skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it's a discredit. arXiv is a preprint database, which means nothing is refereed. It's under "Computer Science", but that's just the author's own classification.

I don't think there's a way for the admins of arXiv to remove a paper. Once a paper is in the arXiv, it's there permanently: even the authors themselves can only update.[0]

E.g. this bit of quackery "Electromagnetic Signals from Bacterial DNA"[1]

[0] https://arxiv.org/help/withdraw

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1104.3113v1
Why is Tesla risking time, money and reputation on making their cars self-driving? The primary goal is surely to get everyone into electric powered cars so we can move to cleaner power, and lower localised pollution.
Man .. wish they were a publicly traded company :(
The Pythagorean theory (simple ratios are consonant) is a consequence of the design of most Western musical instruments. They're typically built around either a string or a column of air, which is constrained at both ends. The overtones are unavoidably integer multiples of the fundamental because of this constraint. If they were not then at least one end of the string would be oscillating, which is not possible because it is clamped in place.

Perception of consonance of a sound can be approximated by decomposing it into sine waves and calculating the sum of the values on the Plomp and Levelt curve (which is empirically measured and a consequence of human biology) for the intervals of all pairs of sine waves, weighted by amplitude. For instruments based around the harmonic series this results in standard Western harmony. There is nothing mystical about it, and the human brain does not have any ratio detector hardware. It's purely an artefact of a simpler underlying rule.

Other instruments, eg. tuned percussion, do not have this constraint. If you clamp a bar at one end and strike it you can get all kinds of inharmonic overtones. This means cultures with music based around these types of instruments (eg. Indonesian classical music) need completely different harmonic theory.

See http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf

This generalizes all existing theories of musical harmony, and explains things like stretched tuning in pianos (a consequence of non-ideal strings).
That's really cool!

It speaks volumes for how well connected and supported the startup scene is there that Dublin has a funded "startup commissioner". We're lagging a lot behind in Scotland at the moment.
Sadly, I think I got it: progress = market saturation = dumbing it down.

Idiocracy, in action. :-)
What I wish people would understand is that you can be sure that all of the autopilot crashes which have happened so far will be analysed by teams of engineers to make sure those fringe cases never happen again. It's not as if anyone will ever die in the way ALL of the previous crashes have happened. Every Tesla crash you see is (ideally), the last time you will see a Tesla crash in that manner.
When autopilot kills more innocent drivers than other drivers you can point me to a problem. Time will tell if it is better or worse and the track record up until May/June was going pretty well.

I'd rather 10 innocent people die to freak autopilot incidents than 1,000 innocent people die because people in general are terrible at operating a 2,000-3,500lb death machine. Especially because everyone thinks of themselves as a good driver. It's fairly obvious not everyone is a good driver - and that there are more bad drivers than good.

Maybe I only see things that way because there have been four deaths in my family due to unaware drivers which could have easily been avoided by self-driving vehicles. All of them happened during the daytime, at speeds slower than 40mph, and with direct line of sight. Something sensors would have detected and braked to avoid.
Idiomatic React Testing Patterns
You think in 2016 there's such a thing as "clear video evidence" that wasn't handled according to procedure?

You do realize that the whole point of procedure is to make sure that evidence isn't tainted, right?
Skype finally arrives on Linux again
Twitter puts out a LOT of software, and open-sources a good portion. I don't know if this is smart in the sense of being overstaffed relative to their revenue, but they do it regardless. Some examples:

[1] Fabric, an SDK for mobile apps - https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html

[2] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron

[3] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/

[4] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb

[5] Ruby implementation of the ICU (International Components for Unicode - https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-rb

[6] Clockwork Raven, Human-Powered Data Analysis with Mechanical Turk - https://github.com/twitter/clockworkraven

[7] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consistent distributed datastores - https://github.com/twitter/gizzard

[8] Twemcache, a Twitter fork of Memcached - https://github.com/twitter/twemcache

[9] Twemproxy, a fast, light-weight proxy for memcached and redis - https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy

[10] Iago, a webapp load tester - https://github.com/twitter/iago

[11] Ospriet, a bestof/voting app - https://github.com/twitter/ospriet
Weave was a truly useful service. It's sad it's shutting down. Far being elitist, it helped a completely outsider like me to meet & build connections in the Valley
I'm on Windows/Firefox the console only echoes back missing characters.
The fake cures for autism that can prove deadly
I actually disagree with this. Of course, building the wrong product and having poor sales/marketing and all that other stuff matters a lot, BUT if the startup's technical people are weak and cannot quickly iterate, then this startup will bleed money really fast, while not being able to quickly modify the product as needed. So, I would say, you need to do technical diligence on the founders, but not necessarily on their code
Our IT guy is an unresponsive jerk
Three Steps to Get Up to Speed on Any Subject Quickly
I hate that this title makes it sound like rare earths only come from China. Rare earths could be mined from other places if the price were higher.
I was under the impression UML gave up the ghost(?)
I wonder, what are the current opinions about the end game for Unity? What is the goal of seeking this new funding? My understanding was they are profitable.
> The rest is already documented and maintained by another company who built this dev tool.

