skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a thought...it borderlines on conspiracy theory, so I don't take it too seriously...but I think index funds are actually damaging to the economy. It all starts from the premise that if it's too good to be true, it probably is.

Think about a truly reductionist outlook on the product of index funds: put money into this thing, with very little effort on your part, and you'll make enough money to retire on! Sounds way too good to be true, to just throw money at something and it makes you money.

One argument is that well, you're investing in the US economy (or the global economy, depending on your index fund). You're putting faith into the economy as a whole...but that means you're also blindly investing into businesses that may not (and should not) be performing well. Companies that may be lagging behind will be artificially inflated in a groupthink (or I guess groupinvest) mentality.

At a smaller level, this becomes a problem when those funds differentiate on things like market cap. If a company has a bad year and drops market cap from $2.5B to $1.8B, that means the company went from being a large cap to a mid cap company in the eyes of institutional investors. So based solely on market cap (and not fundamentals of the business), Vanguard will dump it from it's large cap funds and buy it up on it's mid cap funds. And if most people are only investing in the S&P 500 or Large Blend funds, then you're seeing a massive shift in ownership in companies solely based on one metric. How can this be sustainable for the overall economy? Warren Buffett and many successful investors have told people that you should treat a stock as owning a portion of a business. We've completely separated ourselves from that ownership (and responsibility) when we entrust our money in index funds. And when some of the largest companies are owned by some of the largest financial institutions, it seems like the companies are getting in bed with the same architects of our recent financial meltdowns.

In conclusion, something just seems off about throwing money at a fund that makes somewhat arbitrary decisions for how it owns businesses, and supports the bigger businesses while penalizing the smaller ones (via groupthink and ownership).
What Kind of Sustainable Home Should You Live In?
You can go to New York and your trip could still begin and end north of Cesar Chavez St. in San Francisco.
The low interest rate environment is telling you that capital is in high supply relative to the demand, ie capital isn't very valued. So there is NO good investment strategy that primarily relies on bringing capital to the table as the main way to add value.

Therefore, the investments to look into are those in which capital is just part of the package and where some other economic factor (eg land, labor, ideas and risk taking) is a critical part of the value added. No guarantee they'll do better or you'll find anything, but I believe that's where you could look and actually have a chance of finding something.

E.g., real estate, small business, etc. Those things are also generally traded on relatively inefficient illiquid markets, which is also great -- the averages apply a lot less then. By analogy, if you're looking to get into the business of finding $20 bills on the ground, you might want to focus on poorly-lit areas, because someone else will probably grab the ones in the well-lit areas. In low interest rate times, efficient markets like securities are traded on suck. The fewer people can realistically participate in evaluating the value of and/or trading in a given asset within an asset class, the better.

Just my unprofessional hobbyist opinion though, would love to hear any disagreement or other thoughts! I'm not currently practicing what I preach (can't afford to yet) but by the time I can this is the direction I'm thinking of exploring in, rather than investing more than a token amount in securities. As you say, the interest rate environment has gotten so abyssmal it no longer feels like there's much point.
Why is it "ludicrous" for society to discourage women from
engaging in certain behaviors, if it turns out that it's bad
for society if women engage in those behaviors? That sounds
eminently reasonable to me.

Define "behaviors" and "bad for society" because your bringing this up makes me think you actually believe specific such things. It's ludicrous because saying we should decide social policies based on generalizations of groups of people is a bad idea. Replace women with any group: LGBT, people of color, poor people, foreigners, etc. You'll see that it's kind of a crazy statement. It might benefit some people to oppress people of color, for example, and so you might say it "benefits society" depending on what society you're talking about. It might even lead to technological progress! But does that make it right, and is it good?

Should they not look for chaste women as life partners, if
it turns out that marriages to chaste women end up being
the most successful? Should society not then encourage
women to be chaste, if society cares about how many
marriages end up being successful?

Society should care about the rights of the individual to freedom and happiness to live their lives: equally, without regard to gender.

You also fail to define successful marriage: you could mean if they successfully rear children, or you could mean they are happy long term, or you can mean any other number of things. To encourage systemic behavior on poorly defined things like this leads to people getting hurt. In this case, it means women not having the same rights as men. And not only that: men with what are considered more feminine characteristics sometimes suffer similar consequences. Feminism is a misnomer; gender equality benefits both men and women because gender is not a binary and all men are not the same and all women are not the same.

