skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I don't take exception with the word machine learning (it's reasonably well defined), I agree with most of the points here. Some are grossly exaggerated (e.g. needing petabytes of data to do machine learning). In my research on medical time series, we get strong results with a few thousand examples (megabytes). Same for natural language datasets which are modestly sized. But yes, absolutely agree that function approximation for supervised learning and some kind of artificial consciousness as portrayed in the media are very far apart.
This has turned out to be an amazing thread. While the first 50 books were something I was expecting, Selfish Gene, Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy et all, the suggestions went interesting as I kept scrolling.

In the spirit of all things books, I've compiled the answers into a list (You were expecting someone to do this, weren't you?)

Since, I've done this manually, this is what I've included.

1. Have only included the first level comments and the books mentioned in them.

This means the comments that said, if you liked this, you'll also like this aren't included.

2. Have included books from comments that have provided good answers to the 'why'.

Haven't included just book mentions without explanations of why that has been the most influential book.

Which book is mentioned most?

Haven't counted, but I think it is Selfish Gene and the Bhagwat Gita!

And here is the list --> You guys can go ahead and add these to your reading list.

http://shelfjoy.com/sia_steel/non-technology-books-that-have...
Nope, apparently quick load doesn't load several IDE features at all. What I mean by lazy load is that it should incrementally load the IDE features after the IDE starts.
To make things even worse (even funnier?), GCC also has something like this, I believe it's this feature: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Instrumentation-Options.h...
I defer to mikekchar's comment.

I was initially riffing on MPPA dogma. But I wasn't thinking through the implications of fair use.
You're welcome to drop by most Tuesdays for lunch or breakfast at 8:30 any day of the week, we're at 155 Clarence. Drop me a line at abhih at pivotal.io if you'd like that :)
I'm sure you meant to refer to underwater basket weaving.
You can also "forbid" others from reading and writing your file if use a new temporary file they don't know about, and weakly enforce that by removing the file system entry with unlink while keeping the fd open, then link it again later.

Part of the goal is IMHO not having to write out the entire file every time, only because you changed a few bytes. The atomic renaming can't do that, to my knowledge.

I'm really only wondering about the forbidding reads part, and if that gains anything useful. For a process that knows about and participates in the locking process that's already possible, but mandatory file locks are also for processes that did not participate. Like for example cat, the backup process etc.
The point is, if you handle strings the C way, you're not in conformance with UTF-8.

If someone passes you a text file that is verified to be valid UTF-8 and contains, say, access permissions, then you better not stop parsing it at the first '\0' character.

None of this is a huge problem, but it's something to be aware of. C string handling is incompatible with UTF-8.
Yep, you're right. I was thinking about it from an easy to set up development environment perspective.
List of non-tech books that have influenced HNers the most
Based on this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13967350

and this is why I have done the compilation.

This has turned out to be an amazing thread. While the first 50 books were something I was expecting, Selfish Gene, Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy et all, the suggestions went interesting as I kept scrolling.
In the spirit of all things books, I've compiled the answers into a list (You were expecting someone to do this, weren't you?)
Since, I've done this manually, this is what I've included.
1. Have only included the first level comments and the books mentioned in them.
This means the comments that said, if you liked this, you'll also like this aren't included.
2. Have included books from comments that have provided good answers to the 'why'.
Haven't included just book mentions without explanations of why that has been the most influential book.
Which book is mentioned most?
Haven't counted, but I think it is Selfish Gene and the Bhagwat Gita!
And here is the list --> You guys can go ahead and add these to your reading list.
No it's not a huge problem, but if you're not aware of it, it could easily lead to a security breach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13974919
Considering the relentless increase of lead production in the past few hundred years [1], with every passing year, old lead is probably becoming more and more readily available, to the point that in another 100 years it might be cheaper to just scrape it off rusted car wheels/etc. than deliberately store it for such a long time. As long as we don't get too greedy with recycling.

[1] http://historum.com/general-history/21841-world-lead-product...
Consider the cost of polio vaccine versus the cost of keeping a polio victim undead for a year in an iron lung. It's ineffective medical treatment that really costs. Even if you don't care about human life, even if money is your only preoccupation, we need life extension technology to stop the cost of end-of-life care from bankrupting modern society.
This brings up another subject where I find myself at odds with my hacker brethren. Look, I'm a huge fan of science fiction myself, but the idea that we are ever going to solve any of our problems by colonizing Mars is just that -- fiction.

Sure, I agree with Elon Musk that a disaster recovery plan for humanity seems like a sensible idea. Also, technology developed for space has applications down here in the gravity well we call home.

