skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where are companies using (Deep) Reinforcement Learning
I've read about DeepMinds' RL algorithms being used to reduce Google's Data Center cooling bills by 40% but I haven't seen any other practical applications of (deep) RL.
Is RL limited to playing video games and robot control simulations ? Even real robots don't use RL (today)...
I am currently enrolled in Georgia Tech's online MS in Computer Science (aka. OMSCS), and we got informed today that GT is going to offer an online program on Analytics.

Read more here:
https://pe.gatech.edu/online-masters-degrees/online-master-s...
So blowing up a bomb in a market thats specifically designed to target innocent civilians = shooting an enemy combatant corpse after its dead

Great logic.
A relevant Destroy All Software talk: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world
Blender and Freecad[0] let the user interact via a python shell. I haven't tried to script Blender, with Freecad it's easy to start making things that auto-scale with a var (wall thickness for example). The two are not that comparable otherwise, Blender is light-years ahead but it's CAD roots are new-ish. CAELinux[1] has all the cool stuff bundled.

[0] http://www.freecadweb.org/

[1] http://caelinux.com/CMS/
I have witnessed that very thing more times than I like to admit. I fail to understand what, other than sheer greed, motivates tech people to help build these police states. It's going to come back at us in terrible ways. Technology doesn't care whether it kills us all, it is completely value neutral. Only we can make the right choices.

I once worked at a place that was bidding on surveillance tech for some public transit systems in Australia and the cavalier attitude that management had about privacy was sad, to say the least. They just didn't think it was their job at all to decide what is right or make any ethical judgements whatsoever. To them, mass surveillance was merely a way to make a lot of money and that's all. They didn't care who got hurt when that tech eventually makes it to less democratic nations to be used to suppress and destroy the human spirit.

Well, that company went under, but others succeeded.
> I note that several Silicon Valley companies have pre-emptively said they will not help build a Muslim registry for the Trump administration. Will Palantir, the data-mining company of which Mr. Thiel was a founder, and whose clients include the N.S.A., the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., be involved in that? (Palantir’s C.E.O., Alex Karp, sat in at the Trump tech meeting.)

> “We would not do that,” Mr. Thiel says flatly.

Mr. Thiel, I don't believe you.
Yes things are getting worse, the cinfkuct is wearing patience thin, and, as of today, he had not been pardoned. But there will be no streets named after him, he will be dishonourably discharged from the military, and he will not be generally celebrated as a hero. He is viewed as yet another victim, except by some extremists who get a lot of screen time.

Now can we get back to discussing supporting the coding academy in Gaza?
It has a cyberpunk ring to it.
Guess we're closing our 200+ developer account, fuck atlassian, fuck Jira.
I cannot remember having any trouble playing DVDs on a Linux based system within the last decade. Through this time, I've used: Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Slackware, Arch and, Suse. If your distro doesn't come with DVD playing capabilities out of the box, there are plenty of instructions regarding this on the the web.

I have a hard time seeing how you could possibly be being honest about this.
My dog gets an update on her Facebook feed every time she goes outside and then she updates her Facebook status about 3 times in one walk.
Apple Is Losing a Lot of People
I'm on 7.1.1 and I don't feel like installing the Alibaba app to try this out but when you say it requires the permission to read IMEI is this under the phone permission setting that says "read phone status and identity" or something else?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375158
MNIST ASCII Challenge
The only wifi device I've had trouble with in recent memory is an Edimax EW-7811Un USB dongle. It "works", but the best transfer rates I've ever gotten out of it were in the hundreds of kilobytes/s, paired with up to 5 minutes of uninterrupted connectivity.

There are problem devices out there, but more and more they're the exception, rather than the rule.
I was never convinced by this this argument (It's just a DOM node after all) and found the `crusade` mentality back in the early 2000s a bit immature. I respect your point of view but we don't agree
I always liked Okular, but it seems external PDF readers are less and less necessary for simple work. Really only needed for reading lengthy documents now (50+ pgs.).
Isn't cargo a tool for sharing code?

If you share code you should use semver, because someone will (hopefully) import it and use it, and it communicates your expectations of stability.
You seriously need to read the article, you are completely and embarrassingly misinformed about what the role is that this article is talking about.
Surely, you could run it with Wine?
Interesting take that I had not considered. I was not familiar with the story from Mark. I have thought about this topic as well but from a completely different direction.

My question about uploading consciousness is in the transition point. As I sit here in front of my computer could I click a button and upload my memories and consciousness to a computer? Would they for some reason leave my body at the same time? Would it be instantly fatal? Why?

Wouldn't I really just be forking my consciousness? One version of me would continue forward inside a computer with the memory of the transition and the corporeal me would continue wondering if it even worked. The corporeal me would still die at some point but I could die with the satisfaction(?) that I created a copy of myself at some point in time.

