skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Tell me, what intractable problem are "value systems" and "moral codes" heuristics for?

Suppose you already have a solution in-hand for determining what the "best world" is, and everyone agrees on this definition of what is "right" and "good".

Now, can you calculate with any accuracy what actions each person should take in order for us all to arrive at that "best world"?

I think it's clear to most people who have taken an algorithms course that such a calculation -- even with perfect knowledge about the current and future state of the world -- is completely and totally intractable. (And besides, it doesn't take an algorithms course to notice we don't have that perfect knowledge; I don't even know if it will rain this afternoon.)

Value systems and moral codes -- e.g., "no stealing and no murdering except in X,Y,Z cases" -- provide us with a set of heuristics that while perhaps not optimal at least seem to keep us in decently good steady states for a while.

> The hypothetico-dialectical method of talking about morality, as if it was simultaneously mathematics and politics, has always confused me.

The point is to explore the theoretical limits of what's even possible. If we can show that something is impossible even in a highly idealized setting, then we can probably conclude that the same thing is impossible in more messy settings.

Of course, "all models are wrong" and all that.

But if pure consequentialism doesn't work well even in the most ideal of settings, that might be a good indicator that it also doesn't work well in far more messy settings.

> Plainly there ought to be some observable evidence that we've done the right thing

Why is that so "plain"? Besides, "what should I do?" is a far more... timely... question than "did I just do the right thing?"

> or the term "right" has no meaning at all other than "theorem within a politically fashionable consistent axiom schema."

Outside of religious and spiritual folks, I think most people agree that morality is socially constructed.
Semantic Satiation
How does this hearing get scheduled so soon while other cases have to wait years?
> Instead of using the money to research renewable or more efficient energy production

That's incorrect. Gates has dedicated vast sums of money, over more than a decade, to energy research and has openly and frequently stated that dramatic energy breakthroughs are among the most important goals he or anyone can have to further humanity.

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/bill-ga...

http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-talks-private-nucl...

http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-interview-energy-m...

http://fortune.com/2016/09/15/bill-gates-backs-renmatix/

https://www.cnet.com/news/bill-gates-invests-in-algae-fuel/
Bezos asked for suggestions on how to spend the money. As the article clearly shows.
Stack Overflow Buddy
As neilsimp1 mentioned, it's not about not being good enough, as that's fixable with sufficient time.

To answer your question, I'd write a fantasy economic sim game like a sequel to Patrician III or something, except with wizards and weird races and stuff. A big bit of the game would be negotiating with customers for custom goods and services.

Exactly how much money would it cost to for a casting of Bull's Strength before a mercenary engagement? What are the obligations a wizard has in the event their town gets attacked? When is the Teleport spell economically viable vs just taking a boat? How do you negotiate with beings very alien to you?

Classic pet project that I've wanted to do for years, just never had the time/concentration to do it.
Corporate press release site.
I get a lot of mileage out of using real columns for the data with fixed structure, and Postgres JSONB columns for the parts of the data whose structure varies.
What does that have to do with his personal wealth?

How is Bezos' situation different than Gates?

e: to clarify my second question: How is Bezos' situation different than Gates' when Gates left Microsoft.
The formula is more complicated than this. Services such as shapeshift.io guarantee the price for 10 minutes, as well as sending purchased tokens almost instantaneously. To accomplish this means keeping inventory and becoming vulnerable to volatility risk and liquidity risk.

Picking a reasonable bid-ask spread is hard, and probably involves more input factors than the 4 you listed above.
There’s a large number of post-war Western European nationalisations listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nationalizations_by_co... . Most of them are nationalisations of companies rather than industries (for example failing banks during the financial crisis) to be fair.
The Next Wave of Computing
I didn't downvote you because thats your opinion, other people downvoted u.

As well, I'm pretty sure I'm not a bot, maybe you can give me a recaptcha test to test me and I never said protests are treated the same in USA. Does the USA censor their protests on the media? Please answer me there as I put that on my post and learn to read. I'm angry because this is stupid.

Also I hate the Chinese Communist Party and don't want China under a communist one-party dictatorship. I have not said anything about Tibet, that was you. If I was a Chinese bot I would have just lost my job.

They also approve of protests requests that forward their political agenda:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_China_anti-Japanese_demon...

See above, this was broadcasted on the Chinese interwebs and on Chinese State news where I saw it, if it wasn't allowed, it would have been stopped and cracked down on.

EDIT: Note that a BBC News article about it says that "The BBC's Martin Patience in Beijing says the outbreak of protests was almost certainly sanctioned by the Chinese authorities, as they were well policed."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-19312226

If there is police allowed around a protest in China, it usually is legal

Another edit: Dont pretend you know more about China than I do, i am prepared to protest the Chinese govt on Chinese streets and light myself on fire for Chinese democracy, until you can do the same you have no skin in the game.
Increase Blog Traffic – This Method Got Me 38% More Traffic
That requires self control and discipline.
Many people don't have a great mastery of it.
I like bison and I never minded flex. (ANTLR? Did not enjoy; would not use again. But it was a while ago now and maybe newer versions are improved.)

