skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If Carl's Jr. puts a glorified soda machine as my fast food interface...

Idiocracy has it right again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW-4LU79qbU

I think lots of automation will exist and already does in our economy in manufacturing, technology and many areas. However some automation isn't as desired by the consumer directly and ends up making more work like this salad bot.

First off, unless it is self cleaning it seems like it will take at least one attendant to refill and clean it.

Secondly, it looks like a food poisoning haven as lettuce is many times the culprit there.

Next, it looks like it will waste tons of product, which will be left in multiple days and goes back to the food poising or general bad ingredients.

The maintenance, cleaning, inventory/ingredient management and more make this probably not that great of an idea unless it is pumping out salads in a factory, as a vending machine it seems to be automation just to automate. I personally would not want a salad out of a vending machine.

Kiosk ordering is something that automation is probably good for, making the salad though on demand? Probably not.
Ammar Alnnahas
I tend to agree, but this is Hacker News - how does a new player break into the market in this case?
That day came a while back: Brave.
There probably is some selection bias there. Astro/cosmo/taikonauts are, on average, quite a bit more healthy than the general population.
maybe 3d-cameras can help? anyway, this forgery stuff is getting scary...
Enjoyable, maybe.
Bostrom as an authority on AI, no.
Do Mathematical Entities Really Exist?
>A high level, systems programming, relative new language is used to write software that outperforms the default tools.

It does stretch “the alternative” meaning on it and only then outperforms, actually. But it is not a tool alternative, it is alternative to few use cases, which could be improved by contributing to original projects, but instead they do blind fragmentation. Efforts spent meaninglessly and destructively from the unix community pov.

Take a good tool, call it slow, incompatibly rewrite one option optimized to hell, present as an alternative in rust, take rust hype, cv points, attention, hate from those who understand what is done. Take it all, be a man.
Having machines come up with delicious recipes isn't that far off: https://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Cooking-Chef-Watson-Innovat...
I fear such a thing would lead to Starbucksization of food and beverage production. As mentioned in plenty of other comments here, Starbucks baristas mostly just push a button to get a shot of espresso from one of their machines. They optimize for consistency and "good enough" - and indeed the machine pulls the same shot, every time, from beans which are over-roasted for consistency and good enough for mass consumption and a predictable experience across thousands of stores.

But that isn't what makes food and drink interesting. I enjoy going to a place because they pull a particularly great espresso shot and use it to prepare a macchiato in a way that I like according to proportions of milk and espresso that I think taste best... or a bar which has a particularly great wine collection according to my tastes... or a restaurant which has a fun twist on on a french classic which I like more than the original. Of course, each of these establishments could have a custom version of whatever algorithm you're envisioning which picks the perfect wines, pulls the perfect espresso shots, or prepares the perfect meal - but will they? Or will the platform that enables such extreme automation also enable such extreme commodification, like Starbucks vs a boutique coffee shop? I think it would.
Or maybe it is built by a company that is doing large-scale distributed training, and they open sourced it not to cater to every need, but to help others trying to do the same thing they are. Companies are under no obligation to make sure their open source is well suited for others use cases.
Leverage Go’s powerful concurrency construct of channels ported to JavaScript
Does luxottica own Walgreens?
What habits made me a better software engineer?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15416615
Few people are guiding their kids to be salad cooks. But for cooks, this is probably good news. If they can do their jobs more efficiently, there should be more restaurants, and more jobs.
Blockchain and Bitcoin round-up: 6 October 2017
Yes, FDR. But some say that he was forced into that by the Great Depression, and that otherwise there would have been a revolution. In 1932, there had been a huge WWI veterans encampment in DC. They finally got their money in 1936, in FDR's first term.

And yes, Nixon was perhaps forced into it too. But actually, I mentioned that as evidence for the rightward shift since then.
Also the Curry-Howard correspondence.
Zilliqa unveils a new, high transaction rate, scalable Blockchain
Well yeah, but we reach a point where we don't have a job available to say, 30% of the potential workforce. I don't think robot maintenance will be the next retail or warehouse employee.
My cousin convinced his wife that once you open a bottle of Baileys you have to drink it all or the cream will spoil.
My guess is that Satoshi's vision wasn't that Bitcoin would start a frenzy of "blockchain technology" endeavors that feature the movement of capital to promoters and investors, and between speculators.
Show HN: Beautiful spinners for Golang commandline apps
It's not only possible, it's typically less expensive on a per-capita basis than what the US is doing now.

The system isn't perfect here, some people fall through the cracks or live so far away from a doctor that they can't get the care they need, but anyone that's able to see a doctor or visit a hospital will get the same treatment as anyone else who can.

