skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> With Trump elected, Europe is turning to itself for its defence...

wait, what?... Europe wasn't paying for its own defense before Trump, because why, they just liked the US presidents?! Was it something about them, or were they just these big suckers and Europeans were like "hey free defense!"? Quite frankly, you're making Trump sound better.
This question comes up once in a while. One solution to the complete lack of regulation would be to have something like a bar association similar to how lawyers regulate their profession. It wouldn't have to be a legal requirement, but it would at least set a standard for membership.
ok, but I think it's a valid opinion to express extreme aversion for Thomas Friedman.
You've more or less described IRV.
You really believe it's probable that we live in a simulation based on a math paper? That math paper is itself simulated as is your reading and understanding of it.
Science fiction & fantasy are good tools to exercise mental creativity and think through scenarios of technical change.

Fantasy is a useful way to explore how technology might work in a world with unlimited resources. For example, Dor the magician in Piers Anthony's Xanth novels is able to talk to inanimate objects. In some ways that fantasy approximates a future state for how we interact with AI enabled objects like Amazon Alexa or Siri.

The USC Worldbuilding Institute (http://worldbuilding.institute/about) has been researching how fiction can serve as a catalyst for engineering, business, and social breakthroughs.
Exactly. I can get Comcast up to I think 200mbit now (I have 100) or ATT DSL which would require paying for a phone line + the service which would cost the same as Comcast and run at 768k. This is in Silicon Valley. My apartment building doesn't give me any other options (and Comcast is the only "official" one, but ATT claims they can offer me service...never tried).
The whole publication industry seems like a conspiracy that's hiding in plain sight for anyone to see. Yet it seems to be difficult to get rid of... and yet no one quite knows why.
> ML = anything where parameters are learnt from data.

In some ML algorithms you don't learn parameters. For example: some clustering algorithms are based on examples, not on parameters.

> Yes, this means ML is "just" statistics

So, a decision tree based on information theory would you call it statistics? Information theory and statistics are not clearly the same.

> I thought this was pretty much an accepted definition.

Machine Learning: A machine that learns (regardless it uses statistics, information theory, function optimization, biological inspiration or whatever)
Sounds like Hank Rearden.
Word2vec Parameter Learning Explained [pdf]
There is a widely accepted difference in the US: the PE exam. Other countries make it flat out illegal to call yourself an engineer without the proper credentials.
The farther away I get from Name of the Wind, the worse taste it leaves in my mouth. Perhaps it's because it's unfinished and Kvothe's rosy prose and tendency to superlative is not yet explained. Taken on their own, they just seem overwritten to me.
I don't understand your point. We agree that American Express should not provide insurance to people that aren't working there. I bet we don't agree that the government should provide single payer insurance to all citizens so companies do not have to do it. Unfortunately, my opinion doesn't matter in the country because the elected officials right now do not feel the citizens deserve insurance.
At this point they are synonymous, so there's no point in trying to change the terminology any more.
I think there are still a few good forums out there but they're specific to a hobby or interest.
You do realize that there is licensing for engineers already? It's on a state by state basis in the US although there is a national organization. It's mostly relevant to the degree that you deal with regulatory bodies and have to sign off on drawings, reports, etc.

In my first job out of school I worked on offshore drilling rig design and retrofits. I took an engineer in training exam and would have eventually gotten a PE (Professional Engineer) license had I continued in that field because you had to submit designs to the ABS and other governmental organizations.
> I don't understand how this is a "proxy metric".

I didn't say it was, I asked if it was.

> Non-notable sources are by definition those for which existing reliable sources are absent.

This would also make them non-verifiable, no?

> Wikipedia is committed to minimizing error.

That's fair.
It's not the final bottleneck, it's the first constraint. ;)
I know people who use the Apple Watch for that. The battery is small enough that they let it barge twice a day (when getting ready in the morning, some time in the evening) that it tops up to 100% in a short amount of time.
Chrome 56 will roll out with HTML5 by Default
> I have never had a problem spending money on educational material that was way beyond what you can find in public libraries (Internet these days).

Cool story, rich bro. Taschen and Elsevier are actually very good publishers to compare, not because they are "esoteric," but because both many scientists and many artists benefit from public grants. Taschen does not actively work to keep work it publishes from public libraries. If Taschen acted like Elsevier, for example they would be suing photographers for having exhibitions featuring reprinted photographs in public museums.

