skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being able to calculate the derivative is very useful (the backprop rule, etc.). However it isn't actually necessary here, since you can approximate the slope by just sampling points nearly. Strict differentiability isn't the crucial property here, but it does make things faster.

What is, I think, is that the error function is continuous and there is a monotonic path of improvement from most of the space to good solutions in it. Then you can just descend in the error function until you reach it.

We don't really understand why that happens in deep learning, that is, why the error functions of deep neural networks tend to not have complex shapes with local minima that you can get stuck in. This is currently being investigated.

This also isn't a problem limited to deep learning. In evolution, the same is true - we are limited to small local improvements, but over large amounts of time nature arrives at amazingly efficient solutions. That suggests that the fitness function space over genomes is also, to some extent, continuous and allows monotonic improvement. Again, we don't really know why, yet.
Commenting specifically on the DAO part of the article: What's annoying about the Ethereum hard fork is not that they are implementing their own version of consumer protection, it's that they certainly will not take the same action in the future when it's not their own money on the line.
The real competitors that offer similar features at reasonable prices are:

Incapsula & Sucuri

All others are old school services, highly expensive and more focused at Infrastructure DDoS protection, not website DDoS protection.
It's a beautiful country full of happy people. It's #3 in the Where-to-be-born index [1] and ranks really high when you ask people about general satisfaction with their life [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index

[2] http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/norway/
This headline is far better if you don't know what Magic Pony is.
Andela Fellow Gives Inside Look at Startup
If you don't have any interest in transmission (for now) you should probably pick up an SDR dongle since they can tune a much wider range of frequencies, and are cheaper.

http://www.rtl-sdr.com/
"The largest plane ever to be built is creeping closer to completion"

So it's not actually built yet.

Non-story.
Great talk: Testing with Protractor
Just pretend that you are a US startup and target the US from the get-go. Happens all the time.
Speaking as a Norwegian living abroad, I feel like one of the most important barriers (more important even than capital) to domestic startup success is a failure-averse culture. We have a ways to go before we're on par with the US in this regard.
Am I correct in assuming this is in reference to HFT?
I find I end up with a lot of cruft and my tools of choice change over time, so I don't worry about it. A decent package manager makes this approach tolerable.

Homebrew and Homebrew Cask on OS X handle at least 90% of what I want to install.
That's LLVM's abort intrinsic - no a lot of those left around, I believe OOM, panicking while panicking and stack overflow use it or used to use it.
Show HN: A Fortran web framework
Zuckerberg is investing millions in a company that trains coders in Africa
http://lcamtuf.blogspot.ru/2015/04/finding-bugs-in-sqlite-ea...

Fuzzing found real actionable bugs in SQLite. As I consider fuzzing a variant of static checking (it executes a subset of symbolic evaluation space), I consider the result above as a resounding success of static methods.

Also please look at the date when the phrase was added: https://web.archive.org/web/20090205181900/http://sqlite.org... - it's 2009, the very first version of the page! And they didn't change it a bit since.

Basically you base your damnation on an outdated information.
Git Trident Adds Free GitHub Push Notifications
This sounds like you drive like an idiot. And so you should be marked as one, and are grumpy about it. Well, tough.

Basically what you're doing is playing Russian roulette, and you keep "winning", well yeah, that happens, right up until it doesn't.

Drive like a Google car. Stop being an idiot. Get a smiley face score.
> We don't need to communicate between the nodes

Huh. At the core of almost every problem I've ever encountered in my 20+ year career programming that I would consider "interesting" is the need to allocate work across many compute nodes that have some amount of shared state. You could just as well take A* as a baseline for these types of problems. Your typical cloud computing infra/design is not a good match for these.
Here's a test I wrote recently. The code in question is part of a nodejs service that talks to a database and produces json objects to be used by a web client application.

There is a definition for the schema to a fruit table.

Fruit: {
list_id: 32
}

The list_id indicates that this isn't a real table, but is actually stored in the list_options table. So my code has to generate a different query then for a normal table.

The actual options are populated from a list:

const LIST_OPTIONS = [
[32, "Blueberry", 1],
[32, "Apple", 2],
[32, "Orange", 45],
[45, "Nope", 1]
]

These get inserted into the database. Note that the first column is the list_id from the schema.

