skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are correct that Apple was a duplicate. At a certain level, just about all companies are. Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land. Same with movies. Do you really want to see something truly original because you will recognize nothing.

However, having no respect for people who think they have the best ideas but never execute on them is going a bit far. Arthur C Clarke wrote an article

EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL RELAYS: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?
http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/1945ww_oct_305-308.html

It calculated the geostationary belt and showed that it could be applied to communications satellites. No patent, no possibility of exploiting it. Basically a really interesting blog post before there were blogs.

So I give credit to great ideas that are short of startup potential. What I yawn at is startups not based on great ideas. I'll grant that there are successful startups out there that aren't based on great ideas, just execution. But they don't interest me. So fundamentally, that's a personal evaluation.
Meanwhile my webserver that serves 8 websites (some static sites, some sophisticated web apps) sites at 80 MB used RAM. For everything. You can't make this up.
Entrepreneurs often share startup ideas and hear, “Isn’t X doing the same thing?” This is actually the common case as only one company can claim the first-to-market mantle.

It’s natural to feel discouraged or wonder if the window of opportunity passed, but history has proven unequivocally: first-to-market guarantees nothing.

Never abandon an idea because competitors exist. Abandon an idea because it lacks meaningful differentiation, because no one wants it more than the alternatives.

Here are inspiring examples of companies and products that flourished despite entering the market after others:

Facebook > Myspace

Google > Alta Vista

Nike > Converse

iPhone > BlackBerry

Instagram > Hipstamatic

Airbnb > CouchSurfing

WhatsApp > SMSenger

Dropbox > FolderShare

Skype > Net2Phone

Zappos > Shoebuy

Gmail > Hotmail

YouTube > Metacafe

LinkedIn > Ryze

Tumblr > Xanga

Kickstarter > Indiegogo
I'm not saying things can't leak, I'm saying there's a pattern of leaking things leading to bans when the users related to those leaking things act together to cause the leaking (I'm not even saying that's right).

I think they look at it as emergent behavior from popularity vs encouraged behavior from the attitude of users in a sub, but I also they think they aren't above being biased in how they determine what they act on
You are still using a voting machine, but you've just introduced a shitty paper input that needs to be scanned into the machine. The counting machine is a voting machine. It can be hacked.

The only benefit is that you have a paper record that can be corroborated if there is evidence of hacking later. But we could do a printout paper record on voting machines too.

You'd be surprised how many of those paper ballots don't get recognized when they are counted. Because the checkmarks don't fill up the box enough or because of optical/scantron error.
The overlap between design and engineering: a new perspective on product dev
I'd been off FB for something like 3 months... then the election happened.

the resulting re-engagement was incredibly depressing and not particularly interesting. i've been off now for a few days and i already feel better. YMMV
We've banned this account for showing up just to do ideological battle. That's an abuse of the site. We're happy to unban accounts if you email hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll post only civilly and substantively in the future.
I didn't downvote you - in fact, I think the link is a great one. But if I had to guess at a way to improve your comment, it would be to provide more context for the link you provided. (it's also not really "prior" reading - it's useful as context in general.)

"I liked Eevee's blog post from three days ago, which rebutted some of Zed Shaw's complaints about python 3, and provides useful context for the currently-linked note"
In contrast to what Zed suggests, I would argue that the text/binary dichotomy that you describe is actually very important for beginners to learn. Until I learned Python 3, I never really understood how text encodings worked, which confused me whenever I had to deal with Unicode (I'm looking at you, UTF-16).
They actually did, and then they tried to find connections between the two. Turning up stuff like:

https://twitter.com/ClintonGlobal/status/651606553884258304

(A Unilever and Clinton Foundation cooperation found in https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1596)

and some older abuse charges brought up against people connected with Unilever.

See also: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AfaAe2...

Also consider the possibility that the pedo symbology was inspired by the ice cream logo (and not the other way around).

But most likely just a (meaningful) coincidence. Hearts and spirals are common design elements after all.
The second half reads like this guy believes he is the center of the world. I don't understand the "Well, he's entertaining", it just reads like narcissism and anger. But maybe I don't know enough about this person and his particular situation.
No, you.
React Native Infinite List Done Right (5 Min Talk)
why would this distinction result in a new name? my consumer switch and an enterprise switch are both switches, because that's what they do. or e.g. all cars, it doesn't matter if it's a ferrari or a lada, it's still a car.
In the corner of each there's an MDN link which has that info, though having it inline would be neat too. Also maybe a link to www.caniuse.com
> "Increased ICMP traffic"

Wow. If a virus propergated like this on today's networks, would such traffic event make a noticable dent in the available bandwidth?

