skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bot can be made where one doesn't have to parse commands.

The author of the article could have collected all the conversations and learned a bot that would correctly converse with people asking similar questions.

there's no reason that having the same question asked in different ways should be a problem.

language is structured. structured learning and prediction exists for more than two decades and just recently there have been very nice improvements to known methods (learning to search, neural networks for structured learning etc.).

one can try to summarize an answer to a question from relevant fetched documents. summarization is a structured prediction task.

for example, in the conversations with a bot, you store all of the questions and your answers.

your answers were formed by using documents that contain the needed information. now you're trying to find a mapping that will successfully fetch the relevant documents for the question, and then summarize all of the documents to as close as possible summarization (summarized text should be similar to your stored answer).

structured prediction techniques use simple methods such as pos tagging and then pruning the dependency parse tree of sentences in document to shorten it, excluding whole sentences or text-between-commas or unneeded-adjectives etc. (these methods are based on statistical machine learning, not some silly rule based technique, one can incorporate word2vec features or other neural network magic)

it's not impossible, given enough data, to build a bot that would interact successfully.

sarcasm, and emotions are still a bit away, mostly because they require knowledge about the world, and if your world is a small set of documents you won't successfully get the sarcasm or emotions. this is also the case with people when they come to a different culture.
Google reportedly starting an in-house startup incubator
> This is something that the FCC takes very seriously. There are hundreds of billions of dollars corporations have thrown at just to get rights to little chunks of spectrum (and as one would imagine, I'm sure their lobbyists have Tom Wheeler on speed-dial).

Although those corporations have been a bit cheeky - collusive - with some of those auctions.

ftp://www.cramton.umd.edu/papers2000-2004/00jre-collusive-bidding-lessons.pdf
What about current college students?

If it were possible for a good student at _any_ school to take online courses _for credit_ at an Ivy, and perhaps to even work toward a new "dual" degree that joins both institutions, I suspect the demand would be there. They're already using borrowed money.
Modern catalytic converters are so obscenely efficient, they barely have any effect, even cumulatively, on the amount of fuel lost. You have more loss in the drivetrain.
Show HN: “Donald Trump V/s Hillary Clinton” Better On-Site UX?
Has a massive big change like that ever worked smoothly in a language with really widespread use?

I mean it's 8 years later and python is still feeling the issues from the 2->3 change.
General artificial intelligence with a knack for natural language, that is...
Senators Call for New General Accountability Office Study of Fintech
Collusive Bidding: Lessons from the FCC Spectrum Auctions  (2000) [pdf]
Space and gas taxes.

Europeans do not have significant amounts of space to build housing supplies, that's why space/m^2 is much higher than here in the states, witness San Fancisco's trolley system that caused suburbanization (or at least enabled it).

Gas Taxes in Europe are double than here in the states[1], US gas is taxed at relatively low rates when compared to other nations. Used as a user tax here in the states, its predominant purpose is to fund roadway improvements and maintenance; however, it is used to fund transit and other items. In Europe, the higher gas tax is used to drive (good one Agustus) less travel and subsidize rail lines.

The trams / streetcars in Europe work because the suburbanization was stopped by high government taxes and forces the populous to pay more for a lower comparable standard of living.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fuel_tax_in_OECD_countrie...

*Edited for why, if you disagree, please provide an alternative opinion. I have taken the time to provide a discourse, if a downvote to it is necessary, then please provide a reason.
If you are in the US (reasonable guess for a(n ex-)T-Mobile customer), you might want to exercise your right to pull a free credit report check and make sure it's not screwing it up.

Since it is actually a bit challenging to correctly pull your free credit report, start here: https://www.ftc.gov/faq/consumer-protection/get-my-free-cred... (Simply Googling "free credit report" and clicking willy-nilly can lead to sadness.)

In fact I'm overdue to pull mine myself; thanks for reminding me.
The same reason everyone uses iPhones despite them being built in part by child labor - people don't care about how they get things, they care about what they get and how good they are.