I'm not sure that's much different than writing a book and having children.
In the west, a lot of the women I know would love to quit after having children in order to raise them full-time, but can't afford to. One of the main reasons the Japanese government is pushing to increase women's stature is to get them to work more for the economy's sake.

One of the issues of inequality is that housework and child-rearing is looked down upon, not that people choose to do housework and child-rearing. There are only a few countries that have made progress on that end - see e.g. Scandinavian countries where paternal leave and stay-at-home dads are on the rise.
That's because everyone knows that nobody really uses Google Wallet.
To clarify, I'm not arguing that it's okay to test only in chrome, merely offering up a reason why that is so commonly the case.
James Clapper called Donald Trump about classified Russia memos
OpenOffice is basically dead in terms of development nowadays. If you're looking for a desktop office suite on Linux, LibreOffice (a fork of OpenOffice) is still actively maintained.
I see the difference, but I don't see how it matters. Pardon's are a legal mechanism. They were built into the system from the very beginning. The fact that they take different factors into account (by design) doesn't somehow make them illegitimate.

You didn't quite explicitly say this, but it sounds to me like you want to make sure every unjustly convicted person suffers as publicly and viscerally as possible in order to drum up the political will for change. (I can't think of any other principled reason to oppose a mechanism to free the innocent victims of an imperfect system.)

I suppose it's easy to feel that way when it's not you or one of your loved ones in that position. To them, it's not just a "fig leaf". It's getting their life back.
Having read many of the posts in this thread, I feel compelled to contribute.

The complexity of the politics of the region are beyond my grasp. I am not a political scientist, nor have I spent much time in the region. However, as an entrepreneur who has volunteered with Gaza Sky Geeks and who has traveled to Gaza to mentor at their co-working space, I feel compelled to say that (1) the organization is unquestionably using its resources effectively to foster startups there and (2) the entrepreneurs who are part of the accelerator and the wider community who attends their events are some of the most intelligent, hardest working, and good-hearted people I have ever encountered. That sounds hyperbolic, but it's true.

Most importantly, the entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs are young and have had no part in the decades of political and military conflicts that have created the regrettable tension in the region. They have been implicated in the large mess solely by virtue of where they happened to have been born. Regardless on which side of the issue you fall, it is undeniable that the problems have been created by members of the older generations. It seems reasonable to place the bet that, if a more peaceful future is possible, it will happen by creating productive pathways for the rising generation.

In the most challenging political context on the planet, Gaza Sky Geeks does an excellent job of rendering its work apolitical. I have seen this first hand. The organization is there to help Gazans create for themselves new opportunities and more hopeful futures. And, again, the Gazans who participate in their programs are of the best character and are only seeking to put their energy to create value for consumers, regardless of race or creed, via their startups.

I am not nor have I ever been an employee of Gaza Sky Geeks and have nothing to gain by writing any of this. I have no dog in this fight. But for whatever the words of an internet commenter are worth, I would urge skeptics to consider giving the organization the benefit of the doubt. I cannot say enough positive things about this organization's mission and their effective execution of it.
So, Thiel has done an excellent job of cementing his reputation as a contrarian.

But I'd invite any startup founder to think long and hard about whether you'd want to be associated with him. I read this interview, like many others, and know that we wouldn't get along. So I'm not going to have him as an investor.

I could enumerate reasons why, but here's the bottom line: reflexive contrarianism is just nihilism. Beneath the contrarian tag, I don't see much of substance. And certainly nothing that resonates with me, or that I agree with.

Beyond a certain point, maybe after a certain age, you've got to actually stand for something, not just against things. I don't get any of that from this article, or from Thiel generally.
Imagine using this to train and to "unit" test a self driving car. With realistic graphics and the ability to control events, I wonder how useful this could be. (e.g. simulate near accident situations)
Assuming this map is somewhat accurate, it seems like even just 1m would make most of the difference for that country:

http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/
Nations can prevent their banking systems from interacting with exchanges. It should be easy enough to transfer value to citizens of restrictive countries regardless of the government's position; the trouble is the citizens' ability to transfer value out.
>"When I remark that President Obama had eight years without any ethical shadiness, Mr. Thiel flips it, noting: “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

..... I literally don't even know what to say to that.

>"Mr. Thiel says: “On the one hand, the tape was clearly offensive and inappropriate. At the same time, I worry there’s a part of Silicon Valley that is hyper-politically correct about sex. One of my friends has a theory that the rest of the country tolerates Silicon Valley because people there just don’t have that much sex. They’re not having that much fun.”

People get upset due to a man claiming he can grab women's genitals because he has power and Thiel tries to write that off as "hyper-poltiically-correct"? It's not even a little "political correct". It's common god damn decency to call that behavior sexual assault.

