skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm wondering if this is in any way related to all the fossil fuel stuff going on with Leo, Gore, etc. They've made a lot of money (would be nice if us 'normals' could too!), but am not seeing the same kinda connect for guns
It doesn't. The claim they're making is that instead of learning labels from bazillion similar example, they use bazillion of diverse examples to train a more generic classifier capable of "learning" correct labels from just a few (i.e. 5) examples.

They compare it with human performance claiming their algorithm is better, but it's kind of a bullshit claim, since people weren't allowed to use scratch paper or see previous examples. So instead of a pattern-matching test they turned this into a memory test. Typical of current AI research. Those people will do anything to be able to claim "better than human" performance.
> Imagine a digital “bill of rights” outlining design standards that forced the products used by billions of people to support empowering ways for them to navigate toward their goals.

This scares me
correct. The reason I believe that this was shitty was timing. The lawsuit coincided with the GM deal by all public accounts. Regardless of the legal structure, this was a shitty thing to do. Clearly, he cofounded Cruise and probably did contribute at least to the zeitgeist of the project.

Obviously, a cliff is standard for founders and kyle (based on the application) had posted a personal 100k convertible note. so if he fired Jeremy, that's fine. Jeremy probably would be entitled to something, and it should have been spelled out. However claiming 50% 2 years later to coincide with a 1B exit, seems fucked up. The approach to this, is what I have issues with.
I imagine that this could be done on android by batching notifications for display at specified intervals. Not sure about iOS (without jailbreak) though.
My contention isn't that the browsers of today are superior to native apps. My contention is that a properly architected browser can make better use of modern hardware than native apps coded to legacy frameworks can.
At $7/hr to rent it, security guards should start thinking about pivoting career.

There was an OECD opinion piece recently where they said on balance automation would not destroy jobs. I don't believe it. It will begin by eating these low skills jobs away and then eat its way upwards.
ELLE's 2016 Women in Tech
Grandiose claims, barely-readable and buzzword-saturated language, really weird experiment setup, lack of critical self-examination. These common features of recent AI research papers begin to annoy me. Especially when it's seen in corporate research, where (supposedly) results should be more important than a kind of lingual tribalism seen in academia. Is it really that hard to produce a human-readable description of the architecture and put it in a particular place of the paper instead of spreading them all over? Also, it took me quite a while to understand what the heck they were measuring (and how) in the first place.
I guess whatever you have to tell yourself. You can read minds and you "had to" leave because of it.
Web assembly gets first class access to browser API's and the DOM, which Applets never did. Applets had virtually zero ability to communicate with the webpage they were contained in. This paired with the fact that most users at the time (on Windows) had to download additional nagware to run them, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Web assembly is a continuation of JavaScript and ASM JS and is poised to be a much better solution for all parties.
You are your worst enemy, Yes and I am Mine
For apps written against the "native" Chrome API, Google Drive is presented as a filesystem the same way as the local filesystem - any service can expose itself similarly via the [chrome.fileSystemProvider API][1].

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/fileSystemProvider
A third of cash is held by 5 U.S. companies
It could be called a "boring quine" whereas the better ones could be called "pure quines". I'd still call it a quine though.
Uxkit was just a private objc OS X mapping of uikit that is used privately by the the photos.app on the Mac. Objc is not going anywhere, in the same way that "pure" C did not go away entirely.
Google built a tiny radar system into a smartwatch for gesture controls
The article is a mix of scientific facts with pseudoscientific gibberish. In particular it never explains "Why".

But at least they could keep the exponents correctly formatted, for example:

> Well, there are 20 choices for each of the 200 positions, so 20200 or 10260 possible proteins with the length of 200 amino acids.

should be

> Well, there are 20 choices for each of the 200 positions, so 20^200 or 10^260 possible proteins with the length of 200 amino acids.

Somewhat related: https://xkcd.com/54/
One foreign climber dies on Mt Everest; longline rescue to evacuate some
I work a few buildings down from Knightscope. Walking to lunch my co-workers and I were talking about how they would make a perfect bit on Silicon Valley. They're just bumbling around the parking lot continually, looking both hilarious and vaguely creepy.
New robot bee may soon be a spy's secret weapon
It's is, that is what the 2to3 program does automatically converts that among other things.
Hmm, the new if syntax really feels like a step backwards. (But I can see why they chose it: the C-like syntax here isn't too much of a burden, and is familiar to a lot of programmers already.)
Color coding syntax makes code jump off the page for many of us. Does it for you?

Bracket and parenthesis highlighting alone is invaluable.

My style is Obsidian, with a dark background, yellow/orange quoted text, blue variables, grey comments, bold white operators, white block comments. Ported from VI to N++ for a unified experience.
Sometimes I think Google executives didn't get the point of Orwell's book 1984, but thought they could definitely do better than Big Brother. Like it's evil not to do it, if you have the means.
The open source code is available here: https://github.com/contiv
As a parent, I get the emotional reaction. You want to provide the absolute best for your child, and this feels like a total missed opportunity.