But we're never going to have a large-scale migration off-planet, or any sizable off-planet populations. A Mars colony even on the order of your average Antarctic research facility sounds incredibly difficult to accomplish. We are having trouble figuring out how to keep Earth -- the planet we literally evolved to live on -- habitable for ourselves. Why should we be able to transform a barren, icy, radioactive, razor-sharp-dust-covered, dead rock into a suitable place for us to live?

I feel like my thinking on this subject paralleled the work of Kim Stanley Robinson. The Mars trilogy was very popular in Silicon Valley (and, relevant to the original topic, that series introduced immortality as a plot device to maintain the same set of characters across (even wildly accelerated) geologic timespans). But then KMS went and wrote Aurora, which paints quite a different picture.
Truth be told, talking about cheese for 40 long minutes seems kind of boring. What's there to talk about? You just eat it. My East-European grandma has been making her own cheese using milk taken from her own cows for all of her life, and I've never heard her talking about cheese. Must be a bobo thing.
Sure. But halos seem pretty common - every person I know who got LASIK done in the past 10 years experiences got them to some extent, my dad almost had a nervous breakdown because for the first year after the surgery the halos were so bad he couldn't really drive at night - they sort of faded away with time but he said they were always there and in hindsight, he wouldn't have selected surgery.
Nobody will give a small limited liability company any serious credit line or similar. In practice you still are liable with your personal belongings to any relevant creditor if you are just starting.

Also, if you think that there is no personal liability for the managing founder in a limited liability company, don't search for "Geschäftsführerhaftung" or you are going to have a bad day.
true, it's the result of an optimization process, but intelligence itself (whatever it is...it's a suitcase-term) isn't as simple as that. Or maybe it is, I don't know!
Startups don't require diversity. The first and second wave of Silicon Valley startups were by and large run by white middle class men.

In a way diversity can perhaps even be detrimental to a developing startup community. Coming back to the example of Germany, citizens with a Turkish background very often are entrepreneurs and run their own businesses, much more so than citizens with a German background. However, those businesses are hardly ever what you'd consider startups: Fast food shops, food stores, import / export businesses, travel agencies. In summary: Tried and proven business ideas.
I've tried localstack once a few months ago to mock SQS and found it really slow to boot, had a pretty high memory footprint, crashed very often (was running inside their official docker container I recall), and lacked documentation.

If you just need to mock SQS, I recommend using elasticmq. I've used it for a few months now and haven't had any problems at all so far.

https://github.com/adamw/elasticmq/blob/master/README.md
https://hub.docker.com/r/expert360/elasticmq/
Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13955981

We had a discussion about Amazon.com comingling inventory with seller inventory.

More discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546
Blogspam of

http://www.oit.gatech.edu/news/electric-sands-titan
Tunnels will be important on Mars.
I still kind of cannot get over the fact that almost 45 years have passed since the last human walked on the Moon :(
US Senate Is Threatening the Privacy of Americans
kerataconus, which involves mild to severe astigmatism and a deformed cornea. from what i've read, it's a bit of both. there's a couple of newish soft contact designs i've heard of, but also there's the cost. at a point, glasses don't even provide sufficient correction.
I may not be versed in this but does calling your congress man work? Do you leave a message or do you actually get a person on the line to talk to?

I hear people say "let's flood the line". Is that something the elected official look for to make those decision? I'm seriously asking the question.
Ulbricht wasn't interested in the human rights of his murder victims, though.
I've never seen this description before, saying that introverts are tense and extroverts peaceful. If you put them in an empty room, you could instead easily picture the introvert being calm and the extrovert tense due to a lack of human interaction.

I rather think that the best description of the difference is how you charge your batteries. An introvert prefers alone time to recharge and an extrovert prefers the company of other people to do the same. A social gathering with many people would drain an introvert and invigorate an extrovert. It has nothing to do with inner tension or peace.

I have seen Susan Cain in the book Quiet talk about introverts as highly sensitive, in the sense that they take in and process more information about the environment. An extrovert would love talking to their friends at a noisy bar, while the introvert would be bothered by the noise and prefer a calmer setting. Being alone is then a way of reducing sensory input to produce a sense of calm, it's not that an introvert would need to be alone to relieve any inner tension.
I suppose you could say it goes both ways. On one hand they traditionally weren't easily accepted as a natural part of German society. On the other hand (perhaps also as a reaction towards that kind of rejection), many people with a Turkish background didn't and to some extent still don't want to become part of German society.
east-german secret service stasi had this technique for up to 5 millions of their own citizens, in form of some smellable clothing sealed in jar so that trained hounds can track you.
Good points.

You could have a special tattoo design or a piercing. Or even just a hair style.
I get the feeling that very few old school authors would come forward and say "Hey, my project code is not good and needs to be re-written." Most of the time the message is more like "Sure we're using C but we're very careful and have built in a lot of safeguards."

