skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> With goroutines and the like, all Go actually does is delay the inevitable point when you have to split your main process into two... It doesn't solve the problem, it just delays it...

Yes, but Go's concurrency model is far easier to reason about. "I _want_ to do this thing", and the runtime handles the _how_ and the doing. No need to draw up some IPC messaging protocol to handle trivial tasks safely. It's a language feature (ugh sounds so jingoistic). The cluster module is nothing like goroutines in concept or in practice.

You're making some mighty big assertions there, all the while disregarding the obvious weakness of a _single_threaded_ event-loop. I'm a total Node.JS fanboy since 0.2, but as was mentioned elsewhere in the comments, every language is making trade-offs: substituting shiny new concerns for it's own achilles heel.
Ask HN: Dipping my toes with artificial intelligence and what to expect? (CS)
Recently I got accepted into computer club on my faculty. I got opportunity to choose on which team I would like to be, where we would be working on projects and workshops. Before, I got my interests mainly in OS/Systems programming, I had few smaller projects, solid knowledge of C, Data structures, Memory and Assembly. (started writing my Kernel and hopefully it would grow in some smaller OS). One of the colleagues asked me why wouldn't I join Ai team, and I was like nah it is too high level and full of black magic for me. But, I do not know why, that possibility started to resonate in my head for days. Firstly I had some concerns, besides looking at some stuff and seeing all those black boxes and magic happen in ~100 lines of python code.

- I am not sure how much math is needed. And I ask that because I am not having a lot of math on my faculty. First I was chasing EE degree, finished 2 years and I got to the point where I wasn't enjoying anything except math and programming subjects. So I quit and enrolled to CS where I am now. I got really solid background during EE studies, and when I got to CS I was feeling pretty at home with it. And I do not know what to expect with math in terms of Machine Learning, Deep Learning or Neural Networks. It looks to me like a lot of linear algebra and analysis.

- What would be bigger concern to me is how much of engineering you actually do with Ai? What I liked with OSs is that it felt pretty rad to me in terms of type of work you do. Plus you could easily get interested in DevOps or Distributed Systems, and those doors would be open too. With Ai it looks like piping and manipulating data from one "thing" to another. I won't include myself in those 5% of Computer Scientists that design Algorithms and software that is used to realize all that stuff that you import in few modules and functions in your project.

Thank you on your time, I appreciate any help or advice.
That news is now more truthful than the real news.
Funny how both Hillary and Trump have son in laws who have father's who are convicted felons. Thug life!
Ask HN: How did you get consistent traffic to your website?
In the past, I have gotten spikes of traffic from reddit and HN, but this kind of traffic flattens out after a while. So I am wondering, if you have consistent traffic to your website, how did you manage to get it? Who are your referrers?
- But what really turned me on with Ai is sheer possibility. It is endless. And compared to Operating Systems it looks much more diverse and exotic. There are opportunities to try and learn new languages, especially functional ones, and that is what I am most interested and attracted to.

So I do not know what really to expect. I thought of looking at [sentdex'](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQVvvaa0QuDfKTOs3Keq_...) tutorial on ML with Python, since I am already pretty familiar with Python. Is there any book that you could recommend me to read, so I could get the grasp on what are all the possibilities in terms of Ai in Computer Science. It is very wast and young field. And I was not very attracted to it, since for the most time I was leaving that as I thought I was not smart or good enough for those kinds of things.
Spinoza's Theory of Attributes
You should give it a shot. I was rounding up, actually. There are YouTube tutorials that go from zero to animation in under 20 mins. That includes rigging.

Or don't and just bitch about elitism. Up to you!
This disgusts me.
Another theory is marriage is about economics. Combining the wealth, power, and influence of 2 families.
This is honestly the thing that is most interesting to me right now. MIPS32 has a massive embedded user base. Combined with Go's very fast GC there's some good opportunities here.
Yeah, and Yahoo's two guys in a Stanford dorm, Facebook's just some dude hacking away on a laptop and bitching about girls on LiveJournal.

Companies evolve, you know.
> My next "big" project will be a data visualization system that's probably going to need some Python, JavaScript, and some simple bash piping between the python scripts.

Unfortunately, there aren't great deductive verification tools for either Python or JavaScript.

Perhaps more importantly, there's also not a particularly good understanding of how to formally verify front-end code.

The most important property of a visualization system is something like "the visualization accurately represents the data being visualized", but in a problem domain like this, formalizing the high-level intent is probably harder than actually proving that this intent is achieved.

Additionally, the cost of throwing an exception at runtime are presumably pretty low (unlike in a control system, for example). So once you've formalized your spec, you can just check your specs at run time throw an exception/report a bug instead of or in addition to generating the possibly faulty visualization.

