skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two reactions to this article (and I say this as someone near 50):

1. Dan's obviously not cut out for startup life. When he meets Zack, he assumes Zack must be someone's assistant because he is young. Dan has no concept of the fact that someone might have their position because they are skilled and perform well. In his mind, the only way to have a fancy title is tenure and age.

2. Sure, the language of startups is interesting (graduation as a euphemism for quitting or getting fired), but the clear message is that this is odd, and thus, wrong. As though normal corporate America is the one true way and is just fine. Bullshit. Let's make sure to keep the workplace exactly as it's been for the last 100 years and never evolve.
NpmGate – Lessons Learned Again
Writing a Text Adventure in Go – Part 1
How to hire a programmer when you have no technical knowledge?
Hi guys,
what should I do if I would like to hire a programmer but don't have technical knowledge to evaluate a candidate? Are there any agencies or services that can help me with that?

Thanks!
To be fair to the post, and anyone viewing the page, all you're seeing is a screenshot of what I am assuming a bot or crawler made when it successfully connected to various IPs over port 5900.
Writing a Text Adventure in Go – Part 2
> It's possible the system wasn't even performing online learning

I suppose it depends on how you define learning. Based on how the algorithm failed, I'm guessing it was simply absorbing every piece of info thrown its way, categorizing it, and then incrementing a counter in a database.

Honestly, I think this is how most people learn. Not all, most. And thankfully those that do, only do so from their immediate peers. If their simplistic learning algorithm was restricted to a select group for learning, but was still able to interact with a wider audience, it would have done much better.
I just wish that python could stop being such a butt about not being like the rest of the languages

list of items --> filter list --> operate on list

becomes

operate on list <-- (list of items --> filter list)

And because this is how it was decided to tackle map/filter problems, we'll always have a weird gimped anon-function operator instead, to discourage the map/filter patterns of every other language
> I'd love to have an at-home kit, so I could check the contents of my DNA against a database of known facts.

I think sequencing at home would be difficult. What we would need is for them to sequence your DNA, then send that data to you, then destroy their copy of the data. This would need to be enforced contractually. The problem is that if you lose your copy of the data, it is gone. This has issues with usability.

If if they offered to keep your named detached from the sequence it wouldn't do much. Your DNA probably has more bits of entropy than your first and last name together.
It's worse than that. They had an argument, she blocked him then felt harassed when she logged out and searched his tweets.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Elliott

>because Guthrie continued to respond to Elliott's tweets, the judge said Elliott didn't know he was harassing her, even though he knew she had blocked his account.

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/toronto/twitter-harassmen...
Ah, the Chinese system. Pervasive corruption and token execution of scapegoats.
FYI (and obviously it doesn't help with the systemic problem), a Chrome extension to collapse HN comments was posted a few weeks ago.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11213479
I sometimes wonder if cloudy days (today is specially gloomy in SF) is why we see articles about depression showing up on HN's front-page. [1]

[1] How to Get Out of Bed (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367331)
Ruby Together – Shared tools should work
ELI5, "positive work culture meta-messages"
The programming model you are describing is almost exactly the model Go has, it just takes it a step further and allows N:M "green threading", so you can use all your cores.
Then you will enjoy learning about hardware Chinese character generators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method#Early_Can...

This one synthesized characters from geometric decomposition (and not a completely artificial one either, but Cangjie which is actually widely used to this day for computer text entry).

The stored data representation exactly matched the input form (perhaps not so surprising to users of ASCII).

Amazing stuff.
My same thought as well. S3 has a rate limit, which is where a lot of these timeouts or errors are probably happening. Seems like they should be using a database instead.
23AndMe says they will destroy your sample if you request and I would assume you can ask that they destroy your data.
Geo Search Tool Allows You to Search YouTube Videos by Location
> Peripheral vasoconstriction in the extremities ...

I wonder if this is why seals, whales evolved flippers instead of big limbs less warm blood wasted in big limbs.
Thread pools: How do I use them?
Cool! When you need it to work on an input that's an iterator, please submit a patch with a doctest. That's one of the important benefits of reusable code.
>"Get close to" in law enforcement parlance means "encourage criminal activity". If you read the details in these court cases, you repeatedly see an almost universal pattern of activity on the part of law enforcement to egg their targets on towards the criminal act.

Do you think that real terrorist plotters just ask nicely once and then leave you alone?

