skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In our academic lives, we have books and articles that we regularly return to. The dog-eared pages of these treasured readings contain lines of text etched with questions or reflections. It's difficult to imagine a similar level of engagement with a digital text.

Is it? I read nearly exclusively on my kindle for exactly the opposite reason. I find it much easier to keep highlights and notes, then quickly return to them. And the note taking technology on the kindle is crude. Imagine if it was an _actually_ good experience? If note taking were easier (typing is painful). If the data were free (to be shared with other services). If it were easy to connect with others taking notes on the same topics, at the same time? If clicking on an image of a map made it interactive. There are so many possibilities, most of them untapped. I miss reading things on paper. But if our technology were to improve to half of its potential, I'm not sure I would.
Yep. My take: humans fail at more than hardware does, and AWS takes a lot of action per region.
No one has tokens, it doesn't exist yet.
Do you write math or long notes, or just a few words? I have not found any stylus / tablet combination that allows me to write as freely as pen / paper, no matter how much I'd like to go digital for portability.
I'll edit my post. I have donated what I could afford to donate at the time ($200). Thanks for the heads up.
Ah, thanks. That's exactly what I was wondering.

It's still interesting though.
Scala Native with Denys Shabalin – Software Engineering Daily Podcast
thanks for this one!
Defense against DDOS attacks
I'd say it's pretty high on everyone's list and we have almost no good places to live in the US, so only top talent and homeless people can live in them.
I'm sure it's naive to jump to sci-fi conclusions just yet, but I admit it's equal parts fascinating and terrifying. The general message of the posts is that human knowledge is cute but not required to find new insights. Define the measure of success and momma AI will find the answer. At this point, the path to AGI is about who first defines its goals right and that seems... doable? Even scarier: We think the holy grail of AI is simulating a human being. The AI of the future might chuckle at that notion.
The catch is that this isn't quite zero human knowledge, since the tree search algorithm is a human discovery, and not one that came easily to humans. It also massively cuts down on the search space for an appropriate policy function.

That means that this setup isn't necessarily general. How applicable is MCTS to games with asymmetric information, a la Starcraft? What about games that can't quite be modeled with an alternating turn-based game tree like bughouse?
Came here to make a plug for `rg` as well. I've put it through it's paces the last few months and it's awesome.
> Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do?

Yep, stop focusing on the movie-style end-of-the-world apocalypse, where it's just you and your guns versus the raiders. Instead of planning what you're going to do when it all turns to crap, do stuff now. In short, fix the world you're in, rather than planning for a world which really isn't going to happen.

Talking to politicians is the first thing you can do - if they don't hear the noise, they're never going to do anything about it, and they're the decision-makers. Change your behaviours as other commentators have stated. Talk to your friends so they at least have heard the issue.

But don't pretend that you're going to go off into the woods and survive like in a movie - if society ever did go that far, then you're fucked anyway - no doctors, no hospitals, no emergency services, no entertainment, no travel, so on and so forth. Few of us are actually comfortable with the idea of living permanently off the land (those survival rations won't last very long).
>When it comes to textbooks, our effort should be focused on books that are unencumbered by copyright and other such malaise. The goal for the future should be open education resources such as open education resources

I have the exact same opinion. I commented right here on HN about the importance of these kinds of free resources. The CS community is leading with this, but I see other fields catching up with this too.

Edit: Found my comment[1](Google is amazingly powerful and scary). Check out the textbook to see what I'm talking about with the 'rich content' argument.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905438
Nice discussion :)
Add Pacman and Pitfall to the list. Humans have played perfect games of both. My understanding is DeepMind performed poorly on those games.
there's a difference between correlation and causation, and if you can't measure/explain a direct cause-effect relationship then for technically oriented people your proposition loses credibility.
Cool! I think I'll give this one a shot :)
Yah, pretty much my experience with consumer reports too. They need more objective analysis, but that is hard too given that all it takes to win a 3 year "long term" study is not to have anything major break.

Having been in this boat myself, a few years ago, I decided to simply start fixing my old appliances. Many of which aren't actually old enough to not be efficient (front loading washer from the late 1990's). Its hard when you move houses, but the older appliances (mostly from the 1990's) in my rental are still chugging along. OTOH, the dishwasher, and microwave that got replaced when I lived in it are now on #3 in under 15 years...

