skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, here you are "strenuously agreeing" with me that the original statement was false. We both think that "saying it has too much politics behind it is an oxymoron" is false. You and I agree that one can think that the ice cream cone might have one too many toppings, and to utter such a statement ain't oxymoronic - debatable, but not in any way contradictory. In fact, you think "too much politics" is a common cry. Yes, it is a common kind of debate, but not therefore trivial - since one might end up with a lot of ice cream on one's shirt if the pile of toppings is too high. I think that's already happened.

The more people try to bundle what are in fact quite distinct aims into one movement, the greater chance of failure. Not to mention the greater chance of including an aim which is harmful, not helpful. So I'll stand by my thought that adding in the defeating-the-patent-system-or-bust goal was maybe a tad much.

Nobody doubts that politics are complex and divisions common therein; but surely it's also obvious that politic movements can vary in complexity (number of toppings,) too.

One can't always follow Lincoln's first law of strategy: "One war at a time", but it's an excellent rule of thumb, for politics as well as war, and I think it's pretty clear to most of us now that the EFF has wandered much too far from it, with (economically) catastrophic results - namely all those wasted billions, not to mention the limited supply of developer work-years thrown away on mere rewrites. Not every political movement overreaches anything like this badly.

That there are other arguments with a similar structure to mine does not distress me. That other, false axioms plugged into the same structure might produce a false result doesn't - and of course shouldn't - dismay me either. (Which is not to take one side in the example argument you cite. Not here, anyway.)
How difficult is it to get into a position at a top company where you can do ML research, without having a PhD?

And I'm also wondering about going back to university: Is it difficult to get into a good ML PhD program if you've been in the industry for some years?
it's not a layoff... it's a rollback.

you're all idiots.
Progress – tool to show progress for cp, mv, dd...
It can be shown by clever application of Taylor Expansion that e^2 is irrational.
Is the swimming as refreshing and enjoyable in a wetsuit? I've never tried one before.
Ask HN: What are some alternatives to Unity?
I have recently switched from mac to ubuntu but don't quite like the unity desktop. What are some stable, aesthetically pleasant alternatives to unity?
Agreed. I don't think there is a big fuss about Erlang anymore. Still it's an interesting language from an acidemic perspective if not from a practical one.
Was linkedin really known for their engineering? Honest question I don't recall ever hearing anything good or bad.
I don't doubt that Bataan is the original, original context, but as far as software engineering goes, the term comes from this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Death-March-2nd-Edward-Yourdon/dp/013...
The demand that has opened up is entry level retail at or near minimum wage though.
It's also funny that he's holding up in NZ which sits way off to the left politically when compared to the US.

I guess no government is good, until you want a place to stay when society breaks down.
I'm not an expert, but I believe that Rust's performance will be better if you avoid unsafe pointers. Rust's abstractions are generally cost-free, but if you use unsafe pointers the compiler will have to avoid optimizations that could be broken by potential pointer aliasing.
allow_exception = volume < audible_threshold
Google Photos is great. 100GB of uncompressed data will cost you $2/mo. Supports RAW files and has some nice search features.

Killer feature: the ability to search images by face, metadata, and KEYWORDS. I can search for "dog" or "server rack" and Photos will return pictures that contain those things. It's pretty accurate.
Vouchers could also be said to be a mechanism for letting lower class families receive the same private school education that the rich can already buy.
Alternatively, higher prices for 3D could be offsetting the reduced revenue of the smaller viewership.
Unfortunately, I think you're correct.

Anecdote: I used Erlang, over the course of several years, for very-high-level bot behavior and multi-player mission control, where performance was much less important than the things Erlang provides, but I still had issues with it. Nonetheless, I felt it had given me great leverage, and I thanked Joe Armstrong profusely, when I met him at a conference. Later at the con, I asked a panel whether there were active efforts at improving performance, perhaps with a JIT. They seemed to take it as an attack, and suggested that if I need performance, I should use another language. I mostly write in Clojure now.
Lossless Web Navigation with Trails
I am having a hard time finding where it states that web workers are treated the same as threads managing visual content. Currently timers in background threads are throttled to 1sec minimum interval however workers are not bound by this constraint. I may just be missing something, but I sure hope not. This would adversely impact many games and applications rendering many of them unusable without the web worker exclusion.
If it were a "real" poverty experience, house values would drop, wouldn't they?

Apparently the issues experienced as a result of high housing prices aren't valued enough to drive prices of the homes down, yet.

I guess my point, if I had one at all, is that it seems like the housing market is absurdly high in such a way that will eventually self balance, one way or another. Either the city will continue to sustain itself on the backs of the long commuters who can't afford to live in the city, or the quality of life in the city will drop, which will in turn lower housing prices until the workers who make the city life appealing can afford to live close enough to again commute reasonably.

