skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the past 5 years or so, as a kind of benchmark, I've been checking how Google translates a particular word from Greek, to French.

The word is "χελιδόνι", meaning "swallow" (the bird) in Greek. For as long as I've been trying this tiny little experiment, Google has been translating it to the French word "avaler"- the verb "to swallow".

https://translate.google.com/#el/fr/%CF%87%CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%B9...

Once in a while, a different translation appears- "machaon", which is a kind of butterfly, the Old World swallow-tail. This is slightly closer but still absurd. If GT can make the connection to "swallow-tail", how can it not see the connection to the bird, "swallow"?

The problem seems to be that, in order to translate from Greek to French, Google goes via English. A great big chunk of context is lost in the process, especially since now the translation between two languages that have different forms for male and female nouns goes through a third language that does not.

So for example, I've seen the same gender-reversal as Hofstadter reports in his article. The following string in Greek means "I saw my teacher and she said hello to me".

Είδα τη δασκάλα μου και μου είπε γειά.

The following are the French and English translations by GT:

J'ai vu mon professeur et il m'a dit bonjour.
I saw my teacher and he said hello.

This seems to happen because Google's English language model has learned that "he" is found in the context of "teacher" and "said" more often than "she" is. But of course, such a statistical association is, well, meaningless and for that useless when it comes to translation, where you actually need to know when the least likely case is correct.

Generally, it looks like the complete abandonment of any attempt at representing meaning, and relying instead on text statistics to do meaning-intensive work like translation, is producing a lot of nonsense. And that's not a criticism of Google Translate only. I think professor Chomsky might "win" that old debate with prof. Norvig, after all.
I agree in general, but a degree seems even harder than a binary condition?
I don't know what translation engine Bing is using, but I find that combining Google Translate and Bing results gets me pretty close to the real thing.

I wish teams making those two could work together :(
Bioaccumulation of pesticides in animal tissue is a serious problem.

I do not think you can ever consume the same amount of pesticides by eating plants if before that you ate nontrivial amounts of chicken, chicken eggs, beef, milk etc. Cow eats several tons of plants in its lifetime. I'm pretty sure human comes no where close. The bioaccumulation happening there is a serious issue.

That stuff is filled with bioaccumulated pesticides.
The UK mostly pays developers a derisory salary.

Australia seems to pay roughly on a par with the US, or did when I lived there. But most of the UK is dreadful - software folks are paid poorly and treated like drones.

Unfortunately there are enough people that will take the bad salary, have mediocre performance and deliver mediocre software slowly, that a lot of British companies now expect to pay peanuts and get monkeys.

I've found the only way to replicate the money you can get elsewhere is to be a contractor. You can make about double your quoted figure outside London (my experience in the Hampshire/Wiltshire/Dorset region), or triple or more if you land something bank related in London. No idea what might be available in Edinburgh.
Good point. I was thinking regular street class regenerative braking might be an issue in sports. It'd be interesting to see if F1 is doing anything to compensate harder braking on rear axle.

After all, front brakes do need more power. Otherwise rear wheels are easy to lock out. ABS would kick in reducing regenerative braking. I guess they'd need much stronger front brakes and have regenerative braking kick in progressively with how the brake pedal is applied?

Of course, they could do 4-wheel regenerative braking even with one driving axle.. But that'd be another can of worms.

I'd love to read full paper [0]. Looks like they're looking into this exact problem.

[0] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4077342/?tp=&arnumber=40...
Maybe the interesting question is what allows for the mucus lining of the intestines walls to deteriorate that much, that those strain of bacteria settle in.
In this case there is circumstantial evidence - from what I understand there is a huge difference in population estimates between the first time contact was made with Europeans, and every time after that. All accounts point to an apocalypse due to diseases, even before the Spanish conquistadors came.

In other words: it was the previous ground research that was at odds with the written accounts.
> [...] Japanese - considered (one of) the most difficult languages in the world.

Just in case, one of the most difficult languages to learn by native English speakers. It is pretty easy for Koreans for example---they share the same sentence order (subject-object-verb) and many words frequently share the etymology due to throughout Chinese influence.

More quantitively, Idibon had once catalogued [1] the weirdness of natural languages compared to others. English ranked 33rd place out of 239 languages. Quoting the original, "[p]art of this is to say that some of the languages you take for granted as being normal (like English, Spanish, or German) consistently do things differently than most of the other languages in the world".

[1] https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdes... (the original link is dead)
The interesting question will be how do users arrive at individual piece of the bricolage? If we look at the "save mobile content for later" example, I am sure once upon a time people felt it to be easier to simply copy the link, open the email client and then email -- instead of using the "share" button.

