skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> just use the commit hash

Does the author honestly fail to realize that commit hashes are incomprehensible to most humans and look like noise, it takes extraordinary mental effort to compare them? While difference between 1.2.3 and 1.4.5 is instantly apparent to any human?

> Pinning is absolutely crucial when building software from some sources out of your control

Amen. I am surprised how the author does not recognize it.

In fact, the only idea that does not come as outright false immediately after reading is "if you change behavior, rename". But thinking about it for a bit, it is wrong too. First, naming is hard. Finding good recognizable name for a package is hard enough, if each BC break would require a new one, we'd drown in names. Second, behavior breaks are not total. If RoR or ElasticSearch releases a new version with BC break, they do not stop being essentially the same package just with somewhat different behavior. Most of the knowledge you had about it is still relevant. Some pieces are broken, but not the whole concept. New name requires throwing out the whole concept and building a new one, essentially. It is not good for incremental gradual change.
Some of us have a different problem, which is that our focus can endanger us or ruin our marriages. For us, it is easy to tune out things going on around us like phone calls, houses burning down, or our spouse repeating the same question with escalating irritation...
No, flapping wing aircraft simply are less efficent for size scales that can carry a person. That's why the larger a bird's wingspan, the less frequently they flap, such that condors, storks etc. are basically fixed wing gliders.

We in the artificial world do have our own local optima with quad copter drones. Flapping here would be more efficient. Consider seagulls that dive and change direction instantly, and can respond to gusts without missing a beat. We have nothing approaching that maneuverability. This is an active area of research.
Neal Stephenson's novel "Snow Crash" depended entirely on this theory. I'm not sure if I believe it, but it made for a good novel.
I'm glad Vitalik acknowledged the implicit assumption that the P(x) provided by the prover was really <= 1000000 in degree, because that caught me up when I reached that point.

But I'm a bit lost on how one would apply STARKs in practice. I can't tell if this scheme is intended to provide a proof of existence or a proof of knowledge, for example. Both examples are trivial enough that one can assume their existence (of course there's some P(x) for which 0 <= P(x) <= 9 for all x in [0, 1000000)). But they're also trivial enough that it's reasonable to assume that anyone can know the millionth Fibonacci number. So what good is using this as a proof of knowledge?
This. Learning sign language really expands your horizons. I had always thought of language as linear strings of symbols, because that's what written and spoken language are. But sign language is spatial. It also uses facial expressions as modifiers.
I work in tech M&A and this is a very comprehensive way to understand how to value your business (especially the size of the business the OP is referring to).
So have you ever been to the LA Podcast Festival?
I followed this link and I have watched a few episodes. Can't get over the first episode intro. Developers life summed up in 30 seconds.
There's a shared service a bit like that that I've seen discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10846540
> * you can never be certain that the maintainer actually follows it

That's a bad argument. You can also never be certain any third-party code works at all, or did not change without changing versions, or does not have subtle bugs that surface only in your particular use case, etc. If you dismissed the whole concept on basis that somebody could fail to follow it you wouldn't be able to use any third-party dependencies at all. At which point the question of versioning is kinda moot.

> one user's breaking change is one maintainer's bugfix

This is a "grey zone" fallacy. From the fact that there might be disagreements on the margins, does not follow there is not a huge majority of clear-cut cases where everybody agrees that something is a huge or tiny change, and in this huge majority of cases it is useful. Even if there's no definition that would work in absolute 100% of cases, it works just fine in 99% of them.
Sure but most don't seem to value their privacy enough that they continue using Intel products. As such nothing will change.
A related idea that I had while reading the article is this: it's easy to get computers and machines to talk to each other both unnaturally (with our own protocols) and naturally (using a randomly initialized and then learned/iterated upon version - see https://blog.openai.com/learning-to-communicate/ or Facebook's recent experiment. It's also easy to imagine such a scenario).

But computers are nowhere near being able to have conscious thought. So what's the difference? Clearly it's not just natural language that differentiates the conscious from the unconscious.
Linux sandboxing improvements in Firefox 57
Game development code (specifically, at the moment, vectors, bezier and animation tweening) and Unity tutorials.
Highly recommend you check out the book "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neil

Very accessible set of case studies where algorithmic management of traditionally human-run bureaucratic processes is biased and destructive.
In general this doesn't work out as well as you would hope. In many cases (financial, medical, legal) another person can't trivially act as your agent. (I.E. your secretary can't do it for you)

I think the very wealthy handle this via specialists with specific licensing, but I personally had no luck going the virtual assistant route.
I think this is an excellent idea, particularly for typed languages. For a typed language package manager, you can run the following verifications:

- for a patch version, all exported (name, type) pairs of A.B.C are identical to those of A.B.(C-1)

- for a minor version, enforce first rule, but allow new types for new names.