Or more likely it is someone's open source project on GitHub, and is just as poorly documented as something in-house would be.
Illegally collected evidence is by its definition not reliable.
That's a strong statement, mostly because there's things implied in what you said that are not necessary to held true. For example, there's no reason we can't have a distinction between public release of a video, and allowing charged/affected parties (or their next of kin!) and their counsel to view the video privately at the police station for free (but restricted from recording). I think that would clear up the vast majority of problems, as the police could no longer falsely claim the footage needed to be preserved for some reason. If it was requested to be made public after that, and they refused, at least you then know what you're fighting for if you need to take it to court.
> can't come fast enough for me.

It'll be rather amusing to see the older generations chomping at the bit for the introduction (nay, making mandatory!) of revolutionary new tech.

The youngsters mostly seem rather apathetic towards driving, but there must be a bunch of about-middle-aged drivers who'll resent having their toys taken away (or the ability to use them on public roads, same difference).
Before I purchase anything, I read reviews, both positive and negative for balanced views. A lot of time negative reviews change my mind, even when product is rated highly overall. Though it is not intentional for me but I guess if someone is trying to save money, show them negative reviews first.
Subsidized rides (aka market share acquisition aka dumping)
I think you're missing that there are multiple "sophistications". There is not just one music education, I don't think. There could be a classical music education and context, and an entirely different pop music education and context. And some pieces of pop music could be very sophisticated by the standards of the people who are educated in that context.
> Sorry, but you have no ideea what I'm talking about. You are probably to young to remember...

We don't speak to each other like that here, regardless of how right or wrong the previous poster's knowledge of the subject at hand.
Isn't it just enhanced cruise control?
Are you talking about the stars above your head again?
It's worth remembering that their is also cost involved in using someone else's code. Use it when the benefits outweigh the costs.
Thanks :). The truth to anybody reading is that James is the awesome one. Since I first met him early this year to talk about his experience at Parse, he's been one of the most supportive people I've met in Silicon Valley to date.

If I can give a piece of advice to other early founders: it's tough, it never seems to magically get easy, but there are truly awesome people out there willing to help. Still a long road ahead, but I'm very, very grateful to everybody who has helped make Polybit a reality so far (mentors, advisors, and especially the developer community).
>Given the number of Autopilot miles driven, you'd only expect one death so far, so that we have one doesn't really tell us anything.

It's really telling when it is expected that the Autopilot will kill someone.

What is the current death toll of Google's tech?
I wonder when US gov will take a deeper look at Uber.

It is not only taxi and public transportation laws around the country they "disturb"; I still receive spammy emails they continue to send, and even Sendgrid is fully in bed with them.

I forwarded spam to Sendgrid and they said they will follow up with Uber (so apparently they are Uber's customer support at this point - great!) The spamming practice never changed or stopped despite Sendgrid telling me they will send my email to them (!!) to unsubscribe me from their list, when I didn't even subscribe in the first place.

As I received more Uber spam I kept updating Sendgrid ticked (zendesk). Eventually some 2 weeks later they closed it as "resolved" and never replied to my emails again. I still get Uber Spam from Sendgrid. Stay away from them as long as you can (both Uber and Sendgrid)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003
> Are we sure the future is really "winning" when it's headed toward a fully-immersive VR and hyper-intelligent AI that will essentially replace the need for most human labor?

If it's coupled with basic income, yes.
> But must the standard for safety be higher than existing human drivers?

You better believe it. If I sell you a climbing rope and it fails, saying "yeh, but the average human wouldn't have been able to hold you as you came over that ledge" is not a suitable excuse.
DRM play? What content is this protecting?
I think the GP is talking about breaking up 'natural' monopolies, rather than government monopolies.

Note: Just to skip a potential semantic argument that always crops up around this: whether or not you believe it's appropriate to call it a monopoly if it's not enforced by government fiat is beside the point.
>It gives people the illusion that they can hand off driving to the computer.

The system gives multiple warnings that it's in Beta.

>I'm not sure there's much to be gained.

There's miles and miles of data to be gained.
It's cheaper because it socializes the costs - usually Taxi drivers have to make a licence that involves knowledge of the area and likely other aptitude tests, as well as maintenance of the cars and insurance. Then there are laws that prevent working below a certain minimum income rate in Europe that also affect Taxi drivers as most of them don't operate on their own.

