skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For 8 bit platforms, 8 bits are still bytes/sbytes. Most of them have native functions that work on 16 bit integers, they just take up a pair of registers. You have access to the same array of integer sizes. Plain int is 16 bits, and longs are 32 bits and long longs still 64. Still, I much prefer using the int definitions included in C99, where you define the bit size explicitly. uint16_t is a lot more explicit than int, especially if you've got code that's being shared between a few different micros of different word sizes.
I'm not sure how they seriously wrote this story with that as the lede.

“I’m much more meticulous and efficient. I might go a little slower, but in the end I believe I win.”

Slow is not how you win.

I think this article fundamentally misunderstands the goal of VC backed companies: Billion dollar exits and paradigm shifting technologies. That's not for every company.
Even in the most expensive cities like NYC, San Francisco or London that is still a lot of money to have sitting around, enough money that I think qualifies one as rich (if that was all your savings it puts you near the 80th percentile of wealth holders in the U.S., but he likely owns a house, and other assets). And as it turns out they're company is near the dead-center of Pennsylvania, in between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where cost of living is pretty low.
I can't wait for the AI pop charts!
Just use Elixir/Erlang and all these problems vanish.
I feel like in this day and age, it's "endorsement of a powerful entity" that goes the most towards making a programming language successful - money to pay developers and reputation to gain mindshare are the two things big companies can do best (of course, other factors still apply).
Reflections on 20+ years of day trips to New York City
It is interesting that 15 years later, with Ogg Vorbis not only providing better audio quality at a given bitrate, and Opus apparently even better, MP3 is still abundant.

I was especially annoyed when I still had an iPod, because substantial parts of my music library are in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, both of which Apple could support without paying a single cent in licensing, yet iPod - at least a couple of years back - only supported MP3 and AAC. :-|

I would assume the patents on MP3 have expired by now, is anyone in a position to confirm or deny this?
I trust the courts mostly (especially in well trod areas of law), so I assume that if they find for one party and reward large damages that the suit was legitimate. Before the ruling, or if the ruling was reversed, I don't know whether the suit is legitimate or not. The ruling doesn't change its ethical status, it changes my knowledge of its ethical status.
What if the "privilege" you think you see is actually a difference in average ability or preferences between groups of people that are in fact different from each other?

Affirmative action does not help the groups it is directed towards, it simply handicaps them further by preventing them from being properly matched to their level or ability.

Clarence Thomas recently wrote about this in detail...
Slaveholders argued that slavery was a ‘positive good’ that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life. A century later, segregationists similarly asserted that segregation was not only benign, but good for black students. Although cloaked in good intentions, the University’s racial tinkering harms the very people it claims to be helping

If you'd like to learn about the unfortunate real outcomes of affirmative action then I strongly recommend researching Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell.
Bait and Switch: The Failure of Facebook Advertising
The public realizes the truth. But what can we do as individuals? The best we can do is, what, teach our children the value of philosophy and a common humanity and hopefully have them occupy these leadership roles in a capacity that follows the rule of law and the greater goals?

How do individuals change a system that rewards loyalty, secrecy, and praise to higher ups who run with the status quo way of thinking? Shit, I even recognize that if I was put into a middling position at the CIA/FBI/ETC that I would probably forgo several of my personal moral/political positions to keep and progress in my job.

Changes can come externally through art and civil demonstrations of our power, but really, it may be that our best path is the slow one through education, which is slow, and long, and again, very slow. And very painful.
I have vivid memories of working on Longhorn as an intern. It was an incredibly ambitious project - rewrite of the "filesystem" (really, a relational object store!), driver framework and display stack to name a few. The project failed the same exact way many projects fail - they are too ambitious and not well-scoped. The demo Hillel showed, IIRC, was complete vaporware.
Does that mean the presidential election's outcome won't make a significant difference for the vast majority of Americans, that whoever is elected - Sanders, Clinton, Trump, et al - will basically administer the Federal government the same way?
At some level _every_ service is competing with every other for users' time. But at some point, such comparisons become meaningless.
On AVR 8 bit microcontrollers, at least: yes. Pointers are 16 bits, and there are a handful of instructions specifically for 16 bit integer and pointer operations (which operate on pairs of 8 bit registers). For everything else, operations are performed by chaining together 8 bit operations. Adding two 32 bit ints for example would need 4 add instructions.
The abstract of link [4] says the following:

> Gender differences were found [] due to an increase in girls' gaze behavior. Girls also made more eye contact in female–female dyads and in the second interaction over the first. Boys' behavior remained unchanged over time. The data provide evidence for gender differences in mutual gaze in a younger sample and wider context than previously demonstrated.

