skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm honestly not sure what to think about China at this point because I've read so many news articles and reports from credible sources that paint seemingly contradictory pictures of the health of the Chinese economy.

Perhaps Quora would be a better venue for this, but I'm having a difficult time understanding what exactly may happen to the Chinese economy if all of the following are simultaneously true:

1. China has a trade surplus in its favor, on the order of ~40B/mo

2. China has an exceptionally high savings rate, ~50%

3. China is in an incredible amount of debt

4. China is experiencing a massive outflow of capital by firms and individuals

I understand that macroeconomics is a very complicated and nuanced subject, but would greatly appreciate it if a HN reader could point me towards a comprehensive article or is willing to share their own analysis.

[1] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/china-trade-surplus-widens-...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-01/chinese-c...

[3] http://www.barrons.com/articles/why-chinas-debt-bomb-has-not...

[4] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/02/05/asias-top-ban...
Can someone who knows more about economics than I do explain to me how China can be in debt while itself being the largest holder of American debt at the same time?

Don't the debts at least cancel out, or has China really borrowed more than the US borrowed from it? Or does this all only really matter on paper, but somehow in the real world it doesn't at all?
>would be for the best

The best for who? Do the people who live in countries with valuable infrastructure and institutions benefit from having to share them with immigrants that will be net-consumers of those services? (Note: I'm not saying all immigrants are net-consumers, I'm specifically asking about the subset of immigrants that are net-consumers.)
I was trying to find a pattern for the border between competence regions, and it's quite obvious that point (x,y) belongs to the nation closest to it, much as in a Voronoi diagram based on a continuum of points.
We could introduce a simple rule to get rid of this kind of problem: if it can't be reproduced with the data supplied then it isn't true so you can't publish.
To be clear, it's not that there aren't startup founders who are Canadian citizens. But, in my experience, they tend to move to the US as well—not for the tech talent pool, but rather for access to "proper" VCs. Canada has been creating startup founders for a while now... it just hasn't translated into Canadian startups.

Meanwhile, these startup founders often come back to Canada after getting their startup off the ground in the US... to create a Canadian "engineering branch office"—i.e., to hire tech talent at the cheaper Canadian going rate. But, of course, this only happens for startups that manage to get to a stage where they need whole offices of additional tech talent—which is not most startups.

Given this dynamic, I wouldn't expect increasing the number of available developers would do much at all. Now, if you could come up with some way to keep entrepreneurs from moving to the US, that might help...
I'm in Stuttgart. My biggest handicap is probably that I never studied anything. As a nerd I totally lost interest in school, and so I started to work rather early instead of studying.

And there is no denying that the quality of life is much better here in Germany than in the US (unless you make shittons of money of course).
This, from a former coworker, might give you a good sense of the state of things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPWKJR6IVfA
To supplement the person you are replying to post, in Canada, the same goods and services are more expensive AND your money is worth 30% less than the US Dollar. So if you were able to move to the US and get a job that paid THE EXACT SAME SALARY, you would STILL be better off because good and services you consume would be cheaper AND you pay less overall tax.
> Mexico is asymmetrically dependent upon us for trade

Bingo. All other Latin American countries grew at a decent clip in the past 20 years (5-15% per annum) versus Mexico's 1-3% over the same period of time. Mexican wheat and corn industries have been decimated by American products so they've turned to high-price exports instead.

At least we get cheap Mexican avocados for our toast.
So few have or can?

Lyft, which is still experiencing 100% growth year-over-year?

Didi, which dominates the Chinese market?

Ola, which matches Uber in India?

Grab, which dominates in Malaysia and is experiencing large growth in Southeast Asia?

Didi, Lyft, and Uber are all nearing the point where they can't dump subsidies on the market; they have to raise rates or they won't raise more money. They have to become profitable soon. When they become public companies, they won't be able to lower rates at the expense of profits without raising the ire of shareholders.

By the way, the entire European market is open to the ride sharing company who can be palatable to EU governments. Uber is failing at this; the opportunity is very much there.
Is Google a failing public company?
At a minimum, the businesses should be paying the state the prevailing wage for the jobs being done (the business owner should not be a beneficiary of below market labor).

Even better if the prisoners keep a substantial portion of that.
Trump and the True Meaning of ‘Idiot’
Not sure why you are getting down voted but I was thinking along the lines of the healthcare point.

It is a Nassim Taleb type of point: you're basically making extra money writing healthcare puts, but when there is a crash, you get wiped out.
Some screens give off more radiation than others. You may not need to get a new screen. There are filters you can buy for the screen that can help. But I have noticed that some computer screens really just make my face feel burned if I sit too close for too long, and others don't have that effect.
I did 'foobar' thing in april sometime. Had got that challenge when I was doing some google maps api thing. After finishing 3 rounds (5 or 6 problems) - it asks you to fill in [number, email, linkedin/github ] and reach out to google recruiter.

