skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

-- Douglas Adams
All those differences you mentioned are not related to implementation. The remote repo is functionally identical to your local repo. You can "rewrite commits to your heart's content" on the remote repo too, there is nothing stopping you. Like I said, the only reason you don't is to be nice to your coworkers.

By the time somebody else criticizes your commit messages, you've already pushed. It's too late. All that time you had while the commit was local-only means nothing, unless you brought your coworkers over to your computer to review your commits before creating a PR. Expecting developers to get commits right the first time (before pushing) is not a sustainable solution.
Did you mean 'disrupt'? Hadn't heard of "disturb" before used in startup lingo.
Are you comparing making educated guesses based on observations and analysis with numerology?

Making predictions and providing analysis for those predictions is actually incredibly valuable because it helps people and companies anticipate trends and hedge their strategies.

Unlike numerology, making predictions grounded in reason is actually a valuable and timeless skill that will benefit most people. I'm not encouraging people to engage in nonsense.
As it's a port of the Java version with the same capabilities, it'll probably have the same problems still.

In my personal experience I couldn't get the compiler (none of the versions) work with a simple-enough project and node_modules in all the correct places.

UglifyJS just works.
The custom CPU for Cinematronics (Vectorbeam) games used three of these (from https://archive.org/details/ArcadeGameManualRipoff)

The ALU is implemented using three 24LS181
(N6M6L6) function generators, three 74LS85
(N9,M9,L9) 4 bit magnitude comparators, and
a 74S182 (L4) look ahead carry generator.
Payment Processing/Network is the most innovation-less thing IMO. But still there is not a non-profit leader. Why ?
Introducing LinkedIn Economic Graph Research
My furnace is supposed to have a useful life of 15 years. Every once in a while, it breaks and I call the repairman. I watch him work, and there isn't anything complicated about it. It's just figure out which part broke, and replace it.

So why does it only last 15 years? You can no longer get replacement parts for it. The machine looks to me like it should last 50 years.

The part failures mine had over the last 17 years are:

1. blower motor failed due to the bearings not being lubed, the replacement has sealed bearings and never needs lube

2. a relay on the circuit board failed - new board is $600. The relay is a $2 part.

3. the igniter failed. It's a $25 part, and 5 min to replace it. A $300 service call.
Braintree is now a subsidiary of Paypal which makes me slightly suspicious of them from past Paypal experiences. Though up till now I had only heard good things about Braintree.

Without more exact details it is hard to cast an objective judgment, for me at least. Though the dude seems pretty pissed.
Was MJ ever convicted of a crime? NO.

Maybe you should ask the question in a different way, such as was MJ the victim of a which hunt to frame him for a crime he never commuted. In that case the answer is undoubtedly, YES.
>the more voices the better

Remember that the next time you try to hear your own voice in a stadium. It's an old trick to say, "I want to hear what you all have to say... at once." Then smile as people drown each other out...
Was MJ ever convicted of a crime? NO.

Maybe you should ask the question in a different way, such as was MJ the victim of a which hunt to frame him for a crime he never commited. In that case the answer is undoubtedly, YES.
Cradle to Cradle (2010) is a great read on this subject, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0012KS568 . It's written by a couple industrial designers and I suspect it would be widely interesting to the HN audience.
> Uber has no legal nor moral obligation to help the governments entrap its drivers, or perform sting operations.

Uber does, however, have obligations to obey the law. Part of which would include not using technology to hide law-breaking actions from local law enforcement.
Have you ever watched CGP Grey's "This Video Will Make You Angry"[1]? I feel it touches on most of the issues you raised with the spread of 'garbage' ideas.

[1] http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-angry
I worked at a startup where we used machine learning to review legal documents.

When you have 10M+ documents, it takes a long time for a team of lawyers to review them. So a company with AI/ML is at a huge advantage in identifying the documents a lawyer needs to win a case.

To get accurate results, you need a lot of data, but to crunch that data you need a lot of power, not just speed. A lot of the processing is done now with GPUs (thousands of cores)...traditional computers are CPU intensive and have limited number of cores. Think for example a multi-threaded application running on GPUs vs CPUs...the GPU can divide the problem in more tasks and the processing can be done more accurately not just faster.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/what-is-gpu-computing.html

PS: I think people overuse "Artificial intelligence" we're no where close...but it excites people compared to "machine learning" or "deep learning" or "convolutional network" or just statistics...It's just trying to find an equation that fits the data like linear regression.
Wi-fi on rays of light–100 times faster, and never overloaded
I knew a guy who was a "reliability engineer". His gig was to make things predictably reliable. (Or break on schedule)

If you want a reliable appliance, buy the least energy efficient, oldest commercial model you can find with most mechanical controls possible. I've had my commercial Speed Queen washer and dryer since 2001.
GWB boycotted the Republican nominating convention.
Thanks for the clarification, I wanted to mention it as I got the feeling of having read about it somewhere, but I failed to find the right spot in the documentation.
I don't currently, but I think it's possible. That said, I'm not sure I'd recommend it. I'm building them since they're a reasonable way to handle auth with my unofficial Google integrations (without the special cookie/cors permissions I'd need to store users' Google credentials).

