skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>How'd you find it?

My girlfriend works there, we discussed it at length.

>Why did you think it's unfortunate?

Primarily because they botched it. I wish it was well-enough written so that I could use to convince the people who actually need serious convincing (unlike the PR office or the two kids). Alas it's far too inflammatory, and on so many levels. It's also mushed together in a way that thinking back I can't separate one argument from another. If they separated politics from the technical aspects at least I could use the latter part, but as it is, it's pretty much hopeless.

So now if I am to convince anyone either in the need for scientific rigor or in the need to pay attention to the plights of the Deaf I am entirely on my own, using my own clumsy word. This is not how enlightenment is supposed to work. The most educated and knowledgeable, those with the most authority, those who can write well, or should be able to, they should be providing ideological ammunition to those who are willing to spread the message. Instead they ended up publicly flogging the PR office, which might have been misguided but is fundamentally on "our" side, in a fit of anger. A squandered opportunity.
Fixed my 25 figure, accidentally added one city twice I think.

For the ~70 million figure, see here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_o...
When it was coined "Don't Be Evil" was a reference to Microsoft, who at the time was an especially bad actor in the industry, even for them. Dropping support for a protocol is one thing, but actively sabotaging open protocols like MS did is quite another.
Gchat was (and is) wonderful -- minimal and elegant. I never understood why Google was so hell bent upon trying to move the users from Gchat to Hangout. They would have enough data to know the number of times users clicked 'no' to moving to the new interface!

Hangout might work fine, but I don't like the brand. A "GChat" mobile App would have signified a fast minimal interface to me. "Hangout" just sounds like such a loaded word/service; I rarely open the app for regular chat.

In a rough string of events, at first Google changed the look and functionality of the way Chat contacts were displayed in the left pane of Gmail. Then came the constant bickering to move to the 'new' Hangout interface (from inside Gmail), which, for text chat users, was just a superficial and useless change. I liked the simple old look back then, and still do. After that came Google+, and more irritating notifications to 'update'. In the meantime a huge project Google Wave came and was taken down.

GMail and Google are still amazing, and I respect them. But somehow, few years back, these changes took away my confidence in Google that they always know the pulse of the market. I think it was a mix of overuse of data science and marketing speak that hurt Gchat the most.
VR headsets that are attached to big PCs are very much a solo-thing at the moment. I can understand wanting to play a multi-player game like Halo while visiting a friend's house.

I got my Oculus Rift a few weeks ago and absolutely love it. Practically use it every day. Lucky's Tale was surprisingly good, and I can no longer Elite: Dangerous without the headset.

There's not enough software at the moment. I still want to see a good flight simulator and Altspace-like spaces with actual things to do with people.
You say "few hours" but I'd go even further and say "few minutes".
> I don't know anyone who would say the majority of Java applications aren't huge, slow, memory-hogging beasts compared to equivalent native ones, and whose codebases are just as unoptimised for the perspective of the humans who have to work with them.

I would, and I've been developing in Java for over ten years now, after ten years of C/C++.

I think that your complaints have nothing to do with Java, and much to do with a coding style that became popular in the '90s. You could see the very same in C++ applications back then, but then Java took over. The big enterprise applications of the '90s and '00s reflect the prevailing mindset of the time. Java applications written today don't look like that.

> In my experience, a "simple, elegant" design --- which does not necessarily mean "highly abstract" --- tends to be very close to optimal anyway, with the compiler's optimiser doing the remaining work. That makes me wonder whether claiming a language/runtime/compiler has powerful optimisation abilities is actually a reflection of how much the typical source code in the language has to be "cleaned up" by the optimiser in order to be decently efficient.

In that case I think your experience may be limited, or that you're unaware how big "the remaining work" may actually be, especially on modern hardware. HotSpot has proven extremely adept at running many different code styles very efficiently. HotSpot's next-gen compiler, Graal[1], is IMO the biggest breakthrough in compilation technology of the past decade. It runs Java faster than C2 (HotSpot's current compiler), Python faster than PyPy, and JS as fast as any other VM out there. It even has a C frontend, which, while not yet matching gcc, performs surprisingly well considering how little effort has been put into it.

This kind of work can be very important, namely, the ability to optimize code across different languages. A recent paper[2] found that re-writing parts of SQLite in Python (!), instead of the original C, can result in a 3x (!) performance boost when running in an application, as application and DBMS code can be optimized as one unit.

[1]: https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Graal/Publications+and...

[2]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03207
Sure; I'm not agreeing with his position, just supplying the background.
What, people started using msn instead of gchat because those chats weren't on xmpp?

