skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It's actually a myth that most Chinese characters have a semantic component (indicating meaning).

That's because most people only know about the 2000 Chinese characters used in everyday situations, so they have this misunderstanding; Others who don't know Chinese heard this and keep on parroting it. If you know more about the language (post-seconadary level), you would know Chinese relies heavily on semantic component.

Here is an example characters I saw in Stanley, Hong Kong a few days ago (as part of a 2 lines poem.)

巍峩 vs the normal form 魏我

Normally the character 魏 means "Tower on an emperor's building" and 我 means "I". By adding the component 山 ("Mountain") to the characters, the words 巍峩 now carries a connotation of epicness one associate with mountain range. ie. "The building and I, as impressive as a mountain range."
Should have no problem since this model works end-2-end, so only images are required. However, one worry is that the number of glphys for western language is significant smaller than eastern Asian languages, the styles to model might be a lot more than the demonstrated case here which will lead to an explosive size of discriminator, so some structure change might need to take place before applying to western alphabet
Their web site: "As of October 2016, we are focusing our resources on design, fabrication, consultation, and workshops. We are no longer offering an open lab work space, and we do not provide tools for rental/check-out or in-store use. Consultations are by appointment only." There's nothing wrong with running a prototype-making shop, but most prototype-making shops have much more capability than those guys.
While your comment is over the specified age limit, please note that comments lamenting HN's decline are advised against in the guidelines. [0]

The comment you replied to was relevant to the article and it articulates a valuable perspective that I actually wish we saw more of on HN, more skepticism toward the established VC/startup investment process. It's especially important because YC's involvement with HN has made it a nexus for many who are infatuated with startup culture and unwilling to countenance criticism of it.

FWIW, my account claims to be 3173 days old (or "8.715 average Gregorian years" according to WolframAlpha) and I don't think what you're describing is anything new, or that it's bad. The comments have always been the star of the show at HN. The articles are treated as catalysts because they are. HN is about the discussion that occurs on HN.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm including the Hellenistic era. It continued to grow economically at well above normal preindustrial rates (according to Ober), if not quite as high as in the classical period. Technological progress might've been even faster then -- it was the time of Archimedes and the Antikythera device, and much else. (Russo, The Forgotten Revolution.) Ober concluded with a post-Alexander chapter: the Hellenistic cities were not completely at the mercy of empire-building despots because a walled city at the time was very hard to conquer (instead of starving out) leaving a Nash equilibrium where cities paid substantial taxes but weren't messed with too much in their internal politics, so that much of that culture survived for quite some time.

(From my memory of a book I read a year ago.)

I'd guess that even without Rome, military technology & organization would've made cities increasingly vulnerable, and it'd have been a race between increasing despotism from such developments and the fact that freer more dynamic societies also have a kind of military advantage (see Archimedes again at Syracuse). But of course I'm indulging in total speculation.
But that priority doesn't influence the quality of the recommendations they make. The data they sell doesn't influence the places they tell you to visit because that would in effect bias the quality of the data.
You don't really own the car though. You own steel and plastic and all that sure, they haven't figured out how to erode ownership of that yet. It's all worthless without software though and you don't get to own that. Now you are just licensing it. Now they can slap all the conditions they want on it. They fucked up and people died? Well enjoy your arbitration clause because that was a software issue. That dream of using your self driving car to make money, well you can do that on their network only with their rules.
Yes, you can set Vim key-bind from Menu -> UI -> EditorKeymap.
This is my new favourite thing, want more of this :)
I don't journal, but from what I understand, products like the 5-minute journal ask you to journal some things you are thankful for, something positive/good that happened today, what you could have done better, etc.

This exercise seems more about focusing your day/priorities, clearing your thoughts and taking some time to feel some good vibes. It's not about remembering 100% of your life.

Yeah - If I'm going to look back on life later on at things, it will be 100x in favor of things like my kid's photos/videos vs words I spoke that were transcribed to text.
A lot of people are smart, but not everybody has the opertunuty to act. The guy was maybe smart at age 25.
Makes you wish you could sacrifice points to get a topic discussed- Sigh
AWESOME , nice to South Africans
Well, I understand the benefits, you get fewer bugs and presumably maintenance would be easier. I guess what I'm interested in is other trade offs. How close to the machine can I get with these languages? A fast regex engine these days requires SIMD, which means wherever you are needs to support using special CPU instructions. You also need to very carefully control allocations, and in my case as well, the memory layout itself.