Uber moves all these responsibilities to the owner of the car, now you are your own business man you face the majority of risks and Uber still gets a big chunk of profit. Uber doesn't care about your maintenance costs.

Sometimes it works, often this encourages dangerous behavior to still have profits e.g. skipping maintenance, safe working times, vacation... Uber doesn't care that much about this. A lot of people work almost full time without enough compensation to warrant the stress.

Besides that European countries - at least the bigger cities - have often excellent public transport that is inexpensive and mostly works. Taxis supplement that and Uber is trying to compete on price there, something that abuses the drivers in the long run.

I hope Uber is kept out of Europe or is regulated to protect the drivers and users.
> On the other hand, it's not as if Germany can make it illegal for Turkey to deny genocide.

They can (the nature of sovereignty is such that a sovereign can outlaw anyone doing anything), though they may have trouble enforcing the law by which they make that illegal. Foreign states have been dragged into another state's courts for violations of the latter state's law, though (this is particularly true when the latter state is the US), so its not necessarily the case that there is no possibility of some accountability to such a law.
Does it go the other way? Is it a federal crime for a website to gather information about me after I've told them to stop doing so?
The Longform Guide to the Brain
> Or, their drivers needs to be licensed taxi drivers, and they are not.

I can't talk about Hungary but in Austria an uber driver could not be a licensed taxi driver or at least, it does not matter. However for sure an uber cannot be a taxi because uber has no chance to follow those regulations and restrictions without giving up their business model.

> For example in Slovakia, the law states quite clearly, that if you provide road transportation for other people as a business, then if your car has more than 9 seats, you are operating a bus service, and if it has 9 or less, you are operating a taxi, and must follow all regulations applied to taxi drivers.

That's not how it works in Austria and I'm sure that's not how it works in Hungary. In Austria there are two regulations: taxis and personal drivers. The latter is what uber currently follows. It's a car with a driver that cannot pick up customers from the street who are hailing and it must not be equipped with a taximeter.

> For example, we have other popular taxi service, which also has a smartphone app working very similarly to Uber, with the one exception, that they only accept professional taxi drivers as their drivers.

Uber is not just great because of the app but also because the drivers are rated, the customers are rated and with the surge pricing there is a chance to get a taxi when it's needed. Try getting a taxi in Vienna at rush hour. You can't, because nobody cares extra since you get just as much money there as you do normally but you are stuck in traffic, so there are fewer taxis on the road.
I'm going to throw in a plug for OSH Stencils. Cheap, high quality PCB stencils. I'm never going back to a syringe full of paste! Had a QFN-64 that I hated doing because of that.
The point of the parent was that the statistics are not better for auto pilot - they are either worse OR ambiguous/unknown, neither of which qualifies as the "better" of the gp.
But they do pose a direct, physical threat to everyone in the phillipines.
But you see the process of training is a solution of the problem "how to program AI". For a machine to be intelligent it has to form it's own model of the world. This model is necessarily somewhat opaque because it includes representations which the machine has created for itself.

An intelligent machine that is interpretable in a straightforward manner is an impossibility, it is a contradiction in terms.

You can teach the machine to answer questions about it's internal state in order to analyse it's function or you can apply your own mind to painstakingly deduce it's operation. But I contend you cannot have a generalised rubric for determining it's operation.
Glad you found it useful. If you haven't come across him before, this guy takes some of the best planetary images: http://www.damianpeach.com/index.htm
Grace Hopper 2016 – registrations now open
>The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.

>Religion on the other hand offers absolute truth statements.

See my other comment here for another perspective on faith and religion[0]

In particular, the what happens after you die issue is applicable as it is one where we may never have conclusive evidence for the answer this side of life.

>The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.

As a Christian, my answer is I'm confident in my beliefs, but not 100% certain. I could be wrong as could you.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12084049
Size. The FB app is at the very limit of the iOS app size.
What I've learnt from 2 weeks of React Native
The fastest way to catch Pokémon
Apologies! I'll look into this ASAP. Don't spend enough time bug testing on Windows these days. :)
Number 4 is the only one of those that could provide a basis for objectively claiming complex music is more sophisticated than simple music. The others are subjective.
Yes, I was living in it. It was in a small town in he midwest and interest rates were low. I wasn't paying enough interest to qualify for the tax write off.

Big cities and small towns are fundamentally different real estate environments. Federal laws that aim to help some mythical "average American" usually fail to account for such things.
> here's a wide-spread belief in the UK that arming the police is a bad idea - since it leads to issues.

Absolutely - hence the relatively small number of highly-trained firearms officers.
There aren't any - normally you click in a cell and can edit it immediately.

