skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is why setting up a statement of work contract at the beginning of the project is important. It allows you to defer ballooning ideas off until after the original task is done, and scope it out separately.

I say this having done a decent amount of freelancing and making the same mistake myself (of course, after having read/heard this advice multiple times).

Working for friends and not treating them exactly like any other client usually ends badly.
The reason for studying African Religion in post-colonial Africa
thanks for posting this. it is fun to see historical discussion of such fundamental concepts... Dijkstra's notes also have this flavor.
I still like Fry's Turkish Delight (made by Cadbury). The combination of thin chocolate covering to the weight and almost chewy mouthfeel of the rose-flavoured gel works well - it makes what chocolate there is more unctuous. The weight of it is part of what sells it for me, even though I expect it's mostly water captured in the gel.

Actual sugar-dusted Turkish Delight cubes are less impressive. I don't mind the rosewater flavour - that's what I associated with the product - but it's just thick jelly. There's no contrast. And since I despise nuts, I'll not be eating any with crunchy bits either.
Top of the line MacBook Pro, freshly installed with only Sublime Text and Atom side by side shows a very, very clear performance difference. I have a fetish for clean machines, so it's an "experiment" that repeats itself quite often for me.

Don't get me wrong - I use Atom quite often. However, stating that it does not jave performance issues is just wrong. Period.

Atom needs to do a metric fuckton more work (webengine, remember?) to move the cursor than Sublime, and thus it has severe keystroke lag. Whether you're okay with it or even notice is something entirely different.
I don't really see TJ as a WF competitor beyond the earthy crunchy vibe. TJ is mostly pretty weak in the produce, meat, cheese, and fish sections which are exactly the areas where WF is often worth the premium. I suppose they compete in the frozenprepared food that pretends to be Artisanal.

TJ is a good deal for some things but it only somewhat overlaps.
There are several packages on hackage offering a type safe printf. Some use TH, some use variadic functions (defined with a type class) or other advanced type level features.
Yes. I've read this before, and if you go through it you see it's a less than half-baked theory where anything that doesn't fit isn is dismissed as degenerate music that people are wrong to like. It's egotistical to the point of self-parody. I'm really into the geometric structure of music but this guy isn't even half-way there.

We did not take up rhythm in depth in this article, however I think it is quite likely that rhythm can be explained in a manner similar to harmony.

- Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius

Look, it's true that music theorists aren't scientists and the most innovative musicians are often terrible at explaining the underlying structures or musical strange attractors that shape what they do. I'm a terrible musician and I've been asking and groping towards a scientific theory of music for years. But at every music tech trade show, there are a couple of people like this guy showing off their automatic music composition system. They're very very proud of the theoretical abstractions they've been able to identify and automate, and they should be, it's impressive work. But the music is always terrible, boring stuff that doesn't evoke any emotion. And I say that as someone who listens to tons of techno and 'difficult' electronic music from artists like Autechre.

Theory gives you a framework on which you can build your composition, where that's musical, paint or whatever. There is lots of bad art produced without such a framework that typically has a short half-life, and lots of bad art that merely decorates the framework and is thus pleasing but formulaic, also having a short half-life. Enduring art can develop and even comment upon the framework, but it's not primarily about the framework. The choice of subject is one of the most difficult and hard to teach or communicate aspects of art, and the problem with theoretical exegeses like this is that they attempt to eliminate the subjective altogether and thus kill the very thing that attracts people to art in the first place, the ability to project themselves into it.
Queen of arts: on Virginia Woolf
Within day one of hearing about Mastodon I was easily able to discover that Mastodon.social was the "main" instance and that Mastodon.cloud and Mastodon.xyz were the other biggest instances with English speakers. And people are extremely good about answering questions and sharing information, if that's an issue.

Maybe not knowing that Mastodon.social was the main instance was a bigger issue back when you signed up?
You know at some point the 401k is supposed to be paying your bills, yes? That's its raison d'être. When you have investments paying your bills, you might understandably be focused on those investments yielding some immediate returns. Maybe to pay for that leaky roof, or broken down AC...
VisionMobile’s Developer Economics Q3 2017
I think there is a big difference between merely requiring IDs (which as you say may well be the case today) and being subject to thousands of pages of regulations, of which requiring IDs is only a subset. For example, a big part of those thousands of pages of regulations has to do with submitting SARs--suspicious activity reports about customer activity--to the Feds. They have a handy web interface, complete with a FAQ, for you to use to submit those reports: http://bsaefiling.fincen.treas.gov/main.html

As for individuals transmitting cryptocurrency, I haven't spent enough time with the bill and the existing part of Title 31 to be able to answer that question. I would point out, though, that other sections of the bill make existing law even more onerous than it is today.
Edit a file on an ARM board, where the flash filesystem is less than 100 megs.
Or use backtrace.io to deal with it. It'll transfer the core dump or a derivative to a centralized server.

