skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This neither sounds like a christmas carol nor is doing anything interesting from technology perspective. It doesn't rhyme, it doesn't have a coherent melody, the lyrics mean nothing.

Really, I mean, I could just take create an engine right now that just scrapes content from Google, sprinkle some christmas references and make it sound more coherent AND actually sound like a song.

As someone who's majored AI, I know most of the hype nowadays is generated by media pundits who have no idea how it actually works technically but base their thesis on what they hear from others, big companies whose interest is to generate more worker bees who will know how to use AI, and VCs who want to invest in these little startups so they can flip to these large companies.

There is "some" truth to it--it is super important for the large tech companies like Google, MS, Amazon, Apple because that's their "value add"--but it's not as significant game changer as everyone and their grandma is suggesting. There's a huge difference between a "feature" and a "product". The industry now is mislead into thinking that AI is a "product" but it's nothing more than a "feature" for already dominant players.

Especially when you look at crap like this "AI generated" song, you know most of the hype is gimmick.
Not a book, but definitely check out The Economist's Christmas edition. A lot of in depth articles on a wide array of subjects ranging from historical artifacts to road journeys to contemporary life.
That would accomplish nothing but make engineers feel better about themselves.
I've stayed in hotels hundreds of times and never once had anything stolen. I've thankfully never had to stay in a homeless shelter, but it doesn't seem reasonable to suggest that thefts are more likely at a hotel than a shelter.
Gotta ask you, though. How indignant are you about the recording studios using the term "sound engineer?" Or a hollywood post-production studio employing a "special effects engineer"?

I personally would like to retire the phrase "software engineer". This is partly because I think it's very important for software developers to get out ahead of this and avoid giving the various PE accreditation bodies the notion that they have a claim on software. Civil, Mechanical, hell, even Industrial. Go ahead.

But Software developers, if regulated, should stand apart from these fields. I'd rather see it regulated as a separate field, more like actuaries than a branch of engineering.

In short, software developers should drop their claim to engineering, but engineers should drop their claim to software.

Before you think this is a groundless concern, keep in mind that the patent bar has essentially legalized patents on mathematics while excluding mathematics as an acceptable background for reviewing patents. Seriously, the charter for the patent bar specifically mentions mathematics as coursework that does not qualify you to sit for this exam.

The very low quality of patent review reflects this. I could see a PE takeover of software as being similarly destructive (actually, far more destructive).

It does make sense as part of cartel building, though - expand your monopoly, restrict your competition. Regulate mathematics, exclude mathematics degrees. I could see something similar happening in software development, easily, with greater harm.
I don't use it and it's slashdot era, but maybe metafilter?
>"I won't divulge any specific boards here publicly, but I'd be happy to PM you a nice one."

HN doesn't have PMs.
To me, it looks like a bunch of people who don't know much about the market, jumped to conclusions.

A. It wasn't that large of a selloff
B. There were many indications prior to the announcement that LHM would be taking a hit
Bisect knows how to deal with this; you can tell it to ignore a commit that you know is broken for reasons unrelated to the issue upper investigating (and try adjacent ones instead).
Why would they love something that goes wrong?
Reality in the universe one level up could be different in such a way that it is more conducive to creation of virtual universes. Our idea of reality could be a mere shadow of what others think of as reality.
I forgot my sarcasm tags
Or his Oingo Boingo years:

https://vimeo.com/47162346
They have an awful lot of information about video gamers in conversation history. They could mine that data for game companies and sell it as a way to help companies build better, more addictive and mechanically pleasing games.
This is exactly right.

For electronics, check out http://www.eevblog.com/forum/

For computer hardware, check out https://forums.anandtech.com/
It seems to me that the Snowden approach of leaving the decision of what should be published to journalists (such as the New York Times) is the better approach.

We don't really want anybody to leak anything they personally find interesting, but we do want (good) journalists to be able to discover important stories.
Neural signatures of autism [pdf]
No, you'll hear more cries of "obstruction!". They'll be on Trump's Twitter feed. If current trends continue, the media will feel that each one is news, and will write an article about each one.