If, as you say, education is suffering, people will stop buying the houses, or they'll stop bringing kids to the districts. Either way, problem self-corrects, right?
I didn't imply it was desired or wasn't possible...? Another reply to my comment clarified that Optional also only applies to value types, which makes it analogous to Nullable. There's no reason to port it (as opposed to any other implementation of an Optional type) over.

What is really necessary is an equivalent for reference types.

struct Maybe<T> where T : class {

private bool _isInitialized;
private T _data;

public Maybe(T data) {
_isInitialized = (data != null);
_data = data;
}

// ...etc
}
That's correct:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_managem...

The source:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/013143635X
That's really cool. Your comment reminded me a bit of how kids can go from disinterest to total fixation if something involves minecraft. (and I mean that in the best way possible).
Not sure what example you want. If you are talking about code, take a look at the torch source code. It is pretty accessible.
You don't have to use JavaScript. (See emscripten, binaryen etc.)

The Web is basically just a runtime you don't have to host your files on a server if you don't want. You can distribute them via CDs if you prefer. Also you can use Service Workers now.

That said monetisation all depends on the product not the medium. Just look at Minecraft. It didn't use ads or microtransactions and yet it was run from a Java applet in a browser.
> The limit to automation in this industry and others is, quite frankly, how bad these companies are at making software.

Your statement contradicts the rest of your paragraph (that the article is naive and far fetched).

Because if this is really true, then it's only a matter of assembling a good software team, with one or two domain experts (who know the domain and are good s/w engineers), pair it up with the team of engineers and line workers, and a successful automated system can be built, i.e., exactly what the original post is talking about.
pretty much every big company in silicon valley is known for their engineering talent, since top talent just moves around from company to company (e.g: lots of ex-googlers, ex-facebook, etc).
Yes, they kind of overdid it in fact. They created Kafka, for example
I do the same. With people who actually know something an interesting conversation will develop.

A lot of "architects" will only repeat generalities and have nothing left to go deeper. I also don't like too many buzzwords like "integration patterns" or "serverless architecture".
Because in a lot of markets they control the supply. 3D provides leverage to increase revenue across the board, and if 3D is the only option to see Star Wars, people will choose to pay more and see it in 3D when faced with the option of not seeing it at all.
It's interesting that bees can learn new tasks, but this is amazing:

> Other bumblebees learned by observing trained demonstrators from a distance. Only a small minority solved the task spontaneously. The experiments suggest that learning a nonnatural task in bumblebees can spread culturally through populations.
Break Python programs with a simple import statement
I think the movie portrays them pretty accurately, from Captain von Trapp's perspective in 1938: thuggish, low-class, irresponsible, violent, and regrettably alluring to the young. The really foul stuff hadn't started yet -- and you'd have to know a lot more about the Nazi inner circle than von Trapp did (or cared to) in order to know that it was coming.
That's the useful fiction. Reality: Dollars contributed to campaigns.
It's the other way round. It's a specific kind of personality that's easily attracted to Lisp, not a programming language that makes you special.
All the more credit to Rodgers and Hammerstein.
> Your Erlang program should just run N times faster on an N core processor

But only if your program is embarrassingly parallel with at least N times available parallelism in the first place! If you have one of those it's already trivial to write a version that runs N times faster on N cores in C, Java, multi-process Python, whatever.

If your program has sequential or less parallel phases or needs to communicate then you are subject to Amdahl's law like you always were.

Armstrong has that claim in the Erlang book and I was gobsmacked to see it written down with no caveat or mention of the limits from Amdahl's law whatsoever. I was sure it was a joke and it would be followed by 'ha ha ha of course not - nobody knows how to achieve that despite decades of intensive research', but no it's a serious claim made with a straight face. Erlang's solved it!

Erlang helps you write parallel programs... but only if you program is entirely parallel in the first place.
Save the Date by Google
Don't worry, binaries will always be around. The future of the majority of gaming is not on the web.
This stuff is incredibly useful when dealing with large matrices. The idea is that an n-by-n matrix often doesn't contain n^2 pieces of independent information, but can be written a product of matrices of size at most n-by-r (for r << n). A famous example of this is the Netflix recommendation matrix. In this case, you can often avoid O(n^2) complexity by only dealing with such low-rank approximations.

