing very private things about you and one company having a database of all of those private details of all citizens.

Also, you might not have noticed, but someone is trying to inform you that something isn't fair and just. But it seems like you aren't listening. And what people are also pointing out is that finding an alternative is not really an option if you are locked into a service affected by network effects.
The problem with your annotations is not that they "didn't give fascism a fair shake". The problem is that you tend to do a poor job of reading the TPP text, and also often seem to have not done the necessary background research in the area a given TPP section covers to understand the meaning.

Some examples. Your annotation to Article 20.2 section 3: "TPP prohibits environmental laws that create a “restriction on trade.”

What TPP actually says in that section is "disguised restriction on trade". Either you missed the word "disguised", or did not recognize that the phrase "disguised restriction on trade" is almost a term of art in international trade agreements and so should be taken in TPP with the same interpretation and effect it has been given in the numerous other treaties in which it appears.

Article 18.2, which says:

A Party may provide limited exceptions to the rights
conferred by a trademark, such as fair use of
descriptive terms, provided that those exceptions
take account of the legitimate interest of the owner
of the trademark and of third parties.

Your annotation is:

For example, if someone posts a YouTube video
criticizing McDonald's® for making terrible food
and destroying the environment, this would
ordinarily be protected under the U.S. Constitution.
But, under the TPP, any public use of the
McDonald's® brand would only be allowable if it is
in the legitimate interest of McDonald's®, the
trademark holder. Since a video criticizing them
would never be in their “legitimate interest,”
McDonald's® could be able to bring an ISDS
complaint against the U.S. government and force the
video to be taken down.

You somehow managed to read "take into account of the legitimate interests of" as meaning "in the legitimate interest of", which is quite different.

Article 18.37 section 2 says:

Subject to paragraphs 3 and 4 and consistent with
paragraph 1, each Party confirms that patents are
available for inventions claimed as at least one of
the following: new uses of a known product, new
methods of using a known product, or new processes
of using a known product. A Party may limit those
new processes to those that do not claim the use of
the product as such.

Your annotation is: "Being able to patent “new uses of a known product” will allow patent-holders to make very minor tweaks to existing products to effectively extend their patents forever. Pharmaceutical companies love it!"

18.37 section 2 is just requiring that being just a new use of a known product does not automatically exclude something from patentability. It does not get rid of each country's general requirements for patentability, such as the US requirement for novelty, non-obviousness, and usefulness.
Same. Went home to Indiana for thanksgiving, and found out my 4th grade best friend had ODed a few months before. Sad thing was, is that I wasn't surpised.
Not in my opinion, way too complex. It'll end up just like all the other frameworks that try to do everything; outdated and unmaintained.
TED talks are lying to you (2013)
Do not try to challenge tptacek directly because he is using his real identity so his fear of being plainly wrong on the Internet causes him to selectively respond to comments or use weasel words to avoid that scenario.
We're all the whale aren't we? Its still better than "Oh no not again" isn't it?
The product itself (http://apex.oracle.com and http://apex.oracle.com/ut/) isn't bad: it's tailored toward citizen developers versed in the Oracle DB.

Off topic: if you're reading this, Vlad my boy, I will think about sending you an email at some point. Because we all know how you love emails.
> It is possible to slow time somewhat.

pg mentions this, but what he says after is not even the best advice in this same essay for it. The real insight is here:

> The "flow" that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin that prevents you from pausing to savor life amid the daily slurry of errands and alarms.

The way to slow time down is to break all your routines, and never be in a flow. Have no typical days. Don't have a schedule. Don't have a favorite restaurant, a default outfit, or hang out with the same people more than once or twice before seeking new people. This is nearly impossible for most people to do, because doing these things SUCK. And time is slowest when everything feels like it sucks.

I only know this because this was what my life was for 2 years when I was on the road as a digital nomad. It sucked, but was the most rewarding period of my life as well, because it truly was time slowed down. I learned and experienced such a larger spectrum of things in the same time frame than anyone I knew, including myself from any other time frame.

I don't endorse it as a long-term way to live life, but I highly recommend everyone spend at least a year of their (preferably younger, pre-family) adult life living thus to learn truly how much can be fit in a human life if you frame it right.
They're not equally in control, as you can study, modify and redistribute the code. If you want to make your own version of the software, they can't stop you. So they're not equally in control.

You are relying on them to not be malicious, but you can also rely on anyone who wants to examine the code not to be fired or imprisoned for doing so. That's better than with proprietary software.
Countries without a "sovereign" or other government, like Somalia, still use money. Some people have been known to use laundry detergent as a currency since it lasts for a long time, is relatively expensive, and is inherently useful.
I've never done that but it sounds neat.

Anyway, I'm guessing the answer to your question is: control. You know that you can at any moment tilt your head forward and lose the vertigo sensation. So you are safe and in control and you also feel safe and in control. That makes the experience enjoyable (I assume).
Are you seriously going to pretend that we're not? Come on man. We can't win this one. I mean we have a presidential candidate on stage defending bringing in only Xians as refugees.

