skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really wished HN supported markdown personally.

Edit: I found the formatting doc for HN https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

> Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)

So that might be the answer to putting code on here.

function say(message: string, volume: number): void {
//do text to speech code here
}

but still markdown would be nicer. just do and depending on the phaser/styling it will even do code syntax coloring to increase readability.

```typescript
new line with the code
```

(Edit again: Without the 2 spaces, HN put my markdown example all on one line)

I guess moving HN to markdown could be done. Just say all posts after X date are markdown(or add a boolean to the post in the DB saying so. Then have the editor have like a preview button(but I know HN likes to be lite on JS stuff) but the md could be generated server-side, but do the preview client side.
How is this not illegal?
The gelatin covering the board does serve a purpose--it helps with vibration, among other things. It's called a potting compound, and you'll find it around electronic components in other high-vibration applications (automotive, power tools, etc.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_(electronics)
If you are living in the Bay Area you would think Uber is a bad company. But I just met someone outside of the Bay and realized people love Uber. They have a lot of problems and a lot to do but they are still the market leader.
Y Combinator has a new AI track
Don't have any experience with that tech, but from reading the marketing landing page it sounds more akin to memSQL than Redshift, in that it seems to include options for streaming ingestion.

If I'm going to take on a similar project, I may POC memSQL or Citus DB, and possibly Big Query (if the project is built on Google Cloud as opposed to AWS or raw iron).
>Maximizing profits also involves making products at the price points customers want. If customers don't want to pay for 50 year appliances, why should they make one?

Are customers even offered the option?

And why would "50 year appliances" have to be more expensive? The simple parts, and more basic processes used to manufacture them don't sound like costing more. And they could drop most of the electronics, IoT crap, and fancy features. If the average household could buy a fridge in 1970, why wouldn't they be able to afford one today?
I recently switched to Spark, which is both on macOS and iOS.
That and you definitely wont find anecdotes of appliances that are 2 years old as of today lasting for 50 years.

You could say 'tortoises! they don't make them like they used to' for example.
Whatever brings the money. If am not doing generalist development. If I write down all the specialisations I do or used to do, a tree is gonna die.

Don't compare yourself to the top and cry. There is always someone earning more. I had my time when I was always the least paid guy in the room. Arguably that's still what I feel every time I look around.

I've got a bad image of retail banks. I am fine with investment banks and other banks and non-banks (hedge funds, others) that treat their people well and can build a business out and around what I do. Retail and consumer banks are no places for programmers.

>>> It's not technically difficult, but as a senior, you spend your whole time banging your head against the brick wall of client stupidity.

Not much different from a permie. I find it a lot more tolerable when you can see daily stupidity along a daily rate. Who cares what happens. You'll be on a new contract in 3 months anyway. (That being said, I really hate contracting).
How would this differ from spam? Would you be able to provide reliable metrics on responses?
Also, an asteroid is made of reaction mass.

An asteroid is made of physical matter, yes, but it's not made out of the noble gas xenon, which NEXT used. Skimming the electric propulsion doesn't reveal any high-isp thrusters designed to use powdered asteroid.

Don't forget Newton's 2nd law says that if you even
touch it with your little finger, it'll keep going
somewhere else forever. You don't need a lot of force
to move large distances in space.

This is... true... but your intuitions as to the forces involved are badly off. Let's run the numbers for 16 Psyche real quick. Assume you're putting together an asteroid tug that has an array of a thousand NEXT thrusters, and the 10 megawatt solar array you need to power the thrusters. Assume they're making a solid 50km/s exhaust velocity, the top end for ion propulsion. And, just for fun, include 10,000,000,000,000 metric tons of xenon. This is a pretty big spacecraft, but it's a thousandth the size of 16 Psyche. (2.27×10^19 kg)

Light off the thrusters, and run them until they use up all the xenon. It'll take a while. 63,218,390,804 years, in fact. (870 tonnes per 5.5 years) But, good news! After that burn, you've added 0.05km/s to 16 Psyche's orbital velocity. Delta V between the belt and Earth is around 5km/s, so you'll need to do that about a hundred more times.

There are better candidates for asteroid capture than 16 Psyche.
It's not clickbait. You're being pedantic. It's clear the author meant true / general / strong AI and was merely addressing the hype of some non-AI researchers.

It's a response to people who think because of AlphaGo that we are on the cusp of achieving true / strong / general AI.

> An AI that solves a lot of problems better than humans, and transfers that learning across many problems with relative ease, is getting close to strong AI.

