skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know if is because the author is trying to be accessible, or genuinely doesn't understand AI but the writing eregiously understates the difficulty of human level machines.

If I had to summarize what the article said: "Google tried these robots but are selling them because it turns out to be hard to make robots that are as capable as humans." Which is like saying "it turns out that making humans immortal is really hard."

I doubt that is why Google is selling BD. My guess is that it was a combination of things: BD was a cost center with no commercialization roadmap, someone on the board got spooked about stupid AI risks, with the alphago wins it might start looking too scary for the public.

I think it was a terrible idea for Google, but is great for the robotics world as the behemoth is scaling back totally taking over the world.
You still never answered the question. What languages does a great programmer write in? All I've heard is what would exclude someone.
A lot of people here jump on the robo-taxi idea whenever the topic of autonomous vehicles come up. I think it's fair to say that most of the people deeply familiar with the issues peg that as being decades out. On the other hand, we seem to be very close to very good assistive driving systems and pretty close to (at least the potential to) turn over control to those systems under at least certain types of highway driving.

That's actually a very desirable thing given the number of highway accidents caused by driver fatigue and inattentively plowing into the car ahead. It just doesn't lead to all the visions of cars-on-demand etc. that get people all excited.
I'm in New York, where the SWE landscape is a combination of traditional big tech companies and finance companies. The latter will pay you a lot, but at the cost of working you to death for it. Finance is not a good field for anyone who wants a life outside of work. The tech companies seem to do much better with work/life balance.
>Very US centric.

Well, it WAS made from Americans, and for US use first and foremost.

>Not everyone expresses wages in amount/year.

But everyone knows how to multiply, e.g. by 12.

The currency field might be legit (through extra work for no benefit: it's easy to convert to USD, and wages aren't really comparable between countries anyway, as they depend on the cost of living and national economy).
The shuttle was faster than mach 2 (and accelerating) at time of impact - I presume the foam had decelerated significantly between breaking off and hitting the wing. I suppose you could say the shuttle hit the foam rather than the other way round.

http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-disasters/columbia-...
Ah yes. missed the 'a' :)

Though option 2 in your list would have been a concise and good enough title.
Is losing your marriage an acceptable risk to try an autism cure?
15 years "senior" developer here. £900/day at a bank with little stress, and 9-5 hours. I've been a contractor for ten years and built up a lot of contacts, but some of my gigs I have gotten through recruiters and I'd recommend just applying for contracting positions. The hardest part when starting out contracting is getting past the recruiter (who just want to match your skills to the letter of the job specification).
> strikes with so little warning: a system transitions from entirely fine to one that is entirely (and mysteriously!) non-functional in a single transaction

that's half true.

After vacuum_freeze_table_age postgres will automatically start freeze-only autovacuum processes with very low i/o priority. Unless you have tweaked that value, it's set to 150M which is way below the 2^32 hard failure point.

From then on, postgres will also start warning you about this in the log file.

If you ignore this, once you're at 2^32-10M transactions, every single query to the database will yield a WARNING including a nice countdown that will count down how many transaction can still be processed before armageddon.

Only if you also ignore these, you will eventually run into the problem.

So while I agree that it's a very real problem, I really don't agree that it's a problem which strikes with "little warning". Postgres is very much yelling at you as it starts panicking.
"...but full autonomy is far away. Marc Raibert, the founder of Boston Dynamics, said as much in an interview with IEEE Spectrum in February, when he acknowledged that in the videos, a human steered the robot via radio during its outside strolls."

This seems kinda sketchy to me. It's possible we'll fall into a Robotics Winter, similar to the AI Winter due to these over-inflated claims of advancement.
Personally I prefer wxwindows, which doesn't need upgrading because it just works, but people keep telling me to use qt (which requires a commercial license) and to keep upgrading it too. So dunno who is right.
"Google’s decision to try to shed its Boston Dynamics robotics group highlights a fundamental research problem: software is far easier to develop and test than hardware. "

This is an interesting statement, because I assumed that it was the software that ran the robots that was hard to get right.
This looks outstanding, thanks for the link.
The one you made seems completely focused on foreign workers. What am I missing? At first glance it does not appear to be of any relevance to me.

Also, and this is a usability complaint, but when I'm searching for companies all of the search results are coming up in all lowercase. This is not a good user experience. You should style the companies using the same case that they themselves do. The use of "llc" is particularly bad, as is completely lowercasing companies whose names are acronyms, e.g. "ibm". See this list for what I mean: http://data.jobsintech.io/companies
The more cynical among us would say that you're exactly right. Many designers have big egos, religious perspectives on what designs are "right" or "clean," and suffer from extreme cases of NIH syndrome. These types of articles are resume portfolios for many of them.