Uber as a company is slimy that does shady things to crush their competition. But Uber as a service is awesome and provides a way better experience than using a Taxi in most cities.
"but mankind and societies don't really work that way"

Nothing works like that, but we are only human and we need heuristics and narratives that help us to deal with a very complex reality.

That shouldn't be a problem if we are aware or our limitations. No need to toss books aside because of that.

I find the grandparent comment both, very interesting and relevant to the discussion at hand.
How did what happens? Not all times of the day are good for posting.

More people are active on HN at certain hours (mostly related to US work times, where the big majority of users come from).

And articles can both regularly either fails to catch up until some nth submission, or get on the homepage again and again every few months (even if it's the same article).
And then after Wilf, read Flajolet and Sedgewick: http://algo.inria.fr/flajolet/Publications/book.pdf
Naive (and synonyms) is the one I hear the most, and i tend to agree with it.
Whenever I hear about searching for a mentor, I imagine some guy that simply
waits for illumination to happen, by osmosis, I suppose. I see searching
specifically for a mentor as a kind of fashion or supersitition of these days.
(Mind you, this is merely an association, a first impression that I have when
I see such questions.)

Do you have a plan how to use this "mentoring" thing? A concrete idea what you
want from a mentor and how your work would look like? Do you have anything to
show him/her, so the mentor has any foothold for comments?

This is a good piece of article about exactly that:
http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2010/12/answer-to-will-you-me...
EasyPost is hiring
Here's my trick: use a virtual credit card number (which is safer, anyway, since you don't expose the # of your original CC), and revoke it when you want to cancel. Or, make a VCC# with a $ limit. I don' t know if anyone other than Citibank has them anymore. They are fantastic.
6 Simple Tricks to Make Your Content More Actionable
Logitech made this retro game display from 160 light-up keyboards
Weeks. "We are readying repositories. Estimate date... In the next few weeks ^^"

I don't think you should be able to claim something is open source... until the source is open. But maybe that's just me.
It's especially jarring because their photo of "James Gold" is actually my coworker http://andymatthews.net/
Looks like Nenshi was right.
(Recently in Boston the Mayor of Calgary said Uber were "Dicks")
Thanks, that was the closest thing I could think of. Wasn't sure!
It seems like this relies entirely on the strength of the secondary passphrase, and in turn of the storage by which that passphrase is moved from client to client. And if the encrypted private key is ever readable, it is forever vulnerable to attacks. They can spend as long as they like brute-forcing the secondary passphrase, or looking for the Post-It note where you inevitably wrote down the generated passphrase.

It also seems like there's no key-stretching involved, right? The cost of each brute-force attempt is very cheap? So the option of permitting a user-generated passphrase (with much lower entropy) seems like a pretty bad idea.

Have you looked into password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) mechanisms? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password-authenticated_key_agr... My understanding is they let you use a relatively weak passphrase to authenticate a short-term session using a new 128-bit key, and once that session is established, attacks need to be against the session key, not the passphrase. This involves a bit more active communication than simply leaving an encrypted key in an IMAP folder, but you could do something where a new client requests a key by dropping a message in the folder, then you have to physically go to the old client to confirm it, which leaves a new message in the folder that (only) the new client can use.

I believe Firefox Sync uses a similar approach, except that the low-entropy passphrase is a PIN automatically generated by one of the devices, so the UX feels sort of like Bluetooth pairing.
We built it with mdBook (https://github.com/azerupi/mdBook), which describes itself saying "Like Gitbook but implemented in Rust"
You Don't Own That the Evolution of Property
At my frst job I once had to fix a wordpress site that was 'too slow' which loaded a 12MB 4k by 4k favicon. I kid you not. It also loaded jquery 4 times, had about 20 unminified stylesheets linked in the header. When I told this to my manager he told me 'oh but you only need to load that stuff once and then its cached, so that can't be an issue'. I did not last long in that place. The backend was even more of a wasteland.
FamilyInSafe: family locator, messenger and checklist
[Originally posted on Designer News]

