skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a little premature to brag about the success of this or that (still poorly understood) technique. The agents in the article have created very simple languages that are often not necessary for communication- for instance, when they're not allowed to use words they still achieve their goals by guiding other agents or pushing them around. Also, researchers had to impose very rigid constraints on the type of language the agents were learning, because of course, those agents "live" in very limited environments, conducive to very "unnatural" languages (e.g. ones composed of single words for complex combinations of actions, etc).

The main intuition behind this technique is that we can make it much easier for an agent to learn the kind of language we want it to learn, by associating a vocabulary with a given environment, rather than giving it a vast corpus of text and hoping beyond hope that it will learn exactly the kind of language we want it to from a potentially inifinite number of similar languages that could be learned from that corpus. This is an extremely cool idea, but if it turns out that we've just replaced the work of collating a huge corpus with the work of imposing limitations on the types of language that can be learned, it's still possible that it won't scale up much better than supervised learning form huge annotated corpora.

Like I say, this is an extremely cool idea that can lead to gret advances, but getting agents to create languages with the full expressive power of human language is still worlds away.

In any case, when is it a good idea to insult the intelligence of an entire (unnamed and only assumed) field?
Yes, that is sort of Linus's plan: http://marc.info/?l=git&m=148798319024294&w=2

> You want to have a model that basically reads old data, but that very aggressively approaches "new data only" in order to avoid the situation where you have basically the exact same tree state, just _represented_ differently.

> That way everything "converges" towards the new format: the only way you can stay on the old format is if you only have old-format objects, and once you have a new-format object all your objects are going to be new format - except for the history.

As soon as there is one new-hash commit in a repo, all users of it will have to upgrade their git client - and that git client will (probably?) default to writing new-hash commits.
You must really hate investing in stocks/bonds/real-estate then.
The new item/use interface seems perfectly suited to VR "touch" controllers. And I think back a few years when people said we'd never be able to fly seamlessly from orbit down to the surface of a procedurally generated planet.

I understand that it's healthy to be skeptical, especially when it comes to video games, but CIG has been accomplishing some remarkable things much sooner than anyone seemed to assume so I guess I'm optimistic about VR as sooner rather than later.
I used the Moom to help me with that.

Another good point for windows, it has nearly all the features of Moom, at least those I need.
Interesting. I've never seen an advert for iCloud storage, unless I'm looking at the iCloud settings page, or when I've consumed all of my available space. Then again, I haven't filled my disks to the point of exhaustion recently.
Reading my name (spelled correctly, cudos for that) on Hacker News feels really weird
Do they anticipate that one day we'll have to move from SHA256 to something else again? It's only matter of time. Hash function have lifecycle. Tre transition has to be done in a way that will also make the next transition more straightforward.
FWIW, I was very explicit with investors that we would never flip the company. Our intention is to build a company that will last forever. I also acknowledged that things change. If Denny and my opinion changed would let our investors know right away. So far it hasn't changed. If you are planning on partnering with an investor make sure they understand your values and your intention. To clarify this I put it in writing in an email and have the person confirm they understand.

I always make myself available to chat about this with scientists. Drop me a line by email.

Stay crazy.
Its almost been 6 years and they have raised 140+ million. I would be kind of mad if I had contributed and the haven't released a full game yet and they are changing something else.
> one group was trained in the method of loci, and they practiced using an online course for six weeks, 30 minutes per day.

Does someone know if the course referred to in the article is available to anyone?
I would love to get out of IT altogether. But I don't see any path away that won't involve a huge pay cut, at least initially.
In my experience, a huge amount of insurance is (various front end systems run by various external sources) -> semi-standardized mainframe intake -> mainframe heavy duty processing -> kick out report of manual work items -> Excel sheet -> manual resolution.
More importantly, who wants to spend their life trying (and almost certainly failing) to fix it, while being cursed by the very people you try to help? When the prescription for a society is a Christ-like figure, that society is in deep shit.
But noone is saying you should say goodbye to reality. But precisely BECAUSE it doesn't grow on trees, the cities shouldn't optimize for maximum investment value of real estate, but they should optimize for maximum living space and quality of life potential for their citizens. Empty apartments in city center used as a dumping ground for money are of no use to anyone but a select rich few individuals.
> Although the focus with this book is with the fully interactive figures, I'm more impressed that ALL of the book is available for free.

