skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
and probably way more expensive? But yeah, i have never seen a more accurate captioning for images yet
>"Then it doesn't matter how it compares to what software engineers are paid."

I never said (or believed) that the relative amount was particularly relevant; I had (correctly) assumed that the comparison had been made to give the HN crowd some idea of the amount those particular workers were paid without divulging exact figures.
I have to say, I was trying out several services to train my own image aesthetics classifiers and for that the service is pretty neat. Trained it on 50 Macro images in nature and 50 non Macro images in nature. 7/10 served images were correct. To have a comparison, on Caffe or other open source libraries I need to train with more than 10k images to get the same results + setup the whole server myself. Assembling 10k samples can be quite tiring.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5gfhbrftu4z8xr4/Screenshot%202016-...
"All companies that I worked, I never saw a programmer saying good things about someone else's code."

I think that this may have to do with the fact that reading code (even code that you yourself wrote a while ago) is harder than writing code. When you're writing code, you have an image fresh in your mind of what you want to create, but when you're reading code, you're struggling to build up a mental model of what that code does. And if, because of this, you perceive the other person's code as being harder to understand, it might bias you into thinking that it's bad code.

People who have a lot of programming experience become better at reading other peoples' code - it's a learnable skill, like sight-reading music.

I read a lot of other peoples' code, and I find code that's all over the spectrum: worse than mine, about the same as mine and better than mine (sometimes a lot better). I have co-workers who write sloppy code and other co-workers who write very clean code.

A programmer who has never seen code that they can say good things about is probably fairly inexperienced (hasn't read very much code in their life).
A Statement from The Tor Project on Software Integrity and Apple
Thanks, does this look correct?

http://ded.ninja/dear_oracle/dear_oracle02ru.jpg
Spending $150,000 to stop $2k/month of volume from being sold at any rate of sales cannabilisation is foolish business. Their intention was to send a message. Any lawyer stooping this low should be ashamed of their actions.
Do you have a source for the logographic nature of written Chinese being a misconception? I understand that many people use Chinese characters phonetically to write their dialect, but when I did graduate work in Chinese the books and linguistics professors all referred to the writing system as logographic. Perhaps this is a new line of thinking I am just not up on.
A dancer's thoughts on the MSFT GDC party
I may be misinterpreting your final paragraph. Do you think the 'jessaustin account is a sockpuppet, perhaps even one connected somehow to 'rayiner? I've identified as an anarchist in another thread on this page, and if you read my comments over the years it's clear that I do oppose arbitrary authority. It would be wonderful if the same person who writes my comments also wrote the comments of one of the more authoritarian-leaning HN users. I'd love to live in that world; it feels like Ender's Game.

I don't read HN daily for more than a few days at a time, and even that has been for far less than eight years. I'm not saying that anyone is "not a shill". They're all dogs, why couldn't they all be shills? (n.b. I'm not referring to HN users here, but rather to "everyone on the internet".) I say rather that we should strive to think anything without speaking everything. This is for our own good, but also for the comfort of others. Our gracious hosts have drawn a line. While the line might seem arbitrary, their standing to draw it is not.
Stop it. Patrick, Erin and I had dinner with Rayiner last year. He's a good guy, and also FOUR things HN can use a lot more of:

* A lawyer, ie, someone with real domain knowledge of how the law works, which is a topic that comes up a lot on HN and which generates about as much misinformed commentary here as crypto does,

* A compiler hacker --- in fact, he's part of a weird cabal of "people who graduated from law school and hack on compilers" on HN. Implicitly, he's also probably in the top 1% of programming ability among vocal commenters on the site,

* Someone who doesn't hold the modal political perspective of the vocal HN userbase, which means there's a point to discussing politically-tinged topics with him --- you might learn something surprising,

* A relentlessly, reliably civil commenter, despite being the routine target of a hailstorm of comments like yours upthread.

There are much cheaper ways to find shills than to source them from practicing lawyers with toddlers who hack on compilers in their spare time.

I'm not one of the "moderation lawyers" badgering Dan about you in private. I'm badgering you about it publicly. Please stop mistreating people on HN just because you don't agree with them.
Anything that is stated without proof can be refuted without proof. Why you think your opinion should be regarded at a higher standard than anybody else's?
> there are only pictographic characters.

Only a small percentage of Chinese characters are pictographs. Over 95% are compounds, with the first part suggesting the broad category of meaning and the second part suggesting the pronunciation.

> Each single character translates to an English word or phrase

Each single character represents one Mandarin syllable (with a very small number of exceptions, like 儿), which may or may not be its own word. Hence each character may or may not translate into an English word or phrase.
> No, because C is as fast as hand-coded assembly in most of the cases.