Wife was really excited to see the whole process as 'foobar' opened when she was at my desk. She couldn't believe all this can happen and was super keen to send contact to google and I was saying not-now (we are expecting our first born soon). Yet, to keep wife happy, I did send my contact details without linkedin/github details. May be google recruiters ignored my contact since without professional details -
it doesn't make any sense for a hire.

I checked my foobar link - it still opens though. May be after few months will try reaching..
>fuel an endless and hopeless war on drugs, introduce mandatory minimum sentences

Also, don't forget about clandestinely supporting terrorists like the Nicaraguan Contras who were smuggling billions of dollars of cocaine into inner cities in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_co...
I was hoping this article was about analytic philosophers.
From what I understand it's partially because of the uncertainty of unproven technology, and partially because a lot of people bought them for the tax breaks.

Nissan didn't (and still might not) have active cooling in their batteries and was seeing high failure rates in states like Arizona. Because of this, Nissan ended up extending battery warranties to 8 years / 100,000 miles. Basically if there is anything wrong with the battery or it's capacity drops below 9 bars (starts at 12), then Nissan will replace it.

Combined state and federal deductions on EVs were up to 50% of the purchase or lease price of a Leaf and could be deducted over several years. This combined with annual fuel savings when gas was $4 a gallon meant people could drive a new car for little more than the cost of insurance since Nissan was including free charging at qualified stations for 2 years. So a lot of Leafs were bought or leased and being dumped on the market now that all the incentives are drying up.
Beer prices in Ontario are pretty insane (about twice as expensive) compared to the bordering US states even factoring in the exchange rate. I'm used to $11 12 packs of Molson on the MI side of the border, walking into a Beer Store in ON is always a price shock.
If wallet security didn't require levels of opsec that no regular human can manage or understand, you might have a point.

But you can't blame a layman for preferring to trust an ostensibly secure service in lieu of screwing up security themselves, given how many stories are out there of people getting compromised and their Bitcoin stolen.
Are you saying it's impossible? Or just not fair?
When I teach this stuff, I try to distinguish between
(1) Returning/Exiting/Excepting because of a legitimate error condition
(2) Returning/Breaking early because there's either no work to do or something necessary to do the work is absent/unavailable (the latter often turns into a case of (1)
(3) Returning/Breaking/Continuing early because I've discovered the work is done for either all iterations or this particular iteration, and the remainder of the function/method/loop is pointless cycling. (Often added during optimization, sometimes added too early).
(4) Returning/breaking/GOTOing because I've gotten confused and want to go to a place in the code that makes more sense to me. This is the only that's actually a problem and should be railed against. Unfortunately, it's way more common than it really should be in beginners' programs. I think GOTO got an early bad rap---try writing non-trivial machine code or assembler without liberal use of goto, and many very useful techniques in debugging are basically informed application of goto---because of what I call the "pull the ejection handle" approach to getting into trouble trying to code an algorithm you dont really understand.
Fully agree there needs to be tighter capital controls. Capital should be a second class citizen to labor.
Show HN: Gong – Make working with jira less painful
>> I am not an economist but I suspect China's debt might not be such a big problem....until it is

I'm not an economist either, but I have a working memory, and I can remember being warned about Chinese debt in the early aughts. The debt has grown, weathered a global 'great' recession and the warnings continue...

The Chinese bubble is still being inflated. Chinese debt won't matter until that bubble pops. There is no evidence that the bubble is about to pop; GDP growth has been north of 6% since Clinton's first term and that rate of growth has, if anything, become more stable recently. There is still plenty of Western industry that is ripe for evacuation to Asia, and China -- for all it's changes and growth -- is still appealing for this purpose; they've kept their regulatory apparatus at bay and there are still another 500-ish million Chinese peasants to keep wages in check.

It's still too early for the inevitable snap back. It will happen, but there is some time yet.
Ugh that would be completely amazing.
At a hardware level all control flow is made up of gotos. But by writing them as 'for' or 'break' or 'if' in our programs we make them easier to read by letting the reader know that the jump is restricted in certain ways.
"Authority and American Usage" is generally better. [0]: http://wilson.med.harvard.edu/nb204/AuthorityAndAmericanUsag...
Many have have advocate for such and it is not entirely crazy. I don't agree with it, but it is hardly wtf-worthy.

