skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I'm yet to see a system that produces music that I would call 'good'."

This is really in the eye of the beholder. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

There's plenty of incredibly popular music created by humans that I absolutely detest, compared to which computer-generated music (as boring, random, or predictable as it might be) can't possibly be any worse.

For my own personal taste, it's rare that completely computer-generated music sounds "good" to me, but it happens. Here's an example, from one of David Cope's EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence): [1]

When we depart from strictly and completely computer-generated music to music that contains some generative elements which are "curated" or guided by humans, to my taste the music gets much better. Then we get in to the realm of what could be termed human-computer collaboration.

I like Brian Eno's analogy of "composer as gardener", in which the composer may plant musical seeds and then guide the music to fruition, while not controlling or being the "author" of every nuance as happens with more traditional views of composition.[2]

[1] - ftp://arts.ucsc.edu/pub/cope/beet2.mp3

[2] - https://www.edge.org/conversation/brian_eno-composers-as-gar...
To me, it's interesting because it appears to be a somewhat novel approach to both fundraising and marketing a moonshot company.

Perhaps I'm wrong in thinking this is novel though; it's possible people just like when Boring co. makes a marketing push.
I'm guessing you think these should be illegal because they could kill people.

I think they should be illegal only if there are statistics showing that a non-negligible percentage of them are used to kill people and there are reasons to believe that a state can lower their homicide rate by banning them.

Assault rifles pass the above test, but not sure flamethrowers do.
You misunderstand the raison d'être for pieces like this.

AI-powered filter bubbles are a problem with massive consequences, and op-eds like this one are an important part of the broader discourse; not only for casual readers (the wordy but poignant imagery is for them) but more importantly for legislators and corporations to whom, in the context of other such opinion pieces across the publication landscape, such pieces signal political will for regulation in this space. That's what matters: that people are out there are articulating these arguments, trivial though they may seem to tech folk like us.
I believe, based on the math, that 6 6-bit values barely don't fit in 32 bits. :(
You'd expect coders to be a logical bunch. But they flock like sheep behind their idols. A Musk branded flamethrower that's 3X the cost of a similar competitor is #1 on HN.
Indeed, it is a pleonastic bit.
I dunno, have you ever seen someone decide to burn a really dry christmas tree? If I'm lighting a big bonfire I'd definitely prefer to have as much distance as possible between me and the fire.
You trust a non-government organization more than you trust the state?

Why? As detailed in this article, the government doesn't need to collect the data -- they just buy it from these private companies and get it anyways.

At that point, there's no difference whatsoever. They have the data, it doesn't matter who they got it from.
Citrix Podio went down for 27 hours. This is what happened
Hugh Masekela, South African trumpeter/flugelhornist/cornetist/composer has died
Separating teaching and grading might fix this.
If anyone's interested in more examples, I spent last month doing a "thing a day" bunch of procedural music experiments with Web Audio. A couple of the ones that seemed to work:

* tries to create a semi-randomized fugue: http://aphall.com/2017/12/advent-18/

* jazz combo improvising over the title theme from Metroid: http://aphall.com/2017/12/advent-16/

* generates a chiptune over the progression of Autumn Leaves: http://aphall.com/2017/12/advent-17/

Caveat, they're likely too CPU-intensive for mobile devices.
> servers will be down for the next few hours. We are recreating our entire environment to replace AWS CloudFormation with @HashiCorp Terraform.

One of the greatest strengths of terraform (vs say, cloudformation) is that you can adopt existing resources, and ZERO downtime is needed to migrate.