Re-sharing it here for non-designernews audience. Hope this helps.
It wasn't that straightforward in Europe either. E.g. in Munich, the tram network was reduced until the 1990s as it was thought underground trains could replace it. That turned out to be insufficient, so now we have both. But yes, it involves significant public spending.
The fact remains that millions of people park on the street or in alleys/garages they do not own. Until we start stomping on landlords' property rights to force them to install chargers, and also somehow install chargers in street parking spaces, EVs are just not usable for a huge segments of the population. The only way to make EV ownership practical is, ironically, to make your commute longer by living in the suburbs.
To be fair, many packaged applications in popular distros are insecure (OwnCloud in Debian as one example). The developers of the applications will tell users specifically not to install the packaged version of the application, because it is out of date and/or insecure.

PPAs were supposed to solve this problem, and the official line is that Snap packages are supposed to solve this problem, but better.
I am a bit surprised that the article doesn't have any introspection about knowing the market (or not). It seems like the reasoning was: we want some money; women have money; women buy clothes; let's do fashion. It doesn't seem like there was much of a value proposition for the customer. Maybe the customer likes browsing Instagram. Maybe the customer asks all these questions (stupid questions as well as clarifying questions) to gauge how quickly a return would be dealt with if desired, to establish some info about company knowledge and responsiveness. (Buying clothes online is risky in terms of fit and fabric quality, especially with resellers.) How could a startup cater to the features of the marketplace instead of fighting them?
I'm actually in the exact same position - not super interested in getting a job, very interested in researching and learning, and I've got enough money to be fine for a few years if I really needed to. Obviously I _should_ put forth the effort to build out my resume, apply to some companies that I actually like, and go through the interview process, but I haven't yet. I find it interesting that I'm not the only person in that boat.

As for efficiently certifying UI benefits: I would love to. Here in NY, the labor.gov website is awful and even goes down for hours at a time. If it was any less money I'd be tempted to just ignore unemployment insurance entirely and consider it a trade-off for less time wasted dealing with bureaucracy.

However, according to our claimant handbook[0] we're not able to have someone else fill out the weekly form for us, use an anonymizing internet service, or certify benefits while traveling. In fact, giving someone else your PIN can get you jailed for fraud, so I'm kinda afraid to try automating their system... Given their strictness, I doubt that they would look kindly upon that.

[0]: https://labor.ny.gov/formsdocs/ui/TC318.3e.pdf
I guess it makes sense if you think about it. Nations can change on a whim pretty much, think Scottish independence or the possible creation of Kurdistan. On the other hand city buildings like those in Rome are there for hundreds or thousands of years.

Vid of Europe's changing borders and nations: https://youtu.be/uxDyJ_6N-6A?t=1m19s
Well, parent could be correct.

Just yesterday there was a post on here about London's bus numbers, those had been inherited from the horse and cart days, been used on horse drawn trams, been used on electric trams, been used on trolleybuses (trams with little rubber wheels instead of proper steel ones) and now used on regular bus routes. Seems that London upgraded transport stock to get rid of trams without there being some huge conspiracy. A plausible scenario could happen elsewhere.
Here's how I understand it, but some of this might be wrong.

Good stories sometimes get missed because there's so much posted to /newest.

The dupe detector is currently weak to allow reposts. A repost is better than missing a good story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645
For a language I'm getting spun up on, I use a plain text editor like TextMate. I like to know everything that happens to my code from when it's written until it's compiled/run.