I'm interested in all the possible trade offs here, not just the type safety trade off. (That's why Rust is so appealing to me, because it nails a lot of my requirements while also giving a fairly high degree of safety.)
You have to wonder whether all of this press is just a plug for an exit?

Additionally, how does the board of directors at Foursquare let this last for 8 years?

They raised a down round last year at a ~$300 million valuation and are "aiming" to get to a $100 million to reach profitability (8 years later).
AWS Aurora MySQL adds fast DDL operations
I have my own Sherry the Mouse story. I realized that having a character that could skip portcullises would be useful, so I kept her. I had to make her tougher and I found a way to grind to raise her stats. I gave her a lightning wand (one of the few weapons she could carry), went to a village and found a dog walking around, and had her kill it. In order to get it to re spawn, I had to remove the dead dog body, but it was faster to just put it in my backpack. So I would have Sherry kill dogs until I ran out of room for the bodies in my inventory and then go far away to unload them, then go back and grind some more, shooting dogs with lightning. Once she was strong enough to hold a real weapon, I went to the cave of the giant ants and had her kill ants with a halberd until she was strong enough to wear plate mail armor. A mouse. With a halberd and plate mail armor. Probably my favorite gaming experience ever.
Weka.io develop a software-defined distributed storage system in D with latencies well below a millisecond (over Ethernet). They use the GC in some parts, but avoid it on the hot path as much as possible as it is a simple pause-the-world mark-and-sweep collector.

All in all, the GC isn't as much of an issue for high-performance applications as is sometimes claimed, but all the recent work towards reducing the dependency on it has of course been done for a reason – in performance-critical code, you often don't want any allocations at all (GC or not), and the large jitter due to collections can be a problem in some situations.
I find it impossible to muster even a false sense of hope at this stage, and frankly if enthusiasm solved problems they'd all be solved. Throw some realistic hope my way that doesn't include, "First human nature needs to change" or something like that though, and I'll be there. I'm bad at faith, but I'm willing to pin hopes on analytically sound long shots, if they're all I have.
Raganwald had a good write up on how to do this: https://github.com/raganwald/raganwald.posterous.com/blob/ma...
This is stereotyping at it's finest.

China, even the Han-culture is not a monolith. There are huge cultural differences in China. One billion people are not 'one china' in anywhere else than communist propaganda.

There are differences in business culture, management hierarchy, language, food (what people in the west think as Chinese food is Cantonese food) and relationship with authority. People in eastern cities are culturally more individualistic and take more initiative than they do in other parts of China. That's something that foreign companies with subsidiaries in China have noticed.
Uber said to use “sophisticated” software to defraud drivers, passengers [pdf]
How could infallible information even be stored in fallible information storage units a.k.a words? Interpretation by mankind is the same thing as changing it. Anyway, I'm not saying change or amend the books. Qur'an 2.0 would be carrying forward the "Qur'an" label, the opposite of what I'm talking about. Christianity amended in the past for whatever reason but I don't think we'll see that happen again, they're playing the same game. Since the majority of of people in both camps are visibly not following these books by the letter, I think it's safe to assume most don't actually believe them 100% and should stop labeling themselves.
Autonomous robots with spinning blades. What could go wrong?
>> I was motivated enough to spent 7+ months learning basic Mandarin

That is impressive.

I have tried learning Mandarin, and found that in the same amount of time that you could be communicating (at a very basic level) in another language (even one considered 'hard' like Japanese), with Mandarin I am still trying to get tones right.
The slavery makes me very uncomfortable in wondering about this, yes. It varied a lot between the poleis, like Sparta vs. Athens, and I don't think the Rome of the original post was an improvement.
http://www.maplin.co.uk/microbit
Its for that, i try to avoid any lease or credit. Things that tie you down, tie you up.
A cheap surface would be a pretty killer device for anyone doing their undergrad/grad studies now. In my experience, jotting down on a surface is pretty close to having a stack of A4s and a nice pen to have, you can doodle on it, organize notes, draw diagrams of varying complexity, and take notes in your own handwriting (or if it is bad, type it out).
Ask HN: Career advice for a new grad
Hi HN,

I've been agonizing over a decision between two offers.

The first one is from a company in Ottawa (Canada), doing systems programming (C/C++) with an above-average salary (for a new grad). The second one is from a company in London (UK), with ~ £40k salary. I'd be working with a more "modern" stack (think Python/JS/Ruby/Go/etc).

Following is a somewhat unstructured collection of thoughts.