I think the Elm package manager does this, based on other comments here in this thread.

Either way, that sort of automatic “exports” verification could be a base layer in a semver verification package manager, with integration tests layered on top.
Can you elaborate? How do you know they're thinking abstractly?
"We saw in the 1980s a shift from pensions to 401(k)s; that was a raw deal for workers. These retirement plans were marketed as an instrument of financial freedom, but they were really transferring risk from the shoulder of the employers to the backs of the workers."

This is misleading. 401k's are considerably lower risk since they allow you to be diversified instead of putting all your eggs into one basket (ie a company retirement pension).

The problem is the amount of money going into a standard 401k is nowhere near the amount that went into a pension. You had pensions paying out amounts that would require a 401k account with $1MM+ in it. The standard company 401k match these days isn't even peanuts compared to that, and that's if the company even matches at all.
I think sometimes developers just have trouble conceptualizing ‘performance tiers’ at the low to mid end.

One example is thinking that horizontal scalability of the persistence layer is necessary before you get to even perhaps Series C/D scale. For instance, I had a serious epiphany when I read that Braintree managed to vertically scale a two node (“HA”) Postgres setup to transaction volume in the millions and a massive valuation. Stack Overflow has had a similarly lean footprint for much of its history.

Most developers usually need to focus a lot more on the 20x more relevant task of product engineering. Unfortunately, a product focus usually means pretty boring or repetitive coding work that doesn’t widen your skillset as an engineer. These competing incentives are how complexity gets introduced, how more code than necessary gets written, and how poor/premature technology choices are made.

The right attitude to have in a small to medium size tech company (and particularly one that doesn’t have product-market fit) is that every LoC introduces marginal risk, every additional package is another dependency that needs to be grokked (so it better be delivering serious ROI), agility is paramount, and innovation should only be happening where it’s necessary to deliver on the company’s unique selling point.

But the most important thing is agility; and moving fast (contrary to what the industry generally believes imo) is less a function of rockstar talent than of simply making the right choices, having the right processes, and persistently reexamining and refining things to go even faster. It’s just a completely different mindset from the norm at a large tech company. At a really early stage, you might even be better off hiring a prodigious hackathon talent than your average Google engineer.
Slashdot comment section seems to be on the same level as newssite comment sections.
What's the best way to get started in localization engineering?
I have an accepted job offer in the Bay Area in localization engineering specializing in machine translation. Is there a book I can read to learn more about the area?
There one thing in the paper that has me stumped

> Each primary capsule output[sic] sees the outputs of all 256 × 81 Conv1 units whose receptive fields overlap with the location of the center of the capsule.

What does that mean? The capsules are bundles of convolutions, and the output of the "256 * 81 conv1" is a 1D manifold. What does it mean "overlap" and what is the center of the capsule?

Note on [sic] - seems like it should read "input"
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9617268.
Sounds like this book has an unfortunate bias of victim hood.

Lost your mortgage? Not your fault.

Didn’t save for retirement? Not your fault.

Only job prospect, after working and training and networking for your entire adult life, is moving boxes in an AMZN warehouse? Not your fault.

I prefer a more objective view, like Studs Terkel’s classic book, Working.

Finally, don’t get me wrong — I have neighbors in the described situation. I care about them. I’m just saying I’d enjoy reading an objective narrative about their hard, and unfortunate situation — something not clouded with the tone of victimization.
> Crucially, Jayne's definition of "consciousness" is basically introspection.

With language as a key portion. See any discussion of deaf people who aren't taught language until late in life, such a Helen Keller. The stories consistently have them emotionally overwhelmed when the first learn language. They want to know the names of everything.

And also, they consistently talk about "before" and "after". Before language, they were a collection of emotions, fears, desires, etc. After language, they existed for the first time. They could name things, including themselves.

This looks a lot like the transition to self aware consciousness. Which means Jayne isn't entirely wrong.
Optical Communication and Sensor Demonstration (OCSD) – 10.25.17
So being conservative is OK as long as you don't say it?
Looks fine in chrome, but bad in IE11.

Have you looked in the official posts?
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring
Sell. Make something else.
Coders Should Fear What Happened to Writers
A lot of the spam calls I get are just recordings or they just hang up once I pick up. Hard to imagine it would help to just say "please add me to your do not call list" into the void...
This all said... I think I could really use an in-depth "guided tour of VSCode"
its seems a general extrapolation of a purely free market economy where if you cant bootstrap yourself into the bottom of the investor class by the time you get old for whatever reason, you're essentially human trash
I ordered from Amazon while I was in Thailand and it actually worked pretty well. The shipping wasn't cheap, but it wasn't prohibitive. The most expensive part was the import duties charged by Thai customs. It still ended up being cheaper than if I'd bought the items locally. Though I was on an island in the south, so that might not have been the case in Bangkok.

