skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, not to be too dismissive or cliched, but these slides come off as if LeCun just now got around to reading some Andy Clark or reading neurosci/cogsci papers by Tenenbaum or Friston. The idea that the human brain has to work via active prediction rather than passive signal processing has been well-established in cogsci and neurosci for a while now.

The interesting question, then, is how we make machine-learning systems do prediction well. Probabilistic/generative models have been "wandering in the desert" for a while now because Monte Carlo methods are just so slow, especially for high-dimensional, hierarchical prediction problems like we want to solve in machine learning. On the upside, STAN now has automatic variational inference for continuous probability models, and work on things like the "concrete distribution" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00712) can help us continuously approximate discrete probabilistic reasoning. Maybe as these techniques move into the mainstream in systems like Venture or Picture we can start to scale up predictive/generative/probabilistic modelling to match optimization-based connectionist methods?
Good Beginner Videos on Artificial Intelligence from Facebook Tech Team
Webinar: The Basics of Reactive System Design
HN comments were specifically mentioned as a fix for the latest beta via TestFlight.
Can I test an assumption with you? Lets say that "everyone does it", and by that I mean literally everyone on the planet generates more renewable energy on some grid somewhere, than they use on the grids they are using.

That is the definition of 100% renewable energy use is it not? You can't push power into a grid if nobody is using it, they don't work that way. So if the world is using 12.3 TW and 12.3TW is being generated by renewable sources, your done.
Southerns have an accent. New Jerseyans have an accent. British have an accent. Can't computers have an accent, too?
Watchful.io – Firehose Filtration Platform
It's only a release candidate for right now.
> To say nothing of the fact that a programmer can't use the CLI? What programmer is that?

I've seen this a fair bit before. The most common case (in my experience) is "enterprise" developers who use an IDE, only develop in a single language, and use a GUI Git tool for version control.

I would say that, in most cases, the assumption that they don't have a strong understanding of the concepts abstracted away from them (compilers/git/etc) tend to be more correct than not.
Right, what are the other options?

* Government? Would be targeted as waste. (Maybe sneak it into NASA?)

* Startup? Would anyone fund it? No short term payout.

* Non-profit?

* Billionaire's pet project?
What a great story from Kickstarter's most valuable player to a debt monster that make every of its loyal customer angry
This is the frustrating part to me. I bought a house with a broker I used a lot (flipped abused houses for a few years). He sold the loan to company A, which was great. They sold the loan to company B after a year, and the nightmare started.

One month, they withdrew my mortgage twice on the same day (found out when my debit card declined at the grocery store).

They sent a mortgage interest statement in January. I filled out my taxes, then after I had gotten my refund, they sent a corrected mortgage interest statement. I had to make a judgement call on whether this required re-filing taxes and the expense that entailed.

The worst was when we got a $2500 check from the mortgage company, saying they had recalculated our escrow, and they had overestimated it initially. We spent most of that money on setting up a nursery for a new baby. Two months later, we received another letter saying, "whoops, our bad, we actually did have escrow calculated correctly the first time. Pay us $2500 in 30 days or your house note is going up by $200 a month until escrow is funded again".

EDIT: Recalled another issue with this company. I'd get e-mails monthly: "You're late on your payment. We're about to foreclose on your house". This would be followed by an e-mail: "Our computer system is being upgraded. Please disregard late payment e-mails if you've paid your mortgage. We should have this fixed within three months".
Wonder why they decided to invent their own protocol? I've used IPP over the internet via an SSH tunnel, it's slow but it works.
Thanks! These are really interesting points. And I've to agree, the mix of the two is already a kind of a problem, although not necessarily a big one. But yes, we do give priority to our service clients at the cost of delaying product release cycles, which is not ideal.
Re: the checker-boarding artifacts, that sounds interestingly like deconvolutional NNs treat their samples, at each deconv layer, as independent, rather than taking the Rule of Addition of probability-weights (P(A ∪ B) = P(A) + P(B) - P(A ∩ B)) into account. (Would a model that did do this then be a "Bayesian Deconvolutional Neural Network"? Does that even make sense?)

I doubt this would result in audible artifacts at the audio level, though. The visual checkerboarding appears at the 1px detail-level of the output image—this would translate more to minor fluctuations along an audio sample's Nyquist frequency, which is effectively undetectable if the output sampling rate is of the usual kind (44.1kHz).
Amazon Lex and Google's GCE offer this.
Please check with a CPA (or IRS.gov) before you do this.

Yes, technically, a dedicated home office is deductible.

In practice, it needs to be a dedicated office, with no other use. It also needs to be your primary place of work.

Telecommuting part time doesn't allow use of the deduction.

Working from your sofa doesn't allow partial deduction of your living room.

