skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is the most surprising thing, from my understanding, Palantir's user-facing tech is an ancient c.2007 era Java web start tool backed by a fairly ho-hum enterprise ontology system, some free-text search and fairly basic geospatial map server.

It sounds like a 3-6 month, 3 person project to replicate with modern tech. I think all of the pieces of a Palantir-like system exist with open/free alternatives, but nobody has just bothered to write the glue code to make it happen.

This makes me wonder at the ultimate utility of the particular shape of a Palantir system if nobody else is bothering to do it in quite the same way.

It's probably some combination of PostgreSQL (plus PostGIS) + Elastic Search + Neo4j for the storage tech, pick-your-web-framework for the server-side, D3.js + some mapping library for the front-end and have all the major pieces. A few months of glue code and CRUD writing and it would be done. I'd definitely welcome a quick-to-deploy open/free alternative.

The real money is in the integration, ETL, ontology consulting service bit and so anybody could really build a company around that stuff.
Le Corbusier used controlling lines in some of his houses. It's important to appreciate that good modern architecture grew out of an established architectural culture. Many principles were retained. It's not comparable to dada in art or punk in music, where the foundations of the activity were thrown away.

I'm an architectural historian and all I can say is that feeling is important. Rules are not so important, even the rule implied by the controlling lines technique. So I don't really endorse that tumblr's approach.

I love the way Andrés Duany (famous architecturally conservative guy, "new Urbanist") says he "adores" Le Corbusier's work: "I can't help it." You KNOW he's telling the truth, that he has a feeling for architecture.
OMG I already exhibit extreme indifference to human life; I guess I already have half of the requirements for the death penalty.
> but it's not accurate to write hyperbolically as you do.

Yes it is. Give me 5 on-time, on-budget IT projects I'll give you 50 that flopped.
It was probably a decade ago, so the details may be foggy. But I recall shaking my head at the widely spaced studs that were very visible.
It's one of those situations where 99% of the examples ruin it for the rest
Let me try this again.

Scenario 1: a city votes to do road construction. This results in all residents of that city paying more in taxes. All residents get to decide and all residents pay for the results of their decision.

Scenario 2: the U.S. invades Iraq. There are some casualties amongst U.S. Forces as well as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties, many of them civilians. What's different about this scenario is that none of the dead Iraqi civilians or their families had a say in the U.S. decision to go to war. But they pay the overwhelming cost in life. Whereas no Americans at all are required to risk their lives.

That is the asymmetry in costs that the OP was talking about.
Recurse Center – free, self-directed, educational retreat for programmers
It's funny that you would pick boinc (a rotten mashup of C and PHP with no formal spec) as your exemplar of a distributed system.
So, to boil it down, your assessment is that public schools are structurally less capable of spending money wisely because they're isolated from the market?
It's interesting that Dr. Baez calls himself a mathematical physicist, not an applied mathematician or a theoretical physicist. Can someone explain why?
But motivated by greed and (geo)politics, rarely by religion.

The last sentence in my previous comment was not very clear. What I meant to say is that there are many non-Muslim African countries which have suffered from Western exploitation, yet we don't witness the kind of religiously motivated violence as in Islamic countries with comparable histories. This is an indicator for different dispositions caused by different sets of cultural memes.
That's an answer to somebody's question, but not to mine.
It's one of those many developments that make one reconsider the question of "Why does the firm exist?"

http://www.economist.com/node/17730360
Example of this phenomenon:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/nyregion/05forest.html
I'm frequently frustrated when I'm trying to do chores, or something else, with someone who doesn't understand the concept of parallelization.
Finally, bringing (some of) the nice features of SFML to C. SFML, for me, has just the right amount of control over GPU things without having to really know the OpenGL pipeline.
"Of course, there's no guarantees, but more eyes means more chances of bugs getting caught. And that means safer."

That doesn't. It means potential to be safer if all kinds of things line up. Vast majority of FOSS code is crap like any other code. More eyes didn't change that. What's needed is design/implementation work, qualified review, time, and trustworthiness of reviewers & distribution.

http://pastebin.com/pjc0cueA
What's the term for encountering some relatively unlikely concept multiple times in a short period? I was just looking at the Wikipedia page for the physics-variant of "jerk".
https://smallhacks.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/camera.jpg

Where is your god now?
I certainly don't agree with it. Wearables have a lot of potential, but wearable watches are fundamentally not a great idea - for practical reasons (screen too small, limited battery life) and for marketing reasons (can't compete at the low end, certainly can't compete at the lifestyle/status display high end).

Watch isn't even primarily a watch - it's an iPhone remote. And that's getting into rarefied meta-product territory.

So unlike the iPhone and the home computer, both of which have obvious use cases, Watch is still trying to define a compelling reason for existing.

