skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a wordpress plugins business that earns maybe a couple hundred a month without touching it at all. I know it's not a lot but I sold a similar business a few years back that regularly made $1200-$1500 a month and the products were not as good. The only difference is I'm working so hard on other stuff this hasn't had the time it deserves.
Someone with the time and motivation to add a couple of new features and actually advertize it a bit (I've never done any advertizing at all) would make a decent, passive income.

I also own another business that makes about $1500 a month (50/50 adsense & product sales) but does require a few hours a week of effort. I've only just started improving this and expect it to hit $3k a month within 6 months. I'm not seriously considering selling unless I get a really good offer but you never know!
Yes. The thing with hosting and email is that it adds overhead in an area that may not be a core competence.

You could spend a few hours fixing someone's email because they decided to bulk mail using your servers. That or they get hit by malware that does the same.

Those few hours would be better spent building websites.

It's a good complementary service but my warning was about drawing the line when it starts to encroach on what you do best. We have learned this the hard way.
I think that's a great point, and definitely hard for a huge company like P&G. But for a small company, it can be easier, because when your volumes are low enough, it's often very easy to directly see sales uplift in your top line numbers when you run the ad. If I normally get 20 orders a day, I run an ad and get 40, then the ad budget runs out and I'm back to a steady 20, I'm not too worried about cannibalization.
Article incorrectly states that BTC-e was "Bulgaria-based", like many other articles unfortunately. There is zero evidence for that: https://bivol.bg/en/no-bulgarian-connection-found-so-far-in-...
The Inside Story of SoundCloud's Collapse
I think, as a starting place, Apple's Swift Programming Guide is hard to beat
I think the thing that bothers people like the author and Chomsky is that deep nets can't explain or justify how they make decisions in a way that a human could fit in their brain. There is no book called "How To Play Go as well as I Do" by AlphaGo. This is something we're going to have to live with : The machines are smarter than we are, so we won't be able to understand them except at the most basic levels where we use inductive proof to extrapolate our understanding of very small models to enormously large ones that are beyond our ability to fit into our brains.

We can understand how individual chemical reactions in Einstein's brain work, but that doesn't make us smarter than him.
Specifically your right thumb if you're not a touch typist.
Make ya wonder how many pre internet TV and print ads they would have sacked if they had the ability to truly measure their effectiveness.

Ya also have to wonder how they got to $100,000,000 worth of ads before they decided to pull back.
20 years in – principlesandinterest
> I sense the hand of an editor. Particularly regarding the title.

Gary Marcus is probably fine with the title. He's been talking down deep learning (and talking up his own more old-fashioned Bayesian flavored ideas and startup) for years now, trying to ignore all the successes like Google's knowledge graph and just omitting the actual research, like when he says

> Such systems can neither comprehend what is going on in complex visual scenes (“Who is chasing whom and why?”) nor follow simple instructions (“Read this story and summarize what it means”).

Which deep learning actually... works pretty well on? Look at Facebook and Google's work on visual & textual question answering using approaches like memory networks.
Why are there so many claims without even a demonstration of them?
Safety comes from all-wheel braking, not all-wheel acceleration. As long as you have traction/stability control, AWD is not really any safer unless you're on a winter rallye track (=want to accelerate into corners).

See eg. this study: http://indexsmart.mirasmart.com/25esv/PDFfiles/25ESV-000260....
This same thread pops up on here more or less every month.
> If I am following you correctly, you are arguing that walking is a harder problem than language because it took much longer to evolve.

This is a thorny subject. So I am saying that in some objective way, walking is harder than language because Nature took millions/billions of years to traverse the solution space. Then... once we had a huge number of preconditions existing, then we had the development of language.

I am not saying that this means if it takes 10 years to develop language with some artificial means that it will take 100,000 years to develop walking.

What I am pointing to is that we ought to appreciate that if even blind natural selection took that long, then the possibility space to develop a nervous system must be much larger than we have anticipated.

As evidence of this: consider how (at least in popular culture, but also in comp sci in the old days) we developed chess playing computers and it was broadly assumed that breakthroughs in getting robots to walk and talk would soon follow through. That did not happen. It was a natural assumption but it was wrong.

> This seems to assume that a facility for language and advanced mathematics is independent of the existence of a nervous system capable of flexibly interacting with the environment, but it seems plausible, indeed probable, that language, consciousness and math depend heavily on the prior neural infrastructure, and their development was the most recent step in a process that has been going on since the evolution of the first synapse.

I don't know the answer to that. On different days I think one or the other is true. On Day #1 I think Nature obviously required walking before talking, but we could develop them differently, just has we didn't need to develop better horses to produce cars. On Day #2 I think to myself there's a deeper sense in which you really do require walking before talking because otherwise why didn't Nature develop biological microlife which evolved communications ability long before it developed legs. So...

