skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being one-issue fundamentalist is always a bad thing. A sweeping statement "killer whales should not be ..." does not seem convincing.

No one is even trying to put all killer whales in aquarium. Having few of them where humans could watch them is a good thing. Where else would my 5 year old know about these giant creatures, after all he needs to do something for their preservation.

Watching wildlife up and close is a great experience just so we could empathize with their needs. I cared a damn about Polar Bears or Orangutans until I saw them up and close at San Diego zoo. Now I am much more willing to donate money that helps their cause.

Besides if an animal is entertaining for humans I think that is a great evolutionary trait that can help those animals survive. I don't see how else that df*k Panda would have survived on earth.
How InfoSec Security Controls Create Vulnerability
Learning to program cellular memory
I noticed that too, there is definitely a shortage of attention to detail here.
Oceans also have more space than we have on the surface (given its third dimension) and we manage to ruin those pretty badly.
Interesting you think the recent last few year VW's are 'dull', I think they are beautiful (beauty is in the eye of the beholder).

I like the clean lines and unfussy design way more than other cars in their relevant classes (except the Lupo..not sure what happened with that one).
Am I reading this correctly? Amazon essentially built a better integrated version of "The Clapper" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny8-G8EoWOw
8 illustrations about the Startup Culture that are simply beautiful
I feel like the current VW lineup looks like it was made in the 1990s. The new Golf is nice, but my mkIV gti (while bloated and slow) was audi like in its quality. It also spent ever 4th month in the shop but that is largely better now.
Unfortunately, the investment climate these days focuses more towards the latter. "Make something people want" is what they say.

I really do hope Sam's article raises attention more toward the former though. I suspect you'll see more startups coming out of that bucket in the impending winter while the latters' collective refrigerators all run out of Odwalla.
Science article is paywalled, but the paper is on the arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.5955
Yes, but now it's "on the internet". Therefore it can be called Internet of Things.

IoT is an amazing, awesome, innovative and entirely new concept. Just like "The Cloud" was.

/s
My thoughts on AlphaGo
They also have longer-range solutions now and things that use Bluetooth instead of rfid for this. Works from a few feet away. I'm guessing that it's using some combination of Bluetooth MAC + signal strength.
I think they need to pick a different name. 'Alexa' is very easy to trigger with other names, and reliably activates when I am watching any show with a character named 'Alex', 'Alexy', etc.

One side effect I've noticed is that they seem to have tried to account for it, which has made the Echo less responsive to actual requests; a few times I've stood in front of it yelling 'ALEXA' trying to get it to stop and it does not respond.
Sadly that documentary is one sided and what appears to be motivated documentary. We need to hear the other side too.
> and thus don't really care about their conditions in captivity.

Several vigorous campaigns existed to improve the conditions for pigs. Look at England for an example, where changes in English law were voluntarily followed by Danish and Dutch pig farmers so they could compete on welfare standards.

See also "free range" eggs and higher welfare farm standards.

Plenty of people like eating meat but will only buy meat from animals that have higher welfare standards.
Sadly, there has been comparatively few developments in keyboard hardware and input schemes since the 60s.
Yes, it might be very hard to get up at 4:30, or maybe the guy is just lacking sleep. 9:30-4:30 are just 7 hours of sleep (6h45m since he reads for 15 min).

If he'd go to bed at 7:30 maybe "the Blerch" wouldn't be on his back all the time. Maybe the Blerch is actually shouting that sleep depravation is unhealthy and that he really needs an extra hour or two.
Yes, an internet connected device where you can verbally do a great many things is simply a 'better integrated Clapper'.

You sure get it.
Nope - thanks! I'll check these out.
> That's one stance, but do you think it results in a more relevant experience for most people (emphasis on "most) viewing ads when they see products that are more likely to interest them (because of audience data or retargeting data) vs. a generic ad?

