skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A ray of light. MLPs can approximate any nonlinear function in the domain they have been trained on. What is is about the depth that makes DNNs more tractible to train than shallow networks? Is it that the particular tricks that have been developed for DNNs haven't been generalized to work at arbitrary depths? Is it that it is easier for humans to design the abstractions that are used when they are layered? Are you aware of any theoretical work in this direction?
Top 40 Software Engineering and Development Books
I've had several long correspondences with RMS over email. He's surprisingly humble and down to earth for someone with that level of fame. The first time I emailed him and he responded, I was very pleasantly surprised. In general he's very nice. He does take everything incredibly seriously though. And I do mean every single thing that goes through his brain. His website and his email reply kind of hint at that. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, it's just very unusual. And I think that's off-putting to a lot of people.
Pose a problem — as in killing your comrades in arms? Because many "old rifles" are quite capable of that, despite the age.
They sold multiple models, but only one flagship every year.
Your fix requires a lot of mental CPU cycles on the part of whoever reads the code. Are you sure it wouldn't have been better to do it the simple, obvious way?

double a = *(double *) dpa;
double b = *(double *) dpb;

if (a > b) return 1;
if (b < a) return -1;
return 0;
I think your complaint is simply that error handling code paths are rarely tested, which is true, but is also true in programs that don't use exceptions.
This is one reason I am strongly in favor of open borders.

Based on your comment I'm going to assume you live in the United States, and the only reason your argument has teeth is because you feel stuck under the current system (and rightfully so). If it were easy to opt-out by moving elsewhere then the relationship between government and citizen starts to look a lot more like a voluntary contract.
This is a fantastic example of a back-of-the-envelope calculation!
FWIW, his password was apparently "dadada". But he basically never used Twitter (didn't follow him on Pinterest), so he probably did what a lot of people do for services they don't really intend on seriously using (except most people seriously use those social media services), which is to just make up a silly password for all of them. Even so, probably should've picked something a little stronger than that...
Sild is a Lisp dialect
I don't keep any sort of "this is what I did today" journal. A combination of email, calendar, slack history, and asana basically covers that.

I do keep notebooks that I write in whenever I need to work out my emotional state, but that's not necessarily daily.

I've recently begun a habit of journaling (in the "this is what's on my mind and distracting me from actual work" sense - writing it down seems to get it off my mind for a few hours) and meditating every morning as a focus-enhancing habit, and that's been pretty effective.
Yep - it's pretty common in the pro audio industry to use DB-25 cables for 8 channels of balanced audio (+, -, gnd per channel). They'll break out to 8x XLR or 8x TRS (1/4" headphone plug) connectors. It's used way more in the studio world than the live production world, since DB-25 is far from rugged enough to go on the road.
Removing Python's GIL: The Gilectomy [video]
I see a lot of Angular comments, has anyone had good/bad experiences with TypeScript and React?
I actually haven't ever used SmallTalk, although I understand Ruby is considerably influenced by it (blocks, as far as I understand). Any pointers are appreciated though.

I'm more of a Python person, and Python doesn't really use blocks. I like the duality mentioned this post: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/01/13/iteration-insid... (In summary it's for item in L: f(item) vs L.each(|item| ...)

I don't really think of C++ algorithm.h as LINQ ? I guess I don't use it that much. To me that is more "functional in the small", e.g. map or filter with lambdas, vs. "functional in the large". But I'd be interested to hear more details on this analogy.
It's not exactly the same, but in the UK, Economy 7 is effectively a low tech version of this. At night the price of electricity is cheaper, so electric storage heaters and boilers are switched on then to take advantage of the lower costs and reduce demand at peak times. Rather than using timers, it is controlled by a radio signal broadcast throughout the country.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
Yes, they used that exact term, invoking Darwin at the same time. And I agree with you about the time frame.

I've been reading "The Vital Question"[1] of late and it has been the first book in a while where I've had several "oh that makes so much sense!" moments. And one of the tenets is that Darwin was correct in the small, and wrong in the large understandings of evolution.

Something that jumped out to me while reading it, is that information extraction drives our technology systems like energy drives biological systems. Read the book and then sit back and analyze Twitter as a multi-cellular organism with information as energy and individuals as cells. A sort of Datasaurus. Fun stuff.

[1] "The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life" -- http://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Compl... based on the recommendation tweeted by Gates and comments here, I read it through cover to cover while camping, and now going through a second reading to pick up what I overlooked the first time.
Is it available anywhere to use?
An early Iridium presentation included an artistic rendition of a solar powered Iridium-based phone booth in the middle of a jungle -- a dark jungle with a halo of light above the phone booth. Peasants were walking by on a trail near the phone booth carrying baskets on their heads. Elsewhere in the presentation they mentioned a target price of $3 a minute.