You keep saying "if x turns out to y" but we don't have such data. Either say something or don't, that's why it's pointless. I think you'll find that there are actually no hard and fast rules like the ones you say we should consider may be the case, and that people actually occupy a very diverse spectrum. As such social policy should be as permissive as possible to avoid hurting classes of people not considered the "majority."
Note spellings: Peter Doig vs Pete Doige.
The mobility between quintiles is not particularly interesting; it is far too coarse a measure. The changes in inequality that we see in the US, Canada, and the UK affect the relative earning capacity of the bottom 90% vs. the top 10%, with the 90th percentile being an inflection point at our levels of inequality.

The relevant reduction in mobility would primarily be within the top 10% tail of the Pareto distribution for income, the dynamics of the bottom 90% are quite different -- although their absolute share vs. the top 10% has certainly declined.
Green Homes That Will Make You Want to Go Off the Grid and Live in a Forest
> True, but usually the onus is on plaintiff to demonstrate the affirmative.

As it was here. The thing is any evidence (however weak) that a claim is true, if uncountered, can suffice for proof by a preponderance of the evidence for the claim. So, it doesn't take strong evidence to create some burden for the defense to disprove the plaintiffs claim, but the degree of proof necessary is set by the strength of the plaintiff's evidence, since the standard is preponderance of the evidence.
I keep trying to explain this to my non-programmer friends: No, I'm not some genius, I read lots of information, and worked hard to get to where I was, and from a programming perspective, I'm barely competant and know just enough to be dangerous. Yes, you could probably do it too, although the difficulty varies depending on how well you can handle the kind of abstractions and logic you'll be dealing with.
I agree with your implicit assumption -- that the talent and PR battle is motivating this article -- but disagree with your assertion that secrecy makes Apple unattractive to ML talent.

You're weighting open publishing very heavily, but others may have different weighting functions. The ability to interact with device makers may be convincing to some, or maybe others like the Apple company and culture, or Apple's privacy stance.

Criticizing the article as PR or boasting is true, but somewhat beside the point, because most of the players in this field have always -- for decades -- had a tendency to PR and boasting. Admittedly, proofs-of-concept like AlphaGo do provide substance behind the boasting, but they have a definite PR element too.
I mean this as a genuine question: isn't OpenSPARC a free-as-in-speech CPU that I would presume - given its lineage - isn't a hippie piece of crap?
How to Train Your #NeuralNetwork for Wine Tasting? – Autonomous Agents – #AI
Making $47M with data ain't easy. Here's how you do it
One can still run out of voluntarily obtained money.
Totally agree; since installing the Kindle app I spend a lot more time reading books during dead time, such as when travelling, waiting, etc, than I do aimlessly browsing the internet looking for something to pass the time away.
What about creating art requires you to publicly claim authorship, though? I agree that artists could refuse to acknowledge creating a work to attempt to somehow screw over its owner, but I don't see what about that is illegal; refusing to affirm something isn't lying or fraud.
It'll look better when they dont have to pay any drivers anything at all
Where are the lower priced competitors? If there is no reason to lower price, it won't be lowered.
Why shouldn't that be the case? Why would the top posts be just the place in question? There's tons of high quality pro photos out there. And attractive people probably have more "friends" and get more "likes".

It's like people that go on vacation and take pictures of famous landmarks without themselves in it. What's the point?
Emacs is not written in lisp.

In another comment, @bitwize says No. AutoCAD is written in C++. It has a crude Lisp as an extension language, [...]

Same story for emacs. It's written in C and implements something called "emacs lisp". I'm not inclined to call it crude, but few would defend it if I did... :)

But emacs is special, it's more "extension" than not. That means, the elisp-language extensions that it ships with make up the majority of the "basic" functionality of emacs.
To me it's much more surprising that Apple and other companies refuse to allow publishing. Anyone in AI who wants to continue to be recognized in and remain friends with others in the field and advance their career should absolutely refuse to go anywhere like Apple, unless they plan to stay at that one company their entire life. It's amazing how frustrating it is trying to talk to Apple employees at conferences -- at this point I pretty much avoid it if possible.
Evey Lyft/Uber driver I've ever spoken to always prefers Lyft. Then again I've never used Uber.
One can imagine scenarios where an artist disclaims that they created something out of spite (with family or whatever) and that disclaiming greatly decreases the value of some sold item. If that painting or whatever was fairly obviously the artist's work, would you still feel the same?

This case seems odd based on the news coverage though (based on the coverage in respectable publications like The New York Times and Guardian). I would have, perhaps naively, assumed that the plaintiffs would have been expected to have at least some evidence that Doig (with a different spelling) was the artist in question before it went to trial. Which doesn't seem to have been the case.

