skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interestingly, Vivek Wadhwa said that his source for quantum computing being useful for travelling salesman by trying all possibilities in parallel was from the researcher Michelle Simmons in a Ted talk. I decided to watch it to see how he'd misinterpreted it and he hadn't!

From 4:30 Simmons brings out the laundry list of quantum computing misconceptions. These are that the TSP scales poorly for classical computers and implies it doesn't for QC, implies that there's an efficient quantum algorithm for list lookups because the list can be read in parallel, and says the power of QC is partially because you can store so much information in the superposition (which is, at the very least, misleading). Then she starts comparing the power of QC and classical computers, saying that a 300 bit QC would be more powerful than all the computers in the world put together. In a section that's about what quantum computers will be useful for she includes as examples economic and climate modelling, which is news to me. The slides even include the phrase - 'Quantum computer- can check many different possibilities in parallel'.

All in all, I'm not surprised that Wadhwa was confused.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cugu4iW4W54
Not sure where the other poster lives but the entire Captain Underpants series is in our son's school library. That's where he read the first one and we purchased the rest for him as he's a voracious reader. They aren't the best books but there's a big benefit in the kids having something that they are interested in reading and will read without being pushed.
> Those are the folks who are still around. Even big US national banks, notorious for their immunity to law and enforcement, are starting to feel the pressure. Rumor is, Customers left Wells Fargo in droves after the last kerfuffle and new account opening went down substantially at Citi after their money laundering fine. The hidden cost of bad optics is immense.

There are two parts to a cost/benefit analysis, and you're only talking about the cost part of unethical behavior, as if the benefit doesn't exist. With Wells Fargo, Citi, Experian, Bank of America, etc., when their scandals went down, did they lose more money in the scandals than they gained from their antisocial behavior? I haven't tracked all of these cases til their end, but at least with Wells Fargo, they did not.

More importantly, did the individuals who made the antisocial decisions, who are protected by limited liability, lose money? I doubt it. Maybe they're not "still around", but they're happily retired in mansions and there are plenty of newcomers willing to do the same thing to get the same reward.

It's not 100% of the time: there are cases when bad behavior actually results in a net loss. But I'd say these are anomalies and not the norm. And even if they weren't, antisocial behaviors are profitable enough of the time that some percentage of antisocial behaviors have a positive expected value when looked at probabilistically.
If only the Windows version had a normal msi installer that installed it in a normal place so it worked properly with multiple users.
You've just described the Gell-Man Amnesia effect:

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." - Michael Crichton, Why Speculate (26 April 2002)
Here is a direct quote from one of Vivek's comments:

"Please give me 1-2 sentences that your children could understand that explains the possibilities of quantum computing and I will use these in future articles. I acknowledge that I am not as smart as most of you are. I struggle with the concepts of quantum computing, these just don’t make sense to me."

Is there any other field in which someone would profess complete ignorance about a topic, and go on to write about it in a national newspaper anyway?
I like the idea of tutorials for generating language grammars [1]. I've made a couple grammars myself for both Atom and vscode and I can never find as much info as I'd like. For instance, what labels should various tokens get in order to have them show up as the proper semantic constructs in syntax themes? Last I checked, it was difficult to find a reference of what "standard" syntax themes recognize, and I ended up just looking through the source of existing themes for labels to try.

Going beyond a tutorial, what could be really cool is a GUI where someone can paste in a code snippet of a language they want to colorize, then manually go through tokens classifying them as literals/keywords/whatever. Making a proper grammar for an entire language just to get some basic colorization gets old fast.

[1] https://github.com/atom/flight-manual.atom.io/pull/374
Algorithmia is a FaaS platform with strong service discovery and a lot of AI functions. Model Depot is a listing of open-source models.

You could find a network on Model Depot and deploy it on Algorithmia. Then you (And others, if you like) can use the model via RPC using HTTP calls or one of the Algorithmia client libraries.
Except that Australia has had this for decades.
That child abuse thing wasn't that common at all and don't act like today's people care about their kids more. You can see serious child abuse in the poorer parts of the society every day.
Yes! Also James Burke, who inspired a lot of Carlin's thinking. They talked on his show at least once:

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-18-a-fly-...

Another subject Burke talks about is the exciting idea the 99% can actually contribute to society now, because education and science is no longer the exclusive domain of the wealthy.

