skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do you use to manage your music library? I don't just need a backup option, I need apps that can manage my music/contacts/calendar databases.
Intuitively you'd expect deep learning to improve on Stockfish's evaluation of positions, but perhaps not at the same level of throughput. I'm also intrigued as to whether a purely self-taught AI system can compare in the endgame to an engine with access to a 7-piece endgame tablebase, whose evaluation of those positions is obviously _perfect_.
Yeah, Go being stable earlier, plus being so simple is great for its adoption. That said, Rust and Go have some overlap, but also areas where each is clearly the better choice. There's no reason this needs to be a zero-sum thing!
I when with Pocketcasts. For one thing, they haven’t explicitly said they don’t want my money, like Marco Arment has said. For another thing, i like the interface better.
> The curious thing about Zero is that usually with Gradient Descent you run a huge risk of running into a local maximum and then stop evolving because every evolution makes you not better than the current step.

Deep networks have many parameters and represent extremely high-dimensional cost functions. Some basic heuristics suggest that sufficiently random high-dimensional functions have relatively few local extrema, but lots of saddle points. (Look at the signs of the eigenvalues of the Hessian matrix and apply a coin flipping argument. This suggests that local extrema become exponentially rarer as the dimension increases.)

Moreover, stochastic gradient descent is actually pretty good at escaping saddle points.
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

I don't agree with everything in it, but it is one of those books that really makes you rethink your life when read at the right time.
Don't forget Peterson's claim that only men have high enough motivation to be successful in competitive industries. His view is problematic because some VCs grill female founders not on their products but on their motivation level and how they will take care of their kids. Most power couples I know hire nannies. It's common enough where people shouldn't ask.

Anyway, I concede people can be good in one way or another while also being a total shitstain. See Spacey, etc. But Peterson has always been too angry for me. He's like Colbert with no satire.
Oddly enough, I lived in Chicago most of my life and moved up the Bay Area. I'd be hard pressed to ever move back despite the network of family and friends there.

The weather is beyond awful. The crime rate is through the roof. Rents and house prices have gone through the roof, while comp has not. The city is broke and horribly corrupt.

Don't get me wrong... There's a lot of amazing things about Chicago and it will always have a place in my heart. And the food is indeed good (if leaning towards the super unhealthy and indulgent side). But I'd be hard-pressed to ever move back from my overpriced starter home in the Bay.
I don't know if it's one of my favorite books, but Daemon is really fun.

Unlike a lot of scifi it doesn't shy away from getting deep into technical details. But unlike most writers he doesn't get tech concepts wrong or use jagon in awkward, non-standard ways. It's obvious that computer tech is is native to him.
> between January 2015 and August this year, 146m users may have seen Russian misinformation

As if the fact that Russia may have funded it matters at all.
Show HN: NameQL – Find a name in milliseconds
I looked at the OCW stuff when I took calculus at a community college. They cover the same material but a lot of the homework and exams are made of word problems which makes it (arguably unnecessarily) very hard. After that I only used OCW for lectures and book suggestions and never for worksheets/exam/practice problems because if I want to study calculus then I'm going to focus on that.

You can take it either way. It's hard, but not in a way that makes you better at the subject.
Hi hackers! I built NameQL to help me find names for my new products, and I hope you'll find it helpful too.

It considers 100k+ names in milliseconds and shows you the best for which [name].com is available. Sure, tools like this exist, but I don't know of any that come close in terms of speed.

I used an n-gram predictive model, trained on an English word corpus to generate the suggestions. For ridiculous performance, I used a Bloom filter backed by Redis, together with some sneaky and caching and prefetching.

My next plans are to enhance this by searching the app stores for similarly named apps, and also checking for relevant trademarks, since I find myself doing that a lot manually. And I would like to add more advance name generation controls, like choosing prefix words matching parts of speech and using n-gram word models to generate phrase suggestions.

Thanks for checking it out!
> Cant‘t take such stories serious, as in some way they discredit real Indian engineers who build stuff

the western media loves publishing stories like this about india, china, russia, etc.

their motives are highly suspect, to say the least.
Where Luxury meets Personalization
I liked Name of the Wind because it's a perfect counterpoint to Lord of The Rings, in a way.

LOTR reads like a classical history book, sometimes literally. Everything is true, everything is tied together. The narrator disappears for omniscience.

Name of the Wind is an obvious post-modern slant with an unreliable narrator. The story Kvothe himself tells obviously makes him seem like a superhero and Rothfuss manages to (whether intentional or not) tell a story about a story that doesn't all add up. I can't say it's my favorite book. But, reading it against LOTR was fascinating.
Neuromancer.

