skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great writeup, although it bothers me that he dismisses Dvorak so quickly. Although I've never personally used it, reading articles tells me that it's been regarded as the "best" layout for many use cases for a very long time. He said that he typed one command, `ls -latr`, shook his head and dismissed it. Can anyone clarify as to why?
I saw the same message printed on a business card and taped to a light pole near downtown Seattle yesterday.
The fact that this is upvoted to #3 on HN gives me grave misgivings about the future of HN.

---

Edit: apparently y'all disagree, and think this is a topic that deserves the full attention of HN. Can someone explain why? Isn't it just a crackpot billboard? What's the importance?
Besides sticking with Dvorak's keyboard layout, the best thing I ever did for my comfort and productivity was to write a text editor that laid its commands out on the keyboard sensibly. Both vi and emacs use designs chosen for ease of recall, based on associations between letters and verbs, not for physical ease of use (apart from vi's HJKL). My editor, aoeui, uses right-hand home and upper rows for navigation by various units; the FDB central column of Dvorak for copy, delete, and paste/swap; and a key on the bottom right-hand row for selection. The left hand's job is basically to hold down the control key and do rare things like file operations.
I have tried both Workman and Colemak. I first tried Workman but ran into the issue of that on my phone and on other peoples laptops the layout was unavailable. So I moved to Colemak and haven't looked back, and have now been using it for about 3 months. Both are nice layouts, I dont see any major benefit from switching between each except for layout support on operating systems.
> 1) sounds like exactly what deep learning is...map more complex abstractions in each succeeding layer

Only at such a high level of abstraction as to be meaningless.

> 2) are computers that can understand speech, recognize faces, drive cars, beat humans at Jeopardy really 'nothing at all like human intelligence?'

They are not. Hundreds of man years worth of engineering time go into each of those systems, and none of those systems generalizes to anything other than the task it was created for. That's nothing like human intelligence.
There is something wonderful and terrible about the fact that someone with the resources to put these billboards up is choosing to spend the money in this way.

Clearly inheritance tax is too low.
Kinda. They act more like a for-profit than like a non-profit.
Ruby Iterators, Enumerators, Enumerable, and Loops
Google Takeout might help: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
But if Thiel says he's promoting civil liberties, that his mission is protecting privacy, how can one logically conclude, "Actually, he's just being selfish" without deviating from the merits of the issue and questioning his character?

Surely ACLU lawyers (many of whom are minorities) have been wronged by the government and that contributes to their desire to help others who have had similar treatment.
For #2 you've touched on the "AI Effect"[0] or moving goal posts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
Are there products on the US market that ignore the FCC?

Also, I heard that current TP-LINK are a piece of cake to jailbreak. Being a cheap Chinese brand, they have little reason to go out of their way to "secure" those devices any more than the FCC will care to specifically demand under the threat of banning them from the US.
Or too high (that people would rather spend the money this way than pass it along to be taxed at death).
I did computer repair a long time ago for a friend of the family. He was all into believing this stuff and I was forced to listen to it for about an hour or so. Pretty weird stuff. He thought he could use the concept to get out of debts and speeding tickets, etc.
Qemu is a thousand times better if your OS has KVM support. Especially for running terminals since the only files you'll need are plan9.ini (a short text file) and 9pcf (the terminal kernel). You don't even have to set up a disk image, it just mounts root from your file server and you have everything ready to go!
Europe was in a fairly decentralized state but still there were many chinese kingdoms quite a bit bigger.

They must mean larger within some other context...perhaps temple area covered? Angor Watt is sprawling and flat. I could def see the surface areas of these complexes being the "mostest"
Imagine being able to lease such a machine for $20/mo ...
I've only learned Dvorak because my wrists started to hurt.

With QWERTY, I had a quite odd typing style that had evolved from 2-fingers hunt-and-peck but never got to proper 10-finger typing. This odd style wasn't slow, and I hadn't to look at the keyboard, but my hands used to float all across the keyboard in weird motions, and I suspected it had contributed to my wrist pains.

I wasn't able to force myself to learn a proper QWERTY typing - the decades-old muscle memory was a seemingly impenetrable barrier for me. However, a completely different layout (Dvorak) did the trick - thanks to ABCD, after a 2 weeks of "aaaaaaargh I can't type anything, it's really really irritating" hell, I had learned to type acceptably fast, and what's important - with my hands remaining fairly stationary.

I don't know if this was another layout, or just a pair of weeks of rest, or that was a pure coincidence, but the pains were gone (haven't had any severe since then) and I enjoy a proper typing style. There was some speed improvement, of course, but this isn't something I care about.
> LIDAR: An airborne laser scanner (ALS) is mounted to a helicopter skid pad. Flying with pre-determined guidelines, including altitude, flight path and airspeed, the ALS pulses the terrain with more than 16 laser beams per square metre during flights. The time the laser pulse takes to return to the sensor determines the elevation of each individual data point.

