skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Everything else basically just boils down to "they get to show you better ads" which honestly seems like a win-win to me.

I am not really sure if targeted ads, targeted news, targeted posts, targeted everything in social media is a good thing for a society in the long run. The physical reality is still the same for us; it would be great if we all lived in the same mental reality, too.

On a personal level, while some of the advertising is good (it's useful knowledge to know which online bookstores ship to my country and what are their prices), I've always found the idea of advertising bit scary. A certain kind of optimized stimuli will make me some percentage point more like likely to want to buy a some kind thing I did not want before? Brr. I want more control of what I want.

And some tradeoffs are not about the data. I've also noticed that an infinitely long feed that you can scroll and scroll ... is slightly addictive. I've read that it is so on purpose: all social media platforms popular today make money by advertising, or in other words, by having their users spend their time procrastinating on Twitter/FB/etc (so that they see the ads). I don't think this is a net benefit to individual users or the society as a whole, either.
This is like saying that all that matters to your bank account balance is dollars in and dollars out. It's obviously true in the most trivial sense, but it's not useful advice. There are countless other factors that affect the amount in and amount out.

If someone is trying to increase their bank balance which advice is more likely to help them: "Just increase your dollars in or decrease your dollars out" or "Get a roommate, move to a less expensive neighborhood, cook your own food instead of eating out"?
Section 8 is basically direct payments to landlords to subsidize low-income tenants. The rent on these places isn't in the same ballpark as "market rate" regarding price increases. Instead what these landlords do is the same thing as we (collectively, as a society) do: treat their low-income tenants like sub-human garbage; a nuisance to be avoided or ridiculed when that isn't an option. They cut corners on maintenance and take liberties with timeliness of repairs and so on, because what are their tenants going to do? Move? Hardly. The government oversight body has to do a lot of work to keep these landlords honest (they can lose their subsidy and suffer other punishments if they don't comply with regulations and minimum standards).
> 1) Living people are taxpayers and consumers. Dead people are not.

In the example above, you get maybe 5 years + taxpayer+consumer - 10 lifetimes, which is a deficit both for taxpayers and consumers.

> This is the whole point of insurance. Very few people will be very expensive and most people will be relatively inexpensive. With preventative care and the advancement of research, fewer people should be expensive over time.

Basically everyone needs some sort of medical care. True, the most expensive cases are rare and they befit insurance, but medical costs are normally not about insurance. Checkups, dentists, basic clinical appointments, etc are not great cases for insurance.

That is, hard diseases can be convered by life insurance, without the need for socialized healthcare for the rest.

> Regardless, the US, as a society, has more than enough money. There's no reason for someone to buy his second $50M yacht while someone else dies of the flu because they couldn't afford the $25 vaccine.

This is a typical rabbit hole argument where it turns out nobody wants to donate their salary until they reach the lowest percentile of income to make it fair. Because who are you to spend your money on a vegan deluxe burger when people are dying of malnutrition!

Blaming rich people for hardships is akin to blaming immigrants for it, on the other side of the political spectrum. They guy with the 50 million dollars did not make the rest poor, in fact its possibly the exact opposite.

There is a lot of ideology in the mere presentation of that argument, i fear this can take a bad turn :).

> You can make these hyper-rationalist arguments, but the vast majority of people are willing to pay a lot of money to live in a society that doesn't just let them die of something curable

I somehow doubt thats really true, otherwise it wouldnt be a debate at all...
Ask HN: Who wants a product built in 48 hours?
I have a team headed to the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon this weekend.

What are some ideas that you think could be built over a weekend?

If you'd like to have an MVP built as part of this hackathon I'd love to help you out.
Feel free to comment here or email at harris@nimblelabs.com

Could be a great way to get some press and to get something off the ground quickly.
> scalability is easy now

Dumb, often limited scalability is easy now. Elastic Beanstalk approach is only as good as it's the weakest link, which you have no control over.

EC2 is having issues with recovering from standby? Good luck getting anywhere. You can sit on the chat with the useless AWS 'technicians' that are paid to waste your time until the issue is corrected.
jwz: 'Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.'
> You have to take OP's word on that.

Is there a good reason not to?
How to build an IaaS to $100m ARR
>I wonder if you had been a guitar + tablature player your entire life and picked up piano a few years ago, if you would come to the same conclusion.

I was a tab-reading guitar player for years, then learned classical notation. Classical notation is undoubtedly faster to parse. For whatever reason, there seems to be a much more direct connection between your eyes and hands when you're reading dots.

It seems to be much more amenable to chunking[1] - you stop seeing individual notes and start seeing chords and scale fragments. Tab is a meaningful and direct representation of the physical parameters of the guitar fretboard, which I think is a shortcoming; classical notation represents information in a way that more directly corresponds with musical theory.