Most hand-coded assembly is pretty slow. C isn't any pinnacle of performance either.

C programs are compiled to some non-existent abstract machine that ignores the real variations in memory architecture and CPU implementations. The compiled binary can't adapt at runtime.

I don't know of any C implementations that take advantage of runtime information for optimization purposes. So you end up with generated code with a lot of redundant computation, tests, branches and pointer dereferences (such as function pointer dereference that always refers to same address), just because they might be necessary with some input -- input that wasn't the case this time.

A single mispredicted branch is expensive. Say branch mispredict takes 15 cycles. That's enough to do up to 480 (32*15) 32-bit floating point operations on a single core. Ignoring runtime information takes us pretty far from anything you can call optimal code.

The current crop of compilers are also pretty bad at vectorizing anything complicated. Those cases it can be pretty trivial to beat the compiler by 2-10x, in some cases even 40x+ if your vectorization can also eliminate a lot of unpredictable branches.
Totally agree. My little green cheek conure is turning 13 tomorrow, and I've had her and a sun conure since they were babies. Cats and dogs are pets, but a parrot is a lifestyle. I can't imagine being able to keep them happy and healthy if I didn't work from home.

The other thing a lot of people don't understand is the fact that you have to get rid of anything that might cause problems for their delicate respiratory systems - most cleaning products, candles, air fresheners, teflon cookware, most heaters and hair dryers and straighteners, etc (or go to great lengths to make sure they're never anywhere near those fumes).

Depending on the breed, it can also be really tough to find an apartment where you won't get yelled at all the time for their noise.

There are very, very few people for whom I would recommend parrothood.
It seemed to me like the author of the article was playing a bit loose with Wittgenstein's ideas. Isn't the idea that gravity is merely a "translation" of the curvature of spacetime an example of precisely the kind of Tractatus-speak that the language game idea was meant to demolish? Or am I missing something.
Yes, individual companies can use some of this type of information to hire high-quality underrated/underutilized potential employees; older people, people with no degree, people from non-elite schools, etc. that get passed over may make fantastic hires that others miss. There's definitely room for "moneyballing", and savvy companies would be wise to attempt to use this in their hiring calculus.

Broad correction, though, seems unlikely to happen, whether attempts are done via the market or via legislation.
The incredible resilience/fragility of open source all in one thread: https://github.com/azer/left-pad/issues/4#issuecomment-20006...
1. The amount of testing that SQLite undergoes is not economically feasible for most software.

But the argument isn't about "most software" - it's about SQLite in specific. And that's the crux of the issue. Saying that he believes it would be counterproductive to rewrite SQLite in Rust at this time is not saying that that would be true of all or most or some other programs.
Is that valid? The original license had:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
> included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

As those have now been stripped away, it seems like a license violation.
I don't think you can count use-after-free as exploitable. Sure, if you have them (and I think those cases can largely be ruled out by good design), it leads to crashes. But for memory type exploits you need control over the value in it. Not a security specialist but I'm not aware of common attacks besides overflowing buffers.

In hot paths (like codecs, compression algorithms...) I'm sure you never want bounds checking. It can be optimized away for sequential loops of course, but not so easily in the case of data lookups.
Wouldn't the very slow refresh rate of eInk be an issue here?
I’ve Just Liberated My Modules
What's Happening at U of Wisconsin Is a Worst-Case Scenario Come to Life
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Using_freed_memory
Maniac Mansion is actually playable inside of Day of the Tentacle (including the remastered version [1])

[1] http://www.shacknews.com/article/91888/maniac-mansion-will-s...
> I disagree that it was simply an economic choice, and I think anyone who worked in the ARM embedded industry around that time would also disagree.

I agree. Anyone watching the PDA/smartphone market at the time could see that something big would come behind the corner and shake things up. Yes that was the time of the HP iPAQ and Dell Axim, but also dozens of HTC made phones under different brands and tens of millions Nokia smartphones, all powered by TI's OMAP and not Intel.

The original iPhone sold around 6 million units, at the time Nokia S60/S80 devices, Blackberries, UIQ and any other smartphones driven by ARM CPUs had sales of over 100 million.

So yes, Intel just missed a chance and didn't care.
Major JavaScript projects depend on a 0.0.3-versioned package now unplublished
>I don't think you can do small scale experiments

What if you started everyone out at $50/month, and increased it slowly over the course of say 10 years or 20 years, or 100 years to whatever target you liked? Or do you think a gradual introduction would invalidate the results, or that you couldn't extrapolate from people's behavior at $300/mo, what they might do when the payout is $1000/mo?

Or what if you started walking the social security age backwards gradually, making people eligible at the age of 60 in the year 2020, and 55 in 2025, and 50 in 2030, etc.?