Location:
London >> Ottawa. I'd be looking at a ~40-60min commute (by bus) in Ottawa. For London, public transit and cycling infrastructure seem good. I'm more familiar with Ottawa as I've done an internship there, while my impression of London is based solely on a short visit. Generally though, London seems to be a more exciting (but expensive) place to live.

Type of work:
The first offer seems more interesting as I would love to work on performance-type problems.

People/team:
When interviewing with the first company, I met with two people from my would-be team (including the manager), and with multiple senior engineers from other teams. The company has a high proportion of senior engineers. For the second company, I got to meet a larger portion of the team. There were a couple instances during the interview and several post-interview phone calls where I thought "man, I'd really love to work with this person".

Immigration:
For the sake of future stability, it is important for me to get permanent residency regardless of where I end up. Based on my research, getting a PR in Canada is much faster compared to getting an ILR in the UK.

Some of the questions on my mind are:

- Would it be irresponsible to give up the PR in Canada and move away?

- Would I later regret not moving to London in my early twenties?

- What's more important: work or people?

- How important is compensation for the first job out of college?

Would really appreciate any help/input/advice, especially from people later in their careers who have had to make similar choices.
Spring Home Show on April 7th – 9th, 2017 in West Vancouver, BC
The article talks about the average age of Nobel prize winners, of patent holders, and so on.
Yay... great to see MicroPython on the micro:bit getting some love. In case you're interested, here are the docs for MicroPython on the board -- you can do a remarkable amount on such a small device: https://microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

(Caveat - I was involved in the MicroPython side of things. So good to see the other dev environments represented in the comments here.)

Hurrah! :-)
According to [1, probably paywalled], it's present in both vertebrates and invertebrates, but not plants or fungi, indicating that it's animal specific, but still quite ancient. What the authors have found is not that cephalopods can edit their RNA, but that they do it a lot more than has previously been reported in other animals.

I assiduously avoid studying the brain and behavioral complexity because that stuff is incredibly complicated, but I'm pretty skeptical about the authors' claims in the popular press that this is likely responsible for---or even particularly connected to---cephalopod intelligence or learning. My bet would be that in general, you get intelligence by complicated wiring, but that you don't necessarily need complicated neurons to do that wiring. By analogy, what makes the latest Intel processors so much better than an 8086 has a little bit to do with the 64-bit architecture, but a lot more to do with the radically smaller transistors.

[1] http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-biochem...
I'm not seeing the substantial difference between "opinion columnist" and "journalist" anymore.

The journalist's job is:

..to report a factual event that happened and give the reader enough factual context and analysis for that report to be useful.

Not:

..to convince the reader of one position or another

..to expound on their own political beliefs or opinions

I find that many self-described journalists are able to avoid the second problem but hold up the first as if it were a virtue.
What is overseen most of the time is that mere job counting statistics are worthless. If 20 million jobs were destroyed where people could make a decent living, to create 24 million jobs where people have to work endless hours, live in vans and get no security, it's a net loss for the society.
Similar situation. We had 5-6ms pings to the Lake Superior shard in an era when most people were on modems (IIRC at launch most people weren't even on 56k!). We sat next to each other and could see each other's screen while for other folks even IM was a novelty for team coordination.

When to others it looked like you were warping around and doing 5 things in an instant and you had great communication/coordination with your partners, you could do some serious damage.
Creative Footprint: A Non-Profit That Measures and Indexes Urban Creative Space
Well then we shall see won't we?

If Google isn't engaging in discrimination then they have no reason not to release the info to the government.

Maybe it isn't technically illegal for Google to withhold this info.

If so, they would be free to not release it.

And us not idiot engineers and the media would be free to use this as evidence that Google must obviously be discriminating.

The court of public opinion has different standards than the court of law.

Don't like it? Think you're innocent? Then release the info and prove it! I see no reason to give large for profit companies the benefit of the doubt.
What a strange headline. In what way could anything about audio books be construed as a "reading trend"?
Emotions are flying high in the comments, because the world (including the virtual one) is changing fast(er) and not in the best direction.

There is also great disconnect between the tech billionaires and the real problems in the world.

The numbers they base their worldview on are carefully curated and the story is of course that 'things are greater than ever', but the rest of the people (especially outside the US) are felling it very differently.

Proof of that is Brexit, Trump and populists + nationalists winning in many countries - voted in by people who are finding it hard to adapt to the fast-changing pace of the tech-driven world, in which they have no shares or say.