My hope is that Trump Twitter fatigue sets in very early.
Ask HN: What do you think about websites that won't work without JavaScript?
Personally I prefer websites that work without Javascript, websites that only use HTML/CSS and a regular (PHP/Ruby/Python) backend. Want to use JS? Fine but make sure it also works without. Since a few days I started using VueJS seriously because of a project that has those requirements (mostly an advanced ajax filter) and I like it, but it also got me thinking. Is there any reason to keep maintaining a website for users without Javascript enabled?

tldr; sites that won't work without Javascript enabled, a good thing or a bad thing?
What a rush. Leonardo's drawings are always brilliantly vivid and lifelike to me. I find his paintings much less interesting. It's also nice to know that his drawings sometimes look better in photographs, because they've been enhanced – the frequent state of affairs is fading.
I think there are a few really big problems. First is that nobody really knows how to build reliable software. Well, maybe somebody somewhere does, but there is no standard established method that can be studied and is known to work. Second, software is a set of instructions to accomplish something. There really is no method to design for a set of unknown instructions. Third, this leads to massive confusion over what design even means with respect to software. Ask 100 software developers what they think design means, and you will get 100 different answers. Fourth, many software projects are reliant on a massive stack of APIs to accomplish anything. It is often not known if these APIs are bug free, or exactly how they are supposed to be used. There are frequently unexpected complications using APIs. Sometimes just using third party APIs becomes a research and development effort. How we build anything is rapidly changing, because the community is still trying to figure out how to do it better. User Interfaces on the web is the most glaringly example. Nothing seems to survive for more than a year or two in this space. Many in the community worked extremely hard to get degrees in Computer Science or something similar and it is not enough. If there was knowledge that worked, wouldn't it be imparted through a college curriculum? In my experience, the upper level managers know nothing about software development and create deadlines that are impossible to meet. Software is something not amenable to being rushed. Code of any quality takes a lot of thought, time, consideration, care, analysis, testing, documenting. It all goes out the window when management starts dictating that the code must ship.
Your statement is correct about the Pebble Time 2 though (Pebble Time ~ higher end of the Pebble line)
I think we should all be very careful about extrapolating from our limited experiences with the chronically homeless (if you have a particularly rich experience, for instance as someone who works full-time in advocacy or intervention with them, say so!) and, in particular, with anything that suggests the problems of homelessness can be effectively summarized in a short Hacker News comment.

The issue of homelessness is a particularly nutrient-rich substrate for germinations of the Just World Fallacy, particularly among nerds like us, with our affinity for pat narratives.
Real professionals have passed laws to restrict supply and prevent competition.
I am sure. What's your point? That it's difficult to get new phones in such a short time? You're correct.

Although, to be technical it was a Moto Z Force Droid Edition...
Impaired theory of mind for moral judgment in high-functioning autism [pdf]
Although I am not at all a connoisseur in this area i know that counterfeits are relatively frequent - especially when we're talking about $15.8 million.

What is especially noticeable to me is the back which assigns that sheet to Leonardo da Vinci, being most likely original but would hardly sell for a price that high.

The front on the other side is - almost too perfect - too unbelievable, to good to be true.
Step back and realize he was talking about the "British colonies in North America". Native Americans have nothing to do with his story.
Agreed.

It can be a bit noisier at first but once you learn to read it, I find it makes resolving conflicts so much easier.

For those of you who haven't used it, try switching it on and/or read https://psung.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/reducing-merge-headach... for more details.

tl;dr it shows
Any idea if Mikrotik still makes you pay $40 or so for the GPL sources and then waits to send them to you on CD until several months later?
There seems to be considerable effort being undertaken to allow TensorFlow to work with OpenCL [0]. Also see [1]. This coincides nicely with the introduction of these AMD cards.

I'm looking forward to the day that Nvidia gets some competition in the GPUs-for-deeplearning market. Further, doing some smaller Deep learning experiments on my MacBook Pro with AMD discrete GPU is another benefit I'm looking forward to ;)

[0] https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/22

[1] https://github.com/benoitsteiner/tensorflow-opencl
>They don't tell you what the 21 features represent.

Half of 42.
Some DCs provide PDU's and some don't.
Haven't tried really, but no. I was too worn down by the referendum to willingly take any more...
Its slower on my Nexus 6P than Chrome, although it doesn't have to Deal with the ads. I often scroll on long pages only to end up in some still to be rendered viewports. Doesnt happen with Chrome.
I like this definition of ML.

Off topic: somehow the people not doing data cleaning because it is so boring and ML techniques do not need clean data end up with the worst overfitting I have ever seen.
What are the other choices? PLOS ONE is the only open-access journal I know of that has a good reputation, isn't limited to a narrow field, and isn't just a trash-heap of unpublishable nonsense.

This reputation, at least, is an incentive for them to do good peer review.
Software is unpredictable because there is little demand for predictability. As it is a trade-off, predictability requires experience. Inexperienced application of methods to enhance predictability is expensive.