I am as much intolerant of Muslims as anyone (PC be damned) but I don't think we have a leg to stand on here.
This gist works with test-kitchen to run systemd in a centos 7-based container.

It should be simple enough to adjust to run ansible.

https://gist.github.com/glenjamin/2d04e9c2a163c7848173
Money quote: Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves.
Why isn't it also the case with 'doctor' (medical)?

In some cases, it actually is. In my country, to get a driving license one needs a certificate from a doctor saying they don't have any medical condition that makes one prone to sudden fainting, seizures, etc. Recently, the veterinarians have been demanding the right to pass those certificates, since they're legally doctors too!
I just had a miserable experience trying to get a microservice written in Python running on Lambda. The tooling and documentation isn't there yet. It was so bad that I finally just did it over to deploy on two t2.micro instances with an ELB and auto scaling. Much easier deployment model that everyone understands.
If you read further down on the Github thread, the guy who did the splitting out is no longer working on the project and it's now fully in IBM's hands, who aren't doing much of anything.
I still don't get the whole 9 to 6 thing. 9 to 5 seems more reasonable (considering past norms. I don't believe were productive 8 hours a day sttaight). I think, at the very least the song lyrics should change, or better yet, we go back to past norms.
There's also Backblaze B2 (public beta): https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

Their pricing is great (0.5c/month) but I'm a little worried about their single DC.
SNAP! *

* There goes what little karma I had
I've had some big Glacier bills in the past, even the upload pricing has gotchas[1]

These days the infrequent access storage method is probably better for most people. It is about 50% more than Glacier (but still 40% of normal S3 cost) but is a lot closer in pricing structure to standard S3.

Only use glacier if you spend a lot of time working out your numbers and are really sure your use case won't change.

[1] - 5 cents per 1000 requests adds with with a lot of little files.
Does it enjoy playing the game?
Akinji – Socket.io stress testing tool
I had no idea this existed.

...this basically invalidates any sort of use Strongloop has for tracking its users via optionalDependencies.

Thanks for that.
It’s time to claim your piece of the final frontier
This is a simple case of spending more than you should have because you didn't understand the service you were using. It's impacted a little worse by how silly the whole endeavor is, given the preponderance of music streaming services.
Without getting into our personal, specific definitions of intelligence, I do agree the next 400 years could bring about something horribly disruptive that is not intelligent. Dumb and dangerous, discovered by fools, is the more likely threat to peace in the world.
DTrace for Windows
a) from a quick look at SmartOS, it looks like yet another implementation of containerization, with an option to run a full KVM if you want. And it has to run as a full OpenSolaris-based system image, instead of just being a binary installable on a Linux system (much more familiar to most developers)

b) "dumping a bunch of files from a developer's laptop into a Docker image"... I'm sorry, what? I have no idea what workflow you're referring to here.

WRT your specific gripes about subsystem rollback - the usual Docker best practice is to have each container run only a single subsystem, and to have images be generated by checked-in Dockerfiles based only on checked-in resources. If you need to upgrade or downgrade, you spin up a new container running a different image, fail over to it, and kill the old one.

Once a container starts running it is immutable. Any of the features of a running container can be inferred just from looking at the Dockerfile(s) that built it and the connections it has to storage volumes, other containers, and the external network.
> Docker lets you setup a runtime environment by doing whatever is necessary to make it work

Does that not qualify as "hack-it-'till-it-works", the worst kind of computer activity, especially when one is stuck trying to reverse engineer what the guy before did? Can you think of what implications "doing whatever is necessary to make it work" has for lifecycle management?
You can do it pretty easily with the AWS APIs, and in the process scram-switch only the stuff you really want to kill.
Similarly, we will never have fusion weapons until we can correctly simulate and model a nuclear reaction on a computer.
Indeed. And see how far we've managed to get after we've figured out a good way to pass learned knowledge around.
Followup: Ask HN: Struggling to pay rent this month. Can I help you with a gig?
Original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10813746

I wanted to share with HN what happened, since a lot of these "hey, help me" posts go unanswered.

I was able to successfully pay rent thanks to a few quick gigs that came my way. I was able to work about $2k, a comfortable position while I decide what my next move is.

Said invoice remains unpaid. I'm now a debt collector. There are options to consolidate, but the amount is in excess of $25k which makes things difficult. I do have contracts in place, and counsel I can lean on, but it’s an incredibly exhausting and lengthy process. As a 24-year-old dev-shop founder I have learned my lesson. I'll require pre-paid invoices from here on. There’s more to the story, but in short, I've wound things down after my co-founder (design/sales) unexpectedly left us in early Q2 2015.

The response was overwhelming. I was quickly playing catch-up with the number of emails I received. It brought tears to my eyes, especially coming from HN where elitism is often bred and found.

I'm unsure what my next steps will be. Obvious question of “why don’t you ask your clients?” My answer is either, “they don’t have a need for me where I can make a direct impact” or “they’re too big/too corporate and couldn’t justify being billed by a one-man consultancy/dev-shop, let alone a felon."

