skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The technology to make AI-powered assistants truly useful is still far out of reach, and people aren't rushing to close that gap by adapting their behavior."

Exactly; if you build a bot with the intention of relying 100% on NLP, you're asking for trouble. But I fail to see how that fact leads to chatbots being useless when there are plenty of tools available for guiding necessary optimizations that can lead to a much better experience.

When websites were bad we turned to tools like Google Analytics to make website development data driven -- we didn't stop building them.
If they add features the same way they do with C# I don't see a problem. C# has been extended a lot from V1 but it doesn't feel bloated at all. I think C++ started from a much less solid foundation and is still suffering from that.
I wonder if this is an effect of print media getting involved with the web, thus trying to adopt various "guidelines" from printed documents to web sites.
Interesting work! We definitely need far better inference models in computational biology than what we currently have. I agree with your paper that modeling is unfortunately more of an "art" than a science nowadays... and with huge societal consequences.

Having said that, on a cursory read I think you may be misapplying Valiant's algorithm...

In particular, the original (union bound) PAC guarantee relies crucially on IID samples, so you cannot straightforwardly apply it to time series data and expect the guarantee to hold unchanged. Instead, you should use block bootstrap methods to sample consecutive segments of your time series of a certain size --in which case a (possibly weaker) PAC-like guarantee might hold, provided the dependence across time decays sufficiently fast [1].

I'm also a bit concerned about the semantics of your approach, since I thought gene regulatory inference was/is notoriously intractable, and Valiant's model is very stringent and conservative... So IMO somewhere along the line you are getting a massive free lunch simply by reducing to k-CNF!

Not saying it's wrong per se of course; but I couldn't easily tell exactly where the 'trick' is... So if I were you I would try to communicate more clearly (to dumb non-experts like me) how exactly this particular reduction captures something highly non-trivial in gene regulatory networks to achieve such a (seemingly) drastic speedup..

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4551412/

--
Tried it, xi-mac, though trips over a minimised font awesome css here, not even with all fonts, locks/freeze all other open windows.
I wonder why Uber isn't in the list? Definitely saw some Uber Volvos in SF last year.
Drchrono, HDP Health Integrate for Doctor and Patient Access to Clinical Trials
Draconian throttling is not step one of any sane business plan to exploit a lack of net neutrality regulation. The first phase is to start soliciting the protection payments from your intended victims, and that's not a very public process. Actually following through on the threats of throttling is a lower priority, and takes time to deploy.
JavaScript dev here. Type related Mistakes are common but A LOT of tests keep me safe. I avoid using the Object constructor for data that is passed around a lot and use functions as constructors to create common data structures to ensure their structure and properties are consistent. Simple example:

function User (name, email) { this.name = name; this.email = email; }

This simple solution prevents lots of common typing mistakes where object properties are inconsistent.

Sometimes I include some specific development-only type-checks on the params as well

We cant use Typescript, I would love to use it though
Good to hear from you Andre!

Yes yes yes WebRTC has been a ridiculous pain in the butt for me, which is why I still have websocket fallback as default - browsers really need to get their game together and improve WebRTC (I hear there is a new version coming up that should fix a lot of problems)

What database underneath for the demo? GUN of course, we added a framework called SEA (Security, Encryption, Authorization) which seamlessly integrates Web Crypto API in the background so app developers don't have to fuss with it directly or learn the Web Crypto API (which is poorly documented and very confusing, but a life saver that it is available at all!).

Huh, haven't heard of FlumeDB I will definitely check it out. Great progress BTW, super exciting to see the community grow!!! Yeah, IndexedDB has its quirks, I stuck with localStorage personally cause it works like a charm and is much faster than any perf I could get out of LevelDB (I must have been doing something wrong with Level, because it never worked as well as we were expecting).

