skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So I've been following the english Go community as an outsider ever since the first AlphaGo matches, and it's been great and fascinating to see what an impact AlphaGo has had across all levels of play.

Fan Hui has the advantage of being able to peek behind the curtain, but other pro players have still been studying every public AlphaGo match to try to find what sequences and types of moves it prefers, and which well-known and commonly accepted sequences it completely avoids. The problem, of course, is that if you simply imitate without understanding then you may end up doing stupid things. In fact, even AlphaGo did this against Lee Sedol whenever it played out forcing moves which only served to limit its options and point potential—in some cases strictly losing itself points—all because nobody teaches AlphaGo that when humans play these moves it's often because they're into overtime and simply have to play a move before time runs out to avoid losing on time, and it gives the human more time to read out a complicated sequence elsewhere on the board.

So while it's interesting and potentially helpful to be able to predict and imitate an algorithm, AlphaGo helps show how it's even better to learn, as Fan Hui is attempting to do, what's really going on behind the scenes.

Despite never having placed a Go stone in my life, I have particularly enjoyed Nick Sibicky's Go lectures on YouTube. This one analyzing some of AlphaGo's tendencies from its recent online matches is particularly interesting: https://youtu.be/v8Eh41m7gVA
The way you phrased it previously suggested equivalence (all wealthy are insiders) rather than tendency (more wealthy are insiders).
Mostly they mean very little. Syndicates are very loose affiliations and the information is mostly there to aid investors regarding participation...no matter what anyone might suggest, the site is focused on investors and their needs...which makes sense once you realize that people with money are harder to attract and retain than people who want money.

The use of 'deals' is the tipoff. Professional investors, unlike the retail investors that have retirement funds and stocks and bonds and such, do deals. They have deal flows. Each deal flow has a velocity and volume that requires sufficient liquidity and tolerance for risk. Syndicates with high volume high velocity deal flows are suitable from some investors and not others. Syndicates with lower volume and less risk attract a different market segment of investors.
Unless you have a pile of cash to invest, this stuff does not mean much.

For example, Company A in tech segment I looks at syndicate W and sees investment in companies B and C in segment I and D and E in related segments H and J. They look at Syndicate X and see one investment in segment K. They look at Syndicate Y and see no investments in I, J, or K.

Which one is worth focusing on? There's no way for company A to tell from the data. W may be looking to diversify. X may be happy with having one investment in the larger segment that is the union of H,I,J. Y may be looking to get into H,I,J or not.

Unlike Company A, a qualified investor can simply ask each syndicate about its strategy and see how it matches their goals. Moreover they can look at Syndicate W and decide whether or not it is overexposed.
They will build high... as long as the price and rent remain high. It the price and rent stop raising and go down, they stop building high. Especially considering that building high is more costly, prices have to stay very high to justify building high. Building high / high density does not really lower market prices, that would kill the reason for building high.
I found hackernews when I was a technical recruiter and realized browsing articles here would allow me to be more credible with clients and developers. Now I run the career management / job training department at a coding bootcamp and hackernews feels like the only quality source of discussion about technical news. I also share a lot of articles from here, using buffer, to my linkedin and twitter page.
Well, the word "hacker" in this context really means "thinker." I mentally substitute it as "Thinker News" when I reflect on what the site is about as that better describes a site full of IT and non-IT people delivering deep insights. Like you, I've learned from the many non-technical or just non-IT people that are here. I say "or" because there's many technical fields other than computers. I'm also curious how they discovered the site as it might hint at how to get more of them on here. I've met many people in other fields who would make good commmenters but not sure what entices such people to discussion forums like this.
Picking a random example:

https://2016.djangocon.us/coc/

“All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks.

Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other attendees. Behave professionally. Remember that harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes are not appropriate for DjangoCon. Attendees violating these rules may be asked to leave the conference without a refund at the sole discretion of the conference organizers.”

So if someone decided that they wanted to have a bunch of bikini pictures in their slides or to crack jokes about something being ghetto it's starting from a different place. Because the conference organizers thought about this in advance they don't need to worry about making policy on the fly or having different people give different off-the-cuff answers and then be hammered for later changes.

Just as something like a coding style guide doesn't solve every question in software, this doesn't solve every issue related to personal conduct but it sets an overall direction and gives people an idea of what to expect: someone going to a conference with that CoC would know that the expectations are set to “business professional” rather than “hanging with my bros at the bar”. You might think that something is obvious but once any event expands beyond a small homogeneous group of people all bets are off.

(And, yes, it's shortcuts just as all policies, laws, etc. are because it's easier to have a general trend known in advance than to try to reason about it from first principles after the fact.)
How to Set Up an OpAmp Circuit to Do Complex Mathematics
"Also, I'd guess this "alien style" has a lot to do with the user's choice of algorithm and representation."