More details...
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Congrats on shipping!
>I can absolutely believe that these days there are people out there brewing up little JS scripts to help them with their day-to-day tasks.

I can't. At least if we're talking about people who can't use a CLI or read JSON.
> Your method of disseminating information looks like you're harvesting social/email accounts.

...and then writing a book about it...
Here's a sound clip of one of the voices I pulled, if you'd like to hear it: https://soundcloud.com/zack-bloom/amazons-new-text-to-speech...
And that's okay. You can work from where you are to where you want to be long term! Keep up the good work. A good pair of GOOD noise cancelling headphones can do wonders!
Ofc, just you know ... too much meat on bbq it will be quite degenerative :)

Actually, the API used is require('npm') that mean if it gets stable on OSX there will be quite 99% possibilities it will be stable the same on Linux and Win.
Then templating and releasing will be quicker ;)
‘They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals’
It's for npm, not nvm. It shows the installed packages in a project, the version that is installed and the latest available version which is handy. You can install/update packages too but don't see much use for that since the CLI is there but the displaying of info is decent.
True, but Japanese isn't really a tonal language, so it doesn't really evidence the parent's point.
No. (YMMV, IANAA, etc)

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
incognito doesn't include cookies from your regular sessions
I really like text2speech because I really like the computer to read articles to me while I'm doing something else, but I won't use any internet service for that just to get a little bit more quality in comperison to Apples "Alex" or MeryTTS http://mary.dfki.de/
I had to vote this up as it referenced a work by Greg Michaelson who did a splendid job of teaching me about lambda calculus back in the 1980s and who really got my attention when he explained about S and K combinators.

Another excellent work from that same time is The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages by Simon Peyton Jones which is available online for free:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...

[Edit: I know this is an old work - but I'm very fond of it!]
So I've written what I count/don't count: http://reviewsignal.com/howitworks

Do you have a link to your site? Be curious to look at what you're doing.
I spent so long looking for a comfortable chair that I ended up getting used to working in my reclining chair with my notebook on my lap and a wireless mouse on the chair's arm. I don't really miss using a table anymore.
Like many people, Skype is a fallback communication channel for me. I don't care if my brother or best friend is on Skype because I call them on the phone to talk, text message if I want to chat, or Facetime if I want to video chat.

I'd say Skype is a way to communicate with people, not a way to contact people. And for me, it's a method of last resort for people I can't call/text/Facetime/Hangout. I understand some people might say yes, but it's still somewhat deceptive to put this in the same category as "enable mic" and "enable camera", which Skype cannot operate without.
Show HN: React-svg-pan-zoom – A component that adds pan and zoom to SVG
Yes. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

edit: Funny that two people post the same link and have opposite answers. US tax code is awesome.
How do we know that this is not a fake news? However, I think it's quite true.
Do you mean WaveNet? The noisiness is because it uses 8bit (mu-law) audio. 8bit is because WaveNet is computationally extremely expensive. It's pretty much proof of concept at this stage, not production ready TTS.
It's never been a secret that the company is controlled by the founders. Any investor who invests not realizing this, and that they're going to throw money at research projects like this, has only themself to blame.
I'd expect it to also improve things in regular code since class attributes are saved in __dict__, unless you use __slots__.

I might be wrong though (remember seeing that talk by Heroku about how objects are treated differently even in CPython).
I think they said it right there Military applications. And if price is low enough, you could use it to enable people to do outdoor work at night when it's less hot in arid/hot areas with less risk of injury (due to better vision), etc.
Ah but critical to note, the odds of surviving that smallpox are better in a freshly rebuilt mold free dry draftless house than some old dump of a place with leaky roof and crumbling drafty walls. Also theoretically if you're stuck at home trying to rebuild the village you can't be at the next village over trying to romance some farmers daughter while accidentally catching smallpox. So both the physical act of rebuilding and the result of rebuilding both increase odds of survival.

An interesting resource allocation problem is they may have liked building houses out of older hardwood but if they any random dude chop down and use wood they might very well exceed their carrying capacity so nobody build nothing unless we all split the "house wood" stand of trees equally, perhaps after we burn the village completely down.

Another interesting idea is you can burn the bark off trees for building if you're really careful, but if you're not careful, you'll burn the whole log, maybe take the whole village down. So annual barkless log house construction... 95% odds the village gets a new hut and the fleas get fumigated, 5% odds the whole village goes up in flames. Well sometimes ya gotta roll the dice, I guess.
I got royally screwed. Yesterday my 4 month old Pebble Time Round burned my wrist and killed itself, today they announce they no loner honour the warranty.
Their pebble app has 500,000+ downloads on the Google store, and they have 2 million in pebble sales (I believe that's delivered). They've shipped their second Kickstarter last year (Pebble Time Steal).
The point is, you used to have to have a separate office. You had a desktop PC with a CRT, a bookshelf, a filing cabinet, a landline, a printer, boxes of software on CD-ROM, and so on. Remember how much room that took up?!