Such a beautiful execution of a great story set in a captivating world, packing a pageful of storyline, images and innuendos into every line of text. It feels like Gibson was on a strict word diet, but the result is a one of a kind masterpiece of story telling.
The problem with that is the ease with which anyone can compare their input to the 'key'; externally.

You could very quickly rule out 95% of the field with little effort, and people already do things like say "you look so much like X": we have a short list of collisions already.
"So one of them becomes even more unprofitable"

How do you know this exactly? Maybe the union would make it even more profitable, because it forces the employer to finally treat the employees fairly, and that boosts morale, improving their performance, which increases the quality of their work, and thereby increases profits.

"the other could potentially be unprofitable"

Anything "could potentially become unprofitable". This is sheer speculation. What's not speculation is that it was profitable until it was shut down.

"Either way, the total net increase in cost across both can easily make the entire venture no longer worth it."

How do you know there's any increase in costs at all? And if there were increases in costs, how do you know they're not offset by improved performance, morale, or reputation?
how can you keep everyone safe if you can't see where they are, what they are doing or what is inside their head?
> you can never hold your head straight, meaning your view of the world is constantly from a 45 angle.

This is completely irrelevant. Even adult brain can adjust to seeing the world upside down pretty quickly. With 45 deg angle they could have better depth perception of horizontal objects (not to mention seeing out of 3 or 4 eyes).

> The world is not designed with you in mind

That's the real problem although people without legs, arms or sight have worse and they manage.

> not able to sit comfortably on an airplane

Nobody can do THAT. Also epilepsy and diabetes probably is more inconvenient.

> Try putting food in your mouth from an angle or even having a drink.

I think you severly underestimate brain adaptability. One of them can use 3 legs and you wory about eating and drinking at an angle like nobody is muching and drinking through a straw lying on the side on the couch in front of the TV.

>What about just sitting in a chair

I think in public most chairs are in rows and at home you can put two side by side or sit on a couch.

> And how will you have relationships with other people?

I think that's the real problem and the diabetes and epilepsy and possibly increased chance of some circluatory problems in their brains.
Is this a repost? (No, it's not):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15628132

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15628471

It's funny how media outlets are scrambling to state what was obvious at the very least a couple years ago but it's also kind of scary. It's great people are waking up to this, but worried about some kind of overreach based on emotion which limits not just the big players but also further innovation.

Is that a sign of incompetent media? Why do media outlets wait to talk about an issue until everyone else is, versus doing some kind of investigative research and informing their readers ahead of time? They seem way behind the curve.
nope. i think you're confusing "free as in libre software" with "free as in beer" software.
Intro to Ham radio for emergency preparedness
Seconded. I'd add Wittgenstein and Quine to the list.

Two Dogmas would be a good place to end up.
Certain pockets will get better, which is natural over time in the tech community.

But then as some things get routine, new things pop up or focus changes into fancy UX, etc etc.

So the net effect might be a wash in terms of hours / investment, even though things that were hard 10 years ago no longer are.
I think it does. This area where webpack is trying to shine is just over-complex, so the tool can't be simple, that's it.

And most importantly as for me, developers who works full-time on such projects can sustain the higher quality and improve it over time and if you chose it for now it may been relevant year later or 2-3... I hope at least.
> They don't put a GPS receiver in every server, just a redundant cluster of them in each data center.

Ok that’s what I figured. The way the media reported on this the use of GPS as a time source was the special big deal. And I was trying to work out why because there was nothing novel in putting GPS time sources in data centers. (We did that at my first job not quite 2 decades ago...)
> as there are far more out there than these 2.

GP listed them as examples, that does not mean that they are the only two companies that did so. So this becomes a paradox of the heap. At which point does "a few individual companies" turn into "the internet"? Since the internet is a decentralized system there is no clear defined boundary and any of the big, private infrastructure providers finding novel reason (within their own ecosystem) to not provide a service is concerning.

What if google refused to resolve some domains via their 8.8.8.8 resolver? Clearly this is trivial to circumvent, at worst you would have to setup your own resolver at home. And yet it could affect millions of unaware users.

What if the CEO of a single Tier 1 peering provider suddenly found some content so much in conflict with his values that they refuse to route the whole IP block?

Yes, they are private entities, but the internet consists predominantly of private entities providing infrastructure.
I understand that "Faircode" is not trying to protect downstream users from non-free software. That's my point; It's not about principle, it's about extorting money while appearing to be principled.

Copyleft licenses force people to release their modifications as source code, or pay the copyright owner for an exception (if the owner is open to providing the exception)

Non-Copyleft licenses say "do whatever you want, just give us credit."

