skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The $150 Build-It-Yourself Computer for Kids
An HNer posted this, his creation (https://videocyborg.com), in the past month. September happens to be a month where I had to endure a slow home connection most of the time so, when in the odd cafe, it was nice to have the service so I could watch videos later (at home).
Did they explain why they switched?

Not that I'm complaining. Love Python, dislike JS being everywhere.
Ask how many people have been fired. I like to think the people I have are all very good because I fire all the bad ones. Much better to weed out because of on the job performance than select on the basis of some poor proxy for on the job performance.
I find it interesting that when watching old movies, few got the communications networks of the future right (edit: meaning that they are always behind the curve. We've advanced a lot more than expected). Other than perhaps "Ghost in The Shell".

But on the other end, we have lots of movies expecting much more from us on the 'space' end of things. Many movies that occur in space have us already having permanent moon bases in the timeline.

"Seveneves" by Neil Stephenson mentions our modern communications software at one point in the book, how it alters our brains, and how future civilizations avoided the same fate intentionally. However, I'm not about to make a causality assessment between our communications software and our lack of advancement in space (or any other scientific/technical endeavor for that matter).
>He found his own file and was astounded by the information they had on him. His friends, his work, his habits. Photos of himself going about his business. His social circles. His friends were equally shocked by the collection of the most trivial details.

Facebook has all of that and way more. They even know which sites you visit when you're not on Facebook (think Like buttons and logins and various JS libraries that your browser might request as you browse around the web).
i think in a near future, big corporations will handle their own bitcoins to transfer money between countries
In some ways HN is designed to combat this. You need to "earn" downvotes with contributions, and the sites UX is designed in a way to slow down low effort comments, and to make comments sit for a bit before allowing replies (with workarounds if needed).

The things that aren't features (like the lack of notifications) also help.
Stupid self-driving car didn't turn the thrusters on and jump over the car running the red light.
Not really sure why this is an article.
What makes you think I'm trolling? I like the idea of space travel as much as the next person; I just remain unconvinced that colonizing Mars or even deep space really solves any existential problems for humanity beyond... providing more space. There's nothing radical about not believing that space travel is an answer to anything in and of itself. Apparently there's something deeply wrong for not agreeing with Elon Musk, yet nobody has stepped up to say anything except "troll".

Seriously now, what's troll-like about thinking that there's more promise in improving the human being than in colonizing Mars? If anything, diverting resources to improving the human hardware might get us to Mars faster. Granted, I'm not sure I'd want to go there, but something like Mars could become much more like visiting a national park once you don't have to worry about things like oxygen, radiation, extreme temperatures, etc.
I missed most of the livestream. Why did they just close it? I thought it was possible to simply go back on it. Did they not want people to do that before editing it first?
Want to help fight blacklisting in the tech community?
> Spirituality alone won't help you survive winter, regardless of how developed your mind is.

It's funny that you would say that - you may want to take a quick look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6XKcsm3dKs

(The main site is: http://www.icemanwimhof.com/)
Mars is sexy and looks like a place --- people can see the pictures from the Mars rovers and imagine themselves being there. It's got weather and wind and interesting landscapes. It's featured in myths and legends for so long that it has a special place in people's heart. I can totally see it being used as the end goal of a fairly long plan.

The Moon's not very sexy. It's all dusty blacks and greys. Everyone knows it's a dead rock, we've already been there, and public consciousness is dominated by the Apollo program pictures of astronauts in gigantic, bulky spacesuits.

(This is mostly perpetrated by NASA unaccountably not sending any decent rovers to the Moon. Even the most recent lander, China's Chang'e, deliberately landed in the most boring place they could find. There aren't any interesting pictures of the moon because we haven't been anywhere interesting.)

ISRU's hard there, too. There's water ice you can mine, but carbon? I don't know where you'd get that.

But... if I were building a water ice mining plant destined for Mars, I'd want to test it somewhere. The Moon's a good place. So now I've landed an ITP ship with a mining rig. I'm going to load it with scientific instruments, too. And scientists. In fact, I might as well land two; it's good practice for Mars. And we're mining water, so we might as well use it, and help test the recycling systems. After all, the Moon's close enough that you can dash back to Earth in an emergency; it's the ideal place. We've got two ships; let's use one to recycle the crew on the other, and leave it there long term; there's plenty of interesting science to do, and it's all excellent practice.

So I'd be really surprised if a long-term presence on the Moon didn't sneak into this plan by the back door. And then if a carbon source were to be discovered in large enough quantities for meaningful ISRU, then sourcing methane from the moon would slot neatly in.
I don't understand the abject lack of imagination, or optimism, or whatever it is, that makes some people believe that mildly complicated engineering challenges are somehow impossible. Do you think no one in SpaceX has thought about this for more than five seconds?

