skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it possible to model the rate at which human knowledge is increasing or decreasing? Given that:

A) claims about reality are a lemon market, and it's often expensive or impossible to evaluate the truth behind purported facts.

B) false claims undermine the value of true claims by decreasing trust in them, and by causing people to stop believing things that are true so as to realign their worldview to be logically consistent with misinformation.

It stands to reason that if the percentage of true claims made in papers is less than X, the sum of human knowledge is actually decreasing even if good papers are still being published.
Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10880839
No longer optional: Windows 10 will automatically install over Windows 7/8
> Not to mention Chromebooks essentially are open products.

The OS itself is pretty open. If I'm not mistaken though, if you put it into dev mode, you get a scary screen at every reboot, and an opportunity to hit space to re-enable OS verification, and apparently wipe out whatever modifications you've made to the system. In theory, actually rebooting the system should be a fairly rare event, but that's one of the reasons I haven't considered a Chromebook. I understand the security concerns, but if the hardware makes it difficult to do what I'd like, then whatever security they implement is moot anyhow, right?

Macs are basically the opposite; the OS itself is closed, but the hardware isn't difficult to install some other OS on. You've got options, because you aren't wedded to the software.
Also you can't really rely on a free password manager (which is what users will generally select) to be a long-time solution. Either because they go out of business, change their monetization model, get hacked, whatever. It's one of those things that sounds good, but in reality is unable to gain critical mass for human reasons.
I've wondered about the implications of this mandated affordability. When giving someone a housing subsidy why do it for life ? Why not cap it at 3 years and give different people a chance too.

That guy renting the single bedroom is now stuck if he wants a bigger place - does he give it up and jump into another queue?

There has to be a better way.

Anyone familiar with the section 8 program in the US? Tenants get vouchers to use to pay rent to private landlords.
Ask HN: Any advice or resources for socially responsible investing?
Ah, the times when Microsoft translated VBA keywords into German...

But while they gave that up, we still have localized Excel function names. I don't know how robust exchanging Excel files really is, it makes me nervous, at least.

But given that many companies are global now and Excel is an important backbone to any company, there cannot be more than rare and minor problems with it, I guess.
This site is pretty CPU heavy for something reminding us to respect our users' resources...
Windows 10 goes full malware
A real security guard does more than this robot, though. Especially in case of trouble.
Is style(src="/node_modules/foo/bar.min.css") really that superior to (src="/bower_components/foo/bar.min.css").

You could argue that npm is the better package manager, but the average user does care about the underlying semantics.
Quantum Nonlocality, and the End of Classical Spacetime [pdf]
I work with graphs all the time and I've never had any luck with any graph database. Graph databases seem to flagrantly waste resources, especially when importing data.

That said, I should find out if OrientDB's announced "tenfold" performance increase is enough.
Interesting take but I disagree with one point:

> This style of designing abstractions is often quite foreign in programming in the large, and other schools of thought (see Gang of Four) actively encourage weaving cryptic metaphors and anthropomorphising code as a means to convey structure.

The GoF didn't try to anthropomorphize, all they wanted to do is put names on things. Sometimes, these names have some meaning (e.g. Factory pattern) and other times, they have none (e.g. the Flyweight pattern).

The important concept that the GoF book introduced was to name things. What word was used for these names matters little.

In other words, similar to what the author of this piece is trying to achieve (and he does so pretty convincingly).
"No feature engineering" claim would be far more convincing if they demonstrated network's abilities on several datasets of different types. It's not like that would be hard to generate synthetically. An interesting test would be "logic puzzles" that use shapes, object counts and so on. For example, a test where you have to label a picture based on the number of objects, regardless of their shapes.

As it is, it could be that this particular setup happens to extract features of this particular dataset, while failing miserably on others.

---

Thinking about this at a higher level, I ask myself what constitutes true one-shot learning. The reason we care about it is because in real life most problems don't involve huge datasets of available solutions. On the other hand, this paper does involve training a model based on a large dataset of similarly typed, labeled data. The problem the algorithm solves involves items from the same set.

The first obvious question is the one I asked above: does this approach work for other types of data? The second one is whether the mechanism would work for more diverse datasets. Finally, the most important question is: how well will it perform on tasks that fall far outside of the initial training data? Because that's the true challenge behind one-shot learning.

It's kind of amazing that the paper doesn't try to answer any of those questions. Isn't that the real purpose of research in AI? (Most likely they tried and the results weren't good, but hey, there is no way to tell without re-implementing the whole thing.)
The Necessity of Political Vulgarity
Show HN: Leavethe.us – search jobs by keyword in 50+ countries
If you're going to get in the weeds and build libraries from scratch that don't exist, would you enjoy that in Python3? Or would you like to get in the ground floor of something truly new and truly superior in every regard with Elixir?