Why take downtime?
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy Ether\Ethereum\Gas (whatever the correct name for the currency is)?
Wasn't there a Supreme Court case a while ago that ruled it illegal for the government to put a tracking device on your car? Given this recognition technology, could someone challenge the visible license plate requirement as an illegal tracking device?
By the way, "Amazigh" is not a typo!
How might one make a few bucks from Tether falling apart?
A performance of his signature hit "Grazin' in the Grass" at Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, California in 2014:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzW1XZoQ-6U
Last I checked they don't even get free Prime accounts, the Amazon discount is capped ridiculously low, and the stock vesting schedule is terrible, especially considering how short the tenure is likely to be given how they treat employees. The vibe I get is that you're supposed to think working there is the perk. But you can do so much better elsewhere.
Turns out Devumi's been shilling services on G+:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180128030946/https://plus.goog...

https://plus.google.com/+Devumi
They’re heavy, unwieldy, and a cop with a sidearm will beat you on range. They’re great for clearing out bunkers and pillboxes, but not really an effective weapon in general circumstances.

As for the thickener, adding dish soap or styrofoam to gasoline and diesel mix will do the job; rocket science this ain’t.
I'm just waiting for the musical rendition of USDT. Matt Stone and Trey Parker can re-use half of The Book of Mormon.

Just replace golden plates with USDT.
Not really: just because the market cap of an altcoin is in the billions doesn't mean there's more than a tiny fraction of that amount actually invested (as in, bought with fiat) into it.
Its all good fun, people like jokes and references to things.

Coders are logical but theyre not robots. My companys desks are full of overpriced merchandise from memes and movies.

Also there's nothing else more interesting on HN today.
It's pretty cool and all but what are the uses for this? What set of 4 un ordered 5-bit numbers would i need to store that I couldn't just store as 3 bytes? I waste only 4 bits while preserving the order if need be of the values I'm storing. I can think of a very very small few occasions 4 bits would matter over order but nothing realistic. Again It's a cool trick and I'm not trying to be a dick about it. I like cool little tricks like this even if there's no purpose. I'm honestly curious about some realistic use cases for this or some variation of this with larger numbers.
> My employer provides free meals

Do you mean most big tech employers in the US?

I've never heard of an Australian company providing food for employees. Is it common in the US, or just amongst the big tech companies?
Bitcoin Dip Frequency Data
I agree with the central idea, but the "networking events" are not representative of the industry. They attract professional b*itters by definition.

There is nothing unique about running a startup, it's another business, but, as of today, with great expectations and generally more money and higher risk of quick failure than a mainstream business.
> Is any part of the Democratic Party not pro-capitalist? (As in, “we should have a fundamentally capitalist economy, shaped by some regulation and redistribution to deal with negative externalities and alleviate hardship.”)

That particular binary sense is not the sense I was using; I was using it as a relative descriptor within the Party for favoring a relatively more-capitalist version of the modern mixed economy compared to other factions of the Democratic Party.
Neoliberalism is an economic policy rather than a political ideology. Both Dems and Repubs practice neoliberalism.

Trump, depending on mood, is not quite a neoliberalist given his view that other countries do not reciprocate our neoliberal economics.

It's his opposition to neoliberalism which causes consternation amongst the old right (Bushes). But enamors him amongst traditional unionists who see his policies as more favorable to American workers.
What's the practical use for this?
I grew up in Alaska, though not far enough north that night never ended. Still, when you go to a mostly windowless school (yay 70s brutalist architecture), you arrive in the dark and leave in the dark. I'd get a peek at the sun sometimes but effectively I'd only see the sun on weekends.

Both the winters and summers were surreal, the days bled into one another. I don't miss it at all, though I wouldn't mind going back home for a week in the middle of winter just for the memory jog.
I don't understand as well...
Classic TeX would be damn near useless in the age of Unicode, so you're looking at something like XeLaTeX or LUATex. The problem is that it's really easy to implement a really basic form of TeX, but unless you already planned for the really hard cases, maintaining your implementation is going to become intractible. TeX's real text typesetting is almost always woefully ignored even though _everything_ has to type beautifully, not just makes, and in modern version of TeX, that has to happen without insane syntax just to get a Unicode character we can already "just write" rather than needing all kinds of dedicated macros just for diacritics, it something as simple as mixing two writing scripts that necessitate two different fonts entirely.
Use a phony target that does whatever you want. Mine typically invoke cc to build the program ("cc -O3 -Wall -o main main.c", something like that?), then run the program ("./main"), which prints its stuff to stdout and stderr. Makes it very easy to build+run from within Emacs, where the default compile command is "make".
Well New York state and apparently others ban nunchucks. Can't have two sticks connected by a string. In light of that (pun intended) it is surprising that a device which shoots flames 50 feet out at 4000psi hasn't made the list.
I can add swimming exercises, no problem :)
Up next:

Tesla coil security systems?
Tldr- yes, unless you have them donate the prize money to charity in your name.
You make some very compelling arguments, thanks for taking the time to dig deeper into this with me.
What's the backstory on moving from Indiana to Norway?
I’m so glad so many more people are disagreeing with the truism “ideas are cheap”. Everytime people say that, I have to roll my eyes. Like really? execution is hard but easier as its operating within known boundaries and restrictions.
Is this profitable?
Show HN: An open source web application to track cryptocurrency prices
I started and sold a company with a random person. He now runs an even more successful startup.

At the time I had followed all advice of starting companies with friends, only to get screwed by very close friends. So I gave up on this whole business with friends thing and tried matching with people from Facebook.

The trick is not to get married on the first date, but use these platforms to just meet like minded people.
Seems like you could have just avoided the headache by just replying to reviewer from the get-go? It clearly seemed like a mistake.

> "Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance/stupidity"

More ignorance in this case.
What are some YouTube channels to progress into advanced levels of programming?
There are some cool YouTube channel suggestions on
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224165
But I wanted to know which of those are great to progress into advanced level of programming? Which of the channels teach advanced techniques?
This is fascinating. It's almost a forcing function to prevent overwork and burnout.

Imagine if the lights were on and it was 72 degrees, 60% humidity, 24/7 — the plants wouldn't thrive.
Is there a “backfire effect”?
AI in medicine: Outperforming humans since the 1970s
When egg freezing goes wrong
It's an IFO - initial flamethrower offering!
Or pascal/delphi.

Python + pascal are by far the ones I enjoy the most. I do a lot of F# now, and I like it, except, is not a good pascal!

i.e: The thing that bother my most of F# is that by default it not force to anotate types. One thing good about pascal is that is VERY EASY to figure out almost any line you read (without IDE help. Infurate me that F# know, but hide the knowledge to me!). With python is easy to infer the operations but not the data (ie: easy to read "I'm iterating" but not "and is a array of ints")

I could anotate a lot on F#/Python but is not idiomatic. This mean, that a lot of times I'm lost with F# in the ways is with python, with the worse thing that the infered stuff get crazy hard.

But, IMHO, python and pascal are in the TOP of truly well designed languages, where the sum of all the small things match well
Yeah, I can make a coin with $10T supply and sell one for $1 and imply a $10T market cap.
> how much money are they going to raise from selling hats or flamethrowers?

None? That isn't the point?

To be fair, GP is completely wrong about the nature of this gimmick, but why the hate on Musk? Does it annoy you to see someone throwing outlandish ideas at the wall to see what sticks? Or to see someone attempt to enter new markets when existing choices aren't sufficient?
In a similar vein, some processors have encodings for branch conditions that work out along the lines of:

Branch if zero

Branch if nonzero

Branch if less than zero

Branch if greater than zero

Branch if greater than or equal to zero

Branch if less than or equal to zero

Branch always

Branch never (actually documented on the Motorola 68HC11, I believe)
If it was I can promise you amazon would be out of gpu instances.
Interview: GraphQL at Shopify with Evan Huus
Short futures.
Amazon has had private label products for years, like many retailers do.
Geogebra, https://www.geogebra.org/, might suit your purpose. See it in action
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjPakjpEAXs
You can use it to produce docs, such as
https://www.geogebra.org/m/M4nBYbbG#material/c3wwdgD5
http://www.interestingprojects.com/cruisemissile/
Taking this to the extreme, you could "store" 65535 1-bit values in one 16-bit value. You just have to keep track of how many of them are equal to 1.
There's a pretty wide spectrum between 4 hours per week and working yourself to death.

