skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the biggest change, functionally, between past automation and today's going forward is the actual ability of the system to "know" what it is doing and correct/adjust accordingly. We're moving past "dumb" automation essentially, and from a historical (technology) perspective it's every bit as fascinating as we'd hoped it to be, and then some.

I mean, real-time voiced-over translation on Skype? Eventually even mimicing the other person's voice? Yes please!

All thanks to this shallow form of AI that Nick Bostrom coined as "artificial narrow intelligence" (as opposed to "general" intelligence, i.e. human-like; and "superior" beyond ours). It's becoming possible for businesses of all kinds and all trades, thanks to the drastic cost reduction of deep learning since we moved these tasks to GPUs (and these bad boys keep improving at +25% performance per generation roughly every 18 month). And what AI does, sometimes is order of magnitude better than what any human individual/team could do (think Spotify's recommendations, anything with "big data" and "subjectivity" in it).

Which leads to the same conclusion as your last sentence.
I recall reading about such experiments done on rats, and that was at least a couple decades ago. Is it really beyond our technological capabilities? Note, I'm not talking about electrodes to induce dreams or some such; just a simple direct electric stimulation of the pleasure centers. Presumably, the resulting sensation is that you wouldn't know why you're happy - you're just happy.
Thanks! They were designed to make only one isolated thing and be "debugging" tools instead of creating the entirely new environment as you can get in most animation tools.

So the idea was: you have your page -> you add debugging tools -> craft your animations -> remove the tools and animation still there.

Also, since project's resources are limited - we had to make those simple tools and then connect them to something more matured like https://github.com/legomushroom/mojs-timeline-editor (which is in the process right now). This way we are able to release MVP early and get feedback early while constantly improving the tools.
Indeed private blockchains never had a real relationship with the Bitcoin innovation. The Bitcoin innovation was a secure solution for performing transactions in a trustless/distributed/descentralized (e.g. the double spending problem in P2P transactions). The private blockchains are not trustless, so... this innovation doesn't applies.

Now, what we call private blockchains/distributed ledgers are basically a way to have a common workflow with [smart] contracts between different entities. This is a real alternative to just publishing APIs and orchestrating them.

But I think there is a "first mile problem" here: even if this technology solves some problems, how can you make different organizations to adopt a single technology? More when there are multiple competing projects.
I worked for Accenture for a very short time, and I will say that they have no idea what they are talking about, regardless of what it is.

Somehow, I just found a charge for $3500 from Accenture on my credit report. It HAS to be from when I worked there. They either took back a bonus or thought that they paid me too much I guess. It's been years, I have never heard anything about it, and now my credit took a hit. Worst job/company ever would be an understatement. I quit in record time (<60 days).
The whole drive of mathematics (and logic) is ultimately that syntax is the semantics.

This, of course, is annoying for almost all communication, particularly when we want to use fuzzy, hard to define terms. Languages are useful because you can pretty heavily butcher the syntax, but still be understood. (And arguably, that fuzziness is what drives new thoughts.)
George Carlin, the American dream (quite cynical)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsL6mKxtOlQ

Hillbilly Elegy
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/books/review-in-hillbilly...

My version:
Republican party platform does not believe in the "veil of ignorance" at all whatsoever. They support neo-feudalism and aristocracy. Equality is fake, people are in fact different, those differences should be rewarded and punished in a free market, it is considered unfair to force equality to be true. Even equality under the law is negotiable, where those who can afford better lawyers get better justice.

Democrats are tone deaf, and suck at marketing their own policy successes. They'd rather convince people to vote for them on the basis of a smug liberalism which says if only people had the facts they'd vote Democrat. Ergo if you vote Republican you're either stupid or evil. This is not a winning strategy, obviously.
Why I Am Switching to Private Messaging
No. We're (or I, at least, am) debating whether the concept of 'new job' continues to exist.
For certain definitions of safely and securely, yes.
Sure, my point is that where systems are optimised for speed Bitcoin is miles behind the curve. If a distributed ledger is simply updating to reflect the authoritative accounts of a centralised authority I'm not really seeing what trustlessness is adding to the reconciliation process either.
The case for being an arrogant jerk?
Are you talking about Mojs animations or web animations in general?
They created DOTA2 and steam. Which are both huge projects ans very successful.
Coding Productivity in a World of Distractions
Interestingly, this is (some of) the output of running the makefile: https://sr.ht/zMyE.png
Every Game Release Date in 2017
>2. The election of Donald Trump is a 'lose-lose' scenario. How? What, specifically, about his proposed policies has a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for American citizens and the United States' geopolitical influence?

