skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been on a J-1 multiple times with different employers and they've always used Cultural Vistas. Cultural Vistas has to be the worst, most bureaucratic organization with which I've ever had the displeasure of interacting. All of their employees lack basic critical thinking skills to the point that I've often wondered if I'm dealing with an automated system written by government contractors.

Are there any sponsoring organizations for J-1 that are not such a pain on the intern/trainee's part?
I believe they are having a conference, so that explains the batch of releases in the past week or so.
Unfortunately, a large percentage of the world's population is on Facebook which means that a large percentage of the world's news is being consumed through Facebook. Many would argue that, simply due to the enormous amount of power it wields, Facebook has a responsibility to look past its narrow commercial interests.
> But Zuckerberg has shown boldness and maturity as one of the best CEOs time and again

In what respect?
> Why not admit that your point about wildfires was simply off the mark?

OK: my comment about wildfires was off the mark.

> Why not just admit that you misstated the author's position?

OK: I misstated the author's position (initially)

> Why not simply admit that the issue is more complicated than it seemed to you at first glance and that you may have jumped the gun?

OK: I may have jumped the gun.

> Note that I am not responding at all to the drought data you found.

Ah.
Same. I remember predictions of RFID-based shopping becoming the norm 10 years ago, but it never happened. Does anyone know why the tech didn't pan out that way?
The closest I've seen to something like that is when a country's merits or good deeds are being discussed and someone brings up past mistakes/atrocities. An example would be bringing up Unit 731 when discussing Japan giving aid to some country as a reason that Japan is evil.

As an aside, I frequently see your comments flagged to death and have used you as an example of how a community will create its own bubble. I happen to disagree with 99% of every post I have ever seen by you, but I've yet to flag a post just for being infuriating.
I have a really dumb question about the Haskell GC, which I've never been brave enough to ask, but here goes:

I thought everything in Haskell was immutable? If so, wouldn't that imply that it's impossible to create cyclic references (i.e. A and B can't both reference each other, because one of them has to be created first, and once created, it's immutable)?

Couldn't you then just use reference counting to decide when to recycle objects instead of having full-blown GC pauses? Or is it too expensive to keep a reference count on all those objects and keep it updated? Whatever cost it has, it seems much more preferable to me compared to 50 ms GC pauses for relatively simple code.
I saw that, but it sounds vague enough that there a few different scenarios I can think of to attack this service. Like what are they going to do if multiple people are sharing an account, but they only have photos of one?

edit: I just realized how they can deal with that -- take a picture when the person walks in and tie it to the account they scanned. There still seem to be a bunch of fraud issues, but this is certainly interesting.
I imagine I'd get over it pretty quickly, especially since waiting in line for the checkout is so dreadful. I really, really hate it.
Pretending there isn't a difference is ignorance.
Or even "once you're dressed, I can tell you something about Mercury".
I agree that it shouldn't be a reward - more a thing to do or discuss after the task is done that isn't an option before it's done. Because as I imagine most parents know, any perceived offered reward does become grounds for negotiation.
^ this. If you learn history in Austria today you learn how the bad nazis forced them into voting for yes. If you learn it everywhere else you realize they just liked the idea of work and a "german race".

IMO they are just trying to rationalize how this could happen and chance history by blaming facebook.
Just tried it on https://beetle.email and got spammed with new signup notifications.

You might want to put a warning on there saying that it will submit any forms it can find a LOT.

Also, on the waiting screen, while it's running tests, I filled in the form and it's had an iframe drama.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7rofi17cjormgav/Screenshot%202016-...
Companies have been discussing "checkout-less" stores since forever, but nobody has been brave enough to do it due to the perceived threat of shoplifting.

And while shoplifting is a legitimate threat, are non-shoplifters going to be turned into shoplifters without a checkout? Are normal shoplifters stopped by checkouts? These are the core questions, and until it is tested nobody will know for sure.

