skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can imagine licensing being a terrible PIA for programmers. If you work only in c# at work and learn some new language during your free-time, getting a license for the new language could be so time-consuming and not worth it (studying the obscurities of the language and actually taking a test). That is if there is a new license for every language and job type.
Doesn't work well at high traffic times in some neighborhoods.
I'd suggest that if a person is not from the areas affected then they possibly aren't getting an accurate grasp on the reality via media.

If I trusted my country's media then I'd think that the main issues affecting poorer demographics are drug addiction, homelessness, joblessness due to inaccessibility of education...i.e. lots of things you can fix by electing the correct people and increasing funding.

These are issues, but they're tiny minority issues which somehow remain de rigueur for the media to talk about. In the actual communities the issues are more predominant and less politically correct to talk about, such as tensions between indigenous populations and immigrants, single parenthood, joblessness due to cheaper labour from emerging economies, joblessness due to the facilitation of employer abuses by government through zero hour contracts, gang violence in-part due to drug usage by wealthier classes, and so on.

I don't read American newspapers but I'm guessing that you'll see a lot of the former and none of the latter in the Times.
Remember, Wirth designed Pascal as a teaching language. One-pass compilation, no forward declarations, built-in I/O. Turbo Pascal could compile to a .com file, 64KB max, 16-bit pointers. I'm not sure there was a linker; the first executable instruction was the first byte in e file.

The neat trick was debugging. Instead of tagging to object code with source-code line numbers, to break on line N, Turbo Pascal simply recompiled the source up to line N, and used the size of the output to match the instruction pointer in the debugged image. Move to next line? Compile one more line, and stop at the last produced instruction.

But these were tiny programs, written ab initio. No readline, no X, no network, no database. Hardly any filesystem. To do something akin to readdir(3) meant writing a bespoke function to call the DOS interrupt. Putting a menu on the screen required positioning the cursor in the video buffer and putting each character in successive locations, allowing for the attribute byte.

If Turbo Pascal was simple, it was also primitive. Much bigger C programs compile in the blink of an eye today. Complex programs take a long time to build today, yes. They did then, too.
I am not able to answer this but i really think 'quora' would prove benificial for you
The psychology of human misjudgement (Munger)
"compile-time GC" sounds like it would apply to C/C++'s automatic storage duration too.
The problem with this response is that it is anecdotal and not statistically significant. Which makes it useless, unfortunately.

I never claimed Macs didn't have hardware issues. I claimed that it is nearly impossible to convince a die-hard Windows user that perhaps they might be happier overall on a Mac.
You missed the sha-1 collision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713480

Besides the two Uber stories, it's simply that a large number of incredible events have happened recently. If you'd have told me about the sha-1 collision, Cloudbleed, S3 going down, or the seven exoplanets, I'd have predicted 1K+ votes for any of them, simply because they're very newsworthy, relevant, and super interesting to HN readers.

The two Uber stories hit a nerve in a hot topic, adding a lot of specifics to formerly vague concerns/accusations. If you'd have shown me the stories before they were posted, I would have predicted "front page, probably in the 200-400 range", rather than the 2K+ votes they each got. Either they were very lucky, or (more likely) my model doesn't account for that particular type of story.
Looks like a good data source to seed with.
The first Go program
Why not to use same thechnology for checking source code for errors?
> I hope one day before I die the media companies will realise that their old idea of breaking up the world into pieces and sublicensing is a stupid one.

If not, at least you can die laughing
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When compiled from C/C++, does WASM do bounds checking of pointers and arrays? What kind of memory safety does it offer?
JavaScript is strong competition both on the front end (source ecosystem) and the back end (compiler target).

For people who don't want to use JavaScript (they are using a different source ecosystem), compile-to-WebAssembly toolchains will be in direct competition with compile-to-JavaScript toolchains. It's not at all clear which ones will win. It may be different for each language.

For C++ and Rust I'd expect WebAssembly will perform well, since it fits these languages' runtime model better. But for garbage-collected languages, compiling to JavaScript may result in smaller and faster code, since you can reuse JavaScript's runtime instead of downloading it. There may not be any reason for Elm or Dart (for example) to replace a compiler that works well with one that targets WebAssembly. Or if you like Go, I'd at least try out GopherJS before thinking you need a whole new toolchain.

It's not just performance, either. Generating somewhat-readable JavaScript that you can debug using Chrome Devtools when something goes wrong is a pretty nice advantage.
I work in supply chain optimization, and reinforcement learning has been an important technique in the field for decades. Supply chain problems are naturally modeled as Markov decision problems (MDPs). As the state space of your MDPs gets bigger and bigger, simulation-based reinforcement learning becomes one of the most versatile techniques for approximating optimal solutions.