Tab is lossy, but it discards some very important information. Unlike classical notation, it has no native means of indicating note length and can't accurately represent rhythmic subdivisions. If a piece of music has any real rhythmic complexity, tab alone is insufficient.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)
It's a couple completely new imagery layers. Digital Globe has lots of imagery and these layers appear to have different imagery for lots of the areas I've checked. Digital Globe is offering these two layers to OSM editors to improve OpenStreetMap, and it's great.
Great writeup. Eye opening that you can actually write iOS apps with rust. w00t, totally trying this for my next app. (It's a bit overly bit expensive for my liking but otherwise I would have given your game a shot).
No. I won't install a privacy invasive app (which they all are) just because you have it, never. SMS or nothing if we don't already use something else we'd rather use.
I think you've provided exactly 1/2 of the answer why housing is expensive.

The other half of the answer is that (in short) we've created a set of legal structures to prevent land owners from building the amount of housing that the market would otherwise build on their own land.

The scarcity, and thus value, comes from excluding people.
Industry was concentrated in these centers not by choice of workers. Peter Kropotkin makes a strong argument in "Fields Factories, and Workshops" on how the decentralization of manufacture would benefit the craftsperson.

There actually is a lack of affordable land. Rural land has been amalgamated by the agriculture companies, timber companies, and government. Buying rural land usually has to be done in large acreages and it is still expensive.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantively? We've asked you several times already and eventually we ban accounts that won't.
why should a Fire tablet paired with speakers not be able to do this?

I am not against any category of products, but as a person who likes to own and manage fewer devices, I like my devices to be versatile.
> Can you elaborate on why you think the roller skate is squeaky and about to topple?

Maybe 'topple' is taking things a bit too far since Java works far more often than it doesn't. How about 'teetering'?

But the roller skate is most definitely squeaky, and that's mainly because of the lack of help and organization that the built-in java systems give. I can reference two incompatible versions of libraries and the classloader will blithely load from both of them. You can claim "pilot error", but I reply that it's 2017 and we have huge memories and processors that we aren't using effectively to abstract the problem.

Why are we allowed to slam together these huge, sloppy code edifices atop a system that otherwise puts so much focus on security and safety?

Along with the standard "jar hell" arguments, I've got problems mixing cantankerous legacy spring and pre-spring era jars with post Java 8, CDI, JavaEE, etc jars. I need to containerize/componentize these assets and keep them separate from one another because they don't play nice nice with each other. Sure, I can roll my own JarClassLoaders and build a separation between groups of jars by-hand, but I never would because I want the computer to do that work for me - hence "modules".

In my opinion, if tools like Maven don't solve anything related to classloading in your book, then you are either:

1) off in your own corner rolling classpaths by hand and checking your .jar files into Git, or

2) you aren't working effectively at-scale on large software projects with groups of other people

In my case, Gradle was a revelation - it is a Groovy DSL veneer over Ant and Ivy, and it makes rolling custom classloaders extremely pleasant. Maven is very unpleasant because of its declarative XML language, but the Maven artifact coordinate scheme was a brillant stroke. I'm happy the Gradle folks were so successful in melding the platform compatibility tools of Ant, the artifacts of Maven, and the expressiveness of Groovy into a build system that even a dummy like me can grok and use effectively.
"And SMS is also frustratingly non-universal. After years of having cell service with one of the large providers"
..
"Each SMS shortcode is only supported on a provider-by-provider basis."

Yes, each provider does support their own short codes, but this is not a great example of SMS being "non-universal"

A short code is just "dialling sugar" for {country_code} + {network_code} + {short_code}.

Think about it this way: It would be kind of like trying to access the following url: http://news.ycombinator

Do you need it on .com? .co.za? .io?

So in other words, if you are roaming and you want to use a short code. Just prefix with {country_code} + {network_code}.

The routing should work correctly, the switch (msc) routing tables will have the country code + network code, and route the message correctly to your network. If your network has been configured correctly, it will be able to respond.

There is nothing inherently in SMS that prevents it working. Though carriers can choose to block short codes to other networks (usually to avoid fraud). Your carrier would then need to include request the roaming partner white list a set of allowed short codes.
Just a nitpick on an otherwise excellent piece: Annapurna is actually the most lethal mountain in the world, just ahead of K2. It claims 34 deaths per 100 safe returns over K2's 29.

To climb K2 in winter is extraordinarily dangerous. It's dangerous enough in season. But the Poles are the hardest of hard men in these situations - good luck to them!
GHC already does a lot of loop fusion and optimizing away of linked lists (which is good given the unfortunate overdue of cons-lists over nicer things among Haskell users) which can be extended to work with user code using rewrite rules. Libraries like text, bytestring, and vector do exactly the elision of intermediate structures that you talk about, allowing you to convert from a vector to a list, apply some function that annoyingly only works with lists, and convert back into a vector, and have that compile into a single tight for-loop in many cases.

