skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In general, most of the benefits of randomness are simply the benefits of avoiding a particular low volume failure mode.

Stochastic resonance, for example, is a terrible example of the benefits of randomness. You could do a LOT better with non-random perturbations. Stochastic resonance means random perturbations + law of large numbers allow you get a less quantized version of a signal. But if you have controlled (non-random perturbations) you can get the same result in O(N) samples rather than O(N^2).

Or similarly, consider "computer simulations". You'll nearly always get better results if you use either fixed quadratures (in low dimensions) or use quasi monte carlo (in high dimensions). Some months back I drastically sped up our computer simulations by switching from MC to Simpson's Rule in 1-d simulations.

I can think of very few circumstances where randomized algorithms are anything other than a crude hack to get around forming a real understanding of the problem.
Jacobin makes the core mistake of many economic radical leftists - they ignore that it's not just the good or service itself that's valuable. Quality assurance is valuable. Service discovery is valuable and so is rapid provisioning.

In Jacobin's world, the only person providing value here is the driver. In the world the rest of us inhabit, things like the star-rating system and the dispatch system are valuable too.
Experience - yes, but in which area?

Compared to LXC templates, Docker provides quite nice UX in terms of image building and management. Well, as long as one doesn't hit any limitations or their scenario doesn't have some corner cases, but that's the same for every tech out there.

However, GP mentioned "process isolation technology" and I don't think this is where Docker particularly excels above any other isolation technology out there. When you have the container prepared (this is where Docker's UX excels, compared to others), isolation is easy with nearly anything.
Ditto on that. Anyone?
Why is not going home even considered a possible scenario?
There is no way that it's a good thing, unless you wanna live a myth that Silicon Valley developed and has been portrayed as cool and "the right way to really innovate" by too many movies.
His example is dramatic. But it's not as far off as you might think. Have you ever had a migraine? "Chronic migraine" is a thing, and it's truely awful.
The app in the article looks like vaporware (hope to be proven wrong). Anyone else trying to build P2P apps where the worker sees the full value of their work? I get the theory, it seems possible, but it been a few years since we started talking about building stuff like this on the blockchain and I've seen 0 activity. Every developer (including myself) who I've discussed this type of thing with has basically said the same thing: if I had a bunch of money in the bank and wasn't already working on a project that seemed interesting/important, I'd be down to try building it for some labor vertical (delivery, taxis, farming). From my vantage, it's public service in the same sense that doing a sabbatical with 18F is public service. Maybe 18F should try?
I've read a few guides that say you can use a race condition to kill the process and rename its directory before it automatically restarts itself.
True, I do know people who work at Uber who I have worked with before. Just kidding but I would like to show that worker owned business can be more efficient because of locality of information transfer and decision making. It's not my professional area so I have to rely on my beliefs. I am working toward creating software companies to embody these ideas.
Chinese Consortium to Buy Caesars’ (Israeli) Games Unit for $4.4B
There are no racial requirements on being British.
Don't feed the Trump
I found this study that supports chimeracoder's claim: http://www.aidsmap.com/Life-expectancy-now-considerably-exce...

>A study from the US has found that some groups of people with HIV, especially those treated before their CD4 count falls below 350 cells/mm3, now have life expectancies equal to or even higher than the US general population ... the sole contributor to the increased mortality in people who started ART early was AIDS.
> I've spent a lot of time with emacs, and slime was what I used when I was exploring Common Lisp: both SBCL and CLISP. Emacs is really powerful and I'm fairly at home with it, but I've come to prefer more graphical IDE's. Judging from the popularity of Eclipse, Visual Studio, NetBeans, etc...I'd say I'm not alone. Telling programmers it's emacs+slime or the highway is not a strength; it discourages everyone who prefers those other environments.

LispWorks and Clozure CL are good non-emacs IDEs, and there are several others. I will agree that Emacs and Slime are pushed a little too hard sometimes.

> Beyond that, I imagine that many programming projects target specific implementations for various, pragmatic reasons.

That has not been my experience actually using Lisp for a number of projects. IME it's far more likely to support specific platforms (Linux, Windows, OSX, ...) than it is to support specific Lisp implementations. Even that is usually only because a required C library doesn't run on Windows or something like that, which is no different than Python, Java, or any other language.

No offense, but between your conclusions being incorrect and your phrasing ("I imagine..."), it sounds like you're hypothesizing without much actual experience writing Lisp.
A keylogger is a surveillance tool that collects every keystroke on a PC and sends it to a remote location without your knowledge.

On that (correct) definition, Windows 10 doesn't contain a keylogger.

