skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Despite three major armed conflicts fought between nuclear powers by proxy, none thankfully have resulted in nuclear war. Deterrence works. What doesn't work, and a flaw that is growing exponentially with nuclear proliferation is failures in design, command and control. The incredible and incredibly frightening book "Command and Control" (see link at bottom), highlights several near catastrophic misses in the US nuclear arsenal. Now multiply by all nuclear states, the risks of accident are terrifying. The world would do well to open source safeguards so that even rogue states (eg. North Korea) can benefit from control and process that mitigate risk of unintended nuclear detonation.

https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Ill...
I've got about 15ms to google.com (and the silly speedtest.net page reports 4ms for whatever they chose nearby).
Tesla Shares Hit Hard After Offer to Buy SolarCity
I completely disagree that SBT or any non declarative build system is that much superior long term over Maven.

Maven is not a really like any of the other build systems. I would say most build systems are glorified Make. Maven is not.

SBT, Gradle, and even old school Ant seem far less verbose than Maven but Maven really shines when you have hundreds of projects in an organization. You can get extreme consistency.

You don't have to have everything checked in one gigantic source tree which makes open sourcing projects subsets of your code base easier. Yeah Gradle and SBT can sort of do this but not nearly as decoupled as Maven does it (generally with Gradle and SBT you have to do some path magic).

Just about every PL and editor can readily edit Maven pom files. That means with out loosing comments or spaces you can have scripts go and rewrite hundreds of pom files or even just do a sanity check to make sure that they are consistent.

This is the complete opposite with build systems where basically the build system is turing complete scripting language. Projects have major drift and you loose lots of consistency.
I actually think the hardest part about ML is the lingo. It's very alienating that even simple concepts seem to have their own lingo. A lot of the ideas are just what you as a developer might do intuitively if you had to implement it. But the language tends to be a bit mathy and obscure. So, when you try to read something without understanding the lingo, it seems impenetrable. But once you know things like "quantization is basically rounding" . . . it becomes easier.

Since ML comes from statistics, math, programming, but also other scientific fields, it can even have many terms for essentially the same thing.

For me, as a developer, it was actually easiest to just read some tutorials like the docs for scikit learn and then just start digging through the code of a bunch of libraries. How people name the classes tells you what they think things should be called. But the code tells you what it actually does. I just bounced back and forth between code, tutorials/blogs and books. After a few months, I can actually have a reasonable conversation with our ML people in the language they use and everything else I look at seems easier because I understand most of the terms.

I think asking how to learn ML is a lot like asking how to learn German. It might feel like you need to start with the grammar rules. But I think immersion is the best way. Get the vocabulary, then come back to the rules. I also find that having a burning question in my mind helps me with immersion. So, if you can find a project that drives you, maybe that will help.

So starting with the math fundamentals as a developer seems like an easy way to burn yourself out. But everyone does learn differently. If not, there wouldn't be so many ML algorithms, right? Right?
Why only 3 years ago?

Maybe 10 years will be little more accurate?

git shortlog -sne --since '10 years ago'
1298 Benno Schulenberg <bensberg@justemail.net>
481 David Lawrence Ramsey <pooka109@gmail.com>
382 Chris Allegretta <chrisa@asty.org>
28 Jordi Mallach <jordi@gnu.org>
3 Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>
3 Mike Scalora <mike@scalora.org>
2 Rishabh Dave <rishabhddave@gmail.com>

git shortlog -sne --since '15 years ago'
2528 David Lawrence Ramsey <pooka109@gmail.com>
1298 Benno Schulenberg <bensberg@justemail.net>
803 Chris Allegretta <chrisa@asty.org>
355 Jordi Mallach <jordi@gnu.org>
3 Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>
3 Mike Scalora <mike@scalora.org>
2 Rishabh Dave <rishabhddave@gmail.com>
1 Rocco Corsi <rocco.corsi@sympatico.ca>

Well, now looks little different...
The latency to the West Coast Battle.net server is a very steady 12ms according to the Starcraft in-game UI.
> 74% of Netflix subscribers would ditch the service over ads

http://bgr.com/2016/06/22/netflix-price-hike-ads/
Has Lamborghini ever made a car that had actual technical merit as a racecar?

