skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was a running theme in the "original" PG essays. Every big startup story from that era seems to have an episode like Google offering themselves to Yahoo for $1m. PG (and others) spent a lot of time wondering why the big guys didn't just acquire startups en masse. Now they do.

And for most founders, taking that offer is a rational move, even when the company is quite mature. For a non-diversified human, a 100% chance of $50m is worth enormously more than a 10% chance of $500m.

What fascinates me is the strategy, pioneered by Facebook, of pushing that logic as far as it will go, and spending hitherto-inconceivable amounts of money to acquire any social networking or communication product that could possibly compete with it, long after they achieve product/market fit but before they're so big as to be a sure thing. I remember when $1bn for Instagram was a lot...
In the movie Terminator 2, a futuristic robot with advanced AI was developed by reverse engineering a futuristic chip.

In reality, we do not need to reverse engineer a chip. We can just reverse engineer our own brains.
Having been to a few airports, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that they are not making a mistake 30% of the time.

Airplanes don't run out of fuel mid-flight, or crash 30% of the time, my luggage doesn't fail to arrive to its destination 30% of the time, and I've yet to show up to a flight, only to discover that my seat in just a hole in the floor.

Now, the flight attendants misunderstand my choice of mid-flight snack ~30% of the time, but that doesn't really matter, because it's always ~12 grams of peanut-related animal feed, anyways.
But why people let them do it?
I wish our government would make something of Rolls Royce's suggestion [1] from last year of developing small scale nuclear reactors for general usage, with an eye to utilising more of them in shipping, merchant and military.

Particularly since I read the other day that the Americans have over 140 nuclear-powered vessels (!!) [2].

But no, let's not capitalise on our capabilities — much better to squander them and instead outsource, wasting [credited-] billions and losing potential.

We really are a hopeless little country when it comes to self-belief sometimes.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/03/19/rolls-royce-c...

[2] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-n...
The sigma level in industry traditionally refers to the 'bandwidth', not the distance from the mean, so what you are thinking as 1 sigma is actually 2 sigma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma
If you have any information about your physical body on a resume they'll throw it out because it's a huge legal liability opening them up to discrimination lawsuits.
Yeah, the NV mobile driver clocks in at 292 MB (W7 x64) right now.

One thing that certainly blows up the size is that the NV driver installer bundles support for everything from the old NV 8600M - which IIRC was released in 2007.

If there's one thing I certainly can't whine about in times where phones carry less than 2 years updateability, then it is that NVidia still provides up-to-date drivers for a GPU chipset nearing a decade of life time.
I think a lot of it is that there's so much more digital paper trail and so much more stuff is done electronically nowadays you can't as easily stop being a thorn in their side (i.e activist for some cause) without them continuing to treat you like one.

In the 1960s you could decide that you'd done enough and move to a new city across the country and get a fairly fresh start. Now any trivial interaction with "the system" would get you red flagged at every subsequent interaction.

The cops "randomly" stop an acquaintance of mine fairly regularly and give him much more crap ever since one of his kids got a misdemeanor speeding ticket (threshold is 20-over which is typical traffic speed in some places) in that vehicle with those plates.

>think the US is about to rise into the Fourth Reich?

Not literally but people have diverse sets of political beliefs. It's not a stretch to imagine individual groups that are for/against something being persecuted. Imagine how civil rights activists or the pro-socialist hippies would be treated today.
A Cessna Skyhawk has range of 640nm, height of 8ft, length of 27ft, wingspan of 36ft, and payload of about 900lbs. Take the pilot out, streamline & shorten the fuselage, and give it folding wings, and you're basically there for size, range, and payload.

For landing: well, SpaceX can land a rocket vertically on a drone ship after taking it to orbital velocity. You could do similar maneuvers with a drone. Flip the plane so that its wings act like a parachute to slow its descent, and then turn it around all the way to use the propeller to lower it onto the deck, then fold the wings. Without a pilot, the only limits on G-forces is the structural integrity of the airframe, and such planes are likely to land very lightly after completing their mission. Computer control lets you do things that would be totally impractical with a pilot, like maintain stability in a stall.