UPDATE: First, it doesn't collect every keystroke. Second, it doesn't send every keystroke to Microsoft. It generates information for personalization purposes, some of which is stored locally on your own PC, and some of which is stored online where you can delete it at https://www.bing.com/account/personalization

Note: downvotes don't change the reality. If you can't handle truth, that's your problem.
> and getting Google's search engine to find exactly what I want with its pseudo-AI machine-learning algorithms doing completely inexplicable things with my queries, that I think "generally do the right thing" is not a good idea.

Actually Google works kind of OK now after they overshot seriously some years ago. Today if you use doublequotes around the search terms it actually seems to search for that exact term.

Which I think is a good solution: reasonable AI with easy fallback when you need it.

I guess an AI VM would need an exact modifier: don't attempt any unspecified cleverness on this variable/method/class.

Specifying some kind of runtime assertions on steroids could perhaps also alleviate some problems.

Debugging could be simplified by having the VM outputting all its assumptions.
You can't uninstall Cortana (unless you are on LTSB - in which case, it's not installed)

That said, you can disable Cortana (and have win + s, search up files)

press win + s (which should open the Cortana UI), then press the hamburger menu, go to settings, disable Cortana, and also disable web (Bing) Search.
>with the fastest spread I saw personally among gays and feminists

Per sexual encounter, homosexual men have a substantially higher infection risk than any other group, and heterosexual woman still have a much higher risk than heterosexual men. That's mostly caused by the different lengths of exposure to body fluids of the partner and different probabilities of skin damage in the relevant areas.

Since feminists are disproportionaly often female you would expect both gays and feminists to have a higher infection rate than the average population, regardless of their political views.
Flooding in Houston over the past 40 years has had more to do with development and flood control projects than changes in rainfall.

I really hate when people try to use Houston as an example of the effects of climate change, the behavior of economic clusters, or the effects of zoning. Most of what I've read shows people really have no clue about how those things actually work here.
I even use docker in hobby-projects, because it makes (once you have figured it out) deployment so easy. Its easy to ship, update and ships fully configured (especially if you the debug and production docker-compose share a common root).

It still sometimes happens that i am amazed how easy it is. A few weeks ago i switched servers for a small project and docker-compose up was all i needed to do.
> And that - not finding it difficult - surprised me a bit, because I had heard from friends in high school that they though German, for instance, was harder to learn than French (anecdote only, not data).

In my opinion (native German speaker) German is at the beginning harder than French for English native speakers. After you got to some level both languages are about equally hard.

For the reason: To become fluent in German you have to know inside out how to conjugate a verb (there are some ugly verbs and tenses) and declinate a noun/adjective (in all three grammatical genders, singular and plural) in all tenses/cases, which is really ugly at the beginning for people who aren't used to it. The best way to learn this is in my opinion brute training until you can do it blindfolded.

The reason why I emphasize this is that you will not be speaking fluently if you have to think for seconds each time what the correct conjugation/declination is for the verb that you want to speak now.

As soon you got over this ugly part (which, because it is ugly you better should be learning it directly at the beginning, so that you have it in you reflexes), German and French are in my opinion about equally hard.
Thanks for the great links!

I really enjoyed the Statistical Relational Learning book.

Rob Zinkov and I have worked on two prototypes of probKanren (https://github.com/webyrd/probKanren), a probabilistic version of miniKanren inspired partly by the Hakaru language (http://indiana.edu/~ppaml/HakaruTutorial.html, https://github.com/hakaru-dev/hakaru). We learned a lot from our two prototypes of probKanren, but neither version is ready for real use (and neither version is documented!).

Rob and I have taken a step back, and are now working with Evan Donahue on just adding stochastic search to miniKanren. If you are interested in joining us, please let me know! :)
I recently wrote a first pass at an RSS feed parser for podcasts, but couldn't find examples of interestingly malformed podcast feeds to test against. Do you have examples of sites with badly formed RSS feeds?
Its not playing the long game. Its playing the short game. Self driving cars are going to be here for consumers by 2020.

What protects Uber is the network effect. Even if I had a million self driving cars right now, nobody has my app installed, and I don't have an optimized pricing and logistics set up yet.

And if you have your own fleet of self driving cars, why would you build the whole setup yourself? Why not just rent them to Uber?
A mechanicistic view is only necessary if God is mostly "hands off". Alternatively, God could be regularly be tweaking things to make sure his plan happens.
Url changed from http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5364, which points to this.
NY Times Reports Loss as Ad Revenues Decline
The article says yes.
Evans detail that idid not finish
address 995 kitale,house no 4 four
from kitale town heading to endebess you board boda boda of tuwan and tell boda your going tuwan barabara mpya ask at kitale east at mama yusufu resident there is where i live house no 4 mama chip or mama joo
Starts off with an interesting idea (programming is perfectly specified versus being underspecified but more efficient due to shared context) but then devolves significantly: neural networks are not the be all end all of smart computers.

