skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That matches exactly with my experience being pressed into service writing Rails code for a couple months - the development experience felt like the Stone Age compared to Swift, even if I could write a method ~20% faster

Me, too. At work, I am on two different projects at the moment: an SDK and application written in Swift, and a run-of-the-mill Rails app.

Going back to the Rails app is frankly gut-wrenchingly bad. Every aspect of coding and debugging — and especially refactoring — is so much worse when doing it in ruby.

The strength of Swift type system makes the tools so much better, and at least for me, it's easier to code in it and reason about it effectively (even if yes, you do type more letters).

But, I want to point out: the same is not true of Objective-C. Even though it has a lot of dynamism under the covers, coding in Obj-C in Xcode is much closer to coding in Swift than Ruby. It's only in 'special cases' that you would really use an untyped object reference. So the compiler is able to catch a huge number of errors at compile time, the editor knows what type your variable is so autocomplete is intelligent, etc.

I do like Swift better, but coding in Obj-C is much closer to Swift than Ruby in terms of the tooling experience, and in terms of how much dynamic untyped code there actually is in a program. Modern Obj-C is "mostly typed", and swizzling and weird object casting are seldomly done (usually only in a tricky situation, which is when you appreciate the ability).
yes, it lacks documentation, I started this blog post series to try to address this: https://rgm.io/post/balde-internals-part1-foundations/

if you have some specific question, feel free to ask
what do you mean by "india being always a good neighbour"? yes it used to be, long ago, but not any more. You have no idea how this country is pushing around it's neighbours.

http://www.felanicamp.com/
http://www.thedailystar.net/country/felani-killing-justice-d...

and what do you actually mean by "illigal immigration from bangladesh"? It's actually the both way around. In fact, bangladesh is the biggest and the only destination of all the cow smugglers from india's eastern border.

http://www.thequint.com/india/2015/10/12/cow-smuggling-pay-5...

During the spring/summer, you can cross the Ganges river by walking, if you ever come to rajshahi, chapai-nawabganj border, you will be able to see it yourself.

edit: typo
So? Any generalizing learning algorithm necessarily accepts a large number of inputs (including some unintended ones) for each possible output.

Humans are no more robust against this kind of attack than any other system - consider stage magic, confidence scams, NLP, optical illusions, etc.

If you want a truly infallible system, then no, AI will never provide that. What you want is a magic deity.
don't mean for this to come across as snarky but what has he done lately? is his best work from the 1980's?
How's a last digit 5 digits?

Takes the last digit, if the result is above 65536, do that again
I've been looking into web frameworks in C recently. The offerings aren't awesome. It's hard to find a good BSD-like-licensed library.

Frontrunners included Kore and Crow (another microframework). I went with Kore for a while but it has a pretty terrible API for actually writing web applications. I couldn't take Crow seriously. I ended up going with fastcgi because it was the simplest to wrap using the Scheme FFI.

Others included Lwan (gpl) and Mongoose (gpl).
Thinking of "Watson" more as a catchall term for machine learning research at IBM is more useful than thinking of it as a unified platform (as the marketers try to sell it). This includes research efforts in speech recognition, NLP, and reinforcement learning as well as fun stuff like the "Watson chef". The underlying technology is almost completely different, but it still falls under the Watson umbrella.

In general, every company (startups and big co. alike) seems to be hyping their "AI" capabilities out the wazoo, but three years ago saying those two letters together was a death sentence. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing (hype is bad, but general interest is useful for the visibility of the field) but it is definitely a sea change compared to the last 5-10 years.

I am extremely skeptical of most claims these days, and am a bit worried about AI Winter 2.0 due to hype around largely mundane technologies. There are exciting things happening in the space, but these things are rarely hyped to the extent the more mundane results with corporate backing are.
Better parsers are interesting, but I feel like the parsers we have already are 'good enough.'