The data downloaded from the ALS is calibrated and creates a 3D model of the information captured during the flights. In order to negate tree foliage and manmade obstacles from the data, any sudden and radical changes in ground height are mapped out, with technicians who have models of the terrain fine-tuning the thresholds in processing these data points. Once completed, the final 3D model is handed over to the archaeologists for analysis, which can take months to process into maps.

It's so interesting that technology advancements must often precede discovery and thus are part and parcel (imo) of the discovery process. The same can very much also be said for medical and biological science - e.g., MRI and associated analytic techniques.
Or the feeling of freedom that it gives you!
Transnistria has been in a stalemate since before stopped calling itself a Soviet Socialist Republic; it wasn't (re)invaded later.
I take his point to be substantive: if Americans continue to tolerate the religious right's war on science, we will continue to fall behind the rest of the world.
Go ahead! I don't keep anything on Facebook that I don't have locally.
You might think that but you need information to back up your intuitions (which are wrong)

A significant amount of the total lifetime energy usage of a car is made up by it's manufacture. It is not trivial to say you should always buy something new and more efficient.
I've never installed Facebook Messenger and only access facebook through a mobile browser. What functionality am I missing out on?
I'm a bit skeptical of that change for keyboards I don't have a numeric keypad. I think I type more numbers while programming than symbols.
I like Zed Shaw, his writing and learncodethehardway. I am not sure I agree with someof his conclusions here but I am not sure yours are correct.

One of the key issues for me, Shaw and many others based on comments, is lack of explicit permission. Most academic studies get explicit permission but they also anonymize the data. They also are objective researchers who do not take negative action against their subjects based on the results of their paper/findings.

For me, this hinges on how much was communicated to the employees and how it was handled internally. I do not have information about that which is broad and reliable so I won't speculate on the actual decision.

However, Zed is a hilarious and prolific writer and always has an agenda. If his rhetoric was an overreach or not entirely sound, it doesnt discount that the area between playing a competitive game with assumed privacy and professiomal overlap as an employee at the company is pretty gray.

tl;dr

* Academia is flawed

* Riot games decision making process is flawed

* neither of these have a causal relationship

* Rails is a ghetto
Ask HN: Learn HTML and CSS and also get your code reviewed
Hey guys,

Just a little fun thing I’m doing and if anybody’s interested- hit me up with a message.

So there’s a lot of content available for free when it comes to learning front-end web development. My friend and I thought of leveraging these resources to create projects which focus on building rather than teaching seeing as there’s plenty of resources which do that pretty well. We have used various aspects of open source projects to put together ours.

The idea is that you can complete the projects we have created which come with objectives, specs and the resources we have collected.

After you’ve finished the project, zip up the files and my friend or I will review your code and send you personalised feedback. We will go through each and every line of your code.

If you like the feedback, you’re more than welcome to pay whatever amount you think the feedback you received is worth- otherwise you don’t have to pay anything. We will still review each and every submission.

Here is a link to our Dropbox which contains the PDFs of the project.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/7xvnalc3vlidyxg/AACJDt2N_tIvh1fbS6Ef5t2ca?dl=0
Synching is great for backing things like photos up. Although that sounds like a one way thing that you could do with rsync.
Should we really be openly discussing our plans for an ‘off-switch’ on the public Internet? Shouldn’t there be some attempt to keeps the ideas/plans hidden in a way that they won’t be archived/read by an AI from the future?

If I were seriously worried about this, I would put my plans and all discussions behind a CAPTCHA + paywall like structure that could not be crawled/archived.
The buried lede here is how this is all being afforded. The article implies the existence of multiple instances of this billboard, but while renting billboard space isn't usurious or anything, renting a shitload of them at once surely requires an amount I would not associate with someone capable of so thoroughly misunderstanding the nature of citizenship and the role of government. Or someone who's willing to type the following, to a journalist, which looks to be the product of either a) disordered thinking or b) smug overestimation of one's sense of humour: "google legal name fraud and read the essays like millions of others did....be a real journalist vs. a talking B-B.C. talking pair-rot"
Do you have any experience with attempting to fix these bugs and then submitting patches / pull-requests? Yes, the core team should just fix these bugs. But if they're receptive to upstream changes you want made, then that makes this much less of an issue, in my mind. An open source project's openness depends critically on the core team's acceptance of user patches.
Ask HN: Transpiling a dynamically typed language to a statically typed language
Hi, I have been pondering what I want to do for my master
thesis (2+ years away) and I have an idea. I am writing to ask if
the question has a known answer or is even theoretically possible
to conduct.

