skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you can email me if you'd like my thoughts on any subject I've written about.

-

EDIT: in reply to your question about why I wouldn't answer here, here is an email I've received recently on another subject I've posted about:

"It's a bit annoying when the HN crowd take to downvoting rather than taking the time to understand your point of view; I've been on the receiving end of that more than a few times and I know just how frustrating it can be. My karma would probably be a couple of thousand points higher if I'd followed your strategy of taking a thread to email instead of just carrying on trying to explain my point. You're more sensible than me."

if you want an answer you can put some form of contact into your profile and I'll answer you, or you can write me.

I have nothing to add to this thread here. My two non-comments (this one and grandparent comment), already are at -4 and -4. I wish I could delete them, but can't since they have replies.
KiwiSDR: BeagleBone Software-Defined Radio (SDR) with GPS
Realtime 3D modeling
Shouldn't this be integrated into compilers? Why would you ever not want this kind of info?
Which in the end appeared to be a backlash of being diagnosed with HIV, so taking your anecdote to its full conclusion the DOJ is sickened with a terminal illness they haven't come to terms with dealing with.
Rich also said, I think we're in this world I'd like to call Guard Rail Programming... 'I can make change because I have tests!' Who does that? Who drives their car around, banging against the guard rails? Do the guard rails help you get to where you want to go?"

http://patrick.lioi.net/2011/11/23/guard-rail-programming/

TDD has always seemed to me to be another sketchy, cult-like following in the Agile ecosystem. I've never seen anybody be productive at it, even if they did find some kind of solution to a problem long after they would have doing normal development.

But what do I know, I'm not even a fan of unit tests. I'd rather go to the real-deal and run some acceptance/integration test at 2 in the morning.
Huh? It is my understanding that the current understanding is that quantum computers cannot compute anything that ordinary computers can. They can just compute certain things faster.

A quantum computer can be simulated on a normal computer, just inefficiently.
I disagree with the parent comment's assumption that such data would necessarily be inaccurate. I found it to be quite accurate. I know that I and most of my immediate peers entered our salary data into the spreadsheet, and all of us did so accurately. There were detailed instructions telling you which internal website to go to to find out your compensation information, and the instructions said which values from that to fill into the spreadsheet.
Have you read the USB specs recently? They're publicly available here:

http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/

Just making a standards compliant implementation takes a huge quantity of code. And with a standard this complex people inevitably get it wrong, so you'll need workarounds for all the broken devices too.
Eh, this may be a giant waste.

Its much much more about talent location in these software fields then spending money.

Something like only one out of 50,000 people can make any meaningful contribution to this field. And the revolutionary's, add a 0 to that number.
Agreed, but writing tests isn't necessarily the same as TDD.
True. At first glance, I didn't think that part of the data was relevant to me, but I found myself digging into companies that I had experience with and their h1/green card ratios and how many h1 were in place. There are definite cultural differences between companies that seem to come through in the numbers. I did find a few that have their numbers somewhat hidden - with different company names that you wouldn't search as an outsider.

Thanks for putting that data together. It certainly was eye opening, and as a bit of a numbers junkie myself I appreciate having the raw data presented instead of just summary information. (well, sort of raw. much more raw than others I've found and not spammy at all)
Machine Learning Algorithm Identifies Tweets Sent Under the Influence of Alcohol
Mechanically, it will last until all the first generation Uber driver cars give out. I very much doubt many drivers are properly accounting for wear and tear on their vehicles and still make minimum wage.
I worked for Adobe India for ~2 years. The experience varies with projects/teams. I know a lot of people who were content with the work, and also some (this includes me - mostly because of the project) who weren't. The quality of peers is very good. Reputation-wise its a highly respected company in the industry. It would be a good idea to find out more about the project you'd be working on.
Biological sex isn't binary either, there are far more configurations than just XX and XY.
You seem to have intense negativity towards what you label "worthless fields." What is your definition of a non-worthless field? Not to mention, a lot of graduates in those fields end up working in other fields anyway (I've met a good amount of tech recruiters who were polisci or communications majors on LinkedIn). That seems to contradict your point of considering these people as inherently unreliable and unemployable.
Huh. I've seen TDD help people improve their design skills. It certainly has helped me.

It forces a very short feedback loop between acts of design and experiencing the design as a consumer. That gives people immediate feedback on bad design choices, giving them opportunities to see the problems they're creating.

It also forces people to think immediately about the consumer perspective of a design rather than the implementation perspective. Instead of mentally being inside the objects and methods they're building, they have to start thinking about them from the outside.

