skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know the standard already exists (It's called EPC), and it is actually used a bit. I recall last time I bought socks at Walmart, there was actually an RFID tag inside the label. I believe they're used a bit more in the supply chain, but AFAIK no retailer actually uses them at the point of sale yet.

One reason I think the retailers took a step back from EPC was the general fear mongering and misinformation. In addition to the crazies calling them out as "the mark of the beast", there were numerous reports in the media about how walmart was going to start "putting computer tracking chips in all the pants they sold so they could track you wherever you went." I'm pretty sure they were also supposed to give you cancer and kill baby seals, too!
These links are pretty cool. Are there any tutorials or walkthroughs you would recommend? Like, Go has always interested me but I have no idea where to start to get an experience like say ExpressJS or even where to find templating or rendering.

Any suggestions are appreciated!
The Agile Cubby
We have other sad excuses to shake you down. Petty drugs (Ganja), Copyrightviolations and beeing a Idiot (literally Privat-Man in ancient greek).
Thus far, your list of things not found in the west can bef ound in the west.
"If you are Amazon, you have to acknowledge that you are slowly corroding the retail sector, which employs many (~4.5 million) people in this country."

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/silicon-valley-ha...
Prediction, Explanation and the November Surprise
People have been asking Twitter for years to improve lists, but they don't listen.
The big store chains nowadays doesn't even have someone to put products in their place. Their product provider personal that put the product in the correct place. Now they will have a way to make their own customers to work for them. This is a store owner dream.
If that happens the customer would just complain and in time we'd lose the trust in the store. So, no, the incentive is most definitely on Amazon to get it right. If they don't, they won't last long. Just imagine news stories with people that later noticed that they "purchased" items that they didn't leave the store with. It would be a huge mess.
Awesome insight! This is why I love HN.

My mother makes uses of it every week and gloats that we don't have the tech available here in Boulder (a tech hub).
What are the examples being used in interviews/tests, and for what jobs? (I took one of the last instances of 6.001 / SICP right as the curriculum was changing; I don't regret it, but I already knew programming pretty well coming in.)

If you're testing someone's ability to write some code from scratch, as opposed to how to modify a large system that they can't fully understand by the time the interview is over, you are either conducting a good interview for a very small number of jobs, or a bad interview for a much larger number of jobs. A lot of MIT classes (e.g., the OS class, 6.828, where you're given most of an OS but with the important pieces left out for you to write) are much better at teaching the latter skill.

Also, to be fair, most programming interviews and tests are stupid and irrelevant, regardless of inspiration. :)
True. And maybe they also figured out a technical solution, too. If not, I'm sure they will eventually.

But I'd also have been more impressed with the video if they showed stressed-out parents with crying kids and their hands full as they've got their cell phones tucked between their heads and shoulders, rather than young people quietly grabbing a single item and leaving.

This can actually HELP with those problems because a lot of those problems happen while in a line. Maybe they expect their customers to be like the ones in this video, but certainly my store was a little more chaotic. They should design for that chaos -- and maybe they did, but the video doesn't show it, is all. Presumably because they wanted to stress how easy it was, but to me that comes off as alien to the real world, based on my experience.
I think this technology is something our society doesn't need in this moment. Reducing jobs only because people can't wait in the line is not a big step to humanity. We need to see what are the consequences for future generations instead of trying to look "futuristic".
During college, I worked for about 6 or 7 months in a local supermarket. Seventeen years later, some of my former coworkers are still there.
"Instant on" terminals FTW - what could be better !
Bravo & Thanks! :D
Good one :). NE = North East, not Nebraska in this instance though I can see the confusion.
It's imperfect and unable to be completely avoided, but worse to move the line further in the wrong direction.
In most markets comparables are acquired through an MLS database, and access to MLS is usually not free.

You can hire or become friends with a real estate professional that pays for access to MLS (or become one yourself).

But before sites like Zillow, there wasn't anything like it easily available to the average person.
How do people think it matters who's fault it is?

