skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to empower business teams to have a single view of the customer. When providing support, to see how other teams have interacted with this person. To see info from all of our apps, as well as add their own info in when needed.

A well-designed data warehouse is a myth. As long as I'm the person the business needs to call to both get data (eg via SQL) as well as add new data (eg new ETL process), we'll continue to be f'd.
Hypercentaurs and anticentaurs
Chor-RNN: Generative Choreography Using Deep Learning
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894.
How does this statement jibe with your previous posting of "Contradictory and radical ideas are a necessary part of progressive discourse and they will make people feel uncomfortable and angry."
Great explanation of how Uber could get so big. I never really understood why Uber made it and nobody before, because the App itself does not seem like a revolutionary idea. There must have been apps like that around already and lost of people must have thought of it. I mean I certainly thought of this long before I heard of Uber.

But the missing piece of the puzzle, which this article filled in was that it was never really about the app. It was about using money cleverly to get this thing going.

Now Uber has first mover advantage. But I can see many potential problems for them. They have advantage in name recognition and momentum but I can't see much else advantage.

The tech should be easy to replicate. So I think what will matter in the future is who manages to figure out the best way to use autonomous vehicles.

In this regard I'd rather place my bets on Tesla. If they as they hinted get into doing Uber like stuff in the future with autonomous cars, they have a clear advantage as they got advantages in more fields than Uber which can enhance this particular business.

By controlling the cars, they are pulling in more data than anybody else on autonomous driving at the moment. They are already beating the master data collector Google, collecting more data then they do in a year on autonomous driving.
Great read. I found particularly insightful the idea that conversational UI is like skeumorphism - trying to shoehorn analog forms (conversation) into a digital app, bringing along a bunch of details and actions that don't serve any purpose or are worse than the alternatives.
>...would you really call one of them "inferior" to the other?

I think I would consider the dog brain to be generally inferior, sufficiently so that I would simply label it as inferior. With sufficient general intelligence, you can delegate tasks that your brain is inadequate to accomplish to technology (or possibly other entities, like dogs!), something dogs cannot do and something that makes the human brain clearly superior.

You can argue against human brain superiority without access to technology, but then we're comparing the two in more specific scenarios. Without any particular constraints, the human brain has sufficiently superior general intelligence to make it superior overall.
I'll put it this way:

I have no problem imagining a physical system in my head and running a simulation of it, but it is as if instead of receiving the output of the simulation as images on a screen I am receiving it in the form of instantaneous knowledge of the state of the system.

It feels very similar to modelling program state in my head while debugging or whatever.
How disappointing. The thing I most wanted out of this article was to learn what was so significant and powerful about the elephant cerebellum. Surely, that means elephants have superior abilities in the aspects relevant to the cerebellum. I want to hear about the amazing things elephants can do that this enables.
I'm ok with forcing the KKK underground.
Just learn now. But be aware that observational drawing is a different skill than illustrating your "phantasy" mental images.

In the second category, the engineer Elmer Sperry apparently had a serious facility for visualizing machinery, and would hold out a pen and paper to "just draw a line around it". It's mentioned in Eugene Ferguson's book Engineering and the Mind's Eye:
https://books.google.ie/books?id=WcqaKE_Eg1IC&pg=PA51#v=onep...
I would prefer a simple app interface with big buttons (on mobile) to do the exact thing i want, than having to use some chat menu system. So when im in an airport somewhere i can click while walking to order a taxi or check my email or similar. Just exchange the AI for a simple column of changeable links / buttons to my most used functions, allowing to have sublists. Then allow me to use a builtin password safe to get the information to me in a simple modal or similar. I dont want 100 apps on my phone for each service, but i also dont want a closed interface to how i access the information. Web pages are ok, but most of the time i can not modify the interface to remove items i dont care about. This causes time consuming tasks such as zooming to be able to click on links or using interfaces that can change to whatever the developer thinks is better for you.

Could we create standards for things such as bank APIs, travel APIs, store APIs etc? I dont like forcing things on people, but if we could get some type of collaboration and create a UI where the user gets to create buttons / menu options to access those services directly? Let the user add only the needed options to a button on the home screen called "bank" for example.

I dont need OAuth or similar (Dont want that stuff close to my bank account) but some standard way to authenticate? Then just request my PIN whenever it needs to access a stored password. Or just request the password with saved username when accessing the request for the first time and then save it in a session etc.

I guess what i want for my phone is a easily programmable interface where I can setup whatever functions to access my information directly and not needing to access any other app. Apps are great, but it does not solve the issues that exists on desktops. How do we organize all these icons? Using menus or using desktops with icons? using lists of some sort? Very few systems have come close to solving this issue and most are probably more experimental then production. I believe the cloud should be APIs instead of HTML and Apps. Mobile interfaces should just be scriptable interfaces with some per-defined tasks and an easy way to download new tasks that others have done. Now, this does sound like apps, but its more specific: Its more like downloading a script from your bank that accesses your account balance. Then another script for your card balance. Then another script for a transfer etc. Then you just say where in the interface you want these buttons / links and done.

