skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> IBM, which has been making a big push into blockchain technology, [...] aims to have it fully functioning by early next year.

I believe this is the timeless state of all big Blockchain projects: ready one year from now.

I specifically asked for success stories because I know everyone is throwing money after blockchain stuff. So I don't doubt that there are tons of planned projects. However, I haven't yet heard of blockchain technology being applied to solve an actual problem, except Bitcoin.

CME Group and the UK Royal Mint are planning to launch a blockchain-based product [1] -- also in 2017. But according to the article, it seems to be a simple digital promissory note, with the bearer owning the right to a certain amount of gold. Since we already have a central creditor, upon which the entire system depends (the Royal Mint), there is zero reason to use a distributed database to store anything.

Just put the database in the same safe as the gold.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-gold-blockchain-royal-mint...
The word you were looking for is "immutability".
Judging by the downvoting, it appears that you have hurt some delicate souls here.
Vulkan won't help with correctness. A bad driver or a bad GPU will keep on doing the wrong thing no matter what API you use to fill its command buffer.

I never believed in the "write once, run everywhere" thing to begin with. Its not true with C#/Java, definitely not true with web dev, and most certainly not true with GPUs. It looks good in theory but rarely ever works in practice.

What Vulkan/DX12 helps with is exposing a lot more of the GPU's low-level details to engine programmers. This has the negative impact that all the complexity is now in the hands of engine devs. But the upside is that now finally the engine and the driver can stop guessing about what each other is doing.

That was a good thing decades ago when APIs were much, much simpler than they are today. Nowadays its near impossible to hit the fast path of GL4/DX11 without serious investment because of everything the driver does to "protect" you and make your life "easier"; it grew into a complexity monster.

So its actually harder to use Vulkan than it is to use OpenGL. But once you learn it it becomes simpler to work with.
It may not be unique to America (for example, the Brits seem equally easy to manipulate, based on the recent Brexit vote), but the populace being easy to manipulate is definitely not a "feature of democracy."

The fact of the matter is that there are many democracies in the world where the level of discourse is much more advanced. There are many reasons for this, but the primary factor seems to be that the average level of education in those countries tends to be higher.
"Eventually the word came out: the main developer of the DAL framework had left the company and, according to the Greek CEO, she had been 'too smart' which meant that nobody understood her code."

OMG no - run for the hills.

95% of software systems are not inherently sophisticated - they are 'complex' - yes - maybe there are many features, and moving parts - but there are no pieces of the system that should be hard to understand by anyone. Decent architecture + decent design and coding and an entire banks system should read like a long, but well articulated user manual.

Unless you're doing super low-level stuff, complex algorithms, heavy math stuff, or issues with massive scale or performance etc. ... the end result should almost be mundane in most cases.
I'm not sure this is what a data scientist is. It was supposed to be a research scientist (which is where the scientist part came from) that wrangles data and code. This individual should have both domain knowledge and coding chops while knowing how to conduct research.
The TechCrunch article has a few more details.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/17/anappleaday/

"Forward also plans to offer vitamins and other supplements and wearables through the onsite store and Aoun said he would like to offer other alternatives such as acupuncture in the future."

Add-on services that wealthier clients will pay for are rather profitable. An ob/gyn office a friend worked in was making more money off the vitamins, supplements, botox and microdermabrasion stuff than anything else.

It sounds like they're going to use a model like the Minute Clinics in CVS too, just with a prettier image. They're hiring Nurse Practitioners who will probably see you most of the time for office visits and then there's a primary care physician overseeing everything.

It's not a bad idea and works great for most routine healthcare stuff. I'd love too see CVS or Walmart or whoever start a subscription service like this, as it would (hopefully) help to reduce the number of minor ailments in our ERs.
I have found my highest clarity to occasionally be obscured by clouds, hence my tendency to look outward once in awhile.
And it's down. Funny url though. https://www.cia.gov/$(SERVE_NS_)/library/readingroom/
I believe Exchange/O365/Outlook block by default when the senders are outside the organization.
Bankchains solve #1 by not using mining; they use something like BFT (which is basically Paxos for liars) so that only 51% of the companies in the consortium need to be honest at any one time.
> why do other languages that are arguably JavaScript competitors, like Ruby and Python, not have the same wide selection of alternate syntaxes and sugar packets? Could it have something to do with the usability of the default dialect?

Popularity, and the fact that things were very bare-bones before ES6.

> If this truly bring us first-class support for non-JavaScripts (which won't be real until browser vendors either ship or make it transparent and automatic to install additional DOM bindings), I will be so happy

Interop with existing JS code/data(structures) will still be a problem. Shipping (or rather, not re-shipping every single time the user vists) your favorite language's runtime and standard library will become a problem (which can be solved). By that time JS will be good enough to make it even less worth it, especially for dynamic/GCed languages.

