skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the uniqueness of English can kind of be quantified by its rate of divergence. That is what the author sort of gets to by saying that there are no mutually intelligible languages.

I think that if we could quantify that rate (by time) of divergence, we may see that English is pretty far on one end of the scale.

Consider that the fall of Rome and the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain occurred at roughly the same time (~500 CE). Then compare how far English has diverged from other Low German languages, to how far Spanish and French have diverged (also consider that those languages were already on their way diverging from Latin with a head start on English). English diverged a lot faster.

As to why English diverged faster, I don't think the author gives particularly good reasons. "Inter-linguistic" migration/settlement waves are not unique to Britain. Most of his arguments for English can be applied to French.

The Celtic Gauls were "invaded" by Latin speakers, and to some extent started adopting it as a second language. Then Germanic Franks (and others) started flowing into and settling into parts of what is today France, again adopting the language. Then waves of Norse speakers settled into Northern France and that had an effect on the language. But through all of that, French still isn't as divergent from Latin as English is from Old Low German. What is the difference?

I think the actual answer is probably largely due to geography/topography. English diverged faster because it was more isolated, and left more to its own devices without as much contact with its divergent siblings. I think the extent of contact with siblings is the force that keeps languages from diverging.

It's probably the same reason that Japanese is so divergent (from whatever it is that it diverged from). Similarly, it's why small "isolate" groups tend to cluster in mountainous regions. Basque/Georgian/Korean would probably not exist today if they had originally developed on some flat plains in the middle of Eurasia.

I went a bit long on this topic, but there was an argument for the author to make. I kind of wish he had made it.
I feel the title of the submission and article's title are a bit misleading. What was done here was predicting with ML if a given patient would be re-hospitalized in the next year. The ML does not predict Heart failure, only the probability of re-hospitalization.

A much better submission would have been physionet 2016[0] or the several Kaggle competitions on heart diseases.

Being 60 years old and having accompanied a few parents on their path toward their end of life, I know this article does not describe a great feat.

Heart failure is a progressive disease, it lasts one or two decades, starting slowly, and having a dramatic end. In the last three years there are one to three hospitalizations per year. A simple Bayesian analysis gives the answer far much quicker than any ML.

Disclosure: I started to develop a true heart failure early detector[1], it works by analyzing the heart sounds:

[0] https://physionet.org/challenge/2016/

[1] https://github.com/Hjertesvikt/Hjerte
My argument is that voice isn't all that useful in general and that if Apple creates a much higher quality product than Echo, for example, that people will want it because it's a very nice speaker that looks really cool and can play music, give the weather, and set a timer by voice, which covers the majority of use cases.

In other words, a voice platform that works 10x better than another may only be slightly more useful to the average consumer while if the actual speaker is 10x better, it might be 10x more compelling.
Microsoft Is Right: We Need a Digital Geneva Convention
Good point about headcount. So the federal government hires contractors to handle classified data even though doing so makes it structurally impossible to secure classified data. And they do so over and over again because they're caught between headcount restrictions and mission requirements. And because, as noted elsewhere in the thread, Booz is a massive proposal-writing machine, they're well positioned to receive these contracts.
Especially when you're telling them they only need to work 6 hours. If my boss said we're moving to 6 hours a day, I'll be pretty happy to oblige and be in when they need me.
There other ways to protect small investors - education being one example.

If someone doesn't know how to manage miney they will lose it one way or another - be it forex, or or penny stocks. ICOs cannot possibly be worse than these legal things.
Is it ridiculous though? People buy newspapers (nyt, wsj, etc) and they always had ads in them since time immemorial. The same goes for magazines and cable/satellite TV.
good statistics. thanks :)
Software should be priced on value added, not cost to provide.
It's my fault. I probably should have written "-less" to make it clear I was talking about the suffix.

As for the "fewer" vs "less" thing, I'd say most people get that wrong.
One drawback of Node.js is that it's single threaded. Moreover, even if somehow it became multithreaded today, JS is absolutely not ready for that. (Btw. yes, async I/O is nice, but threads are useful for more than just I/O.)

NPM is quite basic, it pretty much just downloads tarballs recursively from a webserver according to some version spec. The CommonJS module format is fairly loose (and kind of outlived its usefulnes) and so there's no agreed upon package structure and everyone just does whatever they feel like doing, which leads to a huge overall mess. The whole ecosystem is fragmented and very few things are really agreed-upon.
To be a little more exact: Have large amounts of heteronyms to have them be common and not strange exceptions.
It's easy to think we need faster processors when the architectures we use, both software and hardware, are incredibly inefficient.