We're not close. See Yann LeCun's statement on AI after AlphaGo [1] and the HN response [2]

[1] https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10153426023477143

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11280744
Not backup .. load balanced perhaps ? Across two or three ?.. you would not trust single server, cloud provider, DC , DNS for HA then why trust a single payment provider ?
Yeah, a patent would destroy machine learning. 2 years? Try 2 weeks on arXiv... :D

But on the other hand, I'm of the opinion that patents should stay, but trivial ones should stop being granted. And perhaps progressively increase the length based on triviality? Something super novel should get a longer lifespan, but something simple(r) should only get 5 years or so.
Wanted to point out 21.co (https://21.co/) which essentially does this. You can send a message to Ben Horowitz, for example, for $100 (which he donates all to charity). While Ben is on the pricier side, David Lee (of SV Angel, Refactor Capital) is only $1. You pay only if you receive a response.
I don't know about you, but everything I work on is going to be something that someone will have to maintain, or will be actively developed by multiple people with different categories of expertise. Also, I usually want to build on other people's work (i.e. libraries).

So while I'd love to write big chunks of Haskell, if its just me doing it, that code will be nuked and rewritten unless I also undertake a project of education. So accessibility is key. Go/python/js seem to win in that regard, and likewise in access to libraries.

So unless as an organisation there is motivation to step up skilling, e.g. because there is a lot of money at stake if something breaks (e.g. trading software), or because there is a community of practice (compilers) its hard to see Haskell gaining much ground.

Likewise all those other languages has their niche, and it is hard to seem them displacing each other.
Just do the math, Facebook is a mayor threat for a company that makes money from adds, I'll give you a hint, starts with G, amazon is also a threat for the cloud bussines of the same company, I'll give you another hint, the second letter is O, and Ubber is a threat for the self-driving cars of the same company, last hint, the last letter is E, just join the dots.
I lead an engineering team and am on the receiving end of a ton of vendor pitch emails. Almost always they go ignored but nearly every single one will have a few follow ups and surprisingly (but rarely) I may end up responding at the 4th of 5th attempt.

I realize that they're likely automated but sometimes you just need to get me at the right moment in which I'm more likely to respond.
>Honestly, I don't think there is a good argument for patents at this point. If your thing is truly groundbreaking, keep it secret. The reward for having great ideas and successfully productizing them is lots of money; why do there need to be patents (and effective monopoly protections) on top of that?

Because if anybody else can also "productize" your idea, then it will in all probability be others that will make the money (especially if they are much larger than your company, can market more, have economies of scale, connections with retailers, etc.). So you get no reward at all for your idea, or a vastly diminished one.

People wont buy from you just because you had the original idea.

And of course "keeping it secret" AND selling it is usually not an option at all.
Robotic technology has improved greatly over the last few decades. Just over the last decade, smartphones have created a bunch of innovation in sensors, mobile processors, batteries, etc. And reduced the cost of those things greatly.

But robots haven't really proliferated outside of narrow applications. The main thing holding them back is they are blind and dumb. They can only do very simple rote tasks over and over again. They can't identify objects in an image. They can't figure out how to pick something up. They can't learn from trial and error.

ML has improved massively over the last few years. It's now possible to do machine vision at (arguably) super-human levels on certain tasks. When you see videos of reinforcement learners learning to play video games; that's not a huge stretch from controlling a robot. There have been similar jumps in ability in many other areas. From machine translation to speech recognition.

Sure, there may be lots of over-inflated expectations. But I think a vast increase in automation is well within the limits of what is possible in the near future. You may not get Jarvis. But we will get robots that can understand simple orders and learn to do simple tasks.

That's huge. That's replacing most human jobs huge. It will completely change our economy and our way of life.
thank you! I did not know this, having started with the online version...will give it a shot.
Which Dystopian Novel Got It Right: Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World
Correct, but in practice memory has permissions on a page level and most pages today are 4K. So a page containing a buffer is also likely to contain other data as well. Unless you are going to isolate each buffer by placing it in its own page.
I'm pretty new to AI -- would it be better to do this course or the machine learning course by Andrew Ng on Coursera?
Term projects. Those are what prepared me for getting paid to apply my academic knowledge more than anything. All the better when it was left up to me to create the spec. Most of the time I had to abide by some requirements, like 'Must use SPI for communication between two or more microcontrollers', but it was pretty obvious in these classes if you were actually applying what you were learning or not.
I don't have a source other than to say this is what my real estate agent mentioned to me if I recall correctly, but at least in the ACT in an apartment block it's a requirement to provide a dryer if you don't provide a proper area for a clothesline.
So she could bury the details of getting hacked? Again?

