skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea of neural processing and signalling happening outside what we generally think of as the nervous system has me wondering about how oders are processed by insects.

E.O. Wilson has written of a "chemical grammar" of ants, and the relative characteristics of, say, danger or alarm signals, versus food or "friend" signals.

An alarm signal should propogate quickly, be easily recognised, and dissipate relatively quickly (no need in being alarmed long after the danger has passed). There's little concern that it be identifiable to other species. Small, light, volatile chemicals serve this.

A food or "friend" identifier should be persistent, fairly durable, and not be the same between different species (for various reasons). Larger, heavier, and less-volatile chemicals serve this.

The thought's occurred to me that with simple neurological systems, insects may have adapted neurochemicals to serve as exosomatic message transmitters (or maybe I'm getting this backwards and neurotransmitters have evolved from simpler chemical signalling). Which would make the "hive mind" a reality in mire than just metaphor.

Extending the concept, trees and plants with their massive surface areas make for a potentially very capable chemical emission and detection system. It was only after thinking that the branches (and roots) of a tree resemble the dendritic structures of neurons that I caught myself remembering that "dentrite" means "tree". So, yeah, doh!

It also suggests that whilst individual trees don't think, forests might....

Rampant speculation, but I'll toss it out there.
No, you're absolutely right. HR's role is to protect the company, which can be aligned or at odds with an employee situation. In most cases it is about eliminating or minimizing the company's risk of legal action.
CTRL+F union

No results.

How many lawyers does your employer have? How many do you have? Equalise things. Join a union!

Don't have the clout to change something yourself? Join a union!

Worried that the boss will retaliate and you won't be able to do anything? Join a union!

Want a friendly, non-judgemental ear to give you advice? Join a union!

Want to gather lots of information about working conditions in a safe a anonymous way? Join a union!

Worried that you're being discriminated against? Join a union!

Need to bargain for better rights or pay? JOIN A UNION!

Want to improve the way the "lazy fat cat union bosses" work? Guess what - unions are democratic! Join a union and improve it!

I'm in a senior(ish) position in the tech industry and I'm a proud member of https://www.prospect.org.uk/

When I've had problems, my union has given me top-notch advice. They've provided expensive legal support. They've trained me up. They've helped me out. I pay ~£18/month to be a member. I consider it a form of legal insurance - and it is bloody cheap. Oh, bonus points, the settlement they got me when my position was made redundant has paid for the union dues for many years to come.

tl;dr Unions work.
It has been cited in a number articles quoting Demis Hassabis; Hassabis repeated the claim in his recent talk on AG (specifically, that deep RL related to AlphaGo has reduced Google datacenter cooling costs by 40% and is saving Google hundreds of millions of dollars a year) and added in the additional interesting detail that Google has changed its datacenter design plans to add in additional sensors & controls for the deep RL agents.

They haven't gone into detail as to how exactly this is done, but my guess is that they use their historical data series on cooling/electricity consumption to bootstrap and then it learns online normally with policy gradients (since cooling and temperature control seem like something with continuous actions rather than a few discrete ones, so an actor-critic rather than DQN).
Go works precisely because it is a small closed system. An interesting match (from an AI perspective) would be a pro playing alphago on an unusual board (eg, one in the shape of a cat). The pro would take everything he knows about the game and apply it to the odd situation. Alphago is so specifically tuned that it cannot even handle any case except 19x19 (and maybe 9x9). Another interesting question would be small rules changes like "you may not play on any star points or any point directly touching them until turn 30".

Go has deep strategy, but it is very well defined in terms of what can and cannot be done and those rules are not particularly complex. Power grids in contrast are far more complex. There are thousands of rules, but also many more thousands of unwritten assumptions and case-by-case analysis. A final issue is that there exist unsolved and unrecognized problems.

The last AI winter (deep learning is just the latest rebrand) came from researchers overstating their accomplishments and making promises about general intelligence that could not be kept. Any claim about anything that requires general intelligence in the near future is undoubtedly overpromising.
> allowing private entities to issue their own currencies. It is much better than the single monopoly of the government-issued money.

Please elaborate on this.

Why is it better for the people to have dozens of currencies that they can only use for a very limited selection of stores and have to trade for other uses?

The only incentive for "private currencies", that I heard of, is to confuse customers and make them forget that they are, in fact, using real money and not only digital tokens.
This is true if the market is an inert resource, ripe for exploitation. However, the market is beginning to realise that social media is at the moment a bad actor, and that their attention is being traded as a commodity. This realisation will bring a massive exodus towards services which respect users and language.
Had to learn Scheme in college too. It was the only functional language taught, it was taught as an intro course, and most people, including professors, didn't like Scheme.
You should take a look at the Monaco Editor[1], which is used in VS Code. It is available as a javascript component, and there is also a React wrapper around it [2]

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor

[2] https://github.com/superRaytin/react-monaco-editor
The name Tristan Harris didn't ring a bell at first, but as soon as I heard the slot machine analogy, I immediately recognized his work.

