skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tldr; AI could be on a higher plane of thought, but I'm of the camp that they could come up with new formal systems to explain their advances.

Well there's the old saying, "If you can't explain it to a six year old you don't understand it yourself." I think if there were a super human intelligence it would likely understand where our limitations are as humans and be able to break down the components of its discoveries into simplest terms and be able to teach us even if it's at an incredibly slower pace then they can process.

This reminds me of Godel's proof about how by our current formal systems of mathematics we cannot prove everything, and
it maybe even went as far as saying every single formal system will always leave some things that it cannot prove. Obviously a robot had to use some formal system to come to its conclusion so if it's really so smart can it break down the system it used so that we can understand its basic building blocks. Of course there's always the rate of computation and memory problem of humans in the way.

Of course if you're saying that the super human intelligence would be on an entirely different plane of thought impossible for us to understand then that's understandable, but probably less believable.

This line of thinking reminds me of the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott. Flatland is basically a story of a two dimensional square who lives on a two dimensional plane and only knows his world by his limited perception of it. One day he is visited by a three dimensional sphere who explains his world in a way imperceivable to him. The sphere somehow magically takes him off his plane of existence and shows him his world from his (the spehere's) view. He then goes on to take him on a tour of different hosts of worlds who perceive their worlds in different dimensions. He goes from point land to line land then to three dimensional space and finally back to his home plane land. Where is eventually locked in a mental institution for telling people of his adventures. Any ways it's an interesting fantasy story I recommend it.

Hate to go all meta-physical on you all, but basically the story just goes to show you we only know things from our limited perspective of the things around us if there are any higher "planes" of perception it's entirely possible that we wouldn't know about them. Some things can only be known with certain perceptions/experiences/knowledge.

It may sound ludicrous, but I would even say Christianity backs this idea to some degree attributing God to a higher plane of thought like in Isaiah 55:8-9.

Of course I would never put a robot on that level, but I could see some things being imperceptible to the human mind, so it's similar principles. Can robots achieve a higher plane to any degree... beats me. Honestly I'm thinking it wouldn't be high enough that they couldn't explain their thoughts to us.
Headline Analyzer
Deaths per billion vehicle-km:

Germany: 4.9
US: 7.1

I'd say that's a more reasonable measure.
You strangely discount the quite reasonable possibility that something serious happened and you have important information about it but are not a suspect. Now, law enforcement can certainly abuse their power, but there is nothing axiomatically entailed that makes a critical witness into a suspect.
Nah, there are still plenty of relatively labourious steps involved in a Paypal transaction.
Link is broken - anyone have a mirror?
> Let’s not forget that DJI has software which limits the abilities of the drones based on the pilot’s location. For example, DJI has established that airports are no-fly zones. However, there are some ways that drone pilots can bypass this measure and fly without restriction from DJI.

DJI is going really far on this. They already have pre-installed software which restricts drones in no-fly zones. Even more, they are putting out a bounty program to that. I heard that there are some special electrical guns which can shoot down drones. It might be useful to deploy these in no-fly zones.
Amazon, don't you think its a bit late for the April fool's joke?
Reveal-Md is similar: https://github.com/webpro/reveal-md

The pitch for git pitch itself appears directed at developers, who apparently have the time and patience to write markdown code for slideshows, but don't have the patience to output html/js via something like reveal-md. The drawback is the inherent advertising of gitpitch. With reveal-md your slideshow can be uploaded as a static page(s) to your own domain, or even directly to GitHub pages.
Debt Crisis Shakes Chinese Town, Pointing to Wider Problems
Law enforcement can be incompetent or liars (legally!) just as well as private citizens can.
That's what I'm curious about though. They went through the pain of designing a whole new hardware with a camera on it, and put a nice 200$ price tag on it, but right now, the only use of it is to take pictures of your outfit...

Paranoia about privacy aside, there are so much more I could think that an assistant could do if it had eyes, and I'm sure they may very well add those in the future, but right now, even if it was a fantastic product, I still don't see how big of a usebase it can get. Seems very niche.
IBM, Microsoft, et al. certainly throw their patent portfolio weight at small companies when it suits them.

For example, they may bring out their patents to force a lower valuation when acquiring companies.
Bixby, Siri, Cortana and "OK Google" are women's names? The only one with a woman's name that I can think of is Alexa. Granted they all have a woman's voice, but doesnt seem like that was your point.
AFAIK no one poops in the river either (that would be one tricky feat); they poop on fields adjoining the banks and wash up afterwards.

In places like Haridwar one gets screamed at for as little as putting the footwear in the stream.

Then again there are sewer dumping into Ganga all over the place (though this was/is being challenged) - starting in fact from a few hundred meters down from Hari ki Paudi.

I don't know.