Other languages have eaten some of Python's lunch over the 3 debacle, but Elixir is the answer to any question about "what's better".
Well that's not the Linux Desktop we were referring to all along, to be fair. And the whole ChromeOS stack beyond the kernel is closed-source. Hardly a win for "Linux", unless you assimilate the OS to the Kernel.
Anonymously Send a Fart Message in a Bottle
> It's clear that locally installed software is going away

Where performance matters, locally installed software is NOT going away anytime soon. Oh, just take gaming, for example. Good luck making AAA games run in your browser.
Agreed. When you start to work with python 3 it's a real drag to discover that your command line tools require a special virtualenv. It's not even a new problem, eg https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gsutil/issues/29
>supplementing our humanity..

This is exactly the problem. Supplementing x implies complete knowledge of what ideal x is. And what the "ideal" is nearly impossible to assess, since it require complete knowledge of future. I mean, what form of a "human being" will the most optimal through all of human existence? When you supplement without knowing the ideal, it has more chance to do harm than good.

>using these tools is what makes you human, as without them, what's really the distinguishing feature that separates you from the apes?..

Ok. But is it the only thing? What about creativity? We have language. We can create great stories and beautiful poems in them. We can look into the secrets on nature and create immensely powerful tools with that knowledge. Isn't that more of a hallmark of being a human, than mere dependency on our tools?

And is there no limit on how much we are dependent on them. Does it make sense to trade of our innate capabilities in the long term, for minor conveniences in the short?

I had a friend who could easily navigate any complex routes and had all the local routes and short cuts in his head. I respected him for that. Now he cannot find way around a supermarket without GPS. A part of him, that once I respected as a human being, is gone now.

>To me, nothing defines humanity more than the constant improvement of our race, our reach, and our capabilities.

You think our race is improving? Why? Because we have smartphones and have a massive and collective addiction to it?

>and the largest accumulation of knowledge the human race has ever seen..

It is also one of the biggest Ad/propaganda delivery channels.

Easy access to information does not make a difference is the people does not have the drive to consume it. If you give internet to 10 persons 9.5 of them will use it for social media and porn. How many of the addictive smartphone users have you seen consuming wikipedia? I have personally NEVER, not even once, seen someone reading wikipedia on a smartphone.
Fast-moving star duo is heading out of the Milky Way
> Of course, do whatever you want on your local machine before pushing to remote but once you have pushed, stop worrying about it.

This is what I'm talking about. After you push and share with others, I think you are absolutely right. Before it leaves your computer via git push to a shared location, I advocate that you should tidy things up. Thanks for clarifying...
> You'd be amazed how many people encounter a problem with their computer and give up because "it's mad at me." This isn't an educational problem

Wow, you'd have to wonder how everyone here actually learned how to use computers back when there was no Internet and no help from your friends because you were the only one using them.

It's NEVER been easier to use a computer nowadays, not just because they have become better designed and more user-friendly, but also because documentation and help is readily available everywhere at every corner.

Giving up when facing an issue these days is just called laziness, nothing else.
30 Tips on How to Be More Productive at Work After a Night of Boozing
> "what would it take to rob a person of their humanity?"

It really is a big question, but this bit by Hannah Arendt in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (a book I highly recommend, it's as timely as ever sadly) really struck me.. it's on page 667 in the German version, this is my crappy translation:

> Humans, in so far as they are more than a completion of functions able to react, whose lowest and therefore most central are the purely animal like reactions, are simply superfluous for totalitarian systems. Their goal is not to erect a despotic regime over humans, but a system by which humans are made superfluous. Total power can only be achieved and guaranteed when nothing else matters except the absolutely controllable willingness to react, marionettes robbed of all spontaneity. Humans, precisely because they are so powerful, can only be completely controlled when they have become examples of the animal like species human.

So I would say at least part of the answer might be: taking away the ability to act instead of just react, and the the ability to start a logical chain of thinking from new premises (which is also something she mentions, though of course in contrast with totalitarianism, which forces a certain flow of logic based on some premises set in stone; she's not writing about what it means to be human).
I don't trust anyone who thinks Nicolas Cage is dreamy.
> I'm curious, but is a Chromebook useful in offline mode? My family and I have been on sabbatical sailing half the planet so far. Internet has been a big headache as Iridium tops out at 2400bps. And data plans in developing countries and islands can be extremely expensive, up to $1/MB.

Not used a Chromebook, but I assume whatever works in offline mode in Chrome (e.g. Google Docs and Amazon Kindle) works in a Chromebook.