Obviously it's not completely trivial to sustain humans on Mars, but there is literally no reason to believe we couldn't accomplish it using current levels of technology, to say nothing about whatever we're going to invent over the next fifty years.

Keeping humans alive on Mars starting from now is vastly easier to comprehend than putting a man on the moon starting from 1950. I wonder how many armchair pessimists there were for the space program back then.
It is one of the best things engineered I have seen for a long time.
Facilities for re-supply are so close and economical there is no incentive to make them self-sustaining. But it could be done.
deploy bot sucks btw...
It strikes me you need to slice him thin and use a lot of glue and even then I doubt you could build much more than a big yurt.

Maybe I need to read the article more carefully.

(A little more seriously the idea of finding the Venn overlap point between Good At, Love Doing, Adds Value is nice. Does not help me find my next big idea but at least is a filter)
What would you do with such a mentor?
Seriously, this 1000x. if we are going to survive the next millennia, we need to get off this rock.
And how do you protect yourself from radiation on Mars, given its thin atmosphere and lack of magnetic field?
You could have just said "I don't like Javascript" and ended the post there.
It'd be nice to have a TL;DR bot on HN, at least for the more clickbait-titled articles (not saying this is one).
Agreed. The drop shadow needs to be swapped between the two.
The linguistic patterns that you mentioned (parts of speech, etc.) are too simplistic to describe language's idiosyncrasy and they ignore language acquisition.

Machine learning and data-driven methods require models with millions of parameters. Linguistic theories have traditionally not used such models.
One advantage of using a dynamic language like Python is that you don't necessarily have to update the client code to be able to use new functions. You can just generate the necessary code during runtime after loading the specification from a web API. I believe this is what google does with their gcloud tools (and that's probably also the reason why it sometimes feels slow to react).
Yes, you can probably do this using Node as well, but Python comes installed on a lot of Unix based systems nowadays, as far as I can tell Node does not.
I agree, but the tension is healthy. HN wouldn't work if everyone was overwhelmingly positive or overwhelmingly negative. We need skeptics as much as we need optimists to keep our sense of reality in check. The 90's Dotcom Bubble was arguably driven by unchecked optimism.
I didn't mean "special" in a practical way but in a "spiritual" (for lack of a better term, not necessarily tied to religion) one.

We have no chance of achieving that if we keep on endlessly postponing each step towards it. And as far as rocky space dots go, Mars looks incredibly close to Earth.
With so much that happens on this planet I agree. We're doing an appalling job of keeping our only planet viable or leaving a better place for our children. Our species is not fit to be let out. But...

On space and Mars we must agree to disagree. Apart from the exploration and new discoveries that may arise from another planet, like the space race of the 60s many new technologies will arise. By introducing research on other planets (as we have done on ISS) there'll be a lot of basic and blue sky research that's hard to fund down here as it's not thought commercial. Some will be commercial, some might help save the planet. We don't know what we might discover, but it'll be vastly more than staying here arguing about fracking.

That commerce is getting us there and NASA hasn't in 50 years is telling. But it's as telling that there's a willingness to fund ridiculous wars on drugs and terror, and ill-conceived adventures in many places than develop the species with global missions to our home system, or alleviating hunger. I suspect for a fraction of the cost. If Mars were a threat we'd have been there decades ago.

Having an escape route, or at least the start of viable interplanetary travel, even if most wont get to use it might be handy too.
What's the point of a private blockchain? Who are you competing against with your hash rate? And if you are keeping it private to stay in control, why choose a technology designed to not let you stay in control?

I've heard buzz about "enterprise blockchains" several times, but I still don't understand what this brings that an authenticated REST service on top of an SQL database doesn't.
>But increasingly, it seems like the real cream of the crop are saying "companies that run these kinds of interviews are too rigid for me to be willing to work for them".

I do not believe this for a second. The real cream of the crop comes into these interviews, passes them with ease and sometimes even enjoy the process. The worst companies I've seen had low hiring standards, they let any fool join the company and then that fool will go on to interview other fools and lets them join. It's like a cancer and rejecting a few potentially good candidates is worth preventing it.
All of these platforms offer a free trial and a lot of products have free tiers. I'd check them out and decide for yourself.

(I work for Google Cloud and am happy to answer questions about GCP)
It's interesting that google is now better at planning what you should do than you are.
> it is better to rely on ML than on low-quality theory.

Isn't ML (and especially deep learning i.e. neural networks) itself a low-quality theory? From what I understand, nobody really knows why it works so well but uses it anyway.
Old programmers, like the person who taught me, are very good to have in any team. They know something that all of us "youngsters" don't.

