skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What people choose to do with their person wealth is important, when they use their wealth to influence elections.
D3 V4 – What's new?
Software doesn't stay forked all that long in practice, usually, because maintaining your fork is much more effort than creating it, and making your popular is more effort still.

I would expect the same dynamics to be true here - yes, there will be plenty of short-lived forks, but hardly anyone will actually notice them; and community will effectively "bless" one fork, or maybe a few major forks for particularly debated issues, as the official one, and that's what most people will see, and where most activity will take place.
I agree with the conclusion, but do not think you can get their just by looking at how people would pay for a $400 emergency.

For example, in my financial situation, I would borrow to cover an unexpected $400 expanse. However, that is because I have a prior agreement with my parents that they would loan me (at 0% interest) to cover unexpected expenses, so I have no reason to keep a surplus of money fully liquid when it could be earning better returns elsewhere.

My parents, for their part, base their savings on the assumption that they would cover unexpected expanses from their line of credit secured against their house. This, again, is not because they do not have the money to set aside for emergencies, but because they think that the opportunity cost of keeping the money liquid outweighs the cost of occasionally paying on credit. As it happens, they could pay for a $400 emergency out of pocket, but that is mostly because they are too rich to micromanage at the $400 dollar level.

With respect to retirement savings, I do not think that stat is as bad as it first appears (although I do think the typical American is underrepresented for retirement). The basic financial story is:

1) take on debt for big, lifetime purchases (education and a house).

2) Pay of debt

3) Accumulate wealth

4) Retire and live off of accumulated wealth

Given this, it is not unreasonable that young people would have no money set aside for retirement, because it might be more efficient to use that money to pay off debt.
For me it was mostly playing games on-line. Having a clan / team where you talk with your peers every day is pretty cool.

I also took English classes for several years when I was young.
“Across the country, wages are flat. Americans get paid less today than 10 years ago”

His solution has been to advocate increased immigration. Yep, wages are flat, lets bring more people so more people can compete for fewer jobs.
Maybe we just have different perspectives.

I think it is safe to assume that Cunningham is familiar with the concept of static pages, and presumably has his reasons. Accepting that decision and seeing what comes of it seems better to me than all this arm-chair quarterbacking.

There's no lack of people who aren't doing the work but have strong opinions on how it should be done.
I speak, read and write english (my second language) fluently although not perfectly correct.

I started thinking (when studying) and even dreaming (when I dreamt about programming, that is :-) in English before graduating because most of my books etc where in English.

In addition to reading lots and lots, one of the small things that helped me a lot was 10 years back or so I used to have an FF extension that let me doubleclick on any word on a webpage to get TFD definition of the word highlighted.

This took the effort out of expanding my vocabulary as I could look things up without breaking flow.

I still sometimes look up words that I haven't seen before although not as frequently as before.

(My problem is for a lot of words, esp. those I don't use at work I can read and write them but I might never have heard them.)
When reasonable criticism by highly qualified statisticians is dismissed as terrorism, perhaps it is possible that abusive behavior by critics is not the issue at hand.
Thanks for the flexibility (for context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12716662).
Syncbase is the attempt to simplify it and abstract a lot of it. It's API is much more straightforward and is fairly easy to work with.

Part of the complexity is that it's solving like 15 major problems at the same time in an interconnected way. It's also solving them for people like google which means there are a lot of requirements for all the things it needs to do.

Because it does new things, in addition to old things in new ways, there's a steep learning curve for all of its concepts. I totally agree that doesn't mean it couldn't be more elegant and "simple," but the win32/nextstep analogy isn't fair as they were far more similar than vanadium is to anything else. Vanadium is like a hybrid of (to use existing concepts) dns/http/ssl/json/bluetooth/nosql/ntp/kerberos and more. When you put it all together there isn't a lot of existing references or cognitive frames to help you "get it" righ away.
Politics aside. What does it say about his judgement to continue investing in something that is statistically on track to fail. Not only that, but its also a toxic brand to attach yourself to.

Or do we just put this in the "expensive new hobby" section and leave it at that.

----

Update: I want to hijack my own comment to ponder something.

As someone with no money and no influence, I find it hard to think about how to use money to buy influence as part of a grand plan, like many of the comments here are suggesting.

As a layman, I think in simple terms like discrimination, racism, sexism, etc... and my belief in fighting against all those things.

Am I short-sighted? Is there some greater human social structure that I am not aware of that can only be achieved by making such calculated investments? Despite all the immediately negative rhetoric.
This statement is absurd.

Hacker News has a very, very, very well-established history of political pieces. Everything from EU politics, tax policy, candidate elections, and law enforcement practices.
Not for this survey though. It looks like it is purely about money in a savings account, which is a pretty poor measure.
Earth being 'in the way' causing fewer meteor strikes doesnt account for the differences between the near and far sides of the moon [1]. It's a fairly small effect apparently.