Seriously, if she is ever allowed to hold a paying job again, something is wrong with corporate culture.
How do you plan to compete against meetup? How do you plan to attract a critical mass of users?
Intel's strategy here is actually to continue using the standard NVMe interface for Optane SSDs, and to offer a hypervisor that does the job of presenting to the guest OS a pool of memory that is backed by a combination of DRAM and 3D XPoint.
Let's say you had an appliance that lasted 20 years. Would you keep it through all the remodels and renovations? What in a modern house doesn't need to be / get replaced after 20 years? Floors, windows, roof, AC / heater, thermostats, doors, hot water heater, ceiling fans, bathroom fans, toilets... I've replaced all of those in my ~20 year-old house. Some because the originals broke, some because I wanted new / better things.

Man... I hate hate hate short toilets (the kind where you were like 14 inches off the ground at most and your junk always hit the front rim). Now every toilet is at least 17" tall and properly elongated, with jet-flush tech that never clogs. And those old short 30" counters like they built back in the day -- as a 6'1" guy bending over to shave in my own house? I think not. All those things built to old shitty standards had to go.

Replaced fridge and dishwasher about 5 years ago (replaced the 15 year-old builder-quality appliances that had been installed). Replaced the stove and range hood to get something a little more fancy... Why smell things cooking (and risk the smell getting sucked into all your closets and ruining your dry cleaning -- thanks to central air) when you can just get a 900 CF/M fan to suck away all the cooking smells.

So I guess my point is just... do we really want these things to last a life time? We're a throwaway culture. Any excuse to buy something new isn't a terrible thing... who knows what the trend will be 5-10 years from now... maybe we'll have carbonation machines in our fridges and I'll want one of those.

Our parents appliances did last longer, but their fridge didn't have a water filter or an ice machine, or double doors and LED lights and 36 cubic feet of space that magically fits in the same space as my old fridge that had like 30 cubic feet... Gave this more thought... the appliance manufacturers aren't to blame here... it's shoppers preferences and the disposable, competitive culture we live in. I perpetually want the latest, greatest, and most stylish thing I can get. I think they are just selling me what I want to buy...
> People have been saying "___ is not AI" since Claude Shannon built a robot mouse to solve a maze. Then Shannon's chess playing program was "not AI". Humbug.

AI researchers say this because they don't want the hype to lead investors putting money in the wrong places, which could cause another AI winter.

OpenAI is one example. Fortunately, that's a non-profit. If it were profit seeking and they had a large investment that went belly up, it might cause the industry to tank.

That bust will probably happen again in the future. The "scrooges" are just trying to forestall it.
>I don't understand why the patent office doesn't understand the point of a patent

That's the copyright office. And they understand it fine, but they take orders from lawmakers who are paid under the table (or over it) to extend copyrights.
and smoking, which I specifically mentioned, and teen birth rates. I mean of course the biggest one is obesity since heart disease is the leading cause of death.
Don’t Blame the Batteries for Every Lithium-Ion Explosion
As far as I'm concerned, the rot is pervasive.. Even the drivers. My ex girlfriend was riding an uber and the driver exposed himself. She complained to uber and they claimed they fired him but after the recent revelations, I don't trust that company at all.
Someone should consider hiring this young man.
Where do you live?

I've never been to the US so my mental picture of it (which Google Maps seems to confirm) is 99% extremely wide roads, not European-style walkable at all.

So I think, I could never move there (I can't drive a car) and places where I wouldn't need a car are to expensive to live in (NY, Washington).

Are there many Londons in the US?

EDIT: oh, it's Boston.
From earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909520
Seems like a lot of gotchas... you could end up shaving a couple K off your bundle in exchange for bugs that are very hard to track down. I mean, sure, if you write your code ground-up to follow a set of rules it's probably great.
I agree with respect to the behavior of boards, but the public relations imbroglio could prompt a more rash action. Interim executives could perform his duties for 3-6 months. I believe that.

To me, that the perception of Uber as a toxic company has not abated indicates that, even if the board and investors have tried to ameliorate the situation, they have little control over Kalanick. I'd be fairly upset to see my return hang in the balance over something like that, but I suppose your return is always hanging in the balance over something.

