skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The script above basically acts like a wrapper script, launching in a small square chromeless window. So you don't even need to use Chrome, just launch that at startup so it runs in the background.

Small software companies have to make platform decisions. They chose the most popular browser (and notably most secure browser), allowing the app to work on all OSes.
Frequently, yes. Though not 3GL/4GL mobile networks.

I'm aware of the risk and hypocrisy. I'm also far from happy with it (I increasingly dislike Android, Samsung, and with varying levels, Google).

But given the balance of something I can power down, that isn't always on me, and the portability and cost benefits over an alternative laptop, its a far-less-than-perfect satisficing solution for now.
Putting aside the nomenclature differences between 'bots' in today's media and bots in this article (defined, broadly, as a kind of helpful software), can someone tell me why entrepreneur/VC types are investing heavily in the ongoing submarine[0] that is 'bots'?

Serious question; I completely fail to see why there would all of a sudden be a gold rush here.

* There hasn't been some shiny new technology introduced (open source machine learning, maybe? Messengers with APIs have existed for a long time)

* There isn't some massive consumer shift happening that's new (messaging has been around forever. It's been crazy popular outside the US for a long long time.)

* There isn't some crazy new business model everyone's chasing

* There hasn't been some crazy UX breakthrough that solves text interface problems (high learning curve, ambiguity about what the service can do)

I can, however, understand why Facebook and Google want people to build bots on their new platform, hence the submarine reference.

Any ideas?

[0]http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I am not too sure we know how Cyanobacteria arose (I did my Ph.D. on them) nor how mitochondria arose. Given how rampant horizontal gene transfer is I doubt we ever will.

I think the most interest question in this early biology is why LUCA is so complex [1]. We have a massive gap between abiotic processes and the first organism we know anything about. What happened.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_ancestor
Actually for many neural network apps 8, 4 even 1 bit is sufficient for representing weights.
That's a funny example, because it's rare to qualify a type with a package in Java, whilst it's essentially universal in Go.

Automatic refactorings i routinely use in Java are extracting variables, methods, constants, and fields (including automatically finding and extracting repetitions of the body); inlining the same; splitting and combining variable declaration and use (easier in Go, of course!), adding, removing, and reordering method parameters; correcting declared method return and parameter types based on actual use; extracting superclasses and moving methods up and down type hierarchies (again, not relevant in Go); moving methods to a receiver which was one of its parameters. All the stuff which is the bread and butter of reshaping code. All done in a keystroke or two. Not copying and pasting and then manually following through.

Again, to be clear, i have done Go development. About three months of full-time Go with experienced colleagues. I know what state of the art Go development looks like. It's unambiguously slower than Java development.

We'll have to agree to differ on dependency management.
for all of you looking for a real-time api platform that's open source and not owned by a cloud giant come join us build telepat.io
Sorry, I've seen it used in a few environments now... felt like it was common nomenclature. Googling around seems to confirm.
Would Paul Ginsparg vouch for your story?
...are you saying Google isn't a real business?
This looks really cool, but I still don’t understand how Rethink plans to cash out their VCs, though—~$12M, according to Angel List. Cloud hosting is trending toward zero and support/consulting only scales with people. I’m not to trying to be (intentionally) critical; I’m genuinely curious and hoping there is some business model innovation going on here too.
SSRN has worked within the system.

Sci-Hub (and Aaron) said "fuck the system".
I've still got a web site up that hasn't been modified since 1997. I'm waiting for it to turn 21 so I can celebrate with a beer.
Well. It is all about games.My bet is on PSVR for now.
This is great! thank you!
To me, it's not whether they're providing $7 a month in value, it's whether running a dozen dynos at $7 is worth more than than running a single $10 VPS on DigitalOcean.

For me, they do not provide enough value. My apps run drastically faster on a VPS than they did on Heroku, and I save a lot of money.