I wonder what the upcoming linear types work will do.
One advantage of the 5-Line Staff is use of both lines and spaces. It's compact, easy to print, and easy to stack notes vertically.

Another advantage: each note of a diatonic scale is mapped injectively. Cf. representing each line (or space) as a whole-tone, which leads to hash-collisions (e.g. "is that a G or a G#?"). Each note on a line (or space) on which collisions occur would need an accidental. Which defeats the purpose of key signatures.

A diatonic scale contains an odd number of unique notes. The fact that C lies on a line while C' lies on a space is an unfortunate artifact of representing a 7-note scale with alternating lines and spaces.
>clojure.inst requires java.sql.Timestamp

Just curious, why haven't they switched to java.time.LocalDateTime? Java 8 has been out for 3 years now.
“Emergency Alert” Declared at Nuclear Facility in Washington; Evacuation Ordered
rust "intrusive-collections" crate

People used to code like that, mostly in assembler and sometimes in C. It's not necessary for functionality. It's just an optimization. One that needs to be justified with benchmarks. Also, it's not at all clear that use of that module is safe.

I'm beginning to think there's a cult of l33t unsafe Rust programming, where people who write unsafe code think they're cool. I used to say that the way to cure new programmers of that is to put them on crash dump analysis for a few months. After they've found pointer bugs in other people's code, they'll have a better sense of why pointer safety is important.
Shameless plug, but have you heard of Magic Instruments[1]? It sounds like the bottleneck is the guitar's user interface and not your music ability. One of the features is what we call Magic Mode, where a single button is a chord and buttons are laid out in any key/scale, but it can also be played like a traditional guitar.

[1] www.magicinstruments.com
> Have you been using it in an enterprise scenario?

Yeah, sort of, an academic/hospital setting. Actually, I combined my academic and personal e-mail addresses into one at a custom domain, and forward other accounts to it, which annoys some colleagues.

Most people here use Outlook. Sometimes people might have a mailto: link in sig (which gives me a chuckle as it's pointless), but I don't ever remember encountering embedded images.

The biggest human offenders for sending HTML-heavy e-mails are university-wide announcements. In my mind, these fall closer to spam than ham, and what useful information is in them can usually be gained from the title.

> Roughly 90% of the direct email I receive in my inbox comes through in HTML form.

Same, because I haven't bothered to set up spam filtering. But of the e-mails I actually want to read, well below 5% do.

> Plain text is more often coming from mailing lists and automated systems that email me.

Fascinating. For me it is just the opposite. People don't usually seem to bother using HTML, consciously at least. But automated systems use it quite liberally.
I'm not against the idea per se, just highly skeptical when I hear it used, because more often then not, I've seen it used to promote mindless repetition of previously used patterns.
*at least, they do not record all the time...for now.
Perhaps you'd be happier with a fully featured keyboard, no computer required? They make some great stuff these days, and it all feeds back into the computer pretty easily if you come up with a riff or loop you like, and want to put it into a proper DAW for polish. Just flip a switch and you're rolling.
I just installed zeppelin the other day. Apart from the rather big download, it was just executing "bin/zeppelin-daemon.sh start" and localhost:8080 was working.
This was on linux though.
> T-SQL, the procedural language I chose to implement atop SQLite, is not a great general-purpose programming language.

T-SQL ( I'm assuming the microsoft variant ) is not a procedural language, it's a declarative language.

> Using C# in LINQpad is a more pleasant experience for experimentally messing around with data.

This is not true. T-SQL is as close to the data as you can get. C#/LINQ/EF/etc are great for business layer/presentation layer. But for messing around with data, you can't really do any better than T-SQL. Trust me on this.

If you are a front-end developer, then LINQpad is great in building .NET code/CRUD libraries/etc for dealing with data, but if you want to work with data, T-SQL is where it is at.

Developing expertise in T-SQL ( it's not as easy as people think ) will open up a new way of understand data/programming/thinking. SQL Server allows importing of .net code/functions which you can run on the sql server via T-SQL so there isn't really much you can't do with T-SQL.

> A local install of SQL Server Express can be linked to remote servers, allowing you to join local tables to remote ones.

SQL Server Developer Edition is free now. That is a great starting RDBMs to learn databases on windows environment. It has almost everything other than enterprise level features ( clustering/replication/etc ) that most people don't need.
> the cost of scaling later increases nonlinearly At some point it becomes so important that you start losing customers and/or new business opportunities.

That simply is your opinion. You are more likely to lose customers for not focusing on the core product first.
We are talking about the resources of the machine and which of those resources are available during compile time compared to those which are available at runtime.
My company GMail session is invalidated every time I quit Chrome, and there's a moderately annoying 2FA process required to log back in. Thunderbird's IMAP credentials always work.