Interesting part is that a smart computer could resolve ambiguities in a human description of program desired in a way similar to humans. Missing part to this idea is that unless it's perfect, it would need a way to explain choices and results and probably some dialog system to iteratively improve upon how it resolved ambiguities.

E.g, make me an app like Uber but for cats -> here is a version you can play with -> oh I don't really like the cat icon, can we change it -> sure, which of these would you like ; etc etc

Computer requires ever changing human context, and maybe could have individualized context. So it has to learn over time. The point is to maximize efficiency of getting things made: how little needs to be specified before computer gives you something you accept / how fast can you go from some vague idea in your head to working acceptable software.

You should at least be able to get as good as an arbitrarily large number of people who lived a very similar life to yours and were put in a time bubble where you could talk with them to have them write software for you, assuming they're organized very well and highly motivated and great programmers and all that.
That's how economic reality should be treated. Our own reality is primary. We will take back our lives. What Jacobin is working towards is admirable. We believe in progress, that a better way is possible, and that the current state of affairs is suboptimal. We should encourage alternative economic thinking.
I agree Carcassonne is a great gateway game. The basic rules are straightforward but there is some deeper strategy. There are also quite a few expansions that can add even more depth in different dimensions, so you can expand the game to your tastes.
My issue is having basically no accent (raised with German spoken around me), but the grammar and vocabulary of a ~2 year old. Makes for some really weird cognitive dissonance whenever I open my mouth to a German. I feel you on the "think you're an idiot" thing, definitely jives with my experience.
Venezuela has a new 'forced labor' law that can require people to work in fields
They have build numbers for the test rings. Otherwise, they've used names and numbers for new releases. The last one was November's Fall Update, version 1511 (from the date) and the next one is August 2's Anniversary Update.

Either way, the naming is essentially arbitrary, so they can change it however they like. The same Windows code, which has a long history, is going to continue into the foreseeable future...
AFAICT, the process labeled "Cortana" in Task Manager handles search from the taskbar/start menu whether Cortana's actually enabled or not (it's the UI side of the system search service).
I think chronic kidney disease is one of them and I'm dealing with it. If they did urine test screening of the whole population every few years they could catch it in the early stages and try to keep it stable for much longer. Most of the medicines to do this are affordable generic medicines like ACE inhibitors and prednisone however once the kidney damage gets to a point where it is physically noticeable it is too late to treat or manage and costly dialysis and transplants are the only solution.
My experience with early Ruby XML parsers is that they were all "how hard can this be?" hacks someone did over a weekend by people who didn't really use XML or understand the ecosystem of specifiations and thereby barely worked and often didn't support fundamental things like namespaces correctly. It took away everything which made XML powerful and left you with something that was often even finicky.
Cool! What was the other post?
Reading his recent statement here [0], I was reminded of William James's remark on J.S. Mill:

"Mr. Mill's habitual method of philosophizing was to affirm boldly some general doctrine derived from his father, and then make so many concessions of detail to its enemies as practically to abandon it altogether."

[0]: http://greyenlightenment.com/malcolm-gladwell-bait-and-switc...
This does not equate to a 10% change in climate, whatever that even means.

> Change is accelerating...

What change specifically is accelerating? Your base assumption that things are unquestionably getting worse is unscientific.
I think the point is to use a serialization library when you are trying to output a structured format rather than writing a half-assed use-case-specific implementation of one.

Print and friends are appropriate when not attempting to produce data that conforms to any particular structured format.
Refracting telescopes in modern astronomy [pdf]
Indeed, there was no alternative to Thatcherism in the 80s because the Labour party was in a state. History appears to be repeating itself[1]. Given the Lib Dem's self destruction out of the previous coalition as well, we stand to see a Tory government for at least the next two election cycles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)#Internal_con...
We will help you grow your money and bring transparency to the finance industry
How much of Uber is the ability to burn down the massive investments made into the company?

As they transition to a more normal company that needs to make money, can they afford those incentives?
If the default settings are for user information to be shared, then the defaults are evil (even if the intent behind them is not). I say this because they know most people will accept the defaults.

Maybe there needs to be a law about default settings and privacy.
Guess What: You're Already Interviewing Your Customers
Generally doing "the right thing" based on a rough definition of "what we have and what we want" is not mind-reading, but it is essentially what Prolog does. The author seems to conflate AI with declarative programming here, and I think that was the point.
I feel dumber after reading this article. So much, that my own human net of neurons can't figure out or explain why.