They may spend less money, so it is clearly a 'win' for the advertiser and the property to do as much tracking and profiling as they can get away with (and they do).

> And from an advertiser standpoint, if the targeted approach is vastly more profitable than the untargeted approach of how things worked in the early Mad Men days (and it most definitely is), I have to say I can't really blame them for taking that path.

I don't blame them either, but then they should not blame the users for the inevitable backlash.

> I'd be curious if there are any companies out there who position themselves as "ethical advertisers" and do what you outlined in terms of advertising without the privacy tradeoff.

Unfortunately the good are suffering with the bad.

> I'd also be curious how they might fare against competitors who don't take that stance.

They made less money in the short term. But in the longer term there may be some life there, too early to tell.

> Again, people are voting with their wallets, and right now they are saying that they are ok giving up their data in exchange for free content, and that they'll continue buying things from companies who leverage said data to communicate with them.

That's mostly because people have no idea what is in their profiles in the various silos.

It's a bit like getting people to click blindfolded on a EULA and then later to say 'hey, you agreed to this', which in my opinion is simply not fair and taking advantage.
Equity Compensation – Top vs. Bottom 10 Silicon Valley Companies
Nope you really can't that's why RDS, Azure SQL etc. have pretty bad limitations on max instance sizes. The service itself is integrated storage layer (think PostgreSQL + ElasticSearch + Event Bus) that can scale far beyond what is possible with current options.
This might be more amusing:

while true
level = 0
while level <= 100
set all lights to level%
level = level + 1
sleep 5
sleep 120
set all lights to 0%
sleep 1800

The idea is to slowly raise all the lights from 0% to 100%, hoping that because it is gradual it will not wake the person. Then you turn them all suddenly off.

If that succeeds in waking the person, they will wake up in darkness, wondering what the heck woke them up.

More fun with lights: someone at Caltech once modified the wiring of a student's room and the adjacent bathroom so that the light switches in both rooms controlled the lights in both rooms. They they waited in the courtyard that the student's room and the bathroom both overlooked to watch the hilarity that they knew would ensue.

What happened was that the occupant of the room eventually went to bed, turning off his light. Then later someone went to use the bathroom, turning on the bathroom light (and so also the student's light). That woke the student, who got up, turned off the light, and headed back to bed. The guy in the bathroom shouts something, and a few moments later gets his pants under control and goes and turns the light back on and heads back to the stall to resume his business. Meanwhile, bed boy is shouting something and getting up to turn his light back off. What I'm told then happened is that the lights flipped on and off a few more times, with the time between flips getting smaller and smaller, until both guys are just standing at their light switch flipping it repeatedly, before they both go out into the hall to try to figure out what is going on, find each other, and figure it out.
My thing was crystallography. We do have the odd characteristic habit.
The last time I looked into these types of grants was admittedly years ago, but from what I recall, there's extensive reporting and research requirements that you have to fulfill. It seemed like an overly onerous burden compared to the resources available to an early stage startup. Is that accurate? Have things changed?
Pigs are meant to be kept as farm animals. They were selectively domesticated. Same with chickens, sheep, cows etc.
Problem with Orcas is that they are not use to live in captivity. They were just caught in the sea and forced to do tricks. Its same with large wild cats - they have been not selectively chosen over decades to join the human society.
Granted. There aren't many moose in central european cities, which are VW's main market.
This is the most depressing news for human race during my lifetime.

I see this as sign of coming total control, followed by lack of initiative and stagnation of humanity.
I just read it as a bit of defensiveness that slipped in to the opening. "People claim we're not doing real stuff but where's THEIR real stuff huh?" Agree the essay would've been better without it, but at least for me it's easy to skip over.
20 years!?!? OMG I am getting old.
Wow, this is a new DDOS attack vector. Get an ad on broadcast radio saying stuff like "alexa, order more milk", or "okay google, send a text to xxxxx".
Update: I was able to find an arxiv version of the paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.5955v1.pdf

It seems that I wasn't wrong about the context (indeed they focus on solving the full partition function, as opposed to just the ground state energy), but there is some additional information in the paper that is worth sharing.