Since Indian literature (and with it the languages) have essentially become comatose, perhaps the country has lost all ability to make logical deductions [1], that'd be necessary for any level of consistency.

[1] No, I know Sanskrit deals very much with logic and reasoning and grammar. I don't see so much as a vestige today, however. May be since it was/is practiced by a tiny minority that may not be all the surprising.
The chances that this was illegal are very low, and generally laws against censorship apply to government and government agencies, not to private businesses.

Beyond that, I hope you get through ok and find a new position soon.
Gonna go ahead and (once again) be the naysayer when it comes to google. This just makes google a very effective new form of patent troll.
>100,000 tons of methane with a half life of less than 10 years. The math is complex and 1 ton of methane becomes more than one ton of CO2,

You are downplaying the impact of methane. As I quoted in the last post, the IPCC estimate is that over 100 years a given amount of methane is 34 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas compared to CO2. Over a 20 year period (which is probably more relevant considering where we are in climate change) methane is 86 times more potent.

>...but the actual long term impact is fairly minimal vs the savings from not using Coal.

That's the problem - there is enough methane being released by our new reliance on natural gas there is concern that we may be having just as much of an impact on climate change as if we went and burned coal.

>...Remember that's ~100,000 tons / ~10,000,000,000 tons = 1/100,000 so yea methane is bad, but in this context it's 0.001% so it's still a rounding error even if it's 100 times that bad.

The problem is that EVERY natural gas well, storage facility and pipeline leaks methane. This was just the largest one. As I quoted in the last post, "...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas."

>... But, if we got to the point where peaking power from gas makes up ~10% of total electricity supply and the rest of that is renewable power then we will have made massive progress.

Yea no kidding - 90% power from intermittent sources would be pretty remarkable. The problem is that 90% power from intermittent sources won't be possible unless there are major advances in grid storage technologies.

In terms of having to use natural gas, nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, so there is no reason this can't be done elsewhere. Minimizing our use of natural gas when when you consider the climate changing negative externalities of natural gas, would be a good thing.
A fascinating article about some of the adventures of the man, Frederick Russell Burnham, who inspired the creation of the Boy Scouts:

https://magazine.atavist.com/american-hippopotamus

(The article isn't about the Boy Scouts, nor only about Burnham. Burnham's relation to the Boy Scouts is a factoid mentioned near the end of the article.)
It's not just India.

They do it for countries ranging from Russia to China to Japan/Korea. The spin - not surprisingly - often matches whatever the current US geopolitical stance is at that point.
There is some good news though. Recent court cases (Alice, etc.) are really cramping the trolls' style. Intellectual Ventures and the like are backing away from the troll model because their crappy software patents are getting invalidated in court left and right.
Am I the only one getting heebie-jeebies over the prospect of drones being used for purposes of terrorism? It sounds like these guys (in the article) are just jack-asses but it doesn't seem hard to imagine bad actors doing quite a bit worse. I'm also scared of the prospect that autonomous drones might be considerably harder to stop and/or catch the perpetrators before or afterwards.

It also seems likely that this will be something that is relatively cheap and widely available - you might have to be a serious actor lay hands on a SAM, but a lone nutter can probably afford a drone or ten.
Delete Messages from PST Permanently and Enhanced EML to MSG Conversion in .NET
SecuredClass App on Indiegogo
Yes, there are plenty of approaches being made to develop such systems that can take down rogue drones.

Privacy violations using drones are another issue that will promote the development of such guns/systems.

Here's a great article that mentions one such system that can hijack drones mid-air:
http://www.whatafuture.com/drone-hijacking-device-takeover-t...
Yes, why the obscure abstraction that isnt analogous to anything?

Tracks are associated with audio and channels with video. This isn't something that should be unique or creative. The notebook/note paradigm works exceedingly well becayse everyone intuitively understands it. I spent two minutes before I just quit. its too bad, the apo seemed nice
The limiting factor in farm productivity is not decision making by human farmers. Anyone who has been farming for years already makes pretty close to optimal decisions based on the available data about crop prices, weather, soil status, labor rates, etc. The ones who make bad decisions end up bankrupt, and leave farming or work as hired farmhands. And there are so few decision-making farmers left anyway that automating the decision making part of their jobs won't achieve any meaningful cost savings.
Machine Intelligence Makes Human Morals More Important
It could. It could also force the startup to hand over control of the defense (which the startup would most likely be ill-suited to control) and therefore control the defense strategy.

All that is required is a big enough defense fund that acts as a true deterrent.