I see some sort of reinforcement learning as the most promising technique for overcoming the dramatically named "curse of dimensionality" in the state—the single biggest roadblock to optimizing more complex supply chain models.

In fact, the study of MDPs and their solutions stems from operations research, and I think studying problems in that context give you a powerful way of understanding how reinforcement learning algorithms work. Basic inventory control problems are very intuitive, and there's a natural progression from exact dynamic programming methods (Bellman iteration and policy iteration) to different reinforcement learning algorithms that really helps build an intuition for how RL works.
Introducing Pinterest Labs
> "Fake News" is about to get a lot more compelling hen you can make anyone say anything as long as you have some previous recordings of their voice.

Adobe has already developed that technology:

https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2016/11/ado...

Now imagine combining it with this:

Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk

Perhaps using the intonation from the face-actor's voice to guide the speech synthesis.
Your returns are potentially higher. And lower.

Let's say I want to take an Alaskan cruise, but I don't quite have the money. If I get a higher return I'll have enough to go. If I get a lower return I won't go, and I'll still have enough money for rent. In my (admittedly contrived) scenario I'm willing to accept more risk as long as my returns are potentially higher.
Hosting LAMP apps on Cloudron
In light grey on the bottom of the page, for me:
"SHOWTIME® available for extra monthly charge"

Yup, this is going to be exactly like Cable television, and it's no cheaper. No thank you, I cut that cord for a reason.

Maybe if it had no ads? But I'm sure it'll be live television with the ads. There's no point.
How close (# years?)are we to being able to replicate the voices of any given individual with sufficient samples of their voiceprint?
Will it end up costing the same when you break you bundle to only get internet from a provider and get "TV" from Youtube?

Yes, resistance is futile. ESPN won't accept less money per viewer "because Internet".

It makes no sense saving the same content multiple time because multiple people tried to DVR the same episode right?

There are some convoluted and non-intuitive legal precedents about this topic, but yeah, Google is probably only keeping one copy.

won't this cause an increase in internet bandwidth used?

Yes, bandwidth usage has increased significantly in recent years, probably faster than Moore's Law.
Oh, the agony of the military system. It has a learning curve all of its own.

RimWorld is great, but it just feels so much more sparse than DF - you only have a handful of folks. Graphics are nice (and the Prison Architect style is nice as well) and the way to assign orders is much needed (identical to a DF community add-on), but when it comes to Building Your Thang, it's just not a bustling community working against the odds.

It's interesting that so many things are based off what DF lacks (basic graphics, ui-friendliness) but don't implement the heart of DF (complexity), which is admittedly hard and was built up in DF over the course of years.
Ruby Rogues has really decreased in quality since the 'controversy' [0].

My pick is - GRSIOGR - http://giantrobots.fm/

[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/5aokv7/what_happened_...
Actual paper, free summary and full text:

http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(17)3017...
Actually I prefer the original Google privacy policy, I would not have signed up to gmail if it had, then, the current non-privacy policy. It's going to take me years - at least - to back out of using Google products, but I am starting that process; and just hoping I end up actually having a choice.

Privacy is one more "race to the bottom" where the government has to intervene, since acting one at a time consumers are helpless.
The problem setting for RL algorithms provides far less supervision than traditional supervised learning.

This is most clearly seen when you look at how you would train a supervised learning system to operate an RL agent - you would need to provide the correct action at every timestep. So RL algorithms are mostly interesting when you get periodic reward signals and the reward may depend significantly on actions you did previously, rather than the action you just did. Learning to grip objects is an interesting use case from robotics.

IMO the main reason it's getting more attention is that there is a lot of progress being made, and a lot of that progress is due to progress that is being made in the supervised learning of neural networks.

However, people see some strong parallels between RL and GANs which promise to greatly improve unsupervised and semi-supervised learning. Also there has been work on using RL algorithms (largely REINFORCE) to train non-differentiable parts of neural networks. And then there has been recent work on using RL to decide how to train neural nets over all.

So while most people in industry may never need to touch RL, it will be useful in some systems with time-dependent components and is worth learning from a research perspective.
> They know better than to be fickle with infrastructure offerings

Site Search seems like an infra offering to me.
Syncing the virtual DOM
SEPARATE "celebrity and news sources" FROM "friends and family"

You need limitless thumb scrolling energy to find tweets from friends.
On one hand, I'm excited about performance improvements. On the other, I lament the fact that this will kill one of the best parts of the web: the fact that the source is sent to the end user instead of a binary. It now makes the code and how it works opaque, thus killing the spirit of innovation and learning.
While Javascript has its flaws, it's been refined over many years and finally there are pretty decent ways of building UI's, using React, Vue etc. Wouldn't we have to start all over again if people begin to write UI code in languages not built or configured for interacting with the DOM?
Um, no thanks.