But this just highlights the current Apple problem. Cook designs products using a very simple heuristic - smaller, bigger, thinner, more colours: basically good enough.

Jobs used to use a different heuristic - magical, original, creative, obviously useful, with world-beating production values.

It's a completely different approach. And you can see that in Watch.

Watch has no magic. It's good enough - barely, more or less. But that's all it is.

And if you're aiming for good enough instead of magical, it's too easy to fall short and end up with not quite good enough - which is where many Apple buyers are feeling the current product lines are heading.
you meant closure ?
Heh, me as well (https://github.com/rakoo/rakoshare) although I've been trying other technologies and combinations lately, slowing the development a lot.
Huh, so they are open about it now. They definitely were not when I talked to them. I guess enough time has passed that people have forgotten the hard won lessons of the past.

I worked on scaling and generalizing ontologies at university and had already switched to working with Big Data / ML at a big company when Palantir tried to recruit me. I talked to some of their senior engineers about their tech and made the point that their tech sounded just like ontologies. I tried to get them to admit what it was so I could be sure I was having an honest conversation with them. They flatly denied it and made it out like the whole thing was their great new idea. I was unimpressed.

I was still interested in working for them. Access to hard interesting problems can be hard to come by. In the end I couldn't take their legendary arrogance and insecurities - to me these are bright red flags of a toxic corporate culture. And they low balled me. I would have temporarily put up with the toxic culture for large piles of money.
Try writing that same thing without ES6.
Have you actually read what the paper you've linked? I haven't said that it's impossible to review ANN's, but you do not need to review their code to do it, infact reviewing their code is the wrong approach in this case.
You do not want to be conducting code inspection on nondeterministic systems as it would yield very little.
This means that having the ANN being open sourced does not add additional security by having the code inspectable by everyone like with traditional software.
This is what the whole argument is about, not about can ANN's be reviewed.
Where was anything said about putting restrictions onto what people do with their property? I skimmed the article again just to make sure, and I can't find any argument in that direction.

Saying "X is ugly" or "X is ugly, here is a rule to try to explain why" does not mean "X should not be allowed to exist".
If you are a judge and you are in "bad" company all day, does that make you by the spirit of this law make you complicit in future crimes if you release them out into the world?
> There are vanishingly few situations where we can be 100%, absolutely clear on whether a person did something that warrants permanently removing that person from existence.

So would you say that the vast majority of murder convictions leave at least a little room for doubt?
>	What is it like to understand advanced mathematics?

It's really nice! Get to understand
a lot of stuff.

Some of the advanced math is really
powerful for applications.

And, can look back at the math
saw in physics where wondered if the
physics profs really understood the
math and conclude, right, they
didn't or at least not very well.

E.g., recently I saw a physics lecture
where they explained more than once
that a quantum mechanics wave
function was differentiable
and "also continuous" as if
there was some question, doubt,
choice, or chance otherwise. Of COURSE
it is continuous! Every differentiable
function is continuous!

There's a lot more on why it's
nice to understand the advanced
math!
If you did that without first asking about what Ecmascript version you should support I would prompt the question myself, and if you didn't find a different way then I would consider it a very bad sign.
You need to have access to the docker socket, if you're using sockets to connect. That's not necessarily only root.
Debugging Angular in production using the injector
Here are a few questions/problems I was asked in from-end interviews a couple months ago:

Write a function that accepts an array of ints and a target number. If two of the numbers in the array can add up to the target, return their indices. (aka Two Sum)

Write a function that accepts an int x and prints a spiral of "#"s so that the number of "arms" in the spiral equals x.

Write a function that accepts a month and a year, and draws a calendar view of that month.

Given a non-negative int x, repeatedly add all its digits until the result has only one digit.

I think I was also asked something that involved a tree structure, but I can't remember the specific problem.

I thought all of those questions were fucking stupid. The good interviewers, IMO, gave me a "take-home" problem of building some mini front-end app that hit an API, and the really fun one involved reverse engineering an unpublished API - that's how I got my current job.

I spent a lot of time studying the h5bp Front End Interview Questions[1], and the only front-end specific question I was asked was, "What is an SVG sprite?" during an initial phone chat with a CEO.

1. https://github.com/h5bp/Front-end-Developer-Interview-Questi...
You had me there for a split second.
Yep!

Me and one other guy built a web app called FitQuick which was basically a 2-sided marketplace to find personal trainers. Idea being you could use it to find PTs who offer group sessions in the park near you, for example.

I learnt that apparently you need to actually talk to people to figure out if someone would want to use (i.e. pay) for your product in order for you to get anywhere.

We ended up building an MVP but up until that point we didn't actually have any input from potential users so we were pretty off base and it just lost momentum because we were so deflated from no one wanting to use it.