That said I am also kind of lost on the conclusion here.

> Using theory to support our research findings allowed the team to gain a greater sense of self-awareness into their assumptions and how others without those assumptions might think and behave differently.

While insights are fine, without concrete examples, this is just a hypothetical whether this really helped the engineering team.
That sounds like a lot of work. My armchair-engineer instinct suspects it would be a lot simpler or at least cheaper to run everything in the browser (Emscripten/WASM), and serve static pages from a single node.
> Human: After the defeat, many professors with Pan-Germanistic leanings, who by that time constituted the majority of the faculty, considered it pretty much their duty to protect the institutions of higher learning from “undesirables.” The most likely to be dismissed were young scholars who had not yet earned the right to teach university classes. As for female scholars, well, they had no place in the system at all; nothing was clearer than that.

> Google: After the lost war, many German-National professors, meanwhile the majority in the faculty, saw themselves as their duty to keep the universities from the “odd”; Young scientists were most vulnerable before their habilitation. And scientists did not question anyway; There were few of them.

> DeepL: After the lost war, many German national professors, now the majority of the faculty, regarded it as their duty to protect the universities from the "oddities"; the most defenceless were young scientists from their habilitation. And women scientists were not questioned anyway; there was little agreement on a few things.

I'd say the DeepL translation is slightly better. It still misses most of the points.
Typically, applications disable the save button when there are no changes that could be saved.
>Languages like Rust and Haskell are an attempt to put such best practice into the language tooling.

Best practice often varies between projects and changes rather often, ..say.. in a matter of a few years. Most of what Haskell and Rust offer are a library away (yes, even compile time checks) for C++, but not vice versa. There is a reason new languages with baked in 'opinion' come and go.
> When Hofstadter says "There's no fundamental reason that machines might not someday succeed smashingly in translating jokes, puns, screenplays, novels, poems, and, of course, essays like this one. But all that will come about only when machines are as filled with ideas, emotions, and experiences as human beings are", that is just an assertion. I can translate passages about war even though I've never been in a war. I can translate a novel written by a woman even though I'm not a woman.

When refuting his claims, he also makes some errors. Hofstadter has some very good reasons to justify what he says, whereas Shallit's argument is more or less "we can do slightly better translations now than before, so there is no reason they couldn't be better" - whereas the whole point of Hofstadter is that it's impossible to do exactly using current methods.

I understand both views and I think Shallit might have a point, but he doesn't justify it well. Simply by using statistical methods you can achieve surprisingly good results, although the error ratio is still too high IMO. What we already can do is to produce relatively good translations of texts belonging to well defined domains, such as legal documents. But in order to do it well with all domains, we'd need to find a good method of passing on the necessary context information to the translation engine.

Imagine translating subtitles of a movie. It's absurd to expect the machine will produce better results than a human as it's lacking visual cues. However, if we manage to transmit this information to the translation machine (via Computer Vision, audio profiling etc.), it can get much better results. It's very difficult to expect good results could be obtained just by training the neural networks based on previous movies. Yet, this is what Shallit seems to argue.
Nope, take a look at Japanese audiobook stores e.g. https://www.febe.jp/, they're chock-full of self-improvement garbage. In fact out of 5 new books that come out 3-4 are of the "Get People to Like You in 10 Simple Steps" type.
If you haven't updated your browser for four years then you've got a hell of lot more to worry about than if javascript works correctly.
Hofstadter's strength is his ability to stay focused on the highest level cognition problem. His theory is that analogies are the core of human cognition. His main work revolves around discovering how extensive human ability to think using analogies is.

I especially like his attempts to understand and capture the high level cognition in simple toy problems. His `copycat` and `Letter Spirit` programs illuminate the problem and his thinking in very clever way.

The current AI and ML research is building things bottom up and there is still significant gap before we reach the high level cognition that Hofstadter is interested in. What is the representation that binds low level and high level cognition and allows high level fluid concepts to be used as analogies from one domain to next with just one or two examples? Style transfer, variational autoencoders and transfer learning are very limited in this regard.

Challenges for deep learning:

* Deep Letter Spirit. Show 1-3 examples of lowercase letters of the roman alphabet in some font and have an algorithm that understands the style and completes the rest of the alphabet in the same style.

* Bongard problems solver.
What's the point in getting all those $$$K if a single major medical event (like cancer) will bankrupt you?
Ah, and I just checked my retirement calculator. It claims that once I retire at 67 I'll have to pay $8K/month for my medical insurance.
> "It means they don't need to get lawyers involved to check for any licencing gotchas from other non-free code in the tool chain."

They don't need to open source the whole toolchain, just the parts of the code they own/wrote themselves. For the parts of the toolchain they can provide documentation (writing it out if this documentation needed to be created/revised) to fill in the missing pieces.