I recommend his TEDx talk[0], his essay on the topic[1] and finally, his Time Well Spent[2] project to get a firm grasp about his side of view.

(0) https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peop...

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT5rRh9AZf4

(2) http://www.timewellspent.io/
I kind of agree with you that having this distinction would be useful. The real key is it isn't about "dev work". It is a cross between Ops, Dev, and Build. The build is actually more important than the Dev. Even bigger is who you report to. In the old world as Ops you reported to an Ops manager. The to Devops is that you report to the Dev manager, hence breaking down the silos. You could just call it Devops, but I call it embedded Devops to be clearer.

On the flip side I seen just how poorly Dev managers and Dev team leads can understand Ops. It is even worse when they think they do, but don't. This can make Devops painful.

There is also a problem with having an individual Devops on each Dev team. You will end up with each Dev team doing things completely different ways. One will be Ubuntu, one Debian, one CentOS, one instances, and one containers. There should be some standardizing force across the teams.
It seems like the product was built for development and I can track with it generally having an idea of what it solves navigating the site a little. I'm thinking about installing it but it does raise concerns, being fixed in a "haxor" message and the feedback is important. What do you think of http://qkast.com does it address the right perspective?
The Curious Case of the Disappearing Nuts
Not better, though. Just different.
Heads up people who went to the article and downloaded the actual binary itself to see how it renders on their own box. Detected a trojan in it!

I was still able to run it in an sandboxed environment and it worked fine, and kaspersky didn't chirp, so for an outdated or incompetent AV, you wouldn't even notice.

ESET found malware in the demo file they have up --> guberniya_final.zip
http://imgur.com/a/1R4Kl
Quite an industry. Yeah, 640 people went up and 635 came back alive; an ordinary year, you know, yadda yadda.

My boss gets really upset when I kill just a single customer.
> all this effort to not pay lawyers to draft/read/interperet contracts due to "legalese" only to write contracts in programing languages no one can read and understand....see the doa contract which was misread by the founders, by the third party reviewer, and every single person who bought in (except the party that stole $150m via smart contract).

If that seems ludicrous to you, we can all stop using computers as well. Because of the potential bugs!

In reality, there are startups that aim to process actual contracts with algorithms to avoid such ambiguities.
The average disguises a few things. One, I assume that's in absolute terms and not, say, purchasing power parity (which accounts for lower consumer prices in China).

Two, the 'average' in China includes huge numbers of the rural poor. They are living in the third world; an office worker in Shanghai is not, but her income's contribution to the average is diluted by rural subsistence farmers.

This does suggest that there is room for growth via urbanization and modernization: if subsistence farmers switched to commercial farming, and the excess labor moved to productive cities, in theory you've got a productivity boom. But China's productivity is predicated on the world's ability to absorb their excess production, which is not actually unlimited. That said, the central government is taking deliberate steps to encourage urbanization (while simultaneously not undertaking some reforms that would help, like overhauling the hukou system).
That would be a lot easier if it were GPL with no CLA.

The way it currently is, it looks like something Google will develop with the help of the FLOSS community, and then take the code, close it, and continue everything else in the dark.

As they’ve done with most parts of Android by now.
> Gouda notes that there is a tendency within a Stand Alone Complex for the masses to unconsciously project their inadequacies and common desires onto a leader.

Sounds very familiar.
Ah sorry, I was trying to make emphasis on the part that the robot is an empty shell for us and not specially on human consciousness being easy to swap/just software (for which I agree with you).

Edit: After thinking and reading about it, I think that is actually the opposite in the other direction. What might shock us is the concept of the spirit being transfered, while for Shintoism that is not such a shocking concept since they are not so concerned with the afterlife and their spirit will just join nature:

"The afterlife, and belief, are not major concerns in Shinto; the emphasis is on fitting into this world instead of preparing for the next, and on ritual and observance rather than on faith." - interesting read: https://www.japanspecialist.co.uk/travel-tips/shinto-buddhis...
Getting tired of living on the worldline where every time I think I'm making a joke, I turn out not to be.
Unsupervised learning applied to double exponential hypothesis growth
The about tag at the bottom points to a wikipedia page that was deleted but this content also lives here:
http://ghostintheshell.wikia.com/wiki/Philosophy
I knew there was a risk of getting downvoted, but I was surprised that it went to "-4".
Innoplexus Announces the Launch of Its Product iPlexus- the Intelligence Machine
Innoplexus is unveiled iPlexus TM at Bio-IT, 2017 Booth #355. iPlexus.ai is an end-to-end platform for Life Sciences which leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to cut the drug development time, from synthesis to approval, significantly. It generates continuous intelligence and insights, across discovery, clinical development, regulatory and commercial stages of drug development, spanning all major therapeutic areas and indications. It has modules for Competitive Intelligence, Clinical Intelligence, Regulatory Intelligence, Gene and Intervention landscapes.

