skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FileMaker is actually a very capable system, but there are some major drawbacks:

- I absolutely hate their approach to layout / styling / frontend - I wish they'd embrace web technologies like plain css amd html, which they do under the hood but don't really expose to the user / developer.

- there are countless performance issues, like their record-centric approach to showing data. Try displaying a list view that features an attribute from a related table - a very common requirement, yet you can't really scroll that list any more since FileMaker tries to lazily load related data on demand.

- FileMaker has a hard time talking to other services. You can export in multiple formats like csv and excel, however I had to come up with a very complicated approach in order to talk to and sync data with web APIs. Native JSON support in FileMaker would help a lot to make it easier but it's only possible with custom functions.
> won't know it's wrong until you run the program

That's a big problem, indeed, if your goal is to ship code that was never executed.
New Senate Bill Seeking Sweeping Changes to H1B Visa
I did. They describe using a Keras implementation, written by someone else, of style transfer, which was invented by someone else, to achieve a particular artistic effect. They use a pre-trained model. They don't even have to buy any hardware, since they used AWS GPU instances. It's a case study, nothing new has been accomplished here.

Do I also get a Verge writeup if I publish a PDF to arxiv about how I compiled and installed tensorflow? The only reason we're talking about this paper is because the name of a Hollywood actress is on it, and because it has the AI buzzword.

Look at the title: "Kristen Stewart co-authors AI paper". 113 points.

The paper itself was submitted earlier, under its actual title, which does not mention Kristen Stewart: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443107 6 points! The paper is not very interesting. The only thing that makes it newsworthy is the coauthor.
I believe Stripe is Sinatra with a custom rolled ORM. Seem to remember one of the founders posting that...maybe even here on HN.
Appreciate the calm and measured response. Well, given that this is becoming a pretty common cultural practice for study and programming flow, you may wish to chose a slightly less clumsy analogy than your laser pointer example.

In fact, the very practice of using pure tones is actually recommended by medical researchers [1] and therapists [2] as relief for tinnitus.

As for your sine wave argument, it seems likely to be fallacious. Sure, perfect sine waves are computationally generated and do not exist in nature (similar to the way geological straight lines also cannot). But close variations of sine waves do exist. Things like infrasound [3] generated from ocean waves and natural airflows, as well as tones like "The Hum" [4] pop to mind.

In that case, please explain to me how a pure tone (highly compressed and full of AAC audio artifacts, mixed with surrounding natural walla at work) is a perfect sine wave?

Secondly, please explain to me how this perfect (sic) sine wave would traumatise the cochlea?

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3634972/

[2] http://www.tinnitusretrain.com/do-binaural-beats-cure-tinnit...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum
Reminds me of Gordon tullock's hypothesis. He came up with a fabulous piece of design logic: if you want to reduce accidents, install a sharp spike pointing outwards from the steering wheel of every car, aimed at the driver’s heart.

User friendly? No. But it would certainly make everybody drive very, very carefully.
BuckleScript looks great but I've never found any project using it - maybe Reason will be the tooling to make it mainstream?
Anyone Need a Modern Logotype?
> Commit access is completely open. If the code matches the expected style, doesn't cause the related tests to fail, and doesn't cause performance regressions it's accepted into the codebase. If it doesn't it's removed.

It seems to me that any spec. that went into sufficient detail to allow this would be more or less writing the project in another language, meaning there's no actual benefit. I can't imagine that a spec. that doesn't get into that level of detail would be sufficient to prevent all malicious/unwanted commits (say, subtly weakening cryptofunctions or leaking user data over side-channels).
Software Usability II (1993)
I wasn't talking about "the mechanical aspect". And I did not claim anything like what your first sentence implies.
Did you actually read the open letter?

There is no actual empirical evidence presented in the letter, just a paragraph with anecdotal evidence that people are unsure what to do, and assertions that the author's years of experience show that the Guardian's article has bad effects.

The letter complains that the journalist did not ask any established security researchers, and discredits the source as a 'single well meaning graduate student'.

