skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The biggest issue faced with DynamoDB from my perspective has been the problem with any hosted service - that is, the operational stability is in the hands of others entrusted with operating a massive multi-tenant system, and any outage cannot follow your own operational recovery mechanisms unless you plan for failover yourself. And the moment you plan for failover, you need to evaluate why you don't just handle the primary system as well.
Background: I'm more of an idea person, I like making my ideas come to reality.

Java:
- I don't like having to type 'class', public, private, return types, parameter types, etc. over and over again. Writing Java is like owning and driving a boat. Its great once the boat is sailing everyone is drinking beer, but getting the boat to the water (assuming you didn't park it in the marina), setting up the boat, refueling, is too much work.

JavaScript:
- All the freedom and speed that you take advantage of in the beginning to quickly build a prototype comes back and bites you in the ass. Once you starting having multiple people on the project, errors become abundant (Cannot access property of undefined). Javascript is like driving a hummer. It feels comfortable at first, and then you start to realize that gas and upkeep is taking a toll.

C:
- You have to code so much to get so little. Spending mental bandwidth on memory allocation takes your attention away from your core app features.

Python:
- Great for a small subset of tasks, but limiting. You can't build mobile apps or websites with python.

These are a few that comes to mind.
From the article,

> Uber could use them to assess Waymo's argument that it suffered monetary damages from Uber's actions
For me this only seems to work in the legacy racer mode (in https://github.com/editor-rs/vscode-rust). Have you had success in RLS mode? RLS just spits stuff into console. =|
Scientists discover the receptor that makes weed work
I hate to be that guy, but you know that the internet as we know and love it today started out as ARPAnet, right? The internet was domesticated, not weaponized.
I have only had one long conversation with TBL, but he appears at least to me to have his heart in the right place. I met him at the Decentralized Web Conference June 2016.

I want two things, at least, from the web:

1. An open platform where I can post content on my own web site, link to other people's web sites, and let them link to my sites.

2. I like to buy access to entertainment: Google Play Music and Movies, Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Now.

Ideally I should be able to have both of theses modes of using the web, and people who don't want DRM should be able to disable DRM and rent Bluray movies, check movies out of their local libraries, etc. There are some producers, like Spiritual Circle Cinema and others, who sell DRM free video.

I would like to see everyone get everything they want from the web.
Why would you think it has little to teach? The author even says that it's useful and influential.

> What we are doing at C4 is taking messy, conceptually challenging problems and turning them into something rigorous. We’re very philosophically oriented, but we’re also very quantitative, particularly in thinking about how nature can overcome subjectivity in information processing through collective computation. We really think the answer to these questions requires combining insights from statistical physics, theoretical computer science, information theory, evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
No yet.

If interested, we can share ideas?

My web with contact details: http://elmalabarista.com
Neither my business partner nor I are any good at marketing. And we didn't like how most sites put so much pressure on their users to buy things, click ads, share with friends, send out marketing emails, etc...so the things we DID put in were kind of halfhearted, and always out of the way.

We tried selling the data (amazing data if you think about it!!). Anonymous of course! And/or selling the recommendations (easy enough since everything was organized by UPC/ISBN). But that's something it seems like you need to know people -- CEO's/CTO's of bigger companies. We just didn't have the connections, nor the personalities to kiss that much ass. But we tried for several years. I think they're all of the mindset that they've got "good enough" data on their own...or two guys in their garage are too small peanuts to trust. It's funny that just this week Amazon had a post here about it's 20th year of recommendation engine, ~yey~ -- and they still can't get it right (sour grapes? yeah...).

If we were to do it again, we'd probably focus on core functions (the site did A LOT). And seriously work on marketing aspects. Not dark patterns (https://darkpatterns.org/) but more organized and focused efforts.

Honestly though, if we did it again, it would not be for the money - it would be for a cool product and for our own fun...maybe integrate with Kodi...

We'd be smarter on hosting. We were at Rackspace first for $30k/mo...then realized we were being hoodwinked and found PEER1 for $1200/mo...then realized we could get away with a $300/mo DO droplet by converting everything to open source and optimizing -- granted over the course of the 8-10 years, tech improved. But, no more MSSQL, no paid search engine (we ended up on Solr -- AMAZING!), no Windows and just all open-source. I ran our recommendation engine on my computers at home and uploaded results from there. As with hosting, I think the open source stack has improved a lot.