Of course, any moon base would probably be on the near side anyways to communicate with earth.

[1] https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-two-faces-of-the-m...
Good job there
Isn't having two distinct servers one for auth and one for business logic too much for small start ups / services?

I can see the benefit when scaling but starting with this design seems to be a little bit of an overkill / harder to manage? Care to elaborate?

Cheers
I would say so if he's a YC advisor. He doesn't have to justify his actions but it would be interesting to understand or at least try to understand his point of view. My guess is it has to do with taxes.
From what I've seen in everyone's work is that Go's STD libs are amazing... for the the exact use case that Google has needed.

When you have to deviate from doing anything that Google/Pike would consider "acceptable" for what they would see as the "plebeian programmer" the STD libs aren't built for it. I'd not say it's a side effect of the language (not even the fact that it's lacking generics). I'd just say it's age. It's too young to be refined.
Wasn't aware of that. Sam's political views appear to be directly opposite of Peter's then if his Twitter is any indication.
He probably evaluated that if there's a 1/n chance of Trump getting elected, he'll be able to get favors worth $1.25m * k, with k > n.
He's making a wise investment decision - if Trump wins he will probably gain a lot in favors. If Trump loses, he will lose a little bit of money and some goodwill of some people. I'm sure he can live with that. Cynical.
I'm not betting on a Trump presidency, but I'm fascinated at what the electorate is going to look like in the general. We've been basing so much of the polling on projections over 2012/2008 turnout. I would not be surprised if the final margin is within 2 points.
Where would you suggest putting liquid emergency funds?
I've used mostly JWT, the tokens with a short TTL which makes it easier to control revoking/banning in the backend.

It is really simple to set up. In the frontend it's pretty straight forward to implement logout and other common behaviors even if the token is still valid because of the TTL.
A long-time English learner here.

I'd say variety is your friend. I don't know any learner who has mastered a language by sticking to a single technique. You would do everything, maybe with varying levels of comittment - read textbooks, take classes, do flashcards, do speech shadowing, talk to native speakers, watch movies and TV programs, etc.

After becoming able to say what I want (more or less), participating online discussions in the topics I care has been useful for me. It taught me how to structure longer chunks of text to express more complex ideas - you would be surprised to see how often sentence-to-sentence translation fails (between Japanese and English, at least).

If you are starting as an adult, native-level pronunciation would be difficult to achieve, even if you invest decades into it. I have almost given up on that front, and instead am focussing on how I can make my pronunciation less misunderstood. Part of that is to pay attention to vowels and consonants I'm not good at (or to use easier-to-pronounce synonyms where possible).
> Mozilla was driven into the ground by better competition

I thought it was Microsoft's anti-competitive strategy? (bundling IE, changing the API's to break netscape, etc.)
> His solution has been to advocate increased immigration.

Which doesn't square with his candidate's rigidly anti-immigrant policy proposals.
Damn, my nights drinking with other programmers have clearly been very much wasted!
Has he spotted a political party that's to some extent going to be up for grabs over the next few years? Is the cash just so he looks like he's being loyal this election?
Rich guy. Does whatever he wants with his money. 1M is chump change for him to buy influence.
I would be more surprised if the margins are huge. I have come to expect team politics to give us close margins. I would be surprised, in either a very happy or very sad way, if instead the margins are big.
doesn't this turn Mathematica into a scripting language for Haskell?
Or maybe he just can't stand Clinton - a reasonable stance. But Trump...?
This analysis in the purest form of just best business strategy is spot on. Little risk... big upside.
I'm genuinely curious what the rational for Thiel is in doing this. He's a smart guy, but I just don't see the ROI.

At this point, it seems very unlikely that Trump will get elected. So Thiel isn't getting access to a future President.

Plus, in addition to the monetary cost of the donation there's definitely a very real reputational cost. A lot of people in SV hate Trump and are completely mystified as to Thiel's support. (Personally, I'm also confused as to how a self-described libertarian would support a candidate who opposes freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and increased government control over the internet.)
I think it's very difficult to find truly unbiased statistics on this. Every current well-known analyst has been repeatedly egregiously wrong on the matter throughout this election cycle.
I was going to say that. Katakana is basically an emphasis marker more than anything else.
Trump isn't nearly as far behind as you may think: http://graphics.latimes.com/usc-presidential-poll-dashboard/

Yes, this poll is an outlier because their methodology is very different than most other polls.

Yes, Nate Silver has a very different outlook on the election, but Nate Silver was also not very reliable during the primary season (although that is, by his admission, because primaries don't have very good polling).

If I had to make a[n extremely uneducated guess], it's because most polling is done over the phone, and I don't think "people who answer their phone when they don't recognize the number" is a very good random sampling of voters in the US.