The biggest hole in NLP is going from a parsed sentence to 'meaning.' Once we get that right, and are able to feed meaning back into the parser, then all our parsing problems will be fixed imo.
Time is too precious to do business deals with assholes. When I was freelancer every time I tried to work with assholes I ended up losing money and opportunities with reasonable people. It's really not worth it.

Within a company I am very doubtful. I think it may lead to censorship.
The listing says "benefits from the Williamson Act" which apparently means that the property cannot be developed for some period of time - which probably explains the low price.
Show HN: StrelkiJS - small library to index and SQL-join in-memory collections
I suppose they can generate the password, and email it to you before storing the hashed password in database?
Therefore, there are some Turing machines which can't be
proven to halt or run forever in any given consistent
system that can be computed.

I feel like it's worth clarifying the quantifiers here. For all consistent systems, there exist Turing machines whose halting behavior can't be proven in that system. Unless I have some disastrous misunderstanding...
I was wondering how long it would take before someone actually called IBM out on this.
So, how does it handle memory allocation? Are there memory pools?
Basically what I came to say. daurnimator said it better, though.
Mangan: Geek theme for Jekyll
How to access the world wide web in 1996
> Those simple interfaces make programming enjoyable and don't break, so...

Speak for yourself. The last time I worked on a rails project this was the part I most disliked. It made debugging annoying, I never knew what each line of code was doing in totality and and I had to practically live in the documentation to figure out the side affects of everything I did.

This is versus most other frameworks I've used for web services where most things are explicit enough that, even if you don't know the language well / at all, you can still figure out what most of everything does. Jumping into a rails project without knowing ruby and how rails works? Good luck figuring that out without studying the documentation.
Sure, raw land is a liability to a degree - folks could go and hurt themselves on it and sue you, etc.
Back in the 80's, there were two AI camps: Syntax and Semantics. My favorite for syntax was Terry Winograd. For semantics was Roger Schank. Back then, I was trying to map AI onto biology. Syntax was easier; you could easily map the edges to a McCullough and Pitts neural model. Semantic nets was harder; the edges were more of a way of modeling symbolic relationships. So, I couldn't wrap my head around Shank. Wish I had; it felt like I was missing the point.
The ~1990 AI Winter came about because DARPA money dried up after the (pyrric?) failure of the Japanese 5th Generation Project and the end of the Cold War. After those things not enough people could afford $xx+K LISP Machines anymore ;)

As long as there's a continual source of money there won't be another one - so basically as long as companies like Google and Facebook are profitable, and preferably money to be made elsewhere, things should be good.
Can you define lying? Has lying been defined? Check your dictionary.

Knowing what a lie is is not the same as knowing when someone is lying.
As a Canadian, yes they did. Look at our history and how the British tried to assimilate the Canadiens.

That's not to mention that forcing Christianity on conquered subjects was one of the main goals of the British Empire.
What are you talking about? Binney and Drake managed to whistleblow on just what was necessary without dumping our whole, foreign operations. Many other whistleblowers have also been selective. Snowden said he read and organized tge documents. So, releasing just the bad, domestic stuff plus key examples of foreign issues like Belgian telecom would be easy given it's a tiny fraction of what he already did.

This isn't speculative: it's been done by other whistleblowers and he had time/resources to do it himself. He didn't. That's an evil or crime he has to own up to that's not whistleblowing.
Yea the snideness of that last sentence is a bit much, seeing as its current pacifism was bought with American blood and is secured by the Pax Americana.
> Microsoft promised developers that Windows would run anywhere. This summer, it finally will.

Bullshit. Versions of Windows that are all labeled Windows 10 are running in a lot of devices, and you can write applications that in theory can run on all of them (though practically writing one application that runs well on all of them may be somewhat harder if you want your application to be useful in any way.)

But that is NOT the same as "Windwos runs everywhere." in a number of ways.