For languages I'm comfortable in, IDEs all the way. I'm particular to the JetBrains suite (RubyMine, IntelliJ, PyCharm, etc). I like the consistency across the different products, and for multi-language projects (i.e. my current project involves Rails apps, Java/Spring microservices, and lots of ReactJS) IntelliJ Ultimate is unbelievably awesome for my productivity.
Ask HN: What would you do with 1.3M laws?
I'm the CTO of a law search engine that has 1.3 million laws from 47 countries. We're now wondering what else to do with our giant database of laws. What kind of text analysis could you run? ML algorithms? Clustering? What would be interesting for you to see as an experiment?
I feel it's like that too. We live to work and forget anything outside it. Maybe a bit off topic, but I like this piece from a cartoon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy9TsGOswVA.
Can't access the document. Permissions need to be changed.
Etherpad does a not bad job at handling real-time collaboration, with the right plugins included. Sandstorm.io is an awesome hosting solution for it.

I just kinda assumed if LibreOffice was announcing a cloud platform it'd be collaborative...
If You Are Moving at the Speed of a Bullet and Shoot Backwards, What Happens?
People who use metformin seem to live longer than those who don't. Studies are about to be done to see if it actually works:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/fountain-of-youth-drug-trial-has...

"Behind the mania is a widely used, inexpensive generic pill for Type 2 diabetes called metformin. Scientists are planning a clinical trial to see if the drug can delay or prevent some of the most devastating diseases of advanced age, from heart ailments to cognitive decline to cancer. To test the pill, gerontologists at 14 aging centers around the U.S. will follow 3,000 seniors for six years. Half the seniors involved would get the drug, while the others would receive a placebo."
Interestingly, Boston Globe's registered agent is empty! http://corp.sec.state.ma.us/CorpWeb/CorpSearch/CorpSummary.a...
Elixir koans
> any product based primarily on aggregating products that others sell is a failed model

What about eBay?
If anyone is curious, Link #5 (broken) is now hosted here: http://ejucovy.github.io/readability/
> I think it was the unified purpose, the school catchment area, maybe. That proximity.

My high school was super-stratified. The cliques were out of control.

As an adult, I have much more control over my surroundings and have found a place that fits me (it took some time - I've lived in two countries and 7 different cities). At 46, I'm much more comfortable with who I am and liking what I like than when I was 16. Teenagers often try so desperately to fit in that it ends up taking a long time to discover who they really are. BTW, I love how the movie American Beauty addresses this.

These days I have the resources to do what I want to do. That includes eating out with friends, going to baseball games, or just to the park to play with my kids and dog. I think the only time I get the sense of stifling that you describe is when I go to a formal event but that too is an experience I want.
> why is atheism making people worse off?

Care to put forth any evidence that this might possibly be the case?
HTML5 Media Source Extensions: Bringing Production Video to the Web
Oh totally. My wife seems immune to his stirrings on the baby monitor. Without fail, no matter the time of night, I will wake up even if he silently stands up in the crib. Yhe only time I sleep hard now is when someone else is watching him.
I guess it's just the use of the words so and apparently, it reads sarcastically or condescendingly? I'm having trouble finding the words to describe the subtle implication of that combination of words.

Like if you were to say "So we're apparently not allowed to bring guns to school".
Will Swift get more adoption in 2016 and beyond?
(edX employee here)

I'm not particular privy to whatever tactical insight our leadership has on Udacity, Coursera, etc... but I can tell you where edX is looking to head as a MOOC when it comes to college/university partnerships.

We have our partner-developed content. This is stuff like Harvard's CS50, MIT's 6.00.1x, etc. High quality content. People are very eager to take the courses -- they're developed by professors, TAs, etc, from these schools, and, to be honest, there's a lot of front-loaded name recognition -- but there's also a good chunk of learners who go on to pay for a verified certificate. On the flipside, we've talked to major businesses (tens of thousands of employees) who say they're willing to treat these certificates, the output of these courses, in line with their campus equivalents. That's pretty huge for someone looking to beef up their resume.