I'd find that very likely. In the machine learning world the term "bias" means something more like "what the set of hypotheses the learning system can have is" rather than the human English definition, and my question would be, do the biases of the learning processes even encompass "fractal" solutions? They probably don't, because you would encode what is even manufacturable in the first place directly into the biases of the system, because otherwise the learning system is very likely to pop out an optimal solution that is not manufacturable at all. Nobody wants to manufacture a fractalline lattice, whereas given how Nature grows them they come up very naturally.

On that note, another thing you have to watch out for with these solutions is that you didn't miss an issue in your optimization. I'm looking at the first picture in the article, at the middle solution. It has a very fine mesh at the very top. I hope that either that mesh isn't all that important, or that we are effectively-100% sure this part is never going to corrode or experience other manufacturing defects (excessively large metal crystals perhaps) that could cause such a fine tracery of metal to be not work the way the model is expecting. (Unless there is some on the inside, the third piece doesn't seem to have that problem, it looks a lot more robust.) Of course there are places where we can indeed be confident that corrosion is not an issue, and the parts could be tested; I'm not saying that this particular instance is guaranteed to be flawed, just using this as an example of the possible issues with this style of design.
I am a bit geeky as well, so I enjoy the general discussions. HN is also an interesting place discover new interesting technologies.

Then I sort of like to cringe at the whole "start-up" culture. :)
My perspective on the recent language changes to Python
Git cheat list
> I know what you're trying to say, but to the average user (which Ubuntu probably targets), does it matter?

I'm not trying to make a point here, I just wanted to give some context to someone asking a question. I'm not an Ubuntu user, but I'm not an Ubuntu hater either: the distribution I use (Linux Mint) wouldn't even work without Ubuntu.
> it supports more hardware since the kernel is more recent

Kernel ABIs are pretty static so drivers can be backported for earlier kernels more easily than recompiling the entirety of Ubuntu Server for an unsupported CPU architecture - such as SPARC.

That's what I meant when I said Debian supports more architectures.

However going back to your previous point about the age of Debian, you don't have to run the default repositories. If you run "testing" or "sid" then you can be just as up-to-date as Ubuntu or even more bleeding edge. In fact it wasn't that many years ago when Ubuntu was effectively just a reskinned Debian + testing repositories (I'm talking pre Unity, upstart, etc). But at the end of the day, it's all FOSS so anything Ubuntu runs can also be run on Debian, Arch, etc. It's just Debian already ships compiled binaries for more alternative CPU architectures can Canonical do with Ubuntu. Which is why I said supporting different platforms isn't anything new to Linux nor unique to Ubuntu.

> good luck Debian / BSD like on modern laptops.*

I have done. They worked fine. In fact FreeBSD was my primary OS for a period of time and Debian has always been my primary "debian-like" platform for all bar media centres (which do run vanilla Ubuntu). I have also ran officially supported variations of Ubuntu as my primary OS for short periods of time as well. I've tried them all before I finally found what OS I felt right for me.

So I do have considerable experience backing up my claims :)
Maybe it's the posts about business, science, philosphy, economics and so on.
I thought that would be anyone who doesn't work in a "technology" field and/or doesn't have a strong interest in technology.
I would say that being a "technical" person, like any other human trait, is a gradient and foremost a matter of self-description in this context. While most articles on HN are not about programming, they're very prominently technology-oriented or topics that directly affect technology or the people working in it.
Are there open tools for redistricting from census data, given a criteria?
I suspect basic income would lead to an increase in inflation in the current environment. Wouldn't many people continue to work having received their stipend in order to obtain a higher standard of living than previously possible? (I know I would) Then wouldn't it follow that inflation would then take place all but entirely removing the utility of the basic income? In my opinion the jury is still out in regards to actually increasing standards of living over decade long time frames. It is entirely possible that it harms vulnerable people more than it aids them. More data is needed.
And not because they are islamist per se.
Comments

Ease of selecting and reading "stuff" (and not reading)

Subject matter. I have a degree in math and CPS back in the Herman Hollerith days and enjoy the subject matter.
Teleconsole: Share your Unix terminal in seconds
Obviously there are going to be pros and cons. Sure, a percentage of the poor today are sometimes hungry. But very few are starving.

Maybe I'm alone, but I would rather be a poor person in 2017 than a rich person in the 1400s. The internet itself is enough of a benefit for me.
I don't know if I quite count as "non-technical", but I'm definitely not an "engineering type". I'm a self-taught web developer and work primarily with JavaScript. The only algorithm I know is sorting. I am not a "hacker".

I'm here to learn what I don't know about "engineering" so I can be better at my job!
Unless you're on of the few patrons of the service with a nice summer rental or something. Now you're competing with this acquisition instead of other customers with nicer rentals in exotic places etc.
Well I was referring to the parent comment.

