skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think the problem is string theory per se — I think the problem is that we're running up on the bounds of what we can test experimentally, and further progress is going to require some really cleverly designed experiments that can probe Planck scale events. Although the greatest physicists throughout history have for the most part been theoreticians, it may be the case that in the future, the greatest physicists will be experimentalists because of the extraordinary amount of creativity needed to design novel experiments that can probe the most obscure corners of reality.

String theory isn't pseudoscience, because it does make testable, falsifiable predictions. In fact, it makes the same predictions that quantum field theory does for the phenomena that we are currently capable of testing (and arguably using a more elegant framework than QFT provides). The problem is that the predictions that string theory makes beyond QFT are currently way outside the realm of experimental assessment. This doesn't make the predictions false — if that's the way the universe really is, we just may be incapable of knowing that for a long time. There are a few hints that at least some of the predictions of string theory may be incorrect — we have yet to find any evidence of supersymmetry, and many physicists thought the LHC would turn up at least some evidence of this if it existed.

Regardless, I think people get too hung up on buzz-phrases like "is time real?" or "are we in a multiverse?". A lot of these are what I consider irrelevant to science, as the goal of science is to make accurate predictions about the future. If there is another universe out there, it is by definition unreachable from our current universe, so it makes no difference to science whatsoever. Likewise, what is or isn't "real" has no bearing on how accurately one can compute the evolution of some system's state through time.
Heh, you should see the current housing bubble that rages through out china today. The large amounts of fraud, the huge amounts of capital flight, the government backed credit bubbles.
Here's one company I know of: http://www.uavionix.com/products/
> I don't know what it is about driving that makes people think their state's drivers are the worst.

Comparisons to other states they have lived in? Oregonians are way more mellow on the roads than Californians, bar none.
Hype check: Pokémon Go says more about Pokémon than it does about AR
a) San Francisco would look like Detroit if it wasn't for the tech industry. Still is the peninsula's largest camping ground.

b) The idea that "tech" is the pinnacle of social status and the industry to disdain over inequality is laughable at best, even if it is true in that area. Being "in tech" flies so far under the radar in New York City and people in that industry earn the same amounts as in SF.

c) The infrastructure in Silicon Valley is laughable. Many startups trying to "change the world" look at the world through a lens of what doesn't function well in Silicon Valley. When the rest of the world, or the addressable market, already has an adequate solution to a problem the Stanford Grad and their Sand Hill neighbors thinks exists. (Random example: Many gas stations on the peninsula don't take credit cards, for reference. Cellular internet speeds on Verizon, T-Mobile, At&t, and Google Fi are pretty slow, startups are still working on clever WIFI solutions not realizing that the rest of the country has cellular data faster than Silicon Valley's wifi)
Flash bang, smoke, Capsicum?
Interesting, .NET Core doesn't have a good UI story yet. It's just console / web for now. Something like WPF but cross-platform would be great and this looks promising.
Can Amazon Justify Its Current Valuation?
Regular customers can run benchmarks and drop sluggish servers, too.
Clickbait of the year.

Yessss, keep feeding me more of those delicious downvotes.
A middle ground wasn't advocated, he was basically saying "let's keep the pace of innovation constant, but improve quality". Putting incremental effort into quality and testing probably requires you slow down your rate of experimentation, no?
Master Instagram Marketing in 30 Minutes – How to Get Your First 10000 Followers
Legal Experts Raise Alarm Over Shocking Use of 'Killer Robot' in Dallas
I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but I do think it's a mistake to take them seriously, except as an example of what not to do.
> no tech jobs whatsoever

That really surprises me, given the Contra Dance scene in Asheville.
London, Berlin, and Nordics are very strong for European startups. A lot of stuff starting to happen in Asia too (e.g. Taipei, Seoul, Bangkok)
This is Smolin, making his usual, and valid, criticisms of modern physics. Smolin's basic complaint is that there is no experimental evidence for string theory. The math is pretty, and a whole generation of physicists have worked on it, but nothing is experimentally testable. Everything is too small or at too high an energy level. A practical implication is that it doesn't lead to any technology.

Smolin also doesn't like many-worlds, because it talks about unreachable regions. This he considers too speculative. There's a basic problem in quantum mechanics, which leads to Schroedinger's Cat, the Copenhagen Interpretation, and, in the end, many-worlds.[1]

Physics has been stuck on this problem for almost a century now. Philosophy won't help.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation
As a layman, one thing I don't understand is why we suppose there has to be dark matter and energy in the universe.