If I were an investor in Uber I would be more concerned about the Waymo/Otto business. If some injunction comes down with that, a huge amount of the value of Uber could evaporate. If their self-driving business stays on course and they oust Kalanick, I'm reasonably certain that they can deliver on a large portion of their valuation.
It wud be beneficial to take a pramagtic approach ... AI or not ... as long as the end product helps human conditions ... we just use ... similar debates happened so many times in the past ... there is really no point to divert the attention ... for the people who know, it is clear the title is a click bait ... for the people who don't know .. they find out this anyway after they click ..
Uh, no, a top-loader should certainly lock while it's running. When that thing spins to drain all of the water out, it moves dangerously fast. You should double check that there's not something wrong with it.

Also, after growing up with a top-loader, and having a front-loader at my current apartment, I'm amazed at how much water is used and wasted by a top-loader. It's like filling a damn bathtub.
The remaining patents on DTS Core expired last year.

http://dts.com/patents/bd-dvd-players lists 4 patents, all expired.

(DTS-HD is still patent-encumbered, but DTS-HD content is backward-compatible with DTS Core.)
> i thought the purpose of technology was to enoble the human condition, lift up society, and make our civilization better for the future generations

The question is whether that is the purpose of Facebook. I don't think it is; I think the purpose of Facebook is to become a social media giant, as coffeymug said. Technology for Facebook is just a means to that end.
David Foster Wallace's Peaceful Prairie (2016)
No, Jesus doesn't give second chances. You're in trouble man.
> "From 1996 to 2012 under the trade name Lipitor, atorvastatin became the world's best-selling drug to that point, with more than US$125 billion in sales"

Also note that 1996 to 2012 is not 20 years. Drug trials eat up the patent time. This is problematic for some diseases, e.g., for cancer, where ideally you might prefer early-stage interventions or cures, but late-stage trials are faster to conclude and therefore can give drugs with longer patent protection.
I think like all tech they were stating the best theoretical possibility but will take a few years for them to actually get there.
Shrug all you want, but it most certainly is not and neither will it ever be. The definitions have been laid out in the Ashtadhyayi ~2000 years back.

It's not my concern if certain folk have no education in Panini, and are arrogant enough to ignore his work.
I resonate with this. Meditation even though it takes time actually makes you more efficient at work because you don't get distracted as easily. Running a company or programming is mainly mental work and meditation, especially lots of it, helps hone that mental muscle.

Many teachings of meditation also incorporate teachings on compassion and self love which are sorely lacking in modern workplace.

I received so much from meditation (and ayahuasca) retreats it led me to co-found Retreat Guru. http://retreat.guru. Our mission is to get more people on authentic retreats.
Do you think that every idea people have can be carried out with their hands alone?
Of course it's not really AI; it works.
You'd get a short term boost, with a flurry of activity around the suddenly freed patents, leading to a lot of incremental work.

You'd then get a longer term slump, as all companies stop investing in basic research and long-term R&D, since they can just wait and copy someone else's research instead. When building real physical products, being second to market by a few weeks costs far less than the years of R&D required to build a truly revolutionary product, not to mention you can use that R&D money to either (a) polish the your product more than the inventor's original product, or (b) splurge on marketing.
A top loader with no center agitator is almost as good, though it does still use somewhat more water than a front loader.
The main problem is that the controversy involves a lot of anecdote. Critics can't prove they've actually not been consuming some dangerous adulterants because they aren't testing their supply (since testing is pretty expensive). Here's at least one paper discussing kratom: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22133323
Parent probably meant another company that goes from $0 to megacorp before your newborn child graduates college. Not a search company.
My monetisation strategy is giving free app with basic feature and then require in-app purchase for premium feature. I hated ads so I will never put ads in my app, this makes me think hard on what value/problem my app will solve or provide. ( Shameless plug: https://komuter.pro , dead simple app with only 1 view)
Ooooh!! Thanks. :)
I've noticed that Ember fans are generally rails dev, at first I just believe it was because discourse was written in rails but ember and rails share a lot of philosophy/ideology which makes it appealing to some and repealing to others.
That's a political appointment- he has zero training in economic theory. He's an ex Goldman lackey that screwed up the financial bailout, tried to run for political office in California then failed and knows about as much about econ as my grandma. President of the a FRB doesn't mean you are trained in economic theory- it's a poltiical appointment period.
Sorry to hear this..
3D printing with cellulose
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." -- Confucius
"Why not both." I just looked, and it seems, during the last election cycle, the Facebook PAC gave just about equal amounts to both parties.
This is why the drug companies love biologics so much. The patent can expire, but without access to the cell line that produces the drug, it can't be relocated. An equivalent cell line would have to go through clinical trials.

Humira is out of patent protection, but still costs thousands for a dose