As a co-founder/technical person, I immensely enjoy what I do. Frankly, I'll get bored pretty quickly sitting at the beach and staring at the ocean. It's fun and relaxing, but I kinda "get the point" after some time. Whereas, there are endless challenges to keep me motivated, curious, and ultimately satisfied "at work".

It was more or less the same satisfaction and fulfillment I had as an employee. I just enjoyed the challenges and still got compensated generously back then.

Disclaimer: I didn't read the book. I'm sure it has some great points or it won't resonate with so many people. Also I should mention that at our company we instated a 45-days holidays per year policy (this includes personal and public holidays, we're 100% remote, no VC, but no dreams of mega money). So we do see a lot of value in not working to death.
My point about the transport fares was really badly put. Sorry. I meant that the whole system has an inherent single point of failure and single central authority: the train system. A train ticket for a train that doesn't run is useless ;) Using a distributed, authority-less system to provide the tickets doesn't change that.

I totally agree about pure research giving us CS "toys" that eventually turn out to be useful. But we've had ten years to find some use for blockchain that isn't cryptocurrency, and as far as I'm aware, no-one's found one. My suspicion is that this is because the problems that the blockchain solve only rarely need solving. It's unlucky that one of those rare occurrences is currency, hence all the bullshit.
Could one practical use of the general case be to store factorial based numbers efficiently ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factorial_number_system
Are you sure you don't mean

log2((32*31*30*29)/(4*3*2*1) + (32*31*30)/(3*2*1) + (32*31)/(2*1) + 32/1) = 15.34

using the number of sets of values from {0, 2^5-1} with at most 4 elements?

If on the other hand you want to store exactly 4 values, possibly with duplicates (while still ignoring order), you need to count multisets ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag_(mathematics)#Counting_mul... )

log2( (35*34*33*32)/(4*3*2*1) ) = 15.676
That would be United States v. Jones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)
Wouldn't it be better to use IR to saturate the camera?

I think they use IR to 'light' up the plates at night, otherwise the exposure time would be too long to pickup a license plate.

Should make your car invisible to dashcams too.

I want an IR detector for my car, so I can know when I'm getting hit by one of these things. Not that it will accomplish much.
Can you elaborate on the second part? Are you saying you're going to expand the size of the universe by a factor of 2^(k-1) to use as locations of the "bars"?
Or create a vinyl wrap on your car of license plates that don't exist.
Just a bit of historical correction. The article/post says:

"Ten years later, in 1978, his work bore fruit"

This gets things pretty wrong. He got the idea in 1977, and his estimate of "this will take 6 months" was pretty close, in that the initial version was finished sometime in 1978. It then took about another ten years to be "actually done". (Rewrite, add features, fix bugs, create Metafont, create WEB, etc...)
Consider contacting Google cloud or payment support people. Also maybe check with your credit card company to see how they responded to any payment request from Google.
Congrats on finishing exon 101. Now learn econ 201 where they teach about monopoly and monopsony and why someone having access to more money doesn't mean that person derives higher utility from their purchases.
Chronophobia
> As stated in the Wikipedia article[2] this is probably one of the most embarrassing moments in Swedish politics.

I checked the linked Wikipedia entry and it didn’t give any context for why this was such an embarrassment. I also searched Google for more info, but the English-only search results didn’t turn up anything useful. I gave up after the first five or so had nothing to add.

I’m curious if you can give a more detailed explanation of why this was such a gaffe. The limited info on this incident isn’t helping me paint a picture of the situation. As it stands, it seems to be a rather harmless request. I’m missing something significant, I think, about the delivery or tone.