I understand that dark matter is used to explain gravitational irregularities when observing galaxies. However, saying 'there is x amount of unobservable stuff there' in order to make our calculations correct seems like lazy science.

Are there any theories that don't include dark matter or energy? Can gravity function differently depending on its location (space or time) in the universe?
No, hashrate majority can only introduce "soft" restrictions, not remove any hardcoded ones.

Increasing the supply will fork them off into a separate chain incompatible with the majority of users.
Does anyone have any war stories with Eto (https://github.com/picoe/Eto)?

It is a .NET cross platform toolkit similar in concept to Wx (it wraps native widgets).
I like how they see cosmologists as historians. Observe and describe the past, speculate, and muse about the future :-)
If cherubs trigger it, it probably doesn't even need to be porn.
I think that describes much of the startup scene altogether. A lot of people seem willing to forgo a surer path to wealth by taking options instead of salary (as worked out here many times). Is it because they want to be really, really rich? I think it's more that they want the hero narrative that VCs and The Social Network have sold them. As the reality of being cheap labor while you read about the latest lottery winners reasserts itself, it's natural to get depressed.
Banff, Alberta, Canada - Application Developer - ONSITE

https://chj.tbe.taleo.net/chj05/ats/careers/v2/viewRequisiti...
> ... reification of mathematics can lead physicists into dangerous territory where mathematical "beauty" and "elegance" get substituted for real information about the real world.

If it can happen in physics, it can happen anywhere -- maybe even your neighborhood.
You don't get more pizza when you slice it in smaller pieces.
Banff, Alberta Canada - Senior Business Consultant, IT - ONSITE

https://chj.tbe.taleo.net/chj05/ats/careers/v2/viewRequisiti...
I'm sure Google does internally.

Honestly, I trust Joe Random Webmaster a lot more than I trust Google, because some small site manager doesn't already have a vast corpus of data about me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Alternative_theori...

Yes. Hardly anyone takes them seriously, though, for a variety of reasons.
The HN "Hug of Death" ??

Error establishing a
database connection
We often hear about that kind of thing happening, but it is rare to see a specific example going into details and making specific accusations towards a specific person.
Because the political party (and the signers) were comprised of Jewish people? I'm perfectly fine if you read "Israelis" there (or "early Jewish politicians"), or find a different reference closer to "an opinion on Jews", as long as it not detracts from the point I was making: Einstein's dated opinion on racial issues is as relevant as Stallman's opinion on the fashion industry. Interesting? Sure. But relevant? No. It's a fallacy to think that smart people have smart opinions on everything they are not an expert in. It's a misplaced appeal to authority. It's a proxy submission to have HN discuss the recent events, and I doubt HN can make sensible points on this subject, as much as HN can make sensible points on women in technology.

Yes, it could have totally gone the other way too. There are smart domain experts that are very naive, politically incorrect, racist, or intolerant of domains they have less expertise in.
> Physics has been stuck on this problem for almost a century now. Philosophy won't help.

It sure seems to be an epistemology problem which puts it squarely in the realm of philosophy, not physics.
Really impressive work. You've taken "smart and gets things done" to the next level.
I personally think Rob's dream setup sounds horrible. I love having my own phone -- it was shitty having to look for a pay phone or buy a beer in a bar just to use the phone.

And I don't use my phone or laptop for the local storage. If I lose either one I buy a new one and I reconnect to some accounts and I'm ready to go. That doesn't mean i don't appreciate having my own that I can carry around.

Next time I'm hiking in the middle of the forest using Google Maps Offline and want to take a pic of something, I'll think of Rob rolling out his paper map trying to figure out how to get to the nearest camera rental place. Sorry, no storage for pics or maps on your unrolling pen screen.
This was a pretty useless article with no real information or details to counter existing theories. I know the layman usually isn't interested in the details, but you can't just write about nothing. Are there consistent theories with those three features? What are features of existing models of cosmology which will have to be changed if the three features are assumed? The reader will never know.
1) It's not necessarily effective if the seller reimburses shills for purchased products (as already mentioned)

2) It marginalizes legitimate reviewers who bought the product somewhere other than Amazon

Regardless, I agree that it's a reasonable and sensible default.
"I think". "I believe". "Seemingly deliberate".

And yet a statement: Autism results from brain and metabolic damage.

Do you think this, believe it, or just think it seems true?

Do you have an autistic relative or one that has been diagnosed as aspergers, bipolar or schizophrenic?

What skin do you have in this discussion? Your post seems to ask for an interpretation by "truthyness", but your facts are not in evidence.
That's a really good question and why the initial promise of deep learning was best shown in vision. It is only recently that deep learning in text has given enough performance gains to justify the (large) computational overhead.