> As a parent I'm also concerned about the privacy aspects. I believe schools get a special Chromebook that cuts back on the tracking, does this hold true for their retail models?

I don't think Chromebooks have any additional tracking beyond what Chrome has.
A new photo of Mars from the Hubble Telescope
A real rent-a-cop calls the real cops if there is any trouble (which the robot can certainly do). They are a deterrent, not enforcers.
Why would they need the ability to communicate with the webpage they were contained in? They can communicate with themselves. What's the difference between a single-page web application in WebAssembly and a single-page java applet in java bytecode? What's the DOM adding? Suppose I want to run Quake in the browser. Applets already do that. It's not a new idea or a new technology.
True, I darkened the thing a bit, and yeah D9 was a pretty amazing surprise all around.
The Internet is costing young people their jobs and social lives
This article is missing some key facts. It's important to realize that A9 (Amazon's subsidiary in downtown Palo Alto) has at most 500 people located there. They have the equivalent of 2-3 buildings, and they're not large buildings. Amazon's footprint there is really the same as a mid-size startup (ie, the A9 all-hands fits in one large restaurant). I can understand why a city would not want a large employer in a downtown area that provides free food to its employees--this clearly destroys the business for nearby restaurants. Amazon, famous for its frugality, doesn't provide free meals. OTOH, you can regularly see Palantir employees walking to their cafeteria.

Excluding the free food issue, I don't understand why you wouldn't want to encourage big companies to setup small offices in your downtown.
Simple Genetic Algorithm Can Rival Stochastic Gradient Descent in Neural Nets
> it's no longer a Japanese word, and doesn't have to follow Japanese rules

No word ever has to follow any rules. Nonetheless it's pretty typical for loan words to keep rules like this from the source language, at least until different usage becomes widespread.
Life in the age of algorithms
Who's clamoring for apps? AFAICT that's only the companies that want the apps because it lets them spy on their customers in more ways.
> Almost no libs aren't avail on 3 now.

What an awkward way to say "most libs work on Python 3 now"... Why is that? I suspect it's because saying it clearly doesn't deliver the message you want.
Looks fine to me even with an ad blocker (uBlock Origin) on Chrome for OS X.
Ironically, by doing a hard pull, you're hurting my credit slightly, which is against your stated mission.

Some of the appeal of the new FinTech startups are that they don't measure customers based off traditional models of risk eval (FICO, etc.) but that they are able to factor in both past and future based on many more data points. I'll keep monitoring Tally and hope in the future you can arrive to this same point.

BTW, I hope you look into marketing to credit card churners. I think they would love your product.
No, he's completely legitimate actually. He's just so far ahead of people that they can't tell. There's a good Kahneman quote saying he's top 100 intellectuals.

http://realworldrisk.com/
http://realworldrisk.com/clients

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=64BtMdsAAAAJ&hl=en
Do you realize that selfies and emails are creative endeavors? It takes a lot of work to take a good picture or compose an email that conveys anything useful.
> This is about how people interpret statistical results. Which is not a mathematical process - it is what comes after the math.

If the later is not a process with a scientific method which can be detailed and substantiated, than this is mysticism and my interest stops there.

That being said you really don't need to do math to practice mysticism, but I'm sure having numbers and equations help with the hand-waving when selling it to non-technical people.
Linus disagrees. https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/GPbJZX8fmtL
Security guards can give CPR.
Theranos can pivot!
Doesn't surprise me, chromebooks are so much better value than anything else!

I was going to get a dell xps 13 when that power saving bug was unveiled so I ended up getting a toshiba chromebook 2 and a 256gb SSD for <600$

Now I'm running native linux via seabios and loving it. I hate the spacebar screen on startup but I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay 500$ to get rid of it.
Which area you are interested in?
It's radioactive for that long because it /is/ waste. We haven't finished extracting the valuable energy from it yet. (that's what 'waste reduction' (breeder) reactors are supposed to do; concentrate up the useful stuff and leave most of it clean enough to either decay really quickly, or so slowly that it's not harmful.)
Doors – A special file for inter-process communication
If you could use mysql as a replacement doesn't that mean you didn't need a graph database to start with though?
Or you could put the comments in the invisible fork and pass a Turing test.

'I passed the Turing test. No one believed me. Honest.'

passes Turing test by sounding like a petulant child
> emoji are apple and google (and late to the party, adobe)['s] way of enforcing their wishes on everyone else

Sure, that's why we refer to them with a Japanese word.
Very doubtful that this will lead to a lower-total-cost-of-ownership phone for anyone vs. buying the $30 Android phone and replacing it when it breaks.

