skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never been stuck in a local optimum when training a big neural net. No one ever runs to convergence.
The author is right. I met these kind of "programmers". When I started working at my current company, I was promised that I can learn from senior Python developers with 5-10 years of experience. I had 2 years of experience at that time. They couldn't teach me a single thing about Python in 10 months. They write code without any basic knowledge what is happening. They don't even know the tools the other developers wrote.

Example 1: Guy (10 years experience) is running an svn admin command on the main production repository he never tried before, (never read the manual for it) realize it doesn't do what he thought it would do, and press CTRL-C wildly.

Example 2: I set up Jenkins for automating deployment, installed a couple of plugins for it. Guy (5 years experience) made a deployment job using a plugin without reading (or asking me) anything about it FOR THE PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. Took hours to find out he thought the field does one thing but it's purpose nowhere near. A couple of minutes reading upfront would have spared 3-4 hours of unnecessary work and frustration for him.

Example 3: Guy (10 years experience) wants to write an XML parser which deals with unicode. Randomly(!) putting encode() and decode() calls and cursing that accented characters doesn't appear correctly. I explained to him how he should approached the problem and he succeeded at the and. I'm not sure he could have made the program work correctly or if he did, he was not able to know WHY.

Example 4: Guy (10 years experience) comes to me asking help about locale switching in Python. I never used that part of the standard library, so I just opened up the Python documentation and worked out the solution in 5-10 minutes (he sitting next to me). He did not even looked up the documentation for the function he was calling. I'm pretty sure he wasted more than 10 minutes trying to solve the problem...

I had an "AHA" moment when I realized if I read upfront much more (documentation, manual, any kind of help page) about the topic I'm about to use, I can finish much-much faster and understand the problem from the first moment much more deeply.

I started learning Python by reading the whole tutorial [0] upfront and learning Django by reading everything in the documentation, like I was learning for an exam. In two years I gained much more knowledge about Python than any of these guys.

[0]: https://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/
Came across this a little while ago:

> “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}, you are guilty because you have a privileged position in the {sinful,racist,sexist,homophobic,oppressive,…} system.”

> For [that argument] to work, the subject must be prevented from noticing that the demand to self-condemn is not based on the subject’s own actions or choices or feelings, but rather on an in-group identification ascribed by the operator of the kafkatrap. [...]

> The subject must be prevented from asserting his or her individuality and individual agency; better, the subject must be convinced that asserting individuality is yet another demonstration of denial and guilt. Need it be pointed out how ironic this is, given that kafkatrappers (other than old-fashioned religious authoritarians) generally claim to be against group stereotyping?

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122
Yeah, lots of phrases get stripped of their interesting meaning as they become tired second-hand cliches. It's not unusual to see someone quoting a quote of a quote, completely unaware of the original source.
We are all just cogs. What I learned is no matter what sized cog I am compared to others, just make sure my interaction with the other cogs is as smooth as possible. I take pride in doing good work no matter how small or large.
My other favorite of his videos is the sling one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzDMCVdPwnE

I like how he shows the repeated fails and how it take a long time to practice to get better at it.
PostgreSQL: Linux VS Windows – part 2
I love how investors are always willing and wanting to show examples of how they have the upper hand and the entrepreneur has the lower one (chart in the article).
I don't think that would work very well. After all, the list of certificates would have to be a preference, so crapware could just stick its own certificate into the preferences file before installing its addon. Of course, baking the requirement into the binary isn't perfect either, since the crapware can just patch or replace it if it has sufficient access rights, but I'd say it 'feels' drastic in a way changing preferences doesn't (which matters if the crapware is trying to be semi-legitimate), and it requires somewhat more work to come up with a suitable binary and keep it up to date.
Re: conformity, the cliche here in Japan is to point out that where the west says "the squeaky wheel gets the grease", Japanese say "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down".
This use of "need" makes me wonder what the earliest tech is that you could use to build a trello-ish. I'm thinking it's doable with C, CGI, and xmlhttprequest....
I like that, too, but this feels like just a cheap shot at SpaceX right now...
To be fair, if you look at the video, you will see that they landed on the moving barge just fine. It was standing still on the platform, stable, with engine disabled.

Of the locks keeping the landing gear in place, 3 out of 4 succeeded. Whoops. Maybe they should simply switch to 5 or 6 landing gears. After all, they went for 9 engines and can boast multiple launches where one or two engines failed (including this latest one. One of the engines shit itself while the rocket was returning to the barge according to the twitter feed).
I'm confused. Employees and founders get a salary. There is no risk to them. If the company fails the investors lose millions of dollars, the founders and employees leave with 1-2-3 years of salary in their pockets and then go get another job.

