skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The "all poor people are personally irresponsible" argument

[1] I am almost certain I did not make that argument. Rather, people are responsible for their actions - no one else.

> It's pretty cold to tell the minority that actually is sympathetic

[1] Again, your logic seems flawed here. "You did everything right?" According to whom? The majority? That is a very my myopic viewpoint. Your entire argument proceeds to tell me what I said when in fact, that is clearly not the case.

> Protecting people from other people sounds like a great way to describe a government-guaranteed lifestyle floor, such as a universal basic income, or some other combination of safety net programs that are aimed at unconditionally ending poverty with no means testing...

[1] To be honest, you are making some broad assumptions here. You mention means testing, please explain.

[2] Personally, I feel like you are saying a lot of pretty, flowery things here, but what ("It") would protect you from what exactly?

[3] "Against your will?" Are workers not currently being forced against their will to work? Are Mexican immigrants who flee Mexico to work at the wineries in Southern California not being forced to work against their will?

> because policymakers we elected set it up that way. So, yeah, basically majority rules.

[1] And where do lobbyists fit into this equation? Is it really "public" policy if a majority is deciding what is best for the minority? Doesn't this contradict your argument above: "That protects poor people from other (richer) people pretty effectively." What about liberals from conservatives, right vs left, christians vs muslims, LGBT vs straight, white vs black, etc. You see my point here...it is not the governments responsibility to police people but rather the responsibility of people to police themselves. Yes, there will be outliers, however, we are seeing the ill effects of how public policy BY THE MAJORITY adversely affects all those in the minority.

> I would argue that San Francisco is an excellent study in what can happen when a majority...

[1] Insensitive to poverty? San Francisco is a sanctuary city and as such has laws in place to protect the rights of those who are homeless, illegal, etc.

[2] You can't have it both ways. When you do (as with the case of liberalism) you argue where it makes sense in one context and fail to see how those actions directly impact policy across the board.

[3] In my opinion, it is not a policy problem. It is a problem caused from the US being a welfare state. It pays more to be homeless.
Because it's been just about 10 years since they figured out how to:

1) Use convolutional layers, ReLUs, and a few other tricks to ameliorate the vanishing gradient problem,

2) Perform continuous, high-dimensional stochastic gradient descent on graphics cards, and

3) Apply these things via stochastic grad-student descent to sufficiently massive datasets that even the most brute-force models and training methods (backpropagation of errors on a loss functional) can actually work.

In the meantime, the hardware for doing it has become commoditized and the software has consolidated and become standardized. So now it's A Thing in industry.

There are lots of "smarter" algorithms that almost definitely come closer to human cognition, for instance probabilistic program induction. But those aren't fast, and don't always neatly separate training from prediction: you're just not gonna be able to train those models ahead-of-time on a 10,000 image corpus inside a single week with today's hardware and software.

We need to find ways to make machine learning fast even when it's not just a bunch of matrix multiplies. Otherwise, every time we make our algorithms more interesting, we cripple ourselves computationally.
It can be clear to a newcomer that a system has problems without needing to understand everything, or even very much. Sometimes the newcomer is wrong, but a quick scan of the comments here indicate that a number of musicians agree.
Sort of related and shameless plug but I'm building a "comments as a service" application that isn't disqus. My first target market is static sites.

Check it out here: http://www.remarkbox.com
> As a rough example, in a function that's popping from some data source and pushing into a local structure as a part of some larger unit of work, wrapping your collection.append(val) would be harming readability. But if you're "enrolling" a "student" into a "class" you should be doing class.enroll(student) even if the implementation is just class.students.append(student_id)

After calling class.enrol(student), I would expect the student to be enrolled, not just added to a list of students.
Reason #1 to use Firebase (or any other reliable BAAS): it is the next logical step of cloud computing.

If you've been around long enough, you probably had to convince the IT manager of one of your corp clients that it was a better idea to host the company's website on a hosting provider's server rather than in-house. Didn't you?

The argument of shouldn't trust your data to a BAAS provider is just silly: where's your data when you rent a VPS and mount your own back-end?

Maybe Firebase was not the right choice for this particular product, but don't trash it for it.

For me, the only missing feature is full-text search, yet the workaround is not as painful.
Edward Albee, the Art of Theater No. 4 (1966)
You missed the point. iTunes is a old product holding together well.

* No doubt if iTunes was designed today it would be completely different. But as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI, and legacy products (this iTunes still supports 10 year old iPods and older?!!)

* Say iTunes failed today. No doubt the writer would say it deserved it, and the product was a failure from the beginning. But I want to emphasise that iTunes has existed for several years now and has given many hours of pleasure for many millions of users. it works well and is a success.

