skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, as to the reinforcement-learning agent- this is also very confusing (because of the use of "engine" to mean both their engine and the Infinite Mario engine used in the last experiment) but I think this RL agent was created to play the Infinite Mario engine, not their engine:

For a baseline we drew on the “Infinite Mario” engine used
for the Mario level playing AI competition [Togelius et al.,
2010] and constructed a simple reinforcement learning agent
for the engine utilizing the value iteration algorithm. We further
constructed two variations on this agent. The first made
use of the native forward simulation available in the “Infinite
Mario” engine to construct an initial policy rather than relying
on the typical approach of a uniformly random initial policy.
(...)
In comparison, we constructed an agent that instead made use of
forward simulation according to the learned game engine (with
numerical values and names converted to the appropriate equivalent
in the “Infinite Mario” engine).

I think this means that they used a) a ready-made "forward simulation" agent included in the Infinite Mario engine, b) a RL agent they trained and c) a "forward simulation" agent _using their trained engine values as input_. But all three agents were playing the game on the Infinite Mario engine- not on their learned engine. Their learned engine only served to generate inputs for the "forward simulation".

Which must mean that their engine cannot be played, in the traditional sense, for example by connecting its inputs to the outputs of an AI player, or by giving a controller to a human. If it could, they would most probably be demonstrating this ability by having an AI agent play a game of Mario on their learned engine. This doesn't seem to be possible.

Again- that's my reading and I too am not 100% sure about it, because it's really not made clear in the paper.
To be honest, I had some issues on a fresh app with only shoutem-ui which seems to fail in some parts on latest React + RN.

https://github.com/shoutem/ui/issues/327
https://github.com/shoutem/ui/issues/328
Near the bottom he does show the results of running it on 100-D Rastrigin (and mnist before that) with stats and plots. Or do you mean something more complex even than that?
My son has chopped vegetables with a sharp knife as a 5yo under close supervision. When he started to fool around, i took the knife away.

It was super stressful for me, but I rather teach him to use a knife correctly and responsibly. The alternative would be that he plays with it in secret and that is more dangerous.

Also, better use a sharp knife than a blunt one. ;)
I'm surprised you feel anything from that dose daily.

I found Modafinil to be somewhat worthless due to it only coming as an instant release tab and the resulting insta-tolerance.
Maybe a site like gwern.net is generally less suited for A/B experiments like that because of the unique look and speed 'HTML only' sites have. Sites like cnn.com or yahoo.com are generally much more crowded and colorful, so banner ads blend in much better. This might in return result in a higher user acceptance rate for banner ads and probably a different engagement rate too.
A nice summary can be found here:

http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~langmea/resources/lecture_notes/bwt_a....
admittedly, although i also wouldn't class it as a mental disorder, i don't like using the phone. interestingly, i find i often have to have a cigarette to calm myself down before making or answering an important call...
TerarkDB: a drop-in replacement for RocksDB
Not having to fight NIMBY is a huge advantage.
I mix in a little caff coffee in case I miss the benefits
Thing i love about japan is they think very out of the box compared to others. i don't how their society gets it but it's kind of amazing.
It's a bit sad it won't be able to compete in price with low-end laptops. I seriously doubt the CPU is more powerful than a Core i3.
This post goes over science and research, which to me is a consequence to other, "big picture", areas of the Chinese growth. Areas such as economy, geopolitcs and finances. China is no longer a contender - It's the true looming power of the East. And depending on how internal politics play out, it will be interesting to see where exactly China stands in as little as 10-20 years in the future.

One thing that strikes me about China is their attitude towards foreign politics - They still want the world to consider them as a "developing country". Sure, it's a gigantic country, both in land and population - There are still many challenges to overcome, but this is now a country with enormous cash reserves, who own a significant lump of US debt, and making truly gigantic strides on all levels of society.
Surveillance self-defense
...In the same frame of reference as the observer.
What you say is correct, but that reddit thread concerns (I think) a narrow class of devs of which there are many here: US CS majors who graduate with only a few semesters of calc and discrete and are underequipped to bootstrap themselves if they need to understand, say, topology. But they have to gain some understanding, so i put a few book lists in that reddit thread, took about ... 5 minutes.

