skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found that in the ML Class, we could complete many of the assignments by doing the calcs via "for-loops" in Octave - and as you noted, it was really slow.

But I think Ng wanted us to understand what was going on under the hood in Octave when you used its in-built vector primitives, and how to think about the problems in such a way to understand how to "vectorise" them so that the solutions would be amenable to using those primitives.

There was a time where I wasn't "getting it" - and proceeded with my own implementation. In time though, it "clicked" for me, and I could put away those routines and use the vector math more fully (and quickly). That said, I wouldn't have wanted it to be left as a "black box" - it was nice to have the understanding of the operations it was doing behind the curtain.

Which is also why I was disappointed that the math wasn't described more in either of those courses; that part was left as "black boxes" and only hinted at a bit (ie "here's the derivative of the function - but you don't have to worry about it, but if you know about the math, you might find it interesting").

In this latest course I am taking, though, they are diving right into the math - and I have found that they assume you already know what a derivative is and how it is formed from the initial function. Unfortunately, I don't have the education needed, so I am fumbling through it (and doing what I can to read up on the relevant topics - I even bought a book on teaching yourself calculus which was rec'd for me by a helpful individual).
This is incredibly cool. I can't overstate the effect of having a CEO who is an active hacker on the tooling and infrastructure in the company.

On top of that, this would give Zuckerberg so much insight into so many things - the pain faced by developers, the pain faced by the users, how users would want to use AI products, why developers are not able to build the products users want. And this plays well into his strengths as a CEO. There aren't many (any?) big company CEOs who can do this.
> Yes there is, watch someone else do it.

This is not as good. There's a lot of evidence from neuroscience that this leads to an illusion of competence. I.e. it's much easier to follow along through a sample solution than to craft a solution yourself. Until you craft the solution yourself, the knowledge won't actually be chunked as firmly in your brain.

I've seen this time and again, as a teacher, and it was mentioned explicitly in Coursera's Learning How To Learn course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

NOTE: watching someone is a good way to get started, but until you do it on your own, you haven't learned it deeply, and it may be difficult to recall in a real situation.
In Javascript, you have to install event handlers. There is no control when they are executed, which is a problem.

When writing a game engine, you typically create events yourself at the top of the game loop (reading the input sources in a non-blocking fashion). You have better control what handler is called and when, but what handler should be called probably still shouldn't be decided in a central location. So I figure your object-based approach is a good solution. (The individual handlers can rely on the fact that they are only called at the start of the loop).

I realize a Javascript app could easily emulate the game loop style by letting handlers write to a queue.
Using the bitcoin blockchain to store small info is a really interesting idea. Bitcoin is having some scaling issues, but I'm hoping those get resolved in time.

What concerns me is the blockchain is decentralized but the website hosting the post board is not. This seems to defeat the purpose. Unfortunately there is no way to connect directly to bitcoin nodes from web browsers so some central components are necessary, but I imagine there could be a way to make things somewhat decentralized using centralized components.
How Having the Nerve to Win Will Improve Your Trading Results
Amazed by how much work he has done in 100 hours while running one of the world's largest internet company. If anyone interested in trying out some of the "Jarvis" without hacking, checking out https://saymosaic.com. We have put together a tool to enable you interact with your smart devices/services with either voice on Echo or text on FB messenger. Currently, it is in beta with more integrations and aggregated services to come.
I know he did.

Apart from the whole business luminary/billionaire thing, I think Zuck is a pretty cool and insightful guy. I like both the idea of having a "challenge", as well as the specific ones he's done: running, meeting a new person each day, learning Mandarin, doing a cool side project with his house. (I get to hear about a lot of this as one of my best friends works as fb)

At the risk of sounding a little bit self-aggrandizing, I often think about how similar the two of us are, not because I'm particularly special, but just that he's a torch-carrier for guys like me. I'm a month apart from Zuck in age, I'm about to get married to a woman with a serious career, and Zuck and I both grew up in the eastern US (I'm from Chicago). I had a Chinese girlfriend growing up. My family wasn't rich but we also weren't poor. I worked at Microsoft out of college, something Zuck said he might've done if he didn't found facebook.

He's pretty talented though. I definitely didn't create wirehog. I also didn't go to Exeter or have the quality of education he did, either at Exeter, or later at Harvard. I have to wonder how much that stuff influenced his later life, and whether I should try to get my kids into those places.

Controversies aside, I think he's doing an admirable job of casting the tech industry in a positive light, with his positions on taking time off from work, and trying to hire inclusively. I don't use facebook as I have genuine concerns about privacy, but I think he's a real idealist who thinks making the world more "open and connected" is a genuinely good thing. I'd love to meet him some day.
I've been hacking away in as my job Unity for years..