This is all of course besides the fact that limiting access to scientific knowledge for the purposes of rent-seeking is morally wrong and IMO should be criminal.
They had a really well defined user-space, marketed at it well, and really nailed the user experience, while still being free for the typical user. There is a lot to love about Discord.
Dang, yeah the early 2008 MacBook Air (MacBookAir1,1) had an unusually short life. Looks like the late 2008 MacBook Air (the next iteration MacBookAir2,1) would have had an 8 year life. I guess the upgraded Penryn processor and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M made all the difference.
"It's hard to believe that people would panic if the oil price went high, or even sky high. It wouldn't be pretty, sure, probably several industry sectors would die, but I don't see how it would end our world."

You might be interested in watching "The End of Suburbia":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug
Can you define those terms for those of us who are unaware?
Far from it. CSV is by far the most common data exchange format for ERP, CRM and business systems in general. EDI is another. Good luck communicating with SAP ERP or NetSuite without good old-fashioned SOAP. Judging from the documentation none of these seems to be supported by Confluent.

SOAP and CSV are not sexy. They have plenty of shortcomings. However, those are the formats that are used in the real world today (and for some time to come).

Stream processing is a very useful design pattern but like any design pattern it should be used carefully and only where appropriate (see: Microservices).

If I were to build a new complex ERP from the ground up I'd be remiss not to use something like Kafka or Confluent for data processing.

If I want to communicate with legacy systems though that's an entirely different matter. The same applies when targeting SMBs. You'd have a hard time explaining to small business owners why they suddenly need a newfangled stream processing architecture while their old "Export CSV and load that into Excel" process worked just fine.
I, like most people, have no idea what a rod or a hogshead is.

The same is hardly true for the conversion of minutes to seconds.
Neat - I used convolutional neural networks to classify electrocorticographic signals during my PhD work. I'll definitely check you guys out!
OP here. I work at a company that is able to move quickly, and yes, sometimes breaks things in the process. Tradeoffs between speed and safety are fine to make, in my opinion. It does seem like it would be useful to regulate things like ethical conduct, though. Maybe this dictates what systems are ok to move quickly and break and which systems aren't. What do you think?
I can only imagine how coddled your childhood was if you weren't aware of the dark realities of death and war by 15 or 16.

Fear is a choice.

Also many people have overcome much greater trauma than 'age-inappropriate movies'... that's absurd.
Hah, fair. It's always unfortunate when it's hard to address the real limitation though :)
You can make software a predictive profession, by adding an order of magnitude of cost to every software development effort. 10x. It's not that it can't be done. It's the market is not suitable for that sort of development. It's a management problem, not a software engineer problem.

There are a huge number of combinations of various statements that have to be iterated over meticulously. If you want to write tests for each and every one of these conditions, it's going to eat a ton of time to do just that and hence add tons of cost to your project. Developers use intuition when dealing with logic, and they make mistakes or don't understand all the possibilities that could occur... because the brain is limited like that. You can't make them not do that. You can just test for it after the fact and fix problems that are identified, that potentially adds huge cost if you are looking to make it fully predictable.

Lots of testing happens in production systems. Especially in open source software. Or during implementation of some library. Those are identified and fixed when identified. To do that within a single effort will add huge cost to the projects.
Agreed. He's a pretty compelling presenter/speaker. He participated in a discussion on Channel 4 news [1] along with a former Kremlin Advisor that I find highly entertaining.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZjqicN8Zug
Exist to exist?

I'm certainly not saying that.

The point of existence is to create something more coherent.

Fields form particles, particles form atoms, atoms form molecules, molecules form cells, cells form beings, beings form collectives, collectives form unions.

Look to history on that one.

Like you said, it is nothing new, just a fact.

Currently it seems the Genome has rather large ambitions than "meat". It needs a transitional jump to future existence.

To me it looks like it is doing that pretty damn well.
My alma mater will drop subscription to Elsevier in 2017, stating that they have been increasing the fee 4% each year.
Here's is how I viewed this history of collaborative forum information online in the last 20 years

Slashdot - aggregating opinions from "experts". allowed comments. Lacked accountability so then came...

Digg - allowed crowd source voting. active interaction. complicated and over-engineered upvote algorithm lead to...

Reddit - community inclusion. more open voting (and down voting). subgroups.

So that's kind of where I see it. What gets improved on? Is there technology that can be improved? Is there a missing idea or improvement? Is there a next generation that could improve status quo?
The starship concept involves solar powered chips launched initially into orbit, then boosted to 0.2C by a ground based laser. They're cheap and tiny and launched in the thousands over the entire period the first probes are in flight, so you have a continuous chain of probes. The return signal is passed back along the chain to Earth. The probes steer using thermal effects and solar wind. Many probes work together to form a synthetic aperture array.
Many, but mostly special interest, mostly around hobbies. Reddit, Lobste.rs and HN aren't really forums in my view. (reddit comes closest, but still has this focus on short-term threads and voting that is different from what I think of as a good forum. Classic phpbb has its strengths)

What fields are you interested in?
My opinion on Stephenson:

Cryptonomicon is fun, Baroque Cycle is great, Anathem is his best work (from a literary perspective), and Seveneves is 2/3rds awesome 1/3rd bad scifi pulp.