Of course, this was a civil suit and the reality is that you can sue anyone for just about any reason. For better or worse.
I've documented most of ag's tricks in various blog posts.[1] You're right that sequential reads are faster than random reads, but searching a bunch of source code is going to be a bunch of short reads no matter what. Each file is on the order of 50kB, or about 0.5ms if read at 100MB/sec. That's far less than the seek time of a hard drive. I've experimented a lot, and found it best to read ASAP, then let the OS & device figure out the best order to service the requests.

Also, modern SSDs (and even HDDs) have tricks like NCQ. With caches cleared (cold reads), multi-threaded ag is 2x faster on SSDs. Disabling NCQ makes multi-threaded perform the same as single-threaded.[2] (Again, with caches cleared.)

> … That could easily cause unexpected results. …

I've received very few complaints about ag's binary detection. It does a nice job of balancing false positives, false negatives, and performance. See is_binary() in src/utils.c for the exact code[3].

1. http://geoff.greer.fm/ag#related-posts

2. http://geoff.greer.fm/2012/09/07/the-silver-searcher-adding-...

3. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/blob/7d52078cb...
Magnetic fields steer drug-carrying bacteria deep into cancerous tumours
Continuations: Programming Without Programmers? Aka Software
> I'm wondering why gambling(except for lotteries and casinos, etc.) was made illegal?

Because the State can't stand the competition. Note that most numbers games (i.e., private lotteries) have better payout odds than the State lottery.
Why am I not surprised by this. I sometimes find myself thinking I should check my bias against Oracle, just to make sure I'm not being too hard on them for past transgressions (for example, Microsoft is far from perfect but they've come a long ways from many of their more negative past practices). Then I learn something like this, which while it doesn't directly mean they are still continuing in predatory marketing and sales practices, doesn't exactly assuage any fears I might have have had.
Why are there so many programming languages?
Why these things have to take 3 years is sad. Nobody should have to go through 3 years of this crap.
D.C. as well - https://www.uber.com/info/plus/dc/
A lot of their products are lacking though. Maps is awful. So is Safari.
If you must use a magic font, why not use ligatures to replace words?
> It would be interesting to break it down further in “normal” instructions, SIMD instructions

There’s a free disassembler library with that functionality: http://www.capstone-engine.org/

Here’s that break up, in its .NET wrapper library: https://github.com/9ee1/Capstone.NET/blob/master/Gee.Externa...
Yeah well thanks to Uber there are fewer cabs.
This title seems different than the content of the article - which says nothing about users.

That said, I can't pass up the opportunity to say "of course making money matters." Especially in an environment where raising your next round isn't the way (anymore) to profit from a business venture.

All the companies that touted their active monthly user count as a way to raise cash are panicking because their investors are now waiting for those users to be monetized.

But of course, "users" is still a mantra because there are a lot of high valuation tech companies that used un-monetized users as a basis of their pricing or marketplace growth.

These companies will fail if they can't monetize their base - and then the myth of "users" will disappear in the same way that "simply having a .com" meant you were worth millions in the late 90s.
> It seems that Uber might be artificially deflating its prices to try and kill the competition, or discourage new companies from even entering the market.

Or they are just trying to tread water until they can remove drivers as a cost. If Uber can use VC money to pay current driver and then use more VC money to purchase a self driving fleet, they just have to wait it out until their current prices become profitable.
Full loads have been offsetting partial loads all along for airport shuttles, trains, buses, cargo, planes etc, the maths is probably in Uber's favor even without having to compete with Lyft.
Robotron: Top-down network management at scale
> They do not care at all about traffic laws. Illegal u-turns, stop wherever they want, etc.

That's probably a quarter of the people I run into on my commute to and from work. People just don't give a shit about breaking traffic laws themselves. Of course they'll be sure to honk at and scream at the other people who do.

At least in the case of Uber, in my city, cops are a bit aggressive about making sure they don't do things like stop on a busy corner or do other stupid, anti-social maneuvers. I once had an Uber driver stop on a busy corner and block turning traffic. As I got into the Uber a cop ran up and literally ripped the door out of my hand as I was shutting it to scream at the driver he had 10 seconds to move or get a $1,000 ticket. Going out on the main strip during a Friday night, it isn't uncommon to see an officer deal with at least one driver.
We're always bad at knowing what to do with unknown data, because, by definition, when you don't know about it you don't know what to do with it.

Quite often it's just assumed to be error.

Those errors have traditionally led to great discoveries though, (such as the Mercury wobble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Pe...) so if they are repeatable, then such "ghosts in the data" could turn up great fundamental truths.

Every bit of this is speculation though. I am not so sure that anything so profound is going to turn up in AI datasets.
MIT CSAIL Group Seeks to Solve Network Congestion Through Coordination
OS X Application Scripting: AppleScript vs. Ruby
"Those areas need more people actively teaching and encouraging kids to read what books are already there."