> On the other hand, I am skeptical of the somewhat popular view that the key to generalized AI is to make robots that interact more thoroughly with their environment, and that they will then find their own way to language and consciousness.

We cannot be certain consciousness or intelligence are high probability events once you have life. We could be like those French artifact makers who made such exquisite mechanical toys for the aristocracy but ultimately got nowhere whereas the English inventors meddling with water and steam power really kicked off a revolution.

Who is Silicon Valley is genuinely looking at the fundamentals of A-Life or AI? OpenAI? MIRI? Stanford? DARPA?
I know for a fact that the one in Yaris and C4 is an option... And for a while, it wasn't available in many countries. For a C4 Picasso, this is still the case.
It's not just Amazon. Facebook and Google also want to avoid any criticism that suggests they should be regulated as utilities.

The #1 marketplace, #1 social network, and #1 search engine companies all lend themselves to natural monopoly, much like the oil and railroad companies at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Search for Self
Your anecdote coincides with my experience working directly with a certain semi-famous programmer for the past 5 years.

He's very charismatic and a great speaker, and he has a successful business selling his experienced expertise and advice.

But having pair-programmed with him many many times during that time, I was surprised by his inability to discuss real-world coding problems and their potential solutions beyond more than a superficial level.

What I took from that experience is just what you said: there seems to be an inverse correlation. I could produce code that solved complex problems thoroughly and bug-free, and he could talk about them in an abstract way, but neither of us could do the other part.
I read that as a D DSL for FPGA's, not D used for a game right? Did I miss something?
Cloud providers, web hosts, and similar all provide pretty acceptable ads on average (soundless, videoless), while also tending to be a high bidder.

So sometimes I would use the open all option on a bookmark folder that I shoved a bunch of providers in. Just to have those ads show
They do have a video preview if you look at it from within the app store on a mobile device. Check it out, I'm sure your kids would like it :)
Love that they stripped all the controls out. Part the nice aesthetics from the old Broncos is the really clean interior. It's so much less junky than numerous obscure controls on most modern cars.

Tesla solves the same problem, in a completely different way, by pushing everything to an iPad like display in the middle. Both end up with nice clean interiors. The mass market cars look like flea markets in comparison.
What is your battery life, never using ChromeOS?
I see a small controversy in your statements, please help me understand:

> Sometimes I get frustrated by the "AGI is an existential risk" quotes like Musk's because I feel that's a distraction from some really beneficial applications of machine learning that will help save lives.

While I absolutely and adamantly disagree and I can't ever agree that warnings must be dismissed as "distractions", I extract from your statement here that you want us to move forward to a true AI no matter what. But then...

> ...and that there is much more practical work to be done to advance humanity.

Right now AI looks like snake oil selling, you realize that, right? I stand fully behind the statement that we have tons of practical and increasingly urgent issues to solve here in the material Earth.

Unless of course you're implying that the strife for inventing a true AI (=AGI) is a practical work. IMO it isn't. It's better than the medieval alchemy, but not by much.
You're proposing a false dichotomy. If the choice is to do evil or leave then they should leave, but is it? How sure are you that a company with thousands of employees and billions of dollars could not find a third way if sufficient pressure was applied on them to do so, instead of us excusing their defection as reasonable?
Currently probably $5 per day total from all our Apple apps. Like I said, I'm terrible at marketing. I've tried and I've failed.
SMS Controlled Door with Arduino and FONA
Sorry to say it, but I got the impression that the author was unaware it was nonsensical, not that it was a clever motivation.
No, I think this is more designed for the case where you're creating a database implementation yourself. This provides a protocol and a JDBC driver so you don't have to build them from scratch, just as Calcite provides a SQL parser.

I've seen other databases do this by implementing the PostgreSQL wire protocol so they can use off-the-shelf PostgreSQL clients.
Show HN: Python batch merge images and famous quotes
Almost certainly, I think all sentient life has some kind of imagination, even if rudimentary.
Marketing folks do not actually have to market any product successfully other than their own utility to thrive.
Nah, no need for new ML approaches. It's just time for the pendulum to swing back again from the current craze of data-driven/"deep learning"/continuous modeling to the alternative of symbolic/"Good Old-Fashioned AI"/discrete modeling.

The switch happens every ~30 years: around the ~1950s, in the late 1980s, and perhaps again soon...

I realize I'm glossing over many nuances of how the most successful AI/ML approaches combine together continuous and discrete modeling, and symbolic and numeric techniques.