You are naive if you think iTunes one day will work well. It won't get better. What is going to happen with it? It is obvious. You don't have to go past Microsoft with Internet Explorer. They kept that product going for years and it was a great success. However eventually the tech aged and they replaced it with a new product, Microsoft Edge. The same will happen with iTunes.
If reading the Wikipedia page on NoSQL offered you a completely opaque and unhelpful window into how NoSQL worked, and if every tutorial and typical description of the subject seemed to assume you already understood NoSQL, then yes. It would.
Sounds interesting. I wonder how much you can simply thunk your stub 16-bit DLLs to Win32 inplementations, so please, keep sharing.

Similar approach might be a way out for running Alpha/MIPS/PowerPC NT 4.0 binaries.
Apple investigates on-campus sexism allegations, says ‘actions have been taken’
The automated restaurant from the 1960's [video]
I was younger and I thought that the right abstraction - and more specifically, the right language feature - would surely lead me to higher productivity. By invoking a certain keyword my code would magically be better in some way.

However, language features are not the only abstractions you have available. In fact, they're typically the least interesting ones you could apply to a problem - any yokel can lift code out and slap parameters, annotations, reflection, or generic type signatures on it. But to reach interesting abstractions, you have to be patient enough to do discover the shape and flow of the code over time and subsequently apply exactly the right data structures and algorithms to either reproduce the same shapes in an abridged form, or different shapes that achieve the goal more efficiently.

So when I position myself as anti-DRY, which I often do now, I'm saying, don't succumb to the thinking that just shovelling things around and slightly repackaging them will add up to what you wanted. An actually useful abstraction cuts so deep that it may amount to a different thing altogether. The language features are there to solve very straightforward situations that are known to reoccur time and again. Do not use them in clever ways.
Your first point is known as the Rule Of Three:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_progra...
I thought I understood the article author to be saying that employment will typically increase overall as a result of immigration -- but not necessarily total employment among the non-immigrants.
I probably failed to understand what you described but recently found out about Nikola[1] while looking for publishing solution supporting Org mode.

It does support multiple input formats and at least Jinja2 and Mako for templating:

- https://getnikola.com/handbook.html#supported-input-formats

1. https://getnikola.com/
Every time someone makes the comment "oh if America was just like Europe and had X number of days off and relaxed attitudes towards work and a strong work life balance etc", I feel obliged to point out that there's a large majority of people in this country who A) Do not like being told we should be more like Europe and B) Don't mind the 5 day work week and have just as much joy and happiness as anyone. Not to mention the abysmal state many European countries and economies have found themselves in. While they were taking their siesta, the USA was busy being the largest economy in the world.
Working 80 hour days, 9 days a week. Gotta make all of our goals in crunch.
Ive been trying to make Sandra.snow work for me but it seems to be so focused on azure and ssg-as-a-service that I can't figure out the simple parts.
Apple's jet black iPhone 7 is its cheapest trick yet
Keynes famously predicted we'd be working much less by now due to increased productivity, but that hasn't happened yet and probably never will for the same reason we still have to work five days a week.
Monoids, everywhere
Building Sourcegraph - A large-scale code search engine in Go (2014)
I think Horizon is very interesting, but keep in mind it's still very early. As they mentioned on the blog "Horizon is still under heavy active development. In response to user feedback and lessons we learned from building our own applications with Horizon, we’re revisiting many of our early architectural decisions. You can expect to see a fair amount of churn in the coming months as we continue to overhaul key parts of the Horizon stack."
Every bank that existed before 1960 starting with ancient Greek temple depositories all the way through the first "official" banks of 12th century Venice.
I don't think the author was referring to transposition there. I think that was about leaving the notes on the staff the same but just changing the key signature. This is done sometimes as a novelty, and the best example is changing something from a major key to a minor key or vice versa.

The article has a link to a recording of Für Elise in a major key [1], and there are many similar renditions of other pieces around. You could in principle do this with any of the seven modes, not just major and minor.

As for notes outside the scale, it seems like these key-signature-changing compositions typically keep them the same (like the D# in Für Elise).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-rZD2AsHbI
Isn't America 108th of 140 countries by happiness index.
I learned it finding that the feeling I get from it is slightly overwhelmed, mostly because there seems to be so many new things coming up and so much is in flux. I found it worthwhile nonetheless as it's useful for some things and Node is kind of cool actually.

I get a fragmented energy from JS and a more integrated energy from, say, Python.
I believe if you search for the article title in Google, and click on the link, you can avoid the paywall.

Disclaimer: I work for an Alphabet company.
Nothing is wrong with Bruce Schneier.
It's a lot like why the QWERTY keyboard remains dominant.
> Also, this notation has a slight problem. That problem is that sheet music is terrible.

> This has got to be some of the worst jargon and notation for anything, ever.