I'm very excited to see a browser subproject of SSB, that will be great. If it helps at all, we're currently refactoring and modularizing SEA which may help with SSB in the browser even if gun isn't needed or used. Let me know!
Thanks; that’s good to know!
I use One phone for phone calls and personal use providing a wifi hotspot to another phone for Facebook and Google account.. I just wish I could get two separate phones in one case
Is there a list of protected classes? Seems ambiguous to me.
Personally I've moved away from the TypeScript compiler and towards the betas of `babel@7` and `@babel/preset-typescript` (https://www.npmjs.com/package/@babel/preset-typescript).

It seems to be faster and there is better integration with `jest`, `rollup`, various css-in-js libraries and (maybe in future?) `create-react-app`. (I still run `tslint` and `typescript` in the background for type-checking and linting. And I've written a tiny CLI to generate flat `index.d.ts` files to share my packages.)

The one thing I still miss about JavaScript is the possibility of writing codemods to speed-up upgrades. Unfortunately, in order for `jscodeshift` to support TypeScript, I think there would need to be some further work on `recast` (https://github.com/benjamn/recast/issues/424).

Hopefully the TypeScript team will continue to work closely with the Babel team, since this would be very good for the eco-system.
One script to exploit them all and in the darkness TCP bind them
Totally off topic: great blog. I was reading the archives these days, they’re awesome ;)
> This National Geographic documentary...

"This video contains content from National Geographic, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."

Ah, liberty!
I think Javascript is definitely way too forgiving. I just had a situation where a property name was mistyped. The value was "undefined" which then can be compared against strings. So the code worked without warnings but the results were wrong. Took several days to track this down in a long promises chain. With a typed language this wouldn't even have compiled.
Trigraphs can be supported with the simple expedient of putting a filter in front of the compiler that converts the trigraph sequences to the corresponding character. It doesn't have to be in the compiler itself.

In fact, trigraphs were designed to operate this way.

That is, until the addition of raw string literals broke that.
It is something that FATE fixes, albeit by handwaving for the most part! FATE is a much more story-focused rather than mechanics focuses game, and one of the core concepts is to only play through dramatically interesting conflicts with actual consequences for success and failure. In such a case, a routine skill check in D&D would just be explained as flavor in FATE; if you are breaking into a common shop as a master thief, just describe how you do it; now when you come across the merchant and the necromancer conspiring in the back, then the dice come out!
Am I daft or does it only tell you it's for SF only when you click sign up? I mean, I figured it was SF only but it's kind of annoying that I can't really confirm that in any explicit way based on the landing page.
Yes, human dignity like those capitalists who drilled giant oil wells in Nigeria, poisoned the land and the people, hired hit squads terrorize the native populace, then fled the country overnight when the regime changed.
How AlphaGo Sparked a New Approach to De Novo Drug Design
This is one of those 'good problems to have'.

"Sorry we have SO MANY users that it shows the location of, well, everything."
At least you don't need to register with a Facebook account to use all of the driver's features.
That was my main pain initially after I finally switched away from writing my scripts in Bash, but it actually turned out to be pretty easy. I wrote a quick helper function that does 99% of what I need:

def _call(cmd_str):
return subprocess.check_output(shlex.split(cmd_str)).decode("utf-8")

Definitely a verbose monstrosity compared to doing it in bash, but more than worth avoiding the garbage fire that is Bash. And it only works for simple cases
First of all you probably shouldn't complain about the JS ecosystem if you barely know anything about the JS ecosystem. This is evidenced by you bundling several things in your "amd vs esnext vs systemjs and Babel vs browserify vs requireJS vs webpack" which aren't directly comparable. Babel is a compiler, ESNext is a language specification (now ES6 since after being been finalized more than 2 years ago). amd, systemjs, requirejs, and browserify are all still supported and have not been "deprecated" as you say. However for the last 2 years Webpack has been the dominant module bundling system since it's incredibly powerful and extendable.