Mind you, if the startup loses it doesn't mean that it would not be responsible for the payout - but at least the startup wouldn't fold simply because the costs of defending itself are out of reach.
Helix: Getting Started
horizontal rain... umbrellas don't survive there. I would hate to cycle there
You've just summarized why intel dragnets exist, I think
I would love to see a version of this where you can deploy your slideshow to your own Github Pages, with no external dependency on GitPitch.com.
I think the website is down. Here's the cached one:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:h9-Uy1z...
Redesignating programmers as "engineers", or "developers", or "coders", or whatever the flavour-of-the-month description is, is most likely to be due to some perceived stigma with the words "computer programmer". It's just plain ridiculous to keep renaming a job to make it sound trendier, especially when the thing that a person does, writing instructions for a computer to follow, is perfectly and succinctly described by the words "programmer".

I don't expect that pointing this out on Hacker News is going to make much difference, any more than pointing out how stupid it is to call personnel "human resources" and then to decide that "human resources" will now become "HR", but let me point it out just the same.
Frankly I'd take Steve Jobs over those two.

People who want to do "good" to boost their (and their nations') egos are rather dangerous. When you fight a war for "righteousness" rather than greed, you're one awful enemy to have.

Then again, Steve was a Zen student. No surprises there.
Google Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:h9-Uy1z...
Can someone explain why Bitmain controls such a large share of the global hashing power? Why can't competitors produce Bitcoin mining chips as good as Bitmain's? Is the case simply that Bitmain were first with 16nm-based miners, and when everyone else get there too, Bitmain will have no advantage left?
As part of my current role, I setup and managed a unified logging infrastructure as part of a SIEM install. We're talking ingesting logs in the order of TBs a day (Lots).
Here are my observations:

1. Syslog type logs are great when the volume is low, but field extraction can be a pain (unless you're a Regex savant)

2. Structured logs are nice to deal with. Fairly easy to read and a dream to parse. Make sure you have a good ETL process in place to process these logs so they are searchable.
3. If you have a lot of logs, they are only as good at the usability of the search on that corpus of text.

I use Splunk to ingest the logs and once the extractions are in place, it is a dream to search. Other options like ELK are available and work pretty well too.

Show the devs the advantages of having structured logs indexed and ready to search. No more: SSH > cat | grep | tail | less | more

Real-time functionality and the ability to alert on certain conditions is an added bonus.
If you simulate a nuclear reaction you get... maybe a nice video of atoms smashing together? If you simulate a brain you get an intelligent computer program.

Same with the solar system. We can create simulated solar systems. We will probably be able to make simulated brains. What is your point?

Alright, assuming the first AI even is a simulated brain (I don't see why we can't invent intelligence from first principles first.) We could definitely tweak it. We know of drugs like amphetamines that enhance human ability. That's like Stone Age tech compared to what's possible if we had unlimited control over every neuron in the entire brain. Not to mention just adding more neurons and making a larger brain. This is just touching on what's possible, I could go on for ages on possible improvements.
Can the topic be changed to include BitBucket like the README does?
Impraise (YC S14) Is Hiring a VP of Sales
This makes me want to find and watch "Colossus: The Forbin Project" (1970s SCI-FI)
A vast majority of personal assistants are female, that could be part of the reason
On the flip side of coalescing you can end in a situation where volume of signals leads to grinding down in the consumer or worse consumer hanging.

What do you do in that situation? You can force back pressure semantics on senders but then those can grind down, a lot of classic Unix tools were never built with that case in mind.

You could even argue that for signals coalescing should be preferred behavior and multiple signals could be merged together SIGIO, SIGCHLD. In SIGIO you can merge signals impacting FD, with SIGCHLD you should already be running waitpid with WNOHANG.

Sadly I don't believe this can uniformly apply to all signals (don't want to coalesce SIGSEGV/SIGBUS). Also siginfo_t complicates things quite a bit (since the info in there makes it hard to dedup). But such is life in POSIX.... we only now have the hindsight.
Poor man's pomodoro timer
I understand. Makes perfect sense.

I think many very pertinent stories and points of view never surface because of the very real threat of retaliation or ostracism - burning bridges, as you say.

I think that people who expose the mistakes, weaknesses, and perhaps even evildoing associated with people and companies are seen in the collective mind as whistleblowers, who appear usually to be regarded - and treated - badly. This is a sad but real tendency of human nature.

The irony is that many whistleblowers do a great public service, and at the very least keep entities honest by exposing their wrongs. If everyone turned aside and pretended not to notice that the emperor had no clothes, we would be in a dark place indeed.

This isn't a criticism, by the way: I suffer from the same misgivings, which war against my instinct and desire to tell the stories of the injustices I've seen firsthand.

I wish I knew the answer.
Yes, because obviously if that equity turns out to be worth a very large amount of money and the company is never sued Google is not going to turn around and say 'oh, sorry for this vastly disproportionate payment, here is your repayment'.

