skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lenin, 1918, in an article called "Left-Wing Childishness":

Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. [...]

Only those are worthy of the name of Communists who understand that it is impossible to create or introduce socialism without learning from the organisers of the trusts. For socialism is not a figment of the imagination, but the assimilation and application by the proletarian vanguard, which has seized power, of what has been created by the trusts. We, the party of the proletariat, have no other way of acquiring the ability to organise large-scale production on trust lines, as trusts are organised, except by acquiring it from first-class capitalist experts.

We have nothing to teach them, unless we undertake the childish task of “teaching” the bourgeois intelligentsia socialism. We must not teach them, but expropriate them (as is being done in Russia “determinedly” enough), put a stop to their sabotage, subordinate them as a section or group to Soviet power. We, on the other hand, if we are not Communists of infantile age and infantile understanding, must learn from them, and there is something to learn, for the party of the proletariat and its vanguard have no experience of independent work in organising giant enterprises which serve the needs of scores of millions of people.
Please, no need to be hateful, Intercom and Zendesk are from SF too :)
Lots of people pointing out that languages are hard, the numbers given are for really intensive programmes etc.

Not that I had any success with it, but here is a book/site about how to learn which I found interesting:

https://www.fluentin3months.com

The theory is to start from day 1 with 15 minute real conversations with native speakers (Skype pals). You either pay them or offer them the same in English afterwards. You are not permitted to fall back to another language during the call! This makes you study damn hard between sessions to improve you vocabulary and reduce the awkwardness. Benny (the author) spent months working in Spain and learning no Spanish, and stumbled on this method as a last resort.

It is very similar in spirit (immersion, but not requing presence in a native speaking country) to the Kato Lomb approach:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kató_Lomb

Which is documented in her book "Polyglot". (Cut off from native speakers she used romance novels, which have a very low reading age, dictionaries of the language itself, rather than translation ones, and radio broadcasts, and was so successful that the Russians arrested her as a spy when they took Hungary in WW2, and she addressed a soldier in perfect Russian.)
I'm not sure I've ever gone through an interview process where it was just me and one interviewer. Well, there was one time, but that was an exceptionally weird one. Frequently I meet with the department head and someone from HR. Or the whole team. Or a bunch of department heads. Also, the last way I would ever describe an interview is as a "unity of experience". Every person has a different perspective (Rashomon comes to mind - maybe someone should make a movie like that about an interview) and while the interviewers may reconcile theirs among each other to some extent, the interviewee frequently does not see things their way at all.
The negative transfer that Japanese people are faced with when trying to learn English is really a incredible.

Not only do they have a huge number of mis-leading false friends and corrupted loan words (for example the word for plug socket is "consent") but a lot of the core grammar concepts of English do no exist in Japanese. Plural/singular, subject verb agreement, perfect tenses.

And on top of that the Japanese language has many fewer sounds than English. Most Japanese people will never be able to discriminate between L and R, or have a good command of all the Japanese vowels.
Who owns LA Weekly?
Which, 99.9% of the time, would also be attached to the phone.

The "always signed in" model of mobile computing means that once you have access to the device, you have the keys to the kingdom. Why are we concerned about a slightly smoother iCloud password reset flow when somebody with this level of access has enough information and capabilities to get into my bank account?
Can't now. What if there is a law?
Although probably not sufficient for AGI, network architecture is essentially guaranteed to be important, because of both ample empirical evidence of the importance of architectures and ample reason, from facts about numerics, to believe that it is important.

In the first category (empirical evidence),

- The discrete leap from non-LSTM RNN to LSTM network performance on NLP was essentially due to a "better factoring of the problem": breaking out the primitive operations that equate to an RNN having "memory" had a substantial effect on how well it "remembered."

- The leap in NMT from LSTM seq2seq to attention-based methods (the Transformer by Google) is another example. Long-distance correlations made yet another leap because they are simply modeled more directly by the architecture than in the LSTM.

- The relation network by DeepMind is another excellent example of a drop-in, "pure" architectural intuition-motivated replacement that increased accuracy from the 66% range to the 90% range on various tasks. Again, this was through directly modeling and weight-tying relation vectors through the architecture of the network.

- The capsule network for image recognition is yet another example. By shifting the focus of the architecture from arbitrarily guaranteeing only positional invariance to guaranteeing other sorts, the network was able to do much better at overlapping MNIST. Again, a better factoring of the problem.

These developments all illustrate that picking the architecture and the numerical guarantees baked into the "factoring" of the architecture (for example, weight tying, orthogonality, invariance, etc.) can have and has had a profound effect on performance. There is no reason to believe this trend won't continue.