BTW I really like what i've seen of your guidebooks, or whatever you call them (neo-textbooks?).
The conclusion is actually quite contrary to the title, and far more interesting: the author uses that example to debunk the idea that more research leads to more innovation and more prosperity.

I have been tinkering around the same idea for a while, thinking that the state of a country's democracy matters way more than its research output.

I'll quote this article in the future!

In his own words: "Does any of it matter? Many people believe, or assume, that great output in terms of research articles should cause economic prosperity and innovation. I have post entitled Does academic research cause economic growth? that makes the contrary point. That is, though China is catching up in terms of scientific output, this may be a consequence of their prosperity: they can now afford to have their very best minds work on producing research articles. It is much easier for rich countries to fund people so that they can publish in Nature. So being rich will allow you to catch up. But Japan shows that you can be a very rich country and choose not to produce many great research articles. In the least, this establishes that you do not need to produce many great research articles to be prosperous."
Ya, Favorite Son, that one's brutal. Good one.

I'd love to hear your other faves.

My least/most favorite episode is Tuvix. Dilemma! I just can't take it. And the casting, portrayal of Tuvix is just so spot on.

Enterprise's Coginator is a close second.

Dammit, now I've started rereading episode guides.

Thanks for playing catch. This is fun.
Trafficking laws ‘target refugee aid workers in EU’
> The agency regarded as the world’s leader in breaking into adversaries’ computer networks failed to protect its own.

Those are two very different things. Focusing on one of them doesn't automatically benefit your efforts on the other.
Cause for celebration for all who support privacy and security.
The bitcoin foundation plays a minimal role at best in the bitcoin ecosystem. They've never been very important, and they remain unimportant to this day
Does it seem like "productivity" shouldn't be measured in number of papers? Isn't that how we got ourselves into the reproducibility mess?
Don't work there then... everyone has their own preferences. The moral judgements seem silly.
He seems to not show how the ads looked like on his page. He seems to only attribute it to load time. But maybe the ads were visually annoying? Why no screenshots?
Yeah I'm with you on that. There's a lot of grindy jobs that are really just paying humans to behave like robots.

I think we're looking at a massive increase in an already large class gap. The fallout is going to be huge and in not immediately obvious ways. I don't think we have the maturity to deal with it.

It's a pretty depressing topic TBH. I'm not advocating for anything either. I believe technological advances are inevitable in a global competitive economy.
Why hasn't the past half century been filled with at least trying new things? What happened to laboratories of democracy?
Although I admit I have a slight repulsion to the thought of a few billionaires being able to wield almost complete autonomy...

You've just answered your own question. In America, we believe it is illegitimate for any city or state government to not be a democracy. And democracy in practice means rule by a web of committees and bureaucracies. (Electing a strongman to cut through all of this is considered anti-democratic.)

But building an innovative product, whether that be an iphone or a new kind of city, requires directly responsible individuals ( https://medium.com/@mmamet/directly-responsible-individuals-... ). It cannot be design by committee. It requires having a singular will with the power to overrule the squabbling factions that just want to protect their own interests.

If you want innovation in the way cities are built and managed, you need cities to be able to have a Steve Jobs/Bill Gates-like CEO with powers far beyond that of any mayor, beyond the powers of any city government. But our current ideology of democracy does not allow for that.
These stories are all the same but people like to read them, the entire self-help industry is based on this. All the major advice is already common sense.
Show HN: Virtualswift – Create swift virtual environments (virtualenv for swift)
Tesla Approaches Terminal Decline
15ms is correct (or even wildly optimistic) for VR on account of hardware buffering for GPU throughput / input filtering for stability, etc., LCD reaction times, and other local software and hardware stuff.