This seems to reinforce the claim that there are gender differences, doesn't it? (I don't have access to the full paper and can't see the result you're referring to)

> This difference starts at a young age, with boys receiving more functional toys that develop logic and hand eye coordination, while girls receive more dolls, dollhouses, stoves, strollers, etc.

Did you know that a monkey research study examined toy and play preferences of male and female monkeys? Like humans, male adolescent monkeys prefer to play with wheeled vehicles, while the females prefer dolls. "Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children" [7]:

> Sex differences in juvenile activities, such as rough and tumble play, peer preferences, and infant interest, share similarities in humans and monkeys. Thus if activity preferences shape toy preferences, male and female monkeys may show toy preferences similar to those seen in boys and girls. We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females.

[4] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FB%3ASERS.00000110...

[7] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/
Balancing of Chemical Equations Using Matrix Algebra (2015)
A lot of people i know default, including me, to using snapchat as their main camera in most situations. You can download whatever you take a picture of through the app and choose not to post it at all. It has all the features i need from the camera plus some basic photo editing. Also the reverse isn't true: I cant take a picture through the normal camera then choose to post it to snapchat. this both locks you into using the Snapchat camera and ensures that most pics you see on snapchat are taken in the moment, which is very important to the app. btw I'm 23
When you close it with we have to be aware of the realities of behavioral difference between the sexes, your beliefs become ambiguous. A thorough restating of positions doesn't make the arguments less clear.

I have the preconceived notion that we cannot assume that there is a biological difference in cognition. You're right. I'm wary of it because people have been doing it for hundreds of years for equally inane reasons. My wife isn't missing 5 ounces of her brain, her brain isn't held together by more delicate strands, the shape of her brain relative to the skull doesn't make her more subservient. What you seem to miss is that this assumption is not rooted in any scientific reasoning -- in fact more and more neuroscience is coming to the conclusion that there are very few differences in brain structure. Catherine Dulac's research from Harvard has been getting close to this, and although I think her conclusions overstep the data that she has, it's very interesting to me. And you've missed my point. I do think that there is a difference in cognition between the sexes, but I do not think that there is a biological basis for this. Just like I don't think that there is a biological basis for the reason that black children score lower on standardized tests (and there is an easier study setup for this, which is excellent!). The thing is, the studies that they've done show pretty similar results between increasing either sexes primary sex hormone and the effects on cognition. There are very similar results when either sex has a hormone imbalance.

I do actually care to know if men are naturally predisposed to aggression. Here are the links to the studies refuting that testosterone causes increased aggression [0][1][2]. And again, I do care that boys are more hyperactive. I don't deny that it's happening, I think it's a problem, and I think that what we can do to fix it is increase discipline and develop healthy coping strategies.

I'm not rejecting the premise, I'm rejecting that there is an inherent flaw in boys that makes them violent, hyperactive rapists. I'm rejecting that there is an inherent flaw in women that makes them docile, logically incapable therapists.

The fact that this is controversial just blows my mind.

How do you feel about the cross cultural differences in expected behavior between the sexes?

[0] http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature08711
[1] http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/81/10/3578
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W...
When you learn/taught any new programming language you learn about the primitives of the language and how to combine them to create programs. You will create simple programs to test the understanding of the language and get used to the features of the language in terms of how to solve a problem.
On the other hand, the world of professional software development is very very messy, instead of creating program you end up creating these enormous complex software systems. Most importantly its not like that you get requirements, you implement them and you are done, instead you will keep getting new requirements over time which in most cases are conflicting with the existing requirements and the system needs to keep evolving to handle this mess forever. Handling this evolution over time is the most important feature of any language/tools/platform and it seems those people who don't like C++ have been through the frustration of handling that evolution of software in C++.
Nvidia drivers in particular were terrible at first.
Yahoo Japan is a different company, I think owned by SoftBank.

They run a lot of services that are covered by e.g. eBay, Yelp, Google Maps here. I think they're an ISP too.
GIF patents are expired I believe, but I dont' think MP3 is safe until 2018.

This patent, for example, doesn't expire until near the end of 2017: https://www.google.com/patents/US5703999?dq=5,703,999

Edit: This is supported by the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and...