More of the 99%'s brainpower coming online could fully explain the cycle of accelerating technology development that we're observing.
Do you have any more details?
Yes. I moved from Australia to the US in 2012 and was amazed to discover paper cheques are still a common transfer instrument, and that bank to bank transfers were not easy, standardised, or free.
"Slippery Business",Tom Mueller's New Yorker article about the olive oil trade is worth the read. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/08/13/slippery-busin.... Looks like ten years has not been long enough to get the industry cleaned up.

When we think we are getting a pure virgin (olive oil) what we often get is sullied and impure. Still, there is nothing quite like great olive oil.
> I'm surprised no one has written a book.

They have. Help yourself:

https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...

https://asokan.org/operation-elop/
Onion link to the service: http://bsxsptv76s6cjht7.onion/

(source linked in the article, but in Italian: http://www.anticorruzione.it/portal/public/classic/Servizi/S...)
Australian who lived in the US here.

It used to make me laugh when Americans would describe Australia as 'like the US 10 years ago'.

Then I would write them a check.

Then I would try and send a text message that wouldn't go across networks as had always worked in Australia for years...

In Australia leaving in the 1990s I had never written a check because even then B-Pay was around and people did direct deposit for rent and things.

But Australia probably has about as many banks as California, so we have a much smaller problem.
Yes, for me this has been the best balance between
(a) the simplicity (size, 3rd party dependencies, etc.) and robustness of the system for building from source and
(b) the hardware support in the source tree.

No question Linux wins on (b) given all the corporate backing, but whenever I revisit systems like Buildroot or Yocto I feel the system I am using wins on (a). More likely than not I am just resistant to change and not wanting to invest the effort to master those systems.

Purely subjective, but I suspect the system I devised for myself is simpler and more "stable" in the sense it is less reliant on third parties and thus less brittle. Those qualities are important to me.

Not sure if anyone has mentioned VoidLinux yet in this thread. Probably well worth a look at least as an example if "small and simple" are design goals.
> Initial steps included writing job descriptions that avoided masculine phrases like "Ninja rock star coder."

When my fellow male engineers see that in a job ad, they avoid it like the plague.

> Now that 17 of Gusto's 70 engineers are female.

After a focused campaign to hiring women, Gusto's results are nowhere near 50/50. And they had to go out of their way to hire women and focus resources to attracting women.

The male engineers at Gusto were no doubt happy to see diversity, especially since Gusto did not drop their standards just because an applicant is female.
I'm honestly hard pressed to find something in his post that IS accurate. I'd also add that he said in the comments that "I’ll start by admitting that I struggle with the concepts of quantum computing." If you don't fundamentally understand quantum computing, maybe you shouldn't write an Opinion piece about the future of quantum computing.
> heh, I'm sure you're kidding but... I tried squishing it.

Small bugs are often very resistant to squishing.
The 72 votes in 38 minutes as of now means that the few who upvoted it from the /new page are being validated by the general community after it got on the front page.
I was at one of the FANG companies for 6+ years, joined right after graduation. However, I couldn't get senior due to me being naive (I have no ego, hence wasn't able to collaborate effectively with teammates, pissed a few off a few times), positioning of the product (none of my team members got promoted to senior while I was in that team). Last year I opted to change my jobs when my promo was denied again. I had hard time finding other teams to switch to (because of mentions of pissing off people) and also was completely bored of my existing team. FWIW, my technical work was never in question, just that no one supported me at promo times etc.

I am now in another good software company (similar to FANG, probably a level lower in terms of core compsci ability). The big change I have done is to accept that not everyone is learning all the time and not to try to do the same (its software engineering not research). I learnt this throughout the interview process by talking to lot of good college friends (who also work in tech in Bay Area) and acquaintainces recommended by friends.

My change isn't complete yet, hoping that this change will lead to better collaboration with team members and work output. Job title might improve too at some point in the future, though I am not too worried about it.
Good comment. Actually this is what I'm doing... move the logic to the book keeping side and deal with less income e.g. on Hungary with 27% VAT. Nevertheless why do I have to do all this hassle when somebody who sells e.g. a hardcover (vs. ebook) does not need to do this when selling cross border and they need to start thinking in this direction once they cross over 50 - 100,000 € on one country. Because I'm selling digital goods is much harder on my side.
> The "trying all possible solutions simultaneously" explanation of qc. This is a very common explanation, and from what I gather from Scott's comments is that it's inaccurate for TSP, but possibly right for problems that are better structured to use the technology(?)

From what I gather from Scott's comments (and the tagline of his entire blog), this common explanation is basically always incorrect. Quantum algorithms do not try all solutions simultaneously.

That's a description of the theoretical model of nondeterministic computing (like where "NP" comes from), not of quantum computing.
Twilio Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2017 Results
Could Netflix Be Giving Up on Prestige Films?
The fluorescent proteins don't lie.
Well said.