> the node buzz already kind of seems to be fizzling out and moving onto things like Go, so maybe we won't have to wait too long.

This is true. There hasn't been anything new happening in node land for quite a while now, and the basic core platform is showing its age. With tools such as typescript, async/await and generators available, however, a revival is possible. TS tooling combined with a well designed and documented "core standard library" in the style of Dart's stdlib could make node a very nice platform again.
this is amusingly missing the point. logic is, by its nature, an abstraction away from reality. it's a set of specific (not general) rules for evaluating statements of language (whether that language is natural, mathematical, or artificial/computer) such that meaning can be disambiguated.

"reality", whatever it is, has no such requirement that it can be expressed in unambiguous statements.
I'll give you another. Laziness. It's built in. It's trivial to create lazy lists that generate their contents as you walk down the list. Even infinite lazy lists. The list of all prime numbers. The list of all fibonacci numbers.

You can use map, which if I remember my CL, is like MAPCAR. But instead of map, you can use pmap which will do the processing on all of your cpu cores.
I hate those self checkout machines. They are slow and constantly try to error out and alert a human to help me. I'm capable of bagging groceries, just let me do it.

still, there is rarely a line.
WW3 FBI HUNTING DOWN CLINTON FUNDING OF ISIS AS OBAMA DENY'S ANY INVOLVMENT – Y
It's been done several times. To a first approximation, nobody uses it.

You can theorize it might work, but has an enormous activation energy, but it's hard to move past that theorizing without a few dozen million dollars for marketing. Most things easier than that have been tried.
Blockchain technology? Maybe there's something in the future but right now Bitcoin is mostly used as an illegal vehicle to get money out of China. Some 90% of bitcoin trades originate in China. A lot of people who are peddling Bitcoin are holding on to it and try to convince others to use it so their holdings grow. The whole thing became a scam. The other "alt coins" are even worse, Monero is pushed by drug dealers etc.
"So, a database which history could be cryptographically audited."

Doesn't git already meet that requirement?
Did you mean to equate fake news with editorial bias? Because that's what I read from your comments, and I can't agree to that, even remotely.
What and from which countries in particular do you think the US can learn?
Apparently, 6 people (including you) agree with me.
This Is GNU CLisp – An ANSI Common Lisp Implementation
غامبيا تعلن حالة الطوارئ وموريتانيا ترفض التدخل العسكري
TLDR; Losing an employee has cost of 1.5X to 2.1X of his/her annual compensation.

A surprise case study here should be Amazon which has turned this wisdom upside down on its head. There have been rumors of 40% to as much as 70% churn at Amazon and despite of that company thrives.
Hard to believe a graph when its author can't even type $13,000,000.
Like a shit tornado. Shirnado.
You do realize that of all the models available, 538's was the closest to the actual outcome and gave Trump by far the largest chance?

538 was very clear from the outset that the model's goal was predicting likelihoods, not being an oracle. It said there was a 1 in 3 chance of the election coming out like it did. That's not inaccurate - it was unlikely, but it still happened.

Plus, 538 didn't make the data. It aggregated data others made.

What exactly was bad in that hypothesis?
that's assuming people still use Facebook at that time
>biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity

Serious question, not trolling: why does wealth disparity matter?

Let's say you start the year barely having enough to eat and are living in a cardboard box and you end the year with plenty of food and a small house, why would it matter if your neighbor gets to eat steak once a week and has a slightly nicer house? Surely the absolute fact that your are better off than you were previously is more important than the relative distribution of goods?

A quick way to reduce wealth disparity is to burn down every home that costs more than the median house price. That doesn't mean it's a good idea.

So why is relative wealth more important than absolute wealth again?
The biggest problem is that the electorate doesn't trust the elected officials in this matter. To bring down healthcare costs you need to be able to reject treatments that are much more expensive but only provide slight benefits. Organizations like the NHS in Britain are very good at this. But whenever someone gestures in that direction in the US you have people up in arms about "death panels" and the idea is quickly dropped.

I don't know though. Maybe if politicians just came out and said "This proposal will produce 10 extra deaths per year but we'll be saving $50bn so we think it's worth it" then people would be willing to embrace that.
أرخص شركة تنظيف بالرياض 0581114540 (خصومات الان) – شركة الكمال المثالي
I find it interesting that the report is full of renderings of NYTimes stories on phones.

I wonder what the bounce rate is among mobile readers - that is, the percentage of readers who read less than 5% or so of a given news story.

I suspect that it's very high. For me, it takes a significant chunk of radio-silence (that is, no calls, text, social media updates, app alerts, no need for map directions, etc.) combined with an equally significant amount of willpower (i.e. not proactively checking in on any of the above) to read an informative ~1000 word story on my phone.