In fact, there are some very interesting ways to think about the principles behind network structure -- I can't say for sure that it has any predictive power yet, but types are one intuitively appealing way to look at it: http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-09-NN-Types-FP/
I think you are right.

But as a brush in a photo editor program it would be great.
Then a used can 'mark' what areas need to be smoothed and the result will be great.
A Japanese person might say "Why bother writing 'dog' and 'dogs'? If you have more than one why not just write '2 dog'?"

Careful throwing those stones!
Agree, the old model was fine. I've been using iPhone because IMO it's a more secure device than the alternative. Surely they could make this an option?
I'm honestly curious as to what parts of the country you've been spending your time in? I'm Irish born and bred and I can assure you, no American that I've ever conversed with has had the slightest difficulty in understanding me!
If you want to really see how close the relationship between the Germanic languages are, line up some sentences German, Norwegian (or Danish or Swedish), Dutch, English, Icelandic next to each other, and then a second group with Middle High German, Norse (for the modern Scandinavian languages), Old Dutch, Middle English, Icelandic.

Basically if you pick up any modern pair, you get a ton for free. Pick up a third, or even just learn a decent amount about one, and you start picking up a lot of patterns that lets you infer meanings. If any of the modern pairs includes Icelandic, you'll benefit strongly from knowing the older versions of the other one in the pair...

Learn the patterns of how newer forms of your own language derive from the older, and you'll find you'll start being able to "shift down, sideways and back up" very often.

E.g. Dutch or German sch => sk in the Scandinavian languages. "u" in middle of a word => "o". Hence "Schule" => "skole" (school). There's dozens of simple transliteration rules like that.

In terms of older forms, an example from Norwegian that illustrates the closer relationships, that I'm particularly fond of because it's an oddity, is "vel bekomme".

It is a pleasantry that basically means "you're welcome" specifically used after a meal. It's a fun one because while "vel" ("well") is still used in modern Norwegian in many contexts, including in e.g. "velkommen" (welcome), "bekomme" now doesn't even figure in most dictionaries on it's own, and some younger Norwegians would struggle to explain what the word means on its own (I'm 42, and my generation too rarely used it separate from the phrase "vel bekomme", but were quite likely to hear it in somewhat wider use in our childhood)

But it's the same word as German "bekommen" one of the meanings of which is for food to "agree" with you, and with etymology that converges with the etymology of English "become".

Which sounds weird until you deconstruct both into roughly a mix of "to take on" (characteristics of), "to receive" (well).

The fun thing is that when directly transliterating the words into the closest German/Dutch cognates, it's not perfect, but it's close enough that if you know the history of the words, it's becomes obvious in context.

At which point the other (archaic; you may still find old people use it, but even that is becoming rare) Norwegian use makes sense: "Det bekommer Dem" => literally "it becomes you" (in the meaning "it suits you")

For some younger Norwegian speakers, that latter Norwegian phrase is now so unusual that it's sometimes first when they learn German or learn the English phrase that the meaning fully "clicks".
> Convolutional layers are just simplifications which make training easier. They are priors in the sense that we know a fully connected layer in image applications would just devolve into a convolutional layer anyway, so we might as well start with a convolution layer. That "design" is the prior. But it's not mandatory; the network would still function without that "prior".

As far as I know this is incorrect. Can you point to a paper that shows this? If by "easier to train" you mean that the models do not overfit training data, then that's the whole point of using correct priors / hypothesis classes.

I'm not sure what bugs you in this paper, but the point is that they decouple the prior architecture from the training/optimization mechanism, and that seems interesting.
Intel cuts stake in ASML to below 5 pct
Similar here.

My Julia code creates Excel sheets including charts and sparks

I use this shiv to Python's XlsxWriter

https://github.com/lawless-m/XlsxWriter.jl

With a bit of effort you can even make it set up scenarios for Excel solver
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
True, she does say that she tries to do these things. At first I meant she does all that plus her day job.
"It’s only natural, then, that your programmer is reduced to doing only what brings him success: coding."

Replacing "success" by "pleasure" quickly reveals why there's not a single sentence in that article I can agree with. I for one am quite happy not being included in matters that sound like a different job title to me...
I feel like a lot of it includes angels who instead chose to buy Bitcoin.
As cryptocurrencies grow, so does the demand to track their users
(Disclaimer: not a linguist, conlanger enthusiast)

Turkish grammar is extremely regular. The only weird/non-regular thing in Turkish language is its past tenses. Its past tenses are relatively complex and change suffix based on hear-say, story-telling, context, complaining, mood, fact etc... Hungarian and Turkish are similar only up to both being heavily agglutinating (as you know, they're not from the same language family). And its entirely possible English speakers find Hungarian harder than Turkish.

