skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Partisan? What the hell are you talking about?

I'm apolitical, I don't vote, and my comment was a plea to see this from a different perspective. It's bi-partisan.

And how the hell do I use the site PRIMARILY for politics? I must have tens of thousands of comments here.

I made a plea for rationality in the face of over-reaction and fear. A comment on a post about politics. I even said I was glad this was organizing the opposition to Trump; was that the problem?? This is nuts.
Their dropped packet handling is far far better than Skypes as well - in a dodgy wifi situation linq and skype are all but unusable while slack is crisp.
Why would ride sharing companies behave diffrently than human drivers. I don't think laws of economics will change.
While a 'solid' archive wouldn't typically have the compression penalty or the 'listing' penalty it would still have the extraction penalty.
I believe several papers have examined efficiently pruning neural networks, but neural death would be better branding ;) (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.02626v3.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.00149v5.pdf)
There are several more interesting features. The point is these are clearly not the same as the $20 headphones people keep comparing them against.
> and measuring the atmosphere in China, which is home to 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world.

I wonder what the source is on this.

I only spent a minute Google searching, but the numbers I'm seeing put China WAY below 16 of the top 20.
Jesus Christ, though... I searched for "dog" and I'm getting "dog fucks teen porn video" with porn videos among the most relevant results...

(nope, I don't have weird cookies in my browser and it was an incognito session anyway)
Or even those who live in urban centers but like to get out of them on weekends and vacations. I've tried living for years in western US cities both with and without a car. Going without was much cheaper, and I managed to find entertainment and not starve, but getting a car vastly improved my quality of life. Trains and an occasional rental would probably have worked nearly as well in parts of Europe, but the US just has too much empty space between interesting places.
I'm a bit of a VR enthusiast, and I'm not a gamer, so I think I can answer some of these.
>- Outside of car games, space sims, or any other game where the main character is mostly sitting down, does VR work well?

Very well. The thing I hate most, as a non-gamer, is having to learn all of the confusing controls. I really like that VR games take away most of the complication and allow you to do what feels natural. Probably for the same reasons a lot of people like the Wii. I've been having a lot of fun in games like Vanishing Realms:a first person dungeon crawling RPG http://store.steampowered.com/app/322770/ , The Unspoken: where you have magic battles in a New York like setting http://www.insomniacgames.com/games/the-unspoken/ , and a bunch of the puzzle type games.

>- Apart from games what other applications are there at the moment?

Not enough in my opinion, but I've spent the last week using Oculus Medium to make 3D models, and using Quill to make VR paintings. This is actually the area I'm most interested in, and I know that some companies are working behind closed doors at the moment to make more creative tools as well as business and social type tools.

-Anyone try replacing their monitor with a VR headset? How'd that go?

I do this frequently for consuming movies, but the resolution isn't at a point where I'd recommend it for long periods of time if you're doing text editing. I still occasionally browse and listen to music with the screen set to a gigantic size, but it hasn't replaced my monitors.

- Anyone try combining a VR headset plus a kinect? Seems like a natural combination.

Several companies and individuals are. This guy has been involved in the VR scene for many years and has some interesting experiments using several kinects to do mixed reality work http://doc-ok.org/?p=965
>... if that were the case Intel has 4 to 5 generations of silicon already prepped that they could start churning out in volume within 3 months.

Can you elaborate? I'm fairly certain Intel deviating from their existing roadmap to such a degree and on such short notice would be extremely difficult at best.
Okay so now I'm waiting 10 minutes for the car to get to me from parking.
I think it's disingenuous to gauge VR based on GearVR/cardboard/other low cost mobile based headsets. A good VR experience is predicated on excellent tracking to ensure a 1:1 match between movement in the real world with the virtual world, and those headsets simply cannot do that. Of course they are collecting dust, poor tracking leads to nausea.
To add to that: a list of property names you don't even have to exactly know beforehand, since the shell can easily deliver you the exact data structure and metadata of any object (cmdlets, parameters, results,...) usable on the shell.

I find the idea baffling that basically having to have the whole syntax tree memorized instead of the shell providing it for me is somehow less of a "waste of cognitive energy".
Oculus Medium is pretty sweet, it's a 3D sculpting tool for free with a Rift. Some professionals have tried it out and like it. Obviously no Zbrush, but it's their first release of it.

Honestly it's really fun. I don't sculpt or anything, but drawing a tree about the size of my arm and then zooming in, "expanding it" to be the size of a normal tree and standing in it's shade was one of the trippy-ist experiences I've had. So. Cool.
Doesn't matter which way they are calculated. Names are listed in order of performance. Additionally, at least some schools place students into classes based on previous years rank.
@doctorpangloss's comment is 100% right. I'd add the small problem that behavior in small reactor != behavior in large reactor. Reactor scale-up is somewhat unpredictable and often ends in tears.
No you didn't I thought you were referencing the old blender demo. They apperantly did another one.