I think it is actually a kind of wtf that there are no certifications for software devs that make life and death things, life auto-pilot or pacemaker software.
The await import to lazy load modules is quite impressive. TypeScript goes more and more beyond the compile-to-js promise
I encountered one of these beautiful things you mention not too long ago.

void foo()
{
do {
for (...) {
if (...) {
break;
}
}

if (...) {
...
if (...) {
...
break;
}
}

/* even more nested loops and conditionals with break sprinkled all over */

} while (0);

...
}

PS: IMHO this code goes too far with the "goto considered harmful" philosophy. The "while (0)" is serving the purpose of a label. An explicit label instead would be more readable, IMHO.
Yeah, helped confirm what I'd suspected for awhile now. Chicago is garbage for compensation compared to other major cities. It's apparently difficult to break six figures as a senior dev here, that really shouldn't happen.

Dammit, I don't want to leave, but I'm tired of seeing other places get 50-150% higher salaries and bonuses.
Here's an issue: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/15263
Thanks, great to see that TF recongizing the issue with Pipelines/queues and simplifying it. I wish they did NCHW conversion by automatically detecting GPU.

I think Tensorflow is developed in a very principled manner focusing on ability to add more ops and platforms in future. While this has hurt TF usability in the short term I am bullish on its future.
[video] – Teaching my daughter to code (we livestreamed it)
The whole area is heavily, heavily reactionary and slow moving. They're on embedded XP because that's the closest they can get given the software platforms they're dependent on.

You're right that locked down embedded industrial (Linux) PCs are the best option, but your control platform has to run on them...
If you read the article it mentions that local governments borrow from government owned banks. Perhaps that explains some of it.
This comment is hilariously "Bay Area."

> The rancher in Wyoming might buy a newer side-by-side for hunting trips after having a few good years.

Right, because everyone outside the Bay Area lives in a double-wide.

> Most people spend most of the money they make and make a vague plan to retire somewhere around 65. So if you're going to spend a decent chunk of what you make, why not do it in the Valley versus anywhere else?

This is a ludicrous strawman. Most employees in technical fields in average American cities have the means to make a concrete retirement plan, build an emergency fund, and live debt-free without going full-Mustache. My first year out of college, I was spending maybe 20% of my income on a 700sqft 1BR apartment with off-street parking in a walkable, safe neighborhood in a clean, well-educated midwestern city. Now I spend 20% of my income on a short, low-rate mortgage that would be several million dollars in the Bay Area.

> For the rest of us, we have hobbies, families, interests outside of work, and uprooting all of it to move to Wyoming to save some money is just as unthinkable as cutting all hobbies and travel and dining out expenses just to sit on the couch every night.

For the rest of us outside the Bay Area, we too have hobbies, families, the option of financial security, and moving to the Bay Area for nice weather and snobs who think the rest of the country lives in trailer parks is just as unthinkable as whatever else it is you think we do in the rest of the country.
"Regular" would be the classic linguistics term, would it not? Although computer science limits the term to the use of regular languages in the Chomsky hierarchy sense (that is, more specifically to regular expressions and the languages they describe), I am under the impression linguistics as a whole treats regularity as a multivariate spectrum. Some languages have more regularity in terms of grammar productions or morphology than English.
In theory yes, but clean restarts like the Adapteva Epiphany and the Rex Neo can get better efficiency than GPUs because they don't suffer from legacy issues while still running legacy OpenCL code.

As for the matrix multiplier ASICs like the tpu and Volta, I consider them to be incredibly uncreative and an insult of sorts to computer architecture to call that a "deep learning processor". What happens when tomorrow SPNs or graph ConvNets dominate? A proper application specific processor will be able to adapt and still maintain efficiency.

Obviously i have some bias and hubris here, but our simulations show consistently superior efficiency to the tpu while running the same workloads while still retaining the ability to adapt to other computational graphs that TensorFlow may choose to run.
But my security model does not allow putting myself in a position where I am stranded without my second factor (or doing huge amounts of work re-registering everything).
Sleep Tracking Startup Hello to Shut Down
Good question - yeah, the VM is actively maintained. All of the tooling for the Dart ecosystem runs on the VM, Flutter is a Dart VM project, too.

The changelog [1] always has a few entries for the Dart VM with each version, but it's quite clear from using it daily that much more is happening. Some notable recent improvements have been asynchronous breakpoints that are integrated in IntelliJ's debugger and some optimizations for sending messages across isolates.

1: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
A part of the puzzle might be that being good at solving interview questions is orthogonal to having CS coursework under your belt. I can speak anecdotally from my own experience in that I didn't get good at those types of problems until I spent my own time working on them.
The thing with meritocracy is that, at the end of the day, a person is making those value judgements. A person with their own set of biases and prejudices. And especially in code, there is very little in the way of "This code is objectively better than that code."
Those rare smokers practically don't exist; either they are wise and just stop because they were just testing, or they increase their habit, because they are still testing, until they forget why they even started and need the narcotics to numb the pain they caused themselves.

How the damage happens is not important, but consider the possibility of slowly accumulating effects because of a slow rehabilitation potential.
My wife and I discus this all the time. She's in the "descriptive rules" camp, and I straddle the line.