You can call them lazy or stupid but they still exist and a lot of them won't get a new job (again, doesn't matter if they can't or just don't want to find one).
Wow that's depressing. I suddenly feel the impulse to give you a hug and tell you that it's gonna be alright. I wish I was more sure that it actually will be.
They could weight the contents of the shelves. Based on that you may know what you took out. I actually looked into that for a retailer.
How much time do you spend on false security alerts?
Many systems already do this for controlled access. Would be a useful bit of data to have if easily implemented. Problems are when access is not 1 by 1. You could get useful, but not consistent suggestive data.
And the worst damage of the non-runtime components is mitigated via sandboxing.
The whole "colonize planets" won't pan anyway. By the time it is viable a O'Neill cylinder will be a better place to live and we can put them in ideal orbits.
When I bought my house a year ago the bank sent someone out to appraise it.
Faraday cage bags are already a thing.. I can see them being a lot more popular..
If appraisals are not accurate, then what is the definition of 'accurate'? Appraisals are what the lender relies upon to verify the mortgage amount. I also highly doubt that number.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11628080. Unfortunately we have to have a base case for this recursion, which is to treat this as a duplicate.
I'd guess part of why those cities were chosen were to have enough data points to draw conclusions, since all the examples are from a narrow time frame.
Way back when I worked retail we had a cohort of particularly ignorant customers who would get fresh meats from the deli counter, wander about the shop then decide they didn't want said meats and stash it behind random products in whichever aisle they happened to be in at the time.
> The only flaw I never understand with the above is cant the attacker just change the password like 10-15 times in 5mins, and thus "flush" out the old password?

In systems where you have the "can't use previous N passwords" when changing it, you also pair that with a "can't change password more than X times a time increment".
I have a feeling you're wrong -- I see RFID tags on almost everything these days, even tiny cheap products.
httprouter is really awesome. I switched to it when Go's built-in router would cause panics during msan stress testing (back in Go 1.6), and really performs well.
There's a small HEPA filter on the suit itself, downstream of the air hose connection, that filters out whatever may be on the hose connection.

You can go without a connection for several minutes easily.

The article also unusually describes "thinking about keeping the suit under positive pressure." The vents in the suit have one-way valves, so it really isn't something you need to think about.

(-occasional researcher in a BSL4)
I can tell you've never worked in QA :)

you must assume you're users will do whacky things and they will have no idea how the system works.
A university that I'm applying to has a particularly stupid requirement on their login portal, but since I'm a prospective student, I don't think it'd be wise for me to name and shame.
> However, the number of employees working at the cash register is still the same

Actually the ratio of staff:active-self-checkout machines is planned to reduce in each new deployment as customers become accustomed to the machines. Starts around 1:2 and usually sits around 1:4 with a target of 1:8 or even 1:12 at quiet times.

That's definitely a reduction in cashiers since the machines displace existing check-out lines & registers.

Source: an acquaintance is a manager in a Tesco Superstore.
Isnt that what it is marketed as? I found it useful as a starting point when shopping.
No equity is offered for this position.
RFID, image recognition with cameras... what is it? Can someone go and check it out? ;)
Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful – Medium
* What happens when someone throws a product in my bag. Who pays it?
Thought exercise: if you were Zillow, what additional data would you need to make the estimates more accurate? And where would you get it?
Terrible UX is spot-on.

I was using one of these just this morning: got all my shopping onto the scale/shelf and was getting ready to pay. The machine asks how many 5p bags I used. So I start packing the stuff into my backpack to find out whether I need a bag. The machine pipes up: "Did you remove something from the scale?" The screen has a full screen modal warning that I have to put the shopping back.

I put the things back on the scale and guess that I won't need a bag and I pay using contactless but what if my shopping won't fit in my bag?

I understand why we have to "pack" things onto a scale (it makes it much harder to take things without scanning them) but it has to trust you at some point.
Zillow's Zestimates are particularly obnoxious because they provide little detail regarding why the values change and they retroactively revise them. I bought a house this summer that had an inexplicable drop in estimated value of about 15% a month or two before the house was listed. I paid closer to the previous estimated value than the post-drop value. Now when I look at the house on Zillow, the drop is nowhere to be seen and the past year is a smooth, barely sloping line. Never was there any indication of why they had a 15% drop, which was particularly frustrating when trying to determine how much to offer for the house.
SICP changed the way I think about computing. Despite being a book intended for freshmen, there's lots of interesting things to learn about even for experienced programmers, and the footnotes are terrific.
Preact Issue #417 - Do virtual DOM diffing on web worker? [1]

[1] https://github.com/developit/preact/issues/417
Redfin does a much better job with estimates and track their error rate: https://www.redfin.com/redfin-estimate
Come back and contribute to this once they've made a decision. :)
Yeah, usually either a professional appraiser or a real estate broker- neither one should be relying on data from Zillow, both usually would use data from a local MLS.
Eh, it's at least a few ideas for moving from "buying more" to "do things with those he already has", which might be part of the problem.
Its probably too creepy in terms of privacy to detail how it works which in turn will give themselves PR. I can only assume it uses arrays of cameras and sensors with deep learning. Glorious amounts of tracking data.
Newspapers and news television broadcasts had to do that due to the nature of the medium. There's no reason news websites couldn't tailor their content to the user in order to maximize views, engagement, or whatever other metric makes them the most money. Google News already does that.
I can't imagine any scenario where cost to build would weight into appraisal.
I really dislike how American behavior is always equated with western. The US is just one part of the west. I think many of us in Europe have the exact same view on Americans and how they raise their kids. I am a Norwegian married to an American and I got to say American parenting seems claustrophobic and paranoid to me.