I don't think you realize how much money is lost in the black hole of insurance paperwork and claims processing. People spend way too much time, doctors spend way too much time, and the hospitals spend way too much time. All of that goes away under single-payer, it simply vanishes.
How do you pm someone here?
Send an email yourself I guess.

Perhaps there’s a set of minimally laborious actions on our part, that re-trigger the growth of old habits and mental connections.

But now that I write that I’m worried someone is figuring out a model/way to do the opposite.
That's the frame problem, which is a huge issue for AI. In general it is impossible to solve due to the no free lunch theorem.
Sad :( I bet these people have multiple “full time” jobs.
@nathan_f77: That's an unusually large plans and pricing page:

https://formapi.io/sign_up

I'm not saying that it's bad, but I think it's strongly worth your while A/B testing that idea because it's quite granular.

You may find that with just 3 plans you would leave less money on the table over time.

(Of course you would also have a "call for enterprise options" link.)

Another option is (and I did this with pluggio) is to let, say, 50 people in for a very low special price and then observe exactly how many api calls they make.

Then based of that data work out your usage bands and magic levers.

Also, I note your only magic lever is usage but I bet there are other levers you can use to get people from one plan to another.

Anyway, I hope this is useful feedback!

Great job on the site :)
You could write yourself a wrapper that translates supported flags for you, then falls back to grep for anything weird.
It's bizarre to me that you think that 50/50 is good. I'm on 1gbps up/down and using slower connections at home is not ideal for me.
Oh, great. Juicero but for salads.
Sorry to be pedantic here, surprised by the downvoting though.

> Do the cone-handling machines strike anyone else as over-engineered?

Taken literally, the answer is "yes" other people also get this wrong impression. So it's wrong to answer with "nope" just because you, as one person don't have the bad impression. Again, taken literally, the question isn't "are they over-engineered?" but "does anyone else get the impression I got?"

Consider: "anyone else grossed out by the idea of eating insects?" being answered with "Nope. They're fine, nutritious and delicious with nothing disgusting about it". I suppose the "nope" can mean "not me" but it literally is a claim that nobody else is grossed out.

I only clarify because I hope nobody missed that I wasn't disagreeing with the post I was replying to, I was just being pedantic. I should have marked it. There should be a pedantic-mark just like a sarcasm mark.
Of course all of these robots will cost jobs. I’m reading “The Grapes of Wrath” right now, and it all happened before, except back then it was not robots, but tractors. Lots of people were flung into direst poverty imaginable, some died, some saw their kids die of malnutrition, which, IMO, is worse. It’ll be the exact same shit this time around except a lot more people will be affected, but fewer will die.
Someone's going to have to clean all those robots, top up their various fluids, and patch their firmware until some startup bros in Silicon Valley disrupt that market too.
Every distance is walking distance if you have enough time.

By "transit distance," I mean "a distance that can be covered on public transit in an acceptable amount of time." I'd wager that for most people, this is less than half the distance they currently drive.
For Bear, Queen of Angels and Moving Mars are two that have AIs as major elements. I enjoyed them both.
I believe the patent extension to keep it from going generic was predicated on the 12 hour, slow release, dosage.
Those are great.

My favorite is for Yellowstone National Park: It's like a bigger version of Central Park, only with bears.
Ideas aren't really worth that much. Everybody has ideas. It's the execution, and the risk taking, where the money is.
That human can, if properly trained and motivated, recognize when the coffee being served isn't coming out right. They can interface with customers and resolve complicated human problems, de-escalating when necessary to find a good outcome.

A robot has no way of knowing if the coffee will taste good or contains rat poison. It's just going through the motions. If it serves you a dud drink you can't argue with it, you just got scammed. Post an angry Yelp review if it makes you feel better.
Another monopoly that needs to be broken up...

Can you imagine Comcast owning most of the media production companies, all of college/professional sports broadcast rights, internet access for home/business, AND forcing you to rent all personal computers you can use at home?

This is exactly what's happening with the eyewear industry.
Cool presentation! I'm not sure why the submitter editorialized this title, instead of the straightforward "Java at Alibaba" title from the presentation.
The author does address this. "Some people used to argue that buybacks were a more tax-efficient means of distributing money to shareholders than dividends. But that has not been the case since 2003, when the tax rates on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends were made the same."
>Alibaba Runs Millions of Custom JVMs

>They have basically forked their entire backend stack, starting from the OS and moving upwards.

I doubt this being a cool thing. Sure, they are the second biggest IT employer in the country, and have excess resources for everything, but...

A thing about big dotcoms - architects there try to use off-the-shelf software for everything, even if the software is clearly unsuited for the task and its use will require hacks and massive re-engineering.

Putting efforts to use of off-the-shelf software without modifications and hacks greatly reduces all aspects of infrastructure support burden.

