skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I strongly agree. And I have seen it anecdotally a few times in how we have developed entry-level employees and interns who are now top of their field (e.g. One intern is now the VP of design at major tech company). I think the innate talent is in everyone and can be tapped simply by putting them into an environment where they are pushed beyond what might be considered a limit in other areas (even indirectly like through social pressure to keep up with other talented colleagues).

Malcolm Gladwell pointed out how you will see clusters of geniuses emerge from the same time in the same neighborhoods and I think this supports the above as well.

I don't think it's limited to young people either, though it certainly helps. An established reputation will prevent people from being pushed beyond their limits.
Logging and access control. Even today some "special collections" are not stored and provided access as easily as technologically possible in order to intentionally restrict access. The humans in the certified birth certificate process could be replaced by a very small shell script technologically, but legally their slowing things down paradoxically provide a useful service by getting in the way.

If I were retcon-ing the data silo design they're worried about a terror attack methodically destroying trillions of dollars of stored design data, or being too easy and fast to use, resulting in the wrong people putting together the wrong collection of ideas and figuring out the overall plan. You can do a lot of interesting compartmentalized grunt work engineering. So here's the static and dynamic loads gimmie a minimal mass truss design for those loads with a factor of safety of 9 but you don't have to be told thats the death star's laser cannon support thingy and it would be bad if enough people put 2 and 2 together.
I'm in a post-Christmas hangover, so this seems like a great time for me to get pedantic about Star Wars stuff :)

I don't think anybody really changes sides. Star Wars is binary...everything is good or evil. The Republic (good) gets transformed by Palpatine into the Empire (evil), which is opposed by the Rebellion (good), which in turn overthrows the Empire and form the New Republic (good) to replace the Empire. Then lingering forces from the Empire form the New Order (bad) and a relative peace exists until it doesn't. Are there a small number of people who do ethically questionable things? Yes, but for the most part everyone adheres to their good or evil classification.

Darth Vader did help commit genocide, but I don't know that you could pin the blame for anything the death star did on him. Tarkin was the commanding officer and gave the direct command to blow up Alderaan. Vader was merely an enforcer detaining Leia and ensuring things were going according to plan. He's certainly got blood on his hands, but I wouldn't say he destroyed planets. AFAIK, Alderaan is the only one that got destroyed anyway.

Part of being a Jedi is shedding attachment, which is all Anakin's mother ever was (as evidenced by their relationship essentially sending him off the deep end into a genocidal rampage). The Jedi would've had no way of knowing that his mother was in danger while it was happening. If Anakin couldn't feel it in the force, how could people with no attachment to her? Anakin is the only living Jedi to have even met Shmi Skywalker, after all (Qui Gon is dead, Obi Wan never left the ship).

In episode III, it's shown that the death star was originally a separatist weapon.
The World V. Alan Dershowitz
The characters were a little flat yes but it was an original story with a unique ending. VII was basically ANH2.0 when ANH was sufficiently good without being remade.
There is also a difference between learning and playing. During play, the human operated at ~20 watts on computation while the machine ran at a rate of anywhere from 26,000 watts to 260,000 watts, depending on how efficient the TPUs are (and assuming 10x as the ideal case). The human is also learning new things about Go as it plays, planning complex muscle firing programs, filtering audio and managing attention, working on subconscious goals, running complex vision tasks, all while running its autonomic subsystem.

Low power is also still important due to issues of heat and energy availability. Low power also implies high efficiency which is important for several reasons.

The human brain is estimated at 20 watts (when people talk about computing systems they tend to not include the power needed for all the auxiliary infrastructure needed to keep it networked and cooled); it's also estimated that beyond 4 hours a day, learning effectiveness drops precipitously.

If we take the case of Go, you can take a 4 year old human and have a professional player by 13. This is about 950 megajoules spent by the brain while learning Go. For the machine, if you look at the learning part (self play, value and policy on 50 GPUs for several weeks) the estimate on energy spend is about 30,000 megajoules. The policy network is itself ~20,000 MJ, while the full AlphaGo system playing on a single GPU and 48 CPUs is just a strong amateur.

But this is not even an apples to apples comparison since the brain is not spending all of its energy on learning Go. In fact, learning how to play Go is very far from the most difficult thing the brain is learning how to do.
An interesting one.
Really, that's an amazing project!! I've done something similar using the NES, although is not so well polished. I really like the debugger. Congrats! How do I get a signed copy of your book?
cat 100GB_data_file_with_DUPLICATE_lines | parallel --pipe awk \'\!a[\$0]++\' > data_file_with_UNIQUE_lines

is BETTER since it uses less computer resources than

gawk '!a[$0]++' 100GB_data_file_with_DUPLICATE_lines > data_file_with_UNIQUE_lines
I've moved to the Netherlands alone less than 6 months ago - so Dutch is high on the list of things that I want to learn (I can read it pretty well already, but I can't speak or write it very well). I'm using Duolingo, plus I have some Dutch friends already who help me out.