Most of that content is uninteresting, free with an antenna, and loaded with commercial breaks. I would rather spend that money for a season pass on Amazon, or to go out and see a movie once a month. If money weren't an issue, my time is still better spent on Netflix or watching lectures by smart people on YouTube. I guess its fine if they want to attract the geriatric crowd, but I cant imagine people in my generation paying that much for a vastly inferior experience. As others have said, a cheaper day pass would be better, as there still is a place for live content. Whether or not that should be a form of life support for the old guard corporate media empire, that's up to you.
It's in the abstract.
"... For the audio synthesis model, we implement a variant of WaveNet that requires fewer parameters and trains faster than the original ..."[1]

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.07825
Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Pierce--of course!

It doesn't help that many philosophers of mathematics are, for obvious reasons, either also logicians or mathematicians, so demarcating between advancements in philosophy of mathematics that clarify mathematics and advancements in mathematics that clarify mathematics can be a bit of a fool's errand.

Whatever the case, I dislike it when folks from the sciences or mathematics try to discredit or dismiss philosophy--funnier still, and luckily not as bad, is when they question the value of philosophy without realizing that question is in and of itself a highly philosophical question!

Philosophy has been around for a long time and isn't going anywhere in the perceivable future (though I suppose it depends on what metaphysics of time you subscribe to :) ).
See also: https://redd.it/3hn5gx
Twitter should never have succeed, it is a solution for a problem that never existed. It used funding money to artificially manufacture the need for it, to a point that news station started using it as a news source, which is IMO ridiculous.

I think it should just die. I never had a Twitter account and never thought that I'm missing something.

The only utility that twitter was providing was already solved by RSS feeds.
Reflections on S3 outage and S3 metadata limitations
Actual paper:

http://www.onlinejacc.org/content/accj/69/9/1129.full.pdf
Live TV isn't competing against TBP. You can't watch sports or other live events on TBP. Why would you sign up for a live TV service, if you prefer to watch things on demand on TPB?

For any live TV offering they are competing against traditional cable providers. Netflix is already on their way on figuring out the "on-demand" content space. If you look at the blog post, 3/4s of the channels offered are either sports or live news. This simply isn't a service for on demand content.
Pure gold all around. My favorite bit:

"the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce stages a sortie, but meets resistance."
Apple's Tim Cook: We really care about pro users
I just wrote a piece reflecting on the s3 outage and the limitations of s3 metadata/replication:

https://medium.com/@jim_dowling/reflections-on-s3s-architect...
Honestly, and this seems to be an unpopular opinion, the nostalgia and fetishization of the past is completely useless. Do we also yearn for the days of feudal France and its romantic castles dotting the landscape?

Those who wish for a return to a bakery and a cafe on each corner are prioritizing some fond memory of a bygone era over economic efficiency. Consumers speak with their wallets, and apparently their voices have been heard. Yes, everybody enjoys that romantic idyll, but nobody wants to pay for it.
"My voice is my passport."
Blogspam of

http://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediarelations/scientists-reach...
Well, each has its tradeoffs. JIT has low startup time, whereas Firefox will spend quite a while compiling before anything actually happens.
Agreed. But I've felt that way about minified JS for a long time too. I'm not sure there's a way around it.
(2015)

but timeless
> to push people to register

Which is an admission of weakness in the first place. If the product is good enough, they wouldn't need to resort to anything special to enroll users beyond a sign up button up top.
>So why is it true that "0 is a natural number"? If this is false, much (all?) of math research is in big trouble! Does this suggest a sort of mathematical epistemic foundationalism?

Math major here. To me, this seems like a non-nonsensical question. 0 is defined to be a natural number. You could say (as Platonism does), that there is some "real" natural numbers out there in the universe, and ask if the Peano axioms define a system that is isomorphic to the real "natural numbers". Or you could ask if the Peano axioms acuratly define the artificial system that we informally think of as the natural numbers.

You could also ask if any system (real or abstract) can satisfy the Peano axioms. That is to say, are they internally consistent (and is there a constructive proof of such). Assuming this is the case, then (by definition) there will be an object that we call "0" that is a natural number. You can also ask if there is a unique (up to isomorphism) instantiation of the Peano axioms (there is).
This is amazing.