Consequentially, my sites that need more resources than my incubator VPS can provide no longer consider Heroku a viable upgrade path
I don't work on 2TB+ memory servers, but one of my servers is close to 1TB of RAM.

PostgreSQL scales nicely here. Main thing you're getting is a huge disk cache. Makes repeated queries nice and fast. Still I/O bound to some extent though.

Redis will scale nicely as well. But it won't be I/O bound.

Honestly, if you really need 1TB+ it's usually going to be for numerically intensive code. This kind of code is generally written to be highly vectorizable so the hardware prefetcher will usually mask memory access latency and you get massive speedups by having your entire dataset in memory. Algorithms that can memoize heavily also benefit greatly.
I almost didn't read the article because I have quit LinkedIn in 2012 after the breach. I considered myself lucky that my account was not in the leaked data set.

Now 4 years later:
167 million account, 117 million of them have email and passord, of 105 million the password has been cracked. This is huge compared to the 6.7 million accounts released in 2012.

I'd be surprised if my account data wasn't in the data this time:-(
Is Null a tasty treat? Can I have the recipe?
I'm sure there are companies that will run this instance type 24/7 for years. But you can also spin one up for a short period of time, use it to do things you would normally need to do across a bunch of machines and then tear it down.

Having this type of instance available via an API call is within seconds is really cool.
Whoa, I wonder what the story is there. Did Google know this allo.im existed before naming their thing?
Hi Everyone, I'm John founder of Rentork, I'm thrilled to talk about our app and how now you can rent your data online and earn money everyday on your favorite websites and apps when you see ads.
Alexa...
The search queries that get sent to Google are probably the least interesting part of this to them. Sure, Google will get some additional search queries and be able to target you slightly better, but it's a rounding error in terms of the data they already have.

The interest in this on Google's side is on having a permanently connected 'listener' on your network to identify which devices you're running and when. If it's running through your WiFi network, Google is going to know about it.
What is also interesting is that certain words share similar literal constructions in unrelated languages.

The best example I've always thought of is the verb "to understand". Picture standing under something; you get to know it better.

In my native language Twi [1], the to understand is literally constructed as "to to sit under" I know of several other languages with very similar constructions.

[1] http://www.omniglot.com/writing/twi.htm
Great! I found the guides but I couldn't find this info in there.

I like the new features and also the new JS API so I think that's plenty of incentive to migrate. Thanks!
And interesting enough, Matrix faces a different problem than Signal: It doesn't have many good clients at all (at least, last I had checked a few months back). I will agree it would be very nice if Matrix was the dominant messaging protocol that everyone needed to speak with their friends. However, that's not feasible until somebody makes an easy-to-use, beautiful Android and iOS client that doesn't require the user to install multiple bridges or wrangle several accounts to chat with their friends.
They did not overturn the VRA; they just overturned the part that allows the whole thing to be enforced in a timely manner.
I don't use chrome for a number of reasons, the main one being I can't imagine using a browser which doesn't support the blocking of ads, and on Android there are no plugins at all, and given that I use firefox on multiple desktops, all syncing passwords, tabs etc, I'm not about to make an exception for this or that chrome-only feature. I have no idea why chrome doesn't support plugins on Android; they said they'd do it years ago.
For the curious, that's a plaque on the side if the rack showing the Go board at the end of AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol Game 3, at the moment Lee Sedol resigned and AlphaGo won the tournament (of five games).
Let's also not forget that the US government employs well over 1 million employees and several million contractors. They don't all move in the same direction or have a hive mind.

The Department of the Navy developed the original Tor.

The State Department helped fund it (because it can be used by dissidents in countries with authoritarian governments).

The US intelligence apparatus has allegedly funded ways to analyze and/or sabotage anonymous usage of Tor.
It's very dangerous to talk to the FBI without a lawyer. Lying to them is a felony, and you can be convicted on the basis of what their notes say.
The Statistical Mechanics of Zombies [pdf]
Hysterically sounds borderline crazy. Step away from Alexa, nice and slow.
Imagine you invited me over to your home for dinner, and you offered me a glass of tap water. And I said, "No thank you, I don't drink tap water."