I honestly don't understand why all these domain experts are getting so riled up over a single story; instead of welcoming the attention it brings, they are asking a paper to retract a factually correct article, because the presented flaw should be described as a sensible tradeoff, instead of as a back door.
he has said that he used pgp in his emails with poitras and greenwald because he knew from personal experience that, properly implemented, nsa was unable to decrypt messages protected with it
As far as deployment goes, I've had great success with flynn.io and an Elixir buildpack.

Flynn is amazingly easy to deploy. It provisions DO/AWS/Azure then bootstraps a single node or cluster literally at the push of a button. Then you just add it to your repo and push (provided the buildpack is already set up)
But the whole point of type systems is that you can theoretically verify your code at a high level (though very few computer languages are able to approximate anything like a mathematical proof).

I wrote about this in another comment, in the context of writing tests.
This was discussed last month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13210711
How a Kalman filter works, in pictures (2015)
What do you mean by "hosting"? Just storage, or making available to others? To how many? Will they download all of the data, or is it just 1 TB overall?
people tend to view "free and open internet" insofar as it promotes their own views. Free and open internet is nice if it destablizes the power of traditional religion and promotes tolerance of alternative sexuality, but if the same corrosive power is turned on the values of the gatekeepers, suddenly we're arguing about no longer allowing comments on web pages, debating about "fake news" and the like.

People tend to want to cloak their own values in rhetoric that is appealing. They want to seem tolerant and open, when really they want to be closed and intolerant of opposition to their own values. Some people realize this tendency in themselves, but many of those in power or as gatekeepers don't at all.
The interpretation of IP law, at least internally at many big software companies, does in fact work like coodies. Hence things like "clean room implementations" of algorithms, modules, API interfaces etc.
Are you saying he didn't use Lavabit and Cryptocat?
Google's former king of search is joining Uber to lead the engineering team
I love Sublime Text, I use it for non-development work such as writing text files because of the ease of use.

Would love to venture more into the terminal/tmux/vim land but not lose a lot of the nice key bindings that I have been accustomed to with Sublime. I feel like this is the natural progression of being a productive hacker but will wait probably until the end of the year before making the switch.
iPhone News: Beware Emoji Message Bug Crashes Smartphone
For the lazy like me:

"GRVI Phalanx aspires to make it easier to develop and
maintain an FPGA accelerator for a parallel software workload.
Some workloads will fit its mold, i.e. highly parallel SPMD or
MIMD code with small kernels, local shared memory, and
global message passing. Here are some parallel models that
should map fairly well to a GRVI Phalanx framework:

• OpenCL kernels: run each work group on a cluster;

• ‘Gatling gun’ parallel packet processing: send each new
packet to an idle cluster, which may exclusively work
on that packet for up to (#clusters) packet-time-periods.

• OpenMP/TBB: run MIMD tasks within a cluster;

• Streaming data through process networks: pass streams
as messages within a cluster, or between clusters;

• Compositions of such models.

Since GRVI Phalanx is implemented in an FPGA, these
and other parallel models may then be further accelerated via
custom GRVI and cluster function units; custom memories and
interconnects; and custom standalone accelerator cores on
cluster RAM or directly connected on the NOC."
It's great to see this list. As an Erlanger there's one thing that's started to bother me of late, and that's how subdued and declining the community feels. There are a handful of passionate and capable people making great strides to improve things (rebar3 is excellent for instance), but the momentum seems to be all behind Elixir these days.

Most of the action around Erlang (conferences, etc.) seems rooted in nostalgia not in finding ways to connect to new users or new use cases. Looking at the speaker list for Erlang Factory 2017 I'm trying to figure out why there's nobody from Whatsapp, MZ, Facebook, Amazon, Visa, Goldman Sachs, etc., and why so many of the speakers are repeats of years past (in some cases multiple times over multiple years past).

