skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're misunderstanding the grandparent comment. Your argument about convection rolls and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics is an excellent argument that the probability of abiogenesis is much, much higher than the probability of some organic molecules in solution spontaneously assembling themselves into a fully-functioning smallest-possible bacteria. However, that's not what the statement that "the odds of abiogenesis are ~1/2^n" is saying.

Saying that "the odds of abiogenesis are ~1/2^n" isn't an assertion of fact, it's merely defining n = -log2(probability of abiogenesis). (Of course, the probability of abiogenesis occurring in any particular body of water is not a constant, it depends on conditions; but all the oceans on Earth are only 80 binary orders of magnitude bigger than a single mL [1], so n for a lab experiment and n for the entire Earth can't be more than a couple decimal orders of magnitude different, so it's immaterial.)

In other words, your argument about convection rolls is an excellent argument that the n for abiogenesis is much, much lower than -log2(probability of organic molecules in solution spontaneously assembling themselves into bacteria), which grandparent claimed is ~1 million. I have no reason to believe ~1 million is accurate, but I don't care, because grandparent has convinced me that the upper bound is many orders of magnitude greater than 73. Your argument that n could be much less than that upper bound is convincing, but unless you're arguing it's so much lower that it isn't much greater than 73, grandparent's counter to the paper still holds.

[1]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=log2((volume+of+ocean+i...)
Show HN: SQL Back End for the Static Web and Mobile Apps
A while back I implemented the functionality to store and execute SQL via HTTP POST requests and CORS, and getting a json result back. I found this to be really useful for things like posting forms, gathering custom analytics, even implementing SPA's. So I spent the past few months "productizing" it.

Now I'm looking for Beta testers and validation of the concept. Is this something you might find useful? Note: I am keeping with the advice "if you're not embarrassed by the first release, you waited too long", I know it's rough, I welcome criticism and feedback!

https://www.lite-engine.com
That type of "work hard play hard" is a pretty common pattern at universities in the US. Not necessarily all the time, but a couple times a week it can be awesome. The big caveat obviously is you have to be the usually extroverted type of person who likes to go out and get rowdy with your friends.
I agree with you, and you can probably find me saying very similar in the past on HN. But this is so extreme that people feel the need to find an explanation, and since most people have very little experience of serious mental illness they think it fits this.

Have a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJXPlxMb0gs

It's hard to say that's not illness or drugs, right?

This is Hannah Rose Shotbolt, (of Gloucester, Gloucestershire, UK). She threw a bottle at someone, wounding them. She went to prison, and came out, and then got involved in Freewoman stuff.

She wrote to all the people (The Queen! The Arch-Bishop of Canterbury!) to tell them that she was no longer under their contract, and that she de-registered her car. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCdMHwqT39c

(Here's the reply from DVLA) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wkpSiJ3HfY

Her and her friend were driving, and one of them was smoking cannabis. They passed a police car, who spotted the lack of insurance and registration, and pulled them over.

Here's one video of her being pulled over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSGLGByRYE8&index=17&list=PL...

And another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gULUQTUREwk&index=18&list=PL...

It's so extreme that people feel the need to explain it somehow. These aren't just odd ideas. These are bizarre ideas, that lack internal coherence (she's in the UK but makes extensive use of Black's Legal Dictionary -- a US reference book about US law) and that cause harm.

Here's a channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC81FiNbYl92EIl7Zx5G8v9w

Here's another channel that contains some of her videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCELFsi-Defp1GyOEeLZaSzw
The figuring it out is entirely the point of the interview. When I interview someone, I need to work on a problem with them. The simpler the problem we can work on together, the more likely that I'll learn what they're like to work with, not whether or not they've memorized some trivia like how to implement quicksort in 10 lines of Python.
Yes, that's my view in a nutshell.

Of course computation is the exception here. There's a small number of fields that have had good progress, but the major areas have stagnated. Is the invention of the Net enough to overcome this?

