skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And pirates are pretty cool...
There's a lot here, but this one jumped out at me:

> You can indent a Lisp program in any way but the language doesn't require any at all.

Off the top of my head, isn't this true of basically all languages? Except one, and it got a lot of criticism for it (Python).
From Microsoft's perspective, I'm sure it's hard to argue with the market share figures. When there's 20 times as many users on a particular platform... that's where the staff time will go. It's not the Office group's job to sell phones, they sell Office.

2016Q2: 87.6% Android, 11.7% iOS, 0.4% Windows Phone, 0.3% Others

https://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp
SpaceX tend to keep their work internal due to concerns regarding both intellectual property and munitions laws (ITAR).
Java Client VM Performance
Internet connectivity is all about maximum capacity. Everything past that is just sunk costs.

It doesn't cost anything more to use it at maximum capacity than it does to just leave it on standby. (The end points MIGHT use a TINY bit more power, but we're talking on the order of cents per month for terrabytes/month of traffic; it's a rounding error.)
How many startups raise (or don’t raise) their next round? Here are the numbers
My car tells me how many miles I have left by basing its estimation on my consumption over the past 30 miles. It has been pretty accurate.
To add to that, the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 is also an example of how not to evolve a language.
What is the best tech talk you watch in 2016?
I'm willing to bet if the US picked up a Chinese drone in international waters you'd respond differently.
> The thing is, though, that it's usually much harder to have such attacks stick against the powerful.

Sure, I'd agree with that. People with power can more reasonably say "fuck this label, it brings me too much criticism, I'm picking another one". Is the solution not to question anyone for harmful beliefs and actions? Feminists criticise each other as a matter of course - if your goal is to avoid people questioning your behaviour, it's not a label you want. But that's an entirely different thing from being "powerful, confident, and successful".
Challenge: Write a Turing complete machine using a finite number of registers and a state machine. One or all of the registers can contain a rational number of unlimited precision. (This has already been done, so if you are aware of the existing machines, you have to create a new one.)
Whenever I read a story like this or a comment like yours, I remember the following proverb:

>When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

I first heard it mentioned with respect to the Cold War in Africa, but the (Kenyan tribal) proverb seems to apply quite widely.
Use these cameras instead of your phone
Some years ago, Paul Graham wrote about there being too conceptually clean approaches to programming Languages, C and Lisp. The C family is far more popular, but the trend is to take C as your starting point, and add Lisp features to it.

Gosling said that Java drug the C++ crowd halfway to Lisp.
It's definitely true that startups are often founded for the sole purpose of being acquired by one of the Big Boys--but not so that the founders get to work there.

It's because they're hoping to get rich--make the perhaps $10M+ so that they can do whatever they want with the rest of their lives. You almost make it sound like the startup is part of their Google interview strategy and acquisition is how they get hired, but I'd venture that most founders probably don't want to spend more than a couple years at the parent company. They want to start the next phase of their lives.
Please don't create new accounts just to violate the guidelines. Not only do we ban the throwaway (as we have), but we ban the main account as well. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13194008 and marked it off-topic.
A take on the holistic approach of Design
Gboard, now available for Android
It is generally accepted that at least some of the activities Snowden was concerned about were in fact illegal.

Now, Snowden isn't a judge, nor would he have had complete knowledge of what was going on. He couldn't have known for sure that the activities were illegal.

But, unless you take the view that Snowden maliciously revealed activities he actually believed were legal, he at least had reasonable suspicions that they weren't. The job of somebody to whom whistleblowers report is to take that seriously.

Perhaps, in many cases, the reasonable suspicions are unfounded. Perhaps there is a byzantine legal framework in place that makes apparently illegal activity technical legal. Perhaps Snowden's concerns had already been raised by others through the proper channels, investigated, and found to be unfounded.

Regardless of that, we know that in this case some of the things Snowden reported on were illegal, and that going by the "proper channels" did not result in illegal activity being detected and stopped.

Unless we imagine that Snowden is lying about having tried to report it to the agency first, and that nobody else amongst the hundreds of thousands - speculatively: the true number is classified - of NSA employees and contractors had both the knowledge of illegal activity and enough concern about it to report it through the proper channels.

Whatever the case. The part of the NSA that is tasked with detecting and preventing illegal operations hasn't done that for what appear to be some pretty big operations.

Either it didn't care that the operations were illegal, it didn't know they were illegal, or it didn't even know they were happening. None of those possibilities reflect well on the watchdog.
Why is it just hard "on the internet"? And why do people find certain things easier to believe while finding others easier to dismiss as likely exaggeration?