There's more to a president than their proposed policies. Trump's bigoted rhetoric is already having a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for many minorities in the USA (and he's not even in office yet)

https://twitter.com/i/moments/796417517157830656?lang=en
Slightly off-topic, Chrome on my early-2015 MacBook (16GB RAM) lags significantly while rendering most of the demos listed in the repository. If things like this become the norm on the web, one can easily claim that such technologies are not inclusive to most users of the world-wide-web, who do not buy a new latest&greatest desktop computer every 2 years.
Another protip: localForage [1] makes it fairly easy to drop in IndexedDB if you're used to the localStorage interface. The only drawback is that you have to refactor into using promises, since IndexedDB is async.

[1] https://github.com/localForage/localForage
That's awesome to hear. However I see Nylas still is requesting full "view and manage your mail" OAuth permissions server-side. Is that something that can go away?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s37onyv41w91zi0/Screenshot%202017-...
A big one is persistent data structures. Where 'persistent' may not mean what you think it means.

In Clojure it is impossible to surgically modify a data structure. That is, you can't do something like:

(SETF (CAR (CDR x)) 'foo)

which would alter a data structure.

You can modify a data structure, but it returns a new data structure, yet the old one remains if it is not GC'able.

All of the common data structures have this property. Sequences (eg, lists), arrays, maps and sets. If you change the 50 thousandth element of an array, this returns a new array. The old array is unaffected. Yet it gives the performance you expect of an array. (Meaning no apparent cost of copying.)

If you're writing a search procedure, it is trivial to transform one chessboard into a different chessboard, but without concern about the cost of copying (close to zero), or having altered the original value (you haven't). Other variables that have a pointer to that first chessboard don't see any changes.

There are other things such as a great story about concurrency.

Hope that helps.
In my experience the rates for folks on embedded are way below market rates for the rest of the field.

Anecdotally one guy I know quit embedded to do rails development and doubled his paycheck.
I am finding more and more that the 'f' is not required. Just 'rm -r' will get you there usually, and so I'm trying to get into the habit of only doing the minimum required. Unfortunately, git repos require the -f.
An interesting contextual point from 2009 that highlights what an odd situation this is:

Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle

http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs...

Also, their back of the envelope calculations were done presuming that a Kindle cost $359.
Very true, never thought of it this way. Add to that the fact that robots don't have the same needs (can operate with little air/heat/light, don't even need to get out of the room, much less safety concerns in general and practically 0% comfort). You could build kitchens in basements or beneath roofs and save 100% of the floor surface for customers.
> Is the large scale rollout of predictive algorithms really a bigger wave than those that have come previously?

No of course it isn't. But because it's called "artificial intelligence" instead of "conditional probability" or "regression" or something people think otherwise.

The reality is that this kind of technology will make us more productive, bring down the cost of products and services and make them available to a mass market, in exactly the same way literally every tech advance has done.

Of course some jobs and disciplines will be lost, but they will be replaced with different, higher skilled jobs. Just look at the range of disciplines and jobs that the web has created over the last 20 years. I mean just look at Google. The world's largest "AI" platform has spawned entire industries. No evidence this trend won't continue.
Why is that particular use case solved better with blockchain than e.g. incrementing a counter in an actual database?
Yep. Beautifully wrought confirmations of bad hypotheses. After this election I'm taking anything stats-related on 538 (most everything) with a huge grain of salt. Can't stand another "Here's why the numbers show Hillary will win in a landslide" etc.
Two things:

1) It seems like the term "block chain" as used by block chain companies is pointing to what the bitcoin blockchain is but without the proof of work. So, a database which history could be cryptographically audited.

2) I don't think those are necessarily bad points for Bitcoin. Maybe it is run by speculators or gold diggers but in the end many people (including me and friends) have used/are using bitcoin for legitimate reasons.
I think it is also matter of time scale. There may be new jobs once this all settles down. Today I have real fear of mass job disappearance. If I lose job today due to AI and tumultuous times continue for next 50 years it is of no use to me that 2080 is the start of AI based golden era.
Do I understand correctly that pixie is using clojure's lisp dialect and the only difference is that it is not running on JVM?
I suppose my real question is - how many times do we need to do it? Once we have stepped through it by pen and paper once, or derived the result, how many times do we need to keep doing it? My experience in that mathematicians will do this again and again and again.
To many people on HN, blockchain isn't new; many of us have gone through the incredibly curious and fascinated stage around 2011-2013 and are now in the cynical and grumpy stage. If you're curious about this stuff keep learning but HN and Reddit probably just aren't good places to do so.
From my experience in the industry the common advice is you shouldn't share sensitive info in Slack/HipChat/whatever else is bound to get hacked.
The great thing about private train companies is how many other businesses they've built in the stations. There's a near infinite number of fake-French cafes in every subway.