That is why investors get paid first. Am I missing something? I guess I don't understand where this idea that founders and employees should get paid first. In guessing because the did the work but they seem to be forgetting they also got paid for the work. As a startup it might have been less than some other jobs, in compensation they took some tiny tiny risk that if the company is successful they get a taste. But they risk is orders of magnitude less than the investors.

Sorry if I'm not understanding
Actually, the altitude is quite irrelevant, the speed is the important part. Given a perfectly round planet with no atmosphere, you could even orbit 1m high.
Seattle's Light Rail Tunneling Is Going Great
Agreed. Wrote my story below. Not sure how ranking works on hacker news, it towards the bottom. Wish someone compiles these.
Yeah, I understand your point, but I think something is really wrong when a company is agreeing to pay taxes. Of course you could throw out a sacrificial lamb but that wouldn't change a thing. The way taxes are charged really has to be change for these big companies.
What is so bad about systemd?
Apple getting into electric cars hasn't gotten an official word on that yet. They are still trying to invent the technology for self driving electric cars, with a goal for 2019. They might just license the IP to the other car makers if they find they can't make the cars themselves.

Some states like Michigan have laws that if you sell cars in their state you have to make the car in their state. So Apple would have to build a factory in Michigan to sell cars there like all of the rest. Smart phones, tablets, computers don't have that requirement and can still be made in China.

About 6 years ago I tried to get money for what I called the iAuto device that ran Android and replaced a car stereo and did GPS and played music and videos and other stuff. But I couldn't get it crowdfunded. I figure if Apple can't make electronic cars, they'll make a device like the iAuto based in iOS that replaces a stereo in cars and runs apps and can even use smart cars to auto park and collision detection and other stuff.
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't mean to imply that LQG researchers had no interest in proving their framework to be compatible with Yang-Mills theory: that's obviously an essential test of any realistic theory of gravity! My intent was to share my impression that they generally weren't expecting Yang-Mills to appear "automatically" as a necessary component of the LQG formalism (much less for a specific group structure and matter content to be required by it). That's in contrast to string theory, which does seem to fairly inevitably generate not just quantum gravity but also gauge theory by one mechanism or another. (And for a while, many or most string theorists were optimistic that a unique preferred background would turn up within a few years, too.)

I guess I'd say that string theorists I've known just don't think about LQG folks much. I've seen skepticism and some level of hostility, too, when there was an LQG talk in the department. But even then it usually came with a baseline level of professional respect. (Maybe I wouldn't say that so readily if I'd ever met Lubos Motl. There are always a few trolls, right?)

As you point out, quite a few LQG proponents talk about string theory rather a lot, and some even publish articles in which LQG proponent characters argue circles around straw man string theorist caricatures. (I read this one when it came out, as I recall. It made some good points, but it didn't go out of its way to portray the string theorist character as a decent human being, and the tone overall was just so damned smug.)
because they're being installed OUT of the browser. It's not about being scarier. It's about drawing a line in the ground and saying "fuck you, we're not loading you into memory without a guarantee that you are legit and the user added you intentionally."
Minimizing conflict is just one minor tangential point in his essay. The main thing, which I think you might have missed, is the insane pressure of being poor and having no fallback and constantly worrying about money. I do think that since he hasn't been not poor growing up, he doesn't realize that the opposite state in many ways can have its own detrimental effects on motivation
If you like this kind of zoom into the Mandelbrot set, check out this[1] zoom to 2^1116 from a few years ago (which is also available in 4k). The final ~2/5 of the zoom is probably the trippiest part of the Mandelbrot set I've ever seen, with a repeating "evil eye (nazar)"/"eye of sauron" motif[2] of incredible complexity.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbwaFQ2r2c4

[2] http://imgur.com/a/cwVHZ
Honestly just roll my eyes now at these pissing contest blogposts from Bezos. He does his team a disservice by suggesting that what they are achieving is actually more advanced than what SpaceX has done - it all looks like the approach the Soviets took in trumpeting various "firsts" in space in the 60s as the US methodically built capability far beyond what the Russians could sustain.

I am impressed by both companies' ambition, and SpaceX clearly has both the time and money advantage over Blue Origin. Let your accomplishments speak for themselves.
A rocket isn't an inverted pendulum. This is a common mistake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendulum_rocket_fallacy
Thank you. I've been saying this forever, based largely on personal experience living in countries where average portions aren't grotesquely oversize, and where the chemistry of a typical meal is healthier and more natural.

I spent the first six years of my life in the USSR, where my formative attitudes about food were formed: received cultural wisdom was that you should be grateful for food and clean up your plate, both as a social grace and out of larger moral considerations. This stayed with me, but unfortunately is a disaster when applied in the US, where everything is enormous. Accordingly, I'm prone to overeat, since almost all eating out in the US is overeating by global standards. I'm not obese per se, but weight control has always been a struggle.