I agree it's not a substitute for getting up and going to a whiteboard. But, then, going to a whiteboard is not a substitute for TDD. They're mainly working at different levels of design; when I'm at a whiteboard we're generally talking about the relationship of relatively large pieces of a system. Whereas during TDD you're mainly confronting the fine details of design.
I've been working on a web application for the past year or so. Many of the features are extremely valuable, but also hard to understand intuitively.

I started adding little animations with the purpose of "nudging" the user to understand the interface without having to think as hard. Just simple stuff like when toggling a button state, flipping it like a card so the user's intuitive mind more easily comprehends the state change.

I used slower animations in 0.4s range, but I think after reading these comments, I'll switch a lot of stuff to the faster 0.2s. It sounds like animations that are too slow are frustrating people.

If anyone is thinking of adding animations to a web app for the first time: I found them fairly easy to implement just using CSS. (a little bit of JavaScript here and there)

This is a demo if anyone is curious: https://demo.enterprisejazz.com
I used to think this but now I honestly think that "pleasing" animations (fades, transitions) improve my mood. Also, sometimes the buttons are not very descriptive (like 3 different colored dots) so the animation can be helpful by showing you what happened with an animation.
The equations say we're better off overall, but not what to do with the marginalized citizens. It's not surprising that they are both vocal and talked about in the NYT.

Imagine you get laid off and the rest of your former co-workers all got raises that together equal more than your former salary. Everyone is better off, but how does that help you feed your family?
you mean it's power efficient? Consider that it takes the brain, let's say, ~5 years to learn the stuff that a visual NN learns in days.
I would like to downvote the post for this sentence:

>Do you think an individual person at Facebook did that to you for a laugh?

Nowhere in the post that sentence was responding to did the author state or imply that Facebook intentionally showed the author pictures of their dead friend or ex-girlfriend; yet, the responder assumed the author believes that and then went on a diatribe against the author based on their poor assumption.
Use anything as an input device, even bananas
I guess your candidate was ok with volunteering, but it seems like that would very likely violate tax and/or labor laws or IRS regulations.
14 Things Women Couldn't Do 100 Years Ago
As many others have stated in these comments, free trade doctrine makes the assumption that the gains from said trade will be redistributed to the losers (if we did this properly there would be far, far less opposition to the system.) That we do not actually do very much (our "Trade Adjustment Assistance" programs are incredibly weak and stingy) is probably well known. What's less appreciated is that some to much of what we have doesn't even meet the Ricardian definition of Free Trade.

"Few economists have bothered to think about the issue of offshoring, preferring to dismiss concerns about it as manifestations of the old protectionist fallacy. They learned in graduate school that free trade is always mutually beneficial and ceased to think when they passed their exams. This is especially true of “free market economists” who believe that economic freedom, which they identify with the freedom of capital, is always good. Thus, most economists mistakenly believe that offshoring is protected under the authority of free trade doctrine.

However, free trade doctrine is based on the assumption that domestic capital seeks its comparative advantage in its home economy, specializing where its comparative advantage is best and, thereby, increasing the general welfare in the home economy. David Ricardo, who explicated the case for free trade, rules out an economy’s capital seeking absolute advantage abroad instead of comparative advantage at home.

...offshoring, or the pursuit of absolute advantage, breaks the connection between the profit motive and the general welfare. The beneficiaries of offshoring are the corporations’ shareholders and top executives and the foreign country, the GDP of which rises when its labor is substituted for the corporations’ home labor. Every time a corporation offshores its production, it converts domestic GDP into imports. The home economy loses GDP to the foreign country which gains it." - Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.
History repeats itself. Did South Korea learn anything from Japan?

To create AGI you need more than money.
Glad the newspaper photographers figured out how to cooperate with Tesla instead of trespassing and assaulting[1] them.

[1] http://www.rgj.com/story/news/2015/10/29/misdemeanor-charges...
Actually, I think you do. Maybe the app crashed without saving your data. Maybe you hit a button or pressed a key by accident without realizing what it did, and now all your precious work seems to be gone and you don’t know where it went or why.

Not all feedback is automatically bad.

The trick is to get rid of animations that force the user to wait for them (e.g. most “opening” animations are in this category; I do not want to wait for something to finish sliding open before I can use it, I want items to appear instantly).
Can you link those books?
I actually had a version using force-directed layout very similar to yours, took me a while to decide on this version!

Each colour is a verse, fading through the spectrum.