Are there key components of the visualization pipeline that could threaten its correctness? E.g. data reduction, interpolation, fancy graphics code, etc.? If so, I'd focus on those and come up with a good set of formal, checkable-at-runtime contracts that capture your high-level informal specification.

Alternatively, is it possible to do some computation on your output to check that it matches the input data? E.g. you could imagine counting pixels of certain colors on a heat map or pie chart and comparing that to the original data. That way you don't have to verify (or trust) all of the graphics generation code, thus significantly reducing your trusted computing base.

Saying "we have a formal mathematical description of what it means for this portion of the visualization system to be correct, and a way of checking input/output matches that description" is probably a more significant contribution than actually churning through a static verification effort.

> it'll be nice to flash and say "I used formal methods to prove this implementation" as it is going to be for an academic's project.

Are you sure this is the case? Most academics, even within CS, don't care much about formal methods.

If you're just looking to learn formal methods, then I guess it's whatever. But if you're looking to stand out, you might want to figure out what's important to your stake holders and focus on that. I'd be pleasantly surprised if the answer to that question is formal methods.
I don't think it's really in Apple's interest to conform. The status quo means developers have to build native apps.
And now javascript is free without int support!
As a concrete example, Kubernetes (0.5M first party lines of code, ~0.7M libraries) can take about 2-3 minutes to compile on a 2013 MBP on Go 1.7. So probably around 200-300kloc you'd start to say "this feels slow".
The human brain has proved highly adaptable despite the increasing rate of technological evolution over the last several centuries. The important question in my mind is what are we adapting our brains for? If you spend 70% of your waking life watching TV, the skill sets you develop are unlikely to serve you well in any productive domain.
These days, I mostly use those tools for plotting and simple exploratory data analysis.

I also do some modeling for integer programming.
I want a unix phone.

I want a dialer command that can be used with pipes and stdio.

I want to consume "signal strength" with AT+CSQ from a command that I can pipe into things.

I want to see nearby towers in a 'top' like interface that shows me what the local carrier environment looks like. I want to enable and disable airplane mode with a command.

It would seem like you could do this with android, but I don't think you can ...
Imperfect Reflections Pt 2: The Women of Aflac
> There are lies and truth, propaganda and real information. If we fail to distinguish between them, we will have critical problems and many people will suffer.

This is precisely my point with US propaganda and "the mainstream media".

How many people have suffered and died as a direct result of that mass manipulation? Hundreds of thousands to MILLIONS, with a region of the world thrown into chaos.

Somehow, you're trying to argue that Facebook rumors are on par with invasion, torture programs, global surveillance and assassinations.

The difference is palpable and it's a disgrace arguments like the one above are trying to confuse the consequences, the credibility, and the stakes.
If you just make self-driving cars look like normal cars instead of weird marshmallows than this isn't a very big problem.
I'd hope that companies like Nike are struggling in a society like this and that much like the music industry we cut out the middleman and have the designers selling directly to consumers, but that's besides the point.

We turn into a bunch of artisans and crafters, your neighbor is a fashion designer. I'm curious as to what you do in this scenario?

If most people truly don't know where Bangledesh is, then one positive side effect fore free time could be more education. :)
A big part of React (and arguably the whole point of React), is the way in which state changes are handled and re-rendered. A React version of this progress bar element would simply have a render method, that when the state changed would simply be called again for another full-re-render of the element. The fact that this grabs individual elements and mutates them is about as far from React-style programming as you can get. Virtual DOM, tree-diffing, all of this is around a central concept that "immediate mode" programming reduces visual bugs, and is completely absent from custom elements. I'm not saying Custom Element are wrong, but they are absolutely different from React in a core and essential way.
This medium sometimes leaves tone ambiguous... I understand you to be agreeing with me?
Smartlook – videos of website visitor interaction
After reading a fair amount about Stoicism and still being unclear, I've found a good summary in Adam Smith's almost forgotten classic, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" (1759) [1]:

"Human life the Stoics appear to have considered as a game of great skill; in which, however, there was a mixture of chance [...] In such games the stake is commonly a trifle, and the whole pleasure of the game arises from playing well, from playing fairly, and playing skilfully. If notwithstanding all his skill, however, the good player should, by the influence of chance, happen to lose, the loss ought to be a matter, rather of merriment, than of serious sorrow. He has made no false stroke; he has done nothing which he ought to be ashamed of; he has enjoyed completely the whole pleasure of the game. [...]

Our only anxious concern ought to be, not about the stake, but about the proper method of playing. If we placed our happiness in winning the stake, we placed it in what depended upon causes beyond our power, and out of our direction. We necessarily exposed ourselves to perpetual fear and uneasiness, and frequently to grievous and mortifying disappointments. If we placed it in playing well, in playing fairly, in playing wisely and skilfully; in the propriety of our own conduct in short; we placed it in what, by proper discipline, education, and attention, might be altogether in our own power, and under our own direction. Our happiness was perfectly secure, and beyond the reach of fortune."