I don't think this race is nearly as over as most people seem to believe, which is why, if you want to beat Trump, it is REALLY IMPORTANT (all caps!) that you get out and vote!
Right. So kind of like the same noise that is around the cars? Are you suggesting the cars have also been shopped in?
HN needs a +10 button
Disclaimer: I work in the lab that created Spaun.

This seems kind of similar to Spaun [0]. You use Deep Learning to get the features you want and then you do symbolic like operations on those feature vectors to accomplish reinforcement learning. At least Spaun used neurons for the rule manipulation too. I also don't believe the transfer learning claim at all, because the tasks are way too similar. Still, it's a step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned [1]. That being said, good luck find a set of general prior rules and scaling them.

[0] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1202

[1] https://medium.com/@seanaubin/why-does-ai-still-suck-and-can...
Available jobs increase with population. Additional people need more services, goods, etc. This leads to increased demand. In other words, more people are needed to produce stuff for more people.
Ask HN: What are the best ways to promote any opensource project?
How I can promote and present my open source project to the community in a nice and legal way. I mean, I do not want to advertise or spam it, and annoy others.
What bank gives you a 30 day CD at 0.75%? My bank (Bank of America) gives 0.03%.
‘The Wall Is a Fantasy’
But why is he making the donation now? That logic would have made a lot more sense when Trump's odds looked a lot better. You have to multiply the upside by its (low) probability. I also think the reputational cost is more severe than you let on: look at what happened to Brendan Eich, and his "crime" was a lot less than supporting Trump.
He isn't "rigidly anti-immigration". He is against immigration of low-skilled workers who are working low paying jobs.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/09/07/trump_c...
Hillary's not significantly different in that respect -- unless the story is surprise that Peter Thiel's not backing Gary.
True; I wonder what impact a 9 point poll-implied spread turning into 1-2 points in the ballot booth could have on future political activities by "alt right" candidates. It feels like many are treating this as a "beat Trump and save the world" situation without realizing that the underlying movement isn't likely going away. If Trump brings in a large enough group of non-voters, that will have long lasting impacts (people that start voting tend to keep voting).
If using threads means the language is asynchronous to you, every language ever invented that has threads <including php> Is asynchronous.

JavaScripts asynchronous nature is nothing like that of go/etc with threads: JavaScript is inherently single threaded with an asynchronous event loop.

As for callbacks, who mentioned 10 years ago. promises were added to the ecma script last year.

Edit:

Your message seems to be inconsistent.

Every failure or less than great situation in your favoured languages has just been fixed in the last few years.

The things you complained about in another language were fixed/removed years ago but you say it's still just as bad.
degrees aren't education. More education for all is better and not a zero some game. Everyone knowing how to read and write and program is better than only some knowing. Everyone having some basic understanding of physiology enough to know when to seek medical care is better than some not knowing.

There is a shortage of education in the world.

Same with money and wealth. Computers have been getting cheaper making everyone wealthy. I don't care that google still has more computing power than me. I care that I have a 1000x more computing power for the price I had to pay 10 years ago.

More wealth for everyone is good. Imagine if some fairy gave everyone 1gigawatt of power. It would be a net benefit to everyone.

Landlords provide a service. The state also collects property tax which is similar to rent in exchange for some services.

Lives of american poor are absolutely better than their farming ancestors.
The kara is not 空 as in empty?
You're right :). But I've also seen "disclaimer" commonly used in specifically this context (disclosing your affiliation with a company you're mentioning), which is why I use it that way. "Disclosure" would be more accurate, but that's not what people actually say.
"His solution has been to advocate increased immigration. Yep, wages are flat, lets bring more people so more people can compete for fewer jobs."

That isn't true. Peter Thiel has opposed low skill immigration.
> [Trump's] position on immigration is the opposite of the tech industry’s

Is this true? I'm not familiar with Trump's policies because it doesn't sound like he talks about them in much detail. Isn't he all for "legal immigration" and was just extremely against illegal immigration? Has he even addressed H1B or T1 Visas?

Although he has mentioned making immigration harder through intensive testing/vetting, which sounds like it could filter out some smart people arbitrarily. Having personally experienced Canada->US secondary screening most of the questions were already very arbitrary. Especially those without great social skills who can't talk their way through immigration will be at risk. That will also hurt business travel if TSA gets even more power and becomes even more aggressive.

The vagueness of it all makes it a risky bet regardless. That being said, I'm not sure what's worse, vague policy positions with just high-level strategy and no details or over-promising everything in detail and not following through on the majority of them. But I'm generally cynical about all of this stuff.
Won't fit. Max memory is 512KB. Less than an IBM PC.
Absolutely has to be a troll. EOM
Yeah, and it sounds like a lot of his issues ended up being with cgo and openssl. If he'd used the standard lib, he might not have run into many of those issues.
I'm saying neither of them suck. They both have small things "Wrong" with them that are only "Wrong" because I don't like them.