That was exactly my first thought. "Wait a minute, this is an entire textbook, with all the work, and the prior experience, hiding in plain site behind cool interactivity."
Yes. They should buy Soundcloud and set up a semi-automated publishing system for that pipeline. That's a new generation of artists that the corporate labels have no way of reaching, generally. Some of that IP will be enormously valuable, like seed equity.
It is more complicated these days. The asset is more than future revenue. The value of an asset is, at least partially, detached from the rights it embodies. A stock's present value is also based on it's likely future value, which is in turn based on market forces and geopolitic. A stock's price can go up only because another's goes down. An asset can increase in value because regs change or banks decide it can be more leveraged. Such forces are needed to explain why many invest in apparantly negative interest/growth, something that seem irrational if capital assets are valued purely on future earnings.
When i was young, we were taught that Americans are used to moving and this is the main reason why America is rich: people easily pack up and move to where the opportunities are, so businesses don't starve without workers and people don't sit in the dirt in the hopeless places for the rest of their lives. It is strange to see that this seems to be no longer true and people feel so attached to literally hopeless places they found themselves in.
There are two questions: why review at all, and why are the review systems so crappy? For the first, the whole system in the academic world is based on peer review, and I think peer review has mostly proved its worth. For the second: 90% of everything is shit, and the academic world is struggling with the legacy of for-profit journals and trying to get better systems in place. But opting out of everything crappy leaves you with almost nowhere else to participate.
I really hope the music industry isn't going that way as well...
React component composition cheatsheet
aeneas is not based on ASR (i.e., it does not try to "recognize" words and align them with the input text), but on the "older" MFCC + DTW approach.

Hence, it is difficult to give you a precise answer, e.g. in terms of word-error-rate or similar metrics.

For the task aeneas has been designed for --- aligning an ebook and the corresponding audiobook --- and for similar tasks (e.g., captioning videos of lectures or spoken-only content), it generally produces an alignment that is indistinguishable from a manually-produced one.

If you want to see some examples, read+listen one of these audio-ebooks: the alignment has been produced by aeneas: https://www.readbeyond.it/ebooks.html

But of course if you want to align at finer level (word) or a more noisy/non-matching audio, the quality of the alignment can deteriorate.
I worked in IT at a financial services provider as a WAN technician in the 90s. That was my last IT job.

Then I worked mostly in operations at a couple telecom companies. I mostly automated and integrated a lot of stuff, at that time Perl was contemporary and not looked down upon by the cool kids like today. Programming is different when done in a revenue generating department rather than an expense only department so times were better.

Somehow I eventually ended up in engineering writing tool integration and automation stuff mostly for telecom company end users (like telecom techs not end users at home). This is somewhat weird in that engineering is usually not revenue generating but it kind of is here so its kind of in between.

Where I work now IT is infrastructural and replace mice and image PCs and pull cable and fix printers and so forth. There are a tiny handful of interesting sysadmin and router operator jobs but mostly going back to IT would mean imaging PCs. The fun programming is done in engineering by engineering on the production (and test and dev) networks. Under those conditions I have little interest in going back to IT and being paid solely on bean counting metrics like trouble tickets cleared per day and PC hardware replacement average outage time and so forth.
>> the reason they are not talking to us is that they can't understand what we're saying.

Also, who is "they" and who are "us"? This is a very unreasonable and very inappropriate comment.
Tonight on 60 minutes:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/are-h-1b-visas-being-hijacked-to...

A few people left
Spoiled Science
That last part, death, is important, especially to Buffet. He supports the death tax because it strongly encourages business owners to sell to some outside investor.

My understanding is that many businesses cannot support providing the Government with amount of cash necessary pay the tax, or the net reduction in income makes running the business not worthwhile.

Note how the letter is worded to carefully state that the family members will still have some ownership and management will be maintained. While this is certainly wise acquisition tactic, it is also very appealing to a seller who is on the margin and primarily selling to avoid the death tax.

(If you are thinking, "but the inheritor will still have to pay the tax on the cash," you are correct, but paying tax on cash still provides immediate payback with what is left over, whereas running or even just owning a business or any investment asset for 10+ years and getting zero or close to zero is not going to be desirable to a great many people.)
Can't even read the article because of some shitty huge overlay about some Facebook experiment bullshit
>Interesting. Considering language as a lever and a tool for thought, how do you think the position of a language on the analytic/synthetic spectrum affects its suitability for computer interpretation?

Interesting question. I remember reading article many years ago in BYTE magazine, someone, maybe one of the regular columnists who wrote about programming languages, speculating that if a programming language came out of the Orient, it might be different in some interesting ways from existing ones, which mainly came from the West, I suppose, though of course there could have been Oriental contributors to existing ones. For a long time after that I never heard of any such language; then came Ruby.
Except it's a different article.
The original article is a good read: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-moved-back-india-after-...
What does YouTube Red do better than uBlock Origin?
In Italian high schools "Licei" we take 5 years of Latin (and also ancient Greek if you choose the classical study path)... nice to meet you!
Is there a runtime that enforces them? I've certainly found them useful in restricting autocompletion, but I've still been able to feed in accidental Nones.
There ARE many more successful conglomerates like BRK.