Basically, it seems for a lot of things the "quality" seems to have peaked and then due to penny pinching, offshoring, whatever has declined. Of course my mother might say the same thing about her stove from the 1970's, but the current house has a gas stove with electronic igniters built in the 1990's and its also on #3... It seems electronics aren't really a good way to make something last. They might be better at saving some energy here or there, or providing a cool looking interface, but the old mechanical buttons/igniters/etc are often even better.
Ask HN: Salary Increase from Seattle to Bay Area
Software engineer contemplating a move from Seattle to Mountain View. I'd be coming in at the senior level to a company considered a "unicorn". When I do the math on the cost of living increase and what I currently make, the minimum salary that I need to make is 175K. Is this low, on target, or high for a Senior Engineer in the valley?
Wouldn't that eventually mean you starve a large portion of the population as crop yields shrink dramatically?
I'm hoping in the future it'll be easier (in a secure fashion) to implement self-signed certs for those sorts of things that only have to serve pages on a local network.
Do you think they're better for basic research?

Where would society be without the basic research that was done over the last century?
Actually this is the salary of the H1B (and some other types of work visas) applications, which specifies a minimum salary. They may make more.
Any economist can weigh in on this?

I understand that this would reduce the benefit on the employer on assymetry of information, but wouldn't it be the best to go the exact opposite direction and try to get all salaries to be public?
It says it here: Income inequality in the United States spills over from the job into the last decades of life
Find how much air is in ice cream using a vacuum
Warning: there's virtually nothing about Ken Kesey in there. Also, her broad characterization of misfits as misunderstood creative geniuses is not only unfounded and probably inaccurate, it is repugnant to the entire ideal of the misfit that she herself is trying to cultivate; people that resist being categorized and sorted.
Not sure if this is case in Sweden, but here in the US the reforestation is actually a return to the natural state. Much of the country was logged repeatedly in the last few centuries. Modern sustainable logging and the transition to other energy sources is resulting in the land returning to the endless forest it was before settlers arrived.

This is mostly clearly seen on the east coast because most of the Midwest is still used for farming.

Edit: in Europe this is visible in coppiced forests. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing . Haven't seen one here in the US but I assume they're somewhat common in Europe where they were an early and effective method of sustainable forestry.
> What we've done is essentially say that "research isn't valuable unless the researcher gets federal funds to do so, or is paid for by a private corporation."

This has happened in federal republics: in the past states were more powerful and expected to bear a larger portion of the Public Good-producing apparatus. Then some stuff happens (maybe production is de-localized even if it remains intra-national; maybe states enter races-to-the-bottom in state taxes to attract industries, etc.) and only the federal government is able to deal with problems.

So that's probably orthogonal to research.

The basic problem: research broadly framed is a public good, like a lighthouse. But hey, math research is thoroughly public, theorems are all utterly equivalent to a small number of rules of metamathematics. OTOH drug research can often be access-controlled so it can be made profitable. This is the pure-applied spectrum, and all the innovative solutions are about having private actors pay for stuff at the margins in the applied end. For example: I work with symplectic numerical integrators, maybe Mathworks out of its enlightened self-interest should pay me so that even if the research comes out in papers it will be first on its MATLAB suite of engineering stuff. See?
Fuck off with this bullshit. Cryonics is religion for 'smart' people. Smart enough to be able to afford it, smart enough not to be directly swayed by religion. But human enough to want to live forever, one of the big (historical) money makers for organized religion.

It's the perfect scam, nobody will ever complain.
As far as I understand it, you need tight coupling between the browser and the OS to implement the sort of deep-reaching DRM that Netflix/Hollywood wants for 1080p. That would explain why Edge on Windows and Chrome on ChromeOS can do it.

Personally, I see it as a plus that my browser/OS combo does not support this. There have to be horrid security implications that just wait to be unturned.
>"and I'm a little confused about her tirade on "parameters close to 1" -- not to mention that she just shrugs it off with "I have no idea" rather than following up."

Why do cosmologists prefer numbers close to one?

>"The points she made about choosing parameters are very odd, bordering on incorrect, as she appears to be trying to claim that unless you have a theory to derive initial parameters then the initial parameters are useless. But that's ridiculous, it's like saying (using her analogy) you need to have a theory for the position and speed of a particular arrow in order for Newton's laws to be correct."

I'm not seeing it:

>"The initial conditions are either designed by the experimenter or inferred from observation. Either way, they’re not predictions. They can not be predicted. That would be a logical absurdity. You can’t use a differential equation to predict its own initial conditions. If you want to speak about the probability of initial conditions you need another theory."

She is just saying initial conditions are not predictions of the same equation you plug them into.
Nah, you can't exploit information effectively unless you already have capital.
Yep, I've owned Jeeps (YJ, TJ) and regularly ran with no top/no doors. Rain gets in, pull plugs, rain goes out.

Also mud and deep water. But that's another story. :-)
I wasn't familiar with Scala prior to listening to this episode, so I enjoyed that it provided both a background on the traditional, JVM-based Scala, as well as the new Scala Native project, which I'm more inclined to use.
I’m confused. When you say “donated”, what does that mean I’m this context? I thought ICOs are something you buy into to own the coins.

