skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a good example—I hadn't though about development of object permanence in this context.

I'm definitely leaning more on the side of concepts being limited now—but I still have uncertainty about how significant the limits are.

I think that would be an interesting research direction: nail down more definitively the particular structure of human concepts, then use that model to describe more explicitly what their limits and capabilities are.

One hypothesis I have is that all concepts are reducible to a finite set of parts (e.g. types and relations), and they can be multiplied together indefinitely through nesting—so the set of concepts is infinite, but it should be the same infinity class as the integers, so they definitely can't cover everything (in the hypothetical). But, who knows? I don't have the resources to do actual research, so it remains quasi-informed speculation :)

And I guess even if we know the structure of human concepts more definitively, we still couldn't really use that knowledge to determine whether specific things are amenable to conceptualization or not (e.g. the solution to the 'hard problem' of consciousness), since you would also need to say something about the 'properties' of the other thing, which already requires that the other thing be amenable to conceptualization.
Eek. First off, joelx, sorry about the painful process. If things are truly as presented here, I hope things turn out in your favor.

I'm inferring that the post is being polite in leaving off some of the challenging aspects of the client, but as someone that's run a little consulting shop, this alarmed me:

> <Client> at this point began to make lots of requests for out of scope items not included in the contract. My team bent over backwards to accommodate him and finish these items...we had gone far beyond what he had paid for. Our team had racked up 294 hours of work on a project that TheClientCompany had only paid 116 hours for.

Why wasn't this contract closed, and a new one opened, before the 150% work overage mark?

Obviously, sometimes you need to eat a bit of work due to misestimation/unexpected-unexpecteds/reputation/keeping your client happy, but with the estimation of $12k@116 hours, this is $30k worth of work on a $12k agreement (assuming the estimation didn't account for legal/accounting/insurance/pre&post-sale time/expense, which are a bit more static in my experience).

Was the client not politely informed that the requests were going well beyond the scope of work? If you're beyond 2x of the agreement, I can understand that the client started to think of the contract as inconsequential. When dealing with customers without a technical staff (or experience in managing or running something technical) that are asking you to over-deliver, it's often just an issue of not knowing which asks are time-consuming/expensive -- and if you're making it look easy, the client will think it's easy.

> Our contract requires that before a website launches, final payment must be made. My team launched despite this and continued to work on it for him.

When you flagrantly break the parts of the contract that protect your business and interests, it's somewhat understandable that the client would expect to be able to sign-off the work before payment.

Just my two cents, but I'm positive that those two pennies have saved me a ton of money in walking away from certain clients during the negotiation phase.

> I ran right up to both of them, and punched him in the nose. I got in big trouble, but I thought it was worth it.

This metaphor, coupled with the story, makes it seem as if it's "worth it" to hit a client back in front of a judge. Super weird, IMHO.
PyNodes – Simple generic async dependency graph in Python
How can we even get "portable performance" between architectures like ARM and x86/64, let alone from orthogonal paradigms like CPUs and GPUs?

Intel/AMD processors have complex branch predictors and instruction decoders and SIMD, ARM has conditional execution and some sort of quasi-SIMD, and GPUs have a weird hybrid of SIMD and multi-threaded-single-whatever (execution??) with sorta-kinda shared memory. Not only do these architectures implement memory access differently, the way basic control flow operations (conditionals and loops) work is physically different.

That's not even including architectures like SPARC or specialized DSPs. Or FPGAs, which are a whole different universe.
People like these are mentally ill sociopaths that don't care about the needs of the people they are hiring. The web development profession is filled with dealing with people like these. It's a shit job at the lower end having to deal with small business people. They are all barely scratching a living themselves and the way they are doing it via technology leaves much to be desired, and they expect you to pick up the slack. Honestly it's a shit business and really no one should try to do it at the lower end. At the higher end the same job fetches 100k and the clients are happy to pay for the work. The only catch is that you have to be rich already to make 100k for the same work that at the lower end fetches 10k. It's honestly a stupid mistake to do it at the lower end.
>I would like for you to take a look at traffic fatality statistics and and think hard

I would like those people who take it as an article of faith that self driving cars will cause fewer fatalities to watch closely where the liability falls.

If executives go to jail when the software crashes the car and kills or maims somebody and they let it out on the roads then I'm happy.

If instead those companies get slapped with token fines, I'm pretty sure that they're going to push out faulty software before it's ready and kill a bunch of people.

Politically it's still up in the air but currently it's looking like there won't be any criminal liability.
In these scenarios, I push really hard to have a Phase 1 and a Phase 2.

Everything that we agreed to is Phase 1 and everything is is Phase 2 and does not start until Phase 1 is complete, launched, and paid for.