Any modern processor is much faster than the RAM its programs and data live on, hence the multiple levels of cache inside them. Multi-cores add the complexity of keeping the memory consistent. Multiple threads per core put additional pressure on caches while our OSs assume all processors see a unique and consistent memory image (which requires keeping caches consistent across cores). Our most common software doesn't run on GPUs before extensive changes. Only mobile platforms are exploring asymmetric multiprocessing with a single ISA now.

I don't think we need faster single-thread performance. What I think we need is to adapt our software, which is designed to run on ridiculously fast copies of ancient personal computers, to run on computers that instead of mimicking a successful product of the 80s resemble more what we can do now. We need software that exploits the SIMD units (predicate bits that prevent branches are your friends there), that runs well in multiple cores and OSs that can deal with memory inconsistency between cores (maybe using write-through instructions for shared data and write-back for process-local stuff). We need software that doesn't need complicated instruction reordering or speculative execution.
> features get deferred

It's actually the opposite, bug fixes get deferred in favor of more features. Fixes make your player base happy, but they already paid and are therefore not worth any more money, new features drive sales.
I work on off-tree LLVM and have been following NaCL from the beginning. I think it's mostly nobody wanted to adopt googles solution or even admit that browsers needed sandboxing. Hell, Firefox only recently got serious about putting different sites in different processes. It took them years to accept they needed a pNaCL, and by then they couldn't really stomach using something already tried and tested by political opponents. Browsers and LLVM are both too political.
Forex does exactly that and it's completely legal. Somdoes gambling.
I'd say the benefits come from the information content of the features or lack thereof. When you have uninformative features like pixel colors or word identities, there's nothing for traditional methods to work with. You have to start with feature engineering and pruning before decision trees or linear classifiers have a chance.

Most of the wins under the "deep learning" umbrella come from extracting meaning from homogenous features like "the pixel at x-2,y+1 has red=123" or "the word at n+1 is 'king'". That's why we see latent variable embeddings like word2vec come from the DL world even though they're not deep.

When you want to include highly informative features in a deep network, it's often better to feed them into a separate logistic model, as shown in the Tensorflow wide-deep tutorials.
Things have gotten better for the typical Chinese citizen, but the bettering also corresponds to less government (in my admittedly foreign view). The death of Mao removed the problems of Mao's ineptness (famines, Cultural Revolution). The reforms of Deng Xiaoping led to foreign investment, which allowed knowledge transfer to Chinese firms. The transition to a market economy from State-controlled economy created factory jobs for the peasants (and mega-billionaires). People can now own (well, lease for 70 years) property. The loosening of travel restrictions caused allowed the now-wealthier citizens to experience the world.

The Chinese government has managed the country reasonably well, for a authoritarian government. However, I think the evidence shows that the less of the Chinese government authoritarianism there is, the better off the people are.
I'll leave it to the native speakers to provide some examples.
But basically, Russian (along with a few other Eastern Slavic languages) has an entire system of verb organization (this business of "aspect") that has counterparts in only a handful of other languages (outside that family). It's totally pervasive in the language, and way more complex than, say, gendering for nouns or pronouns, or even most verb tense distinctions.
There's a trade off. I'll take a dam that disrupts a local river ecosystem to coal fired power plants that throw millions of tons of CO2 and other hazardous material into the air impacting a much larger area. In the case of the Hoover Dam it's roughly 4 coal plants to produce the same power generation capacity.
What about something like Zipcar?
Segment is probably the biggest NSQ user right now, and they're moving to Kafka - any employees want to weigh in? :)
That's not true: https://github.com/gvanas/KeccakCodePackage/blob/master/Stan...
I sometimes get the feeling that this is the only game HN plays. When people talk about not being able to switch away from Windows due to games, it seems like someone always responds, "Well Kerbal Space Program runs on Linux and that's all I care about." I don't think I've ever seen articles similar to this one about other games gain as much traction. Can't think of very many articles about games getting to the top of HN at all, actually, unless they're about John Carmack writing one.
The Stigma – We need to accept that mental illness is a disease
>but the real fun begins when it is at +96%, and Google/Facebook/InsertNameHere lose their main source of income.

You don't really think it'll ever get anywhere near that percentage, right? When the major players start devoting time and resources to defeating ad blockers that's when the real fun will begin.
>nothing about modern society involve choices that only affect the people right around you

This is covered by tort law. If you can prove damages, you can have your grievances addressed.

If we adopt nationalized health care, your argument is that you should be able to dictate my dietary choices? Even if my goal is to do it like my grandfather that never once visited a doctor (died at 68, which is plenty for me)?

Edit: To be clear, the basic premise of yours that I quoted could be used to justify just about anything. That is a power I refuse to grant to any entity, no matter how good their intentions.
It wouldn't come back to collide with the protagonist every 90 minutes then.
This is the same as taking issue with the statement "one mustn't steal" because there are mechanisms for dealing with theft.

