skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heh .. I don't want this to turn into an AMA. But yes .. I too have questions. How long have you been away from academia and how do you feel about it? I had success in grad school (papers in top CS conferences). I went the industrial research route which paid well initially. Now, I'm nearly 40 and have no tenure and a gap of a few years in my publication history. I am very tempted to get out of the game but am afraid about it being a 1 way street.
From https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-inductive/ :

> It is now generally held that the core idea of Bayesian logicism is fatally flawed—that syntactic logical structure cannot be the sole determiner of the degree to which premises inductively support conclusions. A crucial facet of the problem faced by Bayesian logicism involves how the logic is supposed to apply to scientific contexts where the conclusion sentence is some hypothesis or theory, and the premises are evidence claims. The difficulty is that in any probabilistic logic that satisfies the usual axioms for probabilities, the inductive support for a hypothesis must depend in part on its prior probability. This prior probability represents how plausible the hypothesis is supposed to be based on considerations other than the observational and experimental evidence (e.g., perhaps due to relevant plausibility arguments). A Bayesian logicist must tell us how to assign values to these pre-evidential prior probabilities of hypotheses, for each of the hypotheses or theories under consideration. Furthermore, this kind of Bayesian logicist must determine these prior probability values in a way that relies only on the syntactic logical structure of these hypotheses, perhaps based on some measure of their syntactic simplicities. There are severe technical problems with getting this idea to work. Moreover, various kinds of examples seem to show that such an approach must assign intuitively quite unreasonable prior probabilities to hypotheses in specific cases (see the footnote cited near the end of section 3.2 for details). Furthermore, for this idea to apply to the evidential support of real scientific theories, scientists would have to formalize theories in a way that makes their relevant syntactic structures apparent, and then evaluate theories solely on that syntactic basis (together with their syntactic relationships to evidence statements). Are we to evaluate alternative theories of gravitation (and alternative quantum theories) this way?
What does Bayes say when we swap A and B?
> but given we have obscenely powerful computers it's probably useless to us as a practical matter.

Babylonian arithmetic methods have been used to give us our obscenely powerful computers.
Unfortunately, some (big co) use it as a buzz word and rarely go back to iterate on the MVP.
Just make it as inexpensive as possible, it feels like a cheap version of watergile.
Many hardware manufacturers simply don't understand the danger of using software willy-nilly. You can tell them all day long about using sane defaults, but they won't listen.

Malfunctioning hardware that physically damages their customers' property, on the other hand, is something the significance of which they will understand immediately. A few lawsuits here and there, a few percents off of their stock price -- these are the language they speak, and we must learn to speak it too if we want to encourage them to do something.
As far as click bait goes, this is exactly like I want to see. It inspires curiosity in a way that doesn't feel predatory. I didn't feel robbed or deceived when it wasn't criminal, and the title was truthful to exactly what the article was.
It was legal when they were doing it! Legal != ethical
If HN wasn't financially viable would people pay $0.10 to post?

Would $0.10 per post decrease participation?

Would $0.10 per post significantly offset the cost of running HN?

Would $0.10 be enough to improve the forums, maybe have it notify you when your comment was replied to?
Maybe there's a better source for this somewhere than 'blogspam copy of a clickbait site'.
Why wait for next gen nuclear?

I will eat my words if in a few days South Texas Nuclear generating station melts down (because its being hit by a category 4 hurricane as I type this).. But right now the technology we _HAVE_ is sufficiently safe.
You cannot solve social problems with a technical approach.
I believe this article may have produced the same algorithm as [1] and [2] but applied to tree diffs [3] instead of string diffs.

In particular, Myers' algorithm [2] is generally considered the best general-purpose string diff today, and I bet he was doing A* search without realizing it. I would be very curious to find out if you could describe his algorithm as an A* search.

A* search brought his algorithm's runtime down from O(N^2) to O(N•diffsize). Tree diffs are often O(N^3) or O(N^2•log(N)), and this A* search seems to have brought that down to O(N•log(N)•diffsize). The A* search seems to reduce the extra O(N or N^2) to O(diffsize)!

I'm excited by the general use of A* to prune the dynamic programming search space. We might be onto a more general understanding of diffing.

[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US7313555

[2] http://www.xmailserver.org/diff2.pdf

[3] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304397505...
Ugh. The result of this may be good, but please don't let this be an excuse to dump your organic waste on trails instead of packing it out.
Our company is based in Oregon, not a typical "startup" in that we are a bootstrapped lifestyle business, but we pay competitive wages, full good medical/dental/vision, and a 10% matched 401k. We have lax vacation time policies, typically meaning around four weeks, plus three months paternity and maternity. People work their forty and enjoy frequent three day weekends. We make software for bicyclists so most of our team ride a lot, and we comp all those expenses and a good amount of their fun bike trips. Not to mention a 2k bike budget when they get hired. All that, and we still have a hell of a time finding good candidates with the right attitude. Blows my mind that I can read people here saying they have to move out of the country to feel respected, and we have a hard time finding people...