"Faircode" says "Even if you release your source code, if you make enough money, you still have to pay us."
Dotted and dotless i is a different issue, related to capitalization. Those are still Latin letters. Of course to support most European languages you have to be able to use ASCII and non-ASCII Latin letters together. That's not unique to Turkish.

Think of the Spanish word "cañon", for example. It's not four English letters and one Spanish letter, it's just five Latin letters (four of which are in ASCII).
Check article about human factor in virtual reality data visualization
Best and Easy Paper Airplane – How to Make a Origami Super Plane
It’s shocking how this made it in. I ran the iOS 11 developer betas and this never happened. Seemed like a GM issue, which is even stranger.
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis is the only book I've ever read that actually made me laugh out loud. I'm told Catch 22 is like that, but I haven't read it.
To be fair, I haven't been doing Web dev for 10 years, but I definitely agree that frontend development is incredibly time-consuming.

Especially if you're trying to build something alone, I find it really impractical.

IMO, not every Web application needs to be an SPA. Depending on the scale of your app, it might benefit you greatly (like if you're Facebook or Google, etc.), but often times you can get away just fine with server-side templating engines or otherwise.
'Q' by Luther Blissett. A fictional romp through the Reformation written from the perspective of a protagonist who is on the losing side of every struggle. Low farce, high politics, a bit of sex, lots of death, and a fabulous take on how Western Christianity came to be how it is today.

Written by a collective of Italian anarchists, bizarrely, and named after a former AC Milan and England footballer. You couldn't make it up. Fabulous.
I love just about every one of Robert A. Heinlein's juvenile science fiction novels [1] and still love them as an adult. When I was a teenager, Time for the Stars [2] was probably my favorite, but as an adult, I've come to appreciate Citizen of the Galaxy [3] more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinlein_juveniles

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_the_Stars

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_of_the_Galaxy
Have you considered the possibility that Hitler may be lying or deluded?

The Nazis had their own paramilitaries to start mob violence, and in Britain the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street is credited with preventing the rise of Fascism in the UK. Effectively it's where the "antifa" movement comes from.
> They got rid of autoplay next episodes in podcasts, and make it take three taps to play next episode. That moron swerving during your commute Monday? That’d be one of millions of people trying to advance to the next episode.

Seriously, why did they think this was a good idea??

> They also eliminated “mark as [un]played” in podcasts.

I totally forgot about that too.

What a terrible update Podcasts was.
In my lab there is a masters student working on monitoring deforestation for palm fields in Indonesia using Google Earth Engine, which is similar to Earth on AWS. There is a whole scientific field devoted to analysing this kind of data: remote sensing. It's underrated in the hacker community honestly.
This is everywhere, not just here. My wife is Chinese and she tells me in China, ppl don’t see the need for grad school unless you go abroad. They rather work or make their own business if they stay in China. The reason they go abroad is to try to find a job in the foreign country, have a degree in USA and go back to find a job easier. All the stupid programs usa universities are making up just to get more students is useless for real life. I hope universities becomes useless in a decade or so and we find a better way to get knowledge.
Thanks but I'll take a pass on getting my education from an anti-education religious ideologue.
For the love of Earth, stop traveling
Isn't it true that in the US a homemade airplane is relatively easily registered without much hassle? Just remember reading about airplane kits and whatnot.

I don't understand the aviation minister's concern that "he'll crash". Is it fear of embarrassing the country or actual concern for protecting the guy's life? Or would the registration imply endorsement of safety and put others' lives at risk?

One of the biggest controls on recreational flying in the US for folks I know is the difficulty in getting life insurance coverage. It's a rather effective market restraint: if you're wealthy enough to afford the hobby, you're also likely keen on providing for your family.
Great it worked out for you, but if it wasn't such a pain to upgrade (I know this from personal experience), wouldn't there be lesser FUD?
I would like to hear what your favorite book is.
* Harry Potter!

* A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy: Taught me much about myself and reinforced a healthy pattern of practicing will power.

* The End of Your World: After discovering spirituality and meditation I had lingering questions. This is a frank book on the trappings of the spiritual journey. The break-down of abiding vs. un-abiding enlightenment helped me navigate through fascinating times.
I'd like to see the National Snow and Ice Data Center's data (soil moisture, sea ice cover/concentration, snow cover [looks like MODIS is already available], permafrost, glacier outlines) on AWS.

I know there are people there that want to see it happen, but it's a matter of cost. What incentives/programs does Earth on AWS offer to assist stewards of public data to make it available on AWS?

Additionally, I think some of this data is normally behind URS/Earthdata Login, what did the politics of making the data available on AWS without URS look like?
Heilbroner. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers.
> I would thank the obstetrician

What? Why? Are you nuts? He should’ve killed the little things and asked the woman to adopt (in case it happens again).