Now that everything's digital and on your phone/laptop, most people don't need any of that anymore. It's kind of crazy when you realize it. You don't need a dedicated room -- you can use whatever room in the house is currently quiet and unoccupied.
You can whitelist them if you go to the notification settings for the app: http://iob.imgur.com/uYGg/Jj0DmTtRUy

If you have enabled Power Notification Controls then you can also blacklist from the same place: https://imgur.com/VgDowW3
You can take the "going to change the world" too far. They are bankrupt and still believe they're "Making Awesome Happen". Investors lost their money. Suppliers will not get paid. Employees are losing their jobs just before Christmas. Customers will not get their orders. Current customers are left without support and - in the near future - a limited functioning device. How is that "Making Awesome Happen"? A more humble attitude would be more appropriate.
Potemkin Village
Does this have to be turned on somewhere? I updated to Nougat last night and it still recompiled all my apps on the first boot. I didn't notice any improvements while updating apps from the play store either.
What Is Quality Assurance: A Must or a Waste of Time?
Languages cannot get better, only bigger, without dropping backwards compatibility. This is why Java needs to die. Not because it's particularly horrible, but because we can do better now.
Let me try on my desktop. Harder to open in incognito on mobile.
You forgot to include an editor. ;)
That certainly helps reassuring what we were already thinking.

We're still doubting though whether we should go for option #2 or option #3. Because we still have a lot of great stuff that our developers produce (blog posts, experiments, open source) that could benefit a single brand targeted towards developers in general. It will be more difficult to share those "achievements" amongst multiple product brands.
The cost of delivery

You argue that as if it's a constant -- and that it's not is the point. The exact innovation they are stumbling on is a way to lower that cost to near zero.

Drone technology will eventually happen. The question is how far out it is. And make no mistake, when it does happen, it will truly be a revolution (without the hyperbole).
> "In order to be able to have fluent conversations with machines, several issues need to be solved first: text understanding, question answering and machine translation."

The article makes it sound like "text understanding" was just around the corner, maybe next year...

I doubt that because understanding (arbitrary but meaningful) text requires real intelligence, and AI is far away from that.

And if it really happens one day, then our jobs are all gone. Because programs are text, and with proper training programs are way easier to understand than arbitrary prose - a much smaller subset of concepts contained in a clear structure, instead of almost infinite concepts or even new ones, to be structured however the author sees fit.

So prior to understanding language, AI should be able to understand programming language, because programming language is just a a small subset of language.
It'd be interesting to take the Joint Many-Tasks approach here, training some of an RNN's layers on text-to-speech, and then another set of layers on sentiment analysis of speech-audio, where the error of the sentiment layer can backpropagate into the TTS layer.
So sad that this article has a stereotypic caricature as first illustration.
by all means, please keep doing what you're doing. it's impressive work.

> I'm honestly surprised about how much interest there has been in a landing controller.

This is probably the most textbook example of hyperfocus I've ever seen since I was a teenager and kept jumping higher and higher until one day I hit my head on the ceiling!
OpenCores is one possible source of examples. You could start by modifying e.g. http://opencores.org/project,mac_layer_switch
So long as we're citing favorites, sad SML on the JVM never took off:

http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/mlj/index.html
So if you don't like paywalls, and you don't like ads, how do you expect the content you consume to be paid for?
You're being downvoted, but really, the only saving grace in Java is the occasionally useful tooling that can't be used in the other two actually good JVM languages: Kotlin and Scala.

And right now the only one I can think of is j2objc. Java should absolutely die.
very true. Investors can always vote with their feet.
"I still don't get the foray into delivery of physical low value products. The cost of delivery is a sufficient portion of the total value of the products so as to make it economically impractical for most cases."

Shouldn't your conclusion be the opposite? If the cost of delivery is a large proportion of the good, then lowering the cost of delivery will have a larger impact on the economics of selling that good.

Peapod and Webvan didn't lower the cost of delivery because the human salary was still a large component of that cost. It might even have increased the cost for convenience.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p587.pdf

I responded exactly the opposite. There is clearly the opportunity for a tax deduction based on the limited details from the parent.
I think investors realize that they are putting their money into advertising cash cows, and Google investors are pretty satisfied; that money isn't "gone." If anything, it's the talented workers who go to Google for the promise of jetpacks and find themselves writing adwords code.
The idea is not new indeed, Andy Clarks's review paper was very inspiring to us. But it has not been detailed to a point of implementation/scaling. PVM is an attempt to implement it in a "connectionist" way, but frankly all I need are associative memories, and how they are implemented I don't care. So a "probabilistic PVM" is totally feasible. In fact we discuss in the paper various possibilities in which a PVM like meta-architecture can be implemented.
Agreed. Those nooks are fine for light "home" business (TurboTax, searching for recipes, etc). I would hate to use one for my day job.