Turkish phonology also isn't very complex. Stress is always in the same syllable. There are two very hard phonemes to pronounce: [ɰ] and [ɯ]. But overall Hungarian phonology is more sophisticated.

Vowel harmony is very hard to learn. You cannot think about it as you speak, since it takes a lot of time and is used in every word. It has to be intuitive to you. So it makes sense that both Hungarian and Turkish are hard languages to learn.
In addition to what m_fayer says, you can also bind native libs and make the same adjustments, so most native controls written in Objective-C or Java are basically drop-in (bindings are already available for most common components on NuGet, but they're almost trivial to write)

Binding Swift libraries is a pain though
AWS CloudTrail Adds Logging of Execution Activity for AWS Lambda Functions
Cloudflare Makes It hard to access website to promote it privacy pass extension
Cloudflare new techniques to promote there privacy pass extension, make it very irritating to surf the web.

Every single site i visit that use cloudFlare, i have to submit google ugly recaptcha, which is a real PITA
Introducing AWS Cloud9 – IDE in the Cloud
Ravishing Wedding Invitation Trends 2018
Alexa for Business is now GA
Except that the programmer rarely has an idea of the big picture and the business problems that need solving and often sees the world through narrow lenses of 'problems I've solved before' or 'how things are done' or 'knowing what's going on'. All those 'soft' skills are figuring out what needs doing (even if it's often difficult to translate that into a product that can be developed).
> What people say in meetings; all the posturing and preening; the petty one-upmanship and power-play — none of this has any relevance to what actually gets done in the real world.

That just sounds like you've had very negative experiences in terms of meetings / company culture.

I have lots of meetings where collaboratively we come up with much better approaches to problems, by sharing information and ensuring everybody is aware of other people's perspectives and domain expertise.

Sometimes yes there is confusion and BS. But if we push through it, we usually come out doing better work - or in the ideal case LESS work!
As others have said, yes, that's mostly the case.

Even parsing C and elaborating it to a correctly typed AST is not quite as simple as others are making it out to be, though. Getting all the implicit type conversions correct is not completely trivial, and is a popular source of bugs (see some examples in http://www.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/pldi11-preprint.pdf for instance).

There are also some annoying ambiguities in the grammar and in name resolution rules that mean that sometimes it's not easy to tell whether something is supposed to be a type name or a variable name: https://jhjourdan.mketjh.fr/pdf/jourdan2017simple.pdf

C is a "simple" language in many senses of the word, but it has a lot of complex details. It's fine to gloss over them when writing a compiler for a language very similar to C for learning purposes, but getting everything just right for actual C is tough.
Line up all the things in the universe that are intelligent. They are all conscious.

Unless you mean "imitating intelligence", but that's not what AGI (artificial general intelligence) is targeting.

An AGI robot would be one to include in any future line-up of "all the things that are intelligent". My view is that unless an AGI robot has a nervous system, it will never belong in that category.

It is fashionable in tech today to speak metaphorically with abandon and to call whatever we like "intelligent" (and to have, machine "learning", etc.). These systems are no more intelligent than an abacus: upon inventing a wood-to-lcd converter, we could run Win95 on a few million wooden beads.

Metaphorically, these are intelligent. They fill the role of prior uses of genuine intelligence -- ie., they can help us calculate and therefore substitute our calculative conscious behaviours for non-conscious substitutes. They are tools.

My hammar is no more intelligent than my laptop however. Neither possess thoughts, nor can conceptualize or understand anything. A concept is a (biochemical) technique an animal acquires through a biochemical interaction with the world: an electric field can not have concepts.

The argument that machines-which-seem-intelligent are intelligent is only a fallacy of ambiguity. What we mean, of machines, is a tool-which-helps-conceptualizing. We we mean of general intelligence is conceptualizing. The former and the latter are not the same. In a universe only of tools, nothing thinks to use them.
Hungarian and the other Finno-Ugric languages have diverged thousands of years ago. They share some basic words from the hunter-gatherer time (heart, water, fish etc...), but this is apparent only for linguists as the writing and pronunciation has diverged a lot.

Since then, hungarian language got a strong and more recognizable influence from turkic/slavic/germanic languages.
I've been using ledger for years. I really wanted to give beancount a try, but keeping documentation in google docs aggravates me. I understand that it might be easier for the writers to write and keep up to date. But it's an absolute pain to read/browse/skim/search, which is the whole point of documentation.
Essentially:

1) Stocks are super expensive, so future yields from stocks are expected to be low. (Since price increases will be low and dividend per invested dollar will be low.)

2) Bonds yields are super low, because interest rates are super low.