Despite having a ~15 year head start, and some really high-profile use cases, it seems like the Erlang powers-that-be haven't figured out how to capitalize on much of that, and it's a real bummer for people in my situation (and I'd argue the industry as a whole is worse off for it too). I'd really like to have my team use Erlang, but I'm feeling increasingly irresponsible suggesting they invest in it instead of Elixir.
where else would we look for open source cross dc replication? Riak only does this with enterprise. cockroach doesnt do joins. Mongo I cannot trust.
IBM Watson's legal offering is making this pitch, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/05/1...

"ROSS has joined the ranks of law firm BakerHostetler, which employs about 50 human lawyers just in its bankruptcy practice. The AI machine, powered by IBM’s Watson technology, will serve as a legal researcher for the firm. It will be responsible for sifting through thousands of legal documents to bolster the firm’s cases. These legal researcher jobs are typically filled by fresh-out-of-school lawyers early on in their careers."
Android’s new ‘Instant Tethering’ feature get you online without unlocking phone
I'm still waiting on full JSX and React for BuckleScript.
For some tasks this is true; for other tasks false.

With programming, I've seen some great work done when good people are tasked with alien problems.

I think the novelty gets people excited again while making them (temporarily) more careful.
>I didn't see where it said who they were laying off

"The upcoming cuts won't be specific to any single group, but will be spread across the company's worldwide offices and business units, including sales, marketing, human resources, engineering, finance and more."

Sounds like perhaps they dont expect to make their quarterly numbers, and are doing blanket layoffs to appease investors.
"introversion and extroversion have more to do with how a person 'receives' external stimuli, not in how they react or respond to it."

Yes - I understand the more precise popular definition.

But I believe that people who enjoy being around other people are far more 'present' than those who do not.
Projects in Bucklescript do exist, here's one that shows how easy it is to integrate with JS -
https://github.com/paulhoughton/montecarlo/

Or lots of examples here - https://github.com/OvermindDL1/bucklescript-testing
Takes me back. A long time ago I wrote a simple rendering library for the 3DFx "Glide" library. It didn't do shaders but it would do mipmapped texture rendering which allowed you to have an image (texture) on your triangle. For a while I was stuck on the projection matrix and understanding screen clipping until my Dad gave me his copy of the Kodak Reference Handbook[1] third edition, copyright 1945. And they describe focal length, field of view, fstops, and lens effects very clearly.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=6DgYAQAAMAAJ&dq=Kodak%20Re...
He has a phone number, go call him.
Memory corruption from cosmic rays may be more common than your intuition suggests. This article cites a 2009 study of a large cluster that found single-bit ECC corrections occurring about 1 per minute per TB, and uncorrectable double-bit errors at a rate of about 1 per year per TB:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/how-to-kill-a-su....

Whether this is frequent enough to warrant consideration depends on your application, but there are definitely people here who care enough about how their systems recover after errors of this sort that it's not an absurd suggestion.
Amiga: Two Norwegians on a road-trip to sell their homebrew Amiga game
How many individual mailboxes (not aliases) do you want?
Except this is the JavaScript version.
(2015) the 99% (of startups)
Learn AngularJS Online – A Guide – Codementor
Tesla’s second generation Autopilot could reduce crash rate by 90%
Wow, I'm running Linux on top of RISC-V in an emulator in my browser on my phone!
Zombie – Escape Games 2017
Banking seems like an industry that is super ripe for disruption.

A problem seems to be that it's based on trust (do I trust this person enough to loan them money), and once it is based on trust, that trust will be abused.
I don't think it's "PC and ridiculous" so much as it's self-serving censorship. Tech employer types who frequent this board are generally pro-visa while the rest of the country is suspicious of it. Some are suspicious for xenophobic reasons, others for economic ones.