Why would gchat have as many users as facebook anyway? It's not like gmail was a community like facebook was. MSN meanwhile basically started as a chat client, there where ads for it on tv in Sweden...
It bothers me a whole lot that they did. I can only imagine how much pressure they were under.
You have to wait a good 1 minute or 2 for the article to load. I have found this issue with all of Forbes articles when I have adblock turned on.
The problem with taking the aggregate view is exactly what you run into - you get awkward, inconsistent world views.

Most of the LessWrong style AI-safety people would probably heavily disagree with what you wrote, because you imply that AI-safety is a topic that matters now because "this time it's different". On the contrary, I think most people would say AI is still quite a ways out, as in a few decades, and that the arguments about it don't necessarily depend on the current state of AI. The state we're in is certainly seen as a warning sign, but not proof that we're a few years away from true AI.
Dropbox won't remove kernel access from upcoming Project Infinite feature
Ha! I know how you feel! Check out "Learning how to learn?" (https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn) - it's an excellent course that may help you out. (Though not with jiu-jitsu, kung-fu, and b-212 helicopter piloting I'm afraid :-)).
You're mixing GChat with Hangout. GChat was(is) minimal and very useful.
If you fell victim to defamation by a news outlet and you had the ability to put a stop to it, why would you sue the defamer anonymously through a proxy and not directly?
CHINA'S QUANTUM SATELLITE COULD CHANGE CRYPTOGRAPHY FOREVER
I think it's that optimism is supported over pessimism. You're more likely to read optimistic comments about an undetermined thing than you are to read negative ones.

Negativity about the future is generally downvoted or unsupported.

Those who know AI isn't around the corner are fewer because it takes a ML researcher to know that. They need time to spread a message of positivity to the masses that while AI isn't about to be developed, there are still some really great things coming.
Right, they couldn't let it be its own thing. It always had to be under the umbrella of some other thing that nobody actually wanted. It's one thing to make something nobody likes, it's quite another to make something very popular and then drown it in social-sauce till its users don't want anything to do with it anymore.
Startup Jobs 4 Techies
Also, the point I was refuting from the parent post is the claim that Europe is urban where as the US is not. That's simply not factual, as others have also pointed out.
18,000 passengers per day is 6,570,000 passengers annually which is about 12% of the total 54M passengers at JFK. 12% doesn't seem all that low to me.
Literally every person I've put into my Vive has been blown away by it. Sure, there's probably some selection bias, but I've been buttonholing anyone who sets foot in my house, including my 70-year-old in-laws.

So far, of the 20+ people to whom I've shown it, one has taken it off voluntarily, and all had variations of, "Holy shit, this is really amazing."
Hot water, good dentistry, and high coverage in unit tests.
Don't agree. Self contained app bundles are great. I use homebrew for some stuff and dependencies are a PITA. E.g. multiple incompatible Python versions.
> undeserved hype (I don't think so, I just think non-technical people are making up foolish expectations),

That's what undeserved hype is and where it comes from..

> Much in the same way that overinvestment in internet infrastructure during the dot-com bubble paid off.

Sure. The longer the hype can be tempered with articles like this, the more reasonable the investments, the bigger the pay off.
They need to open up the wire protocol. Let people innovate outside their walled garden.
As jfoutz says - Go is almost like a "better" C. I really enjoyed learning Go last month (I wrote a go server for a mobile app of mine). The "Tour of Golang"(https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1) is a really good place to start.

Is there anything I could write that would make it _easier_ for you to learn? Taking up project/quizzes/follow-ups...?
Before Google bought Boston Dynamics, BD was strictly a DoD contractor. The military wants big, strong, rugged robots, and BD was headed there. (Even though the USMC rejected the Legged Squad Support System, the militarized version of BigDog.) DARPA was providing much of the funding. It took about $120 million to get to the good version of BigDog.

Then Google bought six robotics companies, including BD, which dropped their existing customer base and went quiet. For several years, the robotics community was wondering what great things Google was developing. In the end, it turns out the answer was "not much".

The amusing thing is that Google/Alphabet worried about their image from owning a company that makes a big humanoid robot. Google survived paying $500,000,000 to DoJ to avoid felony charges after they were caught knowingly selling AdWords to an FBI undercover operation pretending to be a Mexican drug lord trying to take over the US steroids market.[1] It's not like Google has a cuddly image.

If Toyota wants a robotics company, they should probably buy Schaft, which is already in Japan, from Alphabet. There just don't seem to be civilian applications for BD's hydraulic machines. Also, it's about time for Marc Raibert, the BD CEO, to retire; he's about 67 now.

[1] http://searchengineland.com/wsj-government-sting-google-phar...
While we're at it, why not use that opportunity to experiment with alternative fundamentals, like ternary or quaternary (like our DNA I suppose) instead of binary, or further explore things like belt architectures [1].