The next evolution of what we're doing by partnering with these institutions are things like Arizona State University's Global Freshman Academy or MIT's MicroMasters. ASU's Global Freshman Academy is taking your entire "freshman" year on edX, and getting real credit from it. MIT's MicroMasters (in Supply Chain Management) is taking a semester online, which makes you eligible for taking the rest of the degree (which is two semesters total) on campus. These cost money; they aren't entirely free like the standard courses on edX. However, they're deeply discounted and this is what our learners say they want.

Many people want credentials, they want them from top colleges and universities, and they want them targeted to specific fields. Ultimately, these people just don't feel confident figuring out which courses to take, and they want to be told which courses to take to get them to a specific place: better comprehension of X, better chances of job in a given field, etc. This is what is precipitating a lot of the advent of the specializations/nanodegrees, as you say.

(sorry, a little long-winded)
I did wonder that. Perhaps he would have threatened to call it in to police as a customer refusing to pay. Maybe he just wanted to torch the ratings of Uber customers, by having them no-show for the Uber they actually ordered.

The whole thing just felt very unsafe. This happened in the early hours of the morning as well. I was very glad when he finally drove off.
Literally just a man behind a curtain
I tried to give an overview on the technical details of the HTML5 MSE/EME, which is used e.g. by Netflix and Youtube. If you are interested in any details, just post it here, happy to answer.
A 16-bit computer made almost entirely from discrete electronic components
Trams completely died out in the UK through the 60s. Just one town, Blackpool, kept them. This was around the time Beeching was making devastating cuts to the UK rail network. The belief seemed to be that cars would be the answer to everything making rail and trams go the same way as canals. Until only a few years ago the trams in Blackpool were running on rolling stock mainly from the 30s and 40s, with just a few bus-bodies from the 90s. They ended up being a living museum and they even bought up old trams from other regions.

A few years ago they rebuilt the entire network with new modern stock and track, with new disabled friendly stops. It's sort-of a success. They halved the number of stops (due to needing platforms for disabled access), so it's less convenient. They increased the prices, making it more expensive than the bus following the same route.

Many other UK cities have brought back modern tram networks, with mostly great success. It's often proved horribly expensive to do - Edinburgh being the example of how not to buy a tramway. The UK is also bringing back some of the axed rail networks as roads become increasingly gridlocked. Of course this is expensive to do, especially as sections of many lines have now been built on.

Other parts of Europe, though not all, seem to make consistently more intelligent transport choices, and have long provided more integrated transport solutions.
The expense of an MLB game
We think it is more beneficial for collaboration if we stick to the common naming of layers, functions and concepts than using metaphors. We provided two links, which help to get you started with that.

But with Leaf it becomes very easy to create modules (Rust crates) that expose layers/networks/concepts, which can have a metaphorical name.
Industrial certifications like ISO 9000, six sigma, etc... are kind of a joke. What happens to those companies if they fail to maintain an acceptable standard? Quality goes down? Who cares? There's no liability.

A better comparison would be something like UL or FCC. Make the standards and testing body liable for their claims. Require PEs to be part of the organization and personally responsible for signing off.

This is a solved problem. We build bridges and electronics that don't kill people using similar methods.
I don't have a child, but this happened after buying a house, and living alone. I went from dead to the world sleep, to hearing everything happening in the house. Even ten years later, I still sleep significantly lighter.
Newspapers are so desperate, they'll do anything. The answer is only use a customer focused card, or insist on invoicing, preferably where you pay in arrears.

My local paper even plays games with invoicing. They bill on a weird cycle (10 week) and will send you out of cycle/overlapping invoices that you don't actually owe. Sometimes those out of cycle invoices casually jack the rate up 20-30% -- if you pay it, you're accepting new terms.
Presidential campaign apps failing to safeguard data
Does anyone know what a 4000T is worth these days? I've got the computer the local library used to use for their local access cable channel rotting away in my basement right now. I have no use for it but I'd like to make sure someone who wanted it got it rather than sending it off to some unknown fate.
Hailo is immensely popular in Dublin, absolutely fantastic service. Sometimes I take it for granted, then threads about Uber and Lyft come up and I realise how amazing it is.