I'm general, supercars are vastly overpriced for what you get. You can easily crush most for a fraction of the price with a dedicated track car. But simultaneously, no supercars are remotely practical on the road, and in fact are not even fun to drive on the street because of speed limits.

Some supercars have been a good investment, such as the Mclaren F1, but the majority depreciate immediately.

I don't really see the point.
Not really, Mpemba is about water freezing. There was a recent Nature paper discussion which looked at the non-linear effects of various climate modifiers[1]. I pointed out that some models have warming causing the onset of a glaciation event, the mechanics are warmer air carries more water vapor (itself a powerful greenhouse influence) which sets up a positive feedback loop making the air warmer and then sucking up more water from evaporation, which retains more heat which makes the air warmer. You cross the dewpoint in the stratosphere and that gets 100% solid cloud cover above the tropsphere. At which point the albedo of the planet goes way up (its a uniform white reflector at that point) and the water in the troposphere precipitates out as the mother of all snow storms and the greenhouse gas equivalent of nuclear winter.

Do I actually think this is going to happen? Not really. Are we recording unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases? Yes. Is the climate we're experiencing similar to the climate that was in effect when those levels occurred in the past? Not really, the early Pleistocene was much warmer than it is now. Moore's paper from 1980 was probably pretty influential here. He, like others, is/was really interested in why we had ice ages in the first place.

The point though is that we talk about "global warming" which implies to a lot of people who don't read the papers that our inputs into the climate will only cause increased heat, but it is more accurate to say "climate change" since we don't have good non-linear models for how the planet responds to all the forcing functions we are throwing at it.

We casually throw around terms like "hottest temperatures ever recorded" or "lowest ice levels on record" but some times lose sight of the fact that the "record" we've been keeping in terms of climate change is, according to ice cores, and other geologic carbon dating of glaciation events, perhaps 2% of a cycle. (assuming 100kyr cycle and 2kr of nominal human recordings). Remember that 2% of a year is one week. We can't take a week's worth of measurements and even imagine all of the variations we'll see that year, so we have to be careful about extrapolating with the amount of data we have. Pretty much everyone (except some really hard liners) can agree that climate can and will change, its understanding that change which we can only develop as we go along. And the latest contribution to our understand was the Nature paper that said, in essence, don't try to model this stuff with linear models.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v5/n5/full/nclimate25...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ted_Moore/publication/2...
Looks like millimeter wave: https://webpass.net/about_network.
Model fitting is only a useful analogy only in the very abstract sense of "is there something missing in my model". But usually people mean model fitting in the sense of choosing parameters in some restrictive model schema (i.e. selecting from a set of machine learning models), but those typically don't provide any meaningful understanding of the system, unless you apply a much weaker definition of "explanatory" or "understanding" than is typical. From my perspective, when you fit a linear regression I don't think you have any understanding of why the parameters are what they are, in the same way that I don't think a coder who tweaks constants in a buggy program until it works has any understanding why those constants are what they are.

> I would be interested to see a counter example - a small model that fits a particular set of data well, but does not provide any explanatory power.

As I said above, a linear regression typically doesn't lend itself to understanding. In fact, I would be interested in an example of a statistical model that does provide any meaningful explanation. Most ML and AI researchers don't even seem to pursue scientific understanding as a goal; predictive power is their measure of success. That is Chomsky's criticism.
probably the ribosomes and tRNAs are the most universal-ish genes.