Smarter on who we hire for PR - I got all our serious PR (Mashable, LifeHacker, Makeuseof, etc). We spend about $30k on snake-oil PR companies. Our first PR company took $20k and literally did nothing (not even a press release blast or PDF) - but suing would cost us way too much time/money so we ate it and went to another referral - who did the job, but it ended up more or less a pointless exercise.

After all that time, going into personal debt -- with creditors calling at all hours, no income in sight, thousands of hours devoted to it, alienating friends and family borrowing from them to survive, we finally decided to call it quits.
Academia only worries about getting results for publishing. Testability, maintainability, clean design, all take a back seat because once the paper is done the author will likely never touch the code again.
Do GANs actually do distribution learning?
To me it's not at all "The Last Question", but more like The Matrix, where all human qualities are effectively inferior to those of machines.

Being human is not about being nice and living in harmony. It's about struggle and unfairness, compassion, competition, fights, power, tranquility, hate, love and war. I don't think there is anything rational or reasonable about it.

Ultimately, any sort of action increases entropy. So might as well enjoy it while it lasts instead of thinking of the greater good and how to force humans into this hegemony of cooperation and sustainability.

This is not to say that some of the more base instincts/behaviors shouldn't be squashed, but I think we should stop short of suppressing most of them.
Eritrea: Anecdotes of indefinite anarchy
I asked a deputy at Bartlett last year why the surge and he scoffed & said the surge has been in step with metro population growth over his 22 years in the department(New Times[i know] & EV Tribune claim to concur I didn't click them, either) . No doubt wrong-way drivers are a problem, but the only thing new these days is someone in our legislature is taking action to mitigate(opportunize?) the problem and the stories get eyes on screens and clicks on sites more than slow news, ghetto murders & axe wielding tweekers... although today's lumberjack will probably make the MSM.
In my courses we were taught the Laplace transform as part of analog control theory. It was clear that the Fourier transform was related, but it was taught completely independently in signals theory. Meanwhile I didn't know the Steinmetz impedance concept as (I understood it) was related to the Laplace transform, but it absolutely doesn't surprise me. I had a sense that all these things, things I'd really like to go back and learn properly, were deeply interrelated. I was sure they could best be presented to students through some kind of integrated and harmonious approach rather than the haphazard let-me-present-my-approach-to-one-aspect-as-if-it's-self-contained-when-really-it's-just-one-piece-of-a-bigger-puzzle approach the instructors (and textbooks) took.

I wonder if the teaching of fundamental electrical engineering concepts has improved on average since the early 80s?

Edit: typo
Conpletely agreed; using DynamoDB for primary storage suffers from needing to design data models around the underlying technology. This is true for secondary keys as well, and is even constrained by the odd pricing model that DynamoDB follows.

I've been happy using DynamoDB as a large-scale caching layer, but even that only fits very specific use case criteria.
I picked up Elixir and LFE (Lisp Flavoured Erlang) at the same time. I prefer Lisps, and so I stuck with LFE, so my knowledge of the current state and capabilities of Elixir is lacking.
Robert Virding who co-created Erlang, created LFE. He responded to Jose Valim in 2013 in a LFE vs Elixir thread [1].

I was accused of spreading misinformation when I made the same point recently on HN in another Elixir thread [2].

So my question is: Does Robert Virding's point still hold about Elixir's macros only able to use its predefined syntax, and not create new syntax like a Lisp can. I like Elixir, I just prefer Lisp's syntax. However, if Elixir is making these type of improvements I may want to revisit it, and to ensure I am not repeating old, incorrect information.

Robert Virding uses this example (look at the thread for context):

>> (defmacro kl
>> ((list* k v rest) `(cons (tuple ',k ,v) (kl ,@rest)))
>> (() ()))

>> which I can use

>> (kl a (+ 2 7) b 6) ==> (#(a 9) #(b 6))

Can Elixir do this or not?

Thanks!

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/lisp-flavoured-erlang/ensAkzcEDQQ
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14390916
I created https://videoplaylist.online a few months ago. The idea was to alow users to quickly tag youtube video using a bookmarklet, and then play these youtube videos. It has a `quick select` feature that allows user to quickly create a temporary playlist and put the entire list on autoplay loop.

I wanted to create this app because I listen to music on youtube a lot, and I usually add the videos that I like to a youtube playlist, but I did not find a way to quickly pick videos from multiple playlists/bookmarks (i.e. mixing) and play them. The `quick select` feature does just that.

