skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Java and other OO languages actually encourage the trend

Java, yes. Other OO - not so much. Java is getting better now, but, for a long time, it was simply a weak language, with primitive type system and lots of necessary boilerplates.

If you look at other implementations of OO, you'll see that the trend of "wrapping everything in dozens of wrappers and other stuff" is definitely not universal among them. Dynamic, reflective languages like Ruby and Python tend to have shallow class hierarchies and few wrappers; especially in Python, heavy use of inheritance and creation of classes for every little bit of data is considered un-pythonic. Then you have Smalltalk, which allows arbitrary code transformations on runtime, which further decreases boilerplate and makes a language more expressive. There's also Dylan and, of course, Common Lisp with CLOS. I'm working with StumpWM lately, a window manager written in Common Lisp - it does use classes and multi-methods, but very sparingly. WM is a piece of software, which is almost GUI only, and so in Java, you'd get a monstrous framework with myriads of classes and relations between these. In CL you don't need that at all - standard defuns and built-in data structures are enough for most things.

Anyway, Object Oriented Programming comes in various sizes and shapes, and it's unfair to see bad Java code as "representative OO" code. JavaScript is OO, Smalltalk is OO, OCaml is OO(/FP), and Julia is OO. Take a moment (more like a couple of years, but...) to look at them and try to compare the languages' object models and the common practice of writing code. You'll see something amazing, more than once, I promise.
I see no downfall or hubris in their decision.

I do, however, see extreme arrogance in your comment. You've decided that just because you don't consider senility or incompetence to be horrible that nobody else should either.

Those two people made a reasoned decision about what they wanted their lives to be like and what they wanted to happen when they could no longer live the way they wanted to. Thankfully their children, who obviously didn't want to lose their parents, understood that being forced to continue living with declining mental and physical capabilities was a fate worse than death to their parents, and did not interfere.
Yeah... that is one of the really unfortunate lock-ins with AWS. Hopefully they will add data export to their "Snowball" product, but they don't really have a lot of incentive to.
"Automotive design is in some kind of dark age. It's not just GM."

I disagree.

In the past few years we have seen several very, very beautiful cars come down the pipeline. In no particular order:

- BMW 6-series gran coupe (the four-door)
- Maserati Ghibli
- Grand Cherokee SRT model ... the cool looking one ...
- Current BMW M5

I'm sure I'll think of some more ...

The problem is, although these are beautiful cars, they're not electric. So you have this weird choice between a modern car that actually has non-laughable technology in it or a car that looks good and has a nice interior[1], but it's all just lipstick on a pig.

[1] Tesla Model S interior is almost as nice as an entry level 3-series/A4/c-class. Almost.
As I wrote in another comment, I'd like to see a source for that.

edit: downvoting me for asking for a source? :)
The problem is trust. The car being safe and being marketed as safe are different.
That's a great point, there is a bit of friction between the idea that if an open source project isn't being actively improved it's dead and Express's mission to be a minimalist framework.
- Is the term 'error function' used as a special function (like sin, cosine, etc) or is it a generalized term ?

For backpropagation I call "error function" a function which takes the training data and the parameters of the model and returns an empirical approximation of how good is the model to be able to differentiate it.

- Are we using the term 'loss function' as a generalized term? whose special case is 'error function'? e.g., in linear regression loss function is 'error function' (MSE like function) but in perceptron, loss function is max(0, -xy)?

I used a squared error loss to define the error function of the linear regression model. This is arbitrary and the choice of the loss depends on the meaning we want to give to prediction errors. Here a big error is penalized way more than a small error.

- Are we using the term 'loss function' as a generalized term? whose special case is 'error function'? e.g., in linear regression loss function is 'error function' (MSE like function) but in perceptron, loss function is max(0, -xy)?

The way I understand the difference between error and loss is by thinking about regularization methods (where you also add a penalty in the error depending on the parameters of the model). In that case error = loss + regularization. When applying gradient descend you would derivate the error and not the loss.
The error is an empirical value that is supposed to estimate the performance of the model on unseen data. This is by consequent not formally defined.

- Using final output of perceptron for error function makes it a "hard problem" agreed. But what about using just the function from linear regression (the MSE-like one) instead of a using a brand new function max(0, -xy). (It's not very intuitive to reason what's so special about max(0, -xy)).

The loss function used is a hinge loss. If the point is correctly classified no penalty is added, otherwise the penalty is the distance to the hyperplane.
Yeah, seriously. Please tell us all who you are conflating with the outright stupidity, jingoism, and racism that is Trump.
Show HN: Inventr – My new startup
Landing page is > http://inventr.org

Submitted in Ask HN first, someone mentioned I should also post here.

Hoping that over time the Inventr boards ask more complex questions especially around problem solving and better giveaways.