RNA Pol is very diverse across clades.
Similarly (and I understand this argument went through physics long before quantum mechanics showed up and made the argument seem silly), the ideal gas law, say, is predictive, but doesn't yield any understanding of the underlying system.
Then we'll confuse it with ARK.
Consider the turtle ...
Released http://www.wikibackpacker.com/

It's growing organically but I want to pound the ground and do marketing for widespread adoption.

I have ideas (contests, giveaways, posters, events etc) but need a business person to carry this ideas forward.
"... you type ..." am I correct in my understanding that this will cause each character press to be sent to the server? And the same for the counter() function that you have there, right? Actually where will such timers run? On server or client? I am trying to mentally visualize computational graph and data model...
Interesting. This article and the book it reviews are expansive in their investigation of the determinants of taste, but I’ve been thinking over the last few years that aesthetics are probably more socially determined than I’d thought. Does that mean everyone in the same house will have the same tastes? Not necessarily. But it does mean what you judge as good or bad will be connected, probably inseparably, to some social group’s understanding (‘your people.’)

If you connect tastes to groups of people rather than to preferences in the characteristics of something, it follows that taste will have trends (as people have generations), that will tastes differ from one city to another, etc., which is what we observe.
"because it's bleeding edge and we can"
Now that I look at it, they essentially do, it's just that they implement it from a more Scala-centric point of view (e.g. implementing traits directly instead of being layered on top of a Java variant). It seems like it shouldn't be too hard to compile JVM bytecode to run on the same runtime.
I'm surprised by your downvotes. While "zero chance" might be a bit dramatic, it seems like this warrants discussion. Does this mean that Google thinks P2P wireless is the way to cover urban areas? Will it disincentivize them from persevering through a city-wide fiber installation because P2P wireless is "good enough"? Or is it a good opening play for fiber in SF because Webpass was already navigating the zoning/regulation/rights and just needed capital to succeed? I'd be very interested to hear others' perspectives on this.

Disclosure edit: I'm a current Webpass P2P wireless customer. I was literally about to switch away from Webpass to another P2P wireless solution (we have a site evaluation next Monday) because Webpass has been unreliable for us lately. I'm really curious what, if anything, this means for Webpass and Google Fiber in SF.
Christo's Floating Piers Were 50 Years and $17M in the Making
Past performance is no indicator of future success.

There's a 0% chance this will be running "indefinitely." You're just skirting the issue by making a promise you can't keep.
Computing has existed for thousands of years. We just have machines do some of it now.
Was it enough to get you to buy a subscription to the NYT? Basic subscription is less than $4/week.
Coding is not over. I too once thought as you did.

In a previous job, I worked extensively with LabView[1]. Like Reason, you hook up wires to little boxes. This enables graphical dataflow programming.

LabView enables a person with no knowledge of syntax to write a program. It's great! Until your program grows in size. Then, you have a very large and very difficult to understand system of boxes and wires. Debugging becomes increasingly difficult. Users can abstract the wires and boxes away into more boxes, but after more than a few layers of turtles, you start wondering why you're even using a system like this.

Later on I discovered that LabView was an instance of a "4GL" and that such things had been around for decades. Although some have been successful in certain niches, to my knowledge no 4GL has ever succeeded as a general purpose programming language.

Why is this? It's because textual programming languages are far more general and expressive. Programs written in text are far easier to change, version control, and understand. There is no silver bullet[2].

[1] http://www.ni.com/labview/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
It's more the interconnection with the rest of the Internet than the building uplink... :)

My building is on 500mbit Webpass and things get pretty dire at peak times.
http://www.bmcm.co/
I don't see how you can criticize Uber for low wages. Uber is a marketplace of buyers and sellers of rides. If Uber raised prices, more people would want to drive and less people would want to ride - leaving drivers sitting around doing nothing. And of course, as a market, Uber does pay drivers more (2x,3x...even 9x their normal wage!) at certain times. To consistently increase an Uber drivers income, you have to either reduce the supply of drivers or increase the demand of riders.