Meanwhile here my nearest Caltrain station has some car repair places and a mystery fondue restaurant that never seems to open. I think it's a money laundering scheme.
Seconding Backblaze for set-and-forget. It's a huge confidence boost for data that is a little bit too large and low-value to handle with more care.
> And it's small. Currently the interpreter, JIT, GC, and stdlib clock in at about 10.3MB once compiled down to an executable.

Oh how the definition of "small" has changed. I actually would like to know how they managed to make something like this so big.

To compare, LuaJIT is about 400 KB, and that includes the Lua standard library, a JIT almost certainly more advanced than Pixie's current one, an incremental GC, and a C FFI.

Neither compilers (well, except C++ ones), nor stuff you usually find in standard libraries, nor a GC should require much code to implement, relatively speaking (e.g. compared to a WYSIWYG word processor). These things are usually small. The compilers for almost every language were < 1 MB in size for the longest time.

I am not saying that Pixie being 10 MB in size is a problem. We have a lot more bandwidth and disk space nowadays, 10 MB is nothing. My point is that a "JIT, GC, and stdlib" package weighing this much cannot claim to be "small" for what it does.
It can be as simple as scanning qr codes with your phone wallet.

Aaron Voisine has done an incredible job with breadwallet, highly recommended.
I don't think this is unusual and I don't think you are a bad person. However, you may be a bad employee. Not in the moral sense, but in the sense that maybe you would do better as a consultant who gets to take on new projects and new clients more often than in a regular job.

I tended to struggle with this too earlier in my career, although fortunately I've been able to work for companies where I can switch to new projects often enough to keep my interest up, rather than just doing maintenance on one long-running project.
What is the cost to companies of letting demoralized employees stick around to wait for options/RSU/bonuses to vest? I'm in the process of leaving a company now where I've been watching this happen for the better part of two years, and I keep wondering how much more productive and successful we could have been if those people had been let go and filled with some new, motivated recruits.
I don't really understand the allure of going entirely fanless. Adding a couple of fans that spin so slowly they're inaudible makes a huge difference in cooling efficiency, with no real downside. For example, I use one of these.[1] It's several years old, but it does a good job of cooling, can't be heard, and doesn't fill up the whole damn case like that one you linked to... I can only imagine newer heatsink/fan designs are even better.

[1]http://noctua.at/en/nh-u12p
Biggest reason I stick to macOS.

Free = not enough, paid = expensive and bloated

Getting tired of this rule when macOS has apps on the sweet spot at affordable prices.
>Something being funded by the Kochs doesn't automatically make it a Koch propaganda outfit.

When that something is a "think tank", adults understand that what it produces is intellectual ammunition for increased privatization and reduced protections for consumers, employees and neighbors of business. In this case, very low-grade ammunition.

>Vague, unscientific claims of class victimization, with no statistical support provided, is the bread and butter of socialist demagoguery

And the bread and butter of right-wing pro-business "think tanks" is the prompting of voluntary red-baiting such as you just offered.

Fact: on the basis of influence, there is no socialist or pro-cooperative-ownership analog to Mises or Manhattan Institute nor to any one of the dozens of pro-market / libertarian think tanks cranking out "science" that always finds in favor of capitalist boardrooms.

That indisputable fact alone means you have no business invoking science -- all you're doing is literally standing up to defend the world's most entrenched, powerful interests. Someone actually interested in science, unlike yourself, would, on principle, be skeptical toward purveyors of "science" that never comes to different conclusions no matter the problem domain.
Okay, your opinion. I still know that it was primarily caused by these two factors, and even know that I know it.

I also have not heard a single excellent argument for Brexit so far - not a single one, and as a well-informed and educated person I've heard many if not all of them. "Plenty of" is too vague to be of any value as a statement, but I also wouldn't agree that there were "plenty of" EU-savvy intellectuals who supported 'Leave', unless you're willing to count people like Boris Johnson to this group. You and the rest of the 'Leave' is being dishonest or simply deluded / misinformed.

Please don't bother discussing this topic with me (or Trump supporters or climate change denial, for what it's worth). I'm sick of it and the UK. What I would like to ask you and your kind is to urge your politicians to exit the EU swiftly and then shut up and never blame the EU for anything that happens to the UK again. Bye!
Everyone teaches outdated standards (eventually). The important thing is to come away with an understanding of the principles (which is what I interpret the OP to be asking for).

I took the Stanford course when it was first offered online, and I regard it as one of the best things I ever did. You're absolutely right in that there's a lot of newer stuff that it didn't teach me, but the database's documentation is usually sufficient to plug that gap.
Accenture's approach to open-source ideas is mostly via a glossy brochure [pdf] [1].