Takeoff seems the biggest challenge. Ground roll on the Cessna is 960 ft, and the drone will be at its heaviest on take-off. Maybe do an assisted take-off, launching from a gun barrel or compressed air cylinder? Again, without a pilot, you can be much more liberal with G-forces, and with computer control you can do things like unfold the wings in the air. It wouldn't fit in a single container then, but you could have a system of containerized components all working together.

Also, the Russians reportedly have containerized cruise missiles, which meet the requirements for range, payload, and take-off. They don't really have multi-mission capability, but it may not be all that far from there to drones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch2Rqte6XOs

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/7632...
2 sigma is a defective rate of 31%. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma#Sigma_levels
On the other hand, I've also seen forum threads about blockbuster games like FFXV that are getting VR support, and many of the comments are "why bother? 3D wouldn't add anything to this sort of game anyway."
The whole point of my earlier comment was that I want a way to wipe my phone. I think that has been lost.
Not a book, but I loved this series about building a Pascal interpreter (currently 12 parts): https://ruslanspivak.com/lsbasi-part1/

It was always on my bucket list to learn to write programming languages, but it's very daunting - this made it easy to learn in bite-sized chunks.
in Syria as well
This is the Art of the Deal:

1. Think big
2. Protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself
3. Maximize your options
4. Know your market
5. Use your leverage
6. Enhance your location
7. Get the word out
8. Fight back
9. Deliver the goods
10. Contain the costs
11. Have fun

Aside from the last one, these are simply statements of strategy on how to achieve your goals. This is not a framework for arriving at the goals themselves. You could use this strategy to work for autocracy or democracy or really any world you want. The first question to ask is which world you want to live in, not how to get there.

His only statements on normative, not positive, values come from things like "America winning" and "being great" and "going back." But it absolutely true that, for many Americans, these are a contradiction in terms.

I can attempt to infer his values from these vague statements, but I think that it is improper for a leader to not start with a set of first principles, independent from ill-defined notions like "winning", that guide what it means to win and what it means to be great.
Meh. I can hear the P-270 Moskit (SSN2 Sunburn) operators laughing form here ..
Announcing the Bcoin v1.0.0 Beta Release
Round Up by Enzer
Bedrock Linux
This Is the Template I Use to Align Critical Client Expectations
AND nobody's eyeballs got cooked.
I can change the battery life of my laptop by buying a different laptop.

I can't change my office layout without switching jobs.
>So, the same happens with American football, or baseball, or sports that are not widely followed elsewhere. Those types of conversations marginalize foreigners, even if it's non intentional.

What about those of us Americans who don't give two shits about American football or baseball or other sports (including cricket)?

And am I "marginalizing" someone if I want to talk about D&D, or retro gaming, or astrophysics, or some obscure musical genre?
I'm assuming this is sarcasm, but in case anybody thinks this, just remember: money = freedom.
Those are mostly interested in biomimetic movement rather than intelligence. They do have some applications, but i don't think they ve convinced the world that mimicking organisms is necessarily optimal.
what's wrong with being an exterminator?
Security in voice driven conversational applications
I disagree with your assessment that Republican voters are primarily motivated by social issues, yet implicitly opposed to "pro-business and anti-labor" things. There are quite a few Republican voters who prefer them on (stated) economic issues and hold their nose when it comes to the social stuff.

Really, the problem (or benefit, depending on your point of view) is that the two party system creates very broad coalitions of people with differing interests. The problem with the Republican coalition is that many of its constituents want things which are contradictory. Like, say, free market economic policies and stricter immigration (which is a form of labor market regulation).