Transparency: co-founder.
Remember the power of marketing: Freud's nephew hired by Cigarette companiest o make cigarettes "sexy" for women in USA (previously a taboo).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations_campaigns_of_...

More on how this guy shaped modern advertising in Century of Self https://vimeo.com/10245146
The fund managers for the funds in that 401k.
He recently did a Talks at Google with the CEO of Deepmind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhkTHkIZJEc

It mostly covers his experiences with Deep Blue. Wish it was a longer talk. He generally has pretty positive view on computer and AI.

One interesting bit is when Demis Hassabis questioned if a chess-trained AlphaGo can be stronger at chess against Stockfish. Would be fun if they really try it.

PS: Hassabis once reached master standard at the age of 13 with an Elo rating of 2300 (at the time the second highest rated player in the world Under-14 after Judit Polgár who had a rating of 2335) and captained many of the England junior chess teams.
> (...) the current hype about AI replacing jobs has much more to do with media clickbait than any real issue we should be worrying about right now.

Hype? For sure. But the current advances in autonomous vehicles will have a very real impact on the working life of the common truck driver (3.5 million in US alone), I think we all agree on that.
Google and Apple vs. Indie Developers
Strategic Seating Planning: Moving Desks to Maximize Performance
Flagged for misleading title. They suggested that Amazon should buy Whole Foods.

Also, who cares? It was publicly reported that Amazon considered buying Whole Foods in April. Tons and tons of commentators said that Amazon should buy Whole Foods[1].

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+acquire+whole+foods&n...
Why would you discourage labor with higher taxes than investments? That argument cuts both ways
Amazon patent to prevent online comparison shopping
Well if you need to ask basic things that means you haven't read the manual, which can easily get you going with a relatively fancy setup. People naturally don't like explaining things that are already explained in a manual that's a C-h I away, hyperlinked and friendly. Emacs is one of the few projects that have good docs, and probably the best among them wrt the accessibility and ease of use of the manual. And still some people hate on Info, probably because they don't read/write documentation at all...
Cross-platform support is not a rare thing for text editors. Even Sublime Text is cross-platform and it does it without bundling an entire browser inside the package.
"The transaction also may help Amazon sideline Instacart Inc., a startup that has delivered grocery orders from Whole Foods stores in more than 20 states and Washington, D.C."

... I wonder how this will play. Is Instacart's business threaten by losing Whole Food as a client?
Beyond Open Source WalmartLabs: We Believe in Open Source
In Nantes (France) we have a contactless card. Tap it each time you take transportation, and at the end of the month you get a bill corresponding to usage. If you only take it a few times you pay by the ride, but if you reach the price of the monthly pass it stays capped to that amount.
The French have it down to an art form. The difference here is smokers still seem to be outside hiking, walking, snowboarding, biking and doing all manner of outdoor things. I'd be interested in how lung cancer rates compare between the US and France.
GDP Is Wrong and Trade Deficits Are Good
They had their chance, the culture did not help keep the company above water.

Noted by a friend who used to work there:

- They treat each store (and each department within each store) like its own separate business, which is great for teaching individual managers about waste, efficiency, profit/loss. However they can't bother to get together on a corporate level and combine purchasing power on most things. Every store has to work on making a deal on their own merchandise, separately.

- In a show of solidarity, all employees, whether floor workers or corporate IT, must work holidays and instead have floating holidays for time off. Then predictably there is a seniority effect where the long-term workers get to have their holidays and the recent hires have to come in on a completely useless day and stay till 3 or 4 when the management "lets" them leave.

Also I recently shopped at their 365 store and it's a great store with better prices, but their website sucks and my name comes up as "firstname lastname" on their computers. If Amazon can knock some sense into their IT, that would be a huge win.
Show HN: mpe.js – Next Generation MIDI for the Web
Most startups are pitched with a problem statement: our users want X, and here's how we're going to give it to them. This article talks about how lawyers don't do X and how Justin thinks they should — but not necessarily that they want to.

As someone who spent 7 years working in biglaw, I can attest that there are many technology-related things that would make lawyers more efficient. For example, the large law firm I worked for ran Windows XP until 2011. This lag is due to (1) the fact that senior lawyers are generally very resistant to new technologies; and (2) the fact that law firms run custom/old software (to do things like format legal briefs to meet the standards of the relevant jurisdiction), which is mission-critical and may not be compatible with software updates.

I'm curious to see what Justin is building here, and hopefully some of the other news coverage with elucidate where the demand is going to come from for his new product/services.

Perhaps they're envisioning their "user" as corporate legal clients, who are going to pressure their law firm to use his project management software? An indirect model like this might make sense, but it sounds like a tough slog to me.