The NYTimes might be the highest quality content I skim online, but really, that's what I do 95% of the time at my desk and close to 100% on a mobile device: skim. I'm pretty sure devices that are concurrently in use for critical communication and/or work functions are awful places to try to engage readers and convey critical, often nuanced information.

Print happens to be great for that. And while I'm not holding my breath, the fact that vinyl records are about to be a billion dollar industry does suggest that old good things can make a comeback.
> If you pick a particular instantiation of a blockchain-style database, it is a horrible, horrible database.

Blockchain is not a database. It's a document timestamping service
(document being a short program that describes where goes what part of
a coin, in the case of Bitcoin), it's just a service that doesn't use
a central place or a trusted third party to produce (or keep) timestamps.

If you were to use it as a database, then no wonder it would suck
horribly. It wasn't designed for that.
That's a worthy goal, but so are "A computer should not betray me if someone else is a user of the computer temporarily" and "I should have full freedom to modify a computer I own." And I think you can't satisfy all three at once.

You can satisfy "do not betray the user" and "do not betray the owner" if you have a locked-down computer like a Chromebook that only accepts signed firmware and signed OSes. That way, no user of the computer, owner or otherwise, can make permanent changes to it that will compromise other users; guests are protected from the owner just as much as the owner is protected from guests.

You can satisfy "do not betray the user" and "have full freedom" if you have a computer with no protections against OS modification (the traditional PC architecture), but that is susceptible to physical attacks, where a user can subvert the owner. And every user needs to subvert the machine afresh in order for the computer not to betray them to the previous user; this is a risky model for things like shared computer labs.

You can satisfy "do not betray the owner" and "have full freedom" with an architecture where the owner gets a password/key that unlocks management functions or BIOS reconfiguration, and physical access (short of desoldering) is insufficient to access those functions.

I'm a fan of that latter model. Of course, I do have the resources to own a computer of my own for my personal computing, which biases my preferences. There's a good argument for building a more just world for people whose only computers are shared computers (libraries, work-issued laptops, etc.), but I think smartphones are becoming ubiquitous enough that we can expect that everyone will soon have a device they own for their own computing.
Wrong URL. Correct one: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4128530/Anima...
Why do you consider CNN fake news?

What about 538's data is suspect, given that it merely aggregates the data put out by a wide variety of other organizations (of all political bents)?
Deep learning startup Neurala raises $14mm
Last time I implemented a complex web frontend was about 2 years ago. I can assure you that the process was anything but "easy and enjoyable". I will, of course, grant that things have improved greatly since the bad old days of IE6. But that's not a good anchor point to use for "easy and enjoyable".
Thesys to Build System Tracking All Stock and Options Orders
First time I've ever seen the IndexedDB API described as "delightful".
I agree. There's no need for a blockchain if two parties can find a mutually trusted third party: use 2-of-3 multi-signature with one of the public keys being that of the trusted party.
I have a Zenbook UX32LN from 2015, with 12GB RAM, elementaryOS linux installed as a system, and on Firefox they work like a charm! Try it on different browser or update chrome?
The sad thing is, there was this idea for WebSQL ages ago and it would have solved this problem AND made database-backed apps easy to write, plus firefox and chrome already use sqlite internally so you could reuse that as the engine. Apparently it wasn't hip enough for the NoSQL folks though.
I don't think the specific example matters. Obviously, you couldn't build a skyscraper without machinery or fly through the air in a metal tube. I'll grant that the US middle class is only 2 orders of magnitude above subsistence (~$2 / day) living.
git and blockchains have in common that they both use cryptography.

So you might have as well said "Signal".
I'm not sure how that's the case. With Breitbart you will end up with a view that, ironically given the parent here, holds there are vast Zionist conspiracies at work on our world. If you mean the election outcome, I'm not sure it was so much a "true prediction" as much as something like a stopped watch being right.
SF Muni/Nextbus failure due to being 4 years behind in upgrading from 2G to 3G
India's currency swap sees economy take a hit, most support anti-graft objective
To get a good mental model of a SQL database, there is this pretty technical but great write up from researchers from Berkeley, MIT, and Microsoft research:

http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/fntdb07-architecture.pdf
The Dark Path, Swift and Kotlin
Lessons Learned as Snap CI Product Manager
Spirituality and myths are different things. Spirituality is about psychological states, thus has a basis in the physical reality.
To be clear, this article is about gravity waves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_wave), or ripples at the interface of two media of different densities caused by gravity, such as waves on the ocean or ridges of clouds, not gravitational waves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave), the propagating ripples in spacetime.
So I looked at Momentum Machines. First of all, as you say it's completely unrelated to AI, all the technology is decades old. I'm not sure I'm buying that the hardware and design knowhow is so much cheaper today; people started seriously automating car production lines back in the 1960's, so I can't see how this would've been orders of magnitude more expensive in the 1990's when the tech had matured for 30 years.

