skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a programmer without a computer science degree and I'm quite aware that CS is a bit of a blind spot for me so I've tried to read up to rectify this a little.

I found The New Turing Omnibus[1] to give a really nice overview of a bunch of topics, some chapters were a lot harder to follow than others but I got a lot from it.

Code by Charles Petzold[2] is a book I recommend to anyone who stays still long enough; it's a brilliant explanation of how computers work.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)[3] comes up all the time when this kind of question is asked and for good reason; it's definitely my favourite CS/programming book, and it's available for free online[4].

I'm still a long way off having the kind of education someone with a CS degree would have but those are my recommendations. I'd love to hear the views of someone more knowledgable.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Turing-Omnibus-K-Dewdney/dp/080...
[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware/dp/...
[3] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-E...
[4] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
CNCF adds Prometheus monitoring tool as its second hosted project
I wrote the the original machine learning for our company using a fork of brain.js. We launched to 300k+ users the first day with a model training time of under 10 seconds. I've since re-written our machine learning in Go. For getting something out the door quickly, Javascript is great.

It worked well for us because we had to stream the data into the network for training, --all the training data did not fit into RAM on Heroku's 1G dyno. Node.js does this IO transfer really well. (Full disclosure, I wrote the streaming implementation for brain.js.)

Also, training artificial neural networks is a serial computation for the most part. (Lots of sigmas). There are parallel optimizations you can make but probably won't see the benefits (in terms of training speed) until you have high dimensional data. Doing this sort of thing on a GPU is also orders of magnitude faster.

One thing to note however, if you plan on serving a high number predictions from trained models in Javascript, you will see blocking because each prediction does require a small bit of computation and Javascript / Node.js is single threaded.
Scientists Who Simulate the End of the World
Look everybody knows it's economics that drives this. That's not the point. We have mechanisms in place that can isolate certain aspects of life and remove them from the capitalist machine.

On a grand scale it's socialized medicine but even on a smaller scale it's health insurance. And it's why hospitals don't kick out a dying person just because they're destitute. What we're talking about isn't "why does medicine X cost $Y?" Most people understand that.

And that's why it's unfair to compare life-saving medication to buying a luxury vehicle.
It's an unwritten and unofficial rule, no one has to respect that, to me it only fuels the "omg our site that relies on linking to stuff on the internet has been linked somewhere on the internet" victim complex.
What's the difference between machine learning, statistics, and data mining?
One thing is that selling water from some place enables the source to be developed. E.g. enable better water treatment technology and eliminate losses. It may very well actually improve availability of water.

Sale of drinking water is not really much of a problem, anywhere; the amounts consumed by drinking are small compared to everything else, and the development of treatment capability may well offset them.

Selling water in bottles is a problem because of the bottles (trash, materials, energy), but that is another thing. Supplying water to other uses (industry, agriculture) is a problem because the amounts are vastly bigger than with drinking water.

To be honest, I trust the English Wikipedia here more than the German...
What did McCarthy have to do with the secret services of the US?
Your observation that it's possible to build xyz type of websites does not adequately discount the necessity of such features.

I'm talking about improving those lightweight and beautiful websites even further. I implement some of those features on every project, to deliver the maximum content & experience quality in every network and device condition possible.

You can't seriously try to shoe-horn the entire platform into whatever your vision of beauty is. Please keep an open mind about a complex future medium, that can effectively accommodate Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Photoshop, Open Office, Google Maps, Skype, Auto CAD, Grand Theft Auto VR, ...
> Why does this happen?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

> There can be only one explanation

Why/how have you arrived at this conclusion?

> it's always framed as if "big evil corporations" is the whole problem

So, you have evidence of food that shouldn't have sugar in it but does in fact have sugar anyway. And you conclude that it's the consumer's fault, because they're stupid, and not the company that puts the sugar in?