Speaking from experience:

- Isolate state in modules (micro-services)

- Focus on systems language first, external behaviour second, implementation details last.

- Design systems to fail and fail fast.

- Do not adhere to Postel's law. Be strict in what your systems accept. This forces the systems designer to create a language which is extensible.

And general advice for teams:

- Consistency is the most important factor in success. Choose rarely and choose wisely your: languages / eco-systems / OSes / cloud services / frameworks. Change based on requirements, not HN popularity.
Very much loved The Windup Girl and would recommend it too. Powerful book.
The biggest gap in Rails is websockets. There's just nothing close to ease of use that Phoenix has in that regard. I have not, however, done much with action cable. I don't feel much desire to do so since Phoenix exists.
Doesn't mean you should write your comment by the same principle.

Reducing entropy by growing more complex seems counterintuitive. I don't see rationality in the chaos. I don't even see what your "It" is. Attribution of rational reason to an "it" seems like a short cut leading to a domain error.

Ultimately this leads to discussion about free will and what not, for which a short-lived discussion does indeed not seem to be the right format.
CoreOS adds automatic updating to Kubernetes
Here's a cool trick I figured out. If you have something measured in units per minute, you can divide it by 60 to get units per second. I won't even charge you to use the method even though I'm in the process of patenting it.
Definitely knew Delft from Van Leeuwenhoek :) . I didn't know Beijerinck, and I had no idea the Nuna was from there.
The problem I have with the GOP's obstructionism was not that it was checking power, but that it was purely political. They obstructed policies that had been supporting by conservatives in the past, just because they didn't want Obama to be seen as having succeeded with anything. That is not what the checks and balances were designed for.
Ask HN: Preferred database/application diagram tool?
My previous team was in a Microsoft shop and Visio was pretty good for drawing up an ERD or mapping out an application's infrastructure. My current team is primarily Mac and Linux, with a preference for OSS but not opposed to paying for software or SaaS where it makes sense. Databases and infrastructure mapping are the biggest needs, but mind mapping would be a bonus. Any recommendations?
From everything I've read, the film version of No Country for Old Men was pretty faithful to the book, so I think I have a pretty good idea of what to expect from the latter. No thanks.
What value does Elsevier provide comparing to something like arxiv.org? Just curious.
Oxytocin and the salience of social cues [pdf]
One would hope so, but tactical ground bursts could irradiate entire agricultural regions in ways that airbursts couldn't.

I'd expect any MAD plan to include airbursts for big cities and ground bursts for breadbaskets.
Arguing that the whole list is less credible because Friedman's on it? I mean, it's fine if you want to maintain your own epistemic closure, but expecting everyone else to agree?

And even you should read him, if for no other reason to be sure you understand what you're disagreeing with. Then, once you can actually state his position in a way that he would recognize as accurate, then disagree as much as you please.
Currently evolution is understood as the change in variability of genes over a population.
The presence of a gene that generates a beneficial trait tends to grow (due natural selection), but the distribution of genes is never static over generations...
This is interesting, I just went to one of the book's Amazon page and this is what I see: http://i.imgur.com/O6x8eNQ.jpg

It's almost like a horizontal scroll version of this blog post. I guess it's the small sample size.
> It wouldn't take much for a few universities to get together to set up the required infrastructure for sustaining the entire enterprise online

O_o

It's a bit more complex than "let's just share everyone's articles out of Bob's google docs account" - from technical details to user workflows to reputation/trust to administrative politics to scientific politics to sourcing verification/reviews to a hundred more things I can't think of off the top of my head, doing such a thing is a massive undertaking and requires buy-in from a lot of people.
>I disagree entirely that this "disadvantage" is enough for them to worry or care. If the disadvantage was real, you'd see more companies sacrificing profits to do it.

Most professional workplaces offer some form of parental leave. My workplace offers 1 week for men (I don't know what they offer women, I assume it's much longer). It's not the 20 weeks that Amex just announced, but it's not nothing.

The disadvantage is real. I've tried to hire professionals in a place that didn't offer benefits before. They wouldn't come aboard -- not a single one (and yes, IMO, parental leave is a standard benefit). I had to draw from a pool of college kids who needed a break into the industry.

>That statement ignores an awful lot about reality.

I disagree. I think that's always been the American way. Government should be small and only interfere with specific legislation when very significant macro-level damage is likely. Other than that, the government's role is to preserve order (including both a criminal and a civil justice system) and promote freedom of conscience within the law, and free people will be free to act in their own best interests without burdensome constraints or regulation. That's how I define "freedom".