It is fine to say that maybe there were quite reasonable constraints, that say, are preventing the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation from being turned over, and pauses in specific technological change are normal, but none of that addresses the question of why has a broad based stagnation set in for so long.

You just can't turn to the current generation and say:

"That's IT! There's no More. Didn't you see how amazing things were from 1700 to 1950? Where is your appreciation! Now Fuck off"

They will at least want to know why?!

That's how it feels to me reading the Wall Street Journal these days. Everything in the past was amazing and this generation are just entitled lazy slobs who got everything gifted to them on a platter.

I think you need a critical mass of people to accept that stagnation has occurred before we can get broad based growth again. Awkward questions that haven't been asked before need to be asked. Right now my generation is sitting on its laurels because it believes, as Thiel describes it: we can just sit back and wait for the Movie of the future to unfold forever.

That won't happen as long as people like this:

thisisjasonsilva.com

are being taken seriously.
Yeah, I find it difficult to understand the hoopla around IME. It's not much different from the BMC that's on pretty much all server hardware.
It's SHAMEFUL that academics like Stein who dedicate their lives to developing amazing open-source software do not get funding and frequently fail to get tenure. These individuals truly are making the world better!
> What is interesting about this is that some sort of trading/contact was occurring across the Pacific Ocean around 1100-1300 AD.

That doesn't seem particularly surprising, given the great migrations around Polynesia in a similar era.
Burning Man Buys Fly Ranch
I'm glad William included slide 10 calling attention to the hostile and insulting attitude Wolfram Research has toward mathematicians and reproducible science in general. (I think some of Sage Math Inc's other closed-course competitors likely have similar attitudes, but Wolfram Research seems to be the worst.)

"You should realize at the outset that while knowing about the internals of
Mathematica may be of intellectual interest, it is usually much less
important in practice than you might at first suppose. Indeed, in almost all
practical uses of Mathematica, issues about how Mathematica works inside
turn out to be largely irrelevant. Particularly in more advanced
applications of Mathematica, it may sometimes seem worthwhile to try to
analyze internal algorithms in order to predict which way of doing a given
computation will be the most efficient. But most often the analyses will
not be worthwhile. For the internals of Mathematica are quite
complicated."

Reference: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/WhyYouDoNotUs...

For comparison, if you want to audit the Sage Math algorithms that your research depends upon, all you need to do is fire up a text editor (or browse their github). And you won't find any statement in the Sage Math docs telling you not to bother because you're too dumb to understand what you're reading anyway.
Normally when you think of an ASIC, you think of a single chip custom-designed for a single customer/buyer. You don't think of a single chip with multiple totally different functions and designs consolidated onto it, which get enabled only if they're shipped to the particular customer who requested that particular function. This is like the CPU/GPU core stuff but on steroids - not just 1 or 2 cores disabled to do yield management and price discrimination, but entire processors.
Transfer learning at the moment works within one domain (say images), because the low level shapes are still similar, but not between different domains of data
Sigh. What they mean is "what if two different conditions with different causes have been previously considered to be the same thing?"
I computed an array of fifth powers, up to 200, then had four nested loops. Using python3 on a 2.66-GHz Core 2 Duo, it took 48 seconds to find the reported numbers. If there had been no solutions, it would have taken only a couple of seconds longer.
Given its baffling nature, I'd say that's a pretty apt comparison.
The thing to realise about Clojure is that it isn't an open source language like Python. It is a language controlled very tightly by Rich Hickey and Cognitect. Major work is done in secret (transducers, reducers, spec), then announced to the world as a "Here it is!" and then suggestions are taken. This goes well mostly, though it took a lot of outside persuasion that Feature Expressions weren't the best idea, and to come up with Reader Conditionals instead.

The underlying problem Clojure/Core has is their communication. If they would come out and explain their philosophy then people wouldn't get frustrated and confused when they expect the language development to work like other open source projects. Clojure's development is functioning exactly as planned. It's not a mistake.