The above was in a recruitment presentation for engineering NCGs. I recall a sinking feeling that I would one day leave academia and work on projects with absurd marketing visions.

Edit: typos
What "powerful technology" are the pyramids evidence of? Slave labor? Ropes and logs?
The Hacker Spectrum
Retrying on any exception might be wrong thing to do. For example, the I/O error many levels bellow might happen for wildly different reasons, and handling them all the same way might be wrong. If not, then the correct behavior of the project depends on exceptions originating from different modules being handled the same, and that increases coupling.
I was addressing your specific assertion with regard to encoding error conditions as reserved values in your return type's codomain, which I agree is ugly.

One benefit of not throwing an exception is that you can maintain referential transparency, which exceptions generally break. You can't substitute a function call with its value because throwing an exception will have different effects depending on the context, which consequently hinders the composability of such functions.

Exceptions are also generally not type-safe, e.g. the return type of a function tells you nothing about what exceptions it may throw. If you go the checked exception route like Java, you do get some degree of type safety, but you do so at the expense of higher-order functions, which can't reasonably be expected to know about the specific exception types its arguments may throw.

On the other hand, ADTs are composable. They work for functions that aren't defined for some inputs (maybe an input type that can't be constrained by the type system). They avoid bugs because they force the caller to deal with the exceptional case (unlike returning null, a sentinel value, or throwing a RuntimeException), but without the boilerplate of exceptions, particularly in languages with pattern matching. The caller gets to decide when, if, and how to handle the exceptional case.
> Why would I want to be stuck with a 5-generation-old navigation/music player system when the car is still fine?

Why would you be? Isn't this a solved problem?

When you want to upgrade your entertainment system, you head to somewhere like Crutchfield or Sonic or Best Buy and buy a new one to plug in. In many cars, it takes less time to install a new car infotainment unit than it takes to buy a new iPhone from a carrier store. (It's often cheaper too).

For people afraid of wires, bored teens at Best Buy will install it all for you for an extra $70.
First gene therapy for children approved in Europe
Some Texans have felt uncomfortable around him.

https://stallman.org/articles/texas.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11840455
Then yeh...HN is not really that kind of space.
Hmm this is how Hitler ran Germany and why they had multiple research programs competing with each other - not sure its a good model to follow
No, Xerox PARC introduced Ethernet, not the Internet.
Landlording poses significant risks which you also must take into account. Thus if your net worth is 500k and all of it is in a rental unit, what happens if your renter floods the house or damages it in some other way?

What happens when your renter quits paying rent and starts legal proceedings based on a grievance, real or perceived? Now you cannot sell the house nor are you collecting rents.

Lastly see my other comments. Any investment that pays dividends gives you a place to sleep. The fact that you live in your investment is uniformly a downside, as it hinders liquidity. The fact that you can rent is again not relevant. Most financial investments begin to return a percentage immediately. Renting rooms is just less liquid and more risky than investing in a balanced portfolio.
How cancer was created by evolution
I think you've reinvented the milkman.

Regular milk deliveries might be a little bit more inconvenient than automatically ordered milk, but it's vastly simpler.
Taler is being designed at Inria, in France. France is not a country with high levels of distrust of government or taxes.
> nuclear weapons, of which there are signs or legends of prehistoric use all over the planet

Er, are there?
Microsoft was famous for its internal competitions between engineering orgs:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?pa...
What kind of speeds can we expect with the data plan? What about latency?
I will avoid buying 'smart' appliances for probably forever. Besides having mostly useless features, I'd rather not have another electronic probe in my life relaying all of the details of my life to everyone.
That example from the mythical man month, however to really put it in context, it would be like hiring 9 pregnant women and giving a bonus to the first one to deliver a baby and aborting the other 8. And yes, that is an overreach because aborting a later term baby is a way more serious thing than canceling a project you've worked on for nearly a year. However, projects that were "late to deliver" were de-funded and it was really hard on the project leaders. When it happened I did not see it instilling in those engineers a desire to work harder and faster next time, rather it just made them cynical and bitter.
Many cities place artificial constraints on rent increases, for example which prevents full amortization.
AI Resources
> buy Nest for the underlying technology

What do they have that is hard to do from scratch?
I was just going to ask this too because I remember reading an article about how people felt that video calls did much to alleviate the loneliness from remote work, whereas texting and even calling didn't quite work
Functions routinely use random number generators. Pretty much all AI/Machine Learning techniques use non-determinism as part of their design.