American kids are under tight and organized control all the time. They got their playdates, piano playing, soccer practice, etc. Their parents are driving them everywhere to all sorts of activities. These kids never seem to have a life of their own.

There are of course huge differences in Europe in how kids are raised. But at least in Norway kids tend to allowed to roam a lot more freely. It is more normal to walk to school yourself or be outside by yourself. Parents tend to not arrange playdates. They go over to each others house themselves. And a lot more of their day isn't organized in any way.

I saw this when studying at college in the US. American college students were a lot more immature than European college students IMHO. They seemed unaccustomed to having this much freedom, and not having parents looking the over the shoulder all the time. American college also felt very nanny like. A lot of rules and regulations as if you are still a child.

It is rather ironic that in the land of individualism and freedom, there is so much control and regulation on peoples lives. I think Americans have mistaken economic freedom for personal freedom.
ProductHunt Announces 2016 Golden Kitty Awards Nominees
I concur. Though I tend to find this attitude pretty ridiculous since the status-quo home valuation process is just as bullshit at the zillow strategy is.

Status Quo in my experience goes:

1. List your house (usually at slightly above whatever the realtor thinks it might sell at)

2. Someone's willing to buy at listing price +/- 5%

3. Bank sends an appraiser whose job it is to figure out what a house is worth (guess what: see #2 for relevant demand evidence), and magically the number comes remarkably close to the price sorted out in #2 massively most of the time

I've never heard a real estate agent complain that zillow's numbers are too low, mind you... only ever that they're too high, which makes sense to be frustrated by if your biggest challenge is controlling your time-costs.
You can never be 100% sure, but you can be as arbitrarily close to sure as you are willing to spend resources for.

If you have a random algorithm with 0% false positives and 50% false negatives, and repeated trials are independent, then technically combining a few dozen runs of the algorithm actually has the same chance of returning the wrong results as a deterministic algorithm failing due to cosmic radiation. The drop-off of failure probability is exponential in the number of trails, making it quite practical to achieve arbitrary certainty. As long as you're a few orders of magnitude more certain than the hardware, the algorithmic randomness ceases to matter.
They need lights for filming. That's a given. But once they have lights for filming, they have the light they need to read scripts. But light isn't enough for tablets, they all need to be independently charged, or you they do nothing. That's a huge knock against their usability.
Blogging Guide: Best Platform for Blog Blogger and WordPress
If that risk exists it will turn into a disincentive for people to even pick up items and look at them closely. If this gets in the way of people making impulse purchases it could significantly reduce the store's sales volume - after all few people stick to their shopping lists and retailers know this. I'm looking forward to seeing the results!
It seems like everything is already prepackaged in the store according to what they have for sale. I know my local grocery store has certain things prepackaged into bundles instead of allowing people to bag them.
> But before sites like Zillow, there wasn't anything like it easily available to the average person.

Zillow unfortunately doesn't help though, as no one takes the value seriously (except perhaps uneducated consumers entering the real estate market). Bad data is worse than no data.
I think what you're actually seeing is the output of a Kalman Filter temporal model. The zestimate is the mean of the filter output, but the error bounds of the filter are more important than the actual mean/reported value.

What happens is that the model uses trends to extrapolate from each "real" data point (in this case, a house sale in your neighborhood). The problem is, and what Kalman Filters help manage, is the uncertainty propagation between each house sale. When it has been a long time from when a sale has occurred, it is unclear what the real/actual price is of a home. This means that on the estimated price the error bounds are large, and zestimate still just reports the mean value of this huge uncertainty.

What then happens is that a house is sold in your area, a new data point is recorded, and the filter re-adjusts itself and collapses its uncertainty/error bounds in the time of that measurement around the measurement. And you get correction. This is why the "old zestimate" is updated.
Not ideal - but does it work in Wine ?
Guys this is not good. As much as I love the convenience of pick-and-go, this eventually will prove out to be drastic for a variety of bad socioeconomic reasons, that most of us are already aware of. Small businesses were already suffering at the hands of Amazon Prime. Now Amazon Go wants to not only kick out those businesses out of the block but it also wants to take away jobs of small retail salesperson. Unacceptable. This can perhaps work at Amazon headquarters but I hope, I really hope it does not make its way to major metro cities like NYC and if it does then Amazon should promise to create certain number of jobs and revenue that it intends to displace. Just because an average reader of HN does not do such jobs or had held such jobs for only a brief period in his/her life, this does not mean that lot of people don't rely on such small time jobs for their livelihood.

Places I can see this working are with low footprints such as cafes at hospitals etc.