In fact, the best outcome for Google would be if nobody ever got sued. (That's also the best outcome for the companies but there is no way of knowing if they would have gotten sued had they not paid their protection fee.)
> Use of any reasonable measuring apparatus will have the built-in assumption that c and h are constant

The speed of light was measured constant by the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, whose apparatus didn't have any built-in assumption about c (nor had anything to do with h).
Unfortunately, Avoton might just suddenly stop working on you.

https://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2000-series-bug-qui...
Look at the "ISIS drones" made from hobbyking parts. Pardon the pun, but it's no rocket science.
Remember that MOAB the other day? Who do you think that message was aimed at?
I subscribe to a few screen casts series ($5-30)/mo and find them very engaging for an intermediate or advanced developer. In particular, I like destroy all software (https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts) because it makes me think of programming more creatively along with how to think about different big picture concepts. Screen casts and books fill the niche I think you're looking for at an affordable cost but don't share the same teaching style. They're no where as near hands on, collaborative, guided or have same level of structure. But they're much cheaper and flexible in terms of time commitment.
I don't really have time to respond to and refute this post, but anyone reading it should know this person doesn't really have any idea what they're talking about, and worse, probably thinks they do.

But my go-to resource on understanding market making at least a little bit is this Matt Levine column: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-10-08/why-do-hi...
Have you looked into https://brandur.org/logfmt?

Having lived with various points between the 'awesome to read' and 'simplest to parse' I currently favor simpler parsing and investing in tooling that makes manual parsing of logs easier.

Of course the decision should include the scale of the microservices. There would be no benefit in optimizing too much for readability if the number of requests to your services is so high that you would need complex filtering before you can look at them.

Another way to cut down the bike shedding is to go with a library that wraps around the format you choose. We built GitHub.com/clever/Kayvee and have changed the format a few times. However since everyone uses the kayvee libraries at Clever it's not too crazy to change the format.

Hopefully this was useful. Apologies for the disconnected paragraphs - on public transit :)
yeah, but not because of the roads. It rains a lot and is very windy, and also very hilly. It's not a cycling kind of place.

Public transport is good, though.
Single insert per transaction is slow with sqlite, but slow is sort of relative. It would be probably be 10 to 80 inserts per second or so, a little faster if you turn off synchronous writes in sqlite.

I would guess most use cases for this relatively simple comment software wouldn't be expecting that many comments anyway.

An agnostic data layer should probably go on your list, but I imagine other stuff would be higher on the list...like a captcha. Spam will likely be the top issue long before performance.
How to Deal with Childhood Stress
https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/xy.htm
This sounds like the definition of someone with high self worth, who values themselves.
I like the app, but the terminology is confusing. For me and a lot of other people, a track is the lowest level of a music app. People think of it as an atomic unit. Making it a project will confuse most people as no one thinks of it as a project or folder. I assumed a track was a note. If it is a project, a. more appropriate name would be album or collection.

Also, it's inconsistent. Youtube organizes channels because it is a video app and people coming from tv immediately understand. Spotify uses tracks because it is a music app and the term track has been synonomous with song since probably the first record player.

Its a good try, but just mashing up two concepts into one causes confusion
Gravitational singularities. If one puts thought into it, one will recognise the shell game played when describing how something that requires infinite time to form as defined by the model, forms in finite time in the real universe. One then recognises that any two such entities will take infinite time to merge in the real finite timed universe.

I am also looking at a paper that purports to say that Einstein's GR which is used to calculate the precession of Mercury uses a couple of simplifications, which if not used, gives GR calculating the precession of Mercury at twice (or thereabouts what is measured). To test the veracity of the paper, I'll have to do some serious brushing up of my engineering mathematics.

Another example is related to the speed of light c. This value is inversely proportion to the square root of the (electric permittivity of the environment times the magnetic permeability of the environment). The normal assumption is that outside of the atmosphere of the earth, the environment is a perfect vacuum. It is assumed that the speed of light is therefore a constant in a perfect vacuum.

For many areas, this simplifying assumption is adequate, but this assumption may not be true. It is only so assumed. It may turn out that due to variations in both the permittivity and the permeability of the extraterrestrial environments, that this assumption is not inadequate but grossly inadequate.

When doing any experimental work, one should keep in mind and have written down all the base assumptions, otherwise, one may garden path oneself.
> Maybe I cannot express this clear enough but the advantage natural evolution has over artificial evolution is the huge number of "experiments" - meaning it had time enough to do a lot of small changes until something worked.

I think you have that backwards; natural evolution is absurdly slow because it takes a very long time to cycle through generations of animals whereas genetic programming on a computer to evolve algorithms can happen billions of times a day because computers are much faster at cycling through possibilities.

> meaning it had time enough to do a lot of small changes until something worked.

Computers can do it faster.