This true but since there isn't much chance of this happening in any meaningful way I guess we have to take what we can? So amazon's initiative has some merits.

Your point also reminded me of the Dolly Parton thing that's done a lot of good work, in a totally non-cynical way.
https://imaginationlibrary.com/
I would pay that in a heartbeat because daily commute costs via Metro is $2.50 (ignoring any pre-tax discounts I get). So for a four week month it costs $50 to take public transportation twice daily. For $110 I get a shared ride door to door? Sign me up. Except of course neither this or
UberPool is offered in Houston so I guess we can all just suck it. Oh well. It would be nice.

Population density is actually increasing in Houston's inner city. It would be an interesting experiment for Uber to at least try pooling inside our 610 loop area.
Ignoring the ample amount of ethical and political objections to the whole notion of government (which government, incidently?) backdoors, how does one even start to implement this kind of legislature? You might be able to coerce Facebook or Google to cooperate, but you can't exactly outlaw any alternative that is out of reach of the EU, or any jurisdiction for that matter. These tools exist now, and won't just dissappear. Any terrorist worth his salt will use whatever works, regardless of legality.
Our picks of promising companies from Y Combinator S16 Demo Day 2
That's not what happens in Sneakers.

They're all trying to figure out what the password is from the video, and Whistler is paying attention to what they're saying, which is that he has an answering service. And if he has an answering service, then the answering machine on his desk is hiding something in plain sight.
I'm not so sure I agree. If you crank up the prices, a lot of users who are users because of those prices will just stop being users. You don't exactly have a good way to lock users into it, so this strategy doesn't seem as effective. I imagine that the most locked in user will be one that sold their car to solely ride uber, and they can just go get a car if the the cost analysis tips more in favor of the car. "Worst" case for this user is they need to buy a vehicle, slighly better but still bad case, they pay more, but less than owning a vehicle but still reaped years of low low prices.
You can run all of the languages you mentioned on the JVM.
We’ll First Find Aliens on Eyeball Planets
Why Europe Can’t Find the Jihadis in Its Midst
In many cases it was made illegal and state lotteries only created much later, so that explanation for why it was made illegal is not plausible.
Obviously that's true, but it's not really relevant to the intended meaning of Thatcher's (obviously oversimplified) quote.
There is nothing racism-specific to that law (and how could there be, because then the law would have to define race). The same law applies whether Erdogan, Mugabe, Kim Yong Un, Theresa May or Christian Kern gets insulted; the problem is that it allows a foreign (as in non-domestic) head of state -- a public figure by definition -- to request prosecution in a case that might very well touch upon, if not outright collide with, §5 GG.
What's super confusing to me is: If the planet is so much closer to its star, and the star is so much larger than ours, why does the artist's conception show the star as being so "small" (perceived size, not actual size) as viewed from the planet? Was the artist just not thinking straight that day, or am I missing something? Yes I understand it's an "artist's conception" but the question remains.
Those horrid alt-buffer init and exit strings in terminfo and termcap are the bane of my existence. I almost never want that behavior, particularly when I've got a relevant section of a man page on the screen and want it to STAY THERE when I quit out of the pager. I use -X in less, but I really want a more universal solution, so I use a terminal type that doesn't have those strings, usually xterm-noapp. But it's not always available.

I'm not sure what you mean about -X and mouse scrolling.
Why not augment our intelligence utilizing AI and become more than human?
Seems a lot like trolling.
But the answer is - go to the next interview.
The original point I was making was simply that the >500 point Elo delta is an exaggeration. So I only need Magnus to steer a few games to draws to be correct.
Is there anything on github that I can use with DD-WRT to play with any of these effects? Maybe visualize the people my router can see?
This is kind of amazing. I have often really wondered what would happen if you basically created a directed acyclic graph/dataflow for data processing (for example, how Apache Spark distributes processing/operations), and then accelerated the operations using physical implementations in FPGAs. After all, a SQL query, when optimized, is essentially a graph of operators that data flows through.

You do have to pass your data through the accelerator to get the processing... which potentially means huge volumes of data moving into this physical processing layer (probably can be done in parallel over a network at high speed) - I would assume this is why shared memory bandwidth was a problem.

This would provide some really interesting options though - imagine feeding data from two disparate databases (say, Oracle and SQL server) in a data flow into this thing - now you have accelerated cross database joins (as long as you can handle the bandwidth and processing on the way in).

There was this post before on HN previously lamenting the state of tools for working with FPGAs, and my related comment wondering if what Baidu has done here was possible:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9408881

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9410160
I don't get this either. The burden of proof should not be on Doig.
President's Daily Brief: Delivering Intelligence to Nixon and Ford