Anyways, I hadn't heard of this virus - it's super neat. Patching its own infection vector and even explicitly removing an existing virus from the target machine... The article loathes it for how overtly it affects machines (forced restart to apply an update) and networks (congestion), but the work it attempted to do was decidedly good. Sounds to me like it worked well, but had poor execution in accounting for the network effects it would have. (I doubt it was rigorously tested in a prod environment ;) ) If anything, I'd see this as a case study that this kind of offense-as-defense strategy has the potential to work... Its just nobody wants to take responsibility to do so.
>> In Texas, where I vote, the machines don't even print paper. We just have to trust that the machine correctly recorded our vote.

This system just begs for being manipulated.
Did it get easier recently? I tried getting into this about six years or so ago and found it really hard to get started. Finding appropriate applets (MUSCLE applet I guess was the common crypto one), incompatible cards and readers, etc.
But it's exercising a kind of blank check of power given by Congress. I don't think Congress should issue blank checks; I think they should do their job.
This is why people got upset about the original post from Zed. One dude whining in a blog does not equal mass dissent in the community. The choice is inconsequential for 99% of programmers and hardly a difficult decision - flip a damn coin if you cannot decide. I make 100x more decisions when it comes to front-end development than I ever have with python 2 vs 3.
What kind of inner products are defined by the absolute value, cuberoot of absolute cubes, fourth root of fourth powers? I never heard of that and would be glad to learn about it.
I have an Asus Flip Chromebook. It doesn't do 15 hours, merely 10, but it's very light, pretty cheap (I bought mine in the UK for £250, but I've seen it in the US down at about $150), has 4GB RAM and a quad core ARM processor making it plenty fast enough for development, and it's even got a reasonable keyboard.

Minor features: capacitative touchscreen, screen that folds all the way round for use in tablet mode, MicroSD card slot, nice big clicky touchpad, completely silent, and a metal case.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/asus-chromebook-c201-review

I run ChromeOS on mine, with Debian in a chroot using Crouton; but I gather you can run Debian on it natively, although with some blobs:

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Asus/C201
I see, thanks for the clarification. That makes sense.
There's a bunch of reasons, probably starting with the voting there being so much more complicated - there are a lot more positions being elected than in the UK. It's hard to say if the machines are really cheaper, but there seems to also be a lack of willingness to adequately fund the process, judging by the queues in many places.

Which is a shame, because it's a fairly effective way to push money back into the economy, at least when a manual system is used.
Well, I'm not in the US, there are no monthly lease here. You really don't want to tell a landlord that you're unsure whether you'll be able to stay for year(s).

I remember when I was a student. There were "student accommodations" that had sort of special terms. People usually stayed there for 3-6-12 months to fit with the university/internship/apprenticeship cycle. That was quite nice. I'm sad that can't have that as an adult.

> I know that I have a guaranteed place to live for the next year or two. [I would not want to live without that guarantee].

I know that I have no guarantee to still have that job [or find another in the area] for a year or two. Thus I have no guarantee that I can stay in this place for the next year or two.

I would like to live with the guarantee of having a job, and a revenue, and a place to stay, and a girlfriend, and many other things... The world doesn't care about what I'd like.
I asked that early in my career.

We want a metric essentially because
if we converge or have a good
approximation in the metric
then we are close in some important
respects.

Squared error, then, gives one such
metric.

But for some given data, usually there are several metrics we might use, e.g., absolute error (L^1), worst case error (L^infinity), L^p for positive integer p, etc.

From 50,000 feet up, the reason for using squared error is that get to have the Pythagorean theorem, and, more generally, get to work in a Hilbert space, a relatively nice place to be, e.g., we also get to work with angles from inner products, correlations, and covariances -- we get cosines and a version of the law of cosines. E.g., we get to do orthogonal
projections which give us minimum
squared error.

With Hilbert space, commonly we
can write the total error
as a sum of contributions
from orthogonal
components, that is, decompose
the error into contributions
from those components -- nice.

The Hilbert space we get from squared error gives us the nicest version of Fourier theory, that is, orthogonal
representation and decomposition,
best squared error approximation.

We also like Fourier theory with
squared error
because
of how it gives us the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle.

Under meager assumptions, for
real valued random variables
X and Y, E[Y|X], a function of X,
is the best
squared error approximation
of Y by a function of X.

Squared error gives us variance, and
in statistics sample mean and variance are sufficient statistics for the Gaussian; that is, for statistics, for Gaussian data, can take the sample mean and sample variance, throw away the rest of the data, and do just as well.

For more, convergence in squared error can imply convergence almost surely at least for a subsequence.