The Democrats have their own versions of these problems, but they're usually less obvious because their coalition is more explicitly transactional.
Thanks for the feedback. Until we provide a way to allow/disable data collection, we have disabled completely the data sending (see https://github.com/wallix/awless/commit/f6389e75787390bd7797...).
I spent a lot of time with Ant and was pretty good at it because I understood the tragically backward 'first writer wins' decision they made and had an elaborate set of techniques to work around it. That decision and the attempt to keep all conditional behavior entirely out of the build process wounded it gravely. The fact that they kept making compatibility breaking changes in minor version numbers was the genesis of my dim view of Jakarta projects. Once I started noticing the pattern I couldn't stop.

I think we are finally starting to accept that Turing-complete data is a bug, despite what the Lisp people have been saying for 50 years, and is not a feature on the Internet. Microsoft served as the poster child in the 90's.

The tension, I strongly believe, comes during debugging. When you are trying to figure out why the data doesn't look right, the less the code resembles the data being emitted, the harder it is to locate the source of the error. Templating engines get pretty close to addressing that concern, in ways that transforms or generators don't. So we keep trying to invent a better one. But once you let a little logic in, everybody wants all the logic.

Ant found the Uncanny Valley, in a way that few other tools have managed. I think I'm okay with your implication that it was actually worse than XSLT, which is saying a lot.

[edit] Ant is also the reason I shift uncomfortably whenever someone announces proudly that a tool was 'designed and implemented on a plane trip'. I'd rather have code you wrote when drunk than code you made while stuffed in a sardine can, subjected to noise levels that OSHA would have issues with, and suffering from altitude sickness. You literally designed this while your brain wasn't getting enough oxygen.
> If you're not a citizen, I think this is probably pretty simple: don't carry anything across the border that you would be uncomfortable being forced to unlock.

I think this applies whether or not you are a citizen, whether or not you entering the U.S. or another state, and frankly whether we're talking about electronic data or not. If you don't want it searched, examined or confiscated, don't enter a nation state with it!

> It is a very bad plan to attempt to outsmart CBP with clever encryption strategies. If you want to protect something, don't bring it to a border crossing.

Excellent advice. You can't outsmart customs with clever encryption strategies.
Conversely, Trump has been talking about reducing NATO commitments and that Europe doesn't "pay its own way". Difficult to know which way it would go.
What I learned from becoming a landlord
Five-Day Fasting Diet Could Fight Disease, Slow Aging
Want to sell your SaaS business or side project?
I'm interested in entering the world of micropreneurship through acquisition and looking to buy a SaaS business or side project. I would also consider a partnership if you're so inclined.

Drop me a note via ed (dot) castano (at) gmail if you are interested in exploring. I'm a self-taught hacker, though in reality, that's not at all where I can add value. http://mbahacks.com/post/47216674637/why-i-created-mbahackscom-or-why-i-am-learnin

My background is mainly in Product, Marketing, Operations, and Strategy. If anything, I'd love to meet some of the talented people out there in HN world.
I'm fairly certain most experts can tell the difference and not all experts are for prescribing medicine either (I believe John Ratey is fairly against it).

Being disobedient does not mean ADHD (and of course the inverse) and there different expressions of ADHD as well (like the passive wondering mind version of which I have). Unfortunately the mass public (and apparently you as well based on your comment) associate hyperactive disobedient behavior with ADHD.
> Adding tuples (value, error)

Like https://godoc.org/net/http#Get?
> For whatever reason, ... they're referring to the width of the band around the mean.

That's exactly how I learnt it in secondary school, the standard deviation, what's the problem?
No doubt. I think the allure of a one-size-fits-all aircraft is just too tempting. For each new generation people just throw away the failures of the past by claiming that NOW we have the technology to not have those same issues.
I would highly consider revising your js/time.js if you want to be consider for a javascript development position, there are some painful issues here.

http://o23.io/js/time.js

please see

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
And "Apache Groovy" since it joined the ASF 2 years ago.
None of us know. It's a real problem.
When we fix software, we know that full rewrites are bad ideas, and that the way to success is to make easy changes until finally you end up with a better product. This is true because failing, for any amount of time, is a terrible outcome. However, when it comes to moving upward for bigger opportunities, the opposite is true: Little is gained by very slow grinding.