Can someone tell me do they think the practice described in the article is a good idea? (The writer says they are just learning so their opinion is not very valuable to me (When theyve cranked out a bunch of games on various platforms and encountered all kinds of horrible shit and overcome it, it would be more valuable to me))

I'm all too familiar with OO's many foibles and I'm interested in functional bur have never done any.

One thing I've heard though, is that OO is bad for most stuff except games. Where you actually have this world with all these entities composed of various objects going around in it about their business.
Its does make sense to have a 'Cow' object that has state + methods to get it to do various things like 'moo'

Additional: Looked around a bit and the Arcadia repo says..
"
Arcadia is alpha-quality software, and shouldn't be used for anything important yet.
"
I'm also try as hard a possible and use as much standard, vanilla Unity stuff as possible, as the more weird custom plugins and whatnot you use the more heartache you get when it comes to building and releasing + updates on a million damn phones or PC setups. Anything not standard has to justify its existence against very jarsh criteria.

I will download and mess with this though. I'm actually really excited to do some functional programming!!
To some degree, Juno's stated differentiator is being the best ride hail app from the drivers perspective by:
- 50% of founder equity goes to drivers
- 10% vs 20-25% cut of fares
- no pooled concept (this may be purely because they're too small to support it, though it is also unpopular with drivers
He probably means as a wide release.

I also believe Uber will probably go wide first because the risk (people get injured, they possibly go down in flames from legal issues) is worth the reward (they have a chance of surviving as a business by automating human drivers out of the equation).

Google has money falling out of their ears and will do a wide release when it's boringly safe.

I much prefer companies waiting until it is boringly safe but I don't think that's compatible with the money fire Uber has built.
Don't count on it.
I have a 2009 MacPro and Apple has marked it obsolete, so the latest OS won't install (without a little fiddling). I like the new MacPro (2013?) but the proprietary SSD socket is a real turn off as is having to buy two expensive CAD cards that I don't need. I was hoping the prices would come down on the used / refurb market, but they haven't very much.

I've all but stopped coding with it (Xcode); the app store is too saturated to have a realistic chance of making money without a massive marketing budget. I can't bring myself to buy an iMac without being able to use it as a monitor once it's obsolete. Perhaps the Apple allure has worn off for me.
Read up on this famous case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_v._Walker-Thomas_Furn....
This is going to sound like it’s not directly addressing your concerns, but stay with me: watch Alton Brown’s old Food TV series "Good Eats".

I used to think cooking was this sort of mysterious voodoo with arbitrary rules, and could not (and still cannot) memorize a recipe to save my life. Good Eats changed everything.

Alton Brown had a background in children's television, and decided to apply that approach to a cooking show.* Instead of simply saying "this meal will taste great, here's how to make it," he goes into weird Sesame Street-style digressions into the science behind things like the "Mailard Reaction" (how the browned crust on a burger or steak happens and why it's delicious) or why different oils get used for different things.

Once the science, chemistry and physics of cooking started making sense to me, I quickly became a pretty goddamned good chef (if I do say so myself). I think this will have a similar effect on your fears — once you get how it all works you won't be afraid of fucking up.

After you've covered the basics with Alton, try http://www.cookingforengineers.com and Modernist Cuisine

* In fact, he didn't even know how to cook; he had the idea, took two years of classes, then made the pitch to the networks.
> Real neurons don't use calculus and activation functions, nor back-propagation, etc in order to learn. All of those things in an ANN are just abstractions and models around what occurs in nature.

But do you think that real neurons are less complicated than artificial neurons? Look at the molecular structure of a single ion channel. It's crazy complicated!

How do we know that neurons don't do calculus? Chemical gradients, summation, etc.
My experience has been that pretty much every Lyft driver I've met also drives for Uber.
not everybody has a credit card.
I wish Apple never had their success with iTunes and iPhone.

It was like winning lottery for them. And you know what happens when someone wins lottery.

They forget about their roots and in the end, only ruin remains.
Former CBA IT exec jailed for role in kickback scheme
In my experience, that "tropical island" trope goes hand in hand with the "4 hour week" BS.

I lived in tropical Thailand for 2 years (wife had a job there; now we live in Korea). And let me tell you, you'll get bored out of your mind sooner rather than later, and find yourself "sitting here on HN" more often than you'd like to admit.

Creative people live for the thrill of being "in the zone", utilizing their potential to the max. Tropical surroundings or "4 hour weeks" have surprisingly little to do with that.
> I did see a great talk last week on using ANNs to accelerate viscoelasticity calculations

I'd love a reference for this. Link, please?
Understanding the Differences in Product Management in Asia and the US
I guess it depends. Seems like people are getting more that 10 hours out of it when used for light tasks.
Wouldn't be a thread about BEAM languages without someone complaining that their education was confined to languages that don't look like Erlang and thus Erlang is awful to read.
I actually agree with your points here! I'm not trying to say all homeless or drug addicts would waste a UBI or other benefit. I think it is a great idea, and will work for the vast (some number of nines) majority of people, of any (current) income or social status.