Also, we're talking about mass murder here, not selling some acid. Maybe you're right about some of these drug cases crossing over into entrapment. A lot of people feel that drugs "aren't that bad" and if a friend bugged them enough, maybe they would try to find some. I don't know the facts sufficiently to conclude either way. But that's not what we're talking about here.
I have to agree... I keep hoping that someone build something easier to use on top of keybase... (assuming keybase sticks to it's single purpose, and doesn't try to build it's own systems on top)

It also makes sense to separate the public key aggregation from the services that use the keys, and the plugin systems that translate... it would be easy enough to create a browser plugin that exposes an API that can be used to encryptMessage or signMessage, where the plugin notified/asked the user.. and all the in-browser app will get is the encrypted message... same for decryptMessage and verifyMessage...

Hmm...
If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly [pdf]
Uber – CodeTheRide
No custom allocator can make a task that fails to allocate gracefully report an error. Rust's error handling design is just terrible, and mostly a consequence of eschewing exceptions.

Had Rust opted for exceptions, it'd be a much better, and actually usable, language. Rust's terribly error-handling strategy is the chief reason not to use it.
Here you go: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/03/open-letter-devoted-par...

It does contain threats to Xi Jinping and his family for his anti-corruption campaign, so that may explain the state's reaction.

> We are worried that this type of inner-Party power struggle may also bring risks to the personal safety of you and your family.
And don't forget, old Luke is probably going to act as the Yoda-equivalent in the next "episode".
You might need to clarify what you mean - I'm confused. What you're discussing doesn't seem grounded in modern ML/AI and seems to be comparing Tay to how humans learn? Almost none of the modern machine learning algorithms "increment a counter in a database". Those which do, primarily instance based lazy learning like k-nearest neighbours, aren't learning in the sense that is exciting for modern systems.

If you're referring to a nearest neighbours style algorithm, then we've had that tech for years and I'd not note it as a modern chat bot. If that is the case, it's even more unforgivable that Microsoft didn't consider it could start spouting back garbage given there's a lot of historical precedent. For such kNN based systems, the only knowledge it has is explicitly the training data, which means it needs to be well curated. Given there's no proper learning going on, we'd be back to a storm in a teacup.
DNA and anonymously do not go together.
So happy I am not the only one.
Bullshit. Every part of the C++ standard library (which is _much_ bigger than Rust's) can gracefully propagate resource exhaustion errors, including memory allocation failure, to callers. That Rust can't is a design flaw.

> there are situations where your application will just abort randomly

That's sure as hell not the case in any environment I choose to use.
Dan Lyons sure gets around. In another life, he was an early and vocal supporter of SCO in their lawsuits against Linux. At least in the end he finally came around and admitted that he'd been "Snowed By SCO"

http://www.forbes.com/2007/09/19/software-linux-lawsuits-tec...

[edit for typo]
You may want to browse the rendered version of it: https://0xax.gitbooks.io/linux-insides/content/Timers/timers...
This is actually a great idea, they should have from the start said this AI might end up being the digital version of Hitler himself and just give it time to show its true nature or let it correct itself in the long run just like Wikipedia.
In precisely zero cases are companies "shut down".
> No custom allocator can make the task gracefully report failure
> instead of panicing.

So, first of all, "custom allocators" means two things:

* overloading the allocator that's used by liballoc, and
the crates that depend on it, like libstd
* other allocators entirely

The first is described here: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/custom-allocators.html

And the second is still in RFCs: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/1398

Both of these things are not yet stable. The second does, in fact, give you the ability to return an error code, by returning a Result.

However, on top of that, I don't see how

> mostly a consequence of eschewing exceptions.

and

> No custom allocator can make the task gracefully report failure
> instead of panicing.

Work together. Or rather, why is panic-ing bad, but an exception good?
This is another perfect example of how the whole "If you've got nothing to hide..." thing is totally insane. This guy had nothing to hide, seven years later the police show up.
By any chance, do you know what's the legal status of, say, shodan.io in US?

If the screenshots weren't reviewed - or, worse, hand-picked - by a human, but fetched in completely automated and unsupervised manner, then it's essentially the same as any other crawler bot (like Shodan or even Google/Bing) does. Connecting to random public services running on globally-routeable addresses and politely asking them what they do (then storing the result) can be argued to be perfectly legal.
> The Chinese government has consistently and strongly denied any complicity in human rights abuses, but says those who break the law must be punished.

The Chinese government wouldn't know what a human rights abuse was if one waterboarded it in the face.
Look at I2P's Bote mail
> Elliott is believed to be the first Canadian prosecuted solely for tweets

Oh wow, thats horrific. I am not sure what is worse; being "taken away" for posting a letter to the president in a communist country or actually going to jail in a democracy for sending tweets.
Name and Password guidelines per Google
The problem is most of the ideas are not new, they are rehashes of old ideas. Many people aren't learning, they are just jumping on the hype wagon without much reasoning.
BLAS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprogra...
It's just the nature of decentralized + secure + anonymous (at least to the transport layer) ... you can't realistically have all three without being open to effectively a DDOS, poisoning the system as a whole.