Second of all, following their links we find that in 2012 they had a full scale machine built that had a 95% success rate, and they projected 11 months until they could launch the concept in a restaurant. What has happened since? No word, AFAICT. Happy to be corrected if I missed it somewhere and they have actually launched.

But otherwise, it doesn't exactly convince me this is "the next industrial revolution" if they can't polish out that last 5% of a single-purpose burger-making machine in almost half a decade.
> Tech companies are usually responsible for creating the turnover they complain about.

I see complaining itself as nothing but an act of trying to weasel out of the responsibility. If a company is really hurt by the turnover, it either dies or starts solving the problem - by e.g. paying people more, or reducing the impact of turnover on the business (e.g. by choosing tech stacks so that developers are easily replaceable). Complaining loudly about turnover seems to be done in hope that someone steps in and solves it without the company having to pay for it.
I recall Readability doing something like that a few years ago. You paid a fee to them, then when you bookmarked a page, some would go to the producer. There were many flaws, not the least of which was that they were effectively forcing an opt-in on the part of content creators, but now that "readability" views that strip ads and extraneous content are built into browsers, it seems like the system had some merit.
Ask HN: Android intents pass 2SV codes to Play Services, or I just hacked 2SV?
If clarification is needed:
I just signed into a gmail account on an android device without typing in the 2FA code.
Can intents pass on the 2FA code to Play Services, or did I just find a bug?
(Edited title for accuracy based on 1st reply)
News and investigative journalism are two different things. If you want some barely-discernable pictures of what the cops are up to in some neighborhood, the citizens with cameraphone model works fine. But there is more than just reporting single facts, sometimes you have to chain a bunch of information together to build a worthwhile story. I think that's what professional journalists are focusing on. When the NYT figured out that Trump wasn't paying any taxes, they didn't go find someone on Twitter that took a picture of him not paying any taxes. They had to dig through thousands of pages of boring legal documents to figure it out. That's a full-time job, not really something a lot of hobbyists are going to get into.
Downvotes, really?
You confuse happiness with motivation.
> Plumbers, electricians - just don't see it happening.

Like many other "optimistics" about AI I think reality will be much more of a hybrid one, i.e. plumbers or electricians will be aided, not replaced, by AI and robots. It's like the 100 horses in your car, it didn't kill the transportation industry but took it to a whole other level. Imagine as a plumber having an army of tiny drones to fix things you can't even see, let alone reach, as a human; from diagnosis to actual repair. You would wield such power that eventually one man could fix/maintain a whole skyscraper alone and still be home for dinner with the kids.

It's the difference between what an office worker could do with pen and paper and the post office, and what they could do once came the telephone: suddenly you could talk to hundreds of people every day without moving. Then came computers, internet, now AI and robots... A century ago, thousands of men couldn't do some of what you alone accomplish in your office today.

The most menial tasks will be automated for sure, however whether or not a given job is entirely made of such tasks is another matter entirely.

I, for one, don't think it a bad thing that we eliminate brainless or skill-less jobs, I'd much rather pay for UBI for these people until they learn new skills more likely to be rewarding on a self-growth level. I also think it a good thing that we supplement most professions with ever better tools -- think what a doctor or lawyer can do with a computer and a few ad hoc databases that they couldn't do without. Even as an assistant, if you are freed from most menial tasks (e.g. "computer, send a thank you email to these customers with our classic style") then you can focus on creating more value for the person you assist. You can reclaim your worth as a highly-functioning human being, add much more value to the table, while robots and AI takes care of things your kid could do (but never will, and that is a good thing).

It's basically what allowed civilizations to work twice less (in time, work hours) and actually keep growing that GDP. I don't know where AI takes us in this regard, but I wouldn't be surprised if on average we could eventually maintain the same level of growth working orders of magnitude less. But since humans love doing stuff, I'm sure most won't work less, they'll just do so much more --and we might yet reconnect with double-digit growth in western countries.
This is an odd way to criticize Patrick because it sounds you basically agree with him. Most of the blockchain boostery I've seen has been some combination of inefficient wheel reinvention, unworkable at scale, or an investment scam. The fact that there is the possibility of someone eventually doing something of real value with it doesn't change that or invalidate people objecting to the hype.
Curve editors are heavily used by animators in most animation packages like Maya. The fact that it's supplied for a Javascript library like this shows the creators have really done their homework.
Obama Commutes Bulk of Chelsea Manning’s Sentence
It's 100% true that people are motivated by other factors. But they are bound to money. Time passes and the life style change... A spouse, children, hobbies, a bigger house ?

Money is not a good motivator for one's involvement in work. But it's a decisive factor to choose a work place because it's a limited and required resource.
DHS Publishes Final International Entrepreneur Rule