Can anyone shed insight on Indian reservations and basic income. For some reason I thought that some reservations with casinos had payments to all the tribe members?

>You don't get much useful information about people's willingness to continue working when you target it at people who have retired.

What about the other claims that some people make with BI, like an explosion of new exciting art/music/novels, etc.. Is that testable with SS recipients (say looking at how many novels they write the year before, and the year after they retire, counting the number of hours they watch TV before and after retirement). Or are they an invalid group because they are old? Or are the "other" category of BI claims mostly just feel good claims that no one really believes?
Apple's '40 Years in 40 Seconds' Video Annotated
I've still got an old vt100. Last time I used it, it was still working, although admittedly, that was in the early 2000s. :)
Trapping on an overflow register signal is very, very cheap, and there are standard libraries for it.

Some of this stuff can be caught at compile time. Like code that does signed addition of positive values and checks if they might be less.
Agreed. Deep learning receives all the hype these days (look at the machine learning subreddit), but in reality it provides very little practical value for the vast majority of data mining tasks that most folks will see. For that, standard methods like you mentioned (and don't forget SVM of course!) are still the go-to methods in my toolbox.
If there's no market in the gap, consider building it up from small, using Patreon or similar. Avoid anything that gives you one burst of money up front and then goes away, whether it's the government or Kickstarter. Monthly subscription, or monthly donation, mean that you can match your expenditure to your income. It will also mean starting zine/indie/volunteer and not big and shiny. The upside of this is that you can grow credibility the slow way.
There are a bunch of rules of thumbs that help you decide faster. Like `needle before haystack'.
You might be interested in https://robigalia.org/
And once you've eliminated that, you have DoS bugs like forcing infinite loops, abandoned (referenced but unused) memory leaks, and worst-case hash table insertions. All of those are serious attacks for anything with a resource budget.
I think that's mostly solved by changing the whole of the idea from "remove/disallow all undefined behavior" to "remove as much of the common needed undefined behavior as possible such that most programs need not really use it". Perfect is the enemy of good.
Its insane. In college, I worked with a guy who owned an enterprise system and the software is very backwards. Everything has to be run on a windows machine, and every time windows updated, there were compatibility issues. We've tried to solve as much of that as possible, you can set up on browser, and then operate all the hardware off your smartphone when the race is going.
Very good ice sheet dynamics presentations from AGU 2015 are available on youtube or on AGU page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p9uRxX95f4

You can think of an ice sheet like a cathedral. Once you melt away the side buttress, a large portion of the whole thing falls into the sea. Many large glaciers have surprisingly small "gatekeepers". It's a dynamic process [x]. We have never seen a massive ice sheet collapse so don't know for certain if it takes two decades or two centuries. The potential to raise the sea level is large, many meters.

This now adds the ocean dynamics there, but I wonder if I got this right: The melt water has no salt, is thus less dense and hence stays on top and just keeps on warming and warming and will then melt the ice a lot quicker.

x: by dynamic I mean that one can't just get a linear relationship between temperature and melt rate. Think more of a collapsing building.
In most states, pharmacists can legally refuse to dispense contraception on religious grounds. No federal law prohibits pharmacists from doing so. Only eight states explicitly prohibit refusals and six states explicitly permit refusals. According to the National Women's Law Center, reports of refusals are increasing.

http://nwlc.org/resources/pharmacy-refusals-101/
Hey Pablo, congrats for the article, really well written and extremely interesting.
I was wondering if you had any interesting input regarding what is better for a blog between writing a short article every day or a longer in-depth article once a week. Thanks, Michele
> One of the most damaging things Clive Stafford Smith has done is to give public support for Moazzem Begg, who was almost certainly a high-ranking member of al Qaeda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moazzam_Begg). (Sure, Begg should have gotten a fair trial -- he would have gone to court had the charges not been dropped, probably because the intelligence services didn't want to reveal all the intel they had gathered on him and his associates).

I don't know enough about this person to say one way or another whether he was a high ranking al qaeda member or not. But _even if he were_ I don't think insisting on a habeas corpus rights for detainees or decrying torture is a _damaging_ thing at all. It was up to the state; who originally imprisoned him and almost certainly tortured him to prove his guilt. They didn't even attempt to do this; and it likely had nothing to do with not wanting to reveal intel -- the 'court' he'd have been charged in had little to no due process, and the evidence was presented to a government tribunal, not to the defendant.

I think Smiths point there wasn't that there was some problem-meanness correlation, but that the justice system as it is structured doesn't even try to have a sensible metric by which to sentence by. I think framing it in terms of damage done to society is a reasonable one. Under such a metric, (unarmed) robbery should be treated with much less severity -- and daresay rehabilitative measures as opposed to just imprisonment -- than rape or murder. That seems reasonable, and not particularly evil as worldviews go.
> 'There are a lot of problems in speech besides transcription. '

I'm trying to be vague because I don't want to violate NDAs and it's a pain to think up examples I'm not currently working on, but there are a lot of applications of machine learning to the _speech signal_ (rather than to the problem of speech to text; there are many other things you can predict) that are super interesting. Some examples are listed in the text I copied.