> In the United States, the technology will be substantially patent-free on 31 December 2017 (see below). The majority of MP3 patents expired in the US between 2007 and 2015
I'd gladly pay for yahoo finance, especially if they made it less shitty.
Interesting, considering Microsoft has acquired Mojang
Having recently spent some time browsing the submissions of /r/deepdream and seeing how far computer generated imaging has come, I have no doubts that one day we will be listening to wonderful sounds that are generated by artificial intelligence. However an intrinsic part of the music (to me, anyways) as an art form, is the humanity of it. A computer can generate lyrics that are relatable on the surface, but knowing that there isn't a person behind those words, feeling what I'm feeling, definitely detracts from the experience of the whole.

That being said, this is incredibly exciting to me, and I look forward to seeing how it progresses, and probably challenges my ideas of what music is
In other news, bananas have surpassed OS X in daily Caloric consumption. I knew Apple couldn't make it without Jobs.

People conflate the purposes of various products under the umbrella term "social network", which makes the assumption that all social networks offer arbitrarily similar function. Simply not true.

Snapchat offers ephemeral pictoral content with humorous ad-hoc additive filters. This tailors the product for those that desire ephemeral pictoral content with humorous ad-hoc additive filters. Apparently, a bunch of young kids.

Twitter offers what is now known through the shorthand, "microblogging". This tailors the product for people who like "microblogging". Apparently, a bunch of people, the median age being higher than Snapchat's median age.

Just because more people are spending time on Snapchat than on Twitter, does not mean that Snapchat is "taking away" from Twitter time. Perhaps different people are signing up for Snapchat that are not signed up for Twitter. Perhaps people that are spending X hours on Twitter are now spending Y hours on Snapchat without taking away from the X hours spent on Twitter. Elapsed eyeball time, and, ergo, ad revenue, are still the same. This isn't a zero-sum game. Twitter shouldn't break a sweat because Snapchat is getting more popular. Facebook shouldn't break a sweat because Twitter's no-character limit policy may increase user base.

Perhaps the zero-sum approach to competition makes sense in certain fields, like when products are similar substitutes of each other; like two different kinds of general-purpose glue offered on the market. Or when market capitalization of a certain kind of product is fixed : it's been widely assumed that the average American's entertainment budget is relatively fixed, so in a philosophical sense, if one popular band didn't exist, another popular band would be more popular.

But when it comes to products like "social networks"? With vast design philosophies and product focus and varying demographics? It's very reductionist to publish a headlines like this and assume it makes any sort of meaningful conclusions. As with any sufficiently popular business, this stuff is capital-C complicated and you can't explain relative differences in success using singular metrics like this.
GSoC 2016 Week 1: Android SDK Tools in Debian
While tech will eventually reach there, today is not the day that deceit becomes an acceptable business plan.
Don't teach people ifconfig! It's all about ip now.
A New Origin Story for Dogs
Three new papers rebut “America is an oligarchy" study
>The problem is even worse for local ethno-linguistic minorities such as Gaelic and Welsh in the UK. Ironically France is only as homogenous as it is due to centuries of centralisation and standardisation deliberately driving out regional linguistic variation.

Which is hardly a comfort to native speakers of regional languages such as Breton, Basque or Occitan.
This is interesting, but it feels a lot like a moonshot, and it isn't even groundbreaking. The approach may be novel but folks have been trying this for a while http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2010/05/ill_be_...

Can code generate a catchy pop tune? Im sure it can. Would I qualify it as music? Probably not.

Music can pull from sources that are EXTERNAL to the music: Heres a modern track that does just such a thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvtNS6hbVy4

Music can have some very non traditional structure that most would qualify as "noise"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYaWND9n9h0

Hell music can even be "silent"
http://rosewhitemusic.com/piano/writings/silence-taught-john...

Ultimately, I think that it is possible for a machine to generate music, but were going to be talking about something that is more or less an AI at that point, after all music has a soul.
we presume that observations are not caused by biological differences without concrete evidence of those differences. The corollary to that is that disparities in outcome are prima facie evidence of disparities in opportunity.

This is a textbook circular argument.
Musk: 'Chances are we're all living in a simulation'
Do you agree with the recent diversity and inclusion effort at github which noted that (6) some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women?

http://www.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-whit...
The immense pressure is the women's own doing. Women largely prefer to partner with men who make more money than them, so naturally if one partner becomes a stay at home parent it makes more sense economically for it to be the woman.

If women don't like the pressure to be a stay at home parent, then women can start marrying men who make less money than them (men don't as a group place little value on their partner making more than them) and instead face the pressure of providing for their family.
If AI generated music works out and becomes popular will people actually optimize for quality of music or instead you would have an Engineering team design the next Pop star which would be optimizing for Profitability and marketability.
Ahh, so maybe the appeal is its non-spamness? In that it doesn't clog up any kind of inbox?
It's a straw man, sure. It's an exaggeration about people being willingly baffled by physics.