The standard for about 2 years now has been to use Babel + ES6 imports with Webpack. Babel lets you write ES6 code that compiles back to ES5, which means older browsers can run it. This means you can write modern code with patterns that will never get deprecated that works in older browsers. Webpack takes some configuration to fine tune it for large apps but getting it set up for a small app is pretty painless these days, and it continues to improve.

I'm honestly kind of sick of there being someone in every comment thread bursting through the door to tell everyone about all the bloat in the JS ecosystem. It's largely been solved and there's a lot of maturity in the libraries in use now. I think a lot of the frustration came from people who liked just pasting a script tag to add new libraries to their frontend, and any system which requires them to actually think and configure before pushing to production is considered too complicated.
No incremental compiler? I thought that was coming in 2.7. Really hope that lands soon. Compile times are my only complaint about TS, otherwise it is so much nicer than writing JS for anything mildly complex.
pypy gives decent speed, and RPython is quite impressive.

But I'm sure it is ease of prototyping and exploring the design space.
When I first joined Twitter a few years ago I tried the ‘search near me’ feature a few times.

Weather bots. For any city within 100 miles of where I am. Plus bots posting job listings. Plus companies posting those same job listings.

There was basically no signal to find, it was all noise. The few ‘legitimate’ ones I found were from local PD/FD.

I think they just need to ban all bots/automated postings. Or make them filters le and require a $100/mo account and $1/tweet. Something to discourage the absolute garbage.
I sort of agree that there isn't any strong reason for an interactive shell to have 100% bash compatibility. However, when I tried to convert to using fish I found my muscle-memory used too many simple history substitutions like "!!" and "!$" (which actually pre-date bash; they arrived with csh 40 years ago!) which were missing. Ultimately I gave up and went back to bash.

It sort of is an "uncanny valley" for a text interface. It feels close enough to a traditional UNIX shell that I start to interact with it like one... but has enough differences that I found myself constantly tripping over them.
Is that the job description for senior level+? It honestly doesn't sound unreasonable to assume a senior+ engineer to have experience with all of these technologies in this day and age. Software development tools have come a long way in the past decade and it's become possible for a generalist full stack dev to learn about and use every part of this (not having to be an expert in any, of course).

I'd say the more problematic part of hiring is in the interview stage, where inevitably you'll be asked questions around binary search trees, merge sorts, and the like. (Admittedly, I am also guilty of using such interview questions myself in the past as an interviewer.) I find that it's actually more reasonable to expect knowledge and working experience with all the tech tools you listed, than actually asking about inverting a binary search tree. I don't have good answers for what one should ask instead.
Not exactly - the Blackbird is designed to be able to change wheelbase and track to suit the vehicle that will then be placed in the shot using CGI. It doesn't replicate the driving dynamics (which as mentioned elsewhere here is largely a function of things that cannot easily be changed, such as weight distribution, not solely a function of traction balance/response which could be programmable in a suitable electric vehicle. There is of course all of the suspension and steering geometry to take into account as well as the damping/springing performance and so on). Not to say that the Blackbird isn't an impressive device, but it's not what the OP is referring to above (nor is what they say possible with current technology, IMO).
Email itself ought to be Considered Obsolete. It’s about time for a replacement based on decentralized privacy-preserving protocols like Matrix and IPFS.
I don't see why this is Strava's problem, to be honest.

The military, CIA should have a clear policy to disable all location services, on all devices at all times.

If you're not supposed to be somewhere and you go for a run on Strava, it's pretty much your fault.
Looking at the 2.7 updates, they don't really seem to be adding more features that result in bloat - instead there is a lot of work to make existing features more predictable and catch potential mistakes. Sounds good to me.
Perhaps you don't have any controversial opinions or beliefs. However, that could change. Not because you change your views, but because in the future a power could arise that wants to kill people who believe the things you do, and has no problem using force to acquire the data from Google to make their lists. Suddenly, you have a problem.
I will address that in part 2 of the FAQ, but the short answer is:

1) I prototyped it in Python; the dependency on the Python interpreter will be removed [1]

2) Oil went through many implementation languages, and one incarnation was 2000-3000 lines of C++. But I realized I would NEVER finish that way. The goal is to be compatible with bash, which is a tall order.