You're able to change the subscription cost on the fly (I think; I haven't actually done it). The bigger problem is there's no easy way to do price segmentation. This is fine for my consumer product, but I may end up rolling my own payments setup for an upcoming business product.
Now i'm about as far removed from this area as you can get, but would "mandatory counseling" be helpful?

Require that everyone get counseling all the time. I don't really have an answer for how "confidential" to keep those records (keeping them 100% confidential is fantastic, but I can also see the merit of knowing your soldier is mentally stable...), but at the very least requiring every single service member at least attend would put them in the room with a therapist and get them accustomed to talking about things.

I'm sure there would still be issues (like a "Has PTSD" checkbox that would cause the same result as you describe), but would it be a net positive?
Hi AlexCoventry,

Please don't get me wrong: there is no future for CTM. You are 100% correct about this. However, quackery is still not a thing of the past. Therefore, I would ask of you not to debunk CTM or to point to its weaknesses (which has been done infinite times). I would like to know the AI-specific answers to your three questions (in your words or in a linked essay / paper). In a way, I don't want AI to be the "quackery of computer science": people use and believe it but it has no advantages. I would love it to be real.

I am all for a future in which we can have AI/machine learning/deep learning if it actually makes a difference. But I would love to know your opinion on what difference that could be and a little on how to achieve that. Obviously it seems I am missing something since YC is eager to invest in this field (or fields).
Releases as in playable demos of small pieces of the game.
He mentions it in the article:

It's a failure of feedback that makes this happen.

If people can't get reliable information about quality, quality will not determine what they buy. Price will, and price is readily available. To get price down, you need costs down. To do that, you replace the parts with crappy parts.

If feedback worked, people would know they were paying less for a less good appliance that will have more downtime, and they would act accordingly.

Part of it is statistical noise: you only get to use so many washing machines in your life, and you may or may not have big problems with them. Your only direct evidence on quality then depends on this roll of the dice.

Part of it is lack of competition: only 4 competitors. You only need to be in the ballpark of "OK" to sell. You're not scratching around for every customer, there's definitely going to be some. So why spend a lot of money making your machine more reliable?

Part of it is cost of information: how much time are you going to spend finding this information? You'll need to learn a bunch of technical terms. And how do you find trustworthy reviews? Most likely reviews are another source of noise, for the same reason as mentioned. So information is expensive to get and anyway if you're right about the manufacturers being the same it's also worthless!
To give a more exact estimate - if you don't use spot instances ($0.20/hour) it'll cost $0.90/hour, and if you do the suggested 70 hours of work for the course, that's $63. And then there's around $6/month cost for the EBS volume.
I wouldn't say the challenge has been "solved" - the system may have only been able to win consistently because the programmers made adjustments and improvements to it between each game. Fitting its heuristics to a specific opponent might actually be overfitting unless it can consistently win against all challengers without being modified between rounds. [edited to clarify uncertainty about "why" it was able to win]
> the proles can now decide for themselves

the facebook algorithms are a black box
The performance consistency that Intel claims cannot be provided by caching. The characteristics of XPoint sound vaguely similar to SLC NOR flash, but it seems like Intel would be opening themselves up to liability by outright lying.
Yeah, but nah: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/micro...
> Are you suggesting that it's okay to adopt a policy of "we'll break the law until we get caught"

Yep, that's called civil disobedience. As long as they pay the fines, I don't think it's wrong to break a bad law.
> It seems to me that the New York Times is just complaining that they can't control the political narrative anymore because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Thoughts?

Well, there have always been different sources of media contending for the narrative. My grandpa used to read both the Washington Times, which he saw as basically true news; he also read the Washington Post (affectionately: "the com-Post") because he wanted to keep an eye on the other team's plans.

What is novel here is that there are now random teenagers in Macedonia just totally making stuff up, and this is competing for reader attention with the same amount of weight as all the other stuff which we traditionally called "news" (https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/).

As recently as 2009 it seemed totally crazy that, like, teenagers on the Internet could just make stuff up and it would affect world affairs -- see https://xkcd.com/635/ , Randall Munroe's September 2009 mockery of the Orson Scott Card "Ender's Game" future where blogger kids make stuff up to change national discourse.