Stay flexible and keep learning. I like the 4% rule: keep increasing the difficulty of a daily challenge by 4%, i.e. keep pushing your self to reach higher and higher.
Yes, that's right, hence 'barely enough'. They do not hunger, yet they don't live as lavishly as the richest 10% of the world either. It's just/barely enough to satisfy hunger, but does it solve the problem? No.
I don't remember exactly, but maybe streaming API got added with WP7.5?
Steven Sinofsky – Apple’s Software “Problem” and “Fixing” It (via Twitter)
I am perplexed. If it's an insect, it is a VERY small one (literally like the size of 1 pixel?).

It certainly moved exactly like an insect. I'm quite confused as to what kind of insect it would be, that inserts itself into my monitor...
It sounds like you ran experiments on the BNN with >20 samples/class. Why were those data points not included in Figure 2?
More anecdata: my younger two are bilingual and didn't know how to read more than really basic sight words before starting K (common core class). They are now highly proficient at reading (english), which (they are decent learners and have no challenges) I reason are due to two things: 1) An interest in reading which is fostered by the class atmosphere - they have "choice" time and some of that can be reading. 2) They have an expectation in class to spend a lot of time reading or being read-to.

I will admit we did read to them every night since they were babies, so that's probably also helpful. But kids usually love the bedtime story.
Is that annual? If it is anything like any other vice, basically it follows the pareto principle, causing massive damage to a small subset of the population which does most of the overuse. "Don't bet the rent money" very much applies here.
I’d instead say it’s an instance of “tried it, didn’t care for it” and nothing more. Both conservatives and radical feminists in the 1970s pointed out that the sexual revolution was in some ways perpetuating patriarchy, except that instead of expecting women to be wives and mothers it demanded sexual availability in all settings and accommodation of mens’ sexual impulses. But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t bad things about it or that there is any reason to “slow down.”

I also disagree with the idea that it’s a “pendulum.” It’s moving in the direction of increased autonomy and self determination for women. Sexual revolution: “we don’t want to be trapped into marriage and motherhood by sexual mores.” Women didn’t want “sex in the workplace”—they were just willing to accommodate it because it freed them from something worse. But now women aren’t forced into marriage and motherhood. But they have more demands. “We noticed that men still have most of the power in the workplace. We want to advance in our careers without having to deal with men trying to use that power to get sex.” These are not contradictory at all.
I'm not dismissing your argument because of inconvenience, I am because there isn't any actual criticism outside of name calling and opaque references to alleged misdoings.

Name calling like "symptomatic of narcissistic, sociopathic women", claiming they invented harassment for personal gain and calling one a "literal con artist" (a person who isn't involved or mentioned at all in this article btw) without explanation are all personal attacks.

And then you actually complain of "divisive politics"? Maybe consider taking some of your own advice, and ask yourself why people might react negatively to the things you write.
Not so much "masculine" as juvenile.
Nice. I am hoping onion services become more ubiquitous for desktop use. So many decentralized networks work so hard to solve things like NAT busting and network issues, and they still forget about anonymity.

I am personally working on a tiny side project to build a chat/forum/etc platform based around onion services for all users. Traditionally, it was annoying to have to ask users to install Tor and open up the control port so your app could leverage it. In a recent alpha there is an experimental tiny little C API that can start the Tor system in-app [0]. Leveraging some of the work from [1], I put in some effort to get all the steps working to compile Tor statically in a a single Rust exe on Windows [2]. As Tor's embeddability game increases, I hope more apps will consider using it as part of their network stack. Granted I know the problems that are inherent with "vendoring" security libs like these, but for some uses the benefits outweigh the costs of requiring separate downloads and separate daemons running.

0 - https://blog.torproject.org/tor-0331-alpha-released-back-uns...
1 - https://github.com/iCepa/Tor.framework
2 - https://github.com/cretz/rtsw-poc
You’re conflating memory with consciousness.

Am I? If consciousness were a phenomenon no one had a memory of, would we even know it to exist? We certainly wouldn't be having this discussion. I can imagine a consciousness without memory, but I can also imagine a fantasy unicorn in real life. This doesn't mean either exists.

As for the illusion question, it’s missing the point. P

I don't think so. I think it's very significant that there's little difference between the consciousness of real sensory information and consciousness of illusion.

Even if you believe it is probably useless, we investigate things of dubious utility all the time, often discovering unforeseen uses along the way.