But even so, it's confusing to phrase intelligence in terms of non-determinism. It's easy to come up with a non-deterministic answer to an arbitrary question. It's hard to come up with a correct answer to an arbitrary question. If unpredictability is a component of sound reasoning, it's because we humans are so bad at reasoning.
ANTELOPE Sportswear: Muscle Activating Smartsuit
Thanks for the thorough explanation. I agree that ADTs are less ugly due to reduced boilerplate and the composability, if your language of choice has exhausting pattern matching (I really don't think "I don't care if my program works, let it crash" is a good default, so non-exhaustive pattern matching is out for me).
"Communist" is a loaded word, but it gets at the idea.

One of the thorniest problems in business economics is this: we know free markets produce extraordinary results, but why is it that even in the absence of regulation, so little of the economy is structured as a free market? Very few businesses of any size operate internally as a market, instead they usually operate under hierarchical command and control. Markets generally exist only at the interfaces between organizations.

Why don't teams bid competitively within a company?
How do individuals decide on the teams to form?
Why are managers allowed to rise to the point of failure?
Why do we pay people salaries instead of hourly wages?
Why do we hire hourly wage labor as if though its was permanent?

The number of questions raised by this topic is endless.

The most general explanation is this: yes, companies adopt inefficient structures, but they more than make up for this through significantly reduced transaction costs.
Open AI != OpenAI

Still very useful, though
You can install and use Chromium instead of Chrome, which is how I'm replying to your comment.
Had NeXT's software pivot been more successful, there would have been more incentive for hardware vendors to pick up DriverKit and write a driver for it.

They were still aiming for high quality, when there should have been an emphasis on quantity.
If you get a different result under representative democracy, the minority must be assumed to have more actual (real world) power than mere headcount indicates.

In that case, direct democracy is indeed broken, but the reason is not "discrimination" against those who are actually pretty powerful, but eventual instability from the system's inability to act as a predictive proxy for more direct (less civilized) resolution.
I was surprised by the comic having a No-derivatives license.
I would say unfunded pensions and "peak stuff" are contradictions. We clearly need/want to consume more than is readily available due to investments not paying off sufficiently well.
Agree. For our kind, hackerspaces and similar coworking spaces are very important. Especially for starting new companies and cooperatives. Having social media like HN is icing on the cake.

At least geeks have the Net though. Huge portions of the population have no genuine social group as they get older. It is no wonder the Japanese are obsessed with high school. It's the last time their peer group was together. Things like participation in sports, religion and other quasi-social affairs are in decline.
Depends on the bug.

A major performance and cache corruption bug in production had four people (on a 6 person team) each spending probably 12 hours per week on it for two months.

A complex corner case that gets hit twice per week out of 100 million requests has been ignored for two years.

A bug that only affected bad actors (people hitting a spam detection threshold, even in good faith, were getting 500 errors instead of a warning) waited a week even though it was just an obvious one-line fix.

The thing about bugs is that you often don't know what's causing them, and some are too complex or require too-specific conditions to be able to track down. If you don't know what's causing it, there's no way to know how difficult it will be to fix.

So most bugs get - if not timeboxed - heavy follow up and pressure to fix it or drop it or work around it after a couple days of non-progress. But there are some bugs you just have to keep working on until you squash them, no matter how long that takes.
Nobody wants to be blamed for a flop.
You can only call tax avoidance stealing money if your prior assumption is that all money earned belongs to the state as the owner, and you can only have whatever the state gives you by its generosity. That is a pretty big assumption.
> detects when I'm out of milk

That's a fad. I wouldn't be suprised if people just wanted to take a look inside their fridge while they're shopping, so a webcam at each level would be enough.
Personally, I use Zotero. For one, I prefer to keep things on my own system rather than use a server. I have 5G of papers in my Zotero archive, which is above the 2G no-cost limit of Mendeley. It's also handy to be able to pull up a paper even when I don't have internet access, which is surprisingly common if you, like me, visit foreign libraries and archives.

For another, Elsevier bought Mendeley in 2013, and Elsevier, well, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controv... or https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Elsevier&sort=byPopularity&pre... . Some of the HN posts in the last 7 months include "Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name", "Dutch universities plan Elsevier boycott", "Elsevier Says Content-Mining Research Papers 'Could Be Considered' Stealing", and "Editorial members of linguistics journal resign to protest Elsevier pricing".
Meh. The us military does this, too. It's pretty common.
The existing products (locks, sensors, smoke detectors) are barely different from existing home security products that have been on the market for years

The existing products have miniscule market penetration, for decades, precisely because their networked integration is abysmal. IoT is yet another attempt to impose some order on the market, which is still focused on incompatibility as a way to retain customers rather than grow the market.