3) Oil is heavily metaprogrammed. It's only 16K lines of Python, compared to 160K lines of bash, and it can run some of the most complex bash programs out there. [2]

It's more accurate to say Oil is written in Python + ASDL [3], i.e. somewhat in the style of ML.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16277358

[2] http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/01/15.html

[3] http://www.oilshell.org/blog/tags.html?tag=ASDL#ASDL
I messed around with oil earlier this week when I saw this posted elsewhere and I've been a fish user for about 4 years now.

I'll have to give yours a spin too. I'm glad there's a lot of shell innovation right now. I'm all for breaking posix shell standards and creating things that are way more usable. Fish's prompt customization, functions, highlighting, completion and searching are pretty amazing.

I realize a lot of these little projects will come and go. No matter what, they're great learning tools for the creators/developers, exploring what it takes to make an interactive shell.

Still, I hope we see more stuff like fish come out (and make no mistake, fish took a lot of years and a lot of devs. In the early days my instance would crash every once in a while in ways I couldn't easily reproduce). It's great that we're finally getting away from the traditional bash/zsh/ksh stuff and into newer shells that make coding and navigation easier.
But if you are so skeptical of the "appeal to nature" how would you decide what's positive for Earth/the ecosystem?

Wouldn't you just come back to the conclusion of "What's good for nature must be natural or else it can't be part of nature?"

Imho it's that logic which most "appeals to nature" are built upon.
Exploring Stock Data with Jupyter
Some notes from the results they just released:

Revenues:
- 4Q revenue $12.97 billion, estimate $12.55 billion (range $12.15 billion to $12.91 billion) (Bloomberg data)

- 4Q EPS $1.44

- 4Q daily active users 1.40 billion, estimate 1.41 billion (Bloomberg News) (3 estimates)

- 4Q monthly active users 2.13 billion, estimate 2.13 billion (BN) (3 estimates)

- 4Q mobile ad revenue as percentage of ad revenue 89%

- 4Q advertising rev. $12.78 billion

General:

- increased headcount: it was 25,105 as of December 31, 2017, an increase of 47% year-over-year.

- This is the first-ever decline Facebook has had in North American users. Daily active users growth in US & Canada fell to 184 million, compared to 185 million in Q3.

Related to new US Tax Plan

- There's a one-time mandatory transition tax on accumulated foreign earnings and a reduction of the corporate income tax rate to 21 percent, effective Jan. 1, 2018. Facebook's provision for income taxes increased by $2.27 billion and its diluted EPS decreased by $0.77 for both the fourth quarter and full year 2017.
Writing better articles than this is the way to stop Google/FB/advertising. Educating people on how dangerous ads are and what the solutions are (uBlock origin, turning off JS, VPNs, and hosts files etc.) is the main thing we can do other than making such things the defaults in products like Firefox (which doesn't even have such features built in yet, afaik). Once a large enough percentage of the population is using such solutions, tracking will no longer be a problem. If the argument is that most people won't want to deal with such education or the solutions it proposes, then those people simply do not deserve privacy or security. People that are too lazy/stupid to use computers probably shouldn't without the supervision of someone competent anyway. Yes, that includes the proverbial grandma--I don't let my mother use a computer I haven't prepared for her, for example.
A daredevil climber risking his life for breathtaking views
Hi ! I'll try to answer your questions as I can :

Unfortunately the final version of the paper is not the one that is on hal -- which is an older one, and I must concede that being new to this whole publishing world, I don't know exactly how you can have access to it. I'll try to sort it out and get back to you. In the mean time, you can refer to the hal version.

In section 4 of the abstract [1], you mentioned that "when the dimension increases... the PAC learning algorithm can leverage available prior knowledge...". Are you referring to the time dimension adding more clauses to the k-CNF?