In this case, it may not have protected him from all the crazy, but it would have reduced that 294 hours to something much smaller. And then he could have bailed on Phase 2 because the customer was an asshole.
>When you get attacked, you fight back. You don't sit there and take it.

Why would I fight someone who's clearly more experienced at being an asshole? What am I going to "win"? I'd rather move on with my life and not waste time and energy plotting how I'm going to fight back.

Even if this guy does "win", he hasn't taught the client a lesson. A leopard doesn't change his spots. Dude's going to be awful to work with for life. All he's done is burn time, money, energy to prove a point to himself that he can't be "bullied."

I know some people are assholes and will try to take advantage of me. When one does (fortunately rarely as they're not tough to spot), I cut and run. Why continue to engage?
Anyone fullstack Android dev?
Short version is that the road is full of things at the 99th percentile that won't be programmable so the car will either fail, bail, or simply stop.

I don't disagree with that sentiment but there were all sorts of things that "PCs" couldn't do that real computers could and they were still commercially successful (and eventually caught up to "real" computers for the most part). I could imagine that someone could come up with signage which self driving cars would understand and act on. Basically put up a QR code that links to the government approved way self driving cars should navigate the hazard, and of course a programming language that could communicate that to the car.

Of course you would not want just anyone to set up overrides or you would have pranksters sending cars off into corn fields or worse.

The part that Nissan appeared to miss is that if you can make them work in 99.9% of the cases, then you can hack around that last .1% and the cars will still be a net win in terms of better road behavior.
This isn't fake news.
> How many times I've skipped checking something because... There's no way it could be that!

I TA'd a course in college that (among other things) was the first introduction that CS students at my school had to C programming. Since most students had no prior experience with anything besides Java (and a little OCaml, because one of the intro courses was half Java and half OCaml), they often would be at a complete loss of how to debug errors with pointers, string handling, etc. Whenever I tried to help students debug something in office hours, they would try to steer me away from looking in certain parts of their code because they "knew that was correct", and quite often the error would be in one of those parts of the code. The lesson I tried to teach them was that if you thought you wrote all your code correctly but it still doesn't work correctly, then you must have been wrong about something, so you have to be ready to challenge your assumptions about what's working and what isn't.
Please correct me if I'm off base here, but isn't a big part of the whole virtual-dom abstraction performance?

Direct DOM updates are slow (rerender), diffing and smart patching much faster. There must be a reason for virtual doms becoming so popular, even for frameworks that don't have a 'functional' approach like React.
Crossgrading Debian in 2017
Reminds me of Ubuntu Bug 255161: Openoffice can't print on Tuesdays (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956)
It really depends on the country. The US is perfectly fine with your passport up until the date of expiry, so is Canada, so is many EU countries.
Absolutely. In Michigan winters, and in most other circumstances, I definitely want to be the one driving if I'm the one that's at risk of [and has great incentive to minimize] crashing my automobile. I really don't want to outsource that yet to a remote staffing center.
This is ridiculously simplistic - take woman, for example. The distinction between woman and girl isn't nearly as simple as age. There's a sorites paradox in trying to find a dividing point of age, but actually woman connotes a bunch of other concepts probabilistically. It suggests independence and maturity vs childishness and cuteness. While girl is often used in the context not of children, but women as objects of courtship - girls on a night out, girlfriend etc. And a poem or song may play with the multiple meanings and ambiguities - where is Britney's Not a Girl in this symbolic analysis?

The only way you can get symbols to work is with weights. Follow this to its logical conclusion and I think you'll end up with a system isomorphic with the vector approach, with dimensions representing something like symbols.
Hacker Noir, chapter 1: Negotiation
Did the contract in question have copyright to the work only transfer upon payment in full? That is a key piece of leverage that you should include in every contract. This way if the client continues to use the code you can inform them that it is copyright infringement, potentially send the web host a DMCA takedown notice, or have your lawyer pursue them for copyright infringement.

That said, the "self-help" takedown sounded problematic -- much better to have the option of a copyright infringement claim.

If a client pushes back on this provision you can explain that you are 100% insistent but it only comes into question if they don't pay -- that has resolved all objections in my experience, and if they pushed further I'd treat it as a major red flag.
Perhaps a "why is there a timeout?" would have lead to a "why is this traceroure so long?" then "why is there a loop?" and "why is my test router in the list?"
If you're interested in seeing the state of juggling now, the top 40 jugglers of 2016 just came out [1], this was the first time since the list started (in 2003) that Anthony Gatto was not on the list.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M22bYjTWJw0
I think self-driving cars have incredible potential, but the media hype is just too strong around this technology. People are used to startups going from 0 to unicorn in 5+ years, because they are often based on simple technologies and business models centered around exponential growth. AirBnB, Uber, twitch, and many more are all technology companies that obviously had many challenges, but they did not depend on a technological breakthrough in order to get where they are today.