Life is shit enough as an atonomically correct human being.
I gave it a few minutes and got nothing.

Maybe try for something even simpler than MNIST, so we can get the great immediate feedback effect of http://playground.tensorflow.org, which I consider the important aspect for learnability?
Tobias Koppers isn't making a "second salary". He was working on Webpack in his spare time, and can now work on it full-time thanks to the funding that's come in.
Great reply.

Your question demands an answer, for real. As does mine.
Why would the source of misinformation not matter? Don't understand why people are so willing to ignore the Russia thing like it didn't happen. If you want to live in a democracy, sources of information matter.
On the surface this looks a little bit like a Land Value Tax, which tends to get broadly praised by economists as efficient and fair. Enforcement and structure appears to be uneven, but it doesn't sound much different from property taxes here in the US.
Well, we do things now that we didn’t used to do, like write tests :) More is expected in the way of features, not in terms of the number of features but how they work. Imagine clicking a tweet from your timeline, then pressing Back, and being taken to the top of your timeline. It wouldn’t be acceptable. But some thought and care has to be put into making that happen. Just one example but basically there are more concerns than there used to be.
Indeed, so many things in that book point to the future I would like to see. I loved eSpace, and the Shamanistic interface, and the cooperation.
I feel like if all work was suddenly remote, city residency would drop at least 50% in a week. I hope remote eventually becomes the norm. There are probably a lot more like me out there who even in their 20s only work in a metro area solely out of necessity. I have a hard time imagining that all these people I see on HN pining for city living and making suburbs out to be worse than prison are more than a vocal minority.
I'm wondering where's the equivalent for California. Sacramento is too significant and big a city to be comparable. I'm thinking Bakersfield and Elk Grove.

http://kedc.com/kern-county-fast-becoming-a-mecca-for-millen...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/4-cities-where-millennials...
You’ll find when you get into industry that a big chunk of the theoretical side is discarded and most of the job runs on intuition and knowing the gotchas and gluing bits of data sheets together then writing software. That’s what the book covers.

Occasionally you’ll need to dig deep into it and particularly if you do RF stuff but that’s about it.

I was disappointed for about six months when I landed my first position at a defence contractor when I found out their senior analogue design engineer had a circuit crib book and most of the designs were sourced or bodged from that and then adjusted on a breadboard. I was simply amazed at how informal it was. The stuff worked, was in budget and performed well. Surprisingly mathematical and theoretical knowledge was rarely discussed.

The signal processing and software guys did all the legwork really.

Me, I ended up writing engineer ERP systems to replace paper and then jumped into the software market.

Now I play around with things and I’ve built a lot of stuff without even firing up a calculator or thinking about the theoretical side of things. Everything has a computer in the middle with a little bit of analogue stuff around the edge which you can usually just pick out of the book.

Edit: to be clear I know Laplace, Nyquist, how to do FFT/DFT, network theorems etc but I just don’t need them most of the time.
I developed a rather simple system called 0 to life. It focuses on achieving goals in the short, medium, and long term. The main idea is that you focus on breaking down goals (like code) in periods of six months. That way, you have enough time to try something and not lose a lot of time. It also allows for you to build on top of past success.

For example, one of my goals was to write a technical book. I did not achieve it because I realized that the goal didn't fit me at that point in life. It wasn't a total loss because I learned a lot from the experience.

Another goal was to release more open source code in a six month period. This is something I did by releasing three different projects. That goal also taught me a lot of valuable info that I can apply in the future.

The beauty of this approach is that you dont have to focus too hard. Having 6 months means you can still enjoy life. It also allows you to pick your goals well (organize them).

Say you want to learn a natural language, learn ML, and go to Japan. Rather than try and do everything as soon as possible, you'd proritize which you want to do first knowing that the others will also get done. You can now organize the goals using whatever metric you want. Which is liberating because there no longer is any pressure related to missing out. If a given goal doesnt workout, all you have to do is wait until the next 6 month period arrives to move forward. This also provides the benefit of using the time between bigger goals to try new things and not feel like you are wasting time.
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy.

Worth reading for the landscape descriptions alone, McCarthy transforms the American west into a hellscape of inhuman violence, savagery, and evil; and yet, it's a beautiful descent into madness.

His character of the Judge is as captivating as he is horrifying. Some choice quotes from him:

> "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."

> "War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god."

> "Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view."

> "The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos."

> "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage."
Default parameters on MNIST should give good results in 5 minutes give or take - depending on your hardware. Can you show what you got?
Gaming on Linux: All You Need to Know