I was just trying to say that no matter what we do, or how carefully we plan, there will always be some exceptional cases that UBI will fail for, and that these failures will generally be the same (very) small percentage pretty much everywhere in the world, people that behave in this way have always existed. The fact that this happens is therefore nothing to do with the community you are in, the government in power, the way the benefit is administered, etc. These outliers will always be available as anecdata, and it is useless to claim that you live in, or will generate, a utopia where they don't.
I think Uber has a huge advantage. If you start a new transportation service in NYC, Uber can just flip a switch, undercut your NYC prices by $2 per ride, and make up the difference by raising prices $0.10 per ride in other cities without competition.

How do you compete with that? You'd be burning money to compete, and Uber would just wait it out until you're bankrupt.

If you launch a global competitor that gains traction, Uber would just lower prices worldwide. If they can sustain a billion dollar loss every quarter, then you're quickly going out of business, and once that happens, they'd raise prices again and return to be profitable.
well some people like enjoying and even spending money on food...
Expect everything to be unexpected (in startups)
is this fake news?
As a (mostly) front-end developer, I agree that reading some of the code in your node_modules can be enlightening. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way.

There have been times when I've dug into a module when something wasn't behaving properly, and was shocked at how bad the code was. It's not as if I included it intentionally - it's usually a dependency of a dependency of a dependency. All the same, it was garbage that I'd been shipping as part of my application.

Your point still stands, though. Having the code where it's easy to find and read is helpful. And reading bad code can be as helpful as reading good code. Sometimes, the trauma caused by seeing some atrocious code can improve your habits more quickly than reading beautiful code. :)
If you like that, then check out his Expect Everything to be Unexpected write-up. My favorite reality check. I posted it in its own thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217086
... and that exactly what the Taxi industry should do, step up. Not just in price, but in technology. IMO the best feature of Uber is the app and transparency like features of taking a trip. If I can pull the app up, input where I am and where I want to go, how much it will cost, and when my driver will be here, I'm happy.

The few experiences I've had with local Taxi systems, coming from a everyone-drives-a-car suburban background, have been awful. Overcharging, credit card machine breakdown, and unreliability of driver arrival estimation have made me seek out more expensive alternatives, just to avoid the hassle.

I now live in a city where I take public transport 90% of the time. But that 10% has been made so much easier by Uber and Lyft(they offer the "same" features, so they are the same in my book). They tell me; How long until the driver is here(often incorrect, but only by a small factor), how long the trip will take(often incorrect, by only by a small factor), and how much it will cost(often correct or guaranteed).

None of the features above sound unique to Uber/Lyft, the only difference between them and Taxi's are subsidization by Capitalization. I've heard of Flywheel offering the same app features Uber/Lyft do, but Uber's are often under ~$10 where I am, which a Taxi can take anywhere from $25-$45. But if Uber's subsidization goes dry, as long as there's an feature-like alternative, I'd still pay for that.
This comes at no surprise. I predicted that at some point desktop computers used by designers and software engineers would start approaching workstation class pricing (around 4K USD or more) as laptops took over. This will reflect the depressed demand as more people are able to get what they need done via a laptop.

Apple might be one of the few manufacturers able to sell desktops at a loss, and justify it since the Makers are the ones using them to generate demand for other, higher margin products like phones, tablets, and laptops.

The PC market also exhibits this trend, but at a slower pace because PC gamers keep prices a little more depressed. However now that high end GPUs are approaching $1000 each, it's probably happening there too.
I don't like that it rhymes.
I just submitted that one since it was my favorite. Especially the image metaphor at the beginning. :) I just saw this comment but extra references can't hurt ya.
> How do you know how many lines are required to configure hypothetical middleware?

Primarily through experience. Happy to be shown otherwise. Middleware usually takes a bit more configuration than that.

> Granted. It seems like this is the only clear win for NGINX, and it may well change if Go libraries mature. Time will tell.