And as a follow up, why donate to an org that has $200M+?
Interesting.

That's always the way I thought it should be done, with a separation of display and structure.

I used to work with a developer who maintained and actually made a decent chunk of change licensing out a very popular rich text editor developed before ContentEditable was even a twinkle in the browsers eyes. We used it pretty heavily within the company as well.

Knowing first hand the horrible feats of iframe content string manipulation that had to be done to make an RTE work in Netscape and IE5.5, ContentEditable seemed like a DREAM.

Ends up there's still a demo up for it, and it almost entirely still works!

https://kevinroth.com/rte/demo.htm
Is it really? Couldn't company's just conceal the real range by giving an immense range (e.g. $20,000 to $300,000)
+1 for LetsEncrypt. The web agency I work for standardized on this for all new builds and existing clients when their existing cert expires. Zero to HTTPS in less than five minutes.
Its possible the wage increases vastly outweight the insurace you would have to purchase to shield yourself from those consequences. If this information raises your wage 10%, its worth all the rest combined.
Isn't that you need to provide 3 recent paystubs prior to your joining?
The author doesn't seem aware that "The Uncanny Valley" refers to the inability to make simulated humans appear natural, not making CGI in general look natural. Very annoying seeing someone use a term with a very specific meaning and not understanding it
What kind of thinkpad? :)
Legacy media are fighting for their lives and are determined to destroy the ad networks which fund their direct competitors. See also the faux outrage of youtube ads.

Expect more stories about ads on facebook and amazon missteps.
I had been following Tezos closely since November and was really excited about the ICO. But it became incredibly apparent that the Breitmans were dishonest.

Firstly, the compensation structure was ludicrous. Many people were upset about an uncapped ICO -- I thought this was fine, until it became apparent that they would make hundreds of millions of dollars IMMEDIATELY. They have absolutely no incentive to continue the product or work another day in their lives. A huge portion of their new found wealth doesn't have a vesting period or depend on any tangible benchmarks.

Secondly, the background of Tezos is completely revised and modified according to their whims. They claim they had a large team working on the project for 4-5 years full-time. Even a cursory glance exposes that one person worked on Tezos while working full time for a major bank and that the team grew insignificantly 6-12 months before ICO. They even changed their LinkedIn profiles to revert this history.

Lastly, both Arthur and his wife are completely inept socially, or knew they would get rich enough to not give a fuck. I'm not one to judge a person, but its certainly not ideal as a manager and figure-head of a billion dollar project. I didn't even think it mattered until I heard they were incredibly rude to just about everyone in their Slack channel asking the most innocuous questions. I thought it must have been one bad experience. I joined the channel and the very first few words I spoke were met by flaming from Arthur himself. Not a couple hours later, he's raging on another person in the chat room at a time when there might be 100 messages/week. Every interaction he had over the next week oscillated between flaming and get rich memes. Later they would delete channel history and eventually shut them down completely under the guise of "preventing fishing attempts", though I never saw a suspicious link anywhere. Arthur stepped down as President because of these issues, but his wife did not fare much better (although I never interacted with her directly).

The ICO seemed worse than burning money. It would be like giving money to organized crime or the opposition party.

IMO they have no intention of delivering anything, except maybe to save face. If the past is any indication, they don't give a shit about saving face either.
Oh, we take deaths seriously. We take serious injuries seriously. We will laugh when you crush your boat, trailer, and truck because you can't follow directions.

Really, backing up a trailer is very easy if you just follow the directions. Basically, aim the truck. Put both hands on the steering wheel, at ten and two. Go backwards slowly. Look in your mirrors. If the boat is bigger in one mirror, turn that direction. Tada!

You've obviously never seen many tourists in the wild, or were one.

We take good care of them. We want them to come back. But, we live in an area where you will die a horrible and gruesome death if you don't follow directions. Yet, many fail to follow directions.

Most of their risk is pretty harmless. Our biggest rescue this year was 28 campers who somehow got completely lost on a nature hike. We had two snowmobiles in the lake, a car in the lake, a kid who drowned under the ice, and a few ATV accidents. Then there are all the smaller mishaps which require a 45 minute drive to an ER.

This might help... I live 1h 15m from a fast food joint - if the roads are clear. You will die here - really. They do it all the time. They do it because they don't follow directions.

Now, if you read my reply again, you'll note that they aren't the majority. The majority still screw up traffic, scare the animals, feed the bears, and generally get drunk and smash into stuff. Not too long ago, a nice lady tried to pet a bull moose in rutting season. She spent a while in the hospital but she lived.

When I risk my life to come save you from a situation you stupidly put yourself into, and then I laugh at you, you can be pissed or grateful. That is up to you. I find they are usually embarrassed and grateful.