I wonder if I'm the only one...
This makes no sense. If the foundation is "accumulating more wealth", that just means they have more money to spend on on good causes later. Nobody can take the money out for themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_China_anti-Japanese_demon...

Chinese government often uses demonstrations that prove their point or to forward their political agenda
Sounds like a phenomenal success, then.
I was doing a little yoga and pranayama, but that's about it. But I had been doing that for about a year before I quit. So nothing really changed in that regard..

I also started and stopped coffee a couple times before really quitting and the anger/irritability came right back like clockwork every time I started drinking again..
>What if you were mugged?

In general, any time you point to others and say "they did this to me" you remove your own power to change the situation. You may have to be creative, but personally I never want to give others that power.

> but I don't think you can (or should) take responsibility for what you feel because you don't have control over that.

I disagree with this. I consider the mind a muscle like any other. It can be trained and taught more productive ways of thinking [1].

[1] https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf (please ignore that the author of this speech later shot himself in the head)
> * $5k cheap, it's nothing, the real way you pay for it is via your time.

Is there a way to stretch this to 3-4 years so that things aren't as compressed?
I recently discovered .to domains allow for emoji like .ws and a few other ccTLDs.

While they have some (technical) downsides I figured they'd be interesting to experiment with so I was curious if any good ones were still available. Manually checking them one-by-one was kinda cumbersome, so I wrote a simple script to check availability for each possible single-emoji .to domain.

Turns out many were still available (about 70% at the time). I registered a few and decided to publicise the list. That was my weekend project ~2 weeks ago. Today I finally launched it.

I wrote more about the timeline and how I built it here: https://medium.com/@marckohlbrugge/get-your-own-emoji-domain...

Disclosure: I worked out an affiliate deal with my registrar so I get a 10% commission for each registration. Of course you're free to use your own registrar of choice.
Show HN: Thetapack: Type-homogenous, crypto-friendly, padded binary serialization
You need to set reminders to take a break once an hour, walk around, stare off into the distance for 5 minutes. This article is from 2012 but mentioned 5 of them: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/five-apps/five-free-apps-to...

I also noticed this was a side benefit of having a good test suite- if your test is valid, thorough, and passing, then you don't have to remember as much mental-model (because it's encoded in the suite), which would normally discourage you from getting up at all
I Bought a Book of Restaurant Recommendations from 1957 and None of them would Serve Me Dinner Any More
DuckDuckGo and Bing are down
EDIT 2: Seems that DuckDuckGo has returned.
https://twitter.com/duckduckgo/status/897501100412030976

DuckDuckGo [https://duckduckgo.com]:

"No results. Try:" + Search suggestions + Instant answers

Bing [https://www.bing.com/]:

"It's not you, it's us.

Bing isn't available right now, but everything should be back to normal very soon."

EDIT: DuckDuckGo statement:
https://twitter.com/duckduckgo/status/897497301106663425
Show HN: Break bad habits, develop productive routines with Tinygain
Thanks captain.
Sure, that's kind of what I was getting at with the average bloke who does this four times year and the professional who does it forty times a day. You're not the average bloke, and for you the added repair & maintenance time of a gas-powered auger pays off because of just how many holes you're digging.
Not necessarily. Depends who you cked over along the way, including your workers. Not saying this applies to Bill, though.
I'm in OMSCS and have to disagree with this statement: "hidden gem is Piazza". Piazza is my least favorite part of the program.
> Because people such as yourself always have some self-aggrandizing, pseudo-intellectual nonsense in your bio

Well, I added it a few days ago because somebody found a way to contact me, and it made them feel less isolated. They told me that I should have my email address in my HN bio with some words of encouragement (it's meant to be playful, if you didn't detect), so I added it. If you get the impression that it's there to play into my ego, well, that's less of a problem than the crushing loneliness of even one person.

> that -- to everyone else -- clearly displays your ego, irrationality, and how wholly unprepared you are to seriously discuss matters in a forthright manner without trying to weasel your way around the topic.

What have I not been forthright about? I am here, a fully identifiable human being. I was making conversation in the wee hours of the morning, and you two took your egg accounts and started assassinating my character. I did not resort to the same tactics, and I tried to answer each jab and remark as clearly as I could manage. I made sure not to make it personal.

> I'm quoting this just to draw attention to it.