Wondering how to get all wealthy people to trust you is the wrong question: What you want is ONE wealthy person to trust you. 300 failed pitches don't matter. You just want to succeed once.

Therefore, my strategy is to aim as high as you can, be ok with a bunch of failures, and once you have success, consider whether you can use it to aim even higher, now that you have established a higher baseline. It's better to have one resounding success an 50 failures at convincing people that never failing, but aiming way too low.
They use very rudimentary sketches that have little to do with real neurons. ANNs have been mimicking these things in a slightly lower detail since the 60s. We can do better pattern matching with ANNs.
> VR is bulky, expensive, technologically still very rough, and there is currently no content that makes anyone excited to get home to get a few more hours of it every night.

Not only that, we had "VR" (with shutter goggles) 20 years ago that you could have said exactly the same thing about, and exactly the same thing happened. The hype train failed to stop at reality station, jumped the tracks, rolled down an embankment, and burst into flames. VR lived on in niche applications. Just like it's going to this time.
This dude should learn to use PowerPivot, it will blow his mind and get him back to the old beloved Excel hands. Most of his examples of "why move to R" can be easily solved with PowerPivot and PowerQuery, with a nice GUI and not a clunky command line.
At least with piano playing and probably playing other instruments, the assumption is that since your hands are still growing and developing when you are a kid, they are formable and practice has a better effect than when they are mature. Maybe the same holds for the brain?
Generally it's not so much what you build, but how it's built. If I look at your project, I'll be asking myself these kinds of questions:

1) Do you understand databases, or did you choose an easy project that lets you avoid knowledge of databases?

2) Do you understand how to write code on the serverside (either PHP, or Node, or Java, or Django, or something like that)?

3) Do you understand CSS/HTML/Javascript, or did you choose a project that makes it easy to avoid these things? Bonus points for React or similar framework.

4) If you are looking for work as a frontend developer, I would also include things like, "is the website attractive? Is it easy to use/user friendly?"

5) Do you know processes......git, Jenkins, AWS deployment, etc?

You don't have to be perfect in all those categories, of course, but the higher you score in each of them, the better.
"Show don't tell" is a pretty basic (but incredibly important) writing concept that many people never learn.
> Why is this being accepted as even remotely reasonable?

That it's unreasonable and unacceptable doesn't mean that it's illegal. Despite your and my hopes, not all unreasonable and unacceptable things are illegal.

> What about 'login with Facebook' sites?

Don't do that then.

> We here know that we should change our password and logout of existing sessions ASAP after being made to do it, but our non-technical family members may not.

If you've given access to your account to someone else, you've already lost, whether you log out quickly afterwards or not.

Don't put yourself in a position in which you must log into an account you care about.
It occurs to me that "prosumer" military sims will probably prop up continued VR development even if the consumer-gaming market stops caring. Just like the US Interstate is mostly there to be a military logistics system, and smart-phone GPS is a pure "side-effect" of ICBM guidance systems, I could imagine that we get cheap VR mostly as a side-effect of the military demanding cheaper and higher-fidelity training simulation software. Stuff like http://www.prepar3d.com fits VR so well it's crazy.
I don't understand what you're getting at. One program is vulnerable, therefor make all programs vulnerable?
Aphyr's test is not a benchmark. It is a test of database correctness under a carefully constructed set of pathological circumstances. It cannot be used to infer real-world performance behavior.