This would be like criticizing ebay for the low price of used products.
me too: Argenta.
5 Things You Didn't Know About Tina Knowles (Beyonce's Mother)
It's... nice? to have the option of purchasing a Steambox with SteamOS pre-installed, if you're unable (or unwilling) to build your own PC and install SteamOS or other Linux flavor. The problem I see, apart from having an underpowered PC or over-priced gaming rig, is the fact many popular games are not available on SteamOS. Also, there is the problem that games are optimized for D3D, which puts you in the Windows camp. Yes, you can get better performance out of OpenGL, but if 90% of your market is Windows, why bother? Ported games generally have poorer performance.

I am hoping that the Vulkan API will be adopted by the games industry to act as a bridge between the two (Windows/Mac and Linux) performance-wise. Microsoft's plans to turn the PC into a glorified tablet or console walled garden is annoying enough. Now they're playing the same trick they pulled on XP users to "upgrade" to Vista, by releasing games that are "exclusive" to Windows 10 on their UWP (Universal Windows Platform). So far, it doesn't seem very consumer-friendly[1].

[1] http://www.pcgamer.com/why-pc-games-should-never-become-univ...
Based on what I know of Webpass' network architecture, I'd be very surprised if latency was >5ms average from any of their individual on-net buildings back to any of the major IX points where they have routers in the SF Bay area.
As someone who used to live in Sydney and now in SF with Webpass... I can tell you that Webpass would be what a proper NBN rollout would look like. It's kind of amazing. It only costs $60/month and you just get an ethernet drop.

No login, no metering, no shaping.

Example latency:

admin@RT-AC5300-E6A0:/tmp/home/root# ping -c 5 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=0 ttl=55 time=3.526 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=1 ttl=55 time=3.559 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=2 ttl=55 time=3.547 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=3 ttl=55 time=3.518 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: seq=4 ttl=55 time=3.584 ms

--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 3.518/3.546/3.584 ms
"Are building" is a bit premature. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_Canal :

> "Major works" such as dredging will take place after a Pacific Ocean wharf is finished and the wharf's construction will not start until after August 2016. ...

> Media reports have suggested the project would now be delayed or even possibly canceled because Wang Jing's personal wealth declined greatly as a result of the 2015–16 Chinese stock market crash.
Yep, WebPass was by far and away the best ISP I've ever had. They actually emailed me in advance about planned service interruptions! Wow!!!
There are CSS rules that control a typeface‘s ligatures for OTF fonts.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-varian...
Ask HN: I think I'm good at quickly identifying dev talent.  How to prove it?
I'm prompted to ask this from this reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/4paeff/what_does_socalled_top_talent_actually_look_like/d4jf9df

Now, I've only been involved in hiring decisions a few times but I feel I've been able to identify someone's level of experience and capability pretty quickly (in about an hour).

I would be interested in testing this out more to see if it's something I can do. Is this something that would be valuable to companies? How could I go about proving it to myself and then selling this service if I am capable?
hey HN. I wrote this. hit me up with any questions and I'll answer them here.
Weird, I had Webpass for a year and was using it for a ton of gaming, and had no idea it was using wireless. It was really consistent and fast.
Also miserably failed, see:
http://buildbot.net/img/overview.png

But as Hegel taught us, it is really the master that is indentured to the slave!
That would make it a 3 factor instead of 2 factor authentication
> Sync goals was probably to make their ad share revenue grow as now you are a logged in user.