I see no reason why we should forever stick with things the way they are, just because they seemed simple to implement at the time. The trend you mention could be a chance to reinvent computers, as it were.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_CPU_Architecture#The_Belt...
Right before Slack started getting traction I had though of building a Chrome extension/app on top of Gmail and Gchat that did similar things. Sometimes I still think about it, but I think Slack has started to dominate.
> It also didn't make any sense they dropped XMPP in favour of Hangouts.

It makes perfect sense. Forcing out competitors (XMPP) with leverage from dominance in a neighboring market (gmail, which was the common interface for GTalk) is a textbook example of monopolization.

If we lived in a world that actually cared about the rule of law, Google would be charged for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (and/or related antitrust acts).
Yeah, that's the case with my family. I was in the "lower middle class" when growing up, but we had a library completely filled with books. Most of them were cheap, used books, or were just collected over the years.

In context of the article as anecdata, I don't think the books themselves had anything to do with mine or my brother's successes. We never even read any of them. It was more of a reflection of what my parents were interested in, which obviously had effects in how we were raised.
David Brooks: ‘To have a fulfilling life you have to make promises.’
> Java is slow and bloated compared to native.

What do you mean by "native"? C/C++? Yes, given enough effort you can write C code that outperforms Java code, sometimes handily, especially in single threaded or low-contention cases. Yet we did write applications in C/C++ before we switched to Java, we had excellent reasons to make the switch, and there have been precious few companies making the switch back. That shows you that the microbenchmarks don't tell the whole story.

Right now, the JVM's biggest performance issue is the lack of value types. Once they arrive -- and work is well underway -- beating Java would be harder and harder, especially given new compilers like Graal. But in any event, I just don't see large developers switch back to C++ (or Rust) en masse. Memory usage is hardly an issue, as RAM is very cheap and underutilized in server environments anyway. Spending effort to conserve RAM just doesn't make any sense, unless you're targeting RAM constrained environments.
You're absolutely right except for limiting the bad actor qualities of MS to just at that time. While they have made inroads to more open systems, they continue to do heavy handed things, e.g. the misleading and intrusive Windows 10 upgrades.
You're right. Point still stands that google's design choices are god awful these days, though.
I thought Google Wave had huge potential but the rollout was so poorly handled. It was a group app that only called people in by invitation, so I couldn't add my team members without them having to go through a signup and wait for approval process, killing all momentum.
Wrong headset :# I could spend days in the Vive and Google Tiltbrush alone.
I mean, micro-benchmarks are just generally not something to put a huge amount of stock into in general, regardless of language. Software that scales out to hundreds of thousands if not millions of users is generally written in "slow", "bloated" languages, and seems to be doing ok. It really all depends on the use case, and who is creating the software. Most enterprise software is slow and bloated, but a lot of other stuff exists that is quite the contrary. Two easy examples:

- Cyberduck is written in Java, yet nobody seems to be complaining about how slow and bloated it is.

- There exists a version of Quake 2 written in Java: http://bytonic.de/html/benchmarks.html It seems to be able to push out more frames than native, actually.

Both of those are real software that actually run well on Java, regardless of penalty paid for running in a VM, JIT, and GC.

Also when looking at the amount of memory and time taken when comparing C to Java in the microbenchmarks, always be sure to mentally factor in the base overhead of starting up the JVM both in time and memory. It's pretty easy to see that when a C version takes up something like 100KB of memory and the Java one takes up 30MB, Java consistently takes up at least ~30MB regardless of how much memory is required for that microbenchmark. When the C version takes up 300MB and the Java one takes up 700MB, that's a bit better of a comparison. (though still not perfect, because the Java GC will reserve a lot of memory for itself, even if it isn't using the full 700MB, if it feels it needs that much, etc.)
Taxes are involuntary and people are locked in prison for not paying them, that is resembling a slavery. Some rationalization for slavery was similar too, e.g. people thought that it's not possible to have prosperity without enslavement.

Probably in the future present times will be seen as wicked too.
A military bot is a lot simpler to make then a household bot, ironically. Soldiers can be trained to use a tool a specific way its intended (provided it's ultimately useful). And the range of things a military bot needs to do is actually somewhat more limited to mostly the things we've already seen.

I'm not really sure what a BD household robot would even do.
Exactly. It's also a logical extension of their COMSEC doctrine which led to things like NSA's EKMS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKMS
I can do "front-end programming using javascript" and "fundamentals of machine learning" but have no clue about "deduction systems".

Amongst the two, which would you say interests you more?
The utility of an airport train is pretty much directly correlated to a) how good the network it's connected to, and b) how slow/expensive the alternatives are.