[1] http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS7.html
How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?
Just to check I understand this correctly, as a layman:

It stops HIV from progressing in the body, holding it at bay. Someone with HIV would need to take this medicine for the rest of their lives. It doesn't actually cure it. (not denying that holding it at bay is a significant step forward)
That's because the US conducts modern wars like it has an unlimited supply of everything, mostly because it doesn't need to worry about the economics of the otherside.

This is why I specifically talked about wars where there is any level of parallelism between the belligerents.

The US will not fire a 2M missile at every Russian pillbox if there would be a real war, because they would lose.
When you are fighting the Taliban who doesn't have any real long range or strategic weapons you don't really care about force depletion, if you are fighting a standing army with equal equipment, equal or greater manpower and at least as far as war economy goes equal or greater production capabilities you start picking your targets with considerably more discrimination.

The US excels at combined arms coordination, but it also makes it's engagement very wasteful, granted one can argue that losing less men is important than having more bombs but that doesn't go very far once the economics of a full war with an equal opponent kick in.

If you are going to waste an airstrike on every ground engagement, and a Javelin missile on every truck you'll have issues when 50,000 tanks start rolling into Europe (these are cold war numbers, chillax ;)).

Shock and Awe might work against Iraq and the Taliban, it wouldn't work against China or Russia, they can withstand it and return in kind, you also will never push a nuclear power into a corner, so US tactics will change to facilitate holding and controlling the ground rather than carpet bombing Beijing or Moscow for 48 hours expecting a surrender.

If nothing else is that this only works when you can unilaterally walk out of the fight like the US can do it now, they could and had dumped everything they could on Afghanistan and Iraq and they can and did just walked away, if you do the same thing to a country that can then chase you home you probably going to reconsider how you wage war.
since the white-supremacist hate crimes and police violence against the working class have been the primary source of violence I've heard about this year.

Ah, I was unclear, by "side" I meant more partisan sides, specifically the Clinton machine as discovered by Project Veritas, and I'm hearing WRT to the post-election riots, the Soros machine, which has certainly been funding BLM, and if not the current rioters, it's clear they're partisan in a way your examples are not.

And definitely not something as general as "police violence", which is along a different axis anyway, e.g. both the Democrats and Trump lay claim to the working class and they put the latter over the top in this election, and the police certainly didn't e.g. determine Eric Garner's political affiliations before murdering him (and I can supply plenty of less publicized white victims if desired).
I knew I shouldn't have questioned you so flippantly... Lesson learned.
Why not just:
v = np.array([2,3,1]).T

is there something wrong with numpys convenience method for transpose but not matlabs postfix unary convenience operator?
A longer Tesla demo video with no cuts: [1] This one is at a consistent speed, about 3x normal, and it's worth playing at 1/3 speed to see what's happening. No freeway driving; it's driving around the Page Mill Road / Los Altos Hills area. This video shows an ahead view and three of the vehicle's cameras with their annotations. The system puts rectangular 2D boxes around things it recognizes.

Road centerline recognition seems good. Every road seems to have really clear centerline markings, though. Road edge recognition isn't always successful. Roadside obstacle recognition seems very dependent on recognizing cars and people. The system doesn't recognize a large trash can in the roadway until very close. Recognition of roadside traffic cones and barriers seems to be about 50%. Guard rails aren't recognized at all.

This has the look of something using deep neural networks trained on common obstacles. It doesn't look like something that profiles terrain.

[1] https://vimeo.com/192261894
OP here. No connection to this site. My colleague just found it. Results look rather creepy but extremely useful.
I've heard Thomas McEvilley mentioned as a good source for the link between pre-Socratic philosophy and India.

https://www.amazon.com/The-Shape-Ancient-Thought-Philosophie...
The market size for HIV/AIDS drugs is under $15 billion [1] so while it's not chump change, it is a tiny fraction of pharmaceutical revenue (over $900 billion I believe). Like the rest of pharma, there's a fast approaching patent cliff which will free a lot of the important IP and many nations have shown they're willing to spend billions to subsidize the development of cheaper generics so I'm not sure that this source of revenue is considered reliable by pharmaceutical companies. Cancer and HIV drugs are the most expensive to develop because they are all used in complex therapeutics and I wouldn't expect many more big blockbusters either. Note also that pharmaceutical companies acquire their IP through M&A of biotechnology startups about as often as through internal R&D and biotech VCs don't have the same incentives as the conglomerates.