I hear it bandied around in these articles that music notation is awful. Can someone explain to me why? I'm not much of a musician, but I can work my way through sheet music if necessary, or write it when I want to. I don't remember what it was like to learn to read and write music so I'm not going to understand why it's so bad just by thinking about it.

First of all, the lines and spaces make a ton of sense to me. When you're playing, reading, or writing a piece, you spend most of your time in a key with a diatonic scale. Maybe you're thinking about the chords: I, vi, ii, V7. The lines and spaces are great for giving you that kind of information. I guess this "completely obscures the relationship between the pitches". I guess that's the case if you forget what key you're playing in. The alternative would be to make the staff fully chromatic, but that sounds like it has a bunch of disadvantages for most music.

The chromatic staff (http://musicnotation.org/) looks terrible to me, since it spreads out the notes farther. I've already memorized all of the diatonic scales, and now the diatonic scales are jumping around, and the staff covers a shorter interval so you get more of those 8va or 15ma.

Hummingbird (http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/) seems like classical notation, just with more redundancy and the symbols changed around a little bit. Maybe it's better but it's a minor improvement at best.

Clairnote (http://clairnote.org/) looks the worst of them all, with half-steps being half-way between lines and spaces. It looks like a recipe for making mistakes and misreading music.

I'm not about to say that it's easy to read music notation, just that the notation seems to have a reasonable amount of logic to it. The idea that somehow it's the notation that's terrible and music itself would be easier to understand or play if we just had better notation--I don't buy it. Maybe someone could convince me.

(Addendum: If you think the chromatic scale is the "right" scale for notating most music, as in "Chromatic staff" or "Clairnote", as an exercise... why do you think that the chromatic scale is correct? Is it because it represents both sets of keys on the piano or the frets on a guitar? Is it because of the mathematical relationship between the notes? My counterargument, against the chromatic scale, is presented by Bobby McFerrin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk)
> 2. Learn your intervals

> 4c. Get a good feel for common jumps

i think that's why the current system works so well. most musicians have intervals burned into their muscles. to use an excel reference, reading R1C1 from the staves is much faster than reading A1, because you can read R1C1 from any line in the staves.
Well temperament is not the same as equal temperament. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament

The whole point of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier music is that tunes transposed to different keys sounded different, so you needed to compose the music specifically for each key.

There’s some ongoing musicological debate about the details, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tempered_Clavier
Interesting objection. To my eye it read as relatively humble and playfully thoughtful.
Oh, you're right.

I still think there should be some kind of iOS device management on Mac (for backups and old-fashion-sync), but I'm not the first person to call for it to be overhauled and split out into a seperate app (iSync anyone?)
I think you're mostly right, trying to apply European solutions to American problems is not necessarily a good idea, just like trying to apply American solutions to European problems is not necessarily a very good idea.

The nationalist slur at the end of your comment was totally unnecessary though.
On the science side of things, Vi Hart put together just an excellent video that goes over harmonics, the overtone series, and why 440 Hz and 880 Hz sound so "indescribably similar" to this blog author.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_0DXxNeaQ0
> nobody has managed to propose a better one

A new notation system will need to be a lot better to justify the change, because there is also a lot of value in compatibility with everything that already exists.

I'm not sure a sufficiently better system exists, because as you say, the traditional notation works. It has its quirks and rough corners, but music is complicated enough that any system would probably have similar imperfections.
Number two is why I use it. My site has about 2300 pages and regenerating the whole thing when I tweak one part or another of the basic template or change themes is less than two seconds. Extraordinarily fast and encourages experimentation at least for me. Maybe folks with better front end skills wouldn't care but it's great in my experience
You can't debate nutters. "professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers" are clearly not bullshit jobs. They are precisely how products and resources are allocated, produced, and sold. That entire bottom paragraph from finance to health services are vastly important in an advanced economy. He seems to want us to go back to being farmers. What a quack.
>But as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI, and legacy products (this iTunes still supports 10 year old iPods and older?!!)

The UI changes so much with each release that I have no clue how to navigate any more, and don't care to learn because I'll have to relearn it all again in 12-24 months. There is no consistency, and legacy to uphold, except perhaps a legacy codebase.
> You missed the point.

No he didn't.

> iTunes is a old product holding together well.

No it's not, it's a terrible product and always has been.

> You are naive if you think iTunes one day will work well.

He doesn't think that. In fact, the title of the article states the exact opposite.

> What is going to happen with it? It is obvious.

Yes, which is the whole point of the article.
If anyone is interested in learning to read music, I've been slowly building a tool to practice: http://sightreading.training/

source is here (built in react, es6): https://github.com/leafo/mursicjs

It's still lacking a lot (like rhythm), but the different generators definitely give my brain a workout. It works best if you hook up a midi keyboard.
If it's the minority that are drama creators, isn't it more reasonable to think that in most cases it probably is discrimination, then?