Anyway, time to end my long rant about mobile interfaces.
Oh be quiet with your logic and evidence.

In the Romantic and Victorian eras the spelling "Shakspere", as used in the poet's own signature, became more widely adopted in the belief that this was the most authentic version.

I guess I lean this way. (I do acknowledge what you said about the man himself spelling his own name differently, makes me wonder why...) But I have always been perplexed about different spellings and pronunciations of proper nouns. My name is Dave in every language, I assure you. Sounds like the Elizabethans were all kinds of lax with spelling!
Definitely needs some work! Appreciate the feedback. Just launched the blog two weeks ago. Working out the kinks :)
Yes, and that's problematic for mailing cash anonymously. It's not so easy to accumulate large denominations, and may attract attention. When possible, I like to mail gold. It's easy to clean, too.
Are you sure it's not even more trivially vulnerable than that? From man 2 chroot:

This call does not change the current working directory, so that after the call '.' can be outside the tree rooted at '/'. In particular, the superuser can escape from a "chroot jail" by doing:

mkdir foo; chroot foo; cd ..
Yep. Terrible site.
I love FreeBSD (and have used it for years and years) but I'll be the first to say the community of FreeBSD (and OpenBSD for that matter) is about as neckbeard as you can get in a community. #FreeBSD on Freenode is one of those Freenode channels that make you want to log off for good. Where a good many Linux communities are helpful and inclusive, the BSD communities are mostly atrocious and toxic. Be mindful of that if you start asking around about BSD.
No problem recognising people here either. It's like a hash, as you said. I'd say it operates more like a bloom filter in my head, as I will always remember an image if I see it again, but previously unseen images can still occasionally spark a feeling of recognition.
Unfortunately I don't think that data is available. But from what I understand it has led to more giving. See this article - http://fortune.com/2010/06/16/the-600-billion-challenge/
Some of these URLs (e.g., 'offers', 'offerless') don't exist - they just display "Unknown".
YourMechanic (YC W12) Is Looking for Dir. Of Ops, Data Scientists and Engineers
Ok, if intellectual curiosity counts as a theme, then I agree.

This goes back to the beginning of the site btw:

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose: Three of five costliest rental markets in U.S
>"It's a premature optimization that makes coding and debugging more difficult."

Going multi-threaded and dealing with semaphores and mutexes also makes coding and debugging more difficult. It's all about trade-offs.
Girl sings for her mum on her mums wedding day and blows everyone away
And they say millennials are self-absorbed!
Yes, that is my experience exactly. No mental images at all. I've tried to learn, but nothing has worked. Yet I can drive somewhere once on vacation, and a decade later drive the route without a map.
International Call by #NuitDebout
Which is interesting in itself, because it means that they could offer affordable personal subscriptions without losing money.

So in fact huge journal subscription fees becomes a way to trap academic research in these institutions, rather than just journal greediness.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought Varnish has support for limiting concurrent backend fetches to the same resource.
Just out of interest, did you go directly to Wikipedia to find the information, or did you go to Google, which then led you to Wikipedia?
Yes, some, probably most people, "see" sheep. After reading Blake Ross' discussion of this I've been wondering how to explain it to the aphantasic. It's a little bit like having a second monitor except it doesn't occupy a part of your visual field. For most people, except da Vinci, it's fainter and less detailed than a real sense impression. Like I can be sitting in a coffeeshop and think of a sunset. The first sunset image I get is almost involuntary. For me it will be cliché, like a stock photo, but I can alter it, or add detail. (Other people may get fantasy landscapes or particular sunset memories).

I can tell you what the colors are like, but it doesn't replace my current visual image. If I focus strongly on the sunset, I may miss things happening in reality, but reality is never fully replaced.

That said, don't take an internet social science quiz too seriously or think you're deficient. People are different.

Blake Ross noted how this seems to be related to how he just doesn't remember a lot of sensory details that other people find important. So perhaps there is some general purpose sense-memory reconstruction and recombination system. But the nature of what you get might depend on what was available. Perhaps for you, remembering a place would be about reconstructing the layout of it. For others it might be visual details, for still others important events or people they shared the space with.
In an intersection of recent topics in HN, I highly recommend the Globe's 2012 rendition of Twelfth Night, in which Stephen Fry plays Malvolio. I was never so much a fan of his as most seem to be around here, but his performance was frankly good, if somewhat similar to the character from Blackadder II. As for the rest of the cast, they range from solid to excellent.
Yeah, it's unfortunate that the (clinically) paranoid survivalists, that honestly have good information to share from a survival perspective, often have paranoid political beliefs.