Then there is the Hilbert space result, every nonempty, closed, convex subset has a unique element of minimum norm (from squared error) -- nice.
Your scheme seems vulnerable to vote buying, e.g., $20 to vote for my candidate, but you have to show me your number so I can check.
Looking for a ML learning partner
Hi all,
I'm a software analyst with a strong drive for self-improvement. I decided to set myself off to study Machine Learning. I'm about to complete Andrew Ng's course on Coursera and I feel I'm doing pretty good. In the meantime I'm developing a ML library in Java for practicing with the course topics. ML is like a rabbit hole for me, I always want to find out more.
However these topics are huge, and I have a full time job and a family.

I'm posting this here because I think it would be cool to find a learning partner, someone with my same drive and interest to share part of this journey with. It's easier to stay motivated if we are in two, tackle the hard stuff that we encounter and (why not) contribute together to this Java library.

I have no expectations. It's simple: if you are like me, always learning new stuff and eager to make even more, then we might go along well. If you are up for it, drop me a mail (address in my HN profile)!

PS: I'm 28 and in CET time zone
In general, any process that allows an individual to verify their vote after the fact will enable coercion over voting. For example, in your proposal, an unscrupulous boss could make a demand before the election: "You must tell me the one-time ID you're voting with. If you choose not to, or if that ID doesn't show up in the registry having cast a vote for <candidate>, you're fired." I think that, no matter what the process is, if I can check how I voted I can also be made to check how I voted while someone watches over my shoulder and threatens consequences.
Go master Cho wins best-of-three series against Japan-made AI
I've had this happen twice.

The first time I gave up. In retrospect I'm thankful I did, because I later came to realize I wasn't a true believer in the idea. Although it was valid from a business perspective (as evidenced by the other people doing it), it wasn't anything that truly excited me. If you're trying to build something exceptional, being excited matters for both morale and creativity reasons.

Regardless, in retrospect the first idea still could have succeeded. The competition's execution, while initially virtually identical, significantly diverged later on.

The second time featured very similar initial execution, followed by a divergence so large that I don't even consider them competitors anymore. It's even happened a few more times on the same idea, and each time the end result is wild divergence. This is likely a result of the second idea being more complex.

The moral of the story is that you shouldn't worry about competitors, even if it looks like doom and gloom right now.

Divergence in execution is proportional to idea complexity. Unless the idea in question is dead simple with no conceivable variation, press on.

Even so, press on anyways if you're a strong believer and the idea excites you.

If you have considerable time invested but don't believe in a way that excites you: kick it out the door fast, throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.

Good luck.
Please post a source or more of an explanation before spreading FUD like this...
That was worded beautifully.
It hurts me to read this. History just shows how horrible humans can be to one another.
The Swift ecosystem has never been half as big as Python's was when version 3 released.
Yah. Except this is writing a script to mayyybbbbeee make a penny.

I understand hacking. I think this entire project is dead on arrival because it has no business value. He is offering to save me 2 cents at digital ocean and maybe profit if I pay 2x the DO price for a VM with less features. That is why this is a dead product.

Wringing your hands about being hacked to make $0.25 Bitcoin mining? That that is not the problem here.
> I can't help thinking that it's an obvious energy waste.

Probably depends on who pays the power bill. Maybe some commercial leases include power ? Also, in NYC a lot of people work insane hours, so even one person staying till 9 or 10pm pretty much requires all the lights to be on. The housekeeping staff usually start about 7-8pm and assuming an 8 hour shift, thats 2-3am at least that they'll be there.

Overall I bet lights are a very small fraction of a building's electrical bill. Think of an elevator and how many amps it requires to power a motor the size of small car lifting 900+lbs of people 30+ stories all day. One guy going to the top floor probably uses enough power to light the building for half a day.
How can it be the exact same product when developed independently? Your product will fork away as you and your customers decide what is important just as they will.

Answers to your questions:

1) Yes. It happens to everyone. And you want it to happen because being first is very expensive. You have to educate the market place and that takes time and money. Plus if you were the first and started to succeed, do you think that other startups (or larger companies that smell an opportunity) wouldn't pour into that marketplace? That's the market-based system hard at work.

2) Joel Spolsky and a million others have said to ignore your competitors and concentrate on the customers. Nothing your competitors ever do will be as significant as just listening to the people who will ultimately use your product. So carry on. Mate, eventually you will have to deal with competitors so you might as well train your mind and your company to deal with this as early as possible.

3) That's ridiculous. If you are passionate about the idea then fight harder now.

4) Yes, you could create an economy where the first company with a particular idea gets a 17 year monopoly. Seriously, you fight because, eventually, if the idea is good and the market is large enough, the competitors will be flocking in. Learn to handle this now. You buckle down and work twice as hard.

You need to realise that nothing, and I mean nothing, gets done until you have customers. You think you've been working hard now but you haven't. Customers are the only difference between a startup and a successful business.

Overall, I think this will be a good thing for you. It's (bluntly) lit a fire under your ass and will make you re-assess your plans to create a more customer-centric plan. Good luck.
Wouldn't a voting system that let people confirm that their vote is taken into account be trivial to implement?