> 'a half-baked siri'
There are so many instances where speech-to-text is super useful for applications other than consumer facing CRUD apps. In a lot of varied industrial applications people are doing very cool things with speech; there are a lot of applications that need very targeted speech systems.
Sure, it's already an app and it's called Saucey.
It'd be cool if there were more maps you could play with on their site.
I had the pleasure of listening to a talk by Greg Baugues over a year ago.

It actually triggered the idea for my startup: http://synaptitude.me/

Essentially, the goal is to provide mental health help/treatment without the need to go to an office, thus reducing the barrier to get help.

Obviously, that's not exactly what you are talking about, but the end-goal, is to build a community around this form of treatment, and remove much of the stigma. The system/program/app we built also makes it really clear to people what issues are, and how to improve them. The clear way our website shows progress/issues helps remove a lot of the mystery and can help users express issues and show progress with loved ones.

We are also looking for people to enter our trial (which we are in the process of organizing): http://synaptitude.me/blog/now-accepting-trial-participants/
I had presumed (correctly) it implied something about how much these people are being paid as if that was part of the problem.

It isn't.
I really liked what you said and I agree in every level. But what do you do and/or what do you think when you start reading someone else's code to avoid this precocious judgment?

Because what I usually see is very quick reactions like in less than 5min of reading, people start complaining.
Just posted a few minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340510
Neil Mitchell, the author of hoogle, has some idiosyncratic ideas about what to search over in hoogle. If you want a more expansive search, give hayoo a try.
It would for the longest time be a C program with a metastasizing wart of Rust hung off the side, impossible to get into, impossible to work with, debugging hell, compilation hell. The distros would weep.
"While it is technically feasible for the freed memory to be re-allocated and for an attacker to use this reallocation to launch a buffer overflow attack, we are unaware of any exploits based on this type of attack."
My price-sensitive futurist perspective would rather we pay the one time $30k price for a basic cryonics suspension than outright kill them or keep them locked up for life. (Caveats that it would then be seen as cruel not to suspend terminally ill patients, old people, and so on, so the sudden increase in cryonics demand would surely improve the methods and decrease the cost...) But in the Current Year and Current World locking them up for life is strictly better than just killing them, because I think that sometime within the next 50 years we have at bare minimum a decent shot at finding out how to drastically expand lifetimes (perhaps de facto immortality) and additionally alter a person's self in subtle ways that still constitutes a continuation of identity, and then we can directly rehabilitate. (Somewhat like Demolition Man, except done right. ;)) I also think the major powers can squeeze by and last that long, specifically no entering of a new dark age even if say the US split up or even if the several social order crises currently underway made some big dents. Without the possibility of living forever with a non-dangerous mind, I actually don't see much reason to prefer life in prison over death, I see a big reason (cost) to prefer death, and if I was sentenced any time prior to the early 1900s I'd ask for the guillotine instead.
I wonder how much of ANN popularity is due to the inherent strength of the model, and how much of it is due to large corporations funding/hiring people who happen to be interested in that particular flavor of machine learning.
Yeah, they definitely have their little bird routines that you have to figure out and accommodate. Mine both squawk their heads off around lunch, then they watch cartoons and take a nap. Sometimes they want to be out on the bird stands near me, other times they want to be in their bedroom alone. We have a routine down at this point, and they REALLY don't like when it's disrupted.
As a shill for libertarian socialism, i am obviously glad to see controlled experiments that validate my prejudices about human nature. I switched jobs a few months ago from a steady job with good benefits to a less steady job with no benefits because it gave me far more autonomy and independence. I know many people who are very ambitious and want to be their own bosses: few of them want to rule others. In fact, of the bosses i know, all of them are frustrated by having to order and direct people.

There is one pattern of thought that i think is missed by this experiment, but another one could just as well measure it too and i hope someone decides to: it's easier to order people to do what you think is right than it is to convince them that you are right. I think under circumstances where a person feels frustrated that their point of view isn't being validated by others they will have a greater tendency towards authoritarian power as opposed to autonomous power.

Certainly, how many of us have gone through the phase of growing up where we think that if everyone just listened to us and did what we said, everyone would be better off? I think well intentioned paternalism is a greater cause for authoritarian desires than narcissism and ego validation.
Also, Grim Fandango http://www.grimremastered.com/ and Full Throttle "Coming Soon" http://www.doublefine.com/games