A better way to treat Clojure is closer to a project at Apple (except for Swift). You can submit bugs, and make suggestions for future improvements, and if you really want to provide a patch. But go into it realising that it's not a community project, and you're much less likely to get frustrated.

With all that said, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and for the most part Clojure has developed pretty well from Rich's tight control. I'd love it if there was a Snow Leopard year for Clojure where the focus was fixing longstanding bugs and feature requests, and more focus on those in general, but the language is developing well.
Sure it can. Sensation is a subjective measure by the patient themselves. If the patient takes a drug then you ask if sensation improves, they could certainly say "it feels like it's improving".

And with regards to ability to walk, fatigue is often a major complaint in MS. If the patient takes a drug, "feels better", they may have more energy and do better on a walk test.

There are measure where a placebo effect is unlikely, such as blood tests of biomarkers or physical processes that are easily measurable without having to ask the patient (e.g. plaque buildup on arterial walls).
Except comparing body to hardware and mind to software doesn't make much sense.

If you want a better comparison, you could compare the mind to what happens within the CPU. Other chips would be other organs/subsystems, connected by veins, nerves and various canals (power and data buses). Then you'd have peripherals (limbs) with their firmware (reflexes), and sensors (eyes). All of those communicate together and have side effects on each other.

In the analogy, the body is the whole computer, and the CPU is a part of it, they aren't two separate entities that run in parallel.

If you want to compare hardware <> software, for humans it'd rather be flesh <> electrical/chemical signals.

You'll notice that almost all interesting behavior happens on the right side of the <>. Flesh/hardware are pretty boring, they mostly limit performance and just have to be in good enough condition to function. Slight alterations of those (burnt transistor, internal bleeding) will bring everything down.
Two minutes earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11884703
There's no hypervisor that'll let you power up a halted server, change bios settings, change boot device or order, boot the system of pxe, etc, etc. It's not the same thing at all, and almost every server made in the last decade has a BMC that gives you all the remote access features anyways, so getting IME isn't much of a change there.
ROS is a good platform for writing software. There are ~50 hardware platforms that support it. Unfortunately robotics is still built to a purpose, and usually a bit too expensive for a typical hobbyist platform. Our latest robot here at Duke was built with modularity in mind and still cost well over 100k.
This looks like the opposite of "make something people want."
I do consider a lot of religious people delusional. But then too it is a very important distinction we need to keep in mind:

Do they let their beliefs - delusional or not - control their actions?

The problem is not having beliefs that are not backed by facts, but when you let those beliefs control you to the point of making you act in ways that are actively detrimental to your own well-being.
Name a few outstanding members of the intellectual right wing.
That would be an interesting read.
This Week in Machine Learning and AI Podcast: Intrinsically Motivated AI and More
It certainly wasn't a factor when WordStar arrived, but otherwise combining mousing and keyboard commands is quite common (i.e. selecting text and then using the CUA cut/copy/paste commands).
Would it be possible to artificially shorten patent terms?

Say, create a blind trust, grant nonrevocable, universal, and sublicensable rights to the trust, and set the trust to grant free sublicenses to anyone and everyone in 5 years?
AIUI the term "observation" in quantum physics has absolutely nothing to do with life.
Tere! While, this is probably in jest, I've been attempting to learn the language for a few months now. :)

Memrise[0] has some Estonian courses. It might not have the best quality, but it's available as a mobile app. I've been going through with "Basic Course in Estonian" which starts off with vocabulary before moving onto sentences. It's not a replacement to understanding the grammar, but it's a start.

Keelekikk[1] has a free Estonian course targeted towards English (or Russian)-speaking adults. You also get paired with an Estonian teacher that you can email. It doesn't have recall like the Memrise or Pimsleur methods, it's worth pairing with the Memrise Keelekikk course.