BUT, attempting to use of off-the-shelf software everywhere at all costs, that will of course give you problems. And the bigger your are, the worse this is. Read the article from a month ago how Alibaba got stuck with using MySQL for mission critical tasks, and how much efforts they put to "unhack" it
I think cold turkey is good idea. If you are not able to do that, I have free beta app for Android and iOS that will force phone to use specific DNS server. If you have someone who can control time and sites DNS will respond, it might help keep you on track using tech like opendns or dnsjack on GitHub. I also have anti internet addiction solution, but it's mainly for younger children since adult could easily bypass DNS settings (dnslearning.org). In order to prevent bypassing system, we tell parents to pay attention to timeline activity.
the fork exposition was weak. admittedly fork() was a mistake and constrains alot of implementations in strange ways. i still dont understand how local/global exactly matches the semantics of cow.

transitive permissions are capabilities.

while i'm sympathetic to the lack of market appeal to a capability based system, doesn't it seem like you could implement posix on top of one by compromising it? fd transfer over unix domain is already halfway there.

seems like a better alternative.
How about instead of a robot to serve salads we make a robot that can probe for contamination?

E-coli, listeria, and other nasty bacteria and viruses like hepatitis are no joke, yet most places have zero tools to test for those things.
What if the robot runs out of disinfectant and nobody notices or cares?

Robots are only as clean as the company that owns and inspects them permits them to be.
Here's a list of sites that support 2FA, via hardware tokens and other methods: https://twofactorauth.org
Interaction works both ways (input and output). Tufte's work is generally in just one direction (visualization as output). It isn't very applicable to application as much as it is to presentation (think: how did we figure out what to present in that PowerPoint inthe first place?).
I'm not a comp-sci grad and I worked at Google for a bit after a startup I was at was acquired. I didn't proceed far after that 2 years due to the need to commute and/or relocate but I had a clear path into full time work without much else.
Although I was granted a bit of a pass, I believe anyone can work at Google given they are
1) slightly above average and have learned every base that they run into in reasonable depth
2) motivated enough to try to interview at least a couple times including extensive "refreshing."
Not many people pass the interview the first time so it's a +6 month play. Maybe longer. They look at progress from one interview to the next.
Google is a big organization full of lots of people and not many of them are strictly that far above average. Maybe the Dunning Kruger effect may be shifting what I think of myself and the average developer there a bit but it's not unrealistic for any developer to think they can work there. It just takes interest and effort.
"As noted multiple times in the article, the unethical design we're seeing in popular apps and services today is largely a result of the widespread use of advertising as a revenue model."

The simple question that I never see addressed in any of these discussions of the ad revenue model is whether the websites or the software could earn revenue without using this model.

If not, then what does that say about the inherent value of the websites or software? No one would pay for it? (Who believes that?)

It appears to me that in recent years the value has been in acquiring an "audience" which can be bought or sold as a "product" (or perhaps access to the audience as a "service"). This is the ad revenue model. As such, in an increasing number of cases, the product of web or software development, i.e. software itself, is not sold (but is made available for "free" or a nominal cost). Instead, audiences are sold.

The result is an overabundance of websites and software that (from a commercial perspective) serve no other purpose than to try to construct audiences. Including databases of personal information.

Other goals of website or software development are consequently neglected.

The thought I keep having is that developing websites and software solely to acquire audiences in some way presumes web and software development is "worthless" except for this limited purpose.

Some VC once said "Software is eating the world" and it became a meme. What if the media business is eating the world of software? When software developers are focused only on ad sales or publicity, the software industry begins to resemble the media business. (Has software been subsumed by media?) Ad sales becomes the lifeline. And like the media, software developers will do or say anything to sell ads. Anything.
And it lets you time the crystallization of your gains.

With dividends, your tax bill each year is at the mercy of the board of directors.

With only capital gains... a stock practically functions like a retirement fund: you can defer taxes until low-tax years.
OP's company can do better than "Dare to be different" on their website after being inspired by all this amazing advertising.
Is this comment your less subtle one? Or are you still working on the less subtle criticism? Because I don't see how the analogy of that story fits, who is the seller and who is the target of flattery and deception?

I can't tell if you think the tech sucks, if you think despite all the presentations and demos there somehow is no tech, if you disagree with something about the practicality... what is your actual argument?
It seems there is an uptick in news stories in general about stock buybacks. With the Bush tax holiday, corps bought back $70B in stock out of the $223B that was repatriated. Even a rookie accountant would see the value of holding offshore profits until another tax holiday (now estimated to be $2T). Thus starting a cycle that is the biggest tax shelter in corporate tax history. The odds are pretty good that of the 3 goals of the trump tax plan, only the tax holiday will pass. So we can expect to see around $700B in stock buyback and the rest will pay dividends to keep stock prices from correcting the current %25 over inflated stock price caused by the tax holiday plan.
All the documentation for that API refers to Messenger bots, not end users, and the quick start page discusses attaching your bot to a Facebook Page.