And for the actual test:

This actual sends the request to be processed.

let response = await processRequest({
type: 'QUERY',
table: 'Fruit',
})

Then I assert that the respone is exactly what I thought it would be:

deepStrictEqual(response, {
status: 'OK',
records: [{
id: "Blueberry",
name: "Blueberry",
position: 1
}, {
id: "Apple",
name: "Apple",
position: 2
}, {
id: "Orange",
name: "Orange",
position: 45
}]

I would have written pretty much the exact same test if it were a statically typed language.
If the canal weren't there then the rain water that fills the lake that supplies the locks would just run in to the ocean anyway. The only difference the canal makes is when the water gets to the ocean - it gets stored in a lake for a while first. Does that really have an impact? Why?
Contributing to the Haskell compiler
Member of The European Union
I have neither an idea of how to build one, nor am I a plausible client. Sorry mate :)
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11935999.
I guess it depends on how you look at it. I'm pretty sure all of the major finance firms have a department dedicated to algorithmic trading, some of which utilizes machine learning. Algorithmic trading has been estimated to be as high as 60-70% of all trades at one point (it's slacked off a bit recently.) (http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/091615/world-...)

A lot of algorithmic trading is more to take advantage of short term arbitrage scenarios, though. The driving factor for the long term (that is, the "human life" part) is still human driven.
I think I got the point pretty quickly: there is too much useless information out there that we swallow up regardless of value. So I stopped reading after a paragraph or two.
Norway's taxes on personal income are just marginally above the OECD average [1], which places it somewhat above the US, but not particularly high for a developed country. The idea that Norway is particular high tax tends to come from the marginal tax rate, which indeed is higher than the US, but the threshold is also high.

Norwegian corporate taxes are low, at 25% corporate income tax [2], well below the OECD average, while US corporate taxes are one of the highest in the world and by far the highest of any OECD country [2] [3].

> What about iterating quickly, which involves hiring and firing people quickly as well?

Then hire people on contracts. Nothing in Norwegian law prevents you from hiring and firing at will as long as you don't make people think you're hiring for a position that is meant to last.

[1] http://taxfoundation.org/article/comparison-tax-burden-labor...

[2] http://stats.oecd.org//Index.aspx?QueryId=58204

[2] http://taxfoundation.org/blog/us-has-highest-corporate-incom...
More like, "Half of websites having problems in the EU".

Cloudflare is that big.
Humans don't have to do it well, only recognize when it's done well.
They really aren't. I used to wash all my clothes by hand every day. If you don't know how to do it, though, it might take longer for trousers to dry.

Just in case anyone is interested, wring out the water reasonably well from your clothes. But don't be too harsh because you will rip them eventually. Instead, lay them out on a fluffy towel. Roll the towel up. Step on one end and then twist the other end until you can't twist any more. Unroll. Hang up everything including the towel.

As I used to do my wife's clothes as well, don't do this with a bra with an underwire ;-) The best thing I found was to fold the towel over the bra and step on it. Bras dry pretty quickly anyway.

I've done the hand washing thing off and on for several years. I think the longest stretch was 8 months. The only reason we have a washing machine now is that my wife does the washing and doesn't like washing by hand. But if you do it every day, I don't think it takes any more active time than washing dishes by hand. If you let the clothes pile up for a week, though, you are in for a long day ;-) (clothes take considerable strength compared to dishes).

I think the main problem in Japan is during the rainy season (now). It can take quite a long time for clothes to dry. As the parent says, you can get by without washing trousers. If I was working in an office, I would be hard pressed to go without 4 shirts. Either that or occasionally go in with a damp shirt...
Meat and potatoes selling.

1) Found a list of potential prospects

2) Called 30 prospects each day

3) Repeat steps 1-2 for 4 years
Unless you have infinite storage, you'll have to overwrite some backups at some point in the future.
Cloning someone's license plate isn't exactly trivial and isn't exactly legal.
Yeah, but going from "This seems like an anti-competitive intervention without much justification" to "If we are all about efficiency, let's kill old people" is an example of slippery slope fallacy, if I've ever seen one. It's unreasonable to assume I see economic efficiency as the only value. So it would be a better argument to point to what important benefits (not in an economical or easily measured sense) are gained from forbidding people to choose how they want to obtain groceries. Instead I feel like you are trying to attack me, and paint me as a ruthless homo-economicus, who eats babies, because they are nutritious.
Yeah, this is a tough thing when coming from other languages.

I've been using references pretty effectively to get around some issues like this, though in other cases Rc is my only resort.

If you have some code up on github, I'd be happy to take a look and see if there's some other options that are less cumbersome.
I just finished reading it.

Good information and nice illustrations.

For your illustrations, do you use pen and watercolor?
It's not just you. With a heritage of Soviet-era immigrants and an atmosphere of paranoia, the space of "technological solutions" in Israel looks different than it does in other cultures. If I had a moment (in a meeting atm), I'd go through and research some of the strides their scientists have been making in oppressive technology.

Also, Stephen Hawking himself has recently participated in a boycott of Israel: [1]

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/is-stephen-hawking-s-acade...
Playing “what if” with “if” – exploring a consequence of Ruby's grammar
idime: Add up to 256GB to your iPhone and share contents w/o iTunes
I looked into these guys a month ago, they have a great team of young researchers.