We can quibble over whether it's the "only" win, but even so, it's a very, very big win. It's a single point of failure that handles a lot of features you'd have to replicate with various packages that lack the kind of support, maturity and community that NGINX has.
Idk.. sounds very weird to me because when I was a kid in the Northeast I had one (1) winter jacket. If it was between September and March I left the house with the jacket else I didn't. Simple. I can't imagine my parents ever checking the weather and I can't imagine a child owning several jackets. Very odd. People make things much too complicated.
Google open sources Project Wycheproof, security tests of cryptographic
Honest question: Do you own a cellphone?
Wholeheartedly agree with this. Right tool for the problem at hand, and sometimes that means using multiple tools (or paradigms). Incidentally, one of the things I like about Python, in that is so easily lets you mix paradigms such as FP & OOP. Certain use cases just don't naturally fit w/ a pure FP style, nor a pure OOP style, but sometimes a healthy mix of both is in order. One of the areas FP really wins is in ease to introducing parallelism. If all of your parallel functions are pure, introducing parallelism should be a non-issue. Results of a function only depend on the (non-global, immutable arguments and, possibly, immutable global state). Shared mutable state is the bane of all parallel programming. Shared mutable state necessitates locking of some form, and even experts get it wrong (and non-experts get it wrong very frequently) - personal experience, no citations.
Microservices – it's déjà vu all over again (slides)
I thought the whole "crazy ones" theme was about Apple building things that helped people change the world. Somehow that's morphed into Apple changing the world. I think might be a problem.
I will also be releasing code (there are quite a few decent APIs that can make this very easy to do - "centralized components") to access the messages from the Blockchain so anyone can easily add the code to their web-site (so if our site goes down - there will be another).

I had thought about creating some kind of interface/software to interact with the Blockchain and serve as a website would but through software. Not sure how you would get around the issue of having a central service wallet that funds it all (Unless messages get sent to my server and then the transaction is made, adding it to the Blockchain). A huge project I'd imagine.

I will be increasing the limit to 450 bytes per message soon - and through chaining you could have any amount of data you liked - but this is not my plan.

The only other issue really is that some trust has to lie with myself and/or the provider (I could reduce risk as much as possible by taking the necessary hosting measures - and then I would have as much control as possible - owning the main Bitcoin wallet [https://bitaps.com/1K69sEhUwNgiva3xzPnToxS89dzydU7nPm] means a lot) used somewhat as I could replace certain words with others or what have you! - but.. this can be randomly tested and would be apparent pretty quickly if it was to happen and people would stop using the service and probably jump ship.
I mean really the only component you're ever going to be able to upgrade is RAM right? Are you suggesting it should be possible to swap out CPUs in iMacs?
Why do I care what the drivers like? I don't buy any other products or services based on the happiness of the workers.

Uber still has the most drivers and the cheapest prices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC

Open	Yes, and royalty free
and sex! The Prius' problem has always been that it looks like the healthy low-fat gluten-free quinoa kale almond milk salad of cars.

The best word I can come up with describe Toyota's car designs is "inoffensive". They aren't necessarily bad, and they are easy to drive and comfortable to ride in, but they are mainly generic and forgettable. Being mass market cars like they are I guess that is kind of the point.
fork() starts new processes, so that would be a weird state to collide.
> After two visits and three calls to the Mission district station, and three calls and two emails with San Francisco Police Department public affairs (a route not open to most civilians), the police assigned someone to my case. That was well over a month after the theft. Walgreens gave them some video, which has been circulated, but Target had already junked its footage.

OK, it sounds like someone did some substantial work. They got video from one source, and queried another, and then did something with the video.

> Uber, which over its four rides obtained route information and the person’s address, was not contacted.

And yet, the investigator didn't request data from Uber, which apparently learned the suspect's address. I wonder what's up with that? Do they consider it too unreliable? Something akin to hearsay? Or maybe they don't want to violate the suspect's privacy? Very strange.
Imagine a world where ubiquitous automated cameras sent you a ticket every time you jaywalked, or if your car automatically reported you every time you exceeded the speed limit.

I'm probably being naive, but I think having rules that are universally enforced would be much better than our current approach of selective enforcement. I'd expect that as soon as those with power to change the law are negatively affected by poorly written laws, those laws would soon be changed.

Should jaywalking itself always be illegal? No, it should depend on whether there is an actual danger and the degree to which it impedes traffic. A more sane law would differentiate between calmly crossing at midnight on an empty street and causing an accident by darting into busy traffic.

Should it be illegal to exceed the posted speed limit? I think so, otherwise why not just have "advisory speeds"? Rather than making it illegal to exceed a speed that drivers are expected to exceed and then enforcing selectively, a firmly enforced limit seems much saner. If the goal is fuel efficiency, then legislate that directly. If the goal is safety, then "reasonable and prudent" seems sufficient.

like stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family

I think this is better dealt with at the penalty phase than by selective prosecution. I feel the owner of the lost loaf of bread should have the right to prosecute or not prosecute entirely at their discretion, but once the police are involved I think they should be required enforce the law and leave the discretion to the judge. It it would seem terribly unfair to the property owner for the police on the scene to summarily decide that the theft was justified and the shop owner must absorb the loss.