Maybe I'm reading it wrong but this does not seem to be an API for creating alternative chat clients.

A messages API definitely did exist years ago, but I'm pretty sure Facebook phased it out, along with many other APIs for user data. EDIT: here it is, deprecated:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2....
Not all shareholders are USians.

As a Canadian, US dividends get taxed like full-income. Capital gains get taxed just like Canadian capital gains: at one-half the income tax rate.

In one of our tax-free savings vehicles: the tax-free savings account, capital gains would be tax free, but dividends are still stuck with IRS withholding taxes of 15-30% of dividends.
The front page https://pair-code.github.io/facets/ is more useful, because you can load up your own data and try it out.
Some tech companies even exist in the little-known state of Wisconsin!
Either I'm being very dense, or something doesn't quite make sense about these numbers.

The slides say that on the busiest day of the year, they were serving around 175,000 transactions per second (126k of which, or maybe additionally, were payments).

On the next slide it says they have 'millions of JVMs' running an 'insurmountable number' of requests.

Is each JVM really taking 10s+ per transaction? Even assuming those JVMs are split between servers, messaging, caching, database, etc, I don't get why they need millions of them to handle c. 200k transactions per second.

Needless to say, I am not DevOps, so feel free to set me right.
So You Want to Build a Generator
Nova Launcher Hits 50M Downloads: Why Is This App Special?
That's an argument for having a higher-value problem-solving employee around, not an argument for having several lower-value button-pushing employees around.

Fewer, higher value employees has been the trend in many industries for the past few hundred thousand years.
Nice, do you have also uplink with gigabit?

In Poland I ave 300/30 Mbit (they connected fiber to my house recently) for 50 PLN (it is about 19 NZD, or 13 USD) per month. They offer 600/60 in some cities (where there is more competition), but I don't know the price, I think is is more in 80PLN range. And plan to start also 1 gbit plan (probably with 100 Mbit uplink).
I highly recommend Django for the backend. It's stable, feature complete, and mature. Python is good for you. You can start here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/intro/tutorial01/

Alternatively you can use Ruby on Rails (equally good).

You should also learn JavaScript for the fontend, but that's a separate battle. I think you can delay the frontend learning for a bit and get used to the backend (HTTP + scripting language + DB).
Peer-review is deeply flawed and in its current form merely an advertisement form. We should focus on formatting science in a way that accounts for merit based on reproducibility, falsifiability and paying for real-life usage for recipe invented. Problem is not all science work is technological application.
Surging False Positives: The Problem of Finding the Needle in a Haystack
No, you are confusing "inflation" versus "minting more money". While related, they are not the same thing.

Whatever school of economics you subscribe to, 99% of the time somebody says "inflation" or "deflation", they are not referring to the "money supply" of currency in existence. Instead, they are referring to a change in proportion between that money supply versus how much "economic stuff" people want it for.

Bitcoin will continue to follow its past deflationary pattern as long as the supply of Bitcoins does not keep up with the underlying growth of everything else... And it's hard to see a future where "Number of coins mined this year" grows while "Size of human economy" shrinks.
Show HN: Really simple one file PHP long shadow avatar generator
You do get better MPG without catalytic converter in a lot of cases.
MIT-Princeton at the Amazon Robotics Challenge
I agree that if you simply can’t get the advertised speed, that’s misleading (though, at least on cable or DSL systems it can be very hard to tell a priori what speeds a given chstomer’s line will be capable of). But whenever this discussion comes up, people push back on the very idea of oversubscription or best-effort service.
"Idea's are worth a nickel, execution is worth..."
> They have basically forked their entire backend stack, starting from the OS and moving upwards.

Isn't this pretty common at the $XXX billion dollar tech companies like Google, Facebook, etc?
I disagree with the insanely/adjectives. This makes it seem that the current problems are greater than they are, beyond the ken of mortal humans.
I totally just set these three up the other night at the suggestion of React's documentation. It was tough getting everything to line up from their separate documentation. Great work on putting a guide together for all three!
Probably for non-transactional stuff I'm guessing. For every transaction there are probably 100 reads from various sources. Not to mention all the other stuff, from invoicing to reporting.
Aquifers everywhere are being destroyed, they cannot be rebuilt. Permanent dust storm on the horizon.
Hello everyone,

I came across the initials image generator few days back on Show HN, and said to myself; hey I made something similar years ago. How about if I make it work on a free PHP hosting and show it to everyone (I know PHP yukhhhh!!! but that's the most common available hosting and hey code stays simple too!). The goal is to show yet another service to world and share :). Hope you enjoy!
OK, I ... adjusted my comment :D