Furthermore, the cost of HIV drugs isn't even the majority of the cost of HIV treatment because the constant monitoring and long term complications are extremely expensive. A single hospital visit for HIV-related pneumonia or another opportunistic infection can cost more than several years worth of the drug cocktails and the visits become more frequent and expensive with age as the weakening immune system contributes negatively to almost every other healthcare issue. The incentives for public health and universal healthcare agencies around the world is pretty cleanly aligned with curing HIV at any cost.

[1] http://store.globaldata.com/market-reports/pharmaceuticals-a...
Heliocentrism makes different predictions, it's a totally different comparison.
How did you overcome the cabal hell? Sandbox? VM? Nix? ...
For the same reason all of the other 50s, 60s and 70s flying platform/personal VTOL vehicles did. They're expensive, relatively hard to fly, have low endurance/range and not enough payload to be useful. Those F107s are much more cost effective cruising one-way at tree-top with a few hundred pounds (or KT) of boom for their recipient.
Tons, like the prisma app.
> designing abstract logical structures for human beings to use

Moreover, you do realize that computers were invented by mathematicians, right?
His son, however, was an egomaniac.

Who, I just learned, renamed Rome and all of the months of the year after himself. He was assassinated in the first year of his new calendar.
Wi-Fi-enabled Qi Aerista will brew the perfect cup of tea
You missed the point, and I'm not sure you understand what "good for business", as practiced by Republican administrations in the US, means.

It simply means no regulations. So businesses are free to do anything they want, with consumers at the receiving end of the negative consequences of such practices.

Most recently, we saw how that played out under the last Republican (Bush) administration. In an environment in which corporations were going gang-busters, I don't recall that administration ever bringing a single anti-trust case.

That "good for business" environment eventually led to the 2008 financial crises. And the single most important curb that was put in place to prevent such a crisis from happening again is under threat, because the guys set to take office in January (2017) have already said they'll undo the Dodd-Frank Act.
Interesting to see differential geometry omitted -- it is useful even in classical contexts.
Thanks, it's frustrating that they turn informative titles into completely useless ones!
You mean, with English words? You know, English was also optimized for being written on paper... Doesn't mean it's broken.
First of all, if a pharma company had an annual income of 2bn from HIV treatments, and that companies CEO went forward with a HIV cure that is only predicted to earch 3bn overall; that CEO could essentially be removed from his position, as that would not be in the best interest of the company and shareholders.

Also, there does not need to be an evil twist where someone deliberately holds back a developed cure. It is much easier to cut/steer the research in ways that favor treatment/management options, ensuring that a cure would only be found be accident.
> When my directs came to me wondering about a promotion, my response was always to figure out immediate increases in scope

Which does mean that promotion conversations are THE career conversations you need to have.
Where's the part of React which allows me to return a new copy of what I want the HTML to look like, while only updating the changed elements of my view instead of totally blowing away the existing elements (the virtual DOM + reconcilitation part of React)? Also, where's the declarative event binding part?

I'd also point out that the state tree (setState) is a part of React, and plenty of apps are just fine being built using only setState for state management (no redux/flux/mobx).
>"What we do know is that this happened 80-140 years ago, why did a virus that infected primates for 50,000 to 2000000 years suddenly jumped species all of a sudden despite the fact that there was just as much if not more cross species interaction during human history is a better question"

Simian AIDS was discovered after human AIDS though:
"Examination of the species-specific annual mortality rates of macaques at the center during the previous 4 yr showed a significant increase in deaths in 1980 and 1981" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC393899/

I don't see how people really know whether the problem originated in humans and spread to apes or vice versa. If anything you would expect such issues to be detected in highly monitored animals kept in well controlled research facilities first...
+1 on hearing about hearing more about this story and current project with grtensor. Seems like you've had an interesting career trajectory.
How about Julia and R?
Having been brainwashed by WaPo's headline, I interpreted it as automated but requiring operator's confirmation before "acting", i.e. actually sending something, which sounds reasonable if you aren't sure that your code will work 100% as intended ;)

But now on second read I see it's ambiguous and the author seems to be politics student so maybe you are right after all that he really did it all by hand.

> Perhaps he just wanted something short and that sounds better than "fake user accounts".

I think "accounts" would be fine. Or "sockpuppets" if one wants to be fancy :)
What a fantastically interesting rabbit hole (referring to the photo collection itself). The work being performed and related implications have always been of interest to me as well. Thank you for compiling these!
I think it's a bit early to try and solve all future problems. Those poor people who will have no jobs need something to do, right? :)

[I agree that "it's owned by someone" can be a problem more than "there's not enough land". Unfortunately, that's politics so I have no quick solution.]
There is another GPL Matlab compatible system called FreeMat, which doesn't get as much as love as Octave (which itself does not get as much love as it should) - http://freemat.sourceforge.net/