Still, this is a real cultural divide for researchers. The "deep learning" types just want to increase their match/success percentages as high as they will go--with little regard for how the sausage is made--while the symbolic types care about whether the model itself provides actual explanatory value.
Actually I guess oldtimers (i.e. the parents of most of us) would prefer real menus.
The ad business requires Google to hire a hell of a lot of developers who are not working on the search engine. A pay service would be viable on less revenue. And nobody knows who many people are actually willing to pay for Google search because we've never had to.
> To just name one simple example - rural hukou is better because every single one of those households was recently given land for FREE.

I know that, and I also know that it gives kids access to substandard education in toufu schools along with requiring higher gaokao scores to get into urban universities, the only ones in China that don't suck. Many of these kids are left at home with their grandparents because their parents have gone off to the cities to work. They maybe see their parents once a year during Chinese New Years.

> Next time when someone complains about the unfair rural hukou treatment, please don't forget to ask them how much land was given to them for free.

Nor can they ever sell this land and move to the cities unless the government explicitly compensates them for confiscation. They can't even use the land as collateral for a bank loan to upgrade their farming infrastructure. They would basically be treated as serfs if they didn't become migrant workers in the cities.

> I'd happily trade my non-rural hukou for a rural one to get my fair share of those free rural land.

You have Shanghai hukou and you'd trade it in for rural hukou just for a few acres of land that you have to farm and can't sell? I'm not sure if you are being serious here, I'm tempted to post it on WeChat for laughs.

> Be prepared when they explain to you about nonsense stuff like "oh, land is owned by the country, we were just given permanent right to use the land tax free".

See above.
Well that's good. I built it to fill my niche and hoping others would find use for it as well.
What do you mean exactly ? There is a video embedded with the drone in action. What claims do you imply ?
Most network protocols, including TCP and UDP, are big endian, so little endian really isn't that ubiquitous. And I imagine a big use case for the binary coder will be for networking.
+1 the USA and UK are definitely on the path of governmental control of content/privacy on the Internet.

A bit off topic: I am in the USA and it surprises be constantly how most of my friends and family buy into American exceptionalism. Mostly, they don't travel much to foreign countries so they don't realize that the USA is one of MANY great places to live. The world for the most part is an awesome place but the news media convinces people otherwise. Re: China: even though China has problems with internal ethnic violence (source: I took an online class in English covering history, economics, and politics taught by three professors in China) my impression of people in China when I was there is that they are generally happy with their society. It is not my place to tell other people what form of government they should have.
> OSS can't afford to pay people to look for bugs and improve the overall software. But commercial companies can.

Software insurance companies can invest a part of the insurance premium on OSS in bug bounties. It’s a shame more people aren’t aware of software insurance, since OSS has several advantages in this area, for example that the source code is available to everyone, such that insurance companies can pay everyone in the world to find bugs in the software they’re insuring.

That’s a definite advantage. It’s not often that an insurance company has the opportunity to invite everyone in the world to help them assess the quality of what they’re insuring.
There don't seem to be any English-language sources on this aconite poisoning case, unfortunately.
I have been in an accident with no air bag deployed and wearing my seat belt. I was rear-ended by a vehicle doing 45 mph faster than mine. I had torn ligaments in my neck that took years to fully recover from.

An air bag might have reduced my injury to a sore neck.

P.S. I was in a 1964 Chevrolet C10 Pickup that I had installed seat belts in.
Google Play is not in China.

Their phones are made many places. Lately in Taiwan and Korea.
> Working at a startup does not make you an expert. Especially when your opinion goes against what pretty much everyone else in the field thinks.

Achievements are perhaps the best yardstick for expertise. Whether a person has worked at a startup or has contrarian viewpoints are both irrelevant.

Gary Marcus was co-founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, successfully raised some money and grew a team, [1] then successfully sold the company to Uber, after which he directed Uber's AI lab. He has a PhD from MIT in cognitive science. And he's been a professor of Neural Science at NYU for nearly 20 years. [2]

I'm no expert, but he seems like one to me.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/geometric-intelligen...
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-marcus-b6384b4/
Patent protected and not revolutionary.
In my experience, it's difficult to go through because it's so comprehensive and thorough, and I guess it has to be because it has to assume the lowest common denominator audience. Personally I'd like a shorter guide that assumes you know a few languages (C#, ObjC, JS, Java) and skips a bunch of the tedium of how programming languages work in general and gets right to what's different about Swift. It may seem like it does that, but look at their page about control flow[1] and tell me it's not an unreasonably long-winded way of explaining switch, for, for-in, while, break, continue, and if.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Sw...
Printing, games, and slower performance for things like Netflix and boot.
Great idea, just wondering why you chose Discord instead of Slack?
I don't know why this is getting downvoted.