But as someone who had cataract surgery as a newborn, please don't fret about it too much. I don't know how old your son is or when his surgery was, but bilateral aphakia is something that has become more of an inconvenience than anything else. It certainly shouldn't limit his options in life. (Unless his heart is set on joining the military, like I was. But, as they say, I really dodged a bullet there.)
The simple trick is to take pairs of bits. If you get 01, output 0. If you get 10, output 1. Otherwise, output nothing.
Even if the source is biased (as long as successive bits are uncorrelated), you get an unbiased 50:50 output. But obviously you get fewer bits out than you put in. The construction in the paper is basically a more efficient version of this.
Is society today really paranoid? Outside of a few loud voices, I think you'll find that is not true. Most people don't even know what data is being collected about them, and seemingly don't care.
Interesting Romanian Girl with Attractive Accessories – The Emporialist
Like the other article on HN today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737232

...I sometimes wonder if some people on HN aren't able to visualize the option of lower-cost lifestyles because they aren't given that menu option. How many articles are there per week about real-estate prices and rent control in big cities, and angst about basic income, etc.. My gift to them, small as it may be, is a window into a separate, but not so far away world.
Looks fine on my Ubuntu

http://imgur.com/ZwPb3dl
Haskell doesn't nearly has as much of a problem with copy-and-pasting from websites as Python have. (But in Haskell the significant indentation is much more optional.)
I've been thinking of ways to make it seem like verifiably benign code, while doing something "interesting."

For example:

print("‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‏‎")

This is benign, but that's not an empty string. The string contains a bunch of U+200e and U+200f characters, even though it appears empty. It proves that you can have strings with invisible characters in them.

Since we have two types of invisible characters, U+200e and U+200f, we can use those as binary digits -- 1 and 0. Thus, we can write a function that takes an invisible string as input, and returns a normal string as output.

So, what kind of string could we feed it? One possibility would be to convert something like "echo 'command-line injection'" into an invisible string. We'd pass that into our decoder function, and pass the result into os.execute. Since the conversion function mentioned above can be identified with an invisible variable name, it would look similar to this:

os.execute(‏("‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‏‎"))

That looks very suspicious, but we can do better. In Lua, you can index into tables with strings. And we have a function which can take invisible strings and produce normal strings.

The final PoC could look similar to this:

_G[‏("‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‏‎"))][‏("‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‏‎"))](‏("‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‏‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‏‎")))

That's non-working code, as I haven't put this together. But the idea is to convert the following (working) code into invisible strings:

_G["os"]["execute"]("echo 'command-line injection'")

Making this work is left as an exercise for the reader. :)

Another interesting approach would be to iterate through the "os" table a fixed number of times, until reaching the "execute" key. The iteration order isn't guaranteed, but given a certain version of LuaJIT, I think it's stable. That means you'd be able to do the equivalent of "os.execute" while making it look like you're "counting to 5."
Relevant
http://www.beelinereader.com/
http://opendyslexic.org/
Tomahawkins/atom: A DSL for embedded hard realtime applications
Right, but it could be a browser feature right?

The main issue (for example in OS X) is that everything gets subsumed by the browser process so things like Command+Tab don't work as well. There are, of course, also OS integration issues, but over time I think we'll get pretty far along on that front.
I really, really hate to ask the obvious, but doesn't this apply to damned near literally everything?

Did we genuinely need a column to remind us of this? Is this how bad it's gotten? I'm not asking rhetorically; I'm dead serious. Has publishing gone so far off the rails that we have to restate the blindingly obvious just to reboot the conversation? I'm nowhere involved in the process and will readily admit that I've got not a single paper to my name, so I'm clueless about the current state of affairs when it comes to published research.

Edit: Wow. Yeah, things actually look pretty bad if we take the opinion at its word. Particularly telling are the examples given, such as:

> For example, a breast-cancer cell line used in more than 1,000 published studies actually turned out to have been a melanoma cell line. The average biomedical research paper gets cited between 10 and 20 times in 5 years, and as many as one-third of all cell lines used in research are thought to be contaminated, so the arithmetic is easy enough to do: by one estimate, 10,000 published papers a year cite work based on contaminated cancer cell lines. Metastasis has spread to the cancer literature.
I must be missing something. If coming to doubt the existence of free will causes people to behave less responsibly, doesn't that demonstrate that those people do indeed have free will?
Sanders outpaces Clinton in fundraising for fourth straight month
I think its just you, looks great to me. Maybe an ad blocker?
As I understood the example, the typo was meant to have been introduced in the "WIP feature foo" commit, and the reformatting was meant to be of the changed code as well.
I was going to post this but first did a /vimium (Vimium search for the word "vimium") in the thread to see if it was already discussed, lol.