Compared to 'real' problems that the world faces, self-driving cars are, in my humble opinion, irrelevant.
From a passenger's perspective, self-driving vehicles have existed since forever - called buses, trains or taxis, so I don't see how the passenger experience will dramatically change when it's driven by a computer rather than a human.

From the perspective of the owner of a self-driving fleet, though, this is a potentially fantastic business.

Of course profits will be largely shared by a couple of shareholders and some leftovers offered to the engineers in the form of yearly salaries and maybe some equity, while the rest of us will get a new bill each month for the miles/seconds driven.

I know it because I experienced it myself as an engineer in a company in which Mark made billions, while those who built the whole thing received scraps from the deal.

So I think the OP post is understandable - maybe the tone was a bit harsh, but the main points I find hard to not agree with.
I figured out that although the big ships had cannons, you had to leave them at the shore. The small rowboats would fit in an inventory slot - inventory was based on slots and weight, so a strong character could carry it. So my group of adventurers walked around in caves and forests with a rowboat in my backpack, and water obstacles were never a problem again.
I looked into this when it made the rounds and I don't agree that it is evidence of intentional bias on the part of Politifact.

I do believe it is a good case study that exposes the weak points of their approach toward condensing a quote down to a true/false rating. I think they would do much better to decompose a quote into separate claims and fact check those separately.

The Sanders quote that was fact checked can be read as making three separate claims, and Politifact discusses each before lumping them together for the true/false stamp:

1. The "real unemployment rate for young people" is not the same as the typically accepted rate
2. unemployment for blacks >> unemployment for Hispanics > unemployment for whites
3. The "real unemployment rate for young people" is 51%, 36%, and 33% for those groups, respectively

Sanders doesn't explicitly spell out (1), but he at least uses the qualifier "real" instead of simply saying "the unemployment rate", and his campaign later clarified what he meant. (2) is supported by the study his campaign supplied. The numbers in (3) match the study his campaign supplied.

In contrast, the Trump quote is:
"If you look at what’s going on in this country, African-American youth is an example: 59 percent unemployment rate; 59 percent"

and Politifact is only fact checking the "59 percent unemployment rate for black youths". Trump's campaign did not respond, but the Politifact research found that "it appears likely it comes from a computation of all 16- to 24-year-old blacks who aren’t working and may not even want a job, including high school and college students." Since the fact-check is focused on the statistic itself, this tips it into the false category.

Of course, a potential criticism is that Politifact should be fact-checking the higher-level claim that Trump is making. But from this quote, it's very difficult to tell exactly what this claim is. Trump tends to use words to paint emotional pictures that are intended to resonate with a broad audience, rather than making a chain of argument to support specific claims. How do you fact-check a claim about "what's going on in this country"? Any interpretation of such vague phrasing is going to rely as much on the personal experience of the audience as it will on the actual quote.

So I do agree that this exposes a weakness of Politifact. But in this case the Sanders and Trump claims are not equivalent, and Politifact has a clear chain of reasoning behind their ratings.

Another, higher-level potential criticism is that Politifact, as an organization with limited resources, has to make editorial decisions and clearly can't fact-check every public statement made by a candidate. I don't know how they decide which quotes to fact-check, so I don't rely on them to provide a complete account of what is happening in the world. But I'm happy they're able to dig in deeply in some cases where clarification is needed.

The lesson to take away is to read articles from fact-checking organizations for what they're good at. Read and understand their cited evidence and reasoning, not just the true/false stamp.
Government employees are actually more free in this case- the first amendment means they can't be fired for their non-official speech where it would be fine for a company to fire them.
Multiagent Bidirectionally-Coordinated Nets for Playing StarCraft
Nope, as a kinda libertarian myself, I don't think this a libertarian forum at all, judging by all the hate for things like sharing economy and such. I think a lot of people (on all sides really) just react to keywords instead of thinking about the content :(

And yes labor input determines cost, and in equilibrium cost and value are the same, and would be correlated in the data -- but reasoning from cost imo amounts to putting the carriage before the horse, and leads to all kinds of shenanigans with the "socially necessary" component...
The time period between mid-closed Beta UO and roughly that Christmas was my all time favorite time period for gaming.
You got my attention with the open-sourced not taking app for programmers. I downloaded it because it was free and had markdown support. This project could even better if it tried to up-sell people with a SaaS offering that would sync all of the desktop apps under a a certain account, but also offer an open source version of that.
IMHO the "lazy" and the "malicious" are the ones making policy. They certainly aren't going to be fired, so - again IMHO - this policy is a non-starter.