By the way, is this response you're giving what the trendy kids are calling 'virtue signaling?' If it helps, you're gonna change my mind exactly zero. I'm not even remotely concerned that it is unethical. If you want to avoid it, don't make us have to clean up after you. You're full of nasty bits that are hard to clean off.
> Only if I change can I expect or hope anyone else will

This makes no logical sense. Only if I fly to the moon can I ever expect anyone else too? Some things require collective action at the government level.
FYI, if you're already shortening the so-called "bangs", you could use "!h" for Haskell. :)

Worth pointing out: submitting bang ideas is very, very trivial, but the whole process may last months. Last time I've read about someone complaining about a long bang, I've submitted "!gw" as a shorter version of searching Gentoo's Wiki and it became a thing a couple of days ago. This is maybe fifth or sixth bang that I've submitted to them via https://duckduckgo.com/newbang.
True. The article does mention one thing that concerns me more: the lack of standards in the formulations of traditional medicines: [M]any AA-containing herbs may be hidden in traditional formulations, mislabeled, or not clearly labeled. Studies done on products found to contain AAs show that their levels are extremely variable and can sometimes be very high.
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/05/business/the-quiet-allure-...

That did in fact happen and was being done by economists. This was about 35 years ago though, so I have no idea if the effect is still in place
I write tons about it on my blog:

http://joshuaspodek.com/?s=farm

http://joshuaspodek.com/?s=fly

http://joshuaspodek.com/?s=packaging

To answer your questions: I buy dry legumes, nuts, seeds, and grains in bulk with containers I bring to the store.

Most fruit and vegetables I get from a CSA, which means picking it up weekly from a drop-off point a few blocks away. I get a lot from the local farmers markets, where I also drop off my compost.

Yes, I eat seasonally and locally, not that I decided to. It just worked out that way.

I didn't buy anything to start the change, but buying a pressure cooker enabled cooking lentils and beans in five or ten minutes, which facilitated things a lot. I don't buy a lot, but the pressure cooker is one of the best purchases I've made.

I didn't plan to get into food and cooking. It's just that with every change I made, my food got more delicious, more convenient, cheaper, and created more community.

The results, in my friends' words: http://joshuaspodek.com/food-world-reviews
There's nothing inherently regressive about a universal income. Taxing everybody the same percentage is considered regressive because of the diminishing marginal value of each dollar. Rich people are taxed a lower percentage when measured by utility. By the same argument, giving everybody the same basic income is progressive.
> On a related idea, 10-15 years ago, the news media was full of stories reporting on how doctors were underprescribing pain medicines.

I remember around the same time, there were tons of stories about how malpractice lawsuits were out of control and Americans were all suing anything that moved, which lead to a lot of states passing bills to cap malpractice awards. When I got older I read Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent". Powerful people are working hard to push narratives that benefit them, and it's important that we be skeptical whenever we don't know where the narrative is coming from.
> it's hard to argue that performance is not an advantage of Go/Java

And I never even remotely argued such a thing so I'm confused as to why you are saying this in reply to me.
Cosmology was the only physics class I ever dropped. Very interesting, but I got the impression that it is very disorganized as a field and (I felt) not worth the time given how little I was learning after spending all my time trying to put together piecemeal conjectures into a coherent understanding. Its bounds for acceptable error levels were also much wider than other fields in physics, which made it hard to ground your understanding in something precise.
That sounds more like glamping than camping. I go camping and backpacking to get away from technology. I can get a far better view of the stars by sleeping in the open in the desert in summer.
It generally asked your household income. This means many 18 year olds can report 6 or even 7 figure household incomes.
One of the more interesting things the success of "starting with zero" suggests is that the idea that some mystical "human consciousness" is the end goal for AI might be laughable in the long term. AI might just casually bypass human consciousness, say "oh, hi!" and wave us goodbye a day later. Also, a factor of 7 billion "happens" in computer science.

This is getting rather creepy to think of, even if it's still science fiction. At this point, I could see a computer that out-thinks humanity within decades. What would it think? What would we even do with its findings? Would we understand it? Would it understand itself? Would it know how to manipulate us?
Its easy to make an argument that salary is not private. The employer knows it and the state knows it.

Trying to gauge the value of this privacy to you, what % of your wage would you be willing to pay for keep it private, or get to make it public?
So yes you can do that now, but is this any different than saying you are going to be a bully just because you can?
also obligatory :) http://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174
I like 'Code Complete'
More importantly, an university can be utterly destroyed as a research institution and still place well in the eyes of undergraduates -- it can still have good teachers that teach the material well and have good job placement stats, not to mention have a great dating scene, etc.
The Digital-Humanities Bust
There's very real client-side protection: Do not have sleazy, add-supported apps installed, and - for what it's worth - keep your GPS and location services turned off except when explicitly needed.
Linear algebraic structure of word meanings (2016)