I can't believe we still rely on trust for this kind of thing.
Right, and they pulled the punch in order to appear fair and impartial. You cannot be fair and impartial against people trying to destroy you or take over - something many internet communities and media establishments need to learn.
I was a bit offended because I think “events are better than threads” but then I had no idea of coroutines or Hoare. When it comes to parallelism I think it will always be hard, as you have to micromanage to prevent locks, congestion and race conditions. The solutions are the same but different, neither is much better. Where coroutines seems useful I rather use queues though, where "next" shift the queue.
I could probably also name drop and I bet not even Zed would have heard of her, or the HN community deeming her not relevant (smile). You can not know everything though, and the point of this comment is that I do not know shit but neither do you, so please be humble.
An honest question - do we even need statistics when we have machine learning? Statistics to me appears as a hack/aggregation of data we couldn't process at once in the past; these days ML + Big Data can achieve that and instead of statistics we can do computational inference instead. To me this looks like looking back to "old ways" for a reference point instead of looking forward to the unknown but more exciting.
> The other key feature usually found in HSMs but not smart cards is backup/cloning without exporting the key (in PKCS#11 terms). This means that the key can be moved between HSMs with all the protections in place. I've yet to see a smart card that does this.

How does this work? Can an attacker buy an identical HSM, back up the key, and restore it onto the new HSM?
This reminds me of an idiom I particular liked by Ralph Waldo Emmerson from Self Reliance

"You see great works — statues, buildings, machines, books, and you feel belittled by them, put in your place, puny, unworthy. But you're looking at it all wrong. Their greatness awaits your judgment. Emerson wrote, "The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settled its claims to praise."
For minimizing the square of the errors I think the good reason is because, assuming your data has gaussian probability distribution, minimizing the square error corresponds to maximizing the likelihood of the measurement, as you and others have said.

Why do we assume gaussian errors? There is seldom a gaussian distribution in the real world usually because the probability for large error values doesn't not decay that fast. We use it because the math is easy and we can actually solve the problem assuming that.
You may be higher up the global wealth pyramid than you think
It looks like Basecamp would fit really nicely into our product process, and I think we have a relatively good process. It might not be for everyone, but I don't think it's fair to rule it out for all give your personal experience.
Ask HN: Topics to learn to become a Robotics/AI “engineer”
Hello,

I was wondering what are the topics that a high school graduate needs to learn to become an competent Robotics/AI engineer. I am not in high school, about to finish my undergrad in hardware and software engineering. However, I want to spend the next couple years to learn/review the topics in my free time while working full time.

Here is what I have so far: http://pastebin.com/0igsB7iy

Also in addition to adding topics, if you have any suggested books. I would appreciate it.
If everyone can verify their votes, then they can sell their votes. E.g. A knows A's hash, and A can show X that A's hash voted for X, so that X will give A $20.
probably liability factors in too. One guy slipping and breaking his elbow because he couldn't see would negate years of cost savings in power.
TamperMonkey is not equivalent to GreaseMonkey in terms of development workflow because TamperMonkey stores scripts in a database and pretty much requires use of its built in editor which is of 'built-in-editor' quality. On the other hand, GreaseMonkey stores scripts in files and therefore allows any editor/IDE to be used in the development workflow.

Because scripts are stored in a database, TamperMonkey does not play swimmingly with GIT either. Finally, TamperMonkey is a third party tool that from time to time asks for money. GreaseMonkey is open-source.

The TamperMonkey EULA:

Your right to use Tampermonkey continues until terminated by the Company, which may terminate this Agreement and your license to use Tampermonkey at any time, without cause and without notice. You may terminate this agreement at any time by uninstalling Tampermonkey. This Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any of the terms of this EULA. Upon termination, you agree to stop using and to uninstall Tampermonkey.
I don't know why the parent is voted down; it's a totally reasonable comment.

It's definitely the case that the Firefox UI very much makes it impossible to move away from the current layout implementation at this point, and moving away would be a massive job. At the same time, the Firefox UI cannot move away from XUL/XBL until extensions no longer have free access to it, so this is definitely a first step that's relevant here.

As for using Servo for web content, it's worthwhile pointing out that not only is it the direction Mozilla is taking (with Project Quantum, and progressively moving components from Servo into Gecko), but it would also be a technical challenge because web extensions have access to extra APIs and have security checks disabled in others.
I had to look up TPM, I didn't realize there was an open standard for crypto processors. Is it safe to say that most HSMs are TPMs?
Many believe that Qubes places an unreasonable amount of trust on Xen.

Read: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/vm-sudo/

The issue isn't only with trusting Xen, but trusting it so much that it makes all other security features meaningless.