Just another anecdotal rant to add to the pile :)
It's a copy paste of

https://www.upworthy.com/a-juice-company-dumped-orange-peels...
At my buddies old house in Saratoga Ca, the soil in the backyard was super dry. What we ended up doing is just composting all the greens out back; watermelon shells, cantaloupe, onions, really just anything non-meat. To agitate the process we just went out with a shovel and stabbed the section out to make the compost smaller. By the time he sold the place the soil was super healthy.
> “We don’t want companies to go out there will-nilly just dumping their waste all over the place, but if it’s scientifically driven and restorationists are involved in addition to companies, this is something I think has really high potential,” Treuer says.
Senior Housing MN
Same issues as those faced in the field of scientific research, really. Pressure to put out something flashy coupled with sensational journalism adding even more fantastical hype over the top.

Question is, what did we used to have that drove research efforts in the more beneficial ways we used to see?
What's wrong with poor performance leading to poverty? There seem to be too many scientists, at least publishing too many papers. Wouldn't it be better if a subset of them quit and did more productive work instead. That would also ease the pressure on publication and fraud for the remaining ones.

I don't believe there are really hero superstars in science. Sure, there's a gradient of ability, but just because you happened to be the first one to discover something important doesn't mean you'll always be the best at future discoveries. There must be a lot that depends on the environment they work in.
Assisted Living Minnesota Three Links
> When I first heard the problem, it sounded pretty easy and I thought I’d be done within a few days, but I discovered a number of catches after starting and it ended up taking 5 weeks

It's really refreshing to hear about this type of real world estimation error that reflects so well the problem in software of making estimates with so many unknowns.
Just launched an iOS app, what should I do now?
Just launched an IOS app onto the appstore, sent it to friends on social media, gained like 10 users and 100+ likes, not doing so well. How should I promote?

Also in terms of tech and dev, what else should I do and watch out for?

Would really appreciate any help and support!

- Note that I'm also not comfortable with a show HN until theres enough on it.
IANAL. However, as an industrial researcher in CS, the standard is this. Once you patent your work, the company is okay with you publishing. There are exceptions. There is a story (no idea if true of not) that the folks who published the dynamo paper almost got fired. Some ideas are so important to the business that they may not be patented and just reserved a trade secret. All of this is negotiable and often done on a case by case basis. Most employers I've had have a standard reviewing process where the researchers submit the paper (to be submitted) and we get an approval that it is okay to publish. There is typically a checkbox that asks if you sought protection for any IP in the paper, etc.
Last I checked bitmessage basically formed a ring of all clients, who forward the traffic. That way it's very difficult to do traffic analysis since you can't tell who received the message.

No block chain, just message forwarding and public key crypto.
BBC the 100 Greatest Comedies of All Time
They're like McDonalds. Not fancy but consistent in getting you there, OK service and no attitude.
I am also stuck on a 16GB phone (an iPhone in this case) and thus I also simply don't have the space for new apps.
When flexibility is advertised in a job position, it usually bends in the employers favor.

Finishing at 11pm? Gotta be flexible to meet the deadline. Leaving before normal time? Be ready to be silently judged
For your enjoyment (there's a couple of other good links in the discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14765868
> Startups are encouraged by the great Reid Hoffman to “launch early enough that you’re embarrassed by your v1.0 release.” But no customer wants to use an unfinished product that the creators are embarrassed by.

The article is a response to famous startup advice, continuing the conversation of just how "minimal" should be an MVP.
Currently on front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15095237
I led the product management and design team.
What is wrong with .NET? For some reason it is not sexy here but c# and certainly f# are great languages and large parts of the stack is open source. Not quite sure why it is seen as something negative especially when something like JS is seen as positive.
To the man: High dose (1+ gram daily) of cannabis oil, orally and anally, will inhibit and possible reverse the cancer growth. Good luck
From the article:

Rios says he became interested in the car washes after hearing from a friend about an accident that occurred years ago when technicians misconfigured one in a way that caused the mechanical arm to strike a minivan and douse the family inside with water. The driver damaged the vehicle and car wash as he accelerated quickly to escape.

It is not explicitly said, but I suspect that the arm smashed a window and that allowed the water inside the van.
Dunno, people getting paid by who valued the content sounds pretty good to me. Sure there's hype/BS in promotional type messages... but don't pay for that one.

I'd certainly put more into my posts if I thought that some modest popularity resulted in a few $100.

Seems like micro-transactions were mostly a non-starter because the credit card companies want high transaction fees. Fortunately these days there are alternatives.
In other words bake not a subset of a cake, but a smaller cake.
One would think that we live in a country that upholds the rule of law, the Hobbesian social contract, and the dignity of basic human rights.