Each Inventr has their own publicly available profile which shows their Inventr status, each brand has their own Inventr page (click on a board to get there).

Sharing is built into the platform with the option to share an idea once submitted for as many upvotes as possible.

Business model likely to be subscription based version for the enterprise to drive change, problem solving and innovation.

We were featured on product hunt in mid December. https://www.producthunt.com/tech/inventr
What do you mean by an antilicense? If you don't want to impose any restrictions on people, just put your code in the public domain. Here's some boilerplate for that: http://unlicense.org/

But you can't expect everyone to do that. Considering people who exercise their rights under copyright a "problem that needs to be solved" is generally regarded as a... radical stance.
There's one very simple reason that general-purpose robots have failed to become economically viable: robots have to compete with humans, and humans are really cheap.

I also think that not enough thought has been put into the question of: if we do manage to replace unskilled workers with robots, what do we do with all the people who are only capable of unskilled work? Not everyone has what it takes to become a coder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
I never said C++ streams were "horrible", just that they were slower than stdio and still got adopted. Which kind of negates the idea that among C++ "designers" (I use that term loosely) that you have to make all sorts of terrible semantic compromises to save a tiny bit of performance.

I don't think stdio is "a security nightmare" either (I assume this canard is based on the fact that it still technically includes "gets" or some other such function that nobody has actually used in new code in 3 decades.)

C++ is a uniquely schizophrenic language because you can't even use libraries developed in one style with code developed in another style. Try throwing an exception when -fno-exceptions is enabled in a google code base. Try passing code using a QString to code that wants a std::wstring. Tee hee. You can't say this about Javascript, Haskell, etc. and frankly your comparisons are vapid.

And the C++ sheep keep bleating "it's C's fault, baaaaa" even after I gave the example of Objective C, which has modules and avoids C++ template hell. You even non-ironically blamed C for the C++ concepts feature "languishing in the standards committee." Can you not see that this is the equivalent of "thanks, Obama" whenever something goes wrong halfway across the world? What the hell does C have to do with templates or concepts?

Yes, I'm sure evil C programmers are responsible for all crappy and insecure C++ software. They're in league with the Zionist media conspiracy to smear C++'s good name. We must root out these double agents wherever we find them! Onward C++ soldiers. Never question the decisions of your leaders, which are made for excellent reasons and always make complete sense.
Sure, that's fine for an individual, but what about for a business? If the person who has an entry in his or her calendar leaves and forgets to remind someone else, what happens then?
You're only cool if you're paying Amazon.
There are "plenty"?

Then name some.

Methinks this endless whining about "bias" when people rightly call out a certain endlessly ignorant political party for that ignorance is the last refuge of people who really have no cogent arguments in them.
This is a little bit like saying that money has caused enormous money laundering issues.
I recently read a statistics books by Charles Wheelman in which he covers the topic of using statistics to manipulate facts. I have always taken statistical facts with a grain of salt, but when you understand the methods of manipulation and then review papers debating climate change for example, its mind blowing to see the manipulation of facts...by both sides of the argument.
Read the article again. You've completely misinterpreted it.
I've made no suggestion of doing anything manually. That would likely be even more dangerous.

There are well-known, and well-understood, automated methods of providing a (mostly) trustworthy source for software installation. RPM+yum on CentOS, deb+apt-get on Debian/Ubuntu. The packages can be signed and verified (so you know you're getting what the vendor packaged), the OS-standard sources are open source and easy for third parties to check and used on millions of machines (so you know manipulation is likely to be spotted quickly), easy to verify the versions you have with one command, easy to update to newer versions when security issues arise, easy to verify the files currently installed match (or don't) the ones that the package shipped with. And, it is relatively easy to package ones own tools and put them into a local repository, using the same methods to insure safe delivery to all of your systems.

I understand using other methods of locally providing packages. And, I understand that sometimes you have to go outside the vendor provided packages (and can't build your own, using the same best practices). But, to imagine that you can/should trust a big blob of data grabbed from the internet and splooshed onto your system (sometimes as root!) using a pipe to /bin/sh, is ridiculous. Don't do that in an automated fashion without explicitly checking out what you're being delivered. And, I would probably opt to host my own private repo of those things, so that I can re-verify any time there are changes before they get splooshed out to all of my systems.

This is basic operations stuff here, and yet folks keep reinventing the wheel, poorly, and aggressively marketing it as a superior wheel.
That's basically the theme of The Second Machine Age. There are a lot of people around here who IMO are way too optimistic about the timelines for fully autonomous robocars. But if/when such a thing actually arrives, the effect on employment will be huge. Even if it may well still make sense to have a human present for, say, package delivery, the number of people whose job is primarily to be a driver is huge.
Sounds like you've got a severe acute case of Epistemic Learned Helplessness.[1] Previous discussion on HN.[2]

1. http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279864
A nice segue is that especially in manufacturing robots are plentiful. From pick-and-place units that move too fast to follow with the naked eye to welding robots and so on. In a way a current car manufacturer is a series of giant robots glued together with a relatively small number of humans.