Anyone else know more?
Something like the atari flashback, but more expensive?
Leaked Files Show How the CIA Can Hack Your Router to Spy on You
He's not speaking about AI per se, but rather the consequences of AI on our lives. You don't need to be an AI expert to give your opinion on that.
Does anyone remember the language that wanted to be future of programming, making everything (API calls, lists on screen etc) inherit from 1 base class, and it used SQL-like searching for filtering on collections?

It had a browser based demo.
> Atom lets me use VIM movement keys

Really!? That's neat, I didn't know that one. So it makes it modal, like you have to do 'i' to change to insert mode?

Movement keys, but what about editing? I frequently use 'y'ank and 'p'aste, 'C'hange/'c'hange un't'il.
...or another B- summer block-buster starring Matt Damon?
I am interested in developing an API for a particular Broker. Could I have your email address?
My Experience with Pair Programming
No, it really doesn't. Depending on one's discount function, such a trade is perfectly rational.

This thinking also reeks of the 'just world fallacy', in which the predicament of the poor is deemed to be a deserved consequence of their moral failings.
But in principle could we access the history?
You're kidding, right? Programmers are decently paid but should strike for a 40-hour work week.
I know someone on the design team and they actually did user testing against the changes, and it's a mix of usability improvements and aesthetics.

You can't really say something is less usable without some evidence.
I was thinking more like the megacorporations in Shadowrun...where you're a citizen of the corporation and they provide virtually everything in your life.

Given their location, I guess they're Telestrian? lol
Startup School 2017 Presentations
How to Get Hired at CircleCI
This. I think there's much value to be had in using a thing like Amazon for what it's good at: an efficient distribution network, and to some extent a captive market that controls its own terms, inputs and outputs and optimizes for that efficiency.

Apart from labor abuses (and some are entered into willingly: see higher level Amazon true believers putting in 90 hours a week to provide half a cent cheaper toilet paper), what Amazon is, is not the problem.

The problem is the idea that all such toilet paper consumers must work to get paid the money to buy that toilet paper, in an Amazon-ified world. And that all the providers of goods feeding the Amazon supply chain must earn their own profits to survive so that they can keep feeding Amazon, on Amazon's terms.

And most of all the problem is that the penalty for failing to earn these wages/supplier profits is death, because there's no alternate system pumping capital down to where consumers do their choosing. Amazon is TOO efficient and a world based on that ethos can't maintain a consumer class at all. The solution isn't necessarily to make Amazon inefficient so it can provide 'jobs', the solution is to decouple job wages from continued existence as a human.
If stores got truly desperate, they could block cellular signal in stores and provide open, free Wi-Fi. I already can't get signal in most grocery stores, since they're huge and seem to have Faraday cages built into the walls.
Is Aurora Morphing into an Exascale AI Supercomputer? – InsideHPC
My email client is text only. Of course I have it setup that I can easily extract all attachments and then point a web browser at them.

In my experience, it is rare that I need to look at an image or pdf, etc.

I'm not doing web development, so there is no particular reason any colleague would send me a screenshot.
How can you _not_ like Turkish delight? I have some every time I see it --- which is rarely, granted.
In a major shift, cancer drugs go ‘tissue-agnostic’ – Science
Helmut Kohl, German statesman who united his country after Cold War, dies at 87
This is awesome and I'm really happy to see venture dollars being spent on the legal industry. One of my gripes has always been that quality legal is traditionally expensive to obtain because the "quality" part in legal work tends to come from literally practicing law for a long time and knowledge about many things quite deeply. Over time law firms obviously grow in standing and therefore size, increasing costs. This can easily leave a huge part of society under-served. In theory, much of the cost is research by humans, and I presume research by humans garnering key insights could be done somewhat algorithmically by scanning case law for key points. I hope we see more and more automation and ML services applied to the industry of providing council around aspects of the law.
Are You Really an AI Startup?
I quit cold turkey and ate 2 large bags of sunflower seeds in the first 3 weeks. Quitting was cheap.

Quitting isn't that hard. It's just super annoying.

Things like exercising regularly and eating properly take more discipline and willpower, for example.
From what I can tell, YC Startup School's first batch had 10K applicants, 3K accepted companies and 800 graduates presenting.

It was very helpful for us (MoQuality) and seems like a huge success overall. Thanks YC! :)

PS: Our presentation: https://www.startupschool.org/presentations/536
The PDF version at this absurd link might be easier to read: http://tu9srvbirvvtmtukd3d3lnbhddjwzgyub3jn.g00.pcmag.com/g0...
You are thinking that using reflection and casting at runtime is not a sensible thing because it is not optimal, but you must consider that constraints in existing code bases will often make writing optimal solutions too costly.