Just like anything in life, you need to separate the good information from the bad... thank god for people that are "different". :)
I was thinking around 1980 or 1985, back before IBM PC and clones became popular. Turns out I was wrong, Intel was about 2x to 4x larger than AMD in those days.

I went back and got some hard figures. I had to average yearly high/low stock price to compute historical market cap. All values in $millions:

1980 1985 1990 ttm / yesterday
---- ---- ---- ----
AMD sales 309 576 1059 3990
mkt cap 446 1672 617 3170

INTC sales 855 1365 3921 55360
mkt cap 1667 3091 7990 149260

In 1985 Intel sales are 2.37x AMD and market cap is 1.85x.

Currently Intel sales are 13.8x AMD and market cap is 47x.
A DONALD TRUMP RELEASE ,THE WORLD UNSEEN
Not all science is statistics. That's just the current paradigm and not applicable in all cases. I agree the reward system is flawed, but it ain't so easy to improve it.
Some links about Reddit censorship:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3pme4i/a_list...

https://reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/374s5i/this_we...

Some subreddits will ban anyone that posts or comments in certain other subreddits.
Should be, perhaps. Much like Java should be standard and identical everywhere. Differences are inevitable, priorities depend a lot more on real world constraints than fleeting desires. Those proprietary standards exist because the web continues to be rather terrible if your problem's not easily explicated in javascript.

The Javascript monoculture that exemplifies the modern web is perhaps the greatest thing holding back good cross-platform development. There's no way to experiment with other languages on equal footing, there's no way to easily extend browsers to provide hooks to native libraries and functionality in a reasonable manner. If the web is the only cross platform environment, then give me my walled gardens, because they're gonna be the only place open enough to actually get things done. The web's a greenhouse, with only the illusion of freedom until you get next to the glass walls.
It's only a moral dilemma if you look at the question in isolation from its consequences.

If you consider the outcomes of banning an ideology, the argument is quite clear and rational - and not hypothetical - this experiment has already been run, many hundreds of times.

In (very) short, if you limit the spectrum of political thought you achieve two major things:

1) you push the hard elements of that ideology underground. There are no good outcomes from or for an embittered, isolated group of people within a society that spurns them.

2) you eliminate an oppositional force, thus shifting the pole of political thought, and end up with a previously benign set of ideologies mutating away from previously nuanced stances towards more totalitarian approaches. In the absence of traditional reactionary forces and diametrically opposed thought, new axises are found.

Essentially, once you commit to a single ban on ideological grounds you are committed to make further bans, as concept creep occurs, and new categories are found unacceptable. This occurs geometrically, and you fairly rapidly end up sending people to gulags and building roads of bones. It is impossible to go back without capitulation of government, as your own thought police will turn on you, and your eager acolytes will happily fill your shoes. These states end up ending in the fire of war or the ice of economic collapse - there's very rarely a happy exit.

You can ban things, in the form of prohibition, at the expense of enabling organised crime and black markets, but the moment you start banning ideas, you are truly damned.

If there's a historical precedent where there's been a good outcome from banning thought and speech I'm all ears, but I'm aware of none.
> I wonder if it's possible to improve your visual imagination through practice?

There are various meditative and esoteric practices based on exactly that.
what reply
I'm so much the other way that it's scary, because it's a
vulnerability, one I didn't know about until it happened.

Musical/artistic family, multi-talented all around me. I'd keep my suburban-bicycled paper-route from getting boring by playing back in my head music I'd heard and liked. Stumbled into hardware, then software, as something I could do and do well and get paid to do it. Whatever it was I was doing -- songwriting, drawing, carving, circuitry, code -- I visualized/audialized it first, working it out on the sketchpad viewscreen of my mind before committing the work to physical fact.

And then I found out how easily the whole thing could be shut down. Stressed-out bowstring-taut -- pending divorce,
single-parenting, work stresses -- and it was enough to let
staph take hold, in my elbow of all places -- and suddenly the ibuprofen didn't keep the fevers down and my visualization got fevered and dissolved away and I couldn't code, couldn't create, because I couldn't visualize, until the antibiotics finished killing off the infection.

Anybody else gone through this?
I prefer to take it as I perceive it, to wit, as a dumb business decision that will likely be re-thought and re-done at some point.
Ikea to begin selling a low-cost, belt-drive bicycle
I think it's a little outlandish to suggest that Bill Gates started the Gates Foundation in order to make more money or save on tax breaks.

Did he do it for his ego? Maybe. But it'd be hard to find someone who has done great work who didn't do it for their ego.