The first and most obvious way is that you can't just take your existing Windows application and put it everywhere, which is what that phrase seems to imply. Nor can you buy one of these devices and immediately have access to all the library of millions of Windows applications that exist. No, if you're a developer you have to write a new universal app and embrace the Windows 10 App Store whether you want to or not.

And if you're buying a device, you better check twice that the software you want is available for the platform you're buying lest you find out too late your device has special requirements.

Secondly, we've had a version of Windows running on lots of devices for a long time. The only thing that's different now is the branding. They're finally all branded "Windows 10" even though in many cases (like Phone and X-Box One) the user and developer experiences are totally different. Is that helpful? I don't really think so.

This article might as well have been written by Microsoft's PR department. Totally not grounded in reality at all.
Microsoft SQL Server added various machine learning primitives to their SQL dialect. So not only can you query and summarize past data; now you can select from the future as well. Bayesian, NN, clustering, the same old flower matching demo, it's all in there. If you can jam enough numbers in you can certainly handwave that you're getting insight out. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175595.aspx

Of course basic data mining is certainly not where the latest research is, but it covers many cases I see on HN or talked about in big data pitch decks. Regardless, it all seems a lot less fancy when you can get the job done issuing SQL commands that wouldn't confuse anyone who learned SQL in 1978. The whole thing is oversold and now largely commodified, to boot.

If and when this stuff starts to show real results you'll certainly feel it. The first wave of successful connect-the-dot bots will open up so many discoveries that opportunities for human labor will swell. But it's not chess, Jeopardy and a way to mine medical records. That's all obvious corporate bullshit.
I guess they meant that the tools were uploaded to website like virustotal.com to test if they pass most antivirus check.
Well, this makes me feel a little better that I could never make sense of IBM's Watson advertising. Even after checking out their site, I couldn't figure out what it was for, much less what it was under the hood.
I think developers prefer a crappy but stable technologies with a proven market over uncertain and fast-moving technologies.

Businesses - yes.

Developers - my experience says no (myself included).
Actually prefer it.lots of crap but some hidden gems every once and a while.
"bailing out" ? hilarious, india has the highest rate of "bailing out" to the west, among all the countries in the south asia, and it's not going to slow down.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/06/us/immigration-statistics-fast...

it's close to china, even though india's population is nowhere near.
> what do you mean by "india being always a good neighbour"? yes it used to be, long ago, but not any more. You have no idea how this country is pushing around it's neighbours.

Both examples you cited are of illegal immigration. There is absolutely no reason for the BSF to kill anyone crossing the border legally.

EDIT: Yes we used to be a good country as long as we allowed illegal immigration and illegal cattle trade. The moment we prevented it we naturally became the bad guys.

> and what do you actually mean by "illigal immigration from bangladesh"? It's actually the both way around. In fact, bangladesh is the biggest and the only destination of all cow smugglers from india's eastern border.

Those cow smugglers are illegally immigrated Bangladeshi's themselves. Read about your smugglers here: http://www.ibtimes.com/cattle-smuggling-dangerous-illegal-hi....

Specific quote: "However, the Telegraph noted that even when soldiers from India's Border Security Force (BSF) seize stolen cattle, they are often attacked or even killed by mobs of people led by the smugglers themselves. Lawmakers fear that the depletion of local cattle would also hurt the farming economy on the Indian side of the border if police do not crack down on smuggling. Putul Chandra Roy Pradhani, the organizing secretary of the All Assam Students Union (AASU), which is better known for campaigning against illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, warned that strict legislation must be passed against cattle raiders as well. “[Cattle] smugglers are taking advantage of flexible laws,” he told the Telegraph. “In 2009 and 2010, [the local government] enforced rules and regulations that almost stopped the [cattle] smuggling. But those rules and regulations are not being strictly imposed now.”

Read about the illegal immigration of Bangladeshi's into India here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_India#I...