A partial explanation is that I dont like the assumption that once work is being performed at higher and higher abstracted layers, that machine hardware, OS kernels, compilers and linkers, package and dependency managers, and all other systems software supporting high level programming paradigms (including AI based methods) are going to fall in line at the application layer.
Good point, though Juice was a direct answer to Java from a pupil of Wirth, so there's that.

It's funny that Franz was influential to both Brendan Eich (JS) and Andreas Gal (Tracing JIT) but we still got JavaScript as a language, even though Brendan cited[1] Oberon as an influence. At least we got tracing JITs and the alternative AST encoding from Franz's intellectual cloud. I would really like to understand how Bill Joy and Brendan Eich studied Oberon and we still got Java and JavaScript, which haunt us to this day like the industrial takeover by C in the 1980s does.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9733520
Any perspectives on post WWII Germany and the Marshall Plan? American textbooks teach that honorable conquest was the exact goal of that initiative. Is Germany worse off now? Or Japan? Or South Korea?
Russia to reveal location of US military satellites in free space database
DevOps tools in a nutshell
Eclipse is derived from VisualAge for Java, which was derived from VisualAge, which was a Smalltalk IDE.

There are a few remnants - the Java Browsing perspective [1] is basically the classic Smalltalk browser [2], which is still there in modern Smalltalk [3]. The only people i've ever seen using it are old Smalltalkers who have reluctantly come over to Java!

[1] http://help.eclipse.org/neon/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse....

[2] http://www.abclinuxu.cz/images/clanky/krivanek/smalltalk-80-...

[3] http://files.pharo.org/media/pharoCheatSheet.pdf
humanity in general is in deep shit

and yet, we waste (and make no mistake, it is a complete waste) our best minds and the bulk of our resources on making people click ads or other similar excursions in nihilism

what is needed is a multinational manhattan project for climate change... instead, we move the deck chairs around on the titanic. it's clear we can expect no leadership from governments or corporations on this issue.
> An interesting and much more challenging variation for experienced Hanabi players is to disallow people from saying a number or color. You point to a set of cards in another player's hand and that's it. Those cards share some attribute, and all the other cards in the hand don't have that attribute, whatever it is.

Interesting! That breaks so many common reasoning rules, especially if you're playing multicolor. I can see how that would add a huge amount of challenge.

I'd be interested to see some of the reasoning based on that variant.
> Since everything is free now, spyware is the only viable B2C business model.

Everything is not free and spyware is not Microsoft's business model. (It makes very little money from ads, and most of that is sold by AOL for Bing.)

The Windows B2C business model is to charge OEMs to install Windows code on PCs, and to charge users for upgrades. This is exactly what it was before.

UPDATE: The extra profit from Windows 10 is earned from your use of Bing. (You will recall that Google and other search engines pay vast sums to get people to use their search by default.) In the case of Windows 10, your extra use of Bing comes from Cortana firing up the Edge browser and doing a Bing search. You may well find this annoying or even evil, but it seems to me that OK Google and Siri do much the same thing.
Now now scandox, not sure if you're trolling with this one? I don't for one second think "the green jersey" was a factor in their thinking at all.
XML is a perfectly fine format that was (ab)used dreadfully by many, many people to such an extent that many people only have examples of completely dreadful XML as their reference.

So many XML-as-interpreted-programming-language monstrosities out there (I know I wrote one as I had the perfect problem domain to use LISP but didn't have the environment capability to use LISP but did have a Database XML field to store 'data' in so I did XML-as-S-Expression with a SAX based interpreter - it was surprisingly nice).
Does that work at small scales? Does 2-3 people in Palo Alto + 2-3 people in SF a team make?
> Self driving cars are going to be here for consumers by 2020.

I doubt this is true, at least if you're talking about all-weather driving. Not even the optimistic researchers I've chatted with are that optimistic; this timeframe would require all-weather driving to be basically solid at the research level by 2018 or so, which is not totally impossible but unlikely. Maybe if it's limited to Uber Phoenix, though.
> you're betting that a facebook group is a scalable solution?

As I understand, they had an experimental phone application. They took down support for it, and are building a next version.
Wow. That's incredible - I'm amazed that they've got the refresh rate so low.
Zhao was not purged because of his support for capitalism. He supported captialism-like economic reform, and he was purged, but that wasn't the cause.
ALTUNİZADE KURYE
What do they use now?
Edit: I wrote what is below in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12197796 but the mobile client published it on its own... Only now I understand the answers.

no, really, no. This is exactly like blaming a woman who was raped because of how she dressed.
I support this attitude!

Haskell is coming around though. We got Stack which is a fantastic package manager, and we now have a web API library which is pretty much unmatched: http://haskell-servant.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ (each Servant endpoint has a type, and you can generate docs and client libraries from your backend code). Editor tooling has historically been the other problem, but that's starting to come around too.