The part that's not correct is 15ms ~ 15,000 feet @ c:

15ns ~ 15 ft
15us ~ 15,000 ft
15ms ~ 15,000,000 ft

1ns ~ 0.9836 ft per https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+light+*+1+nan...

Some other fun figures: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=earth+circumference

Light travel time t in vacuum from t = x/c: | 134 ms (milliseconds)
Light travel time t in an optical fiber t = 1.48x/c: | 198 ms (milliseconds)

You wouldn't want to wait for a camera to turn in response to head movement at these distances, but we're already warping buffers in VR to reduce apparent latency - to hide it better for head rotations. You wouldn't want to try and directly control twitchy aircraft or race cars with this kind of latency, but this is still under e.g. throttle response times on a modern car, and you've probably dealt with worse round trip ping times for online gaming.
Millionaires advice about life, and for us normal people, hoping to get something out of it is like counting on the lottery to have a good life.
I'm seeing diminished returns of my HN consultation.

Also, the hive mind developed here is quite strong and sometimes you can predict the general sentiment of the comment thread.

It's still a great source of news though.
EMail me for a promotional code.
Also make sure you have connections with the CIA so they can use your assets for god knows what (including WaPo).
>One problem is that the proposed offchain solutions are centralized.

Centralized off-chain solutions are much less of a problem. Consider paypal. Everyone hates it but they're the only game in town because its network is self-contained; network effects prevent any legitimate competition. With centralized transactions through bitcoin, there are no network effects to prevent an upstart from competing in this space.
How do you know? The map has been super helpful and to me and if Google is also able to monetize is that not a win-win?
Experimenting with MongoDB for a Prototype Web App
There are ways to have comments that are a lot less awful than Disqus.
Does this seem like sensationalist junk journalism to anyone else? We already know the NYT has an axe to grind regarding this administration, and they take some jabs here too.

Even if you hate Trump, you should have the clarity to see that this article feeds into the Russia investigation by hyping up the harms of Russian meddling to stir up anti-Trump fervor over collusion, even though the events took place before he became President.
There's a pretty steep boundary in the price of silver right about when the Spanish conquistadors overthrew the Incas and started mining out Potosi. That influx of specie kicked off a world-wide wave of inflation and severely distorted economies around the world; I'm most familiar with the ways that flow of hard currency impacted the Ming and Qing dynasties in China, but it's really a world-wide phenomena. Possibly one of the most transformative events in world history.
What have been your favorite papers so far?
When you say this administration, do you mean Putin or trump?
OK, well, are there any colours which are not representable with two frequencies? That is still less than three dimensions.
Just Do It – the competitive sport of tax avoidance
The solution someone suggested elsewhere in this thread is to use make the default ringtone silence, then assign audible ringtones to all your contacts.
Where do your ads appear? On your site I do not see a publisher signup page.
If you watch the original Disney video, there is a throw-away line that everyone is renting so Disney can upgrade houses as they want and if you lose your job, you get to move out. I'm pretty sure that it would have ended poorly.
I have adblock so I don't usually see them and didn't make a point of screenshotting them. When I did (usually checking in Chromium that some CSS change was working), they were fairly ordinary AdSense ads, IMO. Like on DNB FAQ, they would usually be Lumosity or college ads. They weren't flashing or visually offensive, so I never saw them as a problem.
Looks unofficial, https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7c8uc7/someone...
I wish there was a [podcast] mark or something like that, like there's a [video]--I hate consuming information in audio form, this would help me avoid a click.
If you run a company then everything is your business. He might not directly participate in the management of warehouse workers, but if the are being treated badly then it is his responsibility to fix it. It is his job to set the direction of the company and to hire people (who hire people, and so on) that will do the right thing. He is the one who has set a culture of competition among his developers and hard conditions for his warehouse workers.