Snow Crash is how most people first encounter him. It's a warmed over cyberpunk book that repeats a lot of what Gibson did, but is also good.

The Diamond Age is one of the best pieces of speculative fiction written in the last 20 years except that it fails badly to have a coherent story with an ending that makes sense. Which is a shame considering the ideas in the book are so good.

REamde is shit and should never have been published. Dude was playing too much World of Warcraft at the time and decided to write a novel about playing too much World of Warcraft. Bad book. Avoid.
Wow, great resources!

Do you have any suggestions about learning parallelization techniques? Like which one is better: MPI, OpenMP, Cilk, pthreads?

My field is machine learning, and I've been using high level libraries until now, but I'd like to learn how to write something in C that does not suck in terms of speed.
What Makes Some People Think Astrology Is Scientific? [pdf]
Explaining Tree Shaking in JavaScript
Not sure if you're open to the idea, but I've found that smaller image boards, particularly those with a specific subject matter, often are home to excellent, substantive discussion. The only issue is that once a critical mass is reached (see 8chan, 4chan, et al) productive discussion goes out the window due to the ridiculous pace of conversation and the level of trolling enabled by anonymity and lax rules of engagement.

I won't divulge any specific boards here publicly, but I'd be happy to PM you a nice one.
> They seem to suspend the Ethernet controller but don't wake it when packets come in, presumably because the controller doesn't support that. The machine appears dead from the outside after a few seconds of inactivity.

It seems like that would affect more than ssh connections, e.g. you wouldn't be able to receive email notifications.
Truly, anything can be a scam. I think the most disappointing outcome for her will be if she lives out the rest of her life in an average way. Did it work? Didn't it work? Sure, living past 90 would be nice but did her treatment have anything to do with it if that's the case? There are some things we won't know in our lifetimes.
In case you haven't seen this:

https://youtu.be/zg5QMysuSYg

Interstellar strikes a nerve with myself also. I take the dysfunction theme seriously because we are in a Stagnation. There's a thoughtful essay on the subject by the science fiction author Neal Stephenson. He also wrote a book based on it. Surprising few people are aware of that.

http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/fall2011/innovation-starv...
https://lainchan.org/
What exactly are you looking for? A "good forum" is one that fits your needs and tastes well. Are you specifically looking for a tech forum? A general interest forum? Something else? What do you want out of it?
Recounting my comment from a previous article[1], comparing all these voting systems is not really the right way to think about it. First, you need to separate the mechanism used to express voter preference (i.e the ballot design), from the method used to choose the winner. Those are separate things that, in theory, can be mixed-and-matched to produce various voting systems.

In terms of ballot designs, they are basically all just restricted subsets of the "score" voting ballot. That is, any voter preference that can be expressed in an "approval", "ranked choice", "ranked choice with ties", or traditional "single choice" ballot, can also be expressed with a "score" ballot.

That means every voting system is a "score ballot" system with some restrictions applied to the ballot. This means that, for example, you could have an election where you allow the voter to choose whichever ballot they are most comfortable with. Then you just interpret the ballot as a score ballot.

There are multiple ways to choose a winner from a set of score ballots. But debating between them is counterproductive to getting better voting systems adopted. Just start off with one that's easy to understand (i.e. "sum of ratings", or "only the first choice counts"), and worry about improving it later.

The important thing is to give the voter the option to use a more expressive ballot. Whichever one they feel most comfortable with. You could even make it so that initially, all ballots are converted to traditional "single choice" ballots for tallying, but let voters know how the vote would have turned out under other evaluation methods (like "sum of ratings" and Schulze). I think voters would quickly realize the value of counting all of their expressed preferences.

...

But that is a very cool site. Probably the kind of site the web was intended for, don't you think?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950566#score_12952384
One i'd recommend is The illusion of life - the history of animation in disney, it covers some of the business, the people and the techniques and of course the movies, and it's one of the most beautiful books I own. https://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Life-Disney-Animation/dp/078...
Kudos to the interactive diagrams, but this seems misinformed about spoiler history.

The most famous "spoiler" was Perot, not Nader. Bush v. Gore was an extremely tight election, but there were third parties that drew more votes from Bush than Gore, and wer within the margin of error, possibly counterbalancing Nader's effect. Whereas with Perot, he received 19% of the popular vote, most of which were clearly drawn from George Bush, ensuring a Clinton win.
Cormack McCarthy writes books. He has a particular style of language that many people enjoy. You can't really evaluate his work from the movies. He didn't even write the screenplays.
I much prefer the UK model. BT Openreach wire up the infrastructure and take care of the telephone exchanges, and then ISPs compete to provide their services on the lines. To be fair, they have been slow rolling out fibre into rural areas, but most exchanges now have a choice of 10+ ISPs for prices equivalent to $25 a month.