Still...it's definitely not a non-starter. And with the exception of shipping updates which were non-existent once Thai post got their hands on the package, everything worked surprisingly well. All told, it took 7 days to arrive, shipping was ~$50 and customs was ~$65 on a ~$300 order that would have cost over $500 locally where the selection would've meant getting something that wasn't exactly what I wanted.
The antenna could be better.
Alibaba reported sales of $25.3B from Singles' Day
It's interesting that you assume it's a myth. I can personally attest to answering spam calls, politely asking to be added to the do not call list, and still receiving calls from the same spammers over a period of months. Eventually I just downloaded a call blacklist app.
There is a steady stream of these articles describing this as a problem of older people. It isn't. This is about poor people. There are plenty of non-old people living our of RVs, or worse, chasing seasonal work wherever they can find it. An RV is a huge step up from a tent. This is one slightly more pathetic version of an increasingly common story: our modern economy isn't addressing poverty. Poor people of all ages are falling off the cliff. They need help. They don't need classes on writing resumes. They don't need tax breaks. They need cash and a place to live near a reasonable job.
Για το θαύμα η Εθνική Ελλάδος με την Κροατία
It seems planning of "opportunistic" software projects faces related challenges? Though more like research direction exploration/planning, than research production-process management.

Gantt is ok when simple time and resource constraints dominate, and there's a simple path. But not all "project-design spaces" collapse that simply.

Even small opportunistic projects can have painfully large dependency graphs. "If/when browser bug X is ever fixed", "if I find a better algorithm", "if we get hardware X", "if/when these conditions are ever met, budget this amount of work along these vectors", "we could go this way or that", "here are some associated risks", "possible risk mitigations/explorations", "X is a candidate goal state", "with some path dependencies", "and can pay for this pattern of costs". "Y is an alternative candidate goal state", "this area of project space has a bunch of scattered payoffs", "sweeping this way is sparse on payoffs until the risky big one", ... and on, and on.

I've never seen tooling which wasn't ghastly painful for sketching out stuff like this, editing it, and keeping it up to date. I've hope for building something in VR. But perhaps I missed something?
I have subscriptions to the Atlantic, Commentary, Consumer Reports, New York Review of Books, and the Review of Metaphysics.

I used to subscribe to the New Republic, but it changed so much after it got bought out a couple of years ago that I dropped it.
Or tide, which uses the typescript tsserver-backend for all its code-analysis.

Gives you navigation, refactoring, completion, eldoc etc. Basicslly JS on steroids.
2nd RSS post today, and no mention of PubSubHubbub, aka WebSub? Or maybe it's just a low-level feature, not important enough? Strange days indeed.
Please do that. And do, i.e. don't just have that ambition now, which will easily whither in the wee hours of the night. Prepare beforehand so you are equipped to execute your plan when the day comes. Plan days off or whatever it takes to make your plan a reality.
The other problem is that 401ks let you do dumb stuff pensions don't. Dumb stuff like pulling most of your funds in the 2008 crisis and holding it in cash to miss out on the rebound. Or investing in borderline scam products like variable annuities.

401ks are great if you're savvy. They are massively inefficient for society in that they require all the people who use them to understand investing.

This is really bad policy at a society level. People need real, unbiased investing guidance.
Say that we trust Intel completely. Does that somehow make AMT not a security concern? For the ME itself, especially if it's not connected to any networking hardware: Whatever. It seems more like a theoretical threat than a practical problem. AMT sounds like something that I don't want running on my machine, even if I trust Intel itself completely.
You'd think that somebody'd start selling some kind of generator that you could hook up the systems to that would generate various forms of unclean power on purpose, precisely so that you could test those rare failure modes.
If it required what we thought it would require, it would be dome already.
Interesting. You don't use TTY devices then? I wouldn't be entirely surprised if those became less prevalent as telephone services decline in popularity, but I'd figured most of the deaf community used them still.
People not saving for retirement is a huge problem. Average 401k balance is about 1/5 of where it needs to be.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.financialfixation.com/singl...
Exactly. People seem to forget that the fastest (publicly known) supercomputer in the world is made of components that are 100% chinese made (including the CPUs). They are catching up fast, and yet folks continue to bury their heads in the sand.
It's less about having one person's attention, and more about making the BATNA for solving your problem "customer ties up a CS agent for phone support at $10/hr until the problem gets solved".
I sold a tiny site that took me a weekend to build for $40k. It was rolled into another site a few years later, and sold for $25 Million :(

He approached me via email. Went smoothly. To be fair, it was probably only worth $10k, but the work and advertising he did to it really did value it at $25M.
Carracho was alright, but I found KDX quickly took its place -- still quite a few servers running too!
How to Lock Folder with Password without using any software for Free
"...or you could just use the editor that does what you need out of the box."