This means that logically you should put your money into other investments. Which just isn't happening that much . Uncertainty has led to a "flight to safety" into US stocks and cash. Investors currently seem to prefer buying big, expensive companies instead of gambling on higher yield/risk investments.
The incredible inventiveness of Hedy Lamarr – Glamour and glass ceilings
I found it frustrating as well
Anyone that wants to write C compilers has two good books for it.

"A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation", from David R. Hanson and Christopher W. Fraser

"Compiler Design in C", from by Allen I. Holub

A bit old, but there are not significant changes to C since they were written, other than optimizers taking advantage of UB.
Advent of Code 2016 Day12: Leonardo's Monorail
How to Make a Killing Off Smug Instagram Hipsters
The power of benefit-led messaging in tech
From a linguistic perspective, languages being geneologically close to each other does not imply a degree of mutual intelligibility. Dutch and English are close, closer than German and English. But it is possible that English speakers end up learning Spanish easier. Why? Languages are really complex structures, sometimes they don't reason.
> Not that I had any success with it, but here is a book/site about how to learn which I found interesting:

> https://www.fluentin3months.com

He hasn't had any success with it either. Benny is incredibly bad at speaking the languages he's claimed to have "learned" in 3 months.
https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/technic...
So there are two stages here... First is caring about the what, and getting no traction in determining that. It's left to the PMs. Second is caring about the how, trying to at least get ideas implemented on that front. But what's the stage after that? If you get no traction on making a better what, nor doing it with a better how?

Will a company with a strong why, a sense of purpose, that is felt and understood by all the employees help ward off the troubles of obsessing over what and how?
Should I use a serverless architecture for my next project?
Vespa Meetup in Sunnyvale
Ha! I'm living in Vietnam now and it is listed as "Usually more difficult than other languages in the same category." which is a complete understatement!
Do people often rely on tail-recursion for real-world programs?
Before anyone wonders if I know what it is, yes, I do, and yes, I've used it appropriately, but it feels so... academic.
On the beach in Thailand.

I was living on Tonsai for the winter rock climbing season. She came out to do the same about a month after me, arriving on New Years day. I struck up a conversation and we sat on a log and watched the sunset.

A couple months later, I abandoned my idea of working North through China and instead followed her to Australia where we bought a cheap van and spent another month or so surfing. Eventually I followed her home and we've been together ever since.

Every New Years, we make a point of ending up on a West-facing beach to watch the sunset together.

On the 10th anniversary of meeting, we flew ourselves, our kids, and as many of our friends as we could convince back to that same beach and got married as the sun set.

A bit sappy, I know. But feel free to appropriate it if you and your spouse ever need a better story.
Jobs: Zcash looking for software developers
> Who sane in their brain thinks this actually lead to new newsletter subscriptions?

They probably have metrics showing so. Otherwise they really are insane.
If the phone won't start because of a defect, they won't need your PIN because your phone won't start to enter it in.
Very nice. I got see two of these machines as well recently. The memory is indeed quite fascinating. And I totally understand and share that guy's fascination with bringing back things from the past.
There are plenty of times you do need to authenticate someone's true identity. If you're opening a bank account, or offering a loan or credit account (of any sort).

Personally, I'd go so far as even if you're opening an email or social media account under your purported real name (so someone else can't set up a Twitter or Instagram account pretending to be you).

To clarify, given how easily people trust social media, identity verification should probably be required unless it is clearly a pseudonym.
I don't know anything about Arabic but can't see how this can affect English speakers learning rate. This same situation exist in almost every large country. German, for example, can have different phonology and cases based on region. Similarly, Russian too. Turkish pronunciation changes very heavily based on region.
> Worse of all, though, his concern that “We aren’t building the right thing” will be replaced with “We aren’t building the thing right.”

Oh man, this one hits very close to home.

I can say there exists at least one additional circle of hell, found after the engineer has abandoned all hope of influencing code-quality. The kind found after executives have hired outsourced teams to "help" add features with no code-review process or commit-hooks.

Perhaps: "We aren't logging errors right."
Aaand a glaring hole in my ability to evaluate language learning techniques is revealed to me: I can't actually speak any of the languages in his examples.

Well, at least I mentioned Ms Lomb as well!
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If I understand correctly, there are the novel features of this paper:

- Use neural network to learn (state, action) -> (state, prev_state) separately.

- Use this neural network to predict state in 100-step horizon and use that prediction to chose action in RL setting.

This method reduces sample complexity of RL. The method still isn't beating model-free methods with lots of data. I think the interesting part was using micro insects which unfortunately are not available commercially and results may not be reproducible by others.
I hear this sentiment from Europeans often, and I’m sure it’s true. But obviously the languages you’re talking about have a lot more in common with each other than they do with say, Chinese or any other “eastern” language.