Approximately 3 million illegally crossed over to India. How many Indian's crossed over illegally to Bangladesh?
AWS Lambda Is Not Ready for Prime Time
> Tesla's "Supercharger" is supposedly unlimited once you've paid your $2500, but apparently if you use ones near your residence, they send you nag messages saying it's really for travelers.

Because its meant only for travelers. Its for unlimited cross country travel, not as your local free filling station.
as it is a microframework, it does not cares about such details, you can handle memory allocation by hand, or use memory pools provided by glib, create gobjects and use refcount, etc. It is up to you :)

Internally used memory should be free'd manually with the balde_app_free function. it encapsulates most of it for you.
I can prove something is false. I can't prove someone else's motivation.
With no/weak DRM you get the fate of the Dreamcast!
Thanks, I see this kind of (il)logic on HN a lot and it's infuriating. "I think X is bad, this is not bad, therefore not X" or "I think Y is good, since this is not good, this is not Y".
I don't want to call someone I don't know a bad developer, but as a general rule if software is moving more towards safety and reliability and you are resisting that change that's a sign there's a problem with your habits and preferences. Not that the decisions being made are bad.

Swift is not a perfect language, there's a lot of low hanging fruit (some of which is being dealt with in Swift 3), but it's lack of support for dynamic behavior is not one of those problems.
That would be super frustrating. Is there just no recourse for sites like this? I assume they are hosted overseas, but do hosts not respond at all to complaints?
Show HN: Git-psuh – Fix your mistakes through negative reinforcement
This is a real problem and a real concern.

An EV essentially is a car with a very expensive fuel tank (the battery), made out of specific materials and properties. While it is efficient in energy use and can make use of fungible electricity, lithium is rare, limited to specific areas of concentration, and can (as any material) only be partially recycled.

There's lithium elsewhere on Earth, or more precisely, in seawater, but processing seawater for minerals (uranium is another which might be extracted) is expensive in the sense of requiring a lot of energy (arguably the ultimate definition of cost is energy requirements).

At US rates of auto ownership scaled to the world and future populations, known lithium reserves would quickly be exhausted -- a few decades, if that. With recycling, yes, some of that would be re-used, but even at 90% material recoverability (and references I have suggest 30% is far more common), you'll lose ~50% of your original material in 7 generations. (The formula: remaining material = (portion recoverable)^generations. So: 0.47 ~= 0.9^7.)

Other options include other forms of energy storage (including possibly synfuels), other battery components, or we all just start walking a lot more.
Japan is a very cash-based economy. Large withdrawals are not uncommon. 116 transactions at the same ATM should raise some red flags, but there are very few people looking.
> or who are against gender identity equality

"Anyone who doesn't agree with my ultra progressive views that people should be able to define their own gender identity is a hateful bigot and needs to be silenced"
another case like that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulović
>About 11 percent of young citizens of the U.S. couldn't even locate the U.S. on a map.

This seems particularly bizarre, because even if someone hasn't learned world geography, surely they've seen a map of the US in various contexts, and can recognise its shape?
The themes it produced were not inaccurate when it comes to Dylan. The vast majority (and his most beloved works) are not protest songs. Pretty much everything he did after Bringing It All Back Home is not a protest song. Like A Rolling Stone is definitely not a protest song. In fact, most of his work IS about relationships in some form.

I would disregard what the author has to say about Dylan even though it seems to be author's primary example. Dylan wrote a ton of songs and encompassed a couple different personas through his career. He's not one thing.
I've been developing apps with Rails since it was announced. It's been an amazing tool/toolchain, providing a very useful level of abstraction that allows rapid development.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of Go (Golang) development. For me, it's sort of the anti-Ruby-Rails. I really like the fact that it requires me to "roll my own" in so many situations. I need to understand what's happening under the hood to make things work.

But, the abstraction/magic of Rails is useful. Speed to market with trustable, battle tested magic is a profitable proposition.