Amazon Go, please Go away.

Updated: Grammar correction.
he aint the CEO title is wrong.
I don't think science is cultish.

And I don't think I ever did, except for clinate sciences.

The reason they appeared cultish to me was the way anyone who doesn't immediately believe it must obviously be a troll or a paid shill and must be attacked.

Also the huge focus on "n x 1000 scientists can't be wrong" just screams bad science.
I think your impressions of Microsoft are out-of-date. We've been successfully using Azure resources through "Azure for Research" grants. My world, is the world of Linux VMs, Docker, and OSS and I find Azure to be a good fit for our research needs. (I never touch any Windows OS, if that's what you are worried about.)
I own a house in Bentonville, Arkanasas. I now live in Denver, but owning a property in Walmart's company town means I always pay careful attention to retail developments that threaten Walmart.

I know a lot about the various retail companies and how effective they are with technology. Anyone that thinks Target is going to do anything effective in this space doesn't understand how god-awful their entire logistics/supply chain is. It's legendarily bad.

Amazon is another story. And this particular technology is something that can destroy Walmart, eventually. I'll be watching this very closely, because if I see enough headway being made I'll be selling my house before the disaster hits the market there.

Honestly though, groceries and CPG are HARD. I suspect that Amazon has simply thought about cost-savings from having minimal staffing in a store and used it to justify the insane capital costs of an RFID tag on every item and the scanners/camera/compute needed to operate the Go store.

What's always so funny to me is how the millennial generation in general has a hugely negative view of Walmart for paying poorly and destroying small businesses, while having a positive view of Amazon. In this case, Amazon will continue to do what it's been doing (destroying businesses) while paying nothing, because it's automating away a huge segment of work. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it's definitely going to happen, and like self-driving vehicles, this is going to disrupt society big time.
From the rest of the text and the video, I have absolutely zero idea how they are using deep learning here. And let me not even mention that they've used the AI word in the video.

So, I highly doubt that attracting the tech crowd will work if they don't explain the damn thing about how they are using it.
Solves problems that don't exist: Letting people split the fee on tickets so that one person doesn't have to buy everyone's ticket. Check

Acts as though providing the same service as competitors is novel: Almost the entirety of their schtick. Check

High Profile people who don't have any meaningful knowledge of the topic at hand: Tyler Perry and Spielberg totally understand theatre economics. So... check.

Already integrating with social media to monetize the hell out of everything: Oh baby check.

About the only thing novel or interesting are group discounts which a lot of theatres already do. Aside from that, this seems to be an example of everything that is wrong with startup/gig economies outside of exploiting workers (and I am sure they'll find a way. Maybe offer an option to have people stand in line for you).
Active Research Areas in Deep Learning for NLP
Quantum computers still can't solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, sadly. Take a look at the BQP complexity class; it's only a subset of NP.
Another article that avoids talking about the root cause because it's too unpalatable. Blaming facebook is misguided. Free speech is inherently incompatible with news.
You get what you pay for :-)

The Sainsbury's near me have started to go contactless as well, and it's great.
Sales price is really the only 'accurate' statement of value.
City of Vaasa in Finland to Apply for the Tesla Gigafactory
Christmas 2016
Well, Today I Learned that Racket is GCed; I assumed the contrary due to John Carmack being enthusiast about it in the context of video games.

I understand the fact that not everything in a game belongs to the critical 16ms budget (and know about e.g. Unity, which lets you talk C# to it), but I'm still puzzled; can someone expand on:

- Which are these non critical parts? Rendering / physics / animation are certainly in the critical path. That leaves only simple "client" game logic out of it, right? What else?

- For these non critical parts, what are the typical acceptable time boundaries? For example, the article mentions "maximal latencies of around 22ms" for Racket. How is it acceptable for non-critical-path parts? How much would still be acceptable? 50ms? 100ms? "That depends"?

- And regarding Haskell and OCaml, which I only vaguely know about, I had never asked myself how they handle memory. Which makes me ask: are there non-GCed functional programming languages? Does it make sense? (Especially given the kinds of deep complex data structures produced by the immutability that often comes with these languages.)
Amazon app currently already has barcode scanning. My guess is that they are replacing POS with app. If you think about it no one needs those arcane point of sell machines because smartphones can do scanning as well as payment processing. The only thing left is detecting unscanned items which is fairly well solved problem using RFIDs. May be later can be combined as well with measuring weight of person identified when entering.

This is brilliant as-in how no one else thought about it. Lot of small shops have limit on their open schedule because of staffing issues. I am assuming Amazon will set up few experimental shops and then sell technology to other stores. This can certainly revolutionize retail if they persist on executing right.
Go risky on libraries, conservative on infrastructure