The platform leverages our proprietary CAAV™ framework to crawl, aggregate, analyse, index and visualise hundreds of terabytes of scientific data across hundreds of clinical trial databases, biological databases, major patent offices, congresses, theses, forums and regulatory bodies. It offers confidence that the researcher will not miss any significant information that might impact his/her research later. There is value in getting information readily and as soon as it's available - more so in research, as it can totally change the path of the work that happens next. A researcher, now with its help, can get real-time access and understanding of the wide variety of research data, and benefit from understanding their cross-pollination.

It offers an easy to use, intuitive, secure, cloud-based system which generates intelligence across datasets using machine learning models, natural language processing and advanced text analytics. Our patent pending data extraction algorithms leverage our Ontologise™ framework to transform raw unstructured data into a structured form. Making data and insights instantly and continuously available takes the pain out of data collection, curation and analysis, eventually helping to make informed decisions better and faster.
> But the whole point of a contract as a program was that it was supposed to be easier to debug, and that wasn't true. Whereas the point of using software for space probe navigation is that it can navigate almost as well as a human while requiring less air.

No, another point of a contract as a program is that once it is ready, and considered bug free by many, it can be reused potentially unlimited times, with all the productivity increase that it implies. It can free people from having to pay the expensive lawyers.
Has anyone any code they can show which performs the same job on both and is close to comparing apples to apples? It'd be interesting to me, not for performance comparison, but as a real world application structure comparison, a kind of more advanced Rosetta Code[1] example.

[1] http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code
I believe the parent poster was mentioning the modern ability of commercial banks to actually create money through loans. There are many places to read about it, I quickly found http://positivemoney.org/how-money-works/advanced/how-commer... but there might be better sources
Could you source that? I'm not saying it's incorrect I've just not come across it in these things yet. That'd be the key to getting me on the decentralised bandwagon
This is also exactly how EvE Online has worked with PLEX for years now.
Samba Exploit Could Lead to Next WannaCry Outbreak, Update Now – HotHardware
How performant is this?

I don't have it on me right now, but if I were to dump a 400-kW document into the editor, would it still be snappy? That's one of the major weaknesses of Google Docs right now, and I'd consider switching if I found anything that lacks it.
The Spanish Civil War wasn't, to quote OP, a "grass-root movement engineered" by Hitler; it was a failed coup.

Both Hitler and the British intelligence offered logistical help to the rebels. The coup was already planned for months by the generals, and they were just waiting for the appropriate time to strike. The moment came when the police murdered Calvo Sotelo, not when the Nazis and British encouraged them.
I disagree, just ask the manufacturing industry how well unions work. They worked well at getting employers to relocate their production facilities.
Ask HN: What's the biggest waste of money at your job?
I'll start - how much a team I've worked with spends on PR and Gartner.
That article has an extremely strange title. It links to a few philosophical topics, like dualism, without exploring them and then gives a plot synopsis.
It says you gave up your ownership (and the control that goes with it) for convenience, and now the new owners are doing things you don't like with what used to be yours.
That is NoOps, but somewhat depends. You could have a developer who has a dedicated job of managing the infrastructure, but still doing some development work. Also don't forget the build engineer part for automating deploys. But if the responsibility is spread across the team, that is NoOps. It also tends to lead to a tragedy of the commons situation, because no one steps up to do the things that aren't fun.
Sorry, yes. I should have said only two of the four US regions.
If you're being acquired, then somebody wants to see your work live on. But you seem to be a fairly large bus factor. If someone is spending 40mm to acquire you and your team and your product, is it possible that one of the priorities becomes hiring someone or a small team that can bring some more domain knowledge in? You're obviously critical to this operation, but no one wants a team where one person being out for a week means customers are sitting around waiting for you to get back.
Usually when I see people do that kind of thing the money raised is a side effort and all going to charity. They're doing the event (climbing, running, etc.) anyway, not using the donations to fund the event. I'm not saying it doesn't happen where people use the donations to fund their event but it's not something I see very often and I don't understand why anyone would donate to it.
I'm skeptical about some of the examples provided. (Do we really know that Instagram's 3-second delay is gratuitous?) But I don't doubt that social media is pushing people's mental reward buttons.