Yes, the general advice for users of the GAE datastore is to build Entity Groups around the data for a single user. That isn't absolute though, and it doesn't cause problems for watch lists; the Watch can be part of the User's EG rather than the Issue's EG. Or it can be its own EG. In practice this doesn't require as much consideration as you probably imagine.
I believe that anybody with the aptitude for abstract thought can learn programming and mathematics at any age, and that anybody without the aptitude for abstract thought is never going to become competent at programming or mathematics no matter how early they start or how hard they work at it.
> Companies simply do not hire generalists other than very narrow corner cases

Then he ought to be spending 90% of his effort finding those narrow corner cases instead of sending out 1,000,000 applications.
It's 99% luck, 0.99% perspiration and 0.01% innovation.
How Amazon is already conquering air, road, and sea in 2017
Pretty sure his post was sarcasm. ;-)
I think you meant "km," not "nm."

Cessna Skyhawks also do not, you know, carry munitions, and have a top speed of about 180mph. I'm by no means an aerospace engineer, but I think a blithe assumption that you can take a slow, light, un-durable civilian aircraft, turn it VTOL, arm it, and launch it from a box essentially no larger than it is, and have an even remotely effective combat aircraft, is unfounded.

And in any case, that's still not a "swarm."
4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump
Yeah, and it's apparently also shifted down by 1.5 sigma.
I would kill for an R package that displays R error messages as something useful. Especially if it's happening 200 lines deep in a library somewhere, it would be nice for that library to catch the error and display something that pertains to what I wrote instead of just throwing whatever error occurs on that line. Or at least tell me what library the error occurred in so I don't have to guess.
Personally i like to travel with a burn phone that only has the contacts i need in case something happens to me and dont bring laptop because m usually not traveling internationally for work.
Neat stuff!

Notes:

- pacemaker warning sign on the edge of the doorframe

- Frequency smack in the middle of the AM band (1.32 MHz)

- demo'ing very low power consumers

- very directionally sensitive (just like any other radio transmitter)

- room is set up like a Faraday cage
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13662204 and marked it off-topic.
The right response to improvement, is to continue to improve. The world ain't perfect yet.
that's the Next Big Thing in software engineering. lay off your QA department and shovel the burden on the users, who work for less than minimum wage. Actually, they pay you to find your bugs.
> What Happens When Two Bankers and an Engineer Get a Billion Dollars?

To quote Willy Wonka, "They lived happily ever after."
For learning Haskell: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_...
I concur, I really don't see what value this brings over the official aws cli.
I agree with this, but at the same time some solution for type safe generic data structures would be nice. I'm not sure if there is a best-of-both-worlds solution. :/
As a defensive measure, why can't random noise just be added to the image prior to classification attempt?
http://www.helios32.com/resources.htm

Radiosity: A Programmer's Perspective by Ian Ashdown is a full numerically accurate hemicube radiative transfer engine from start to finish. Now a free pdf.
This is also the first thing that came to mind for me. One of the finest web dev tutorials ever written.
> FFS, there is a conference on how to not screw things up in real life with Excel.

> In Excel, I change one or two cells and see everything update immediately

This is the problem - it's all too easy to change cells, misclick, and generally make mistakes. When you do things from a programming language, you need to be explicit about operations, and explicit about what changes you're making.

Spreadsheets should be for entering data only, R is for processing data.

All the examples of enter data, create a chart, oh let's change/update some data, oh let's add something to the file, etc..., are why you end up with incredibly convulated spreadsheets that inevitably are filled with errors.

Enter your data with whatever tool you want (spreadsheet works for this), then process it (R works for this), then shove it in a database. Nice and easy, not error prone, and every tool can have easy access since databases are ubiquitous.
> You can't reasonably use Python or Ruby on the frontend

You can use Ruby via Opal, and there are a few front-end (and at least one isomorphic full-stack) frameworks.

For Python there is Brython, but I don't know of any FE frameworks.
Bollocks. Full Stack Developer is just a formal title for generalist.
Forgot to mention:

First chapter of the book takes you through creating your own "Suave" functional web development library, which was a lot of fun and eye opening.