- This has been done before
- [New technology] is a fad and will die out
- Being "cleaver" isn't making something un-maintainable
- Here are all the cases that you need to look out for. I've done this before
- A replacement isn't an alternative and a replacement is feature complete

When I get to the point where I start a company, I don't think that I'll ever form a team without at least one 40+ member. It's a waste of resources to do otherwise. Saves you a lot of time and energy of fixing mistakes when someone on your team can predict all of the mistakes you will be making.
I'd argue they are consistent in that every candidate who made it past resume screening is given equal opportunity to partake in a well documented process. Whether or not the process itself is effective is a different question.

Sure, interviewers themselves are inconsistent (accents, prejudice, interview difficulty, etc), but that's not something that can be fully mitigated when every candidate gets a different set of interviewers.

Again, I'm not defending the practice and would just like to have a constructive discussion.
Ariel also doesn't like this clause in the React license:

The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, if you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) initiate directly or indirectly, or take a direct financial interest in, any Patent Assertion: (i) against Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, (ii) against any party if such Patent Assertion arises in whole or in part from any software, technology, product or service of Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, or (iii) against any party relating to the Software.
So now there's YouTube app (which doens't allow me to listen to a talk offline on an airplane or background or pay for YouTube Red), YouTube Music app (which I'm not allowed to use at all), YouTube Gaming (which has an UI and UX build by a madman). Then there's AndroidTV version of YouTube app which has severe feature limitations and probably some others as well. I don't really like to be negative, but it doesn't seem that Google has any idea what to do with YouTube or any interest of expanding it to EU and the rest of the world. Not to mention the rampant catastrophe that's ContentID police system that's benefiting only large corporate abusers with no recourse.

So I wonder, will I perhaps be able to watch talks and other videos on an airplane now using YouTube Go? Which subset of functionality will work on this soon-to-be-abandoned app? Does it even address any of the issues that content creators, Google and us users have with the platform?
My favorite news app of all time was Circa which was broken into bite-sized facts. You could even subscribe to story and receive notifications when a new bit of information arose.

Unfortunately they never charged money and it disappeared about a year ago :(
MySQL Product Manager here. Any feedback on the Storage Engine API?
It's not going through YC, but Purple (https://getpurple.io) has done a good job, IMO, of having good coverage in a novel way (through facebook messages)
It's a pretty limited use case, unless you think that people tend to wander the African bush with chainsaws and elephant guns just because... reasons? You'd have to quite literally go well out of your way and leave civilization behind to be targeted.

Maybe you can tell me what exactly you suspect would go wrong in this limited scenario?
F-35 ejector seat modified to stop it breaking pilots' necks. Which is nice
> But on the other end, we have lots of movies expecting much more from us on the 'space' end of things.

"Expected" may be the wrong word. People that have the capacity to travel through space but basically interact in familiar ways may just be a better fit for the medium than people who interact in unfamiliar ways.
> I can't agree more. I've seen HN degrade into that kind of discussion over the last 2 years and it really disappoints me.

You say it's "degraded", but it's more likely that HN's audience has diversified as it's grown, and therefore it's less likely for you to agree with any given comment.
> send a few people to die in a metal box millions of miles away

I wish I had this much talent at putting a negative spin on things. You could make a cure for cancer sound like the bubonic plague.
Really good work - thank you for post.
HP’s DRM sabotages off-brand printer ink cartridges with self-destruct date
I created an account just to post this.

The Q&A was the worst Q&A I have ever seen. Truly awful. I usually am a pretty calm person but watching that made my blood boil. This venture could well be one of the most important things to happen to humanity, and those were the questions that people asked.
The questions were awful at all levels. Featured self promotion, ignorance and plain stupidity.

I just needed to get this out there. Seriously, what the actual f.
https://blog.whatsapp.com/529/Setting-the-record-straight is all I know about
This is a good post up until the rehash of JavaScript's sins.
People also harnessed that technique to playing music on a radio via RF noise, before sound cards were cheap. The thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11203951 point to some examples.
I refuse to take these tests today. Let's have a conversation, break down a problem, look at on a white board. If you want me to take your fucked up bullshit coding test, pay me my contracting rate for it.

I hate these things. They're shit.
Knight Foundation's single focus is media and journalism. For example, MapBox came out of a $200k grant they provided. I'm sure there are a lot of developers and start-ups they have or are currently are funding who can use more support. You might want to talk to them about what people are doing in the field.
I think everyone agrees with you on that. However, I think most people (here) also understand that doing that will take some political heavy lifting. Something on the order of the affordable healthcare act.

If you figure out a way to fix the patent system so no more stupid patents can be registered I'd be all ears :-)
Is anyone using TypeScript with React Native? I'd be interested to see how easy that is to integrate.
Fires burn too fast for this analogy to work. Even in the worst climate change cases, we have a very long time to work out how to get off the planet.