Nobody seems to think this is a good idea (and they are probably right). So I'm the only user of my own app :)
I quit using Facebook years ago. If you value your privacy, I would recommend you do the same. Facebook's data gathering is pervasive and perverse. And it doesn't stop with facebook.com. All those social media buttons you see for Facebook on websites also gather data for Facebook and Facebook works with several 3rd party companies to gather data such as Acxiom and Atlas Solutions, which is owned by Facebook. Government organizations, such as the NSA, can and do legally purchase and acquire this data without a warrant.

https://labs.rs/en/category/facebook-research

http://veekaybee.github.io/facebook-is-collecting-this

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/08...

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-li...

"The only winning move is not to play."
I mean... of course? But I feel like the idea here is that you can "entrust" them with operating the system and not worry about rolling your own failover mechanism, as long as they seem to be upholding their SLAs.

(Of course, cloud vs. bare metal is a long-running debate, but I think I take the position that multitenant clouds are generally cheap enough that it's worth the cost for the extra feature velocity, if you're not truly at scale.)
Currently having this problem right now. The authors also don't respond to emails either.
What did you find infuriating about BigTable?
>On the other hand, this means that typed systems are in some sense strictly less expressive than their untyped counterparts. It would therefore be interesting if somebody found an expression which was both (i) meaningful and (ii) only expressible in an untyped language. You would then have an argument for untyped languages :-)

Any type system will reject some correct program. As a trivial example, consider:

if( f() ):
1 + "a"
else
1

This is a perfectly fine expression iff the result of f() is always false.
I believe the article specifically notes that BigTable gave far better performance than DynamoDB.
The US is exporting more than 1m barrels of crude oil a day for the first time
Anecdote: I'm having dinner last night with a couple at their house and I'm advising one of them about getting an appliance for her partner - so we browse some options on her cellphone together and find something suitable.

Perhaps 30 minutes later, her partner was on his cellphone and gets an ad for the same appliance, he let us know because it was something he had been wanting. They were both on the same IP address via the router. While they initially had a good laugh, it was supposed to be a surprise.

It really did annoy me and when I explained what was happening they found it equally amusing and frightening. I am pretty sure both of them went to bed that night worried that the other was going to be getting ads for things they might be looking at on the internet.
GPS is an outlier case. Unlike almost everything else, GPS has perfect scaling. No matter how many users use it, it will not be adversely affected.

Other services like that are public radio and TV.
In the exception-that-proves-the-rule department: notonmywatch.com is much better than onlyonotherpeopleswatches.com.
> (legal, that is)

Is any major platform more restrictive than the regional law?
I wrote https://qriusity.com/ as a part time project, I have always wanted to build a quiz app but there were hardly any quiz APIs available for public use, so I decided to take on the effort to build one myself, working on extending the db, right now it has around 17k questions, need to work on the API and content.
Suggestions welcome on improving the API and legal aspects of collecting questions.
liveedu.tv (formerly LiveCoding) has a coding audience orders of magnitude larger than that on Twitch at this moment.
Few weeks ago I decided to spend a weekend to try to understand Ethereum. I found the whitepaper to be pretty instructive (it even helped me cement my understanding of bitcoin).
Here is an annotated version of the whitepaper by vitalik:

http://fermatslibrary.com/s/ethereum-a-next-generation-smart...
I don't see any comments on the article... I even tried a plain browser without addons.
Maybe you are worried about not how it will work, but the myriad of ways it might fail under unusual/unexpected circumstances?

I particularly feel this anxiety when writing code for real time safety/automation/process control systems of plant and machinery.

For me this is as the consequences can be quite visible and quite expensive - many tonnes of equipment or megawatts of power may be involved and you can't just reboot it to fix it once the equipment is damaged. Also a lot of peoples jobs may be impacted, so others are relying heavily on you to get it right.

I find that good architecture/data structures go a long way to allowing a feeling of ease as these enable simpler code to be created. That and use of state machines so the behaviors are exhaustively and unambiguously defined and if well structured then debugging is limited to small parts of the code related to a particular state or transition.
i strongly believe that managers should stay away from relationships with people under them. unless they really don't care about either career.

but managers should really be able to have one-on-one lunches with their employees. humanizing (not sexualizing) the relationship is important.
What European Political Philosophy Has to Say Today
previous discussions of cited issue:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14682210

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681377
My friend owns a local outdoor recreation equipment/rental/guide shop. He actually said he'd kill for an app like yours based primarily on location. He and his wife like to go on road trips and seeing which areas have more activities available would help them prioritize where to explore. He cited the maps in the MTB Project mobile app as a baseline interface--the shortcoming with that one being that it's too narrowly focused on biking.