On the other hand, I lived in Yerevan, Armenia for nearly two years 2012-2014. Within about half a year of arriving, I lost nearly 30 lbs, eating an average diet and having no exercise regime whatsoever. There was no gym membership and no morning jog. I did nothing special to lose weight, it just happened. The amount of walking involved in everyday life surely helped, but it wasn't extraordinary; the inner centre of Yerevan is small, not on the scale of a European capital. I just ate a lot less, it turns out. It was a fairly rich diet, too, with lots of dough, bread, meat and carbs--just less.

Of course, I promptly gained the weight back a few months after returning to the US.
One would think that using fuel to touch-down slowly is wasting fuel since they could use some kind of capture scheme with a parachute instead. I've read many times that the weight of the fuel is a big problem in spacecraft.
"Earths magnetic field...is on average it is about 30 Tesla, and 16 Tesla's is about the force required to levitate a frog...So unless flying saucers weight just about as 2 mid sized frogs I'll take the bet that if they do exist they use something else to keep them from crashing"

Something about this doesn't make sense. Probably has to do with the answer to this question: Why don't frogs normally float due to the Earth's magnetic field?
yes, and also I am not sure it's really that hard to be a reasonably decent student and attend parties. I mean you could study 8 am to 8pm on a Saturday, go to a party, be in bed by 1 am and study 9 am to midnight the next day
Node.js Hacking Challenge
Big fan of Jake and his team. Pretty sure they're stuck licensing case data, like everybody else. That means no unrestricted bulk downloads of permissively licensed case data for end users.

That data is "free" insofar as you can read it on Casetext without payment. That's great---I do it a lot---but it's a far cry from what Public Resource aimed to do and what Harvard has now promised to do.

In some situations, like Lexis Nexis' relationship to the State of California, there were are are already "walled garden" interfaces where you can go to read and download case law one case at a time. That hasn't opened the playing field for viable, comprehensive alternatives to Wexis, which is probably why Wexis can be convinced to offer them.

If and when the data become truly open, I can't wait to see where Casetext goes.
The ethics of this go deeper than what you describe. If Warren Buffett invests 1m in a company, is he in a riskier position than if a McDonald's clerk were to invest 10k in the same company? The absolute dollar value is not the only way to gauge risk exposure.
Everything was delicious and affordable
genetics != merit
Experimental Physicist here. I don't know how unlikely it is that I'm reading this on a Friday night. No, I have a life, really.

We know quite a bit about electromagnetism. There probably is lots of undiscovered fundamental physics. However, we wouldn't necessarily need to discover new physics in order to do cool stuff like float something on the Earth's magnetic field. The breadth of phenomena which electromagnetism covers is huge, and many people spend a whole career working with just that one force. It might just be that we haven't thought of the right way to use it yet.

The difficulty with floating something on the Earth's magnetic field is actually less about the strength of the field, than it is about its gradient. Because the Earth is so big, for the field to change by a few percent takes many miles of distance This is assuming we are talking about the average field as a whole, and not any anomalies which distort it, because if you are using a distortion of the field, whatever is distorting the field, like a magnet, is really what you will be pushing against.

Because force = energy divided by distance, and the strength of the earth's magnetic field is essentially a energy density, if even a weak field changed over a small distance, an appreciable force could be generated on an object which interacted with that high gradient field.

But since the Earth's field changes very slowly over distance, most of the ways of interacting with the field (like using an electromagnet such as in an electric motor) won't give us very much force. Instead, we would have to use some other means which depended less upon the field gradient. Some of these other effects would be e.g. the Hall effect, or an E x B drift.
Don't be pedantic. I'm sure assuming spherical cows we can make super efficient dairy farms. We don't have a perfectly round planet with no atmo. And we don't have rocket engineers who point rockets at the ground. Speed and altitude are practically the same thing.
This is an artifact of the maximum complexity of front end apps having risen dramatically in recent years.
Why would he pay double his income taxes to set an example? No doubt he is already paying the government what he legally owes in that respect.

Google on the other hand aren't, are they?
If you haven't seen CourtListener, you should!

It's incomplete, in that most court website feeds don't have Bluebook citable pagination. The US Supreme Court and a few states with strong neutral citation rules are exceptions, but, alas, not the rule.
As usual, with Enigma the human operators were the weak link. If they had used Enigma properly, it probably could not have been broken before the end of the war.
luck is a big factor but being in the right place at the right time maximizes the probability of getting lucky
No, staying standing up is a part of landing. We don't know if that gear failed because of shock forces in landing. "Figure out landing" means "make the rocket survive" not "get the toes touching the ground". I think SpaceX is doing more advanced work, has many more impressive successes than Blue Origin, but ignoring Blue Origin completely, I'm also not going to give SpaceX a pass on their objective failings.
ShipBob
The Week in Bitcoin: Issue 53 – An Awesome Bitcoin Newsletter Worth Reading
> escape sequences aren’t yet supported

Does this mean you can't even include a quote character in a string? If so this is kind of useless so far.
Doesnt sound like a very knowledgeable headmaster. Larry invented PageRank and did a respectable implementation of it before he had other engineers take it over.