Bezos clearly follows the news. He must have read articles mentioning the poor working conditions of his employees. That he hasn't fixed it- and doesn't appear to be trying to fix it- says that he doesn't think that taking care of his people is worth the cost.

From a business perspective, I get it. Amazon has thin margins as a computing, logistics and retail company. It's competing against Google and Wal-Mart.

From a human perspective, it sucks.
Not following? Did American inventors and get Thomas Edison, George Washington Carver, Alexander Bell and a bunch of others.
A usual Sunday afternoon for me as a young child was to cut pieces of wood with a pocket knife until I cut myself. Then I would go to my bedroom and read a book. I may or may not have learned anything.
Probably Trump. However, many of the issues the NSA faces occurred before Trump's administration.
The New York Agreement was canceled the other day.

Also, comments like "if you understand the technical implications of it then you should have a very clear idea about what is going to happen" are really unhelpful, like a no-op soaked in condescension.
So called "intellectuals", I imagine, oppose capitalism because they can see that it has failed to benefit the majority of species on earth. It has reduced a paradise of abundance to a known quantity to exploit. It has provided man (not human-kind, mainly just the male half) with his mandate for remaining short sighted. He's been knighted with full ability to exterminate and destroy in the name of progress.
This article lost me from the first few sentences. "Intellectuals", "left-leaning", fool. It doesnt take a so-called intellectual to see that capitalism is not only a failed economic theory and poor rallying point for a government, but an utterly outdated mode for human living, my child can see that reality. Everyone opposes capitalism, if only they'd intellectualize.
> "Yes. But they also charge more because they can. Healthcare is not special. It's like any other limited resources. That is, increase demand and the price goes up."

If you're talking about pharmaceutical prices, there are ways around that. For example, drugs that are FDA approved and available elsewhere in the world for a lower price should be able to be legally imported and sold at that lower price. To give an example of how this could be implemented, there was a bill that was proposed to allow drugs from Canada to be imported and sold:

https://www.pharmamanufacturing.com/articles/2017/senators-p...

This bill was for the same drugs that legally available in the US, but sold at a cheaper price in Canada.

https://twitter.com/sensanders/status/819404681806016513?lan...

By increasing competition from imports, drug prices can come down. Also, allowing generics to come to market faster for the most commonly used drugs (i.e. cutting down the time for which a single pharmaceutical company has a monopoly on producing a drug) is another approach that can stop pharmaceutical companies from over-inflating drug prices in the US.
Hi! One of the authors of 10 PRINT here.

You might enjoy this browser-based graphical variation. Many people also made Processing-based variations, too:

http://diydsp.com/fun/10print/10_print_param.html
> Mass and energy are exactly the same property

Definitely not. Everything couples to the stress-energy tensor, but not every type of particle has rest/invariant mass. No one really speaks in terms of relativistic mass anymore. (So a photon has energy but no rest mass.)
I looked at some of your pages on archive.org but saw no ads either. Can you give me a hint how to find the pages with the ads?
I wonder if the confusing, messy UX you talk about (I've never used the app) is a deliberate strategy, or just bad design.
I think it’s a question of whether they’re a tyrant for themselves. A lot of people that act like tyrants are clearly just in it for the power trip.
All comms being disabled is a real red flag. My dad’s a master mariner so I’ve been around enough marine grade equipment to know that one radio breaking is rare, but 6 all at the same time is ridiculously unlikely. Either total incompetence or someone’s lying.
Running Microsoft Azure Stack Development Kit at Home
"Rendition Infosec" - give me a break, you were a peeping tom secret policeman, not a kidnapping secret policeman.
It was on almost all of the HTML pages (except the index & Modafinil) up to September. Perhaps the JS doesn't run when loaded from IA or something?
I think a most of the problems with ads are just caused by how Google and other big players run online advertising.