Target is getting awfully close to this. With their Cartwheel app you're meant to scan all your items as you shop (so it auto-applies coupons and discounts); but they haven't taken it to the next logical step and allowed you to provide your Cartwheel output at the checkout for checking out.

I will say that the way Target has implemented smartphone barcode scanning makes me think that there might be a future in all this. It is extremely painless, they just need to stop kicking you out of the scan screen when it finds a discount (i.e. it doesn't kick you out if no discount is found, but does when a discount IS found, that's problematic for efficiency reasons).
It already feels very weird to me to walk into an Apple store, check out on my own phone, and just walk out with product. This will take some getting used to.
WW3 QUOTE THERE SHall BE RIVERS OF BLOOD AS ERDOGAN TO SEND
Interesting, i've read about these Store Concepts for years as Test Projects from Rewe in Germany, but they never rolled them out widely. Probably sticking RFID on everything was too expensive. This camera based solution might be better suited for a wide rollout.
I got excited when I thought this would be about Go usage on AWS, but this is way cooler.
Out of interest, what would you say is the difference between a text editor and an IDE?
So, theories? RFID labels at the exit, computer vision to track which items you grab? Any of this coupled with tracking phone location?

The fact that they speak about "supported phones" would point to some radio / location stuff going on.
My first thought is: I don't have a supported smartphone.

The current checkout process entails the acceptance of common legal tender, but this process will require I have their app, and presumably allow it quite a bit of tracking permission.

A cool demo, sure, but I think I'll stick to shopping like the normal folks.
I've been wondering about RFID too. But I guess if you have too many items in one place (shopping bag) it can be tricky.
I was thinking that, but then realized that the concept of fraud doesn't really apply in the way we're used to. I mean you're allowed to walk into the store, take anything you want, and then walk out.

How would you even define fraud in that context? Presumably there are things you could do to confuse or mislead the technology, but it seems to me that as presented the onus is on Amazon to just charge you the correct amount based on what you leave the store with.
So technically they built something to automatically detect shoplifting (but charge to customer in the process).

If this worked in generic stores they could make a killing with theft detection services.
Please just exit the store, we don't take cash here.
Here's an ad from IBM circa 2006 predicting(?) this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eob532iEpqk

Crazy to think we're actually here now. And even sans-RFID.
Flatpak puts most of the common dependencies into cross-distro "runtimes". The runtime maintainers would bear the responsibility for keeping the base system patched.
I don't have any specific advice, but this part stood out to me:

> I have a pretty big backlog of customers I cannot fully get going with my limited time.

What is it that they need that demands so much attention? Is there any way you can automate that so you can be more hands-off?
Do you remember the name of the talk? Or do you have a link to video? I've been dabbling with something related (NLP and finding a specific piece of information, with much much smaller scope though than a generic case) and would love to see what pros are currently thinking.
I've been running PouchDB + CouchDB 2.0 in production for a while now (financier.io). It's worked great, and I really recommend you to check it out. A couple things:

1. CouchDB 2.0 is still rough around the edges, particularly with its new Fauxton interface (ex: completely broken when proxied into subfolder).

2. CouchDB 2.0 brings the _bulk_get API which has improved sync by an order of magnitude(s).

3. I do have custom logic for logging in overriding the _session API in order to do rate limiting. (I proxy with nginx for IP rate limiting and node.js for failed password attempts rate limiting.) I also have custom logic for provisioning a new CouchDB database per user and setting up permissions.

4. I host on Digital Ocean but I use their new block storage solution so that a growing db does not become unwieldy/expensive.

5. My SaaS subscription system is kind of unique: When your subscription expires you'll simply lose write access to the server (CouchDB), but you can still pull down your data to PouchDB.
Robots, jobs and the human fear of change
Question about the hat example given:

The author says that the phone company wouldn't learn anything about google's solution by keeping notes because of the randomization of the coloring. that doesn't seem to be true to me.