An unfilled arrowhead shows a transition between words in a line of a verse, a filled arrowhead shows a transition between lines.
I'm getting a MySQL connection PHP exception, which includes most of the database password... You probably want to change it
Now that the Andrews case is concluded, I wonder if Hogan's team will be able to cite it at the inevitable appeal.
Xdg-app 0.5.0 released
Well, Moore's law is ending within 10 years (I'm fairly sure that you can't have a transistor smaller than an atom), so, I'm not sure why I would expect that computational power would continue to grow exponentially.
how about some in-database spelling auto-correction:

http://blog.databasepatterns.com/2014/08/postgresql-spelling...
He's probably not coming back :-(
Nah, the stock goes up enough that they say you got a 10% raise. Meanwhile the money you actually get in your pocket has dropped by more than 10%.

Fair enough I guess, but I am not a fan.
They're different languages with different design goals, different corporate backers, and different communities. Why should they attract the same projects or developers?
Why the worry? It is just that the private equity markets have developed well enough to make IPOs unnecessary for the vast majority of even very successful companies. Why IPO if billion (ok, at least centimillion) dollar VC rounds became the norm?

Only the hugest successful startups may find private markets too constraining in this environment.
TDD is just a tool, not a religion. If the tool works for you, use it. If not, don't. I would encourage people to give it an honest try and see if they find it valuable.
Why Innovation Requires Economic Freedom
Ironically it says "The connection was reset".
Elo is a comparative system, so your rating is based on your performance against others with regard to their ratings. It's not surprising that, even though it has only played for a short time, AlphaGo is already rated that high given it mopped the floor 4-1 with one of the best players who has ever lived. Expect it to be rated 1st soon, if that's the goal of the team behind it.
I believe MusixMatch has timing data (it's what the Shazam karaoke mode uses), however I'm unsure if the free API allows access to it. Worth a look though. https://developer.musixmatch.com
Isn't that still assuming that the information that pkg provides is generally trustworthy?

I assume their consideration is that the list might not be trustworthy, so knee jerk updating based on a potentially faulty list is itself a vulnerability. Would a 24h delayed updated list of security updates be worse than an incorrect one?
There are people who go around driving their car into guardrails. They are the people who build cars. Because if you don't test failure modes, you don't know that your product performs to spec under them.
If it's an unfamiliar system, it may not be clear where it has been minimized. I can spare 0.2 seconds in exchange for a quick reminder of how to "unminimize" it.
Know Thy Complexities
The Mattering Instinct
Depends on what one means by intelligence. People with cerebellectomy have difficulty with balance, but it doesn't really interfere with their general intelligence or their sensory experience.

I think the cerebellum is no more or less efficient than other areas, and I don't know if "computationally intensive" is the right way to look at it. The cerebellum really is similar to GPUs. GPUs use a lot of silicon to do constrained, repetitive tasks efficiently, but they don't support general processing models outside their narrow domain.

It's hard to compare with cephalopods, though they're very interesting, because their neural architecture is so radically different from ours. For starters, ganglia in their arms allow each arm a certain measure of independent activity. E.g., arms that get severed can try to "feed" the mouth for up to an hour after detachment.
This is really cool.
However adoption will be a really challenging issue. When you end up having to upgrade your pos to print these qr codes (with little incentive) you could just end up switching to a square-esque system instead.

I think the Json format is cool. Qr codes as a representation should be one way of sharing it.
In that case the correct solution is fixing the app so it doesn't crash, and fixing the input device so it doesn't generate spurious inputs. The Unix style of silence on success is the best feedback, because it means I can mentally queue multiple actions without being interrupted.
> Much like slaves, stress for modern humans is constant and never ending.

> While the constant amount of stress, the feelings of helplessness, lack of balance, etc, simply persist if not increase.

I think you are projecting. If you have internet access and the depth of knowledge of most people that read HN, then you have the tools to be self-sustaining and carefree. All you've said is you personally have hobbies you find relaxing but are unhappy with niches you've found for spending the rest of your time.
I've used TDD both at my paying job and as part of some kinds of exploration. I agree it's more challenging in both places.

The place where I won't use it is when I'm writing throwaway code. If I'm really being exploratory, then I just go write garbage. And when I've done enough exploration to start writing real production code, I'll start fresh with TDD.