Many things go right in the USA, but our prisons and police forces commit crimes worse than those observed in Yugoslavia, Syria, and Congo.

Many Americans are content to see "criminals" locked away with the key thrown away.

What they don't know is that in the USA, you are one step away from being jailed for literally ANY reason, guilty or not.
Major Internet Outage in Japan Yesterday
"Katas are the same problem solved in different environments."

Are you sure about that? I thought it was more solving the problem, then solving it again more efficiently / differently in the same environment. Like using recursion the second time around, not changing languages.

"Don't code your CSS from scratch, use Bootstrap or similar. Don't create an auth system, use the one that comes with your framework."

Definitely true for productivity, but a lot to be gained in experience by knowing how to roll your own.
GPUs will handle ints just fine, but it's not what they are best at. They are best at fp32, and depending on the GPU the gap is rather substantial. The performance characteristics of integer ops is also kinda weird.
I heard a variation of this once: an MVP for a car is a skateboard, not 4 wheels and an undercarriage.
This mirrors my experiencing gardening in Georgia. We have about half an inch of topsoil there, and below that is pure red clay with close to zero organic matter in it. If you want to have a garden, you add compost. I added a couple thousand pounds of well composted manure, and double tilled it to mix it in down to a couple of feet. The result was that I had loamy soil that grew vegetables like nobody's business.

Put enough compost on a plot and it will turn into a jungle, just like my garden did after I stopped tending it. I was afraid to go in there to pick tomatoes.
A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1902) [pdf]
Ok, I'll bite. So is it better for organic waste to rot in a plastic bag in a landfill? or be left outside where it can rot down & degrade. Isn't it better to pitch your apple cores, food & bio-waste etc. into the woods? Surely the only things to pack out would be non-biodegradeable stuff; packaging etc.

Every time I run trails, I see little blue or black poop bags left all over by dog owners (they never ever come back to pick them up!). Somehow I feel like it would be better if they just let their dogs crap in the woods as nature intended (not on the trails, but it can be flicked into the brush) so I don't have to look at the poop bags.
Well of course, but I think running C/C++ on the web is a complete nonsensical waste of time. That's not a useful market to target and critically it completely ignores the needs and problems of the current market.
While looking for a job, don't forget to perform due diligence on the company's culture. I once accepted a job offer hastily, just to get into the company and discover the culture was 'filthy' (poor working conditions, sexual harassment, e.t.c). Glassdoor[0] does a good job at providing reviews, though I haven't seen a tool that helps you 'vet' a company's culture specifically. I think it's important to factor in company culture as you look for a team to join. Good luck with the job search!

[0]https://www.glassdoor.com/
I wonder what would happen if a bunch of candy bars were dumped?
If "rational trigonometry" was something completely weird and totally out of left field, then yeah, then that would be a little unbelievable.

But really, if you think about it, measuring angles by ratios of sides of right triangles is not weird if your primary interest in measuring angles is for practical applications rather than abstract theory.

Accurate rulers are easier to make than accurate protractors, and are easier to work with on the construction site. So it would not at all be surprising if some ancient peoples worked with sides instead of angles.

Since Wildberger advocates that kind of approach to trigonometry, it makes sense that he'd recognize when someone else might be using such a system.
Xerox PARC and Bell Labs?
Agreed entirely. If the customer isn't happy then either you set your bar for "minimum" too low, or you've proven that your product isn't viable.

It's not that customers don't like MVPs, it's that customers don't like shitty unfinished things.
more generally, densely planted trees can use a wide variety of biomass sources for compost: https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-real...
Disney Pandora Charms UK, Pandora Disney Charms Collection
Good, but a better idea would be to flag sites that auto play video or audio and penalize them in search.

Seriously, this is a frigging plague. I can't understand how designers rationalize the idea of blasting someone with a video or sound without their explicit approval. At the very least it is incredibly annoying. At worst it can be jarring and even inappropriate depending on time, place and context of the person doing the browser. And then there's the consumption of cellular data if you happen to be on a mobile device.

I would like search results to include a nice bright red warning saying "WARNING: Site auto-plays video or audio". Even better, drop them down to the tenth page in search results until they stop being assholes.

That will fix the problem. I don't want to have to go around a bunch of tabs and mute them.
I don't know what that site is. The Wikipedia entry the image is from is more interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_G._Funkhouser#A_note_on...
I think the right way to do it would be to make it modular and profitable, so that the rent/agriculture/solar/wind from the first floor could pay for the construction of the second floor, etc. Either that or set up a kind of franchise system where new settlers could purchase a customized home pod that gets bolted on to the existing structure, consuming some utilities but providing a mounting point for the next one.
So as an example of where this is a problem - All NZ government websites are hosted underneath the govt.nz namespace, e.g. dia.govt.nz, treasury.govt.nz, ssc.govt.nz and so on.