For many languages, and many tasks performed on these languages, features have already been discretely provided. If you take English, split on the space character, and then throw those into a standard classifier (Naive Bayes, SVM, logistic regression), you're likely to get a reasonable result. If you add n-grams, so a little bit of collocation information, you tend to do even better. For most tasks, you may even make the simplifying assumption that features don't even interact at all. Even naive use of these methods will get you 90% of the way in many NLP tasks with very little computational overhead (as is evidence in this article).

For other languages, generating those features is a more complicated matter. Chinese is written without spaces between words for example. Extracting such discrete features from there requires an extra step in the pipeline. The way in which you split the characters can also depend on context, requiring an interaction between these components. This interaction is very iffy when it's in a pipeline and you don't have gradients flowing end to end, as is the case with most deep learning systems.

Images are far more like the latter case. There are few discrete features that can be easily extracted from images. Images are also scarily high dimensional - the number of pixels, the number of colours, the interaction between pixels, etc. Using human generated methods of feature extraction on this is fraught with a lot of complicated hand tuning and a lot of misses.

tldr; Text, by virtue of being human generated, is far more structured and far more amenable to easily extracting discrete representative features. For images, we just never really found a highly effective way of producing discrete representative features by hand.
Deep learning, by virtue of providing the feature extraction in an automated manner directed by the loss on the task, has helped solve a major issue that plagued computer vision.
There's no need to go as far as nuclear war. Climate change will manifest itself in political instability and mass migration (see Syria and Africa), and perhaps even more fundamentally, rampant desertification which is liable to lead to food shortages in poorer countries.

But yes, it _is_ a global catastrophe and sadly few people seem to care enough to do something about it.
We've done such a good job with autism awareness that at this point I'm honestly not even sure that people know what autism actually is. Our idea of "autism" has become less Temple Grandin and more the nerds from Revenge of the Nerds. So, yeah. You should probably want to hire nerds as programmers.
I would pay several dollars to keep some courses I took in their original form (even archived form, no new edits or posts). I guess many other course participants would too.

That might be a source of income for coursera, probably enough to cover operational expenses of running the old platform with old content.
That we aren't capable of experiments that distinguish between various forms of string theories doesn't negate the fact that string theories are already compatible with all the experiments we've already done and are likely to be done in the near future. This is no small achievement. There is no other framework that is even in contention right now.

Perhaps when we have some alternative theory that survives that basic hurdle, we can discuss whether we're wasting time pursuing string theory rather than some other idea.
Ingress does something similar in Paris. You have a mission where you need to interact with a few portals that are in the Jardin d'acclimatation, and the app states that in order to fulfill the mission, you have to buy a pass to enter the park (since the portals are inside it).
If you want to help Archive Team in its efforts to preserve disappearing content and have some bandwidth to spare:
Run an "Archive Team Warrior"-Appliance! This way you can help downloading all this content that is about to disappear!

Or do you have some Digital Ocean promotional credits left, that are about to expire? Spin up a (few) VMs with docker-containers running the warrior on DigitalOcean!

http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Warrior
Maybe they're also using 1984 as a manual on how it should be done.
Those slugs that you extracted don't seem to be correct. I wanted to match them with the ones from here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kaWxZG3krI83WfdzlExW...
That's a management and culture problem, not a remote problem. You need good management who understands remote in order for it to work.
Maybe, but sadly philosophy doesn't have a good track record when it comes to actually solving problems.
> unauthorized, purposeful or unintentional, access or transmission of sensitive or critical information

So there's no loss of data involved. You still have all the data you had before.
> string theories are already compatible with all the experiments we've already done and are likely to be done in the near future

Yeah, not enough people are aware of this in my opinion.
> Cops do die on the job.

There's over a million police in the US.

Last year less than 200 US officers died on the job.
> considering software engineers can get >400k these days if you know where to look

That is far above average.
Umm, at a small startup you're lucky to even have a manager.
Why isn't this working on mobile Firefox? The install button is greyed out for me.
I can remove the qualifiers if you prefer. I have reams of facts rooted in physiology but this isn't the forum for that.

You sound like a serious sperg. I like the term and find it useful, but I won't pretend for a second it's medical.
The <article> tag already makes it pretty easy.
> Why do so many Hacker News readers have such an aversion to using the mouse when editing if these luminaries of computing have all moved on to mouse-based editors?