The first is that their construction relies on a method where (1) the spins used to simulate a target Ising model are a subset of those taken in their universal model based on SAT and (2) that to make a correspondence between the energy levels in the universal mode and the target model one must throw away terms in the universal models partition function with energy larger than some Δ, so that the spectrum of the target model is a subset of the spectrum of the universal model. I think (1) is a neat trick, although maybe not too surprising if you are familiar with, e.g. hidden spin layers in neural network models. With respect to (2) they claim that this allows one to approximate the target model partition function with an error term of size O(exp(-Δ)). I would assume that this means that there can;t be too many states in the full model with with energy greater than Δ, since if they grew exponentially in number this could counteract the exponential damping in contribution in the partition function. Maybe someone who actually read the paper from start to finish can comment?
Do Walmart's 'always low prices' spread to nearby houses?
> I guess then we would have to put some antibacterial in plastics too.

Maybe. It's not like plastic products have a particularly long lifetime anyway, there are plenty of things that degrade them (like sun).

So as long as the bacteria doesn't act super-quickly, I think we'll be ok.
Show HN: Venv2docker – create a docker image from a python virtualenv
Every company doing hard tech should be considering federal funding for early stage R&D. The US gov't has been consistently providing more early stage capital than VC for several decades through the SBIR program.

This is generally good advice, but I'm a grant writer (see http://www.seliger.com if you're curious) and have worked on many SBIRs and STTRs. I'll add that there are downsides as well. One is simple timing: if the appropriate SBIR or STTR funding cycle just concluded for that year, you may have to wait another year to apply. Then another 1 – 3 months for a decision. Then longer for final authorization of the budget. The other day I talked to a guy whose best potential SBIR source had had a deadline the month prior.

Second, Phase 1 grants can just be too small for the amount of effort that goes into them.

Third, they don't come with the advice / community / expertise of good VCs.

Fourth, they take a lot of effort to prepare, and for first-time grant writers they can be quite hard. The alternative is to hire someone like my firm. While I'm biased towards doing that for obvious reasons, we also cost money.

While I don't want to talk anyone out of applying, I do want to note that the downsides are considerable too.

As a side note, I used to submit some SBIR and STTR RFPs to Hacker News (search for "seliger" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nsf.gov), but I stopped after a while because no one upvotes the submissions.
It's nice to be reminded how differently people look at the world, to me someone doing great things at a young age is someone doing great things, jealously doesn't even cross my mind.

If you compare yourself to everyone else there are going to be lots of people 'ahead' of you all the time (to quote a well known film 'there can be only one'), seems like a waste of time to be concerned with how other people are doing.

I ride in a bicycle club, I'm probably one of the slowest riders there but I don't care since the only performance I care about is me from a month ago.
Author here. I've been working on this for the past few days and would love to get some feedback on it. Some caveats: it's a pretty young script, has only been tested in bash, and only on ubuntu 15.10 and debian jessie. If it works on any other platform it's an accident. Any suggestions or feedback will be appreciated, good or bad :).
True, much needed for a full understanding. Though revelations like this raise suspicion about nefarious activity and whether the debate will be even: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/seaworld-admits-it-sent-spi...
GM has been doing great stuff. The Tesla Model 3 is already here; it's the Chevy Volt.
Those comments have merit. Brushing comments off because you look down your nose at the choices or priorities of others ought to be called out. Besides, the bit about "people not building anything at all themselves" is at best a non sequitur distraction that lowers the writing quality of the post. There's no defending it.
No, it's not.

The sea has extractable uranium in it already, and the volume of water is pretty much a literal drop in the ocean.
If you like this game, you might also like Modded Minecraft. Many technical mods strongly associate with developers who love to tinker on absurdly complex physical systems. I've found the process to be a nice change of pace in the evenings.