Munroe was wrong, Card was right (?!), and it totally happened. The 2016 US elections went to /b/, /pol/, and /int/ -- congrats, folks! Interesting times.

The "old media" people who bewail this stuff may be complaining that they're losing influence, yes, but some of them actually believed the story that they were doing a public service, and those people are upset about something else, too.

A friend who spent some time in the old media told me that what worries them about this shift is that people are "no longer following a single newsgathering organization they can hold accountable" and instead use "contextless random shares via their Facebook feed (which produce a sort of race to the bottom)". He added that "the passive nature of the Facebook News Feed is one of many forces causing people to take less responsibility for their information intake and lose information literacy skills. I guess that's probably bad."

Those are reasonable things to be worried about whether you favor the Washington Times or the Washington Post or Breitbart or the Huffington Post or Coast to Coast AM.
The only thing I get from this post is that Braintree delayed their payments due to whatever reason(without telling them why?).
The ethos of suburbia is conspicuous consumption, especially conspicuous consumption of land, and actually using it to produce something useful makes it more of an investment. This is also why it's illegal to carve off part of your house and rent it out, generally hard to keep boarders, illegal to actually engage in any kind of business in your house, and so on. I guess the ideal is to be like the landed gentry in their country manor, which also explains the obsession with lawns.
Well, the rate of failure is the lowest compared to other manufacturers. And those repairs are way too expensive I should say.

White Knight dryers are surprisingly good, yeah. The LG washers work fine for 3-5 years, their weakest point is the suspension (really hard to replace) and the drum bearings/spider (irreplaceable), especially if you overload them.
"Persist all data" shouldn't be taken as a literal notion. It's better to think about decisions of persistence eventually moving from strongly hardware influenced to purely software- and problem- defined. Just as we've developed abstractions and tools at the persistence ("filesystem") layer now, like snapshotting, similar tools will evolve to take advantage of the new hardware constraints.
> Part of which would include not using technology to hide law-breaking actions from local law enforcement.

I very much doubt there's a legal clause specifying that uber has to provide service to undercover agents. If there was, I expect uber's legal department would not allow that program to go through.
> I don't know what super heavy duty high end washer/dryer you could get these days for $4500, but I bet you could find one that would last 50 years.

I'm hoping the Electrolux I spent $3000 on 5 years ago lasts another 45. That would be great. So far so good though. No rust, no leaks, and the only problem we had to call a service person for turned out to be the fault of our electrician, not the appliance.
Please not. People e.g. download questionable fonts from the net, which e.g. have been stripped of everything non-alphanumeric, and then complain to you "your website looks bad", or they have official, but fossilized versions of fonts... I always strip local-sources when embedding webfonts for this reason.
Intel has a reference design for just keeping RAM powered but it's only used in storage controllers, not in any servers you can buy.
Isn't most weather data gathered by the government?
It benefits every aspect of ones life. The problem, though, is daily responsibilities make it very difficult, nearly impossible, for most people to meditate that long every day.

But taking time out to go inwards everyday doesn't have to take that long. Just 20 minutes or even 5 minutes every day will do just fine. The key to benefiting from it, as with most things, is to keep the same time every day.

Just pick any time of the day or night that you can afford. And make it a habit.

To take it to another level, find a spiritually-powerful word that you feel comfortable repeating (chanting) to yourself. Then chant it during those times you seat in meditation.

There' are higher forms of meditation, but start somewhere.

With time, you'll begin to see aspects of life that your physical senses cannot perceive. And as you become more aware of the visible and invisible aspects of life around you, you begin to worry less.
It's at least as related as the sexism controversy, which is mentioned. The title and subtitle both blame Uber's current turmoil and controversy, and the Alphabet suit may easily become the biggest issue. If the CEO conspired to steal tech from Waymo then the entire management structure at Uber is going to be in serious, serious trouble with its board and with the law.
Isn't this largely driven by consumer demand?

The prices of appliances has dropped dramatically in the last few decades.

Building a long-lasting appliance often requires even marginally more expensive materials - many of which are highlighted in this article.

If consumers are primarily price sensitive at the time of purchase, they may choose the $50 cheaper appliance even if it lasts 40 years less. What I mean to suggest is that price sensitivity at time of purchase often trumps long term gains - which is why you often see things like payday loans being used. When a person is paycheck-to-paycheck they probably aren't thinking about their financial position in 50 years, simply out of necessity.