Because most of the HN readers (those who are programmers, anyway) are
down-in-the-trenches programmers, and as such, they choose whatever
editor/environment makes it the easiest to edit source code. If it is Vim, it
is Vim then. If it is Emacs, Emacs it is. Nano, Elvis, ed, Sublime Text,
LibreOffice Writer, Inkscape, Gimp -- whatever helps to write. It's the code
that is published on SvnHub or whatever, after all, not the environment's
settings.
Ironic anicdote: I order a cheap ($50) generic waterproof jacket from Amazon and got what was obviously a counterfit Northface (with branding and everything). Thankfully they sold and priced it as a generic so I knew what I was getting. Overall a reasonable coat but the detail elements (velcro and straps) were of poor quality.
You know what's cool?
If they can reach better prediction, faster, with that approach, it will strengthen.
If they can't, they will be a footnote.
At least, if the scientific method is alive and well.
> However, saying 'there is x amount of unobservable stuff there' in order to make our calculations correct seems like lazy science.

That's not how this works.

Dark matter and energy are placeholders for anything that can explain the discrepancy. The most likely explanation for dark matter is just undiscovered particles, but changing the physics of it to make the calculations come out right is also something that people do.

There's not really a difference between the two either. Post-QFT the concept of a particle is much blurrier than before, and "changing the physics" might just involve introducing a new background field that behaves differently in different places based on its concentration. In essence, you have introduced a new particle.

Please note that while it feels like lazy science, coming up with alternate theories that have the same success and rigor as QFT is very hard. Its not that they are hanging up their pencils and declaring premature victory. It is that literally the best description of physics out there to date doesn't explain this, and within that description yet-to-be-observed particles is its best bet. They are working on better explanations, but Rome wasn't built in a day.
I think the commenter meant that while you can work at those companies in many places, if you want to be on the major projects and advance your career, you will have to be in the Bay Area. Google even has a fairly large office in SF, but usually people can't work on major projects there. You have to be at the HQ
Thank you! I didn't realize there was a way to pull APKs from the official source repo, rather than resorting to a third-party APK site (which I assume is not to be trusted). Gotta make sure my Pokédex is safe :)
Bullshit. How do you think your computer functions? You don't get high level programming languages without philosophy. Where do you think natural sciences came from?
> Just look at these statistics

Stats are tricky. I can forgive a serving officer not understanding the stats, and falling victim to a cognitive bias.

But you have the benefits of understanding stats, and knowing about bias. You don't have any excuse for making such mistakes.
I moved to Asheville after I had a remote job secured for a while. The problem is that Asheville, like much of the country, lacks jobs in general and that what's there pays rather little for even North Carolina even though the cost of living is the highest in the state. This offsets a lot of the cost advantages of being on a tech worker salary. A devops job I saw here paid $45k, and you can easily get $90k even in RTP.

Now I'm moving again a year later after I bought a house (rental options are terrible in small towns) mostly because my spouse has basically zero job prospects here despite some great credentials which meant an effective 30% pay cut on top of what I took to be a remote worker instead of onsite in a large metro area.

Don't move to Asheville specifically unless everyone in the house already has a job lined up or is really good at cooking or being a server.
> There is only one universe

ok, except what else just has 1 of them

> Time is real

ask a photon that
So... no?
I can't talk for the UK, but here in Australia we have traditionally never had buy-side agents (they do exist, but they are relatively rare). Also the fee the agents get is much less - 1% to 2% and closer to 1% in the big markets.

The other thing is in the large markets like Sydney most of the properties are sold at public auctions. The last two properties I bought I bought at public auction. Many people find this so stressful they hire agents to bid for them, but this is just a fee for service usually.
Prediction: Dark matter is the emissions/pollution from the EM-drives of previous and remote civilizations.
Two questions solved in one answer ;-)
It reminds me Silicon Valley (S03E09) when they introduced "Pipy (or Piedpy?)" to help the user through their UI which user is too dumb to use..
Except for being the origin of physics, astronomy, medicine and other fields? "Philosophy" is a wide spectrum of which only a very small part is concerned with problems so abstract that we cannot expect a solution to them.
> Was Gates actually the technical wizard that he has been made out to be?

At least there are strong signs:

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Gates&oldid=... "In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates's solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent."

According to https://www.quora.com/Who-beat-Bill-Gates-in-math-at-Harvard... "Christos Papadimitriou, one of the absolute top theoretical CS people in the world (almost certainly top 10 active researchers), told his girlfriend at the time that Bill Gates was the smartest person he had ever met.

Bill Gates, advised by Papadimitriou, found a bound on a problem that stood for 30 years."
This reminds me of the old adage about the drunk looking for his keys under the lamp post because "that's where the light is". If the solution in physics requires a revolution in philosophy then that is where we must look.