The main application I saw was applying neural networks to video compression, improving compression by 3x or more (I guess by regenerating the lost detail?). Not sure if Twitter has much use for that but it looks like they have patented a bunch of other stuff too, and I'm sure will be a great addition to twitter's ML team.

Congrats to the guys - and hope they continue creating interesting tech in old blighty after the vesting period is over.
It should be noted, of course, that both Jet and SQL Server Compact are essentially considered "deprecated" technology and are not recommended for new development efforts. The compact database format Microsoft recommends these days (and which comes bundled with the Universal Windows Platform SDK these days) is now actually SQLite.
This is also the best way to do it in Chef.
It's so dark in the winter, I guess it helps to work in a startup maybe you don't notice as much!
I've worked on a few projects where I've needed to know pairwise distances among a set of addresses.
Machine learning on your images and videos to "enhance our strength in live and video and opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter"!

As ironically stated here [1], "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

Though Twitter has a good record of open-sourcing internal infrastructure projects, I think it's it's safe not to expect any substantive amount of this work to see the light of day.

On the other hand, the quality of their search and recommendations when it comes to non-text content will significantly improve. They're really doubling down on Twitter being the "best place to see what's happening and why it matters, first", which is a welcome change from the confusing signalling in months prior.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11930354
Just FYI that's basically opposite how the phrase "doesn't bother" is idiomatically used in at least American English.
I've found ansible to be okay at setting up my environment. I'm able to configure everything from my zsh themes, terminal font size, window manager shortcuts, thunderbird logins, and so forth. The playbook takes about 30 minutes to run and after that I have almost everything ready.

Unfortunately I don't have a public GH repo I can point at as I don't want to expose everything I use to the internet. However the principle is the same as provisioning servers with ansible.

The only thing different I do is I use GPG keys to decrypt and untar things like thunderbird profiles rather than using Ansible vault. I restore GPG keys + SHH keys from offline, encrypted USB backups.
Breaking and entering implies there is no authorization but here we have the property manager saying yes.

Also, breaking and entering is generally a misdemeanor rather than a felony.

And on top of that, there is no entering. People love to paint bad abstractions on top of computers, but fundamentally all there ever can be is you asking the remote computer to do something and it deciding whether to do it or not. That doesn't look anything like B&E or trespass. The best meatspace analogy is social engineering. But there is no generic law against manipulating people and the laws against specific types of manipulation are highly context-dependent because so is the harm.
How was your experience with Capterra advertising? Was it a B2B Saas?
To get "cheap" (or as "cheap" as elsewhere in Europe) software devs to join them in their startup?
I'm not certain I would necessarily agree with that. I think humans are limited by memory, not by technique, and I see no real reason the same way we do it now cannot scale.
Fear of missing out? Dread of constant repetition.
> The huge triumph of DL has been figuring out that as long as you can pose a problem in a differentiable way and you can obtain a sufficient amount of data, you can efficiently tackle it with a function approximator that can be optimized with first order methods - from that, flows everything.

This isn't really what is responsible for the success of deep learning. Lots and lots of machine learning algorithms existed before deep learning which are essentially optimizing a (sub-)differentiable objective function, most notably the LASSO. Rather, it's that recursive / hierarchical representation utilized by DL is somehow a lot better at representing complicated functions than things like e.g. kernel methods. I say "somehow" because exactly why and to what extent this is true is still an active subject of research within theoretical ML. It happen in many areas of math that "working in the right basis" can dramatically improve one's ability to solve certain problems. This seems to be what is happening here, but our understanding of the phenomenon is still quite poor.
My concern is that the builders and the worriers are not the same entity.
If your budget is $300/hr, then I would either contact the core developer(s) or use one of the consulting companies specializing in that software. Also there is a lot of cross-over in those groups, which you can use to filter the latter category. For instance for Postgres, scan the hackers mailing list for the most common names. In a lot of signature lines you'll see "EnterpriseDB" or "2nd Quadrant". You could also look at who is giving talks at the conventions.

As a freelancer (IMO an exceptional one), I would love to charge $300/hr, and I feel for the "drop in and recommend/make a fix" engagements I would be worth it. But realistically at that price people are paying for lower risk. They want high confidence that whomever they hire will truly solve the problem. Usually that means hiring a company instead of a person. It's true there are as many bad consulting shops as there are bad freelancers, but it's still a little easier to pick out the top ones by their public activity, and you know they are open for business if you want to hire them.

I would avoid "marketplaces" like gun.io etc. As much as they try to maintain high standards, they still wind up competing on price. My own rate is nowhere near $300/hr, but it is still too high for those places, so I doubt experts with real name recognition are active there.
Moore's law, as formulated, is always ending it seems.

There's a higher level formulation that has no name (as far as I know) that goes something like this[fn]:

- The rate of change of the decreasing cost for a human society to perform an arithmetic operation is always increasing*.