My idea is to write a source-to-source compiler from a Lisp_2 to
Rust, but I do not know if it is possible to transpile from a
dynamic language to a statically typed language. Is it?
Atleast uDemy promises Lifetime Access forever despite it being pirated or not... its a Garuantee.
OpenSSL DSA key recovery attack
That particular sequence uses the right-hand pinky finger a lot. I think 'L' and '-' would be better on Dvorak if they were swapped. But throwing out the whole layout because of one UNIX shell command seems to me like he was looking for a justification. Dvorak gets all the basics right and can be found everywhere; to me, the differences with other ergonomic layouts are probably less than the error of measurement.
The Sovereign Citizen / Freeman on the Land movement is fascinating, if you're interested in that kind of stuff.

I tend to disagree with the ASA here. The Sovereign Citizen movement is associated with severe harm -- people lose their money and their possessions, sometimes ending up in jail, because they associate with This One Weird Trick to stop paying tax or drive without insurance and licence.

US tax authorities have a list of frivolous tax arguments. These are often used by SC/FoLs.

https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/the-truth-about-frivol...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11153729

There are a bunch of Youtube videos of people making incoherent arguments using these themes.

Here's one of my favourites: police seized a camera. The people went to the station to get it back. The police want to give it back, but can only give it back to Mr Allen. Since the people don't have names they can't claim to be Mr Allen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5X_5v08xCk
I found that the web browser that comes with Inferno, which is a very interesting variant (not a distribution) of Plan9, is quite a bit better than the one found in the "original" Plan9. Inferno is amazing in its own right and is worth having a look at.
How do you substantiate the analogy between origin of life and convection rolls formation?
We will be closer to cracking neural nets and are closer to the singularity when we can train a net on two completely different tasks and each task can make other predictions subsequently better. IE: train / test it on spam / ~ spam emails, then train the same net with twitter data male / female.
whoa, you map Caps Lock to backspace, not control?
For me, it's coming down to a fundamental difference or distinction: Those who believe in a zero-sum-gain world, and those who believe in a net-sum-gain world.

I fall into the latter camp. In other words, I believe that by sharing and cooperating, we all can advance.

And, I find myself increasingly thinking and experiencing that the zero-sum-gainers are my opposition. They take as much as they can get away with, and they give as little as they can get away with.

Personal advancement, versus communal.

I can't cooperate with them.

And, I no longer want to engage with them.

I cannot afford to do things that lend or provide them power. For it is only ever turned against me, to leverage further advantage.

Now... for "the community" to come to realize this, and act upon it.
This looks like it belongs in a "fractal of bad design" article.
The whole basis of these sovereign citizens/freemen/reichsbürger/similar-thing-in-other-countries seems so odd to me.

The state can impose laws on you, because in the end, the state wields physical power.

To lawyer about, even with odd ideas, within the framework of your state, to try and change it, or by interpreting existing laws wildly differently makes some sense.

But to pretend that the laws of a state don't apply to you, because you deny the whole state legitimacy, means you are putting the physical power of you and your fellow dissidents against the power of the state.

That makes some sense in some situations I guess, but to try and do that so half-assed semi-within the legal framework of the state you are in and often enough just to get out of traffic tickets... I guess I just don't seem the end-game.
Also note the White Keyboard Layout, which was released recently as a reaction to the Workman layout due to some concerns about the optimizaiton parameters.

https://github.com/mw8/white_keyboard_layout

He defined a somewhat different set of scoring, then ran a simulated annealing algorithm to find a layout that optimized that score, then did a few manual tweaks for consistency and learnability. The code for the optimization is available, so you can define your own scoring and run it yourself.
Seconded. Colemak is great. All the frequently used keys are on the home row, and yet it keeps the most important QWERTY keyboard shortcuts.

Also, colemak has wider support than workman. Software support and native keyboards are easier to come by. Software support exists out of the box with Linux and Android.

Native keyboards are even better, because this ensures that it works, even in the BIOS, login screen, or when using virtualized OSs, games, and other such scenarios.

I was able to buy a fantastic native colemak keyboard from the company WASD. I've tried various types of keyboards, but only WASD had everything I was looking for, and had outstanding build quality.

But switching layouts is a painful decision to make, and should only be made if you've weighed the pros and cons.
It seems disingenuous (in the blog post) to act as if Rich was saying that the results of applying union to a list were correct when he was clearly saying that the fact that it produced any value at all was an implementation detail.
7 of 9? There are 12 signatories to the TPP.