I like your idea of a default mindset of internet tools should be written in a safe language with proper engineering techniques. I'm not sure I would go as far as malpractice but it might be a good stick to use to force makers into better practices.
You can get this : https://anonymster.com/tutanota-review/

They are available on git hub
> I've begun mentally treating "Natural" as the equivalent of someone saying "trust me". Well, I did... until you seemed to preemptively think I had a reason not to.

I'm not sure what your point was there - but my post wasn't meant to be a "everyone thinks natural means good" - just that it gets used so much by marketers I assume people must. I definitely subscribe to your approach.

I'm in the UK, and from what I gather our labelling requirements are stricter than the US's (at least in most states) - for example "trace" ingredients still need to be listed. Unfortunately, it is clear that most take the marketing over the reality, and I accept that it does take time to go over ingredients on everything you use (especially when batches change the ingredient list, which is pretty common). I've had to shop for diabetics before, and it's a nightmare, because two of the same product on a shelf can have 10% more or less sugar.

Here in the UK, there is a lot of law around requiring advertising to be faithful to reality - e.g: recently they made a requirement that fruit juices have to list the fruits in order of quantity in the name of the juice, so you can't sell "grape and elderflower" juice that has a first ingredient of apple juice. I think these regulations, where possible, help consumers a lot, and "natural" is one of those misleading terms.
> but those same researchers will do the work for Google for stock, a decent salary, and access to interesting problems that don't involve killing people.

Regardless of origin you can rest assured the technology will make its way into the hands of a killer. It always does.
Just to take you back even further, it originally started as "Blizzard DOTA".
If you work with a large-ish ObjC+Swift project, XCode is quite painful. I regularly lose syntax coloring. Compile errors get stuck and don't disappear when the code is fixed. Refactoring Swift code is non existent. Importing images in the project locks the entire UI thread. Storyboards that are more then a couple of screens take ages to open and edit.

SourceKit should help XCode to reason about Swift code but somehow XCode gets lost at least once or twice a day on my machine (MBP 15" i7, 16GB RAM).

Android development tools used to suck but since Android Studio 2.0 and the rise of Swift, it is now iOS dev tools that are lagging behind.
Direct link to the full-size map for the lazy right-clickers:

https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/files/2017/02/MapMigration_c.j...
What is the most useful language for English speakers to learn?
>Which is why the rest of iOS has no bugs?

It has no show stopper bugs, and is used by close to a billion everyday just fine.

And the "rest of the iOS" (kernel, userland, etc) is orders of magnitude more LOC than the filesystem. And with all kind of interactions between components, not just a constrained API that all sandboxed apps use, as is the case with an FS. It has way bigger test surface and (presumably) way smaller test suites than an FS would.

What's the reason to assume an FS which is under production for 2 years now at least (it didn't appear magically formed a day before last WWDC) will have not just some obscure or infrequent bugs, but data killing bugs?

(And why they'd be more than with the frequent new features and changes that Apple made/retrofitted to HFS over the years? Because they've started from scratch?)
How long before humans are 0wnz0red?

http://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/
Is Quora Down? Getting 504. Gateway Timeout
Ask HN: Is Quora down? (March 28)
Rise of the UX writer
Or a contractor fixing the lights spots it on his way out. Not a lot of thefts happen by tunneling into buildings!
How to get started with VR interface design
Used my python package dwc(https://github.com/hvnsweeting/dwc)

dwc */ | sort -n | head
494: examples/
846: docs/
1268: mal/
1464: perl6/
1483: coffee/
1509: io/
1534: racket/
1571: ocaml/
1579: es6/
1621: factor/

Edit1: for better command

Edit2: for formatting
I got tensorflow to analyze blutooth signals off a wireless controller.

talk about dreamland autoaim
Developer incompetency has nothing to do with 2d vs 3d animation.
The Security fixes in iOS 10.3
Interestingly, taking inflation into account, the value of 3 pence in 1949 is exactly equivalent to £1 in 2017.

Unfortunately it doesn't work as well for the commemorative coin dated 1937, which is worth closer to £2.
I'm not scared by all this - I think it's positive. I find death at the moment a bit of a downer and merging with tech a way to improve things.
L Marks and the British logistics giant Wincanton are launching W² Labs
Juno orbiter races by Jupiter on fourth science pass
If you enjoy cheese as much of everything you'll know that there's a seemingly endless stream of varieties even within a single defined kind of cheese.

I would say that having 40 minute discussion about cheese is no more obscure than having one about programming languages, of course context and setting plays a big role in suitability of both discussions.
Why scientific transparency is so tricky
I could see it being a case of scan, pass the phone back to child/whoever's with you (or scan it their side for them), then they're all registered on that account. A bit like plane digital boarding cards. That does remove a potential fraud signal though so maybe they have a better idea.
I consider Nim's approach an advantage since it prevents nasty confusion by accidental typos, in particular in big projects with many modules.
I didn't notice this comment before:

> Another security area I looked at was docker grsec incompatibilities, eg. https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/20303 though didn't get closure despite suggesting what IMHO seems a decent fix. Meh.