The advantage to prescriptive rules for language is that you don't lose the context of a language over time or distance. My hope was that the popularity of the web would make it easier to communicate and understand each other, and also that languages would mature to the point where we could read historical documents without a language barrier.

Instead, it seems like language in popular use seems to have evolved more quickly, we're not as good at communication as before, and we collectively choose our words less carefully out of a smaller pool.

Or maybe I'm just getting old and cranky.
Yes, that's also a traditional comment in every EV-related Hacker News discussion.

I'd be surprised if Canada was that different than the US: some apartment complexes will install chargers because it will eventually be an important amenity (that's why I have chargers at my apartment complex), some communities will start requiring them for new construction (Palo Alto does this already), you'll find chargers installed for on-street parking (already happening various places), and eventually the government will probably mandate installing chargers in all larger parking lots (probably when EVs are a lot more popular than today.)

Another place you might charge is at work. Facebook has ~ 170 chargers at their headquarters, last I looked. They're ahead of the curve, but you'll find that more and more over time.
Evaluation in Natural Language Processing
It's literally slavery: you're compelled to labor while being unfree to leave. We call lots of other things in history slavery that meet those criteria.

It's slavery as the punishment for a crime, but it's slavery without qualification.
Applications of Artificial Neural Networks in Games – An Overview [pdf]
So is this a case of merely moving money from one pocket to another? Or are local governments actually independent of China's allegedly totalitarian central government?
In the Scifi Short Nano, a Simple App Can Wield Horrifically Dangerous Power
That's why you set up backup factors.

It is for the same reason that services like Google Mail won't let you set up a U2F token without a backup factor.
Yes. Because giving it a different name addresses the problem with goto.

The problem with goto is that it is opaque. It has no structure, it has no constraints, and it communicates no intent. It says "execute the code behind this label," and gives no clue what the code is or what it does.

But if you give goto a different name that reflects how you're using it, that solves the problem! If your goto is named "break" and it occurs inside a loop, that tells you what the goto is trying to achieve. It tells you at a glance what code you expect to find when you jump, and its relationship to the other code in the program. In short, it communicates intent.

The same is true when the name is "continue" or "throw": you know where in the program that goto leads and what sort of code you expect to find when you go there. You don't need to read it to find out. And if you do read it, you have a better idea of whether it's right or not.

(Also note that criticism of goto applies a lot more to historical gotos, whose argument was an arbitrary memory address. Modern gotos aren't nearly as bad because they generally take a label rather than a number, and because their jump targets are often restricted to the immediate lexical environment.)
You're right, I hadn't actually re-read the page since the last Show HN (when it was just targeted at server-side)
This is complicated by the dramatic drop in new batters.

If a new x kwh battery pack cost 10k then but a new xkwh battery pack is only 4k new today then predicted deprecation calculations should arguably be based on the 4k price not the 10k initial price unless you expect such dramatic price drops to continue.

In any case, I think the current used prices would be vastly lower if people expected the kind of range and lifetime limitations you get from not replacing the batteries.
Analysis of sentence embeddings generated by bag of vectors and LSTMs
Hi,

You might not remember me. I'm the poster you're responding to. How have you been? Me, I'm all right.

I was just thinking of when we first spoke… it seems like so long ago! I remember it as clearly as yesterday: you had made a partially-conherent argument that the auth creds for a git URL could leak into a remote deployment's reflog! Oh, how we laughed, and our amusement doubled in size as you fancied a implausible situation where the read-only deployment credentials could be recovered from the very same repo they allowed access to!

It was much later when we crossed paths again, but your talent for sharing inventive tales had not waned in the slightest. For this next performance, you regaled us with the simple truth that no person can be certain that their commit history will not reveal their darkest secrets, and thus should strictly eschew sharing it in a public place; but that the contents of their index was above suspicion, and could be shouted to the world without a moment's thought! Many of us stumbled to determine what byzantine process made the working directory automatically scrub itself of secrets, before finally the jape dawned on them.

I eagerly anticipate our next encounter; what fresh new hilarity will you share with us?

I hope my restatement of my understanding of your position helps make my position clear,

--falsedan
I don't have a menu at all. Other comment worked though, thanks!
> And Canadian companies can't afford developers as is, and you suggest increasing the cost of said developers which would force Canadian companies to either change field or close their doors.

If Canadian companies can't afford to pay developers what the market bears out, they will close because those developers will get paid what they're worth somewhere else. That's capitalism.

You're suggesting Canadian developers should take lower market salaries to help those mediocre companies survive...?
My Lawyers Got Trump to Admit 30 Lies Under Oath
I am doing much out loud, but no laughing? What kind of a comic is this?!
Easier said than done because of all the extra work needed to seperate your features into dynamically loaded modules.