Here is a video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ, of everyday people trying to explain what a browser is, a browser, the most important piece of (general use) software developed since the word processor or spreadsheet.

Try asking the general public what PageRank is, much less who invented it, and be prepared for a montage of silent deer-in-headlights responses with the occasional stammering about librarians for good measure :)
I also tried and failed to "buy out" existing scans for permissive public licensing about five years ago. I actually approached the Law Library Microsoft Consortium, which none of the librarians I knew were even aware of, and couldn't get anywhere.

Frankly, even now, with Harvard announcement in hand, I doubt I could. It just wasn't a thing the institution knew how to do. "Does not compute."

I'm sorry to hear things have gotten worse.
The pendulum fallacy has to do with the tail of the rocket not naturally following the head during launch. Landing really is an inverted pendulum problem.
For what it's worth:

https://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=unikernel%2C%20li...
Understanding e to the pi i [video]
Best Slack Integrations for Project Management Tool
I'd like to know what innovation Larry brings to the company these days. Especially technical innovation, rather than managerial one, as the primary meaning of the word.

Musk is the chief technical specialist in SpaceX, as he put himself. It's unclear what he does on this role, but his explanations are touching some rather deep details, so at least he looks like having a good understanding of technical aspects of SpaceX systems.
Most people don't realize how limited the palette actually is on NES. The entire gamut is only 54 colors (nominally 64, but there are duplicates and an "unsafe" entry), and any 16x16 block can only have 4 colors. There are some ways to work around this with clever hacks, but it was mostly the artists being clever rather than the programmers.
> The vector drawing hadware is analog and uses a single 8-bit DAC

Even in that day and age isn't a 256x256 grid a little bit coarse? I know it draws smooth vectors between those points, so it isn't a jaggy problem. But there aren't many points to fit objects in.
This is incorrect. The Earth's magnetic field is about 30 microTesla, not 30 Tesla. Also, the flog floating effect (one of my old profs actually did that experiment!) depends upon the field gradient as well as the field strength.

Field strength is not the same as force. The reason why they don't levitate things bigger than frogs with a 16 Tesla field is because bigger things won't fit into the magnet bore, not because 16 T is too weak. One of the techs who worked on one of those serious magnets (at NHMFL) told me that if they put an iron bar in the middle of the bore, it would generate enough force to lift a 747. Of course, that much force would probably break the floor under the magnet, and it's really hard to fit a 747 into the lab.
It doesn't take much experience to point out what others are doing wrong and say what they should be doing. However, it's much harder to pick these things out about yourself and do things right yourself. It's always easier when you're on the outside looking in.
"Can I accept money from investors only on the condition that they get paid only after employees and founders get paid a minimum amount, like $1M each?"

Sure, you can do that, but good luck finding an investor who would be willing to actually give you money under those conditions.

If I were an investor, what incentive would I have to take on this additional risk? There are thousands of founders lining up outside my office who are more than willing to accept my standard terms.
Sounds like a rather weak comparison, as USSR did manage to get a set of impressive results in space - at least as American specialists were characterizing them.

Not sure if SpaceX really has more money than BlueOrigin - that used to be the other way around. Time advantage is clearly on the side of SpaceX though.
In Defense of Gerrymandering: Politics as Usual Is Better Than Bad Math
Yes, half of Europe.

> Twenty eight seconds later, an electrical blackout had cascaded across Europe extending from Poland in the north-east, to the Benelux countries and France in the west, through to Portugal, Spain and Morocco in the south-west, and across to Greece and the Balkans in the south-east.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout

There were even some TV documentaries about it, and in some areas it continued for days.
AFAIK, that fallacy relates to thinking of a rocket as a normal pendulum. It's got nothing to do with inverted pendulums.
Landing a booster was done, e.g., in Delta Clipper program, early 1990's.
Android does it best - you can install non-play-store stuff, but you have to go into a scary menu and fiddle with settings. Better than an are you sure popup.
They aren't going ten times higher, or launching from Houston. They launch from Florida and California, they are building a launch site in Texas, but its not in Houston.

The Falcon 9 1st stage will get over twice as high on some flights. Then height it self isn't a big deal, it's the extra time in free fall speeding up before it hits the atmosphere.

The big difference, is that the Falcon 9 is heading east at 1.7km/s, carrying as much mass as a fully fueled BO rocket when it stages.
Show HN: License-up – It's 2016. Update all outdated licenses from command line
Like what? I'm aware that they were early, but did they accomplish more once the US was landing on the moon?