Vimium is incredible.
The biggest problem with road cars using valve springs (or indeed engines) that run at 20,000 RPM isn't technological; the issue is practical. Valve springs that function properly at 20k are going to be strong and produce serious resistance at low engine speeds (as a percentage of total power output). So much so that F1 cars with idle speeds of 7,000 RPM are normal. Low RPMs is where most road cars live. F1 cars don't want to be running at low engine speeds since that's not where the power is. Sacrificing power production at the low end (due to the power consumed working the valves) is an easy trade-off for a racecar.

Proper valve spring design is hard: it's a balancing act between power consumption at the low end and power production at the high end. F1 engines have a (relatively) narrow operating band, whereas a road car is expected to be usable from (a low) idle to redline.

(Expense is less of an issue here. Multi-million-dollar supercars with 20,000 RPM redlines would sell well.)
Hulu.com HTTPS broken
What about people who enjoy open plan offices and find them to be more productive? These people do exist. Sure for some teams open plan offices are a bad idea. However, this sounds like someone who doesn't enjoy this environment (perfectly reasonable) coming up with arguments why no one should do it.
Have you seen school food?

I have been to my kids school during lunch - so much wasted food it's incredible.

Please dom't waste more money on that.

I can see myself voting for this only if I owned the local food company.
Spy611 - Dan, you either have an offbeat sense of humor, or some form of sociopathy.
If the external drive stays plugged in, you can back up to it automatically. Good for a desktop (which can then serve laptops).

Time Machine likely makes sense for laptops, though it's got low storage capacity at the price.
Show HN: 3D Printed Town, Lac-Mégantic
Peirce quincuncial projection
> Which works great up until the point that some existing data that's supposed to be text, like a filename, or a file in a text-based format, or string fields in a file in a binary format, et cetera, turns out to be invalid UTF-8. Maybe because it was written in the wrong encoding, or because some binary data has been stuffed in (e.g. with heredoc quoting), or due to corruption, or even maliciously as an obfuscation measure. And Py3 turns up its nose and rejects it, probably by throwing an exception and killing the script - while programs written in other languages, including Py2 (if the unicode type is avoided), 'just work'.

I'm tired of people spreading FUD about it. they either don't understand what they are doing (and do it incorrectly) or are repeating what other people (who did things incorrectly) said:

» echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8
» echo $LC_CTYPE
en_US.UTF-8
» echo 'works' > $'\377'$'\377'$'\377'
» ls
???
» cat $'\377'$'\377'$'\377'
works
» python3
Python 3.4.1 (default, May 23 2014, 17:48:28) [GCC] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> a = b'\377\377\377'
>>> a
b'\xff\xff\xff'
>>> a.decode()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte
>>> b = open(a)
>>> b.read()
'works\n'
>>>

Accessing files with invalid utf-8 characters works just fine. Being explicit and clearly distinguishing between a string and bytes allows python to know when the filename is encoded using utf-8 (or in fact any other encoding you have defined in your environment) or bytes. Actually python2 struggles here, because it treats everything as bytes and can't tell what is used. Yes, legacy python probably won't crash, but it will spew garbage.

Python3 on the other side is strict about to point errors in your code. If python3 code will crash it's either bug in python or (most likely) bug in your code and you should fix it.

I (and I'm sure a lot of people) prefer program to crash, pointing where the error is, than silently corrupt data once in a while, and when you notice the issue spending days or months figuring out where the corruption is happening.
There's a better way.

(/ 2 3) ; => 2/3
(/ 2.0 3) ; => 0.6666667
The “best quality” programming languages
Richard Feynman had grapheme-color synesthesia, so he effectively saw all math with "syntax highlighting":

http://sdl.granthazard.com/exhibits/show/famous-synesthetes/...

I have some proposed a system with examples here:

https://nbeaver.github.io/equation-manager-description/
They don't have skylake yet - but its been about 370 days since the last refresh. If they don't update at macworld next month they'll give up half their damn market share.
Web Project Reviews
I have the Samsung Chromebook 2 (Exynos CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage).

I tried using a Class 10 MicroSD card to hold an Ember-CLI project, and running commands on it was intolerably slow.
I find it helps in grasping the gross structure of a piece of code, which lets me know where to focus my attention. Also highlighting strings has saved my butt a few times.
Did you try applying for jobs that specifically mention remote, like those found via https://www.google.com/search?q=remote+jobs ?

Was it ever to easy to find a remote job? You have to understand that there are 2 things going against you:

1. Remote jobs are (and have always been) relatively rare.

2. There's lots of additional tax/paperwork complexity to hiring foreigners (in your particular case, for US companies trying to hire people who are not americans). That limits the opportunities for remote work even further.