Man, the straw man fallacy on HN is like the proverbial hammer... You are talking about externalities of private contracts. Thing is, this also is subject to specific legal regulations in most Western countries. It is not subject to whichever moral judgement you are trying to fit in here.

Construction, industrial emissions, things like that are when the state can limit the civil rights of contract parties. Buying and selling bonds is generally considered not to have externalities that endanger the common good.
How to Build and Manage Teams – Vinod Khosla and Anu Hariharan
Oh, God no. Bill Bryson is not a linguist and has no real grounding in the field, and "The Mother Tongue" has been criticized for decades for its abundance of factual errors, misunderstandings, and urban myths. There is a significant mistake on nearly every page of the book. Some of the reviews on the Amazon product listing that you link to discuss this in detail.
Net neutrality proceeding's integrity threatened by DDoS, senators say
Google's Assistant isn't any better at this sort of inference. I have my wife's work and cell number and I get asked any time I use it which one though I'm reasonably sure I have never once caller her work number.

The Google Assistant happily asks me if I want to finish researching "Care Bears" because I once searched for them on Amazon using Firefox in Incognito Mode on a friend's computer but it can't seem to figure out that I always only ever call my wife on her cellphone.
Prototype gamified interface
English has many great things:

- Easy to learn so you can speak like Tarzan and being understood. Pronouns, articles, and verbs, for a basic grammar, is quite easy.

- Articles have no gender (e.g. "the moon" has an article that is not masculine nor feminine, which is a pain for learning Latin and German languages).

- Is the most universal language in the world.

And some drawbacks, too:

- To master English is very difficult, like mastering most advanced languages.

- Pronunciation vs writing is not 1:1 (e.g. Spanish and German are easier in that regard)
The impact of low and high IQ on economic growth and technological progress [pdf]
Descarga Pack Con 3.795 Logotipos Vectorizados Para Illustrator
Chicago-based Outcome Health raises $500M on $5B valuation
> Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe.

The average speed limit on municipal roads in Ontario is 50 km/h, which means that anywhere within 5km will take 6 minutes and, within 10km, 12 minutes.

Running 5km takes me 18 minutes, and running 10km takes me closer to 40 minutes. Humans walk at about 5km/h, which means that 5km would take about 1 hour, and 10km would be 2 hours or more, since exhaustion starts to factor in.

Car travel is unimaginably faster than walking. I don't know anybody who wants to spend 2 hours on a round-trip to a grocery store 5km away when they could do it in 10 minutes in a car.
Agree, they are big but that's because they are pre-installed on hundreds of millions of hardware devices. Not because the services themselves are particularly good.
Also from Arizona:

Eenie meenie minie mo / Catch a tiger by his toe / If he hollers, make him pay / Fifty dollars ev'ry day / My mom said to pick the very best one / And you are it
Mental illness can cause someone to be disabled in a way. The mentally ill are discrimated against be ause the average person does not understand pyschology and can't see the diease and thinks we are faking.
What do you mean? I use iMessage probably hundreds of times a day (to my chagrin, but I digress). The Music Store has been overtaken by streaming services, but it made a titanic impact on the market -- and as much hate as Apple Music gets, it's actually a completely adequate service.
If that's all that's activating your Echo then consider yourself lucky.
@iamatworknow

Sure but there are better alternatives to either coal or hydro-electric.

I think even a modern natural gas plant would be better until we can build a smart grid that can store during off-demand and handle peak-demand loads.
For example, intransitive "to go" (and "to be") take either of two prepositions "в/на" (in/on) depending on destination. You go in school but on class, you go in bedroom but on kitchen etc. I am not sure if there is a system for this. Different objects also use different verbs to stay in place. E.g. silverware lays on a table but a pan stays there.
The period of the debris cloud interactions is about equal to the orbital period of Hubble's orbit. If the orbit was a different inclination but otherwise similar and so crossed Hubble's orbit, it would do so at two points and so the period would be half of the orbital period (it would also require extremely unlikely timing to get it to cross Hubble's orbit and actually hit Hubble at the crossing point, but if it did so at one it should do so at both.)

For it to then hit the ISS, at a far different altitude and inclination is even more problematic.
You're so right. Especially at the small-scale end, it's much cheaper to build a buggy and fragile product with a database you can access any time and fix stuff for your users. Instead of hiring a bigger team with the QA discipline to send nearly-perfect releases out into the wild, the hacked-together SaaS can be built with 10x fewer developers and one DBA. That's been true since at least 2005.
Agreed. I'm surprised Factorio hasn't surfaced more frequently on HN. The game's automation play is just as addictive and creative, and it runs on Mac and Linux.
There is quite a bit of documentation on the design but I haven't seen anything more specific along the lines of a TLA+, Lean, etc specification.