I've tried it the other way, where I retrofit tests to existing experimental code. But because the experimental code was to help me learn something, it generally ends up being poorly designed. It's only once I understand the big picture that I know the write way to express my understanding in code. At first I didn't like throwing out the experimental code, but now I prefer it in that it frees me to be entirely experimental, rather than writing something that's half experiment, half production grade.
Imagine waking up every morning with 50 new arxiv papers uploaded that night. You panic and quickly scan through the papers - any of them could be very related to your research, or scoop your latest idea, or have good ideas you can use in your own work. Arxiv makes no attempts to filter these for you, so it's up to you to carefully scan through this unlabeled list of paper titles. You eventually find 3 papers that you have to read and put them on your list. You manage to read 1 that day. Next day you wake up and 50 new papers are up. You iterate for a few weeks and suddenly you have a toread list of 20 papers and 100 new arxiv papers just came in that evening. That's what's currently happening in research at least in deep learning (but I imagine more widely too), especially around big conference deadlines, and that's what I label "things seriously getting out of hand".

That's a first use case. The second way things are out of hand is that you remember this paper from 3 years ago that was very related to this one, but can't remember it's name anymore. Here you can sort by similarity to any paper, and usually these papers come up on top of the sorted list. This is also useful for finding related work. Another use case is a peace of mind that you somehow did not miss some papers that you definitely should know about.

Google Scholar is supposed to have similar features: it emails you papers it thinks you would be interested in and can in principle show similar papers. I don't know what they do internally but these features are quite terrible and low quality in my own experience compared to what I get here. More generally the amount of innovation in Google Scholar over the last few years is sadly either zero or negative (but overall I still get nightmares about what would happen to academia if Google pulled a Google Reader with Scholar). For arxiv-sanity it's tfidf vectors of bigrams from full text of each paper and I do L2 lookups for similarity ranking and train personalized SVMs for people for recommendations. The results are, at least for me, significantly better.
The 'go vet' command has a -shadow flag to check for this. And as the author points out, editors can point it out as well.

It definitely isn't ideal, but it can be dealt with. I believe Rob Pike had called out that the number of ways you can do variable assignment/declaration is something he disliked, but it's impossible to change in Go 1 at this point.
BOOM! We're thinking along the same lines. Plus, people in safety-critical industries, CompSci, and Eiffel's customer base took up Design-by-Contract or strong specifications for modules with positive results every time I saw it. They all saw the benefits. This became true with more complex code bases. So, stuff like you describe is close to the sweet spot some of us are hoping to find between hardcore, specialist stuff and quick-and-easy, lightweight stuff to knock out most pervasive issues in interfaces and implementations.

Note: Far as interfaces, there's been recent work on contracts for passage of time (i.e. ordering of events). So, even temporal considerations might be specified this way in a tool like Eiffel, SPARK, or Java/C# in future.
Top comment on Schneier[1] right now:

The Israeli Atena company, part of the MER-Group and headed by the ex Mossad Chief S. Shavit, won a contract with the Israeli Tax Authorities to mine freely available data from social, forum and P2P sales sites, as well as from financial and investor sites, to extract information to be cross correlated with the authorities' files held on tax-payers - with the aim to discover cheaters.
[...]

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/friday_squid_...
Thanks, I'll spin a VM with it.

Indeed some rebranding for slackware may be a good idea since its reputation suffers from misconceptions and outdated irrelevant truths.
Business people and financiers exist to extract value from the people doing the actual work. That is the entire purpose of the position. They literally sit around most days devising new or better ways of extracting more value.

We should, therefore, not be surprised when the structure of organizations in their control reflect that reality.
It's only an unfamiliar system once. I'll accept animations as a tutorial mode if they can be turned off when they're no longer useful. I won't accept an additional 200ms of unnecessary latency every time. That's more that enough to feel like an interruption, so the harm as far more than the cumulative time wasted.
I think the compatibility of those statements hinges on the difference between an idea in the sense of something you could transfer in an elevator, and an idea in the sense of the culmination of an entire viewpoint on a topic, along with the mind(s) that developed that viewpoint.
If the robots are to work around or with people their movements are important. People are very good at predicting and understanding each other's behaviour, which is useful for safety and coordination. This may be secondary to just getting around but it's a serious consideration and area of research in interactive robots.
That minimum exists in SF, which is not a new market. Source: my last Uber driver.
The fact that pkg isn't least-privileged in its operations sucks, but the idea that this somehow makes the contents of a cryptographically signed vulnerability list, fetched via SSL with chain-of-trust verification "untrustworthy" is nonsensical.
Thanks! Yes, I'll be interested to see how Toyota goes. Although many people have taken the TPS lessons and applied them in software, Toyota itself is not one of those companies. (Indeed, their software appears to be terrible. [1]) That makes me think that the visionary leadership that created TPS is long gone, and that they are coasting. But yes, what they're coasting on has a continuous improvement component, so it could be that an advantage is a permanent part of the culture.

[1] http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende...
Book review: become a better learner by discovering “How Learning Works”