Another reason might be that the Nokia 3310's of the world have been basically prototypical products - they are overdesigned. When the user has a perception that a phone is fragile, what's the threshold? We might not need a phone that can be run over by a truck to think a phone is tough. If the split of material cost -> price point and consumer perception is optimal at a certain point - companies will try and design to that point.
Phoronix reviews ARM SBCs
Filters don't work, but idea is nice :)
Neither of those systems would scale. Have you ever heard of a paxos/raft scaled beyond ~9 odd members in production?

Blockchain's also provide data redundancy and security between entities. It'd be way more effective way to communicate commodities, medical records, etc as the security, data model, and system API are all integrated into the blockchain model.

Having the "database" be the API would be great for those of us dealing with supply chain. Want information from your supplier in Shenzhen? Good luck with current systems! Paxos/raft do nothing to resolve data access and verification.
It's not misleading at all. If you forget that commits are immutable, then you get people who think they can edit a commit message and push it up no problem.
This is sounding like a golang version of "Leave Britney Alone".

The author wasn't accusing the creators of Go of being incompetents and unable to produce good tools. All was said is that currently, the tooling is not as good as Haskell's. That Go is a newer language is not a valid argument for rebutting that claim - it's only an explanation for it.
Don't you know? A great way to deflect responsibility for inflammatory comments to say that you were kidding.
This looks nice, but it's not clear to me what it actually does. Is it just a list of github issues with first-time-only tags?

I would add some about information to make it clearer to the user what the benefit of this app is.
I fondly remember my grandmother's old washing machine and stove from the 60's, but what will be left of our economy if we stop throwing away appliances and other products that used to last much longer within 5-10 years? We'll kill off the little growth we have left in the US/EU and go into recession.
Doesn't it make you wonder how they got a merchant/business account then in the first place? Because if Braintree doesn't support Serbia, CAR:GO shouldn't be able to be on it. But it seems they are. And if they don't support Serbia, how come they've accepted funds?
Some little controller will break in 3-4 years and cost $450 to repair.
One of the reasons for the limited life would be the longevity of the actual heat exchanger - they will eventually corrode due to the corrosive nature of the exhaust gases passing through them.

Additionally, the manufacturer probably doesn't want to have to stock parts for 16+ year old models.

An analog would be software; nothing stops a circa-1994 Windows NT machine from continuing to work, but good luck getting support.
We used to joke that Miele bought up all the metal that wasn't used for the Leopards for their washing machines (cast iron counterbalances and very thick walls) :D
He's probably read The Art of the Deal at least once.
Thankyou, this looks to be exactly what I need! Starting the course now.
An excellent question. May the digital credit union arise from the ashes!
As they're a subsidiary of PayPal, it really would require extraordinary evidence to convince me that Braintree doesn't suck. Sadly, no such evidence was offered in the linked post.
I also came from a small town and got out as fast as I could. I moved to the city where there were more opportunities and people were more open in general about other human beings.

You paint "city people" with a large brush. And it doesn't really align with the facts. Remember, our tax dollars from the cities are where GDP growth is happening. And we pay more for services than we get back. Many of these rural areas already benefit from huge subsidies from the federal government, especially the corn industry. Many of the southern red states get back more in federal dollars than they contribute. Hillary has even talked about re-education to new industry and funding for coal country, but they didn't care and instead bought the lie that Trump was going to bring back an industry already on its way out. So I suspect they want a handout.

I do lose respect for any person who doesn't respect civil rights. I very much want to help these people, but they need to meet us half way in the 21st century. We are talking basic civil rights, to be recognized as a human. Recognition that climate change is not a hoax and humans are causing it. But even then, what are we supposed to do? Give them welfare? Why should we do that when they complain about others getting government help? Why are those good citizens deserving of help but the urban poor can be forgotten and denigrated constantly as lazy?
US monetary policy is largely governed by the fed, which has 25 branches throughout the USA.

They meet and discuss and then form US monetary policy. You can google and read their decisions.

It's not easy to get up to date with this stuff. You're going to have to put in over 100 hours of study to get a basic handle on the vocabulary.
Business bafflegab, but on the Blockchain
I struggled quite some time with Closure Compiler, and in particular with CG's broken/inofficial support for CommonJS modules. I succeeded by pasting all module code into one file, removing `require()` calls and presenting only the single concatenated file to CG (and the minification and linting results were very good).

Granted, this is only possible if you reference modules/classes uniformly by the same name across your source, rather than using CommonJS "import as", and it only applies if you have no or few external dependencies which isn't realistic in the general case. Supposedly, using ES6 modules fixes this but I haven't checked yet.
Or maybe he thinks his current mansions, sports cars, and retirement funds are good enough?
He replied to that question on FB: "We had to open a company and a bank account in the EU."