I also got insight in to how small businesses and in this case PTs operate. A lot of them are terrible at running businesses and seemed more interested in working out than making their business a success. I'm not sure entirely what my takeaway here is, but I will remember this next time I do anything that's B2B.

In terms of warning signs there were probably obvious ones that we didn't notice because all we cared about was making a 'cool' product. When the penny dropped for me was when I went to demo it to a PT manager at a gym (we kinda pivoted) and she turned up 10 minutes late and then proceeded to do administrative paper work while talking to me and only half paid attention.

--

In truth, it took a while for me to get over it because it felt like I was being shat on despite giving it a go. What I've come to realise is that no one cares if you're giving it a go except you and I shouldn't have expected gold stars for participation.

I'm building something else now and have 2 actual users (non-paying) who are consistently using the product and providing feedback, so that's really, really, really rewarding. Here's the shitty-free-heroku-dyno version if you're curious: https://simplerm.herokuapp.com
True. I also work in a HPC context where that's a problem. That's actually a place where I had to hack together something with venv in order to use an output analysis with a python that's compiled differently from the main Fortran executable. But that's quite an edge case.
Also:

1) You need to be exactly at the article length limit. Usually means cutting out a lot of detail and gentle explanations you had in your first draft, but might also mean a need to pad a bit.

2) You need to cite everyone who is probable to be your peer reviewer.
Share price has doubled since August 2011, and 16x dividend payouts in that time - https://www.google.com/finance?q=aapl
Agreed. I think they will be able to make it more and more standalone as the technology for that becomes available (battery life is probably the main reason they can't now). I see it as similar to the iPod being Mac only at the start.
Google throttling Keyword Planner data for low spending AdWords accounts
No question, his text is quite lovely, although also a part of the language my book (intentionally) stays away from. There are many, many ways to teach kanji, depending on how courses are taught (even learning it at home from books/internet on your own). Another good source for mnemonic-based kanji is Heisig's work, although I've found the best approach so far to still be "learning the kanji in the words we're using that week", with plenty of repetition and practice. It's tedious, but for a large number of people, effective! (but of course, not effective for all)
People (specifically Wall St) want magic.

If Cook can't deliver that, he's running out of time.
Sorry, by "cookie cutter" I mean it's blatantly obvious they are all (within a neighborhood) designed and built by the same property developer. Around here, a developer will buy land for a subdivision, then hire one architectural firm and one construction crew to build 200+ houses all to the same general specs and overall theme. Yes, there are variations, but it's variations on the same theme.
With kana there's really no better way to do it than just writing it.

Like a certain Japanese guide puts it, "write it 100 times and drink some beer".
I'm not sure where you got that connotative sense for "dwelling". It shouldn't carry negative value - it's a very neutral term for a place someone lives.

"To dwell on" something isn't inherently negative either, it simply means to spend a fair amount of time thinking or focusing on a single thing. Whether that's good or bad depends on the context, and is not implied by the word itself.
Thanks! That means a lot. I have been getting that from reading HN for a while. The community here is very supportive of allowing people to make mistakes and continue improving and growing. I think it maybe time for me to give this idea another shot.
> The single biggest improvement in school performance (charter or public) comes from switching to year-round school--especially among minorities.

Why is this? This sounds like "keeping them busy"...
You said:

"it's simply beyond the human capability to review. So you'll end up with ANN's reviewing other ANN's which are reviewed by other ANN's at the end."

That implied it was beyond human capability to review ANN's to the point we'd need ANN's to do it. In the paper, they give a number of deterministic methods to review ANN's noting some were successful by the teams using them. Countered both of your claims in that context.

"This means that having the ANN being open sourced does not add additional security by having the code inspectable by everyone like with traditional software."

I agree that most of the problems won't be caught here. More about training set and safety monitors. However, the paper shows methods like rule extraction, visualization, and simulation that have aided in assessing and improving neural networks. These work on that internal state that's incomprehinsible at first glance. It's also usually stored in HW logic, the SW code, or some data format. Having those provably facilitates analysis of ANN's performance. Assuming it's the kind that's analyzable at all. ;)

Note: Code-level errors, either by hand-written or auto-generated engines, can also invalidate an ANN's behavior. Vast majority of software flaws occur right here. Obviously, some static analysis or safety transformations can increase assurance of correctness of overall system. Should be combined with other V&V methods.
Yes. "Beyond all reasonable doubt" is fine for throwing someone in jail and putting the key all but permanently out of reach. But I think that, as a society, we must retain the ability to say "oh shit we fucked up very much here is the door we are very sorry please take this huge sack of cash along with our sincere apologies" if or when we discover that our legal system made a massive error.