Next Steps
Ready to learn how to create these beautiful animations? Check out my blog and Motion Design course at The Kinetic UI.
Yup. After Jalopnik pushed photos of ISIS burning someone alive into my RSS feed with no content warning, I was done and removed every Gawker property I followed. One, it had nothing to do with cars, and two, at least give me some warning before seeing something like that.

Then they outed Conde Nast's CFO, which was a pretty terrible thing to do all around.

Frankly, I've found much of their content to be really inferior quality compared to other sites that are less interested in being first to post. At least the sites I followed I was able to replace with better, less sensational sources.
please don't be an AI. you seem to be a BSD version of Skynet.
It's a useful criticism.

In the UK current best practice (although it's still changing) would be to have two questions: one asking about gender identity and another asking about gender reassignment.

Someone born as male who identifies as female should need to tick "other", they should be able to tick "female".
I guess not very much if Redox will support open hardware.

http://www.xda-developers.com/risc-v-cores-and-why-they-matt...

http://hackaday.com/2014/08/19/open-source-gpu-released/

http://www.openfpga.org

http://hackaday.com/2014/08/19/open-source-gpu-released/

http://open-ethernet.com

Some compelling projects (GPU) failed for lack of interest. The concepts behind those projects did not fail because most of the projects were isolated. The best time for open hardware is yet to come. Redox could accelerate that.
I was reading this:

http://www.redox-os.org/book/book/design/urls_schemes_resour...

and I really got interested in the "everything is a URL" idea.
But then I noticed that the most important parts of this text were missing :/

Perhaps somebody can clarify here.
> The animation isn't making the user think the app is faster...

I disagree. The right hand animation, sure, but if I saw the middle animation, I don't think I'd register the latency at all. In fact I think I might misinterpret and get irritated that my time was being wasted with an unnecessary animation.

Not necessarily better, but I would have been distracted from the load time.
thanks great feedback it has been updated.
6 Strategies for Finding Truly Disruptive Solutions
I know plenty of programmers from those countries in the UK, and they will be happy with a lower salary in their first year, but as soon as they realise that everyone else is being paid much more they leave and demand the same salaries.
(which we can assume are evenly distributed among salaries).

Why would you assume that? To me it seems the opposite, that they wouldn't be evenly distributed.
I am constantly amazed at how people will find a way to fly to Mars in a bucket just so they don't have to learn how to operate a rocket :)
>I can much more readily leverage my intellectual and social capital if I have cash in hand and that will almost certainly result in a better outcome at retirement.

I doubt it. Would you have predicted the rise of HelloFresh, Snapchat, Uber, 20 years ago? Really doubt it.

Besides, not all people in the world (read: everyone but you) is this "smart", especially about delayed gratification. Hell! I recently wrote a small paper and I found some striking results that almost 40% of Americans start saving for their pensions after 40! That is way way way too late. I studied actuarial sciences and around 80% of your final retirement savings is due to accrued interest. It's huge.
Entertainment news. Yeah I personally do not care. But Hulk has fans. And always boast of his sexual prowess, uses the media to sell his image etc.

Hence news interest in that area. It's distasteful but I prefer the 1A protect as much as possible before the govt or courts tries to narrow it down.
Python Tutorial: How to launch rapidly a REST API with Bottle.py
I remember him, and his goals. (Guy Fawkes may not have been the best example.)
I'll buy a printer soon. I spend way too much time in front of screens.
I looked up the quote: "Raibert said that for the outdoor scenes, a human provides general steering via radio while the robot uses its stereo and LIDAR sensors to adjust to terrain variations. ATLAS also does its own balance and motion control. "

This kind of navigation level steering is an easy problem compared to stable walking over rough terrain and recovery from kicks and shoves.
the site does not have search so maybe you are referring to a different one?
I wonder why they decided to write their own coreutils instead of using https://github.com/uutils/coreutils
Actually, they can be really small... http://kolibrios.org/
"X is hard" is the new Considered Harmful. The newest thought-terminating cliché.
If you are interested in feedback, Projbook might make a good "Show HN".

Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
Legal foreign workers are required by law to have the same salary than U.S. workers so it's relevant.

>I'm searching for companies all of the search results are coming up in all lowercase. This is not a good user experience. You should style the companies using the same case that they themselves do.

The data come from government records and it's all in uppercase.
This. Another article that was more in depth said that the other robotics companies Google bought were being integrated into other divisions. Boston Dynamics is the only one being sold off. For whatever reasons they didn't mesh well with the rest of Google.
Anonymous claims to leak Trump ’s personal info under #OpWhiteRose
Upvotes and downvotes aren't about burying/promoting content. They're about maintaining a certain baseline of quality.