Many, many, more.
My Cousin Vinny.

My sister and my brother-in-law are both lawyers. They love this movie. Their professors all love this movie. And from earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13885659
A quicker guide for real beginners:

Do you want to understand in detail what's happening? => Arduino UNO

Is the UNO too small/slow? => Arduino Due

Still too small or you really just want a small computer running Linux but with GPIO-Pins? => Raspberry PI
He is talking about College/University education, and companies sometimes requiring advanced degrees for basic jobs.

High school is and will always be needed. Also, for some careers university education is obviously necessary. Just not always.

However, this probably only applies to the USA, or other places (South America as well) where students get into high debt to get degrees.
I'd argue that's only true if the system can't be better than emailing papers around.

I think Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket have shown us that you can do better than emailing patches. I think the academic world could do better than just emailing crap (the arXiv has already done this, but not for full on peer-review). It's just that the current tools are not good.

I think Aaronson is mostly right to tell off these journals. However, I think the idea of tools that improve peer review is a good one.
The best way to start is to start.

One way we got around this in Seattle is we threw rooftop parties at our apartment. I went to all the networking events in Seattle, I found the good people. Then, I invited all the people I thought were good over for drinks and bbq. If you have a good filter for good people, the good people will appreciate it.

When first getting into engineering I went to a rails meetup group twice a week. You're right that there are a lot of founders trying to recruit at these types of meetups, which is annoying. Try to go to the meetup with a specific thing you're working on and then see if someone wants to pair with you. When you're pairing it will be hard for someone who is recruiting "technical founders" to bother you. If you don't like the current meetups, start your own.
You've got the order backwards.

Buffett's talent - capital allocation - is what provided the capital to begin building the foundations of the conglomerate in the first place. He stacked a large amount of capital up from the wildly successful Buffett Partnerships, long before he had any supposed process in place in regards to what has made Berkshire successful.
I spent two years of my life doing nothing but self teaching myself programming. I was 19 when I started, and 21 when I found my first job as a programmer: a junior in a Django e-commerce shop.

I quickly found that what enthused me about programming was not present at all in the real industry, that apart from the paycheck, the job would be, probably for my life, identical to that of a Fordist production-line worker: insert necessary letters and punctuation here, repose, repeat. In a room in some building, sitting all along, dabbling with deadlines, weird demands. This was boring, and not what enthused me for programming at all, that was the explorative aspect, the tool-making. So I quickly decided that I'd never ever be a professional IT person.

In the two years I had perfected my English, to the level that I'd say that my English level was near-native. This proved very useful to me, allowing me to qualify for an Italian philology course, from which I'll graduate with a GPA of 3.80/4.00 in a year and a half, and which for me has been a part of a literary/humanist adventure which started about the end of my teens.

For a living... I don't really know. I have two main paths: academia as a phylologist, or sth. else. I really want to run a cafe, but I don't have any capital at all to start such a business. My overall plan for the future is pursuing my curiosities on one side and moderate, mentally-light and sociable work on the other, because, for me at least, the life is way too ephemeral and short to do otherwise.

As for HN, well, I've not lost my interest in tech and programming. I use, for example, Emacs for any kind of documents, email, RSS/Atom feeds, etc., there are some bits of Elisp that I've published. I'm slowly studying Common Lisp as a programming language. Writing programmes is pleasurable and useful still to me, and following HN helps me keep in touch with it. Also, HN is the only ONLY _o_n_l_y_ place where I can share the same platform with people like Alan Kay, many other CS celebs, creators of software that revolutionised computing and is maybe used by billions of people, and the sheer fact that I'm typing into the same textbox that these smartest people are typing and that one day our paths may cross on this forum on an interesting topic is, God, oh God, exciting.

So, here is some more than what you bargained for, I think :)) A really nice and relevant Ask HN that helped me get these out, so thank you so much!

edit: add the missing `identical'.
Ask HN: Best wiki/notes app for a couple of developers to share notes?
Which wiki or notes services or apps are the best for a couple of developers to share notes about various projects?
The core of Wallaroo is written in Pony. We provide a C++ API w/ Python prototype finished and GoLang and JavaScript API explorations underway.
How easy is it to reuse the memory palace?

Ultimately I'd like to use this technique to remember played cards during a card game. I can remember most cards quite easily, but often when it comes to the last 3-8 cards, I can't be 100% sure what they are.