There is a gap between Level 2 and Level 4 (arguably Level 5 with the new standards, but I'm going to assume Level 4 means what most people would call a true self-driving car) autonomy which is dangerous, because it lulls humans into a false sense of safety. And then when the car can no longer drive itself, the user is expected to take over with a delayed reaction time and little to no context in what could be a very dangerous situation. It is a deadly valley. There are numerous studies on this topic from the aviation industry, and drivers don't have nearly as much training as pilots.

I think real self-driving cars are awesome, and the first time I sat in one years ago when I worked on it as a PhD student was truly an incredible experience. But the hype around the technology is too much, and when investors push for a product in a few years when it's not ready at best companies will fail and at worst people will die. Misinforming the public on this is a very serious problem which nobody seems to care about, even after at least 1 death which is still under investigation.

I am all for working on this technology and seeing incremental improvements over the years. But I am frustrated with the media's portrayal of how it's just around the corner (I am frustrated with the media in general), and I believe the overpromise of the technology is largely responsible for the death of the Tesla owner in Florida last year (and there are other accidents that are reported in China which get much less coverage).

People will say self-driving cars save lives and are safer. In theory, yes - but the problem is we aren't there yet. There just isn't enough data to make that claim. When Tesla said it was safer, they ignored the fact that all of their driving was on highways (which are statistically safer) and that their owners are more affluent and older (at least I assume the average Tesla owner is 25+). The data isn't available when you break down these demographics, but I suspect if it were that 1 death would actually make autopilot deadlier than manual driving. It's a moot point though - anybody trying to extrapolate meaningful conclusions from a single data point is making a ridiculous claim.
When I was @ yahoo! in mid 2000s, I used to argue with my principal engineer to great lengths on why he should consider Python for DevOps. Writing code in perl felt like a pissing contest on who can obfuscate and make the code do insane things with least amount of characters.

Now, I have barely seen anyone use anything but Python (Golang maybe...) for this. Bottom line - readability matters! people have moved on and perl has outlived its purpose.
Depending on the hill gradient and if it's safe, you could try going downhill on the commute using just engine-braking (use a low gear) rather than riding the brakes. This could help determine if the problem is brake-related or not.
You're making the unfounded assumption that it is necessary to simulate "the actual true process that governs nature"; Bostrom's argument does not require this, it only requires a simulation of people with our kind of experiences.
I'm not going to dodge the premise of your quandary, which is that accountability and responsibility are necessary components of a civilized society, and that idealizing anonymity also introduces problems and is prone to abuse.

Your example is disconnected from this premise though, for other reasons. Even with air-tight biometrics, determining the exact identity of which twin crossed the border, the police would still have their hands tied.

Biometrics would not solve a hit-and-run manslaughter, simply because the level of surveillance necessary to prove the identity of every passenger in every driver's seat at all times would amount to oppressive totalitarianism.

In reality, a rental car provided to a vactioning traveller could have been stolen for a joy ride, and possibly returned before the renter noticed it was gone. The police would need a stroke of luck, in the form of some video footage or a witness further corroborating the identity of the driver at the time of the incident. A border crossing, and a rental agreement wouldn't confirm the criminal, even if a jury might convict on that basis alone.

Anyway, back to accountability. There's a fine line painted at the boundary of the statement: Those who have nothing to hide, have nothing to fear.

It's always going to come down to the constituents of a given society, to determine the level of discipline required to participate with adjacent members. An individual's neighbors will determine how volatile their environment is. A permissive environment may attract those rejected from other regions. A fortress may sterilize all behavior. Everyone should be able to choose their own peers, according to preference, but what if one finds themselves chosen for the purpose of exploitation? There's no easy answer to this situation. Complex systems require defense mechanisms to persist and withstand chaos. My point, though, is that people should understand which side of the defense mechanism their on, and whether they are participating deferes, or regarded as the defended, or perhaps if they are the repelled chaos.
Pretty sure it's just meant to be a parable.
I've been running Linux for about 4 years now (Ubuntu -> Mint -> Fedora -> Arch over the first year or so, been on Arch ever since), and I've never had to recompile my kernel (I did choose to do it once, but this was because I was interested in trying it out rather than something not working right; I'm a bit masochistic that way).
It's stupid that we have to do our taxes. The government should and is more than capable of sending us a bill and expecting us to pay it.
I'm looking for a mobile developer (ios/android) to help me finish a couple of ideas and help me pick the best one to submit for YC18 W

email is interested ycpartner18@gmail.com
I agree. Whenever I read 'rock-solid' my distrust alarm goes off and it's almost always reading some buzzword laden marketing text.
If you're worried about surveillance now, wait till every car on the road is a backdoor into your life, every conversation, you're mood, everything will be up for grabs, being constantly transmitted back to base.