I don't use it all the time, but sometimes I want to read my email without digging out my phone.
If they are going to enable calling, I sincerely hope they learn from the current phone spam and email spam mess and don't let just anyone call you at any time.

Ideally, you could authorize people to call you by giving each person/entity a different token that authorizes them to call you. Then if that person/entity sells the token to 3rd parties, you not only know who sold you out, but also you have the ability to revoke that token easily.
Chrome OS joins forces with VMware to accelerate the adoption of Chromebooks
Ask HN: Will 3D printing make warehouses a thing of the past?
In retail: From mid/late 1900's-2000 it seems the trend was retailers who could spread out their physical locations the fastest to get the most discount stores in front of customers was the winner; Over the last ~20 years the equation seems to have changed to be who spreads out their warehouses full of discounted goods to ship to customers is the winner. Is 3D printing the next trend?
If you're the author of DAMPVM or are familiar with the internals, can you comment on:

1. The costs of migrating a process. How long does it typically take to an order of magnitude -- ms, secs, mins? How much state needs to be transferred?

2. Limitations. Can all processes be migrated, or are there certain types of process state that prevent migration?

3. What process state needs to be migrated, and how does that process state get enumerated?

4. Are there cases where a process is migrated, but some of its state stays behind, and the new process uses a proxy to continue to read and write it?

Been curious about past attempts at this lately, and I've found a few by digging around. For instance, Sprite OS was a BSD offshoot in the late 80s that had some form of cross-machine process migration:

https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/migration-sp...
I'm assuming that shados was using the term "municipal tax" to refer to property taxes. If not, then I'm not aware of any other type of large common tax that could referred to as municipal tax relevant to this discussion.

Property tax is also for local use, such as schools, police, and city/county departments. Taxes for the state are mainly state income tax and state sales tax.
No, sorry, it's not just optimisation of existing capacity. Here in the UK the long waiting lists incentivise people who can afford it to get treated privately so they can get back to health sooner, saving the NHS from doing it at all. Often the treatments happen using the same facilities and staff that would also carry out the NHS-funded treatment.
I disagree. Currently, people's food and goods travel thousands of miles before reaching the user. Not too long ago, people grew most of their own food or it came within 50miles. With technology, it would not be hard for people to return to that lifestyle and still have many day hours to dedicate to intellectual or fabrication pursuits.

I am very in favor of Georgist style land taxation.
I think there are plenty of aging folks that are open to being set up with whatever their family sets them up with to keep in contact. Especially if it increases contact with the distributed family. My siblings and I went in on an iPad for my grandmother a few years ago when she was over 80 and she used it a ton and regularly got FaceTime video calls from her 5 grandkids and 11 great grandkids (who are across the United States) before her death a few months ago.
I'll give it a shot.

Traditional Neural Networks worked like this: You have k inputs to a layer, and j outputs, so you have O(k * j) parameters, effectively multiplying the inputs by the parameter to get the outputs. And if you have lots of inputs to each layer, and lots of layers, you have a lot of parameters. Too many parameters = overfitting to your training data pretty quickly. But you want big networks, ideally, to get super accuracy. So the question is how to reduce the number of parameters while still having the same 'power' in the network.

CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks) solve this problem by tying weights together. Instead of multiplying every input by every output, you build a small set of functions at each layer with a small number of parameters in each, and multiple nearby groups of inputs together. Images are the best way to describe this: a function will take as inputs small (3x3 or 5x5) groups of pixels in the image, and output a single result. But they apply the same function all over the image. Picture a little 5x5 box moving around the image, and running a function at each stop.

This has given some pretty incredible results in the image-recognition problem space, and they're super simple to train.

Another approach, Recurrent Neural networks (RNNs) turns the model around in a different way. Instead of having a long list of inputs that all come at once, it takes each input one at a time (or maybe a group at a time, same idea) and runs the neural-network machinery to build up to a single answer. So you might feed it one word at a time of input in English, and after a few words, it starts outputting one word at a time in French until the inputs run out and the output says its the end of the sentence.

What Facebook is doing is applying CNNs to text-sequence and translation problems. It seems to me that what they have here is kind of a RNN-CNN hybrid.

Caveats: I'm an idiot! I just read a lot and play around with ML, but I'm not an expert. Please correct me if I'm wrong, smarter people, by replying.
I think you misunderstood what I'm saying. Typically, the macroexpansion is a compile time process that uses different machine resources than the runtime processes of the same language.
This. And it's very convenient to run in and pick up some necessities after.
Sufficiently harsh and prompt punishments would likely solve that problem.

But we don't like the idea that the government might seize properties or the like as a punishment. So...
this is an excellent analogy!