"The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce" is particularly brilliant.
Minor quibble: you don't need deep space communications. The Moon is laughably close. I am quite confident that we can easily make contact with the existing unmodified Dragon capsules by using something like one of these bad boys: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/goldstone.jpg

Of course it's laughably overkill for the purpose -- amateur radio operators using much smaller equipment can already send and receive signals to each other by bouncing them off the Moon, which has four times the signal attenuation owing to the doubled distance plus a good deal more in losses from the poor reflectivity of the Moon to radio waves.
Too bad 1Password doesn't encrypt title and URLs.
> As the article points out, there are all too many HTTP libraries that only support GET and POST, not the more "esoteric" verbs like PUT and DELETE.

GET and POST are all you really need for REST.
I was already involved in editing and administration pretty heavily, and separate from that I also knew how to program. It seemed like a natural thing to do to focus my efforts on programming because it was the best way for me to have an impact. There were plenty of people who could write and edit articles, but way fewer people who could write programs to perform useful tasks.
For the content I'm describing, FF has vastly superior startup/cold execution performance, and mildly better long term.
Blogspam of

http://news.uga.edu/releases/article/more-mosquito-species-m...
Disclaimer: I work for netlify and posted that tweet.

Yup, they took those portions of our service down, but we now have redundant status page hosting setups and prerendering that is not tied to S3 (the latter is the only part of our service that was affected, and it was fixed within an hour of the outage)
Garbage collection is coming to WebAssembly.
Most of the problems described with REST in this article are examples of REST implemented improperly. We've had years to get it right; things like HTTP verb support, debugging, discoverability are all by and large a solved problem. The one point that stands is that it is deeply tied to HTTP, but I consider that to be a positive: a well designed REST API means the message is only about the content of what it's serving and not about negotiation of that content.

Here in the "JSON Pure API" you see a reinvention of HTTP request and response concepts built into the API payload, leaving the implementation of negotiation up to the consumer of the API. You lose all the benefits of years of development that have gone into browsers and web servers to handle this for you.

The main problem with REST is that people tend to call any JSON endpoint they build a REST API (and hence the term, "RESTful") which leads to a misunderstanding of what REST actually is.
I saw it too. I thought that it was part of the article, as an example of the lame advertising that mall stores use.

Looking again at the article, it's not there. So it was a real ad ;)
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Your read is absolutely right.
Graviky Labs: Capturing air pollution and recycling to Inks
I didn't see anybody swooning over Elon Musk on this page. Is that passé now?
I was #150 but moved down a bit, one guy I'm doing the course with got into the 90s (but I think moved down a bit too)
That's what I used to do :P, one of the features that httplab offer, is that you can inspect the request
Zoom was down too.
Trolling, bro?
Couldn't agree with you more.

A lot of people jump into the naive belief that science replaces philosophy because philosophy is often the starting point of many of the sciences--as is typical, we see a connection and begin a reductive process that dumbs it all down to a straightforward relation like causality or linear progress, ignoring the actual complexities of the relationship. Nietzsche would scold us!

We tend to forget, of course, that science is really just another, even if it happens to be the most sensible thus far, form of dogma, and philosophy is one of the only, if not the only, discipline that can call it to account.

Philosophy of Science is an incredibly important field and will only become more important as we advance in the sciences--it has revealed and dealt with issues such as, our epistemic prejudice (ie the belief that most people hold that our current science is 'correct' even though history's course would increase the probability that it isn't), whether or not there actually is such a thing as scientific progress, or progress in general, how objectivity, as we frequently understand the concept, is grossly mishandled and probably an impossibility in its purest sense, how methods of verification can lead us astray... the list goes on.

Philosophy is important and I wish more people studied it or at least had a general familiarity with it. It really should be a gen ed requirement down to the Jr. high level.
Let's look at it another way and the so-called "sunk cost" fallacy. I have somewhat expensive tickets to an NBA game. On the night of the game, I'm sick and there's a blizzard. If I paid for those tickets, I'm damn well going to that game. If they were given to me, I'm staying in. Study after study shows that most people also would act in this matter. That this type of behavior was considered irrational made me think that a lot of economists in the past didn't try to understand actual human behavior. BTW - this is not comparable to an investment situation

I have a degree in economics too and my main complaint is that I wish those in the field treated it with more rigor, more like a scientific or engineering field... explicitly state the simplified assumptions and limits on the models. And don't proclaim that your model is correct without experimenting. It's not as much a problem as it was in the past, but people like Hayek advocated for whole changes in society based upon ideology and philosophy without any experimental evidence. I understand it is difficult to conduct experiments, but if that is the case, stop being so certain and adamant in your position without evidence