That survey was from Spring (only a US company would forget that the other hemisphere has a different season) 2015. That was prior to the TPP being publicly available. Attitudes seem to have changed considerably since then.
I don't think there is a basis for this. Taxi's are very regulated in Quebec, the taxi drivers themselves do the intimidating via their union and on the streets. The reality is that they have to pay large licenses, regular inspection fees, past several tests , have ATM machines in the car, etc, while the uber drivers don't.

If you want to see mob involvement related to cars you want to look at the towing industry, but generally they stick to the money, which is construction.
I would hope you're not developing, much less shipping software that relies on you copying and pasting.
This reminded me that there are other NN variants that might help provide some clues in that direction.

Hopfield nets for example provide associative memory.

It may not all be groundbreakingly efficient, but very worthwhile.
Agreed, and I know, so I should have said my use case is more with plan9port which is used with existing Unix applications. Therefore I had the desire to open a special win in acme that would support some level of tty emulation.
Canadian Police Arrest Suspect in Bomb Threat on GO Bus
> That was the major point of dispute, since taxi drivers usually get loans to buy these plates knowing that they can re-sell then anytime. Uber changed that.

So fundamentally their complaint is: "My investment carried a risk"
This sort of thing would obviously happen as Coursera is a high-value, VC-backed firm. This sort of thing is best done open and nonprofit. One I know like that is EDX: non-profit with open source software with courses from MIT, Harvard, etc. Check it out people.

https://www.edx.org/about-us
It was a long time ago, but I also remember a 2 week switching time. I was pretty good by the end of the first week, but after taking a weekend off, the worst day was the following Monday -- I couldn't remember any layout and couldn't type at all without reference to a diagram!
I agree - this would be general intelligence. You can adjust weights for one problem very specifically to some degree of success, but having that affect a different slightly related problem (and even being able to distinguish between two differing problems) is going to require some rethinking, or enormous compute power exponentially beyond what we have now.
Thanks - good idea - will do that.
This is the most realistic answer.

Steve Yegge was making similar criticisms years back, saying Clojure was "user-hostile". That's probably not fair and largely a matter of opinion (see the link for a back and forth), but it is another piece of evidence that says the Clojure community does things their own way. Not shocking, it's a lisp!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/3jjit5/what_does_s...

Clojure development is opinionated, for good and bad.
One advantage of Mars to the Moon for a self-sustaining civilization that no-one mentioned is that it is MORE than a few hours away. Any moon base or future economy would be very dependent on earth, while Mars have more incentive to be independent and a real civilization backup.
Uber Hired Investigators to Impersonate Journalists to Target Lawsuit Plaintiff
All better critical movies get a certification slap. The certification is a pure censorship instrument.

"Ram-leela" was pressured to change its title, to get an U/A rating eventually. A too modern interpretation of their sacred Hindu mythos.
"Kaum de Heere" was too positive about the Indira Gandhi assassination.
"Madras Cafe" got an U/A. About the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.
"Shahid" got an A. A biopic on a human rights activist and advocate, with no violent scenes.
"Dil Se" got an A. One of the classics of indian political movies.

All can be recommended.
Dr. Atul Gawande is one of my heroes; he's arguably one of the most influential public-health thinkers around. Practicing surgeon. Med-school professor. Stanford undergrad, Harvard Medical School. Rhodes Scholar. MacArthur Fellow. Frequent contributor to the New Yorker. Author of several books; I think I've read them all, and all of them were excellent.

"Atul Gawande (born November 5, 1965) is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and also chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Gawande (footnotes omitted)
The lack of bloatware would be something of value so I would not so quickly dismiss their effort even though the website contains hype.

The community forum is where the action seems to be happening:

http://eve.community/
I'll drop you one with the PDF. See also

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11883723

Temporarily stick your e-mail address in your HN profile and I will send you the PDF. Also stick in a random string, and I will add it to my profile thus confirming my identity.
Why do you say that? The negotiations seem to have been progressing since 2011, and Slovenia ratified Serbia's Stabilisation and Association Agreement without delay; they only seemed to have faced opposition from Lithuania.
I talk about Uber all the time when I'm in a taxi in Montreal, to be honest it's really not fair for them. Why should they have to pay a expensive regulation licenses, maintenance check-ups on the books, past several tests including knowing your driving area streets/history/etc, have ATM machine in the car with paper print out's, regulated machine for travel to cost ratio, yet an Uber driver can circumvent all this?

The real fear for cab drivers seem to be self driving cars even more than Uber.
As in

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11883868

same for you.
Although I suspect that if the tech crowd embraced this instead of weirdly ambiguous billboard, we'd quickly have several different competing definitions of 'free' and half a dozen rival working groups speccing the next iteration of freedom! ;)