Would you have any questions for me? Would you feel strange about drinking the tap water yourself now? Would you wonder why I chose to say "I don't drink tap water" instead of just "No thank you"?
FISA is a real court but this information wouldn't be under FISA court jurisdiction.
WhatsApp makes a lot of sacrifices to have encryption by default, like no backup of messages, no real ability for the servers to do anything smart, no real search functionality, desktop client that requires the phone to be on, etc.

An incognito mode allows the default mode to have more functionality, and matches their approach with Chrome. It's not a bad tradeoff.
Twitter's been around for 10 years, and Twitter is mostly a fad. I wouldn't call it alarming.
Thanks for sharing, very interesting.
Eh, that's just fintech. They push stuff like that out as fast as possible, then update it continuously as the story develops. The difference in a few millisecond of publishing is directly correlated to profit.
Also having the code run on players' computers means there's no way to stop cheating by having a human player providing some of the intelligence.
I'm not saying I want this, but it would be possible:

Imagine your access card for the gym doesn't provide free access to everything, but every time you enter the sauna it bills you one dollar, or physically walking into a class bills you the individual class tuition. Unlocking the racquetball court door costs three dollars. Then after your workout you walk up to the vending machine to get your bottled tapwater or fancy water or whatever and pay with your gym access card. Inevitably there are not enough treadmills for peak times, so something is set up today like signup sheets and time use limits, but crazy as it sounds you could pay per use or bid to reserve, high bid on treadmill #7 from 6:00 to 6:30 tonight is two dollars, wave your magic token thingy here to give you the new high bid at three dollars. Gamify things such that every 100 miles on the treadmill means a free run next time. Insert anecdote of people hooking up their fitbit to a cordless drill to get 100 miles per day so as to get free treadmill time.
Well of course they do, the number of people for whom heavy LTE usage is an economically feasible prospect (i.e. unlimited usage) is vanishingly small. Since their network can't tell who pays per GB and who doesn't, yes they want people to consume as much data as possible.
> By revealing that AlphaGo was based on this hardware

Interesting, as the nature/science paper made no mention of this, it was exclusively trained on GPUs.
Messaging apps are old but perhaps it's messaging APIs of widely used platforms such as Slack that are new?
No, only WhatsApp has it. Facebook Messenger doesn't, SMS doesn't.
You can at least audit the network traffic. And since people have been able to hook their own software into Siri, you probably somehow can break open its encryption and look at the content. (Unless I misremember how that worked)
I wonder if Heroku would have the userbase it does if it wasn't for them being the goto place for throwing personal projects for the last few years.

Clearly they don't believe that kind of marketing to be worth it now, but I'm sad to see that option go away.
So what you are saying is that we should censor who we are when we are on the web?

For some reason that sounds wrong. The web should adapt to us, not the other way around. That is one of the big things wrong with the web and the world today.

It comes down to Paul Graham not being creative enough to implement a system that can organize human ideas without resorting to police-state tactics.

I get it, it's a seemingly intractable problem. Not insulting the keymaster, Paul Graham, just challenging the idea that we should all conform to some webmaster's view of how the web should work.

I am not going to let supreme douchebags like Zuckerberg and Larry the Page dictate how we should think or behave, thank you very much.

I will never follow an out-of-touch techie ruling from inside the silicon valley bubble. Would rather go to war.
Google Allo and Duo, new messaging apps
> Google Cloud is way more advanced than both AWS and Azure in many ways

I see this being thrown around here a lot. Buying into Google's PR is what this is. If you've valid points apart from BigQuery vs RedShift, I'd request you to enumerate them for me.