Edit: I should clarify that I’m reading this at a time when I am not in a position to follow the YouTube link.
The pay data on glass door is almost always lower than the market.
His math is right. The factorial already took care of the fact that order does not matter.

If you want to optimize storage of duplicates, you still have to store the number of duplicate numbers, and you are back where you started.
I love python. And hate Java (as logical is to hate a language, ok?)

Java have a super big assets: A very powerfull VM. And this is the part where python is not as good. Is sad that Python3 was not used as the moment to build up a good VM, but well, history is history.

And this actually mean: Put a very strong and well funded team behind it. Make a good VM for python is hard
Bots and arbitrage, yes.
My point was that we already have bullet point 2.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/30/16569402/ai-generate-fak...

Bullet point 1 probably isn't too far off.
Copyright Royalty Board Boosts Songwriters’ Streaming Pay Nearly 50%
You are right. The person hiding behind big words is arguing from definitions without understanding the context for applying them.
Yes, this is it. Thanks. Now he's selling the content. But hey, why not?
It actually does. A lot of people moved recently to tether due to volatility as a stable value token.
Following bitfinexed@ is also good.
Most governments really doesn't like people issuing anonymous assets that are "as good as dollars" like Liberty Reserve or Tether.

The entire point of Tether is to help cryptocurrency exchanges avoid AML/KYC laws (because it's expensive to comply with them) and their problems appear to stem from that. IIRC Tether is based in Taiwan and their mystical $2B bank account is presumably in some "offshore" jurisdiction. If Tether ever released an audit they'd have to reveal either that they have no money or what bank they're using and then that bank would be pressured to close their account.
Shame all these players cant get their shit together before we all have electric cars :-(
New license plates in my jurisdiction are $59... Maybe something to do every few years...
It's because ads are "free" money. They make money for/from things that people don't want to or can't pay for.

I'm definitely not saying it's a good thing. I lost all patience for it years ago, but I get how it happens. It makes a sad sort of sense. Don't want to properly fund schools because it means you pay an extra point on your taxes? OK, let's sell the kids' attention to the highest bidder. Let's put some junk food vending machines in the halls while we're at it. (Or, more realistically in most states where school budgets are tied to local tax revenue: Rich districts get an ad-free and well-funded education experience, while poor districts have to pursue every possible avenue to raise funds.)

I wish I knew how to turn it around. Nobody likes it, as far as I know. But, nobody seems to be doing much about it.
People have different morals and ethics. I don't have a problem with DRM, for instance, and even if we debated to the point where I had to concede some theoretical problem with it, it'd be pretty far down my list of ethical priorities.

I'm not commenting to advocate for the notion that people should get an ethics education so they'll all turn out to be good Democratic Socialists. I'm saying, our field would be better off if people recognized that their ethics intersect with the field heavily, and they should do this work mindfully.
Making sense of string theory
I'm not particularly convinced.

Your comment reminds me of someone's essay on programming languages, and of the improved efficiency of adopting same. There was machine language, and then assembler, and then the first set of third-generation languages, and then ... C. And for all that's come along after C, there's been some progress, but in general, relatively little.

Each variant has its advantages, and disadvantages. C itself has major problems (it's insecure as hell), but ... works well enough. And so we're caught in a bit of a hairpin-bend effect.

I'd have to see a particularly good argument that this is a fundamental limitation of human minds, or of technological sociology (that is: the net effects of programmer skill and education), or something like that.
Lot's of these reading/lecture lists around https://functionalcs.github.io/curriculum/
"Marxist" is the new indicator for Godwin's law. It's a term free market fundamentalists who don't understand the real world trot out to show that they have nothing substantive to say anymore.
I said this before, and i will say it again.

Call your representative and voice your opinion. Donate to eff and aclu or any other civil and digital liberties organizations, to help them protect our privacy and rights through legal means.

Privacy evasion is slippery slope and it only gets worse.

Take this as your daily or weekly reminder to do something, even if that something is donating just the price of a coffee.