Try this form to add a company:
http://goo.gl/forms/5OEg6TahHdLrPmaG3

And this form to add an event: http://goo.gl/forms/LI36LptYhqbuudY83
Safe is like 'secure'. It's a relative concept, and the level of safety we are willing to accept from products is something that should be communally decided and required by law.

We shouldn't go off expecting that someone elses ideas of safety will jive 100% with our own, and then blame them when someone else buys a product and is injured.

Should Telsa drive-assist deactivate and slow the car after 10 seconds without touching the wheel? Probably, but I won't blame them for not doing so if there is no regulatory framework to help them make a decision. It's certainly not obvious that 10 seconds is the limit and not 11, or 15 or 2 seconds.
This is a common point of miscommunication between engineers and management. To an engineer, anything not strictly ruled out by the laws of physics is possible. The answer shouldn't be whether something is possible, but whether it's advisable, prudent, likely to continue being successful, within budget, etc, etc.

Just about anything is possible if you're willing to throw enough money and time at it.
Using physics-based models will make it even more frustrating and complicated. You'd have to take into account "temperament" or tuning, which someone else has already mentioned. Then, the relationship between frequencies is dependent on what intervals one decides should sound good.[0]

Music theory is an abstraction: it tries to make a transient activity (musical performance) amenable to being described on paper. Maybe an appropriate analogy is mathematics to physics. You can't learn to program a computer by learning only abstract grammar.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament
Someone wants to start cashing out or someone wants to IPO and this gives a starting value to the company.
You said:

> Or you're suggesting that any nation that doesn't act as a puppet of the US should be forced into severe economic sanctions as punishment? In other words, the US should be the only sovereign nation in the world?

That's stuffing words in his mouth, because he literally didn't say anything remotely like that. It's also far more inflamatory than anything he said.
I think there is an economic threshold for the need to know something versus the effort to reverse engineer and find out exactly how that thing happened. (don't xkcd this, randall!)
I'm on OSX/Firefox and I see the same. Maybe Firefox is the missing platform you need to test ;)
As is often the case, the most insightful comment is tucked away at the bottom of the page.
Bach music often consists of incredible easy and small ideas.
My guess would be Microsoft. Unity uses C# and it would fit into Microsoft strategy.
Other commenters here have done a good job picking out specific problems with the author's arguments. It's always frustrating when someone who is capable and knowledgeable about one subject decides to try their hand in a different field without having bothered to do any real research or study in it. And it's doubly so when they proceed to then dismiss, literally, the entire field as "superstitions," and "unscientific" even as everything they've written betrays that they haven't bothered to familiarize themselves with basically any of the work that's been done in music theory or psychoacoustics in the last 100 years.

I usually love it when articles about the intersection of music and computation show up on HN, but in this case it's really unfortunate. At least it's sparking some good discussion, I guess.
>In any even remotely sane universe... Americans would be as proud of the Tesla Model S as we used to be about the moon landing or about winning the Cold War.

While I generally agree with the author's sentiment, I think part of the difference with why Tesla is getting so much flak instead of praise is because the pioneers of yore were astronauts, scientists and soldiers who took risks they understood, and did it willingly.

But with Tesla, the intrepid pioneers of autonomous driving are everyday people who are engaging in behavior that is probably more risky than they realize, and we're now seeing some of the consequences of that.

At the same time, I think you could argue that some people, at some point, are going to have to take on these risks at a large scale, and the one thing Tesla has going for it is a rabid fan base, and it may be true that without that kind of cult following, no company would be able to survive this phase of autonomous driving development.
Can we please stop spamming HN around this theme?
This could happen if Uber manages to be cheaper by avoiding taxes or breaking speed limits; or in general does something that's good for the customers, but bad for society, and so is forbidden.

I don't know that that's the case. In other places, it seems to manage to be net good for the customers, good for society, and mostly only bad for existing taxi companies. But "people are using Uber" is far from sufficient evidence to say that taxis are crap.
>With between 11 and 13 million millionaires in the US, it's a $60 billion business.

What are you basing that on, without knowing any financial information? If the mere existence of millionaires makes a massive company viable, then what company isn't?

Do you believe that the very wealthy, today, are doing these things themselves, and that an Uber courier is solving a huge problem for them? Paying people to deliver stuff isn't new. Neither is driving people around. What Uber has done is made in convenient and, thus far, inexpensive. Do you think Uber will reap massive margins here? The barrier to entry is very low.
I took Boden's mandatory first-year class Intro to CogSci in 1990. She was head of department, so I saw her around but I didn't know her well. I enjoyed the class very much.

She was a very respected figure in philosophy of cogsci and AI, but I don't recall her doing any practical robotics, which was barely present at Sussex at that time.