I don't like Docker's chrootarchive any more than the next person, but your fix is not trivial (unless the fix you're referring to was to disable the security features). Part of the point of chrootarchive is that it protects against a malicious archive from modifying the host filesystem through dodgy paths -- something that using a chroot prevents. Otherwise chrootarchive would have to implement all of the chroot path handling code the kernel normally deals with (which is not good fun, take it from me).

The security issues that grsec is trying to protect users from do not apply to chrootarchive because (in principle) the binary being run in chrootarchive is safe (it is `tar -x` so shouldn't actually be trying to access or otherwise mess with disks for example).
> Where would we be if Newton and Einstein were still alive?

If Newton were alive, would Einstein's theories ever have seen the light of day?
> even with the most tangential usage of ML

What, basic linear regression is not cutting edge enough for you?
I tried to read the piece you linked, but TBH I couldn't be bothered to wade through the fluff and stopped before I came to the part you were referencing.

Maybe you could quote it for us?

Anyway, the question I wanted to ask is: how does United/American/Delta's structure compare to, say, Lufthansa, or Air France, or Thai Airways? I've honestly never flown a US carrier, but long-haul complaints and horror stories tend to be about US carriers, not European ones, even though I suspect they have pretty similar structure.
http://www.slashdot.org/story/312289

https://www.infoq.com/news/2016/06/visual-cpp-telemetry

Appearently they backed off, due to major outcry. The usual salami tactics.

Nevertheless to this day developers compile binaries with the affected compiler version - still in release builds of various up-to-date software.
4 tips we noticed from speaking with business representatives at the 4YFN 2017
> 19 years ago I hadn’t exactly established my “daily routine” of spare time development already but I was close and for the larger part of this period I have spent a few hours every day.

Holy shit. A few hours every day is pretty much every free moment. For 19 years :o
Right, fair use, and public-safety arguments.
I remember hearing the 5M number on the day of the election and maybe the day after, but not all the votes were counted at that point.

It looks like the voter turnout was pretty average. Going back to 1972, the turnout numbers are similar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St...

Thank you for the reminder about the limitations of gerrymandering!

Senate is 52-48 which doesn't seem like a sweep. This includes two independents which caucus with the Democrats. I think the Democrats actually picked up two seats, which doesn't seem like a sweep either. Also, in your previous comment, you said the GOP won some seats. Which seats were these?

Donald Trump had a victory margin in the bottom 10 of historical elections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
You're not being too hard on the article. The hatred for Wayland is especially pointless. The author claims that Wayland "has nothing to do with the vast industry out there" because servers don't run graphically, completely ignorant of the embedded Linux market (where the "monitor + keyboard + mouse" X paradigm is most broken) and other major driving forces behind Wayland.

Yes modern software libraries are inconvenient because they change a lot and constantly break. But that's not a new thing, it's been a problem as long as software libraries have existed.
> Broadly, no way do I believe that many people, not even fleets, especially not individuals, will put up with the charging time of a battery powered car. It's just so darned much more convenient to fill up a 20 gallon tank with gasoline.

This may not hold true in the near future. With charging stations capable of putting out 350kW, we will have drastically reduced charging times. [0]

> Finally, I'm guessing that Musk has had a lot of subsidies, and I have to guess that Trump will turn off that faucet.

Actually, Tesla doesn't lose much if ZEV credits go away... In fact, the way things stand, other auto manufacturers are able to fully monetize their ZEV credits, while Tesla only makes 50 cents on the dollar. [1]

[0] - https://electrek.co/2016/12/26/tesla-supercharger-v3-zev-cre...

[1] - http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-trump-decision-on-e...
Thiết+kế+căn+hộ+giống+biệt+thự+đẳng+cấp
Try different brands. My wife had the same problem when she went to an astigmatism lense they were too floppy and very difficult but persisted and changed brand/type (still dailies) and they're much better.

Stuff is changing all the time
Food restrictions can cause alienation as well, unfortunately. I agree that that the expectation that socializing=drinking is a problem.
I got the sense that the memories of the future being beyond Louise's control was due to her novice level command of heptapod. The heptapods seem to know events 3000 years in advance, so it seems they can plan well. Also, they seemed undisturbed by Abbot's death which leads me to believe they were also aware that would happen.

Which is also something interesting to consider. Death is probably less bothersome if your perception of time is non-linear.
As a non-US citizen who as been to all the countries in question the answer seems obvious: Their citizens are much unhealthier.