If we could find easily-actionable answers to those two questions... sigh.
Yes, it is editorializing. It's also clearly prefixed as such to distinguish it from factual data. It's a valid and possible conclusion as to the motivations for China's actions, given their prior statements and lack of statements regarding this incident.

Would the article be better for leaving out any international political context? I think most people would agree that international politics are at play here, and a good news organization will attempt to help with what might be happening so the layman might understand. You might not agree with their assessment (you haven't actually stated whether you think Trump's statements played any part), but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be there.

I just looked up the breitbart coverage (two articles?[1][2]) of this story, and to my eyes, it seems a bit odd that it doesn't include any context as to possible reasons why. RT[3] actually has a fairly fleshed out article[3], and implies a different reasoning, which is that there's posturing over the waters there specifically. It was published a few hours after the other ones though. NBC[4] seems the most balanced so far. It mentions Trump, but as just one of a few tense exchanges, points out it's not a major thing, it's just unprofessional, and that it actually wasn't that close to the disputed area. It's also only 20 minutes old, apparently.

Different outlets and even just article authors will have different takes on the news. This may change over time as stories develop. It's not out of place to look for what you think is relevant and include it in the article, as long as items that are facts are presented as such and sourced, and items that are opinion are presented accordingly as well.

1: http://www.breitbart.com/news/china-captures-underwater-dron...

2: http://www.breitbart.com/news/us-says-chinese-warship-seized...

3: https://www.rt.com/usa/370559-china-us-drone-sea/

4: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dod-official-chinese-nav...
Are you supposing that Edward Snowden knew that these allegations would come out three years after his initial leaks and decided to completely bypass even trying official channels for whistleblowing before jumping immediately to exfiltration of classified information?
"Smarter" has no nessisary or consequent intersection with "Shares human values" or even "Values human existence"

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

One of the reasons AGI will be so dangerous is the near certainty it will have utterly alien values and intentions.

It seems exceedingly unlikely that we will be able to program in what consitutes "human values". We can't even begin to remotely agree and explain them fully to fellow humans, let alone what is basicly an alien intelligence.

It is slightly ironic that people bring up Assimov's laws of robotics in this context, because pretty much every story he wrote was about how the laws could be subverted via "loopholing" of sufficently intelligent AI.

If something is very much smarter than humans, we cannot possibly hope to constrain it via some kind of faustian bargin agreement. Because in the end, the devil is always smarter than you are.

If an AI kills you from either malice or indifference, or just that you are composed of plenty of paperclip-capable raw materials, you are dead all the same.
Hardware by Software Developers
Walk past the car and photograph the driver. They really love that.

I assume you're being sarcastic, but they might actually "love that" if their objective at that point of the investigation is to alarm you and see what you do. It's an acknowledgment that they have indeed alarmed you.
It'd be really great if people could stop using the term AI by itself when they mean weak AI, or really machine learning. Its ultimately very misleading -- the only "awakening" that's happened is neural nets are popular again and getting good results. If strong AI gets solved... well then that's really when the machine will have awakened!
But do they matter on the world sphere where the playground is dominated by a few players with nukes, navies, and large-enough domestic economies to be able to enact sanctions?

I come from a small country. There's a few in Europe, known for good wines or thermal baths or scenic sights or ethnic foods, but their continued existence is only guaranteed by their membership in a mutual defense pact. Those who aren't part of such an arrangement are out of luck -- "international outrage" does not protect sovereignty, as we have seen time and time again.

Right now, there's little need to conquer territory when you can just make everyone reliant on your for technology (USA), rare earth minerals (China), or natural gas (Russia). But as resources get more scarce, what is Latvia to do? Hungary? The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia? With their cash flowing to foreign powers for technology, raw materials, and energy, rely on tourism, find some unique skill niche, or try to become a tax haven?
That does not appear to be the analogy that he's making, in any way.

The analogy is that even a well maintained car (which we should do anyway) will eventually break down. Cancer is one of the many ways that cells can break down as they age. We do not know how to prevent most cancers.

There are some ways to lessen cancer incidence, for example women that have children before 30 seem to have less risk for breast cancer. Does that mean that all women should get pregnant before their 30s? Getting pregnant also brings lots of other risks.

We're starting to see cancer vaccines for those cancers that can be driven by viral infection, such as head and neck and cervical cancer. As we learn more about the immune system's involvement in cancer, we may be able to design cancer vaccines that are tailored to a certain person's HLA type that allow the immune system to target some common cancer mutations.

The other new, and surprising, directions of cancer prevention that I see researched involve taking medications for long periods of time, which themselves have other side effects. For example, for those at high risk for cancer due to variants in their DNA repair genes, the risk calculation might make sense to take a medication for much of one's life to prevent cancer, but this is only a small small subset of the population.