> There's a possibility that we won't invent new jobs in time. We should think about what that means.

Of course the market ponders the future but only in order to make the largest profits and it can only think about things that easily can be reduced to money/value. So what I meant was more that it can't think about the "meaning" of a current trend, ie jobs going away. In retrospect it _can_ see what the change "meant" for the economy.

What I'm saying that that we can try to think about the possibility that automatization will eat jobs at a rate greater than it creates jobs. We can hypothesize that there will be a new equilibrium in the future. If that time is decades away and during this process many people will be thrown out of a meaningful/constructive way of life where you have a job into a highly stressful hankering along on random shit it might be a good idea that we together (those who have jobs) pool a part of our income and provide something like a minimum wage (or something that we think out which is super way better) by taxation. Sacrificing a bit of the speed of which the the total capital accumulates with the 1% in order to provide a better life for the 99%.
I believe it's when an object is so far in the distance that it doesn't require stereo rendering, just render it once.
I'd say I'm pretty technical (I do frontend / full-stack work in my dayjob), but as startupdiscuss said below, it's a spectrum. There are plenty of people that are better coders than me, that work lower-level in the stack or are more mathematically inclined.

The tech articles aren't the only reason I come back - there are a lot of useful insights here around startups, business practices and culture, as well as war stories from entrepreneurs. The more places I work the more I observe that engineering skills are great, but not the main hurdle for product or company success.
Gore & Associates (makes of GoreTex) operate like this. Whole groups of worker-owned co-ops in Northern Italy (Emilia-Romagna) also operate more or less this way, in a loosely-coupled network.

The trend in modern employment toward more individual empowerment, less hierarchy, and greater profit share points toward a co-op future for a large band of white collar jobs. Or it would, if they weren't so heavily discriminated against in the US tax code.
> HN's primary audience is "hackers"

Who told you that?? HN's primary audience is startup people, it was even called startup news in the beginning. It certainly has nothing to do with hackers (for any definition of hacker).

HN exists to support YC, that's all.
> "The one that allows you to improve the quality of your code with unit testing and type checking"

Wait, are we really talking about a static website?

I'm a big fan of React and all the JS ecosystem, but when I need a static website, I just make my bunch of html files (and I copy/paste the same header/footer on each), my css file, eventually 2 lines of JS directly in a <script> tag to toggle a menu on mobile devices, I upload it on S3/CloudFront and that's it.
Lol wrong way of marketing own business. Purely nonsense :/
Everyone knows there are secrets on Github.
I've yet to find higher quality discussions covering a broad range of topics on the internet.

Also the uncluttered U/I...no distractions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12454742
Iz This the Besst Reel Esteight Sine Evar?
Somewhere out there silicon based life is having the same argument about carbon based life.
Humans can create thoughtful art, write meaningful stories and journalism. But the vast majority of that content is garbage and has negative value. I wouldn't want it even for free; someone would have to pay me to consume it.
You use JavaScript! You're a hacker. :)
I'm a swedish social democrat, I really shouldn't be discussing politics on HN.
Off the top of my head:

1. GitHub is a broadly-adopted tool that the author probably already knew how to use

2. It's hard to accept PRs on Medium

3. It allows the author to list the repository on his profile, thereby helping them convey competency to potential employers

4. It's easier to archive a git repo than a Medium post, and easier to rehost elsewhere in the future if/when GitHub dies.

5. Git allows change tracking.

6. It uses Markdown, which can be processed through automated tools to produce a variety of formats, from PDFs for email to EPUB to send to a physical publisher.
Nobody is forcing you to like it or use it.

SPAs definitely try to force me to use JavaScript when browsing.
While I don't disagree, curious to hear your reasoning for not doing this.
> Still, being able to submit patches via email is an absolutely necessary skill for everyone who considers himself a hacker. Lack of it makes you unable to contribute to many great projects

What? That sounds like a problem with the projects, not the people. Why make it so much harder to get contributions?
i can't even tell if your post is satire.
> No Pieter, you should read your email more carefully, this is a consequence of your messiness.

Yep. End of story.
Fortune's 2017 World's Most Admired Companies
Eh, I think it is good in Java in cases where Null input is possible.
ASCII art map of the World: using geospatial processing
I don't smoke, but I am a beekeeper, so I am often breathing in smoke. I've always worried a little if that was bad for me. I guess I will try harder not to breathe it in. Without it, I would get many more stings, which I assume is also not good. There is a chemical replacement for smoke, but that is probably even worse.
I'm glad you didn't; I think picturing and calling three judges 'enemies of the people' was one of many steps in a long descent from news to reactionary propoganda; and as such should be shunned by all civilized people everywhere.