Next up, is the surveillance of the public, imagine all those cameras and microphones driving around, goodbye privacy for good.

The best bit is it's being sold to us under the banner of safety. I don't like road deaths either, but mas-scale surveillance is just the same problem.

I share your sentiments exactly, welcome to 1984.
Yep, worth giving another look: I couldn't stand C++ before C++11, and now I can't stand C anymore :)
I wonder this too, because on our servers, which are running WHM/Cpanel, they're all running on CentOS and it seems to work very well. I'm on macOS privately.

But yeah, for some reason, on our servers, it seems to work solid, but here it's not very liked as dev distro.
Your comment, particularly the degradation in byte alignment leading to worse subsequent compression, reminds me of the following Hacker News comment by NelsonMinar from then end of November 2016:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13049894

>It's crucial to evaluate encoding space usage in the context of compression. For instance gzip(base16(data)) is often smaller than gzip(base64(data)) for practical data. Even though base64 is more efficient than base16, it breaks up data across byte boundaries which then makes gzip significantly less efficient.
You are underestimating how game changing even "incomplete" self driving features will be.

Autobraking for accidents only, is a "self driving" feature that you can buy right NOW on most 2017 cars.

Auto braking alone could save 10s of thousands of lives every year, and it is absolutely production ready.
Thank you! This seems like something that could work for a person like me (assuming I know me lol.)
I feel the same way with Bash.

It's great for one liners, but it breaks down when doing simple things like checking if a variable is a string or integer.
as a transitory measure in the beginning there will be zones marked as self-driving areas and others where this will be deactivated.
Isn't the Spanish spoken in Spain much different from the Spanish spoken in Mexico / South America? At-least that what I see on youtube comments in Spanish teaching videos.
Cops Take One-Legged Homeless Man's Stuff Including His Crutches – And Trash It
> You're vulnerable to hacks who can impress the public with easy tricks and are a hundred times or a thousand times less talented than you, and who don't even work hard.

This I think has led to something interesting. Most proficient (and by proficient in this case I mean capable of juggling more than 5 balls) jugglers are either young, or relatively old. The top 10 this year were all born after 1990, and some are significantly younger (<18).
An Unbelievable Journey – A Chat with Brian Chesky of Airbnb
Yeah check noise response to steering.
I suspect CV joint problems. Very commmon, but often not disabling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant-velocity_joint
> Restrict Windows Update P2P only to local network

I find this interesting as a security choice rather than completely disabling P2P updates, as I'd guess that a substantial number of users aren't in control of all machines on their network, and if the other computers on the network got their updates from peers outside the network, then you'll still end up getting the updates from those peers. Is completely disabling P2P updates not an option?
Yes, yes. We're all so high and mighty. Each of us knows more than the other, in an endless moebius strip of circular genius.

Gee whiz! I never heard of roombas! How do they work? Can we make self driving cars behave just like them?

You seem like you seem to seem.
It's a common misconception that states like Michigan ban Tesla sales entirely. They can't do that, as it's interstate commerce and the Feds have exclusive powers over that. All the states can do is regulate how businesses operate within the state. So they can prevent Tesla from opening stores or service centers within the state, but they can't prevent people from buying the cars.
Typo: Powerful
The overwhelming majority of devops-related stuff I see is in Ruby, not Perl, and Python is a (distant) second to Ruby in that. I keep up with all three on the off hand that a client really has a burning desire to use Perl or Python, but it's Ruby as far as the eye can see in these parts.

Even stuff not written in Ruby invariably ends up with a Ruby DSL around it so mere humans can use it successfully.
When (not if!) ride-sharing in electric cars becomes much bigger, it will free up a huge amount of real estate from car-related use to other uses. (Fun fact: In the U.S., there are four parking spots for every one of the 255 million cars.) Add to that, all of the gas stations, oil change outfits, car washes, auto parts stores, auto dealerships, etc., etc. Every home that elects to go car-less will now have whatever garage, carport, driveway space available for an extra bedroom, garden, etc.

The other urban trend of smaller housing unit zoning will allow increased density which will also bring the cost of housing down. The demand is there a NY Times article reported that when new micro apartments (260 to 360 square feet) were available, 60,000 people applied for one of the the 55 units. Article: http://tinyurl.com/ntdjvt9
tl;dr Economy is booming but living here is expensive. Also, gas prices are cheap right now so... that helps.
Are there many applications that recover from OOM?
Nat Hentoff has died