When everybody does the standard cancer prevention techniques: don't smoke and don't get too much UV from the sun, we still have lots of cancer that is going to hit people.
If your target customers are in Vietnam, go for it.

If your target customers are in the US, be careful.. what are the implications of being so far away, both physically and timezone wise.

Obviously, double check local/domestic law about doing business elsewhere, filing requirements, etc.
Scaling Scala
> I personally think Edison was a thief and jerkoff

If you haven't, read some more biographies about the man. You'll discover that things were a bit more complicated than what you may currently believe; above all else, Edison was a businessman who invented, and an inventor who knew business, and saw opportunities where others didn't.

That doesn't mean he was a saint - he had and did plenty of things that on retrospect weren't very moral, and questionably illegal. The way he treated his wife and children was terrible - but wasn't out of the norm for the era (unfortunately). And he was a master of taking and expanding on other's ideas and marketing them as his own; you can call that theft - perhaps plagiarism is a better term? - but it isn't anything different than what still happens today.

Excusable? No - but again, it's more complex - and Tesla had his own faults. I've found in my reading about both men, that they were both complex characters of their time. The real tragedy, IMHO, is that their individual prides got in the way of the possibility of their mutual cooperation; had they done so, history would likely be much different today.
Some/most Common Lisp implementation have better native support for numeric types than Python, but Python has a wealth of libraries like numpy that bind to optimised C/Fortran/assembly.
HBO didn't even need to send a takedown over autistic teen's artwork
This story is completely unintelligible. I have no idea what this story is about, where does it say he was designing for Silk Road? Did he say he was talking with DPR or something?
Well, Common Lisp!

In the Scheme language, many imperative forms have an unspecified result. For instance, see R7RS 4.1.6: "the result of the set! expression is unspecified".

Also, a related misfeature is that function arguments can be evaluated in any order.
Like the founders left it to the English courts
This really is an interesting story, but I wish he'd taken it to a journalist instead of writing it himself. The narrative is choppy and has a lot of holes in it. I would have loved to see this done as a feature from someone with a lot of experience writing about technology. That might also have given some extra credibility and context to things.
Visit sauna regularly to stave off dementia, 20 year study suggests
Then your problem is humans, not AIs. And "pushing a button" is a severe understatement of what an AI would need to have a human do to cause the implied level of damage.
You're not valuing what they bring in experience. If you have seen multiple cycles of successful projects and failures you learn patterns.

We tried it like that before and this is what will happen. But instead if you do it this way you will be more successful.

Some bosses may not like the push back and see it as questioning their authority. However if they can overlook that the teams they manage will be more successful.

If you're unemployed in IT over 50, especially in Silicon Valley, you're going to have to adjust your salary expectations down. The older programmer may not want to work for less but it is far better than the alternative.
The one killer app for wrist devices, at least so far, seems to be fitness. Active people find it useful to wear something that quantifies your biometrics and tracks your runs.

Ugh, I wished there were some way to have relayed this to the Pebble CEO a few years back. I've been through three Pebbles, all of which were backed on Kickstarter. But having to take the Pebble off my wrist to swap with a Garmin before a run made this crystal clear to me: as soon as Garmin (et. al.) puts notifications on their devices, Pebble is done. I knew the barrier was low because I had done similar hands-on work for another large fitness-oriented company. And when I updated my Garmin to one that had notifications and apps, I never put my Pebble on again.

No one wears watches anymore. What would it take to get people to put something on their wrist? Two or three years ago one need look no further than the wrists of one's cow-orkers: fitness trackers. Be it the xTreme d00d who wears his giant Suunto Ambit as a signal, or the office admin who just wants to "lose a few pounds" with a $99 FitBit. I was usually met with indifference as I went on about how nice it was to leave my phone in my pocket all day thanks to Pebble. Until a watch renders Facebook feeds and toots, people are going to take their phones out anyway, at least that's my guess. Take a look at how many phone zombies have an Apple watch on their wrist (my current data are taken from corporate halls of a large multinational that serves caffeinated beverages, so the dataset might be skewed).

Most telling, though, was that the final Kickstarter was because they couldn't get the money another way. Two versions shipped, and they still don't have cash to back the manufacturing of a third? At that point, I'm going to guess that Pebble knew they were done but a "hail Mary" was worth a shot. And like most such plays, it didn't work. They gave it a good go, missed the market a fair bit, but at a minimum I'd say that the team can be credited with getting the ball rolling even if they didn't ultimately benefit from it.
Well, the Connection Machine was highly parallel.

Also the declarative way of programming in languages like Lisp, and also the macros, would surely allow for nice expressive DSLs.

So far I am only aware of companies exploring Haskell and F# support for GPUs, but I guess it is usually a matter of someone trying it out.