Would be interesting to see the boost stats in that case, 3.7 boost is a bit low for a 6900k part tho everyone I know that had it rubs it around 4.2-4.3ghz.
No hate towards you at all, but describing technical things as crisp drives me crazy. Can anyone enlighten me as to why that would bother my brain?

Does a certain region use this or its usage widespread?
US Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims
Per-thread performance tends to matter much more than number of cores for the enthusiast market, which has centered around the 6700K (which I've got in my own machine right now). The 6700K retails for $330 and is about 14% faster per-thread than the 6900K, which I'm betting is a tougher proposition for AMD to manage.

This chip definitely seems rad, don't get me wrong--I just think the enthusiast market is sensitive to what this isn't, at present, doing.
Show HN: Elm Architecture for Swift
Has there been any pricing info or are we just assuming now that this thing won't be 10% more expensive than the Intel parts it turns out beating?
From the statute (and in the letters):

> the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such an investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Of course they could still lie but you can't be investigated just for your protected speech. Not defending the whole thing, but didn't realize that requirement until now.

[edit: formatting]
Very wishful thinking on my part, but I think we're far closer to a general intelligence than most expect.
What happened to worst case analysis? Don't we all know the flaws of best case?

I think (and I could be wrong) that there are many more cases where conservative driving is safer than aggressive driving.

In a lot of the cases mentioned, doing nothing or stopping are the safest choices. What's safe to drive over? Just assume everything is unsafe and only drive over it if it puts others in danger to avoid it.

If the road is blocked and you need to communicate to navigate, don't. Wait.

If the road conditions are changed due to construction in ways the car can't understand, stop. Find a new route.

Most humans wouldn't do these things. The nice thing about the autonomous car is that it can drive extremely cautiously.
I find this headphone war discussion a bit boring. The AirPods are much more interesting as Apple's first foray into augmented reality.

If they add positioning, this product becomes Magic Leap without the visuals. I don't think they see this as a music device, they see it as a new platform for audio. Interesting things start happening when people start leaving one or both in their ears all day. Arrival times in your ear at the bus stop. Ask Siri for a price check while at the store, etc.

A cable to your phone makes the earbuds hard to forget. This makes it easy, but the design details have to be right for you to truly forget they are in.

I know "forget they're in" doesn't sound like a groundbreaking feature, because it's not connected to any obvious technical challenge, but I think if they succeed at that it would in fact put these in a new category.

Positional audio would seal the deal. You can walk around your kitchen and it would feel like your invisible conversation partner was in the room with you.
And to top it off, they autogenerate a lot of 'news' so they pop up on every single stock 'news event' on Google Finance. It's just all so spammy.
And only in a narrowly defined way. It speaks nothing to the continued die off of the forests due to the drought, the battle for water table control with all the private interests, let alone what up stream sources may or may not have been replenished.

The 'drought' is far from over.
Agree. Actually, just posted a related question a while ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13171928).

And if you're going to have votes, at the very least those should be public, as they are in some forums that I've come across and in some bug trackers.

Upvotes: the only point of those seems to be to serve as a form of "reward", like "badges" and the like, to entice those with an insecurity problem to seek some validation. The only ones benefiting from it are the site admins though, as people tend to generate more content in order to collect "upvotes". Note I said "more", not better quality. See Stackoverflow for example.
At least ThinkPads are described according to MIL specifications, not references to alleged witchcraft.
Self-driving cars of the future don't need to look / be shaped like a conventional car. Not all of them at least.

The ones designed for slow night travel don't need to be air efficient, they could be shaped like a big square with almost real beds (like on a train).
Good, I would be really sad if they were pulling these kinds of bench "games".
Hey I just wanted to remind you about the Principle of Charity[0] as well as HN's guidelines for commenting[1]. It's easy to forget when you feel strongly about something but that's a real person you're replying to and they are probably acting in good faith. We should be civil on HN even when we have strong opinions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Best Xfce distro of 2016
An ounce of prevention beats a cure. The "smart" people are the ones that know taking the extra time to set up tests, controls before production, effective logging and documentation, are the ones that DONT have to wake up overnight to shitstorms.
One way education is cruel is the one-shot at college thing. My wife's from China and her family is amazed that it is possible for her to go back to university in the USA.
> Also with Intel you can upgrade to more performant Xeons

Xeons are not necessarily more performant, in fact, often they are less performant than their desktop brethren...

They're server CPU's, designed for long uptime, typically underclocked compared to the same silicon in an i7/i5 package (they focus on stability, not sheer performance), support ECC memory (again, not performance related, rather stability), support more memory, etc.
APUs didn't take off except in low-end-ish notebooks and low-end desktop computers not because the idea is bad, or the graphics performance was poor (it wasn't), but because the CPU part was subpar.