This seems to be happening not just on social media, but throughout the consumer technology space. The most obvious example is how video games skinner-box the customer, but I've also become cynical of how my industry (television software) is driven by consumer addiction. When I started working on television applications years ago, I saw it as an opportunity to help people experience art. Now I see people spending every spare moment glued to video, and I just feel like a drug dealer. :/
That's the theory. The practice is that unions worry more about campus carry than about treatment of adjuncts (yeah, I'm an academic scientist and can speak only from observations) and that they serve more as a shield from accountability than anything else.

After the local public-sector union made brief noises about unionizing postdocs - my then-supervisor, himself protected from accountability by the double shield of tenure and union, tried to discourage us from supporting the effort - and retreated quickly I changed my position. The local union boss graduated one (1) PhD student during his 30 years on the faculty. Other faculty members were on the record of saying they are ashamed to be represented by such a lazybag.

American unions somehow painted themselves into a corner.
Devops just means your IT people are software engineers. That's it.

Web systems are so complex (and automated) to manage these days that you need to be able to write code to manage the infastructure.

Google has been doing this for ages without calling it Devops. As far as I'm aware all of their main support people are software devs
I was under the impression that once the scene graph is set up, JS performance does not matter all that much, but then I'm running a rather modest application with JS being mostly used for bindings. What parts have been slow to you?
To piggyback on your point, Pettis lays out explicitly how China should shift to consumer-driven GDP growth... then also points out how politically difficult it will be (because it likely entails assigning losses to the wealthy and politically connected, via breakup of SOEs, transfer of wealth to households from the government, etc).

So yes, grandparent's point is correct, that there's room for consumer-led GDP growth. But the mechanism for how to get there is not easy. (And it's something Pettis has written about extensively.)
What the hell is a repository solution? A CMS?
I agree: I've always thought that Brendan misunderstood and didn't appreciate some of the most important aspects of Self: 1) that you can inherit from multiple parents, and 2) that you can easily change the parent slot(s) at runtime.

Just as his misunderstanding of the meaning of equality [1] [2] and truthiness [3] manifested itself as quirks in JavaScript's design.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Equa...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/brenda...

[3] https://www.sitepoint.com/javascript-truthy-falsy
Marathons wind me up something chronic, charities dump hundreds/thousands of pounds buying places to "sell" to runners at a profit. The runners fund this by convincing people to give them money towards it, and asserting the money goes to charity.

Well, some of it does, but a massive chunk goes on paying for the slot they're running in. Because they want to do it for fun/validation/other.
Hey! Where could I find this post?
It's not a black box method. Their Community Standards[1] are pretty cut and dry, and every person I've known to have been banned was flagrantly disregarding those standards for months prior to their accounts being deactivated.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards
I feel your pain, I'm not a founder, but I also work in tech as a developer and sometimes wonder what it would be like to be a bartender or waiter. I have a friend who works as a waiter and always seems to be on vacation in some exotic part of the world. Makes me wonder how he can afford to do that and I can't?

I realised I needed to do 2 things:
1/ Figure out what you REALLY want to do.
2/ Figure out how your work life can support it. Is your work life not supporting it? Figure out what you need to change to make it get there.

For me, that meant switching jobs to something that allows remote work and unlimited vacation and organising my work day so that I can just put in 8-5 and leave work at the door.

Also, try taking an open-ended vacation. Don't make any plans, just get the time off and do what feels right.
Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?
Related: http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00103.html
It's great to see a message broker that's optimised for performance - having looked at the source of a few of the more popular brokers it's clear that there's a lot of overhead in many of them (object allocation/boxing, multiple copies being made of the data, inefficient serialisation, verbose wire protocols and so on).

I'd be really interested to see how uTT performs compares to Aeron[0], which, while not MQTT, as far as I'm aware it is the fastest message transport around[1,2].

[0] https://github.com/real-logic/Aeron

[1] https://github.com/benalexau/rpc-bench

[2] http://akka.io/blog/2016/12/05/aeron-in-artery
Also, sadly, Sandstorm is not built for federated/decentralized apps that want to connect to arbitrary other servers.
It's totally possible to write code that's straightforward to port later. I'd say the biggest blockers tend to be database and code-organization related.

If you make a component that is the sole entrypoint to it's concerns, gets it's own database, and have an ORM or database context layer that is capable of dealing with that,
moving to a microservice is as simple as taking that same code, exposing an http layer to it, and making your original interface call to the service instead.

If other code is joining into the relevant tables, skipping said interface and doing it's own thing with the guts of it, you'll have issues.

This can of course be done in any language, really, though database tooling can definitely vary in ease of doing it
I do not understand what it does.
I linked to abstract. This might have more info.

https://phys.org/news/2017-05-fossil-beetles-la-climate-stab...