Being a skeptic in an internet forum is easy. Solving problems that The Gates Foundation has set out to solve isn't. I'll continue to lionize those who do the latter.
Everyone were all kinds of lax with spelling. If you ever get involved with genealogy you will likely learn to hate the extreme levels of inconsistency there will be in written records covering the same person. It's not unusual to e.g. find church records written by the same priest spelling a parishioners name differently in different records, and these were official records.
First Prince now Shakespeare?!
There is a language problem here where it is impossible to be sure that when people describe subjective experiences in the same words they are actually having the same qualitative experience.

I don't take it too seriously. It's just a jumping off point for a conversation about an interesting perceptual quirk.
I see it as a very powerful language, which is why it is so easy to mess something up if you don't know what you are doing.

Think of a carpenter. A hand saw is much, much safer than a table saw, but if you mess up, you might have just lost a finger or two. If you're teaching a kid to work with wood, you let him use the hand saw, not the table saw, for obvious reasons. Programming languages can be interpreted in the same vein.

Most of the article came across as condescending. I see JavaScript as being a language that is only just now realizing it's true potential. Web 2.0 was "coined" 17 years ago, and truly got people's attention 12 years ago. Javascript in the browser, of course, predates that by half a decade. Node.js only showed up 6 years ago, and has only recently gained traction in the last 3 years (IMO).

In other words, OF COURSE there's going to be more front-end jobs for JS... it's had a 2-decade runway!!! Node, OTOH, is just now finding its feet in potential applications. That doesn't make me point at it and scoff, but rather to say "this is where the innovation will be!"
In llvm you cannot just pass or return structs, every frontend needs to explicitly handle the details of when and how to registerize structs to handle the system V abi for example.

That code is not so trivial to do yourself actually.
In my experience any organization that fails to respect senior contributors cannot endure.
qbe allows both stack slots like llvm, or directly inputting non ssa code which is automatically turned to ssa form.
Kinda like IFTTT?

https://ifttt.com/
The single theme is that of intellectual stimulation, which attracts a certain crowd. We don't see any content in the entertainment space, or the politics space, for example, unless said content is stuff that hacker types find intellectually stimulating.
The left on campus combines the rhetoric of victimhood, with verbal and physical harassment of those who disagree with them[0][1]. Of course this will eventually turn against them.

[0] E.g. an activist says to a crowd "every single trump supporer has a full legal name, attached to a social security number, with a place of residence, and employer, and classes. That information is easy to find online" in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ50XmALd54#t=3m18s [trigger warning: this video also features physical harassment of Trump supporters]

[1] A university lecturer and activist tries to stop someone filming in their "safe space" (which is also a public space) and yells "I need some muscle" in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_vgu4ewxVc
You are forgetting about stress completely.
> The absence of async callbacks not only makes the code cleaner

I agree async callbacks are not very pretty. However, neither is dealing with shared state between threads, or doing thread management in general. Personally I will take the ugly callbacks over buggy/unsafe thread management any day.

> The absence of async callbacks not only makes the code cleaner, but also means that when you're debugging and hit a breakpoint, you can follow the call stack all the way back to the request entrypoint.

Look for the "async call stack" in the v8 debugging tools. This lets you follow async callbacks around like a normal call stack.

> I'd rather state this as "Needs Async Libraries" as a con for Node.

Again, having a single-threaded run loop avoids entire classes of problems (like shared state), which is a huge plus in many cases.
He says second monitor. My wife just said she sees as though her glasses are off at first. Very visual words from neilk and her both.

Unlike glasses or monitor, my "collections of attributes" when asked to actively generate a sense of things ("Picture X") seems more non-visual attributes.

Picture a chair: wood, cool to touch, weighs this much in the hand, makes a scraping noise when slid, fairly clean design with straight high back, no arms but indents for buttocks, sturdy, can be stood on to reach things. I just don't see an imaginary visual of one.

// I can mentally/visually flip through an endless card deck of them, like nielk's Google Image Search example. I don't feel like I can visually put an imaginary one in an imaginary room in my mind.
Bingo! I commuted weekly for years and that's exactly right. Island style departures.
On Linux I configure a network namespace that routes everything through my VPN, and I run a separate Chrome profile within that namespace (or whatever else I want to run and route through the VPN).

http://pastie.org/private/fzx7btxmvxbnftgkx31k8g is what I use as openvpn up/down script. Feel free to study/reuse.
All of my jobs have been meat grinders that left no room for outside work and had contracts which explicitly forbade any such. Before I started to plan seriously for independent work my corporate benefactors quit me. Such experiences are actually quite common and make this article seem trite.
My qbe C frontend is actually written in myrddin which is a lot like rust/ocaml.

To be honest, C is not well suited to places where there is adversarial input such as servers, but when it comes to logical correctness of code I do not see amazing benefits from languages like ocaml.