Why aren't you all protesting about being tied into such oligopolies? America is supposed to be about free markets and open choice.
You're going to use simulated experiments to prove or disprove we're in a simulation? Based on our simulated understanding of the physical laws of our simulated universe?
Bring in the Goddamn Adults Already
Well, it's the universal view in evolutionary biology, in everything I've read and people I've talked to. It's also clearly stated in the opening paragraphs of the wikipedia entry for example [1].

Or were you asking why biologists are so sure? I'm not a biologist, but my understanding is that the evidence for natural selection is simply overwhelming on all levels (archeological, experimental, theoretical, simulations, etc.). Other evolutionary processes have interesting work behind them, but the burden of proof to show they matter as much as natural selection has just not been hit yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
I read a LOT of fantasy, including all authors on your list :) .

However, I do get a feel that they're more "escapist" than the books YC readers (and people like Bill Gates) read. Many of the recommendations are more in line with what they're building (people going through similar struggles or role models or understanding the world).

And the engrossing fantasy books can take good chunks of your time (which I guess an YC alumn ought to be devoting to his startup or personal life).

In the same vein, I don't expect most YC alumni to recommend lengthy TV series :)
The best online forums are the ones devoted to a topic and run by people who believe in what they're doing. HN, in fact, fits this description to a t. bluelight.org, which I used to moderate, is a great example of how a dedicated community can generate productive discussion even when most of the members are heavy drug users without college degrees. Quora, by contrast, has some of the smartest people from all over the world, but it's hardly a "community" and is susceptible to its own forms of groupthink and political squabbling.

If you're specifically looking for discussion on politics, philosophy, and religion, aka the three things that end up on every forum that isn't about them, I suggest reading books and peer-reviewed journals.
To continue...

Wouldn't you like to teach the younger generation something so that they can survive better in the current world?

Where the heck does that come from?

The Genome
There are regulations that affect the work of software engineers. PCI DSS is one that I am familiar with. Perhaps unfortunately, if your software interacts with the real world (like payments infrastructure), you have to heed regulation. This tends not to affect people who are casually writing software or working on many open source projects, but it does impact large companies like Google.

(I like to think of this as pretty similar to the Haskell IO monad. At some point you have to break out of your cozy side-effect free code and actually do something. At that point you have to deal with the messy real world.)
Thanks. I've read it, what I'd like to see is more of the stuff addressed to other developers, exactly like in your response above.

You understand the issues because you personally compared, measured, whereas most of the developers just consider something as "working" if they personally "don't wait" too much for the stuff they are producing. That's why I wanted to motivate you to consider talking about your experiences that more developers can directly use.
You don't get it. There's nothing wrong with mood music. It's about the reason you put it on.
Have you found any notable economist that critiques his work?
Needlessly convoluted. It would be much simpler to create Numerai as described, and participate oneself, uploading the 'predictions'. The key Numerai person can de-anonymize it by looking up the mapping of the 1 stock with insider information, and adding a big buy on that one. (I'm not sure if participants upload their model to be run by Numerai or just provide their predictions based on a public data feed; I think it's the latter, but even if it's the former, you can just create a model optimized to emit a big buy on the key stock and otherwise random & self-canceling.) The rest of the data can (and should be, in case of SEC investigation, as using large-scale real data would generate lots of paper trails like payment to data providers) be genuine and released as described - who knows, the participants might actually find real signals which are profitable and also mask the insider trading.
BaTFLED: Bayesian Tensor Factorization Linked to External Data
Perhaps Marryat is more authentic than O'Brian or Forester, but he is not as good a writer. Easy lacks the coherent storytelling, character building and -- at least compared to Aubrey/Maturin -- the excellent sense of humor.

Worth a read? Absolutely. Better? I enjoy both better than Marryat, but especially O'Brian.
OS X Menubar app for change your function keys to special keys
I didn't downvote the parent, but I also don't consider it to be civil (which is requested in the HN Guidelines). There are a number of ways to point out that this is not yet in production, and many of them don't require the dismissive tone his comment struck.
Try our community/voting platform at Snapzu (http://www.snapzu.com). Would love any feedback or to answer any questions. Cheers!
WE DOCUMENT OUR API'S
That seems so obvious that I have always assumed that the feedback loop is from the likes of Elsevier and back into the pockets of the top brass of the universities. How could Elsevier otherwise keep everyone hostage?
Imzy is young enough to play a pivotal role in the community. Never underestimate that.