I'd worked on a proof of concept that would have all three of the above features using a DHT for delivery, relying on collisions for addressing, so that targets overlap, but a given target could only decrypt messages actually to them... the down side is it would be possible to send MANY messages to a target, so many that the system would be brought to a crawl and effectively useless.
There have been disappearance of Hong Kong booksellers by the Chinese government, as reported here: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-35480229

as well as bookstores in Hong Kong airport being replaced by "Chinese friendly" ones http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education-community/artic...
I have an uncle who got tested by a program like that a few years back. I'm not sure if it was the same one, but the results basically just said he was a male of Western European descent.
And all the money in the world can't buy you happiness, so stop turning communities into country clubs.
What use is the DNA match to third parties if there is no name/identity information paired with it?

I guess it reveals a few bits of information if you know your killer submitted a sample to the project (but an easy way to avoid this threat is to not be a killer).

Most of the threats I can think of start with the third party already having the DNA, so it's existence in the project database doesn't seem important.
8 Things I Learnt Creating a Web App
In fact no, I was not aware of Allwinner GPL violations when I was buying it (which was about 2 years ago). If I knew about them, it might have affected my decision. I publish most of my software under GPL (check my blog and GitHub accounts), so I'm definitely not ambivalent to GPL violations.

Then again, I don't have time these days to thoroughly research ideological aspects of all the stuff I buy. I bought a CubieTruck, not a tray of Allwinner chips. I'm sure that if you looked up track records of all supliers involved in any hardware product these days, you would find plenty that violated GPL at some point.

I admire people that can say that they checked everything and that their laptops don't run any binary blobs and have no relations to known copyleft violators. I simply think my time is better spent in other pursuits.
Stop giving the president just another excuse to give him another out.

He has plenty of smart people around him, yet he still insists on government over privacy.
There are plenty of things considered robots that follow a preset sequence and don't directly respond to their environment. For example, animatronics at theme parks, in movies and at certain types of restaurants are types of robots, and none of those act outside of a fixed pattern. The type of robot used on Robot Wars or Battlebots doesn't really perceive its environment, and acts closer to a typical drone. The automatons inventors used to make before computers became a thing are often considered robots.

Really, the definition of a robot is pretty vague, and usually along the lines of 'a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically'. Or maybe not.
C is still the choice language for many things. Perl is still cool to me, though seems to have been replaced by Ruby for web development.
I'm actually amazed that this is news to the HN crowd. Desmos is in the standard vocabulary of many students.
Responses to Typos and Personality: “Grammar Nazis” Confirmed?
Finally – the Advanced Swift book is ready
Crate raises $4M seed round for its next-gen SQL database
"Every" screwdriver kit you can buy in Sweden is very likely to have both PZ and PH included.
The only time we use other instances is when we really do need that all-day CPU performance. Thank you for your article!
Totally agree on the graphs, but the office references are bang-on. The roof of building 20 is built for strolling around and poring over hard problems. It's a 3 minute walk from the rest of campus and they have cold pressed juice up there. The MPK20 reference set a perfect scene.
Here's the letter: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/03/open-letter-devoted-par...

One of the lines, a veiled threat to his safety:

> We are worried that this type of inner-Party power struggle may also bring risks to the personal safety of you and your family.
I think I saw the same one, seems to be a place near LA. Pretty scary stuff.
Sun interacts with your system a lot. But more generally I believe in rhythm as a source of economy. Whenever that makes sense.
Pelatih Yordania Harry Redknapp
With no technical knowledge, you shouldn't hire a programmer.

But the way you write about this, it's as if you are assuming you cannot gain technical knowledge. Unless you are a rock, this assumption is probably false.

So first step, learn about the domain of concern. Including some technical knowledge. You'll need at least enough to decide whether your plans are well considered, and to communicate your intent to whoever you might hire.

Then you could learn about hiring: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=should+I+hire+a+programmer
Where's my petabyte disk drive?
> why is panic-ing bad, but an exception good?

Because the Rust people don't believe in making "catch" a first-class primitive in the language, and in fact, fully support a runtime option to turn all panics into aborts.

Even if abort-on-panic were to be killed as a legal mode of operation, and even if the stigma were to be removed from std::panic::recover, we'd still be left with a language with two error handling strategies and endless programmer confusion over which to use.