If your needs are simple enough that you don't need Emacs, more power to you.

Some people are happy programming in Notepad because it does all they need -- or all they think they need.
>Would you (and others) be willing to have an extra 20 MB download to get better intellisense?

Absolutely.
I'm curious about how people who think that way react when you tell them about Babylonian mathematics;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_mathematics

For instance, there is a Babylonian clay tablet from ~1700 BC that gives an approximation of sqrt(2) as 1.414213 (correct to 6 decimal digits).
Sat. Nov. 11 launch scrubbed https://twitter.com/NASA/status/929329965090426880
The Church of the SubGenius Finally Plays It Straight
> "For one thing, Amazon should pay its workers more and give them better working conditions. It’s laughable that the workers get a 15-minute break when they have to spend it walking to the break room. It’s completely insane."

Perhaps the rest of society should be more aware of the darkside(s) of the business models they are supporting?

Plenty of multi-nationals - Nike comes to mind - have been pressured into making changes to practices that were not socially acceptable.

Why isn't Amazon being held to the same measuring stick?

Editorial: Why is the public still so naive about the "hidden costs" of cheaper? Certainly, Walmart (for example) and its darkside would be fresh in the minds of the American public. Instead, it seems, the perception is Amazon is the saviour (from Walmart), when the new boss is really the same as the old boss (sans the glossy high tech paint job).
Not alone here, I have my work phone unplugged or permanently on do not disturb (straight to voicemail which gets converted into text in an email), likewise on my cell phone I reject almost all calls and an automatic reply via text saying “I’m sorry, I’m not able to take your call or you’re calling for an unknown number, please email or iMessage me instead”, if the number calling is a land line my carrier converts this to a robo-voice and calls them back to say this, if the number is blocked - tough luck.

Not only are 99% of phone calls a waste of time, you’re inefficient with no written log of the conversation (not even for security but also to improve workflow and prioritisation / memory recall), furthermore the impact of the context shifting from what I’m currently working on / deep in thought over to a jarring phone conversation at the time that suits the caller - is incredibly disruptive.
This is complex vendoring, nothing more.
What's strange to me is that as people watch this transition in ML technologies, they can see and accept what's right in front of them but can't see what's coming next. There's growing evidence that that ML/AI is a programming language problem – that's why all kinds of new IRs are being created for ML frameworks, as you say. But these are never going to be good to program in directly, so the next obvious step is to put a really nice, general purpose surface syntax on them. Once you start thinking about what that surface syntax should be like, you quickly end up with something very similar to Julia. People don't seem to be connecting the dots just yet.

In some sense ML people are working from the bottom up while Julia is working from the top down. ML/AI frameworks are starting to put better IRs on top of their low-level codegen. They haven't gotten to the surface syntax part yet because they're just starting on the IR – but they will, because that's the next logical step. Julia, on the other hand, is working from the top down, starting from a really nice surface syntax that's excellent at codegen. First it has targeted CPUs, now GPUs, and in the future TPUs, Nervana chips, FPGAs, etc. It's already possible to target all kinds of different hardware with the same productive, generic high-level code. Which approach do you think is going to end up with a better, more productive developer experience in the long run?
Dnd-priority on Android does not silence texts from known contacts, I've been forced to use it because of spam calls too.
Heh, there are a lot of ways to model it, and we've iterated on the details quite a bit and I imagine we'll iterate more in the future, but here's a quick explanation:

In our model, a node is a "run", which is an experimental procedure performed on a sample (or sometimes multiple samples). Each run has input samples, output samples, and structured data results. A notebook entry can have multiple runs associated with it, since a scientist will likely be processing many runs at once, and every run lives in exactly one notebook entry.

A common use case is to take some input sample, perform some transformation on it, and produce a new output sample that will be used downstream. Another common use case is a "screening" step where you take a collection of samples (one run each), run some analyses on those samples, and discard the ones that don't meet certain criteria. So sometimes the output is a new sample, sometimes it's the same as the input, and sometimes there's no output.

An edge indicates that the output of one run will be automatically fed into the input of the next run, and generally shows the flow of physical samples through the different stages.
Companies should hire whomever they want.
Investigative journalism tools
I don't get enough (any) spam calls to do this, but have you ever thought about using http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/?

Instead of blocking the spam calls, it connects a bot that ties up the caller in a pointless conversation for as long as it can. I'm sure this would result in the telemarketers removing you from their lists themselves.
Or you know use a browser respects your privacy, I don’t trust chrome isn’t sending my data to google even after changing my default. Its really handy that the same browser keeps the search and url bars separate so the intent it never mixed, which is really handy if you’re not working with public sites with FQDNs all the the time.
Omnia: An editor-like Clojure REPL