On top of that I want to learn industry game development techniques, including finally getting a solid grasp on C++. I've got a pretty strong grasp of systems engineering concepts and memory management since I'm very active in the Rust community but by the end of the year I want to be qualified to get a job in the games industry. Web development is not going to be my career, that's for certain. I'm reading through various maths-for-computer-scientists books, and I've got a bunch of highly-recommended game dev books (Game Engine Architecture, Real-time Rendering, looking at getting Real-time Collision Detection) in my library. I was an avid amateur mathematician in a past life, so although I'm rusty I'm getting back into my stride quite fast. If anyone has more tips on how to get your foot into the door in game development (engine/tools development, very specifically _not_ programming the game itself) I'd be extremely grateful.
Handbrake uses ffmpeg behind the scenes and adds a nice GUI and many DVD related features. Ffmpeg is a dark art to many.

The JSON API to interact with libhb also sounds interesting.
Tatooine is beyond the Republic's sphere of influence. Droids only develope personalities after going a long period of time without a memory wipe (a quirk of their programming?) R2, 3PO, Chopper, and K-2 are the only canonical droids we see with personalities.
There are worse criticisms of the Jedi than them being uncommitted to social justice---that dusty order of ascetics is an anti-democratic paramilitary that forcibly conscripts and trains child soldiers to engage in extrajudicial killings in the name of the Pax Galactica, a meritocracy rooted in the notion of genetic supermen. They are as vile as the Empire that succeeded them.
Re: GUI 'downside' - They mention a 'JSON API' to interact with libhb, though I have yet to find it in the docs.
I just downloaded it for the first time in a while 3 days ago and noticed that H.265 exists and compresses twice as well at the same quality level... how in the hell did I miss that? (VLC will play them). I did a test on a full-rez MKV and worked great
The best books of 2016 list you get when you combine 36 “Best Books: 2016” lists
There many other reasons for writing: general readership, personal branding, advertising, stream of consciousness, etc. If the purpose behind writing the piece was to engage the Hacker News community, it was ineffective. One way to take that is as editorial feedback on the writing in terms how it met the expectations of the intended audience.

Collin is a very experienced and respected member of the Hacker News community. It is worth listening to him most of the time. This is almost certainly one of those times if the intended audience was Hacker News.

Finally, it is useful to experiment with different writing techniques because sometimes the results can vastly exceed expectations. Experiments sometimes don't produce the hoped for results, and that's the risk.

Good luck.
Yeah, I made it about 5 days in this year and then quit because I wasn't having fun.

Too many of the problems had the structure:

* here's Part A
* submit solution for Part A
* OK, now here's Part B
* Part B is just different enough that you have to do a not-fun refactoring of your Part A code (that wouldn't be necessary if you'd just been asked to also design for Part B up front)

It was too much like working with an awful PM who can't decide what they want, and it mostly just made me angry.
And they both, just like most of scifi, fantasy and other action movies are just variations of hero's journey with similar archetypes. So what? Originality for it's own sake doesn't make anything better.
That money is being used to improve commuter rail. The first bits of spending are to electrify CalTrain and make grade separation improvements which will increase capacity.

That sounds a lot more tangible and useful than an imaginary hyper loop or putting more "self driving" cars on the road.
And the discussion about the paper:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13257424
There is also an in-development GNU Parallel clone/alternative written in Rust. https://github.com/mmstick/parallel
Yes, the absurd of piracy warnings is ridiculous

Really makes me think twice about giving them my money
After seeing the Spinor 'belt' animations on that page, something in my gut is screaming at me that there's some great use for this phenomenon in EMF power generation.
Are you implying that there's a conspiracy not to help people feel better?

Also, DanBC's point is accurate - for people with mild/moderate depression, talk therapy is as effective as pharmaceutical therapy. Thus, we already do have treatments that do not increase suicidal ideation.
Mental ability is innate. I think his point was that is also plastic. Perhaps even low IQ individuals can develop genius level ability on a specific topic or function in life or even brought up to the IQ of someone capable of success in grad school.
2-4GB is not enough for you? And the brand spanking new 2016 Macbook Pros default to 8GB and 2-4 is not enough on an old computer? I routinely browse the web in a 2GB Linux VM with Firefox under Windows, with less than 1GB in use on htop. It's easy to run even Ubuntu with under 200MB of RAM usage if you forgo Unity, and 500 MB with it.

What hobbles the web on older hardware is not "2-4GB" but very slow processors (having to handle all that advertising Javascript, over-animated UIs, and bloated front-end frameworks).
> I would not be surprised if Death Star construction was initiated during the Old Republic.

It actually was. In the prequel trilogy, we see that the Separatists have plans for it, which are then acquired by the Empire at the end of the film.