There are plenty of projects like this and I'm curious how they go about creating specifications, checking their designs, etc.

Would the project benefit from a formal model or proofs? A colleague and I started a side project to provide specifications for core Openstack components but we're keeping our minds open to other projects as well.
To me the simpler theory is that the US has been quite wealthy since World War 2 and has lots and lots of space.

Which doesn't mean that building sprawling subdivisions is a great idea, but space is a pretty easy thing to sell.
The variations with those kinds of elaborations towards the end always seem more amenable to ad-libbing more or less syllables (like "very", or "are not" versus "aren't") to change the result when you see how it'll turn out.
The article seemed to be worth reading for you as it prompted you to solidify and articulate your thoughts, and to share a good tidbit on SaaS pricing. ;-)

In the same way, it may trigger thoughts/ideas for others, regardless of whether the agree with it or not. I'm glad I read it, as well as the comments.

*edit - missed a word.
Secure attachment and high IQ: Are gifted children better adjusted? [pdf]
Intelligence and Success [pdf]
I don't know the solution but I would be super hesitant to take jury trials away (even for civil suits like described here).
Roku itself is a walled garden. You cannot develop apps for them unless you are blessed by them. Last I checked the SDK was closed (as in, closed to even try out developing for Roku).
You misunderstood, I think... I'm saying if you know the 214 radicals and you see the character for e.g. house, you'll understand the character(s) and even sentences (sometimes).

If you know the radical 黑 and 死, then you can easily infer the meaning of 黑死病. Even though the third character is not a radical, you can spot the radical for 'sickness' there. The other component looks a lot like the radical for 'skin'. So that last character's meaning is actually something like 'skin-disease' or 'disease of the skin'. The three characters combined basically means 'black death'. As in the plague.
Ask HN: Should I get an AI CS degree as an experienced SWE?
I have been an SWE for about 10 years, in my early 30s now. I make good money in this profession and live in Europe. I had earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from a great technical institution many years ago have worked every since.

I wonder if now is a good time to get a master's degree in CS focusing on AI. I have taken lots of AI courses on Coursera and can build neural nets to accomplish non-trivial problems, but I still feel my AI foundation is poor.

The reason I am conflicted about a degree is because I am not sure if my work post-degree would actually change. I work at an AI-focused company right now, but the AI "thinking" work is always outsourced to researchers/Ph.Ds in the field. I never touch that side of things.

My job as a software engineer is to be an executor/implementer of the models they come up with. If I had a solid grasp of AI, but remained a programmer, would my job prospects change? To be clear, I do not want to become a researcher -- I prefer the software side of things.

But I don't know what that means for an SWE with a solid AI foundation. Would I get to work on problems that solid SWEs without the AI foundation do not get to work on? Or should I expect the split in the industry to be as it is in my company now.

Part of me wants to do the degree out of pure interest, but I also must weigh that against at least one year of lost income and a possibility of no extra doors being opened. If I don't get any benefit and could just study AI books on my own, that would also be good to know.

I would appreciate any advice or especially from software engineers who have done an AI degree or self-studied, and do not work as researchers. If you could paint a picture of what your daily work is like, perhaps in comparison to what a "regular" SWE does, that would be most helpful.

Thank you.
Is there any way to do a bottoms up analysis of infrastructure projects like this and see where the differences come from? I imagine the costs on projects like these are pretty finely broken down, although I'm not sure how one would go about actually getting the numbers to analyze.
how did that go?
I'm currently 15minutes, about to become 40 minutes from work. I don't mind as audiobooks are a great investment.
I wonder how much of that is really true. there are unity games that show much complex physic than this, which has custom movement for orbital mechanic and uses physics mostly as a glorified stacking problem within connected rocket parts of which there aren't that many really.

I guess most of the physic slowdown is some improvised custom code around joints that makes the solver choke
> has derailed discussion of the actual article

Unlike complaining about what people choose to talk about, which has a long track record of success.
Technology improvement: Ranked Choice voting

Political impediment: Dismantles the two party system and its vested interests.

Technology improvement: Algorithmic redistricting

Political impediment: Eliminates a strategic job security system for already-elected politicians.

Technology improvement: Cryptography

Political impediment: Eliminates a surveillance and control mechanism of politicians.

This is why we need some form of limited direct democracy. Politicians will never vote for something that directly or indirectly contradicts their own personal self interest. They won't vote for shorter term limits, bans on insider trading, stronger 4th amendment protections, ranked choice voting, objectively neutral redistricting, etc. Technology can only help us to the extent that policy and politics allow it.