What other options may I have that I'm failing to see? As I said, I can't pass a background check. It has rarely hurt me, but I’ve rarely put myself in a position to find out if it will matter. As you can tell, I’m pretty open and honest about it, but a little timid.

If you’d prefer to reach out to me directly, you can send me an email at ptftpd1ad6mz2iw@jetable.org and it’ll forward directly to my email.

All-and-all, I’m entirely thankful (albeit surprised) that HN came through with such a response. The elitism is still here, and I still get a little perplexed reading some comments, but for the most part we’re good peoples.
Wtf are you talking about? The guy is talking about what he experienced in the 70s. Are you seriously going to claim his memory is fucked and they were actually saying 'hot age' when they were saying 'ice age'? Regardless of what the scientific consensus was of the time, a pending ice age was reported in the mainstream media.
Also, in 1975, punk was just getting started, and it wasn't yet clear that radio was not gonna play the Ramones.

I remember hearing "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the radio for the first time, and thinking they'd never play it again, 'cause it was just too weird.
> The world doesn't have time for everyone to deploy their own server. I mean, honestly, ask yourself if you even have time to do this, or if it's just yet another project that's going to get piled on top of the Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone Black you have sitting in your projects box.

If there is something naive here, I would think it's this? What is so inherently difficult about deploying a server? If you want to find out what the right thing to aim for for the future is, it's not useful to base that decision on what is currently the case. By that measure, thirty years ago, you would have argued that computers for everyone was naive (honestly, ask yourself, who would have the time to learn how to jumper the IRQ and IO port assignments and all that?), and yet, somehow, we managed to end up with everyone carrying computers around all the time. Notice, though, how people don't actually manually assign IRQs on their iphones?

I mean, what is even the fundamental difference between a "server" and a "client" that makes one of them so incredibly difficult and dangerous, but not the other? It's both just software talking to other software over the network. Yes, if you have crappy software, you can end up with huge security problems. Ever heard of Windows 95?
I realize there are a plethora of companies that do interesting things on the back-end (and increasingly a lot of cool stuff on the front), but when it comes down to it the vast majority of (enterprise) web jobs involve getting some information from a database, running it through some business logic, and returning the processed data. That makes it sound easy, but if you happen to work for a large company doing enterprise-level web programming, you know that the sheer scale of the data can make your work mind-mindbogglingly difficult at times. I love a good challenge, but when you're solving the same uninteresting problem over and over... well, you just lose interest.
Pre HIPAA I never had a problem obtaining my records. The trouble is less-knowledgeable health gatekeepers are relentlessly indoctrinated into believing that privacy is paramount. A records request that doesn't follow a rigid checklist is defaulted to REJECT. And it is in the name of protecting the patient's privacy.
This looks like a very creatively elegant solution to a problem a lot of people have been talking and thinking about as well as working on . . . Wish it were open source.
Not really. Some places would be completely undeveloped while others would have been about the same size or even larger (think of industrial mid west cities).
None of this is practical now with the security hassles

In North America with TSA, absolutely. When I need to do a stopover in one of the efficient airports in Central or Northern Europe, I often go out to arrivals area (even if it involves going through passport control) and then back through departures. This way I can spend time doing some shopping for brands I don't have at home. CPH and ZRH are very good for that, CGN less so, ARN is not worth the hassle. Security in the departure area is always incomparably better than the same in America and with a layover of 1.5-2 hours you can do it at almost a leisurely pace.
"middlebrow megachurch infotainment" nails it.
This is why I break my large files uploaded to Glacier into 100MB chunks before uploading. If I ever need them, I have the option of getting them in a slow trickle.
> "The Dockerfile format is completely fucking useless at this kind of thing."

Right... which is why we have Docker Compose. The point of the image is to provide the code and the harness for launching it WITHOUT those assumptions.

> "But wait - how do we configure these services for multiple environments (test/prod clusters)? They don't read our ENVvars, nor do they know of our internal service discovery tools."

This is why docker containers are composed out of other containers. You use an elasticsearch container as a basis and extend it out with your tools to make your unique flavor of deployable search unit. This is not a new technique to anyone, as even the es docker image itself is built off another base image.

I get the impression the writer of this has yet to really internalize what docker containers are.

> "Tools like pyinfra and Ansible are much more suitable for this kind of work (and don't install useless crap to generate a config file)."

Are they though? This is said without really any justification. To me, I'd 100% rather do it via Docker. Next to actually locking everything into one big solid lump via Nix, Docker actually gives you reproducible and reusable chunks of code with nearly infinite and modular configurability, without any care about installations stepping over one another or even library conflicts.

Sure, things like an unprunable stale image cache filling up small disks is annoying. But the alternative is a continuous and inscrutable agglomeration of code and configuration files onto a box, eventually leading to total disaster.

But kinda typical of someone who wants to run Go. If you're building Go you've already accepted that you'll never ship the same executable twice.
Maybe what you're actually looking for is Apache Kafka?