After all, there is FPGA tooling generation support for Clojure already,e.g. Piplin.
SSL isn't an encryption algorithm.
> There's a non-zero chance that a cure for cancer is impossible

"Now try it without the quadruple negative" [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7VvRYtIyRs&t=01m06s
Great use of functors in ES6
You can't just dangle those in front of us and not post links. I demand satisfaction, sir and/or madam.

(I've seen people do flappy bird with reinforcement learning before, though)
>As a software person your are employed to Solve Business Problems - NOT to write code, NOT to write tests, NOT to hack on platforms, NOT to be Agile. Solve the problem (or add the feature) - never lose sight of this. The value you bring is directly related to this.

My chemical engineering degree really instilled this idea in me early on, and it's by far the biggest motivating factor as to why I love to work at software startups. When a scientist discovers something in a lab, the ChemE's job is to then come in and figure out how to turn this discovery or innovation into a legitimate business. How do we scale this reaction up from a petri dish to a 10,000 gallon reactor? Where and how do we get the reagents? How much do they cost? Are there any hazardous byproducts? How do we dispose of them?

I like to operate the same way as a software engineer. I'm an engineer, not a scientist. My job is to use technology to produce value for the business, while mitigating risks of that value eroding over time. All the work done should be focused on those two things. And it's not about focusing on those things instead of other things, it's more about realizing that anything worthwhile to do at work that you can come up with actually filters back to those two things anyway in some indirect fashion, so you might as well keep those ideas front and center.
the boom in "old geek" job boards is the market correcting itself. smaller companies have known about it for a LONG time, because we don't have access to the genius-level kids that churn out code 80 hours a week. tough luck for us, too bad, so sad.

our team is exclusively 35-60. i wouldn't hire a non-genius 25 year old to run anything critical. nope, no way. sorry, kids.
For anyone interested, John McCarthy's original paper on Lisp is here:

RECURSIVE FUNCTIONS OF SYMBOLIC EXPRESSIONS AND THEIR COMPUTATION BY MACHINE (Part I)

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.html

From the page:

"This paper appeared in Communications of the ACM in April 1960. It is the original paper on Lisp."

I had mentioned it in this blog post in which I gave a few examples of doing simple computations recursively in Python (for beginners).

Recursive computation of simple functions:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/03/recursive-computation-of-s...
And if you want a new array whose first element is increased by one, you either have to allocate space for the entire array, modify the array, or use a different data structure.
And here I would have thought that Tay was 2016's most notorious AI launch...

(RIP 3/23/2016 nevar forget, #taken3soon)
China is on the UN and one of the permanent members of the security council...

If China doesn't want to play by the rules everyone else has agreed to, they can go become a bigger version of North Korea.
if you don't rent your toaster from the power company
It does. With my commute I have intermittent connectivity in the stations and none in the tunnels. I can usually start a level while at the station, play it while underground, and then finish at the next station. It doesn't require internet in the middle of the level, just at the start and at the end. And if you finish a level with no internet, you'll get a "Connectivity Error" dialog with a Retry button, so you can wait until the train pulls into the station and hit Retry. I haven't tested yet what happens if the app is terminated while in this state.
It's worse: from the error message, it seems to be a bug with floats. From my experience editing Wikipedia, floats tend to be a pain. Do you know why the [edit] link on the sections is on the left? It used to be on the right, as a float, and its interaction with the right-aligned images (which are also floats) often caused problems. I've blanked out the several templates we had to use to try to make floats behave themselves.

And there was also that Mozilla bug where IIRC some kind of rounding error caused 1-pixel misalignments with floats. Took a long time until that one was fixed.
"saving the world to disk and rebooting" sounds like a primitive form of garbage collection to me :)
Haskell and Elm use whitespace as well, but I don't recall if they enforce the indentation.
Agreed, why is the U.S. standing in the way of righteous Chinese Navy sailors from claiming their birthright territorial waters of the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea, and Chinese Taipei (Taiwan is a fiction spun by pig-dog imperialist American spies).
English is notoriously awful when it comes to phoneme/grapheme correspondence (French is pretty close).

Essentially what you're saying is that Devanagari is superior because there's something closer to a phoneme/grapheme bijection. Which may or may not be true, even though it wouldn't surprise me (I don't know it at all, but I assume some English sounds aren't as trivial to transliterate).

But that's entirely orthogonal to the alphabet. In fact, you could perfectly map Devanagari (or IPA) to unambiguous roman syllables, so that the "Th" sound in "The" is written differently than the "Th" sound in "Theranos." It's just a matter of coding.
None of them. They are all novelties and should be treated as a commodity with no intrinsic value rather than a currency in the typical sense as you would with forex trading.