He's also big in the local Chamber of Commerce and said that lots of Chambers are willing to spend money to position their town as outdoor-friendly.
> Depending on the effect sizes, the selection bias might even make observed correlation coefficient negative even if it's positive in reality (which I think it is).

This is well known in SAT scores. SAT math and verbal scores have a very strong positive correlation in reality; inside almost all colleges they are negatively correlated, because colleges impose threshold effects below and above. (That is, colleges admit students in a narrow band of SAT scores, rather than admitting students who are above a minimum threshold.) You can stylize that into the idea that total SAT score is constant for the students in any given college, which easily explains why component scores would be negatively correlated within colleges.
I would imagine the use of AWS Lambda might be a pretty decent incentive to use DynamoDB. I'm guessing that stateless DynamoDB queries are faster to fire off than dealing with Postgres or MySQL connection setup and teardown.
How important is the adoption of Solidity for Ethereum's success?
>This will not work at scale in DynamoDb.

I don't think we're getting the whole story from the author. I'm not the biggest fan of Dynamo either for reasons I won't get into here, but this type of workload is exactly what Dynamo was built for: serving a website with millions of customers.

Disclaimer: I work at Amazon, my views are my own.
The super structure of a Software project, size and density of crew.
Incendiary though the phrasing is, I'm halfway inclined to agree with you. There's a lot to be said for a solid, simple strong typing system. But some of the more sophisticated type systems that I either seen or read research literature about (I had a colleague who was doing PhD research in 'refinement types') are seem like they are hitting diminishing returns for programmer ease-of-use while catching an ever-diminishing number of bugs.

If you allotted me a finite amount of effort to put a codebase (a) into a strong type system, (b) festoon it with lots of pre- and post-conditions and asserts, (c) run it through every static checker under the sun, (d) build a huge suite of tests, (e) find a way to formally verify critical algorithms in it with (say) Z3, (f) carry out fuzz testing, ... I'd probably say "do the easy stuff from most of these categories" rather than "pick the One True Path and figure that that will save you from all your bugs".
What is your job cause my software engineer co-workers and I have very lax hour requirements as long as you get your work done.
With many providers, you do still get the content, just limited to 480p.
I've been reading a lot about Ethereum, and I am really interested in blockchain tech -- but I also wonder about this.

I am really curious as to whether it would be possible to develop new languages for the handling of smart contracts, or if it is possible to develop smart contracts (using a library or other resource) with existing, popular languages like c++, python, or javascript. I know web3 is already quite accessible and while I haven't looked at the source, it seems relatively easy to work with. But the core language for smart contracts... I think Eth would benefit from some flexibility on the development end. Or maybe I just don't know enough.

Anyway, I think that would be a big leap.
Wrote this recently, kind of an answer to this question (if you don't mind another disgruntled JavaScript rant): https://guscost.com/2017/06/19/future-driven-development/
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In academic systems papers, every performance claim needs to be backed up by an experiment. But you can get credit for features even if you argue that it is possible to implement that feature with your design, even if you didn't actually do it.

In production software, this is flipped. Every feature claim needs to have an associated test, as it's a contract with your user. But when it comes to performance, everyone just waves their hands.

I'm being a little glib. But production software has to work. You'll spend far more time dealing with all of the "less interesting" details and edge cases than with research software. As ams6110 points out, this means more focus on testing, maintenance and good design. But I do want to emphasize testing - sometimes you'll spend more time testing something than actually implementing it. There's also often many more residual effects from dependencies elsewhere in the ecosystem you're working in. That's not typical in academic software.
Can't trust ethereum or bitcoin for the same reason we can't trust the fed and their "quantitive easing":
1. It's way complicated
2. It's fiat
3. Nobody understand who really is in control of its value
I think we should distinguish interactive things like games from the sort of title that's copyable via the 'analog hole' -- for movies/songs/books, effective DRM is incompatible with human liberty, but I don't have that problem with DRMed games.

(This isn't to argue in favor of DRM on the web. It ought to stay in its restricted-device ghetto.)