> "I don't see how they could do any of the above tasks for less than the price of this Kickstarter."

You seem to be overlooking that reverse engineering hardware drivers is a hugely inefficient process. People only do it out of necessity. Furthermore, the Kickstarter has set modest goals of enhancing the work that has already been done (MPEG2 acceleration, etc...), the end result is not a driver that can be used for more general purpose graphics acceleration (e.g. no OpenGL driver). That's not to say it isn't a good step forward, I welcome it, but you should be aware that there's a long road ahead after the work for the Kickstarter has been completed. If you don't believe me, look at the ongoing work being done by the Nouveau team.
I see this as an inevitable consequence of several deliberate design features. It's a link-sharing site, and people get karma for popular links. The votes serve to make the items rise on the front page, getting more votes, hence more karma.

So people will rush to be first, and there is no serious mechanism to check whether the same story, or even the nearly exact same link has been submitted before.

But anything more sophisticated will be more complex, harder to understand, more fragile, and possibly less popular. It's not hard to see several things that might make it better, but it's uncertain, more work, and guaranteed to make the system less transparent.

<fx: shrug />

To some extent it is what it is. But FWIW, I agree.
This a (mostly) solved problem. With Server Side Rendering the html payload delivers what the client side is would have rendered. The client side js takes over rendering after it loads.
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Result of the example Text from deepl.com:

At home, they have everything in duplicate. There is her own car and his own car, her own towels and his own towels, her own library and his own library.

It translates it a correctly from French.
Have you considered how much accumulated lifetime is wasted by all those 3 seconds again and again?
This whole mess started when Facebook decided that they know best what you would like to see.
We save more than 60% of daily water
You cannot make C++ secure and safe with a library.
I think this view of Docker is pretty common: poor man's virtualization. You'd prefer real VMs but you can't reliably & performantly run nested VMs on public providers. Or can you? What's the current status on AWS/GCP/DigitalOcean/Hetzner?
The best explanation demystifying consciousness I've found comes from a claim it's a social phenomena that only arose around 3000 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

These days most people are conscious because you need it to function in society; there is a good deal of evidence in the book.
"they die from being eaten, from disease, or starvation"

This is true in the animal kingdom as well. Especially for a farm animal, being eaten. If wolves can catch deer or elk, they can catch a cow. I mean you've seen cows right, not very fast. :) This is also an unfortunate consequence when animal rights activists decide to release domesticated animals, they don't know how to survive in the wild. My family would always take cats people didn't want anymore on our farm, and they disappeared quickly. We assumed coyotes, because their parents didn't teach them how to be careful. :( Instinct can only get you so far, you need to be taught as well, and generations in captivity means the parents didn't know what to teach.

And food gets scarce in winter. I was watching a documentary where one chipmunk was storing acorns, and another was hiding nearby, and just stealing them. I don't remember the name, but it was on netflix, and it was focused on high speed, high resolution camera work. The animals seemed to be an excuse to use the cameras, lol.

Also, if I had to die, I'd rather have a humane execution like a farm animal, rather than being eaten or starving. I know there are 'documentaries' that portray suffering on farms, but the farmers I know take good care of their animals. At least in the dairy magazines my dad gets, they are constantly stressing animal comfort, prevention of disease, reduce stress, etc. Because this maximizes production. First, those documentaries are biased, and second, those farmers aren't good at their jobs. Our cows seem happy and content, and why shouldnt they be? Plentiful food and water, we keep threats away(which is unfortunately why predators are often endangered or threatened), we do everything we can to make them comfortable, healthy, and happy. Keep in mind cows don't care about being in captivity, they don't have the concept of freedom. They just want food, safety, and mating.

Hope this doesn't sound harsh, but that argument is wrong. A good farm is supposed to be the ideal environment for the animal, the same way a garden is supposed to be the ideal place for a vegetable. The animals die much more humanely than in the wild. I facepalm every time i hear on of those "it is more ethical to hunt than buy from the store" arguments.
I loved remote work and did a lot of effort to ensure that we adopt a remote-friendly culture.

However I will never get over the fact that we found some of our engineers ended up doing freelancing work, over-estimating work and basically just slacking around in the freedom of their homes.

I would love to hear if anyone had similar experiences or how they prevent such in remote environments.
Yep, if you can't pivot and get into IT, data, streamlining and automating you're doomed. Walmart vs Mom and Pop shops is a great example of that. My family's business has been stuck in that rut for the 20 years that I've worked in the IT and marketing sectors. Very little growth, tons of untapped potential.
What Is the Last Question?
Not for me. I have a Tesla and I love it being silent most of the time(it is only dangerous and you have to be careful around schools and urban areas in general).