Universal robots, ones that can do basically any task that any human can do are not even on the drawing board right now, so we're limited to these application specific models but where they are engaged they are incredibly effective and have all but replaced the humans that did those jobs previously.

The reason often quoted is that this is because robots can work 24x7, won't unionize and so on, but the little fact that people usually miss is that repeat accuracy is a very important factor in reducing part and product failure so betting on robots means that you get a much more reliable and consistent product out the door saving you a fortune in re-work and warranty claims.
> Simple supply and demand dynamics are not at work here.

It depends on your definition of "simple".

I certainly don't think it's possible to relate prices directly to shortage of supply, because things are not that simple.

I also note that, because so many overseas buyers want UK properties, demand is essentially infinite. This decouples prices from the local buyers' ability to pay.

> I'm sure there was a crisis not so long ago where lots of people were betting on house prices continuing to go up for the foreseeable future which didn't end too well.

It didn't end too well for some people who were forced to sell, for whatever reason. But the vast majority of home owners just sat tight and waited for prices to recover. They did. And so far, they always have.

There are obviously going to be local variations due to external events -- floods, factory closures, gentrification and thousands of other things. However, the overall trend is clear.

> Maybe, just maybe, the problem is too many people thinking of housing as an investment?

Maybe, just maybe, the problem is that they are absolutely correct to think that way.

As you point out, if you bought a house in 2000, you've doubled your money and saved a lot on rent, and with very little risk. With interest rates at current levels, where else can you get that sort of deal? (Serious question if you have a serious answer. My shares and savings haven't beaten inflation.)
Assault with a hand is much less likely to end in serious injury than assault with a weapon.

Additionally, anyone carrying a weapon is up to no good and can be arrested now. Do you know how often I carry a weapon? Never. I've never touched a loaded firearm (and I've been in the UK reserve forces for 15 years). I've never seen a firearm in the hands of anyone who isn't a trained professional (although if I lived in a rural area I'd probably see a farmer use one for vermin). I've never seen anyone with a knife bigger than a penknife (which mustn't lock) outside a kitchen or workshop, and if I did I'd call the police because they're up to no good. I believe that I am much safer than I would be if people around me were carrying weaponry.

You say it's weird. I think it's weird for people to wander around carrying weaponry. I know someone in the US whose brother considered taking a gun to the shops in case there was anyone there with a gun. Carrying weapons causes them to be used. When I go to the pub, do you know how often I wonder if the loud-mouthed slightly drunk guy is carrying a weapon? Never.

Casual UK knife crime (by which I mean the recent influx of stabbings etc amongst, typically, poor teenagers; not hardened criminals, but idiot, insecure children) is rooted in the unfortunate belief that they need to carry weapons to be safe.
Weapons and business goods at scale may be more viable - a la Boeing.
The Web Is Dangerous: Phishing and Browser Extensions
My political theory includes as a major idea that people dying when they don't have to is typically bad.

Based on this, I judge certain environmental problems to be significant. Someone else, motivated by the belief that environmental problems are overblown, denies that they are. Mind you, this person doesn't deny that we should try to save lives. They just deny the facts about what's happening. [1]

There are (contentious!) philosophical theories on which neither one of us is being objective, but, C'MON, whatever philosophical points you might make, you have to acknowledge a very real sense in which one of us is just reasoning badly.

[1] And to forestall any knee-jerk reactions, yes, it is sometimes the case that people assume a potential environmental problem is a disaster because of the opposite sort of mood affiliation. Which is more common isn't even the point.
It doesn't have to be that way. Alphabet can pump money into the robotic subsidiary forever. But it'll be more and more obvious how much of a drain it is when the robotics company is a black hole of profits.
That's roughly it. I was referring to a difference at the type system level, rather than the runtime level, though.

Disjoint unions aka sum types (as seen in Haskell/ML etc) entail some runtime way of keeping track which side of the sum any given inhabitant lies on. Tags are one way to do this, but e.g. in a language where pointers/references are never the zero machine word, and unit is represented as the zero word, no tag would be needed for the type Maybe String.

Union types (as seen in Pony, apparently, and also in Typed Racket), by contrast, /don't/ preserve information about which side of the union an inhabitant came from.

So, disjoint types: A + A ≠ A
but union types: A ∪ A = A

So expanding (Maybe X) into (X + 1), we have that (Maybe (Maybe X)) = ((X + 1) + 1) ≠ X + 1,

but if instead (Maybe X) expands to (X ∪ 1), we have that (Maybe (Maybe X)) = ((X ∪ 1) ∪ 1) = X ∪ 1 = (Maybe X).