It's not impossible to find remote work at a company from a different country but it's very hard (and have always been hard).

The best strategy is to do something outstanding, that will get you noticed. The better you look to potential employer, the more likely they'll be to invest additional effort into hiring you.

A total side-note: there's no such thing as "average of 17 years of experience" when you're talking about just one person.
Yes. The basic error checking provided by something as simple as different colours for reserved words, defined variables, strings, etc, is extremely useful.

More developed syntax highlighting which knows about methods or functions that are in scope vs out of scope, variabkes that sre not defined in this scope, etc, are another layer of utility.

I get used to "for" being a certain shade of blue. When it is not blue, there is something wrong. If it is green, I have an unclosed string somewhere. If it is red, I have an unclosed block interfering with scope. If it is underlined, I have put the "for" where the parser was expecting an identifier.
Using MAD instead of standard deviation in the formula for correlation would result in the possibility of random values being "correlated" by values that exceed 1 in magnitude (the proof for a correlation coefficient being bounded by 1 relies on the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, which could no longer be appealed to).

This doesn't detract from Taleb's points at all, but it does show a mathematically "nice" property that results in the usage of standard deviations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy%E2%80%93Schwarz_inequal...
Google Compute Engine--Debian VM--for remote dev machine. I'm using Google Cloud Storage for static web sites. It is accessed as a remote file system. https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/hosting-static-website...
This seems a bit harsh. From the article, "I’m going to keep talking about the Apple font, because that’s the code path I worked on in Chrome..." Although this is toward the end of the article, it does give a good reason for why the author is only focusing on a rather small domain: she worked on this specific domain (Chrome, Apple, emoji). In case it wasn't immediately obvious, she doesn't actually mention any browser (or rendering engine) other than Chrome (Blink). Perhaps you were looking for a more complete essay on all things emoji, but it looks more like the author just wanted to write about some stuff she had worked on that she thought was interesting.
> If he lives until he's 75 its worth more than the company could reasonably find.

I would say that he's got a pretty strong incentive to make sure Aviva doesn't go out of business. That alone will limit his ability to extract value out of this contract.
> Higher life expectancy.. Well that's quite an easy one to improve when you stop starving everyone.

If that's the only reason, then why is the quality of life so much better in China than in India, the world's largest democracy?

For example,

- Life expectancy at birth in China is 73.5 years; in India it is 64.4 years.

- The infant mortality rate is fifty per thousand in India, compared with just seventeen in China.

- The mortality rate for children under five is sixty-six per thousand for Indians and nineteen for the Chinese.

- Maternal mortality rate is 230 per 100,000 live births in India and thirty-eight in China.

- Only 66 percent of Indian children are immunized with triple vaccine (diphtheria/pertussis/tetanus), as opposed to 97 percent in China.

- The mean years of schooling in India were estimated to be 4.4 years, compared with 7.5 years in China.

- China’s adult literacy rate is 94 percent, compared with India’s 74 percent.

- India's literacy rate for women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four is still not much above 80 percent, whereas in China it is 99 percent.

Source: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/05/12/quality-life-indi...
> You can't build a Twitter clone

Replacement, not clone; I don't care if it has all the features of Twitter. There are some instances that are more Twitter-like (e.g. Quitter), but they don't interest me.

For me, personally, this has nothing to do with cloning Twitter. For others it might, but I think that is misguided.

> in a decentralized way and expect to have good performance on the analytics side

I'm not sure that this matters. As a user, I'd prefer that there _not_ be traditional analytics, because centralized services' analytics amount to surveillance.

> The power of Twitter is having a single firehose where you can hook and analyze ALL the tweets.

Federation doesn't prevent another service from collecting and performing its own analytics on a federation. It certainly wouldn't be as performant, sure---but that's not the issue that we're addressing. A decentralized service is worth any performance cost for many of us.
I'm trying to think of a company that proves the opposite, but I can't.

For example Tesla and Space X seem like likely candidates, but Musk, and any founder with a billion dollar + exit, is an absolute cheat code in fund raising and can't be used as a standard for any normal company. And yes, most of the companies you mentioned are completely normal with founders who are categorically not Elon Musk, or in the case of Theranos, not Steve Jobs.
> Apparently the burden of proof is on whomever you want it to be on

No, I've been very clear how to deterministically determine it, you're not listening or responding to anything or any point made; You're having the same argument with several people yet are unable to admit you're wrong; so we're done, you don't know how to converse or the capacity to change your mind when shown your mistakes.
Because async doesn't do what you think it does.

https://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2012/01/13/javascript-perf...
Certainly it does -- and yes we do. Things are so bad that entire fields of science are best disregarded until a few good meta-analyses come out. Or, better yet, large randomized trials with predetermined criteria for success or failure, and no fishing allowed.