And before anyone accuses me of xenophobia, I think if we need their skills we should give them citizenship so they have the same rights, same mobility, and same negotiating power as the rest of us. If they don't have that parity, it lowers the bar for the entire market (citizen and resident alien).
Perhaps the distinction between "analysts" and "builders" would be better context for discussing math background in startups than PhDs.
https://github.com/Azure/ACS/issues/3
They have physical access to the device. They can enter recovery mode by holding down command r when restarting. It gives them a different copy of the os with multiple apps that you can type in (like the terminal) and would allow superuser access to whatever they wanted, however your encrypted home directory would remain encrypted and they would not be able to read it. In the olden days you would stick in a recovery cd and reboot onto that... you could also (historically and presently) stick a USB drive into the thing and boot into an os on that.... NEVER give out your password.
Scientists advising military say fears of AI existential threat are uninformed
Simplified Data Localization in Serenity 2.8.10
I'll admit that lately I've been mostly taking Uber because it's cheaper than Lyft. So that probably explains it - Lyft simply doesn't cut prices as aggressively. (But I still check both because sometimes Lyft is cheaper).
Very nice introduction. I find it especially interesting to see that in graphics design, simplicity is almost as important as in software development - and moreover, for very similar reasons: So it is easier and faster to change, so you can faster try more variants.
I'll have to check if I'm missing something but I haven't been happy with the effect on Ubuntu despite hearing this for a while.
From a contractor point of view, joining a team working with a standardized architecture means that you are productive from day one. I don't like custom projects with custom architectures and directory layouts. It slows down everybody and IMHO it's not cost effective for the customer. In the Rails world I could accept Trailblazer which is at least a bit established. A custom Sinatra application, no thanks. I gave it a try and ended up with a half assed clone of Rails or Django, messier and less pleasant to work with. One shouldn't underestimate the polish of frameworks after years of development. I rather pay the upgrade tax than the extra amount of work to build everything from the ground up.
My holiday project was to upgrade a Rails project I helped create to Rails 5. The BadgeApp [0] is used to certify open source projects as satisfying the Core Infrastructure Initiative's Best Practices Badge. It is open source, so you can see the diff [1] if you're interested. The upgrade took me several hours, and was greatly assisted by our 99% test coverage. Biggest line count change was from needing to explicitly specify params in tests. The biggest annoyance was that Fastly's gem still doesn't support Rails 5, so I needed to fork it [2].

I too am hugely appreciative of the Rails ecosystem.

[0] https://github.com/linuxfoundation/cii-best-practices-badge/
[1] https://github.com/linuxfoundation/cii-best-practices-badge/...
[2] https://github.com/fastly/fastly-rails/pull/67

Here are the app statistics:

+----------------------+--------+--------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Name | Lines | LOC | Classes | Methods | M/C | LOC/M |
+----------------------+--------+--------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Controllers | 687 | 476 | 8 | 59 | 7 | 6 |
| Helpers | 184 | 134 | 0 | 21 | 0 | 4 |
| Models | 711 | 470 | 5 | 55 | 11 | 6 |
| Mailers | 160 | 115 | 3 | 12 | 4 | 7 |
| Javascripts | 405 | 308 | 0 | 35 | 0 | 6 |
| Libraries | 369 | 281 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Tasks | 369 | 281 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Controller tests | 605 | 513 | 6 | 53 | 8 | 7 |
| Helper tests | 56 | 45 | 2 | 7 | 3 | 4 |
| Model tests | 398 | 309 | 9 | 37 | 4 | 6 |
| Mailer tests | 71 | 54 | 4 | 5 | 1 | 8 |
| Integration tests | 614 | 446 | 10 | 25 | 2 | 15 |
+----------------------+--------+--------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Total | 4629 | 3432 | 47 | 309 | 6 | 9 |
+----------------------+--------+--------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
The Why has multiple answers - one is human curiosity for possibilities of better result (which is the sole cause of all the technology we see around us).
I use it while tethering so that automatic updates don't start chewing up expensive bandwidth.
There's nothing magical about matrix multiplication. Smooshing multiple transforms together just comes down to taking those systems of equations and combining them. If I have one transform that scales space by 2, and another that scales translates space +5 (OK, yeah, this is an affine transform, not a linear one, but I wanted to focus on one coordinate for now), then I have:

f(x) = 2*x

and

g(x) = x+5

Using basic high school algebra we can find out that:

f(g(x)) = 2*x+10

and

g(f(x)) = 2*x+5

This applies all the way down. The magic isn't in numbers in a square shape, it's in basic algebra. Matrix multiplication comes down to composition of multiple systems of equations like this, and if you start from that, and nothing more than the distributive property of multiplication, you can easily derive "matrix multiplication".