Talking about downvotes is flat out boring and it adds nothing to the conversation. Therefore, I'm disengaging from this conversation and strongly encourage you to do the same.
please dont override default scrolling behaviour, the site is unusable
Ask HN: Inspiring software engineering carriers
Often times, I wonder about the people behind the greatest software in this world. I am not talking managers here, just programmers who actually get their hands "dirty" and build the stuff.

How did they come up with their ideas / solutions?

Did they study any specific topics?

How do they work? How do they make the most out of the limited amount of hours a day?

Without digging too deep into their private life, what kind of background do they have? What kind of personality?

At what companies did they start their careers?

Is there anything they have in common?

What makes them unique?

I am not expecting answers to all the questions, I am just genuinely curious about the brightest minds in the software engineering field and to understand how they got to write software that humanity needs and relies on.
Let's add another layer of complexity, this will solve everything!
There's a search bar in the header in the upper right corner on every single page ...
The book has steps, but I think it runs through qemu
Yes... that's what x'es are for.
Maybe, but the videos (and surrounding media) were presented in a way which implied the robot was autonomous, finding it's own path through the terrain.

It may not be intentionally misleading, but still misleading.
Yes indeed.

* There's the Unixy "x" suffix

* Iron turning to rust is a redox reaction

* Redo means "do again (differently)"

* Redox is an almost-homophone with redux meaning "revived"
For whatever is worth, animated UI has been a thing in window managers forever, and I've never had a good experience with it. If it was named "Forced latency" design it wouldn't be so sexy.
He was an amazing writer, but unlike Hulk Hogan, his racism seeps into his art. :(
It is not unfair in the slightest. Complaining that you earn 100k rather than 120k is, in my opinion, the height of silicon valley arrogance. You would not have accepted that salary if you did not think it was fair.
I'm sure "machine learning for MBAs" will be a thing very soon if the current trajectory holds.

Using a scale of 1-10 to rate the "human-ness" of AI belies the complexity of the situation. Computers are already better than humans at a huge number of tasks. In other areas, they haven't reached the level of an infant, or even a mouse.
I'm not asking for arrests, I'm asking for resignations or internal protest. This was an blatant ethical violation, even if perhaps not a legal one.
Exactly how does that improve the error handling in your shell script beyond "ignore all errors", as discussed by the OP?

I am genuinely curious how you would write a command with a pipe in plain POSIX /bin/sh such that a non-zero exit status from the program that writes into the pipe is detected (as can be done in bash with "set -o pipefail" or "$PIPESTATUS").
Project lead here. I haven't had time in the last few weeks to work on this, so the book is pretty far behind the kernel itself at the moment. Playing the long game. I was hoping to do some more today, in fact...
Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos
That project is attempting to re-create GNU-style coreutils, they wanted a slimmer, BSD style one, from what I understand.
"To develop robots, you have two options: You can either simulate an environment and robot with software and hope the results are accurate enough that you can load it into a machine and watch it walk."

This is much harder than you'd think.

Here's a fun story from 15 years ago when a friend of mine tried to do some simple AI:

His goal was to have a humanoid shape created is software learn how to walk using simple AI. The idea was that it would obey some basic laws (gravity, the limits of its joints, etc.), do something random, check whether or not it was closer to the goal of walking, tweak its parameters, and iterate. The chosen goal was not to fall over.

He set up the program, let it run over the weekend and let it do millions of tries. Hopefully when he came back to the office it would have learned how to walk, or at least stand up without falling.

His disappointment was huge when he came into the office: The simulated robot was sitting down with its knees bent, thus having achieved the goal of not falling over.
I feel you're on the mark with this.

It's not all that different from the endless stream of programming articles that promote a particular approach as the one true solution, when the writer happens to be a consultant in that specific approach.

"Awesome Agile Angular solves all your front-end woes! -- Sign up for my mailing list, buy my e-book, take my 3-day course, come see me talk at the TimeWaste 2016 conference."
Audio Ads – Beatrate-radio.com
I would guess, that most of the size comes from history.

Like, once it seemed a good idea to have it like that and later people found out there are a bunch of things missing. Now many of them have to be implemented on the driver side over and over again.
Someone (their insurance? Them?) Won't let you rent until you're 25.
Also, just as when BMW bought Landrover, the sold it two years later. Google has learned what they needed to learn from Boston Dynamics, and I assuming had a chance to syphon off any talent they wanted too. Time to move on with the key assets.
There's a bit more info here: https://github.com/redox-os/redox/wiki/URL
"And either way, you're still much better off listening to half-wrong field of psychology than to your grandmother. They at least have some context and try to get it not terribly wrong."

I think you misunderstand what he means when he says "listen to your grandmother".

He is talking specifically about time tested heuristics that have survived a for thousands of years - memes that competed, and won.

The best example I can think of is fasting: this is a tradition that appears to be very well preserved among all of the worlds religions and advocated by all of the worlds great thinkers - from the ancient greeks to Christ to Muhammad. And now in 2016 we're figuring out what a great idea it is from the perspective of "science".