Perhaps we can all sound cryptic sometimes. I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I'm saying that if you have it in for me, and (for example) you have direct access to a blacklist of some sort (usually reserved for management, and not peons), it'll do me no good that you're upset and willing to look for my bio.
He bags & tags them, calm your anxiety guys.
A fair point. I see how the two situations are different.
I was just curious. I wanted to see what people on hacker news were reading. I am sorry about all of that from a while ago. I realized I was taking too many shortcuts and deleted everything that I shouldn't have posted from that account.
Those protests are cracked down on, im talking about these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_China_anti-Japanese_demon...

These are usually broadcasted openly on the Chinese internet and allowed by the Chinese government. Like I'm of Chinese ethnicity and I occasionally see Chinese news, these are the only protests put on Chinese State news that you can see because it forwards Chinese govt. agenda.

EDIT: Note that a BBC News article about it says that "The BBC's Martin Patience in Beijing says the outbreak of protests was almost certainly sanctioned by the Chinese authorities, as they were well policed."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-19312226

If there is police allowed around a protest in China, it usually is legal
I have a regular old masters in CS from GT. It's probably worth it from a career standpoint (if nothing else it signals that you care about self-improvement and take active steps to doing it). I would expect you'd miss some of the 'grad school experience' (for better or worse) and networking opportunities. The actual content itself can probably be gotten for free from other courses on the web if you take a syllabus from a CS dept to get an overall program. That path wouldn't have the benefit of access to teachers and would require a lot of discipline.

I don't know how it would be looked at in Brazil or what the economic cost/benefit are in terms of your own income. I did know a few folks from the University of Sao Paulo that did grad and postdoc work while I was at GT though, so clearly some people are aware of GT in Brazil. That might be another avenue to get opinions from. I would be interested to hear how the costs compare to an institution that was local to you.
Doesn't that lead to a pretty big loophole that allows lies of omission?

After all, you could just as easily answer "do you like this watch?" with "I like the way its blue colour matches your eyes" or some other true, positive statement that doesn't answer the question as stated.
Not to go too meta here, but hn has a very unique algorithm for vote count, it's not a direct 1:1, instead they use a combination of your hn rank, the account you're voting on,who else is voting on it, plus a couple other factors to determine whether your vote will leave an impression.
Germany doesn't have that, and will never have that? Quite a prediction

The only one predicting anything is you, Captain Pedantic. Parent used the present tense, which I take to mean that if I look for an apartment today in Germany, I won’t find an apartment with a charger. Tomorrow? Who knows, no one was talking about tomorrow. On top of that, speaking from a German perspective, odds are that English is a second language. But you go right ahead and pick apart that sentence for something to criticize.
All the more reason for me to use my crosscut then. We'll certainly replace the blade on the circular though.
I'd like to also mention that making your own mozzarella is incredibly easy and worthwhile [0]. I started making my own cheese of all kinds recently, which has been a thoroughly worthwhile time and money investment. But especially when my wife wants to make her cauliflower pizza, I make a big batch of this mozzarella for toppings. This Australian guy Gavin Webber has tons of great instructional videos on Youtube.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VbuBcNCgAc
First, I think you meant "Now substitute... 'innate linguistic capability' with 'innate technical interest'" right? Because it's the "interest in things" vs. "interest in people" argument that Damore uses, or did I miss the point entirely?

If I didn't, I simply have the following to offer: there are many, many fields that are dominated by either women or men. No one really knows why. Simply saying "sexism" and calling it a day doesn't give enough credence to the problem. It doesn't identify the root cause. And unless you merely want to treat symptoms, ignoring the root cause will cause the problem to fester.
Start a Premium Content Business Using Node.js, React and Cosmic JavaScript Extensions
I have something like this that I managed to find at a Goodwill thrift store (of all places).

It's basically the same kind of device, but looks like a screwdriver. The bits aren't twist drills (though you can chuck those in as well), but rather something like a shaft with a stepped channel down one edge. The whole tool was obviously made "back in the day" - completely metal. The bits store in the handle (screw-on cap - again, all metal).

I love collecting and using older tools like this, if I think they'll be useful. I've got a couple of other oddities as well.

One's a set of "interchangeable auger bits" - they look like flat twist drills, but wider - almost like a spade bit and an auger bit combined. Each is chucked in a special chuck, then that is chucked into your drill. Again, it was another small but useful set from Craftsman, and it works great (I've used it for both wood and HDPE cutting board material).

The other weird tool - which I have yet to use - is kinda scary, and I don't know if I should even try: It's a circular saw blade meant to cut curves (!!!). It's triangular in shape, teeth on all the edges. Again, I have no idea if or how well it works. Maybe one day I'll get brave enough to try (I have used a metal cutoff blade in my circular saw - which was crazy to me, but it worked great).

Both of these other weird tools I found at Goodwill as well (so maybe what I'm saying, is if you're looking for such tools, Goodwill is a good place to look).
It was a democratic decision to make charitable donations tax-deductible. Also what counts as "charity" is a political decision.
Oh yeah! My friend used to tease me every day after work when we worked together. "How's it hanging up there in the code fog" he would always say when I was grasping for words :) I never really noticed though: so no headaches or anything like that...
All good. http://www.founderchronicles.com/ looks great by the way.
Which is why this is an anti-trust case.