I used to install systemd from backports on wheezy only because I don't have to write sysv-init scripts that way.
I'm a little like that with programming. I used to have a similar, but more pronounced, problem with my native language (English). I could read and write way above my grade level, pretty much from as soon as I could read and write. I've seen college students who write worse than I did in 5th grade.

I could tell you when a sentence had a problem and how to fix it. What I couldn't do was tell you why something was wrong in the language of talking-about-language. Basic parts of speech, sure. Past that I was lost. It took learning a fair bit of French in a formal setting to get that stuff to stick. I think the problem was that I didn't need those words to think about my native language[1]. It just happened for me. Learning a foreign language made it easy to pick up the vocabulary, because I actually needed it to talk about what was going on.

Point being that maybe there's a way to pick up some of the lingo by finding a way to need it. Maybe learn a radically different programming language from what you're used to.

On the other hand I find that even a not-especially-deep understanding of how things actually work makes some of these named concepts and patterns look like really obvious and not-needing-their-own-words cases of some more fundamental thing, so if it's that giving you trouble then I'm not sure what to do about that or how to make you need those words enough to learn them. Some significant percentage of the time I end up re-casting "complex" ideas as an implementation/combination of some simpler or more fundamental thing(s) I already know, which turns out to be an exact match for how the thing actually works and leaves me wondering entirely WTF all the fuss is about, and usually thinking I don't actually understand it long after I in fact do because everyone writing/talking about it is using mysterious, magical language. Being able to communicate with people who prefer to... I don't know, come at problems from the other direction I guess, is a problem I continue to have.

[1] N.b. I would eventually have needed them to develop further, and I picked up some really bad habits in high school that harmed the quality of my writing but helped me make mandatory page counts so I definitely had room to improve.

[EDIT] embarrassing farther/further error. The finer points of usage remain a struggle.
Technically the mild brain damage of drinking heavily over time is permanent. The nervous system is a biological system made up of organs: it's always changing, often permanently.

You might identify yourself with a particular functional aspect if your mind, but you're going to have to do a fair amount of scientific work to pick out which functional aspect. Just gesturing to the meat doesn't really pick out anything immutable or specific.
hakrlog.com

sample blog - pvsukale.hakrlog.com

Markdown blogging for hackers. Everyone gets a unique subdomain and they can write and publish with a simple interface. A native nested comments section, No ads, No monthly charges. People can follow authors for weekly emails and RSS. It is in beta, no current users though. If anyone wants to support development / buy the project contact email :-
pvsukale at gmail dot com .

Developed using Rails. ( I am a last year CS student)
Long time ago I used some free $ on adwords to advertise Dropbox. I maxed out the free storage upgrades within a day or two. I am sure I am not the one who did that. People click on ads. Plus ads are not always meant to lead to sales. For companies like P&G who sell products with many substitutes it's also about maintaining brand awareness.
I drive a Yaris myself (the center display looks different than the one pictured, but the concept is the same). It doesn't have a HUD and I actually love the center display. As stated before, it is never blocked. In a turn, when a normal instrument panel is behind the steering wheel, I can still monitor the speedometer and shift gears according to the speed.
Also, I totally have the road in vision when looking at the speedometer.
>They get what...30-40% of their profits from China?

~20% in Q117, down 12% from Q116 [0]. China is their only shrinking market (at least at the granularity of data provided).

[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q1FY17DataSummary.pdf
How to MILK a COW AT THE PROSPECT PARK ZOO
After taking assembler my freshman year (1970's) i wrote the combination lock code in the octal representation of 1-9. I wrote it on the bottom if the storage unit rented to?store furniture between terms..

When i returned to unlock it, the numbers were faded and unreadbale.

Got lock pliers from the office
I'm not sure. The usual answer is that the ranking algorithm determined it should be downgraded. Why does it show up just fine in Firefox, but really terribly in Chrome (all unstyled, plain text, no images loaded, links don't work correctly)?
From 2007 (now fixed).

These are some of the hardest papers to write and make visible; I was disabused of a few beliefs and the treatment of number theory didn't upset me so this was great, particularly the Fourier bit at the end.
You can do byte-swapping in one instruction on x86, so it really isn't something worth worrying about. There aren't many big-endian systems out there, but it doesn't really matter that much. If you wanted to, you could change this so it always stores the numbers in little-endian (and does a swap on big-endian systems) but a lot of the uses of this will likely be for networking, and people generally expect big-endian in that situation.
Lightweight common vanilla utilities for the modern web development
Zeta Ret ProtoSS Library [JavaScript, Polymorphism, Prototypes, OOP, 1kb]
Bingo. No one rushes to the store to get Downy because of a Facebook ad, but they might start buying something else a few months later if another brand has been consistently hitting them with ads.
Would you be interested in selling the WP plugin business? If yes please let me know more about it.