The gaming consoles show how well the concept works, although, sadly for AMD, these deals may be high volume but don't have high margins.

AMD dedicated graphics have only minor issues imho, they're very competitive with nVidias offerings. But in the professional and compute segments they fail to take off, because nVidia established the popular, proprietary CUDA standard there. I don't think there's a (major) technical reason why AMD has much less market share there.
IDEs can open classes by name, wherever they are on the classpath. I'd normally have all projects open in any case even on quite large codebases - it's very practical with modern hardware.
(cough) I think that was probably chemistry humor. Acids. Bases. Salts. (cough)
You could cherry pick benchmarks back in the Bulldozer days that AMD would edge intel out in - while getting handily beat in everything else
Matthew Green to audit OpenVPN
Good points overall, but I wonder what about new usages like neural networks ? Seems like new tricks might make multi threading a bit more trendy compared to previous years.
25 Years of Vim
Napoleon didn't clarify, I don't believe. The quote was "I would rather have a general who was lucky than one who was good." Certainly, "Beyond possible comprehension by others" isn't what I mean or a likely interpretation. "Succeeded for reasons beneath others notice" would be more the idea. As an example, Grant's tendency to thoroughly disambiguate his orders and always put them in writing (after a Shiloh order debacle) helped his luck a great deal. But it isn't something others would necessarily notice or be in a position to notice. Sheridan had some astonishing luck, but it was possible because he insisted his subordinates (each taking separate routes) be highly disciplined and courageous and get to each point exactly on time, no matter what. (Later, one of those subordinates, Custer, would be cut down because his peers didn't fulfill their orders and arrive on time to join him in battle despite all - and because he did push on as he'd been taught. Coordination only works if everybody's doing it.)
Trains won't stop in front of your house.
5-Step-Framework for better quality in software selection
The information to bitrate ratio on video is so low compared to a write up... There's a lot to learn locked up on YouTube but I have trouble making myself sink the real time cost.

Some prior related HN discussion, with links to repos:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11746425
10 Best Freelancing Sites Where You Can Find and Hire the Best Remote Developers
Yeah, we need to rollup adBlock with registration, cookie, and app nags.
Slightly off topic, but I hate how publications are written. It seems like authors are purposely using big words and sentences that are often 5-6 lines long in order to make it seem more clever.

I find myself often having to reread a sentence in order to understand it.

These algorithms are often very simple and can be easily explained. Don't over complicate them.
And then it gets fixed, just like with current defects on current cars. Why should it be any different ?
But AirBnB and Uber require the owner to invest effort: cleaning the house (or arranging the cleaner) and driving the car. If you could hire your car out fully autonomously that changes the equation.

It's like you're saying I shouldn't bother with my zero effort $100-a-month passive income just because somebody else is making $200-a-month with higher margins.
Big chunk!
Ask HN: How do you market your side project?
Like with most things Apple, they don't necessarily create the first product in a space, but they define the category by refinement of user experience and inventing the necessary tech to support that.

This Plantronics case isn't that great. You have to open it with two hands in front of you, and carefully place the awkwardly shaped headset in. You probably have to look at it while doing so. It's rather large, and the clear plastic cover looks like it can break pretty easily. It's also only one ear, and it's a $30 accessory.

The AirPods can be opened one-handed while in your pocket, and you can place them in without looking. They're also smaller, the case looks quite a bit more durable, and they work with the charger you already have as an iPhone user (lightning). The AirPods and case were designed with a broader UX scope - the entire user experience, from opening to listening to putting away - as one unified product.

The process that most hardware teams typically take is more narrowly focused on the core product hardware, rather than the entire scope of its use. If Plantronics had designed their headset with a broader UX scope in mind, they probably would have designed the headset itself differently, because its awkwardly shaped and hard to store. Instead I imagine they optimized the headset design for solely when its on-ear, and then asked how they could make a case for that shape. Such are the little differences that distinguish between regular products and category-defining ones (see also: iPod with iTunes).
There's always blackmail, too. Plenty of ways to force a warrant canary to continue as normal
Got a Vive, happy to answer:

> Outside of car games, space sims, or any other game where the main character is mostly sitting down, does VR work well?

Yes, you need a cockpit or something if you want to move while sitting down, otherwise most? (including me) people get sick. This has the downside of limiting the visibility though, which is a problem given the relatively low resolution. In a cockpit with limited view things further away look pretty bad.

But the Vive got 'room scale' which is where VR really shines. Basically any game you can play within your 'play area' works very good, unfortunately there are not that many. Point-and-Click teleporting can be used for moving beyond your 'play area'. It works well but breaks immersion a bit and gets awkward if you want to avoid enemies etc. I can highly recommend the Minecraft mod 'vivecraft' in that regard. My most played game with Vive so far, even though I never played Minecraft until then.