Humans have lots of biological and mental weaknesses that can be exploited for profit. Preferring highly caloric food is one of them. It seems fairly pessimistic to call that "dumb". Before the invention of mass produced food, preferring sweet things was an evolutionary advantage. That fact is now being used against you, and all of us, in a big conspiracy called "marketing".
The "problem" is that there are so many different use cases. There are people using emacs on strange systems for decades and their opinions vastly differ from a new user looking for a javascript environment. There are lots of opinions in emacs, and usually when you want to do something to core you find out that there's a wide swath of users who have the opposite opinion to what you were thinking. It's not a bad thing, its just tough to do anything because there are so many packages, users, expectations, ranging from 1-25 years of behavior.
I'm going to take a different tack: How about we stop hazing medical professionals at the beginning of their career and only ask them to work 8 hour shifts with an appropriate amount of time off until their next shift?
Baidu ordered to clean up search results after student's death
One of the reasons is the bond between the living who continue the dangerous pursuit. It is a statement between them that nobody gets left behind. That is the level of commitment needed; unequivocal and unending.
The magic insight is always this: "Because I want to feel good." When someone doesn't want to put this in words, they get annoyed and stop talking to you.
Getting Started with Beanstalkd and Node.js
If by "manage" you mean "make sure the scarce resource goes to the highest bidder". That's not the same as maximizing overall happiness, because purchasing power ≠ capacity for happiness. In fact it's often the reverse. The person who can get the most happiness from a glass of water might be the least able to afford it.
>the opportunity for individuals to move to a place that is most inline with their personal philosophy

There are very, very few people who are lucky enough to base their current country on their personal philosophy.
Yup that's fine. If the ROV kicks up any silt, shut it down and go for lunch. Nobody's air is running out so you have extra time.
Is this really true?

Over here (EU), the purpose of a corporation does not have to be maximising profit (although that is the default) and CEO does not have to use every legal method to maximize profit, at all costs.
Motivational Daily – Get your day started, motivated
Gilead has developed the first drug since penicillin to cure a major disease and people think the price tag is too expensive.

In the modern world, it's not ideal to create a drug to cure something. Once people are cured they no longer need your drug. That's why we have so many drugs like Lipitor and Viagra that treat symptoms but do not cure.

The "problem" with Sovaldi/Harvoni is that the patient only takes it for ~90 days, and then they're cured.

The drugs are cheaper than regular treatment of Hep C - which ends in liver transplant. Do people think the price tag was just random? No, it's because this is a price at which the taxpayer saves money by curing the disease vs. blood transfusions, liver transplants, lost economic value, etc.

Not to mention that the waitlist for a liver transplant is getting halved as we cure Hep C.

As we slam Gilead the other really evil pharma companies like Pfizer are taking notes and patting themselves on the back for creating drugs whose end goal is to addict the consumer.
I think what he meant was that proof that a particular piece of evidence was illegally obtained is likely to necessarily be illegally obtained as well. Thus it will be thrown out itself before it can used to get the original evidence thrown out.

Or at least that's my interpretation of the comment in question. I have no idea how true it is.
There can only be one explanation: most consumers are dumb.

Or other people have different tradeoffs between short-term pleasure and statistical long-term health. You can define that as "stupid" if you want, but I'm guessing there are plenty of things that you do because you enjoy them that you would not do if maximizing health were your sole priority.
Quantum swing – a pendulum that moves forward and backwards at the same time
it originates from the meta subreddits ( subreddits that only crosslink to other subreddits, such as bestof ) completely derailed any meaningful discussion as soon as threads were posted in said meta subreddits.

its less of an issue if you link from here, as not everybody on this side will be a logged in user on reddit, but it should still be considered polite, considering that there is an actual 'best-practice' for linking
This almost implies that some people are born with a lack of self control? You can't just simplify it like that.

From birth, everything we process with our senses adds to our understanding of the world and our ability to navigate it. If Nestle has enough money to flood the market with information supporting themselves, how can you expect people to make the right choices? And remember, not everyone has the fortune of growing up in a balanced environment that allows them to evolve a rational way of thinking, so they aren't just gonna jump on HN and start doing some research.

You can't just take the first order approximation. You gotta do the full expansion, man.
PayPal nixes Purchase Protection for crowdfunding purchases
This is the equivalent of RTFM or the 15 page terms of service documents that no one can possibly read. Sure it makes sense in some cases but you can't use it as an excuse to shift the burden to the consumer however you like.
Fort McMurray, a Canadian Oil Boom Town, Is Left in Ashes
I'm a big fan of idlewords's contrasting take on tech: http://idlewords.com/
Also note that the people retrieving the dead in both cases are in the same group as the dead, risking their lives in the same way. They have presumably thought about the possibility that they will die in the same way, and the idea that someone will retrieve their corpse and return it to their loved ones probably brings them a great deal of comfort.