You might also like our Minecraft Modpack, Resonant Rise. You can grab it on the ATLauncher (just search for ATLauncher). It's designed around complex and interesting engineering challenges.

There's a similarly REALLY cool Minecraft mod on the scene for Minecraft 1.8 called "Psi" that you can try (available here: http://psi.vazkii.us/). It lets you use a visual dataflow language and trigonometry to create "magic spells" that are very technical in nature. It's a very fun exercise, and it's neat to write a program (with almost NO flow control!) that does things like dig a tunnel or build a bridge or throw zombies skyward, all by magic.
Intel Mulls Sale of $1B Venture Capital Portfolio
"and that's a valid point in a country where blacks, for example, are much more likely to receive the death penalty for committing the same offences."

I would really like to see these statistics from a legitimate source, because I'm not sure where you are even getting it.

My issue is that the 'black lives matter' cause has merely become a thinly disguised fascist group aimed at bullying and destroying anyone that disagrees with them.

"Hands up, don't shoot" never happened. This was proven, yet it didn't stop the hashtag warriors from screaming it at everybody and news anchors on networks from CNN standing behind it (after it was proven false).

Facts no longer matter. It's all about the narrative that everyone is racist against blacks, no matter what actually happened.

All of these protests have added body cams to many police forces. Most people are now silent about it. I have seen case after case where a cop is accused of 'racism' and the body cam shows otherwise.

The US is probably the least racist country in the world when it comes to minorities. Try to get a job in Asia, Europe, or Africa. You will quickly see the difference.

In most countries outside the US, you are required to send them a picture and they can not hire you for pretty much any reason.

Instead of focusing on being a victim, the minorities in the US should focus on education and keeping families in tact. It's really the only path to success. The Irish, Italians, and Chinese were all treated like slaves in this country and were able to overcome this through education and a strong family structure.

I've worked at many different companies and I've never seen racism in terms of hiring (although I'm sure it happens in a small amount of cases). Businesses just want someone that can do the job. If a person isn't getting past the hiring manager, it's most likely because they don't have the required skill set.

Many people like me, are angry and frustrated because the alleged victims have now become the bullies. I wish we could have true equality, where race truly doesn't matter, but I think I'm asking for too much.

It's funny how true equality is seen as a bad thing. I am now part of the counter-culture, which means I don't want aggressive bullies being allowed to control the speech and actions of me or others.

I don't want our society to continue along this broken and misguided path and it's why many educated people are voting for Trump.
There are three options for trigger words. There's Alexa, Amazon, and Echo.

We have ours set to Alexa (default) and when the neighbor girl comes over (Alexis) the Echo frequently wakes during conversations.
So, with No SSH - how do you debug that one-off problem that is only on machine abc12? I'm not talking about mutating, I'm talking about attaching gdb to the process while it's handling requests. I'm talking about collecting CPU profiling information from production. Stuff like that.
I call massive bullshit until I see it. StarCraft was one of my favorite games ever due to good design of course but also all skills required to be good at it. There's literally so many ways to approach an AI with humans stomping them in hilarious ways basically every time.

They'd benefit best by categorizing attack strategies, counter strategies, aspects/units on map, and so on. The DeepMind system would do all that in a way that converts raw data into small, actionable information. Traditional methods could do pathfinding, buildup, time-limited decisions, micro-ing, and so on. A hybrid system seems best here.

They're not just going to throw DeepMind at it and beat good humans. We'll find its patterns, then outsmart it. Especially the pro's.

Competitions with bots and humans below:

http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~cdavid/starcraftaicomp/report...

Great survey of the problem domain and various techniques here:

http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~cdavid/pdf/starcraft_survey.p...

EDIT to add:

I suggest a title change along the lines of "DeepMind will try to beat StarCraft next." That's more accurate in terms of both reality and original article.
> What makes you think it's a problem with social awkwardness.