Assuming the solution that Google colored in was correct, the phone company doesn't necessarily need to know the frequencies of the edges, merely that they are different: which is learned by recording the results after E^2 selections.

Am I wrong here?
In the video, the customers check in with a barcode displayed on the app.

Probably there will be a guard at the entrance: the barrier will beep when someone enters without signing in, and the guard will stop them.

What's more interesting is that there can be absolutely no dead angles for this to work.

They might have cameras inside each shelve, mounted on top, to correlate products taken with the person standing in front.

But what if two persons stand close together, one leans over and takes something...

Or what if you go into the store with a friend or your kids. And you all pick up items which are supposed to go on your tab.

It's definitely a challenging problem.
Is It Really Possible to Create a Livable Atmosphere Up on the Moon?
They will most certainly be tracking a lot more than just you picking up your item. The data they collect about shopping behavior will be interesting.

Like, how long I hesitated before I picked up something, what I had already in my "cart" at the time, what deals I looked at but passed on, etc.
These days: not reasonably (more on that later). The computations are the kinds that traditional computers just don't do great on (intentionally, in both directions).

In the past: Yup. That is why many server admins for the big clusters learned what bitcoin was. Either to do that themselves or to yell at the people who were trying to.

But this is (arguably) a problem as certain geopolitical regions have a LOT of miners and resources which give them a significant advantage with respect to mining new coins. Think of it as increased probability rather than a guaranteed return. But, more importantly, it arguably gives them too much control over the system. Do some research on the subject, but I am sure that if I gave you two guesses you would get it.
Bitcoin Legal by Default in Russia, Confirms New Federal Tax Document
They had AWS re:Invent 2017 last week, so that is the reason for so many announcements :)
Yes, I understand the guarantees lock-freedom gives. My point is that I don't see how the same benefits aren't achievable with a simpler mechanism merely given a CPU that doesn't go out to lunch.

I suppose environmental portability is a good enough reason, even if I find it silly that high-performance multicore apps are forced into such a scenario.
I'm absolutely shocked big chains aren't doing this already. I hate the lines at my local grocery, it's fucking annoying as hell, a terrible UX and everyone always seems upset (i try to be chill, fwiw.. for the cashier sake lol).

I sort of doubt i'll ever see these Amazon stores though, Brick and Mortar is quite hard. I suspect i'll see someone (Amazon or otherwise) add this to the big chains i already use, though.

Either way, lets get rid of lines please.
I hear it's not much worse at 3 AM at night.
Transitioning from a startup to fully grown company hurts
RFID tags are still to expensive in the supermarket context. The margins are usually razor thin (at least in Germany) and the products are quite cheap. Even when buying RFID tags in bulk they are too expensive.
jesus man the constant switching of inflection due to jump cuts and shitty jokes was irritating. This is the stuff I always hate about your videos, and in general any "how to code an AI that does ___ with only < 10 lines of python". No you're giving me an extremely generic framework, and some vague direction that i can read off the linked page (the 9 lines), not how to actually write all these things, those are like afterthoughts in the video, more work goes into the click-baity titles and thumbnails then actual substantive information.
> No.

Explain please?
Do they really need "Computer Vision" and "Deep Learning Algorithms" just to scan a product and assoc it with your id?

The AI meme is getting ridiculous.

PS: I love how the video is based on the US and displays a multicultural, young and health conscious folk, yet not a single obese person is shown :) And how the protein section has chicken, beef and tofu, but no pork products :))
Presumably they'll want to deactivate the accounts for people who don't settle their bills, and they'll want to keep out folks who don't have accounts. This seems attackable to me, probably because they haven't released enough details about how it works.
think youre overestimating how "challenging" this will be for 99% of people
Mux – A lightweight, fast HTTP request router for Go
Jailbreak iOS 10
Just don't share the account. That may already be part of their ToS.
Next-In-Thread:

---

We see Ivy as a widely used component.
We use archiving some components to
recalibrate our focus. I don't think
that we want to archive Ivy in the near
future. Instead we try to push Ivy.