But all of them are evaluated as one, govt.nz. But they are all quite separately hosted and operated and use differing technologies.

Looks like this works fine for other similar situations e.g. .co.uk.

This is a really cool service, thanks for making it available for use!
Instagram is listening to you: a scary experiment
the problem isn't actually Ethereum, but the tools they provide for writing smart contracts. the exploits are in contracts, not EVM.

that doesn't actually make it better, but it does highlight the problem of using code as an absolute arbiter b/c it can be hard to tell if it describes your intent accurately or not.
> I have no real way to tie this back to programming ...

One facet of the tie-in is the age-old question of what to optimize for: Programmer time? Execution speed? Code compactness?
Code maintainability? Cf. The Story of Mel [0].

[0] http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
The rate of scientific progress is roughly proportional to the number of working scientists. People might have other value judgements, but I don't think science is progressing nearly fast enough.

We've been trying hard to cure cancer for decades, with significant progress but we haven't cut the death rate even in half yet. We can't get people to Mars. Phones still need batteries charged every day or two. Most cars still burn fossil fuels. We don't have clean, safe, nuclear power. We don't understand nearly everything about how the brain works, and millions of people suffer from poorly controlled mental illnesses. We don't have household robots to cook and clean. It takes a whole day to get to the other side of the world.

These are all bottlenecked by science. 2x more scientists would result in substantial improvements in daily life within a decade. 10x would be better.
I sit corrected :)
Hey Anu & team, congratulations. You're addressing a definite need-gap.

Query:

How do you ensure safety. Do you make your suppliers follow certain safety protocols designed and tested by NextDrop, if so would you be making that public?

Boiled water -
We & travellers to our country are constantly advised by experts to drink only boiled water; even when if it's 'purified' by the supplier to remove contaminatents, sub-par packaging results in dangerous contamination. Assuming you have customised dispenser to record data, how to you plan on addressing this need.
No, it isn't. Games are already served by consoles first (which obviously won't run webasm), and steam second. There's no market there, and it's already one-click to launch steam to the game in question. Where it will then download in a medium suitable to handling the downloading & updating of a game's assets instead (which, even for a demo, is in the gigabyte range - you aren't lazy loading this).

As for 3D applications what 3D applications? Do you really think Maya is going to be ported to a browser? Why would they bother? Why would they restrict themselves like that?

The web has no advantages in this space, and the needs of those markets is already being served with superior technology and infrastructure.
Yeah most of their planes are disgusting and I can't stand their branding. It's such a shame that they acquired Virgin America. I loved that airline. I wish we lived in a world where that acquisition had been the other way around.
Keep in mind that a C-section is done only when normal labor isn't enough; it's an alternative to the use of forceps (which is very difficult to teach and can be catastrophic) and not to normal vaginal delivery.
More word of mouth, a video demo, some reddit, a blog where you offer unpaid consulting

good luck!!
> Though it has not actually been built, it is the tallest design to have been completely specced out.

specced? feels weird to see that word in what should be an authoritative source. Always makes me a bit cautious about Wikipedia when I see that choice of wording...
> What is wrong with .NET?

Nothing at all. I've done quite a bit of it (ColdFusion too!). Nothing wrong with health care or energy industries either. I do think there's a lot of the HN crowd that only have eyes for the hip languages or fun startups though, whether it makes sense or not.
No, because a webforum is not exactly difficult to replicate. The users would all move to whatever free alternative popped up.
Ok, we'll change the URL to that god help us from http://www.the-daily-llama.com/2017/08/23/a-juice-company-du....

For revenge, and to follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, we've changed the title to the most boringly representative phrase from the article.
Not only that but you don’t want to have to redo analysis and verification on blocks that have been already mapped, placed and routed. Especially as one does minor bug fixes towards the end of a design. It’s like refusing to use libraries.
All banks have lots of people interacting with ACH.
I have fond memories of freeware and postcardware from a few decades back. In contrast, I'm rarely impressed with either free or paid apps.

The most solid apps I use just promote or expand another primary product. They're made as an adjunct by a company with a different revenue stream.

I don't know if it's walled gardens or the ease of payment that drives the shift. I'm glad people can get paid for good work, but I worry we lost something.

On the other hand, maybe it's just nostalgia taking. I wish I could find all the old astronomy simulators and games I found on BBSs, see if any of them actually hold up. Maybe software overall has gotten so much better I just raised my standards.
BananaCoin
ok, Throwaway, I'll bite. My username at usual suspects.
True, but many slow uCs support system clock == SPI clock. Probably not as relevant these days with 99% of stuff happening on 32-bit devices with clocks so fast you would need RF experience to route SPI at system clock.
The way ACH works probably has had a non-trivial positive impact on US commerce.