No, it was in response to user feedback. The portion of the userbase that wanted it to just work like a traditional account system was greater than the portion that wanted to mess around with syncing codes. I don't know where you got the idea that this change had anything to do with ads.
Because it works great with JS turned off, and you can measure what is using your CPU an d what it is doing and how much time it is taking (also you can measure the network).
There's over 1000 employees working at Mozilla Corp. Bear in mind that, beyond the basic backoffice services of running a company, they have the following on their plate:

- Firefox
- Rust
- Servo
- Addons
- Online help & support documentation
- Soccorro crash reporter
- FirefoxOS
- Aframe.io VR framework for WebGL
- WebGL
- Thunderbird
- Bugzilla
- BrowserID/Persona
- Sync

Multiprocess is enabled in Developer editions, so it's definitely coming.

edit: thousand, not thousandk =(
Right. But just to be clear, C++ was an implementation detail. You could treat the entire toolchain as a black box that read in PHP code and produced a single executable binary.
Do You Need to Stretch Before Working Out?
Well the Huracan is near the top of the Top Gear lap times, but is beaten by track cars such as the Ariel Atom.

They are status symbols mostly. They are absolutely not practical for any kind of normal transportation.
You can find the interface index by running the shell command:

ip link
If you don't have a freemium game (I strongly dislike that business model), I would love to know what you're working on

EDIT: Nevermind, think I found it down below: http://www.bmcm.co/
If you listen, you can hear the sound San Francisco rental managers rejoicing they can advertise they have Google Fiber.
Ethereum is the OP_EVAL of cryptocurrency
I think I mixed up Snowden and Assange when I wrote that late last night. Sorry HN.
I don't really get this phobia of fixed wireless. The technology is improving by leaps and bounds--while the technology for digging up city streets isn't.
Effectively lost mean different things on a human and a geological timescale.

It could take millennia (or longer) for the water to slowly push through various kinds of bedrock, to finally get above ground again. By that time whatever contaminants were in it will have been filtered away.

It's an incredibly slow process, but it's not as if we could somehow drain the oceans by fracking at full speed for several millennia.
One thing to understand is that a lot of new wealth is not in Western nations and some, regardless of where they live, have access to where they can play with their toys. Throw in exclusivity which some makers exploit by having limited run versions.

While the prices are silly, one can ask why would anyone pay more than 20k for car when that can buy you safety and comfort for four? Just like my impulse purchases can be a certain amount that is fine for me but extravagant for some and cheap by others.
This is nice, but does not solve the problem of giving a user the power to approve merge requests but not accidentally "git push origin master."
People spend 1,000-10,000$ per month on pay to win games. You don't need a lot of them to break even.

PS: It's actually become a fairly common issue people seek addiction counseling for.
My guess: It is also a cute character from Disney. In French they are not homophones, and people seem to care a lot less.
A Girl Cross All Limits for Selection in Waqar Zaka Show
Chomsky's aversion to statistical techniques is much deeper than most of this discussion focuses on.

Here's an enlightening quote from Chomsky:

"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who know its (the speech community's) language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance. (Chomsky, 1965, p. 3)"

Chomsky is uninterested in linguistic data of the kind used to build statistical language models; those are "linguistic performances" and he is only looking at "linguistic competence", the ability of an ideal speaker to "produce and understand an infinite number of sentences in their language, and to distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical sentences."[1]

Now, I'm personally happy to criticise statistical techniques for their lack of explanatory power. But I'm not willing to go further and say that data is irrelevant. Chomsky is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_competence
Not to downplay the importance of good concrete, but I thought the Panama Canal structures almost all handled freshwater (since they rely on the flow of water from Gatun Lake).
e10s (multiprocess) is currently rolling out. It's probably the biggest single architectural change in the browser's history and requires coordination with huge numbers of extension authors. Lots of people have put a lot of work into this project; it's not like you can just flick a magic multiprocess switch on a giant application like Firefox.

http://www.arewee10syet.com/

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule_and_Status

https://asadotzler.com/2016/06/06/firefox-48-beta-release-an...
Interesting.. I've been very happy with Webpass for the past 8 or 9 years (though my building's crappy wiring can "only" support 100Mbit).

A Webpass engineer I spoke to last week mentioned they're rolling out fiber to the building to provide redundancy for the wireless mesh. Surprised me as I could count on my fingers the number of outages webpass has had since I started using them. Perhaps it'll replace the wireless portion in the longer term.