If you want to help with Ivy, you're welcome.

"It's already a challenge to stick with
Ivy build system itself given the lack of
fixes/releases/responses." What are the
problems you think are resolved with new
Ivy releases?

Jan

---
Amazon's had their conference, reInvent 2016, going last week

https://reinvent.awsevents.com/
Insurance companies will love it the most.
Kennu, projects like OpenStack & Cloud Foundry struggle doing 10% of AWS. unlike AWS & Azure, OSS doesn't have central control. if we learn from Linux the stack is composed of many independent elements (storage, networking, configuration, security, ..) and the way they all work together is because the community agreed on abstractions/APIs between those elements. that's what i suggested in my post, in most cases linux can have few file systems, few protocols, .. since in an open environments people can innovate, but all those adhere to the layers & APIs of the stack

BTW the problem is that you use AWS APIs in small scale, than you grow and have to pay quite a bit to AWS, and its too hard to move to the half-baked open source frameworks

Yaron Haviv (iguazio)
After reading the thesis, the proposed model of computing is like a concurrent Smalltalk where everything is completely mutable, even an object's code and prototype chain. The author then writes a function to calculate the Fibonacci sequence by turning it into a distributed system, with some effort, and then runs the code and talks about its performance!

At first glance, there seems to be a lot of incidental complexity and creative choice in expressing a function from integer to integer in this system, which goes against the ideas of code reuse and separating meaning from optimization -- i.e. that there is one global Fibonacci function that we can inspect and understand and don't have to rewrite for performance, or in another language, or to run in a distributed fashion.
In the UK, Tesco have been running a 'Scan as you Shop'[0] thing for a couple of years now. Customers pick up a scanner as they enter, scan their items as they go into their cart, and they have special checkouts which read your scanner.

There's a random chance that your scanner will be audited by a human against the contents of your shopping cart. Usually the first time you use it, then it backs off.

[0] http://www.tesco.com/scan-as-you-shop/
So, eventually everyone will be trading with yocto-satoshis but I guess that doesn't really change anything.

A little bit like how a 'Calorie' is actually a kilo-calorie.
I suppose it's publicly hosted which might be rare or totally new. TBH the most frustrating thing is that unlike github's notebook hosting you need to login just to view the content.

And for some reason the back button doesn't work once you encounter the login page. That's enough to make me want to stay away.
What they should feel weird about is the battery of security cameras that will watch your every move.
Where did he talk about simplifying them? I must have missed that part.
I find I have lot a easier time getting my son to accept hard dictates when I don't provide a reason - it's just the way it is. "Because I said so" is surprisingly effective[1], I think because he's learned that when I say it there is no more discussing.

Reasons provide a point of discussion - and my boy will discuss endlessly anything he's given the opportunity to. Particularly if discussing the reasons means not having to do the thing he doesn't want to do.

The problem I have is that I remember always wanting to know why (hell, I still do). So I have a default explain-first mentality that I've become increasingly aware I need to break.

It's a hard balance to find. You want the child to know the whys of what he's doing - but you don't want each reason to turn into an endless discussion.

[1] he's not happy about it, but it is remarkable effective :D
I try to give them a choice in what they want on their bread, but they always want something I'm not offering, or they want nothing, or they ignore me. So I just make their choice for them, but give them time to interrupt me. Sometimes they're ignoring me so hard that they miss their opportunity, and then we've got a problem.
SF Bay area, I've had 3 formal house assessments, & each time they "start with" Zillow et al to look at "reasonable values in the neighborhood". Which seriously affects your ability to refi, etc.

So Yeah Zillow has an effect. It's worth it to create a login & enter in your upgrades, so your ZESTIMATE goes up.
I worked at a grocery store for several years, and one thing I recall is customers CONSTANTLY putting items back in a random aisle, rather than where they found it.