There is ENORMOUS pent up demand for networked everything, if only a cheap universal standard arose and was accepted.
Defaulting on a debt is stealing - especially if the debt is, like taxes, principle only - it's a specialized form of it.

Besides defaulting applies to loans. In this case you're specifically withholding something that is legally someone else's.

That's theft, no matter how you cut it.
I'm not sure what you mean by error values being dropped on the floor by default. In Go or languages with ADTs you would have to consciously ignore an exception. Languages where pattern matching is prevalent force you to deal with the exceptional case to unpack anything useful from an Either for instance.

And if the study is to be believed, checked exception are almost always dropped on the floor, just with more boilerplate and ceremony.
What was the context/reason behind spending 5 years at the end of the earth? Curious.
The pyramids were probably massive public works projects, with off-season farmers making up the workforce, paid in beer. Not slave labor.
See also this old EconTalk interview: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/01/munger_on_the_n.htm...
Outside of Search, Google's most successful product is YouTube. I just wonder how well their doing monetizing it.
I get the impression that almost everyone in this space overreacts and throws dirt at each other. Here is how others of the Tor project reacted in a similar situation:

https://pando.com/2014/11/14/tor-smear/
Every sentence you form is a contract, every fantasized aloud common endeavor uttered a promise. The problem is, that he is a contrast to most of us who - for having a family and a live style "sell out".
He is what we could have been if we would have stayed true to the ideals of our youth.
That's what put people off.
That's C's idea of generics.
Hitler also spoke German and ate 3 meals a day - not sure it's a good model to follow.
In the blog post, I have one example of the React use case with screen capture.

I find it very helpful to have properties defined, so when I use the component, I immediately know what are the props I can provide.

There are some 3rd party React components that won't have type definitions yet, but the popular ones are well covered. I have written most of the components I have used, so I haven't had many problems.
Your argument would hold water if that money was earned with no help from federal or state at all.

So no use of public utilities, roads, etc, oh and your company can't employ people who have benefited from them either - like going to a public or state school.

Good luck with that.
So what did you mean by saying "I'm very sensitive to noise [but not noises of type X and Y]"? How does that not imply a general issue with obtrusive noises?

I've heard of plenty of people who don't have particular sensitivities to noise but find those two types of noise obtrusive.
I think that demand is from the companies and not the consumers. Stand in front of a Lowes in the Midwest and ask consumers who walk out if they would like whatever item they bought to be hooked up to the internet. I bet you would get more No's than Yes's.
For people wanting to get play with visual programming, Pure Data is another beautiful, open source option.

https://puredata.info/
Hey everyone, if you didn't know, Wing is open sourced at Github. (https://github.com/KingPixil/wing)
Does this reflect more poorly on Twitter & Pinterest or Mark Zuckerberg in the public eye?
As an aside, angular2 is just coming online and there's a big interest from our community on redux, so you might share into that community too. The fact radical is written in TS means it's a great fit :)
In the context of an organization that has a formal QA department, it is very difficult for the QA folks to make the system throw all the relevant exceptions. It falls to the developers to test those code paths and then there are a million other things that have higher priority.
Not that long ago, I had an experience with this[1]. I'm currently running a test with my old phone to confirm that it is listening to me. I have an old android phone, with the microphone disabled (tape on the input)

Every once in a while, I will have the tape removed and say a few keywords, then disable it. My hope is to see if I will receive any advertising in with these niche keywords. It's only been a week so far, but I will update the post if there is anything.

(Note I have create a new google account just for it.)

[1]: http://idiallo.com/blog/be-mindful-with-ad-targeting (disclaimer: my blog)
>MLPs can approximate any nonlinear function..

Theoritically yes. But the drama is when you have to actually do it. DNNs are not more tractable on their own, they are made feasible by current set of techniques.

>Is it that it is easier for humans to design the abstractions..

You could argue that activation maps generated in convolutional layers by the filters are feature engineering, as those filters are manually created. These are problem dependent, and we know more about the problem than the algos. That's why feature engineering hasn't gone away completely.
You obviously didn't drive if you were reading, napping, catching up on email, playing games (at least I certainly hope not). At least within the US, a typical commute (with the exception of very large cities such as NYC, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, which have large public transportation systems) involves spending time driving their own car, which essentially prohibits any activity other than listening to music, and maybe talking on the phone. So yes, it's wasted time for most of us.