Somewhere along the way "let's add an image of some company our readers might be interested in" turned into "let's serve a huge Javascript that perceivably slows the browser in order to serve an ad from the highest bidder who might or might not run a criminal enterprise. Also make sure the ads show off the vast amounts of data we collect, we have to appear as creepy as possible".

Small ad networks or sites that organize their adverts themselves sometimes have great ads. But I am not sure if the reputation of online ads isn't already damaged beyond repair.

Add to that the small revenue from ads (the author makes $30/month from ads and $700/month from patreon)
Or that the boat was heeled over for a long time, probably grounded.

That's an awfully long way above the design waterline to indicate heavy loading.
Belated reply, sorry. I've bookmarked this for later. Great links, thanks.
1. It happens more than you'd think. Some legacy system is still up and they are connected to the same credential store. You find a hole and get into their internal network and some random webportal that no one maintains still has access to the database.

2. Yes, so this one is more like you are shooting with a shotgun from a long long range and hoping to hit. You can improve the accuracy by using a password dump on your target. People have a common pattern that they use with their passwords. You can either find one that is still being used or try to find a couple they have used and create a new one. Great site to demonstrate the power of a password dump is https://haveibeenpwned.com/. So in some cases it is possible, but as someone who professionally red teams, I wouldn't bruteforce past a certain time period before trying something else.
> "an auditory analogue (imagine an impossibly high pitched sound like crickets chirping)"

This is tinnitus, something I've suffered from since childhood and it has gotten worse recently after attending a concert and standing too close to the speakers. It does indeed feel like a "noise floor"; in a silent room it becomes overbearing.
The legacy API is not on nightly. I think they have a similar API in WebExtension Experiments, but in nightly, legacy add-ons do not work.
From talking to coworkers there is such limitation but only to the point that it can only go up 2% per year. I am guessing there is no other type of cap? In Texas such cap exists for people 65 and older where their tax rates are frozen in perpetuity. Does such cap exist in CA?

So putting aside inflation and the like, assuming value held constant wouldn’t taxation property values “catch up” after many years? Or are there other factors at play besides the 2% limit?
Advanced carbonate fuel cell technology in carbon capture and sequestration
Well, the point of the guide is the nice 2-D visualization. Which he cannot do for the 100-D problem of course. It would be nice to make the same guide but with a harder 2-D landscape.
My bet is they were doing a drug run. From what I hear runners will leave drugs tied to buoys off uninhabited islands and they’ll be picked up by small boats. They don’t bring drugs onboard in case they’re searched.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they got scared when they saw the coastguard and cut the load. Just like Han Solo.

Edit - that could also explain the ‘shark attack’ story - a loose load tied to one side could bump and damage the hull. They’re trying to cover if someone notices, instead of saying ‘Oh I misjudged a channel width once and bashed the side’.
> "The fundamental purpose of intelligence is to be able to effectively penetrate our adversaries in order to gather vital intelligence. By its very nature, that only works if secrecy is maintained and our codes are protected."

lol "codes"
The hope is that one's level of expertise in those areas are correlated.
The other side to this is users see the ads, relate to the ads, click the ads, and thus leave your site. Your pageviews will drop.

Whether or not one agrees with the outcome, if you have a large site you definitely should be doing independent testing. Google's ad reps, much less reps from other networks, will tell you to do things that harm your site.
I needed my time tracker to be fully automatic, so I built one [1].

1: https://wakatime.com
I honestly couldn't follow most of the math but found this really interesting. I used to do UX analyses at a marketing agency and would constantly link clients to [1]. Page speed is huge, especially on desktop where its easier to navigate away. OP mentions this, but I imagine the effect is massive on a site where users are actively researching a topic and have tens of tabs open and so can easily switch to a similar website.

I do think this test could have been done without banner ads involved. Looking at page load speed per user and how that effects traffic would likely have the same results.

From my link below:

> A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

[1] https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/