In this day and age, were an exoneration to happen, I would also mandate that the state put up billboards in the person's home town and where the crime allegedly took place and run Internet ads and do lots of press interviews to get it out as widely as possible that someone has been exonerated.
I use SVG graphics almost exclusively nowadays. Browser support is near-universal. Being able to use the same graphics asset in a wide variety of sizes and screen resolutions is immensely convenient. Rather than having numerous copies of a logo (small, large, retina etc) I only have to make one SVG version (and one PNG fall-back if IE8 matters).

Want the logo a bit smaller? Want that little design element bigger? It's incredibly convenient knowing you can change up your design a bit without having to regenerate your graphics.
You're welcome. I don't actually use UUID's so can't comment about.
"probably very weak universal aesthetic factors"

This is your shakiest assumption. Art tends to reflect modes of human experience (how could it avoid doing so) and richly, sensitively evoked experience makes for art that has very broad appeal. Something like Shakespeare is universally popular not for colonial reasons or because it's somehow multivalent (in the sense of being specifically compatible with multiple cultures). It's a deeply satisfying reflection of human nature and a consummate engagement with human experience, which is what architecture should be too.

McDonalds food doesn't claim to be a high-point of human creativity, and it's not. Same story with McMansions.
Not in architecture circles. See for example Dwell magazine[1].

[1] https://www.dwell.com
They're isolated from the market and also must bear burdens--beyond those directly implicated by their core service of educating kids--that ordinary market participants do not have to bear.[1] And their status as highly-politicized publicly-run organizations does not allow them to operate any other way. Indeed, much of the negative reaction to charter schools is based on the fact we do not impose on them the burdens that make publicly-run schools so inefficient.

[1] I mean, the article is actually a prime example of this. None of the criticisms of charters are substantive. After all, few people could say with a straight face that we should pass a moratorium on the expansion of Starbucks because, as a company led by a white-male CEO, it is unable to meet the needs of black communities.
>And, in that respect, it's quite easy to see that helping an old person who fell down to get up is something good, while raping children is not.

I think it's a bit more difficult than that. After all, in many cultures, it's fine to rape children, as long as you rape the right children.
"I was still interested in working for them. Access to hard interesting problems can be hard to come by. In the end I couldn't take their legendary arrogance and insecurities - to me these are bright red flags of a toxic corporate culture. And they low balled me. I would have temporarily put up with the toxic culture for large piles of money."

Smart decision. Far as ontologies, the Cyc project to create common sense in machines was my favorite at the time. Used ontological, knowledge base if my broken memory is accurate. I was and still am firmly convinced that finding an architecture suitable to solve that problem is a pre-requisite for the AI's we really want. Deep-learning is approximating it but closer to how brain does vision than common sense. Minsky noted at one point he could count number of researchers doing common sense on a single hand or so. That's a hard problem if you want one. Also unbelievably hard to get funded. (sighs)
Cyclone is way more ambitious than I was thinking. I'm not looking for safety; I want something that, for people who either like C or are required to write C, takes off just some of the rough edges.

In fact I don't think the syntax would even change, modulo a few directives.

Just the semantics. And not by a lot.
William H Calvin makes a similar argument in _The Throwing Madonna_ (and less succinctly, but more entertainingly, in _The River That Flows Uphill_). He's got a lot to say about the evolution of hand-eye coordination and throwing as well.
>I'm a native Texan, which I point out solely to rebut the assertion that all--or even many--Texans are in favor of the death penalty

When it comes to an action as permanent as killing a person, disapproval without preventative action (i.e., abolition) is tacit approval. So long as Texas keeps executing people, I don't see what difference it makes how many Texans are in favor of it.
That would only mean that morality is relative across cultures, not that morality doesn't exist within the same culture.
"Forget all that 'local minima' stuff. Just tell them the crystal has a bubble in it and you need to shake it out."
The full sentence was "...opening the code won't tell you much if anything, it's simply beyond the human capability to review."
It was within a comment subthread about the value of traditional code inspections for reviewing ANN's more specifically will the availability of the code for everyone to inspect be as "valuable" for security assurance as traditional software, context is everything.

If you get a the source code of any traditional software reviewing the code can be done by humans regardless of how complex it is, with ANN's it's not really the case simply because of the nondeterministic nature of the system.
You can validate the "correctness" of an ANN but it's not done in the same manner as reviewing traditional software.
>Your comment seemed flippant as you play off the title of the article, and I don't think the average reader wouldn't have interpreted your comment as a value judgment.

Well, you, for one did. Your comment seems to imply that I thought jazz not selling also meant that jazz doesn't matter.

>What were you intending to convey with your factual observation?

Just what I said, nothing more, nothing less: that today jazz doesn't sell.