This is one of the problems with uses of null in languages that have it.
Form habits if you can, do it consciously. This takes some practice but if you start with something simple you'll get the idea soon enough. Habit forming is a pretty powerful technique to get yourself out of a rut (and into a better rut ;) ).
One might argue that its better to live in borderline poverty and be happy than submit to the crappy environments offered by American corporations mentioned above. Just make sure that you have some passions to keep you busy when living in this mode.
Mostly because you descend into a circle of procrastination and self-hate. And the funny thing is, they are engineered that way: facebook doesn't want you to keep the connections with your dear ones, all they want is to keep you more and more on their website, scrolling mindlessly. That why I blocked the site in /etc/hosts, and only use messenger.com and pidgin with the new facebook plugin.
Don't forget the version numbers!
I have a hard time to understand what you mean by "aggregation" and "facet of the entropy which in general can be defined using relative volume in the space of states of possible configurations of the system for a given values of generic coordinates". Please post a link to some exposition of your theory, I'd like to take a look.
I think the problem is Tesla's connector is much faster. Last I checked Tesla offered others access to its connectors, too, for a license fee (obviously, it would be dumb to offer it for free).
If you take a US perspective, perhaps, but globally, there are other bright spots. For example, after reading about iRobot's struggles to get permission for its wireless lawnmower robots, I was surprised to look into it and discover there were a fair number of lawnmower robot manufacturers for both large and small suburban scale robots which reportedly work well and are rather popular in the EU. Smaller lawns and higher labor costs speculated to be why.

(I liked the idea, but after calculating how big our property was, only the most expensive commercial lawnmower robot reached parity with our John Deere Z-track riding lawn mower's capabilities, and the payback period was implausibly long, so I'm stuck doing the mowing myself. For now.)
I actually have a superpower where I can smell mildew when no one else can. So even 30 minutes of leaving the clothes wet is too much for me.

It's interesting when I meet people I can smell who has left their clothes in the washer too long.
I used to roll my eyes at him. I thought he was just a nut. Turns out, he was right, and I was wrong. I hate the fact that he's right, because the warnings he made seemed so obviously stupid to implement.

Yet here we are. I now respect him immensely
It's simple. Everyone has switched to either Koa (designed by the team behind Express) or, more likely, a client-side framework like React.
What I want to know is if Alphabet is still trying to make robots for war. They promised only a year ago they wouldn't do that and wouldn't become a defense contractor, and then a month ago we found out they "failed" to sell their robots to the US Army.

Good thing it was only Google that had to abide by the "don't be evil" mantra (more or less). Alphabet apparently could care less about it.
1) yeah! socialism!!
2) exactly! like a quadcopter with a handgun attached :)
Free Basics and the Internet’s Political Battles
When private companies take out loans, that creates more money. So economic growth causes the money supply to increase. If they default on the loans, the money created previously is still there.
The very nature of cold storage would mean that if they'd actually implemented cold storage this hack wouldn't have been possible, because the key wouldn't have existed online in any form.

It's like robbing a bank by hiding around the bank employees until overhearing the combination to the get you behind the tills (the "hot wallets" in a crypto exchange) only to find out that instead of just giving you access to the small amounts in the tills, it actually also gives you full access to the vault (the "cold storage") that should have been time-locked and require at least two separate physical keys to access.

It's hard to secure crypto exchanges sufficiently because of the very nature of it, but it is not hard to come up with security schemes that would make this kind of breach far less costly, and cold storage is one of them.

In other words, as the article writer pointed out:

> Your cold storage should be actually cold. If you can get at your cold wallet's private keys without physically getting out of your chair and walking somewhere, it's not cold.
Kurzweil's Phantasms
tldr: You need more money for measurements of economic growth to grow, whether you need it for actual growth is an open research question.
I've believed this for a long time. In fact I think this same idea would drastically help adults learning a new language too.
Sure, but why? Because it's difficult? Because it's useless newfangled morally-corrupting stuff?

Because it's a socially dividing privacy issue to want to involve yourself with social media; even if you choose to use it passively.

Is it also commendable to cook all your own food from scratch, do all your laundry by hand, avoid use of electricity, etc?

Yes, it is, but i'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to discover as to why such things may be commendable.
signalfd is awesome, except for the fact that it breaks debuggers. There's a long-standing kernel bug that forgets to notify the program doing a ptrace before delivering a signal to signalfd. Don't believe me? Write a program that loops forever and exits when it gets SIGINT from signalfd. Run it in gdb. Hit <C>+c. Watch in amazement as the program exits instead of stopping.
Livestream of SpaceX's attempt to land on a barge