I'm using "social awkwardness" (perhaps incorrectly) as an antonym of charisma. If things are biased in favor of charismatic people, then presumably they're biased against uncharismatic people.

> I'm sure I'm not the only one dissuaded by the requirement to post a video. Phone call, skype, in-person, morse code would be better.

You're probably not the only one, but personally, a phone or Skype call causes me more social anxiety since I'm on the spot and have less control over the presentation. So, yes, a video biases towards people who are comfortable on camera, just as a phone call biases towards people who are comfortable on the phone.

You're thinking of the problem only from your own perspective. Can you imagine difference in logistics between watching 1,000 one-minute videos versus organizing 1,000 one-minute Skype calls?

>> The general heuristic these days is to follow charisma ... It's the exact impression I got from YC after that process.

> I'm not exactly saying that they're actively looking for charismatic people.

Ok.
I support the collision risk management system for a few of the Earth observation satellites at NASA. Pollution of low Earth orbit is a big deal. There are thousands of individual objects being tracked up there. Some of them are satellites that have exceeded their lifespan, some of them are parts of later stage boosters, and some are debris from previous collisions.

When a satellite nears the end of its life expectancy, US law requires that the remainder of the propellant be used to decelerate it so it disintegrates in the atmosphere over the ocean. Presumably European and Asian space agencies have similar rules. These rules didn't used to exist, and there's stuff that's been up for decades.

Yes, these objects are very far apart, but they are moving very fast, and there are surprisingly many of them. Operational satellites are extremely valuable, and if we anticipate anywhere close to a 1 in 1000 chance that one of these objects will collide with one of our satellites, we will burn some of the irreplaceable propellant to avoid it.
They do it for most pets now too. They're useful for identifying runaway pets wherever they end up, and for stuff like https://www.sureflap.com/en-us . I have a few of the sureflap doors and they work well for keeping my cats on their own diets (controlling access to a combination of crates + auto-feeders).

It's the same (exact?) thing as far as I'm aware; rice-sized glass bit with a tiny RFID chip inside.
> Mincer said: "I don't see how microbes degrading plastics is any better than putting plastic bottles in a recycling bin so they can be melted down to make new ones."

How it's better is that recycling is really just downcycling. Recycled plastics are of worse quality and are put to inferior uses. Plastic bottles that are recycled are not only melted but also shredded. Over multiple recyclings, the shredding reduces the molecular length and therefore qualities like tensile strength. The mixing of different plastics also degrades quality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downcycling

So then this bacterial approach provides a potential exit path for plastic that has been recycled too many times to be of any decent use any more.

It sounds like these particular bacteria do a better job of breaking down plastic than what happens to "biodegradable" plastic when it is left out in the elements namely turning into "plastic dust" that hangs around.
I've been thinking of changing it to Echo -- using 'Amazon' just feels too corporatey.
It doesn't help that Scala takes a lax attitude towards functional principles whenever it's convenient -- for instance, you can map over a set, and certain maps will get you a different type back. Haskell it's not. It's more like a terse Java with optional types and pure functions added on.
Once Teslas are self-driving, Uber is a mere app. At that point, Uber will die. Uber needs to become Tesla, before Tesla becomes Uber.
Isn't ironic that all this great engineering advances (they're influencing Intel) are all based on running more efficiently the much hated PHP?

In the future, maybe the first step to make a highly scalable green web-based startup is to choose PHP to write your code. ;)
Speaking roughly, spin glasses exist because nature itself can't solve the minimization problem. Here's a book on the topic: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9917.html
OK, that does look like a lot less trivial a result than the article made it look like. :-)
Prove this.

Hell, don't worry about proving it. Just define "sentient" in a objective, empirically measurable way.
A jetta would barely fit into my garage. If a "regular" pickup can swallow a jetta does that mean I can expect a "large" pickup to be bigger than my entire 5 bedroom house?