(Or possibly just fascist propaganda, since conservatives usually believe in the rule of law.)
sorry yes, I meant the CBSA :)
> IMO, the natural progression that combats the impact of robots is to transition from a "buy a new one" society to a "fix the old one" society.

The thing is, it's probably cheaper to buy a new robot-produced item than to pay a human being to repair the old one (particularly if one can hand the broken old item to a robot recycler).
>"They're claiming any parking is a "subsidy". They want minimum parking requirements eliminated."

Sorry I am not understanding what you mean by "minimum parking requirements". I just went an looked at the article again, they mention increasing prices on parking but I'm understanding what "minimum parking requirements" mean here.

Parking is interesting though because although the price of spaces might be held artificially low by subsidies, the "game of parking" in cities is also a tremendous cash cow in the form of parking tickets. Parking tickets are one of those things that are not there to disincentivize people from bad behavior but rather as a revenue generator for the city.

So while I am all in favor of eliminating parking spaces and widening side walks but I think that cities have come to rely on parking tickets:

http://www.parkingtoday.com/blog/2013/12/washington-d-c-tops...

Sadly I think this is the real reason you won't see any appreciable change in the existing subsidized parking model. The lure of cheap parking is also the great enabler of "parking enforcement as revenue generator" for cities.
Not for long! The Racket community is in the process of relicensing under a more permissive license.

See https://github.com/racket/racket/issues/1570
Welcome to today's extreme left.
> It certainly has nothing to do with hackers

This seems a rather extreme assertion about a website named Hacker News.
Less powerful but more usable.
I definitely have an engineering background but I think I can understand people that come here without one. In the end HN is really a place to talk about also a lot about many other topics.

I mean, just glancing at the front page now:

- What makes the perfect office?

- Your personal Facebook Live videos can legally end up on TV

- Let’s not demonize driving, just stop subsidizing it

- Airbnb Acquires Luxury Retreats, Beating Out Expedia, Accor

- Humans evolved to tolerate smoke poisoning
>> "The customer needs to keep contact information up to date."

I own a few domain names and they ask me to update this info one per year. I've never understood why they need it at all though. Why should they have my address/contact info and why should it be publicly available? I'm sure the answer is obvious but I can't figure it out.
Probably the difference between having Angular being a full MVC framework, while React is simply a View library you combine with other libraries to get what you need.

Combining various libraries can be a pain and sorting out all of the dependencies and node modules like he stated can be cumbersome.
I am self-learning programming and find HN to be a good resource, even if a lot of it is over my head. There's also discussion here that doesn't exist on other websites about things I like, such as the BSDs and Lisps. It's also a good place to skim tech news because if it matters it's generally on the top page with a lot of comments.
> We've now reached the point where HTML and CSS served via a normal webserver is regarded as insufficient

We've reached this point in 1995, that's why Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP !

Edit: Oh, I just realised that this is even older than the CSS spec itself (1996). So technically, there has been no point in time where HTML and CSS served via a normal webserver[1] were regarded as sufficient :)

[1]: what is a «normal webserver» anyway ?
Havard-led woolly mammoth de-extinction project gets closer to reality
I get that you don't want things behind your back, but what's wrong with overhead lights? I mean every office/room/space has a light on the ceiling.
I'd change the title to: "Have your MVP publicly facing within 15 minutes with Serverless." IMO takes a lot more care, planning, and implementation details before I'd consider something a truly prod env.
Why does this feel like using a sledgehammer to hang a painting? I know people like React a lot, but it has no place generating a static website.
An Overview of Open Standards for IoT Communication Protocols
I don't know about your city, but availability of transit generally seems to be well over demand where I live.
There is nothing wrong with taking a distribution from a company; investors/founders need a payout.

while I agree with much of the content, I do disagree with this statement: "Companies that keep reinvesting keep adding risk to their companies."

I can't agree with this assertion. Companies that keep reinvesting their profits are doing it to finance future growth. Obviously, future growth implies a degree of risk. But you could argue that by reinvesting profits, you are de-risking the future by building capability to satisfy a demand and the proof of demand is the profit generated.
Maybe "Beautiful Racket" ?

http://beautifulracket.com/
Intellectual interest.
That requires pressuring manufacturers (whether legally or otherwise) to make their products more modular and standardized and less integrated and proprietary.

For instance, Apple's latest Macbooks get a 1/10 repairability score [1], when years ago it used to be higher. Now Apple is even fighting against legislation that would require it to make iPhones easier to repair [2].

This is not a clear-cut issue, though. I'm sure such regulations will impede innovation to some degree (less thinner devices, potentially lower battery life, etc). But as you said, we as a society need to decide on that compromise.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+Macbook+2015+Teardown...

[2] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/source-apple-will...