It would be great to avoid, but moving people out of coastal cities certainly has a precedence, and there's plenty of land in Kansas, the Taiga, etc. Life would be tougher than today, but it's not an existential thread.
Sorry, I must have edited that out when I put it to screen.

The estimate appeared in Facebook's 2014 10-K filing.
The fact that HP can't get a handle on their service/returns budget isn't their customers' fault. Having problems with things like after-market parts, 3rd party repairs, and home-spun modifications is not a problem unique to HP, or printers. If HP was more interested in reducing their service/RMA costs than forcing someone who owns a $55 printer to buy $40 ink refills, they would have developed an electronic tamper indicator rather than a kill switch.
You're right - a $3k k80 is generally inferior for most DNN applications than a $1k Titan X. The primary reasons that big companies use K80s have to do with achieving high computational density, and licensing issues, more than the performance of a single GPU. Sticking 8 Titan X boards in a machine is a bummer job if you want to pack them closely together. But for academic researchers, a quad Titan X box is pretty solid and quite affordable.
Does Mars colonisation increase the chances of Earth becoming (more of) a corporate dystopia? If not, then if there is a chance of a Mars colony which supports your values what are you losing by the attempt? [edit: this is awkwardly phrased ... it is like a free roulette shot, it may or may not pay off, but if it's "free" the net value is positive.]

And I also think if colonisation ever was big enough to absorb a significant (i.e. 5%+) portion of Earth gross product (i.e. the sum of GDPs) then it could also improve life on Earth by improving the effective ROI of the capital deployed elsewhere.
Sorry. I just found it amusing, that here we are, using the English alphabet (a descendant of the original Phoenician alphabet) talking as if phonetics as a reading aid is a new phenomena. But the whole reason the Phoenician alphabet became so popular 3200 years ago was it's use of symbols representing spoken sounds.
Scientists Demonstrate Long Distance Quantum Communication
I have no idea why I am being compared to Donald Trump.

> Being old is not an indicator of success.

I didn't say it was. A history of success is an indicator of being successful though.

> You seriously seem to live in some wonderland where the quality of a candidate just magically appears out of thin air.

You seem to love in a wonderland where a candidate's aptitude can magically get turned into a score on HackerRank.

> They don't want the job badly enough.

Yeah, fuck them for not wanting to waste time on your startup that will likely bomb in a year. How dare these people want a personal life.

> I routinely test older candidates who can't program anywhere outside of the little box they made for themselves, and freak out when they see a programming language that isn't the one they've used for the last 20 years. Is that inhumane?

And I've met hotshot new grads who think they're the best thing since static typing, yet can't benefit from years of experience in how software is made in the real world.

> Gayle is awesome. Cracking the Code Interview is a really great book, and I credit it for getting me through some of my interviews. Everyone here poking at her are people shooting the messenger for delivering the inconvenient truth.

I only now realized the user who I am going back and forth with elsewhere in this thread was the author of these books. I am pointing out the flaws in these types of interviews and how they are very overvalued. The book's ability to get you through interviews means nothing about how those interviews select for people who can do the job, only that the book was designed to help you get through interviews.
Nice idea, but I assume anyone recruiting for space travel is going to insist on people who are very fit and in 100% good health, which usually means fairly young people. Certainly there could be some older people, but probably not a majority.
Unless I'm wrong, the only listed alternatives are both paid and closed source. Xamarin (requires VS Pro) or Appcelerate (requires $480-$1200/year/developer).
Your error is confusing "I can" with "people can".
Definitely like the food and farming addition. Basic sustenance is still a very important issue for a significant portion of the human population. Worth investing resources into.
To be fair, the Supreme Court's standard is pretty confusing!

As to your example, I suspect he answer is still "no." It's not enough to just "add something" to the abstract idea--the thing you add has to have an "inventive concept." Field of use limitations ("quicksort to sort birthdays") or post-solution activity ("quicksort then you do something else") do not make the abstract idea patentable. Routine activity--and arguably, adapting algorithms to different data formats is routine in programming--aren't sufficient either.

One thing that's left unsaid in the cases but that matters in practice is that the patent has to "seem like a real invention" that produces a useful result. Courts deny that they do this, but post-Alice there has been a tendency to inject elements of obviousness and novelty into the issue of patentability. If your algorithm doesn't seem like it was hard to come up with, or it just produces numbers that are not directly useful to the end user, it's going to get labeled "abstract idea."

E.g. consider an algorithm for distributed reference counting. That'll get dinged as an abstract idea. However, if you come up with a way to manage image/video resources in a distributed cache that happens to use a distributed reference counting algorithm, that might pass muster.

Finally, the law has changed a lot in the last 6-7 years. But there are still lots of patents out there from back when the law was laxer that are getting litigated (and often invalidated in light of Alice).