Edu!

[0]: http://www.memrise.com/courses/english/estonian/
[1]: https://www.keeleklikk.ee/en/welcome
Good point. If startups are willing to pay much extra for a solution with vendor lock-in, the can certainly follow that path.
As far as jobs are concerned you can't go wrong with PHP. Clojure jobs are virtually non-existent outside London and even in London Clojure they are scarce. As far as Indeed.co.uk goes even Rails is pretty thin on the ground outside the capital. PHP, JS and Java, on the other hand, are a bag of tricks you can take anywhere and always find work. Keep Clojure for your own projects.
Yes, it has a bunch of ad scripts that cover the page with an invisible flash element. Clicking it generates popups and popunders. Pity you're being downvoted.
WebVR Bringing Virtual Reality to the Web
2 Valedictorians in Texas Declare Undocumented Status, and Outrage Ensues
As a an academic contributor to a mathematical software project (much less mature than Sage), I want to thank you for giving this talk. Hope it starts a much-needed public discussion about this topic.
This doesn't have to be the case.

AWS documentation is absolutely terrible (incomplete, out of date, etc.), the APIs are often inconsistent or confusing, official SDKs are half-baked (weird error messages, no error messages, etc.), and there are tons of overlapping products.

If Amazon actually made some effort on making AWS more user-friendly, it wouldn't be nearly as time-intensive for a small team to figure it out.
Google co-founder Larry Page is secretly building flying cars
Seriously, very impressive. Even seeing a simple 10-level history of return values from function calls would be a much needed addition to any debugger, but this idea goes beyond that. Well done indeed!
I use lists a lot. That's because I program in Lisp most of the time. Lists are a very flexible data structure. But I wouldn't use them in a language if I had to implement them from scratch, such as C, or in a language where the functional style is unnatural, such as Java or Python, even though both those languages have basic support for them. I'd use vectors and hash tables instead. They're less flexible than lists, but good enough for most purposes (and they might even be faster).

The only time I can remember implementing lists is when writing a Lisp interpreter or virtual machine. And that uses a fixed length array of cons cells, so no dynamic heap allocation is necessary.

I've been asked list-related questions at interviews several times, e.g. how to destructively reverse one, and how to tell if a list is circular. If it's just to check that I really have implemented Lisp, then they're reasonable questions, but I suspect all the candidates for the same job were asked those questions.
Ah, yes, it actually triggers when I scroll.
It's common to have a value called "total_elapsed_seconds" which comes from job logs, traces, etc and "leap seconds" wouldn't be relevant. You just want to "pretty print" it into hhh:mm:ss and %mod is the easiest way to calc that.

I've used % for various unrelated tasks for more than 20 years. Another example... in languages that didn't have bit shifting like C/C++, I used % to convert bytes to a hex string (e.g. x%16).
See the before-the-last slide

Academia values mindless papers over actual results.
Jack left?
Very cool. I wrote a similar framework while I was working at a previous company that translates XML into iOS views. From my experience, this might not take off for regular native-app building, but it's invaluable in usecases where there is a base application and a high amount of configuration between various enterprise clients. Good luck!
AWS at the lowest level is just a virtual server in the cloud (EC2) and files in an unlimited storage (S3). Maybe if AWS is too difficult one is making it too difficult by using services that are overkill at the time. You can slowly add services as you need them. A couple web machines, load balancer and database is as easy to setup on AWS as it is locally and it has many more availability and security guards than any local server.