That formulation can be taken back to from scratching marks on papyrus, roman numerals, the abacus, the banks of navigational computer staff cranking out log and trig tables (and various results) in the 1600~1900s, the vacuum tube up to the transistor photolithed into a 2D matrix, and soon quantum, photonic and 3D matrices...

[fn] That might be better stated by taking the inverse. I don't know. Need more coffee.
> Works fine for unix. :D

The trend towards higher-level data formats is universal across all OSes.

Even on Unix, users typically read html, write odf or docx both being xml, print PostScript, etc.

Plain text is friendly towards developers. But it’s neither interop-friendly nor user friendly.

> Visual C++ off the top of my head

Only the C++ compiler. MS can’t change the compiler because backward compatibility. The IDE however works fine with such files.

> "UTF-8 Everywhere" site is trying to promote.

The transition is going to be expensive, because most languages and frameworks (C++/MFC/ATL/QT, .NET languages, JVM languages, Python, etc) use Unicode (USC2 or UT16) strings for decades already.

To justify the costs, the benefits of the transition must be substantial.

And there aren’t any.
Thank you for the detailed reply. I understand it would be normally used for an app which provides travel planning abilities now.
> I find this all a bit depressing. This is not the future of finance; it is the past of finance. It is a harsh world of naked caveat emptor; it demands the enforcement of trickery just because it was tricky enough to trick people. Consumer protection is a relatively new idea in finance; it has caught on because it is a good idea. You can debate how far the law should go in protecting people from the consequences of their own mistakes, but a world in which at least some mistakes are fixable does seem nicer than the alternative.

What I find depressing is the ongoing rationalizations around legacy business practices. It is these models that ultimately harm the consumer. Using weakly biased arguments that government or business is responsible for "protecting" the customer is ridiculous, especially in light of recent revelations of corruption in our government and business sectors. It's time for a change and there's not a damn thing you can do about it, Matt.
Based on comment history, I'm guessing it's IP-API [0].

[0] http://ip-api.com/
Yammer is useless, but I found Lync to be very reliable. Why use Hangouts if your company is using Slack for team channels, and it has group video chat? Of course Lync is now "Skype for Business" and I don't think its as good as Lync was tbh. I think Microsoft should buy Slack and toss it into its Office 365 offering, if you want my honest opinion.

The web version of Word and Excel are vastly superior to Google's docs and sheets, I don't know how you can argue otherwise. Though, I don't know why you'd use them when you get the full versions for free in your 365 (which totally demolish Google's offerings.) Docs hasn't really done anything since it first launched, while sheets does have decent integrations...but it's no Excel.

Now 365 has baked in project management, Delve, business insights etc. There is no comparison.
How we “achieved” a 133% newsletter open rate (scam media company metrics)
UK Startup Accelerator / incubation programs
I think the concern is more that a sentience that is many orders of magnitude more intelligent than humans simply won't care about us. How do you feel about ants?
Note that Octave Klaba is not French. His mother tongue is Polish. Also, he is not CEO of OVH anymore (he switched to a CTO position last year).
Yes, you are missing a framework. With a decent one you'll get all of that for free, without doing anything at all.
Try Django, and you'll get user, validation, authentication and more out of the box.
Still love "Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C....."

(On another note, James seems to have written a post back in March of this year. It's been such a long time since he wrote anything I wondered if he ever would again.)

Now back to writing an application in PL/SQL....
Same situation and same sentiment here.
Arduino Powered Longboard with Speed Reactive Lighting
The Career Ladder Isn’t in the Office
Forget Norway. Kenya!!!

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/kenya
Years ago when I did this sort of thing, 'less traffic overall' was maybe 5% of the traffic on Bing that you would see on Google. Often traffic was so low it wasn't worth the extra overhead of trying to manage the campaign. I'm not sure if this is still the case, and to what degree?
Sounds like you're doing great!

If I could offer one bit of friendly criticism, it relates to this sentence:

My biggest struggle is that because I am still actively developing and adding new features to the app, I have problems putting down the coding tools and building momentum with marketing.

I keyed in on that particular sentence because it sounds almost exactly like something I said in a few of my own solo ventures. The longer that I kept adding features, the easier it got for me to think that the next 'killer' feature would turn everything around and I'd end up with legions of customers begging me to take their money.

In retrospect, I think that this all relates back to how, for me at least, development is easier than marketing. Marketing always felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall, but dev was the exact opposite - I'd get things done and get all of these constant little rewards.

I wish that someone had told me to freeze features for a few weeks and get out there and start hustling. In retrospect, I realize that I wasted much of my runway adding in features that nobody would ever actually pay for. Since I got so distant from customers, I didn't realize that until it was too late.
Seven reasons why Asana never made a cut with us