Whether you think every company should offer 20 weeks of parental leave (itself debatable from a business perspective, though obviously not a perk many employees would willfully decline) is different from whether you think they should be forced to do so.
> but that it was purely political.

Any governing action is entirely political; I think your problem is that it was entirely partisan.
Seriously why all the down votes.

I'm saying this is a prestigious publication company with very low distribution.

What would you do if your revenue didn't meet your principles?

Maybe a Kickstarter?

I'm pretty sure these guys are doing what they can.

Why don't you ask them?
This is why I have stopped buying things from Amazon. I feel uncomfortable buying from a company that treats its employees this way.
Claudia.js – Deploy Node.js Projects to AWS Lambda
Since its 4.47 x 9.5 x 10 to the 15th power meters to alpha century, it doesn't seem feasible to form a communication chain of such tiny devices. How are they powered in deep space?
I probably wouldn't claim 100% compatibility but we're already passing ~95% of the tests, and intend to fix more. There will likely be a few minor differences but we also have 20 thousand components that need to "just work" so we're striving for as much compat as possible, and any changes would be very contained.
Again, that's not engagement. That's judgment and whether you live 'there' matters not a whit.

BTW before you can cite confirmation bias you have to engage the material. She did. You didn't.
There's obviously a lot to both positions, but as a succinct answer: I would argue that a mixed policy likely generates the best outcomes -- by instigating a crisis to motivate public interest and movement on the topic, and then sustained, strategic leaks over the following decade(s), once there's an interested cohort (with a baseline of evidence).

Ill date myself a bit here by saying that Snowden is the only major leak of my lifetime, but it seems to me that he was able to get traction on the issue when a lot of people had failed to (eg, there were rumors of NSA programs before including from NSA insiders, but little public attention), but what has kept the topic alive is a series of strategic leaks of new information to sustain public attention and keep the debate focused on it being a current issue.

So in some senses, I think we need those doc drops of "They're really looking at all your dick pics, hook-up texts, and tracking every illicit meet-up", but I also think that we get a lot more usage out of quieter leaks of key details, once the conversation is happening.

That was sort of the point of my analogy: quiet rumors from key staff to shareholders were ignored or suppressed by executive staff until one guy in accounting dropped the whole set of books. This obviously leaked a bunch of business secrets, but Id argue the only way to comprehend the scale of wrongdoing was to see that the entire system had become organized around that illicit activity.

It was only in that context we could even start a conversation about the scope of what had gone awry.
As I said elsewhere, the end result of this appears to have been demonstrably suboptimal --- again, stipulating that this is regarding the American public interest:

* Some stuff got published that was important and vital (though its impact on public policy was ultimately minimal).

* Some stuff got published that simply shouldn't have been leaked --- for instance, details of technical implants useful only in narrowly targeted espionage.

* Some stuff didn't get published that should have been --- for instance, in light of what we later discovered about Juniper/Netscreen, had everyone to do this earlier, a list of vendors impacted by VPN implants would have been helpful, and could have been doable.

* Some stuff got published that were simple false, such as the notion of a "PRISM" system that gave NSA direct access to Google's systems.

A more carefully curated, competently explained process of leaking could have improved all these outcomes, and that's exactly what Gladwell is suggesting Ellsberg accomplished that Snowden didn't.
I think its difficult to find this kind of regulation for SE partially because its so new and not well understood compared to other engineering professions. What is software engineering? The kinds of things that would regulate, say, programming an operating system kernel is not the same thing as someone who makes wordpress templates. Yet both would describe themselves broadly as Software Engineers. What is the difference between the aforementioned wordpress-template-maker and someone building a full web application in React? Where is the line that divides "Engineering" begin and end?

I can see a regulatory body develop certifications around software engineers that develop critical infrastructure or spacecraft, where a single failure is catastrophic, but that expertise might not apply for the person making the interface app for the same piece of software (or working in some other layer of the stack that is not so stringent). Is that person "less" of an engineer? It opens the door to institutional bias towards what is considered "proper" engineering, and much like relying on formal education for hiring, provide a poor heuristic in hiring practices.

However I think that we will eventually get there once we figure out collectively what "place" software has in society, once these divisions settle down and become better understood, then we can figure out how to regulate each properly. I think this could be 50-100 years from now.
Anycast in 9 easy steps
It's getting there, though admittedly some fields are more advanced than others.

Maths and physics are pretty good examples. You have https://arxiv.org/ for open access to pre-prints and overlay journals are starting to gain a little traction, for example http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/
Serious Answer: To Kill IRC for a whole generation