>they didn't cause significant problems

That's not a valid criticism of any feature. I'd say that the worst feature of any programming language yet has been pre and post -- and ++. Some of the nastiest bugs I've seen have come from there.

In both cases I avoid them. I only really use -- and ++ if I need to, just like ternary operators.

> Just because "other languages suck" doesn't mean php doesn't,

Ok what about other languages that are good? Python's ternary operator isn't the same as C-style languages but I still think of Python as being good.
Small chance of making it to the Supreme Court? http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_57d80d57e4b09d7a687f9b03/a... ?
Pretty much all of Thiel's investing thesis is to invest in things that are statistically on track to fail, but whose payoff if they succeed is greater than most people imagine. PayPal, Facebook - both of these were terrible ideas when they came out (along with a number of other ones that did, in fact, fail). His idea is that people consistently mis-price risk, and so investing in a portfolio where everyone else thinks it's a terrible idea but you have reason to believe it's a better idea than others suspect will give outsize returns. (Note: it doesn't actually have to be a good idea, it just has to be better than everyone else thinks it is.)

Supporting Trump fits perfectly into this: if he loses, he gets egg on his face (which most people will forget fairly soon) and may lose out on a little startup dealflow, but if he wins, he becomes the sole connection between the Presidential Administration and Silicon Valley. That's worth a lot more than $12.5M.
Where is the robot?
The article mentions that:

"There may not be one perplexity value that will capture distances across all clusters—and sadly perplexity is a global parameter. Fixing this problem might be an interesting area for future research."

There are some suggestions in the literature for fixing this. Michel Verleysen's group suggested a "multi-scale" approach:

https://www.elen.ucl.ac.be/Proceedings/esann/esannpdf/es2014...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2014.12.095 (more details in this one, but behind a paywall)

Their approach is to calculate the input probabilities using multiple perplexities and use the average. They also suggest tweaking the output probabilities, but it uses a free parameter that isn't present in the standard formulation of t-SNE (their suggested algorithm takes the same approach as t-SNE, but uses a different cost function and output weighting function).
yep. this is Thiel just playing with toys because he has left the reality tunnel the rest of us are living in. he's off in his own world now imagining ways to amuse himself.
Its unclear what Peter Thiel is supporting with this donation. This candidate is highly inconsistent. Perhaps his bet is that if this candidate is elected, it will result in chaos. A sharp, rapid upheaval will enable him to accelerate his overall agenda. Given his net worth he is insulated from the negative effects this chaos will have on everyone else. Given his net worth he, and others who support his agenda can quickly capitalize.
You've got me sucked in now. So let's assume that I work for Gitlab, and I host all of my side-work / personal projects on Gitlab. Do that mean that those projects are effectively using "company facilities or assets?"

Usually "using company time/equipment/etc." are viewed as things that you obtained via your employment with the company. But what about things owned by the company that I would have obtained via the same channels as any other customer. Does Oracle have a claim on IP created using a piece of Oracle consumer software by an Oracle employee?
Peter is free to support whoever he wants. Just because he is associated with YC, does not make his views YC's views.
A lot of software to attempt to make the boring repitition-based stuff more fun, for things like grammatical patterns and vocab. Anki (free) is my all-time favourite. Usually use a popular pre-made deck to learn what's recommended, and then have my own one going which I add a new flash-card to whenever I encounter a new word in my daily life. Review them in the evening. Something new I found out recently is that Anki has plugins [0]. AnkiStrategy [1] is currently making sure I get my daily review in.

Duolingo [2] (free) also helps with getting a grasp on basic grammar and vocab, but doesn't support many Asian languages (Vietnamese just got released and Indonesian is in progress).

Memrise [3] (free) is similar to Anki but has more of a modern, community-based app feel. A lot of great user-generated content.

Skritter [4] (subscription, phone app) helped me a lot when I was learning to write and recognise Chinese characters. They also have Japanese Kanji version.

Software-wise, I am currently learning Vietnamese, and for that using my own Anki deck (30-40 cards a day) and 5 duolingo lessons (adding new vocab to Anki). Feel like I'm making fast enough progress, but I think integrating anymore software to my daily revision routine would be too much.

Then you need a lot of interaction with people, using what you have leant in that language to attempt to communicate. I think this is the most important part and where you'll learn the most. You'll be forced to practise your listening, speaking, drawing on vocab and grammar that you know and have to put mould them into an understandable sentence. You'll make mistakes and look like a fool, but that's just part of the learning process. Try to treat it like a bit of fun, and hopefully the people you're talking to will also.

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-useful-Anki-plugins

[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1494320602

[2] https://www.duolingo.com/

[3] https://www.memrise.com/

[4] https://skritter.com/