> The first Death Star's schematics are visible in the scenes on Geonosis in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones showcasing the early development of the Death Star prototype, the Death Star plans were designed by Geonosians led by Archduke Poggle the Lesser, a member of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and is shown early in construction at the end of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Star
Possibly the coolest thing about the Echo is developing your own skill. If you're comfortable with JavaScript (or, I believe, python or Java) you can really quickly put together a skill, which in development mode only you can use. Their example templates are really clear.

So a lot of this would be easy to set up, if you're willing to do a bit of below-IFTTT type programming. And, since it uses AWS Lambda, your usage is almost certainly going to stay in the free usage zone (you get a comparative ton of compute time for free each month with Lambda).

I'm sure Google has, or will soon have, such a development environment for their device as well.
Xutlu Server – Only PHP and MySQL for Windows
Prostate tumor – CyberKnife
7 Key Principles of Question-Based Leadership to Win
Now-logs: realtime logging for now
If an AI is duplicated, so that a new instance is created (pro-creation), then surely the new instance already knows what the parent instance learnt?
My son-in-law was over for Christmas, and he didn't know that I had an Echo dot, so to show it off I said, "Alexa, tell me a joke". It told us a lame joke. My SIL had to whip out his android phone and say, "Hey Google, tell me a joke!" and it told us a lame, funny joke. Score one for Google.

Then he said, "Google, tell me a Christmas joke" and it told us a pretty poor Christmas joke. I then asked Alexa for a Christmas joke, and it told us a funny Christmas joke!

So, clearly, in by far the most import imaginable use case, they're pretty much tied :-)
For monads, learn the following concepts in order:

Category

Functor

Natural transformation

Adjoint functor

That's it.

If you don't understand what monads are you should probably wait with topos theory. It quite abstract and you should probably be comfortable with both algebraic geometry and category theory before you approach it
How much faster is a plain text search really than an regexp without special characters? You'd think this would be quite easy to optimise for a regexp engine.

I admit I try to use -f all the time but your post suddenly made me realise I'd never actually measured the effect. :/

Edit: yes sorry I meant -F
GNU Parallel rules! I made $100K with just a few lines of code involving Parallel.
>Well, I think a lot of competitive advantage of Google/Facebook

But 99.9% of people are not trying to compete with Google or Facebook. They are looking for basic insights.

I do agree that ML isn't and shouldn't be "easy". But we inevitably and thankfully get abstracted away from the inner workings of things over time.
They also say in E IV that the death star is well defended against a full fleet, but that a small group of fighters should be able to break through more easily.
If you want a real bang up tutorial that covers absolutely everything theory and implementation check out Broken Thorns. You'll need to Google for it because I'm on my phone.

Two small notes: the website is down (it's quite old and I'd be sad if the owner has a bit of bus-syndrome), you can find it on the waybackmachine

It's the best tutorial out there for an x86 based OS
It sort of a theory about the object at the intersection between logic and geometry
Man did I get lucky with my cat when reading all these comments here... She always has a bowl of food available, only touches it when she's hungry and rarely finishes it completely. I fill it up once or twice a day, and she mostly ignores me when I do. The most she does is come and smell the freshly poured food from time to time, but with little interest in actually touching it at that point - even when her bowl had been completely empty. And when she eats, she's always very calm about it, like there's no rush.

And it doesn't stop there. She knows how to use the litter-box, but she prefers to go outside - which means I rarely have to clean it - like once every month at most, only when she has been left inside for too long. I should find something to notify me when she actually used it.

She probably spends 70% indoor, 30% outdoor, which is when she terrorizes the other, more tame (but much larger) cats of the neighborhood or goes hunting. I should also find something that addresses here hunting nature, because the rate at which birds and mice are dropped at my back-door is quite alarming. A collar with a bell didn't seem to affect her hunting success-rate at all, and only gave her an allergic reaction to the collar - so we removed it.
Supporting the upstream is different. One cannot simply download AOSP and install it on your phone, however custom roms provide something you can actually download and install. Google deliberately does not improve the AOSP base applications because they don't want people using their proprietary apps. Google mainly supports AOSP because they can get more people hooked on google services with it than they loose from things like Kindle.

So directly supporting an easy, installable downstream with bells-and-whistles like cyanogenmod would be a serious threat to google.
Nvidia is a large distributed organization so it's possible if not likely that the relative understanding of this particular UK team is not reflective of the total expertise at the company.

They definitely have more than "just a processor":
http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-automotive-technology.htm...

I have a friend who works in the self driving team at Nvidia in Santa Clara (apologies for the login wall):
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/full-stack-engineers-self-dri...

They've also got some demos up on YouTube:
http://youtu.be/YuyT2SDcYrU
OP here, not sure who has changed the title. Thought it was relevant to the paper.