Rust's designers have done permanent damage to the language by not making exceptions the primary error reporting mechanism available to programmers, and it's not a mistake they can undo now.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11368670 and marked it off-topic.
I adore Bosch. His most famous works are almost reminiscent of the surrealist period of the 1900s but with the vastness typical of a lot of Renaissance era art. One of my favorites, however, is Creation of the World [1]. Reminds me of some of the awesome science fiction art of the 80s.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Hieronym...
See the staff-selected art (created with the Desmos Graphing Calculator) for some examples of what robust input looks like: https://www.desmos.com/art
You're saying that Germany doesn't control the ECB I think. So I guess it's just coincidence that ECB policy has been consistently and primarily in favor of German economic interest, and has been an unmitigated disaster for everybody else. The trade imbalance is in part a symptom of this.
That may be true, but there are degrees of anonymity. The problem described in the article is not the DNA, but the association of the DNA with some other identifier. If all they have is a DNA sample, the only current way to look it up would be to match it against another DNA sample, which only tells you that you submitted a DNA sample.

In the future, it may be possible to take a sequenced DNA and simulate what the person looks like, but we've barely crossed the threshold of having enough computing power to sequence a genome, so we're many years from that being possible and, even then, without knowing the donors age, you wouldn't be able to say what the donor looks like today.
All is well until you have to deal with SEO for SPAs :) and then there is little choice other then node. https://github.com/audreyt/node-webworker-threads spawn real threads with web workers compatible API.
Anyone know if Crate is a drop-in replacement for any existing RDBMS?
You can also see instinct take over when people are drowning. By watching this series on YouTube, I learned to spot exactly when drowning takes over:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KTqPloUiU

[Side note: DO NOT read any of the comments. They are particularly obnoxious and there is nothing worthwhile. You have been warded.]
*for high workloads. Yep. When they run out of credits (which happens a lot less often than our clients usually predict), the system handles the workload with the baseline performance. Depending on how well the software running on the server is designed, that can mean simply a few delays on the requests of the users; it doesn't have to break functionality.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=recruitment%20agency

You might want to refine that search to include the area where you are looking to hire.
I liked that in the Hyperion series, the AIs were constantly laughing even though most of them didn't care a whit about humanity. It was terrifying.
Looks like "we" is StockTwits: https://twitter.com/crosbyventure
True, but I think what is most interesting is that we don't know whether we can restrict them or whether they have any rights which is a pretty scary thought.
Damn, you beat me by a minute! ;)
People do all kinds of things under peer pressure and coercion they wouldn't do otherwise

There's plenty of stories of tptb totally overstepping the bounds of peer pressure and coercion. I'd even argue that most people will choose to follow the crowd to fit in, not rock the boat, rather than go against their peers.
You could certainly be forgiven for thinking that - the CCP still did most of the same stuff, it was just less blatant about it. Xi Jinping has been taking a slightly more 'robust' approach.

China had a period of greater international exposure leading up to and then after the olympics so they naturally took a less aggressive approach - think house arrest rather than re-education camp.

In addition, compared to Mao and the actions of the Politburo during and after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, almost everything looks 'better'.

The CCP is trying to walk a tightrope between a stronger role in a globalised world and running the sort of insular police state which is its bread and butter. This sort of thing does leak out from time to time, but for every report which meets the outside world, there are others which don't catch the media's attention.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/asia-and-the-pacific/ch...
Glad you liked it. If you share it as well, you may have five internet thanks-money from me.
Actually I'm making this offer available to all the HN users.
I have been interested in taking PicoLisp for a spin, but I've found the friction of installing on OSX a bit much. Do you know of an easier way to use PicoLisp, without re-hacking gcc back into the system?
Hardware needs that complete ecosystem that Grove is talking about. Software doesn't need that quite so much, at least in terms of the comparable capital intensive activities.
Read this paper from July of last year and it'll make more sense as to why this research is interesting: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.05869.pdf.

Seeding a dataset with human labels, then generating new, better data is pretty cool. Similar to deep mind watching go games, then learning to play better than said games. Add to which, humans can't tell the difference between the human generated data and algo generated data.

We're about 3 months from where you can bootstrap a system like microsofts with freely available code and data. From there, if "memory modules" start working better so models can "remember specific context" (it can already remember general context), you'll have a bot that's a pretty good model for passing the Turing test.

I'm defining a practical Turing test as text-based, human gets 5 questions, other party replies 5 times, then human must predict: human/not human.
I disagree. I don't think what you're describing is how anyone learns... people are imperfect at absorbing information.

When we read/hear something, it goes though a number of filters. People will interpret what is said differently (sometimes incorrectly even); they will miss certain bits of information; they assign different weights to information depending on who said it, their feelings about that person (whether they think the person is trustworthy or not, for ex), whether the information aligns with other information they know, etc. And they will apply their biases to that information.

Then after it has been through all of that.. it's stored in memory where bits and pieces of it will be forgotten or misremembered... and some amount of it will be correct (a lot of things that survived only because they were learned repeatedly).

The human mind learns very differently than a computer.