In general things work best that happen right in front and the controllers are very precise, so any interaction with them improves the immersion a lot. I'm still waiting for a RTS game where the world is scaled to the size of your play area. Skyworld looks interesting and heard good things about Out of Ammo (haven't tried either).

> Apart from games what other applications are there at the moment?

Google Earth VR was truly amazing. It's the first thing I would show anyone, it's so most closer to actually being there than anything else.
Tilt Brush is a great application as well and Kodon looks cool (haven't tried it). Both are a complete new way to create 3D objects and I believe we'll see more of these.
Unreal Engine has now support for editing in VR which looks super cool, but since I don't do game development I can't say if it's a real improvement or more a gimmick.

> Anyone try replacing their monitor with a VR headset? How'd that go?

Resolution is too bad for 'virtual screens', but I think it could be used to visualize complex data much better than any multi screen setup.
Also that process has been around for at least 10 years:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14580573

I met the guy (Charlie Nakamura) who developed the process. It took a hell of a long time to get everything working at useful efficiency, then a fair amount of development to get it working at scale.

Also see others in this space:

Amyris (older synthetic bio company)
Zymergen (newer synthetic bio company that seems to be doing some of the same things Lygos wants to do)
We Are Living in a Post-Shame World – And That’s Not a Good Thing
Out of curiosity: how far away do you think we are?
> Sometimes I'm OK with that. Sometimes I wonder if I've been misunderstood and could have written it better.

And if you had an actual reply telling you what "wrong" with your post, wouldn't that be more useful? Sometimes people downvote simply because they misunderstood/misread your post.

> Either which way, it's blunt, simple and useful feedback.

I'll give you "simple" out of those three. What is "blunt" about it? And for useful, see above.
I enjoyed RethinkDB a lot. Sad to see the business go belly-up.

Have you evaluated Couchbase? I've been looking for an excuse to try it, but I usually just fall back on Postgres.
In Firefox just click the readability icon.
> Over 300,000 NSLs have been issued in the past 10 years alone. The most NSLs issued in a single year was 56,507 in 2004. In 2013, President Obama’s Intelligence Review Group reported; that the government continues to issue an average of nearly 60 NSLs every day. By contrast, in 2000 (the year before the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act that loosened NSL standards), 8,500 NSLs were issued.

[https://www.eff.org/issues/national-security-letters/faq#5]

* - formatting
>A well run Notes system was a real pleasure to deal with. [...] 2004

Well then its become progressively worse since. Been using it for 3 years now and each version has gotten progressively worse (unstable, slow, bloated).

Random people's Notes crashes multiple times a day, others have mysteriously slow ones, sync issues etc.

Its only redeeming feature is SameTime...
I am sticking with Digital Ocean over Lightsail because I don't like potential financial liability. I like being able to not think about my vps for months and knowing there is a maximum amount I will be charged.
It never ceases to amaze me that the best steps towards achieving AI is to look at how we perceive that a Neuron works and simulate it.

And the thing is, we aren't exactly sure why exactly that is.. it's amazing.

Sometimes the best thing we can do is imitate nature
I've had at least half-a-dozen non-techie friends signup for Signal since Trump's election.
Aha! I worked with Notes a few decades ago, interfacing it into PeopleSoft. I got it to work but I never really got a grip on the slippery concept of what exactly Lotus Notes was, and why it was so terrible at one-to-many data structures. But thanks to your comment I now get it! It was a document oriented nosql db, years before we had a name for that.
I'll give you this... your ending was well played.

And I'll grant that if you truly believe that climate change is "likely to kill all of humanity", that easily leads to a "damn the consequences" attitude toward fighting it.

However, your expression of the alternatives eliminates a lot of nuance. For example, suppose that climate change is "likely to stall all economic growth worldwide for centuries", meeting your definition of "a big deal". Is it really hard to imagine what worse consequences geoengineering could possibly have? What if geoengineering is "likely to kill all of humanity"?

So, yes, I'll remain at least as concerned about geoengineering (and "damn the consequences" thinking) as I am about climate change.
> Makes me think they would submit two requests: one for metadata and one for content

NSLs can't (legally) be used for content, only metadata.

(putting aside, of course, that metadata is itself content)
Sure, not Turing test level AI, but the car needs not to just correctly interpret what the other human driver is communicating, it too needs to communicate back, sometimes assertively. Sometimes you need to actually talk to the other driver.

Anecdote: I was driving down a long, narrow country road, lots of turns, space only for 1 car, land rover coming in opposite direction, and another car behind me. We had to verbally negotiate who reverses back 50m to let the others go past. I cannot think how an ML algo could resolve this situation, even if it could, how would it communicate it's intentions to the humans, when flashing your lights isn't enough?