I think this sentence is actually referring to what is presented in section 5.3 of the final (and hal version) paper.

I'm having trouble reconciling the PAC term "h" with "model confidence" in section 5.2. Is this allowed because the PAC learning "delta" (probability) [2] parameter is dropped for the k-CNF adaptation?

I think there are two things here.

First the "delta" you are referring to is indeed taken to be equal to the "epsilon" and both are what we call "h" in section 2.1.

Second, the idea of the discussion in section 5.2 is the following: let's say you fix a number A of initial states and simulate B steps of for each of these states. You will have a given number of (de)activation samples for each (de)activation function. Then, accross all 2n (de)activation functions, take the minimum number of samples you got, and call it Lmin. Then using results from section 2.2, with S=(2n)^(k+1), you can find h so that Lmin=2h(S+log(h)). This h will be your "model confidence".

However, if we didn't have one "h" but one "delta" and one "epsilon" (wikipedia notations), I guess we would not have a given value but only a relation between the two (i.e. defining one would define the other).

I'm afraid I don't get your last point.

I'm new to HN so I hope this answer will be somewhat correctly formatted.
I'm 202cm and they're fine for me. Was amazed the first time I tried
Interesting numbers:

Facebook spends more then 1/3 of it's money on R&D.
YoY increase of Daily users by 14%.
Facebook paid an effective tax rate of 23% in 2017.

Most important quote:
"2017 was a strong year for Facebook, but it was also a hard one," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. "In 2018, we're focused on making sure Facebook isn't just fun to use, but also good for people's well-being and for society. We're doing this by encouraging meaningful connections between people rather than passive consumption of content. Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people's time is well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day. By focusing on meaningful connections, our community and business will be stronger over the long term."

Direct link to the earnings report, instead of the tech crunch article.

https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
Furthermore, you usually don't need Babel if you're a Typescript user because the Typescript compiler covers more or less the same ground.

Use Typescript+Webpack if you like types, or Javascript+Babel+Webpack if you like surprises, and in either case use ES6 module imports.
I would also like to see a comparison with magit, the Emacs git UI.
Ask HN: Facebook adding/accepting friends without me knowing?
I've logged into Facebook, and I saw a new message "You are now connected with John Doe". I clicked on John Doe thinking maybe I sent friend request some time ago. Nope. I never even seen this profile. So I asked the person if he accepted/added me. Nope, he has no idea either. The message was sent 30minutes ago so I am sure he/I would remember.

Did some investigation and it turns out the person is in my distant family - all mutual friends are family.

Being web developer myself I do not believe I fell for phishing attempt (even tho it's possible), and in that case, why would phisher add a random distant family member and no one else?

It's not the first time, but last time I thought I was phished so I changed my password and it was also slightly different. I noticed a person or two on my friend list I never heard of.

I feel this is the final straw. Got to think how I am going to move away from the platform, any tips? Seriously that's insane, wasn't the whole point of facebook at the beginning that you add who you want?
Database performance dropped badly, and we had to increase the number of database servers.
It was difficult to implement !! and !$ in fish (I rarely actually used them in bash, so it wasn't an issue for me) and I know others who found that annoying. However if you dig around, there are a couple of solutions on Stack Overflow and blog posts that add in that functionality using plugins or functions. It's not exactly the same, but some of them work pretty well.
Google and Facebook have no choice but to reveal your data to governments that ask for it. While the companies themselves might protect your data, simply giving that data to a third party renders it readable by the government. Any protections provided by the constitution (4th amendment) at that point are null and void. So by definition, Google and Facebook cannot be good stewards of your data while complying with American law. Neither can any other third party. Period.
IAAL; this area of the law isn't my field, but in more than one area where I do claim some expertise, Thomas has a better knowledge of the law than some attorneys I know.
The interviewee quotes Ayn Rand with no warning or precaution, which is kind of surprising.