It should be noted that this overview dates from 2013 and that a lot of new results have appeared since then. The author gives some good references in the abstract.
A number of notable opensource projects in the big data space were started at LinkedIn. Kafka is probably the most prominent example but there are others too. So I'd say they're fairly known for their engineering. You definitely don't get good projects like that coming out of a company without really good engineers making them.
Yes, for starters they wrote things like Kafka and Samza there @ LinkedIn. I consider this post required reading for anyone wanting to build serious business distributed data pipelines, and guess where it came from? :)

https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...
Give them a sample, 'The company you thought you're interviewing for is just a smoke screen, we're actually a stealth startup for a social network for pets" and have them diagram out how it might look for a MVP launch, 2 years in, 5 years in. What technology choices, how are they going to launch internationally, scale to hundreds of millions of pets, how are they going to achieve sub-second latency for the FindMyPet API, high-availability, do operational and business intelligence monitoring (and which BI metrics would he care about), unifying code across multiple platforms, etc.

Most importantly they should light up when they get the question. Like someone just sat a piece of cake in-front of a fat kid.
Kafka, Samza, Databus, etc. LinkedIn is pretty capable when it comes to engineering. From what I've seen, most people's beef with LI tends to be product-related
so many people (including me from time to time) misunderstand "computaionally expensive" that I think Elixir/erlang/beam will serve a lot of systems/apps well for a long time until they really see a need for "intense" computation
I've been working for a while on a number of different projects to harness WebRTC to connect businesses and customers and make it all very easy to use.

Callingly is the latest and most straightforward solution - something that can be used by everybody from a mom selling things on Craigslist or Etsy to big international corporations.

Basically, you just sign up with your phone number and you get a Callingly page like this: https://callingly.com/leon

You can put this link in your email signature, post it online, on social media or even embed it as a button in your website. Then anybody can just click on the link and call you directly through their computer, tablet, mobile phone, etc.

The call goes right through to your phone and you know it's coming from your online profile. The caller never gets to see your phone number and you can control what hours during the week you're available to let your phone ring. Otherwise, it just goes to voicemail.

Plus, the web call is free for the caller anywhere in the world - so it's perfect if you have international customers.

I'd love any feedback!
React is in the business of limiting its API surface, not increasing it. I think they have done a great job of it - libraries like this should exist in userland.
This has not been my experience. I have some very long running group messages that switched over automatically when my brother switched from iPhone to Android.
You can implement something very like torrent using web tech.

https://webtorrent.io/
> we need academic administrators on a separate career track to police the bloody lot.

No, we don't. Predatory journals are neither run by nor wanted by the academic community. They are a product of exactly such administrators looking at useless stats such as # of papers published in a "journal".

We don't need better trained bureaucrats that will ultimately still just look at "n papers published" or "x citations" or any other mindlessly calculated statistic.

The administrators you mention do not sound like peers (as in peer-review), but more like they are no longer involved in research and just do administrative tasks. If that is the case, then maybe they are simply the wrong people for the job.

Very few people can accurately assess the quality/impact of research, and most of these are the peers themselves, i.e. the researchers/academics currently active in the area. Lists like the one discussed are a helpful tool to do that assessment quicker, as some publications can be immediately flagged for lacking peer-review. But they do not replace actually understanding the research.
Happy Hacking Keyboard history
3D can reduce the availability of 2D showings by 50%, so if there are half as many times when 2D is showing, then there will be customers that choose not to see the film because showtimes don't fit their schedule.

Source: Myself, a dad that only sees movies a couple times a month during a very limited time period when the babysitter is available
I lived on a block just about the furthest from any subway in manhattan: 81st and York[0]. A car never crossed my mind.

http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/99544282749/found-the-manhat...
What you've described is definitely not a commons but a simple pricing outcome for a financial product. In a competitive market you'd expect that price to find an equilibrium, not to rise without bound.

Notwithstanding which, this case exhibits none of those characteristics. It is rent-seeking, pure and simple.
Just as a counterpoint, I've seen it on a 4K LG OLED tv and I thought it was just as "meh" as theater 3d.

I also tried to get some 3d games working because I thought it might be better than movies, but it was decidedly worse. Like, really bad. Headache and nausea inducing in mere minutes bad. This is probably the reason that hardly any games support 3d tvs any more.
Another Canadian university story: the University of Saskatchewan has a fairly decent agreement. Faculty, staff, and grad students (but not undergrad students) make an agreement to assign any patents coming from their research to the university, and the university in return gives back 50% of the commercialization of the patent back to the researcher.

Additionally, if the university decides it doesn't want to commercialize a patent, it will return ownership to the original inventor.

Copyright remains wholly with the author.

This came up in my MSc program, when I was considering commercializing some of the software that I wrote while doing my research. Likely not patentable (the university's IP lawyer agreed). My supervisor felt he deserved partial ownership, but I had written all of it on my own. The university's lawyer basically told us that since I was the sole author of the work, and the university has no copyright assignment agreement, it was all mine to do with as I pleased.
Processing with superconducting circuits: a review
Here's a thread on RethinkDB's current status:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rethinkdb/comments/5oipf7/what_does...