More likely that this will become a standard compute/networking interface into a bunch of specialized modules (stereoscopic cameras, home automation, industrial control, etc.)
By JP standards, the way you mean, DVD has six syllables (ディ ー ブ イ ディ ー).

The previous poster probably meant that the Japanese pronunciation sounds like what in English would be considered four syllables.
from October last year, nothing new
It doesn't look that way to me (and I run ad blocking, script blocking, etc), but it's still woefully low contrast.
> I understand the security concerns, but if the hardware makes it difficult to do what I'd like, then whatever security they implement is moot anyhow, right?

"Difficult" as in a supported developer mode? Of course there is a way to reverse it otherwise they would have non-stop support calls from people who hit the button to see what it did and freaked out. The whole point of Chromebooks is that you can always get back to a usable state no matter what you do to it (even chuck it out the window, just log-in to a new one and you're 100% up and running).
Don't be so elitist. "Back in the old days", computers were a niche item that only called to enthusiasts. Now they're an everyday appliance.

It's like calling people lazy because they call a refrigeration technician to fix their fridge rather than do it themselves. Computers are ridiculously complex, and you need a ton of knowledge to even start troubleshooting any but the most trivial problem.
OpenSource project's booster by GitHub gamification
I had a bit of that when I got my next-most-recent pair of glasses. It took less than a week before I stopped noticing it entirely.
I don't think my current pair have the problem, but I'm not sure I could tell any more.
Yep, as mentioned above, often "chaffing" is a more realistic approach. Sowing confusion is easier than refuting or censoring.

Often you can't take back what you said, BUT you can change e.g a non archived profile image to associate comments with a fake account.

Related question: is it best to give a child a unique, or very generic name?

Currently I lean towards generic, as unique names or pseudonyms can be created on demand.

All of this intersects in interesting ways with "real name" policies IMHO
Yes, I'm thinking in particular of my wife's digital piano, which has some horrific obsolete Yamaha software to transfer files, and my 2006 Acura, which has a completely crummy in-dash navigation system. Both would have been much better served by a plug-in compute module that had its own networking and could be upgraded independently.
Free speech and democracy do not tell people what to believe. These give people a voice at higher levels of government. It is a way to avoid conflict and enable everyone to contribute to the progress of society.

Government officials in China are not chosen by the people. The "People's" republic is a farce. Those who disagree with policy are expelled or imprisoned. BLM may be ignored and discounted by some, but they have a voice and can effect change. Tibetans, people of Xianjiang, Falun Gong, and countless other would-be activists have no such path in China.
Right, because we all know the most important feature of smart phones is their cost savings, which is why Apple phones sell close to their marginal cost and don't have 30% margins.

And this kind of device, while it may not be interesting for many consumers, will be very interested for industrial, enterprise, or medical users.
It's well-known that PyPy3 is not production-ready. I've spoken with them about this many times over the years and it's not being worked on like PyPy5 is.
Look, as a fellow 20-year New York City veteran, you can see in this city what you want to. You're clearly taking a bleak view on it. I'm sorry you've viewed so much of the city through this lens and been turned off by it. But this really speak more of your lens than intrinsic qualities of the city.

I agree with you that the educational infrastructure here is sadly lacking. And the highways.

I largely disagree with most everything else you've shared. Jersey City and East New York aren't remotely similar to each other - huge swaths of Jersey City are perfectly livable and lightyears ahead of East New York, which is notoriously one of the city's most challenged neighborhoods. Huge swaths of Jersey City are also downtrodden, but... it's an entire city. It varies up and down. East New York is just a single neighborhood.

Trashcan cleanliness is middle of the road - I've certainly seen better but I've certainly seen worse. New York is a far cleaner city than the stereotypes suggest. Some blocks are absurdly filthy. Others are pristinely taken care of and perfectly clean.

I couldn't disagree more strongly on your attitude about housing projects. They are not death zones. You're not placing your life into your hands by walking through them. You can use your iPhone walking straight through the middle of many of them and you will have zero problems of any kind. You're doing a real disservice feeding into peoples' worst paranoid fears about housing projects. Some have more problems than others. Most are filled with decent people and most are far more stable than reputations suggest. Some housing projects I'd feel uncomfortable walking through But most I wouldn't (and don't).

And so on. We could debate these perspectives forever, but I've learned quite clearly that you can take two people who live in this city for the same exact amount of time and find one who views it as a filthy godforsaken land of misery and poverty while the other sees it as an inspiring place full of passion, beauty, and inspiring and deeply giving people. Eye of the beholder is a real thing here. I won't fault your perspective but I seriously challenge the idea that it's some uniquely accurate perspective.

I, for one, couldn't imagine wanting to live in Tokyo over New York, no matter how pleasant it is (but I wouldn't mind better train service).