You can just chalk it up to culture, but there is also a logic to it that is every bit as logical as the "leave my meat where it falls" crowd: if you have a culture of retrieving the bodies of the fallen, no matter the difficulty, then that means that you won't leave behind the wounded to save your own skin. This, in turn, makes it easier to trust and to risk your life for your comrades -- they'll take care of you in turn, living or dead.
Virgil: Sentiment Analysis for Chatbots
Really solid breakdown of what this exploit is capable of. ImageMagick is incredibly common, and unfortunately, few people who use it likely realize they do, since it's often only referred to deep inside other applications' code.
Too Many Jobs Are Hidden. Hack the Process and Go Direct
Perhaps we need smarter tools and better cooperation. For instance, I bet a large part of code in large websites is shared with some other website. Why can't our tools figure out if this is the case, and then create some kind of "shared library" to be used by both websites.
It's just not true. Even at top level, many games are won from an equal or slightly worse position after the opening, heck Carlsen is famous for it and he's #1 by a huge margin. Saying that you must have a stronger opening than your opponent to win is not true at any level.
Haven't worked on it for a while, but see also www.hecl.org
TCPTuner: Congestion Control Your Way
Good point. I admit that I'm not very good at getting laid myself. However, if you eat healthily, you will look much better than if you eat unhealthily. We know that men are attracted to good looking women. However, women seem to be attracted to high-status men, and put less value good looks.

I wish there were some studies that compared how much success healthy and good looking but relatively poor men would have with women, compared to unhealthy and bad looking but relatively rich ones.

I hope I did not get too off topic here, but I think maybe it's possible that this is part of the explanation. That people want status symbols in order to get laid, and thus have less time for health. So maybe I was wrong about the Average Joe having a low intelligence...
https://twitter.com/lambdamart Also have the LambdaMart.com domain purchased. If you need some AWS Lambda functions give us a holler. We can do C/C++/Haskell/Bash in addition to the officially supported SDKs. Skunkworks project on hot booting Ruby VMs so they don't twiddle for a few seconds parsing your script. Also a skunkworks project on using Lambdas as data stores for complex static data structures.
The hottest trend in web design is intentionally ugly, unusable sites
CoreOS raises $28M Series B round led by GV
It strikes me that my browsing experience not has seen a net improvement in the past 6-7 years. Whereas the functionality of websites is undoubtedly better, the ad-swamp is definitely greater too. I call it a draw. For all the content/UI improvement, there is a corresponding increase in advertising encroachment. If we assume that in tech things are supposed to improve over time, 6-7 years of static is a regression versus expectations.
Equivalently, click on the 'web' link
Yamaha wants to sell you noise-canceling headphones, and a motorcycle.
> If you read a few books on nutrition, you will learn that refined sugar is unhealthy. This is not hard for anybody with half a brain to figure out.

Totally true, I myself went thru an over use of refined sugar and non-healthy fast food choices. It was a truly terrible experience that thankfully I caught at a young age before it progressed to thousands to possibly hundreds of thousands in medical care.

Essentially I ended up having tears in my throat and ulcers at the same time causing and obscene amount of blood to, well for sake of the conversation, come back out of the body reverse style. It was due to the amount of sugar intake and "fast food" that caused me to experience this horrible scenario. I feel as though a lot of people who experience this just go, "oh I'll take some pills and I can get right back into it" which in it self will cause the problem to worsen but the general populous has for some reason come to believe that the magic pill solves all and we can rely on future technology to keep us "safe from tipping the edge"..."until it all collapses into a mess".

I honestly believe it's the fact that our culture is now bred to have things handed to them so easily. As an application/web designer I often have to create "dumbed" down interfaces that to me seem illogical and a waste of precious coding time.

While yes it sucks they don't put it in bright high contrast words on the labels, but at the same time they are putting it on the label and if we just took the time we could curb this silly notion of the big corporation is evil - even creating a core class required for students to take at various stages of school would make a phenomenal difference (in theory).

Essentially while a company may be evil, they are only evil because it's making a profit. We the people of the world need to make the change for big industry to make change because at the root of it they only do it because we keep paying!
That's not true, you're legally obligated not to defraud the company but beyond that you can do whatever the board lets you do.
One aspect of the patent system is that the government or non profits or whatever could do drug development, get patents and then give away licensing.

Would doing that put an end to commercial drug development? Or would commercial drug makers continue to seek treatments where they saw opportunities to profit?

Sofosbuvir is a really great test of how we reason about this stuff. The price is high and easy to balk at, but it's cheaper and better than the previous treatment. Cheaper and better are clearly compatible with the profit motive. So we are left with our intuition that the price is unfairly high. I think part of the answer is to look at how medical payments are structured.
> it can often resolve when the surgery is "fixed" (e.g., removing lap-bands)

If the ailment is exclusively psychological, then presumably you believe this would hold even for a sham surgical intervention. E.g. you tell/convince the patient it's been removed but it's still there, and they get better. Is that the case? Otherwise it sounds like a mixture of physical and psychological, and you are being overly reductive.
I think you missed the observation there.