TL;DR quote:

> We're still actively working to transition RethinkDB to a fully open-source, community driven model. Progress seems slow because we don't have access to any of the official outlets (blog, twitter, etc) from a legal perspective, but I can assure you work is being done.
The slowness of Erlang was a conscious decision. You're supposed to offload all the computationally intensive things to native code. That may not be ideal for your use case and a PITA, but it's how the language and runtime was designed. I would guess Erlang would do (if it isn't already doing) well in HPC as the thing that coordinates all the Fortran code.
> Try applying your reasoning to eg administration of the atmosphere.

You mean in terms of airspace? Because that's a thing but it ends at space, which nobody owns. It's a system that works pretty well.
For what it's worth, there's a similar feature currently available in Firefox Test Pilot: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center
I've always thought that Erlang would be more successful if it had a better deployment story, along the lines of Go or Rust: e.g. if you had the option of baking an Erlang runtime into a static binary. As it stands, software like ejabberd and rabbitmq are pretty ugly in OS package form (because distro maintainers think such packages need to rely on a common, usually very old, Erlang runtime, instead of allowing them to vendor it in as you're supposed to.)

Now that I think of it, Canonical's push toward "snaps" (sandboxed and vendored—but not fully containerized—software bundles, as a package format) might bring a flourishing of Erlang-based application software, given that it's much more compatible with Erlang's style of release-management.
> How do programmers fix these problems? They don’t. They pray.

Ah! No, Joe, that's what you do.

Most of developers have figured out how to do concurrency and parallelism with mutable state and locks. It's not as hard as you make it sound and it's supported in a lot of languages which, as opposed to Erlang, are statically typed, hence much more suitable to the kind of large scale software you describe.

And yes, that was already true in 2007.
Online JavaScript Editor (product)
Blender has my favorite release notes: https://www.blender.org/features/2-78/

Though that's cheating a bit because it's easier to get pretty pictures of features in Blender.
3 SAP HANA health checks you must do
I talked with them. They're using wordpress, so it may not have been easy. (If they're terminating SSL at an LB or cloudflare, these things can be really annoying to debug with wordpress too!)
Now what self driving cars really need are sensors for handling adverse weather conditions. IE sensors for seeing through fog, seeing through rain and snow, detecting ice on the road[0]. Or at the very least a sensor for detecting that things are so bad that the car should just stop.

[0]https://www.photonics.com/Article.aspx?AID=6204
From linkedin I gather they have around 3000 people. Not sure if that includes jet.com employees also. So <1% are laid off. I got a call few months back for position in Reston VA. They never proceeded after initial call.

Edit: It should <10% or ~7% as another commenter corrected me.
Topological quantum computing: a review
This article is basically bullshit. There is no coherent, reliable body of knowledge saying there is any global epidemic of blindness, or that use of LEDs leads to retinal degradation in all but the most extreme circumstances.

Note the sidebar where the researcher making the claim has invented a solution (a filter) for the problem. It even lists a price. So this article is literally bad science wrapped around an ad.
I live on Kauai. I moved here 5 years ago from Canada. I can tell you most people don't understand Hawaii has a much different culture, history and people than "mainland" America.

Mark is making a huge mistake. The people on this island in particular are much more community and heart based. The fundamental mistake Mark is making is that he is entering into a lose-lose situation. This will NEVER be forgotten and he will NEVER be welcome here. He will always have to watch his back while he is here.

In my opinion his best course of action is to stop all law suits and make amends. People will forgive him for making a mistake but only if he can admit it first. This is not California. The island will "spit him out".

Kauai is known for being the last island of Aloha. Good luck Mark.
Very few people use R for deep learning.

There's a tensorflow R port, but it requires setting up a working version of tensorflow on python. So once you have that set up, all the documentation, error messages etc are for python - so you might as well just use python.
That was me. Or rather, I created a table with columns s0-s255 and built a primitive tree interface for a stacktrace dataset called Strobelight. Searching was literally if s0 == 'foo' || s1 == 'foo'... etc. This horrified the real Scuba devs enough to add proper vector type and search operators.
Reputation for facts and accuracy is the lifeblood for mainstream newspapers, because it attracts a specific demographic that they can charge a premium for the ad space. Degrading newspapers to the point of 'entertainment' is just fallacious
I do find it said that it is near impossible to find non-3D IMAX showings. My wife isn't a fan of the 3D. So I'm often forced to go to the normal showing and skip the IMAX showing.

It'd be great if they had both!