AWS success is largely from startups and the ability of Amazon to make it easy/fast to setup, yes it can get complex like anything but by default it is pretty simple. They do have many, many services but you only really need a handful or a couple depending on the project. Maybe they need to separate out those huge lists of features/systems into buckets of simple, personal, small to medium, enterprise etc.
Please charge an unreasonable amount, to secure a good source of funding for your work.
I'm having trouble finding much value in this post. It seems to be a combination of the author picking apart very specific aspects of Clojure (clojure.set? clojure.test fixtures?) in a highly opinionated fashion to represent issues with overall project focus, combined with not acknowledging the project's history (maybe that can explain the inconsistency with Protocol usage--as far as I know Protocols only got added in 1.2), combined with not acknowledging the size of the team and what they have to support, combined with not acknowledging how much time is spent on dealing with real, important bugs and performance issues (please see release 1.8's changelog, for example: https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/changes.md), combined with not acknowledging how much new development is actually about features that users really want (see clojure.spec or reader conditionals in 1.7, both of which address long-standing issues previously solved by third-party libraries, as just two things that immediately come to mind).

As someone who has been using it professionally for more than three years, there is a ton I have to gripe about in Clojure. Personally I find the hodge-podge type system and inconsistency with how certain core functions handle associative data structures infuriating, and schema/clojure.spec on some level I see as a hacky half-measure, and yes parts of clojure.test are semantically inconsistent and awkward to use in ways that bug me. But: as a language allowing me to get things done in a professional context, as a community of developers with actual adult leadership who are generally welcoming and share a practical, thoughtful philosophy, I think it holds up just fine against other language ecosystems.

It would have been quite reasonable to write a blog post about the deficiencies in clojure.set and clojure.test. Write a post about how Protocols could be better used throughout the Clojure codebase itself, and maybe even push some patches up via Jira and see what responses you get. And sure, I've had some prickly interactions with David Nolen myself; he can be that way--he also addresses bugs quickly, is constantly providing answers to questions on IRC and Slack, and is pushing ClojureScript in new and interesting directions while acting as the primary maintainer of the CLJS codebase (I believe?).

Point being, some of the issues raised in the piece may be real issues. But they do not represent some kind of overarching deficiency in the team as the author seems to suggest, nor are they necessarily relevant to the majority of developers using Clojure professionally.
So why couldn't they simply include the extra debug code and use that config for Clojure compiles?
I too would enjoy a quad core in the Air/Pro line, or at least the Pro line

The 15" Macbook Pros are quad-core http://www.apple.com/uk/macbook-pro/specs-retina/
Slightly off-topic: Does anyone know if Sage allows for lisp-style meta-programming like Mathematica?
The maintenance numbers don't make sense to me. I'll use the numbers for Mazda and Mini as examples.

They say that over ten years the average Mazda or Mini will cost $7500 to maintain. Both have a model in the top 20 most expensive to maintain with a Mazda 6 being $12 700 and a Mini Cooper being $11 200. Neither one has a model in the 20 cheapest to maintain list so their cheapest to maintain models must be at least as expensive to maintain as the most expensive car on this list. This puts a lower bound of $7500 on the cheapest to maintain car for each of them. How can the average for these manufacturers be $7500 if their cheapest car is at least $7500 and they each have a car that costs significantly more?
Omitting the other members of the LBH conspiracy and Schmidhuber is unfortunate, but I agree with the idea that the number one reason deep learning is working now is scale. Hinton also says it himself, for example (at 5m45 in the video below): "What was wrong in the 80 was that we didn't have enough data and we didn't have enough compute power. [...] Those were the main things that were wrong".

He gives a "brief history of backpropagation" here: https://youtu.be/l2dVjADTEDU?t=4m35s
You're right and make a very good point. But that doesn't change the fact that there are bugs from 2009 which barely have comments or even a reasonable explanation.

Me being a pretty average typer (~95 WPM) I could type 2-3 paragraphs detailing why I am against fixing anything, in no more than 6-8 minutes.

So for 7 years such bugs to never even get a proper explanation is showing the maintainers as douchebags, not victims.
Free software , paid hosting
That's not practical when you have a massive images directory. A decent framework should have the equivalent of Jekyll's keep_files:
Thanks! Can you share why you think it may not be for regular native-app building? Would love to hear your experience, would be extremely helpful for making decisions.