So you have no proof for your assertion. Only a suspicion. Perhaps a well founded one, I could even grant that.
> Perhaps - the whole truth is a bit more nuanced?

100%

Truth be told, Education is at once a deeply Enlightenment established good, a nationalistic and civic program, a method of reducing child labor, enculturation, an international competition (both pride and output), a pragmatic way of getting ahead for most of the population, as well as a medium of training a future workforce.

As such any program would be at the mercy of the prevailing cultural and political zeitgeist.

My critique comes from the more recent move of aggressive privatization of education (for-profit colleges, charter schools), combined with increases in standardization (No Child Left Behind, ACTs, and tying teacher pay to those outcomes) which both are relatively new phenomenon. I have a ~glorified opinion~ (hypothesis) that business leaders and politicians made sensible policy decisions based on observed improved output in businesses and factories, such that they both resemble each other after many reforms.

Additionally, we often hear about schools failing to educate kids. But this recent study brings together and asks; How many are performing above their grade? They drew this conclusion[1]:

> Currently, the evidence suggests that between 15% and 45% of students enter the late-elementary classroom each fall already performing at least one year ahead of expectations. Our initial question – How many students are learning above grade level? – needs to be extended. The more important questions may be:

> 1. How should we reorganize our schools, now that we know that large numbers of these students exist?

> 2. How can we best meet these students’ learning needs, if they already have mastered much of the year’s content before the year has even started? And lastly,

> 3. How can schools balance the potential for excellence against the need to achieve basic
proficiency, when the variation in student achievement within classrooms and schools is so vast?

Lastly, I must admit I wrote that as a counter-polemic of OP's original post.

[1]: http://edpolicy.education.jhu.edu/how-can-so-many-students-b...
Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But you got it figured out to share with everyone?
> The big change I have done is to accept that not everyone is learning all the time and not to try to do the same (its software engineering not research)

What do you mean by this?
I think the last time I saw an Atom post on here (a blog post), it ignored VS Code, and here we've got a very minor focus on responsiveness/performance.

I'm mostly reminded of Brackets, https://github.com/adobe/brackets, which I moved away from as a general-purpose text editor, but still seems solid for specifically doing frontend development.

Everyone focuses on Atom as a general-purpose editor, and its performance isn't so great in that regard, but if it focused on a specific area, it would be something I might consider using again. It feels easier to have editors for different things, than manually enabling different sets of plugins, for different projects.
Solar panels already have huge economies of scales and lots of research investment; as a matter of fact, their price has been coming down incredibly fast thanks to those. There is no reason why adding bitcoin there will increase that speed.
One reason HN readers may have come across Quinn Norton is her account of the kafkaesque trial against Aaron Swartz, which she witnessed up close. It appeared in the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/life-...
In order to enforce such a terms of service, the company would have to send a lawyer to court.

Most companies don't even show up to court, because the cost of paying a lawyer is more than you are suing them for in small claims court.

If they did show up to court, they would then have to argue that (a) their terms of service take precedence over the law -- in many juristictions, it is illegal to write a contract preventing someone from suing you for particular conditions.

And they would have to argue that (b) their terms of service are still valid, considering that they aren't honoring their contract in even paying the OP in the first place.

If OP took Upwork to small claims court, it is almost guaranteed that he would get the money owed to him by the clients who paid him that Upwork is currently holding onto illegally.
My son learned English as a teenager, instead my daughter has an english mother tongue teachers at his school, mixed with regular teachers, so she have definitely a very good pronounce, but she is not able yet to talk, just knows certain words, a few sentences and so forth. I've the feeling that all the books we read she in Italian have only a marginal advantage on her english skills...
I got my Ph.D. in physics in 2010, worked for about 1 year in research then took a year to try and build my own startup while collecting unemployment. I didn't successfully get a startup going but I learned enough web development during that time that I have been doing it professionally ever since.
For example, how could we ever confirm that Google treats reports on its ads the same as reports on other ads? It's unlikely that we will be able to make that confirmation, and should probably instead assume they are not treating them the same and insist that Google prove that they are. Err on the side of caution and all that.
> ..., having exclusively bought Nexus devices since the Galaxy Nexus.

Me too. Why will your next be a Nokia?
Hackers exploited a #Telegram Zero-Day vulnerability to deliver malware
> developer mode which comes with its own set of drawbacks

Not really, you turn on "developer options". There is no developer mode as such, just many separate options, all with defaults that don't change things from non-developer behavior.

I have animations set to 2x regular speed, it's nice.
While You Were Offline: Quincy Jones Is an Oracle
The camera on the G5 Plus is terrible, fyi.