So shameful.
MongoDB ransom attacks soar, body count hits 27,000 in hours
27,000 MongoDB Databases Suffer Ransomware Attack
are the transactions sold with the personal information? xyz bought these things this month. Seems hard to believe, although I'm sure they may do this after anonymizing the user's personal information.
I am sure and I do not.
What a silly article: "download the controls to the private sector" indeed. The government already owns the telcos, half the banks, the only domestic interbank transfer system and the only domestic travel reservation system so they have your IMEI, real time location and history, network traffic, bank balance and payment and employment history and travel plans anyway. And that of your friends/relatives. They certainly don't need help from an app. That said, after 16 years in and out of China, I still feel safer here than the US.
There was a novel where someone showed a "home movie" like that -- Marooned in Real Time, Vernor Vinge. It's not a spoiler, just a cool detail. Alas that the time travel that made it possible went only one way.
Well, this is "upload random text files to certain locations."

Let's Encrypt is meant to be renewed by cronjob, and most web servers probably don't have programatic control over their DNS records.
I'm somewhat considering going to a bootcamp in Toronto and currently researching schools available here. I wonder if I can ask you more information about your experience with the one that you attended. Thanks.
Lit Kidz – Watch Me Go *New Dance Hit 2017*
‘BioClay’ a ground-breaking discovery for world food security
That does show a fairly easy way that this could have been prevented in GoDaddy's case though. Simply provide both a chunk of data as a token and a location that it should be placed.
The hotels I stayed at in Spain, France, and Italy made copies of mine.
Google Cloud rolls out encryption key management service
Given that the article did a poor job of actually stating the problem of semver, could you list the issues you encountered when dealing with rust's use of semver?

I worked at Amazon for 1 year. They use semver for everything. I think that's one of a few technical superiority I missed since left. I am curious about its problems.

The article did not say much. As for the suggestion given in the article, I cannot help to think that one can always release a number based on a semver to external customers. That does not prevent semver being used internally at all.

> a general trend towards literally forcing things to adopt semver

This statement assumes that semver is bad if forced universally, which may or may not be the case.

Your comment include no fact that this is bad. When you mentioning rust, you also did not say anything why semver is bad.

I mean, if someone put an arbitrary number there, and users are screwed because of author fails to maintain the correct contract, at least people can go to there and point out that the contract is broken. Removing semver does not do anything good. It just give the author an possible excuse, i.e., if users are screwed, the author can claim that he/she never meant to make its software backward compatible. For that, semver also provides the same mechanism, i.e., bump a major version number. At lease users know that they can expect a breakage.
He has Ezra Klein voice. Or maybe it's called NPR voice.
I'm also a Johnny. I'd say a more general term is "builder". Players who like making new things in games are builders. Sandbox construction games like Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, Space Engineers, etc, tend to suit us.

Builders probably best fit under Explorer in the Bartle Taxonomy, with some Achiever elements.
I can't find the link right now but I believe blizzard disabled p2p over a year ago.
How does my brain (me!) see, communicate or experience things? Through sense organs; and there's no reason if I could somehow upload my consciousness into a computer that it couldn't do those things too. I tend to agree that the upload part might be a bit tricky, but if you could port my mind (or spirit) out of my flesh computer into another form, then I don't see why it couldn't interact with the world.

http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html is a great read on the concept.

We probably don't agree that mind is a program running in the brain, and is equivalent to spirit. But it's always fun to debate ;-)
how you tried gnumeric?
I slowed down for a while when I first got Netflix. Then I sped up again when some of the shows I was watching disappeared when I was mid-season. Netflix is great, but when I want to actually be sure that I'll be able to watch something, I buy it.
How Google Maps knows when there is traffic
> Google allowing apps to read
> phone IMEI in Android

An unpopular sentiment, but this is why I love iOS. I genuinely don't think any of my apps can meaningfully spy on me without my having told them they may. I even get reminders if I've let an app read my location in the background, to check that's what I want to do.
Last time i did that about 6 years ago i opened it with gimp and drew over it
> I'm a day to day Linux user, and I couldn't be happier to have switched back from osx (2004-2016), but the switch is clearly not for everyone yet.