I feel the thermal engine motor noises so wasteful and disgusting. Going to wild nature and watching all animals flee because of stupid kids with their quads making unnecessary noise over 100 decibels makes me desire to punch those guys in the face.

The only time I went to F1 when I was a kid the sound was so high that you could feel it even with your hands on your ears. I found it painful and tacky.

I am engineer myself, and I see all this sound as waste energy that does not go to move the car. Barking dog never bites. All talk, no action.
Fun fact: the Vim plugin for my browser gave me the link hint "SSE" for the "<n> comments" link on the front page.
Seems like the passengers could have solved this themselves, by just walking in circles.
> "My point was that it seems pretty clear what the poster meant by "move faster". So the question "to what?" isn't all that helpful."

To be honest, I find that strange. Moving faster without setting goals about what you're moving faster for (other than profit) seems like a good recipe for dilution of focus. A company requires focus in order to maximise efficiency. Building up spare capacity just to buy time to run around like headless chickens seems like a wasted opportunity, from a business perspective.
A Mind for Numbers - Barbara Oakley

I spent a lot of time studying, but not learning effectively.
I identify with your point about nepotism, but ironically references favor nepotism.

People who have been lucky enough to work great mentors, and smart & supportive colleagues, are at an advantage.

I personally didn't find one of these environments until 5 years into my career, so I'm well aware of the closed minded, short fused, agitated, demotivated, and political developers that exist out there. I know this may be hard to understand for anyone working in Silicon Valley where smart and open minded colleagues are probably the norm, but the other perspective is worth keeping in mind when it comes to references.
On the other hand, it's interesting how well Google Translate translates philosophical text. Just compare the translations below.

Gadamer's text from Truth and Method:

Die folgenden Untersuchungen haben es mit dem hermeneutischen Problem zu tun. Das Phänomen des Verstehens und der rechten Auslegung des Verstandenen ist nicht nur ein Spezialproblem der geisteswissenschaftlichen Methodenlehre. Es hat von alters her auch eine theologische und eine juristische Hermeneutik gegeben, die nicht so sehr wissenschaftstheoretischen Charakters waren, als"vielmehr dem praktischen Verhalten des durch die Wissenschaft ausgebildeten Richters oder Pfarrers entsprachen und ihm dienten.

Weinsheimer and Marshall translation:

These studies are concerned with the problem of hermeneutics. The phenomenon of understanding and of the correct interpretation of what has been understood is not a problem specific to the methodology of the human sciences alone. There has long been a theological and a legal hermeneutics, which were not so much theoretical as corrolary and ancillary to the practical activity of the judge or clergyman who had completed his theoretical trainin

Google translate:

The following investigations have to do with the hermeneutic problem. The phenomenon of understanding and the right interpretation of the understanding is not only a special problem of the humanistic methodology. There has also been a theological and juridical hermeneutics from ancient times, which were not so much scientific-theoretical in character as they corresponded to and served the practical behavior of the scientist or pastor trained by science.
What's "important feature" for you is completely irrelevant for a lot of users that only want to send a text message. Whenever something else than plain text happens in my message is not only unintentional (I didn't even want to press the stupid button) but can incur high costs to me or my correspondents by my or by their phone company (neither all the world has the same contracts nor uses iMessages the way you do).

Having a bunch of buttons near the text field of a message to be sent that can be accidentally and easily hit is an UI fail for anybody surely not needing that bunch of buttons. You can show them to those who need them but you should let others protect themselves from them especially in the app that can result in sending SMS or MMS which can be expensive.
> "for reading documents from other people it's not."

I don't see the OOXML standard formats going away any time soon.
Faster decompression.

These things are loaded on every boot, which needs to be fast. That includes both the time to load them into RAM and to decompress them, and it's possible that gzip still wins on that.

Personally, I keep my initrd uncompressed because I've found that on my SSD loading that is faster than loading any compressed version + decompressing it, but that doesn't hold for spinning rust.
A Top ML Conference in Northern Europe for Developers
History shapes culture who knew? America is still fighting the Civil War.

But the Chinese don't blame the West for the decline of China and the fall of the empire. They blame the old corrupt elite. When Deng Xiaoping went abroad in the 80s he did his damnedest to appear cultured and in control.
Reddit does a simple link comparison to see if the article has been submitted before, which does limit the double-posts, however some people then intentionally subvert the process by running the link through a processor like outline.com or archive.is, or simply finding alternate articles from other sources.

This is unfortunate as the thing I really want to see is an in-depth conversation about a topic more than an individual article.
Six Nation Rugby 2018 Live