Original title: First publication from Apple: ...
To be honest the same can be told about many GNU tools. At least myself I still experience this moment of being totally lost infront of the man screen from time to time. Parallel has a nice tutorial https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/parallel_tutorial.html Have you seen it?
Question from four years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886390
I would have thought a simple grep would do the trick if you have the source code.
The Voluntarism Fantasy (2014)
Other than the educational value of doing so, what would be a reason to write a brand new operating system? Obviously there is a lot to learn about existing operating systems by coding you own, much in the way that writing a new languages teaches you about existing languages, but what are some creative applications of a hand made operating system?
> Apple hasn’t pulled the Withings apps from the App Store yet but it probably wouldn’t hurt to download them if you think you will need them…just in case.

Pulling the app from the app store strikes me as a whole different ballgame from removing the product from the apple store. Seems like that would cross a line from fairly normal tactics into essentially bricking devices for a large segment of customers.
ffmpeg has no support for dvd titles or chapters.
Ask HN: How to invest 50k?
I have 50k in savings I'm willing to invest in the best option (the one with the best ROI-security ratio). I have no previous experience in investing nor in finance.

Anyone with experience who can help me?
I want to learn how to walk on my hands. I will achieve this by repeated wall hand stands at home. I also want to learn how to live again and how to respect myself, so that I can create a distance between me and work, and stop wasting my short life in an office
> When we make software, in practice, we have to construct the software and test the artefact, hoping that our tests are adequate. We can't do meaningful checks on the design itself, let alone on any sketch which prefigures the design.

But we can do meaningful checks on the design beforehand, and we can create high-level sketches of a design. We have tools from computability theory, complexity theory, automata theory, graph theory, etc. We have tools for formal specification and verification. We have tools and principles for designing software components and their interactions. We have experiences from past projects that we can draw upon. We can do research, and we can readily discuss issues with other engineers all over the world.

I (and I suspect that I'm far from unique in this) do these things in the early stages of every project. My boss will come to me with a list of requirements, and some requirement(s) will invariably be intractable in terms of computational complexity, and I'll have to sit down with him and work on a compromise (most often, it's a case of the client trying to describe the solution they invision rather than the problem they need solved, and once we've determined the rationale for a requirement, we can come up with an alternative that fits the bill easily enough).

After all of the requirements are both computationally possible and tractable, I come up with a design sketch to illustrate the architecture of the application at a high level. I identify the major components and how they relate to each other, and I identify the flow of data for each her case and what happens to it at each step. I describe what extension points we'll need in order to accommodate the addition of functionality that didn't make the cut for the first iteration, but that we already know to be needed in a future iteration.
My goal for this year was to read 10 books. Not a huge challenge but I'm happy I managed to complete it. I'm currently at my 16th book - so I might say that's pretty good.

Here's my 2016 reading list:

#1. Zero to One - Peter Thiel - 3.5*

#2. The Alchemis - Paulo Coelho - 3.5*

#3. Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston - 3*

#4. Traction - Gabriel Weinberg - 4.5*

#5. How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie -4*

#6. Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations... - Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber - 4*

#7. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work - Mason Currey - 3*

#8. Rich Dad, Poor Dad - Robert T. Kiyosak - 3*

#9. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs... - Eric Ries - 4.5*

#10. Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly - Bernadette Jiwa - 3*

#11. Elon Musk: Inventing the Future - Ashlee Vance - 4*

#12. Rework - Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson - 4.5*

#13. Anything You Want - Derek Sivers - 4.5*

#14. South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami - 3.5*

#15. As A Man Thinketh / The Path Of Prosperity - James Allen - 4*

Currently I'm reading If This Is a Man / The Truce by Primo Levi - and so far it seems to be one of the top 3 books I've read this year - definitely a 4+* book.
Here it is: http://www.brokenthorn.com/Resources/OSDevIndex.html

The website's working just fine for me, but in case it doesn't work for someone else or if it goes down again: https://web.archive.org/web/20161223021815/http://www.broken...
Great read - I worked through it in JavaScript in the console. Writing Scheme-ish code in JS is so much nicer with ES6 than it was with ES5!

const iterativeImprove = (guess, improve, goodEnough) =>
goodEnough(guess) ?
guess :
iterativeImprove(improve(guess), improve, goodEnough);

I think the example used (and the intermediate functions) come straight from SICP. I always intend to do the exercises in this book, but never have... This post actually got me to do it, so hat's off to you!
The Theory of Multiple Intelligences and AI
The man page isn't too bad. It is better to just look at examples in my case and see what you can find.

I do agree it needs some work to be a little more approachable.
My main home computer is a 2 Go netbook with an Atom CPU. Not only I use it to browse the internet on a daily basis, but it was what I used to develop an award-winning, AI-powered content classification webapp.

I used to do it because I had no choice (alternatives are way too expensive than what I can afford).