I have personally interacted with Googlers who lament the fact that 'no one internally bothers using most of GCP' and hence not being able to 'iterate/innovate as fast as AWS' is a key disadvantage despite their 'superior offerings', whatever that means.
It would seem to me that bacteriophages alone sort of ruin the idea of a phylogeny with a single root.
I have a question for the HN molecular biology aficionados: Where can I find some good critique of Nick Lane's ideas? He sure convinced me, but I would like to see what the experts say about it.
Got a Coin 2.0 because of the hype and peer pressure. Took 2 days to set up because I typed address information incorrectly and had to verify my identity to unlock my coin account (this was on me largely). Already souring on the Coin experience the first place I used it, it failed. Haven't put it back in my wallet since then.
Is Africa Hiding the Next Mark Zuckerberg?
I think this is the most likely answer. Once handed an NSL, you either have to quit the project or hurt people; or maybe even less than two options.
To me it is personally annoying because so many people and esp developers seems to want Chrome to become the new IE: a subpar (yeah, until google give you nested vertical tabs ;-) browser that web developers have fallen in love with to the point where they forget anything else.

Anything that reinforces this automatically qualifies as bad (and I'm only partially joking here ;-)
> They did not overturn the VRA; they just overturned the part that allows the whole thing to be enforced in a timely manner.

Specifically, they overturned the preclearance requirement, which requires places that have been found to discriminate in the past to get clearance from the Justice Department before implementing changes to voting procedures.

This requirement was to prevent jurisdictions from implementing changes that have major deleterious effects on specific groups and then having one or more elections occur (and then official acts and laws passed shaped by the results of those elections) while the legal challenges work up through the system.
That happens because the company is trying to adjust the capital structure to maintain a 'constant' leverage ratio.

Too much leverage? Sell shares!
Not enough leverage? Sell debt!
How tainted drugs “froze” young people–but kickstarted Parkinson’s research
Unfortunately I can't seem to find it but I read a story recently about a couple who lost their newborn during a home birth. The twist was that they were minutes away from a top NICU with an ambulance standing by. They were told that if they had given birth in the hospital, their child would have lived. The father was basically saying that the reassurance of having an ambulance standing by is illusory and if something goes wrong you want to be inside the hospital, not an ambulance ride away.
http://ramses.tech (shameless plug)

It's not exactly the same thing but it achieves the same goal and is opensource.

API services are generated from RAML files (yaml) No code required for simple crud, biz logic can be hooked using http event handlers. Uses Elasticsearch for reads and Mongodb or Postgres for writes. Other DB can be hooked by writing the proper Db engines, it's all documented.
Perf/W, the official metric of slow but efficient processors. How many times must we go down this road?

Let's see this sucker train AlexNet...
I feel for the grunts that worked through the night writing that note. They'll probably get a nice bonus though.
Isn't this exactly what's supposed to happen at big banks? I thought we wanted the equity research department to be separate and not conflicted with capital markets?
They're not looking at things like antibiotic resistance, they're looking at genes core to biological function like cell membrane proteins and ribosomes—and those look like they came from a common ancestor. So, your options:

1. Common ancestor.

2. Not common ancestors, but with enough random chance common biochemistry that this core function gene could be usefully used by the new microbe, and is functional enough in the new host that it isn't ejected immediately, and managed to stay functional and evolve past the original core function gene in terms of fitness so that original core function gene could be ejected, and the original core function gene did get ejected and the microbes with the new core function gene managed to outcompete all the microbes with dual core-function genes.

The latter is highly, highly unlikely.
The equity research department is firewalled off from the deal teams doing the offering. It would be unethical if the people who published the research note even knew anything about the offering.
Wonder what it will do the the industry term Full Stack Developer. Will people who call themselves that will now need to know about chip design?

OT: Cool blog! :)
20 year C++ programmer here. I work on multithreaded server code. Stopped using modern C++ features 5 years ago. I'd compare my use of C++ to be roughly equivalent to the use of C++ in the NodeJS project or the V8 project. I'm not a user of Boost.