Your comment really seems to be an attempt to turn that presumption and balance on its head.
When you spend as much time talking about felony convictions for those that Snowden unmasked instead of hemming and hawwing as you have all over this topic, I'll feel a lot less comfortable calling you a snivelling pro-establishment equivocator.
Forgot to add that with the success of the bundle, they made a post with a great set of resources for beginners:
https://www.yoyogames.com/blog/392

There's also their 'learn' section with youtube vids that you follow along to in order to make space shooters, platformers, etc.:
https://www.yoyogames.com/learn
I think the "completely obscures the relationship between the pitches" is more about the relationship to the tonal than anything else. A note a full step above the tonal sounds the same in any key. When first glancing at a piece of music, the relationship is obscured; to tell something is a perfect fifth from the tonal, you first need to recognize the tonal.
>>3. If there is problem of understanding we embrace the opposite as a being of equal value with the capability to contribute and grow. We realize that we don't yet know everything. That we even can't know everything because everything can change. So we engage with each other in a quest to discover how we can overcome the problems we face.

I have a small doubt about it. On its face, your proposition seems quite attractive (in fact, as a liberal I always try to live by it) but in some circumstances it is outright dangerous.

To elaborate: Yes, we don't know everything, yes, we may not even know everything but still we have to manage our existence and our survival. So we cannot just indefinitely and naively apply the above mentioned principle of "If there is problem of understanding we embrace the opposite as a being of equal value with the capability to contribute and grow". To some extent we may allow the opposition to expand and we (as liberals) will accommodate some of their demands. But there has to be a recoprocating response of accommodation from the other side. We can wait for "certain amount of time" for the opposition to respond to our calls, but if our very survival and our very values are at stake, we cannot keep on waiting and accommodating the opposition indefinitely.

So, I suggest the following, to continue with your suggestion:

>>One technique is Quine's [1] semantic ascent: instead of talking in terms that lead to conflict let's talk about the terms and find some common ground and understanding.

I agree that causing unnecessary conflicts is bad. But raising points regarding doubts about something is not only not bad it is required.

So we must raise at least the following points, w.r.t. Islam, for public discussion:
Who is considered as innocent in Islam? Is a kaafir (infidel) an innocent in Islam (i.e. according to Islamic scriptures)? What about abrogated verses in the Quran? [1] What is Islam's view on homosexuals?

We can begin by asking these questions, and let us see if the other side at least allow these issues to be discussed publicly?

[1] http://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Abrogations_in_the_Qur%27a...
> There are lots of "smarter" algorithms that almost definitely come closer to human cognition

Source?
Corporate Executives Are Making Way More Money Than Anybody Reports
If it weren't for unions we'd all still be working Saturdays. But we all know unions are only for the good for nothing & the lazy.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/...
The Man Behind Right Side Broadcasting
You know what he is asking, answer the question or don't.

>>The fact that it was people like Bruce Schneier who got access to the documents [...] is a big part of my problem with the process...

Clarify.
I liked it so I pitched in. Too lazy to make an account, though, so I put it in a gist [1].

[1] https://gist.github.com/anonymous/a22380f8c37b22dba03606e368...

EDIT: now that I think of it, Ctrl-R is really the killer app of bash/readline and it's saved me many more keystrokes than the word/line delete or cursor motion keys.
Scott Walker, John Doe Files and How Corporate Cash Influences American Politics
Having spent a month with Spacemacs, to give it a shot, and returning back to Vim, I've been craving some of the Spacemacs innovations. Unfortunately, we can't get elisp, which is a big selling point of Emacs for me, but Spacemacs' narrowing search menus, following SPC, and its community-configured layers make it often enjoyable to adopt a new configuration.

It comes at a cost though, the abstraction. Many say "the Spacemacs source is so readable; if I want to tweak something, I can just find what I want and go from there." In practice, I have never found this the case (likely since I've used Emacs for only 2 months) and I don't imagine I'd find it the case with SpaceVim/SpaceNeoVim either, even after having used Vim for half a decade. As a result, I consider these projects to be a more robust vim-sensible, which is a reasonable starting point, or common point, for new users, users who want to share a single configuration, or users who don't desire absolute control and just want some features to work (i.e. everyone but power-users). Fortunately, that suits a lot of people. More power to them and good luck to SpaceNeovim.
To me there is no sport that better exemplifies this idea than curling. To the naive observer it just looks like sliding stones down a sheet of ice. But when you understand the game, and level that professionals are able to play at, the strategy and depth of thought involved is simply astounding. It is like chess on ice.