An example is:

For some reason or another you've written a thread dispatcher that will dynamically spin up threads and route the outputs of these threads into new threads. (e.g. https://github.com/bilus/pipes )

Obviously this library will need to do run-time casting of types already as C# makes it too difficult to orchestrate these threads without some shared type. (Here is an example of Microsoft following this pattern. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd321424(v=vs.110).... )

Now you need to hook validation into this existing dispatching library by assosciating validators with the outputs of particular threads. Without a shared type you cannot invoke the validator, but it sure is convenient to write the validator using generics.

Another example is:

You have two interfaces, "ISerializable" and "IEquatable", and two validators, "Validator<ISerizable>" and Validator<IEquatable>", and these validators apply to multiple classes.
To run all of these validators against a given class you have three (un)reasonable choices:

* Create a boilerplate wrapper class for each of these validators for each class that they apply to, and store them against that class somehow. The disadvantage of this is that you lose track of which validators are shared between classes which may be important for some optimisation.

* Create a non-genic type "IValidator" or "Validator" that all validators share and put these in a collection. (i.e. as mentioned by the grandparent of this post).

* Bite the bullet: The code that calls these validators has to be duplicated. (This is the incorrect choice though because some day you may need to add a spin-up/teardown before running the validators and now you don't have a centralized location to do this)

Another example is:

You are writing validators for types from a 3rd party library. You may not modify the source code of this library, because it's WinForms. You've been tasked with a set of arbitrary validation tasks for your multi-million line codebase. Maybe you need to add a spell checker for all user-editable text? Maybe any control that is bound to a particular property needs an orange background.

Suddenly you have a case where you really do need to do casting and reflection to figure out which validators to run, as you perform the unfortunate evil of a recursive search through the entire control tree to hook up your validation, rather than re-writing a few thousand files.
Well, duh. Anyone with their head out of their ass for the past 15 years would have noticed that.
RIP Instacart.
Bad at Negotiating? Facebook Is Working on Bots That Can Do It for You
Except that it had already happened. Sure, jobs will be created by low interest rates, but they are all pointless bullshit jobs that frankly we could all live with out. They are just an excuse to work. Thus the opiod crisis, increasing suicide rates, and Trump.
Agreed. "Bullshit inquiries" was probably not the best way to describe people caring enough to ask. At the time I found myself repeating the same thing over and over and over again, followed by telling people the bright spot in the whole situation "I have plenty of emergency food and water." Wash rinse repeat. "I have plenty of emergency food and water." Wash rinse repeat. "I have plenty of emergency food and water." Wash rinse repeat.

Followed by an adrenaline crash. Followed by all the little muscles around my knees and spine giving up. For the next months, sleeping on other people's guest beds, these little muscle pulls ached. I was mentally drained and physically in low-moderate pain for about a year afterward.

My strong recommendation for everybody's emergency supply kit: pack a jumbo bottle of ibuprofen. Being homeless physically hurts.
I am wondering - why did you decide to raise outside money at all? I assume you would have been able to do the round yourself, save time / effort around the fundraising process and concentrate on product instead?
What are the chances? Why the improbable is so commonplace.
Give me enough data points, and I could explain it all with the math.

We don't have enough data points. At a certain point, we perhaps can't have enough data points, just because the interactions are so complex.

Try reading Dekker's Drift into Failure. It's about failure analysis in complex systems (and why reductionist thinking is often a bad idea when trying to understand such failures), but it certainly applies to trying to "explain" the audible behavior of real-world sound reproduction with mere math.

edit: As a for-example... a speaker driver (like a headphone) is basically an electric motor attached to a spring (the diaphragm suspension). The suspension (spring) holds it at a zero point, and the motor moves it from the zero point, pushing air in the process. An electric motor consists of an AC-charged coil moving against a magnetic field. Now, if you look the other direction, a coil moving inside a magnetic field is an alternator, generating AC power.

So when the signal from the amplifier drives the motor that moves the speaker driver, energy gets stored in the spring - and then released back into the alternator, and pushed back into the terminals of the amplifier. That back signal is subject to serious nonlinearities from the suspension, including distortion, frequency response variations, and frequency-dependent group delay and phase shifts.

Most - but not all - of the back current from the speaker is absorbed by the output devices from the amp (which have high but not infinite impedance). What gets through is then picked up by the global negative feedback loop that is supposed to keep the amplifier linear, injecting it as phase-reversed signal into the input. Um.

This has a number of effects. First and foremost, it makes the amp/speaker interface much more sonically colored that it seems on the surface. Second, it blows up amplifiers when under enough strain - this is a real-world effect that any PA engineer has observed.

But go on, tell me again how my objections are just unscientific mystical hand-waving.