I have to agree with the author of the article. It takes longer to train developers to write idiosyncratic modern C++ code and compilation times explodes. Compiler support for bleeding edge C++ features is spotty at best. Harder to reason about the correctness of modern C++ code.
I don't understand coin.

I have a debit card, I don't need to carry anything else.

It does contactless payments, chip + pin payments, ATM widthdrawls, verifies who I am at the bank and has my account details on it.

What else could I want, a credit card for things which belong more on credit? OK so now I have 2 cards, but really beyond that what else is there?

No amount of mobile hardware / phone apps are going to replace 2 cards both of which fit easily in a wallet and don't require charging, don't wear out for 5+ years (by which time the bank has replaced it free of charge), and I don't need to take out of my pocket for any other reason (so I'm not likely to lose it or leave it elsewhere).
Do you reckon that means it's using small floats?
It seems entirely reasonable to me, and there's good historical precedent for it. Let's look at SHA256 hashing as an example. The maximum number of hashes that the best GPU around can do is around 1 GHash/s. However, for the same cost, of around $600, specialized hardware can do around 5 THash/s. That's about five thousand times the performance/price. There's no reason that hardware that is super-specific to neural network computation can't similarly have large gains.

Link to the specialized hardware for SHA256 hashing: http://www.amazon.com/Antminer-~4-73TH-25W-Bitcoin-Miner/dp/...
Hacking the JavaScript Lottery
From the top of her original article:

> I had already been in the process of moving, permanently, to Germany, and had retained a German immigrations lawyer several months prior to these events. [1]

It's not like she just impulsively thought about Germany and left that week. Yes, it was a catalyst, but it seems to me that she was already on the fence, ready to leave. She even said she was waiting for her visa approval to be accepted after the FBI had made a request to interview her.

[1] https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/fbi-harassment.html
For what it's worth, I've had Comcast nearly 4 years and I'd say 80% of the time, at least, the speed is great and I get more than what I pay for.

Occasionally at really odd times (mostly middle of the night) I'll get a disconnection from service, but that hasn't happened in a long time, and maybe twice in the past 4 months my speed has dropped pretty sharply. But for the latter, when compared to the service I've gotten the entire time, it's just a blip.

The customer service is absolutely awful though, unless by some odd luck I can get forwarded to their corporate offices in the US.
My understanding is that the Signal protocol isn't an IM protocol like XMPP, but a messaging protocol like OTR. Just like you can use OTR with XMPP, Signal can work be used inside IM protocols like Matrix and XMPP. Or with proprietary ones like WhatsApp, Allo, and Signal itself. The former provides federation, the latter do not.
Moxie replied in this Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/05/11/wire-s...
I seriously don't understand this NSL business. There's this secret institution misusing the name court which kinda doesn't exist but makes rulings and if you're on the naughty list of the powers to be, you might get an invitation. To me this all sounds like dark ages of inquisition. I thought we were over that with Enlightenment and such and there were no witch burnings anymore. The painful effect is that many people self-censor and act like they're in China or DDR (communist Germany). Better not get on their radar.
NSL only cover "non-content information" (metadata) and can't force you to do something like backdoor TOR. And you can fight them in Federal Court.

You can't NSL "how does TOR work?" or "give me the encryption keys to X."

What an NSL can do is say "give me a list of emails sent by XYZ@yourdomain.com" and you aren't allowed to tell anyone.
I doubt FP hardware size is the limiting factor in their implementation (it's not in GPUs and definitely not in high perf CPUs). More likely they came up with higher level architectural tricks that let them specialize for machine learning (i.e. taking better advantage of locality in the application, etc).
> Perhaps some day we will have to migrate elsewhere, but I find that possibility extremely unlikely because the clear amount of effort it took to create the Google-y version means this is a long-term play.

Hahahahahaha. Aight. Whatever you need to tell yourself. This is even sillier than Parse; FB doesn't have anywhere near the track record of killing projects that Google does.