May I ask, where did you get the part about "conscious observer"? Yes, there's a thing in QM about observation collapsing the wave function, and there's disagreement on what that actually means. But I can't imagine that an interpretation promoted by actual physicists would use a squishy term like "conscious" in their hard science.
What about it sounds like a moonshot? It's using an existing Google open source project and is looking to use it for an artistic purpose along with building a community. Honestly it sounds like a 20% project from a couple of people on the TensorFlow project. Almost 0 cost.
Yeah, I think having a display that isn't obviously part of your outfit will be a really big enabler of wearable technologies. That and flexible printed circuits that can survive dry cleaning or a washing machine.

One of the reasons Glass failed was because it was about as in-your-face as possible. Resistive screens also failed in the same sense because having to pull a stylus out to use your phone is aggressively technological.

In contrast, touch is a really casual interface, and though the touch UIs that I've used all had warts it was at least possible for anyone to grasp the basic mechanics of the interface. In my mind a wearable device that is obviously a wearable device isn't going to be as successful as clothing that monitors your heart rate or SpO2 because you have to consciously interact with the device. If you fill your gym bag with smart clothes then you just wear them like you would wear gym clothes.
I didn't understand that statement, could you perhaps draw an explanatory diagram for me?
Convenience. It was a mistake that I've since reverted. I'll probably switch to a password manager that requires a master password to unlock domain-specific passwords.
To be honest my interpretation of 'trolling' is the age old one. Saying something outrageous, looking for an emotional response. I don't see any of those posts doing that, seem measured to me. If I didn't think so, I'd definitely retract/apologize.

I just thought this was an open forum for the Real McCoys where we could signal not only people but employers out on what appeared to me to be BS. I am interested in jobs myself. If we can't call them into question in the lion's den of developers that is HN, which has been made clear- I find that as quite the letdown.

I'd like to see them required to put if they respect the 8 hour workday or not to truly separate the wheat from the chaff. Then it would be more than just the same as hitting up indeed.com.. just another recruiters playpen.

Regardless I do respect your guys' site, your rules and wishes. I know more now about HN than I did before and won't do it again.
Beyond Asimov: how to plan for ethical robots
> What if a language is inferior but popular

aka web-dev-world. Where the lowest common denominator has more foot-guns than C. Worse, the footgun often won't go off directly when you pull the trigger, but some time later, perhaps when it is aimed at your face.
Most of those phones are at the extreme low end and aren't used as smartphones the way iPhones are
I think movies with "real" futuristic interfaces would be boring. For example the Minority Report movie with wifi would have none of the disks being inserted. Playback would happen in people's heads. Nothing would really be moving. Also, Tom Cruise wouldn't be able to just go back to his base and still get in. Also, they wouldn't make such silly mistakes letting "the hero" have so much leeway. He'd just be quickly captured and that's it.
Blade Runner re-encoded using neural networks
I mean, it is possible that hundreds, possibly thousands, of people have misinterpreted your writing on colonialism, human biodiversity, etc. However, you seem to be smart and a better than average writer (if florid, at times). It seems like someone of your intelligence and writing ability would be able to make a point effectively, without so many misunderstandings.

But, I hope that I have misunderstood your writing on those subjects.
Its only about two years living expenses in most major cities. People have mostly forgotten, but traditionally having the ability to survive at your standard of living for a year or so (ie, having some wealth, just not enough to live off exclusively) was defining of the middle class.

Its tangential, but it is very interesting that even in developer circles devs think they are middle class when they make $130-150k a year even if their cost of living is ~100k which means their total savings even after a decade (and something eating into their rainy day fund, including vehicle / home purchases and such) they still don't have two years living expenses saved up, you are still definitively working class.

Very few people today are actual middle class anymore, by reasonable standards of what to define it as, since cost of living has gotten so absurdly high relative to income compared to what it was decades ago.
Mostly the navigational system is a mess - and feels of duct taped features without ever a desire to go in and clean it up.

Some points from just using it now:

- The strange lower left/lower right hamburger slide out menu things with odd icons. Right one leads to news, left one leads to snaps.

- When you go to the lower, right hamburger thingy - to go "back" there is a camera (not a back chevron/arrow) at the top left. Go experience it - it is weird.

- You can swipe down from the main camera view to get your profile. Took my 31 year old ass a year to discover that.

- The view snap vs. message view is just... no. I know what it does and I still input wrong.