LinkedIn have freely provided public data to any competitor but hiQ. If they were preventing any company from taking the data, say by putting it behind a user login with licensing, it would likely not be under consideration.
The article is quite vague on the problem formulation, other than being somewhat equivalent to the TSP, so I'm just going to speculate a bit onto how they solve it. The TSP can be formulated as an Integer Linear Program (http://examples.gurobi.com/traveling-salesman-problem/). This type of problem is very well studied, and several free and commercial problem formulation tools and solvers are available, some that scale to thousands of variables.

They also probably decouple their problem into disjoint regions before solving it, to reduce the dimensionality of the problem(s).
The e-mail Larry Page should have written to James Damore
I've completed the majority of the OMCS program. My specialization is 'Computing Systems'. I have a 4.0 GPA so far. I did not do CS as an undergraduate, but I've been programming since I was very young.

Here are my thoughts on what people need to succeed as an OMCS student:

* Be able to program in C, C++, Python and Java at an intermediate level. And, know one of these very well.
* Be able to use a debugger (GDB) and valgrind.
* Be able to administer and configure Linux systems.
* Understand data structures and examples (std::set in C++ is RB Tree backed, std::unordered_set is hash table backed)
* Understand basic networking concepts and key technologies (TCP, UDP, IP, switching, routing, etc.).
* Understand the x86 computer in general.

Finally, I think some of the classes are meant to weed students out. People may think that 'Intro to Graduate Operating Systems' would be an easy first course for CS beginners. It's not (unless they've changed it). It was primarily about writing multi-threaded clients, servers, caches and proxies in C, using shared memory (IPC, POSIX Shared Memory) and various other C/thread projects until you become a half-way decent C programmer. They deduct points for working code that has any errors (memory leaks, etc.) too. So don't be surprised if a seemingly easy OMCS course turns into... I had no idea. I'm going to have to drop this course. I saw that happen to several students.

I've done well so far, but I have the programming/logic background to do the work. If you don't, brush up on the skills listed above before enrolling.

Edit: The class projects are a lot of work. Be prepared to give-up your weekends and evenings. Even if you know the material and the language, it's a job to get through some of the projects.
Outside of work there aren't many things I do that are "worth the money". Is it worth the money to bake pizza? Not if you compare the cost of a chain pizza vs what I make on average when I'm working.

I do so many things at home that are not "worth my time", but if I could trade doing them for more hours sitting at my desk would I do it? No! I spend enough time working. Some people enjoy cooking, gardening, yard work, etc. There are days that pulling weeds is a nice break from sitting at a desk. I'd never want to work every waking hour at my job so someone can cook, clean and take care of my house for me. Some things I do - are they worth the money? Not a chance. Worth my time? That all depends on how you'd rather spend your time.
Is non fossil fuel energy research too hard to be funded? Gates and Bezos etc have funded just about a billion. Why not 20 billion
> Without further qualification

"The society you live in" and "a basic understanding of how the world works" are always that most important qualifications on any invitation to share your opinion.
> I was shocked to find an entire neighborhood accustomed to helping itself to the plums-- without permission and without any kind of exchange from their own gardens

Several of my neighbours tell us and others when their raspberries and currants are ripe, there's simply too much for them to eat. I wouldn't continue without invitation from a new owner, but why would you not invite others if you have more than enough for yourself?
You are spending so much time and money tearing that poor Miata apart.

What inspired this?
Well, it wouldn't hurt.

Great progress right now:
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t...

The total money spent on cancer is bigger than 20B though.
Ask HN: Is there a sharpe ratio for AI?
Is there something like a sharpe ratio (which essentially figures out how much return was generated vs risk taken compared to a "risk free" benchmark) for AI?

Essentially, the AI's performance under test is the return rate, the risk free rate is some arbitrary benchmark (a human for example), and the risk taken is the "bandwidth" of the algorithm -- bandwidth being the AI's ability to adapt to changing conditions.

An AI that composes excellent poetry, for example, might have a high rate of return (it composes excellent poetry) but a low bandwidth (the English language does not change rapidly) while an AI chatbot might have a low rate of return (it is sometimes incoherent) but a high bandwidth (it's very adaptable to different patterns of speech).

Such a ratio would allow you to compare the performance of different approaches (ML& variants, rule based, etc) in disparate fields.

Does anything like this exist?
I have been using DDG off and on all morning, as recently as 2 minutes ago. It was fine all morning but it was very, very slow. Apparently its heavy and steadily increasing use is causing issues for the site.
My drink of choice is sugar free monsters, so I got the sugar thing in check. Definitely a valid point, though.