Personally, I have no issues with Linux being used almost exclusively as a developer OS (on desktops and laptops). I don't really see Linux moving towards being used by non-technical users any time soon, and I'm perfectly okay with this.
I thought to submit this while reading two comments in the Eta discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13376724
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13379629
Android Nougat's glacial upgrade pace shows why Google's Pixel needs to succeed
This is the new trend - dedicated AI coprocessor. Fast and less power hungry.
Er, I don't know anything about rust but cargo is a package manager, right? And the version field you're referring to is what will get checked if someone declares a dependency against your package, right? And you're saying semver makes little sense for that?
I don't know much about CMYK, but I found this summary on the current state of CMYK support in Gimp: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GIMP/CMYK_support
Top 20 Social Media Platforms for Mobile App Marketing
Slow Romero style coders can be sawed 10x faster than other normal ones.
For some reason, this reminded me of "Pied Piper" of "Silicon Valley" fame.
sea to summit ultra-sil day pack

68g, 20L, silnylon

http://www.seatosummit.com/product/?item=Ultra-Sil%26reg%3B+...

Possibly my favourite of my many backpacks. It scrunches up to the size of a clementine, making it an ideal secondary bag to keep in one's main bag when travelling. It can be worn under a jacket to inconspicuously carry a laptop in areas with pickpockets.
As someone from post-communist country, I find tone of the article a bit creepy. He has to 'explain himself' to whom? And for what?
We had single party system for 50 years, it did not worked out that well.

> suggest that Mr. Thiel was not even a gay man, because he did not “embrace the struggle.”

Political preference is more important than sexual orientation, when deciding if someone is gay???? wtf?
IIRC, Amazon deprecates old versions after some time period. That solves the "no one wants to update" problem. It also shows clearly that when a major version will not be maintained regularly.
Safer? I guess that Great Firewall does work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...
Does it matter if I have written a somewhat famous tutorial on web development and started a YouTube channel which has decent views?

I have got +ve response on both
Its not true these days anyway as you can just use the windows drivers if everything else fails. Which works perfectly except the initial 10 minute setup.
Oh come on. 16 years is modern China not Maoist China.
Thiel's responses communicated that he is beyond the point of no return with the trump problem. He can only say good things, almost like politician himself. Too bad.
FYI mint sucks with these things. Badly. Their driver support seems more random than anything. That said i am pretty sure i remember some kind of bloat kernel in their repos which ships with all the relevant stuff.
>That said, after 16 years in and out of China, I still feel safer here than the US.

Can you elaborate on why is it?
Are you saying that writing Haskell in Lisp is easier than writing Lisp in Haskell? Or did I get that backwards?
Interesting usage of Serbian domain (.rs).
The best use of pardons would be to release thousands of people that have been convicted under the three strikes and your out schemes. Not all will deserve to be released, but someone that used up there last strike with shop lifting or stealing a car does not deserve to be put away for the rest of their life.
Yep. It's almost there.
Used to use excel a lot earlier (on Windows) in data science job.
Now have excel on Mac, but google spreadsheets mostly gets the job done on most occasions. (Now I am mostly a programmer/product guy)
A few problems I have encountered with google spreadsheet:
1. Sharing some stuff with third parties who exclusively use Windows and just want an excel.
2. Speed of working with all the keyboard shortcuts still seems better in desktop excel as compared to google spreadsheet (but I am happy with the progress of how many of those same shortcuts now work on google spreadsheets).
These kinds of articles about "attacks" are annoying. Let's be absolutely clear: there is no "attack" or "hack" involved. No real company was affected by this. There is no operating system bug involved. No software vulnerability. No zero-day exploit. No social engineering angle. There's no real problem.

This is simply first-time developers with no server experience, deploying their first project, who don't understand the first thing about having a server on the internet. Publicly exposing an open port for software that is innately designed to run on a private network has nothing to do with... whatever you want to call all these "exposé" pieces about "attacks".

You could write an article to explain the introductory concepts of system administration to newcomers to the industry. But to even mention the word "attack" when the only thing involved is an open port is... sigh.

I feel for newcomers who need to learn. I really do; the amount of information one needs to absorb to be even remotely competent is vast, and takes at least a few years to pick up (and then another decade or two to fine tune that knowledge). But this is not a situation where the maintainers of software packages are to blame for not educating their users, or insinuating that their products are not "secure out of the box". It has nothing to do with individual software packages, and everything to do with the very core aspects of having a computer connected to a public network.
I'm not sure, but I think pg314 is making reference to the hand crank that could be used to power the laptop. I don't think it was initially included in the design (I may be wrong on that). I also heard rumor it wasn't a smashing success as a power supply, but it was so long ago that I don't remember the details terribly well.

I'm actually far more optimistic these days about tech in difficult areas. The computing power (and screens!) we can get out of just a small battery is phenomenal compared to OLPC's time.
I subscribe to the Economist, too. Their opinion of Trump jibes with mine, as far as I can tell. Do you disagree?

And I ask about media because you've got to start from an agreed upon set of facts. That didn't used to be so difficult. (Not sure we disagree on facts here, but it's the easiest explanation for wildly different opinions on this subject. Might as well dispense with the big issues first, eh?)