Those are the kind of "grandmother was right" insights that he is guiding us towards, as opposed to (for instance) the more modern "eat little snacks all day long" which is probably a disaster from an insulin response / oxidative stress standpoint. That's the junk message from no-skin-in-the-game authorities.

Caveats:

If your grandmother is in the United States, like mine is/was/are, they never followed this heuristic and instead took the eating schedules of the pioneer farmers (three squares a day!) into the urban environment with disastrous health consequences.
The World's First Mobile Hostel Launches on Indiegogo
DataQuir – Easy Search and Engagement Service
rust "unsafe" is not about proprietariness of the hardware. It's about doing lower level operations that, in order to express, the rust compiler's safety logic must be disabled.
The most important lesson to improve software delivery
Telegram bot behind hacker_news_feed channel
I think Google simply concluded that BD's hydraulics-based approach was a technological dead end, and that there was little to be gained from trying to retool the existing, highly-specialized team. And once the DoD said they wouldn't use it, there was no customer on the horizon to offset the ongoing cost. So there was no short or long term reason to keep it.
Hi everyone!
I've open sourced the code for my bot that posts top stories from Hacker news to telegram channel https://telegram.me/hacker_news_feed
Code isn't perfect, but it works ;)
Any suggestions and help are appreciated
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
(Gandhi)

Hits hard
UI/UX is extremely important, but it should be remembered that it has its origins in usability and ergonomics. Does it make sense, is it intuitive, is it productive etc? Even removing features or interface elements if they're found to be confusing or unproductive. You're trying to help the user know where they need to go, or what they should do, at each step.

Animation on the other hand, is rarely important, but if used carefully can provide feedback that's difficult to achieve without. Hiding latency is another useful example. Effects on select or buttons fading in etc almost never adds anything helpful.

Trouble is UI/UX and animation is often becoming more about looking cute or professional than actually being productive or ergonomic. It's not a gain if it takes .5s longer to select each item, or takes two extra clicks. Code it to be snappy and professional (or cute, depending on app), then add animation if it's helpful at a sticking, latency or confusion point. That's very different to baking motion design into everything from the beginning, where it risks becoming style over substance.

Not to say I don't care about how things look, I do. The way it looks should be helping with what it does, not detracting from it.
I thought you had a reasonable point until your closing.

While I'm always cynical when I read FB's "We care about you" phrasing when bringing up photos/posts from the past—"We" being a soulless algorithm, I always welcome the opportunity to reminisce when my parents come up.
Probably in the long-term too.

If you look at the human brain as a computation device and the mind as the software, evolution as the design process, you see that biology has been iterating on the very problem we're trying to solve for hundreds of millions of years, billions if you include abiogenesis.

We don't really understand how the human brain works. We don't know how nature engineered our own initiative. We have a rough idea of the algorithms involved, but understanding those algorithms in detail is not going to be easy.

It's always going to be much much easier to fix the human brain's limitations than it will be to re-engineer a new one. So the economic case for strong AI isn't ever going to really exist, because first we have to build the world where human-level AI is a thing.
Despite what you may feel, animation and UI/UX are extremely important

I disagree. Well-conceived and well-executed animations can be a nice incremental refinement on top of an already good UI. However, they won't compensate for poor static elements like a bad layout or naff icons or illegible typography. In turn, no amount of beautiful UI whether animated or not will compensate for awkward interactions or a flawed conceptual model.

Motion is a great tool to hide latency

You know what's also great for hiding latency? Designing your system properly so it doesn't have noticeable latency in the first place, which is a viable alternative in the overwhelming majority of cases I've seen advocating this sort of animation-as-band-aid.

give some spacial awareness

You know what's also great for giving spacial awareness? A UI layout where the space is used logically in the first place and different areas of significance are clearly presented. Step 1: Don't dumb everything down to nothing but flat colour boxes and line art, thus giving up a whole array of other useful visual tools and creating a whole set of problems you didn't otherwise have.

can be an additional tool to give quick feedback on an action

True enough, but the key word there is "additional". Animating in response to every user interaction looks cute in demos for trivial gimmick apps, but gets old very quickly if you're using serious software for extended periods with numerous interactions per minute. There's also a frequent irony that those trivial gimmick apps tend to run on mobile devices with touchscreens, so all those clever button animations are right under the user's finger where they can't be seen anyway.

I've personally found its one of the major reasons the "average" person chooses software.

Really? I've never seen much evidence to suggest that in all my years doing UI design work. Much of the time, the user won't even have seen most of the animations before making a decision about whether to use the software or not. They're a nice incremental refinement, helping to reinforce an already well-designed and well-presented UI, but a major reason for choosing software? That seems highly unlikely.