I want to introduce Golang into my current project, but I haven't quite found the right place for it yet. Rails makes it so much easier and faster to add functionality at our scale.
I bet even during WW2 Japanese civilian life was peaceful too, but that doesn't prevent Japan's brutal invasion into other nations. Your personal experience doesn't matter much. Also I don't think Asians reveal their true thoughts to foreigners easily. Besides what matters is Japanese government's take on the history. If Japanese government continue to deny their wrongs during the war and worship their war criminals in shrine, then it is a major problem to the neighbors.
While that's true, why don't we see this sort of stuff with Django or Flask?

Of course we see people complain about these tools, but my impression is that people who end up leaving those communities are rarely because of community issues (more like "I'm going to do some Go instead"-style things)

Surely something is different. It's not like Django is unused...
Let's try not to be vague. In America, like many allies, it's entirely legal for spy agencies to spy on foreign countries and businesses. To support this, there's laws that enforce secrecy of what they do from targets to intel to methods used. Americans are mostly fine with this and even respected our spies outside instances of corrupt or foolish choices. So, public was OK with spying outside US within certain parameters like no IP theft.

So, when Snowden leaks those things, he's leaking national secrets we used to maintain an edge over the competition that America was fine with. That's not whistleblowing as it reveals legal stuff Americabs implicitly agreed to supporting foreign spying. Just a crime that sets us back while others continue their espionage.

I hope that was more specific. Such leaks are shy Snowden is partly a traitor who damaged our country. For domestic and some foreign leaks, he's a whistleblower that helped our country out a lot. I'm for lenient treatment, maybe immunity, given that. He should've learned from Manning that Dump It All (TM) was a terrible strategy with high consequences and inconsistent voter support. Future whistleblowers should focus on clear violations, corruption, and incompetence that everyone wants to stop far as voting public. Rest hurts credibility.
What is with the poor grammar and spelling errors?

"Recently they ran an ad featuring Bob Dylan which made laugh, or would have, if had made not me so angry."

"Ask anyone from that era about who Bob Dylan was and no one will tell you his main them was love fades."

"Dog’s don’s but Watson isn't as smart as a dog either."

etc
Which is the only place you can find it right now, since it currently only has 2 points. If nobody ever looked at the "newest" page and upvoted articles there, no articles would ever get to the front page.
I just gave it a test on my end. G++ and clang++ are both compiling without warning it seems.

Has this been fixed?
No, the AI Winter came because expert systems did not do much.

I did a Masters at Stanford CS in 1985, and met most of the big names of that era. Stanford CS was dominated by the expert systems crowd, headed by Feigenbaum, and the logicians, headed by McCarthy. AI was being taught almost as philosophy. (Exam question: "Does a rock have intention?") You could graduate without ever seeing an expert system run, let alone writing one. Very little actually worked. But the faculty was claiming Strong AI Real Soon Now. From expert systems, which are just rules you write and feed to a simple inference engine. You get out pretty much what you put in. It's just another way to program.

Feigenbaum was running around, testifying before Congress that the US would become an agrarian nation unless Congress funded a big national AI lab headed by him. Really. There were a number of AI startups, all of which failed. There was a fad for buying Symbolics 3600 LISP machines, a single user refrigerator sized box with a custom CPU.

None of this delivered. That's why there was an AI winter.
I would say not all the desktop apps have been 'rewritten' lately. The evolution of the desktop many, many great apps for years and decades past have been obsoleted sometimes the software was way ahead of the hardware.

If you aren't finding anything interesting that is unwritten, you might take a trip down history and see what things had been abandoned on the wayside fro one reason or other, that might be time for a refresh.

As far as new platforms - I think augmented reality (such as google glass, hololens) is going to be a new desktop metaphor and see a lot of "wheel reinvention" in the coming years as the platforms become stable.
I have an early car, without the necessary sensors.
I tend to disagree with people who insist on political absolutes. Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
That may be the problem. He sounds bitter.
It may even be counter-productive, if it means you no longer feel the need to cover your mouth when coughing.