For example, everybody uses the airport trains in Tokyo, because Tokyo's train network is awesome, and the trains are both faster and cheaper than taking a taxi. The Tokyo Monorail, which is only one of two links to one of Tokyo's two main airports, has a ridership of over 300,000 pax/day. By comparison, DFW's airport link gets under 2,000 pax/day -- in large part because the total ridership of the entire DART light rail network is barely 100,000 pax/day!
Oh wow, we'll be adding three more services to this -- https://sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf

No words.
related reading: https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/quic...

there's a lot of linked reading on airport connectors' rather bizarre propensity to attract huge amounts of capital spending relative to their eventual ridership numbers.
The phones have always been the best phones you could buy for the price. The camera on the Nexus 6p and the 5x are still up there with the latest flagships.

Android has never had a good tablet story...but on the phones, you should definitely try a Nexus
> I'd rather put in 1 to 2 hours a day of insanely immersive gametime than 12 hours of Civilization

I'm not finely aged, as I'm only 25, but I feel the exact same way. One thing I loved about Quantum Break recently was the fascinating live-action video that breaks up each chapter of the single-player game. I'm a fan of immersive experiences, so the 2-3 hours a week I spend gaming have a bigger impact on me and are more enjoyable.
To really "get" meta-programming, try using Lisp/Scheme. I've found that really helps to "grok" the concepts and makes it much easier to understand in C++.
Is it actually possible to be specifically deafened at such a low frequency? There's no resonance down there, and it would be so much lower energy. I would expect all other hearing to be severely and possibly permanently impacted before infrasound could be deafened.
It doesn't help that airtrain only gets you as far as those 2 stops at the end of the A train or Jamaica terminal for the LIRR. Even after your 4.50 ride on airtrain you still have another hour or so into Manhattan. If they had followed the original proposal and built it as a connector JFK -> LGA -> Penn station (or some other central location) I bet ridership would be way up.
Well, some projects fail entirely, and their people go on to do other great things based on what they learned.

Some people from Thinking Machines Corporation (founded 1983) [1] went on to build a cool parallelizable programming paradigm that even those without programming experience could utilize with relative ease. It's called Ab Initio (founded 1995) and is largely used as a Data Warehousing / ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool for getting data from databases, running a lot of the same operations on it, then sending it to another database.

> Thinking Machines alumni ("thunkos") helped create several parallel computing software start-ups, including Ab Initio Software, independent to this day; and Applied Parallel Technologies, which was later renamed Torrent Systems and acquired by Ascential Software, which was in turn acquired by IBM. [1]

Ab Initio has a GUI front end for code that looks like a data flow diagram. The "graphs" are converted to k-shell scripts that grab the data from various sources. I guess the k-shell implementation made it easy to parallelize.

I always thought this was cool because this company had found a way to allow inexperienced programmers, and even some other STEM graduates with no programming experience, to write software that operated on data in parallel, which is generally considered to be a hard thing to do, even today in some cases, let alone in early 2000s.

They're very secretive, so many people don't know them, but I believe they are very successful. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, they had clients like AOL and double click, which is basically where all the advertising revenue was going. All that processing and recalculating was handled by this software.

I know because my first job out of college was to use this software on Fannie Mae's loans database. That system was SUPER complicated but working with Ab Initio on it made it a cake walk compared to using, say, Java, which a previous contractor had tried and failed to do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_Initio_Software
Chrome OS is awesome, but it desperately needs these features
Who is building the open-source Slack? Four things are needed:

1. Good support for multiple active clients, including mobile. If I see a message on desktop, I shouldn't get notified on mobile. If I read on one client, when I reconnect on another, it should show me the convo starting where I left off. Etc etc.

2. Eternal history (ideally configurable by users/channels) with decent search.

3. A few basic bells-and-whistles over IRC: preview images, allow file uploading, snippets, emoticons, profile images for users.

4. Multiple "team" / server support in the client.

I had high hopes for http://shout-irc.com/, but it ended up falling short in a number of areas. Notibly, its plugin support is not very good, so it's quite hard to add the sorts of features that I mentioned.
It's surprising how well SFO is doing with its BART extension.

Incidentally, the article missed Cleveland Hopkins Airport (CLE). Like SFO, CLE simply has a transit line that ends at the airport, not a special connection. Those seem to be more successful than short-distance shuttles that make a connection to the big system.

Oakland has a shuttle between a BART station and the airport. It's cable-hauled, strangely for a 3.7 mile system.

As usual, Asia is way ahead in transit. Tokyo Haneda has had a monorail for years. Incheon now has a maglev. Shanghai, of course, has the really fast maglev to the airport.
That's certainly a possibility, but you don't even need to get that complicated. Gene A in humans could have a slight difference in its DNA sequence that causes it do work differently from the chimpanzees' copy of the same gene.
It's not a question of managing source branches, it's a question of whether you have to update your OpenSSL dependency once for the whole company or a thousand times over for each individual software package.
This is a very cool intro to the new features of JS! Thanks! :-)

What part here is Currying?
Because you are talking about requiring such labels. Requirements are there for a reason, even if that reason is implicit.