I keep a proper home office. My house has a small dining room, which was too small for large family dinners (8+ guests), so the room was repurposed as an office. The current dining room used to be the family room (which is now in what would have been the formal living room).
Wouldn't we describe what TTS systems do as more of a speech impediment? Sure they use a particular accent, usually that of a standard prestige dialect. But it's not the accent that's weird.
Nobody uses it though.

It costs $1.50 per transaction so it's not practical for paying your friend $5 to split a burrito etc.
I did that kind of thing all the time when I did phone tech support. If I suspected that a cable wasn't plugged in or was in the wrong port or whatever, I'd have people unplug everything and plug it back in all the time. It fixed a lot of problems, especially with home routers/switches.
It is definitely possible, me and a few other students did it in a university course. Assuming the FPGA at least has a media access controller (translates bits to analogue signals) it is not to hard to encode/decode ethernet frames.
Sadly, on the top of my head I do not know of any open IP.
We wrote our own, but it is closed.
IMO those are specific choices for specific types of applications, when most people just need a simple front end for their app.
Tldr: FitBit acquires() bankrupt pebble, lays of 60% of staff, cancels all pebble product lines. FitBit also cancels the warranties on already sold pebbles. FitBit may also have stiffed some holders of $27m of pebble's debt.

() due to legal shenanigans we must not call this an acquisition or an acqui-hire. Also, FitBit didn't do those things, a shell company created by this deal did, which is totally different somehow.

When things like this happen, I always hope that consumers that got screwed over by the deal (and people that hear about it) avoid the acquiring company after the fact. If they treat pebble customers like this, how will they treat their own customers later?
I don't think that's a good comparison. PARC efforts could at least be justified as being document related, which was solidly in sync with Xerox strategy. This "moonshot" stuff can't be classified as pure research as per Bell Labs/IBM Research or corporate goal focused. It's only a failed attempt to prove the capability propaganda that they communicate to the world.
Every type-inference language I am aware of assumes that anything that looks like a float is a float. It would be un-pythonic to assume that everything that looks like a float is a decimal. Imagine having to cast every damn float to a float.
Story of my last few jobs.
The demo files in the article sound pretty decent, but this sample is pretty bad. It sounds pretty robotic by itself (lots of artifacts, odd pitches, no pauses), but saying "during the one thousand nine hundred and seventies" is the real kicker.
The hardest part of working from home is getting other people in your life to realize that you are working, and should be treated as such...
Languages cannot get better, only bigger, without dropping backwards compatibility.

Completely agree. Dropping backwards compatibility, if you have serious users, really isn't an option either. Just look at Python 2/3.

You can deprecate stuff and very very very very slowly remove it, but it really is a slow process if you want to keep your existing users happy.
> "The killer quote is “Most people I know end up sitting on the sofa, and half the time the TV is on when they’re working.” I could not concentrate in such an environment. "

if you can't do it it does not mean it's not true, I do most of my work sitting at a sofa with tv running and my kids running around, I guess it's just a matter of getting used to, I can just ignore tv sounds and do my work sitting there.
Schadenfreude with Bite
May I inquiry your Brother printer model ?
Computers tend to be easier to use when you have your own personal system administrator available.
The Futuristic World of 2017 Is Super Depressing
Danish is good, the rest sound not so very lifelike.
Corrected, thanks! They occupy a similar place in my mind, and while I purposefully and deliberately made an effort to use the correct one initially, I accidentally regressed later...
if AWS ceased to operate? Oh jeez, there'd be at the very least an economic meltdown - lots of companies would cease to run, some pretty big ones too.
By that standard every language needs to die. Or to put it another way, how long should languages be permitted to survive as we figure out better ways of doing things?
Which it fails miserably at. They probably picked the one example that worked.

Someone linked another example here:

https://soundcloud.com/zack-bloom/amazons-new-text-to-speech...

And it pronounces 1970s (the decade) as one-thousand-nine-hundred-seven-ths.
Yes!

We'll all die one day. We don't have to be pessimistic and gloomy about it but we do need to prepare. We all hope it won't be right away but yet there's no guarantee in life. Everyone has different priorities when things get rough, but without planning, the regular defaults apply, and they (usually) aren't what you or your family want.
My Garmin Vivoactive HR does just fine, normally 5-6 days without issue, with some GPS usage.