[1] https://www.accenture.com/t20150523T115642__w__/us-en/_acnme...
I'm not advocating this approach, simply asking: have you investigated nootropics? I am just starting to experiment myself and it seems some if it may be helping with anxiety, but will take more experimentation to say something more confidently.
Wasn't there a talk show host that was complaining on air about how it was so hard to live in Washington DC on 'only' $500k?
The biggest challenge I notice in this community is a lack of imagination. At the risk of being critical of HN royalty, Patrick just showed that it's far easier to be snarky than imaginative.

Any implementation of a blockchain where a blockchain simply replaces a database is lazy at best, and most likely completely pointless. Almost all blockchain stories that make it on HN are financial implementations that fall in to this camp, and as such they are rightly called out as being pointless. Unfortunately the comments are a pile-on of negativity, rather than a discussion of possibilities.

The interesting work is being done in areas where things that weren't possible before, are now possible. This requires imagination and resolve.

My background is in ad tech, and I've recently had conversations with companies working on solving two big problems in large media buying agencies - bot-based fraud, and auditability of programmatic trading. These problems are being solved using the bitcoin blockchain.

I'm not invested in the success of these businesses, or bitcoin/blockchain at all - but through my experience they are solving real problems (ie. ad fraud is around a ~$5-10B problem every year for the large agency groups) in ways that weren't possible before.

So to answer the question about why the community is negative towards blockchain? The HN community self selects for a group of people who solve problems in the roughly the same ways, with roughly the same tools. It's not really a conducive environment for a technology that could solve problems in a new way with new tools. It then implements a voting system that only strengthens the community homogeneity. So once a technology like a blockchain is in the out group, it's unlikely to ever be in the in group.
As others have mentioned [0], blockchains pay a lot for working in a trustless environment. The real issue is that there's not actually a lot of trustless environments that need such a solution. And there's better solutions in trusting environments.

To take your example, a country issuing identification numbers does not have a trust issue. The people generally trust the government to correctly issue and record an ID number.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13420629
I probably wouldn't have taken quite the offense if I wasn't actually typing this from a reservation in the US. My first vision of tribal is a bit different.
Another difference is that Coreboot is essentially a rolling release, whereas Libreboot periodically takes a snapshot of upstream and maintains it for a while. Libreboot is therefore something like a long-term service release.

Anecdotally, I also found Libreboot easier to build. There is less configuration involved.
As someone who loves both PyPy and Clojure, I wish Pixie was right up my alley. But I don't understand why the choice was made to be ... sort-of like Clojure, but not all the way, as opposed to just-another-Clojure-implementation. Why can't I have a .cljc file that runs on Pixie?

(Not voluntelling halgari to do things! I would just like tn understand.)
> but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket.

Is that why I see numerous people live blogging every city council meeting or random discussion forum on a possible new law?

Yeah, 20k people will post that they're at the inauguration and thought that X had an ugly dress or Y looked unhappy... but that's hardly useful.
> “It’s logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality.” Logic is the art or skill of non-contradictory identification. Logic has a single law, the Law of Identity, and its various corollaries. If logic has nothing to do with reality, it means that the Law of Identity is inapplicable to reality. If so, then: a. things are not what they are; b. things can be and not be at the same time, in the same respect, i.e., reality is made up of contradictions. If so, by what means did anyone discover it? By illogical means. (This last is for sure.) The purpose of that notion is crudely obvious. Its actual meaning is not: “Logic has nothing to do with reality,” but: “I, the speaker, have nothing to do with logic (or with reality).” When people use that catch phrase, they mean either: “It’s logical, but I don’t choose to be logical” or: “It’s logical, but people are not logical, they don’t think—and I intend to pander to their irrationality.”

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/logic.html
And lately Affinity Photo which is directly trying to compete against Photoshop.
The only reason your credit "took a hit", based on the way those formulas work, is because it went to collections or because you have barely any credit. And both of those reasons are completely your fault.
> It's simply amazing how somebody can spin this into "money doesn't motivate people". Some people will only see what they want, and make any excuse for that, no matter how absurd.

Almost nobody reads the original studies. Instead, they read news stories and articles, most written by professionals who are paid to spin it in amazing ways.
AWS itself is a great example: Most Amazon Web Services (e.g. S3, EC2) can be controlled and accessed via APIs, and Amazon charges for that API access. Here's a more concrete example --- the pricing page for Amazon DynamoDB:

https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/
The AI will need to learn people skills if it has to do the job of an IT Manager.
I also think it would be interesting to see what publishers would do with the data on which articles actually generate money. I'm not sure I would want news organizations to only print what sells, as I would surmise that's partly how we ended up with less insightful news gaining popularity.