I wonder how this tech deals with that? Maybe they figured that out, too. But I was amused in the video when I saw the customer putting it back where it belonged, because that's not how I remember that going...

All that said, this is fantastic and exciting.

Edit: I also hope they're already thinking about EBT cards and WIC.
I just got this book ~2 weeks ago and am using it in conjunction with udacity's course. Python Machine Learning (PML) is more low-level, math intensive, and hands on than udacity and other resources I'm using.

Thus far Udacity's course fits your explanation of using sklearn docs, tweaking inputs, etc. while PML provides a technical explanation of weighting with perceptrons and then you hand-write a perceptron learning algorithm.
I believe it was this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1Cyyt-4-n8
I'll admit, my first thoughts were "How can I exploit this system? How would I place sensors? What kind of sensors? Pressure plates? Cameras? IR trackers?" etc etc.

And I'm no shoplifter, never done that, I just tinker with stuff all the time. It's a kind of occupational psychosis. Same with lockpicks.
Another fault with his logic is that programming languages are very specialized and very powerful tools. You could try to dumb them down to make them work for the average person (which has been done ad nauseum at this point) but then they would no longer be capable of solving certain classes of problem either simply or quickly.

To go back to the car analogy, yes most people understand at least at a rudimentary level how modern cars function, but most people also lack the tools to do anything but the most basic of maintenance on a modern car. Even assuming they had the tools available, they still wouldn't understand how to use them or even how to diagnose certain classes of fault. We could say that in order to allow everyone to perform maintenance on their cars at home that car manufacturers aren't allowed to use anything but standard tools to build their cars, but that would basically undo the last ~30 years of advances in the auto industry. Want to own a Tesla? Oh sorry, non-standard parts, going to need to pull that off the market. The situation in the programmer world is basically the same, yeah we could make everyone program in something like BASIC (and even that is probably too complicated for most people), but that's kind of like tieing one hand behind your back and then jumping in the deep end of the pool. Programming is hard enough as is, we don't need to start introducing handicaps.
It's interesting that they talk abut a supported smartphone. If it was just computer vision looking at what you grab you would only need a printed card with the QR that the folk in the video uses to check-in.

So, probably there's something needed from the phone as well: NFC, low energy Bluetooth, inertial location tracking? I guess that we will see when we look at the supported devices list.
We provide UpCloud as one of the cloud options for our SaaS database/metrics/messaging offering at Aiven.io and have been extremely happy with their disk i/o performance.

Here's just a quick "hdparm -t" test I just ran on two random low-end nodes:

upcloud-de-fra: 1028 MB in 3.00 seconds = 342.12 MB/sec

aws-us-west-1: 58 MB in 3.02 seconds = 19.17 MB/sec

I would of course recommend everyone to benchmark their actual workload on each cloud option before making the decision.
As far as I know supermarkets are already able to track customers paths using their smarthphones thanks to your WIFI announcement of known networks.
> perceived threat of shoplifting

If that's the problem, couldn't these companies just test it? I mean, even if all the items in the single pilot store were stolen, would it really be such a big cost for Wallmart R&D department to have exact empiric knowledge as opposed to "perceived threat"?
Yes, the stuff he's saying has been known for ages, but there's been a greater trend recently of people hinting otherwise. I worked in a research group that was focused on AGI until I left academia last year, and there are spirited debates going on about just how close we are.

For what it's worth, I completely agree with the sentiment presented here that we're far enough away that we don't know what direction even we need to start down to make the best progress, which in my view makes any sort of prognostication of questionable value. It's also why I think it's not that productive to have people like Stephen Hawking arguing about future AI as a threat that somehow needs to be mitigated. Even if he's right in the general point, we know so little about how that future system would look that it would be like asking Isaac Newton to make cars safer.