Don't get me wrong. I use matrices in everything "production" for 3D graphics -- the compact notation is extremely convenient. I just wish we'd stop ascribing magical properties to matrices like "without them you lose the ability to smoosh multiple transforms together" because that's clearly false.
I wrote up a non-technical post about my experience with BuckleScript http://yawar.blogspot.ca/2017/01/bucklescript-significant-ne...
If you want to play with NLP, then just try Gensim, sklearn and Keras. If you're serious about NLP, it's hard stuff, you need a PHD in the field.

In a way, vision is easier. Instead of discrete symbols (words) it's continuous signal which are much easier to interpret and generate from neural networks. By comparison, best language models are behind best image generation models (2-3 years behind, in my estimation).

For example, there are few applications of GANs to text, and many applications to images, GANs being the hottest thing in deep learning now. So you have to keep in mind that NLP is by and large still not solved. There is no decent conversational chat bot yet. We can reason over small pieces of text but that is far from full understanding. NLP at this level is hard.

What you can easily do now is to classify text, detect sentiment, entities, word vectors, grammatical parsing and summarization. All are low level stuff.
What are those two templating engines?
I have that same book on my shelf, survived 20+ years and more moves than I can count.

My first computer was the Sinclair Spectrum and I've always been pleased that the z80 assembly was close to Intel's syntax. The competitors at the time, such as the 6502, always looked so dense and hard to read.
There is already exactly such a tax that needs to be paid with every visa application that had collected 2.3B as of 2011.

>The American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act (ACWIA) established what is commonly referred to as the “training fee.” This fee is currently set at a level of $1500 for companies with more than 25 employees; the fee is reduced to $750 for companies with 25 employees or fewer. This payment must accompany most H1B petitions. The amount collected, totaling more than $2.3 billion between fiscal years 2000 and 2011, is used for funding training and scholarships for U.S. workers. The report cites a statistic from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that a portion of these funds has been used for 58,000 college scholarships for U.S. students in the fields of science and math.

https://www.murthy.com/2011/04/08/report-on-3-billion-in-h1b...
Those were the days, I programmed in assembly language for at least two years without an assembler.

As you say poking bytes into RAM, via the lookup table in the computer manual. Writing them down on paper, and trying to leave space in the code so I didn't have to recalculate all the relative JMP-offsets if I tweaked my program over a few days.
I'm curious about the performance of Elixir code compared to Erlang. I guess I'm what I'm really asking is how different is Elixir from Erlang in regards to the paradigm, and what performance costs does it pay for it?
That's part of the green card process, not H1B. None of your references support what you wrote.
Optimizing resource efficiency in Microsoft Azure
Amazon solved the payload problem in drone delivery system
> "The upcoming cuts won't be specific to any single group, but will be spread across the company's worldwide offices and business units, including sales, marketing, human resources, engineering, finance and more."

I was referring to the type of people, mostly. Like, software engineers, hardware engineers, designers, HR folks, etc.

> Sounds like perhaps they dont expect to make their quarterly numbers, and are doing blanket layoffs to appease investors.

They announced these over 6 months ago so I'm not necessarily convinced that's why. Though I would love to know for sure.
I found a page explaining the differences between bucklescript and js_of_ocaml : https://github.com/bloomberg/bucklescript/wiki/Differences-f...
"the unwillingness of business leaders who rightly take pride in their corporate efforts to promote women and minorities to say anything about Presidentially sanctioned intolerance"

Remember this when Silicon Valley leaders lick his boots.
This is such good news! Good luck!
GPR of Chang’e 4 to explore the far side of the Moon
Somewhere in the region 1-5. Certainly not many.
Honest question - why should you be entitled to a free (as in beer) high-quality database that provides open-source cross-datacenter replication? Typically that is a feature only needed/used by large enterprises with sizable IT budgets. Considering the product is complex to develop, why should someone do it for no compensation?