Though I'm not sure it's worth my time. I already remember more cards than my usual opponents.
could this be alleviated by password managers or is the act of logging in, in and of itself, a burden you would prefer not to do?
Ask HN: What are your motivational quotes?
I think this is more of a guide for somewhat experienced hardware people picking a microcontroller to go into production than a complete beginner to electronics. Agreed that anyone else should just grab an arduino.
Perhaps rural America should cease voting against its own interests time and time again.

There's this onus on urban dwellers to "understand" rural America. Where's the reciprocity?

Rural America has a structural advantage in the US Government. It receives billions of dollars in subsidies which are solely for Rural America. It votes consistently against policies which would benefit all Americans, because someone believes Urban Americans are not Real Americans.

I'm done with empathy. I've moved on. Rural America can solve its own problems.
My applications sure dont. If my word processor was phoning hone with encrypted data, ANY data, id be in serious trouble with many people (clients, professional associations, my insurer, a bunch of different police types). Some of us do things with our computers that we legally cannot share with anyone. So no, not all aps do telemetry.
You sure it was Type 1?

Generally people are diagnosed with Type 1 at a very young age, since it is caused by your own immune system destroying beta cells in the pancreas, which if untreated results in eventual death.

Type 2 is more often associated with age and diet. It is the most common type in particular at later ages, but some people get it younger due to genetic predisposition.
for this very reason i am cross posting everything i write on medium https://medium.com/@cindywu/why-y-combinator-made-all-the-di...
Am I the only one here looking at Tiny's site and wondering when they acquired buffer?

I didn't know it was sold and can't seem to find an announcement anywhere?
I think you misunderstand.... Certainly congrats to bluemax for successfully managing concurrent celiac and T1D but nothing has been "beaten" here.

T1D is an autoimmune disease which destroys the pancreas' ability to produce insulin. Your body needs insulin to process sugar in the blood into energy, a large part of that sugar comes from carbs.

Celiac is an autoimmune disease which is a reaction in the gut to gluten. Exposure to gluten causes inflammation in the gut and ultimately damages the lining of the intestine to the point where your body cannot absorb nutrients (including the carbs) from the food you eat.

What bluemax observed is the damage from celiac was restricting his carb absorption which reduces the amount of insulin required to keep blood sugar in range.

It takes ~6 months abstaining from gluten for the intestine to heal and for carb absorption to return to normal, over which time insulin requirements would also return to normal. Going gluten free allows the intestine to heal (and you have to stay gluten free -- the celiac doesn't go away).

My daughter is T1D+Celiac so I'm quite familiar with it as well.
You're forgetting that the avg income in most major German cities that are not Berlin is higher than there. Living costs in Berlin have gone up massively over the last few years, income however has not changed at all. Having worked as a freelancer for a time, there was a big difference in daily rates I could ask for. In Berlin, 300-350 Euros often were considered high already, where 400-450 was quite normal in the south.

See e.g. http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/neue-studie-zu-einkommen-u... (German)
The difference I see is that it breaks previous expectations. Ads in media have a long history, and there's a bargain that people understand (even if they don't fully understand the details).

Operating systems historically have not been like media. Perhaps this is the future (shudder), but pretending there has not been a difference doesn't get us anywhere. And it is jarring: compare it to one day, ads start appearing on your towels at home.

Personally, OS ads and invasive telemetry are way, way too invasive for me. Never used Windows as more than a utility thing for specific apps, but I'll never use Win 10 without crippling the mothership comms, and I'm moving away from OS X as well, because of the increasing cloud-everything centricity and the neglected unix subsystem.

Finally, this is probably a complaint specific to me and a not that many other people. I do systems engineering professionally. When OSes start doing things that I can't control and start communicating without explanations as to what, exactly, is going on for reasons that are not driven by my intent, I cannot trust the software. My machine, my environment, my rules.

People always jump to the phone comparison here. My phones are rather locked down too, snd I'm not happy about the direction, but can do little about that.
the feature doesn't exist, but i cross post everything i write on medium
No one is arguing to roll your own when there a generic sort in the standard library. The issue with clever things is that people try to make a all purpose solution for what could be a simple one off solution. The all purpose is only used for 2-3 uses and it never battle tested.
There's also this page documenting the issues of wikipedia pushing contributors away:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_los...
Counters exist in English.

"5 head of cattle" is exactly analogous to "ushi go tou" (牛五頭)

Most English counters have left common usage but the concept exists. Similar but not the same many people enjoy learning all the names for groups of animals I English. "A murder of crows" for example
Not that provide the same returns.
Reading even one changed line tells us that they replaced hardcoded char arrays for SHA1 with a generic struct that could be used as a container for any hash.

Some functions that previously operated on those char arrays have been changed to deal with the more generic struct instead.