Airliners could certainly land with parachutes. They could even glide in for unpowered landings. And doing so would save a lot of fuel in either case. But that fuel savings would come at the cost of adding huge operational complexities, and risks. Powered landings are more precise, more predictable, and more reliable. They reduce operational complexities, even if they are costly, and for that reason they are more than worth the fuel costs. An airplane could carry more weight a farther distance if it glided into landing unpowered, but effectively all landings would become emergency situations, and it's just not worth the small benefit of increasing payload.

The same is true in orbital rocketry as well. Parachutes may seem like a good idea, but they increase recovery complexity and costs, they increase the likelihood of damage to the rocket, they reduce predictability, and so on. Powered landings are the most dependable way of ensuring the stage can be returned and of doing so within an operational profile that can be streamlined and optimized until its very reliable and efficient, just like landing a plane. The fact that it comes at some cost of payload capacity is comparatively inconsequential, as it substantially increases the likelihood of recovering the tens of millions of dollars worth of launch vehicle hardware (which over its lifetime will service launches worth hundreds of millions of dollars).
Thanks for sharing on HN. Rust community's discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/4ij2ub/googles_tensor...
Thanks!

I am currently thinking of taking a break and come back to the program with a fresh perspective. I have faith in future me, I just need to find him ;)
Funny that you mention starvation wages. 50 years ago, you would have had to spend twice as much on food and you wouldn't have gotten anything at the level that's available today. I'd encourage you to read some of Megan McArdle's posts on how we look back at historical food preparation with glasses that are extremely rose colored.

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-10-30/friday-foo...
Yes, that's certainly true. And we always had waves of immigrants, it's nothing new. However, I think right now many perceive it as a large amount of immigrants that come quickly, maybe because of media coverage.
I was reading an astronaut's biography a few days ago, talking about the transition from the moon missions (where every half-hour was planned and accounted for) to Skylab (where people were working in the same place for long enough that it became necessary for them to have free time). And on one level it's a huge waste to have someone on the ISS where it's costing $x000/minute to keep them up there playing candy crush or whatever. But it's also a sign of maturity, that we are no longer desperately squeezing out every minute we can possibly get up there.

I think we're somewhere similar with the web. Internet is plentiful enough that we don't need to scrape and squeeze every last kilobyte. Maybe medium takes 3mb to render a simple plain page. That's ok.

(I do wish a lot of sites would up their information density though. Above all I wish I could get a full-width page, not a phone-width segment down the middle of my widescreen display. At home I've started using a stylesheet that disables max-width on all elements, and I've yet to see a site that looks worse that way)
Honestly, it does seem sort of egoistic to continue being a soldier if you have a family, at least to me. I'm going to have a hard time explaining it in a way that doesn't seem confrontational, but the most exaggerated example of this is Pat Tillman[1], the professional football player to turned down a $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist in the Army after the Sept. 11 attacks. Two years later, he was killed by friendly fire, making a widow out of the woman he married right before enlisting. Even if you ignore all the absurd, bungled propaganda surrounding his death, he probably did a lot of good in the Army -- but was it as much good as if he'd stayed home and used a couple million dollars to help vets or something?

I very much understand the sense of duty that pulls people toward the military, and I know it's frequently a complicated situation. But I don't think I'll never understand these guys who marry a woman, have a kid or three in between deployments, then just go running back into a war zone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Tillman
While a nice article that I do agree with, it's not exactly accurate.

90% of website size is media (images, audio, video, etc). Discounting that and saying that a 1MB page is so much bigger than just the text it delivers is silly and doesn't really make a point. Maybe it's unnecessary, maybe not, but that's subjective and most people would rather have images and decent UI.

It's true that ads are another factor, and it's slowly being solved, but ultimately comes down to the wrong incentives across the industry. The more annoying/heavy ads work better and pay more so everyone from advertisers to agencies to publishers will continue to optimize toward them until something changes (which might be adblocking). This isn't a technical problem so much as business and politics.

However, the publishers these days *are pretty short on tech talent and mostly use off-the-shelf CMS systems like wordpress (which are already bad software) and then just layer on their plugins, themes, and ads to create the mess we have today. Again no easy way to solve that without talent either on the pub side or in the platforms themselves. Some progress being made here with things like facebook instant articles and medium.com hosting.

Overall, the web definitely has a cruft problem, but it's not really that bad considering all the various channels of information access, and it's all slowly getting better.
Zenefits Was the Perfect Startup, Then It Self-Disrupted
Hyperloop firm shows off the magnetic tech that will help it move at 760 mph